Carol Bergman

 

 

 

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil…

 

  -from the St. James Bible, "Exodus"

 

… a conference was convened at The Hague in 1899. Twenty European powers attended  along with the United States, Mexico, Japan, China. Siam  and Persia. The Russian proposals for freezing armament levels were defeated, but the convention did agree on rules of warfare and established a permanent court of arbitration… the International Court of Justice…

 

-Robert K. Massie, "Nicholas and Alexandra"(1967)

 

 

The refugee agency sent my parents to Wyoming. They were doctors and could use their skill to find work, they were told. They had no choice. Refugees rarely have choices. Not at first, anyway, not just after they've landed and been shuttled somewhere or other. Pretend. Imagine what it feels like to be at the mercy of broken systems, callous border guards, and opportunistic Governors running for President.

 

My mother got a job as a nurse's aide, studied English, and tried to get visas for her parents. No luck; they were killed. My father got a job as a "ghost doctor," shadowing ophthalmic surgeons and sharing his particular expertise in still fractured English. The Latin medical words were the same, at least. He tried to get visas for his parents. No luck; they were killed. Meanwhile, the refugee agency scattered his siblings. One of them landed in Canada, another in California. Close enough to stay in contact over the years  so that the word "family" still held meaning. My mother, an only child, had a cousin or two left, but everyone else was killed.

 

And so it goes if you are a refugee. What has been taken violently shall not, cannot be replaced. Every reparation, restitution, or truth and reconciliation commission, is inadequate, a mere gesture, a token, however comforting. The past is past and cannot be retrieved or rewritten. Life may begin in an olive orchard and end in a tent city.

 

On bad days I try to remember how fortunate I am to have American citizenship despite the scary fascistic insanity here at the moment. And if I can't face my daily challenges, I say to myself, "Think of your parents. Think of the Afghans, Armenians, Palestinians, and so many others. Pretend you are a refugee."  How does this help? It keeps me humble. It keeps me hopeful. It keeps me determined. The United States of America was once a safe haven. And so it shall remain, I say to myself.

 

Why am I pretending to be a refugee today? Because it's been a challenging day and I am feeling sorry for myself. My car needs new tires, it has sprung a leak and needs to go into the shop today and then again on Monday. I had to drop it off early this morning and walk home under a thunder-threatening sky on a road too busy with traffic. And it was foggy. Okay so I am tired and have work to do, my knees hurt and I am not supposed to walk too much this week. Big deal. Get on with it. Stop complaining. Pretend you are a refugee. Your problems are nothing compared to the refugees who are drowning off boats in the Mediterranean, or cowering inside containers at Le Havre, getting caught and thrown into cells, treated like cattle until they feel so dehumanized and frightened they can hardly answer questions: "Where are you from? Why are you here? Where are your papers?" 

 

My father's parents were killed en route to America, the promised land, shot dead in the mountains, their bodies left for the coyotes. Using their life savings, they had hired a human coyote, in fact, and he didn't make it either. All dead in the mountains. My grandparents' bones are in a crevasse and cannot be retrieved for a proper burial.

 

And so it goes if you are a refugee, trying to escape a war zone, or persecution because of your sexuality, or because you are a young woman living in Iran threatened with imprisonment after getting arrested during a demonstration, or because you are a Palestinian and have grown up in a refugee camp in Jordan and cannot return to what should be a shared homeland with the Jewish People if the words peace and reconciliation meant anything.

 

Pretend you are a refugee, just for an hour, just for a day. And then get out the vote for people who are competent, people who care, politicians who see beyond our borders to the world beyond and all its struggling people.

 

This post is dedicated to Narges Mohammadi, winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, who is still imprisoned in Iran. Her husband and twin sons are refugees in Paris.

