Letter to Whoopi

Have you been following the recent controversy with Whoopi Goldberg? She got in trouble with her statement claiming the Holocaust wasn’t about race but about man’s inhumanity to man. Immediately she had to duck and cover as the barrage of abusive artillery rained down upon her. Never has public discourse been at such a low ebb, where anything you say can be fodder for attack and much of it, hiding behind the shield of the Internet, hateful and abusive. 

 

I’ve enjoyed Whoopi Goldberg’s work and in many ways, that’s entirely besides the point. What’s important is to think about what she said and consider it in a way that allows us to emerge from a discussion with a larger understanding. Without the personal attacks or over-inflated emotion (though of course, the Holocaust and race both carry enormous emotional charges.). Since Whoopi hasn’t called me up to discuss the issue, I’ll use this venue to air my point of view.

 

I understand how she might come to see race as a literal black and white issue and when white people killed white people, it didn’t seem to come under that umbrella. Yet it feels entirely off the mark to put that horror of the Holocaust on the “man’s inhumanity to man" shelf. In this imaginary debate, some talking points to consider:

 

1) “Man’s inhumanity to man” rarely (or never) comes from some random propensity toward hatred and violence. As the South Pacific musical song says, “You’ve got to be taught how to hate.” That requires an ideological construct that burrows into people’s brain, purposefully perpetrated by those in power who gain from brainwashing people. Despite the portrayal of hand-wringing malevolent- snickering evil villains in the movies, most people doing horrific things are convinced it’s in the name of some elevated purpose like freedom or doing God’s will. 

 

2) The ideology that fueled the Holocaust was the mythology of The Master Race. Let me highlight that: Master Race.The notion that the blonde-haired blue-eyed Aryans (Hitler was 1 for 2 in those categories) were superior to the lesser races of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs was used to justify the slaughter. It was ordained that the lesser races were slated for domination and destruction and thus, the dominators were perfectly aligned with the notions they were fed and could sleep peacefully at night. In exactly the same way Southern slave owners excused themselves. 

In short, the Holocaust was entirely about race. One might argue it was also about economics (the Jews ran many of the businesses), but the race card was the one that justified all subsequent horrors. 

 

3) It should be noted that homosexuals, intellectuals and even jazz-lovers were also fair game for the concentration camps, but that again was racially justified, seeing them as impurities and impediments to the Aryan ideal. 

 

My disappointment with Whoopi’s apology on the Stephen Colbert show is that she didn’t seem to use this opportunity to enlarge her perspective, but simply said she was sorry that people misunderstood her and in the future, she would keep her mouth shut on the subject. That felt like an unsatisfying response. 

 

Before posting this, I looked into the situation a little more and found this statement:

 

"On today's show, I said the Holocaust 'is not about race, but about man's inhumanity to man.' I should have said it is about both," Goldberg tweeted. "As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, 'The Holocaust was about the Nazi's systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.' I stand corrected." 

While I still politely suggest that while it might be about both, the racial justification is the larger percentage and the important one to understand. Not much we can do about “man’s inhumanity to man,” but helping people understand how evil is justified by the smokescreen of good and has been used to fuel racial hatred and injustice, that’s something that anyone willing to use their brain cells. can come to understand and re-align their thinking, perspective, morality and action.

 

The story goes on. The View Show she’s a part of suspended her for two weeks for her comments, even after her apology. Really? The ex-Pres can tweet out unrelenting hate speech and 20,000 lies and his Repugnantican posse can continue to gleefully spread their warped perceptions and ugly speech on Fox News and there’s no consequence? I've never once, not once, heard any of them say, "I stand corrected."

Is the View Show’s action yet another example of “man’s inhumanity to man?” (or man to woman or woman to woman) or is that about race? Food for thought. 

