Photo-aggression

My wife and I spent two weeks this summer on a tour of Spanish museums, wherein an insightful art professor led twenty-six retired, worldly, under- employed people to places of their dreams.  I could write about the art in the cities we visited- Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Valencia and Barcelona- or the hotels or the heat (we arrived during a historic August heat wave), but those things are well covered elsewhere.  What I want to write about is the photo-aggression committed by tourists, both American and otherwise. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not self-righteous about it.  I took my Droid, with its swift camera, and shot one or two photos per museum.  So I know the feeling people who love travel have, that they want to share something of what they’ve seen, to bring a bit of it back, to "own" it (and of course the more crass feeling of, “Look, this is where I went and you didn't”).   Such feelings used to be expressed in journals and letters, but now, as the spoken word is increasingly demoted to short text expressions- these even freed from the syntax of sentences (Las Meninas, OMG!)- the photographic image is the way we enhance our memories.

Fine, but how interesting can your memories be to others if they include every painting and sculpture you see?  That’s right, everything.  The goal of our group (who were otherwise congenial and intelligent- I hope they’ll forgive me for this little critique!) and of groups all around us from many countries, appeared to be to photograph each and every piece of art, along with its descriptive plaque.  As soon as we exited the bus, an advance squad, mostly men, would fan out to snap the exterior of the museum, catching every column, angle and perspective, fighting for space with young couples holding out sticks like fishing poles with narcissism as bait.  Some of the men, as they rushed the museum gates, appeared to have worked as soccer refs, coming to sudden halts before their targets, devices held out front, ready to inform the eye and make the call, knees slightly bent for speed in moving to the next target.

Indeed, the invasion of the image-snatchers broke free of museum walls.  Any element of the environment with potential to be interesting, which was pretty much everything, was subject to photography: lampposts, signs in windows, graffiti, bad reproductions of Vermeer in restaurants, manhole covers, and, of course, each other.

How do tourists represent their countries when they commit photo-aggression?  I learned, from the beautiful paintings of Joaquin Sorolla, who is making a well-deserved comeback, of the arresting custom at Spanish beaches of permitting young boys to swim nude (if you've never heard of Sorolla it's because he was nearly snuffed out by Picasso's gang).  At a beach on the way to Salvador Dali’s house in Port Lligat, I beheld a real-life Sorrola at a small cove dotted with families. As I took off my shoes to wander over the stones into the gently lapping Mediterranean, a nude boy of about four walked past with his mother.   The serene Sorolla moment was destroyed when several Americans from a nearby group spotted a Kodak moment and whipped out their devices, no permission to photograph having been requested or received.  I wondered what the reaction would be on one of L.A.’s beaches if a group of tourists, cameras upraised, approached family groups to photograph the children.   Maybe the Inuit were right that having your picture taken steals your soul.

I'm sure my fellow tourists are not trying to steal souls, but if it's not to steal souls, what’s it for, this compulsive creation of images?  If you were the first person on Mars, you would certainly want to record everything you saw.  Here on earth, however, everything is amply recorded.  I found no work of art too obscure or counter-culture that I could not find its reproduction on my cell phone, for free.  Archeologist of the future will love our age, which they might call, “The Age of Record Keeping.” 

Maybe there’s some psychological need at work.  Marshall McLuhan posited in the 60's that “the medium is the message,” meaning that the medium impacts the message and modifies it.  Perhaps we feel that works of art need to be processed through a mechanical medium, like a camera, in addition to the medium of our minds, in order to be modern, or post-modern, or something.  If that’s what people think, they’re wrong. 

"But," you might counter, "What’s so bad about taking pictures of great art in a museum setting if that’s what people want to do?"

For starters, museum photo-aggression eliminates, for everyone in the space, the contemplative and peaceful state of mind required to appreciate art.  How peaceful can you be when you have to be two feet from a painting before you can see it because, from further away, your view is obstructed by multiple hands raised high, positioning devices as if at a Stones reunion.  When at last you're close enough to see the painting, it doesn’t help that, while you’re finally viewing, say, Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which you waited your whole life to see, a chorus of whir whir, click clicks attends you, along with multiple red dots that move across the surface of the painting like targeting lights from snipers trying to kill art itself.

