Celebrations, Community and Cancer

This is being written earlier than usual, because I will have left Berea right after Easter to officiate at the wedding, near Washington, DC, of my nephew. Nick has always been a symbol, for me, of the continuity of our generations: he was born hours after my mother’s death and his names echo those of my father and a favorite great-uncle.

Weddings are an example of the power of our need for community, and it will be a privilege to have a part in the formation of a new cell of community in the tissue of human life. It is a conceit of most couples to assume, early on, that their wedding is about them, but most quickly discover that a whole host of others are connected to "their" wedding.

Beyond the obvious connections—relatives who have, and claim, a stake in the proceedings; attendants imported from the four corners of the globe to "stand up" for the couple; friends who gather in support, curiosity, or both—there is a whole industry geared up to make sure each couple thinks their wedding is unique, while looking very much like most other weddings that year. "It takes a small city," it seems, to get a couple married.

But we put up with the expense, and the loss of individual freedom inherent in the promises of marriage, because something very deep in us tells us that we need one another, that we are meant to be connected to the lives of others.

Biologists are discovering that this is true at the cellular level. All human cells start out pretty much the same; what seems to lead them to "decide" to differentiate into part of a pancreas or a left shoulder or a right thumbnail is the influence of the cells around them.

However, cells sometimes arise which simply ignore these messages from their community. They have no apparent connection with the rest of the organism and are unable to process information from the other elements of the body. If the left shoulder, or the right thumbnail, or the pancreas, need help, they won’t get it from these cells, which are interested only in their own growth, in replicating themselves without regard to the needs of the whole. We have a name for such groups of cells. We call them "cancer."

The cancer cells proliferating in a tumor think they have their world by the tail. They can go on using up resources forever (they think) without regard to the needs of the rest of the community they share life with—the body they inhabit.

Of course, they are dead wrong. And, eventually, they are just plain dead. Just like the pancreas, left shoulder and right thumbnail. The body their selfishness killed took them with it.

This entry originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the Berea, Ohio News-Sun on April 15, 1999.

Attention and Augmentation

I might as well ’fess up immediately: I was never much of a baseball fan until I moved to the Cleveland area, so (unlike other boys in the late 1930s and early 1940s) I didn’t really know enough about Joe DiMaggio for him to be a hero to me as a kid. (My heros were writers: Howard Pease at first, then H. L. Mencken, and eventually the incomparable E. B. White.) By the time I reached adulthood, “Joltin’ Joe” was enough of a cultural icon that I recognized him as having everything you want in an athlete: skill, style and sensibility, and he maintained all those attributes right up to the day he died, a day or two before this is being written. Anybody who disinvites George Steinbrenner from his funeral has to have something going for him.

By one of those freaky accidents, the story of DiMaggio’s death was reported in the same newspaper as the story of Michael Copp, the hapless teenager who now faces life without the young woman whose breast-enlargement he arranged and who also faces prison time for using his mother’s credit card to pay for the surgery. And, while I know as little now of Copp as I did of DiMaggio when I was a boy, he does, somehow, seem like an Evil Twin of the great DiMaggio.

I don’t go in much for cultural tut-tutting. I don’t like searching sewers, for one thing, and, for another, I think it’s too easy to glorify a past that wasn’t usually as golden in reality as it becomes in retrospect—nostalgia, oddly enough, often ruins the human memory. But there’s something about the juxtaposition of Messrs. Copp and DiMaggio on the cultural radar screen that brings me up short.

“When I was a boy....” people expected to become celebrated for doing something that advanced, in some way, the human condition. E. B. White did it by writing essays that are models of grace and civility; even today, I always feel better about being a human being after reading one of them. Joe DiMaggio did it by starting or stopping the flight of a 3" white leather spheroid on a Summer’s day, by maintaining an attitude of respect towards his star-crossed star of an ex-wife, and in a lot of other ways of which we have been reminded these past few days. He, too, had grace and civility; he, too, always made you feel better about belonging to our species.

It was really pretty simple: you worked hard at doing something worthwhile; you got good; you became famous (at least among people who enjoyed that sort of thing). And if you were truly world-class, you used your fame to advance some other worthwhile thing.

There is nothing about Mr. Copp’s life which makes me delight in belonging to his tribe. Even the idea of watching him and/or his augmented associate on a talk show makes me physically ill. It’s not just that their actions were vapid and possibly illegal, and ought to be condemned rather than celebrated; I cannot, for the very life of me, figure out what such creatures could possibly say that would be of the slightest interest to anyone who valued his or her humanity. He worked hard at something utterly without value, loused it up, and now presents himself as another member of the parade of self-made victims, using his celebrity to promote additional triviality—DiMaggio’s Evil Twin; DiMaggio turned inside out.

