Gentrification, Grifters, and Graffiti

Me with wife, Margo, and cat, Raymundo, in our first Peace Corps site, San Carlos Alzatate, Guatemala, 1985

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala some twenty-five years ago (1984-1988), Sexta Avenida in Guatemala City's Zona 1 was my main route on foot to anything I needed or wanted to do in the capital. I'd usually stay at the Chalet Suizo on 14th street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, kitty-corner from the Parque Concordia, and right across the street from another one of Ubico’s medievalist fantasies, the Palacio de la Policia Nacional, a castle of crenellated walls, bastions, and bartizans, apparently awaiting the onslaught of commie catapults. I remember the twelve blocks on Sexta Avenida from 18th Street to the Parque Central as a river of bumper-to-bumper traffic and sidewalks streaming with pedestrians picking their way through vendors selling newspapers, used textbooks, trinkets, porn rags, candy, and fruit slices. And there was that heady mix of exhaust, piña and piss, with small splashes of women's perfume and men's cologne.

The picture on the left was taken in 1987, early in the morning before the normal traffic arrived. You can see the cigarette/candy vendor rolling his wares to wherever he’s going to open up shop. The Lux was the place to go for second-run movies—and (I shake my head at the memory), a place where you could still smoke inside the theater while watching the movie. Up the street was the then swankier Capitol theaters mall. The other way, The Pan American for breakfast, when flush with cash and willing to deal with the dour servers who resented scruffy Peace Corps volunteers asking for umpteen coffee refills. For dinner, Picadilly’s or maybe the Fu Lu Sho (I felt a pang of kinship with Francisco Goldman’s character, Roger Graetz, from Long Night of White Chickens, who also hung out in those places in the 1980s). There might be Kandy’s or Pops afterward for ice cream. But usually I was on this road to get to the Peace Corps office several blocks beyond the National Palace, or hit my favorite librerías and ferreterías in the area for office supplies and hardware. And Café León on 8th Avenue was mandatory, one of the few places downtown back then to find export-quality coffee.

La Sexta wasn’t much different during my research stints in 1992 and 1994, but now, as you can see in the picture on the right, it has been transformed. As I reported last year (Goats in Guate), the city decided to turn the avenue into a pedestrian mall with a bike lane and route for a rapid transit bus (the bus service was not yet running as of early July). The Lux now features soft porn flicks, and the Cine Capitol (below left) is now a megapaca—basically a thrift store selling used clothing imported from the US and elsewhere. There are pacas all along the way, odd notes in an urban renovation designed to make an area more upscale (the missing letter in Capitol hits that note again). If you want to catch movies worth watching now in Guate, you have to head out to zone 10. The restaurants and ice cream shops of my past are still there for the most part, except for the German place where I used to get my periodic dose of potato pancakes; it burned down years ago. But now there are a lot more US fast food joints and spendy coffee shops and restaurants. Café León held on too, but now is a pleasant Starbucky’s kind of café instead of a no-frills store.

The city cleared the streets of vendors, shunting them up in a long row of stalls on the already crowded and competitive 18th Street—I don’t know what happened to those who couldn’t afford the rents. Gentrification has its price—and as is the case everywhere it seems, it’s the poor that pay a chunk of it (you can find a brief story about La Sexta and its renovation here).

There are still many office supply and bookstores on adjacent streets, with dusty, faded window displays that may not have been changed since Ubico’s time, though sadly, far fewer used bookstores where I made some great finds in the 1990s. My favorite hardware store, El Globo, is still there. During my Peace Corps days, I’d walk in, eye all the sultry steel and glittering aluminum hanging from floor to ceiling in this huge room, and feel for a moment that I really was handy with a spade, a master of the hammer, a wonder with the machete--I might just need that wood plane, or a roll of barbed wire. For something, I was sure. Then I’d start the four-step process of getting what I really came for, like a little box of nails, and receive another of my many lessons in Guatemala on how to get over my often unreasonable impatience (Worker 1: helped me locate product, if I could remember the Spanish term; Worker 2: took my order at the counter; Worker 3: took my money and carefully, slowly made out the receipt; Worker 4: upon proof of purchase, handed me the product after carefully and slowly wrapping it in brown paper).

