Slant, gook, spook, wop - just a few of the racial epithets used by Clint Eastwood’s character in his new movie Grand Torino. As Mark and I watched the movie last night at the Starlight Muvico, I was a unsettled by the audience laughter each time he spit out the nasty slurs; why did they laugh?
Possibly because Eastwood’s character is cartoonish and two-dimensional. As a veteran of the Korean War he is ridiculously out of date with the world around him. I admit I enjoyed watching his face contort into frustrated spasms; once most memorably when a receptionist in head-scarf escorts him into his doctor’s office where he discovers his doctor has retired and is replaced by a young Asian woman.
Although I didn’t find humor in the slurs I could relate to the the character’s frustration. The world is changing so fast and in so many ways; its hard to imagine keeping up even as a relatively young person. Journalist Michael Tomasky writes that American’s white population is expected to drop from 68 percent to 61 percent between now and 2020 and then fall to 50 percent by 2050. My son’s first grade teacher is Muslim and his doctor is Indian. This is probably to his benefit.
Video sent out by Chip Saltsman, a Tennessee candidate for the Republican party chairman, “Barack the Magic Negro”:
In conversation with an African-American friend she asked me why people hate the Jews. She said, “I understand why they hate us, we look different, but why the Jews?” I could only shrug and reply that much wiser and smarter people than I had explored the question without any definitive answers. It was the first time we’d talked so intimately about race. It felt like a leap of trust made possible by the growing strength of our friendship and our shared involvement in the election of Obama.
Finally, no one was laughing in the last scene of Grand Torino when Eastwood’s character, who during the course of the movie accidentally befriends an Asian family living next door, finds a way to bring justice after they’ve been violently victimized. Written and directed by Eastwood, the movie is a perfect coda to his work in the violent racially stereotyped Dirty Harry movies of the 1970’s. Now that we’re about to see our first African American take office maybe we’ll have many more such conversations.
The video below on constructing a hydroponic garden is made to help others interested in hydroponics. I won’t say it was easy - the effort taxed my limited practical abilities. My success probably has alot to do with my taking time to write out in detail the assembly instructions given verbally to me by the owners of HydroHarvest Farm. Those detailed instructions are now available for anyone who purchases hydroponic garden materials from the farm.
The end of the year arrives and we’re counting our blessings. Mitzvahboy transitioned nicely from Hillel School to first grade at our neighborhood school, Lewis Elementary. I continued serving Raintree Writing Service clients, writing the occasional book review for the St. Petersburg Times while also working as Parent Liaison for Hillsborough County Schools and Mark completed a new play, “River in the Desert.”
For me, 2008 was the year to accept the realities of middle-age: reading glasses, slowing metabolism and hormone changes. My personal coach tells me that is the age where one must take care to fuel every muscle, bone and blood cell with with food on all levels - intellectual, physical, spiritual; self-care becomes even more critical to meet the demands of parenting and family life.
Like many families, we’re anticipating a very challenging 2009. The financial crisis, the deterioration of print media, and cut backs to education have created a perfect storm that affects about every family we know, including ours. So my resolutions for 2009 are very basic: find ways to bring healthy, low-cost foods into the house; introduce family activities that nurture the soul and body without depleting the bank account.
I’ve got 4 hours of good sun on the north-east corner of our property. Unfortunately that means that the hydroponic gardening towers I’m investing in with my father’s holiday check will have to reside in the front of the house. Possibly in a few months I can move them to the patio in the back. I checked with our next-door neighbors and they had no objections. I’m planning to grow enough produce and herbs so that we can stop buying the tasteless stuff found at local groceries and have enough excess to share with friends and family.
Cooking
I’m the proud owner of two new stainless steel frying pans and my first cuisinart food processor. My sister Lauren is my go-to person for ideas and inspiration for making healthy home-cooked food. For those looking to cut food costs take a look at Super-Target. I found a half-gallon of milk was TWO dollars cheaper than what we’ve been paying at Publix. I found many items at lower cost and many of the Target brands a higher quality than what we’ve been buying.
Family Time: Bicycling
I’m not sure we’ll manage this. But who knows - 2009 may be the magic year! We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood where it is possible to bicycle as a family. We’re also near enough to the Hillsborough River to ride in neighborhoods on the river. And we have a new pet that loves nothing better than to be with us. Fluffy’s holiday gift will be a basket so that she can ride along with us.
The Great Outdoors
Sure, Mitzvahboy is outdoors in scheduled activities: he’s on the Junior Swim Team at the Temple Terrace Rec. Center and will have tennis and baseball lessons and soccer in the spring. But I want him to have outdoor experiences that are less directed. So we’ll spend a weekend on the Suwannee River filled with music at the Paralounge Drum Festival and attend a few of the great free activities at the Weedon Island Nature Preserve.