I recognize that the manners of my childhood were sometimes as phony as Mr. Copp’s girlfriend’s glands. I realize that they were sometimes used to cover malice and malevolence, and to mask motives much more sinister than the simplemindedness which would enlist Mom’s Mastercard in the service of mammary maximization.

But, by gum!, they contributed to a general sense of human dignity, and something dreadful has happened when we, as a people, decide to treat Copp, his girlfriend, and many other denizens of the Daytime as if they deserved the attention we lavish on them. Attention is too precious a commodity to waste on fools.

This entry originally appeared in the Berea, Ohio News-Sun on March 18, 1999

Government by What?

As I sit down to write this column, the United States Senate is about ready to vote on the two Articles of Impeachment presented by the House of Representatives against the President. By all accounts, the affirmative vote will fall short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict the President and remove him from office, and it is possible that not even a simple majority will vote to convict on one, and perhaps both, of the articles. This means that the issue which has, for the past year, held center stage in the theater of national politics will finally have been laid to rest.

Its grave, however, may well be unquiet. The issue of presidential impeachment has divided Americans like no issue since the Vietnam War, and the polarization could easily continue. Today’s Plain Dealer carried two articles: one assessing whether Ohio’s Senator Mike DeWine will pay for his high profile in the senatorial process; the second detailing a possible strategy of retaliation by the White House against Republican members of the House of Representatives, and especially against the House Managers of the impeachment. Meanwhile we, the people, find ourselves having to deal with feelings of outrage, disappointment, frustration, and a sense of lost opportunities. Many have had friendships lost or frayed by this sordid chapter in our national life.

What is manifestly clear is that we will continue to be governed, in the political sense, by fallible human beings who operate from mixed motives, have gaping holes in their moral armor, and who often seem blind to what is perfectly obvious to us. Whatever the Senate vote may bring of the much-celebrated “closure” there will be no change in the basic realities of human nature and political reality.

So what about us? How shall we govern ourselves in this imperfect world, so full of ambiguity and compromise?

That is a question much more important (in my view) than the issues which have occupied the Congress for the past year; much more important, even, than the question of Clinton’s fitness to remain in office.

Dr. Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the murder of his family and his own imprisonment in a Nazi death camp, has said that the last and most valuable human freedom is the freedom to choose one’s attitude, one’s internal response to whatever external situation one faced. The exercise of that freedom, indeed, is what he credits with saving his life, and it became the basis of a whole new school of psychotherapy which he formulated in the process of rebuilding his life and work after the war.

The essential question which confronts each of us, all the time, is simply this: “Will I be governed by what I admire, or by what I dislike?” It is a choice we make as spouses, as parents, as citizens, as members of any group, and as we look into the depths of our own being. And on the choice we make depend, I think, the happiness and fulfillment we experience in living. The people and situations life presents to us are almost always a mixture of good and bad, so we don’t get either unalloyed pleasure or unmitigated pain. We have to choose where our focus will be.

There is no question but that, in the short term, hatred is more powerful than love. It made Hitler’s job an easy one. It powered decades of Klan influence in the American South. It affected both sides in the Branch Davidian fiasco and the Ruby Ridge tragedy. It undoubtedly contributed to the recent shooting of an innocent man by New York City police officers. It fuels the standoff in Kosevo and imperils the Middle East peace process. And it will guarantee a sellout for Browns-Ravens games in the foreseeable future.

The Christian world began, yesterday, the observance of Lent; in many churches, Ash Wednesday involves a literal reminder that we all have our “black marks” and that we expect to share in the Easter victory only on the basis of God’s love for us.

Governing one’s self by what one admires means that, while we note both what is good and what is bad in any person or situation, we, like God, make our decisions on the basis of what is good.

This entry originally appeared in the Berea, Ohio, News-Sun on February 18, 1999

Cones, Calvinism and the Constitution

There is no probably no better index of how far the American people have fallen from the ideals of the Founders than the traffic-controlling orange barrel, which some have suggested ought to be named the Ohio State Spring Flower (but hey!… no shame, O.K.? The Massachusetts State Bird is a rude hand gesture.)

The traffic-control cones appear—by the hundreds—for perhaps half a mile before highway construction sites. They are placed in neat lines, gradually narrowing the available space to however many lanes are open past the construction site. The idea is that drivers will use the marked space to merge smoothly with the rest of the cars sharing the highway with them.

Of course, nothing of the sort actually happens.

Instead, we see a parade of jerks who see the available space as an opportunity to move a place or two ahead, and who squeeze past you, swerving in front of you in the last remaining half-inch and then jamming on the brakes. It is annoying and dangerous, a form of the old teenage game, “Chicken.” And it’s the result of poor anthropology on the part of the Ohio Department of Transportation.

The premise of the orange barrel line is irresistible: just show people a reasonable approach to life, and they’ll embrace it forthwith. Such an idea flatters us that we are logical folk, able to see and adopt a course of action based on reason rather than emotion.