Curiously, during my visits to Guate these past three summers, I've felt a vague urge to enter a ferretería and shop for I don't know what. It wasn't nostalgia. It was like what I imagine a phantom limb may feel like, an itch in empty space that needs scratching. I'd joke with my research assistant, Heidi, slowing down in front of a hardware shop and wondering if we needed a blowtorch or a pickaxe, and I guess that was my way of scratching the itch of memory. And there were lots of other itches, and though I tried ot keep it in check, Heidi had to live with quite a bit of reminiscing, poor woman.

For a few weeks, I worked at the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s Archivo de Tribunales where there was a depository of military tribunal records. That meant dropping off Heidi at the Archivo General near the Parque Central, and walking another mile (see map to the right). I’d cut through the Parque, and take La Sexta up to 14th street, cut left, passing below the battlements of the Palacio de la Policía Nacional (below) and, depending on my mood, hook a right on either 7th or 8th Avenues.

One day right by the Palacio, a 30-something man in a suit greeted me and wondered how I was finding Guatemala. We ended up talking about my Peace Corps past and present research, and his days in Ohio and his current work as a school teacher.

Four blocks later, at the 18 Calle, I realized what this was about. I stopped and asked him if he wanted money. He said no and asked me to sit with him on a bench. He had something important to say to me. I sighed and we sat, and while I kicked myself I heard about his sick father, his troubles with the Education Ministry, his empty pockets. I slipped him what I had in my pocket, around fifteen quetzales. While he looked nervously over my shoulder, he told me God would bless me, and then scurried off. I got up and turned to see a group of young men eyeing me cooly. One of them mimed a kiss at me and suggested the next time it would be his turn. Thusly blessed, I moved away at what I hoped was a dignified pace, and buried myself in a sidewalk crowd.

But happily there were very few days where I felt like prey, and was free to observe the life of the street. If I chose 8th Avenue, I'd run into more noisy traffic, and a growing number of people as I neared the Supreme Court. It ended at 20th Street in a crowded block of little diners, sidewalk stands, and vendors wandering about selling umbrellas, watches, pens, cell phones, and sunglasses--the necessary accessories of the clerks and lawyers, most of whom already seemed to have cell phones pinned to their ears (I even saw security guards and military police chatting away on them while on duty).

And there was the incessant cry of "Tramites, tramites!" When I worked at the Supreme Court archive in 1994, there were orderly rows of suited men in and around the Supreme Court plaza, each with a chair, a little table, and a portable typewriter. They were there to help people do their "tramites," literally 'procedures,' but in this context this meant selling the service of composing and filling out the required legal documents. Now men and women hawked this service on the street, stopping likely customers, and I assumed they worked out of offices nearby, using computers instead of typewriters.

To the right you can see the Supreme Court and its largely empty plaza. I'd enter through that dark space at the lower right of the picture. The Archivo de Tribunales had a staff of five when I worked there in '94, and a nearly soporific atmosphere. Evidently there were few investigating past judicial proceedings in a country where violence had trumped the law for so long. I was often the only one there toiling away through military tribunal records.

The 1996 Peace Accords ending a 30 year civil war opened the way for the 2009 Ley de Acceso (akin to our Freedom of Information Act, but much more liberal). The archive now has maybe fifteen staff, all of them on the move, taking requests for copies, making copies, preparing documents for the archive (which involved slamming bundles of paper on a table to tighten them), while also managing to make snack or lunch orders, get their shoes done by a shoe-shine boy, share shopping finds, and discuss the World Cup. No falling asleep here.

I'd come here a year ago and was told that no one knew offhand where the military tribunal records were, and the index for the collection was missing. But they said try again with a formal request some other time. So I returned this year, a bit more insistent, and made it beyond the front window to the office manager. She looked at me steadily with her light green-brown eyes, with a slight smile on her face, as if she were waiting for an answer to a question she had asked. When I just simply smiled in return, a little mystified, she handed me a piece of paper. I saw dot-matrix print and my signature at the bottom--my request for permission in 1994 to examine the Tribunal records. "Fijase," she said, a Guatemalan word that often precedes bad news, the index was indeed gone, and the collection was stored in a distant warehouse. But, luckily, I had written down parts of the index, and it turned out those case files were on hand. And the the following day I could finally answer her question. "I'm sorry it took me so long, but I remember you." She had been the receptionist back then, this chatty, vivacious twenty-something who was always tossing her curly hair. Now she was reserved, all business, and appeared embarrassed that I hadn't recognized her. I wanted to tell her, "Sister, we all got old," contemplating all the ways my body had begun to break down in the past seventeen years, but didn't think that would help.

