Here We Are Among the Living: Generational Conflict and Social Change in Post-War North America

HERE WE ARE AMONG THE LIVING:

GENERATIONAL CONFLICT AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN POST-WAR NORTH AMERICA

SAMANTHA A. BERNSTEIN

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Here We Are Among the Living: Generational Conflict and Social Change in Post-War North America

by Samantha Bernstein

Youth cultures are born from the sense either that adult society is a monolith of corruption or that it is moribund, having failed to institute progressive principles it claims to advocate.

This study contains two parts: first, I explore the transition in the 1960s from political activism to cultural protest and investigate how youth culture today arises from these earlier roots. Autobiographical and epistolary literatures are examined for their use of

subjectivity and association with social criticism. I argue that a sense of shared experience is lacking among today's youth but is crucial to social engagement, and that subjective forms of literature connect individuals to each other and their society. The second part presents

sections from my epistolary memoir that reflect the generational conflict between Baby

Boomers and their children, as well as the need for today's youth to find meaningful ways to participate in creating positive societal change.

iv Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to my mother, Harriet Bernstein: the project began as conversations with her about her youth, my generation, and the state of the world; with her love and encouragement (and delight in playing devil's advocate), those conversations became this thesis. Acknowledgements

I gratefully extend my thanks to all those who have guided me through my studies. Richard Teleky first suggested that I pursue my interest in epistolary literature and social change in the Interdisciplinary Studies program, and has provided valuable insights throughout my university experience. From Penni Stewart and Marcel Martel I received kindness and direction, as well as the resources to properly research this study. Priscila Uppal encouraged me when I was a cagey undergraduate, unsure of my talents or the use of university; for her support and direction I will always be grateful. Susan Swan encouraged me to write my book when it was only a few furtive pages, and for her belief in my ability to write it and the importance of what I wanted to say I cannot thank her enough. Without the dear friends whose words and actions I have appropriated I wouldn't have had a story to write. Joe Clark gave me someone to write to, and his belief in the beauty of consciousness reminds me why I'm alive. Eshe Mercer-James has been an incomparable friend and editor: working on my book with her has given me moments of the purest joy, and her insights have helped make this project and my book what it is. My Mom gave me confidence when I was too shy to ask questions and too uncertain to pursue my dreams. Everything I know about dedication and courage I learned from her. Michael Bobbie has looked in my face with love even in moments when my face expressed only fear and self-deprecation. His ideas and insights resonate throughout this work.

VI Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part One - Departing from Father's Hall 11

Part Two - You Could Strike Sparks Anywhere 19

Part Three - Whoso Would be a Man Would be a Nonconformist 33

Part Four - There Was No There There 45

Part Five - Werther on Big Brother , 63

Part Six -Nightingales in the Dark 81

Works Cited 105

Here We Are Among the Living (Introduction) : 114

Here We Are Among the Living (Excerpts) 119

Bibliography 234

vn My candle bums at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - It gives a lovely light. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Better to burn out Than to fade away - Neil Young

If there is a common thread that links every Western youth movement of the past two centuries, it is this: the terror the young feel of becoming old, and the determination not to do so in the same fashion as their elders. Youth cultures are by definition born from young people's dissatisfaction, from the sense either that adult society is an impenetrable monolith of corruption or that it is moribund, having failed to act on progressive principles it claims to advocate. In the first student movement of early 19th

Century Germany and the Romantics that followed them, in Russian nihilists, French

Bohemians and Dadaists, in the 1920s' flaming youth, European youth mobilizations of the 1930s and in the last great youth movement of the 1960s, the animus against established society and its creators is striking. Unlike class-based activism centering on labour rights and living conditions for the working class, youth movements draw from youth of all classes and their anger is often directed at society in general rather than around specific complaints or demands. Today, there is no coherent youth movement in any Western nation. While there are activist groups dedicated to various causes such as the environment, student rights, and anti-globalization, these groups are not united by any common goal or feelings of shared struggle. What there is, in the absence of a youth movement, is a clearly defined and heavily advertised youth culture based on the 1 counterculture that youth movements have historically created to signal their rejection of mainstream, adult society. This rejection has become embedded in Western culture as a defining feature of youth and has changed the meaning and modes of dissent for young people.

As the last youth movement, and a time of cultural and political ferment unparalleled in North American history, the 1960s remain central to the North American populace's self-conception. Recent books such as Tom Brokaw's Boom, Rolling Stone

Magazine's 2007 trilogy celebrating the 40-year anniversary of 1967, Toronto's 2003

"SarsStock" concert, and comparisons between Presidential candidate Barack Obama and

John F. Kennedy signal the lasting power of that turbulent decade. As Todd Gitlin, writer, professor and early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) has noted, kids today "regret having "missed the fun""1 of the 1960s. Indeed, raised with images of Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury, with the groundbreaking sounds of the

Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and countless other era- and genre- defining bands, and with the fear of AIDS alongside tales of the 1960s' much-celebrated free love, today's youth have many reasons to feel they came too late to the party. Perhaps one of the most significant and overlooked absences in more recent generations is the Baby Boomer's sense of generational solidarity, their certainty that under the weight of their collective desires "the past simply had to give way to the future" . Obviously the Baby Boomers were not a unified movement several millions strong, but were divided by class, race, cohort, and ideology. Nonetheless, this sense of themselves "as a group distinct from previous generations" is the feature from which all later representations of the Boomers draw their 2 strength. It is not as a few intellectual outlaws in a jazz club, not as a little band of absinthe-sipping aesthetes that the Boomers became known; it is as a crowd. One million faces turned toward the Washington Monument, half a million bodies on Yasger's farm, hundreds at a time tuning in for the Kesey-Leary Acid Tests, rag-tag bands of young people on communes - these are the images of the decade that have captured the popular imagination. As Gitlin wrote,"[f]or every hundred schemes a handful materialized - but never mind, the spirit of One Big Movement was alive"4. Indeed it is a notable paradox that a generation which put such emphasis on "doing your own thing", "letting your freak flag fly", etc. - a generation that put such emphasis on individuality - should be remembered most for its collective spirit, for creating a geist that enraptured and outraged

North Americans to a degree since unseen.

We should now pause to clarify our generational definitions. In Millennials

Rising, a compelling, sometimes frustrating book about the generation born between 1982 and 2002, authors Neil Howe and William Strauss define a generation as "a society-wide peer group, born over a period roughly the same length as the passage from youth to adulthood, [...] who collectively possess a common persona"5. This is following Karl

Mannheim, the famous generational theorist, who asserted that generations exist "only where a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization"6. Howe and Strauss go on to argue that "[demographers who insist on locating Boomers according to the fertility "boom" of 1946 to 1964, and then Gen Xers according to the fertility "bust" of 1956 to 1976, are not defining generations in any 3 useful historical sense"7. Grappling with this problem in the preface to his enlightening

"biography" of the Baby Boom generation, Doug Owram arrives at the following conclusion:

As shock wave or as a shared historical experience, the baby boom does not run from 1946 to 1962. Those on the sharp upward curve of births created the shock-wave effect. Those who were children in the 1950s and grew through teenage years to adulthood in the 1960s and early 1970s can lay some claim to the shared historical moment8.

Sharing Owram's assessment that infants born late in the war were part of the historical phenomenon that became the Boomers, Howe and Strauss locate the Baby Boom's birth years as 1943 to I9609. For the purposes of this study, however, our "Baby Boomers" will have been born "sometime between the late war and about 1955 or 1956"10. In speaking of subsequent generations, we will follow Howe and Strauss, defining

Generation X as 1961 to 1981, and the Millennial generation as 1982-200211. These parameters will be useful as we try to assess the nature of the changes wrought by early

Boomers.

In speaking of "the 1960s", we must define not only who acted out the story, but also what its timeline was. Andrew Hunt has convincingly argued that the rise and fall of

SDS has dominated 1960s accounts because "several of the pathbreaking preeminent sixties historians were either members of SDS or SDS sympathizers" , and also because such narratives offer a tidy story and moral. Foss and Larkin identify white support for southern black integrationists in the early 1950s as the beginning of the sixties , as does

Doug McAdam. Jo Freeman contends that the southern sit-ins of 1960 were the direct inspiration for the increase in campus organizing over the next two years14, and Dmitrios 4 J. Roussopoulos has linked the Canadian youth mobilization to both these sit-ins and the anti-nuclear activism undertaken in Britain in the late 1950s15. Theodore Roszak, author of the seminal The Making of a Counter Culture, has recently placed the sixties as a phenomenon stretching from 1942 to 197216, and Roussopoulos believed his generation to have been "symbolically born in 1945" with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki17.

For our purposes, however, we may consider the sixties to have begun in earnest in 1962, the year SDS drafted the Port Huron Statement and broke with its parent organization, the

League for Industrial Democracy, and to have effectively ended about a decade later. In

Canada the 1960s can be said to begin with the November 1959 founding of the

Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CUCND), and to have ended around 197018, although, as in the States, protest activity continued into the early years of the 1970s. One reason for this definition is the crucial role the media played in making the sixties what it was. Beyond 1970, media coverage of protests and demonstrations dwindled, thereby changing the nature and context of youth dissent.

These parameters explicitly contain our focus to white, Anglophone, predominantly middle-class youth; major movements outside the student-radical-hippie purview such as the black power movements, Quebec's FLQ, or right-wing movement groups are beyond the scope of this paper, and will be considered only as they relate to the youth movement in general. In addition we cannot delve into the feminist,

We will also contain our focus to North America: while European uprisings, most notably the French and Czechoslovakian uprisings of 1968 had significant resonances for the North American youth movements, there is sufficient material to examine in indigenous influences and actions. The middle of the twentieth century was a time of global upheaval; we cannot give European, Asian or Latin American movements 5 environmental, or gay rights movements; firstly, although these causes were taken up late in the 1960s, their true momentum began in the 1970s, and secondly, their use of "identity politics" was (and remains) a complex issue which goes beyond our exploration of counterculture. The term "radical", while perhaps now overused, we shall take in its most basic meaning of favouring extreme changes or reforms. Thus "radicals" in this paper are youths who desire major structural changes to society, whether that desire is expressed through political activism or, as was increasingly the case for Baby Boomers, through personal expression and lifestyle choices. Because of our particular interest in how the ideals of early student radicals metamorphosed in the mid-1960s into youth counterculture, much of our discussion will focus on the United States; as we shall see, the aesthetic and ideological choices of young Americans deeply influenced Canadian youth, and this relationship was not reciprocal. Finally, Hunt has detailed the rise in movement activity in the early 1970s and questioned, with several others19, whether the activism for which the 1960s were noted was not in fact more pronounced after the decade's end. However, by looking only at those events that occurred as the first wave of

Baby Boomers reached young adulthood it will be possible to chronicle the transformation of youth activism and culture over the course of the decade, and to better comprehend the popularization of that counterculture throughout North American society.

Accepting a relatively traditional demarcation of the decade, however, does not mean this paper endorses the "death of the sixties" narrative that dominates popular

attention enough to properly understand their relevance to North American youth dissidence, and therefore must omit them. 6 discussions of the era. Firstly, it should be mentioned that the perception of radical youths becoming conservative adults did not arise with the Boomers: Orwell wrote in

1937 of "that dreary phenomenon, the middle-class person who is an ardent Socialist at twenty-five and a sniffish Conservative at thirty-five"21. Anthony Esler, in his fascinating account of youth revolts over the past 150 years, quotes a youth in 1830s France who expected that at twenty-five his "handsome, melancholic" peers would drift into

"Byronism [... ] and become a Childe-Harold [sic] type, full of cynical world-

99 weariness" ; by forty, he would be miserably ensconced in adult respectability.

However, "[t]he demise of sixties radicalism is often the central premise on which standard representations of the decade rest"23. This is the Big Chill story, the hippie-to- yuppie, Yippie-to-stockbroker tale that has resounded through popular culture since the

1980s. "Throughout the conservative 1980s, journalists were fond of interviewing former

1960s civil rights and leftist activists who had renounced the politics of their college days, joined the establishment, and embraced political conservatism by middle age"24. Seeking to redefine when the sixties happened, Hunt notes the narrative allure of a rise-and-fall story tied to student radicals, but posits that SDS-dominated 1960s narratives may have 9^

"inadvertently contributed to the cynicism" about the decade, and that this cynicism has been a factor in the lack of political protest in more recent decades. In this story, "sixties activists are blamed for their Utopianism and for their inability to prevent the commodification of all their values"26, and these failures led directly to "the sense of 97 [political] impasse" associated with the postmodern era . While these notions are productively challenged by Julie Stephens in her recent book Anti-Disciplinary Protest: 7 Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism, hex belief in the power of "anti-disciplinary politics" to generate political and social change is problematic for several reasons: primarily, she does not adequately address the consequences of this countercultural commodification, nor the effects of the decline in institutional politics which did not begin in the 1960s but which was profoundly accelerated by the forms of rebellion embraced by young Boomers as the decade progressed.

That social and political influence should be sought through personal choices and behaviour rather than through institutions or organizations is perhaps the most lasting idea generated by the early Boomers. Rejecting the privatism of the 1950s, 1960s radicals believed life should be lived in open accordance with one's politics. However, the forms of expression that such politics took on in the youth culture were diverse. In his well- known paper "The Biographical Consequences of Activism", Doug McAdam postulates that "no more than 2 to 4 percent of the generation took an active part in any of the movements of the mid-to-late 60s"28. What constitutes "active" participation will be examined in greater detail, but what is important to note here is that the widespread revolt we associate with the sixties was largely a cultural phenomenon with cultural and political consequences, rather than a strictly political movement with cultural repercussions. In this the sixties' youth movements are linked to several youth- dominated eras, most distinctly the Romantics of the late-18th and 19th Centuries, the

European Bohemians that continued the Romantic tradition, and the youth cultures that arose in the wake of the First World War.

8 The most important commonality between these youthful moments in history is their emphasis on experience, subjectivity, and self-expression. In all eras of youthful rebellion these qualities are embraced as a repudiation of the dominant, bourgeois society, and often lead to influential artistic movements. The link between subjective experience, self-expression, and societal rejection can be seen in literature as early as 1774, in Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe's groundbreaking epistolary novel The Sufferings of Young

Werther. The tragic story of a young man hopelessly alienated from a society he finds stifling and false, Werther helped spawn the Romantic movement and remains a classic example of the "better to burn out" philosophy that has since beguiled generations of disaffected youth.

Today, largely as a result of 1960s youth movements, the North American economy is driven by consumption based on the countercultural demand for self- expression, the belief in the supremacy of personal, momentary experience, and the association of "cool" with rebellion against "the system". As demonstrated by Joseph

Heath and Andrew Potter in their useful but ultimately misguided book The Rebel Sell, as well as by Hal Niedzviecki in his excellent Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, the Baby Boomers did what no previous generation could and turned their countercultural, oppositional stance into a dominant cultural value .

Thus it is, finally, this relation between subjective experience, personal expression, and politics which this paper will explore. What is the place of art in a society where self-expression is a right and some amount of rebellion the norm? We will look first at autobiography, today popularized as celebrity tell-alls or political memoirs 9 but hailing from a confessional mode devoted to the quest for self-knowledge .

Autobiographical forms have experienced a resurgence in the postmodern era in both literature and the social sciences, as narrative becomes recognized as "the means through which social and cultural life comes into being"31. Closely related to autobiographical forms but more directly implicated in social criticism and dissent is the epistolary form.

Both as fiction and as collections of letters, the epistolary form has been associated since at least the Middle Ages with political, philosophical and moral questions, and has been particularly significant to women. Like the autobiography, the epistolary writer is concerned with psychology and self-knowledge, but the letter form facilitates the exploration of individuals within the context of their societies. In addition, both forms stem directly from the quest for "authenticity" which has also preoccupied so many rebellious youths through the ages. I will argue that literature, though competing with an unprecedented array of contemporary media, maintains its unique power to help people

"imagine intensely and comprehensively", to place us "in the place of another and of many others"". In an age of such unparalleled access to information on each other and the world, the place of literature is perilous. Is writing, and particularly self-narrative, a further indulgence in the solipsistic tendencies of late capitalist society? I hope to show that literature, and especially the autobiographical and epistolary forms, remains useful to society because it does what simple entertainment cannot: it deliberately shows us psychology and society as they produce and reflect each other. The blogger, reality TV contestant or sensational memoirist says Look at me; the writer says Look at us. In an age of such uncertainty about how to live ethically, how to understand or signal our unease 10 with contemporary civilization, self-narratives that grapple with these questions can be seen as torches bearing the flame of radical self-reflexiveness and social criticism within literature and society.

Part 1: Departing from Father's Hall:

The Childe departed from his father's hall: It was a vast and venerable pile; ' So old, it seemed only, not to fall, Yet strength was pillar'd in each massy aisle. - Lord Byron, Childe Harolde 's Pilgrimage

The famous invulnerability youth are said to feel exists alongside a terrifying sense of powerlessness. Society, after all, is a complex organism, and adults know their roles in it, where youth must figure out where they might fit. The feeling that there is no way they can or want to be absorbed into this fully-formed entity, which asks much of each individual, has pervaded youth for centuries. In The Cult of Youth in Middle-Class

America, the sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg seeks to understand generational conflict as "a genuine class-conflict between a dominant and exploitative older generation and youth who are slowly becoming more aware of what is happening to them as demands on them are [...] escalated . He believes that there is "an inherent basis for such a conflict in the fact that the old dominate the young and the young wish to replace them"34. This can be seen as the Freudian Oedipal conflict writ large, or as a straightforward material imbalance which inevitably generates tension.between young and old; probably both factors are at play. Professor of Social Work Michael Brake agrees with Friedenberg's materialist analysis of youth, claiming that "[y]outh is a particular generational response

11 to a wider class problem involved with structural elements such as housing, employment, future prospects and wages"35. Youth movements, however, are often sparked among youth for whom future prospects are relatively bright: young Werther, for instance, was representative of the expanding middle class of his time, and the fate bested by death was serving in a court of law. This struck a thundering Beethoven chord among Goethe's

European contemporaries; the Sturm und Drang movement which arose in the wake of

Goethe's work was the beginning of an important response to Enlightenment sensibilities and to the changing social conditions developing from the growth of industry. It is clear, then, that possibilities for upward social mobility and a place within adult society do not determine whether or not youth will rebel. In fact, from the Romantics to the French bousingos of the Latin Quarter, from the Fin de Siecle youth to the Lost Generation of the

1920s, it appears that economic improvement is often accompanied by restless, alienated young people.

There are various ways in which youth express their dissatisfaction with society.

In 1942 the sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the term "youth culture", conceiving it as

"the bridge between the dependence of childhood and the independence of adulthood" .

Brake draws attention to the fact that Parsons' analysis was ahistorical and divorced from class analysis, but supports his assertion that youth "favours justice and social change, is interested in activism, but is frustrated because of being deprived of power and influence" . Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston, in a study of "elite" or relatively well- adjusted youth, found that "[y]outh culture as a whole requires a refusal of conventional adulthood for the time one is in it"38, and that even those youths expected to assume 12 prominent positions within society viewed adulthood with skepticism and little expectation of personal fulfillment39. Alienated from the dominant culture created by adults, youth seek identity and belonging; it is this desire that Brake identifies as containing the potential to bond youth into a movement40. Esler affirms this, stating that an age group is most cohesive and self-conscious in youth41. The nature of this self- consciousness, and thus of the youth movement, is shaped by the class and backgrounds of the youths. Brake follows Matza's 1962 analysis of the "three subterranean traditions of youth"42, which may employ "deviancy as a weapon against the prevailing hegemony and dominant class formations"43. These traditions are:

1. Delinquency which, whilst not denouncing property arrangements, violates them. It rejects methodism and routine, especially within the school system. 2. Bohemianism, whilst actually indifferent to property, attacks puritanistic and mechanized bureaucratic society. 3. Radicalism which, by focusing on economic and political exploitation, has a less generalized cultural attack, concentrating on specific areas of economic exploitation .

Brake identifies the latter two categories of youth as middle-class, where delinquency is the domain of the working class. Certainly we will see these two traditions at work within several generations of middle-class youth who, though they stood to benefit from their society's economic structure, could not accept it. What, then, determines whether or not youth will revolt? Esler has surmised that "any sort of historic upheaval may provide the spark"45, and that although only a minority of any generation will become radicalized, they will find a surprising amount of support among their peers. These youth will then form what Roszak has defined as a counter culture, "a culture so radically disaffiliated from the main stream assumption of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the appearance of a barbaric intrusion"46. Yet, as we will see, counter 13 cultures are not made of hostile aliens, but of angry young citizens who intend, through their lived rebellions, to more fully realize the goals and dreams of their elders.

Many psychologists, sociologists and writers have tried to understand generational conflict, and it is doubtful we shall much advance the project here. However, one factor which recurs in almost every youth movement is particularly salient to our discussion; this is the tendency for relatively liberal parents to breed radical children47. Prominent psychologist Bruno Bettelheim postulated that "youth [... ] is happiest when it feels it is fighting to reach goals that were conceived of but not realized by the older generation before them"48. Whether or not youth are "happy" in their antagonistic roles is questionable; what seems certain however is that as young people enter adolescence and become cognizant of the world around them, reforms introduced by their parents become the objects of deep criticism, and often spur the youth to action.

Thus, we will turn now to the world in which the Baby Boomers were raised, to better understand the causes and nature of their rebellion. In agreement with a number of studies, Todd Gitlin asserts that young American radicals in the 1960s were "[cjhildren of the relatively democratic families of the educated middle class, [who] wanted to live out the commitments to justice, peace, equality, and personal freedom which their parents professed"49. Thomas N. Trenton, in his study of Canadian radicals, comes to a similar conclusion: "[sjince their early childhood socialization experiences, these youth had been encouraged to develop a set of liberal-humanist values which predisposed them to protest.

They favored intellectualism, humanitarianism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism"50.

Children of the society that created the Breton Woods Agreement, the WTO and the UN 14 Declaration of Human Rights - postwar attempts to re-align modernity with the highest ideals of the Enlightenment and uphold an international moral code - the Boomers were poised for disappointment and anger. In his study of 1960s activists, Cyril Levitt found that "[m]ost former activists explained the source of their radicalism in moralistic terms, as a response to the gap between the ideals of their society and the actual conditions which blatantly stood in contradiction to them"51. He found that the main issue for these youth was race, but the atom bomb, poverty, and foreign policy were also sources of deep concern. While there are marked differences between Canadian and American society in the 1950s, most notably the absence in Canada of institutionalized segregation, there are several similarities which we will now explore in greater detail.

The most important commonality between the two nations that comprise North

America was their postwar wealth. So much has been made of this point in literature on the subject52 that it does not require much further explication here, but certain features of this wealth bear further examination. The first of these is the rise of suburban communities; in both the United States and Canada, the growth of suburbs was extraordinary. Seeking to fulfill their parents' unrealized dreams for security and domestic comfort, the G.I. and early Silent Generations took the money they had saved during the war, got married, and bought houses. Owram contends that "[t]he main goal of youth was to get married. The main goal of adults was to stay happily married"53. Once married, it was desirable to have children as quickly as possible, and to raise them with bedrooms and backyards of their own. Thus, "[i]n the United States the suburbs grew 8.5 times as fast as the central cities from 1945 through to the end of the 1960s [...]. In 15 Canada the trend was the same. The 1961 census noted that the 1950s brought growth that was consistently higher in the suburban areas than in the cities proper"54. The emblem and early inspiration for this growth was Levittown, 17,000 cookie-cutter houses erected on Long Island between 1947 and 1951, but this former potato-field was only one of hundreds of quasi-rural communities constructed during the postwar economic and demographic boom. Of course, the mass-production of homes and the lifestyle they encouraged were not received with unanimous glee. "More than sixty years ago urbanist

Lewis Mumford observed that "suburbia is a collective effort to lead a private life""55, and criticized the uniformity of suburban existence56. Novels such as William Whyte's

Organization Man and John Keats' Crack in the Picture Window exposed the frozen heart of postwar suburban society; and the Beats, by the mid-1950s had reclaimed madness and deified freedom in defiance of Moloch. The societal changes wrought by the expansion of suburbs are too extensive to be dealt with in detail here, but include increased reliance on automobiles, the homogenization of residents (most radically seen in age groups), and the 1950s' notorious "privatism", which has only increased with the expansion of suburbs

en in the past forty years . These upheavals in family and social structure heavily impacted the Baby Boomers; Owram argues that the most significant effect was the sense of generational solidarity experienced by children raised in an environment shaped around their supposed needs and desires .

This "filiocentric"59 belief system was deeply entwined with many facets of 1950s

North American culture, and was at the epicentre of the craze for "togetherness" that spread like brashfire through the population. "Coined by the publishers of McCall 's in 16 1954, the concept of "togetherness" was seized upon avidly as a movement of spiritual significance by advertisers, ministers, newspaper editors. For a time, it was elevated into virtually a national purpose"60. "Togetherness" made something coherent and even beautiful of postwar American life, which a former McCall's editor described as people

"crawling into the home, turning their backs on the world"61. The extended family, in decline since the industrial revolution, took its last final blow from suburbanization; the new, nuclear family - a fragile, precious thing made more so because of the recent years

ft") of privation and the Cold War threat of nuclear destruction - became the driving force in society. As the atomized family unit with expendable income became the norm, a glut of articles and books appeared preaching and teaching the new lifestyle, making family- centred privatism a virtue.

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan details the changes in popular literature, especially magazines, which heralded the "Father Knows Best" lifestyle ideal of the

1950s. Much of this literature focused on child-rearing, and child-experts appeared in unprecedented numbers, Dr. Spock and John Dewey foremost among them. As the

McCall 's editor said, "what else could you do with togetherness but child care?"63 The child was the family's pride and joy, his development the issue of foremost importance.

Advice at this time was also heavily influenced by Freudianism. Friedan addresses this in

The Feminine Mystique; Owram has contended that "the decade after the war was the age of psychology64, and has chronicled the rise of Freudian thought in North America in

17 some detail. Regarding childhood development, Freud's theories were popularized as further encouragement for liberal parenting, and this era saw a marked progression towards permissive childrearing; middle-class values decried the "spare the rod spoil the child" doctrine of earlier generations. It is notable that other similarly wealthy, stable countries have tended toward permissiveness: the French Romantics of the 1830s, for instance, were coddled in homes emulating Rousseau's adulation of children. The wealthy, nuclear, child-centred family was the brightly-pasteled womb from which the

Baby Boomers emerged into adolescence; we shall subsequently see how this focus on psychology, family, and privacy manifested when these comfortable youths encountered the "reality principle" of societal expectations and institutions.

One of the most obvious and widely noted effects of the large and wealthy

Boomer generation was the expansion of the university system. Owram argues that the sheer size of the generation was one of the major factors in their influence on society.

University enrollment bears this out: in the United States, public funding for higher education rose from $742.1 million in 1945 to $6.9 billion in 1965. The number of degrees granted to undergraduate and graduate students doubled between 1956 and

1967 6. In Canada, university enrollment increased 178 per cent between 1950 and

1965 , and the construction of new universities was unprecedented. As an example, in

1962 York University was a field in North York, Ontario; by 1969 it was a progressive university with upwards of 7000 students . Historically, universities have played an important role in youth unrest: the first street protest in Russian history occurred in 1861,

this topic is also explored in Adam Curtis's exemplary documentary series The Century of the Self 18 a time of expanding university enrollment, and was staged by students against a new and more rigorous set of university regulations69. In her paper "On the Origins of Social

Movements", Jo Freeman outlines four essential elements involved in movement formation; these are: "(l)the growth of a preexisting communications network that is (2) cooptable to the ideas of the new movement; (3) a series of crises that galvanize into action people involved in a cooptable network, and/or (4) subsequent organizing effort to weld the spontaneous groups together into a movement"70. Universities, especially but not only those with a history of social activism, are a network for young people, who we have seen are predisposed toward co-identification and causes of social justice. In the following section, we will examine how the seeds of middle-class social dissent, nurtured in institutions of higher education, sprouted on university campuses and took root across the continent.

Section 2: You could strike sparks anywhere...

- Hunter S. Thompson, on 1967 in America

The following overview of 1960s social movements is roughly as comprehensive as a rendering of Crime and Punishment in haiku. We will, however, be able to see a distinct movement from campus politics and student radicalism to the countercultural social dissent that has been the era's legacy.

In 1962, fifty-nine members of Students for a Democratic Society convened in

Port Huron Michigan. The product of their collective effort to draft a statement of purpose for SDS was the "Port Huron Statement"; in the well-known first lines, the authors identify themselves as "[... ] the people of this generation, bred in at least modest 19 comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit" .

This inherited world had greatly disappointed them. The social progressiveness and moral leadership these youths expected from their elders was shown by Jim Crow and

American foreign policy to be empty rhetoric, "ruling myths" designed to maintain undemocratic power structures. The Statement goes on to depict the subjective and objective powerlessness of American citizens, and to identify universities as institutions uniquely suited to begin the necessary process of social and political transformation in

America. The authors argue that student apathy is a reflection of wider American society; citing citizens "polled by Gallup who listed "international affairs" fourteenth on their list of "problems" but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years" the

Statement contends that "Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs"72. Here we can see the effects of suburban

"togetherness", the backlash against the "modest comfort" of postwar life. As Todd

Gitlin, who was present at the SDS convention, has noted, "The Port Huron Statement discussed "human relationships" before it got to the political principle of participatory democracy"73; he calls the "surrogate family" formed by early SDS members "a living protest against both isolation and fragmentation"74 . Pushing against the confinements of their domestic spheres and parental expectations, young Boomers began to see their comfort for what it truly was: an unstable perch atop rotten foundations, maintained by the willful blindness of their elders.

Working against student and societal apathy were those who, in the latter fifties,

"moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience, and, less frequently, against economic manipulation".

SDS's ideals of love and community were not only in opposition to the sterility of modern life, but aligned them with the civil rights movement whose moral and nonviolent activism was one of the main inspirations for the student movement . What was necessary, then, was a concerted effort to harness the potential of universities to generate positive social change, alongside organized student efforts to engage the most pressing problems of poverty and discrimination. One of the first such ventures by SDS was the

Economic Research and Action Project, an outreach project in northern ghettos beginning

77 in 1964 which sought to create an "interracial movement of the poor" . The same summer, hundreds of white, northern college students traveled to Mississippi in an effort to help register black voters and bring attention to southern racism, a project which continued and grew the following year. Clearly, by the early sixties a significant number of students had been mobilized by the growing civil rights movement, and as McAdam has shown, these students were more likely to continue their activism not only throughout the sixties, but into their adult lives as well78. McAdam also observed that "[w]ith the rise of "black power", the role of whites in the movement grew ever more problematic.

Consequently, the focus of activism for the white New Left shifted [toward ] the student, 7Q antiwar, and women's liberation movements" .

The American civil rights movement provided a "climate of rising expectations" for Canadians as well. As Owram has noted, television coverage of the civil rights protests - with their police brutality and nonviolent resistance - brought "something new into the homes of North Americans" . Southern racism was a clearly delineated moral 21 issue for most Canadians; the youth in particular were deeply moved by the "strength and courage" of the "heroic young blacks" . Canadian Boomers were also inspired by

British anti-nuclear activism, particularly the first four-day march, in 1958, from

Aldermaston to London to protest nuclear weapons testing83. Between the civil rights movement and the nuclear disarmament movements, early Canadian New Leftist

Dmitrios Roussopoulos reports, Canadian Boomers "began to get a sense of participating again in history . Learning that Canada planned to import American nuclear bombs, a small group of professors and students launched the Combined Universities Campaign for

Nuclear Disarmament (CUCND), holding its first demonstration on Christmas Day 1959 in Ottawa. Roussopoulos maintains that with this action, "a new mode of living began to evolve within us; we found a new way of acting together [... ] The individual, we discovered, still had meaning. The anti-nuclear struggle in this country had a deep meaning for us, subjective as well as objective"85. Owram contends that this organization

"raised serious questions about the Cold War and [... ] provided a nucleus for later radical organizations"86; it also started the magazine Our Generation Against the Bomb, which was to become the first New Left publication in Canada. In this country, as in the

United States, youth sought an outlet for their sense of moral outrage; the civil rights movement gave them the courage and sense of possibility, and Cold War militarism gave them a cause.

However, such single-issue reformism was quickly going out of style. Owram reports the following changes in Canadian student activism:

By 1962-3, the CUCND had a number of younger members, and they 22 were often more influenced by the spirit of Port Huron than by the single- cause CUCND [whose] pacifist rhetoric and religious moralism came across as old-fashioned, even priggish. For this group the future lay with the exciting and turbulent events in the United States. Many newer members spent the summers working with their American counterparts, learning the techniques 87

of civil disobedience and imbibing the ideas of the student Left in the United States.

Thus in 1964, the CUCND was abolished, and its younger, more radical members began the Student Union for Peace Action. Roussopoulos, one of SUPA's first members, has written that "[o]ne political point was clear to the SUP A youth - Canada's international role could not be changed until basic social and political change took place in our no society" . Like their American counterparts, Canadian New Leftists believed themselves to be acting against the political passivity and moral turpitude of their elders, as well as the cynicism and apathy of their peers. Explicitly modeling themselves after the nascent

American movement, SUP A "replaced undemocratic, bureaucratic procedures of the Old

Left for a looser, uncentralised, self-determining movement" ; the notion of

"participatory democracy" raised in the Port Huron Statement guided SUPA's organizational structure as well as their ideals for social progress. They also began community organizing among the poor; such projects, established in the summer of 1965, included: working with the blacks of Nova Scotia, the Indians and Metis of northern Saskatchewan, the Doukhobors of B.C., the poor of Kingston, the rural poor around the nuclear missile site at La Macaza, Quebec, developing a peace concern amongst professionals in Toronto as well as "school for social theory", a project against the Comox military base in B.C., and later on a radical information and publications project which printed and circulated essays in the thousands and reprinted articles on a variety of topics. In addition, by the mid-1960s, SUPA was involved in demonstrations and teach-ins against the Vietnam war, and had revived CUCND's dormant magazine, shortening the

23 title to Our Generation, and giving it an explicitly radical focus. However, despite media attention and attempts to build a political base on campuses nationwide, the uneasy confluence of more and less radical students was a continual strain on the organization91 and contributed to its rapid demise.

As well, they faced competition from the Company of Young Canadians, initially formed by the government as a sort of Canadian Peace Corps but quickly overtaken by the young activists. The CYC was heavily influenced by SUP A, and in their rhetoric and intent were clearly motivated by the same sense of youth disaffection that helped re-form

SDS; Owram reports that the CYC's "statement of 'Aims and Principles' [... ] spent more time on alienation and homogenization of modem society than it did on poverty or illiteracy"92. Even so, it adopted Saul Alinsky's philosophy on community organizing, and attempted to follow in SUPA and SDS's footsteps. As a government-funded organization the CYC was in a unique and difficult position; it quickly drew criticism from the media, the public, and the government for its members' countercultural appearances, radical positions, and for providing funding for SUPA, an arrangement problematic for both groups . Nonetheless, from 1964 to 1967, SUPA and CYC were

"the pre-eminent national organizations propagating New Left ideals" m Canada.

* We cannot delve further into the Canadian student New Left, though a good overview of CYC is provided by Margaret Daly in The Revolution Game: the short unhappy life of the Company of Young Canadians published in 1970. Myrna Kostash's 1980 memoir Long Way From Home: the Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada is perhaps the closest Canadian equivalent to Sale or Gitlin's participant-memoirs of their work in the New Left. Brake (p. 160) notes that one reason Kostash wrote her book was "because Canadians some fifteen years her junior seemed to have never heard of the SUPA, the FLQ, the Abortion Caravan or the campus resistances" - an indication of Canada's fascination with the American counterculture to the detriment of their own. 24 In the United States, the student movement first came to the forefront of national attention in 1964, "the year the first cohort of the baby boom was reaching college in force"94. Much like the French Romantics of the 1830s, 1960s youth became radicalized when they moved from the indulgent homes of their upbringing to the repressive corridors of higher learning95. The Free Speech Movement which was to radically disrupt campus life over the next five years began in earnest at the University of California over the university's refusal to allow civil rights activists to recruit or fundraise on campus.

Emboldened by their work in the Freedom Summer project, Mario Savio and Jack

Weinberg occupied Sproul Plaza at Berkeley, signifying a turning-point in the youth movements of the sixties. The Free Speech Movement spawned campus protests too numerous to be dealt with here; their demands for more relevant courses, the abolition of in loco parentis, and the democratization of university bureaucracy is the stuff of sixties legend. What is significant is that by 1965 the conditions for a mass youth mobilization were in place. For youths coalesced at universities, angered by those institutions' repressiveness, by the escalating war in Vietnam, and by the perceived failure of civil rights reforms, the FSM became the means to "attack the system as a whole, the

American Way of Life itself. The potential of universities to generate widespread social dissent was beginning to be realized.

In Canada, as in the United States, university campuses were expanding and turning their collective gaze and actions outward as never before. With the "massification of the elite" , higher education became seen as a right rather than a privilege; students demanded relevance and social responsibility from their universities as from society at 25 large. Among Canadian and American students, university "was not regarded as training for a vocation so much as an opportunity to develop one's interests and self-awareness"98.

Vitalized by their sense of generational uniqueness and entitlement, Canadian students made tuition the first national student issue". In 1964 there was a brief clash between students and the board of governors at the University of Alberta; 1965 saw 3,500

University of British Columbia students marching on the Association of Colleges and

Universities of Canada's annual conference. Thus mobilized, Canadian students protested a wide range of issues: "[cjourse requirements, tenure, officer training on campus, the unionization of food workers, the pay of maids in dormitories, the language of instruction, transfer credits, representation on committees - all became volatile issues at campuses in the latter half of the 1960s"100. Interestingly, it appears that the Canadian

New Left had a broader basis of support than their American counterparts: in a study of

University of Toronto students, radical leftists were found to have come from both middle- and working-class homes, and from both urban and rural backgrounds101. By contrast, American radicals tended to originate "from the more privileged socio-economic stratum of society. Their urban parents usually had higher incomes, more advanced education, and more prestigious occupations"102. Certainly, however, the FSM in

America was inspiring similar actions among Canadian youth; as the Port Huron writers had hoped, two generations were doing battle for control of educational institutions, and the elders were losing ground.