 

 

 

 

Brain Gym

I’ve been walking some five to seven miles a day to arrive at a simple truth— exercise matters. I feel more alive and alert, am sleeping better, weight is down. Human beings were made to move and it has been surmised that ancient hunter-gatherers covered about 12 miles a day— without a Fitbit to motivate them, I might add. When we moved into the sedentary activities of offices and schools, the body clamored for our attention. So we used our money earned sitting at desks to buy gym memberships, sat in our car while we drove there, jostled for parking spaces and joined other sweaty bodies indoors riding bikes that went nowhere and working on machines that did nothing to get our food ready or build shelters. However strange and artificial it would appear to those who get their exercise actually working with their body, it is one way to meet the body’s truth: exercise matters.

 

As with the body, so with the mind. The best exercise is rigorous thinking, born from a lifetime of reading, writing and reflection and vigorous discussion. But the ingenuity of humankind has also devised some other kind of brain gyms in the forms of games and puzzles. And so in the luxury of my retired life, some of these have become daily sustenance. A 15-minute solitaire game to exercise the number and pattern mind, a 30- minute crostic to work out the language center, a two-to- four day jigsaw puzzle to awaken the mind tuned to images, colors and shapes. Then there’s Bach and jazz improvisation on the piano, the callisthenic routine to shape and keep in shape organized sound. Numbers, words, sounds, images all given the needed exercise to stay wholly alive, alert, attuned, keeping the brain synapses doing their push-ups. 

 

When people stop exercising their bodies and sink further into the couch of lethargy, sloth and flab and dullness run the day. When people stop exercising their minds, their cerebral couches sag with the weight and the dangerous thoughts of others invade their mental landscape. Alongside the aforementioned rigorous reading, writing and discussing, a steady diet of challenging games and puzzles not only elevates your quality of life, but is a holding action against the coming invasion of dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s. 

Cards, Sudoku puzzles, acrostic books and jigsaw puzzles are cheap, portable, easy to come by and the results are tangible, a big improvement over the rabbit hole of surfing Facebook or going down into the pit of the evening news. In the moment of navigating the intriguing challenges of walking through the maze that eventually reveals meaning, you are God in your kingdom, wholly in charge at your highest level of intelligence, invulnerable to the insanities of others. You emerge ready to face the real game of daily life and deeper thinking with the strings of your brain's synapses buzzing and humming and ready to go back into the fray.

 

Exercising both body and mind is a very good idea. But there's more. If both demand exercise to stay in shape, it stands to reason that the heart could also use a workout program. Stay tuned. 

The Gods of Small Things

“What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great.…

When we win, it’s with small things, And the triumph  itself makes us small.”  - Rilke

 

The Paperwork Nightmare (see Jan. 27 post) continues as the gods of small things are determined to drive me over the brink by gumming me to death. The short story is that after jumping over the last hurdle to sub at a school, another one quickly appeared on the track— my TB test results. I had the test taken at the Jewish Home for the Aged back in September and I thought they could simply send the results over. 

 

But simple? What was I thinking?! Of course, they didn’t have them and then noticed that I’m not in their volunteer system and even though I’ve come once-a-week to play piano for the elders for 12 years, now I need to fill out their volunteer paperwork and watch the Elder Abuse video. Then I can get the TB test and return again for the results. I’m being besieged on all sides by trivial bureaucracy and it’s wearing me down. 

 

Rilke’s poem goes on to talk about wrestling with the Angels who will surely defeat us, but strengthen and enlarge us in the battle. He ends with:

 

“This is how we grow: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”

 

 I had planned to get thrown down to the ground by Mozart’s Piano Sonatas today and instead, am spending precious minutes arranging the paperwork pick-up, scheduling the TB test, sending out the multiple e-mails, entering dates and times on my calendar. 

 

My only consolation? That I don’t have to send this post to Blogspot to get their approval. Not yet, at least. 

 

Advice to Future Teachers II

 “I’ve never thought that society should take care of other people’s children.”

