In some ways, the American political system is working as intended: the elite, or at least an elite, is making the decisions, just as the proverbial Founding Fathers designed. Sadly, that elite does not comprise the actual representatives we elect—perhaps a blessing, since our electeds tend to be kind of stupid after all. There’s no irony here: candidates are selected by the two parties because they are weak: weak minded and weak-willed. They are therefore more moldable into the electable product. Witness George W. Bush, a blank canvas upon which Karl Rove could paint his masterpiece. Still, a certain level of competence is necessary, as the meltdown of Sarah Palin’s candidacy evinced. This is not to say that, had the press actually scrutinized W. the same way that the same thing couldn’t have happened to him, but they weren’t then in love with Obama, didn’t have the evil temptress of Palin to gird up their loins to resist.
But parties are cognizant of the need to kowtow to their masters, the much maligned “special interests,” by which we can read “wealthy businesses interests.” The Right may complain about the Sierra Club or the ACLU, but those entities take to the courts because they can’t afford to run candidates; only the really loaded can finance a campaign. The open-secrets of the senators from coal country or the representatives from Boeing wouldn’t seem so tired conceptually if they weren’t actually just that. In the biggest coup (all puns intended) yet, we have just passed an era in which the president and vice president were wholly owned subsidiaries of the oil and gas industries. This worn path, however, leads us to the gates of our true masters.
By doing so, we follow the money too, and even after the recent collapse, the top 5% still control almost half of all there is. And just as the feudal lords’ powers ebbed or flowed depending on their relationship with the Holy See, so too do the current elites see their wealth enhanced or degraded by political patronage. Boeing never missed a major government contract when the powerful triumvirate of Nancy Kassebaum, Bob Dole, and Dan Glickman represented Kansas, where Boeing has a major plant. But when these were replaced by the relatively weak and ineffectual Brownback/Roberts/Tiahrt delegation, Boeing lost a major bid, and to an overseas company to boot.
It doesn’t help that this delegation is at least 2/3 intellectually dim either; the downside of being able to control a politician is simply that he or she lacks personal power. In this, George W. Bush seems to have won the day for Big Oil but lost the war, as America’s global position was weakened vis-a-vis OPEC, its relationship with Russia shot, and its access to Iraqi oil fields remains doubtful. In the short term, the almost unimaginable boon of oil prices at $120 a barrel last year have come back to haunt a wrecked economy and Venezuela and Russia renationalizing their supply.
The American people, of course, hardly even enter the picture. Even during election years, they are so docile and suggestible, so apathetic, that it’s nearly certain they’ll fail to surprise. The election of Barack Obama reinforces this idea. He may be black, but he’s also unrelentingly centrist, even conservative, in times that call for bold and progressive action. No puns intended, in Obama the electorate did not back a dark horse, as that would have been a Kucinich or a Nader. The American people have failed to riot in the streets or even calmly protest even in the face of eight years of obvious incompetence, a quarter century of declining wages, and complete economic meltdown. George Orwell, it turns out, was wrong about this: the proles need not be poorly educated. In fact, despite increasing numbers of college degrees, we’re now less likely to agitate than we were when things were going relatively well. The system that we purportedly love, that we send our kids to die in order to supposedly protect, has broken down, been hijacked by the same people who have cynically outsourced our jobs and dismantled the industry we worked so hard to create, and in order to “show them” we elected a man who packs his group of economic advisors and regulators with them.
It’s as if, along with middle-class expectations and middle-class educations, we’ve also adopted bourgeois conservatism, even if it makes our actual lives less certain, less wealthy, less satisfying overall. The middle class that, in its ascendancy, demanded more freedom is now, in its senility, demanding less.
I suppose we get what we deserve, but it is hardly meaningful politically to exist so, with half of us living up to our expectations to vote one way and half the other and neither way promising actual change. What has happened in this country over the past 30 years is the largest voluntary handover of power in history, with literally a hundred million of us not even participating in any election and tens of millions more not demanding that their parties do better. We fail to question the party lines that, inevitably, fail to improve our lives.
There is something of the mindset of war about this, and much of that egged on by the Right wing media and the Republican Revolutionaries who took over congress in 1994 but whose first major victory was the Reagan-Bush regime from 1980-1992. We still fight on their battlefields; they have long held the high ground in the minds of most Americans and even the mainstream media so often touted as leftist. The latter are all solidly in the realms of the wealthy, after all, and are still more worried about their investments than the plight of the poor. The Right determines the language–”taxpayers” instead of “citizens,”–and projects the power relationships—the supposed control of the “intellectual elite” and the threat to freedom that is the ACLU. The lack of push-back and redefinition from the Democrats is an indication that they, too buy this language to some degree. This is also why universal single-payer health care, the only system that actually makes sense, is an impossibility in this country.