In April 1965 the first major demonstration against the Vietnam war took place in

Washington, spearheaded by SDS despite the group's conflicting positions on both foreign policy and the direction of SDS . The march, and continued escalations in

Vietnam, resulted in a large influx of students to SDS which caused a generational split between older and newer members. Robert J. Ross, social movement theorist and a former national officer of SDS, has reported that the number of chapters doubled between

December 1964 and June 1965, and that after the 1965 March on Washington, "the mass media did the recruiting for SDS"104. After this time, the organization was no longer in

"the hands of a group of old friends, the Port Huronites no longer dominated"105. This was, Ross has shown, partially as a result of the early members' failure to communicate their vision of the organization to new recruits, which in turn had resulted from the New

Left's antipathy toward "structure"106. Studying several social movements including the

New Left, Freeman has concluded that "[t]he mass media may be a source of information, but they are not a key source of influence"107; social movements therefore require experienced organizers to be successful. In the case of white Boomers, "the multitudinous events of the sixties served to goad students into political activity, but SDS

1OR provided them with a structure in which to engage in it" , a structure which changed as the movement grew and its priorities changed. The mass media, including the expanding record industry, connected the youth through powerful images and sounds that spoke to their sense of generational solidarity. With a growing awareness of their size and strength, the Baby Boom generation was also forming a culture increasingly oppositional to the mainstream. This opposition was not to be restricted to protests and pamphlets, but expressed through a lived revolution of values. The changes in SDS reflected those occurring in the New Left generally as the FSM and antiwar movements expanded109. The importance of drugs, music, and the ideal of

"freedom" was also drastically changing the movement. By the mid-sixties, the Beatles had grown their hair and were singing about marijuana, the "psychedelic rock" exemplified by the Jefferson Airplane and the Fugs was gaining popularity, hitchhiking had become a routine mode of transportation for youth, spiritual seekers began dropping acid, wearing bells on their ankles and studying the I Ching. In 1967 Buffalo Springfield released the song "For What It's Worth", a portent of the paranoia, violent clashes between police and protesters, and factionalization that would come to ravage the movement. The same year, Hunter S. Thompson compared the Berkeley of 1965 with that of two years later: in 1965, "Berkeley was the axis of what was just beginning to be called the 'New Left'. Its leaders were radical, but they were also deeply committed to the society they wanted to change. A prestigious faculty member says the Berkeley activists were the vanguard of "a moral revolution among the young""11 . By 1967, however, Thompson notes the remarkable change that has occurred in the Berkeley political scene due, in large measure, to "the hippies":

A hippy is somebody who "knows" what's really happening, and who adjusts or grooves with it. Hippies despise phoniness; they want to be open, honest, loving and free. The reject the plastic pretense of 20th century America, preferring to go back to the "natural life", like Adam and Eve. They reject any kinship with the Beat Generation on the ground that "those cats were negative, but our thing is positive". They also reject politics, which is "just another game". They don't like money, either, or any kind of aggressiveness.'11

Thompson goes on to report that activists who had "always viewed hippies as spiritual allies were, in 1967, becoming concerned that students "who were once angry activists were content to lie back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana smoke - or, worse, to dress like clowns or American Indians and stay zonked for days at a time on LSD"112, and notes that the G.O.P. gained 50 seats in Congress in the 1966 elections, sending a message that the "radical-hippie alliance"113 was not as politically strong or relevant as it had hoped.

Gitlin has also written on the uneasy confluence of political radicals and psychedelic culture, and the "competition between the radicals and the hippie-gurus"114 Timothy

Leary, Richard Alpert and Ken Kesey, for whom "[p]olitical news was game-playing, a bad trip, a bringdown, a bummer"115. Gitlin cites the following as a case study in the tensions between politicos and hippies: people at the time believed that the scraped, dried interiors of bananas would get you high; an edgy Gitlin, fearing the runaway sex-drugs- rock-n'-roll culture taking over the youth scene, wanted to hand out leaflets at the

Chicago Be-In of 1967 pointing out the exploitative practices of United Fruit. He didn't, but coming across a girl with a Chiquita sticker on her forehead, raised the issue with her, only to be told "Oh, don't be so hung up on United Fruit"116. Clearly, the priorities of the youth culture were moving away from explicit political issues to the wider culture; "the preoccupations of a great mass of youth - rock, dope, sex and clothes - had been politicized. This did two things. First, it confused the adults, who were never sure where style ended and political revolution began. Second, it gave non-political, non-activist students the sense they were part of the generational struggle against authority"117. Early activists had been influenced by the existentialist belief that human beings had the capability, and therefore the responsibility, to choose how they would act; by the mid- 29 sixties, Marcuse's Marxist-Freudian ideas on the "democratic unfreedom" of advanced industrial civilization, combined with the expanding drug culture had transformed the desire of early New Leftists to live in accordance with actively sought principles into the widespread belief among youth that liberation and expression of the self constituted a revolution.

This liberation was not entirely joyous. Between June 1967 and August 1968, anthropology Ph.D. candidate William Partridge lived amongst hippies in a southern university town. His dissertation portrays these youth as "most assuredly miserable"119.

This misery was partially as a result of fears about the "rednecks" just outside the town, including the police whose harassment of "longhairs" was legendary among the students.

Most significantly, however, Partridge claimed hippie unhappiness was a result of social conditions they felt powerless to change: "[conditions they regard as repugnant, hateful, and sometimes debilitating are daily topics of interest and conversation, although the tone of this interest is one of bitter resignation. For the effects of hateful conditions of existence can be mitigated through selfconscious acts of withdrawal but not wholly abolished" . Such grievances were aired in the nightly "rap sessions", group discussions usually facilitated by marijuana where the participants attempted to free their minds from the deathly constrictions of their society. LSD was also an important tool in achieving one's highest duty: to know the self . Here, perhaps, we can see the transmogrification of Freud's postwar influence - the focus on psychological exploration and interpretation stolen from the halls of professionals and enshrined as a sacred rite for each individual to practice, whose only priests were their peers. This is another facet of 30 the Boomer's renegotiation of their childhoods; the "togetherness" of the postwar home resulted in tightly-knit yet transient bands of youths who, having severed their emotional if not financial ties with parents122, sought to create a new form of togetherness among sympathetic members of their generation. Thus, the changing youth culture of the mid- sixties resulted in a difficult form of freedom for many youths. Like the French

Bohemians, the hippies were "outsiders in bourgeois society [. . .], damned doomed souls, victims of forces they hardly understood"123. Keniston reported that 90,000 juvenile runaways were arrested in 1966; Esler has chronicled the misery of Haight-Ashbury's young residents, including bad drugs, police harassment, venereal disease, hepatitis, and increasing addiction to hard drugs124, and called the mid-sixties "the age of the wandering hordes of true street people". As Keniston has written, "[t]he incorrigibles either turn political or drop out. Or perhaps they fluctuate between the two, restless, bewildered, hungry for better ideas about grownupness than GM or IBM or LB J seem able to offer"125. Adrift from the moorings of biological family and society, unorganized by a coherent political agenda yet painfully alive to the violence and hypocrisy of their elders, white middle-class Boomers turned inward and began to create the revolution within themselves.

Gitlin writes of his early days in SDS that "the movement constantly tended to become its own end" , part of which was to erase "the rifts between work and family, between public and private, between strategic, calculating reason and spontaneous, expressive emotion"127. Yet for this generation of young leftists, living out one's ideal of the world meant explicitly engaging in political questions; their analysis, though anti- 31 Soviet, was in general informed by Marxist thought and materialist principles. The New

Left, however, was neither tightly organized or ideologically coherent; to questions about what the youth wanted or how they planned to get it, the New Left's answer was unfailingly ""Build the movement. By contrast, much of the counterculture's appeal was its earthy answer: We want to live life like this, voila!""128. The generation to emerge in the mid-sixties followed in the tradition of "Emerson, Thoreau, Rimbaud: change consciousness, change life!" . Brake contends that the hippies "gave shape to the non- economic aspect of political life, representing the expressivist rather than activist pole, stressing the personal, the private and psychological - that is, subjectivity in politics" .

In only a few years, the civil disobedience tactic of breaking certain specific laws, living in the world as it should be in order to make it so (exemplified by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat on the bus) had become a countercultural refutation of American society as a whole, "the idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself [... ] and the rest of the world be damned (which it was already)"131. Across the nation on campuses and in the growing number of hippie enclaves, outright contempt for American society, the belief that to be free was to "free your head", and the romanticization of developing nations was changing the palate from which young radicals would paint their notions of social transformation. Section 3: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In 1964, Jerry Rubin was a Berkeley radical who had dropped out after two weeks of school to devote himself full-time to the FSM. He was first arrested at a sit-in protesting an army recruitment table that was set up on campus after non-student organizations were banned in an effort to halt recruitment for civil rights causes. In his influential 1970 book Do It, Rubin chronicles his early involvement with activism spearheading efforts to stop trains carrying troops, running for mayor of Berkeley, and organizing a be-in at Golden Gate Park. He first garnered national media attention when he showed up to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee in the garb of a soldier from the American Revolution. Like Gitlin, Thompson, and many others, Rubin places 1967 as the year the youth movement took a new direction. He describes his conversion from traditional activism to politically motivated theatrical pranskterism thus:

Generational war flared within the Peace Movement in San Francisco on April 15, 1967. On the speaker's platform stood lifeless professors, ministers, Reform Democrats, union leaders, intoning speech after boring speech. Down in the street stood freeks, longhairs, beatniks, students, kids, 132

the unwashed. Why were we standing around listening to them!

Rubin's assertion of a generational divide is significant: he is not only speaking of adults, but of the earlier cohort of radicals. He objected to what he perceived as unfortunate and unconvincing attempts on the part of the peace movement to make their cause respectable and therefore gain a wider base of support. Increasingly convinced of the uselessness of peaceful demonstration, Rubin espoused the view that "Martin Luther King was only as powerful as the black man standing behind him with a molotov cocktail" . Armed with 33 his scorn for mainstream society and his healthy respect for the absurd, Rubin went on to help organize such media events as the attempted levitation of the Pentagon, where he claims 100,000 peace protesters showed up to surround the building, and at which Rubin was arrested urinating on the evil five-sided building.

On New Year's Eve 1967, Rubin and several other activists including Abbie

Hoffman came up with the moniker "Yippie", and later the "Youth International Party", if one had to be priggishly Old Left about it. The group's "slogan" was "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball", and, as Rubin explains in his first book Do It! (1970),

"everybody has his own creeping meatball - grades, debts, pimples. Yippies are a participatory movement. There are no ideological requirements to be a yippie. Write your own slogan. Protest your own issue. Each man his own yippie"134. Attuned to their generation's increasing skepticism about traditional politics, the Yippies espoused an individualistic and anarchistic form of activism aimed at destabilizing the American status quo. One of the first major acts undertaken by the Yippies was the presenting of

Pigasus, a pig, as their candidate for President in the 1968 election - an act which, though seemingly an expression of the new politics, was presaged by Lord Byron in the early 19 century when he presented a tame bear for fellowship at Trinity College .

The Yippies were very much of their generation, however, in their understanding of media and their decision to use theatricality to harness that power. This had important ramifications for the movement as a whole: the Yippies' stance was "Fuck electoral politics. Live the revolution" . A marriage between Matza's definitions of

Bohemianism and Radicalism, their position made withdrawal engagement; Yippies 34 overtly politicized hippie culture by carrying its principles of free expression and anti- capitalism to theatrical extremes which got media attention. Young Boomers, severed from Old Left traditions, improperly socialized into the New Left, frustrated with the ongoing war, and increasingly feeling themselves separate from adult society, were deeply susceptible to what Gitlin called the "siren song of hip-Left harmony"137. It must be noted here that the Yippies did not constitute the first countercultural rebellion-against

New Left movements*: that distinction goes to the Diggers, a San Francisco-based group who combined street theatre with revolutionary activities such as serving free food in

Golden Gate Park; Gitlin has described them as "radical existentialists, artists of the

1 ^R will" . Another notable guerrilla theatre group was the Lower East Side's Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, "a hybrid of European anarchism [... ] and the Marxism of the

Frankfurt School"139. We will, however, focus our attention on the Yippies, as it is their use of television, in contravention with the Diggers' wariness about the medium, which will best illustrate the popularization of the counterculture through images and style.

Herbert Marcuse's two best-known works, One-Dimensional Man, and Eros and

Civilization, were highly influential in the 1960s. The following quote exemplifies the aspect of his analysis of late industrial society that must have most appealed to Boomers:

"...the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, as the self-repression in turn sustains his masters and their institutions. It is this mental dynamic

And it was a rebellion. The clashes between guerrilla theater groups and traditional Leftist organizations make for highly entertaining reading. 35 which Freud unfolds as the dynamic of civilization." . From this idea of self-repression it is easy to understand the move toward what Julie Stephens has termed "anti- disciplinary politics": "a language of protest which rejected hierarchy and leadership, strategy and planning, bureaucratic organization and political parties and was distinguished from the New Left by its ridiculing of political commitment, sacrifice, seriousness and coherence"1 . These last attributes were seen by the Yippies as the cardinal sins of early radicals, who in their misguided attempts to foment revolution were only reproducing the exclusionary, hierarchical, and futile politics of their elders. The attempt to escape Freud's "dynamic of civilization" can be seen in the Boomer's use of drugs for mental liberation, in their attempts to create new family and social structures on communes and in student/hippie ghettos, and in the Yippies assertion that "[Revolution meant the creation of new men and women. Revolution meant a new life. On earth.

Today."142 There was no wisdom, no tradition, no law that was to be respected; their fathers' halls were not only to be abandoned but smashed, for to recognize any element of the old order was to inevitably generate more of its evil. The Yippies thought their generation could outrun history.

From Rousseau onwards there has existed in Western society the idea that haggling over specific policies or politicians was useless, since civilization itself is rotten to the core 4 . Revulsion with society and the belief in "natural man" was a significant aspect of the first Romantic movement, and also heavily influenced the American version thereof144. In Rebel Sell, the authors argue that the United States was a natural breeding- ground for countercultural thinking. This, they say, is because "[w]hile European 36 intellectuals were constantly trying to graft countercultural criticism onto older theoretical traditions - Marxism in particular - Americans were far more likely to treat the countercultural idea as a self-standing program"145, as a result of their particular strain of

Romanticism. Gitlin also maintains that "the SDS Old Guard were steeped in a most traditional American individualism, especially the Utopian edge of it expressed in the mid-nineteenth century middle-class transcendentalism of Emerson and Whitman"146.

However, in Gitlin's telling, the "rugged individualists"147 who formed the SDS's Old

Guard in search of "a meaning in life that is personally authentic"148 were drawn to SDS in part because it held for them the promise of a "beloved community"149. Even the sexual freedoms so associated with the era (and with many radical and bohemian youth cultures) were not, for the early radicals, only a refutation of prevailing social norms through illicit acts; they were also an attempt to build a new kind of society where sexual relations reflected the spirit of honesty, community, and personal freedom that the group wished to uphold. This is not to say that women were treated equally in the early days of

SDS; indeed, the women's liberation movement gained significant momentum on account of women such as Casey Hayden, who came to see the subservient role they were playing in New Left movements. But their camaraderie and desire to be recognized as individuals within a group, rather than simply as individuals, sets the early New Left members apart from the later counterculture. For early radicals, change was created by a collective of individuals; their refusal to conform to the expectations of adult society was an attempt to create a new society through consciously constructed lives that expressed their ideals.

The Yippies represent the most profound extension of Emersonian nonconformity: the 37 idea that individuals should be the only locus of political protest, that in fact to be a progressive individual one must free himself from every last shackle of society.

The Transcendentalists' concern with conformity and their fears of industrialized society had, for the Baby Boomers, been amplified by the Second World War and

Stalinist Russia. The Holocaust stunned people with its assembly-line efficiency, the real

Frankenstein of technological progress at last unleashed on the modern world.

Furthermore, in America the Holocaust was perceived as a kind of mass insanity; the complicity of the German people in this genocide seemed incomprehensible unless attributed to a kind of mob mentality gone to horrendous extremes. Hanna Arendt, in her

1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, first identified the notion of "the banality of evil", and this influential idea was seemingly confirmed by Milgram's now-famous psychology experiment "Obedience and Individual Responsibility". In short, participants in this experiment were asked to administer shocks to a "learner" (actually an actor), ostensibly to see if punishment aided learning. In fact, Milgram was trying to determine how the

"teacher" would respond to commands from a person in authority. The experiment's results horrified American society: more than half the participants were willing to continue administering shocks as they were told, through a fellow citizen's screams and even until the subject believed the "learner" was unconscious or dead. Where was the

American 'individualism' which was supposed to stand in such opposition to the repressive conformity of the Communists? For many Boomers, the conformity their parents feared was everywhere evident: in American society's materialism, in their political systems, and in their personal relations. 38 In Jerry Rubin's view, his generation would lead the revolution because they were free of the traumas his parents' generation had endured. "Those who grew up before the

1950s live today in a mental world of Nazism, concentration camps, economic depression and Communist dreams Stalinized"150; worse, they had internalized submissiveness to authority, and as he states in his second book We Are Everywhere, "[o]bedience to the state is a bad habit"151. Paradoxically, the Yippies felt that what young Americans required to break this habit was a vision; "a myth was needed to coalesce the energy" .

Attempting to explain the power of myth in his book Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie

Hoffman (writing under the pseudonym Free) quotes Marshall McLuhan:

McLUHAN: "Young people are looking for a formula for putting on the universe -participation mystique. They do not look for detached patterns - for ways of relating themselves to the world, a la nineteenth century".

So there you have it, or rather have it suggested, because myth can never have the precision of a well-oiled machine, which would allow it to be trapped and molded. It must have the action of participation and the magic of mystique. It must have a high element of risk, drama, excitement, and bullshit."153

The Yippies required a myth that would spark the revolution in millions of young individuals wary of all "patterns" or ideology; a myth that would not become 'trapped and molded'. Yet the myth which sprung from these young men was necessarily a product of their history and culture; thus, Rubin could quote early Yippie Stew Albert saying '7 didn 't get my ideas from Mao, Lenin or Ho Chi Mink I got my ideas from the Lone

Ranger"15*. Further, Yippie "bullshit" was almost unfailingly macho, the visions of boys raised on wild west stories and utterly mired in the sexist, homophobic thinking of their era. Hoffman's favorite taunt to "the pigs" was "You fuckin' fag-ass cocksuckers..."155 39 and Rubin's first two books are filled with images of young people holding guns, of riots and destruction. Both men idolized and romanticized Che Guevara, Chairman Mao and

Fidel Castro. The early New Left had aligned themselves with those leaders in the struggle against American imperialism, but the Yippies directly aligned white, middle- class students with oppressed populations in developing countries, and emulated the revolutionary style of rebel leaders. Yippies began carrying the NLF flag at student demonstrations, which weren't demonstrations but "jail breaks. Slave revolts"156.

According to Rubin the new revolutionary was "a streetfighting freek, a dropout, who carries a gun at his hip. So ugly that middle-class society is frightened by how he looks.

A longhaired, bearded, hairy, crazy motherfucker whose life is theater, every moment creating the new society as he destroys the old" . Destruction and creation are given equal weight - the future no longer needs to be made present because the future is now, embodied in rebel youth, and the past is cannon fodder at best. Most importantly, "the old" society is no longer to be won over with peaceful demonstrations and consciousness- raising; the old society is the enemy, to be terrified into submission. Heath and Potter argue that "[f]he goal of radical political activists and thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries was not to eliminate the game, but to level the playing field. As a result, radical politics throughout the early modern period had an overwhelmingly populist character.

The goal was to turn the people against their rulers" . For the new generation of radicals, however, the rulers were understood to reside not only in palaces that should be

Ironically, this itself is a position historically occupied by youth in similar circumstances. stormed but in each individual consciousness, colonized by social institutions and in need of liberation. Thus, conformity became the great enemy that united the youth.

These youth, after all, were raised with high expectations which were then cruelly disappointed. They were in large part raised in a world that valued them inherently, commended their creativity, and directed tremendous resources toward their development. When the youth took up the civil rights cause, their elders praised their morality. Yet society wasn't changing. Levitt quotes a student editor in Toronto who said his generation grew up "expecting the lollipop of the world was going to be theirs

[but] the people who seemed to have control of both the bombs and the lollipops just were not listening, or weren't responding in any concrete way"159. The Vietnam war escalated; universities expelled radical students and fired radical professors; the police violently attacked protesters at Grand Central Station in March 1968; the next month Dr. Martin

Luther King was assassinated followed two months later by Robert Kennedy. The assassinations shook the New Left to its roots: Gitlin recalls his slight bewilderment at the vision of Tom Hayderi, a radical who had recently called Kennedy "a little fascist", holding his Cuban fatigue cap in his hand and weeping over Kennedy's casket. The movement was quick to call Hayden a hypocrite, but Gitlin offers a subtler interpretation:

"[w]e still wanted the system to work, and hated it for failing us"160. As children alienated from their parents cannot help but desire their love and acceptance, so the children of the 1960s clung, perhaps against their will, to the hope that their elders would see the folly of their ways and help their young create the new society. After the assassinations and Nixon's election in November, hope for the possibility of change 41 through institutional means was completely abandoned. Like the 1920s Dadaists, the

Yippies were in revolt against reason, but unlike their predecessors the Yippies' generation was unusually large, wealthy, and free of the trauma of war. For them, withdrawal was not sufficient yet all legitimate forms of dissent had been revealed futile; how could one struggle against society without recognizing its structures? From this dilemma, anti-disciplinary politics were born. "Laughter, paradox and parody were paraded as ethical forms which would guarantee the purity of the movement thereby protecting it from adulteration by the things it despised"161. With all traditional heroes gone, the youth were left to become their own mythic inventions; the Yippies'

"romanticized politics offered heroic and mythological roles for its participants"162 and most importantly, were highly telegenic.

Television, however, is a tricky medium, and the Yippies' relationship to it seems unresolved. Gitlin has noted this ambivalence; as an example of their media bravado, he quotes Abbie Hoffman saying "[t]he media in a real sense never lie when you relate to them in a non-linear mythical manner" ; that is, the media cannot distort what has already been willfully distorted. The idea behind this was that the kids of 1960s

"Amerika" were so thoroughly revolted with bourgeois society, and had such rebellious visions dancing in their heads, that the sight of their imaginings depicted on television would unleash the revolution; the Yippies would perform "actions so outrageous and absurd that the news media would be conned into carrying their subversive message free to the masses"164. In other moments perhaps Yippie members were more wary of their chosen medium. "Justifying his Yippie stunts on talk shows, [Hoffman] wrote: 'The goal of this nameless art form - part vaudeville, part insurrection, part communal recreation - was to shatter the pretense of objectivity... rouse viewers from the video stupor"165. The

Yippies felt that, rather than being passive observers of meaningless entertainment, the young could be teased and excited into seeing themselves as subjective entities, constantly creating the world with their perceptions. They understood that, for a social movement, myths can "exalt the group, vilify the enemy, and have strong cohesive functions"166. Unsurprisingly, this reliance on myth, and on the media to propagate that myth, was a point of contention within the movement. Gitlin feels the Yippies were quickly trapped by their public personas, corralled by their own outrageousness onto a set designed by the Yippies but built by the media to fit their requirements. They were accused of being fame-chasers and "media freaks" ; Hoffman claimed this was an impression created "by our ability to make news. MEDIA is Communication. The concept of getting it all out there applies whether you are speaking to one person or two hundred million" . The difference, however, is in what can be communicated, and what gets lost in transmission.

As we have seen, early SDS was successful in large part because of the close personal ties between its members; with its rapid expansion, the core ideas and values behind SDS were obscured by the many conflicting demands and beliefs of the new members. As well, newer members felt that the leaders were inaccessible, and therefore did not find the same recognition and sense of involvement as had the Old Guard. The

Yippies, however, made it possible for anyone to be a full participant in the revolution with no social ties whatsoever; anyone could be a Yippie by simply proclaiming himself 43 one. Yippies abolished the potentially intimidating necessity of developing a coherent critique of society or joining an organization (which would require making one's individual self acceptable to a pre-existing collective), in order to participate in creating social change. The Yippies likely also appealed to youths who otherwise would have had no political engagement. Sherkat and Blocker have posited that a sense of political efficacy - the feeling of being able to influence the political process - is an important determinant in who becomes an activist. However, the 1960s showed that a limited sense of political efficacy may coexist with a strong sense of potential for social disruption: at the time, shocking adults was both easy and seemingly revolutionary, and the Yippies exploited this fact.

Most significantly, however, the Yippies played on their generation's hunger for excitement, their impatience with anything that smacked of the old, the respectable.

Thus, Rubin could write in Do It:

Have you ever seen a boring demonstration on TV? Just being on TV makes it exciting. Even picket lines look breathtaking. Tele vision creates myths bigger than reality. Demonstrations last hours, and most of that time nothing happens. After the demonstration we rush home for the six o'clock news. The drama review. TV packs all the action into two minutes - a commercial for the revolution.

This is perhaps the most telling passage in all of Rubin's writing. In the notion of "a commercial for the revolution" we can see the disparity between those for whom activism was a means through which society could be changed, and those who saw being an activist as an end in itself. Not much real work, in terms of injustices being addressed, can get done in two minutes, but the impact on a person's brain can be tremendous, as 44 advertising has proven. The Yippies were seemingly oblivious to the possibility that activism "sold" through commercials would be received in the same manner other commercials were received; despite their apparent approval of Marshall McLuhan, the

Yippies failed to grasp his most famous statement. The need for picket lines to be

"breathtaking" changed the meaning of picket lines: their importance shifted from the fact that they had happened, and that specific demands were being made by them (which, in a few years, had become normalized in American society), to the romance of their image, and what that image signified for people who sought to emulate it. By using not just theatrical stunts but specifically television to propagate radical ideas, social dissent became a product that could make people more themselves if they bought in.

Part 4: There Was No There There

As with novels and movies, television allows people to briefly connect with a world outside their own; perhaps television is especially powerful in this regard, as it makes it possible for millions of individuals to consume the same media at the same moment across an entire nation. They can do this within their own homes, entering into an invisible community bonded by a mutual television experience. Thus it is notable that as New Left movement structures were weakening, the media conceived a heightened interest in the youth counterculture, which thereby reached a wider audience. This was not only because protests were growing in size, but also because the counterculture was becoming more shocking, and therefore more entertaining. While many radicals were

45 trying to continue with peaceful demonstrations and consciousness-raising tactics, for others the myth of tough, crazy kids taking over the world shone like a beacon through the ever more frustrating, frightening reality of the late 1960s. Particularly for younger

Boomers who would have been hearing about imperialism and racism since their early adolescence, the counterculture was a way to break the apparent stalemate between old- school radicals and "pig Amerika". Media coverage made a formidable movement of the disparate happenings on campuses and in the streets of American cities. It was an inclusive movement, without the need for complicated ideological debates: a movement that could build its numbers through two-minute spots on the news.

However, as Freeman noted of SDS, such a barrage of media attention could not help but change the nature of the movement. For those within movement organizations, the media created disharmony through elevating some radicals to celebrity status, which it did on the same basis it created other celebrities: good looks, outspokenness, outrageousness. The media also changed adult society's perceptions of its youth, in many cases generating fear and opprobrium by depicting the most alarming elements of the counterculture, from violent drug users and syphilitic teenagers to insurrectionary youths decrying fascist America. In his essay "The Making of a Counterculture - Technocracy's

Children", Theodore Roszak contemplates the movement and the criticism it had drawn.

He writes:

It would be a better general criticism to make of the young that they have done a miserably bad job of dealing with the distortive publicity with which the mass media have burdened their embryonic experiments. Too often they fall into the trap of reacting narcissistically or defensively to their own image in the fun-house mirror of the media. Whatever these things called "beatniks" and "hippies" originally were, 46 or still are, may have nothing to do with what Time, Esquire, Cheeta, CBSNBCABC, Broadway comedy, and Hollywood have decided to make of them. Dissent, the press has clearly decided, is hot copy. But if anything the media tend to isolate the weirdest aberrations and con- 170

sequently to attract to the movement many extroverted poseurs.

Indeed, the media must have captivated not only extroverted poseurs, but also many who knew "something was happening" but were not "exactly clear" on what it was or how to join in. Through the media, youth had instant access to others like themselves, or at least others who more fully embodied the revolutionary spirit of the times. Media coverage helped to change not only the movement's population but also its focus. As the Yippies began to dominate news coverage of the movement, shocking mainstream society out of its complacency became vital revolutionary work. Furthermore, one thing certain to garner media attention is violence. Violence "became the threat and the temptation around which the whole movement, whatever its actual disinclination to pick up stones or guns, revolved. Violence organized the movement's fantasy life - and, through the mass media, the whole society's"171. At the November 1969 march on the Washington

Monument, the largest protest in American history up to that point, Hoffman and Rubin marched on the Justice Department and rioted in the streets. "Over the protest of the news staff, the Justice Department sideshow took the lead over the mass march on the

CBS Evening News172. Esler has identified a persistent dialectic in youth cultures between idealism and violence: youth movements, in attempting to hold their societies to their own promises, inevitably ask too much; they face disappointment and eventually harsh retaliation. Some faction of the youth will then respond with violence . In sensationalizing youth violence, the media accelerated the movement's decline. As the 1960s drew to a close revolutionary rhetoric engulfed the movement, streetfighting fascinated both movement and adult society, and among some radicals the notion of political terrorism took hold.

Gitlin contends that the movement's militant surge was both strategic and "the expression of an identity, a romance, an existential raison d'etre"174. In his and others' tellings, by the late 1960s the immense weight of American Leviathan seemed to be crushing the spirit of the movement; Marcuse's Great Refusal "was apparently impossible but deeply necessary"175. Gitlin describes the sense of "political impotence" and despair that began to permeate the movement after the Kennedy and King assassinations and years of violence in black ghettos; blustery insurrectionary talk was common among

"young white men who could not admit that [they] actually had nothing to offer the people in Detroit". This sense of paralysis and middle-class guilt was heightened by black militancy, especially the stylish Black Panthers in their berets and leather jackets, whose aura of authenticity and menace must have seemed enviable to white radicals .

For them, no matter how much heady rhetoric assured them of their oppression by society, their collective identity was chosen rather than imposed by truly repressive

177 structural conditions . For some radicals, such as the members of Progressive Labor, a

Marxist faction of SDS, the job of the middle-class was to foment revolution amongst the working-class. Others saw the oppression of students as symptomatic of the oppression of the middle-class, who along with the working-class were blind to the tyranny under Owram has written of the "hierarchy of authenticity" that existed within North American radical circles, in which "the black movement had gained pride of place, both through its long oppression and through the action it had taken to challenge it. [... ] As one American radical accurately noted, 'nothing made the idea of the revolution more vivid to the white left than the Black Panther Party.'" (p. 168) 48 which they lived. It is little wonder, m this climate, that the Yippies would look appealing to white middle-class youths: in contrast to the disharmony and sense of futility ravaging the image of the old New Left, Rubin and Hoffman embodied the possibility that white men could be sexy revolutionaries.

The movement's factionalization was physically evident at the 1968 Democratic

Convention demonstrations: "the Yippies held their Festival of Life in Lincoln Park adjacent to the hippie community in a section called Old Town. Two miles south the

[National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe)] held its rallies and made its speeches in elegant Grant Park across the street from the Hilton Hotel, the main headquarters of the convention" . In the months leading up to the convention, many radicals and organizers sensed impending chaos at the convention demonstrations and within the movement. The Yippies "threatened to float ten thousand nude bodies on

Lake Michigan, pick up delegates in fake cabs and drop them off in Wisconsin, dress up as bellboys and seduce delegates' wives, wear Vietcong pajamas and give out free rice in the streets. The press loved these crazies; frightened officials took their wildest fantasies literally; and the myth of Yippie grew" . Many within the movement were concerned that the Yippies would trigger violent confrontations. In addition, as Allen J. Matusow recounts in his highly-regarded book The Unraveling of America, even within the Mobe,

"the role of violence was discussed endlessly. It bothered Dellinger [Mobe chairman], a pacifist on principle, that his two coordinators [former SDS leaders Rennie Davis and

Tom Hayden] seemed in a mood to tolerate it" . Ultimately the Mobe's organizers decided that the demonstrations would be peaceful, and that civil disobedience would not be designed to disrupt the convention's proceedings. However, the notorious Mayor

Daley would not grant permits to either the Mobe or the Yippies, and threatened violence.

As well, Johnson announced that he would not run for a second term, thereby making a probably violent demonstration seem even less appealing or necessary. "The Chicago

Seed, a local hippie paper, warned potential demonstrators, 'If you're coming to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair." The Seed's advice to the peaceably inclined was to stay home"181. Gitlin told friends he was going to Chicago "with the instinct of the moth for the flame" . The greater portion of the youth, however, did not have the same instinct, and the hundreds of thousands expected to come never exceeded ten thousand.

Gitlin and many others have covered the convention in detail, marking it as a defining moment within the movement, heralding its end; for our purposes, Gitlin's opening summary of the events will suffice:

What exploded in Chicago that week was the product of pressures that that been building up for almost a decade: the exhaustion of liberalism, the marauding vengefulness of the authorities, the resolve and reckless ness of the movement, the disintegration of the Democratic Party. But Chicago threw all the elements into chemical reaction, and redoubled the pressures; from that week on, potentialities became actual. The movement emerged committed to an impossible revolution; the Right emerged armed for power and a more possible counterrevolution; liberals barely emerged at all. Chicago confirmed that no centers were going to hold, no wisdom was going to prevail. It wiped out any lingering doubt that the logic of the Sixties - of both the movement and the mainstream - was going to play itself out to the bitter end.

Like so many other violent outbursts of youth movements, this one earned the wrath of the public; while the media, some of whom had been thrashed alongside the youth, were initially outraged by Mayor Daley's violent repression, many soon recanted their criticism

50 of Daley and the Democrats, as the majority of the American people approved of their actions toward the demonstrators .

For many radicals, Chicago proved that escalation of the movement was necessary, perhaps inevitable. Some gravitated toward Progressive Labor, who thought

Chicago had alienated the working-class and continued their efforts to build a worker- student alliance; others in SDS felt the "Park People" headed up by the Yippies "were the vanguard of the developing revolutionary forces"185. Gitlin attempted to call for moderation and strategy, and wrote an article widely published in the underground press that warned of agents provocateurs and the "crisis of masculinity" that were leading people to perform unproductive and dangerous acts; his thanks was a tongue-lashing from some members of the Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, who felt old New Leftists like

Gitlin threatened the new and necessary toughness the movement was beginning to acquire. The main problem, according to Gitlin, was that the movement had no coherent strategy or unified set of demands. Their ideals and plans "were drawn from nineteenth- century Germany or turn-of-the-century Russia or twentieth-century Cuba or some other twilight zone"; the movement had become "Narcissus admiring himself in a TV screen" , oblivious to the world beyond its own image. Only, as we have seen, the youths' reflection in the TV was captivating, yes, but not entirely beautiful; the news every day proved their powerlessness; class and skin privilege proved their irrelevance. It was into this frame, then, that the militant Weathermen stormed, declaring war on the

American people.

51 Space prohibits chronicling the changes that occurred in the movement toward the end of the decade, and we must therefore ignore the remarkable proliferation of movement factions in the late 1960s, many of which - women's liberation and the environmental movement, for instance - became driving forces for social change in subsequent decades. However, a brief exploration of the Weathermen, the militant faction of SDS that "walked away with the organization in the name of the organization" , will illustrate the way in which revolutionary images and rhetoric changed the meaning of direct action for the white counterculture. By 1969, both SDS and the movement as a whole had splintered into innumerable fragments. At the same time, the Boomers' sense of generational uniqueness had become the sense that they were

"riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave"188 which would baptize society as a new, moral entity. Esler writes that "[r]ecent history was taking on a shape and a direction, not only for the dissenters, but for many otherwise apolitical youths as well. It was a typically generational point of view - typical, at least, for this stage of the youth revolt" . Competing with despair was the sense that the Revolution had begun; written about in The Atlantic and The New York Times Review of Books, depicted in The Battle of

Algiersx , the chains of tyranny seemed about to break. At the centre of this struggle was Vietnam, whose resistance to U.S. forces was beginning to look like the first step in the ultimate dismantling of imperialism. Yet, as history has shown time and again, this sense of historical inevitability is always dangerous. For if "[t]he revolution was an eschatological certainty", then "obstacles and even disasters could be seen as transitional, the errors and sins just friction in the machinery"191. Or as Brian Flanagan, a member of 52 the Weathermen, put it decades later: "When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some terrible things" . The Weathermen, like so many vanguard groups before them, took it upon themselves to tell the movement, and the American people, exactly which way the wind was blowing. In fact, they decided to make the weather.

In June 1969 the Weathermen came to the SDS convention armed with a live

Black Panther as proof of their recently formed alliance. The Weathermen's manifesto was widely regarded as unreadable, but many Weatherpeople were well-endowed with bravado, good looks, and charisma; SDS leader Carl Oglesby said of two Weathermen that they had "this Butch Cassidy and Sundance attitude - they were blessed, they were hexed, they would die young, they would live forever . Most importantly, they were offering action where the New Left's momentum had faltered. That summer, the

Weatherpeople set up collectives in various cities, trained with weapons and martial arts, and in general attempted to smash their bourgeois selves; Stephens contends that the

Weathermen embodied "both anti-disciplinary and disciplinary tendencies of the sixties"194 . Their first major act was the Days of Rage, a four-day assault on Chicago in

October 1969 meant to "get outside of the acceptable boundaries of protest"1 5. When no more than two or three hundred people attended, the Weathermen took this as proof that white middle-class youths had been bought off. They also continued to claim black militants as their allies even after Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton called them "muddle- headed" and "Custeristic"196 for their ill-conceived violence in Chicago, which he feared

* Another interesting example of this phenomenon is the fascination with Gurus: that individuals who placed such tremendous importance on freedom and self-expression should simultaneously seek complete subjugation to a religious leader begs questions about the Boomers' relationship to authority figures, and perhaps aboutthe real ability of youths to reject them, no matter how desirable it may seem. 53 would bring violent reprisals on black ghettos. Tom Hayden, who had initially been supportive of escalating the antiwar struggle, changed his mind after Days of Rage, saying "...They were not the conscience of their generation, but more like its id"197. By the end of the sixties, the generation's id was driven as much if not more toward destruction than pleasure. The Weathermen's "last aboveground communique" read:

"Smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness"198. Perhaps the most disturbing expression of this drive for destruction was the Weatherpeople's adulation for Charles Manson, arrested with his followers in

December 1969. Weatherpeople "saluted each other with three upraised fingers - the sign of the serving fork that had been stuck in the stomach of Manson victim Robert La

Bianca. And they celebrated the death of Sharon Tate in her eighth month of pregnancy because no white baby born in the mother country of the empire deserved to live199.

There could be no clearer symbol of the self-hate and fascination with death that consumed militant radicals at the end of the decade of peace and love.

Every youth revolt must contain a partial will toward self-destruction, firstly because it is not possible to despise one's parents without despising part of one's self.

The problem of youth movements is that to the extent which adult society is seen as untenable, it must be rejected. Thus, youth movements have always had young martyrs who in their deaths perform the most unconditional refutation of society: to die young is to embrace youth eternal, unbowed by compromise. For against the monolith of adult

Freud discusses this in terms of the inescapable guilt of the original parricides, who must then atone by deifying their murdered father through rigid social structures. society, of civilization itself, what can the youth hope to achieve? Societal institutions must be shown illegitimate, but what happens next? Gitlin says that for his generation, the honest answer would have been: "The movement, whatever it says, has no serious intention of ruling; we are once and for all a youth movement, aiming to reform our elders, and if they will not reform there is no alternative but to throw ourselves down on the floor and scream [...]" . The Yippies and their violent brethren Underground were the tantrum that convulsed youth culture when it realized its impotence. At first, white radicals stricken with what Gitlin calls "Weatherguilt" pondered whether to join the

Weather Underground, and if their reticence to do so really was a manifestation of class and skin privilege. There were imitators: Gitlin writes that by conservative estimate,

"between September 1969 and May 1970 there were some two hundred fifty major bombings and attempts linkable with the white left ; these were, of course, amplified by the mass media.

