Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Signs and signification

Here’s a question:

If you post a sign in your yard declaring you stand against hate — which is admittedly a rather small gesture at best — does it say anything about your neighbors?

The answer, I had always assumed, was no. My declaration of belief, whether it is for peace, against hatred, or in support of something like universal health care, begins as a personal statement. I believe. As a writer, I know I need to go farther — as I teach students, the phrase “I believe often is used as a crutch. I believe something to be true, I, meaning it is my belief and only mine and I can believe what I want. Screw the evidence. Forget supporting my arguments. I believe it and that makes it as valid as anything anyone else might say.

This certainly is true of some things: taste, for instance, is deeply personal. I like The Beatles and Kendrick Lamar and don’t like Mariah Carey or Journey. I have a host of reasons, some rational, many not, but it doesn’t mean you have to agree.

There is, as with all deeply held beliefs, a sense of ownership and an implication that the holder of the belief is right and everyone else is wrong.

But does it imply anything more?

A month or so ago, the conservative blogger Matt Rooney commented on the signs this way on Twitter:

I was a bit surprised by his argument. Yes, the signs are merely a small gesture, but “Condescension and tokenism at their worst”? That was just absurd.

I commented in a retweet that it was a small public declaration, which elicited this response:

Again, this is absurd. Why would one assume hat my public declaration of what I believe is an implied critique of my neighbors? The answer, I think, is that Rooney and many on the right who are critical of the signs see them as a threat to their world view. My simple declaration, made public, raises questions about their beliefs that they may find uncomfortable — not that they hate, but that something in their belief system encourages hate? I don’t know. I’m loathe to engage in a pop psychoanalysis of politics and I want to make it clear that this is not about Rooney — he just provides a useful example, even if it is something that is a couple of months old.

Why bring it up now? Well, the sign discussion is an ongoing one. I drove around recently and found a dozen “Hate Has No Home Here” signs in my Kendall Park neighborhood, not including other variations. I also found a couple of pro-Trump signs — rare in Democratic South Brunswick — and a variety of others for football teams, colleges and contractors.

My posting of the sign is about me, about what I believe, about my belief hat I have to make that belief public. Do I hope others will follow suit? Of course. Do I hope it makes bigots uncomfortable? Yes. Does it mean I believe those who don’t post such signs — or the myriad others I’ve seen recently — are “bigots,” as Rooney said? Again, that’s absurd, presumptuous — and condescending, and it’s a variation of an argument that paints disagreement as something nefarious. My sign, which symbolizes something I believe in, which states my belief pretty clearly, is dismissed out of hand as an effort on my part to show my superiority and, because that is all it is, I can be ignored. My instinctive response is to say “Fuck off,” though I usually try to engage.

It’s like when someone says “you just want to be the smartest guy in the room” as a way of diffusing the points you make. (Which happened recently.) It no longer is about what you say, but about who you are. It is a personal attack — I don’t have to listen because you’re just an egomaniac who likes to hear himself speak. The instinctive response, again, is to say “fuck off,” and perhaps that is the best response. After all, why engage when someone seeks not to answer but to demean? Or, I could say, “I don’t need to try. I am the smartest guy” — a joke, though I suspect it is one hat, given the medium (Facebook and/or Twitter) and the sanctimoniousness of both sides of the argument (mine included), it is a joke destined to sink like the proverbial lead balloon.

A Trump flag in Long Beach, NY.

“Hate has no home here” signs are really no different than the Trump signs that have popped up since his election — not the election signs, but signs that proclaim support of the 45th president and restate his slogan “Make America Great Again” — or the sign on my neighbor’s yard that proclaims “Proud to Be an American” (like the song). I don’t take either of these signs as questioning my Americanness or my patriotism (even if that might be — I can’t know without asking — the intent of the sign displayer). I know where I stand and I’m glad to know where you stand, as well, even if we disagree, even if it might mean we should keep some distance between us.

The reaction to the signs, like our efforts to dismiss he possibility of debate, is a symptom of a larger problem in American politics and society, one that is making it difficult, if not impossible to create the temporary alliances that need to be created to move the nation forward. I don’t mean we have to give in to racists and white supremacists, but we have to acknowledge those points where agreement can be reached and use those things we hold in common as a launch pad.

And we have to admit the humanity of our opponents, which has become difficult in our hyperpartisan era. Fox News, and more recently, cites like Breitbart, demonized their opponents, seek to take political or philosophical differences, paint their opponents as morally deficient because of these differences, and then bludgeon them with the differences.

