Terror and Humanity

(On September 11, 2001, an editor from Newsday called me at home and asked me to write about what was happening in New York.  I didn't know what to write, or if I could write anything.  I was traumatized by what I saw on TV and what was happening a few miles from my apartment.  The next day the following article appeared in Newsday and many other newspapers.  I think the words still resonate today, amid the battles we are fighting with each other and within ourselves.)

This one is for the thousands of individuals who died yesterday. Those innocents. It's hard to write this, to write anything. The fathers and mothers. The children. Brothers and sisters. They died for somebody's idea of a just cause. But you were simply killing innocents, can't you understand that? The children visiting the top of the World Trade Center were simply looking at the view. The mothers who jumped out of these skyscrapers, in desperation, did not know about your just cause and did not care about politics. These innocents who died are America, and those who will mourn them today will rebuild our great city and our great country in their honor. We don't have a choice but to rebuild and try again to live in this sometimes nightmarish world. In these thousands who died amid an ordinary Tuesday morning that metamorphosed into terror, we have a representation of America. But that does not mean they bear any individual or collective responsibility for your hate.

You hated them simply because they were a disembodied 'America' in your mind, an abstract idea, something easy to hate because you had already categorized them into something distant, something you can't or won't touch, something far away you will not have any discourse with. A thing. For you, killing the Twin Towers was killing America. Killing buildings was equivalent to killing people, to killing a country. All these 'things' were the same, in your hate-filled mind, but you were wrong. You have killed innocents. You have killed individuals. You categorized us into this thing that you hate, you idealized us into something wretched, and you went about trying to kill this idea-thing with your horrible acts. But you were wrong, and this is why America, this unique and wonderful land of diversity, this expanse of individuals working together, cannot be defeated by your hateful acts. We will rebuild our country, and we will always remember those innocents who died yesterday.

What I believe this Tuesday should teach us, if we can still learn anything in our deepest grief and shock, is that our ideas, when we turn them into hateful things, when we categorize innocents into being disembodied entities, these ideas and the minds that latch onto these idea-things for the sake of a warped clarity, they are at the root of what is evil. To be human is to engage with, to care about. To be human is to love another. To be human is to communicate with someone, even if you are only shouting at them. The most human of all is discourse. With nature. With other human beings. Even with other ideas. But when you prefer an island of clarity in your mind, when you don't want to be contradicted, when you don't want to defend your actions, then you will turn human beings, innocents, into things. And then it so easy to kill these 'things' in your mind.

But even if America, that America of individuals working together, was deeply wounded on this black Tuesday, even if thousands of us died because someone turned us into a thing to hate in his mind, America will not be defeated. We will get up again. We will grieve. We may even hate for a while, too, because our anger has reached unimaginable levels. But we will fight against our hate, we will argue against it, in our own minds, and we will finally put it aside as something at the root of evil, where we do not want to go. And then we will win our fight to be human. One day in the distant future, one day perhaps far away, we will have a good day when we don't cry anymore for those thousands of innocents who died yesterday. We will never forget them, but we will go on with caring about, loving, and arguing with each other. And then, on another clear and sunny day, when we should be taking our children to the park or to visit a famous skyscraper or simply getting them ready for their first week of school, we will be wounded again by someone who has not bothered to escape the idea-things in his mind. And never shall we give up on ourselves. Never. This one is for the thousands of individuals who died yesterday. I wish I had known every single one of them.

American Anima

Sometimes you need a break to regain your anima. That is what I needed after finishing a few projects, after a long hot summer, after trying to make sense of the American political scene where a large segment of the population lives in willful ignorance or willful opposition to the great values I thought this country stood for.

Yesterday I suggested to my thirteen-year-old son Isaac that he read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: freedom is slavery, Barack Obama is a Muslim, bigotry is tolerance.  Does the truth matter anymore?  I am not sure.  Everything is politics and spin.  Where do we stand?  Who cares.  It is only a matter of whether I win against you, whoever ‘you’ are, and whether I can convince enough people that lies are truths.  And if enough people act on these ‘lies,’ who is to say they do not become ‘truths’ anyway?  That is the head-spinning historical moment we are in.