I saw the same behavior last summer on another museum tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and London (the only relief I found, in London, was in the Tate Gallery’s almost empty William Blake room, where I learned that no one cares about Blake anymore).  It’s a puzzle to me why so many great European art museums tolerate unbridled photography, particularly in Spain, where museum staff are as alert to transgression as the TSA.  That alertness to respect for the art of their country, though it can be off-putting at first, is ultimately beneficial to the viewer.  In the Prado in Madrid, for instance, museum staff constantly monitor noise levels, emitting a harsh “Shh!” when decibels exceed a certain point- often a welcome service. Yet the only museum I visited that forbade photography was the Picasso in Barcelona.  Why do most museums permit unrestricted camera use, which causes at least as much distraction as noise? 

I implore museums to ban the use of cameras.  People would be able to look at art again, and sales of postcards and prints would dramatically increase at the gift shop! 

One sin too many

One sin too many

tipped the scales,

mortality, not life

prevails.

For Eve, you know

just could not wait,

her female hunger

hard to sate.

The serpent eyed her

thinking how

he'd transfer all his weakness now:

The weakness of not wanting much

the weakness of

his cold dark touch.

Take this, he hissed,

God won't be pissed;

the obedient creature

is not missed.

Eve was not sure

and for a while

thought this is naughty,

not my style.

But then she thought

our life is hard in

this infernally pleasant

garden;

God must know

that stories need

a conflict

for the mind to heed.

Thus did the serpent

choose most fit

she who knew

before she bit

The fleshy fruit

raised to her jaw,

the story is our god's,

she saw.

And Adam

more prone to be led

saw the truth of what she said.

Swallowing hard

he looked about

in mortal fear

he turned to shout:

"Oh no! We're in

the story line,

we'll have to be interesting,

not devine!"

Creation's ratings, now assured,

though we'd rather not have any.

We wonder, should we have demurred

before one sin too many?

Am I White?

I. Terms

People who see me tell me that I’m "White," but I hesitate to feel the "White" guilt that many sponsor.  The hesitation comes from two sources: our muddled definition of “White,” and the life experiences of my family and me.

Our society has never used the term “White” with a proper definition.  “Caucasian,” the previous term of choice, has proven nonsensical, so much so that its usage has been largely dropped by agencies such as school districts that keep track of employee and student ethnicities. The concept of Caucasian people derived from the late 18th century German academic Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who believed the "White" races originated in the general area of the Caucasus Mountains. That idea was debunked, but the term gained new life from another German, the philosopher Christoph Meiners, who, in 1785, coined the phrase “Caucasian race.” In Meiners’ classification, there were only two racial divisions: Caucasians and Mongolians. The Caucasians were, per Meiners, more attractive, having the “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin,” while the Mongolians, which included Jews, were not attractive. Clearly, as a Jew, I have little incentive to use the term “Caucasian.”

Unfortunately, the term that replaced “Caucasian,” “Anglo,” which for over 30 years I have designated myself to be on forms for the Los Angeles Unified School District, is as meaningless as “Caucasian”.  You really could not pick a less descriptive term for “White” than “Anglo," short for “Anglo-Saxon,” a reference to the Germanic tribes that settled in Britain after the Roman exodus. Firstly, in order for the term “Anglo” or “Anglo-Saxon” to make historical sense, it should be “Anglo-Saxon-Norman,” to take into account the Norman (i.e. French speaking Viking) invasion that created the modern English people and its language.

The specific problem for me is that, while everyone agrees that I’m “White,” I have no common ancestry with Angles, Saxons or Normans. Depending on which history you accept, as an Ashkenazi Jew I am either descended from an ancient Semitic tribe or from a Turkic group called the Khazars, a nomadic and warlike nation that dominated the Russian plains until about 800AD, when it was weakened (along with the Slavs) by the Mongols, then destroyed by the Vikings who created modern Russia- contrasted with Sephardic Jews, a more provably Semitic people, many of whom migrated through North Africa and Spain, and who are no more related to "Anglos" than the Ashkenazi.