Ultimately, however, the generation could not sustain this seething self-hate for long. The pipe bomb that exploded in March 1970, killing three Weatherpeople, is almost universally regarded as one of several decisive blows to the decade's youth movements. Amazingly, over the next several years of "revolutionary" activities, the

Weathermen avoided killing anybody, however a copycat group of militant radicals did accidentally kill a graduate student in August 1970. Foss and Larkin contend that:

the 1969-70 period marks the watershed of the white middle class youth movement. It was during this period that the pro cesses which define the existence of a social movement - intensification of social conflict, reinterpretation of social reality, the redefinition of the self- ceased to be mutually reinforcing. Two developments stood out: first, the movement participants no 55 longer attempted to bring greater coherence to the still fragmentary freak vision. Second, and relatedly, a dissociation occurred between the objectives of personal liberation and social transformation which 202

hitherto had been increasingly experienced as indissolubly linked.

The Weathermen, soon renamed the gender-neutral Weather Underground, were the final and logical extension of the Yippies' mad, half-serious call to total revolution:

Weatherpeople lived out the Yippie-created myth of armed freaks creating nation-wide panic, and took the countercultural belief in living the revolution to its ultimate end, becoming a vanguard group that would force the revolution through sheer will. As well, the fact that the group's most visible member was a female who "fused the two premium female images of the moment: sex queen and streetfighter" , made the group particularly attractive to female radicals; the Underground put aside feminism, however, for the revolution. Ultimately, militant tactics "alienated the leadership of the movement from the large majority of students, and within a year greatly weakened its impact on campus and in society"204. Amid increasing violence within and toward the movement, even the counterculture was losing its poignancy as a social transformation. Writing of the fateful concert at Altamont, California, in December 1969, where the Hell's Angels killed an audience member while the Rolling Stones performed, Gitlin recalls knowing that "suburban fans who blithely blocked one another's views and turned their backs on the bad-trippers were no cultural revolutionaries. Who could any longer harbor the illusion that these hundreds of thousands of spoiled star-hungry children of the Lonely

Crowd were the harbingers of a good society?" . The Boomer generation, for all its size and wealth, were as drenched in their history as any, and these middle-class children of liberal parents were only capable of the actions for which their histories had prepared them.

Their young lives had shown them that the world was theirs. It is only in a wealthy, technically advanced society that youth could dream, as Hoffman and Rubin did, of a society where money was abolished, calling for "[a] society in which people are free from the drudgery of work. Adoption of the concept 'Let the Machines do it'" .' Wealth created irreconcilable contradictions within the movement; certainly it influenced its concerns and goals, as documents like the Port Huron Statement show. As the movement became more radicalized, however, the position of middle-class radicals became increasingly complicated. "The New Left's torment - the torment of all radical student movements - was that relatively privileged people were fighting on behalf of the

907 oppressed: blacks, Vietnamese, the working class" . American wealth was at the core of much of the decade's rebellion: a generation who had always known wealth could not understand its unequal distribution, nor the alienation and meaninglessness that were inseparable from most labour. Thus, many of the moral problems which impelled them to protest their society where born from their privileged place in it. As Gitlin records a fellow-activist saying "Where would we be without guilt?" . Guilt, however, will not convince most youths to sever all ties with their society and become criminals; further, it is hard to feel a struggle is authentic when undertaken on behalf of other people, through means copied from distant revolutions. The Weatherpeople's "craving for the experience of struggle led them beyond the point of contact with a movement of white middle-class youth"209. Cut off from student politics or community organizing and without an 57 indigenous and relevant ideology, the Weather Underground had nothing to offer once the initial attraction of their image faded.

The violence and confusion that overtook the youth culture changed the meaning of what Martin Luther King called "a lived revolution of values". While we cannot begin to explore the post-movement groups that absorbed the energy and discontent of young people after 1970, it is important to note the Well-documented rise of such interests as vegetarianism, mystical religion, yoga, personal therapy and encounter groups. Each of these suggests the desire to find personal fulfillment and betterment apart from politics.

The rise in therapy merits some further attention here, and the Esalen Institute is of particular salience to our discussion: it drew thousands of participants throughout the

1970s, including Jerry Rubin who became a vocal supporter. Working out of the Esalen

Institute, Werner Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training sought to free people from their past by showing them that anyone could be anything they wanted. This ideology appealed to those who, like Rubin, had hoped for a full-scale revolution and now had to accept that the era of mass youth mobilization had ended. In EST, "power to the people" took on a somewhat different meaning:

Something theatrically revolutionary was happening at est. In the 1960's we had used political guerrilla theater to get people to see beyond their roles. Now Werner was creating a psychological theater provoking people into self-confrontation. Whenever people discover themselves, they grow and learn - and that has to be revolutionary. (My act is liking something only if I can call it "revolutionary.") The key to the 1970's is the consciousness revolution. External events are important in determining consciousness, but in the end we decide exactly how to respond to any event that takes place in our lives. The current consciousness changes reflect the growing awareness by people of their own power: "I control my consciousness, my inner reality."210 Rubin's testimonials about Esalen signal the retreat of youths who felt they had failed to bring about a social transformation. The Boomers' desire to create a better world, and their belief that this began with living one's politics, had metamorphosed into the duty to create the self one wanted to be. Gitlin calls it "professionalized counterculture, transcendentalism for an organizational age" . This consciousness revolution was a boon to industry. Speaking in Adam Curtis' documentary The Century of the Self, Daniel

Yankelovich of Yankelovich Partners Market Research Inc. clearly stated his revelation about the Boomer generation. Worried about how a consumption-driven economy would survive an onslaught of nonconformists suspicious of trends and consumerism,

Yankelovich was relieved by what he learned from Esalen:

The conventional interpretation, the dominant interpretation was that [youth nonconformity] had to do with political radicalism, but it was clear to us that that was a mask, a cover. The core of it had to do with self-expressiveness. This preoccupation with the self and the inner self • 212

- that was what was so important to people. The ability to be self-expressive.

From studies undertaken by Yankelovich, it became clear that this generation wanted products that would express their individuality, their difference in a conformist world.

Hence, by the late 1970s, the birth of lifestyle marketing and of new manufacturing systems which could cater to the diverse desires of the Baby Boomers. Research done by the Stanford Research Institute around 1979 identified these new consumers interested in self-actualization as "inner-directeds"; while these individuals were originally thought to be liberals with a high degree of social awareness, SRI research showed that the individualistic messages of Thatcher and Reagan appealed to "inner-directeds". SRI 59 program manager Christine MacNulty says with certainty that "mner-directeds" "made the difference in those elections"21 . Thus, what began as social dissidence was valuable both to conservative politicians and to capitalists. Today, the feeling that individuality can be expressed through products is the endless forest of possibility that fuels North

America's economy; we shall explore the contemporary relationship of self-expression and politics in greater detail below.

If it appears that Canada has been forgotten it is because, in the North American youth culture, Canada was mainly a recipient rather than an innovator. As Brake has stated:

One problem for Canada has been its sense of national identity, due to its historical links with Britain and France, and its proximity to the United States which, particularly in the eyes of the outside world, has confused the sense of national identity. In some ways this has been reflected in Canadian youth culture. It is largely derivative, and uses elements of borrowed culture, and any oppos itional force is highly muted. [... ] There are of course exceptions, particularly among native youth and in Quebec, where a much deeper sense of oppression and opposition exists. There is no distinct national flavour to youth cultures, which are usually based on the styles of a borrowed tradition, rather than built on the indigenous forms of local traditions. If there is a tradition of resistance in Canadian youth culture, it is at an individualistic rather than a collective level.

As in the United States, the period between 1964 and 1966 saw the rise of youth counterculture, particularly in larger cities. Toronto's Yorkville Village and areas of

Montreal and Vancouver drew the youth with music venues and cheap rent. Owram has written that between 1964 and 1966, "[t]he political sensibilities of folk merged with the mass market of rock [... ] and the distrust of adult values and styles moved from the fringe of youth culture to its identifying characteristic" . This distrust was manifested most clearly on campuses which, as outlined above, erupted in protests. The divide between adult and youth cultures also inflamed Yorkville in the summer of 1967 when

Toronto's mayor and assorted businessmen decided that Yorkville should be developed, and the area's hip community protested. Sixty-one people were arrested over three nights of protest216. As one participant said, "I don't think there's been civil unrest in Toronto the scale of that protest ever before or since"217. However, true to its stereotype,

Canadian youth cultures were in general more polite and less combative than their southern neighbors. Alison Gordon, a Yorkville regular during the 1960s, has said that the neighborhood was full of "wannabe hippies" with "no ideology"218. In 1969 a false

Hepatitis scare helped precipitate the emptying of the area.

Perhaps one element of Canadian youth culture that slightly predated its American counterpart was Canadian youth's use of the mainstream media: Owram gives the example of two SUP A members who, in 1966, burned a Canadian flag on Parliament

Hill, predictably outraging politicians and the mainstream media; after this stunt, SUPA's membership and visibility increased significantly219. As well, Canada developed a diffuse but extensive underground press , although it began relatively late in the decade and many efforts were short-lived. Nonetheless, underground publications assisted in the middle-class critique of work and helped to spread the notion of an "organized and coherent counterculture" . While the free press in Canada did help popularize Native issues {Omphalos was founded in protest to government programs that would have

Ron Verzuh explores this facet of Canada's counterculture in his poorly-written though well-researched book Underground Times. 61 displaced Saskatchewan Natives and Metis), ecological issues (most notably Harbinger which was influential in preventing the Allen Expressway extension), and issues of free speech (the Georgia Straight, Logos and others survived obscenity trials), it was also held in thrall by American culture.

Paradoxically, while American imperialism (both cultural and economic) was a major point of contention for Canadian radicals, the activities of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen regularly reached Canadian youths through their indigenous underground press. The first issue of Toronto underground publication Guerilla, in June

1970, had Kent State on its cover: "Stunned by a vivid newsphoto of a young student kneeling over a slain friend and news of similar killings at Jackson State, students joined protest strikes on hundreds of campuses"221. Toward the end of the decade, the Front de

Liberation du Quebec, Canada's answer both to guerrilla tactics and civil rights, gave

Canada's white middle-class youths a local cause celebre; one of the most noteworthy moments of explicitly political, non-student youth dissent in Canada was Guerilla's decision to publish the FLQ's manifesto in 1970 despite being legally banned from doing so. However, Quebec separatism also helped divide the youth movement, most significantly in Quebec students' repudiation of the Canadian Union of Students, which had tried to bridge the concerns of Canadian students and the wider New Left. Cut off from the cause of Quebec separatism, the CUS encountered the same fate as American student movements, becoming divided by "ideological infighting" and eventually

999 succumbing to the "apocalyptic rhetoric" that engulfed the late 1960s . As in the United States, 1969 saw violence and factionalism undercut the efforts of the New Left, 62 turning students and adults away from radical causes. In Canada, the public reaction against student dissidence was sparked by a violent protest at Montreal's Sir George

Williams University, which had been wracked by increasingly pugnacious dissent since

1968 over an allegedly racist professor. On February 11 1969, students and police clashed at the university and students rioted, causing two million dollars in damages to a computer centre; after this, Owram writes, "[m]uch of [adult society's] goodwill evaporated"223. Owram contends that the strong reaction against the Montreal students was due to increasing press coverage of the violent factions of the American youth movement: "In the previous year or so, television and magazines had regularly beamed sensational images of violent youth from whatever American city or campus was in the news at the time". Thus, the Canadian reaction was "attributable in part to the fear that

American extremism was moving north of the border"224. Thus, perhaps appropriately, the indeterminate distinctions between Canada and the United States contributed to the decline of Canadian youth movements.

Part 5: Werther on Big Brother The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles - from Subterranean Homesick Blues

The one indisputable legacy of the 1960s in North America is the personal freedom accorded to young people of subsequent generations. Youths born after 1970 are far less likely ever to experience the frustration (or exhilaration) of being frowned upon by society for wearing peculiar clothes, hairstyles, or adornments - arguably the punks were the last to truly shock anyone, and we will briefly explore this phenomenon below.

63 Nonconformist behaviour and attitudes will not, particularly in urban centres, draw any particular attention to an individual. Despite the occasional congressional hearing on rap lyrics, in general societal acceptance of revealing clothes, teen sex, and criminal or otherwise antisocial behaviour is tolerated in levels the G.I. generation could not have imagined as youths. Drugs, as well, are a fairly common part of adolescent life; inevitably this causes parental concern, but only unusual tragedies such as drug deaths at raves draw the kind of media attention regularly given youth drug use in the 1960s.

Youth culture, in short, is only superficially oppositional: subversive behaviour may garner disapproval, but never is it considered a political issue. Clearly, then, youth dissent can no longer be meaningfully expressed through counter-cultural means because the forms and meanings of self-expression were changed by the youth cultures of the,

1960s, most markedly by the counterculture. Heath and Potter contend that the counterculture "has become the conceptual template for all contemporary leftist politics.

Counterculture has almost completely replaced socialism as the basis of radical political thought"225. As we have seen, this began in the mid- to late-1960s as liberalism was discredited and the Old Left abandoned as irrelevant, while the New Left floundered organizationally and ideologically. Meanwhile, in their repudiation of all conventional forms of protest, "the counterculture problematized the very concept of resistance"226.

Counterculture attached political and ethical importance to aesthetic choices: people expressed themselves through aesthetics, and this self-expression was, in the

1960s, an explicit resistance to dominant culture. The success of capitalism, however, is due in large part to its adaptability; as Stephens has written, "challenges to capitalism 64 might just as easily enhance its survival as threaten its existence" . This phenomenon has been popularized in literature and among many leftists as "co-optation", a process already lamented by the end of the 1960s . Roszak in 1971 contended that "commercial vulgarization is one of the endemic pests of twentieth-century Western life", recording that "[i]n London today at some of the better shops one can buy a Chinese Army-style jacket, advertised as 'Mao Thoughts in Burberry Country: elegant navy flannel, revolutionary with brass buttons and Mao collar'" . As early Yippie Stew Albert said: capitalism "took our philosophy and agreed with it, and then created products that supposedly helped you, aids that helped you be this limitless self. The product sells you a way of life, a way of being. The product sells you values. You dress this way, you live in

00Q a house like this [...]" . Clearly, the countercultural idea that each person creates herself and in so doing creates society is easily adaptable to the needs of the market.

While some leftists believe that co-optation is a form of containment, used deliberately by business to neuter political dissent, it seems more to the point that capitalism feeds off trends, and countercultural lifestyles were a trend. Indeed, "[fjhe critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty years" . As Hal Niedzviecki puts it: "Once upon a time, being "true to yourself was the siren song of the beer-swilling punk, the footloose beatnik, the Left Bank absinth- guzzling, orgy-seeking, perpetually unemployed painter..."; today "the nonconformist has lost his identity" l. Nonconformity, once the refuge and rallying cry of social dissidents In a not-uncommon fit of blindness, Rubin in 1976 records seeing "the hippie Che style on TV commercials" and knowing that "longhair symbols were no longer effective"; apparently, however, his years of psychological exploration did not reveal to him the possibility that his "commercials for the revolution" helped pave the way for commercials that simply used the revolution to sell products. 65 from early Romantics to Jerry Rubin, has not only lost its political value but is today almost impossible to achieve.

The last nonconformists to truly shock society were the punks. Originally a rebellion of British working-class youth, punk culture was a rejection of society by those who felt society had rejected them. As Dick Hebdige writes in his fascinating book

Subculture "[t]he radical aesthetic practices of Dada and Surrealism - dream work, collage, 'ready mades', etc. - are certainly relevant here. They are the classic modes of

'anarchic' discourse"232. Through recontextualizations, juxtaposition, and "the celebration of the abnormal and the forbidden" surrealists from the turn of the century onward have attempted to "disrupt and disorganize meaning" , a subversive act which calls into question society's claim to legitimacy. As the inheritors of Dadaism (via the

Yippies et. al.), punks embodied a lived rebellion against society through their rejection of consumer culture and conventional notions of attractiveness, taste, and propriety. This rebellion was signified most noticeably through attire, which was designed to be as shocking as possible, appropriating fetishwear, household items such as lavatory chains and safety pins, and garish makeup worn by both sexes, making faces into "sharply observed and meticulously executed studies in alienation"235; punks even re-appropriated symbols such as the swastika, which Hebdige concludes was worn to shock. In addition, punk dances such as the 'pogo' and 'the robot' blasted conventional notions of dance, and punk music rejected melody, harmony, and musical exceptionality (Johnny Rotten of the

Sex Pistols famously said "We want to be amateurs"); punk publications "demonstrated that it was not only clothes or music that could be immediately and cheaply produced from the limited resources at hand" , and celebrated impulsiveness and independence from both mainstream standards and resources.

Like the 1960s counterculture, however, the punks' use of style to signal dissidence was doomed to appropriation by consumer society. By the mid-1980s, punk style was readily available. Stuart Ewan writes in his insightful All Consuming Style, that

"[a]s punk became marketable style, it became its opposite. Initially a rejection of conformist fashions, and of the false status that they carry, its appropriation by [... ] the style market transforms it into an item of competitive consumption with an inflated

9"-t7 price" . Ewan quotes a young man who works for "Punky's Underground Fashions from London": Formerly, this youth says, punk clothes "had meaning. The spikes represented violence, fighting back with power. The chains and buckles represented how they felt like prisoners of their society... how they felt bound to something.... Most people... were very afraid of punks [...]. Nowadays most people think it is cute to dress a "little punky""z . Today, no one bats an eye at the sight of youths in chains and spikes sitting outside their local mall. "Since nothing is shocking, we can never challenge the precepts of mainstream society through an aesthetic that aims to jar passive spectators 9^Q out of their mindless habits" . While a "hardcore" punk subculture does still exist apart from commercialized renderings of it, it is only one of many possible subcultures through which youth may choose to express themselves; thus, its functionality as a rejection of society has been obliterated.

It is notable that members of the 1960s' counterculture were not unaware that their protest could become profit. Even "hip" businesses in the 1960s were subject to 67 disapproval: in 1966 the recently-opened Psychedelic Shop in Haight-Ashbury received a note saying "You're selling out the revolution. You're commercializing it. You're putting it on the market" . Rubin warned of "hip capitalists" in Do It!, saying,

"Revolution is profitable [... ] They take our symbols, drenched in blood from the streets and make them chic"241. Of course, the problem is that it was the counterculture that made the symbols chic; capitalists simply responded to (and manipulated) public demand.

However, within the large and oppositional counterculture of the 1960s, it was more possible to express one's individuality through aesthetic choices that did not rely on mainstream society: the transient lifestyles of many made the passing-on of possessions routine, styles were hip then that would be laughable now, allowing people to wear things they presently would not, and despite resistance, the proliferation of countercultural businesses provided goods through alternative means. Today, the smaller, less transient, less unified generations of youth will more easily find a rebellious aesthetic in traditional retail outlets; further, the commercialization of countercultural styles have severed them from their political roots, and much of today's "countercultural" youth likely see their stylistic self-expression as a rejection of "the mainstream" but not as an explicitly political act.

However, among some, consumption remains a point of political resistance. By purchasing second-hand or ethically produced products, consumers can signal their discontent with consumer-culture and capitalist exploitation. In Rebel Sell, the notion that "nonstandard acts of consumption" can be "politically radical" is discredited because, the authors contend, it is predicated on the faulty assumption that capitalism 68 demands conformity. While it is true that "rebel consumers" are unlikely to have a major impact on society, the idea should not be completely discarded. Firstly, it is one of the last bastions of two 1960s' radical notions: that one should live in accordance with one's values, and that one should, like the black students sitting-in at southern lunch counters, force the future by living in ir . Retail monoculture is problematic for many reasons besides the homogenization of culture , and is therefore a legitimate site of resistance.

Major chains like Wal-Mart have notorious labour-rights records, and destroy small businesses by undercutting their prices; large corporations are often prime beneficiaries of suburban expansion, thereby contributing to car-dependent lifestyles. Arguably, then, choosing to avoid chain stores and, more radically, to buy as ethically as possible, remains a moral act: put simply, ethical shopping is logical because if everyone did it, positive social change would result. Of course the problem is that most people are not able to. Ethical products tend to be expensive and time-consuming to acquire, and many people, especially those in suburban areas, may have no alternative to their local box stores.

Subjectivity and self-expression have been neutered not only through consumerism but by pop culture as a whole. What was once a rebellion against privatism and conformity has become what Niedzviecki calls the idea of "specialness". As he convincingly argues, today's youth are steeped in the notion that they are special, that they can achieve anything, and that their personal peccadilloes and interests are inherently

* Hal Niedzviecki reports that, in the United States, discount chain stores account for 50 percent of a bestselling album, 40 percent of a bestselling book, and more than 60 percent of a bestselling DVD. (p. 104) 69 valuable. The meteoric rise in popularity of shows like American Idol is a perfect example: each season, tens of thousands of hopeful performers - most of them talentless

— vie for recognition in the pop universe. "Each believes that he or she is a unique individual soon to be singled out and led to the altar of stardom"244. Through pop culture, and especially television, people have access to worlds far removed from their own;

Madame Bovary, fatally indebting herself in search of the life to which she feels she is entitled, could never have conceived of the opportunities today's youth have to purchase their desired selves. Anyone can look like any star they want, simply by picking up a celebrity magazine and then purchasing the appropriate products. Furthermore, contemporary pop culture seems accessible because the dominant myth is that every celebrity is simply a "normal individual" who through pluck and luck attained stardom; the American rags-to-riches story played out, courtesy of the proliferation of media, on a previously unimaginable scale. "Each and every manifestation of pop culture purports to be telling the story of how the individual transcends obstacles and the masses to earn recognition, success, happiness"245. This suspicion of "the masses" which first appeared as a reaction to 1950s conformity has become a belief that each individual is separate from the rest, resulting in a deeply ingrained scornfulness toward society as a whole.

Populism is dead, and in its place has arisen an insatiable thirst for individual distinction.

Originally, the opposition faced by the counterculture was socio-political; today, however, each individual feels that their personal trials and tribulations are the opposition

* Nothing could exemplify this better than US Weekly's section "Stars: They're Just Like Us!", which shows the Beautiful People doing their grocery shopping, putting gas in their cars and yelling at their kids, just like anyone. to be transcended. Subjectivity, once claimed as freedom from repressive social and religious mores, today means that everyone has a story, and everyone's story is special.

This is evident not only in North America's glut of talk-shows and reality television, but in the ever-expanding cybersphere:

Online diaries, blogs, and other similar variations on the theme of online confession/personal opinion have gone, like backyard wrestling, from being a faddish craze to a seemingly permanent part of life. They are our new anti-community communities, testament to the power of pop, the rise of the individual, and the strange belief that every time you pick your nose, someone else should know about it.

Indubitably, online communities serve important functions for many: people whose possibilities for communion with others like themselves are limited by stigma or inaccessibility may find solace and assistance in virtual communities. However, online forums for personal expression combined with a youth-centred culture have de- radicalized subjective experience. Today, there is nothing rebellious about Goethe's

Werther. He feels he has a profound talent for art? So do thousands of others to whom he can be connected instantly through the internet. Feeling alienated and burdened by consciousness? Any emo band will reflect his pain back to him. His angst, sense of uniqueness and desire for self-expressiveness would no longer set him apart from bourgeois society; it has become bourgeois society's bread and butter. The embrace of subjective experience embodied by Werther and other early Romantics has today been popularized by blogs which shamelessly chronicle the daily lives of thousands. Each one of those bloggers believes that their experiences and their expression of those experiences matters, and they believe this because people read about them and write back. The idea 71 of individuals bonded into communities through locality or interest has become an ever- expanding world of ersatz communities based on the individual desire to be recognized.

The decline of communities also has serious political consequences . The face-to- face recruiting and organizing deemed necessary by Freeman, Gitlin, and others is today nearly invisible. While every city and community will have charities, government agencies and activist groups committed to providing social services or pursuing social justice, these groups are not linked by any common program of social change. Certainly this trend is evident in universities: at York, for instance, students may set up a demonstration against "Israeli Apartheid" in Vari Hall with information and speakers; they may even draw pro-Israel students who counter-demonstrate. The event will be reported in the university paper, and perhaps a couple hundred students will pass by and briefly listen. Ultimately, however, this demonstration is by and for its participants, and has little effect on either their fellow students or the university. This is, in fact, a reflection of the normalization of protest, and the remarkable proliferation of causes in which today's youths can involve themselves; just as it is no longer possible to shock society, it is also nearly impossible to get its attention through reasoned discourse. Facing the gauntlet of booths offering membership in any number of clubs and organizations, students may find their choice overwhelming, or feel a limited sense of efficacy to produce meaningful change. In short, the vandals of the 1960s took the handles of both countercultural protest and institutional reform, and they have never been found since.

* This is chronicled in extensive detail by Robert D. Putnam in Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community The most consistently visible cause for protest in the past decade has been the anti-globalization movement, in which this generation of protesters plays the famous person's child: self-conscious, never fully in the spotlight, interesting only in relation to someone else. Perhaps this is because the 1960s have become North America's point of reference for the meaning of dissidence. Just as Baby Boomers had to work hard to distance themselves from the songs, stories and ideologies of the Old Left, today's protesters are searching for the bright edge of their parents' shadow. Nonetheless, the kids did stay in the picture; at first pundits and activists proclaimed that with the rise of the antiglobalization movement There Would Be Change. Hal Niedzviecki observes:

When the "Battle in Seattle" protest occurred in 1999 on the occ asion of a meeting of the secretive World Trade Organization, every thing from CNN to Adbusters magazine to a barrage of underground press zines and websites announced that here, at last, was a twenty-first century answer to the age of civil disobedience, flower power, and Aquarius. Here was the centre of genuine rebellion, perhaps even the great hope for a new flowering of true individuality. Not unlike the fervour of the sixties, today's anti-globalization movement pits the young against the ossified, lays claim to a moral high ground, and flirts with violence, danger, and martyrdom. Here is rebellion and dissent, not only possible but underway in our own lifetime. However, as we move further into the millennial age, this supposed flowering of civil disobedience seems 247 to be withering.

In Genoa, in 2001; in Quebec City, 2001 and in Gleneagles 2005, WTO and G8 summits drew thousands of protesters. Neither the media nor the public gave them the kind of serious attention that the student and antiwar protests of the 1960s received, although in

2005 an estimated three billion people watched Live8 248, when hundreds of musicians

' While the Iraq war initially drew massive crowds in protest - the first time a war was protested before it began - the war has since continued with surprisingly few displays of dissent. Although public opinion has turned decisively against the invasion, there are no Jerry Rubins stopping troop trains, no massive campus strikes, no attempts to exorcise the Pentagon. 73 around the world performed to raise awareness about global inequality, and we shall return to that presently. However, as one example of the Seattle coverage, a CNN story juxtaposes a photograph of 1960s protesters burning draft cards next to one of a young woman in braids surrounded by police in riot gear at the Seattle demonstrations; the thrust of the article is why now . In attempting to answer the question, several Boomers are interviewed including Todd Gitlin, who says "We are in the midst of a tremendous global revolution,... and the consequences are on a scale that are hitherto unprecedented". Tom

Hayden says, "It's this feeling of the loss of control over your own life or your job that ignites so many people"; and Dennis Hayes, the environmentalist who coordinated the first Earth Day in 1970 sees the protests as stemming from a feeling of "powerlessness".

That this assessment should come from three Boomer activists is fascinating: it is unlikely that any of them would have answered similarly in their youths. Then, against the powerlessness identified in the Port Huron Statement, young Boomers had a sense of possibility generated by their generational solidarity.

As we have seen, activism tends to occur in a climate of rising expectations as, for instance, the wealth and supposed moral righteousness of the United States made

Boomers susceptible to the image of civil rights protesters, whose struggle belied the country's virtue. Further, activism tends to be more prevalent amongst those who feel they have a good possibility of affecting change, as the wealthy, large generation of

Boomers did until their movement collapsed. Despite this, the WTO protests may well be a response to a feeling of powerlessness. Free trade and global inequality are not

74 straightforward issues. Although they are in a sense foreign policy issues, which have traditionally been the main stimulus of student activism250, it is not one issue but a complicated cluster that the anti-globalization movement seeks to address. While there is no such thing as a simple foreign policy issue, the face of some are plainer to read than others. In protesting "globalization", therefore, people may be objecting to specific policies, but they may also be spurred to attend protests by a general feeling that their lives are not within their control, and mysterious organizations like the WTO contribute to that feeling: the lollipop of the world, as our aforementioned 1960s student radical called it, is further from reach than ever. The apparent powerlessness of individuals facing a heretofore unseen revolution notwithstanding, the CNN article opens and closes with a twenty-three year old woman who says her life has been changed by attending the protest.

This, unfortunately, is not very likely. In McAdam's study of former civil rights activists, he uses the concepts of "conversion" and "alternation" to explain why some youths remained socially active while others did not. "Conversion is defined as a radical transformation of a person's life, including their self-conception, network of associations and larger worldview. Unlike conversion, alternation does not entail a radical break with the past or the construction of an entirely new self. This does not suggest that alternation is an insignificant social process"251. Specifically, it was the difficult conditions (which required a high degree of commitment to the project to endure) and the relationships formed between those involved in the Freedom Summer projects that made its

75 participants "more disposed and structurally more available for subsequent activism". By comparison, "for most movement participants, nothing in their experiences even hints of conversion or alternation" . For people who simply show up to a protest, and barring exceptional circumstances like getting beaten by police or falling in love, there is little chance that they will then engage in more comprehensive activism.

That is, unless an individual has decided to make being an activist part of who they are, because the image of activism appeals to them . "Activist" is today a possible choice of identity, alongside "skater", "grad student", "geek", etcetera, and as such it comes with a particular style. It often sounds something like this excerpt, taken from well-known anarchist activist and writer Ramor Ryan's account of the G8 protests in

Genoa:

Carlo Giuliani was twenty-three years old. A rebel. The papers belittled him, called him a "ne'er do well," a squatter. But we know him as a comrade and a revolutionary. He fought the paramilitary police bravely, fearlessly, pitting the little streets against the great. He was involved in the Zapata Social Center of Genoa. Carlo's death was not heroic, nor tragic. It was the consequence of his life, how he lived, how he resisted. Moments before he was shot in the face, Carlo probably felt the extraordinary rebel joy of this spontaneous uprising against power in the little side streets of Genoa. [... ] For the police, Carlo had to die. Now they must kill us, because we are beginning to really threaten their power. Carlo was 253

murdered. We are all Carlo .

Most certainly, however, we are not all Carlo. For those who never knew him or anyone like him, or are mildly suspicious of 'people like that', Ryan's account of the Genoa demonstrations may well be alienating: it makes no attempt to win over those outside

* This is the inverse of the counterculture: rather than embracing an image as a form of rebellion, rebellion is embraced as an image - a natural product of the original synthesis. radical circles, assuming in its language a sympathetic reader. The article's high- adrenaline, urgent tone communicates the author's experience, persuading the reader with the rebel romance of the moment; the familiar "better to burn out", "rock, roll and resistance will never die" sentiment is clear. Interestingly, Ryan in his article criticizes the media for over-reporting the violence, claiming the media fabricated bomb scares "to dissuade protesters from coming and criminalize those who did". While the media are notorious bloodhounds , and the possibility of faulty information (deliberate or otherwise) is not to be discounted, Ryan's objections to the media's fascination with violence are interesting in light of his own fascination with violence. The article is intended to depict the unprovoked brutality of the police, yet one cannot but suspect that the author is reveling in describing "The Siege of Genoa", or "The Ghost of Pinochet".

The language of violent resistance is a throbbing vein through the article, and the rebel

image its skin. Young people who do not gravitate to the aesthetic of love and struggle -

or the "activist" style of army pants, unshaven women, and bandanas - will be less likely to pursue an activist lifestyle or identity.

Those who do are seeking the same community and recognition as earlier

activists, but the culture is radically different in this era of mass media. As Niedzviecki

notes, "[w]hen activists try to get the word out about the cause on their own, using

websites, videos, 'zines, and pirate radio, the line between chronicling dissent and using

Niedzviecki also notes that "there is very little discussion of the substance of anti-globalization claims, amid the detailed analysis of troop movements, tear gas, and which parts of the summit fence have been penetrated" (p.217) 77 one's status as protester to enter the pop world and further an Fm-special agenda is a thin one"254. Niedzviecki quotes a girl who attended the Quebec City protests: "Going to

Quebec City was, without a doubt, the craziest, most dangerous, most fun experience I've ever had"255. This depiction is not meant to diminish the many useful forms of social engagement in which people do participate, nor even the desire to protest in the streets, as the search for identity (even through aesthetics) does not preclude the possibility of positive results. Nor should Ryan's quote be discounted as irrelevant: for those within or sympathetic to the movement, this article and others like it serve an important cohesive function, for they, like all literature, have the potential to make allies of strangers. The question is how powerful the alliances will be.

The 2005 Live8 campaign is an interesting case in point. Equally fueled by celebrity and public goodwill, the project was explicitly consciousness-raising. It aimed to bring awareness to problems of global inequality and gather signees to a petition to the world leaders attending the summit. As organizer Bob Geldof writes on the Live8 website: "This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at

G8 an end to poverty". While there is no doubt that bringing global awareness to the problem of poverty, or to the existence of the G8 and WTO are moral aims, the problem is that Geldof s "ordinary people" were not offered the chance to grasp anything more tangible than a white wristband. They watched a concert with a conscience. Today, if one wants to be "part of the campaign", one can provide an email address to the beautiful

78 Live8 website adorned with innumerable hands reaching into a clear blue sky; they will

"contact you during 2006 with important email requests on what YOU can do in 2 minutes to keep our leaders to promises that could transform millions of lives forever.

This stuff works - Please keep up the pressure". As it is presently 2008, the "join us" button is now defunct. Meanwhile, the "cause" of poverty has been more closely aligned with celebrities like Bono, who kindly tells us that "It is this movement of church people and trade unionists, soccer moms and student activists, that will carry the spirit of Live 8 on. It is this movement, not rock stars, that will make it untenable in the future to break promises to the most vulnerable people on this planet"256. While this is undoubtedly true, it is a difficult dynamic for a rock star to be telling us so. Like the rest of pop culture, social activism has become something outside of our immediate experiences, represented by famous strangers offering us a chance to be like them.

Apart from predilections, there are the problems of time and money. Later

Boomers, GenXers and the earliest Millennials were not born into anything like the wealth of the postwar babies. In her wry and well-researched book on her generation,

GenXer Tamara Draut chronicles the various socio-economic obstacles GenXers experience. Firstly, [according to an analysis of U.S. Department of Education survey data, today three quarters of full-time college students are holding down jobs. [... ]

Nearly half of them work twenty-five hours or more a week"257. While it is arguably beneficial for students to work part-time, twenty-five hours a week leaves almost no time for relaxation, let alone activism. Further, the "student" identity that helped spread activism among the youth in the 1960s has today been weakened both by work which keeps students off-campus a greater portion of the time, and by the fact that some form of post-secondary education is now required for more jobs than previously. The necessity for youths to attend college or university combined with rising tuition fees have resulted in far more students carrying debt, particularly student loans and high-interest credit card debt. In America, the median consumer debt (which accounts for all debt other than mortgages) for people under thirty-five tripled between 1983 and 2001 . In Canada the trend is similar: StatsCan reports that student loan debt rose from $10,800 in 1990 to

19,000 in 2000259. The pressure to get a career, and the increasing demands of those careers, also account for GenXers' relative ignorance about institutional politics. Draut reports that "[o]n any number of indicators - newspaper readership, knowledge about news and politics, or talking about current events with friends - Generation Xers and the

Millennials are less informed and engaged than the older generations" . This is not an inherently generational dynamic: Putnam has shown that from 1940 to 1960 youths were at least as well-informed as their elders . The main reason GenXers cited for their lack of interest was lack of time, which follows from the fact that young adults today are

"working longer hours for less money than their parents did at the same age" .

Space unfortunately prohibits going into detail about the factors influencing

GenX's political engagement, but one in particular must be mentioned: Draut found that members of her generation do not view their experiences as shared ones . Howe and

Strauss, explaining perceived membership in a generation, have recorded that "[i]n the late '70s, the media paid almost no attention to Gen Xers who, come their early-'90s discovery, often denied that there was such a thing as Gen X"264. Compared with the wealth and sense of generational uniqueness that helped spur the Boomers to activism,

Generation X's economic struggle and lack of generational identity could easily account for their moribund political and dissident cultures. Howe and Strauss contend that the

Millennials - raised in a child-centred culture, wealthy, numerically large and precociously self-aware of their generational distinctness - will change society for the better. However, their book was written when Hanson was popular and the Dow Jones was only going up; eight years later pop culture is not as innocent as it was (nor was it ever as innocent as the authors contend), and the stock market not nearly as stable.

Nonetheless, perhaps this newest generation will reverse the trends of political disengagement begun in the 1960s, although many factors will determine what form that engagement might take.

Part 6 - Nightingales in the Dark

"He who writes to himself writes to an eternal public" ~ Emerson

If one factor in the dormant state of social activism is a perceived lack of shared experiences, then perhaps literature can be of some assistance. Literature, as mentioned in the introduction, purposefully provides insight into the society that produced it; while many anthropological and sociological observations can be made from reading blogs, online diaries and so forth, the writers themselves are often more the conduit than the

81 architect of these insights. Also, online forms are not narratives in any real sense - there may be continuity from day to day, but as there is no foreseeable end and the events are constantly occurring, there is no plot; it is ticker-tape existence, perpetually created and forgotten^. In contrast, literature both connects contemporary audiences to their world, and future audiences to their past. While historical and philosophical works may serve similar functions, such forms "neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as [literature] doth" . So many defences of and arguments for literature have been made over the centuries that our present forum would not begin to contain them; our discussion, however, leads us to the consideration of two forms in particular: the autobiographical and the epistolary. Since our post-modern era holds as its only truth that nothing is objectively true, we must look to subjective thoughts and experiences to make sense of existence while avoiding solipsism and a sense of entitlement about our perceptions. If, as Aristotle suggested, history is particular and literature general, autobiographical forms are a compromise that use the universalizing potential of literature to narrate a particular history; epistolary literature expands on this idea because the form addresses the concept of the individual as inherently connected to society. Both autobiographical and epistolary forms present unique possibilities for ethical discourse

Perhaps we can say that online writings are the raw materials mined from life, and literature the refined product - but this leads us into the question of the use of language itself, and what constitutes "good writing", which is far beyond the scope of this paper. * Some might argue that the internet is a better vessel to posterity than books, which so easily go out of print. There is some validity to this point in the present age, when far more books are published than remain on bookstore shelves for a meaningful length of time. However, though it is far too soon to tell for certain, it seems unlikely that centuries from now people will be reading the same online diaries they are reading today. This brings us back to the fact that online writings are primarily interesting because they are contemporary, usually appealing to readers because they can connect to the writer through shared culture or experiences. 82 and practice in society by placing the quest for self-knowledge in the context of the writer's history and community, using subjective experience not just to reify one's self but to communicate with others.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the emerging novel form was widely distrusted by both religious and literary communities. Puritan morality of the time regarded fiction as sinful lies, and literary critics denigrated novels for their lack of authenticity. Writers were aware of this and worked to counter the novel's negative image, often by framing fictitious narratives as autobiography or "real" collections of letters. However, it was not only the attempt to evade scandal that midwifed these forms: the medieval Christian ritual of confession "has played an important role in the unfolding of the Western literary tradition" . As Susan Gallagher writes in her "Genealogy of

Confession", "James Olney, the architect of the modern study of autobiography, says that autobiography as a literary mode evolved from autobiography as a confessional act, and that the secular autobiography, epitomized in Rousseau's Confessions, eventually replaced the spiritual autobiography" . Literary theorist Roy Pascal confirms this, asserting that the autobiographical form "owed much to the Christian confessional, not simply as a relieving confession of sin, but as a means to reach an objective relationship to oneself268. Thus we can see that in "the West", the project of self-knowledge is historically tied to the literary self-creation we now call autobiography. Pascal contends that "[t]rue autobiography can be written only by men and women pledged to their innermost selves" and that "self-knowledge" is "a primary motive for the writer" .