I could rail against the specific lies swirling in the political and cultural scene, but plenty of other commentators are already doing that.  Instead, I feel I should be a philosophical conscience, someone who tries to understand what this moment might mean for our community.

As readers of Chico Lingo will note, sometimes I gain meaning from the specific, and sometimes I pull back to philosophize about my experiences.  The movement from specifics to generalities, and back, is a way to test what I think with what I see and experience, and to adjust my thinking with reality.  Perhaps somebody like Hegel would call this ‘dialectical,’ but I simply try to stay away from such fancy words.

I believe you can think profoundly without obfuscation, by using simplicity like a sword.  That is why I write philosophical stories.  Philosophy in literature is that unique nexus between specific characters --their situations and motivations-- and moral values.  Such stories can ‘show the way,’ so to speak, without being heavy-handed; they can encourage readers to experience truths they can appreciate in their own lives.  If you as a writer write a good story, it will be good most importantly because it will be believed.

So what are some of my preliminary conclusions from the strange and acerbic political scene of the United States?  The commonalities of our American experience have been undermined because of our economic problems.  Or to put it another way, we are losing our sense of community, of belonging to and with each other, in large part because we or family members have lost our jobs, we feel economically insecure, and we have experienced businesses and governments fleecing us, instead of representing our best interests.  This Great Recession has turned us against each other.  Whites against African-Americans and Latinos.  Christians against Muslims.  Even the old against the young.

When I sat in philosophical seminars as a Yale graduate student, it always seemed odd to me that abstract arguments about ‘the truth’ were precisely detailed and logically dissected, yet no one ever chose to point out that professors were gentle, encouraging, and even forgiving with their favorites, while being merciless and impatient with students outside the chosen circle.  What constituted ‘the circle’?  It was different for different professors.

But the point was that if you were in the circle, you could learn from your mistakes and be encouraged to take chances to progress as a philosophical thinker.  If you were outside the circle, you were ignored or dismissed.  The discussion of ‘the truth,’ and even accepting such-and-such arguments as legitimate for or against the topic at hand, depended on aspects that had nothing to do with ‘the truth.’  What often mattered underneath our discussions about the truth was how friendly you were with the professor, did he like you, or did he know you already.  When you were given the benefit of the doubt, you could go far.  When you weren’t, you were stopped dead in your tracks.

I think something similar is happening in the United States.  Our beliefs in religious freedom and protecting the rights of political minorities (enshrined in the Federalist Papers and the Constitution), our belief in welcoming immigrants to become enfranchised Americans, as long as they worked hard to succeed, even our beliefs in equality and fairness- all of these values depended on an economically prosperous America.  As long as we were dominant in the world economy and growing domestically and producing profits and jobs, then we could not only tolerate, but encourage, these traditional American values.

But the economic world has changed.  Although we are still the world’s largest economy, many countries have grown faster than we have, some of our companies did not adapt well to the multi-polar world, the dollar is under siege as a reserve currency, and too many of our citizens became fat and lazy, perhaps too entranced by an insipid materialism and celebrity culture.  We don’t read.  We eat too much.  We are not as good as we were in math and science.  The economic world beyond our borders is not only catching up, but in many respects is leaving America behind.

So we have begun to turn on each other.  We have begun to abandon cherished values.  We debase the Constitution, while proclaiming to protect it.  Bigotry is defended with a defiant wave of Old Glory.

I am left pondering a final interesting question: Is our declining relative prosperity in the world a cause or an effect of our frayed community?  Perhaps as we became more of a heterogeneous community, it also meant we worked less well together, we trusted each other less, and we could more easily take advantage of each other.  So our cultural, racial, and religious diversity in part caused our economic problems.  Perhaps it is not a matter of cause and effect at all, but of interrelation.  Our differences and our economic problems have fed on each other, in a vicious cycle.