Memory is a tricky thing, of course, and is often the occasion for misunderstanding, argument, and pain. I'm not just talking about questions of accuracy, but of what we decide to remember, and how we remember it. This is true for both individual and collective memory. Hence we have our vitriolic debates over the history curriculum in schools, the disagreements over who or what to commemorate with monuments, street signs, or holidays, or fights over access to private and public records. Guatemalans have more dire decisions to make regarding what goes into their public memory. Talk about real phantom limbs: over 200,000 Guatemalans killed or disappeared during the civil war.

Some--probably university students--have made their arguments with graffiti on 7th Avenue. They want someone to pay for the grievous sins of the state. They want the public to remember the civil war as an act of genocide against Guatemala's Mayan population (see pictures below). And there's some nostalgia there, too, for the revolutionary past: "Turcios Lives" is a reference to Luís Turcios Lima, a graduate of US Special Forces training, and one of the leaders of the 1960 military uprising that would be crushed, and then return as a guerrilla movement. And there are the newer voices trying to be heard in the public square--from the feminist scrawling "Women in Resistance" to the marches and demonstrations I witnessed around the Parque Central, sponsored by the GLBT community, AIDS activists, and sex trade workers.

Clearly, La Sexta is not the only thing in Guate undergoing wrenching change, but it would be a mistake to reduce Guatemala City to my inevitably selective memories, skewed anyway by my disposition and predilections, and perhaps the sweat dripping into my eyes as I walked to work. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes and images here complicate the story we usually get in the US news, equating the country with rampant crime, political intrigue, and social conflict. Guatemalans lives are more mundane and richer than that.

"JUSTICIA POR GENOCIDIO" (Justice for genocide)

"JUSTICIA DONDE ESTAN?" (Justice, where are you?)

"AQUI SI HUBO GENOCIDIO" (Here, yes, there was genocide)

"JUSTICIA" (Justice)

"JUSTICIA" (Justice)

"NO MAS IMPUNIDAD. BASTA" (No more impunity. Enough)

"NO OLVIDAMOS NI PERDONEMOS" (We don't forget nor forgive)

"TURCIOS VIVE" (Turcios lives)

"MUJERES EN RESISTENCIA" (Women in resistance)

A Day in the Life. . .in Guatemala

Map of our typical walk to work in Guatemala City

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head . . .

I suppose it's a stretch to connect my experience in Guatemala to a Beatles song, and it's not like "I'd love to turn you on," but my recent two months down there on a research trip was something like stream-of-consciousness song. A jumble of loosely connected images and events. A juxtaposition of the ordinary and the strange.

We can, like Lennon, choose to look at strangeness in our ordinary lives, but living in another country can give us the inverse, seeing the ordinary in what seems strange to us, and allowing that seeming strangeness to get us to think more carefully about what we take for ordinary, as right, as common sense. I suppose in consultant-speak this is "cultural competency." I'd rather think of this as a way of seeing a different country without resorting to the simplistic categories of 'exotic' (Guatemala is a "Land of Magic and Color"), 'weird' (sinkholes apparently are "weird news"), or 'messed up' (according to both neocons and the left-leaning).

So's here my first attempt to impose some order on the daily jumbles and juxtapositions of my experiences over two months in Guatemala. First, though, some quick context. I was down there from May 15 to July 10 on a research stint with an undergraduate "student summer scholar" (S3), Heidi Fegel. Grand Valley State University's S3 program is a competitive scholarship awarded to twenty or so students each summer, funding their work with a faculty mentor in a collaborative research project. Our project involved researching the institutional and ideological origins of Guatemalan military interventionism in politics, and that project included researching recently declassified Guatemalan military documents housed at the Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) in Guatemala City.