  

I had a conversation this week with John and Johnnie as they were emptying the  refuse dumpster into their massive truck.  All through the summer they'd been leaving a mess and I'd spotted a rat more than once rummaging in the odiferous scraps. Johnnie—spelled with an ie he told me—was the boss, a handsome Black guy with a white goatee and an outgoing persona; John was his slim, quiet much younger white sidekick. They pulled out the dumpster as I stood and watched. There was plenty of garbage underneath left from the last pick-up. "Any way you can clean up that mess?" I asked.

 

"We got you that new dumpster," Johnnie said, defensively, trying to save face maybe?

 

"Right, the animals were getting into the old one. The lid was bent. Thanks for replacing it. BTW I'm just a tenant here."

 

"But you reside here," emphasis on the reside, a preacher's intonation, trying to impress or just a bit flirtatious, fine with me at my age. But we both knew that my residency had nothing to do with the garbage John and Johnnie had been leaving behind. Slim John looked at me sweetly and pulled out a shovel. In two minutes the underside of the dumpster was spotless.

 

"Glad you've got a shovel on board. Much appreciate it, John," I said.

 

That's when I noticed the gold or gold plated medallion hanging on Johnnie's orange sweatshirt. I could see what it was but asked anyway.

 

"That's Jesus," Johnnie said. "You believe in Jesus?  You pray to Jesus? He's going to watch as the world ends and then maybe save us, if we believe, if we pray," he said.

 

"Or maybe it is for us to save ourselves, be good to each other, do the right thing, like you are doing today," I said.

 

But my conversation with Johnnie was not over. He was a performer,  par excellence. Slowly, he pulled his hands over his face and added narration: "Skin and bone melting, contorted bodies collapsing into the desert dust. Sound familiar?"

 

"The nuclear apocalypse," I said.

 

"Exactly," he said. "All predicted in the 'Book of Revelations.' God watches as we destroy ourselves."

 

"We do it to ourselves. I couldn't agree more," I said, relieved that we'd had what I'd read the diplomats call "a meeting of hearts and minds," however fleeting and imperfect. Then he invited me to his church to sing and pray—John  is a member too, he said.

 

"I'm a non-believer," I told him. "I don't believe that prayer will help stop war though I accept all blessings. Did you bless me?"

 

"Not yet," Johnnie said, "but I was planning to."

 

There wasn't any time to ask these guys if they were registered to vote, which is what I usually do with strangers I encounter, young people especially. Maybe Johnnie was old enough to make up his own mind and it was none of my business if he voted or not.  Or, maybe I dreaded the answer, so I just ended the conversation with, "A pleasure talking. Thanks for your hard work. Have a good rest of the day."

 

 

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

 

-Joseph Brodsky

 

 

 

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

 

― Arthur Miller, "The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts"

 

South Carolina English teacher Mary Rose Wood has gone through an ordeal that's sadly familiar to many high school teachers, college professors, librarians, and school administrators: she is being attacked for a book she assigned for her AP English class, for the stimulating open discussions she's facilitating in the classroom, and for her continuing, forceful insistence that her well-practiced pedagogy works; her students do well.

 

Ms. Wood teaches at Chapin High School in Chapin, South Carolina, a nearly all-white school. She assigned Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, a nonfiction book about the Black experience in the United States. 

 

After a complaint from a student, District officials ordered Ms. Woods to stop teaching Coates' book which has been the target of censorship campaigns across the country. In other words, along with hundreds of other books of note, Between the World and Me has been banned.

 

Transcripts from a Lexington-Richland 5 School Board meeting  obtained by a reporter reveal that school officials were worried that Ms. Wood's choice of Ta-Nehisi's book might be a violation of new state laws preventing schools from using state money to assign a book that might make students feel "discomfort, guilt, or anguish" because of their race. South Carolina is one of five states where book bans have been the most prevalent, alongside Texas, Florida, Missouri, and Utah. Chapin, South Carolina is in Lexington County which has a vocal, well organized Moms for Liberty chapter that has backed school board members among other officials. They recently published a "campaign package" for inexperienced moms who want to run for elected positions. 