In any case, we need to get ourselves out of this ditch so that we can recognize the best in ourselves.  Or, in our dire straits, we need to remember who we are, and so get ourselves out of this ditch.  For me it doesn’t matter which way we regain our anima, as long as we do it.  A good start would be to turn off the radio and television, and reconnect with the small and neglected spaces within our mind and within our community.  What you will find here is who you are.  In these spaces, nobody will tell you who you should be, nor how you should think.

Traveling Alone Together

I am toward the end of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on my iPhone no less, and I have relished every second with this poet.  Just as with Emily Dickinson’s Collected Works, which I also read on my iPhone, I have longed to take a leisurely subway ride, or to have a free hour or so before I sleep, to reenter this portable world of words.

Whitman and Dickinson are so different.  I admire Dickinson’s almost mathematical precision and rhythm.  Her abstractions on poems often match my thinking in an uncanny way: as her song ends I understand, and yet the idea lingers in the air and adds depth where no words are written.

Whitman however unleashes the line from any certainty, and revels in nature’s details, as if ideas would only intrude in the world before our eyes.  I admire Whitman’s enthusiastic camaraderie, his openness to sex, immigrants, the offbeat, and the wonder of being alone.

Both poets in a way seem alone with their poetry.  They are to me deeply humanistic, yet this is not a humanism that values the chitchat of society, or the glib conclusions of casual and catty observers.  They seem alone to me because they travel within themselves.  To stop and remark politely would despoil their journey.  They hearken to ‘others’ --what writer does not want to be read?-- but these others are those like themselves.  They are traveling alone together.

I started Chico Lingo to communicate, debate, chronicle, and explore the days before me.  At times I write to you, the reader.  Sometimes I plead for understanding.  On other occasions, yes, I will pontificate and complain.  But I also write to myself.  It is one of the interesting and peculiar activities human beings can do: they can reflect on what they think, through writing in my case, in which my ‘thinking’ is arranged into words and paragraphs, through Chico Lingo.

I embarked on this journey into myself principally because this is how I have always been.  I want to be alone together with others who are not glib, who question what is given to them by authority or tradition, who wonder at thinking and understanding, the process, and who see what is in between the said, the concluded, and the promised.  When I have ignored this ‘searching self with an acute perspective,’ to give it a name, I ignore myself.  I do it when I am in a hurry, when I am in pain, and when I am weak-minded.  And I have always regretted it later.  It is as if I had temporarily lost who I truly am.

I have often imagined it is the soul reaching out, this thinking and writing alone together.  This soul is meant to be understood and read, and it is meant to reach someone, but that audience is whoever listens, and perhaps limited to those who already will not forget the quiet self that shadows them even within their family.  The audience for this soul, instead of being a target, grants itself into the company of those wanting to be alone together.

So I seek my audience with a vague hope to be heard, but even if I am not, if my words and strange musings remain unread and not understood, I would still reach into the darkness.  I don’t know why.  It is not for the audience.  Nor is it for a vain self.  It is --how can I explain it?-- at once to sanctify and upend life, to lift it from what it is, to focus thought into words and create a call to what was and what is when we live.

Illegal is Illegal

That stupid tautology is what passes nowadays for thinking in today’s debate on illegal immigration.  It’s stupid, because instead of explaining or justifying anything, that tautology glosses over the complex context of undocumented workers in the United States, and how many of us benefit from their work.  With such glibness, we wash our hands of understanding their plight.

It’s good to be a hypocrite in this country on illegal immigration.  It’s rare anybody calls you on it; it’s rare self-satisfied hypocrites do any reflection.  Illegal is illegal.  That’s it.  Case closed.  I’ve even seen that slogan trumpeted on political placards in upstate New York.

I was in Missouri last week, staying at a nice hotel, paid by the school which brings me in to conduct writing workshops.  As I was editing and grading stories and essays from my students, there was a knock on the door.  Two women with cleaning carts smiled sheepishly as I opened the door, and said in heavily accented English they would come back later.