83 The very form, therefore, can be said to have an ethical basis, as originally it was a means of determining one's relationship to God and later, to oneself.

The role of ethics in contemporary "Western" society has been complicated by their postwar deconstruction by critical schools from semiotics to feminism to psychoanalysis. Such criticism holds that in the 20 century, "Enlightenment leftovers" such as "the universal subject" and "the traditional concept of self have proven to be radically inadequate, and that ethics is heavily implicated in the various crimes committed on behalf of this subj ect.

For it was in the discourse of ethics - was it not? - that the subject, grossly flourishing in all its pretheoretical arrogance, claimed an undisturbed mastery over itself and indeed the entire world by claiming to base its judgments and actions on the dictates of universal law. According to this account, whenever someone claimed to be acting on "the ethical imperative" or "the moral law", they were in fact rendering mystical and grand their own private interests or desires. Making claims of this sort, one might even persuade oneself that one's interests were globally necessary: ethics could be the particular way in which people preserved a good conscience while overriding or delegitimating the claims of others. Ethics thus became for many the proper name of power, hypocrisy, and unreality.272

The Weather Underground is a clear example of the abuse of ethics; for them, a poorly elaborated but deeply felt morality dictated violent actions. The most current example of the cynical use of ethical discourse is the United States' occupation of Iraq. The "ethical" project of bringing democracy to Iraq is, of course, simply the rhetoric employed to ease the conscience of the populace, and it has proven remarkably effective; ethics are a powerful tool for such legitimation because human beings appear to have an innate desire for moral systems, preferring that power be legitimated by right rather than might.

Michel Foucault has been one of the most outspoken critics of such a paradigm. For him, 84 "ethics was a typical humanistic soap bubble whose reality was the relentlessly productive force of various discursive and disciplinary regimes"273. Perhaps as a result of their deconstruction, critical concern with ethics has experienced a resurgence since the

1990s, in works from Slavoj Zizek to a new Spinoza Reader to feminist theorist Luce

Irigaray274.

Perhaps this renaissance in ethical discourse is because of its increasingly blatant misuse, and this misuse demands that ethics be interrogated and reclaimed. We do away with ethics at our peril, for at "the decentered center of ethics [is] concern for "the other""275. Ethics are the means by which the individual is compelled to look beyond himself and toward the possibility of principles that are in some way "more fundamental" than the necessarily unique and contingent needs of any one person. It is this universal property inherent to ethics than makes them dangerous; it is also what makes them necessary. While the postmodern era has exposed their potential hazards, it is imperative that the idea of ethics not be entirely destroyed by the ascendant power of the individual as "freed" from the bonds of impossible and irrational claims to objective truth. For even after all totalizing systems are destroyed, the individual will still be obliged to make decisions, and these decisions follow "a prior, often silent and even

977 unacknowledged choice of principles" . If, as Foucault's panopticon model of power suggests, power is implicit in every structure of our existences, then how can we hope to act without reproducing these power structures? James O'Rourke, in his discussion of the ethics of the confessional mode of literature suggests that "[p]ower really is everywhere, and how we respond to that reality is ethics" (197). Ethics, then, can be seen as 85 inextricable from action: every choice we make about who to be or how to act is an expression of ethics. Yet most people of the present age (the religious being an obvious exception) possess no code or doctrine to guide them. Cut off from universal principles and doctrines, from the possibility of empirical truth, how can we learn to relate to ourselves and the world in an ethical way?

This dilemma has led to an increasing interest in the place of subjectivity within the social sciences. In their 2000 article on autoethnography, Carolyn Ellis and her partner Arthur P. Bochner explore the methods and benefits of using personal narrative and self-reflexivity in social science discourse. Written in the first person almost as a short story, part of the article is a lecture Bochner gave and Ellis records in which he explains how "in the late 1970s Pie] began to feel uneasy about the political, philosophical, ethical and ideological foundations of social science research" , on account of its claim to empiricism. The article goes on to depict and explain the benefits of "narrative as a mode of inquiry" , which challenges and arguably strengthens the social sciences by acknowledging the subjectivity of researchers. Bochner asserts that

"[w]hen the narrator is the investigator, to a certain extent she is always asking what it is right to do and good to be", making "personal narrative [... ] moral work and ethical practice" . Hyppolite Adolphe Taine, writing in 1867, had a similar idea:

If there are any writings in which politics and dogma are full of life, it is in the eloquent discourses of the pulpit and the tribune, memoirs, unrestrained confessions; and all this belongs to literature [... ] it is then chiefly by the study of literatures that one may construct a moral history, and advance 281 toward the knowledge of psychological laws, from which events spring.

86 For Taine as for Bochner, subjectivity is not seen as oppositional to society but rather as its foundation. If individuals better understand themselves, they argue, society can be improved. Better than strict "dogma" is "unrestrained confession", by which humans may develop a more thorough understanding of their minds and the ideologies they wish to propagate; in the social sciences, a recognition of subjectivity responds to the crisis of empiricism while suggesting a possible course for ethical action in response.

It should be mentioned that the ethics of autobiographical forms are not unambiguous either in the social sciences or literature. To the concern that personal narratives are "reflective of [our] culture of confession and victimization", playing into this society's propensity to make spectacle of the suffering of others, Bochner replies that there is no general principle by which to judge self-narratives. Each must be considered on its own merits. Often such narratives are a source of self-empowerment used by the writer as a means to "gain agency through testimony"2 2, and in the social sciences, as in literature, personal narratives can provide a forum for marginalized populations to participate in society. A distinction must be made, however, between the quest for self- knowledge and the desire for self-expression and recognition. "Between 1945 and 1980, more than five thousand autobiographies were published in the U.S. and the subsequent two decades have witnessed a rising tide of textual self-revelation"2 3. In a society devoted to the notion of individuality and self-definition, to the inherent value of individual experience, it is reasonable to be suspicious of such a trend. James Frey's

2003 book A Million Little Pieces can provide a useful case study about the putative

87 ethics and usefulness of autobiographical forms. This "memoir" caused debate in the literary community when it was discovered that Frey had greatly embellished his tales of alcohol and drag dependency. The first noteworthy element of the scandal is that Frey originally tried to sell the book as a novel to seventeen publishers, but it wasn't until his agent suggested he re-package it as a memoir that Frey sold his work. It went on to be praised by Oprah Winfrey, become a favorite with the self-help industry, and sell over three million copies284. Why would the same book be more valuable as "reality" than as fiction? Frey, in his apology for misleading the public, offers a possible answer. He claims that the book's central message is "that drug addiction and alcoholism can be overcome, and there is always a path to redemption if you fight for it". Originally, he says, he did not think about whether he was writing fiction or non-fiction; he knew only that he wanted to use his experiences to help "change lives".

Clearly, however, publishers believed that Frey's story would be more valuable to the public if they could directly identify with the author as a real person, not a fictitious character. This notion is born of venerable ancestry: St. Augustine, widely held to be the

forefather of the confessional mode, was first impelled to religious life by a true

conversion tale written by Ponticianus; arguably, "[p]art of the emotional force for

Augustine [...] is that they are true events concerning known individuals285. Yet literary

scholar Michael Bell contends that it is not only the "truth" of the story that affects

Augustine so strongly, but that the tale's "emotional efficacy arises from what it has in

common with fiction" . By this logic, then, it is a combination of the universality of

88 literature with the specificity of personal narrative that makes autobiographical forms powerful. The outrage over Frey's deceit suggests that his readers were drawn to the book more out of prurient interests than by the emotional force of his story. Perhaps if an autobiographical work is interesting only because it gives readers a sense of peering through the keyhole into a stranger's world, it should not be considered "literature" in the same sense as works that use a personal narrative to transmit a culturally relevant story.

Works like Frey's may more accurately be placed in the category of self-help literature: for people dealing with a specific issue, the testimony of others who have been in a similar position can certainly be helpful, but their limited scope generally diminishes their potential to effect a person's ethical codes.

A related example is the newly popular genre of "Chick Lit", much of which is directly or loosely autobiographical.* These books are explicitly directed at women with expendable income, almost always centred on issues of love, commitment, career, and the possibilities of family. The genre has drawn criticism for its superficiality and self- indulgence, and been defended both as pleasant entertainment and as honest expressions of a certain population. Particularly those dealing with the tribulations of motherhood have been attacked for their class-bias and praised for offering support to women who find the books appealing because they recognize themselves in the protagonists. One defining feature of autobiographical Chick Lit is its lack of concern with politics: perhaps because it is a genre spawned by GenX, which as we have seen is remarkably apolitical

* Rebecca Eckler and Sophie Kinsella are two popular examples. 89 and also because of the protagonists' social class. It is literature which uncritically expresses its society, and as such is unlikely to serve as a call to ethical conduct. Such works are not concerned with identity, but rather give their readers "a persona to aspire to", as Leah McLaren explains in her review of new "Literary It Girl" Sloane Crosley's first collection of nonfiction. McLaren explains why: "Because they have all the same problems the rest of us do in our 20s and 30s, except on them all the angst, hangovers, neuroses and one-night stands are somehow cute" . Even more than Frey's readers, some of whom may have been drawn by compassion or curiousity, Chick Lit appeals to those who share particular values and lifestyles.

It is difficult to determine in what ways autobiographical Chick Lit differs from, for instance, a book like On the Road. While Kerouac was indeed concerned with both identity and society, and while his work has likely impelled readers from his generation onward to reject society and pursue authentic meaning and self-knowledge, many readers must simply have been romanced by Kerouac's fascinating characters and the lifestyle they embodied, whose image compelled emulation. With other personal narratives the ethics are clearer: works like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, for instance, allows

Nafisi to testify to the guilt she feels for her society's Islamic Revolution, while using her subjectivity as resistance against the tyrannical ideology that has robbed her and her students of their freedom. Orwell's political memoirs answer Taine's desire for a history reified through the lived experience of individuals, whose subjective response to political events oppose the ideological pieties and inaccuracies of journalism as well as the over- simplification and temptation to sentimentality presented by much literature. Barbara

Foley has studied testimony in Holocaust narratives; in her view, by rejecting the possibility of an all-encompassing narrative that will illuminate the totality of a devastating historical event, memoirs provide an ethical combination of historical re construction and personal exploration, helping both author and reader to better understand the event. This historical reconstruction can serve valuable functions even outside of societies experiencing significant political turmoil: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, for instance, a classic bildungsroman (except that its protagonist is female), chronicles the upbringing of girls in early twentieth century France, yet in so doing documents the social conditions of de Beauvoir's class, gender, and wider society. A more recent example is

Gail Scott's Heroine, which problematizes image as it relates to activism by depicting the role of radical women in 1970s Montreal, using the personal voice to interrogate the relationship between identity, ideology, and political engagement. Clearly, the ethics of literary autobiographies, like those in the social sciences, must be judged on individual merits. For Harpham, "ethics is [... ] the point at which literature intersects with theory, the point at which literature becomes conceptually interesting and theory becomes humanized. Within ethical theory, narrative serves as the necessary "example", with all the possibilities of servility, deflection, deformation, and insubordination that role implies"289. Books rarely spark social movements (Goethe's Werther is a possible exception) - as Freeman tells us, "people must be organized"290 - but literature can enhance people's understanding of themselves and their society, contributing to the formation of the ideals and values upon which each individual acts. 91 Literature is the only form of mass communication primarily produced and received in solitude, yet its function, like ethics, is to connect human beings to one another and foster understanding between them. Harpham asserts that "[literature contributes to "ethical" understanding by holding the mirror up to the community and the individual so they can judge themselves, promoting explanatory models that help make sense of the diversity of life, and imagining the "unity" that might be desirable in a human life"291. In the absence of tangible communities based on locality, identity, culture or creed, the act of imagining what kind of community one desires is a starting point for creating that community. The existentialist idea that each person is responsible for choosing her actions deeply influenced the Baby Boom generation; in attempting to live their revolution, they identified the individual as the primary site of resistance and dissent. Nonetheless, youth in the 1960s had several "myths" that helped shape the narratives they told themselves about their identities and actions: students, for instance, were mobilized by their collective sense of the universities' injustice, a narrative widely promulgated through increasingly frequent demonstrations and media coverage thereof.

In another example, Yippies influenced youths' ideas about their society and themselves, but the actions they chose were modeled after an image they received through the same medium they receive advertising and entertainment - Yippies embodied an ideal of an identity that could be approximated by adopting certain styles of dress, speech and thought. In both cases, however, there was a collectively held narrative within youth culture that influenced how individuals acted and interpreted their world. Today, there is no such common narrative, except, as Niedzviecki suggests, "specialness", and the belief 92 that an authentic identity is one built in opposition to "mass society"; the myth of

(youthful) rebellion is embedded in music and clothing. With no material or ideological movement to join, activism, like any other act, is undertaken by individuals for individual reasons. There is no way to disentangle identity and political engagement for the middle- class; in the public yet intimate arena of literature, the relationship between politics and identity can be honestly engaged and hence navigated more effectively. Even in the age of the individual, where personality and personal accomplishment are everywhere celebrated, the actual individual remains a necessary and worthy subject. Ethics and literature ask us to examine who we are in order to understand why we act how we do, and then to consciously choose what the best courses of action might be.

"The end of a postal epoch is doubtless also the end of literature" ~ Derrida

While Derrida's pronouncement should arguably not be taken literally, it does highlight the interconnectedness of epistolarity and literature: the growing popularity of letter writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries parallels the rise of the novel form, and as we saw above, both autobiographical and epistolary forms contributed to societal acceptance of the novel. Life writing theorist Marlene Kadar contends that

"epistolary literature is a legitimate and necessary function of- or even a step in our progressive consideration of- life writing" . This is due firstly to the fact that both genres were originally a response to unfavourable opinions of novels, and secondly because epistolary works, like autobiographical ones, are particularly concerned with identity and psychology. Epistolary scholar Janet Gurkin Airman notes that epistolary 93 literature's closest formal affinities are with the diary novel, memoir novel, and theatrical dialogue293.

What sets epistolary literature apart from these other genres, and makes it particularly salient to our discussion, is its historical relationship to radical thought, philosophical and moral questioning, and social criticism. "Sartre associates the open

(epistolary) literature of the 18th C with "doubt, refusal, criticism, and contestation""294.

That letters have, from Ovid onward, carried women's otherwise unheard voices into the public sphere accounts for some of the radical connotations of epistolary literature: as early as the fifth century, Popes called on noblewomen to "fight against heresy, mediate disputes, and influence their husbands through letters"295. Also, the genre's concern with romantic love, particularly transgressive love, associates epistolarity with the potential for social destabilization through unsanctioned individual feelings and actions. Finally, the letter form has been used since the middle ages as a forum for social commentary. "Giles

Constable observes the extensive use of letters to disseminate news and ideas and argues that it is almost impossible to make a distinction between public and private letters during the medieval period since medieval authors were always aware that they addressed multiple audiences" . Thus, centuries before the advent of "counterculture", epistolary literature was contributing to social criticism and dissent by presenting political observations through the lens of subjective perceptions and emotions.

Problems of identity are exacerbated by the existence of choice. When one's actions and thoughts are not prescribed by doctrine, law, or social mores, self-creation becomes more necessary, and is necessarily difficult. Arguably, the middle-class is most susceptible to 94 problems of identity-formation because unlike either the very wealthy, who are defined by not having to work, or the working-class, who have traditionally been defined by having to perform manual labour , the middle-class identity is not directly a product of work. While clearly certain types of work are associated with the middle-class, these jobs are various in nature and can be chosen on the basis of an individual's predilections and abilities. Goethe's

Werther, for instance, was not required to be a lawyer: deemed suitable for the job because of his education and connections, his dilemma (and that of Romantic youths for centuries to come) is that he loathes his class and the identity he is expected to assume. For of course what one can choose is determined by conditions outside an individual's control; thus,

Werther's personal desires and the demands of his society are at irreconcilable odds. His letters, then, allow him to construct and express the identity he desires, in opposition to the identity foisted on him by society:

What I told you recently about painting is certainly true of literature too. The point is that one should recognize what is excellent and dare express it, and that is, of course, saying a great deal in a few words. I experienced a scene today which would yield the most beautiful idyll in the world if it could be told accurately; but why talk of poetry, scene, idyll? Must we be eternally tinkering when we are to experience a natural phenomenon?297

These beliefs, stated at the very beginning of the book, determine the course of action

Werther takes: he lives out his beliefs both that one must "dare express" subjective experience of the world, and his attendant despair at the impossibility of doing the world justice through artistic renderings. His letters, and language itself, are set up as fundamentally inadequate, a recurring theme in epistolary literature. The letter form,

* Today working-class jobs are increasingly in low-paying retail or service positions, as manufacturing and resource-extraction industries dwindle. 95 however, "offers the widest scope for self-revelation" . What Werther has previously written to his friend is his certainty that artists (and lovers) must burst the "dams and ditches"299 of civilization if great art (or great love) is to exist, and this is what he attempts to do. The identity he creates and reveals through his letters - a refugee from bourgeois society, a tormented artist whose only work is an impossible love - gives form to his life, and makes his death necessary to complete the work of art that is himself. The only record of his masterpiece, however, is an imperfect one: his letters, in which a self that found no expression through work, love, or art, makes an indelible impression.

In The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Derrida probes the interconnectivity of psychology, identity, society and letters. Like Werther, the speaker in

Derrida's work finds limited possibilities for self-expression through the letter ("the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature itself'3Q0). Derrida's concern with "proximity and distancing"301 is depicted through envois to his unnamed lover, which make clear both the necessity and inadequacy of letters. In his description of the work he will compose on

"psychoanalysis or philosophy operating since, on the basis of'th e posts" , Derrida reassures his confidante/lover by saying "We are the card, if you will, and as such, accountable, but they will seek in vain, they will never find us in it"303. Through the

alignment of the individual, or ego, with the postal principle, or letters, Derrida shows that the ego, like the letter, is an imperfect vessel defined by the distance between itself and

others, the "back and forth"304. The absence that compels the letter is the "reality principle, the most external necessity, all my impotence"305, which, following Freud, forces the ego into existence. Through their depiction of self-creation, letters can demonstrate the 96 degree to which our self-knowledge and our ability to communicate is contingent and limited, while representing the necessity to bridge the distance between ourselves and others. This is an ethical project similar to the destabilizing of objectivity accomplished by personal narratives: epistolarity signifies the fundamental inadequacies of what we can know, undercutting claims to "truth" which, while always meant to better society, in the case of ideology are inevitably dangerous.

A more literal connection between politics and subjectivity can be seen in epistolary works which take society or social upheavals as their subject. In her book

Romantic Correspondence, Mary Favret states that "[i]n the mind of late 18th C Europe, the letter fused the world of epistolary romance, the domestic tragedies of Clarrissa or

Julie with the world of political revolution"306. Such "domestic tragedies" were already concerned with questions of class, morality, and social stability, which in literature is often aligned with female sexuality. The epistolary form frequently depicts sexual, or at least romantic activities, and while the story may end tragically, the form necessarily elicits a type of sympathy with the character's situation. In the eighteenth century, particularly in France and England, the sentimental novel was widely perceived as aiding and abetting revolution. Seduction, as depicted by extravagant displays of emotion recorded in impassioned correspondence, was seen to undermine the domestic trust and fidelity which form the discipline of social life. "The plot of unfolding revolution was

[...] commonly understood by contemporaries as a plot of seduction (frequently across class lines); so it was that the 'novel of sensibility' came to serve as such an important narrative matrix in the period" . In granting primacy to the emotions and their expression, the epistolary form embodies the potential for radical subject matter to be intimately explored.

One of the foremost examples of the revolutionary possibilities of the epistolary novel is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1761 novel La Nouvelle Helo'ise: Rousseau's protagonist Julie has a willing affair and becomes pregnant; after a miscarriage she is reinstated in society through marriage with her father's choice of suitor. On her deathbed, however, Julie pens a letter proclaiming her undying passion for her former lover.

"Reasserting at the last moment the revolutionary, disruptive potential of female sexuality and its associated epistolarity, Julie's last love-letter in effect entirely overturns the carefully reconstructed fiction of the power of patriarchal social order, revealing all its contracts, premised on the fiat of the father, to be empty"308 *. Indeed in 1791 Edmund

Burke vilified Rousseau's seminal novel for inciting servants to betray their masters and thereby opening the floodgates for social upheaval of every sort: "Striking not just at the class system but at the roots of the patriarchal family (most especially at the security of the patrilineal inheritance), Rousseau's plot of ideological seduction struck, by extension, at the State"309. La Nouvelle Helo'ise spawned a plethora of novels in response, both affirming and vehemently countering Rousseau's position. In the backlash to the French and American Revolutions, and the rise of Napoleon, writers such as Jane Austen and Sir

Walter Scott attempted to erase forms associated with the plot of sensibility, partiqularly the epistolary novel , although Favret has convincingly argued that Austen uses the post

I would argue that Rousseau is showing social contracts to be both empty and necessary: Julie is the sacrificial lamb affirming the necessity for humans to restrain their natural impulses in order for civilization to function. 98 to critique and mock bureaucracy . It has been postulated that the rapid decline in popularity of the epistolary narrative around 1790 was in large part a result of the problematic political resonances of the form.312

Beyond expressions of female sexuality, the epistolary form was explicitly aligned with revolution due to its role in Europe during the French Revolution. Favret reports that Helen Maria Williams' Letters from France were some of the first eye-witness accounts of the Revolution and were widely published in the British press .

Fascinated with the "spectacle" of the Revolution, Williams "aims to animate her readers with feeling rather than persuade them with facts and information"314. In his history of the Romantic movement, Schenk notes that "the art of letter writing was enlivened and enriched by the Romantics", whose "literary exchange on an international level [...] helped transform Romanticism into a European intellectual movement" . Thus letter- writing, long a forum for public discourse, became explicitly associated with the

Romantic belief in the primacy of subjectivity, containing within it the Romantic notion of the destabilization of power through subjectivity which existed into the 1960s. Another early example of the expression of internalized experience as political and social history can also be seen in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, in which Wollstonecraft revises Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Wollstonecraft "socializes

[Rousseau's] solipsistic imaginings by inscribing them within the form of a letter to a friend"316. Wollstonecraft's letters make explicit the political relevance of imagination, for it is the human mind's "power to envision a new form of society" which compels her letters. Wollstonecraft's personal narrative is placed in the domain of social criticism by the epistolary form, which asks that subjective perceptions be considered as the foundations of society.

Epistolary literature, both fiction and nonfiction, is particularly suited to question the relationship between society and individuals firstly because letters are intimate expressions of individual minds which are transmitted through the public infrastructure of the post. In addition, as Sedlack notes, in the middle ages women could "commit many things to letters which it would be shameful to express openly in public" ; the epistolary genre is "receptive to the demands of female modesty yet possesses a potent ability to attract an audience, [and] thus rejects a dichotomous gendering of public (masculine) and

Tin private (feminine) spheres" . Furthermore, the development of the form is tied to the late-seventeenth century trend of publishing Letters to the Editor in periodicals. Some periodicals were devoted to political discussion, and opponents would verbally duel in ongoing arguments. From these dialogues evolved question-and-answer periodicals where readers were given the opportunity to write in with questions of any kind.

"Originally such letters related a decisive event or a train of events in a person's life which then served as a text for the editor to draw his moral and instruct his readers on how to behave in human society"320. Over time the letters became increasingly personal, and the writers exposed more of their thoughts and emotions, "went further in characterizing himself, so that a full-fledged epistolary story emerged" . These genuine letters were increasingly replaced by invented ones describing situations which were both realistic and dramatic, and usually containing an element of scandal which would both titillate and instruct the periodicals' mainly youthful audience. Thus the Letter to the 100 Editor further aligned epistolarity with matters of social conduct and romantic love, and explicitly recognized these subjects as matters of social importance by placing them in the domain of public discourse.

Finally, the epistle foregrounds questions of identity formation as a social process because "[t]he epistolary experience, as distinguished from the autobiographical, is a reciprocal one"322. In a fascinating study of the correspondence between Goethe and

Schiller, Margaretmary Daley extends Airman's analysis of the intersubjectivity fostered by epistolary fiction , and applies it to nonfiction using the idea of "epistolary distance"324:

Through epistolary distance each author responds to the other and in so doing gains distance from himself, sees himself and his writing, as it were, in a mirror, yet a special kind of mirror capable of influencing and altering that which it reflects, capable of bringing an unclear reflection into focus, capable of turning opposition into self-knowledge. 325

As in The Post Card, the act of breaching physical distance compels self-creation on the part of the writer. Daley shows the importance of epistolary exchange both to Goethe and

Schiller's artistic creations, and to their self-knowledge; in his letters, Goethe clearly expresses his belief that "only through dialogue with the other has he been able to discover his own nature, his own self 2 . Daley's study provides significant insight into the importance of others in the process of self-creation, showing it to be a reciprocal process between the self and others; it also asserts the importance of dialectics to artistic development. If we think back to the "rap sessions" pursued by radicals in the 1960s as a vehicle for self-knowledge, the difference between epistolary self-creation and public self- creation is clear: the "rap session" does not provide the "author", or. speaker, the

101 opportunity to assess his own self-creation - his perceptions are utterly subject to the judgment of the group, placing the emphasis of the public/private self-creation on the public aspect, which then determines the form the speaker's self-creation will take. In letters, however, the author is the primary reader; her letters project the self into an external realm which is visible to the writer, allowing her to place judgment on herself which is then mediated by the judgment of others. Through responses to the letters, "the literary self or subject [may] perceive itself as object but not objectively"327. In the act of writing, the correspondent gains distance not only from others but from himself, while simultaneously recognizing that self as contingent on the perceptions of others and expressed through interaction with them.

In postwar North America, an era of unprecedented withdrawal from public life, the epistolary form's collapse of public/private boundaries was utilized by the Beat writers as a form of political engagement. The Beats, of course, became famous for their opposition to the dominant cultural values of their era, and their use of personal experience to signify their rebellion. In his study of Beat letters, Oliver Harris contends that Ginsberg and Kerouac's letters were a response to economic, cultural and social marginality. "Private letter exchanges always implicate technologies and economies of communication and desire at work in the wider social body"; thus "[fjor these undesirables denied voice or place by Cold War discourses, the letter embodied postwar

"IOC

American dreams of an alternative personal and social space" . Arguably these dreams . were not born in the postwar period, but are inherent to the existence of America itself and found a peculiarly individualistic expression in postwar society. Harris notes, 102 however, that in the age of mass media, the Beat's use of "a near-universal form of personal communication through which to recognize how the universal is communicated by the personal" is informed by nostalgia and the Beats' veneration of the American

Transcendentalists whom the postwar generation claimed as their ancestors.

By reviving the Romantic belief in the political and social importance of subjective experience, the Beats instigated the cultural transformation toward individually expressed political rebellion embraced by the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s.

The Beats' use of letters to signify their social dissidence connects them to their Romantic forbears and re-affirms the letter's implication in self-creation and social criticism in contemporary society. The epistolary form allows the writer to write for himself, a nightingale singing in the dark , but also to write for others, encapsulating the interconnectivity of self and society. In order to rescue ethical discourse from cynical misapplications, it is incumbent upon individuals to consciously interrogate their desires and beliefs in order to choose the most ethical actions. As society is increasingly fragmented by distance, class and ethnic differences, cultural affiliations, and lack of free time, literature which attempts to honestly reflect these conditions for any given population serves as the mirror by which readers can better know themselves, their conditions, and perhaps their aspirations.

This paper has tried to depict contemporary youths' political withdrawal both as a product of the forms of political engagement to which the Baby Boom generation turned when conventional methods appeared futile, and as a result of the conditions of late-

103 capitalist society, both cultural and economic. Since the advent of Romanticism in the eighteenth century subjective experience has been regarded as a site of resistance to dominant cultural values, particularly by the young, who often find themselves alienated by the moral failings of their elders and so resist incorporation into adult society. In the

1960s, youth culture was seen as the foundations for a complete social transformation, which would be brought about by the new selves and lifestyles sought by the Boomers.

Instead, the Boomers' rebelliousness has become the driving force behind the North

American economy, fueling consumption with the promise of self-creation through products. Youths are "invited, urged, and commanded to rebel against the system"331 by mainstream culture itself, which depicts rebelliousness as the only true form of individuality. Thus, the relationship between self-creation and society must be examined in light of the fact that personally-expressed rebellion is no longer a viable form of political engagement. Autobiographical and epistolary literatures, with their emphasis both on psychology and community, offer a possible forum for the re-interpretation of social dissidence, although the influence of literature on youth cultures of the past century is a topic that should be studied in more detail.

The early radicals who wrote the Port Huron Statement observed that it had become unfashionable to talk of values, but that such discussion was necessary for society to progress. With no contemporary youth movement to bring this conversation into the public sphere, it is incumbent upon individuals to consider their own values and desires for society in order to reify and ethically institute these visions. Youth movements define themselves in opposition to adult society; this has often been symbolized by young 104 people's exaltation of their own youth to the point that death seems preferable to aging

("Hope I Die Before I Get Old, as the Who sang in 1966). Yet to truly change social conditions an individual cannot shun society, but must make a commitment to it and to accepting one's place in it. Today, a truly radical perspective is one which recognizes the individual as a unique product and expression of her society, casting aside the possibility of the eradication of history, a "year zero" from which an utterly new society can be constructed . Autobiographical and epistolary literature offers contemporary readers a means to connect to each other and to history, foster a more complete self-knowledge, and thereby choose to live more ethical lives.

Works Cited:

1 Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. p. xiv 2 Owram, Doug. Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. p. x 3 ibid, ix 4 Gitlin, 226. 5 Howe, Neil and William Strauss. Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. p.40 6 Mannheim, Karl. Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992. p. 303. 7 Howe, Strauss, 40 8 Owram, xiv 9 Howe, Strauss, 41 10 Owram, xiv 11 Howe, Strauss, 41 12 Hunt, Andrew. ""When Did the Sixties Happen?" Searching for New Directions". Journal of Social History, 33 (1999): 147-61. 13 Foss, Daniel Larkin and Ralph W. Larkin. "From 'The Gates of Eden' to 'Day of the Locust': An Analysis of the Dissident Youth Movement of the 1960s and Its Heirs of the Early 1970s - The Post-Movement Groups". Theory and Society 3(1976): 45-64. 14 Freeman, Jo. "On the Origins of Social Movements". Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies. Jo Freeman, ed. New York: Longman Inc., 1983, p. 15 15 Roussopoulos, Dimitrios J. The New Left in Canada. Montreal: Our Generation Press, 1970, p.8 16 Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 11. 17 Roussopoulos, 7 18 Owram, 298 19 see Altbach and Cohen (1990); Levine and Wilson (1979); Foss and Larkin (1976) 20 Stephens, 2 21 Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1937, p. 148. 22 Esler, Anthony. Bombs, Beards and Barricades: 150 Years of Youth in Revolt. New York: Stein and Day, 1971, p. 86. 23 Stephens, 1 24 Braungart, Margaret M. and Richard G. Braungart. "The Effects of the 1960s Political Generations on former Left-and Right-Wing Youth Activist Leaders." Social Problems 38 (1991): 297-315. 25 ibid. 26 Stephens, 2 27 Stephens, 3 28McAdam, Doug, 1989. "The Biographical Consequences of Activism". American Sociological Review 54(1989): 744-760. 29 Niedzviecki, Hal. Hello. I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. Toronto: Penguin Group, 2004. p. 219 30 Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. 31 Brockmeier, Jen and Donal Carbaugh. Introduction. Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography. Self and Culture. Ed. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2001. 32 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Defence of Poetry", 1840. 33 Freidenberg, Edgar Z. "The Generation Gap". The Cult of Youth in Middle-Class America. Ed. Richard L. Rapson. Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1971, p. 90. 34 ibid. 35 Brake, Michael. Comparative Youth Culture. London: Routledge, 1985, p. 26. 36 Brake, 40 37 ibid. 38 Keniston, Kenneth. "Youth Culture as Enforced Alienation". The Cult of Youth in Middle Class America. Ed. Richard L. Rapson. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1971. p. 86 39 Keniston, 83 40 Brake, 26 41 Esler, 32 42 Brake, 86 43 ibid. 44 ibid. 45 Esler, 33 46 Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1969, p.42 47 see Esler, p. 121; also Trenton (1983) 48 Bettelheim, Bruno. "The Problem of Generations". The Cult of Youth in Middle-Class America. Ed. Richard L. Rapson. Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1971,_p. 81 49 Gitlin, 19 50 Trenton, Thomas N. "Left-wing Radicalism at a Canadian University: The Inapplicability of an American Model." Interchange 14 (1983): 54-65. 51 Levitt, Cyril. "The New Left, The New Class, and Socialism". Higher Education 8 (1979): 641-55. 52 for studies on wealth and activism see Altbach (1979); Albach and Cohen (1990); Sherkat and Blocker (1994); Foss and Larkin (1976); Flacks (1967); Keniston (1968) 53 Owram, 13 54 Owram, 56 55 Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000, p. 210. 56 Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 222 57 ibid.

106 58 Owram, 82 59 Owram, 60 60 Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1963, p. 41. 61 Friedan, 43 62 Owram, 52 63 ibid. 64 Owram, 39 65 Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 1962, p. 15 66 Gitlin, 21 67 Brake, 155 68 Owram, 181 69Esler, 127 70 Freeman, Jo. "On the Origins of Social Movements", in Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies. Jo Freeman, ed., New York: Longman Inc., 1983, p. 21 71 http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html 72 ibid. 73 Gitlin, 106 74Gitlin, 107 75 "The Port Huron Statement" 76 ibid. 77 Gitlin, 165 78 McAdam 19 ibid. 80 Freeman, 11 81 Owram, 166 82 Roussopoulos, 8 Kibid. 84 ibid. 85 ibid. 86 Owram, 165 87 Owram, 220 88 Roussopoulos, 10 89 Brake, 156 90 Roussopoulos, 10 91 Roussopoulos, 11 92 Owram, 229 93 Owram, 225 94 Gitlin, 164 95Esler, 80 96 Esler, 267 97 Levitt, 644 98 Trenton, 55 99 Owram, 236 100 Owram, 240 101 Trenton, 60 102 Trenton, 54. See also Flacks 1967; Keniston, 1968. 103 Gitlin, 180-185 104 Ross, 183 105 Ross, 184, quoting Kirkpatrick Sale (1973). 106 Ross, 187 107 107 Freeman, 23 108 Freeman, 16 109 Mankoff, Milton and Richard Flacks. "The Changing Base of the American Student Movement". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 395 (1971): 54-67. 110 Thompson, Hunter S., 1967. "The "Hashbury" is the Capital of the Hippies". The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 383. 111 Thompson, 384 112 Thompson, 391 113 ibid. 114 Gitlin, 208 115 ibid. 116 Gitlin, 212 117 Owram, 204 118 Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p. 1 119 Partridge, William. The Hippie Ghetto: The Natural History of a Subculture. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. p. 9 120 ibid. 121 Partridge, 60 122 Partridge, 10 123 Esler, 77 124 Esler, 285 125 Keniston, 100 126 Gitlin, 107 127 ibid. 128 Gitlin, 258 129 Gitlin 213 130 Brake, 92 131 Gitlin, 213 132 Rubin, Jerry. Dolt!. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970, p. 66 133 ibid. 134 Rubin, 84 135 Schenk, H.G.. The Mind of the European Romantics. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966, p. 137. 136 Rubin, 51 137 Gitlin, 235 138 Gitlin, 223 139 Gitlin, 239 140 Marcuse, 16 141 Stephens, 4 142 Rubin, 56 143 see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. "Discourses on Inequality", The First and Second Discourses. Ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964. 144 Heath and Potter, 56 145 Heath and Potter, pp. 68-69 146 Gitlin, 107 U1ibid. 148 Gitlin, 108 149 Gitlin, 107 150 Rubin, 90

108 151 Rubin, Jerry. We Are Everywhere. New York: Harper and Row, 1971, p. 149 152 Rubin, Do It, 82 153 Free. Revolution for the Hell of It. New York: Pocket Books, 1970, p. 107 154 Rubin, Do It, 79 155 Free, 100 156 Rubin, Do It, 215 157 Rubin, Do It, 82 158 Heath and Potter, 18 159 Levitt, 646 160Gitlin, 310 161 Stephens, 36 162 Stephens, 90 163 Gitlin, 236 164 Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper and Row, 1984, p. 412 165 ibid 166 Johnston, Hank and Bert Klandermans eds. Social Movements and Culture, Vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, p. 15 167 Free, 193 mibid 169 Rubin, Dolt, 106 170 Roszak, Theodore. "The Making of a Counter Culture - Technocracy's Children". The Cult of Youth in Middle-Class America. Ed. Richard L. Rapson. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1971, pp. 101-102 171 Gitlin, 316 172 Gitlin, 394 173Esler, 118 174 Gitlin, 256 175 Gitlin, 246 176 ibid 177 Johnston and Klandermans, 22 178 Matusow, 416 179 Matusow, 413 180 Matusow, 414 181 Matusow, 415 182 Gitlin, 318 183 Gitlin, 326 184 Matusow, 423; Gitlin, 336 185 Gitlin, 336 186 Gitlin, 337-338 187 Todd Gitlin speaking in The Weather Underground. Dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel. 2002 188 Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York: Vintage Books, 1971, p. 68 189 Esler, 20 190 Gitlin, 346 191 Gitlin, 347 192 The Weather Underground. 193 Gitlin, 386 194 Stephens, 91 195 The Weather Underground 196 ibid

109 197 Matusow, 342 198 Gitlin, 402 199 ibid. 200 Gitlin, 338 201 Gitlin, 410 202 Foss and Larkin, 52 203 Gitlin, 386 204. Altbach, Philip G. "From Revolution to Apathy: American Student Activism in the 1970s. Higher Education 8 (1979): 609-26. 205 Gitlin, 406 206 Free, 173 207 Gitlin, 380 208 Gitlin, 398 209 Foss and Larkin, 54 210 Rubin, Jerry. Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven. New York: M. Evans and Company, 1976, pp. 167-168 211 Gitlin, 425 212 The Century of the Self, part 3. Dir. Adam Curtis, 2002. 213 ibid. 214 Brake, 145 2150wram, 190 216 Verzuh, Ron. Underground Times: Canada's Flower-Child Revolutionaries. Toronto: Deneau, 1989, p. 95 217 The Summer of'67. Dir. Donald Winkler and Robin Spry, 1994. 218 ibid. 219 Owram, 222 220 Brake, 84 221 Verzuh, 146 222 Owram, 298 223 Owram, 287 224 Owram, 288-289 225 Heath and Potter, 16 226 Stephens, 40 227 Stephens, 85 228 Roszak, 102 229 The Century of the Self 230 Heath and Potter, 98 231 Niedzviecki, xiii-xii 232 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen and Co., 1979, p. 105 233 ibid. 234 Hebdige, 106 235 Hebdige, 107 . 236Hebdige, 111 237 Ewan, Stuart. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1988, p. 253 238 ibid. 239 Niedzviecki, 219-220 240 Stephens, 78 241 Rubin,Dolt, 235 242 Heath and Potter, 108 243 Gitlin, 224

110 244Niedzviecki,63 245 Niedzviecki, 65 246Niedzviecki, 167 247 Niedzviecki, 217 248 http://www.live81ive.com/ 249 http://archives.cnn.eom/1999/US/12/02/wto.protest.perspective/index.html#3 250Altbach,610 251 McAdam, 745 252 McAdam, 746 253 Ryan, Ramor. "AndJBalanced with This Life, This Death: Genoa, the G8 and the battle in the streets". Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement. Ed. Daniel Burton-Rose, Eddie Yuen, George Katsiaficas. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004. 254 Niedzviecki, 218 255 ibid. 256 http://www.live81ive.com/ 257 Draut, Tamara. Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30- Somethings Can't Get Ahead. New York: Doubleday, 2006, p. 45 258 Draut, 98 239 Allen, Mary and Chantal Vaillancourt. "Class of 2000-StudentLoans". Canadian Social Trend? 74 (2004): 20-6. 260 DrautDrau , 191 261 Putnam, 36 262 Draut, 192 263 Draut, 179 264 Howe and Strauss, 42 265 Sydney, Sir Philip. "An Apology for Poetry". 1595. Critical Theory Since Plato: Third Edition. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. U.S.A.: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. 640-652 266 Gallagher, Susan. Truth and Reconciliation: the Confessional Mode in South African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002, p. 11 267 ibid. 268 Pascal, 75. 269 Pascal, 195 270 Pascal, 184 271 Harpham, Geoffrey Gait. "Ethics". Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. London; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. 387-405. 272 Harpham, 387 273 Harpham, 389

274 O'Hara, Daniel T. "The Return of Ethics: A Report from the Front", boundary 2 24 (1997): 145-56. 275 Harpham, 394 276 ibid., 277 Harpham, 396 278 Ellis, Carolyn and Arthur P. Bochner. "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject". Handbook of Qualitative Research. Second Edition. Ed. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S.Lincoln. California: Sage Publications, 2000. 733-761. 279 Ellis and Bochner, 743 280 Ellis and Bochner, 747 281 Taine, Hyppolite Adolph. 1867. from History of English Literature. Critical Theory Since Plato: Third Edition. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. U.S.A.: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. 640-652. 282 Ellis and Bochner, 749

111 283 Gallagher, xiii 284 http://online.wsj.com/public/article 285 Bell, Michael. Sentimentalism. Ethics and the Culture of Feeling. Great Britain: Palgrave, 2000, p.8 286 ibid. 287 McLaren, Leah. "The unbearable lightness of literary It Girls". The Globe and Mail. Saturday April 12, 2008. 288 Foley, Barbara. "Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives." Comparative Literature 34 (1982): 330-60. 289Harpham,401 290 Freeman, 26 291 Harpham, 400 292 Kadar•,, MarleneMarlene. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 293 Altaiann, JaneJa t Gurkin. Epistolaritv: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1982, p. 192. 294 Campbell, Elizabeth. "Re-Visions, Re-flections, Re-Creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women". Twentieth Century Literature 41 (1995): 332-48. 295 Sedlack, Erin A. In Writing It May Be Spoke: The Politics of Women's Letter-Writing. 1377-1603. Diss. University of Maryland, 2005. 296 Sedlack, 10 297 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sufferings of Young Werther. Trans. Harry Steinhauer. New York: Norton, 1970, p. 10. 298 Schenk, 145 299 Goethe, 9 300 Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p.48. 301 Derrida, 177 302 Derrida, 176 303 ibid. 304 Derrida, 181 305 ibid. 306 Favret, Mary. Romantic Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 7 307 Watson, Nicola J. Revolution and the Form of the British Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 4. 308 Watson, 13 309 Watson, 6 3,0 Watson, 3 311 Favret, 155 312 Watson, 17 313 Favret, 53 314 Favret, 61 315 Schenk, 162 316 Favret, 104 317 Favret, 118 318 Sedlack, 2 319 ibid. 320 Wurzbach, Natascha. The Novel in Letters. London: Routledge, 1969, p. xx 321 Wurzbach, xxiii 322 Altaian, 88 323 Altaian, 111

112 Daley, Margaretmary. "Double Vision: Polar Meetings, Epistolary Distance, and the Super Writer in the 'Schiller-Goethe Correspondence'". The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 36 (2003): 1-22. 5 Daley, 2 •6 Daley, 10 7 Daley, 18 8 Harris, Oliver. "Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady and the Political Economy of Beat Letters". Twentieth Century Literature 46 (2000): 71-192. 'Harris, 177 0 Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" 1 Niedzviecki, 203

113 Introduction to excerpts from Here We Are Among the Living

"Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on..." - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

The difficulty of deciding to write this book, now tentatively called Here We Are

Among the Living, is not well-represented by the following sections, although questions about the usefulness of art, my fears about wanting to be a writer, and my mother's belief that art "justifies life" are fundamental to the development of my (textural) character.