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates, to his everlasting credit, traveled to South Carolina to  attend the School Board meeting, and sat next to Woods for support. Though neither of them spoke, their presence was a defiant presence. It is not clear if they were asked to speak, or refused to speak. Ms. Woods is still teaching the book and speaking openly to the press about the attempt at censoring her and the books she chooses to teach. Kudos to her! 

 

If this sad saga seems insane, it is. The attacks were angry and threatening, targeted at Ms. Wood's and Mr. Coates' personhood more than their professionalism. The targeting is very familiar to me: I was denounced and reported to administration by a student during my student teaching days in a gerrymandered school district in Oakland, California, and again more recently at New York University where I taught nonfiction writing for more than two decades.

 

I wasn't the only professor in the city, or the country, experiencing persecution by militant students on the left and the right in 2020 and 2021. I knew of at least two others—one at Columbia University, one at City University of New York. We all had been demonized by a student mob who reported on social media that we'd been misguided or culturally or gender insensitive, among other defaming slurs, then pilloried in front of a kangaroo –academic – tribunal, terminated and/or shunned by frightened colleagues. I was grateful, at least, that in higher education there are no angry parents to contend with, or young students complaining to their parents, or incited by their parents.

 

When did students acquire so much power? Where are the adults in the room? Why didn't the South Carolina Education Association(the South Carolina teachers' union, affiliated with the National Education Association) attend the school board meeting and advocate for Ms. Woods? Where was ACT-UAW, the NYU Adjunct's Union, when I was pilloried? Present but mostly silent.

 

Like every other American citizen, a professor employed by a university, or a teacher in a public school, has a right to due process, the right to face her accuser and defend herself, a right to be called to testify openly and without constraint. A school board meeting is not a HUAC meeting, it is not a Salem Witch Trial. Or is it?

 

For more information:

 

https://academicfreedom.org/

 

https://pen.org/issue/book-bans/

 

If you are local, please join me for a a Banned Book Club at the Gardiner Library. November and December will be virtual.

 

October 12: Ashley Hope Perez, Out of Darkness
November 9: Art Spiegelman, Maus
December 14: George Johnson, All Boys Aren't Blue

 

How do you separate yourself and your memories from History? How do you separate your presence from so many absences? Questions I can only ask, and never answer.

-

-Viet Thanh Nguyen, "A Man of Two Faces; A Memoir, a History; a Memorial"

 

 

It's been several years since I have written a memorial piece on 9/11, but I woke thinking of that day out of my sleep this morning. I had watched the 60 minutes segment on the firefighters last night and must have been thinking or dreaming about it. The images in my waking thoughts were silent, without sound, the hush of the city as the buildings collapsed forever seared in every 9/11 survivor's psyche.

 

I was still living in New York City that day. Our home was a co-op on the Upper East Side and  I was teaching at NYU and Gotham Writers Workshop. Our daughter, Chloe, was in her own apartment on the Upper West Side; she worked close to the World Trade Center. She was running in Central Park listening to the radio on her Walkman when she heard the news; thankfully, she had not yet boarded the subway. When she got home she called our landline, not yet an artifact. Patiently, she uttered three simple words: "Turn on the TV."  If memory serves—and memory after trauma weakens—that  was the last we heard from her until we established email contact. For some reason, email was still working, and I was grateful that the phone lines were up on the West Side of Manhattan so that Chloe could reach my mother to assure her we were all okay.

 

But that was us, our family, safe and sound in a city that had become a war zone, the enemy combatants dead in the debris of the Towers, suicide bombers from the other side of the world, a world none of us had ever visited, much less understood. What did it have to do with us? Americans I knew who cared about the world outside our borders, and America's role in that world, hypothesized instantly and endlessly about what this seminal horrific event signified and portended for the future.

 

But first things first, there were confused seniors in our building who required care, and workers who had arrived early in the morning and had no way home. The American Red Cross sent out a call for blood which somehow was conveyed throughout the city. My husband, Jim, has Type O, the universal donor, with a special enzyme which was badly needed. We pulled ourselves out of the apartment and headed to Second Avenue. It was only as we surfaced from our apartment building that we saw and smelled the billowing smoke and the stream of workers covered in ash escaping the site. We made it to the Red Cross, but were turned away. Few if any survivors had arrived in the emergency rooms. The Red Cross did not need blood.