I beckoned them in, saying it was okay.  As I worked, I heard them chat in Spanish about Mexico defeating France in the World Cup.  I introduced myself in Spanish, told them my parents were from Chihuahua, and saw their jaws drop.  Yes, we were all Mexicanos, the guy in the oxford shirt with the Macbook in front of him, and the ladies who were cleaning the toilets and vacuuming.

I spoke to ‘Julia’ for a while, from Guerrero.  She told me she desperately wanted to learn English, but had no time.  “Trabajo dos trabajos.  Diez y seis horas seguidas, y no me da tiempo.”  That is: “I work two jobs.  Sixteen hours back to back, and I don’t have the time.”  She smiled a toothy smile while she said this, and my heart wanted to break.  I asked her how they treated her at this hotel, and she said the manager was extremely nice to them.  Julia told me she sends money back home every month, to her family in Guerrero.

What is remarkable to me is how often this scene has been repeated in about every hotel I have stayed in America.  A few months ago, I was in Denver at an annual conference of writers.  At one of the fanciest hotels in the Mile High City, again an undocumented worker was cleaning my room.  I chatted with ‘Maria Teresa.’  As we spoke on the second day, she was almost teary when I handed her a signed copy of my first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories.  I told her to have her children read her the stories.  I almost lost it myself when she responded, as we said goodbye at the door’s threshold, that she wanted her children to become like me.

These are the people who are the overwhelming majority of the undocumented workers vilified by the idiots in Arizona, and elsewhere, as illegal immigrants.  They are the salt of the earth.  Many of them are desperate to be Americanos.  But Americans already in power, many of Italian, German, Irish and Scandinavian descent, have forgotten how their grandfathers and great-grandmothers arrived in the New World.  We want our hotels clean, and cheaply, so we can profit from the labor of Latin American workers.

We want our strawberries and apples picked beautifully, without bruises, and cheaply.  But we turn the other way and somehow don’t hear when someone explains how this is possible at high-end markets like Fairway or Zabar’s in Manhattan, or across the country at Stop & Shops.  Who is in the fields picking our fruit, for hours under the merciless sun?  Who cares!  Illegal is illegal, they say happily, as they stuff another strawberry in their faces at the Marriott.

I instead talk to undocumented workers, especially if I see them working diligently to make our country better.  I ask them how they are.  I listen to their stories.  And I can only respect them in return.  That’s the decent thing to do.  That’s the right thing to do.  When did we become so callous?

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks?  With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces?  Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers, and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks.  Two men from Guanajuato.  Undocumented workers.  They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn’t an INS officer.

I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards.  I wondered why passersby didn’t see what was in front of their faces.  We use these workers.  We profit from them.  In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies.  And it’s so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned, and speak with funny accents.  Illegal is illegal.  It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger.

Literal: Latin American Voices

This spring I have an essay in a groundbreaking magazine I hope many of you will buy and read, Literal: Latin American Voices, edited by Rose Mary Salum.  My essay, “A Third Culture: Literature and Migration,” focuses on a topic I discussed at the Guadalajara International Book Fair last November, namely how my writing has been affected as an immigrant to the English language and American culture.

What is exciting about this bilingual issue (Spanish and English) of Literal is its mixture of literature and politics, art and photography, translated works from Latin America and Germany, poetry, fiction, and interviews.  Its nexus is Rose Mary Salum, an incessantly curious editor, who has created an intellectual cornucopia.  I have read about six other issues of Literal, and each is a surprise, a provocation, and a plea to look at the world anew.  I have C. M. Mayo to thank for introducing me to Rose Mary in Guadalajara, where over a long lunch the three of us had one of the best conversations I’ve had at any literary event.