-      Senator Ron Johnson

 

Yesterday’s college class was simply even more joyful than I imagined. After reminding them to keep their playful selves alive and kicking, we jumped into the hands-on activity: How to introduce kids to the 12-bar blues in a way that is fun and makes sense to them. I started with my thumbnail history and meaning of the blues in American culture, a tool of survival and resistance and triumph that black Americans crafted (sorry, Mitch McConnell to need to remind you that black Americans are American *)  that touched the nerve of so many white folks, helping liberate them from repressed bodies and closed hearts and inviting them into a world of soulful feeling. I reminded them that any pop artist today came from the fertile soil of the blues and to be ignorant of that history means not knowing who to thank and not knowing why it’s important to thank them. This college being in one of the too-many states where telling the truth about race in America is being written into law as a crime, I invited them to sign the imaginary non-disclosure agreement. Of course, I was kidding, but by the end of class, it became clear that this is no laughing matter. 

 

At any rate, on we went into the joyful playground of kids-level blues via the Cookie Jar game and by the end, they were all jamming on recorders or guitars or voices and looking like they sounded great. (Remember, this was online and all mikes were off.) At the end, in the comments, one of the students wrote:

 

“I have felt very disillusioned with things lately because of the state of the world, but this made me so happy.”

 

Which, of course, made me so happy.

 

But not for long. After the class, the teacher, a colleague I deeply love and respect, needed a listening ear about what she was going through in this state where the governonr had just outlawed Critical Race Theory in schools and instituted a “tipline” where parents can report any teaching that makes them or their children “uncomfortable,” with the consequence of the teacher being fired in this “right to work” state.  

And the stories got worse. The decision that kids would now be allowed to go mask-less to school with a population of 55% vaccinated.  That teachers are not allowed to question it and if they choose to stay home for fear of getting Covid and infecting a vulnerable elder parent, they would be let go. Alongside the mass hysteria of states trying to ban books, it’s clear that we are becoming China, Turkey and yes, Nazi, Germany. All in the name of “American values.”

 

Most heartbreaking of all was this teacher’s feelings about these young college students eager to become lifelong teachers entering the wasp’s nest of this toxic environment. What should she tell them, kids who are already disillusioned with the state of the world? At the end of the class when they felt the tonic of happiness and hope, should she and I tell them, “But why bother? No one cares about making kids happy, telling them the truth or helping them to actually think. They want you to lull them into obedient servitude and shut down all authentic feeling and thinking so the big boys can throw around their power and privilege and gleefully wreck the world.”

 

In the face of it all, my advice to future teachers? “Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.” We are the last hope of humanity, we who can keep hope lit in our bright-eyed wondrous students and if we give up now and let the nay-sayers win, we indeed are doomed. We are needed more than ever. So while you keep your own hope and happiness and playful selves glowing, even as a smoldering ember, gather your courage and resolve to keep the fire lit. We may go down, but we will go down fighting. Watch out, Ron Johnson. We are coming for your children. 

* In a lame attempt to defend the epidemic move to strip away voting rights, McConnell said "Black Americans are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans."

Advice to Future Teachers

 (In 20 minutes, I’ll have the supreme pleasure of giving an online Music Ed class to college students back East. Here are some thoughts as to how I’ll begin)

 

Remember when you were a kid and couldn’t wait to grow up? Finally get to decide your own bedtime and eat as much ice cream as you want? And now that you’re 18, 19 or 20 or even worse, 21 or 22 and out of college and into the working world, do you find yourself wishing you were a kid again? Yes, you’re happy to be more independent, to drive yourself instead of waiting for your Mom or Dad, to eat ice cream when you want and get a double scoop whenever you feel like it, to see the opposite (or same) sex as something more than a friend and finally understand (or not) what all the fuss is about. But independence means paying utility bills, owning your car means dealing with the ever-more expensive repairs, eating all the ice cream you want might bring pimples or an expanding waistline and let’s face it, relationships are complicated! It was much simpler to wander around the park with your friends and dig holes and skip stones and climb trees and play tag and get mad and then be friends again 10 minutes later.

 

We have no choice but to grow into adulthood, but we do have a choice as to how much of our childhood wonder and innocence and curiosity and spirit of fun and play we bring with us. So if you’re training to be a teacher, a few tips that might make your teaching more fun, more effective, more joyful:

 

1) Children are not adults in small bodies. Meet them where they are at each stage of development, align yourself with each age’s particular dignity and delight.