We found two rooms to rent at a house not too far from the Archive. Like many larger Guatemalan houses, ours was a series of rooms wrapped around a courtyard (above). We shared the house with with our dueña, Patricia, her cat, Tito, and two other renters, Beberley and Laura. Beberley worked for CONAP, sort of like the US's EPA, (though she left that job to finish up her thesis), and Laura is an artist and a DJ. Patricia is a homeopathic therapist, just starting a practice after several years of working with returning Guatemalan emigres.

So, I guess it's already a little strange. I shared a house with four women from their early twenties to late forties, in a foreign country, researching a topic that is still politically sensitive--though nowhere near as volatile as it was before the 1996 Peace Accords that ended a 30 year civil war. There were days where I'd hear Heidi's indy music wafting into one ear, the thump of Laura's technopop in the other, while Beberly and Paty held animated discussions about the healing virtues of this diet, or that meditative practice. Quite a change from the Grand Rapids ranch-style house life with my wife, mother-in-law, and fellow middle-aged and neurotic male, KC the wonder dog, working away in the solitude of my basement.

But Heidi and I quickly fashioned a kind of routine for the work week, waking up, falling out of bed, and dragging combs across our heads (so to speak; Heidi's hair would likely devour combs). There was a clock in our kitchen (right), but punctuality was not a priority at the Archive, so we followed suit, and one of us would get around to making breakfast, the other doing the dishes, and then we'd pack up our laptops and drinking water, and usually by 8am we would let ourselves out through the front door, security gate, and the driveway's steel portón. The house is in Guate's Zona 2, a pretty safe neighborhood, but all the doors, locks, and concertina wire were reminders that we were living in a country with one of the highest violent crime rates in Latin America. Still, were we to take the US State Department's travel advisory as gospel, we should have been holed up in a swanky hotel in the Zona Viva, and traveling to the Archivo in Zone One in a bullet-proof SUV with an armed escort. I appreciate the State Department's concern for its citizens, but like any country, crime is concentrated in particular places and situations. Avoiding them and ostentatious displays of wealth (like flashing our laptops in public) made life in downtown Guate more than doable. And I believe just not acting like fearful targets helped, too. Of course, it helped that I was already pretty familiar with the city. I lived here for three months in 1988, another ten months in 1994, and had done some quick research trips here the last two summers. Familiarity reduced that flight-or-fight instinct that can pop up in any new or challenging environment (I find driving in, say, Chicago a lot more scary than walking the streets of Guatemala City).

While I was used to navigating Guate, it was all new to Heidi. Though she had spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica on a high school environmental trip, daily life in Guate and the archival research were different matters. And as her faculty mentor, I was responsible not only for her learning, but for her health and safety. So research abroad with a student assistant added wrinkles to routines I had developed for working in Guatemala. And things like sharing a bathroom, or coming to an agreement over how to cook potatoes or wash the clothes, added new dimensions to the teacher-student relationship, to put it mildly.

But this collaboration was not nearly as complicated as I feared it might be, probably because we're both fairly easy-going, and because Heidi proved capable of handling the various stresses with patience and humor. Oh, we both had our less-than-stellar moments: my conniption when I was unable to find a restaurant while circling the same blocks in the pouring rain, or my incredible stupidity in handing over our passports to a man to handle the customs duties at the Salvadoran-Guatemalan border (though all ended well, I'm still upset with myself over that); Heidi's frustration boiling over a few times due to all the unwanted male attention, or just tiredness coming out as anger at a Greek salad that was not at all Greek. However, these were blips in an otherwise rather angst-free research trip.

So, anyway, we would start off the typical workday with a two-kilometer (1.2 miles) walk to the Archivo. We'd walk the short distance up our street, 10a Calle, to the Avenida Simeon Cañas (see map above). At this corner, if we looked right, we'd see our source of freshly-squeezed orange juice, a stand run by a woman and presumably her daughter, who always dressed to kill and nonchalantly ignored the young men calling out from the packed city buses passing by. Beyond the stand, we could see the edge of the Parque Hipódromo, a complex of baseball stadiums, an amusement park, and the famous Mapa en relieve--a large three dimensional topographical map of Guatemala built to scale (below).