With both common terms for “White” - “Caucasian” and “Anglo” - virtually meaningless, there is not much to go on but the color white, but that is of limited help since “White” people are not the color white, any more than “Red,” Black” or “Brown” people are those colors.  I used to superimpose my forearm on a piece of white paper to show my inner-city students that I am not white. With my skin tone contrasted with actual white, it was clear that if my skin were a crayon color, it would be tan.

II. White guilt, special privilege and oppression

So much for the blanket definition of “White.”  The question now becomes, whatever kind of White person I may be, have I or my ancestors oppressed and harmed other races in heinous ways, and have we, as "White" people, been the benefiary of special privileges because we are "White"?   I don’t have any information previous to my grandparents and some great-grandparents, but from what I know of my family history, I’m not seeing much oppression of anyone, or race based privilege.  Both sides of my family fled for their lives from Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania in the late 19^th Century.   America was a promised land indeed, but not in an easy way.  My paternal grandfather, who came to New York City poor and speaking no English, worked for a while in a sweat shop, then made his way to Bismarck, North Dakota where he opened a successful store.  To my knowledge, no special privileges or slaves were involved.  The local KKK burned a cross in front of the Lasken Building (my dad, watching the crowd from the second floor where the family slept, recognized the chief of police and the husband of his second grade teacher).  Neither my grandparents nor my parents could join Bismarck's country club.  

My father became a pharmacist and we moved to Los Angeles when I was two years old.  Most pharmacy chains would not hire Jews.  The notable exception was Thrifty Drug Stores, where my dad worked throughout my childhood for $1.98 an hour.  He later used his knowledge of Thrifty’s exorbitant prescription prices to open the first discount pharmacy in L.A.  He made money, but, again, no privilege or slaves were involved, other than wage slaves (who got respectable union pay), and they were of every color.

In 1972, when I received my BA in English literature from the University of Minnesota, I went to see the chair of the English department to enquire about graduate school.  A distinctly unfriendly man told me that there was “no room” in the English department for me.  I later learned that the ‘70’s were the tail end of the practice of Midwestern university English departments to exclude Jews.  (I’m not very bitter about it; the fallout from this exclusion has been that I got to teach elementary kids to read and high school kids to read more, rather than toss all my work to TA’s and wear elbow patches).

I thought about administration and got a master’s degree in educational administration, but received intense hostility from the district when I tried to move into administration.  I was told by a principal, in a moment of candor, that I was the wrong color for administration.  The message was futher clarified by a Hispanic coordinator at an East L.A. meeting who told me I should not take a walk alone in the neighborhood because, not only was I White, but I was a particular kind of White who looked “really White,” so walking alone might not be safe for me (I did walk alone and felt perfectly safe). If the L.A. district had been rational about race it would have included in its mandates a message that people who look really white are not necessarily descended from slave owners or people who are comfortable in a world that accepts slavery. As it happened, the district, years later, headed its Critical Race Theory curriculum "Challenging Whiteness."

III. Does it matter?

There are enough reasonable people around of all races that I don’t worry about being misunderstood in intelligent circles.  The broader problem is that our national politics is increasingly racial (for want of other substance), with the 2016 presidential race presented as a struggle between a "White" party, the Republicans, versus the Democratic Party, a coalition of races in agreement on "White" guilt.  Thomas B. Edsall, writing in the New York Times (“The Persistence of Racial Resentment,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=139836&preview=true) relates that the GOP has won the “White” vote in every election except one going back to 1952 (the exception was LBJ in 1964).  Edsall writes that Mitt Romney lost the GOP ticket in 2012, not because he lacked non-“White” votes, but because he only had 59% of the “White” vote, not the 62% he needed. Were this translated into campaign advice for Romney, it would be that he should have done more to get the "White" vote. But how would he have done that? And what does "White vote" even mean?

The 2016 presidential campaign promises to be a landmark font of confusion regarding ethnic politics.  The “White” vote as defined above, by virtue of its link with Republicans and the Tea Party, presents itself as retrograde, bigoted and ignorant, as well as Midwestern and Southern.  What are the options for a “White” person living in, say, Los Angeles, who does not want to be represented in this way?  The standard option would be to join the Democrats, but that does not work for me because I regard the Democratic Party as shamelessly corrupt, both in its pork-driven and harmful education policies and its reincarnation as the party of war.

