Walk This Way

“Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.” -Belloq to Indiana Jones, in Raiders of the Lost Ark

I recently watched a video on the Architectural Digest’s YouTube channel about New York City apartments. The five different types of apartments there were broken down in to how and why they were built and who they were built for. It was a fascinating look at what they were like in the beginning and what they have evolved in to in the present. I was appalled to learn that the Loft style apartments in Soho were once thriving and innovative communities of artists. They turned what had been large and open manufacturing spaces into unique and attractive residence/studios with the blessing of city government - for awhile. This got the attention of the rich later and they began to buy the lofts, pushing out the resident artists by driving the prices up so high that they were no longer affordable. The spoiled rich decided, like all bullies do, that they were more entitled.

In the 1960’s the famous row houses in San Francisco had lost their appeal and were made available to the hippies and bohemians who were now able to afford them.  To be honest, many of them did trash the hell out of the structures, but some of the more creative residents were instrumental in ushering in a new wave of music styles and contemporary art.  Here again, the rich decided that they were more entitled and began buying them to restore and refurbish to their affluent standards, making it impossible for anyone other than the well to do to ever afford them again. Ironically, many of the displaced hippies who promoted peace and love and freedom and a natural and down to earth lifestyle gave it all up for capitalism later on and they now own businesses and giant corporations and are politicians in Washington and serve as political leaders in many of the 50 states.

A similar thing happened in Scotland some time ago when wealthy performers in the music and movie industries decided that they wanted to live a more peaceful and tranquil life when they were not working and began buying up properties there. Their mere presence managed to raise the price of housing in the country sky high and caused the eviction and homelessness rates in that country to rise at a rate and a level that had never been seen there before.

People who look different and act different from the self-titled ruling class are not paid attention to if they do not present the standard look of the conservative elite.  It becomes difficult to get a job or be taken seriously in this world if you do not look like those who have convinced themselves and others that their façade is the only façade that matters. And make no mistake, it is just a façade. It is only the trappings of wealth on your surface that creates the illusion of superiority.  It is rather like the scene in the movie The Crying Game, where the young woman takes off her clothes to go to bed with a man and lo and behold the woman is a male, much to the horror of her intended partner. You can pretend anything that you like while in disguise but at some point, the clothes come off and you will be seen for what you really are. Under the designer clothes there is still a human being who is no different from the rest of us. You might get attention in the music and film industries with a unique look and point of view but these instances where it has made a breakthrough are usually short lived as the monied people are easily bored with the unique.

Our very nature as left leaning people is to seek more peace. Only people who prefer peace will see a need for maintaining it.  Is capitalism so ingrained in our culture that there is no escape from it? Is elitism a trait that cannot evolve out of our reality? Capitalism has allowed many of us to accumulate at least a semi comfortable life, but it comes at a high price that we must pay to keep it. Easily ⅓ of our life is spent paying homage to the elite capitalists who make it painfully clear to us in no uncertain terms that they hold all of the cards in the game that sets the rules upfront that we could lose it all at the drop of a hat if we slip up even once at playing by their rules.

There is an ancient woodcut depiction of the devil, who is naked and being followed by a group of people. One fellow is kneeling behind him, lips puckered, to kiss his ass. It is a fine representation of how capitalism actually works and would probably be proudly displayed on the wall in every workplace if the employer thought that he/she could get away with showing the truth of how they actually feel about the workers. The term ”human resource” has become so common place that most people don’t even see it for the insult that it actually is. It means that employees are disposable and easily replaceable like any other thing in life that we use and discard when its usefulness is no longer serving us. You can throw away an employee as easily as you can throw away a paper cup or an old sock, and believing that it is the employer’s right to do this to us keeps on destroying lives by the minute. Witness the seven employees at a Memphis Starbucks who were fired for daring to try to unionize. Starbucks was recently ordered to reinstate their employment, but if anybody believes that this will actually help those seven people, they are severely mistaken. They will not be welcomed back with forgiving arms and will never be treated with any respect. The best that this ruling has done is put a media release out there that shows an employer can get a slap on the wrist for bullying, but the employer will always be the bare-assed devil who can destroy a worker’s life in other ways that are perfectly legal and acceptable as long as they are still holding more aces in the game, and they definitely are. No matter what sanctions are put upon them, the employer still holds the power and the money to bounce back. The seven employees are on borrowed time as to how long they will be able to keep their jobs when they now are sporting a scarlet letter “A” (for activist) on their shirts for bucking the system. And like the book by Professor Richard Wolff tells us, the “Sickness” truly is the “System” that worships abuse as an inalienable right of capitalism.