But we would turn left and head south on Simeón Cañas, a wide, fairly quiet boulevard that the city closes on Sundays for bike and pedestrian traffic (on the right, Heidi, at the beginning of our walk down Cañas). With the shaded wide sidewalks, this was the most pleasant part of the walk. Just before the roundabout circling Parque Jocotenango, we'd pass what I took to be a family--a man, woman, and a little girl. The man seemed to be managing a small parking strip, or maybe just offering to wash the parked cars. The little girl might be lounging in a makeshift hammock, or seated on an overturned bucket, eating breakfast with her mom, or having her hair combed. If we returned early enough in the afternoon, we'd see another girl there, perhaps eight or nine, sometimes doing her homework. Their calmness always struck me--the little girl quietly playing, while her older sister sat there next to the noisy traffic, her head bowed over a workbook.

At the roundabout (above), we initially tried just sneaking through during momentary traffic breaks. We ended up using the pasarela—a pedestrian bridge (right, and another below of me, with Jocotenango behind)—instead of braving the drivers who apparently believed they had the duty to teach pedestrians how

‘survival of the fittest’ works in the urban landscape. But we saw lots of Guatemalans ignore the pasarela, which may explain why on average, according to one report, six people die each day crossing Guate streets, even though pedestrian bridges were close by in a majority of the cases. I suppose this is not all that surprising in a city whose population of both people and vehicles has exploded in recent decades.

After crossing the pasarela, we'd loop around the Parque Jocotenango, passing food stands and El Torre, a grocery store where we often shopped, and an Education Ministry building, where there always seemed to be a long line of people waiting out front, and most everyone along the way would give us a quick look of curiosity, even ones we saw every morning. I always wondered what they thought of us. Were we just an interesting distraction in an otherwise tedious day? Did they think "Hold on a sec, this isn't a tourist area--they must be missionaries"? Or maybe some of those human rights workers? Or maybe, like we can idly watch passing traffic, we were just another element in the shifting scenery for them? Perhaps what I took to be their interest was really my self-consciousness. I suppose all of these guesses could be true.

Whatever they thought, they would have probably seen me in a sweat. By this point in the walk, in the humidity of Guatemala's rainy season, and keeping up with Heidi's blitzkrieg pace (one of the very few times in my life when someone has walked faster than me, but maybe I'm just getting old), I'd begin to feel damp. One benefit, I suppose, was that if Heidi wasn't leading, I knew she wasn't feeling well. Fortunately, this was rare, and usually I was just cursing myself for once again forgetting to bring a small towel to mop my brow once we'd reached the Archivo, and I'd know I was in for an hour of worrying about sweat dripping on my documents and keyboard.

After Jocotenango Simeón Cañas turns into Sixth Avenue, but the city was tearing up a huge length of that street, so we'd cut up to Fifth, and continue south. Until reaching the Parque Central, the route now had a lot less traffic, allowing us to focus on avoiding stumbling over upturned pavement, or stepping into one of Lennon's four thousand Blackburn, Lancashire holes that had apparently migrated to Guatemala City (I didn't keep a strict count, but I believe we tripped equally often, and though I had more close encounters with vehicles, I had fewer mishaps than Heidi with food and drink).

So after twenty to thirty minutes since leaving the house, we'd reach the Parque Central, the heart of Guate's Centro Histórico. It's a two block plaza. On the north side of the eastern half sits the old National Palace (above, Heidi checks out an election rally in front of the Palace)--a hulking Ubico era (1931-1944) greenish-grey building that has been recast as the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura. Instead of housing despots, it now serves Guatemala's ongoing nation-building project--a difficult one given the age-old and overlapping divisions between la gente indigena and ladinos (mestizos), the poor and the rich, and rural and urban folks, and perhaps now Catholics and the rapidly growing Evangelical population. If you ever get a chance to visit the Palacio, it's quite stunning inside (you can see pictures here). The Catedral Metropolitana sits on the eastern edge of the plaza (below, Andy, in front of the Cathedral and food vendors that fill the plaza on weekends).

To the south is a large swath of commercial and apartment buildings. The western half of the park is a lovely green space, filled with trees, benches, and food vendors. The National Library faces it's western side, and on the backside of the Library is our ultimate destination, the Archivo General de Centro América (above). The entire time we were there the city was refurbishing the walks in front and on a side of the Archive. Construction site rules are far more relaxed than they are in the US, which made things easier in some ways, but also more risky. We could just walk through like everyone else did, and weave around workers jackhammering cement or laying stones, but we also might walk through string guidelines, step into wet concrete, or get in the way of a mini-bulldozer. It was always a lively way to start our work day.