Thus I believe it’s time for everyone to stop obsessing about our ethnicities.  We’re all in the same boat, anyway: every race is about to be threatened by the biological sciences, which are on the verge of creating new types of humans to, well, replace us.  2016 should be the year of realistic assessment of the prospects for all humanity, not a rehash of our imperfect history so far.

Mystical kicks on Route 66

Our driving trip the first week of 2015, like our last to Havasu City, took my wife and me into the Southwest, this time as far as Sante Fe, New Mexico.  Our itinerary paralleled old Route 66, the romanticized predecessor of the Interstate Highway System, surviving stretches of which feature commercial clusters which promise and often deliver nostalgic glimpses of early automotive America.  This trip was different from our Havasu getaway in another respect: We did not get away from the world, but were immersed in it by the car radio and our mobile devices as word of the French massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher deli invaded our space and seemed to stain even the open deserts.  

Our first stop, Williams, Arizona, where we stayed at the Railway Hotel and took the delightful old narrow gauge train to the Grand Canyon, occurred before the awful news, so we could relax and enjoy the Americana.  The train was built when there were no drivable roads leading to the canyon and was taken by many notables in the 1920’s, including movie stars and presidents.  It chugged along for two hours each way, past beautiful snowy terrain. 

At the canyon, after some minutes staring into the seeming endless depths, it seemed to me that, thanks to the Colorado River, one can look into private parts of the earth.  The guide explained that it is a common misperception that the river cut into a motionless plain; in fact the plain rose as part of the Colorado Plateau, the river just keeping level.  The result in any case is an assault on the earth’s integrity, allowing the viewer to look where we normally can’t look.  I wondered if the earth was in pain from this violation.  Or was it a sexual penetration?  Is the earth ravished here, in the throes of rapture from the river’s thrust?  When such thoughts come over me I take a cautionary moment to think of the scorn a geologist might have for them.  The earth alive?  Native Americans were allowed to think that, but we are not, as the dogma of our state religion, Science, has it that matter is a random chaos of unconscious reaction.  Our one permitted mystical focus, which we call “God,” is not matter, but spirit, guiding us in our manipulation of matter.  Our drive to colonize the extra-terrestrial universe is a crusade to force all matter to conform to our will.  Such, anyway, were my thoughts at the Grand Canyon.   

The next day we toured Meteor Crater, Az., a wonderful gigantic dent in the earth, surrounded to the horizon by the Colorado Plateau, dated to a meteor collision about 50,000 years ago.  The crater and visitor center are privately owned by the descendants of a man who staked a mining claim here and dug several hundred feet below the crater floor in the mistaken belief that a mass of extraterrestrial iron that he could sell to the railroads was buried there.  In fact the nickel-iron mass had disintegrated on impact into myriad small particles which lay everywhere around the site.  The largest intact piece of the meteor, about two feet long, is in the visitor center.  I touched it eagerly, wondering what far away mind, what “other”, I might be in contact with, again, obviously, deviating from the state religion, where iron and nickel atoms are “materials,” in effect dead things. 

On the tour of the rim I had forgotten my water bottle and the guide suggested I eat snow.  I did and it was delicious, and I wondered if any of the dispersed iron atoms were in the snow.  Could it be that I would metabolize pieces from “outer-space,” that they would become part of me?  Looking down into the crater I again had the thought that something sexual had occurred.  Was the earth fucked here?  If so, perhaps there was a resonance in the ground beneath my feet, detectable even in the snow I was eating.  And I thought, not for the first time, that it’s a good thing our state religion does not have an Inquisition (at least not a formal one).

At about this time the news of the Charlie Hebdo attack broke, followed soon after by news of the kosher deli attack, and our trip from then on was not, strictly speaking, a vacation, in the etymological sense of a vacated mind, though we found some escape our first night in Santa Fe.  We arrived late.  It was cold and dark; most stores and restaurants around the historic city center were closed.  Luckily we found that the Hotel La Fonda’s restaurant was not only open but featured a lively country band and a group of people who had been dancing there for 35 years (per our waitress, who seated us close to the band).  Several of the dancing couples were quite expert, one in particular whose precision moves looked professional, so, although we love dancing, we felt a certain hesitation to join in.  The first martini took care of that (we learned the next day that, at 7,000 feet, the effects of alcohol in Santa Fe are notably enhanced), and we danced through a number of songs (the regulars were quite tolerant of our lurching about, for which we were grateful).