Concerns about the production of art are well-suited to the epistolary form: as Altaian points out "[t]he novel that tells the story of its own publication [...] is also telling of its own completion" ; it also "reflects the need for an audience" . A dialectical and self- conscious form is therefore suited to the presentation of ambivalence about writing, and about the need for writing to be read. As well, this book does tell the story of its (hopeful) publication (or at least creation), and my commitment to an identity and to my society are also represented in the act of the book's writing.

Because of its concern with the individual as she develops within her history and community, Here We Are Among the Living is likely best described as a memoir, which has been defined as "personal history that seeks to repossess the historicity of the self . All of the characters wrangle in some way with the problems of history and heritage: parents - how we are or are not them, reconciling ourselves to their imperfections - as well as familial, cultural, and societal histories figure largely in the characters' attempts at self- knowledge and self-definition. My concern with the weight of history can be seen in the

114 book's discussions of my mother (especially, in an attempt to better understand her, her history), my father (biological history, being severed from one's history), literature (too massive to contemplate but demanding contemplation) and history itself (how do we know/receive/express it?). For this, too the epistolary tradition is appropriate: Airman has found that "the epistolary genre is a highly conventional and imitative one, which delights in articulating its' own imitativeness"4. Letters, then, or rather emails, seem an appropriate form for a postmodern book that is concerned with recognizing history and attempting to productively incorporate it into the present. The Port Huron Statement asked for "a quality

[of life and being] which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved"5. The characters in my book, being the children of Baby Boomers, also express many of that generation's ideals; this book is my attempt to do, and depict others doing, some of what our parents' generation envisioned.

None of us think we can create such a world as the Port Huronites desired, but we all think it necessary to try.

Struggling with (loving and hating) the past, we are also both terrified and desirous of the future. While Sam, Florence and Joe, in particular, are deeply committed to the

Romantic belief that we should "see and feel truly the grain of the world" - as Gitlin says his generation felt they could - the weight of the future (as well as the past) inevitably interferes with the present. Letters are well-suited to these temporal neuroses: Airman contends that "preoccupation with the future is intrinsic to the epistolary form, where each letter arrests the writer in a present whose future is unknown" . The act of writing a letter 115 is an immersion into the present, an attempt to grasp and articulate immediate experience; a letter is also a commitment to the future, a sending of oneself into a future where one is being read by another. And this imagined future holds the potential for personal and social improvement: as Daley notes in her study of the Goethe-Schiller correspondence, "[t]he kind of mirror each presents the other is something more potent than a mere, looking-glass, for it presents each man with an image of himself not as he is, but as he should and might be" . Many of my letters, too, are an attempt to articulate what I or my peers should or might be - my better self, perhaps, sent into the future; a vision of the future to live toward.

Concern with the past is also an acknowledgement that individual development is a dialectical process, with "internal" and "external" forces never clearly defined. The epistolary form, as we have seen, depicts this ambiguous process. As the letter breaches the space between public and private, it also addresses ambiguities about the sources of my artistic aspirations: are they internal, or external? An "innate need" to write, or an assimilation of the expectations and desires of others, a reaction to family history? A desire for self-knowledge and self-expression, or a need to be recognized for my

"specialness"? There are no answers to these questions, except perhaps to say all of the above, but the book takes as its moral North Star the idea that trying to know is better than not trying, and that it is "better to have an imperfect knowledge than a futile or false one"9.

As we have seen, both the autobiographical and epistolary forms involve the interaction between self and society. The characters in this book are deeply concerned with abstract political problems and with the creation of community, both in the present and the future. The paralyzing plethora of options facing an individual as to who, what, and where 116 to be is explored through the different characters' choices, and each choice reflects a negotiation with the challenges of community, political engagement, and identity. As a brief example: in the first letter, I am twenty years old; I am defining myself in opposition to my mother, and through my rage at the disgusting world. By 2003, Michael and I are at the anti-war protest, attempting to act on our political beliefs but finding the means inadequate; my relationship with Michael seems to present possibilities for living out my values, but this also appears inadequate and mildly ignominious. In the last letter included, it is 2005: Joe has participated in an anarchist demonstration against the WTO, a

"weightless moment"- magical and immaterial. Over the course of the book, those of us with a taste for socio-political analysis come to the recognition that our chosen lives alone will not change society. Reading every Noam Chomsky book and talking over political theory will not change society; living communally and playing samba music in the streets will not, ultimately, meaningfully change society. As Gitlin writes in his 2003 book

Letters to a Young Activist, "[proclaiming a marginal identity is a salvage operation in the acid bath of modernity"10. Nonetheless, how we live matters. To say that we cannot individually alter the state of society is not an excuse to abdicate responsibility toward it; this book depicts, and is, an attempt to create and live by a system of ethics that takes into account the many ways in which our ability to live ethically is hindered. As Gallagher has written, "the term [confession] implies moral obligation, ethical responsibility, or religious consequences"11. In writing this "confession", I have expressed my (middle-class) guilt for my relative freedom from suffering and my inaction to alleviate the suffering of others. At

117 the same time, the book functions as a delineation of the ethical responsibilities stemming from this guilt and commanded by my recognition of it.

By the end of the book, all but one of the main characters are trying to reconcile themselves to their histories, and have made explicit or implicit commitments to society.

Florence, a character associated with subjective experience, creativity and instability, is pregnant. Ty is going to medical school, albeit in Australia (Ty being the embodiment of

Contradiction, he who most values community must shatter the community he has created in order to move toward the self he has always desired). Eshe has found love and a possible career. Joe has become a social worker and found a city in Britain, the country of his birth, in which he is not miserable. And Michael has finally proposed to me, reflecting our "investment in society"12. Disgust with society, as every youth movement has shown, is unsustainable and, I argue, ungrateful - bohemian withdrawal is not an option now.

Thus, in the proper history of the confessional, my book serves as "a call to action" to myself and the community I have depicted: my letters are a subjective rendering of a collective identity that we have formed and which has defined itself as committed to this society, and to the more just society we imagine.

Notes:

1 Altman, p. 154 2Altman, 186 • 3 Hart, Francis R. "Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography". New Literary History 1 (1970): 485-511. 4 Altman, 199 5 Getzels, J.W. 1972. "On the Transformation of Values: A Decade After Port Huron". The School Review 8 (1972): 505-19. 6 Gitlin, 203 7 Altman, 127 118 8 Daley, 10 9Taine, 641 10 Gitlin, Todd. Letters to a Young Activist. New York: Basic Books, 2003, p. 126 11 Gallagher, 18 12 Brake, 28 13 Gitlin, Letters, 3 14 Gallagher, 17

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: Generation Blues (and Happy Birthday!) Date: Sept. 18 2001

DearEshe,

I figured you must be alright because what would you have been doing downtown at 9 o'clock in the morning, but I was still relieved when you called. What a fucked-up week it must have been for you there. The news coverage hasn't stopped even here and it's all appalling. Happy Birthday to you, eh? We'll do something good when you come back for

Thanksgiving.

So, have your peers gone mad? Is it patriotic speeches day and night? An orgy of sudden reflexive nation-lust? Or do they even have any idea what's going on at all? You poor thing, what a mess. This is gonna be our Kennedy assassination - fifty years from now, people will be all Where were you when the towers fell?

Yesterday I was standing in the kitchen after dinner, ranting bitterly as Mom washed dishes. This whole thing has made her sad, much sadder than I would have expected. She was crying when she called to tell me to turn on the TV. I don't feel sad. I mean, I do, it's horrible, all these images of people with their pictures of missing loved 119 ones. Lives suddenly being snuffed out is always heartbreaking, obviously. But I can't help feeling manipulated by it all, I think of people all over the world, real people just like these New Yorkers, mourning their dead that the U.S. is responsible for. Or Capitalism,

God of Our Times. They don't get TV. specials, and they don't get a mention in the TV. specials about dead Americans.

Why are you so angry she asks me.

Why? The question is so fucking ludicrous Eshe. Why, Why is because they brought this on themselves, and that's what I told her. I knew I was being vicious, having a little adolescent moment, trying to say the most shocking thing. And of course Mom, poor

Mom, was appalled.

How can you say that? She looked hurt that I could have even thought it, like she had maybe brought me up wrong, that I could say such a thing. Those were innocent-

But Eshe I couldn't even let her finish - her outrage and compassion just seemed so unreasonable, so poorly placed. I tried to explain that I didn't mean the people who died were guilty of anything, not all of them anyway, and obviously I'm not saying I think they deserved to die.

But Mama, I tried to explain, This act was caused by other actions, it's not for no reason, and America is behaving, the people are being told it's this incredible, inexplicable thing. But it's not inexplicable. It's perfectly fucking explicable.

I was nearly crying, spinning around on the linoleum in my socks, talking through my hair. All I could be was disgusted, and sad for everybody.

120 And Mom, so perplexed. My whole reaction to the "national tragedy" a mystery to her. I know my vengeance shakes her; the constant invective against everything has reached a tidal constancy which has obliterated "normal conversation". I can't help it. I am always simmering; at the dinner table or watching the news I boil into an unseemly rage, my frame nothing but a vessel for indignation. How could I not have known these things before? How are we supposed to live in this lousy stinking mess our parents are handing us? What good will it do me to mourn New York's dead? I have to explain to my mother that if I'm mourning for dead strangers, then I'm mourning for all dead strangers equally. Well, maybe not dead rich people. No no, I'm kidding.

But surely, Mom was saying, Surely you can understand why Americans are reacting the way they are -

~ Like they're the only nation ever to get attacked by something? Three thousand people. Sure it's a lot of people, especially in the fucking States - they haven't had that many people die at one time on their soil since the Civil War. They think they're untouchable, like they have God's word and they're safe forever. But Mama, the people don't know what their government's up to. Do you know how many deaths the United

States is responsible for worldwide? Millions. Millions and millions of people dead, and for what? So the rich can further enrich themselves-

-- Oh, says Mom, so this too is rich people's fault.

(Poor Mom, I can imagine her in a chorus of Jewish mothers, lined up since the time of Trotsky - Oy veys mir, my daughter is a Communist, now she'll never marry a nice doctor...) 121 Do you think, I asked her, It was a fucking accident they flew into the World Trade

Centre?

Practical mom: And the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, whatever, those aren't civilians. That's a fair target. The American military isn't some benign peacekeeping force, you know? The rest of the world knows

America is fucking evil -

Excuse me, evil is a strong word. Who would you prefer to have running things?

China, maybe? Germany, if, godforbid they had won the war? At least America has an idea of human rights, they have women's rights, I mean c'mon.

Sure they have the idea of human rights. La dee-fuckin'-da for them. They can afford to have human rights. They just can't afford for other countries to have them. You think Haitians want to work for 35 cents an hour? No, you have to have dictators to do that. God, the hypocrisy of it, it's so sinister, don't you see? That's why I say evil —it's so premeditated, and it's all for money ...

I was getting breathless, tripping up on myself, on generalities. But it just seemed so obvious, so perfectly simple. Mom was pursing her lips over the dishwater like I was a fanatic.

Well, she said, I don't know where you get your information (she's always asking me where I get my information), but I think, she said, (holding her hands out like I was a mad dog needing calming), I mean I'm sure America has its faults, but -

Faults? Mom, I told her, read Noam Chomsky. Read anything, you'll like him, he teaches at MIT. Read about what the States has done in South and Central America and 122 then talk to me about faults. It's just so unnecessary, this violence, it's all greed, you'll see.

I just finished Chomsky's Turning the Tide, so my brain was a splitscreen of headless Guatemalan babies and businessmen perusing figures, CIA fatcats sweating in the jungle, passing along their American wisdom.

And Eshe you know what Mom says to this, to this miasma of human misery and premeditated cruelty and blind stupidity? You know what she always says?

So change things. It's up to your generation now. Every generation has its challenges. If you don't like how things are, make it better.

Sure. Their generation saw civil rights come into effect, women's liberation happen, now we'll just calmly bring about the new world order of peace and justice that people have been fighting for unsuccessfully for two thousand years. No problem, as Ty would say.

So I asked her How. But I didn't mean it because I don't think she has any idea.

She only has her incredibly sweet but frustratingly absurd everytime assertion that I, we, our group of brilliant friends now on the cusp of everything should somehow take the bull by the horns, so to speak, come into ourselves and change the world. Utterly, because that's how it would have to be changed.

So I asked her, too loudly, How should we do that? Conditions were way better for you guys and the world's no better, arguably it's worse. I knew I was exaggerating, yes yes feminism, gay rights, medical advances, whatever. Set changes on an unchangeable

123 stage. Most hippies, I said, were just nice middle-class kids who smoked pot and listened to Hendrix albums and had lotsa sex. That was a big deal, the sex. But like -

(I knew that would get her - she cocked her head, mildly offended): Yes, she said.

Excuse me, it was a very big deal, the sexual revolution. And how about those nice Jewish kids who went down south and were killed, got lynched by some good oP southern boys, trying to fight segregation. Young lawyers. People who felt they had to make a difference.

I conceded that point. In these conversations it seems to be Mom's habit to bring up these martyred white civil rights fighters. As though they were representative of what the hippies stood for, what the generation was capable of. Maybe that is what they were capable of; what came later was just what happened instead.

Mom was saying, Write letters. (It's always some personal take-action solution like that - as though I'm anyone to be writing letters about anything. And what do letters do?)

You have all this passion, why don't you write an article for the Star, or hell, send something in to the New York Times, they need young voices.

Ah, moms. What is more timeless than a mother's tendency to grossly overestimate the importance of her children?

Mom, I said. There are undoubtedly better-qualified persons than myself to write for the New York Times. I dunno, it just seems too big - whatsammater, something hurt you?

Mom had winced, was holding her side as she sometimes does. She sucked the air through her teeth and said, Oh, just got a little pain, you know ... I'm very tired. It's been a

124 long day, I think I need to sit down. She slowly pulled off her rubber gloves and laid them by the sink, shuffled to the couch.

Her little pains always seem a kind of remonstration. I should have done less talking, more dishes.

I asked her about her day.

Yeah, she said, you know, just the usual crap. It's trailer day, I had to fight with

Cineplex to get more screens, Pat called me seventeen times, and she's doing ten things at once so she's all distracted on the phone ... I had fifty-two emails this morning and fourteen voicemail. Until eleven o'clock all I did was respond to email because I kept being interrupted by the phone. And it's all the managers from the theaters calling, going where's my stuff, and I have to ask them the same questions, did you set up a promotion, did you fax the form ... it's just so boring.

Oh Eshe, how I loath my mother's job. I have always loathed my mother's job, even as a small child, but it's only gotten worse with time, become a festering vendetta. I hate her job far more than she ever could, you know how she is, she really cares about things. Well, maybe that's how people naturally are, or at least want to be. Jamie is reading about Taylorization, you know, streamlining production and all that, and he told me a story he read recently about a man working on a new factory line. When asked what the worst part of his job was, he didn't say it was boring, or he had repetitive motion stress, or even the lousy wage. It was the fact that the line moved so fast he couldn't do the job well.

125 I think people want to do a good job. They want to take pride in their work and be valued for it. They'll find ways to give their work value and meaning. But in this world, that's hard to watch. It's hard to watch one's mother pissing away her talents on a company that doesn't respect her, feeling she has no choice but to stay.

And Baba called me three times, Mom was saying, and I was on the phone with her in the middle of the day for almost an hour, you know, she just doesn't care. I tell her I'm busy, she keeps right on talking. She has no-one to talk to, poor pathetic thing, she has no- one; she needs someone to complain to - oh goddamnit.

Mom had torn a small hole in her pajama-pant leg. Uch, she said, bending down with a groan to inspect the piece of metal jutting out from the wooden trunk-cum-coffee table. It had seemed a cheap, rustic replacement for our old Arte Shoppe coffee table, finally relinquished to the rust and unnamable grime of two decades of use. I still like the trunk, but it has turned a bit vicious. I should try and whack the nails back in.

I have to go to bed, Mom said: her end-of-day declaration signaling the retreat to her room and her as-yet intact blond wood bedroom set. That set is inextricably linked in my mind with the snapping of tape measures, Mom at one end, me at the other, measuring dresser, highboy, night-tables; and then an empty room, empty master bedrooms in empty apartments, our voices ringing against the bare walls as we speculate furniture arrangement, agree the set would or would not fit.

It is a beautiful set, I would hate to see her part with it. It's so elegantly carved but solid, reminds me of something Mom's beloved demimondaine would have had in their

126 boudoirs. A present from Zaida shortly before he died, irreplaceable because he is gone, and because no one now of course could provide Mom with such luxuries.

And Eshe I am strung between wanting to make Mom not want these things and wanting to give her everything. It's all too hard, hearts on the Bernstein side are weak and

I am afraid for her. Although I know life would be easier for her if she wanted less, it's too late for her to change. What baffles me is that when she was my age, she really thought her values were radically different from her parents. She thought she had rejected materialism, thought she knew the treachery of money. But now she wants to be living in the style she grew accustomed to growing up. She wants theater, vacations, nice clothes. And why not?

Those are nice things, everyone should be able to go on vacation sometimes, or take in some culture, as they say. But she just never quite seems to have what she needs so I wish she could be contented with less.

And can I be? What will I find myself wanting when I'm fifty-three? Can I envision a life I can have? And what will I do with this impossible need to describe everything, which you my dear friend indulge? This ignominious desire to render the world in language the way I see it? It seems by turns so important and so ridiculous.

Always the same battle with my little notebooks: possessed by a thought I run to the book and scribble it down only to wonder, in the act of writing, why I am doing it. This poses a problem with emails too, but less so.

Though I apologize if I've gone on too long. The weight of this day, this whole week -1 had to shift it, put it behind something. At the end of the day sometimes I just look at Mom and our chaotic apartment, and Baba mired in tragedy, my whole little family 127 waiting for redemption, for a story that will make sense of them and I find myself thinking there must be something I can do with all this. But you know. The next problem is what does that mean?

I may have to come down and visit you soon. Tell me when is good.

From: "Sam B." To: [email protected] Subject: p.s. Date: Sept. 19 2001

Just wanted to share Margaret Wente's brilliant view of things: "The poison that runs through the veins of the suicide bombers does not come from America. It comes from their culture, not ours. The root causes are in their history, not ours".

This is what gets in the newspapers. She sounds like a little kid passing the blame for something she's done - It's Billie 's fault, he's the messy one, he didn't take off his muddy shoes...

I love how you can't say "poison" runs in the veins, say, of black people, because that's racist, that would be a big no-no. But you can say a "culture" (as though "Arab" was a unified culture) is poisonous, and you can say it in a centrist paper in a centrist country and all the little centrist people will nod their heads in sage agreement. Oh no, it's certainly not OUR history, not our precious, enlightened West.

I tell you, the violence of my own thoughts frightens me sometimes. 128 ****** •*•***

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: Guiding an Old Hippie through Modern Love (and other stories...) Date: January 15 2002

Hello Sweet Joe, thanks again for calling on my birthday, it was so good to hear you. I can now legally drink in the States, woohoo! Mom gave me an album that she's been working on for months - a photographic retrospective of my life, with captions. Which made me cry, of course, partly because I felt badly that she'd been staying up late to get it finished - she's been working on it for months; I'd been wondering why her bedroom door was closed at night, and it's because she was in there, gold pen in hand surrounded by photographs of me as a child. But it's a lovely gift; the cover has that quote from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." Which sort of distressed me, in a way, because I know that's what Mom wants me to do, and I don't know if I can or should. Sometimes I don't know if these dreams of mine are mine or hers. How can I know, how can anyone? So then sometimes her encouragement feels like a burden, an external thing foisted on me; a spell, making me want things I shouldn't. And then comes the guilt, for I am questioning the value of what my mother prizes most in this world. And how can I claim to parse out the "external" from what is "myself? Easier and better to think she's right; I have whatever gifts she says, am capable of what she says; much nicer to believe it of course and anyway I've had these same thoughts for such a long time,

129 longer than I can remember... But isn't it funny that a Mom be more of a willing idealist than her kid? Destiny, so beguiling to believe in Destiny...

Speaking of which, if you think you are meant to be here, then you'll come back.

Like I said, I really will marry you to get you back into the country; I think we could fool the authorities. It was of course strange having my birthday party at 420 Crawford, F.'s paintings up where your photographs from New York used to be, photographs of herself pasted to the walls. At the New Year's party at least you had left so recently the place still contained your absence. Now there are no daisies living unnaturally long lives in the kitchen sunshine, brass doorknobs mysteriously bare of your leather jacket, no ventalin puffers on the bedroom floor. They're talking about making the place smoke-free which is too horrible to think of, but they said don't worry about it for the party. Which was okay, you know, the usual. Lotsa Led Zep, Flo getting stoned to Janice. Flashes of being 16 and mouthing the words to "Come As You Are". Bratt happy drunk, slopping over to me with his pained smile groaning Where's Joe?, his hands on my shoulders. Meandering off in his wife-beater. He had to open, I think. Probably still drunk when he got there. When I left him at three he was starting a mural with F. on her bedroom wall. Looked like a naked girl, big surprise. Eshe brought some guy she hates but is sleeping with (perhaps her one bad habit) who told me I have a body like a comic book superhero which is crazy but flattering nonetheless. Michael fell asleep on the couch, just like at New Year's. Except that on New Years' he came home with me.

Did I tell you about that? I guess not. It was kind of fucked up. He'd fallen asleep on the couch like right after midnight (at which, by the way, F. pinned me against 130 the kitchen wall, standing right next to Eshe! She pinned me to the wall and planted a massive kiss on me. I hate to say it but it was kind of hot, even though she's psycho).

Anyway I woke Mike up when I was leaving at about two, and he seemed not to know what to do with himself, and I guess I was just sort of like, I can take you home, you can come to my place... And then he was just there, I don't think we even said a word in the car. Through the freezing night good little Zippy purring along all warm and blue, with

Mike next to me there in his big coat and it seemed so natural. We were so perfect in the orange lights of her fabulous '80s panel display, quiet and together, strange in our own ways and even with each other. But knowing and easy with how we're strange. Then we got home and he was in my bed and I felt triumphant that he was there - can't stay away and all that. But sad because he seemed sad, or worse than sad, defeated. Also I had to tell him, I mean I thought it was only fair to tell him about Nathaniel. I was surprised when he interrupted me - I'd been telling him how it had been so great to reconnect with Nathaniel, how he'd seemed to have forgiven me for the shit I'd done. And how the sex was just, well, we'd never been in a room together and not wanted to have sex. But he's gone back to L.A. and that's where he's staying. A good thing, probably. In any case I was telling

Mike because I thought he had a right to know and he was just like, Whatever. It's okay. I don't need to know the details. Reaching for me as he said it, but weary, his long limbs seeming tired out reaching for me and Joe it was so good to be tangled up in them again but

I felt like I was taking something from him. But he'd asked to be there, he'd wanted to come, so what can I say? I wondered if he'd stay the night and he did. Too late, he was too tired, the bed was so there and familiar. Falling asleep next to him I had the weirdest 131 feeling that we were two siblings who'd had a fight but were forced to sleep in the same bed. The intimacy, the sometimes stifling yet beautiful intimacy of two heads beside each other; the sense that tomorrow the person that still, quiet head belongs to will enrage you, provoke you and everything will be irritation, complication and discord, but now in the warm darkness is your companion, someone you can trust with the vulnerability of your unconsciousness.

In any case in the morning he beat a hasty retreat and I spent the day shuffling around the apartment, watching Breakfast at Tiffany's with Mom and hoping for snow.

Mercifully she didn't say anything about Mike being here (and taking off), just gave me that eyebrow-raised what is this bullshit anyway look and I shrugged. It was nice, really, to spend the day eating Cadbury's Fingers, calling Cat! Cat! with Audrey Hepburn, crying over her nameless beloved pet returning to her and George Peppard in the alley in the rain.

Later in the evening Mom could no longer help herself.

So she starts, I'm just curious, but-

Oh lord, Mama I don't know what I'm doing.

Well, okay, you don't have to talk about it, but I just wonder because I thought you were broken up and then I see him here

We are broken up.

Okay, so then why -

I don't know, it was New Year's. Nobody likes to go home alone on New Year's if they can help it.

132 Well I understand that, but if it's supposed to be over between the two of you don't you think it confuses the issue a little bit for him to be coming around? I understand you want to be friends, you've explained to me that you're not going to stop hanging out with him and whatever, but there's got to be some kind of line. I mean honey, how can you tell if you're "going out" or not. ("Going out" in a goofy voice to connote her sense that this term is idiocy).

Yes, it confuses the issue. The issue is confused. He's confused. I'm sort of confused but, I don't know. I probably should have just taken him home.

Well, she says, Mama lion instincts ready to pounce, What did he want to come here for anyway? He says he doesn't love you anymore (this not said to be hurtful, though it is because that's truly what he said; Mom drawls says he doesn 't love you with disbelieving scorn, dredging love up from the depths of her chest as though to display for the world the pettiness, the uselessness of Mike's understanding of this concept love if he can't love me) your relationship is done, so what does he want to come here for?

I don't know, Mama, out of habit?

Well! Habit! I don't think that's -

Not habit, not habit, but, it's familiar, he seemed sad, he was sitting alone on the couch and fell asleep, he's been all quiet lately. I don't know, I guess he just thought it would be nice.

It would be nice. Well honey, it just seems to me that if someone, a man, is coming around a lot, and he's staying over, and you're the person he goes to when he's sad or whatever, then, by your definition anyway, that's going out! 133 Well, sort of, but we're not. I mean, it's not, there has been no agreement that we are dating, we're not together.

No agreement. So that's how you define dating? I altogether don't understand your use of that term anyway. Dating, when I was a young woman, meant a man came to your door, he came and got you, he took you somewhere, a movie, dinner, whatever, and then he brought you home. And if you liked him you saw him again. You say dating and it means the guy comes over and hangs out in your living room.

We like hanging out in living rooms!

Okay, so you hang out in living rooms, but there's no, I don't know, there's no delineation, it seems to me, that you're "going out" as you call it, even though you don't go out anywhere. Are you also dating Ty, or J.R. or whoever?

Well, the delineation is, if you're sleeping with one person on a regular basis you're going out. So no, I'm not dating Ty or J.R. or whoever.

So that's it? It's just sex.

Well, sex and the, like, acknowledgement that you like each other. You do, you just agree you're going out. And you probably remember the date you agreed to, or maybe you were doing something special or maybe the person actually said, like, do you want to go out with me, and that's that. I mean, Mike and I were just one day like, so, I guess we're going out now. After Nathaniel had told me it was totally over, and there was nothing stopping us, you know, we just decided we were going out.

And now you're not.

And now we're not. 134 Well, whatever you say honey, like I said I just think in my day

In your day? In your day people were just having sex with everyone as I understand it.

Well, that really depended, I mean some people were like that, for sure. It was free love and all of that. But even the Living Theater, like I told you, Rod, when we were together he said I could be with whoever I wanted but it would change things. You know?

I mean, we could have had that kind of relationship I suppose, but it would have made it a different thing. And that was the most anarchist of the anarchist. The Living Theater I mean, they were not exactly playing by conventional rules. They were crazy, man.

(In 1967 she was in Rome with her friend Andrea. Zaida had sent them for the summer, hooked them up with some job at an Italian production company, the one that did the spaghetti westerns. In any case she ended up meeting The Living Theater, an American ex-pat group that did all this crazy stuff, nudity, audience participation - very avant-garde, very political. How did she meet them? It was really really hot one night and she couldn't sleep so she and Andrea went down to a cafe. On the way to Italy she'd made a bet with

Andrea, said, Plunk me anywhere and in a week we'll meet some interesting people. So within the first week there she was in the cafe and there was Rodd, this lanky blond

English guy with little pink Lennon glasses, and a couple other guys from the Living

Theater. And that was that. Rodd fell in love with her. So Andrea and Mom ended up hanging out a lot with this crazy anarchist theater group. That was also the summer I believe when Luciano Vincenzoni, the screenwriter of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wanted Mom to be his mistress. I think it was the same summer, it must have been. I don't 135 know how she had time to have so many serious love affairs. Stereotypically, Luciano was very good-looking, very vain and incredibly charming. She didn't want to be his mistress so a few years later proposed marriage, but he didn't want kids so she turned him down.

Sometimes Baba will ask Mom why she didn't nab such a rich, handsome Italian man when she had the chance - He didn't want kids? Phooey, waving her hand at Mom's lunacy - tells Mom she could be living in a beautiful villa in Rome. Mom says, Sure keeping the household while he's out having affairs with young things... Anyway, the

Living Theater. Mom always tells the story of Andrea who was still very, let's say, naive when she got to Italy. Andrea and Mom had become friends at Emerson, and Andrea was this political-minded Jew, studious, very straight in knee-length skirts, penny loafers, frizzy hair straightened. And very uptight, apparently. Mom somehow intrigued her with her black clothes and irreverent ways and they became friends so Zaida sent them off to

Italy thinking Andrea would be a good influence on Mom. So Mom always tells the story of how Andrea was in the bath one day at the pensione, shaving her armpits in the deep humidity with her hair in curlers and in walks one of the Living Theater guys. Jim

Anderson, a big black guy with leather cuffs. He stands there, staring at her. She sits, arm still raised, razor suspended by stubbly pit, blinking furiously as Andrea is wont to do and finally says in a taut voice Will youpleeease get out of here. It cracks Mom up every time telling that story. Anyway so that's the Living Theater, and that's Rodd.)

Okay, so Rodd said sleeping with other guys would change shit that's one thing.

But I mean was it really all I'll pick you up at 7 o'clock and we'll go see a show? I mean, that's so, like, 1950s. I mean did you ever get in a serious relationship that way? There's 136 Irving, that sure wasn't like that, there was that dude, whatsisname that followed you home in his car

Oh yes Michael Schwartz she says, a twinkle in her eye at the memory. Who saw me in my little silver convertible and followed me home.. He ended up making a lot of money. But I think he was connected to the mob.

Yeah that's creepy, you dated a guy who followed you home. What about

Stephen? You guys were in class together, I bet you just started hanging out doing whatever and then you were going out.

Stephen? Well, I don't know, I think we must have gone on dates, I'm sure, we probably got high and went to a movie the first time I don't know. Who remembers?

(Stephen was Mom's first husband. Married at 23, divorced, I think, at 23. Avery sweet guy, dimples, great sense of humour. Son of a famous Canadian comedian. Stephen apparently couldn't get his shit together; Mom would go to work, come home and find

Stephen stoned, guitar in hand, place a mess. Mom not prepared to do the hard work of waiting for him to grow up, I think. I think of this sometimes thinking of Mike, think about giving men time to figure themselves out.)

So that was my New Year's. I convinced Mom that there was no reason for dating to mean being taken somewhere by someone and having it paid for. A funny thing to have to convince an old hippie of, don't you think? She's all for women's lib and all that in one sense, you know, she's very proud of what women of her generation have accomplished, down with mean old patriarchy, etc. But at the same time she still thinks a woman ought to

137 wear makeup, that not shaving your armpits is gross, that men should pick you up for dates.

Very strange.

Eshe's gone back to school, back to the Americans she loves and hates. Pleased to return to her little room at 114th and Broadway, to have that motion-picture New York

View, to breathe the vibe of an idealized city, a place where every subway is romantic and the students eat in the diner they went to on Seinfeld. But hating it too, the small- mindedness of her ivy-league colleagues so banal, so foreseeable it's pathetic: the virgin sluts and their pleasureless alcohol-drenched escapades, the students in the Black

Students Association giving Eshe the cut-eye because she didn't join. And the guy on her floor who delights in making fun of Eshe for being Canadian - she had a screaming fight with him before Christmas break about, I believe, Canada's recent colonial history, and returned to her dorm to find "Fuck Can'da" written on the whiteboard on her door.

In any case the night before she left we parked Zippy in front of her house and smoked our last joint, talked about husbands and sunny kitchens and how it would be.

My husband would sit shirtless on the counter and read the newspaper to me while I cooked eggs; with Eshe it would be the other way around and she declined the tousled- haired baby (though I think she'll change her mind).

I told her, My grandmother is forever telling me how I'm so young and I can't possibly understand what it is to be old and how she never thought of herself old when she was young. But I tell her Baba I think all the time about what I'll be like when I'm old and I agree that no, I cannot predict what will go wrong with me or what I'll have to contend with as I age, or what that will be like. But I do think all the time about aging 138 and how I hope to cope with it and the attitudes I want to keep. And you know, I think a lot of people we know think of how they want to be when they get older. Is it the people we know, do you think, or is it this generation in general?

Is it? asked Eshe, Or do you think it's our age, because we're starting to see our parents more as people?

That's true, I said, But I think maybe we're doing that younger than our parents did. What with the new parenting styles and all, befriending your kid, breaking down the traditional boundaries between parent and child - maybe we're seeing them less as parents and more as people earlier because they don't have that, like, parent-aura around them the way parents did for earlier generations. Or maybe it's divorce. Our parents are divorcing at like five times the rate of their parents. And then the kids are angry and are looking for flaws.

Aren't kids always doing that with their parents anyway? asked Eshe, her voice making the high, girlish curtsey that is its custom when asking questions.

That's true so maybe never mind. Maybe it's our generation more than before because we hear our parents and they're like When I was your age.... They use their age to justify their stodginess. You know, like you always hear Oh when I was your age I was burning my bra in the streets. But feminism's come a long way, and I'm so busy working and taking care of the kids... So we see our parents and are like, I'm going to be that age some day pretty soon and do I want to be like that? But actually people have probably always done that - looked at their parents and said, That's not going to be me, nosir. Then in about twenty years they're clones. Is there any escape? This came about I guess because we were sitting there in the car in our hats and mittens, sealed in by the frost and I just thought what a tradition this has become with us.

Lighting the last smoke of the evening "You Can't Always Get What You Want" came on and we howled along to that and when it ended I said When we're forty we'll be doing the same thing, sitting in the car like this, except I'll be like Fuck this is my one cigarette of the week, better enjoy it. How's your kid?...

And Eshe said We'll go home to our husbands all stoned, tee hee. And he'll find it cute and give you a good shagging and you'll wake up and have tea in a sunny kitchen and play with the baby.

That sounds like bliss, I said.