I think this is partly why we view signs like “Hate has no home here” as provocations, rather than indicators of what the sign-owners believe.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 16

Gary Cooper in High Noon

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy

Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s: Part 16

(Read Part 15 here, Part 14, Part 13 here, Part 12 here, Part 11 here, Part 10 here, Part 9 here, Part 8 here, Part 7 here, Part 6 here, Part 5 here, Part 4 here, Part 3 here, Part 2 here, and Part 1 here.)
 
I keep coming back to the words “myth” and “mythology” as central tenets of Kerouac’s world view in On the Road, and I think it’s because Kerouac uses superlatives and archetypes as shorthand, offering the reader a story of a disappearing America that he’s gleaned from popular culture as much as from actual American history.

The superlatives — big, great, mysterious — tend to be generic, but work together to create an impression of godlike grandeur. He writes of “the bird of Shenandoah” and the “hillbilly night of Charleston,” phrases that are relatively vague and that ultimately derive their meaning from repetition over the full expanse of the novel.

The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. The Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and ropes by the river. The endless poem. By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the hill of the Western night. (255)

Wildly impressionistic, to borrow a construction Kerouac might use, the passage depends on the reader having followed Sal on his travels for 250-plus pages, and on the hundreds of novels, stories, songs, films, etc., that the reader has grown up with and internalized. Woody Guthrie and his “ribbon of highway” is there, as are Huck and Jim’s travels on the Mississippi and James Fennimore Cooper’s forays into the dark American woods. All are present in these few words, and in Sal’s/Jack’s perceptions of the world around him. It is there in his concept of the Fellaheen (which he only touches upon in On the Road and more fully develops later), in his depictions of small towns, of Denver, his imaginings of Dean’s father, even of Dean himself.

A young Gene Autry

Dean is as much an archetype as he is a fully fleshed out character. As Sal describes him, Dean is a man of the West and a native American intelligence. Sal’s first impression of Dean is key, because it builds the character from a set of broadly understood cultural archetypes. He “was a young Gene Autry — trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent — a sideburned hero of the snowy West” (5). This is the trope from which all of the mythologizing flows.

Roland Barthes describes myth as “a type of speech” (109) that “is chosen by history” (110) and “has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication” (110). It carried pre-agreed-upon, though often unstated, cultural meaning, acts as a touchstone to which we can return to construct our narratives. Think the evil step sister, mother-in-law jokes, and the various monsters that come to us via folk and fairy tales. These act as shorthand, returning again and again in different tales, more often than not providing this agreed-upon information.

Advertising uses the myth-making function, building brands by creating a common language — both word and image based. The vague phrase “just do it” has been transformed into an exhortation to workout, to be an athlete, no excuses, while also being linked specifically to the Nike brand. Nike equals athletics, is athletics, in the popular imagination, thanks in no small part to Michael Jordan (another figure who has attained mythological status) and a pithy turn of phrase.

Myth, Barthes says, uses pre-existing semiological chains — “a relation between two terms,” and a third, the correlation between them that unites them and creates meaning. He uses the example of a bunch of roses that “signify” passion (Barthes 113). Roses exist on their own as flowers and are turned into a signifier through the act of giving. Passion is the message, indicated by the relationship between giver and recipient, but also by historical associations. The roses, therefore, become more than flowers, the giving more than action. Together, they tell a story.

We see this form of myth in our understanding of the American West. John Mack Faragher, writing about Daniel Boone and “the myth of the frontier,” he describes myth

not as a synonym for erroneous belief, but as the body of tales, fables, and fantasies that help a people make sense of its history. Like history, myth finds meaning in the events of the past. But unlike history, myth is less concerned with facts than with ideological essences.

The Western, whether a Buffalo Bill extravaganza, pulp novel or film, film, is “the story form of the myth,” he writes, and “tells a tale of progress, a justification of violent conquest and untrammeled development” — a narrative of American exceptionalism that contains within itself its own critique. It is “consistently subverted by the presence of pathfinders who are also critics of civilization, outlaws who are Robin Hoods, or whores who have hearts of gold.”