“People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they have left.”
        -Theodor Adorno

Up The Women, Gender Fascism

The British sitcom Up The Women (an actual rallying cry of the Suffragette movement in England) is a very funny depiction of a small group of women who realize the need for emancipation of their lot but are sorely inept at making a effective statement of their grievances. The title can only remind you of insults such as “up yours” and “up your bum” in modern times but therein lies the dichotomy of what equality tends to conjure up in the minds of far too many people. The show is an amusing look at the women’s movement in England in 1910 which can apply even today when you realize that so many people are confused and just “winging it” when it comes to how we can address the unacceptable situation that we find ourselves in over 100 years later with respect to the truly just partial equality that women had in this country until the recent Supreme Court decision that took away a large part of that sadly partial equality and set us back about 50 years again.

I took a DNA test recently to try to discover my lineage on my Mother’s side of the family.  I already knew our origins on my Father’s side as a distant relative of mine had done the research for us years ago and published his findings in a large volume that my Father bought for me. I was pleased to discover that we originated from one man who came to America in the late 1700’s from Scotland, but I knew very little about my Mother’s side except for small amounts of information that I managed to glean from my Grandmother.  While waiting for my DNA results I decided to go to Ancestry.com and see what information was available there.  What I found was not really surprising at all when I remembered back to my Grandmother’s jolly and upbeat personality and some of the unusual things that she used to say before I realized that what she peppered her speech with, which to me, seemed eccentric and comically bizarre sometimes, had a legitimate origin that I did not know back then. Things that she often said just in passing were Cockney Rhyming Slang. Someone else having said a certain word or phrase would very often prompt her to say a series of words and phrases that made absolutely no sense in the context of what had been said to her.  It usually just rhymed with the last word that they had said. So it was no surprise to me to learn that her ancestry as far back as the 16th century was British.  She probably had no idea that she was British to the core, but somehow a bit of the linguistics of generations of Brits before her survived in the lyrical language that she spoke nearly every day of her life. I wish that I could tell her all that I discovered about our family centuries ago. I do believe that she would have been proud to know that one of our ancestors, Sir John Kidd, was actually Knighted in the 1500’s.

Another thing that I discovered in our lineage was a tragic testament to how difficult life was for the women in our family especially in the 1800’s. There is a long list of the patriarchs in our family having had multiple wives in their lifetimes from the loss of wives having died young after giving birth to multiple children. There were many men who were on record as having as many as 10 - 20 children by sometimes as many as 3 - 4 wives during their lives.  In one episode of Up The Women, the leader of the suffragette movement in England, Emmeline Pankhurst, visits the group and singles out the character of Eva, who is pregnant.  She asks Eva how many children she already has and Eva replies, “14." Emmeline tells her, “Tell your husband to tie a knot in it!” Very funny in the tv show but not funny at all when you know that before birth control and legal abortion there were probably millions of women who wished that it was humanly possible for their husbands to do just that and stop the continuous pregnancies and the multitude of health problems and financial fears that came with being unable to control the constant addition of children in to the family. No matter how much you love children, there needs to be a balance in how many family members two people can manage. I have to wonder if the men didn’t also wish that they could “tie a knot in it.”