They manage to do this by false dilemmas: the system we have or socialism, the vagaries of the market or the “rationing” of health care, and that feeds into the scorched-earth politics of a two-party state wherein winning is the point, governing is secondary. And the only way to win such costly campaigns is to enlist the power, and thereby pledge fealty to, the rich.
The question history will have to ask, and the answer is not exactly clear, is why such a powerful and hopeful and active people gave up on their democracy, why we decided that solutions that actually work were too ideologically scary to try, why making our public servants actually serve the public was too much to bother with after all.
We can understand time as a series of statements about our affairs. Our interior lives clock better than the watches we make. The Brazilian may linger, may use his presence as a compliment, as Robert Levine would have it: “It is 12:30; class has been over for half an hour, yet here I stand, and we are speaking, you and I.”
A nervous New Yorker may glance at his watch not out of disrespect but from some slow interior meltdown, a neurosis in numbers on an imperturbable dial.
Or he might just want you to notice his timepiece.
Puritanism has its own dire results, its vestiges a steady and straitened rhythm on the town tower, whether Colonial brick and wrought iron or International steel and glass. It says “This much have you lived, and what have you done to show your membership in The Elect?” These days, that translates into mere doing well, rarely into doing good. Do-gooders need not schedule themselves tightly since justice is forever and now.
It’s telling that the new city hall in my town has no exterior clock: it’s a black glass tower. It says “We are the government, but you are on your own.” This structure owes nothing to the church, no single spire, no icon melted into Modernist abstraction. It is as matter-of-fact as the office blocks housing the administrators of industry, and like them it seeks its authority in opacity.
Watches, in particular, are about availability if not always about utility. A black-faced über-simplified Movado with just hands and a single jewel at 12 o’clock says that the user assumes too much–or is in a position to assume a great deal. It is a timepiece for the privileged poseur. All manner of prettification has befallen watches and thereby the reflection of time: a gold Rolex with complications might be paired with an Aston-Martin or a Jag, a Bentley instead of a Rolls. The Swiss Army “field” watches I cling to attempt to convey practicality but also quality, ruggedness, durability, a self-branding most ignore, so my watches communicate more to me than to anyone else, a reminder of some lowly but still quite impossible set of personal ideals and expectations.
Most people under 20 or 25 don’t bother with watches. They use their cellphones instead. This bespeaks not just a lack of internal regimentation (mom always made sure they made their soccer games on time) but also a lack of subordination, an entitlement: they’ve never been anywhere a cell phone was verboten. Relying on a cell phone clock assumes an available network, and this generation is nothing if not heavily networked. They assume networks function as a matter of right. It will be easier to deny this generation health care coverage than high-speed Internet. That the latest technology might be far from reliable has never occurred to them—that it might be unavailable is inconceivable. They are a social people in a way that mine—a batch of “latchkey kids—was not, and that their communication device would also be how they mark time says more about them than all the worried books the their Baby Boomer parents have written.
In the Western world, particularly in the US, it’s hard to find anyone whose life is time-free. Monks and nuns, such as we still have, live lives just as regimented as ours, or moreso. They’re on liturgical time, though, not on schedules set by self-appointed efficiency experts in HR. But I’d hardly call the schedule of a monk “God’s time,” as that seems to have been expressed through planetary motion and is marked by our fitful and sometimes unsuccessful adaptations to it. This time is perhaps most elusive of all, and astronomical and meteorological scholars aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone around you aware of the phase of the moon or the precise moment of dusk or dawn. The rise of watches and clocks knelled death to cultures revolving around agriculture, with its intense concern with seasonal changes and its own inland tide. The vestiges of fieldwork remain in the paltry 2 or 3 percent of us who still farm, but I have never met a farmer who didn’t wear a watch, showing that they, too, are more the slaves of the market than the soil. Only the most romantic among us still imagine a farmer who somehow senses the vagaries of wind, the value of a sunbeam more or less; the real ones have one ear open to the commodities futures on the radio with its inevitable readings of time at half-past and on the hour.
In most classrooms, the clock is on the same wall as the chalkboard, a horrible mistake from a pedagogical point of view. High and above the teacher’s shoulder, the clock dominates like a sort of temporary moon, and it steals spark from even the most thunderous of lessons. In the idealized world we try to solidify in the academy, it should only be the teacher who cares about time, not the students. And even then, the teacher should only care for the most practical of reasons. But this, too, is an indication of our state of affairs: the administration is responsible for where the facilities department puts the clock.