In this issue of Literal, the highlight for me was an unpublished essay by the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  The essay was a talk Paz gave at the University of Texas at Austin in 1986, and is entitled, “Writers and artists in the history of Mexico.”  For anyone who cares about the role of the intellectual in society, in fomenting democracy or stifling it, for anyone who wants to understand the link between Mexican culture and its politics, this is an important work.

Paz focuses on the attitudes of Mexican intellectuals to modernity from the 16^th Century to the 20^th Century, inaugurated by the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the eventual rise of the PRI.  Clericals dominated intellectual life in Mexico in the 16^th Century. Within a rigid orthodoxy, they struggled with uncertain attitudes toward modernity.  The revolutions of intimacy and reason, the critical cadre of intellectuals exemplified by Hume, Descartes, and Newton, catapulted Europe and the morals of its people to an intellectual ferment that was modern, particular, and pluralistic.

The positivism that arose in Mexico in the 1860s, however, was a global explanation for Mexican society, which instead should have been a philosophy particular to that country.  As Paz relates, the positivism of Porfirio Diaz and his cronies was simply the adoption of the “old theology” with a pseudo-scientific focus.  Before Juárez, intellectuals were part of the church.  After Juárez, intellectuals became part of the state, an unfortunate trend which continued even after the Revolution of 1910.

Paz asks the question: how can you modernize a nation and its morals if those responsible (namely intellectuals) are not completely modern?  He argues that Mexican intellectuals possessed a ‘pre-modern psyche’ with modern ideas.  Mexican intellectuals were not democratic, or interested in solving social issues; they adopted philanthropy, as a social action from above, given their uncertain status as statist elites.  Patrimonialismo, or corruption, became a social norm; a political-bureaucratic class and centralismo flourished.

What Paz says is missing from Mexico, and what he would have wanted Mexico to have, are a balance of power in politics, a critical and independent press, the autonomy of the legislature, and “authentic democracy.”  He longs for that “fraternity of man,” which he believes exists among average Mexicans, and which he sees spontaneously on display during an earthquake, where neighbor helped neighbor.

The role of the intellectual, according to Paz, is to help create this fraternity: “I am one of those who believes in gradual and peaceful changes.  That is why I speak: I believe in the word.  Gradual and peaceful changes are not attained without the intellectual class.  Not because this class is owner of the power to change something, but because this class exercises the power of persuasion that other classes do not possess.  From there, a change of consciousness must be fundamental.” (My translation)

There is no clearer explanation for why I started Chico Lingo.  To have an independent voice.  To persuade.  To change how people look at the world.  The word is not flimsy, even though it possesses no obvious power.  But sometimes the word reaches deeply into souls, particularly those who are still listening and looking, and that is where you may win a world.

King of the Chicanos

Today I finished reading a wonderful novel, King of the Chicanos (Wings Press), by Manuel Ramos, which was published a few weeks ago.  Ramos has written several crime fiction novels, and so the prose is tight and clean and the plot moves quickly.  But the importance of the novel is its focus, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the questions which arise about whether the movement continues today, in other forms, in other venues.

Most of the events described in King of the Chicanos take place before my time, when I was in grade school in El Paso.  But these events, and particularly the issues of the protagonist, Ramón Hidalgo, resonate today.  The unabashed support for racial and ethnic profiling of Arizona’s new immigration law and that state legislature’s attack against ethnic studies programs demonstrate that we are in a Back-to-the-Future moment.

The fight for respect, for being treated as equals, for pride that lifts us to become better citizens, was a fight fought by our predecessors, and a fight that needs organization, commitment, and passion again today.  Hidalgo is a natural leader who is animated by the police's brutality against Chicanos, by the establishment’s disenfranchisement of Mexican-Americans, from politics to literature.

Can we say we have progressed so far that these issues are not relevant today?  Of course not.  I would argue, in some cases like Arizona and the media’s stereotypical portrayal of undocumented workers and even American Latinos, that we have regressed to a worse state of affairs.