The Founders would have dismissed such a notion with howls of derisive laughter. They may have been vague in their thinking about God, but they were very clear about human beings—they recognized that we are power-hungry rascals who will almost always choose a course of action based on pure selfishness. And so, they designed a system of government which separates, and limits, power. It’s too bad they didn’t anticipate the automobile.

Let me tell you how I think they would have solved the problem of merging four lanes of traffic into two. They would have erected, just before the construction site, a large wall of reinforced concrete, such as would protect the workers and definitely win any contest with the average vehicle.

They would have made this wall very visible, and perhaps put a sign or two up to warn of its presence, but they would certainly not have bothered to try to manipulate people into being reasonable by setting out nicely-narrowed lines of orange barrels.

Instead, they would simply have let nature take its course. A few yahoos would, of course, try at first to take advantage of more cautious drivers by zipping around them. But it wouldn’t work as well without the assumption of reasonableness inherent in the little cones and barrels. Such drivers would quickly find themselves facing the wall, and probably for quite some time as more prudent folk whizzed past them in the two remaining lanes. In short, you don’t try to make people be reasonable with little plastic cones; you force them to make reasonable choices by making unreasonableness so painful that even the intellectually-challenged decide to avoid it eventually.

We have just been through an extraordinary period in our national political life. Our President and our House of Representatives, both operating on the level of testosterone-empowered teenagers, have been playing a kind of “Political Chicken,” and both cars are, as of this writing, pretty heavily damaged. There were orange barrels a-plenty, but both parties assumed that they could outmaneuver the other, and we now have parts of the body politic strewn all over the highway, to say nothing of the smashed-up orange barrels flying hither and yon and any number of highway workers maimed in various ways.

There is another Construction Zone a-coming, and, this time, I hope the guys will notice the concrete wall placed just ahead by the Founders.

To whatever extent President Clinton’s situation is the result of a thirst for revenge for the Watergate debacle, it is as nothing compared with what will face future Republican presidents. The impeachment process, intended for the likes of high treason, has been trivialized, and if we are not to dissolve into a parliamentary form of government, someone needs to take note the abyss ahead.



This entry first appeared in the Berea, Ohio, News-Sun on January 21, 1999

Juneteenth - A Day For Everybody

One hundred forty-three years ago today, the residents of Galveston, Texas, watched in stony silence as Gen. Gordon Granger and 2,000 Federal troops took possession of the island and read General Order No. 3, which implemented the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation in the last holdout of the Confederacy.
The celebration of “Juneteenth Day” has grown organically ever since, with some thirteen states recognizing it as an official (if not always a “legal”) holiday. It marks the official end of human slavery in the United States.
General Granger made it clear that he expected the former slaves to remain in place and work for the same masters as before, only now as paid laborers. They would not “be allowed to collect at military posts and . . . will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
In the view of many Caucasians, “support in idleness” has remained a goal of the descendents of the Africans imported as slaves to this country. Every welfare applicant is viewed with suspicion, unless, of course, the “welfare” takes the form of no-bid contracts for well-connected former associates of the Vice-President. Oh, and who happen to be white.
In my experience, gaming the system is the favorite indoor sport of a lot of folks. Some parents try to ensure that their children (yes, plural) obtain an Individualized Education Program at school so that they can collect Supplemental Security Income even though the child is not truly “disabled.” And some candidates tout silly, stunt-y programs such as a federal gas tax “holiday” in a brazen attempt to garner votes.
The upcoming presidential election bids fair to become a referendum on a great many issues which have divided the country for generations, questions such as: “Will we continue the scorched-earth politics of division and degradation or will we learn to work together?” “Will we face the real problems confronting us, or will we continue to set up phony issues as distractions from the dangers to our nation?”
And the big one: “Will we recognize that in the fight against terrorism, the mind-set and tactics of police work will be more efficacious than the mind-set and tactics of the military?”
The rhetoric so far is not encouraging. To listen to it, one would think that being “Commander-in-Chief” was the only part of the job of being President worth considering and that being “tough” was the only qualification. We’ve had “tough;” we need “smart.” The Preamble to our Constitution recognizes that providing for “the common defense” is important, but it’s only one of six purposes and not the first-mentioned.
For what it’s worth, the Number One purpose of our government is “to form a more perfect Union.” Then comes “to establish Justice” and “to ensure domestic Tranquility.” My hunch is that, if we concentrate on those goals, the common defense, the general Welfare and the Blessings of Liberty will take care of themselves.
We did not become the envy of the world by swaggering around it as if, like any bully, we could do whatever we wanted without fear of reprisal. We became the envy of the world by setting people free to reach their potential as fully human beings. That, I believe, was what “Juneteenth Day” was and is all about. It ought to be a day of rejoicing for all Americans, and it ought to be a day when we reflect on what still enslaves us.

This entry originally appeared on June 19, 2008, in the Berea, Ohio News-Sun