Heidi, in the Archivo's reading room.

And if you're still with me, within a few days I'll post more on this day in the life in Guatemala, and my encounters with gentrification, graffiti, and grifters as I made my way to the Supreme Court archives another mile away.

Easter thoughts from your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

When I look for examples of of godliness, or godly people, I resort to fictional characters. J.D. Salinger's Seymour is one of these. Salinger kills him in a 1948 short story ("A Perfect Day for a Bananafish"). After a rather caustic portrait of Seymour's wife (and presumably of middle class proto-suburbanites), Salinger--cruelly to my mind--has Seymour shoot himself while his wife naps nearby.

I don't know enough about Salinger, or am not enough of a literary critic, to know whether Salinger regretted offing Seymour, but Salinger couldn't let him go. Seymour would continue to appear in later stories, and in 1959, Salinger wrote a novella called "Seymour: An Introduction," in which Seymour's closest brother, Buddy, writes a preface to a collection of Seymour's haiku. These two passages stand out for me, for Salinger's vivid storytelling and humor, and for how his literary creation inspires me.

So, for this Easter, here's to all those who already have a belief, and to all the rest of us who don't, but muddle along with a faith that we might learn to see God curled up somewhere, that we might get a ride on a Joe Jackson bike, and that we might get better at loving others as well as Seymour loved Les.

. . .there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places--e.g., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides--smiling from ear to ear as he did it--as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananada's terms; i.e., 'See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk')--the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.

[Les] came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishing. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation--in my view, at least--was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been neatly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les--as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Boston: LB Books, 1963): 108-109 and 148-149.

NOTE: nearly the same version of what I originally wrote for my Facebook Notes, April 24, 2011.

Oh, those beleaguered straights.

InsideHigherEd.com today reports on efforts in the Texas state legislature to "require any public college with a student center on 'alternative' sexuality to provide equal funding to create new centers to promote 'traditional values.'"

Proponents have framed the measure as an effort to get equal time for heterosexuality on public campuses where, apparently, straight folks barely get the time of day. A political interest group, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), worked with State Representative Wayne Christian in crafting the legislation, but its goal was to not to carve out equal resources for heterosexual programming and support, but to get universities to defund centers serving GBLT students.

The YCT doesn't think universities should be funding the promotion of any kind of sexuality or values. Sounds egalitarian, doesn't it? But YCT Vice Chairman, Tony McDonald lets us know what this move is really about: "It is clear that our public universities are funding centers which promote a radical political and social agenda in favor of normalizing homosexuality and expanding homosexual rights."

Basically, the YCT and fellow travelers have fallen back on the litany of privilege that we have heard before from whites and males arguing against affirmative action, or straights fighting civil rights protections for GLBT people: the minority group aggressively promotes and agenda while the dominant group simply wants to 'live and let live;' the minority group gets all these extra rights while the dominant group is victimized. It's another round of "reverse discrimination," but this time for those poor straight people, who apparently can't cross campus without "pansexual" weirdos waylaying them, or gays sneakily luring them into deviant lifestyles. It is one of the whines of privilege--your existence on the same field with me is an affront to my tender identity, so stop complaining (you've never had it so good, anyway).

I'm all for carefully reviewing university budgets, and, frankly, I'd like to see more resources dedicated to the classroom rather than student services--but US universities have long had functions besides transmitting and generating knowledge--they are mechanisms of social mobility and socialization, they are laboratories of social change, and since the tremendous expansion of higher education after WW II, they have become this place where parents send their children to practice adulthood--hence all the support services for young adults trying to navigate the world outside their homes, as well as their often tumultuous internal worlds.

A Paranoid Style in American Politics for the Millennial Era

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" for Harper's back in 1964. In this now well-known piece he compared 19th century conspiracy theories with those of the "radical right" of his day, the John Birch Society and others whose political rhetoric featured "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

He thought the comparison was a stretch--that the paranoid of his day were markedly different from the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings and other 19th century wingnuts:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Do we not hear in the anti-Obama/liberal/progressive tirades a lament for the disappearance of a "real America" and calls to take it back? Don't we hear wild accusations of socialism, communism, and treason? Consider other Hofstadter characterizations:

. . .The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. . .