 

2) The best way to understand children’s ways of thinking and learning and living is to remember your own ways at the age and keep them alive in you. 

 

3) The best of your childlike (not childish) self is that sense of play, learning as a grand game and adventure that comes in not just through the mind but through the senses, through the body, through the social body, with humor and much laughter, just enough challenge to keep you engaged.

 

4) But teaching will also require the adult in the adult. The best of your adult self is the one who has traveled beyond the childish self, that merely impulsive, explosive, whiny, temper-tantrumish little brat who selfishly wants every need and want satisfied RIGHT NOW and believes whatever they think is true is true without having done the work to understand it more fully. There are far too many of these children in adult bodies in our public politics and our job is to train children to become caring, responsible, compassionate, intelligent, hard-working and kind adults who still carry their curiosity, humor , openness and sense of play with them. 

 

I’m here to testify that in 45 years of teaching some 6 or 7 classes a day to kids of all ages, I never once felt burnt-out because the whole grand adventure was one glorious romp in the playground. Of course, I had my moments when it didn’t feel like ice cream every day, when I waiting with longing for the weekend or summer vacation and goodness knows I never loved filling out report cards. But because I was lucky enough to not have to jump through any hoops excepts the ones I laid out on the floor, I was free to create the kind of games that both the kids and I needed and enjoyed. 

 

In my second year of retirement, I’m now back with kids once a week and no matter what the age, I notice how quickly they accept me and enjoy me as a teacher. I suspect that’s because within five minutes, these extremely intuitive and intelligent beings feel like I know them, that I like them, that I’m prepared to enjoy them, that I get them. 

 

If it turns out teaching is the call that was meant for your response, remember to play and have fun, to keep imagination side-by-side with the thousand details of learning, to get down on the floor with the kids and meet them where they are, helping them rise inch-by-inch to the kind of adult you hope them to be come. 

 

So let’s learn how to play the 12-bar blues in 20 minutes and start here: “Somebody stole my cookies from the cookie jar! Waaah! Was it YOU?!!!!!”

As If

Have you considered how much of your life, your actions, your daily activities, your hopes, dreams and plans, are based on an assumption that any of it matters? Whether it matters to you or your loved ones or some stranger doesn’t matter— we go ahead with what we’re doing “as if” it matters. That’s what keeps us going. The fantasy that it matters (to whom?) that you finally lost five pounds, that you made progress on the Mozart Piano Sonata, that you found the perfect piece of furniture to complete your living room is just that—a fantasy.

 

For if we ever paused to think about it, we would be immobilized by the greater truth, the brutal reality, the crushing realization, that in the big picture, none of it matters. Not a bit. Who cares that one of your books is out of print and needs reprinting, but while the layout person has the text, he doesn’t have the cover image and the person who did that retired 10 years ago and doesn’t have the file? Why drive all the way to school to pick up the last copy of the book and drive to Berkeley to bring it to the new cover designer to scan, only to discover her scanner is too small for the book size? What’s the point of happily discovering that your scanner has a feature that increases the resolution when it consistently cuts off 1/8 of an inch of the 9 by 12 book at the bottom? Why bother to spend over an hour at Kinko’s trying to scan it more professionally and keep at it even when their scanner keeps getting the size wrong? Why go through the infuriating confusion when it finally works and is sent to your e-mail, but doesn’t arrive in your e-mail? Should you really persevere , bike back to Kinko’s and have the worker try it on another machine, finally see it arrive on your phone 15 minutes later and then go home to send it to your new cover designer and find it has disappeared on your computer? Not in new mail, old mail or spam, but then, YES! there it is in recently deleted (and who deleted it? Not me!) and finally, after miles of bike riding and driving and time spent that you had hoped to enjoy in the Park, why bother sending it to your new cover designer only to discover that is  .6MB under the limit that can be sent by e-mail and you’ve been typing this for twenty minutes while the “sending” button swirls around? So now you probably have to upload it in Google Drive and then re-send and don’t forget to press “anyone with the link” or you’ll have to send it again. 