 

Time collapses  in our memories. Maybe it was a week later, maybe two weeks when I joined the crowds walking the city in running shoes, stopping at makeshift paper memorials and "have you seen?" signs, writing poetry and attending readings, lighting candles for the dead. I started to immerse in the history of the Middle East, Islam, extremism and fundamentalism, imperialism and jingoism. All of that history is still relevant today—in the upheaval in Israel and Palestine, in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in America's withdrawal from Afghanistan, in the right wing surge in the United States.

 

The beginning of the term in that vivid, terrifying autumn of 9/11 was delayed, and when I got back into the classroom at Gotham Writers Workshop Irene and Phil Tufano were waiting for me. Phil was a firefighter who lost all his friends in one of the Towers. He wanted to write something about his experience, even though it was still so immediate and raw. And when I returned to NYU Professor Vasu Varadhan was waiting for me. She lost her son, Gopal, in one of the Towers, a loss she did not tell me about until months later when we started working together on her memoir, On My Own Terms; A Journey Between Two Worlds.

 

In the writing is the healing. the connection, the attempt at understanding, and the testimony for future generations.

 

 

I'm hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter.

 

-Shawn Corey Carter aka Jay-Z

 

 

 

It's the beginning of the school year and e-Bay is selling off collectible metal lunchboxes to nostalgic adults eager to wallow in their childhood obsessions.  I was tempted to bid for my favorite but figured it was probably rusted, and which one was my favorite anyway? I can't remember. It probably changed every year depending on my television or book serial heroes and heroines of the moment. I never liked cartoons; the characters I preferred were all live action.  Lassie maybe? Nancy Drew?

 

We went to Woolworth's on Broadway between 102nd and 103rd Street, on the East Side of the Street to load up on school supplies. That Woolworth is long gone, but my memory is vivid. Oh, how I loved that store. Spalding balls, jump ropes, jacks, Crayola crayons, the store was a treasure trove for any kid—with money. Rich, poor, I never knew the difference. What I wanted and needed was there and I could have it.

 

I couldn't wait to see my neighborhood friends back from holidays at summer houses and camps, and learn something new at school. Like all affluent kids in my Upper West Side neighborhood, the premise and promise of education was a constant; it was never questioned. Towards Labor Day our parents herded us to clothing stores and shoe stores to buy new outfits. We'd grown and we were learning fast that we were privileged, that the school we went to was okay, or more than okay; it was mostly White, and the teachers were too. The demographic we lived in signaled privilege and safety. There was no busing, not yet anyway, the public schools in Manhattan were de facto segregated as were our neighborhoods and, to a large extent, they still are. Black and Brown kids lived somewhere else, up above the invisible interface, which in my hood was 110th Street. My friend Rochelle lived there, but I never went to her house. The memory of this childhood friend comes back to me often. Her mother was a nurse, my mother was a doctor, and they were friends. They both worked at the Margaret Sanger clinic downtown and every morning, once I was allowed to walk on my own to PS 75 on 96th Street and West End Avenue, Rochelle and I walked to school together. She came to my house for lunch and sometimes after school also. Now that I think of it—where  was my new lunchbox?  My mother must have packed it for me in the morning before I left for school and she left for work on the subway with Rochelle's mom. My lunchbox was there, waiting on the counter, next to Rochelle's lunchbox.  We must have insisted on owning a lunchbox even though we ate lunch at my home and Rochelle brought hers to "live" with mine every school day. We asked our moms if we could live together. They laughed and said it wasn't possible.

 

At lunchtime, a maid was waiting for us. She was often a Black maid; there were many over the years. I heard my parents talking about this maid and that one. I would try to befriend them when my parents weren't home. I can't remember any of them.