What conventional dreams, hey, my sweet Joe?

And you shall live next door and in the summer afternoons we'll shell peas on the stoop listening to Bob Dylan or Muddy Waters, watching our kids play out in the road.

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: little golden men Date: March 26 2002

Hello Dear Eshe,

What did you think of the Oscars? Mom and I had a pretty good time with them - though it would have been more fun if I'd seen either Training Day or Monster's Ball, so I could know if I was actually rooting for Denzel or Halle Berry. But hoo-wah, two black winners 140 and a Best Picture about a crazy person. In one year! That must be progress! I love the self-congratulatory bullshit the Awards spawned - and Halle Berry the whitest black woman in Hollywood, and John Nash the asshole who came up with Game Theory. But it's still a sign of our increasingly liberal minds, I suppose. So there you have it, America shines forth in all its glory once again.

They're always a little hard, now, the Oscars. I still get all excited about it, because it's been a tradition with Mom since probably before I was sentient. And having a good excuse to pig out on Hagen Daaz and Cheesies is always nice. But the sight of those rat- bastard studio execs sitting there so smug and ensconced in their little worlds makes me want to bomb the whole production, makes me hope for the 'quake that will rid us of

Hollywood forever. And yet, feeling my fat rolls grow larger by the Cheesie, I still get

sucked into the She looks gorgeous! And, What has she done to her hair! Judge, judge, judge. Thinking, tomorrow no sugar; tomorrow, hard-core cardio. The whole thing an exhausting tug-of-war between rejection and desire. Fuck them (I want to be them), Fuck them (Someday I'll show them all). As people on any periphery feel towards the people in the centre. But what periphery, what centre? I don't really want to be those people, I don't want to make movies, though I used to think I did. But who didn't? And then once you

see what that world is, what the possibilities of making a film that might really do some good are versus the possibility that you will be steam-rolled by a team of executives and end up looking like an asshole because you have a movie that's halfway to meaning

something but destroyed by the need to appeal to that ever-changing and never-accurate

God, the Focus Group - once you know that, why go into film? Well, there's indie-film I 141 suppose. But it's still the industry, those types - maybe it's that film is so much more image-driven than, say books. But who am I kidding, the literary world is a horrible little place too, I'm sure. Trade hot, confident stupid people for funny-looking, smart, awkward people, and what's the difference? Well, at least it's not all about image I guess.

So it sort of makes me want to cry that Mom's sitting there believing that someday

I'll walk down that red carpet, win for Best Screenplay and thank her in my speech. Which obviously I would, and I get all welled up thinking, actually, about it and how happy I would be to be able to give her that, to announce to a billion people, or whatever it is, that my Mom has taught me how to appreciate life, that because of her I don't understand the word boredom, that she's remarkable for her powerful grasp of dreams, where I falter daily merely trying to keep sight of them.

But it's never gonna happen. Our family has come as close as it's going to come to the film industry's top brass. Back when Baba was singing at Franc Mancuso's daughter's wedding (another funny Baba story - she had some tremendously expensive dress made, but it was of some crazy material and it stretched over the course of the evening, until by the end it looked like a bejeweled tent); when Mom was buddy-buddy with Dick Cook and, who's that little Disney fucker, Eisner? Well, if by buddy we mean they paid her handsomely to work like a maniac, and then wouldn't give her sick leave when she got walking pneumonia after Zaida died. Fucking Disney, man; they're like a multi-gazillion dollar company, and they wouldn't give the woman who opened their Toronto offices,

(illegally, by the way, under her own name, to circumvent some kind of delay), a fucking month off to get well. Then you read articles about how rich that Eisner bastard is, and you 142 read about the Haitians making 30 cents an hour to sew Disney toys and t-shirts. It's just so sinister and unnecessary. And horrible to think of all the kids with their stuffed animals, their little Disney character friends just like I had - man, I loved my white Aristocat - and it's all Moloch. Kids' earliest stories and fantasies hooked in to the death machine. What chance do they have, bedazzled as they are by the twinkling teeth on the maw of Capital?

God what I wouldn't give to just be able to fucking watch Cinderella (always Mom's favorite), or Lady and the Tramp with my kid and not think about impoverished, brutalized work-forces, and fat white shareholders and Walt himself, the old Nazi. All of my childhood feelings and memories about these characters have been coloured by these things; it has doubled my nostalgia and also made me resent it.

So this is watching the Oscars. And the fact that this world is so real to Mom, this world that has trapped her in its orbit, its poisonous outer circle, just kills me. To use a

Holden Caulfield-ism. And even though nothing could be phonier, although it's all one big phony convention of phoniness, the memorial always gets me. Even though I hate the whole racket of being made to care about people who have nothing to do with me. It's the way their young selves flash upon the screen; stills from old movies where you think, this person lived that moment, they said those words, and now they're dead. These beautiful young girls with bow lips and slender waists, you know they aged, became stooped, grey.

But in 1942, man, she was something to look at; she was at the peak of her beauty;

Hollywood was in its golden era; it must have been wonderful. And Jack Lemon, man, I loved Jack Lemon. All those old guys are going, Jimmy Stewart, Walter Matthau, now

Jack. And George Harrison, beautiful George, what a great head he had. (All the stuff 143 about his death has been so sad - what the whole time was about, the sense of possibility everyone had, the mind-blowing music being made. What happened to it all?) I even got sad for New York, what with Woody Allen up there and all the iconic images of the city. I got sad for what it was, what it could have been; the New York our generation can never know. The dirt and the excitement, before the dirt got swept under the rug and the excitement became triumphalism. Now I can't even love the place like I want to. So many things I'd like to love simply that have been marred by the meanings they've acquired.

Write soon, Sam.

*********

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: We've All Gone to Look For America... Date: Oct. 15 2002

Dear Eshe,

Tonight when I came home from taking Joe to the airport Mom was yelling into the phone, at Baba of course. The transition was a sharp kick over the edge of a precipice, having been suspended for six days in the melancholy peace of Joe's eyes, the quiet joy of watching him observing everything. To open the door on That's right, Mother, if all you do is sit and worry, then you 're going to feel sick, Mom rolling her eyes on the couch amid a sea of newspapers, TV on silent, gave me that same feeling you get in dreams where you've been flying and then you fall. That unstoppable, terrifying but passively accepted descent, my own futility ringing in my ears like a high wind. For six days when 144 Joe was here I felt young, beholden to no one, just a long-haired kid with a car and a pack of smokes, music blaring and adventure a constant prospect. I imagine that's what it felt like to be young in the Sixties. When being young was what was going on, and your jeans, weed, music all signaled freedom, all meant infinite possibility, radical choice, the indescribable magnitude of Right Now.

In that spirit, Joe and I hopped into the car on Friday night and, to Mom's intense distress, headed for Detroit (Oh, you have to go look at the poor people? Smiling rueful love as we nodded and laughed. Oh well, she said, Joe's with you, you'll be okay).

Having heard so much about its bombed-out downtown, the beautiful empty old buildings and general decay, we figured we should go before the developers get their hands on it.

Though it is America, where "urban regeneration" isn't quite as hot as it is here, (except in New York of course)... Anyway off we went to find the ghost of America's golden years, two joints smuggled in my underwear, no hassles at the border thankfully - Why are you going to the States? Shopping, said I. It's one in the morning, said the customs agent; Ah, but I want to make the outlet malls early, I replied, and on we passed.

However, we realized when we got to the outskirts of Buffalo that we'd taken the wrong way around - the all-night convenience store clerk laughed at me and said the fastest way to Detroit was back through Canada. But we didn't mind covering a lot of road so I drove as long as I could stay awake through the subdivision-sown fields, Joe horrified and fascinated by the size of it all, the immense pre-fab impermanence of the new millennium Ohio settlements. At one point on a dark misty patch of highway a deer appeared; I slowed and we watched its beautiful, terrified head vanish into the bushes at the back of a strip mall. Eventually we stopped somewhere outside Cleveland and spent the night at a Travelodge. Eshe you know it's strange, the fly-by-night motel check-ins and seedy glory of early-moming smokes in motel beds are still alluring, but already they're not what they were when we were eighteen. The unbelievable excitement of being handed the key, opening the door on your own sparse little paradise of shabby motel furniture, dusty curtains shielding us from the Interstate is already fading. Perhaps because I'm expecting something. Driving to New Orleans we had no idea what awaited us, we were high on novelty alone, on the feeling of our own bodies and minds propelling us through the mysterious South. Now I guess we choose to look for that sensation, and get some approximation of it. But Joe and I made a pretty good go, and having never done a road trip like this with him before it was sort of Kerouac dreamy to wake up next to a skinny, beautiful boy in the early light, light a smoke looking out at the grey humming highway, make wonderful awful motel coffee in the little machine then climb back into the car and keep driving. The illusion of freedom a car gives you, I tell you, it's so seductive.

Approaching Detroit we had perfect weather; Joe stuck his torso out the sunroof and took pictures of the skyline - one of the joys of Joe being the effortless contortions of his body. And of course his unending delight at mangled shit: there was an excellent pile of it around 8 Mile, what looked like the steel skeletons of a thousand dinosaurs rising into the sky north of the highway. We parked on the street beneath an empty building that looked like a miniature castle and started walking. I got a shot of Joe by a boarded- up garage in an old building that had "WITH OPEN EYES I" spray-painted on it in 146 green. The sun very white reflecting off the dirty building, Joe squinting at me, legs apart, hips slightly askew, a portrait of suspended motion as always. The streets were almost empty, it was maybe 11 a.m. on Saturday morning and for blocks we saw no one.

We passed silent, dirty alleyways with treacherous-looking fire escapes; closed-up diners, the shingles falling from their roofs; an abandoned synagogue with grimy multi-coloured windows and 1950s-looking red steel doors. I took a photo of Joe standing in the middle of a six-lane road by a steaming sewer grate because we thought it would be iconic, though the street was a bit sunny and leafy for what we had in mind. Still, it looked as sad as we expected as we got to the heart of downtown. Black people trudging along with shopping carts, black people waiting for the bus, a few black people driving by in shitty cars. Everywhere garbage, boarded-up department stores, forsaken restaurants, ornate hotels ghostly as a sacked palace, the tattered remains of awnings flapping from their rails, dust thick on the windows. The sunshine making strangely sweet, picturesque the dirty bricks and flaking gilt shop-sign we had our flitting visions of post-war American families congregating outside diners on a morning much like this one: ladies in hats entering department stores, bright, tail-finned cars rolling down the streets, a war just won, factories a continuous hum except on Sundays. You can feel what it must have been like here, America has that oldness to it; at least, these northeastern cities do with their brick buildings and cracked pavements; yes, the pavements seem older than in Toronto, narrower and more uneven. A patina of hard work and long hours hanging on everything.

Only a few neighborhoods in Toronto feel old like New York or Detroit feels old.

Cabbagetown, maybe, or parts of the Annex. Montreal of course is a whole other animal. 147 But somehow American cities seem to have changed less, there's a thicker residue of decades past; downtown Toronto feels so deliberately polished in places. Scrubbed so meaninglessly clean.

On a shady side street by an empty park I lit a joint and we puffed happily till we saw a cop car rolling toward us, slowly, window opening. Oh god, crazy American cops,

I thought, and flicked the joint into a bush as they stopped. The beefy white cop called

Joe over to the car. He talked to them for a moment and showed them his passport, then came back as the cops pulled away. We watched them turn the corner and then I retrieved the joint. What did they want? Apparently they were looking for a white guy who had just robbed a store or something, but when they got a closer look at Joe they saw it wasn't him. We walked on, happy that my visions of calling my mother from a Detroit jail cell would not come to pass today, and noticed pages of a book skimming along the pavement, getting caught in the ragged bushes. We picked up a page and what do you think it was? The Bible, the holy word floating across our Sabbath path. For an instant I hoped it would contain something of significance for us, but it didn't; I can't even remember now what section of the Bible it was. No matter, that's always the way with me and the Bible; I was almost relieved to find no revelations in those scattered pages.

So Joe and I loved the city of course; I think Joe was happy just to be in a city.

He's happy in Wales and living with Dave (he's let his hair get quite long, it's curling around his ears - he's sort of starting to look like Dave) but it's very remote, even Cardiff a good two hour's drive. And while he loves wandering off into the verdant hills with his guitar or sitting by the fire in the lightless country nights, I think he's a bit restless, 148 missing the hard edge of urban life. Dave is a complete country boy, happy to be quiet for days on end, needing nothing but the fresh air and gnarled little Welsh trees to make him happy. The hostel is maybe twenty minutes from where he grew up, and he's content if he can visit the stream he played in as a kid on a regular basis. And Joe, quiet Joe may have found his limit for quiet. He wants to stay up late, get stoned and talk about books; he wants to get a cheap flight to Prague for the weekend. Dave only reads travel books and wants to go on a biking tour of Scotland; he talks even less than Joe. So the feeling of being set loose in a warren of buildings, something unknown around every corner, the worlds and universes glimpsed in every stranger, the endless supply of strangers, the weird American candy, the cigarettes sold in pharmacies, it all helped satisfy that itch for novelty, for the feeling that things entirely different from your own life are constantly happening in places you haven't discovered yet. May never know. And you know Joe, how he looks at things so carefully and quietly gliding down the sidewalk as he does, skimming the buildings, making everything more still, more worthy of being looked at.

It's a real skill, that; no not a skill, a gift: to see both the whole and the parts, to be captivated by anything, to have eyes that frame the world for you as art, simply as it is.

But then, you're sort of like him in that way; maybe you romanticize less, but you observe as closely and wholly.

Unfortunately the night we returned Joe had an asthma attack from the cats, so after an hour of wheezing that his puffers did nothing to abate I took him down to Mount

Sinai, where we were eventually attended to by a deeply unsympathetic triage nurse who told us that, since Joe had no travel insurance, it would cost him $500 to have an oxygen mask put on him. So he decided against that, and we just sat in the sterile waiting room, him looking intensely miserable, until his lungs felt better. (I always wonder with him how much of his physical problems are physical, and how much psychological. My suspicion was that his return to Wales was weighing on him, although it's true that he is allergic to the cats. But he so rarely says what he is thinking; usually all I can do for him is sit quietly with him and wait until he feels better). We slept in the Lincoln, parked on the street outside the apartment. Mom thought this nuts - looked at with a rather unimpressed face as she left for work - but we enjoyed ourselves. The next night we drove down to Cherry Beach and slept there, which was even nicer, because in the morning we could get coffee from the coffee truck and sit, wrapped in the Moroccan blanket, on the sand in the sunshine and feel like we were still traveling.

Yes my dear Eshe it was good to be on the move again, even for two days, what with that post-trip travel bug still gnawing at my gut. Though it's good to be in school, learning new things. I've had moments taking notes on maquiladoras or discussing the causes of Bi-Polar Disorder that I am so completely happy I actually smile to myself.

Just being a proper student, taking in facts, ideas. I don't know anybody and don't really care. The great thing about not living on-campus is that I don't have to try and find a university social life. It can just be school for school's sake, and my social life is

something else. Of course it would be nice in its way to have that collegial atmosphere one sort of fantasizes that university would be like - people strolling the campus talking about what they're learning, heated debates over beer and all that. That said, from what you tell me I'm not missing much. How are your fellow Columbians? Still prancing 150 along behind the President, I imagine, SUV keys dangling from their lily-white fingers, freedom ringing off their gleaming teeth.

And today the war authorized by both House and Senate, what a victory. No wonder you don't go out. Jesus Eshe where's our generation's Ginsberg, where's the room at with the pot-smoking poetry-writing bearded guy who doesn't go to class but reads all day long and wants to talk about Whitman? Where are the scholarship rebels loving but scorning their Ivy League status, or the uncomfortable rich miserable in their privilege and philosophizing about it? Can it really all be these sheltered stupid little kids? (That said, when I first got to England and was reading the Portable Beat Reader I realized they were all crazy misogynists, those Beats. Women doing all the cleaning, cooking, baby-raising; men engaged in the serious work of consciousness, exploring and describing it; all probing and claiming and leaving, very macho, I was surprised I had never seen how much. Sheltered and limited in their own ways, probably very self- important.) Speaking of which did you hear Lieberman's wonderful assertion that the world has tried in every way to "convince Saddam Hussein to live by the rules of international law and civilization", but it hasn't worked, so now they should be bombed?

I love that, you can literally say a nation is outside of civilization, essentially make a call to civilize the natives by destroying their society right here, right out in the open and no one bats an eye. Never mind the absurdity of an American politician invoking the sanctity of international law...

But hey, these are the men what run things.

151 Meanwhile DreamWorks continues to exploit my mother and all of her co workers except the General Manager, the only man in the office. It really is such an Old

Boy's Club, you know, Don got that job because he's buddies with some guy, and that guy recommended him over golf somewhere, while Mom had been out of the business for a decade. At least Don remembers Zaida - was brought here from out west to be trained by him in fact; Mom says Don has great film-sense, is one of the last people in the business who has any. And he respects Mom's heritage, not that it makes a difference to her paycheck or the insipidity of her work. Because who would hire her - a woman, a middle-aged woman; a single mother; her father renowned in the business for shrewdness, temper (and for some, his massive heart). Those big-handed Jews smoking and cursing, making deals, good to their secretaries, prying open Protestant Canada with nothing more than a highschool education. I think only recently have I really understood what it means that she was the first woman General Manager of any major film company, and the youngest too. That's fucking crazy. I remember her suits, and visiting her office, watching her smoke and curse at her desk, phone glued to her ear. You know when she quit they replaced her with ten people? But she was freelancing in the 90s as the business became sleek and modern; the old men dying off, vicious little MB As with their clean-cut textbook vacuousness taking their places. And she's supposed to be grateful that Jeffrey

Fuckface Katzenberg hand-picked her himself for this job, this mid-level bullshit that he knew full-well was like asking a Harvard professor to teach kindergarten.

But, like my great-grandmother used to say, tse meisefrum drek, e medaflecken de finger. The world is a bowl of shit and you have to lick your fingers. That's the truth. 152 My Baba's crazy grandmother Sarah who spoke only in rhyme knew what was up. Boy oh boy though my Mom she has this great wonderment at life but I think that's why every day it smacks her in the face and every day it's a surprise. Like she's never fully accepting that life is a bowl of shit. She really really wants it to be a bowl of cherry ice cream that she can lick clean with joyous gusto. And that's very beautiful in a way but insanely frustrating because life is so clearly, so very clearly not a bowl of fucking cherry ice cream. Not most of the time. But she is in perpetual disbelief at life's hardness, its relentlessness is a personal affront. And yet she is unbelievably effective, keeps a million balls in the air all the time, has uncanny business sense. It's hard to watch such a conflicted assortment of instinct and adaptation. Meditating upon, desperate for the day when life will be smooth and sweet and she won't have to try so hard to like it.

And I want to help but I get so disgusted with what she has to deal with and then just rail on and on about rich people and she invokes Zaida expounding on Benevolent

Dictatorship and asks me Well how do you want to do it and I try and muddle through

International Laws and Progressive Taxation then just get furious again thinking about

Benevolent Dictatorships, so seductive and almost beautiful but then horrifying in their implications. Anyway we may as well just ask for Utopia and be done with it.

And that would be silly.

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: Beware the Revolution! 153 Date: October 19 2002

Dear Joe,

I hope reintegration into country life hasn't been too difficult. Thank you for sending the photographs -1 love the one with the city reflected off the hood of the car, what a great shot. And me in the side mirror, pumping gas - my hair has gotten crazy long, eh? Why do I always look best in pictures you take? Must be looking at your sweet face does me good.

Yesterday I did my first real assignment for writing class. We were to go on a walk and describe what we saw. Mike picked me up from work after I closed and we went down to Kensington Market. I love it down there at night, cardboard boxes piled by the curb, crooked little shops with their graffiti-covered shutters pulled down, savvy cats on their serious night-prowls. We walked around and I took notes, a girl sitting on the street came over and told me to touch her hair because it felt "like a ba-sheep", Mike pet an orange cat outside a bicycle shop. It was a nice assignment. Next class we'll edit them in groups.

As Mike and I walked we had the following conversation, on account of my saying Why can't the city be a conglomeration of neighborhoods like this? Instead of what will happen instead, a bunch of rich people taking this place and turning it into a fake version of itself with "loft living" and "boutiques":

154 He said, There needs to be a change in the middle-class consciousness. There never really has been. Like with the French Revolution, you know? They were lighting for a change but they didn't know what that change entailed.

I, more cynical, said, They never intended to help the proletariat, only used them as bodies to fight with as always -

Well, maybe some, but I think some people really believed they were bringing

about freedom and equality. But like Robespierre? He was just a fanatic. I mean, killing priests in the countryside, we believe in the Church of Reason, all that. Saying this is

better for the people. But it's their way of life, you can't just take that from them. It's very tempting, though, to talk about, well they don't need this or that and they're greedy

and someone has to make them understand. So that's what we'll do. We'll take their cars

and their televisions and make them change their lifestyles and we'll force them to be

free. (It is very tempting isn't it? Visions of the clear-sighted righteous entering

mansions, leaving with truckloads of extravagances, patiently explaining the new society they've got all set up in their herbally-shampooed heads to the bewildered but unharmed

rich. But Mike, more practical, more familiar with the gilded, blood-spattered

mausoleum of History knows this is not the way out, only the most beguiling and

dangerous way further in. So he tells me...) But you can't. You can't force their eyes

open, they'll resent it, and it'll always be someone. There'll have to be someone at the

top, forcing the change and then it will just be the same thing. More violence, more

bloodshed in the name of a beautiful ideal. That's what happens when people start

talking, you know? When people get into little groups and they're dissatisfied and all 155 these protest groups and activists start coming together and talking revolution. So twenty, thirty years down the line when you see people forming these groups, beware. Don't go running so quickly in that direction.

Smiling at me he says this, an old man in a young body giving me the long view while I twist and rail against the sloth-like progress of the human mind.

But at the same time you need those little groups, don't you? I mean, you want people coming together with common cause and talking about why they're dissatisfied and how they might change things. But no, I'm not so much for the bloody overthrow stuff myself. Though it is very alluring. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and all that.

But I know it's no good. I'm more for the gradual process. Of course I'd rather that everyone just had a revolution of consciousness but you know, I don't know if it will happen. It's asking a lot. But maybe the one saving grace of this fragmented, fucked-up post-everything society is that we can't really converge like we used to any more. I don't know if you can get enough people to agree on one thing to form a vanguard, even. And if, if, this time change generates itself slowly, through the personal changes of the individual, then we'll be making progress. If this time it's not one huge thing led by a few people, if it's really all different people just changing slightly over time, then we'll be

learning something.

And for a moment there it seemed possible. That people might look at the world

and see, in their own Rational Self-interest, that things should be different. They might

start businesses and run them ethically, might stop using pesticides, stop whaling, stop buying new clothes for entertainment, stop building suburbs in fertile soil. If people 156 today can already be upset about a war that hasn't even started yet, then maybe in fifty years we'll actually be able to not go to war. You know, Chretien's been waffling weirdly about Iraq. He sites poverty and injustice for terrorism then recants it, then cites it again quoting Bush's new policy doctrine. But at least there's waffling. That must mean something. For a moment there on Kensington Street where fifty years ago my great-grandmother haggled for beets and live chickens I envisioned a new generation of

Canadians walking to the market with their canvas bags, buying local produce; I envisioned swaths of downtown turned into community gardens; I saw self-sustaining suburbs with small businesses, parks, convenience stores. I saw CEOs living in normal- sized houses and sending their kids to public schools, and schools where teachers are paid fairly and children aren't zoned out on computer games and Ritalin, fat on apathy and dextrose by age eight. Countries reverting to protectionist economies, fair trade deals worked out between suppliers and independent buyers; employees all become shareholders, laissez-faire capitalism universally laughed at. It doesn't seem so hard, I thought, just a few changes in perspective, a radical but sensible reshuffling of priorities.

I want to believe that people can come to their senses, have changes of heart, know the effects of their actions and care about the consequences. Walking with Mike through the

Market, contained little world that it is, I thought about the life we could lead, the small steps we could take toward the changes we want, our children growing up and continuing the work.

Then, I thought, I had better learn how to sew. How to bake bread. How the economy works. Then as always it started to get away from me, look too big, everything 157 controlled by uncontrollable forces, by men in suits who wouldn't give me the time of day, by desires we don't understand and might not be able to; we'll just have to muddle along, I thought, and hope we figure something out along the way. It seems very dire sometimes. The UN just reported that there's an "ever-mounting hunger crisis", and it's not as though it's a surprise. But people want their Hummers. They want hamburgers. I want hamburgers. I want fruit in the wintertime. I and 95% of all women, on some days if not all, no matter what our political ideals, marital status or religious doctrine feel we would be more worthy of love if entirely smooth and very thin and this requires energy either to control or to accomplish. We all know people are dying in horrendous and preventable ways, we know there's prejudice and injustice and so maybe we give to charity or have a bake sale for Afghan schools for girls. We institute political correctness and teach ourselves the proper terminology.

But meanwhile there are bosses to impress and dinner parties to host and parents to take shopping and bodies to be kept in shape. Life marches on, there are only so many hours in a day. And everywhere ads, and music videos indistinguishable from ads, an endless parade of two-dimensional emaciated ladies in hooker couture, little girls trying to look like them prancing through the mall with their debt-riddled parents. Parents who work themselves to death so their kids can have video games and Nike shoes, grow up comfortably insulated against everything and then reflexively move as far away from their parents as they can get. What do they owe anyone? Our whole generation saturated with ads that vividly simulate the lives we want; and since the ad-creators know we mock everything, they mock it for us. They satirize love, death, neuroses, existential crises, 158 cultural icons (my latest favorite: a Dempster's commercial with a white afro-ed hippie stereotype giving an overdone peace sign to a bag of whole wheat bread); they mock the very desires they're trying to manipulate. And it works brilliantly. Look what they aim at our parents. All their youthful ideals now hooked to consumer goods; all these clothes, images, songs that were supposedly so meaningful not forty years ago now delight them in their new incarnations; they hum along in their living rooms to Hendrix, Donovan, the

Rolling Stones as shiny cars drive their closed courses through winding roads made soulful, psychologically meaningful by the familiar songs. It's revolution as sheer spectacle, rebellion held captive for our entertainment; it's the MarineLand Dolphin

Dance of Freedom. But what's worst is that this calculated, ersatz nostalgia transforms itself in the minds of aging hippies into real nostalgia, a true connection with an enchanted cultural moment that flits across America's TV screens in thirty-second clips.

Oh my sweet Joe, what must it have been like to be alive when idealism was real? When saying you want to change the world was not analogous to saying you want to befriend a

Unicorn? I wish we hadn't missed it, because it will never happen again.

And that's what the Boomers seem not to grasp. When I'm gasping with horror at the news or some vile commercial Mom says We tried, now it's up to you. When I'm shaking with rage at the dinner table she goads me on, channeling pugilistic Irving, or

Zaida's delight in debating his wayward daughter's strident pronouncements on the world. Like them she takes an oppositional stance just to get me going, will argue any position until I'm floundering in a sea of ire and my water-wings of Reason have bobbed off into the distance. And once I'm flailing there, drowning in my own criticisms, sputtering disgust, Mom will say with a little smile You're very angry here in the living room, but what are you going to do about it? That was the thing about my generation, we were out there having protests, sit-ins, be-ins. We got media attention. We put out pamphlets and underground newspapers. Where are your underground presses? You say you hate this system of media empires and corporate propaganda and all the rest, well, counter it. Make what you want to see happen.

She's so sweet and earnest as she says this, slightly aggressive as she often is, challenging me to strive for something great, to make my voice heard above the din. As though I have as much right to demand change in this world as I have to return a plate of substandard food at a restaurant (which she does readily and I cannot bear to do). To my anger and cynicism she responds with plans, suggestions, provocations, brown eyes glittering wildly, intensely focused on my face. What must be my insolent, wounded face. With every molecule of her being invested in believing that great deeds are possible, that I am capable of performing them. It's a sense of entitlement so complete, so un-self-conscious it's infuriating. There is no thought to the millions and millions of other people with the same objections I have, to the countless underground 'zines and political websites and god knows what else that's already out there spouting every kind of radical anarchist communist environmentalist feminist whatever. Never mind mainstream stuff like Atlantic Monthly and Harpers and all that, where the Ivy League liberals have their thoughtful, well-researched pieces on anything I could think of. So who am I, that I should go and start a zillionth journal? What good would that do? I should hold a sit-in?

For what purpose? There must be a dozen organizations in Toronto that do stuff I would 160 be into. There are rallies and workshops and demonstrations from time to time and what I should do is go join something, anything, and fucking put up posters or hand out flyers or do whatever shitty work is needed. But Mom thinks there must be some bombastic action, some happening that we can create right now to capture everyone's attention and

"get these issues out there". As though they're not already out there. It's endearing in its way, how she is so stubbornly naive, so unwavering in her beliefs. And sometimes, by the time I'm done arguing with her and insisting she understand that it's all been tried, it's all impossible, I look at her across the table, shifting in her seat, about to declare her move to the couch because it's been a long day and her body hurts, and I think Sam you

shit. Why don't you just say Yes, Mamma, I will write an article for the New York Times

on my generation's frustrations/ ennui/ confusion; that's a good idea, thank you.

Meanwhile it has at long last been determined that she needs to have dental

implants put in. It's taken months of visits to the dentist and x-rays and poking and

prodding and trial and error. Finally, implants. Which are going to cost thousands of

dollars she doesn't have and means that next Tuesday morning will be spent waiting in

the dental surgeon's office then shepherding a codeine-zoned Mom home to bed. It's a

disgusting procedure from what I gather. Mom asked the surgeon for all the details, as

she always does, though it made her queasy telling me about it. I asked her please to

spare me so she wasn't too specific but it sounded pretty gross. Poor Mom.

So that's pretty much the news from old T.O. It's hard to believe I've only been

back for three months; it seems like it's been like this forever. To school most mornings,

to work most nights; Mike dropping by, lunch breaks getting stoned at Jamie and Ariel's 161 place. Being a shift supervisor has its benefits -1 leave work, talk semiotics with Jamie for a half hour (I say talk, I don't know anything about it but I'm learning) then run back to the store and have dinner after punching in, eat "broken" cookies with Jesse and

Katrina. Before I know it it's closing time and I'm stacking the patio tables with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and then I'll remember how recently it really was that these same espresso-stained hands were tracing the moss on a Welsh waterfall, how they were so tanned against the stone of the Spanish Steps as I posed for a picture to send

Mom. She said it was a trip to see me there, where she had such vivid memories of being.

I told her how I'd imagined her there when she was my age. It's true. Standing on these

Steps I'd always heard about I tried to conjure her, envisioned the long, straight auburn hair, that impish smile I'd seen in photographs. As Eshe squinted into the camera at me in my slightly grimy jeans and torn shirt, the day around us a nondescript wash of brightly coloured tourists milling through streets of chic shops encased in grey stone, I imagined

Mom there on a hot night, high, radiant, decadent as a Fellini character in all her

audacious youth, every man's face turned toward her.

But already it is almost November, and, amazingly, life weaves each day into the

next and makes a pattern of it, of one's self. I suppose some people find that horrifying,

but most days I don't. Perhaps it's because I'm only very young that I find the pattern of

my life, simply because it's mine, fascinating. That my rough, intuitive hands, pale

peasant hands, have explored hyper-lush Welsh moss, have rested on a brown steering

wheel down through the whole Delta, made a thousand lattes, touched firm young bodies,

are typing these words now, and that they know how to do these things, and other people 162 recognize them as being mine and as doing things in their particular ways. Puerile, eh?

But then sometimes it still does seem wonderful that those ways my hands have mean

something to other people, something particular to them and unknowable by me yet that

is how I exist. Because my hands have a consistent pattern in your brain, are woven into themselves again and again over years, you will know me well, I will have a history. As yours, sweet Joe - the fingers' sturdy knuckles and broad round tips, honest as a parsnip, and the slightly bulbous, implicitly rural thumb - tell me everything I cannot know about your childhood, your Yorkshire town. Your hands always come to me first in the act of picking something up, thumb and third finger brown from the espresso machine, index

finger brown from nicotine. Always slightly outstretched, your hands, ready to examine, they make me think of Courtney Love singing / have a blister from touching everything I see... What will they learn to do next, those eager, gentle, capable hands?

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: The Will to (Abdicate) Power Date: January 27 2003

Hello my dear Joe.

Don't worry about not calling, I know it's really expensive, but thank you for the

wonderful long email - you know there's no better present than coming home to a page-

full of your brain. I'm glad your new job is good - perhaps just being in a city every day,

meeting new people, helping them get their lives together will be good for you. And 163 though it sounds awful in fact, you gave me a good laugh with your description of your commute in poor frozen William, stopping to scrape the ice of the windshield with your fingerless gloves, cigarette between your lips, curses on your tongue. What is Newport like? Tell me about your young charges - what sort of lives have they had? What do they need, and what can you do for them?

Yes, it was a nice birthday. Mom gave me this cool old card she's had since the

1960s — she said she felt now was the right time to give it away. It's very '60s-looking — wavy perpendicular blue and green stripes bisected at the bottom by slanted horizontal stripes and Thoreau's words, in irregular white, "If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away". Inside, in perfectly level purple script,

Mom wrote that I should consider the message repeatedly, it had always meant a lot to her. Honestly it almost irritated me at first, the card; it's groovy-looking, but reading it I thought oh lord, another reminder to "follow my dreams", a nudge in the direction of that handsome fellah, Greatness. Which it probably is, but then you have to love her for that too. And reading the quote again I thought about how differently it might have been interpreted more than a century ago when it was written - or even what it would have said to Mom when she was my age.

Michael and I went to dinner with Mom, Baba and Marc at Le Select, on Queen; it's cool, it's like an old French bistro, Mom looked right at home with her pink cheeks, hair in a loose chignon. Of course with the family it's always drama and misery: something is always the matter with someone's health, or Baba just wants to sit in despair 164 and recollect when Zaida was alive and Mom gets mad. But having Mike around seems to help. Baba and Marc both like him a lot, which is amazing considering that Baba made it a lifelong practice to like as few people as possible; Marc is happy as a clam because he can talk about the Three Stooges or old cartoons or Star Treks and Michael gets right into it. Michael knows what Marc's talking about when he starts going on about the Borg.

And Baba, since she likes Michael, gets almost flirtatious, regaling him with all her stories about her singing days, Marc chiming in with details about the composer or conductor or whoever else; it's very sweet, actually, even Mom gets into the stories, though it's often stuff like, Oh yes, that was the trip when you wouldn't leave the opera house. We were in Paris for maybe two weeks and all I ever saw was the opera house.

Really? Baba will say, laughing, eyebrows cheekily raised.

Yeah. You felt safe there. Father wasn't with you, so the only place you felt safe was the opera house. God knows why I was with you, I guess you and Father thought it would be nice for me to see Paris with you, ha ha. ("Safe", slightly more forceful than it might have been, "ha ha" painfully sarcastic, but at least Mom laughs, can make an amusing story from the absurdity of her upbringing).

Then I'll ask Was that the same trip you hit your head on the taxi cab and ate room-service mashed potatoes with your fingers while talking long-distance to Zaida? (It was).

And Marc gets to display his vast knowledge of music - you know he has a photographic memory; the amount of information in his head is astounding. Poor thing, with his fucked-up spine and nervous system disorder; sometimes I imagine what he 165 would have been like without those things. If he'd be "the head of the family" now

Zaida's gone, rather than my Mom. He's always so sweet at birthdays, gets me like five cards which he scrawls all over with his exuberant love and familiar jokes about pigeons and Sylvester the cat. And he'll buy a card for Baba to sign and she'll draw a little face in there with her shaky penmanship and sign it "love, yer old Bab". It's funny, she never says I love you, so these cards mean a lot to me - it's like the only way she knows how to communicate it. Because I know she does love me, loves all of us painfully much, she just can't express it properly. It comes out as criticism, or worry, or fearfulness about her own health to try and keep her loved ones nearby, because she's terrified at every moment of losing one of us. (She woke Mom up in the night once when she was about six, to tell her she was dying; and once she told Mom that if she went downtown, she'd be dead when Mom came home.) That is how she experiences love. Then once a year, she writes it in a card, this almost child-like admission of her overwhelming feeling of attachment.

There is something in all of this that makes perfect sense to me, though I hope I can act less nuttily than she did. But I also think she's becoming more forthcoming in her old age. I think Mom didn't even get it written in a card. Baba and Zaida would always be away for Mom's birthdays because it's in May, when the Cannes Film Festival happens, so for many years as a young woman Mom would get, say, a phone call from a travel agency saying, Your parents have bought you a trip to Rome. Happy Birthday. Or some such distant extravagance. Then there'd be whatever clothes they brought her from

France. Which she generally hated.

166 Anyway with Mike around the whole thing is much more festive: we two babble on and I feel like a kid, indulged and pampered on her special day. These dinners also help to remind me why I love Mike. I remember the first birthday we were together, when I turned nineteen, I was for some reason in a terrible mood and not sure why I'd left

Nathaniel for Mike, was thinking I'd made a big mistake. Then we went out to dinner and I saw how happy he made Baba and Marc, how sweet and engaged he was with them, utterly nonplussed at what I thought was my family's incomparable weirdness. It changed my entire perspective on him that day, reminded me of the deep goodness in his being that people can't help but respond to. Awful as it is, that day I was irritated by what seemed to me his immaturity, his geeky predispositions, even the earnest, first-time love I was being showered with. But after that dinner I remembered how all those things were part of the almost other-worldly goodness that marks him out - he told me once how when he was in China, this old monk at a temple Michael visited just couldn't stop laughing, the sight of Mike's face just tickled him so. I guess it's this curiousity he has about the world, his ability and desire to understand people and do right by them.

So we ate some delicious steaks and tried to keep the conversation off pain of any kind, and Baba told the story about the time she was at a party in her honour and, as she was talking to a journalist, her beads fell off her neck and into her and the journalist's coffee cup. So she went to the bathroom and re-strung the beads, wiped the coffee stains off her skirt, came back to resume the conversation, and the same thing happened again.

She always ends these stories with Oh well, those are the kinds of things that were always happening to me. I was always falling out of the car, or going on-stage with chewing 167 gum m my mouth (Mom chiming in with Yeah, the people in the front seats were hysterical because there was this Diva, beautifully dressed, with these long, kid-skin gloves, and she's got the chewing-gum stuck between her fingers and she's pulling at it while she sings these incredible arias...; Mom stretching her fingers out like a jellyfish opening and closing as she talks). Baba saying But I was a very elegant lady!, half-joking and half serious. Then she'll say Your grandfather used to get me all sorts of beautiful things, a-ny-thing I wanted, he would get. He would go into a store and say, You look about my wife's size, try that on for me willya, honey? A prince of a man, she'll say, A king. She'll look off into the distance, brows arching toward each other, eyes raised in the universal look of unbearable suffering, and it's absurd, an exaggerated stage pose, but it's also completely real.