The next day we took a walking tour of the city, our initial mood somewhat dour, both because of the aftereffects of our revelries the night before and the deepening horror on the news.  But that news proved to be an engaging backdrop to the tour.  Santa Fe is one of those cities where history informs everything.  It embodies the living memory of Native Americans, the Spanish Conquest, the Catholic Church, the Mexican period, the early American period, and something else we did not know about.  The guide took us into a sprawling 19^th Century hacienda, through room after room added over the years, and in the furthest room was the former office of Robert Oppenheimer, where he met, towards the end of World War II, with other people with familiar names, like Edward Teller, as these men, engaged in the Manhattan Project, oversaw the invention of the atom bomb and its first detonation in the nearby desert.  Touching the preserved objects on Oppenheimer’s desk, I thought of the atom, and again my heresy was aroused, probably more so in the context of events unfolding in France.  What is an atom?  It comes from the Greek, meaning, “that which cannot be cut,” but of course we have cut it.  What does that mean, to “cut” an atom?  We have split it into “sub-atomic” particles, an oxymoron in the etymological sense, although, as if attempting to make semantic amends, science journals often assert that within the atom we've found new “basic building blocks” which cannot be cut, like quarks, or whatever particle we have not cut yet. 

We’ve found that when we cut an atom, a burst of something we call “energy” emerges.  This energy can be used to do things, like heat cities or incinerate hundreds of thousands of people.  The latter is what Oppenheimer et al had in mind. 

But what is an atom?  To find out, we hurl them at great speeds at each other, causing collisions that rip apart their structure so that tiny components spill out.  In my blasphemy, I consider that a strange way to find out what an atom is.  What if you were an advanced being from another galaxy and you wondered what people were?  You note that they move excitedly over the planet, changing everything, often rubbing against each other, activity that apparently produces more of them.  To further your understanding of people-particles, you deem it necessary to hurl them against each other, ripping apart their structure so that their components fly out.  That does not seem a likely scenario, as an advanced being would probably figure that nothing much would be learned about people that way.  I guess what I’m saying is, we’re not advanced.

After the first atom bomb was detonated in New Mexico in 1945, Oppenheimer is said to have quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  That occurred to me as we walked out into the cold sun in the courtyard.  What underlying phenomenon is happening in France, and almost everywhere in the world?  Are we becoming Death?  Does our state religion of dead matter mask a religion of murder and suicide?

Fortunately we had a few more kicks on Route 66 to revive the sense of carefree getaway, like a stop in Winslow, Arizona, where we sought coffee and parked at random on a corner memorializing the Eagle’s song, “Take it Easy.”  The corner store featured a plaster statue of a young dude flashing a smile and waving across the street at a permanently parked flatbed Ford, a plaster girl at the wheel.  Above the statue was a sign reading “Route 66."  While Susan checked the stores, I wandered down from the Ford, finding a gap between buildings featuring a lonely hut,  big enough for one person to stand in, with a wooden sign reading, "World's Smallest Church! Come in and Pray!"  I went in and closed my eyes, hearing only the cars on Route 66, and I saw everything that had attached to my ego since I was one year old suddenly stripped away, as by a tornado or an atom bomb, and from everyone around me and the culture of the whole world, a vast layer was stripped away, and we were all souls, basic building blocks of consciousness.  I jumped out after a few seconds, wondering what spirits I had disturbed here.  I looked over to the plaster girl in the flatbed Ford for an answer, but she gave none.

Through the long and rainy deserts on the final stretch from Phoenix to L.A., we heard that the male French terrorists (one female escaped) had been killed.  I spent the hours navigating the deserts and L.A.’s freeways wondering if there was any logic to feeling good that these men were dead.  I think everyone would agree that those deaths do not represent the end of something, but a mere beginning in our religious quest to become death, destroyer of worlds.  

We gave thanks to the Southwest, and Route 66, and the earth as it expresses itself here, for providing a backdrop to our thoughts and mysterious lives.