 

Rochelle was the only Black girl in my class and possibly in the school. Both of us lived out of the catchment area and we should have attended a school on 105th and Amsterdam near the projects. The school and the neighborhood had a bad reputation. I had always assumed that my parents and/or Rochelle's parents strenuously advocated and received "waivers" for both of us to go to PS 75.  Years later I learned that my parents had lied about our address, that they'd used a colleague's address, and that Rochelle's parents had done the same, so desperate were they for their children to have the best education in our red-lined neighborhood. It seems unlikely their deception was ever uncovered. Or, maybe by the time it was, the teachers didn't want us to leave. Rochelle was smart, I was smart, we could spell and read and talk with a clarity any teacher would appreciate, if the teacher was well trained and kind. One or two of them were not.  They needed to go back to school as much as we did, or more than we did. Would you believe me Reader if I told you that in Miss Brill's Second Grade classroom at PS 75  there was a "dunce corner" and that a whole generation later, when my daughter went to a public school kindergarten on the East Side of Manhattan, there was a "time out" corner in a still nearly all-White kindergarten class. All the Black kids were on the top floor of that East Side school in a persistent and pernicious de facto bused-in segregation. And the teacher of my daughter's kindergarten class targeted the boys in her class for humiliation as she ordered them to face the corner, albeit they were all White boys. God help us, and them, if she'd had Black kids in the class; she was vicious. And the parents could not stop her, or change her, that was obvious at meeting after meeting. I sometimes stood outside the door at pick-up time and watched this teacher abuse the boys verbally. I glared. I wanted her to know she was on notice. The principal had put her on notice, but it was too late for me, and many other parents. We'd had enough, we took flight, leaving the poor White kids behind on the bottom floor of that de facto segregated neighborhood school.

 

This was all long before lockdown drills and pandemics though the catchment areas and neighborhoods in the city are seemingly unchanged since I was a child, calcified in their callous disregard of fairness and opportunity. Separate and unequal. Separate but unequal.  

 

I called PS 75 to check on current admissions policy. The guy who answered the phone was friendly. "895 West End Avenue," I told him, " between 103rd and 104th." I was put on hold as Nat King Cole sang "life is still worthwhile." The guy came back and confirmed that PS 75, Emily Dickinson Elementary School, was in District 3, but that my kids would have to go to PS 145 up near the projects.

 

"Oh, nothing has changed in New York City," I said.

 

"I'm sorry you're disappointed," he said, but he misunderstood, He thought I was a parent with a school age child. I hadn't said otherwise, and I didn't disabuse him. I was just asking questions without identifying myself as a journalist. I wanted to know, I was curious.

 

"I like the Nat King Cole," I said.

 

He laughed, "Oh, you like that?"

 

"Yes," I said.

 

"Don't be disappointed. Depending on enrollment, you might be able to get a waiver."

  

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

 

― Jane Austen

 

 

In the decade I lived in London, I never minded the weather. I bought myself a well-made expensive umbrella, stayed calm and carried on. I had no expectations that it would be warm and/or sunny anywhere in the British Isles, having prepared myself for the louring English sky with my reading of Austen and Bronte. Louring. It's the perfect word, a variation of lowering. Indeed, dear reader, I can think of no other word to evoke the soft, sometimes drizzly grey blanket that sits under the blue sky and sun's rays, obscuring it, obfuscating it, chilling those that walk beneath it in all seasons, until recent climate-changed warmer summers. Indeed, it must have been rare for Jane Austen to feel the sun's warmth during her lifetime (1775-1817) else she would not have written that sentence.

 

If the weather is so often awful, why do the Brits talk about it incessantly? It was a wonder, really to have found myself a willing participant in the ongoing, continuing, unrelenting conversation about atmospheric conditions, and to relinquish that cultural habit once I returned to the United States. Oh, how I missed it, though. It was a lubricant in a notably reserved society where conversational lubricants, however ritualized, are sorely needed  So, too, the kettle always on the boil, the porcelain tea pot, and the extremely strong cuppa with just a dash of milk. That tradition has sustained me to this day, especially at breakfast. There's solace in the thought that the often brutal British Raj in India (1858-1947) left one beneficial legacy, at least.