And Marc will let out a desperate little sigh, and Mom will pick at her food and sharply say Mother, is the drama really necessary, and so it will go. It's silly to say we try and ward off pain because in a moment any of it, all of it, can become painful. Just the faces arrayed around the table, these most familiar faces in the world that will, in all probability, be long dead before I leave this world. Some moments it seems each of them, capable of being extinguished at any moment, are themselves as they will be in memory even as they are before me: flickering images; symbols of themselves. I see them as if imprinted on the air around the table, as if all future tables will bear that imprint even when the body is gone. And then too all of what that imprint, the one I can perceive, lacks; all of what they were before I knew them, what I can only know sifted through their memories - Baba as Zaida's wife; Mom as Irving's, as a defensive young thing; Baba after a performance. What were they like? I have always wondered: even as a kid, when I'd come downstairs sometimes and Mom would be doing the Mashed Potato or, to my horror, the Hitchhiker - licking her thumb and putting it to her bum and everything -1 realized this was not just my Mom doing a silly-looking dance, but a person who had been in that other time, was a person back then too, a person with rhythm and a mischievous gleam in her eye. Wow, I forgot until now but when I was ten or so I wrote a poem that went like Thirty years ago men sat in their chairs, watching my Mom wave her long auburn hair, thinking of a long and lusty affair... Ha! Joseph, look at what you make me think of. I remember Baba was horrified at some part of that poem too.

But Mom loved it. And it had something in it about her dancing in the living room, heavier, but still light on her toes. Man, I should find that poem...

Well, there you go, as Mike would say. Speaking of whom, we've been having some pretty good talks lately - he did an essay on Burke and Rousseau last semester, something about how for Burke human nature and its environment are distinct, but for

Rousseau they are intrinsically linked, and how that affects their concepts of political hierarchy. I never knew that Rousseau thought property was the root of all evil - that's pretty cool. Mike of course loves Rousseau, but he can argue for or against any of these political philosophers. It's crazy, Joe, this stuff just makes implicit sense to him; he can read it like I read Jane Austen. Except he takes these minute, incredibly detailed notes - he has books full of them, practically rephrases the text. Which is, I suppose, why he remembers everything so well. Ah, facts...

169 As I expected, he's been a little less thorny since New Years', though still not the wide-open, devoted boy he was when we first met. Strangely, he said he had to spend the acid trip ensuring he didn't seem melancholy; that he felt missed opportunities for affection. That surprised me. But he's happier, I think, when I'm around than when I'm not; anyway he seems to seek my company more these days, so what else can I ask?

("Seek my company" - sounds like something a Colette character would say. Have you read Colette? Jesus Joe you could read it in the French, that would be amazing. If you haven't, you should; Mom gave me Ripening Seed when I was maybe 14, and I've loved her ever since - you will too, her descriptions are beautiful. Though she's hard to find, now, depending on what your book-store situation is like. I tried to get one of the

Claudine series in Chapters for Eshe's birthday, and the employee didn't even know who

I was talking about. They used to carry Colette, at first, when they were trying to capture market-share; but now that they've closed everything else down they can focus more on home chatchkes and forget about the books. More money in candles than Colette).

Sorry, anyway...

Visa vi your comments on choice I thought you'd appreciate this snippet of last night:

We were lying in Mike's bed staring at the blue wall, the shitty white bookshelf full of Chomsky and role playing games, and Mike says, It's so much easier when you're a kid and you still really think you can run off and be a samurai, or something. There are these values, codes of honour, there are like, all-encompassing causes to be fought for, and infinite possibilities. (He was shirtless, dreamily petting his cat who had his other hand between her paws and was licking it very sweetly). Whatever. It's stupid. I was just a kid who fantasized a lot, you know, always going to far-off lands, or Jesse and I with our spaceship in his basement... That's what kids do, you know? It's just hard, I guess, when you realize it's time to accept that you're going to work in a job, and it's going to be pretty much the same from one day to the next. But that's life, and it's great, even if it's not all about saving the world, or whatever. That's just kids who've watched too much TV, been spoiled with these really vivid fantasies and haven't really had to worry about anything, and it warps what you think is possible.

(Jeru the Damaga was thudding through 99.9% of these niggas ain 't shit, and most of these niggas suck dick. I think it's fascinating that Michael the Certified Nerd has this fairly prolific collection of underground MCs and DJs. Jeru is this angry, moody guy

Mike's been listening to a lot lately.)

Well, I said, It's also this middle-class thing like our lives are supposed to be somehow extra-ordinary. And Capitalism. Everything is supposedly open to you with capitalism, and it's not supposed to have anything to do with, you know, your father was a blacksmith so that's your class and you can read all the adventure novels you want -

-If you can read-

Right. And if you can then, bully, but you still know, very empirically, that you can only hope to alter the conditions of your life so much. The only good thing about being a serf or peasant or something, as opposed to just being really poor now, is that at least back then you couldn't dream of being a noble. If you were born in the mud, at least 171 you weren't also expected to hope not to die in the mud. Now people spit on you 'cause you're down, and they spit on you twice if you don't even have aspirations.

But people have always hoped not to die in the mud. That's where revolutions are born.

That's true. And you can't really want there not to be that impulse. But now we

expect so ridiculously much from our lives. We're not supposed to, you know, just go to

a job and slog it out for forty years, us middle-class kids. And be able to buy a house

sometime, maybe a timeshare or a cottage later on. Every generation is supposed to want to do better than their parents, but our parents did everything. They have, for the most part, houses, they've given us lots of shit, they take vacations. Although the nineties did

fuck them up.

Yeah, the recession was bad, it's true. Hit my parents hard, the corporate video

field just dried right up. And then with digital and stuff? Oh man. But yeah, our parents

had it pretty good, probably a lot better than we're going to have it. My parents had a

boat when I was a kid.

But that's the thing, too. They were anti-saving - so many of the Boomers went

money-mad in the eighties and then broke in the nineties. So the thing is we have to do

even better than that - we have to live lives more in accordance with our values - well

that's the other thing, too, is this Right to Individuality we have now.

Well they've left us with this goddamned legacy, like we're supposed to

distinguish ourselves in some way, be innovators or have some special skill, or yeah, use

172 our individuality to contribute to society in some tangible way. Our lives are supposed to be stories, he said.

Exactly! Two thirds of the world just wants to have a job and feed their families, not be snatched up and killed out of the blue one day, and we just got fucked by these ridiculous expectations.

As a kid, he said, I always respected the hero who triumphs over adversity, pictured myself surviving these hardships. But then you realize that adversity sucks, it really actually sucks, but I still feel like I have to take on the task. Even though suffering isn't the glorious journey I thought it was as a kid, it still has to be done. You realize you have some kind of free will, but that free will means acting on the world, and that free will is chaos.

Is it chaos? I thought. Isn't my will the thing that drives me toward this life I want? Isn't that less chaotic than not knowing what I want? I hadn't thought before about the fact that my imaginings are always of the happy ending, that I never pictured any desolate journeys or travails or tests. Just the peaceful hearth, bountiful garden, adoring husband. A pen in my hand, a babe on my arm. My destined future, unchanged since childhood.

So we talked about the difficult task of becoming real, and I comforted us both by saying that we doubt our skills now because they are so new. Of course it's terrifying to have to actually do things, to have to figure out what these selves we seem to be might be good at. Because you do, but as a kid you just have these images, these stories that you don't know you're choosing but which affect how you see everything. And then you get 173 to this age and have to take that point of view and bend it to the real world, the limited

options in front of you, and just don't feel up to the task. But how can we know what we're capable of, I asked him, When we've barely even begun trying?

And that, my dear Joe, is what I try and remind myself when I'm in my writing

class and everyone's scribbling happily away for the cue card exercise and I'm blank- headed wretched, thinking oh sure Sam, sure you '11 be a great writer... (you haven't started trying yet). Or in Labour and Globalization Part II when I get despairing, feeling there is so much wrong, and so many people already working against it with so much more knowledge and capability than me. When it's so clear that I'll never be able to do

anything. There are so many hundreds of years of injustice, none of which I've

experienced, who am I to try and change anything, what can I do from my fat, cozy

continent, my privileged position atop the shit-heap? Compost? Buy organic?

Whoopdee-fuckin'-do. And what good would it do to leave everyone I know and defect,

go off to some piss-poor corner of South America like some people? Ease my

conscience? I doubt it. It seems very reasonable to simply accept that I'm never going to

do anything, anything being so hard to accomplish, and there being so many people who

are better-equipped than I by either character or history.

Which reminds me, Michael had a dream recently where these powerful, priest

like people thought he was a eunuch, although he wasn't, and were chanting "equip,

equip, although you're not equipped" at him. There was more to it than that which I

174 forget, but if that doesn't say it all about his feelings about the future, I don't know what does.

It makes a good little chant really, something you can march around the kitchen to while making eggs.

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: War, Now and Then Date: Feb. 15 2003

Dearest Joe,

today we attended the protest. Yonge St. looked like a fairground, people dragging gap-mouthed children along the crowded sidewalk, eating pizza in the road, everyone heading south in the grey early afternoon. Though it was breakfast Mike

stopped at Pizza Pizza for a slice, which he too ate drifting down to Dundas, where we were absorbed into the moving mass of demonstrators headed westward. Joe do you know how I love the rabble-rousers with loudspeakers shouting anti-war epithets in rhyme? Loudspeakers get me every time, they just sound like something's going on.

Their staticky insistency.

Mike was cagey, darkly assessing the uselessness and beauty of the huge crowd.

There will be a war. A million fragile bodies bundled against the cold, their temporary

unity through twenty blocks of city street won't change anything. I know he's thinking

They let us make our noise, why not? 175 It was a diverse crowd, made the cause seem reasonable and respectable. Happy, frumpy middle-aged couples in Mountain Co-op gear; burly blue-collar looking dads with blond kids on their shoulders eating Twizzlers; young couples with messy hair and babies in hemp slings who I smile at, reflexively, not able to help wanting this life I want, am ashamed of wanting. Especially there, in the midst of all those well-intentioned people, their slogans and ideals; there in the grey light telling our government we don't condone the killing they're about to do and all I can want is to live a good life. All I can do is look at these pretty, activist couples, the possibly moral, aware, capable lives they might be leading and think / will have that. Herbs in kitchen planters, cloth diapers, interesting bean dishes for dinner. I looked over at this boy I seem to love - silent, stern, whole arguments playing out in his head and barely aware of the thrumming street around him, knowing only that he is not fully in it, that this whole scene asks something of him that he can't give. And this is the man I want, this lonesome, searching thing with his cynicism and resolute moralism? Why not someone like that nice sandy-haired goy with the small white teeth, a Robert Redford type in wholesome corduroy pushing his daughter in a stroller, satisfied wife in long cotton scarf and hiking boots smiling at him? I can see their messy Annex home, colourful and comfortable, see them going to the farmer's market in the summers, conscientious, happy in their choices. It must be lovely. But studying their calmness, their sureness, their comfort with themselves and the crowd I wondered what my faux-Redford would do with my doubts, the bad mornings, the hopeless hours. What would he make of my Mom, my family, the rage I sometimes bring to a debate? How much instability does a man like that want? How much misery would 176 he like to contemplate? Looking at Mike, face pale and almost dogged above that massive green Chinese army coat, long legs striding forward at the edge of the crowd it was perfectly clear that no-one more sure, more comfortable would be any good.

Because when it comes down to it, we have a similar unease.

Except that I know I want this life, this home-owning, child-rearing life. And there he is, a young man full of all a young man's restlessness, skepticism, unnamed ambition and fear and here I am with all my plans for him, like any scheming woman in history. Not scheming, exactly, but weaving plans, visions, acting with intentions. With no way to know if my belief that what I want for him, for both of us, is really what would be best for him or if I just want it to be. How much of this society does he want to reject and what will be left when he is done?

The best thing I saw was a group of elderly ladies marching in lively hats and scarves, singing, holding signs, canes, each other. That, I thought, is a way to be old.

Mike and I didn't talk much; we brought no sign, no noisemakers, we didn't chant or answer to call and response. I wondered if this was the '60s, a protest against Vietnam, if I would have been the same. Could I have been caught up in the moment more than I am now? Would my belief or the feeling of unity with all these people have been enough to wring shouts from me then? Would I have been here with some organization, more involved with local movements? No way to know. We passed a guy with a sign saying

"No to War and Globalization", wearing a Nike baseball cap. What do you do with that?

Mike and I walked side by side, carried along by the colourful human tide, maybe for no better reason than to say that we did. 177 Afterward we went back to Mike's house. His dad, leaning against the kitchen

counter took a toke from his wooden pipe and talking with his breath held, as older tokers will do said, I dunno. I think you guys are much more, sorta, politically aware than we were. Yaknow?

Janice declined the pipe, passed it to Mike who said Well but you guys had the

Vietnam war -

But Brian interrupted with a conditional Yeah, but for us it was like, we would hear that some guy we'd had a toke with was off fighting in the war, and that's when we

sorta went, whoa - it really made it personal. You know, after we worked in that camp in

Vermont we would hear that this guy or that had had to go to war and it was suddenly real to us, you know.

And all these young men coming up here, dodging the draft, Janice added.

But it wasn't the same kind of like, awareness; like I think you guys are much

more informed on a sort of deeper level.

Mike said It's true, maybe people are paying more attention. This protest against

going into Iraq is the first protest in history against starting a war. Vietnam was going on

quietly for five years, and it was only when all these young American soldiers started

coming home dead by the thousands that people started protesting. But a lot less people

were actually demonstrating against the war itself.

That's right, Brian said, obviously enjoying his son's astuteness. It's very sweet

to watch Brian and Mike have a conversation; Brian likes to expound his views and to be

right, and Michael is very respectful of that. But at the same time Brian clearly likes to 178 see the scope of his son's mind, the multifarious facts and theories on which it draws, his

articulate seriousness. Janice mostly just watches them both lovingly, occasionally bursting in with a vivaciously expressed thought.

I sipped my red wine, which I mostly drink when with the Bobbies, Country Joe

in my head going and it's a one-two-three what 're wefightin 'for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn... and admired their solid pine table. I surveyed with pleasure their spacious

kitchen, renovated in the mid-eighties when their business was booming, and envisioned

how I'd redecorate. Bad old habit of someone constantly moving - or maybe I've always

been like that. I feel bad about it when it's the home of someone I know; it seems rude

but I can't help myself, can't help imposing my own aesthetic on everything. I thought of

Janice and Brian not a decade older than Mike and I when they bought this house, this

then-cheap east-end house not having any idea what it would be worth in twenty years.

Lovely old detached brick beauty, nice big tree out front, working fireplace. Bought by a

couple of young people with their first kid, a business plan, good senses of humour which

they needed when the '90s hit. But they've done okay, they've done great. They still

have this house and they still have each other. It's comforting.

Brian was saying You guys have it hard. You know, when we were in school,

tuition for the year was like, uh, 350 dollars...rent was like fifty dollars a month, you had

a part-time job and you could afford to have a car. Brian said all this with incredulous

enthusiasm and I got sick with jealousy. What sweet ease, what peace and simplicity.

Michael said And when you graduated there were jobs available for you. You

guys were still riding the economic boom of the fifties. People could expect to get a job 179 and keep it their whole lives, they could afford to buy houses, that's just not the status quo now,.. Yup, in a lotta ways, the sixties were a good time, man.

And holy shit Joe were they ever. Not everywhere, maybe, not so much for your parents I guess, since from what I know England didn't have quite the same prosperity boom. Though it must have been a crazy time there, too. So much more history to contend with. But what must it have been like? To graduate with no debt, to have your pick of jobs? Even a big city like Toronto still blessed with a host of half-run-down neighborhoods full of cheap old houses, lots of little variety stores with that dusty yellowing plastic on the windows. Universities booming and not yet exposed as a cynical cash-grab, a head-tax on the middle-class as Mike calls it. When it actually mattered to have a B.A. No wonder our parents can't understand why we're so pessimistic - for them, youth is a time of hope, opportunities, great expectations. A time to choose your path and forge ahead in life. A time for questioning, sure, and doubts and confusion, but also for action, for exciting new experiences and taking risks. It must have been nice.

Not to sound too bleak. There must be advantages to growing up the way we have. I just don't know what they are at this moment.

Actually that's not true. Even if our economy isn't what it was when our parents were our age, we're still afforded so many advantages just by being born to even a nominally middle-class family in a developed nation with social services. It's certainly far easier if you're born here than having to immigrate. I got to meet Mustafa, Mike's

Arabic tutor, last week, and it once again made me ashamed of the lacuna between how we like to think of ourselves, as Canadians, and what's really going on. I went up to his 180 place one night, to get his help with translating a poem; (Priscila in class held a discussion about Auden's assertion that translation is the only political duty of poets, and then gave us this assignment).

I drove us out to Mustafa's apartment at York Mills and Leslie, one of those grids of forlorn urban nowhere to which we shunt our immigrants and lower-class single people. It really is abominable. What buildings there are are dilapidated brown high- rises, or dirty white ones like Mustafa's set slightly back from the wide, busy roads. Near the apartment are one coffee shop and a gas station. I can't imagine what it would be like to try and live out there with no car, as Mustafa does - schlepping groceries through god- knows what interminable stretch of emptiness from wherever the nearest grocery store is, waiting for buses to come along on their low-service routes. But it's a big three-bedroom apartment for $1000 a month all in, and that you just can't find downtown. He lives with a room-mate, a frumpy, nervous but decent woman named Mary, originally from Buffalo.

He spends a lot of time on the internet, reading things and contributing his opinions to various forums.

So I think he's grateful for Michael, not only as a student, but as someone to have an actual conversation with. Mustafa is in his late thirties, married twice but no kids, with a Master's in linguistics from an American university. From Syria originally, he was in the States for awhile after he finished his degree, had immigration problems, and came up here. Of course he's hoping to find some good work - teaching preferably, or translation.

But so far, nothing. What an uphill battle. And it's a terrible shame, because he's obviously a great teacher. I could see the pleasure he took in Michael's progress, and 181 how subtly and intelligently he's been nurturing Michael's grammar and vocabulary, giving him the structure of the language which is what Mike likes.

Also I don't know the last time I met anyone who loves poetry so much. His whole face changes when he reads, becomes suffused with light; he looks almost noble, like a gentle prince from a far-away kingdom. In the harsh overhead light, around the plastic-tableclothed table, Mustafa told us about poetry back in Syria.

In Syria, he said, poetry is in the newspapers; it is political commentary. There is a national competition there, where someone recites a poem and the next person must recite another beginning with the same word the last ended on. It is a huge event. Even kids know poetry; well, when I was a kid anyway we'd sit around and recite lines from poems and we'd have to name the poet.

My god, I said, I don't know anyone who could even play that game. No one knows lines from poetry. Let alone poets.

I know, Mustafa said, lighting a cigarette. But? What can you do? There is another relationship with poetry entirely, in Syria. Remember, in the Middle East drama was not allowed, it was considered immoral. Instead the oral tradition was carried on and retained its importance...

It was very interesting. He loves the Romantics and he adores Virginia Woolf- what he calls her hallucinatory style. He's obviously deeply engaged with the world; I can see why Mike likes talking to him, and also why, when Mike first met him, he said his tutor struck him as a frustrated intellectual with a bit of a dark side: there is a darkness under his eyes, a slight bitterness around his beautifully-made lips, a curl of 182 disappointment, distaste with himself. He distinctly did not intend to come here and be a straggling tutor in an East York apartment building. But then, Mike tells me, he had trouble in Syria, too. A bit of a rebel by nature; child of a police officer in a family of eleven. He ran away with a girl when he was in his early twenties, that was his first marriage: very scandalous. And then there were some political troubles, and he left to seek his fortune in America. He is one of those sharply intelligent, rootless, discontented men that this world seems always to produce in such quantity.

But he was almost nervously happy to be serving us tea, laughing at the gargantuan cat Big Guy as Mike had him heaped on himself in a puddle of bliss. We smoked a joint and Mustafa helped Mike translate a poem by - a Palestinian woman, first reading it to us in Arabic. I shrank under the impossibility of doing the words justice: the incantatory beauty of Hurietie, hurietie, as Mustafa read it would not be rendered in its English "freedom, freedom". The meaning of the word to the people that poem belongs to, the sound of the word itself- isn't there a longing in hurietie, something gentle and possibly hopeful? "Freedom" is such an assertion; a bold, straightforward word. So inappropriate for its content, I've always thought. Of course, what hurietie sounds like to me as opposed to an Arabic speaker I can't know -1 suppose

I'm only imbuing it with whatever qualities appear to me. Typical hubris of the subjective mind. But fun.

In any case, I was glad Mike has befriended this strange character. They spend half their time studying, I'd say, and the other half just chatting. Mike is working on

Mustafa, he says, regarding his ideas about Israel. He's not against Jews, per se, but he's 183 violently against Israel, and also America, and therefore holds Jews suspect. I was

slightly awkward at first, wondering if he found me suspect also. But he seemed to like me - it was clear he'd decided what kind of Jew I am from my ideas and choice of lover.

Who, meanwhile, has been trying to get Mustafa to look at the problem of Israel in terms of States and Power, not in terms of religion or fundamental attributes. It's that timeless conversation. But Mike likes the debating practice - he's very good at asking people to explain what they believe, while at the same time presenting facts which force the person to further justify their beliefs. I've seen him ask people questions until they

can't answer themselves anymore. Then suddenly his framework of facts seems the only

logical position; it's very Socratic, and quite entertaining. And useful for me, of course, who ought to be better able to justify my outrage at Israel's behaviour, and am

instantaneously de-railed by the whole "But they want to drive us into the sea - they tried this time and that time, now how can we trust them" argument. I'm hoping the exact

dates UN Resolution 242 has been vetoed, and the circumstances of the Yom Kippur war,

and all that shit, will eventually become tattooed upon my brain.

So you see, I still know so very little. But I know I love you, and that is

something, as they say, that is much.

184 Excerpt from May 16 2003

The next day was the Big Day! Michael and I put on our Sunday best and walked the nine blocks to the Columbia gate, where we met Eshe's Mom. I love Eshe's Mom.

Erica was forty when she had Eshe, her only child. She left Eshe's Dad, to whom she was never married, a little after discovering that he had another child with another woman, but has remained close friends with him. Empress of Nonsequiturs, Erica will come into a room with her calm, distracted air, look at you with slight consternation and say in her low voice something like, I was just talking to the neighbor and she said she made cauliflower, but it was no good. I told her I don't know how you mess up cauliflower, but who am I to talk, I hate to cook.

She has always been a sort of fascination to me - her unusual, green-eyed beauty, her self-contained calm and almost girlish movements, her habit of immaculate housekeeping which Eshe has inherited. Their reserved closeness, the deep personal similarities that bind mother and daughter in the absence of abundant physical expressions of love. And their family stories that Eshe tells me, so different from mine, about Erica's childhood in Dominica; and her arrival in Toronto in the early 1960s, witnessing the burgeoning Black Activism scene at Bathurst and Bloor where she became close friends with Dionne Brand, who has gone on to become a successful writer, and also Eshe's godmother. Through them I've been exposed to a whole other Toronto, more political, more downtown than anything my family could have shown me. Erica works in public health - for the past few years doing sex ed.; her stories are full of committees and meetings, organizing workshops for immigrant woman or underprivileged youth; yet 185 she's not the hyper-energetic, join-for-the-sake-of-joining woman one might imagine when thinking of the socially active. She likes to talk, but not to many people - from her

Eshe got her aversion to making plans, waiting instead for others to call her; and also the scan-and-avoid technique that Eshe has employed so diligently at school when walking in places she might be forced to have unwanted conversation.

Yet it's from Eshe I know about the housing co-operative at Christie and Dupont, and about Hawthorne, an alternative elementary school in the Annex (where she was in a class with Ty, Jed and Nathaniel, how weird is that - she only became friends with them again after I met Jed and Nathaniel in Grade 10); from them I have some idea of the kinds of quiet community activism taking place all the time. Erica was quite strict with Eshe when we were in highschool - Eshe was forever getting grounded and having to devise ways of sneaking out of the house - but has loosened up considerably in the past few years. Eshe and I are planning to get our Moms together, because they like each other, and need us to arrange a play date for them.

Anyway, waiting for us with a bemused smile at 9 am was Erica. We found some

seats and then Michael and I went and got coffee and bagels. We returned and sat around

in the bright humidity for 5000 rounds of Pomp and Circumstance. Seriously, we waited for at least an hour and a half before the graduates even came out, and that song was dribbling out of the loudspeakers the whole time. It became kind of surreal. The sky was heavy as mercury. Miles from us, it seemed, the stage drapery hung in limp splendor.

All around us Ivy League mothers milled in respectable sundresses and wide-brimmed hats, or fanned themselves in their Jackie O. suits squinting at the stage. The bulging . 186 stomachs of hundreds of fathers spilled contentedly over black patent belts; folding chairs were sweated upon, grass was trodden, children dirtied their nice clothes, teenagers with still-wet hair looked unimpressed, walked around to flaunt their skimpy dresses; Michael and I rated girl's asses on a scale of 1 to 10, an ignominious pastime but effective in combating boredom. Erica sat still, hands in her lap, a little smile on her lips, watching the people. And on and on it droned da na na na na na, na na na na naaaaa...., slowly, like parade music performed by sleepwalkers...

Finally the graduates came out. We saw a couple hundred tiny figures fill some seats at the front. We saw some suited figures step to the mic. We faintly heard some words like Achievement, Pride and Tradition, Challenges Ahead and Opportunities; they speckled the damp air like drops of rain. We waited for the burst of meaning that would refresh the day, for the speaker who would bring to life the struggling bud of excitement wilting under the hazy sun and arid sentiment, shriveling in the breasts of undergraduates and audience alike. But that never came. It was just another undergraduate class, after all; just a bunch of kids pushing off to their next phase of schooling. I of course finally had to submit to my bladder and so missed Eshe's three-second walk across the stage, and when I returned, Erica whispered, laughing, that she was so surprised when they finally called Eshe that she was halfway across the stage before Erica realized she should clap.

And that was that. Eshe came and found us, momentarily, so Erica could get a picture of her in her cap and gown before they had to be returned (no throwing of caps anymore, man, they're $60 a rental and have to be returned immediately after the ceremony). So we found an unclaimed patch of grass and Eshe grinned, my singular 187 friend at 22 in all her sweetness and beauty, captured for posterity on the teeming

Columbia lawn before running off to try and beat the huge line to return her ceremonial garments.

From: "SamB." To: [email protected] Subject: A Joyous Chip in the Living Mosaic Date: June 30 2003

Dearest Joe,

I was thinking of you last night as I sat on the concrete steps outside the Anglican church next to Flo's parents' house. We've been going there for years to smoke joints late at night, hidden by tall bushes and the shadow of the church walls. We'd taken a blanket, lanterns with tealights, and our cups of juice in pretty glasses - it is one of Flo's sweet peccadilloes that she'll always drink from the prettiest glass in any cupboard, and will walk down the street holding it nonchalantly, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to be drifting down the street with a blue glass chalice or porcelain teacup in one's hand. We were sitting on one of Mrs. Shaw's innumerable wool tartans and discussing the church. Flo was Christened, and like most romantic little girls loved the ceremony of it, her white dress, the church dressed up in white flowers, the reverent

Sunday morning hush. Not that either of her parents were religious - they had returned to the Church, like so many people, for their children. Flo, like both her Mother and Bri, rejected the Church at thirteen, having realized it would answer none of her questions

188 about life, other people, or herself. It's funny, I said to her, how so many parents try to get their children to like things the parents long ago rejected.

It's true, said Flo; but I see why they did it - they wanted some doctrine, some sense of history or community or something. Anyway, then we get to do the rejecting ourselves. Kids always want to reject something, I guess it's nice when it's not something your parents care about. And my Dad has stayed involved with the church.

Not for religious purposes, but they put on these little plays, like, yearly community projects and my Dad helps out with that doing the sets and stuff. Sometimes he acts.

That's cute.

Yeah, she inhaled, smiling, passing me the sagging joint, a joint which could only be described as Ty describes Flo's joints - a goober-sponge: a bulging little submarine which Flo over-enthusiastically "baptized", drenching it in spit. Sorry, she said, mouth full of smoke, it's a little, uh... Anyway, yeah, my family has always been good at having projects, staying involved with things that interest them.

I know, I said, it's probably really good for them. That seems to be less and less common - people having hobbies, being involved with community stuff. No one has any time.

From there we got on to the Puritans that founded America, what their lives were like, the rituals we've lost as a society, and the morals, and whether we're better off having traded strict morality for this ambiguous thing called realism. And then Flo, as she is wont to do, looked at me with her bright eyes and said Right now you look to me

189 like some kind of Industrial Revolution waif, all pale, with your hair flowing down your back like that.

This particular vision is probably a result of the swaths of Victorian fiction she's been reading for her summer course, but people are always reminding Flo of other times and places: Eshe with her calm smile has been a Nubian Princess, a Tribal Priestess powerful and mysterious; Mike of course is a Monk, sometimes a Wise Turtle; Flo's usual favorite for me is Milk-Maid, especially when I'm in cleavage-revealing shirts and my hair is curling nicely; (there's also the Mermaid and the Dame with the Rings). But tonight on the stone Church steps in a loose shirt with a big neck I was a Waif- pretty funny for someone with my build, but okay - with nobility in my blood but cast out into the world as a peon to become fun-loving and gritty among the common folk. A sort of

1930s movie-storyline, I think).

And Florence, on her back toeing the church wall said, I am of the nobility but I just like people.

You're a democratic aristocrat, said I. Which seems rather a good description for her generally - her family so well-heeled and well-established and Flo traipsing the city, talking to everyone, indiscriminate in her fascination.

My grandfather, she told me, Used to say that an artist should be classless, that artists should be able to mingle with nobility or drink in a pub with working men. I could really see that in him. Especially when he took me to Italy when I was fifteen I really saw how he liked to talk to everyone and anyone would talk to him.

190 This seemed to me good advice. And I liked the idea of a classless class of society, of people who move through the world unhindered by the status to which they were born.

Of course when I told Michael this later, he quite accurately pointed out what a middle-class aspiration that is. If you're poor, he said, you're going to have a lot harder a time hiding what class you're from. Ditto if you're really rich, especially the Old Rich.

But if you're in the middle, oh sure, you're well-educated enough to talk to the wealthy and not conditioned like the wealthy to be immediately suspicious of the poor. Or suspect to them.

I suppose everything I think about art generally reflects a deep allegiance to the middle-class. Who could hope to erase class distinctions through art but for those in the middle? The elites want elite art; the poor probably think most art is elitist; only us muddle-headed but well-intentioned bourgeoisie could believe in a book or painting that would transcend those boundaries.

But it's a nice idea.

Actually, Mom took me to Neil Young's Greendale concert last week, and

afterwards we got to talking about how Rock and Roll broke down some barriers between race and class. It was a fun night - we'd been to the CSNY concert a few years back and were so in love with Neil's bewitched spinning and strumming and stomping - in his

flowing black robe he looked like some kind of shaman conjuring the spirits from his

guitar - we had to see him again. I was a bit worried about this whole concept album thing, but actually it's great. And Mom and I got stoned in the parking lot before the 191 show, Mom taking her lady-like little tokes and then daintily putting the roach out on her tongue as we reached the ACC. At which point I had to take charge because large stadiums full of people tend to bring out Mom's least competent self, so I led her, aghast and giggling, to the chocolate vendor and then to our seats as she gawked at the ugliness of the venue and the rowdiness of its attendees with their baseball caps and plastic pints ofMolson.

The great, and also the awful thing about going out with Mom is how you never have to guess how she's feeling. Well, you know Mom - her face tells all before she opens her mouth, which she inevitably will; if she's having a great time, you know it; if she's not, you know that too. Now, I think that's a wonderful trait in many ways - she's right there, experiencing everything to the fullest, uninhibited about expressing that experience to those around her. But this is the kind of thing just designed to humiliate children. It's like this innate thing that kids don't want their parents to stand out in a crowd. It makes no sense, and maybe it's not the same everywhere, but here there's like this herd mentality, I don't know what it is. We have no respect for our elders, we cut them down compulsively. Anyway I have always fought this impulse, but it hasn't gone away entirely yet, I am ashamed to say. But whatever, I know there's nothing less cool about my Mom just because she happened to carry me in her body for nine months -just there's this tiny niggle; I'm sure I'll grow out of it someday.

But I can't do like other kids, who tell their parents off when they do something the kids think is stupid, or they don't like. I think it's rude and anyway it has just never seemed an option with Mom. I can disagree with her opinions, argue points, most 192 certainly; she loves a good debate. But as for commenting upon her character, she's taught me that love means complete acceptance, and it's always been clear that that often means letting people be the way they are despite one's own desires for them to act differently. Sometimes it's frustrating - for instance, Mom is very cuddly in public. I'm standing there in the ACC trying to get into the music, to have whatever experience of live music one is supposed to get, and which I often can't quite grasp. I guess I wanted to let myself be totally absorbed by the song, the feeling of being one body in several thousand all experiencing the same chords, the same rhythm at the same moment; but there Mom was with her arm around me, bringing me back to myself, and her, and all of what our life is, her arm a barrier between us and everything else. I knew she was looking to me to be in the moment with her, knew she was simply full up with love, with the joy of sharing this experience with me, mother and daughter together listening to the new music of an old head she was digging at my age. She wanted to be united with me in enjoyment, in recognition of our love and the strange, overwhelming beauty of life and I was reticent; I wanted my own experience. I knew I should be able, was ashamed and saddened at my reticence; wanted her experience too. But I stood there fighting annoyance at the way she has to insinuate herself into every exceptional moment; she always wants to name it, make it tangible, acknowledge it very deliberately and this

somehow diminishes nothing for her, heightens it instead. I wanted my experience but I didn't want that to include excluding my mother, rejecting her unwieldy joy, I wanted that joy so I fought back the slightly stifled feeling, willed myself to be there with the music and with her, to appreciate the moment as she was appreciating it: as a singular moment 193 in our life together, a memory-in-the-making, an instant in which we are fused by a common experience made intensely precious by so many past shared experiences. I just thought Sammy, don't ruin this with petty grievances, adolescent individuation problems or whatever. I put my arm around her and turned to her, let her see how happy I was before turning back to the stage, swaying in time with Mom, with Neil Young and Crazy

Horse and the whole, packed arena. Not engrossed entirely, but close enough.

Anyway the point of all this was that when we got back to the car we got to talking about Rock and Roll, how great it is that Neil Young is still around, and Mom was saying that she thinks it's so amazing how the music of her generation, which defined her generation and baffled her parents', now serves as a bridge between her generation and mine. And it's true - the concert was at least half people in their teens and twenties, and almost everyone I know grew up, at least to some degree, with their parents' music. Neil

Young, Led Zep, The Grateful Dead, Jimi, Janice, The Doors, these were at least as big a deal to the people I knew in highschool as Soundgarden or Nirvana. Of course, I'm sure that had something to do with the people I knew - for those obsessed with, like, Cypress

Hill it's possible The Beatles were never exciting, but I think for a lot of people that music was the first hint that their parents were cool once too.

Then we got on to music as a unifying force in general - of black and white people Mom was saying, which is true to some extent, but I had to point out that that was largely because white musicians in the '60s basically caught on to the cool music black people had been making for forty years and stole it, with no acknowledgement of their sources. With which she agreed. But everyone's a product of their time, she reminded 194 me. Back then, it was major just to be playing "black music" and dancing around all crazy. That was pretty radical forty years ago. And artists like Mick Jagger have spoken about the fact that a lot of their songs were written by American Blues musicians. And

Rock music did, Mom pointed out, bring exposure to the blues and blues musicians that they might otherwise not have gotten. I had to concede this, though I made her concede the shiftiness of it, how the very basis of this music we associate with freedom and liberalism is based on the same colonial bullshit as everything else. But then what can you expect? I asked her; I guess so she said absentmindedly. She didn't want to dwell on more lousiness, more failure in the world. She wanted to think of the good, and I thought how for her the very fact that Rock exists, that it changed anything is good enough. The imperfections of its origins are only further reasons to praise it, not a hint that there might be problems with what it is because unavoidably a product of its history.

But it's true, I said, Rock did kind of get people from all walks of life listening to blues-influenced music; it transcended class and culture to a greater extent than any music before - maybe because it's such a mongrel, you know, its heritage is so mixed.

And the medium it came through was so new! Mom said. I mean, I think television played a huge part in spreading Rock and Roll.

We were then polishing off the last of our joint, idling below the Front St. bridge in the post-concert traffic, our dark little bubble like the inside of one bead in the neon necklace strung up Bay Street. Mom reminded me of how much of North America came to the Beatles, and hence the British Invasion, and hence the Blues, via Ed Sullivan. She remembered sitting on the carpet in the living room of her parents' house when she was 195 about 15, watching that show with her father. He was pretty old-school, but Mom said he got a kick out of the Beatles; later he would sometimes sing I wanna hold your haaaaaaaand- she imitated it, the inflection was this very Jewish sort of loving mockery, the "aaa" very nasal, "d" with the tongue between the teeth -1 could sort of see Zaida

singing like that to Mom, all passionate in her hippie attire and defiance but loving her

father, too, and glad to be kidded by him for a moment. Their two disparate worlds

finding a moment of commonality in five minutes of a variety show.

Anyway, class and the arts, a fascinating topic, and one I should probably stop babbling on about now. It's just funny how it keeps coming up...

In other news Ty has launched a lawsuit against the U of T before the Human

Rights' Commission. This is because U of T fucked him around with his disability rights:

he went through all these hoops to get the expensive testing and they found that he does

indeed have learning disabilities, but didn't make the appropriate accommodations until

almost the end of the year; (there are all kinds of goodies you can get as a student with

disabilities, like a laptop or recording device, both of which he now has but would have

been helpful through all the lectures he is incapable of listening to and taking notes on at

the same time). And they just kept right on giving him the multiple choice tests that their

own la-dee-da testing disclosed he can't do. (All year he was subjected to the distressing

and mildly embarrassing situation of being one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable

people in the class, yet failing multiple choice tests). As a result his grades are way

shittier than they should be, and he wants them stricken. We always knew he had some

kind of dyslexia - his reading is laboured, his handwriting looks like a Pollock painting - 196 but the tests have revealed that his brain really is kind of strange. His communication skills and his processing of auditory information are highly above average, but his intake of visual information - written words, facial expressions, is highly impaired. So for instance, he was tested as being able to read only 30 words a minute, very slow.

However, when someone reads to him, and the book is in front of him, he can read 110 words a minute, which is extra-ordinary. This explains why he can listen to a program on the CBC and tell you almost everything about it months later. His IQ, for what that's worth, is 144, adjusted for the disability, and 93 without the adjustment - hence why the vaunted U of T did agree he has a "functional impairment to express his potential".

Basically, he has difficulty getting "words from the world to the brain", as he put it; his mechanical processes of reading and writing have a glitch. This also, Ty feels, explains why he has such trouble following movies, or picking up on people's body language. Just like multiple choice tests, where he can't keep the question and possible answers in his head at the same time, in a room full of people he has to process each one individually, which occasionally leads to social faux pas, or what some see as arrogance. But he simply has difficulty processing what people might be thinking about him, so assumes they like and accept him, and goes about his way. Which works out great most of the time...

In any case, he applied to have the unfair grades stricken but U of T doesn't want to do it, because they are rat-bastard fuckers. Now Ty is nervous about his Med School application, because his grades are just above the cut-off mark even though this year he got all A's and A+'s. And of course it's not like he can afford a lawyer, so he's figuring' out the whole legal process himself. Which he doesn't seem to mind. The other night we were hanging out and he's like So it looks like I'm taking U of T to court... We were on the steps outside Ariel's store (a material manifesto of Ariel's aesthetics, FLAVOUR

HALL spelled out in a cascade of letters over the orange and pink Plexiglas door, the whole thing exploding like a synthetic flower from the back of the old brick mansion, bordered by a ragged but productive garden baring its wares to College St.). The streetcars were humming by red and empty, a police car drove slowly by. Oh look, it's the po-lice said Ty. Let's go talk to our friendly neighborhood policemen.