 

And since the 2000 copies in the first printing in 2008 sold out by the second printing in 2012 after four years on the market, now it took ten years to sell out again and does anyone really care anymore? Why am I determined to keep climbing over obstacle after obstacle set in a path that should have been really simple? And who is putting those obstacles there and why? If they wanted to drive me crazy, they’ve succeeded. Test my commitment, well, that too. See how serious I am in my fantasy that the work collected in the book from, at the time of the printing, some 33 years of teaching, matters enough to keep sharing it. Well, either that or just some habitual stubbornness that I will not be defeated by the gods of minor mishaps, even when they come in a maddening series of little catastrophes.

 

Still sending, sending, sending, meaning not sending, so it’s off to Google Drive I go. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll take a little walk first. “As if” that matters.

 

 

Amanda Gorman's Next Step

 

(I wrote a slightly different version of this last year after watching an interview with Amanda Gorman and Trevor Noah)

 

What’s next for Amanda Gorman? Where to go after reading her poetry at the Presidential Inauguration and then the Super Bowl?

 

In order to answer that, we have to understand the territory in which poetry lives. ‘The Hill I Climb’, her inaugural poem, is not the mountain of fame and fortune. It has nothing to do with the number of likes on Facebook or the number of talk show invitations. It’s the one that offers that spectacular view that you can’t see down in the lowlands. The poet makes an uphill effort, feels with a rock-climber’s mind where the next needed word is that will support the weight of the poem. Once at the top, her responsibility and pleasure is to report to others what she sees. To encourage them to ascend and see for themselves. That’s one of poetry’s possibilities and there’s always another mountain out there.

 

The poet is also a deep-sea diver, descending down into the watery depths of sorrow and grief and then rising up from those waters with a poem that has the power to give someone a hug who cannot be touched (especially in these pandemic times) in their hour of need, a poem that has the physicality of an embrace coiled in the muscle of language. There is no bottom to that sea and no end to those waters.

 

The poet is also a miner, looking for the glimmer of gold hidden in the folds of the hard rock of our armored human heart and coaxing it out. Or panning for it in the streams of our flowing lives, trying to stratify the merely mundane and separate it from our extraordinary possibility.

 

What lies ahead for Ms. Gorman? The full measure of a human life with all its complexities, triumphs and tribulations. The challenge to keep climbing the mountains, dive into the seas, excavate the hidden gold and write something lasting and memorable that brings comfort or inspiration to people she will never meet. The hope to stumble upon something that is at once timely and timeless, particular and universal, something that appears to someone as if the poem was written precisely for them, for what they’re going through, what they need to hear, what they wanted to say but couldn’t find the words.

 

At the same time that the Inauguration and Super Bowl is an extraordinary moment of fame thrust upon her, one that allows her to reach millions more than the 20 people in a poetry reading, that opens doors and gives opportunities for more poems to be shared, there is also a great danger. She could get lost in the glitz and glamour of a rock-star culture, the one that prefers to adore and idolize and grab the coattails of the rich and famous rather than do the work themselves to shine their own light.

 

Poetry is not a halftime show at the Super Bowl nor a touchdown run with a “look what I did!” end-zone dance. It’s not about how awesome and amazing she is, but how vulnerable and wounded and beautiful we all are and can be. It’s not about entertainment and let’s get on with the show, but about finding the needed words for any occasion that stops business-as-usual in it tracks and brings healing, solace and light.

 

The deeper question is where are wegoing to go from here? And the best answer is found in bringing poetry into politics on its own terms, bringing beauty and soul and grief and sorrow and vulnerability and human connection to the Senate floor. As with Pablo Neruda in Chile, W.B. Yeats in Ireland and Vaclev Havel in Czechoslavakia, it is time to consider poets for Congress. 

 

I am happy to nominate Amanda Gorman.