 

Fast forward to the summer of 2023 in the Mid-Hudson Valley under a too frequent louring sky. Cool one day, humid and blistering the next, culminating in ferocious thunder storms and flooding. Morning, mid-day, and night, I check my two weather apps, I check the air quality, I pay attention to the fires in Canada and am grateful there have been no fires in the Minnewaska Ridge of late. I plan a walk and talk with friends early or mid-day, or late, depending on the weather. Weather conversations inevitably culminate in climate change conversations in the present tense. The change is here, we are living it.

 

With thanks to #sistersinlaw Joyce Vance (Alabama), Jill Wine-Banks (Illinois), Barb McQuade (Michigan) and Kimberly Atkins Stohr (DC) for inspiring this blog post about the weather. 

 

 

 

 

We will not be turned around

or interrupted by intimidation

because we know our inaction and inertia

will be the inheritance of the next generation…

 from "The Hill We Climb," by Amanda Gorman

 

A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

 

 

I've been thinking about the elusive Melania, the Slovenian-American former model who started dating Trump after meeting him at a party in Manhattan in 1998, exactly 100 years since the photo of Eleanor Roosevelt I chose for this blog post was taken. When asked by the NY Times what kind of a First Lady she would be, Melania said, "I would be very traditional. Like Betty Ford or Jackie Kennedy."

 

Traditional. How does that play these days? Very well, apparently, in some retro circles. That said, Melania's low profile, her near disappearance during the indictments is interesting, even understandable. Apparently she's sequestered with her parents and her nearly grown son, Barron. Wouldn't you do the same, dear reader? Stay clear. Sequester yourself with those near and dear? Redecorate the home you bought in Slovenia? Keep your Slovenian passport up-to-date? Make sure your son had dual citizenship? Send your parents back to your Homeland before the trial/s?

 

During the administration of her beloved—if  that is what he was—Melania  also maintained a low profile, albeit she worked various charities, like most obedient and hard working First Ladies who learn quickly to second fiddle their husbands. Without exception First Ladies who had  pre-White House careers abandoned them when their guy made it to the Oval Desk—even Michelle abandoned her successful law career—and  then tried to keep on keeping on with book contracts, healthy gardens, and other "projects." Bill Clinton groomed Hillary for her Senate run by giving her an important position in the cabinet, re: healthcare, was that it? Was this appointment before the Under- the- Oval Desk Scandal, or after? Was it a deal the maligned couple struck when they were still in Arkansas?  During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary, a smart First Lady, quoted from the obsequious First Lady Handbook: "Our lives are a mixture of different roles. Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is . . . For me, that balance is family, work, and service."

 

Indeed.

 

I am wishing Melania well in the months and years to come. Truly I am. But I am also wondering when, if ever, the United States of America will wake up to its smart women politicians and vote one of them into the White House, not as an appendage to the President as a VP, or a wife, but into the Big Chair, where surely one of them belongs. Eleanor, Hillary and Michelle could have carried the responsibility well, wouldn't you agree, dear reader? They were smart enough, educated enough, worldly enough, and tough enough. And I suppose we could say the same for Kamala, if she is given the chance, though she remains unimpressive in many respects. But then again, she's in the Big Man's shadow. And it's a long one.

 

A garden is like the self. It has so many layers and winding paths, real or imagined, that it can never be known, completely, even by the most intimate of friends.