But what takes King of the Chicanos to a subtler, more complex level is Ramos’s unstinting portrayal of Ramón Hidalgo’s mistakes as a leader and flaws as a human being.  There is vicious infighting in the organization Hidalgo leads; personal conflicts trump organizational imperatives.  In one sense, this is the limitation of ‘familia,’ of not taking the organization beyond a personal level, to a more professional, perhaps politically powerful level.  Hidalgo is also self-destructive in a way, womanizing his way out of a marriage with an excellent partner whom he never ceases to love.

Lessons learned, I kept thinking, as I finished the novel.  Yes, there are important lessons learned in King of the Chicanos.  This work should be read by many young, and not-so-young, activists who are tired of being stomped on by the likes of Jan Brewer and Rush Limbaugh.  We need more than raw passion this time.  We need to be focused, and we need to be bigger than ourselves, and we need to be a political force that can translate our power to the ballot box, to legislatures, to the courts, and eventually to mainstream American culture.

I also want to point out, in my literary realm, how our struggle continues.  We need more books by and about Chicanos, and not just the version of ‘Mexican-Americans’ assumed in New York or Austin.  But to have that, to have more quality books published by small and large publishers about Chicanos, we need to buy more of our books, we need to educate our community about our stories, and we need to keep telling our stories, in every corner, in every town, until we are heard.  But first we need to listen to each other.  Only then will others turn around, and pay attention to the literary commotion and debate that is ours.

Mr. Fixit

I have spent the past two weeks fixing broken things, or having them fixed by experts.  My son’s MacBook needed the RAM replaced at the new Apple Store near Lincoln Center.  I fixed the blinds on our window that were about to crash down on our heads.  I called the A/C repair guys, who came to oil and clean out the air conditioners in our apartment, but I wasn’t very impressed with them: I had to make sure they did the job right, and often they were sloppy.

Our electronic Yamaha piano had four keys that wouldn’t pop up anymore, in part because our fat cat Ocistar jumps on the piano to launch himself out the front door whenever I go to the trash room on our floor.  I found an electronic piano wizard, courtesy of the Sam Ash Music Store, who repaired it beautifully.  I’ll permanently fix the cat-piano-problem with the thick cover I ordered for our Yamaha.

A reliable handyman in our building fixed the kids’ toilet, which didn’t flush properly anymore, and replaced our tub faucet, which during a shower gushed water onto my feet but precious little on my head.  Another handyman re-caulked both bathrooms.

I fixed the navigation system on our Honda Pilot, and repaired the filter and cleaned out the pump that produces a nice waterfall for a small fish pond in our house in Connecticut.  Two dead trees are decaying in our side yard; they need to come down.  When will it end?  I wish I could repair the state of Arizona, or pay someone to do it, but even some problems are too big for me.

There comes a point when too many things are broken.  I reached that point two weeks ago.  Everybody was complaining, but not doing anything about it, and so I grabbed my Fixit flag and charged into the first problem first, and then the next, and the next.  But it really never ends.  Today the mop broke.

Of course, I’ve been ‘repairing’ my novel all throughout this Fixit frenzy, which means I’ve been rewriting it.  That also never ends, until it does, and how you know when the writing is ‘finished’ is an epiphany of sorts, a sense of judgment that this, what you have on the page, is what you always meant to write.  Whether someone will publish it is, again, another matter.

But I still do have a sense of tired accomplishment, that several of the things I fixed, or got fixed, will stay fixed, at least for a while.  This state of ‘fixedness,’ so to speak, is but a brief moment in time.  Soon enough something else will fall apart and need repair.  I don’t live for that stasis, but for the struggle to reach it and for what I learn by fixing things.  It’s really philosophical, and all that crap, but I’m exhausted.  So maybe that’s the point of the state of ‘fixedness,’ to rest.  I sorely need it.

“Dad, something’s wrong with the printer!”  I have to go.

Arizona

Obama won the last presidential election, but Latinos are facing the political backlash from conservative whites, who see, more clearly than ever, that their days are numbered as the ethnic majority in this country.  That’s one conclusion I can draw from recent news and events.  I am felled by an awful spring flu, with a fever and an achy body and a nose that gushes as if it were the well of the Deepwater Horizon. But this is too important a day to be a bystander.