So we truly need to take a look at the past to see what our future holds now that it is officially a crime to terminate an unwanted pregnancy when the right to do so was ours for nearly 50 years.  Having the freedom and ability to plan and balance our lives and the lives of those we live with has been lost and I know while many of us are still reeling from the shock of having lost a freedom which should always have been a given in our lives as human beings, we are now in an unbelievably dangerous position with respect to how on earth do we proceed from here when our government has “tied a knot” in our ability to control our own lives and has made it a crime to even attempt to do so?

ABC television had a series of animated PSAs for children in the 1970’s called Schoolhouse Rock, which taught select events in history.  One of them was about the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote after hundreds of years of denial.  It had a song called, “Sufferin’ ‘til Suffrage”, which was a very cute and clever way to teach what, until very recently, appeared to be something we would never have to address again. It appears that we need a new song and a new voice to speak to the world to let everyone know that freedoms are not necessarily etched in stone anymore.  We absolutely need another “Up The Women” movement to replace the one that we now have which is “Up Yours, Women!”

1000 Faces, 330 million Lives

Silent film star Lon Chaney was portrayed in the 1950’s film “The Man of 1000 Faces” by actor James Cagney.  It is a bittersweet movie about the life and rise to fame of Chaney as a character actor. I recommend it to anyone who has ever been touched in their life by the pain of being or loving someone who has a physical affliction or any kind of life challenge that often times makes us feel like the world would prefer that we were never born. Despite what ignorance and prejudice might tell us is truth, our place in the Universe and on this planet was preplanned and predestined to make a difference in sometimes small ways and sometimes very large ones. I don’t really know how the biography and films of Lon Chaney affected the people who were alive during his short but profoundly meaningful career but while he lived, he did more to capture the attention and give the world a glimpse into the sad and painful plight of people who were seen as different.

Lon Chaney knew all too well what it was like for people who were different having been a child of deaf-mute parents in the late 1800s. The movie reveals that Lon was constantly getting into fights with other children who thought they had a God-given superior right to ridicule and insult his parents for being “Dummies.” Later in the film when Lon is married and discovers that his wife Cleva is going to have a baby, he is so excited that he wants to go back to his parent’s home for Christmas so they can meet his wife and learn that they will soon be grandparents. Having not previously told his wife that his parents are deaf, he hopes that once she sees that they are a family like any other she will not be troubled by the fact that they cannot hear.  He was dreadfully wrong.  She is horrified when she learns the truth, and does not want to go through with the pregnancy.  She does relent and agrees to have the baby after a bitter argument with Lon, but their relationship never recovers from it, and Lon takes his young son after he is born and leaves Cleva, then telling his son when he is old enough to understand that his mother died.

After years of struggle to make a career for himself in cinema Lon finally breaks through to make many films that have at the center of them, a character who is different.  Many of the characters he portrays are grossly disfigured and treated cruelly and harshly because of their very existence. A 1930’s film called “Freaks” produced and directed by Tod Browning, had a role specifically handpicked by Browning for Lon to play, but Lon died of cancer before he could star in the film.