― Anne Raver, "Deep in the Green: An Exploration of Country Pleasures"

  

Deep in the green this morning, the air clear enough and cool enough to have a very early morning walk past farms, haystacks, the Minnewaska Ridge in the distance visible for the first time in weeks, and then visit with my friend Jo Ann who has offered me chard from her raised-bed vegetable garden. It's been netted top and bottom to avoid tick infestation, her husband Jeff assures me, but I've sprayed up before arriving anyway. I'm still a city girl, have always lived in apartments, and never even participated in an urban communal garden, though I have visited and admired many, both in the US and overseas. I have a green thumb for indoor plantings, though, and when I lived in London on the top floor of a Victorian house with a skylight streaming cloud-diffuse English sunlight onto the landing, the spider plants went wild. Chlorophytum Comosumis is their Latin name, and they are immigrants from Southern Africa apparently, naturalized plants that have contributed so much to our controlled indoor landscapes, an illusion that all is well with the landscape outside with its droughts, floods, smoke-filled air, and human malfeasance.

 

Until this week, the atmosphere in the mid-Hudson valley has been tropical, all flora and fungi abundant, a welcome side effect of our climate changed summer. Jo Ann's garden is no exception, but as we walk into her flower garden she complains that it needs weeding, that weeds have become abundant also. And what is a weed, exactly, I wonder? When did a plant become a weed? In what century? In what geothermic era?

 

The Weed Science Society of America—yes, there is a society for the study of weeds—defines a weed as a plant that is not wanted, that germinates constantly and invasively and without our consent. These weeds interfere with the plantings we have chosen to nurture and propagate, the vegetables and flowers we cultivate for our pleasure and nourishment. A metaphor, perhaps, for the invasive weeds in our body politic and continuing attempts to rid ourselves of them without poisoning ourselves.

 

But I digress. Let us return to Jo Ann's garden and her bounteous gift: two kinds of chard, basil, cucumber and a sweet yellow zucchini. The stir fry was delicious.

 

 

I tried to straighten him out, but there is only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

 

-David Sedaris

  

 

I don't know if Willa Paskin, Slate's TV critic and host of their Decoder Ring Podcast is Jewish, Christian, Muslim or a Jewish Buddhist, and I'm not sure it is even relevant, but it is niggling me, as the Brits would say. I was listening to her being interviewed  by Natalie Kitroeff on The Daily, New York Times podcast, about the history of the Barbie doll and its new blockbuster iteration. About two-thirds into the interview Paskin casually mentioned that Ruth Handler, co-owner of Mattel and developer of the Barbie franchise, was Jewish. The word "Jewish" fell gratuitously in the middle of the sentence like a prong on a fish. The prong never was extracted: there was no context, no backstory. Kitroeff let the moment pass without further questioning. She's the Central American, Mexican, and Caribbean NY Times Bureau Chief and relatively new as a host to the podcast. Maybe she's still learning, or just standing in for someone on vacation. The gratuitous labeling deserved a follow-up question, which never came. That's a shame because there is a significant connection between Barbie's origin story and Ruth Handler's origin story.

 

Handler was a child of Jewish-Polish immigrants, already the owner of Mattel, when she traveled with her husband to Switzerland, and discovered a beloved German sex-toy doll based on a comic-strip character, "Lilli," created by Reinhard Beuthien for the nationalist right-wing tabloid newspaper Bild in 1952. There were few if any Jews left in Germany to enjoy this buxom, blonde-haired Bavarian/Aryan masterpiece. But Handler was attracted to her three-dimensional realism, bought the rights, and transformed her into an oversexualized American ideal woman. Barbie's Aryan birthing, a smidgin beyond the Nazi era, was ignored, or forgotten.

 

The podcast interviewer's oversight--or disinterest-- in the story behind the story reminded me of a passage in Richard Ford's Sportswriter, the first in his Frank Bascombe trilogy. The lonely and miserable protagonist parks his car at the train station during rush hour one evening and watches the crowd surging onto the platform. He comments on all the "Jewish lawyers" who commute to DC from New Jersey every day. Why not just "lawyers?" I wondered. Why "Jewish lawyers?" What is this? And is it the character talking, or Richard Ford talking? Why has Ford written this antisemitic trope into his character? Instantly, my stomach dropped, I lost my sympathy with poor old Frank, and then I lost my concentration. I'd had the same sensation of disgust and fear with Wharton's antisemitism, Hemingway's antisemitism, and Picasso's misogyny. For the record, I haven't stopped admiring all of them.