Arizona’s new law, SB1070, has been given an acceptable façade with the argument that it’s only against illegal immigrants and that it won’t result in racial profiling.  But what is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that someone is an illegal immigrant?  What does an illegal immigrant look like?  Like John McCain?  Sarah Palin?

It’s a law that the rogue cop who already hates all things Mexican, illegal or not, will easily abuse to jail a poor mother and father who don’t happen to be carrying their birth certificates in their back pockets.  I suspect that even if American Latinos have their birth certificates when they sleep, that the Arizona birthers will assume these documents are fraudulent.  They simply don’t like Mexicans, whether they are here illegally or not.

I conclude this not because I am paranoid, or because I see every political issue through an ethnic or racial lens.  I do not.  Read my blog, witness my marriage, see how I raise my children, examine my voting record.  What you will see, I hope, is a person who was given great opportunities in this country, who is conservative on some issues and liberal on others, who is proud of his Mexican heritage, yet still criticizes and tries to change practices within our community to make it more successful, more powerful, more open-minded.

But when I see that yesterday the Arizona state legislature also passed a bill that “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” I know that this legislative majority in Arizona does not like Mexican-Americans.  Imagine, a Mexican-American studies program in Arizona is being compared to treason.  What kind of mentality makes that irrational link?  The Arizona Department of Education is also trying to fire teachers with accents who teach English classes.  What is happening in this crazy state?  This weekend, the ‘education’ bill is awaiting the governor’s signature.

So I don’t draw my tough conclusions on anything but the evidence of idiocy that are the actions of the Arizona state legislature.  I can only wait for those legislative Caesars in Texas to also take up racist and xenophobic causes, or Oklahoma and Alabama.  Are we about to start a new Confederacy in the South?  What happened to giving opportunity to new strangers to this country, to helping them become Americans, which they so desperately want?  What happened to being open-minded about someone who doesn’t look like you, who doesn’t sound like you?

For Latinos, we must organize.  We must protest.  We must register to vote in huge numbers, and then vote with our neighbors and friends at the ballot box.  We must get involved in politics locally, seek alliances with those who will help us.  We should never stay silent, and allow others to do the work of fighting for causes we care about.  That’s what this country is about: getting involved, gaining our voice, getting a chance to fulfill our highest potential.  These days should prompt a new grito for freedom, respect, and self-determination.

Financial Chess

Tomorrow I will make another financial chess move.  We are refinancing the mortgage on our house, to a super-low interest rate, at a shorter term. We close on the deal in the morning.  My father often criticizes me for “always worrying about money,” but discovering a financial advantage and having the guts to take advantage of it have been the ways in which I have gained my economic freedom.

During the nadir of the financial meltdown in March 2009, I was smart enough not to panic, even though I worried about my investments and what my wife and I had achieved, in stock gains, over many years.  As the market came back over the past year, I vowed to take into account that worry.  I sold stock, and Laura and I decided to use those gains to pay down our mortgage and so shorten the years of our mortgage debt.

When I was younger, I had almost 100 percent of my investment money in stocks, stock mutual funds, and only an emergency fund in bonds.  As I have gotten older, and with the experience of 2009 fresh in my mind, I have realized I want to preserve more of what I have, and not to focus only on growing it.  So I adapted.  Adapt or die, I say, to any would-be investor.

Yet the bonds I have purchased have been on the short-end of the yield curve, because I expect interest rates to go up.  They can hardly go down any further, so the best bet is that they will either stay stable for a while, or go up.  When interest rates go up, the prices of bonds go down: an inverse relationship.  So any bond that is long-term (i.e. greater than ten years) will be hurt more by a one percentage increase in interest rates, than a bond that is short-term (less than three years, or just one year).