The true sign of wealth is the illusion of effortless order.
At one time, the worst one could accuse The Iowa Review of being was occasionally boring. But the Winter 2008/2009 issue commits the literary crime of publishing a piece that’s downright bad, sloppy and wrong.
Worse yet, they gave Andrew Mortazavi’s “Stop Six, Ft. Worth” the annual Iowa Review prize for fiction. Judge Ethan Canin might simply have been having a bad day, or he might simply be clueless, but Mortazavi’s short story barely rises to the level of what one might expect in an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop.
I first became alerted that something was amiss when I ran across a glaring usage error. Mortazavi’s narrator, Jeremy, refers to the rear lights on his older brother’s Cavalier as being “break” lights when they should, by all accounts, be brake lights. Now, I’ve selected a few imperfect manuscripts for publication, but that was based on the overall quality of the work. After that, I made sure the minor errors got sorted out before the piece went to press. You’d expect a story entered into a contest to be a bit more polished from the get-go.
The narrator is also utterly unconvincing. How Jeremy can simultaneously pull off being a 13 year old, a near drop-out, and someone who prefers to sit at home all day and read is beyond me. I’m sure there are a few people out there like that, but I’ve never met them. The 13 year old dropouts I knew read comic books if they read at all, but mostly they just played video games and got high. The readers were all in class, probably because they were not intimidated by the classroom, were rewarded because of their linguistic acuity, and admired educated people. Even in the inner-city setting Mortazavi tries to explore, the intellectually curious are welcome in school and tend to advance.
Mortazavi, no doubt, posits this nearly impossible narrator in order to give himself the excuse to write lines like this one: “Pale blue lights shined from both ends of her swimming pool, the surface undulating in the night breeze, casting the backyard and the brick house in an eerie incandescence easier felt than seen.” That’s a lovely line, poetic, even. But no 13 year old male would ever think like that, no matter how precocious. He’d be too embarrassed, to begin with, too interested in posing and narrowing his thoughts into some media-driven notion of cool. Problematically, Jeremy actually does a bit of the cool-posing at another point in the story, which comes off as an inconsistency rather than an enrichment of characterization.
Creating an unrealistically literary character is the sort of move that probably resulted from a creative writing workshop, and it has become so common as to be a cliché: need to fit in all of your darling lines but still appear gritty and real? Have your hitman/barkeeper/bouncer/steel mill worker be a former (or budding) English major! Or, worse yet, make your short story/novel/novella about an English professor! I’ve been around a few of the latter, and I can tell you that, with a few exceptions, they’re extraordinarily dull people who lead remarkably boring lives. English majors become writers because they express themselves better in writing, so they’re really not all that much fun to hang out with, but they’re grand fun in correspondence. Not surprisingly, stories about their lives are either unrealistic or just plain tedious.
I suspect in Mortazavi’s case, though, he simply doesn’t know well enough how an inner city kid would talk and thus can’t really sustain the voice of a 13 year old ghetto kid over the course of a 14 page story. So he finds an excuse to make the kid use a voice very much like his own, in this case making Jeremy actually a middle-class white kid whose broken family falls on hard times and has to go live in a bad neighborhood.
But even that fictional kid would never utter a line like the one above. If anything, he’d be even more sullen and disaffected than a 13 year old bookish black kid who has lived in the ‘hood his whole life.
Since the story is past tense, one could argue that Mortazavi’s narrator is a literate adult simply reminiscing about an important event of his adolescence. Fair enough. But that would mean that Jeremy-the-near-dropout eventually does turn his life around and become successful, and then what’s the point of looking back at this particular time? There’s no question of the narrator’s fate, and there’s no suspense and little to think about. If this interpretation holds, the story falls thematically flat. So perhaps it’s really about the other elements in the story: the death of two black twin girls and the cops’ indifference to it, the depressing ironies of an inner-city drug trade fueled by the habits of spoiled suburban white kids, the vagaries of economic decline. But if so, then wouldn’t it have been more productive to have written the story from the point of view of Jeremy’s older, drug-dealing brother, Stanton? Stanton’s connection and the father of the dead girls? The father’s daughter and the dead girls’ older sister, Ciara? The middle-class druggies Kyle and Chelsea? If these are the themes Mortazavi wishes to explore, using Jeremy as a narrator just complicates things and gets in the way of saying anything definitive or even exploring interesting questions about these matters.
But again, none of the other characters would have been capable of noting so wistfully “I now longed for that kind of bland uniformity, a return to safety and assuredness . . . .” And if these other characters had been the focus, Mortazavi would not have had the chance to show off his awesome wordsmithing.