Self-Care: Reading, Nutrition, Exercise, Blogging
Obama administration, Islam, healthy living, gift-giving, the ideas of Garrett Hardin - all really, really interesting. This year I’ll use i-Google to expand my information sources; I will make it to tai-chi on Saturday mornings; I will visit Mind, Body, Spirit for a nutrition consultation. I will enjoy Mark’s gift of a subscription to the New Yorker after not having it for several years. Sure I’m filled with self-doubt about the value of my blogging, but its been a great creative outlet; who knows what professional opportunities may be coming as online media matures.
Good luck in reaching for your own new year resolutions!
Be safe, be fearless, be informed….Happy New Year!
You just know times are changing when the front page of your favorite newspaper covers the story of the President-Elect’s weekly YouTube address and you skip the article because you saw the video. Climate change, the global financial crisis, two US wars, and everywhere jobs are evaporating. We’re doing what we can to adjust. Almost everyone I know is either looking for work or insecure about their job. Creative Loafing is in Chapter 11 and Hillsborough County Schools have declared a deep hiring freeze.
I pulled my retirement funds out of the stock market. We canceled our Sunday New York Times. I traded in my car in favor of one that is more fuel efficient and we’ve ended the habit of casual eating out. I’m eyeing the backyard with its sandy soil and thinking maybe better to try hydroponic gardening.
As a parent there are benefits to being Jewish this time of year. MitzvahBoy is accustomed to receiving gifts under $5 on each of the eight days of Hanukkah so his holiday won’t be much affected by our budget cutting. He noted recently that those who observe the Santa myth get more presents. Oh well, I said, we’re Jewish.
For years I’ve struggled with this season of compulsory gift giving. There are gifts that can never be repaid and gifts intended to establish bonds that I’d prefer to refuse. I’ve been interested in authenticity at the expense of ritual. But that may be changing thanks to my new best friend the book “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde. Hyde writes in the introduction, “A gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.” For me this idea is helpful; true gifts aren’t acquisitions and they aren’t motivated by any thought of getting something back.
In the first chapter of “The Gift” Hyde writes “Another way to describe the motion of the gift is to say that a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten…This, then is how I use “consume” to speak of a gift-a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of anything in return. There is little difference, therefore, between its consumption and its movement. A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis; you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.”
So in that spirit I offered my mother-in-law a potato as a birthday present. A bit unorthodox, but appropriate - she’s always encouraging us to eat vegetables so I gave her an organic sweet potato from the Sweetwater Farm. She reciprocated by bringing a delicious sweet potato casserole to thanksgiving dinner. Encouraged by this small success I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend making a stew. Two days of boiling and soaking and chopping yielded two pots full. I gave away quart baggies labeled “Elizabeth’s Kosher Turkey Stew.”
Ready for another opportunity involving food-gifts, I agreed to help MitzvahBoy’s reading teacher with a Hanukkah presentation for his class. Nevermind that the one and only time I made latkes they were horrid, heavy greasy starchy blobs. I’m moving ahead with confidence thanks to the latke making advice of the expert Jodi Ray.
I’m looking forward to a season of experimenting with consumable gifts: food, books, ideas, time. Friends can look forward to gifts from the Leib family of fresh roasted coffee from Café Kili, homemade cookies, time together lighting Hanukkah candles, and blog posts exploring the complexities of gift giving. With any luck I’ll navigate more comfortably and with increasing skill the rituals of this holiday season.
Columbia journalism professor Sree Sreenivasanm is hosting webcast reports by Journalists and experts in Mumbai and in the U.S. on the attack. A Jewish community center in Mamba, Nariman House, home to the Orthodox Jewish group Chabad Lubavitch, was also attacked. The identity of the attackers is unconfirmed; early reports identify one as Pakastani and possibly others may hold British passports.
It’s fascinating to watch the way technology makes it possible for journalists to collaborate from different cities and outside of news organizations to organize an internet news bureau to report on a subject in real time. The next webcast is scheduled this morning at 10AM and then again tonight at 10PM.
Thanks to Daniel B. Smith’s article “What is Art For”, in today’s New York Times magazine about Lewis Hyde, I’m on the hunt for Hyde’s book, “The Gift.”
In the NYT’s article Smith writes about his discussion with Hyde on the book and its influence among artists. For anyone producing creative work, you’ll appreciate the article’s exploration of the issues around intellectual copywright and the broader question of how related laws and regulations assist or impede creative work. He ends with a lovely excerpt from a song written by Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn in response to the book. The song is like the book titled “The Gift.”