Another financial chess move I have made over the past three years is to increase my foreign stock allocation.  When I teach an investment analysis course, I always give my class the current total stock market capitalization of the world, and what portion belongs to the United States.  Since the 1970s, the American share of world stock market capitalization has declined.  The world outside the U.S. is growing faster than the U.S.  Brazil, India, China, and South Korea are great growth stories.

Even individual American companies I purchase for my portfolio I examine in light of their foreign revenues: companies with their eyes on foreign markets will simply have less of their eggs in one (domestic) basket.  If you think our budget and trade deficits will have a negative effect on the dollar (I do), then you will benefit by having companies earning their revenues in Euros, Yuan, Won, and Yen.

I also expect taxes to go up.  Why?  We have these gigantic deficits and lack the political will to tackle spending on entitlements and the military nationally, and on state and city government budgets and bureaucracies locally.  I blame both Republicans and Democrats for this situation, and think they will come together when they are forced to come together.  Crony capitalism on Wall Street and dysfunctional politics in Washington have left us in a mess, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world.  I believe the Tea Party activists are overstating their case.  I see reported profits for S&P 500 companies higher than expected, and perhaps there is a chance we can grow out of this deficit hole.

Right now I would vote for Obama again.  Why?  He has been pragmatic when faced with the economic cleanup of the Bush mess.  Obama has forced consumer protections on credit-card companies and is actually regulating, as the government should, the practices of financial institutions which drove the American economy into a ditch.  The laissez-faire, I’m-a-deregulator philosophy of Bush allowed the powerful to take advantage of the weak and uninformed, and the well-connected to seek a public bailout when their crazy risks exploded in their faces.  And ours.  We can’t let that happen again.

Returning the Blood to Words

At almost every AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) there is a moment, a panel, a writer who reminds you of why you became a writer in the first place.  The annual conference is in Denver this year, and Martín Espada, the master poet, was the man for me this year.  Last year it was Marie Ponsot.

Espada: “Writers should return the blood to words.”

Espada said so many things on his panel, “Justice, Community, and the Republic of Poetry,” with Tara Betts and David Mura.  But that sentence encapsulates his ideas about writers fighting the deadness of language used by politicians and even the deadness of perspective given our busy and often compromised lives.

Espada read and sang in a way only poets do, to uplift the literary sprits, to call us to the social mission of writing, to dethrone the accepted, to criticize the unjust, to delve roughly and humorously into ourselves too, lest we forget that not only is the world the issue, but also the self.

Years ago I had a similar reaction the first time I heard Curbstone’s Alexander Taylor speak at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center.  Sandy, who died in December of 2007, may he rest in peace, invigorated me and gave me purpose.  I write to change the world, to prod myself, to seek answers to questions often unasked, to lead the good life as Aristotle may have envisioned, which is hard and unrelenting.  And I try to do this with good stories that engage the reader.  Philosophy in literature, some have called it.  So hearing Sandy, just like hearing Martín, captured my soul.

I dropped everything, even the panels I am missing as I type this, to write this entry.  This is what great writers do: they cause you to act.  They don’t just entertain you (although they have to do that if they are storytellers), but they prompt you to do, to change your perspective, to ask yourself tough questions, to believe in a just republic and imagine the impossible.

Martín Espada and Sandy Taylor were great friends.  I also remember hearing Martín speak about reading poetry to Sandy as he lay in the hospital during his final hours.  I knew Sandy, since I had been briefly on the Curbstone Board.  But I do not know Martín except from afar.  I am lucky to have paid attention to their words.

I have been pondering why it is that poets, recently, have been the ones inspiring me.  It is their exceptional use of language, and their thinking beyond the norm and the staid.  This poetic thinking I believe is deeply philosophical.  These writers seem to pose the question of ‘seeing’ without assuming what it means, or what it has meant, or what it can mean.  ‘Seeing’ for these poets is a new act with every poem.

During breaks, I am finishing Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and have already received recommendations from poet-friends on what to read next.  It has been a great conference so far.  But now I need the solitude and quiet that beckon me even in a crowd.