There are a couple of ways Mortazavi could have gotten around this problem of voice, and only one is significantly fraught with peril. The dangerous way would be to actually spend some time in the inner-city listening to people talk. One could live or work there, volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or even just go hang out in a park or walk the streets to get a feel of the sound and sense, the sight and smell of the rougher parts of town. After awhile, writing like these people think wouldn’t be all that much of a challenge, but the traditionally lovely lines might not so readily come to mind. One might just find the beauty and the grace of the language poor, uneducated people use. But perhaps privileging the real voices of the poor and uneducated is slightly threatening to those editors and contest judges who already think they know what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it.
Hanging out in the inner-city might have revealed to Mortazavi that, unlike in “Stop Six,” male drug dealers rarely even know their kids, much less live with them. It’s typically the mothers who feed and clothe and house the children. He might also have observed that those men in the inner-city who do live with their own teenage children don’t give them alcohol, and because they don’t, SRS doesn’t take the kids away. The character in question, Ciara’s father, and father of the twins, must reasonably be in his early thirties at the youngest, even if he started having kids as a teenager himself, in order to have a teenage daughter, Ciara. As a drug dealer, the chances of this character staying alive and out of jail at that advanced age would have mitigated against his allowing a man armed with a sawed-off shotgun to grace his front-yard barbecue, as Mortazavi has him do. Drug dealers who survive past thirty and remain at liberty to cook their own food tend to be low-profile. Maybe this story was so captivating to its judge because it reinforces certain fantasies we have about inner-city life. Perhaps it lets the reader feel “edgy” for reading it, no matter how much it fails to comport with reality.
Another way Mortazavi could have overcome his problem with narrative voice would have been to just make the damn thing third-person. Third person narratives are, as far as I know, still allowed, and then the narrator would not have to have been a realistic character himself and could have waxed as poetic as Mortazavi wished without peaking the ol’ bullshit meter. Granted, such a move might have led to some interesting and possibly unintentional postmodern juxtapositions of tone, but that sure as hell beats a failed attempt at realism. A third-person narrator might also have given Mortazavi the option of not so directly researching his subject. He could have boned up on his reading and relied on Google Earth and still come up with something convincing enough for 14 pages.
One final option would have been to simply write a poem with inner-city Ft. Worth as its subject matter, and the problem of a narrator could have been dispensed with entirely, the lovely lines could have been retained, and a mining of the mundane and even dangerous for its beauty and depth could have happened. That is, after all, what a poet does, and he need not encumber himself with pesky characters and their peculiar voices at all.
There are other problems, like the gratuitously disgusting way Ciara eats her barbecue, which makes one wonder if Mortazavi is just trying to gin up the edginess after it got blunted by all the literary soft-focus. That would make the story border on exploitation: Ciara can’t just be angry and slightly dissolute; she has to be nasty as well.
But none of this bothers me as much as the failure of Ethan Canin as the judge who awarded this dog of a story a winning prize. Mortazavi can be forgiven for writing a clunky, crappy short story; I’ve written a zillion of them myself. But what was Canin thinking even publishing this trash, much less giving it first place? The Iowa Review contest’s second-place short story, Jacob M. Appel’s charming “Helen of Sparta,” presents a pre-teen female narrator who is not only convincing but is at a stage in her life in which the events change her perspective in a more mature direction. The story explores ideas in a way that’s thought-provoking and with characters and situations that are realistic, and it doesn’t feel the need to be edgy in order to do it. “Helen of Sparta,” in its own quiet, petit-bourgeois way, says more about regular people than “Stop Six” manages to say about anything at all.
In the same issue is Ron Carlson’s even better “Victory at Sea” which is not only convincing in its characterization, plot, and setting, it’s also poignant, sweet without being sentimental, and also funny. Those are the sorts of qualities a journal like the Iowa Review ought to prize.
At this point, it would be easy to start making suppositions about how these literary contests are actually run, but I think the larger issue is what the academic paradigm is doing to how we approach good writing. MFA programs in Creative Writing as an academic pursuit already privilege largely white and middle-class voices by being university-housed. But beyond that, they tend to blunt aesthetic experimentation and tend to turn us away from the artistic force of the lives we actually lead, no matter how banal. If Emily Dickinson could write head-removing poems while in self-imposed isolation in her father’s Amherst home imagine what we could do while suffering through death-defying daily commutes, precipitously collapsing economies, and ecosystem-devastating climate change. Granted, we’re not all Emily Dickinson. But we can create writing curricula that enhance our mindfulness and our powers of observation. We can create a literary climate that encourages experimentation and openness to voices not normally heard. We can create, in other words, a literature that hears.
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