In this YouTube video Hyde talks (at length and not terribly well) about the topic of his upcoming work, “the privatizing of the cultural commons.”
video description: Hyde addresses many of the issues and concerns that modern copyright use presents to works traditionally open for public consumption. Referencing the life and work of Ben Franklin, he argues on behalf of the public’s need for access to traditionally public ideas and works for the benefit and progression of society.
Ok, let’s take a few more days to congratulate ourselves on electing a president who uses modern technology. In this first address via youTube, our new president-elect talks to us like grown-ups, citizens instead of infants who can only babble and shit and suck and whose highest aspiration is to shake a shiny rattle. We are encouraged to imagine ourselves as world citizens instead of rogue mavericks. See also Garrison Keillor’s column on Obama - the coolest president in the world.
This morning as MitzvahBoy is getting dressed to go to Sunday school and Mark gathers his tallit and prayer shawl for morning prayers at Kol Ami Synagogue, I’m flicking through cable channels to see what I can find. I hit pay dirt on C-Span’s Washington Journal where the Al Jazeera Washington Bureau Chief, Abderrahima Foukara is taking questions from callers on the response from the Arab world to President-Elect Obama.
I’ve been wanting to explore the Arab immigrant experience after reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story, “Infidel”. But a few years ago under the Bush administration, it seemed dangerous to do so publicly. Call me chicken, but exploring ideas can have very unpleasant social consequences and in some parts of the world, can get you killed.
To list a few examples: the filmmaker Van Gogh stabbed on the streets of Denmark over his film, Submission; angry mobs threatening violence over the Danish cartoons lampooning Muhammad; death fatwas issued on Ali and Rushdie; and of course, 9/11. Muslim activists in the Netherlands have called for Dutch politician Geert Wilders to be prosecuted under the blasphemy laws for having argued that Islam was incompatible with personal freedoms and Western democracy in his 10 minute film “Fitna”.
And finally, there was the stark reminder last year each school day when I dropped off MitzvahBoy for his kindergarten class at the Hillel School of Tampa : a police car at the school entrance.
We are Jews living in a neighborhood with a growing Muslim population and where Sami Al-Arian has lived for years. And I have yet to be able to connect with our Muslim neighbors - the culture divide is deep.
Frankly, everything I’ve seen and read about the position of woman in Islamic countries is offensive to my values. I’ve read on the subject extensively, books and essays and on the blogosphere. Combined with what I observe in my day to day life, I can’t find evidence that in general terms Muslims are living in America with much interest in integrating and adapting. I’m looking for political and civic engagement - and the voices of Arab women. Why aren’t they active in the local PTA? I have what I think are reasonable fears that this particular immigrant group may be antagonistic to our democratic traditions. Having women walking the neighborhood draped in black from head to toe creeps me out and reminds me of Margret Atwoods scary novel about the suppression of women, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” So chicken I will be.
What a difference a year makes. MitzvahBoy is now at public school and has for his first grade teacher a woman who wears a head-scarf. We have an incoming president who carries Hussein as his middle name. And in my mailbox this week is an invitation from Torah University, an educational outreach of the congregation where Mark and I were married, to attend a series of classes titled, “A Muslim Perspective: To Begin to Understand the Islamic Experience that will Encourage an Open Dialogue.” The class are held at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church. I’ve made plans to attend and blog about the discussions. Stay tuned.
I wish I could have been gentler this morning with the senior-citizen caucasian man who interrupted my joyful conversation with a fellow Obama supporter to tell us he did not share our views. With little patience and no apology I told him this was our moment to enjoy and he’d just have to listen. It was the morning after the election. This is a president I can believe in, someone who I can look to for leadership. At this particular moment, so rich in historical significance, so meaningful to so many, I hope our grandparents can forgive us our goofy, irrepressible joy.
The idea that with Obama’s victory we’ve rejoined the world community is one of the big reasons why I’m so proud to be American today. Worldwide reaction to Obama’s presidential victory is captured in this New York Times video.
If the yard signs were any indication, our neighborhood was fairly evenly divided between Obama and McCain. On my early morning jog the first day of President-Elect Obama’s victory all but a couple of the McCain signs were gone. Maybe they’ll follow McCain’s lead in his concession speech and accept the change this election represents. Or maybe not. Our democratic experiment continues.
Election Night Fun: CNN interview with Will-i.am hologram
If you think that Palin’s experience of having an autistic nephew and a downs syndrome son makes her a certain advocate for special needs kids - check the record - then VOTE OBAMA!