Kerouac’s vision of the West, which is the primary focus of On the Road, like his vision of Dean is based in this Western myth. He writes of the “Great American Desert” (182) and “huts with the weather beaten signs still flapping in the haunted shrouded desert wind, saying ‘Rattlesnake Bill lived here’ or ‘Broken-mouth Annie holed up here for years.'” In doing so, he is signifying a lost time and a changing landscape by alluding to a kind of Hollywood-inspired western lore, a legend of the American West filtered through memory, dime-store novels and John Ford westerns that exists on a plane parallel to what we learn about the west in our history books — a romantic notion that is as backward-gazing as the the work of Ford, Zane Grey, or Frederick Remington.

This is not a criticism, so much as an observation — and one that often gets left out of discussions of Kerouac’s work. There often is an effort to cast Kerouac as a groundbreaking progenitor of a new mode of writing, the scion of a world-changing generation that has always held itself in great regard. This obscures Kerouac’s connections to earlier American writers or his mournful view of change.

Kerouac, through Sal and his other stand-ins, is conflicted, caught between the need to break free from social restraints and a romantic attachment to the past, which drives his own movement.

This myth-making is central to his ethos, and is as important as the freedom he extols and that Dean represents in creating an audience for the book. The first wave of young readers wanted something different, but also were brought up in a culture that mythologized itself, that revered an Old West and American archetypes symbolized in the images of Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda.

Western imagery would come to be an important component of the ’60s counterculture. Some of it was overt: films like Sergio Leone’s trilogy or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, of course, updated the Western genre, but musical groups like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, The Byrds, The Band, and even The Monkees toyed with wardrobe, album art, and lyrics that harkened back to a supposedly simpler and freer time. It is no accident, I think, that Peter Fonda — Henry’s son — and Dennis Hopper play Wyatt and Billy (as in Earp and The Kid) in Easy Rider, which is really just a modernized retelling of any number of Westerns from the ’50s and tracks almost perfectly with Newman and Redford’s Butch Cassidy.

Anti-heroes had become the norm, with flawed men (and it was almost always men) doing battle with an even more flawed and gravely ill social structure. Bonnie and Clyde were ruthless, but they were the heroes of Arthur Penn’s violent classic; no one was rooting for the g-men. The same goes for Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which captured the sense of change and drift that had marked American culture in the post-war period.

The anti-heroes were “real”; they existed outside the structures of square society and lived an “authentic life,” untainted by the conventions of polite society — which is why the Hell’s Angels, a group of violent marauders, attained a level of heroic legitimacy.

Again, Cooper and his Leatherstocking Tales are significant. Faragher ties Cooper’s tales, which he describes as “an enduring literary version of the (Daniel) Boone character” that “staged a conflict between civilized restraint and natural freedom.”

On the surface, (Cooper’s) stories make the case for “the march of our nation across the continent.” Yet his characters voice powerful countervailing arguments. “The garden of the Lord was the forest,” Leatherstocking declares, and was not patterned “after the miserable fashions of our times, thereby giving the lie to what the world calls its civilizing.” Ambivalence about progress resonated with a deeply felt American regret over the loss of wilderness as an imagined place of unbound freedom.

This easily could describe Kerouac’s vision of the West.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Disaster porn and those viral looting videos

Disaster coverage tends to be cliche: images of a storm or fire, anchors in safari or military garb, a reliance on hyperbole — and the inevitable images of (usually African-Americans) looting some neighborhood store. The story arc is predictable. Once we get past the stories of trapped tourists and occasional resident, we move on to the tsk-tsking of those who were either too stubborn or, more likely, too poor to escape the tragic calamity’s path, followed by stories and images of generally isolated incidents of bad behavior played large.
This is what we’re seeing now, as a handful of looters in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale are writ large and used to make the case that looting is widespread.
Newsweek, for instance, used the arrest of nine in Ft. Lauderdale to proclaim “Looting has begun,” implying a bigger, more ominous crime spree was in the offing. A closer look at the story makes clear, however, that the magazine was relying on the same report nearly every outlet was using — some to underscore racist stereotypes — and that the looting was a minor part of a broader overview of the storm and that looting was far from the norm, a couple dozen arrested in a region of 7 million residents.
Newsweek is not alone — a bevy of news sites around the country relied on the video, along with a slew of conservative web sites for whom the looting underscored the racial scare quotes that is their bread and butter.
These images of looting should be part of the coverage — they happened and are news — but only part. They require context (an admission of their rarity) and should not be sensationalized as they have been. Context unfortunately goes out the window during storms like Irma, as networks battle each other to see who can offer the most salacious pictures to drum up viewers and page view. Bad behavior fits the bill, because it breaks up what quickly becomes generic storm video.
The 24-7 nature of the coverage sadly encourages bad journalism, as does the quest for ratings and clicks. Rather than nuanced coverage that provides usable information or answers thorny or unasked questions, we get what has come to be called “disaster porn,” which John Doyle in the Toronto Globe & Mail defined as “indulg(ing) in endless coverage of destruction,” which, “as with all forms of pornography, is numbing.”
“Viewers,” he adds, “become desensitized and instinctively long for even more dramatic, horrific footage. Perspective is lost, and talk and discussion seems redundant as images dominate.”
The upshot is that discussion of climate change, disaster readiness, and land-use regulations, is ignored as we focus on the mind-numbing repetition that is storm coverage.
Doyle asks viewers to push back:

It’s up to those of us who watch TV to remember how easy it is to be numbed by the saturation coverage of giant waves, collapsing buildings and people clinging to the wreckage. It is up to viewers to think about issues of infrastructure, safety and what obligations governments have. Numbed by over-stimulation from disaster porn, we can fail the planet and ourselves, and all-news TV is just an enabler. When language is beggared by images, it’s time to react by thinking hard.

This sounds great in theory, but the clicks prove that most viewers, despite what they tell us, are willing to devour disaster porn without much thought. It is not the viewers who need to change, but the people who make decisions about news coverage. Rather than just. Having clicks and viewers, we need to remember that we are not just for-profit businesses (and we need to discuss whether the for-profit model is our best hope going forward) but that we offer a public service, and sometimes we need to give viewers and readers what they need and not just what they seem to want.
At the very least, we should end the practice of normalizing the abnormal.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Replay: Lost Ones, original thoughts post-9/11

This is admittedly a bit mawkish, but it was where my head was shortly after the 9/11 attack 16 years ago. I wrote it over a three-day period almost three weeks after the attacks, when the names of those killed started filtering into the public consciousness, and I have not altered it.

I thought it worth re-posting today to remember a lost friend.

LOST ONES: SEPT. 11, 2001 
— for Mukul Agarwala

Mukul Agarwala in his 1980 yearbook photo.

The picture on CNN was vaguely familiar, I guess, older, thicker, an adult version of someone I knew once, listed among the missing with thousands of others.

The name was what I remembered, connected to longtime memories, eroded with time, vague like that face on the computer screen.

There was the joke and the smile, something witty in my yearbook, that’s what I remember, the easy way we got along, but no images, nothing concrete beyond the hazy sense of knowledge, the house on Karen Street, the smell of curry permeating.

Your second day on the 94th floor, jet crash, terror attack, the towers came down, bodies lost, some vaporized, thick smoke, extreme heat, so much death.

I talked with your mother, talked with your father, listened to the heavy sighs and sobs, their grief hanging like an aging sunflower, its heavy head too much for its shriveling staff, bending it beyond its breaking point.

I went to synagogue for Rosh Hashana for the first time in nearly two decades, to be a part of a tradition, to remind myself of the temporary nature of our lives here and the vastness of the universe. And I needed to pray — for the hundreds confirmed dead, for the thousands more still missing, for the lost sense of security and safety, for peace, for the hope that the terrible events of Sept. 11 will not breed more bloodshed and violence.

I received an e-mail from someone I knew in high school, someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years or more, someone on the periphery of my life, lost long ago as we cut loose from the past. He’d heard of your disappearance like I had, struck by the photo, by the resemblance to a grainy memory saved in black and white with the others, one among many in a yearbook tucked away somewhere.

It took me a while to find my yearbook, packed in a trunk loaded down with odd mementos and debris of time past, loaded with rusted punk rock buttons, old greeting cards, a denim jacket signed by all of Annie’s friends in Brooklyn.

I e-mailed Andy, hadn’t heard from him in years, old friend, a best friend, lost friend, we grew apart like so many others from that time, wanting to reconnect, knowing that I missed that chance with you.

I’d thought of you over the years, decades now, wondered what you’d made of your life, occasional fleeting thoughts tied to a time past, another life really, thinking of all those people who litter the imagination, the memory, old friends and classmates, teammates and such, the random faces returning periodically like snippets of songs.

We leave too many things unsaid in this life, that’s what I’ve learned, leave too many things for the next day, too often waiting for the right moment, any moment, too content to let events control our lives, until the time passes, old friend, and there is no time left to talk and far too much left to say.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.