 

Ford is a still living writer so I wrote him a letter and sent it c/o his agent and his publisher.  I never got an answer, of course, but a few years later I saw him in a restaurant eating alone. I was having lunch with a sophisticated relief-worker friend who came from a similar background as Ford—WASP, Southern—and I told him about the letter I'd written. He suggested I introduce myself and mention my letter, and though I don't like to disturb well-known writers in public places, I got up from the comfortable banquette and walked over. As I managed to unfreeze my angry brain all I could say was, "I love your books," which is true. I walked away feeling defeated, hurt and cowardly. What had happened?  I have faced down antisemitism often in my writing life, and in person, too, but the encounter always sets my heart pounding.

 

My friend consoled me, we paid the bill, and left Ford to savor his solitary lunch.

 

A few years later Colson Whitehead took Ford on at a literary party. Whitehead had written a bad review of Ford's recent collection of short stories and Ford was so upset that he told Whitehead that he was just a kid and should "grow up." Ford then proceeded to spit at him. So, I thought, I was right about Ford; he's a racist and Colson Whitehead is a mensch. He made light of it, and even cracked a joke as Ford was seething. Ford was warned by friends to cool it, that he'd never live down what had happened that day—a white writer from Mississippi spitting at a Black literary star is a trope in itself. Indeed, the incident has become a literary cause célèbre. The time has passed to give even well-known literary racists, albeit brilliant writers, a pass.

 

 

Dialogue from 2001 Space Odyssey, 1968 (Based on a 1951 short story, "The Sentinel," by Arthur C. Clarke) :

 

Interviewer: HAL, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by your dependence on people to carry out your actions?

 

HAL: Not in the slightest bit. I enjoy working with people. I have a stimulating relationship with Dr. Poole and Dr. Bowman. My mission responsibilities range over the entire operation of the ship so I am constantly occupied. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

                       

***

 

 

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I would make a phone call to Verizon, say, or Spectrum, or any other company, and chat to a live person about a discrepancy in my bill, get it "sorted," as my British friends say, wish the person a good day, and breathe a sigh. But person-person contact is mostly over. This week it hit me hard, partially because of the strikes in Hollywood, more later. But also because I called Verizon, and received a link to a "chat on text" opportunity. Yes, dear reader, an opportunity. The entity—what else to call it—kept texting, as follows:

 

 "I understand."

 "Are you a live person?" I asked.

 "Yes, I am a live person."

 "If you are live person, why do you sound like a bot?"

"I understand."

 

This conversation was almost as entertaining as the one between HAL and Mission Control in 2001 Space Odyssey.

 

Artificial Intelligence. Now I get it. Sci Fi predicted this just as Cli Fi predicted our climate changed summer. But there is more : the theft/scraping of  copyrighted work, and the threat to the livelihood of writers, film-makers, artists and musicians. My husband is a long-standing member of the WGA, the strongest writers' union in the country, and I am a long-standing member of the Authors Guild and PEN America. In this household, we #standwiththeWGA in its strike action which, if successful or unsuccessful, will have a ripple effect on every creative professional in the years and decades to come.

 

Even if you do not share my union politics, dear reader, at the very least consider the toxic effects of dehumanization because this is what the abuse of AI implies, for all of us. However artistically rendered, AI generated characters, images, melodies, dialogue and chats are usually stilted and barren. Undoubtedly, the technology will improve, as it always does, more reason to stay ethically grounded and examine what it can and cannot do, and what it must not ever do. Just imagine a future where all humans begin to sound and act like bots until no one can tell the difference. 

 

My husband and I shifted our mobile carrier from Verizon to Spectrum. It was, primarily, a financial decision, but all-told, our local Spectrum office is friendlier. We spent more than two hours with Eric and Dionne, kind and patient people, who asked the computer questions about the process, which was complicated and arduous, albeit a mostly human endeavor. The machines surrounding us that day—screens and phones and WiFi routers—were tools, and nothing more.