My father had a glass eye which I knew nothing about until I was about 10 years old.  No one ever talked about it, and my father wore thick lens glasses and had a very good quality glass eye so it was just something that I never could have known if someone hadn’t told me.  And they didn’t.  When I did learn about it my parents were going to take a day trip to Chicago and I was asked if I wanted to go with them.  I very much wanted to go but I was a bit intimidated by it because I had heard that Al Capone used to live there and he ran a criminal syndicate from there during Prohibition. I suppose it was ridiculous to be frightened of someone who had been dead for many years prior to our visit, but I remember seeing the incredibly tall high-rise buildings in the downtown area and wondering if any of Capone’s gang might still be there just waiting to shoot down anyone who might look at them wrong. On the way to Chicago, I still didn’t really know why we were going there except I did know that my father was going to see a doctor.  While my mother and I waited for my father when he was with the doctor my mother told me that my father was getting a new glass eye.  I was profoundly confused when she told me that.  It was all big news to me that he had an old one!  She told me not to say anything about it when he came out from seeing the doctor.  I don’t think that I could have anyway.  I was still processing the news when he did return.  He didn’t look any different to me. He was still “Dad”.  So, the drive back to Michigan was quiet in our car which was no different from the drive to Chicago had been. A few days later, I got up enough nerve to ask my mother how he had lost his eye. She told me a story that wasn’t true but I didn’t find that out until years later when I asked my father to make an audio tape for me and tell me what he knew about our family history. When I found out exactly how he had lost his eye I couldn’t believe that my mother had lied to me about it.  I do not know to this day if it was a deliberate lie or if she really didn’t know the truth herself. One thing that I did learn from my mother that was true was that my father was extremely sensitive about his eye and that more than once my father got into fist fights with other men in Louie’s Tavern after a few beers if any of them dared say anything about his glass eye. Why my parents took me with them to Chicago that day I will never know. They didn’t invite my older sister to go.  I can only assume that my father wanted me to know about it but didn’t want to talk about it.  Since I was the quiet and reserved child in the family, I guess he thought that I would learn the truth but wouldn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t.  I was always the observer and rarely the participant in family conversations so I must have been thought to be the only one who wouldn’t run out and tell every kid on the block about my dad’s glass eye.  He was right.  I never did.

So why am I telling these stories about how people have situations in their lives that can get them harassed, ridiculed, ostracized, beaten up and even killed for being different? Because things haven’t changed. Some things are better understood now.  There are wheelchair accessible buildings and many changes have been made to better serve the physically challenged.  But the challenges of the people who have a different point of view or a different lifestyle are targets for harassment and ridicule more now than ever.  The good news is that forums where we can express another opinion are available to us now but it does not follow that we will necessarily be safe from hatred and violence for making a statement.

As Lon Chaney was able to draw attention to the plight of the disabled, disfigured, and mentally challenged in that time period, there are people now who are tirelessly working to shed light on how people are being treated unfairly for just needing a job, affordable housing, healthcare, and earning a living wage.  I have seen all of my life how people are given little or no respect for trying to advocate for a better future for themselves and for others. The situation has been made much worse in the last few years by those who are so proud that they don’t have these struggles that they feel entitled to verbally and physically abuse those who have not been so fortunate. I have yet to discover how this kind of harassment can be stopped when the very people who should have our backs when abusers attack us are many times abusers themselves.  Communication with the Universal mind offers some guidance on this, but it is a problem of a species that has free will to choose right and balanced action or action that can only bring out the worst in people because their priorities and incentives come from a place of selfishness, jealousy, and a delight in cruel treatment of others. Our society cannot be bothered to intervene. And a people who will not take care of their own will not use the tools available to them to put a halt to the abuse.  People call on their god to stop what is happening to our world without understanding that we are given the knowledge to solve these problems ourselves, and as individuals we must apply the information that we are given on a daily basis.  There are people who advocate every day to show us what is wrong and how we might fix these problems, but not enough people are listening, and most of the people who are do not see that they have a place in bringing about the solution.

In the early part of the 20th century, we had Lon Chaney to show us what society needed to address in the culture to stop the needless cruelty toward those who are born or created by life circumstances different.  We have many people right now in this early part of the 21st century who are telling us what can be done to redirect ourselves to bring about change. Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, Robert Reich, and Richard Wolff {who by the way shares an April 1st, Aries birthday with Lon Chaney} are speaking to us every day in many different venues that are accessible to us free of charge on YouTube. But for whatever reason that we might cite as a reason for not trying to apply the insights that they provide we are truly not making an effective push for the change necessary to bring us out of these situations.

I would urge everyone to look within and find the unique strengths that you already possess by the mere fact that you are in this country and on this planet and apply them in whatever manner you believe to be appropriate for you.  Do not assume that it is always someone else who can do the job better.  The people that I listed above had to start somewhere, and many times it starts with the feeling that something is very wrong and you are fed up with the fact that nothing is being done about it.

Find your anger and find your voice and this time find them for the good of the many instead of the good of the few who decided that the voice of hate was the best catalyst for change.