. . .A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. . .

. . .One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . .

The current hysteria over Muslims gives us all these facets of paranoia. You'll run smack into the apocalyptic gloom at websites like Jihad Watch or in books like "Stealth Jihad." And think of those ex-Muslims "telling all" about the evils of their former faith. Or watch one of Glenn Beck's overwrought chalkboard exercises.

I'm thinking the only difference between Hofstadter's day and ours is the name of the threat.

2012's getting closer--time to warm up the culture war!

Economic woes have dominated the national political discourse but there are some GOP factions determined to keep their conservative social agendas in play. One such faction is the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition (IFFC), which sponsored a forum of presidential hopefuls, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former US Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and radio talk-show host Herman Cain, and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer. Ex-Moral Majority maven Ralph Reed also shared his two cents.

The forum took place at a Christian fundamentalist megachurch, Point of Grace, and the IFFC’s Vice-President, Gopal Krishna, got the crowd warmed up with a quick, rousing ‘The country’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket’ introduction. I’ve been hearing this stuff for thirty years now, and wonder why it still works, but then I remember I can still laugh at old Monty Python shows. Here’s what Krishna had to say (and, boy, he can outwhite those Iowan Christians, can’t he, though apparently there’s little love lost between him and the GOP state establishment, according to this source.

. . .Therefore, allow me to express some of our concerns and let me know whether you agree with them.

We are concerned that a world-famous capitalist country is now doing a slow dance with socialism [applause].

We are concerned that a rich country which rebuilt other countries after World War Two is now borrowing mind-boggling amounts of money from other countries [applause].

We are concerned that the world’s most powerful country that was respected by the friends and feared by the enemies is now abandoning friends and apologizing to the enemies [whoops, cheers, and applause].

We are concerned that a country that was a melting pot for all the brilliant minds in the world has now become a land of law-breaking illegal immigrants who want amnesty. . .[applause]. . .granting that amnesty will be a slap in the face of all legal immigrants [applause].

We are concerned that a country that was founded on European style Christian moral values has now become multicultural haven for every weird and kinky lifestyle [cheers and applause].

Today’s program is a small part of our efforts to take back our country and restore its principles, moral values, financial independence, physical strength, and leadership. Let’s get started. . .

It’s glennbeckish tripe, based on a fanciful understanding of history and concepts like capitalism, but unsurprising given the nature of the forum. What I just don’t get is how conservative Christian groups reconcile their supposedly high moral standards with standard-bearers like Gingrich—familial wreckage in his wake, and the only Speaker of the House to be reprimanded for ethics violations—and Ralph Reed, who buddied around with Jack Abramoff. But I suppose their bad reps are the result of liberal media bias.

And what the IFFC doesn’t seem to get is that using its gospel to criminalize and demonize those whom they oppose is not going to get anyone outside its choir to listen—and they probably even lose potential allies—the social conservatives who aren’t militant Christians. But then, I understand their quandary: to be principled one must be absolutist, and if one starts compromising, then it’s that slippery slope to liberal hell. Thing is—according to their rhetoric—they're already there. Just can’t win, can you?

You can see the C-SPAN video here, and read NPR’s story on it here.

Letter to Senator Jim DeMint

I write in opposition to your legislative proposal to cut all federal funding to NPR--an effort to punish that media outlet for firing Juan Williams. NPR is one of the few media sources that does not spout bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric, and to end federal support for NPR is not a blow for "free speech," but rather an effort to silence a news source that does not permit slurs in the public square. You are, in effect, celebrating the right of commentators to blather inane statements that incite an unjustified fear of a category of people based on the actions of the few, conceivably a version of someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. In effect, you are contributing to a growing and increasingly ugly domestic crusade against Islam.

I am not one of your constituents, but your proposed legislation directly affects me and millions of fellow Americans. I deeply regret your contribution to a US image abroad that we are hypocrites, preaching liberty abroad while trumpeting religious intolerance at home. And I strongly resent your attempt to hamper our ability to find news and political commentary that does not contribute to the anti-Muslim hysteria.