That reminds me, I said, I have to go to the station and report my missing passport. I somehow lost it in New York, I think in Central Park.

You don't have to go there, said Ty, just call and file a report.

That's not what they told me, I said.

Just call 888-

888 nothing man, I called the number I found in the phone book and it was like

What do you want? Okay I'll transfer you click hello? Hold please click-

No! Ty cried, starting to laugh a goofy laugh, you just call and speak to -

Speak? There were no people! Only for you is this something that can be done on the phone in fifteen minutes.

I think, he said, when this whole disability thing is done I'll take on another

Human Rights case.

Right, I said, because for this you have time.

Well, he said, it's not that hard. 198 For you it's not that hard. You know what the difference is? For you (looking at

Jamie and Eshe giggling on the steps) or for me, we see these systems as like huge,

efficient machines, all organized and with locked rooms and organized files and people with manicured fingers to look through them; everything all efficient and systematic and

shit. But to you, Ty, you see it all like some big house after a hurricane, papers everywhere and people standing around not knowing quite what to do and you stumble

into the room where the head of everything is like eating lunch and he says Here, take half my sandwich!

Ty was laughing and going No! It's easy! He stopped laughing and said The bureaucracy is permeable.

Which is perfectly true, of course. He was looking at me with that knowing little

wise-urchin look, dark eyes shining up at me beneath arched eyebrows, face intent and

sure. And I remembered that this is one of the reasons I felt I had to know him, that ease

with which he walks into City Hall, or any government office and does just what he came

for no matter how difficult or unusual. He talks to everybody, treats them like people, not

as the face of an institution, and it gets him what he wants. If you need a ticket re-opened

right away talk to Morris, the funny fat gay guy in the basement of city hall, but don't ask

him for a pen. Whatever you need, be it a JP or a parade permit or a tow truck or your

name on a guest list at a party, Ty can probably get it. Mom always said he's the best

operator she knows, and that's saying something considering the business she's in. It's

true, I guess; he does know how to operate, sometimes it's made him manipulative. He

hasn't always had the clearest sense of right and wrong, though he deeply wants to do 199 good for those he loves. I think he's just had to adapt to being on his own for so long, to having almost no parental guidance and having huge ambitions but no support. It's just in his nature to want to do things, and he's not particular about doing things by the book, so he's learned how best to use that to his advantage. Mom says he's an aggressive little

Israeli. With which Ty agrees, I believe.

All of this, too, must have something to do with what a showman he is - we played the Pride Parade this year, and now my brain is emblazoned with the image of Ty shirtless in the searing sunshine balancing on the back of a pick-up truck, strutting in time and wailing on his repenique, the light obliterating the drum, making it another small sun.

In a beaded black bikini top - a wonderful burlesque thing lent me by Michelle -1 was strapped into my surdu and wedged into the truck's bed with four other surdus and players, bottles of water and knapsacks, Ty conducting from the edge the rest of the band.

Michael in an undershirt and Michelle in leather short shorts and knee-high platform boots, collar around her neck where later Ty would lead her on a leash, shook their shakers valiantly in the mid-day heat, the crowds behind the barrier cheering and squirting water guns. I saw Ty realize we were passing the judging station and decide, savvy, confidently reckless, to lead us into one of our showiest breaks - sudden as it all was and disorienting with the crowds and constant motion we faltered at first but sure as a hungry predator Ty dove at the beat, kept it within the band's grasp. We tore at it, back into the groove; I remember looking down and seeing Jamie roaring the break's Yeah, in white wife-beater and black dog collar smacking that tambourim amid twenty familiar bodies and their instruments suddenly unified in effort and crazy joy within an ecstatic 200 mob all come out to celebrate the Human Right to Fuck Whom You Want. Bare-assed, bare-titted, draped in beads, in uniform, in wedding attire, on stilts, in bondage gear, on elaborate floats on flat-bed trucks flailing multi-coloured sweat from their painted bodies the revelers flooded Yonge St., while around us a million bodies - straight, gay, young, old, every race and creed - strained to cheer us on, all of downtown pulsing Madonna,

Bollywood pop, every club beat imaginable, and buried within it all, the tenacious boom- clack of Samba Elegua. It was great. Only through Ty, man, only through Ty would

Mike, or Jamie or Michelle or I, or most of the people in this band, find ourselves in the middle of a mile-long parade.

At the end Ty said it looked like people were dripping off the buildings, and it really did: people were leaning over the roofs of the brick apartments above the stores on

Yonge, they were perched on window-sills, legs dangling from the ledges, there were faces in every window. The sidewalks were swirling with faces and limbs, people hooted from trees and atop garbage cans, children and girls grinned on men's shoulders, people leaning on every building, on tip-toes on every stoop. So much skin, hair and cloth amid the bricks, concrete and asphalt, changing everything. And everywhere rainbow flags fluttering against the buildings, draped off balconies, Yonge St. itself like a disorganized rainbow, a bright mosaic of bodies and floats stretching up the city's longest artery and spilling through half of down-town. It made me immensely glad to have been born in a city at this time; a scene like that is the best, I think, a place like Toronto can offer.

Whatever cities are and whatever their failings, it seems at least that having so many disparate lives come together so closely, so unavoidably, leads to people accepting 201 differences more easily. And so a parade like this seems a kind of proof that consciousness does change, that given patience and hard work and the right conditions, humans can improve.

That said, Mike's been reading the Middle East Road Map document rather compulsively, and doesn't hold out much hope for it. We read all the bullshit in the papers - this is the clarion call for peace in the Middle East and all that - and wonder how so-called intelligent people can be so dumb. Entertaining themselves with this blood- soaked Punch and Judy show...

Excerpted from July 16 2003

In Montreal I can walk around and see where Zaida or Irving would have lived as a child, can pass Baron Byng highschool (now a community centre) and think crazy, my father as a young man walked these halls each morning. It's good to know where the people I come from come from, but still, to live there would be a choice to claim that history as more mine than it is. And I don't want to be yet another Torontonian dissing my city for boring, heading east to better satisfy my need to be in the most happening place. Better I should stay, try and make the city I know into what I want, rather than looking for that thing, ready made, somewhere else. Silly though it is I feel I would be betraying poor old Toronto, its deficiencies and absurdities, were I to leave it. And something in myself too, for whatever Toronto is I am from it. Other than you, Joe, people looking to distance themselves from their homes usually seem suspect to me. 202 What is it of themselves they don't want? You at least know what you don't want, and some of what you do. For me, moving to Montreal has always seemed like an attempt to be cooler than I was made to be by birth. I guess if I was into the music scene it would be different, but that's not for me. Though Montreal does have great weed. I hear you can call guys who'll come on bikes and lay out a selection for you...

Anyway it's wonderful to visit. After our long, pleasant day I felt like a kid after the fair, muscles spent, slightly sticky with heat and ice cream but completely sated, crawling into soft sheets, night air drifting in through the window. The old-fashioned lamp glowed white on the white wrought-iron bed; it seemed very correct that Michael should be in his white undershirt, sitting on the bed taking off his socks, that I should be tucked in, pink and freckled, in a cotton nightie. We could be farmers, I thought, in the

1920s. Outside the cows are sleeping and the corn is growing. Or immigrants in this house at the turn of the century; this could be our one sweet moment together before sleep, before the next day's storm of factory-work, washing, babies, insults, the confusion of making a life in a new country. But no, we are just us, two twenty-first century kids in a B&B learning to be adults as people do, taking little vacations, meeting family. Like playing house but for real.

The next day we drove out to Meimonedes, where Irving now lives. Or, I presume, waits to die, since I cannot call what he's doing living. From the moment I saw the huge, institutional building rising from the flat, barren suburb surrounding, I wished I hadn't come. In the lobby, women no more substantial than a wisp of smoke lingered in slippers assisted by conscientious but distant caregivers. You could see the look of shift- 203 workers in their eyes, doing what they are paid to do before it's time to clock out, solicitousness for ten dollars an hour. Liver-spotted men in wheelchairs held cigarettes in trembling fingers. I took a few desperate drags of mine before stubbing it out and heading to the elevator. I knew I should be calmer. This is age, I thought, this is what happens. These people are comfortable, well looked-after; they have some pleasures still within their grasp. But in my head was a line of Irving's, from the poem he wrote for his mother after she died: the inescapable lousiness of growing old. This was a line my mother has always repeated to me, now it would not stop. Inescapable as I looked at the women's sunken mouths; lousiness as I watched their fragile bodies huddled around the television.

Stepping off the elevator into the pale pink halls of the fifth floor, I smiled into the

smiling eyes of my father's neighbors, their bewildered, expectant faces. As I passed one of the men said Hello Darling in his raspy Jewish voice and I nearly lost it. How dare I

come here in my youth, my glory, with my love steady and quiet beside me. I felt unbearably strong, as though I might harm them; dangerous, the powerful, undeniable pulse in my veins. I was taking up all the air; the sanitized air was ringing with my blood,

with Michael's; like a church-bell's toll absorbs all the sounds of a Sunday morning we

suffused the thin atmosphere, claimed it in our call to the unclaimable. What right had we to disturb the residents' Monday morning routine? The audacity of me to come in here

full of the city streets, the hot night, the bright morning, and traipse memory down the

halls of these old men. These men whose lovely brides are now bones beneath the earth,

or who come visit them, step tentative steps across their husband's rooms bearing food or 204 pictures of grandchildren. And most impossibly, most incredibly they looked at us with interest, with delight even. Whatever whisper of irretrievable lives, of wedding nights and Sunday brunches, of the strength in their hands when they first held their children, whatever we were to them they wanted it, and what's more, wanted whatever of that we are not. As their dimmed eyes followed us, bare-shouldered twenty-first century girl with her messy fellah in army pants, they seemed to be trying to conjure the life we might make together; they wanted us to breach their bloodless corridors with the tidal force, the taste, the scent of the world they are leaving and cannot know.

Passing an "activity room" with construction paper flowers pasted to the windows

I focused very hard on putting one foot in front of the other. Couldn't we just leave? I asked Mike; There's no real point in our being here.

Yes there is he said gently, smiling gently.

Each of the rooms had a picture of its inhabitant on the door. Some pictures were very old: above eager eyes dark widow's peaks gleamed their gone splendor; women waved by boat railings in red lipstick and traveling suits. How strange, I thought, that these kinds of looks are disappearing from the earth - no one will wear their hair like that anymore; even the look on their faces, the features themselves seemed different. Others had more recent photos: old ladies grinning cheekily with their Bingo sheets; white- haired Bubies and Zaidas surrounded by a passel of off-spring in one of the visiting rooms, grandchildren in their incomprehensible clothes awkward beneath the loving grasp of their elders, the residents' children in their prime, poised more or less comfortably between what they were and what they will be. 205 Outside Irving's door was a picture I remembered from one of his books, a head of unruly dark hair, pugnacious little smile playing around the lips. Inside the darkened room Irving was sitting on the bed, a nurse and a personal assistant bent over his shrunken frame. I watched them expertly, carefully help Irving to his wheelchair. His assistant, Diana, who's been with him for years, told me he'd just gotten up from a nap, he'd be a minute getting ready. I managed to say I'll just go to the washroom a minute, get into a stall and close the latch before I started howling, howling. I couldn't stop. I was terrified someone would come in and hear me wailing; I had to stop. I buried my face in a bouquet of toilet paper and wailed, thinking of nothing, only unable to stop crying. Sam, I said aloud, Stop this now. I blew my nose; my lip started to wobble. Just go I said, splashed water on my face, smeared some gloss on my lips and went.

Michael looked at me tenderly as I returned to the room. Irving was in his wheelchair; his white hair, still quite impressive, was neatly combed. He was wearing black track pants that looked slightly dirty, were deeply horrible for their unapologetic practicality. I thought of all the hands that had touched him throughout his life, and of the hands and hands that touch him now; the competent professional hands tending to him, keeping him clean, ministering to the body over which he has so little control. Diana suggested we go sit in a room down the hall so we set off, Diana pushing Irving, Michael and I walking uselessly beside the chair. She parked him in a pale blue room with no sun but big windows providing a nice view of the surrounding brown suburban grid. She told us he might be a little more disoriented, having just woken up, and that he'd been very tired lately, but she bent over him and yelled into his ear Irving, Samantha 's here. You 206 know Samantha? Your daughter? He made no reply. So she smoothed down a wayward tuft of hair and said Okay, smiled slightly guiltily, as if it were her fault she couldn't rouse him, and left.

And I looked at him a moment then ran off again, ashamed of my weakness and at the mercy of myself.

When I returned Michael was sitting close by Irving, telling him how he first came upon Irving's work. It was after we'd come home from Montreal and Mike found out he'd gotten the part in the play. Turned out the playwright was a major fan; the play started with a recitation of A Tall Man Executes a Jig. This was some coincidence, having just come back from Irving's tribute, so Michael took himself to the library and read up on this man who'd suddenly become such a presence in his life. So this was what

Michael was relating, his benevolent face eager and open, resting without pain on the silent, white face of my father. For an instant I hated him, Michael, for being so calm, for beaming so peacefully as he was. Sir Mortimer doesn 't shake you I thought bitterly; for you this is only another part of life.

Then I heard him saying Mr. Layton, I know you don't know me, but I just want to tell you... you have a very beautiful daughter. Samantha is an amazing - a really special person. I'm glad I met her, and so I guess I should thank you.

It seemed absurd, this little speech - who ever heard Michael say special! - it seemed a shining moment for an actor in a TV special, until I realized, knew all through me that it only seemed absurd because this moment was so removed from ordinary life.

We have no normalized speech for these occasions, what could he say, other than that? 207 With the formality one would use in meeting a girlfriend's father for the first time, and the bluntness reserved for special occasions or children, Michael was saying perhaps the only reasonable thing to say: Old Man, I love your daughter. You have never known her, will never know her, but I do, and before you die, know you've done a good thing in this world, because you created her.

Michael looked up at me, pulled a chair around and said Talk to him. Tell him about yourself.

And I loved Michael beyond all reason, felt myself delivered up to him and into his care. I wanted to do as he told me, knew that he was wiser and more admirable than I.

I've been writing, I said, looking at my father's downcast eyes. Their magnificent blue was dimmed, had become clouded. I saw a tear roll down his cheek. Was he crying? Did he know me? Was it pain at this situation, the words he couldn't quite grasp that caused that tear, or was it simply bewilderment? Was he crying at all, or were his old eyes simply leaking, knowing nothing?

I got into the Creative Writing course at York, so, um, I start in the fall, taking workshops, and... I traveled last summer. Around Europe, Morocco. Didn't get to

Greece, though, that's the next trip. And Mom's okay... stressed, you know, working, looking after my grandmother, I'm sure you remember her, ha.

And I sat there trying to keep my lips steady as the tears coursed down my face.

Why, why oh why did I not give him my number when he asked for it? When he walked with me to the door of his home on Monkland, no taller than me and shuffling, but beside me nonetheless and he asked me Can I call you. His memory already failing but still able 208 to hold a conversation, to be pleased by the stash of poems I so shyly presented to him, delighted by the songs I played for him on my guitar, there in my braids and heavy eye make-up at sixteen. Eager to get back to Bri in her uncle's empty house, put this strange interlude of day behind me. I said No, I said No, I was frightened of upsetting the established order of my life. What if he called and Mom answered? What would he and I say to each other anyway, with my young self so unknown to him, so new and fascinating to me, and his world already shrinking, becoming a cocoon of sustenance, a shroud of routine around him.

He did call me once, I don't even remember what was said. It was a few months after Mike and I had returned from our trip to Montreal. After the tribute where Max my eldest brother read a poem about each child except me. Where, my head swaying with my daughter, my lovely daughter, the poem for my sister Naomi, I had gone up to my father and he'd looked at me with those endlessly delighted blue eyes and said You're beautiful, who are you? Ever the poet, Bacchanalian worshipper of beauty. When I told him he pulled me to him, his arm still surprisingly strong; his colossal wrists rested on my shoulders as a photographer snapped shots of us and other people waited in line to speak to him, eager and self-conscious as guests at a wedding. It was then that I realized the wonderment in his eyes was not just that life-lust I'd heard so much about; it was the look of a man whose history is dwindling to forgotten photographs, found and lost, found and lost. He was marveling, surprised, his forgetting a sadness, a lightness across his face.

When he called I was straddling Michael on the couch in the afternoon sunlight, warmly thrilling with the warmth of his body, but peaceful as a tired child with her arms 209 thrown around her father's neck. I remember so vividly because of how new the feeling was, that stillness and comfort. Michael and I were then still utterly new to each other, and my knowledge of love was mostly Nathaniel, too restless, too wary of love to sit with me as Michael would. And of course Bri, which was a whole other thing. So I remember feeling that I was delivered into Michael's hands there in the still apartment in the golden afternoon and then how strange it was that it was at that moment, with my face buried in his smooth, boy-smelling neck that the phone rang, and it was Irving. But that's all.

Back in the car outside Meimonedes the water-works started up again. I lay my head in Michael's lap, the car muggy and smelling of stale coffee and Smartfood. Holy

Jesus Motherfuck that sucked I eventually managed, sniffing and hiccupping. Michael unpasted the tendrils of wet hair from my cheek, smoothed them back on my head. I'm never living in a place like that. If I get Alzheimer's, I'm leaving instructions to be put down before that happens. Fuck that, man. Same goes for you. (And I was suddenly struck almost hysterical with the thought of his paternal grandmother dying of

Alzheimer's at 40; his maternal grandfather died of the same, although he was 93. It seemed inescapable, I could not bear it, Michael would forget me, he would look with that bewildered tragic delight at this world we have known together and how would I stand it?). You don't know me, I said, It's heroine overdoses for us both. Ride some horse off into the sunset and adios, world.

Michael waited until I had lit a smoke, a tremendous, wondrous, glorious smoke which I also resented deeply and with every fibre of my body but inhaled with defiant

210 gusto; he waited until we were moving safely toward the highway to say Don't say that.

Don't say you'd choose to end my life, if I were senile.

I'm not talking senile, dude, I'm talking like, practically vegetative. Did you see him, man, did it seem like he was having a lot of fun? Was he getting a lot out of life?

I don't know, Sammy. That's the problem, we can't know. What if I can't communicate anything, what if-1 mean who knows what the brain is doing at that point, what it feels like to be living that way? But I might just be grateful for one more day with the trees and the sky. I might still get pleasure from that. You can't decide to take that away from someone else. And for yourself, too, how can you know, now, how you'll feel about life when you're that old?

You're right, I said, eyes very carefully trained on the traffic, knowing utterly that he was right but overcome by the thought, the image of Mike old, dying; saying goodbye to the trees and the sky, loving them as he leaves them.

What is the purpose of any of these imaginings? So we shall all die. From some angles it seems nothing to get hung about, as the Beatles would say. We have our time, then it ends. What could be simpler? Hopefully it isn't too painful, extreme pain is generally to be avoided, but death? Evaded in lucky moments, perhaps, but nothing more. This is Michael's mother's view of things. She was raised Rosicrucian. There is re-incarnation, there are spirits that live on. The physical body is a shell. Not that she doesn't love life or the body, she very much does. Only the love is not bordered with the pain of knowing it will all fade and end. That seems to pose very little difficulty for her.

Not that she's some automaton unmoved by the sufferings of others - she is concerned 211 for the old, the sick and the unfortunate. But the thought that all must end? Well, we've come to learn what we can, to fulfill whatever purpose we came here with. Our souls will continue. And without believing fully in the spiritual, mystical doctrines Michael has absorbed some of this lightness; no one in my family that I can think of is so light with death as he.

I see that it is futile, all this tragedy, this desperate clinging to life out of fear of its ending; I see it is indulgent and ridiculous. But I can't seem to help myself, the thought of a life ceasing. Silly as it is I am terrified of death, more other people's than my own.

And of Age. The inescapable lousiness of it. Mouths a black hole rent in the universe, that's the other line from that poem of Irving's that makes my blood tingle, something about his mother's mouth a hole rent in the universe. I look at my mother's mouth sometimes, in sleep, and am taken down by the undertow of that line sucking beneath my consciousness.

A whole world gone out of existence, in death. The final, most pitiless forgetting.

But so what?

So what is I cannot imagine a world in which Michael Bobbie has ceased to exist.

It seems impossible that I could watch him age, fail, break down, and eventually die. But that is of course what people do; sometimes I can hardly believe it. That pretty much everyone on the planet experiences some permutation of this loving and dying business, are more intimately involved with it, in many places, than I will probably have to be. It's strange to know that inevitably I will bear what now seems unbearable pain. That everyone does. But never mind. Meantime here we are among the living... 212 On the topic of pain, I have to depict for you the conversation I've now had three times with my grandmother. Speaking to her a few days after we returned she was going on about Marc being sick: I was up with him until five in the morning, she said, And so

I'm three-quarters dead. Not half but three-quarters, you see? And I have the arthritis pain down my hip, I can hardly stand up.

Well you shouldn't have to be on your feet, I told her.

Yeah but I have to bring him something, you know, and have to go in and check his temperature, you see, I need someone to take care of me and I have to take care of him, what can I do? So anyway your mother tells me you were very glad Michael was with you when you went to see your father.

Yes, I was very glad. (Thinking, I just told you all about this two days ago).

Well was it so horrible?

Yeah, it was pretty horrible. (And I briefly revisited the conversation we'd already had, resenting what I believe to be her fascination with all things painful. If I told her I'd just won the Pulitzer it wouldn't garner half the attention she gives to one difficult hour). It would have been a lot more horrible if I'd been alone.

Oh really? Well what did he do that was so good?

Oh, you know, he was just supportive and, uh, talked to Irving a bit. I was just kinda sitting there not saying anything.

So what did he say?

I told her what he'd said.

Oh well that's very sweet. Mike is a nice boy. 213 Yes, he's the nicest person I've ever come across.

Mmm. Too bad he doesn't want to marry you.

Maybe he does but just not now.

Not now, you always say that, not now. So then when? I don't think he's gonna doit.

Look, I said, trying to secrete reasonable sounds from a brain that was blistering with impotent rage; Now would be an unreasonable time to get married. He has two more years on his degree, I have at least that. He wants to travel, live other places. I want to travel -

He wants to live somewhere else so maybe he'll meet some other girl while he's away there and then what?

Then he meets another girl. Nothing I can do about it. I'm 22 years old ferchrissakes. No one gets married at 22.

Well Mike's friends are all getting married you tell me.

One friend. One friend who is Mike's age and isn't in school. Man, we can't afford to get married.

Oh, she said. If he wants to marry you, I'll pay for the wedding.

She said this slightly mockingly, teasing me with what she believes to be the impossible. But I think she was serious about footing the wedding bill.

Ah well. Here we are and isn't it grand. It is, in fact. The week was gorgeous, hot, sunny. The cicadas are starting to drone, which always makes me feel the city is melting around the edges, like Dali's clocks; the ice cream trucks are chiming their ways through the leafy neighborhoods as they've done for decades making the city vague, simple, languidly tantalizing. Yesterday Michael and I had breakfast in Kensington

Market before I had to go to work. After walking around awhile we decided to try the

Kara Cafe, which is the newest incarnation of Tryst, where I used to play gigs when I was sixteen. It hasn't changed much; they still have the same random assortment of Chinese,

Thai and traditional breakfasts, only it's been cleaned up a bit and the quesadillas I used to adore have been replaced with fruit smoothies. We sat out on the crooked concrete patio and looked at the menu which encouraged us to "Share a True Market Experience".

I rolled my eyes. Well, you're in the Market, said Mike.

Yeah, but now that they've marketed my Market Experience, it's a little less marketful, you know? Once you try and cash in on a particular trait, deliberately try to replicate it it's changed, it's not just the thing anymore, it's the thing and what people are trying to get out of it.

We went on that way as our French Toast arrived, talking about the Market, what it would be like to live there, if it will change, how it might be possible to keep it from changing too much for the worse. What it will mean for the housing market if the economy is in fact headed for the "disastrous course" which we have long been predicting and which the Dow Jones now, according to Reuters, also predicts as a result of Bush's new tax cuts.

As Mike left me on the steps of Starbucks in the white afternoon light I thanked him for the nice day. It seemed right and appropriate to be that way with him, slightly formal, appreciative that he is still himself, with his separate, boy world. To show him I 215 know that I have no inherent right to his day, am grateful he wished to spend it with me.

That sounds strange, perhaps, but it's true. He has always gone on his way so independently, I don't want to take lightly this new closeness that seems to have been forged between us. So different from our first years when I was bold by nature and by design, amping up my own recklessness out of curiousity and desire, demanding that he know me. And he so pleased to have that demanded of him, having waited so long before submitting.

But now is like a second courtship, a proper one, and I like our little formalities.

My word, what a behemoth of alerter. I've been so happy writing here I've hardly noticed the time -1 should go to bed.

Much love, Sweet Joe,

Sam.

Excerpt from May 6 2004

All of J.R.'s friends were very nice and to each of them I could find nothing to

say. They seemed embroiled in worlds that had no need of anyone like me. There was a

security radiating from each of them that made me feel imbalanced; I could conjure up no

appropriate conversation. The only things I could think of to say wouldn't have flown.

Like, So, how often do you talk to your parents? Or, How many of your fellow-students were minorities? Or, How are you and the people you know dealing with the fact that. there's a surplus of university-educated people for the jobs available? But this didn't

seem like the kind of thing anyone there wanted to talk about. 216 At the national park I wandered off by myself and watched the hearty, rubbery little flowers quiver in the strong wind, never losing a petal, and wondered at their resolute beauty. What can I know, I wondered, what can I know of such an instinct for tenacity. Humans survive, I thought, but their survival warps them. We have to find some kind of armour that doesn't make us ugly. I suppose that is perfect adaptation, as the rubbery flower is perfectly adapted to its windy hill, and for humans it is not possible.

In our adaptation to circumstances we can only slide the spectrum between more and less beneficial to oneself and others, more or less aesthetically pleasing.

Mom came to Victoria after the convention ended. We met her at the Empress

Hotel for high tea. J.R. was late and we were both incongruous in the plush surroundings, our sneakers and sloppy bags comical against the rich carpeting and silk drapery. It was strangely nice, in its way, to be there with my old friend and my Mom, having such a treat on the middle of a weekday afternoon. Pretty little sandwiches and delicious tea in delicate porcelain, plucking sugar cubes with silver tongs, devouring scones and Devon cream. And Mom has always liked J.R. - she always recounts the first time she met him, as he rolled a joint in our living room at the post-show party for the Green World. He looked up, terrified, trying to conceal his nefarious activity as Mom walked toward him.

She laughed at him saying It's okay, it's cool, go ahead and J.R. stammered with tremendous relief Really? We don't do that in my house.

Anyway they were pleased to catch up with one another, and I was pleased Mom had survived another convention, though I could see she was in that wired-tired, go-go-go business mode, veering between rage at this or that industry stupidity, animated stories of 217 nice things people said to her, and declarations of her exhaustion. I began to feel uneasy in the darkening room. It was coming onto dinner-time; the hotel was humming with increasing numbers of people, the airy conversations of vacationers mingling with the curt, serious tones of the hotel staff as they prepared for the evening rush; the tea-room had emptied except for us and one family of Chinese tourists. I thought how expensive this tea was going to be, and with Mom's declaration that We have to do something nice sometimes, felt that familiar wave of sickness at all these extravagances we can't afford.

Fuck it, said Mom, as though she could read my thoughts, which she probably could; That's what I have a Visa card for, you know? Life is short. This is like, ah, a special thing; this tea is a big Victoria deal, and we're here on vacation, and fuck it.

And that tone fairly characterized the rest of the trip. We stayed at J.R.'s, one night, Mom staying in his bed. Which we all enjoyed, actually - Mom dug being back in a shared house for a night, like being back in Yorkville or Emerson days, she said. And

she liked the vibe of the house, its student bustle and haymishe kitchen with nice bread and a large selection of tea. After she went to bed I stayed up with J.R. as he burned

some fabulous mix cds for me (he's always been a source of some of my most beloved music - this time, Eliot Smith live, some Cat Stevens I never had, some Neil Young), and he talked about this girl he's been in love with and who's breaking his heart. Poor J.R.

He loves these adventuresome, independent girls, but the problem is, those girls are

selfish. This one wants to travel here, she wants to work there; she loves J.R.; she wants to fuck other guys; she doesn't want to put her energy into love. It always makes me

suspicious of people to hear that they have personal goals that get in the way of being in 218 love, like it's too demanding. But she's young, my age. I suppose that's young to attach one's life to someone else's, and that's the choice that has to be made at some point. J.R. doesn't even know if he's staying in Victoria; more likely he'll move to San Francisco, as he has dual citizenship and thinks it would be cool to live there as he tries to get his journalism career going. Sweet boy that he is, he's sort of old-fashioned when it comes to love. He wants a girl who can enter into life's daily cares with him, who he can call whenever to talk about whatever, who he can love and cuddle and rely upon. That said, he also doesn't want that - he wants to take full advantage of his studly youth, to resist the co-dependency he half-craves and swing like a modern Tarzan from limb to supple limb.

Ah well, such is always the tension in the young folk, I suppose.

Mom and I went to a well-known local bakery and got some bagels with several flavours of fantastic cream cheese, then began our drive north. I don't know what the matter was with me, but I couldn't relax, couldn't seem to feel that I was on vacation, doing something nice, and just allow myself to enjoy it. I smoked some pot, listening to further tales of DreamWorks' stupidity, and stared out the window at the incredible forest.

All I could say was Wowie Zowie. Wowie Zowie.

I mean, truly it was stunningly beautiful - we just don't have trees that size in

Ontario. We stopped at Cathedral Grove, a well-known bit of forest, and briefly walked around grokking the magnificence with one or two other tourists. I thought of Joni 219 Mitchell singing "We cut down the trees, put 'em in a tree museum", dismayed that surrounded by this vibrant, astonishing display of life, that was what I was thinking.

But it felt like a display, all of it. On the one hand, I am glad that this forest is valued as a national treasure, because that will mean more of it is left alone. And it's a good and healthy thing that people come to natural wonders looking to appreciate them; it's encouraging, after all, that people still feel compelled to explore the natural world, still crave whatever it offers to our industrialized brains, not yet content to watch nature documentaries or forsake forests altogether for the frenetic bounty of cosmopolitan life.

On the other hand it feels forced and removed, this coming to a place to worship its trees.

The same way we'd drive up to a monument or any point of man-made interest, we drove up to Cathedral Drove, got out of the car, looked at the trees, said Wowie Zowie, then got back in the car and drove away.

But unlike a monument, which was made to be pilgrimaged to, this homage by strangers of the forest seems to take something away from it. For people like me or

Mom, who know nothing of eco-systems, nothing of the history of this place, our reverence only makes an object of a thing which is complete in itself. We diminish it by our enthusiasm, which issues only from our wonderment at the size of the trees and ferns, the fertility of the soil; from the feeling of being in such a verdant, thriving place, so different from anywhere we'd ordinarily find ourselves. So in the end it is only ourselves we're seeing everywhere; in every tree and rock and bit of moss it's our wonderment, our desires we find, and I hated making slaves of the trees and moss, subjecting them to

220 myself when in fact I should be at all moments conscious of my subjugation to them. For my species and I need this natural world to survive, and it needs us for nothing.

We drove to the Wicaninnish Inn, a hotel and spa outside Tofino. It was all stone and huge windows, natural fibres, bronze Haida-looking art and ocean views. It seemed much of the staff were fresh-faced young white people working between semesters, overseen, of course, by a cadre of serious, well-trained Hospitality Services graduates.

They were all very good at their jobs, and the place was run beautifully. The staff was polite, the place smelled good, the food was delicious and mostly local.

But as I'm sure you can tell I wasn't entirely happy. I wanted to be, oh lord I felt terrible that I wasn't. I walked around the stunning grounds, their trail through a carefully sculpted rainforest garden just depressing the shit out of me. They had laid out this trail ingeniously - on a relatively small plot of land next to the Inn, a path wove through trees and bright, colossal flowers; there were birds and the hyperbolic ferns, you could hear and smell the ocean. The path curved so cleverly, you could walk for a good forty-five minutes and feel that you were isolated in a paradisiacal wilderness. And you pretty much were, except for the $250.00 a night hotel at whose door you landed when you emerged from the enchanting path. And the Inn itself was fairly isolated on a rugged bit of coastline; eagles perched in the trees and swooped, to vacationers' delight, over the water. Walking the shore people could imagine that they were as cut off from civilization as the area's first inhabitants. Then go to the spa and, after an essential-oil massage, sit in thick terrycloth with feet in a salt-bath on the terrace and breathe the invigorating ocean air. 221 So we did, Mom thoroughly enjoying her Fuck-it extravagances, complaining only that she couldn't stay for three weeks rather than three days.

I thought of Wicaninnish, the great chief after whom the Inn is named and whose biography they still politely display in the lobby, and wondered what sad changes he witnessed before he died.

Hoping to seem peacefully contemplative, rather than null and miserable, I walked along the beach each day as Mom rested. Watching the gulls our first day I remembered how my grandmother had taught me to draw them when I was a child. I loved how she did it - it seemed so childlike, one stroke of a pencil, like a long, extended M - and such a novel thing for Baba's old, gem-enrobed fingers to be doing. But I'd always thought it an abstract, easy out for really drawing the bird's form, until I saw a whole great gull vanish into a sliver of grey, a pencil-mark in the sky, etched and erased. She was wiser than I gave her credit for, I thought, and it occurred to me that disappearing gulls with their desperate cry have probably made Baba sad. She's probably stood somewhere in New

Jersey, or Atlantic City, and found the coastal lonesomeness and transience bringing tears to her eyes. But she wouldn't have been able to express it in words or make sense of it,

so it came out as fear, and temper, and the rich tragic timbre of her voice, whose echo in her mind is probably what attuned her to the desolate gulls in the first place.

And thinking of Baba, Mary Simmons in her finery singing arias to packed

concert halls as her daughter put herself to bed, I thought of Mom singing Donovan to me

as a child - "and the gulls are wheeling spinning on Jersey Thursday" - and with that

song's gentle melody washing through me became indescribably lonely, cast out from all 222 solace, hopeless as a lost ship. How simply I loved that song when I was little; how simple and peaceful to have it sung to me as I drifted to sleep, or warming on a beach towel on vacation in Florida. Nothing, it seemed, could be simple like that anymore; not the song, not the gulls, not my mother's love or her singing to me.

And not this vacation where I should be enjoying her generosity and pleasure, taking an interest in what I saw rather than judging it all mercilessly, and feeling it to be proof positive that I would only ever be part of this world's problems. I could not help seeing our activities transposed over my life at home, and it made them seem equally ludicrous. Everything vital to my life was mere superficiality, a product of privilege; empty aesthetics. And yet I wanted to be back at the loft, ensconced in the endless parlour games of our conversations, the rapt impassioned hours asserting our beliefs to each other and four walls; wanted to be riding the shared high of ideas, the indisputable importance of discussing them. How I scorned, in those talks, what I was doing now.

Staring out at the muted Pacific sky I was embarrassed that, in all those flushed raps with

Michael striding through the east end decrying bourgeois folly, loathing the cult of money into which we'd been born as middle-class North Americans, swearing to create a life of simplicity and usefulness, I was always a girl from this family, raised in what I was raised in. Lobster dinners at Park Plaza for my third and fourth birthdays. A Mom who finished her highschool degree there, a few blocks from the squalid shared house from whence her father had plucked her. But at least in the loft, or talking syndicalism in the Market, or house prices with Eshe on Euclid, at least then I am framing my situation in a way that makes sense to me, which I have chosen, with people who think similarly. I can put my 223 history into a context; find a vision of the future that integrates the best aspects of what my family has offered me and reject the unnecessary or immoral parts of my upbringing.

Here I was so nakedly what I come from. No one in my immediate family had ever been camping, even. They were so city, so sophisticated; it was impossible that

Mom and I could have come to B.C. in any capacity besides this one. We were there to relax, to soak in the natural beauty, the mystical wonder of sea, forest and sky. To enjoy each other's company. The luxury, physical beauty, and spiritual elements of B.C. were a perfect combination for Mom's sensibilities; I could see why she's spoken of wanting to move there. "Vibrationally", as she said, "energetically", she felt much better: calmer, lighter, not oppressed and harassed as she often does in Toronto. She feels Vancouver

Island is gentle on the system, and that things like Therapeutic Touch, distance healing, and psychic phenomena are more commonly accepted. And the smattering of Native elements appeals to her. For Mom, the spa's name was a tribute to the chief, a way of keeping his memory alive among people who could easily have forgotten him. She could absorb whatever bits of information about the Haida were provided here or there, and not feel as I did, that those little scraps and facts were only a remonstration against how much we don't know. She always considers something better than nothing, and I wish, sometimes, that I could see it that way. I mean, I suppose something is better than nothing, but that never makes me feel better about what the something is. It's always, like the bio in the Wicaninnish, a minor concession, an easy way to make people feel progressive and informed.

224 Instead I just felt like a hypocrite and an ingrate, unable to reconcile what I considered my politics with the realities of my existence. Which I always feel, anyway, but the circumstances there made it infinitely more acute.

Driving back to Victoria we listened to Rush Limbaugh on NPR hollering about the "wackos" that consider Thanksgiving offensive because it signifies the oppression and destruction of Native American peoples, and who think we brought smallpox, syphilis,

AIDS, and environmental destruction over with Columbus. Wackos, absolute wackos.

Which of course sent me into paroxysms of rage, though I could tell my constant ranting was beginning to irritate Mom.

Though he did get her pretty riled up when he started going on about how "if you start playing with crystals you end up playing with fire. Better to stick to your Bible".

Ach! Witch-hunter! You see? This is why I'm still selective about who I talk to about this kind of shit - crystals and psychic whatever. There's still this distrust, these crazy bastards who would have been drowning women in Salem.

It's true, I said, And lots of people listen to this guy. The same people who think that Saddam is a miniature Hitler, like this fucker just said, think attacking Thanksgiving is sacrilege, Native people are a pain in the ass, and believing in anything outside his interpretation of the Bible makes you Satan's spawn.

I went on awhile like this, muttering invective in response to Limbaugh's hail storm of ignorance, until Mom said, Okay, Samanth, I think your feelings are clear. It's becoming like a non-stop rant with you, like you have a one-track mind.

225 This was infuriating, as I had tried, only a few hours earlier, to discuss something about J.R. and his life with her, something she'd usually be entertained by, and she'd seemed totally disinterested, brushing the topic aside with an Uh-hunh. Well, everybody has to find their way, I guess.

I just shut my mouth and stared at the trees. It could have been television.

We stopped at some trail, read the info board about the kinds of trees and birds. It said watch out for panthers. Cool, I said. Mom looked doubtfully at the foliage.

We'd only walked maybe ten minutes before she said I don't have a good feeling about this.

Really? I asked. I was enjoying myself, walking through actual forest, no one around. Well maybe we shouldn't take the time now, I said.

Yeah, she said. Also my body is maybe not up for long hikes right now. I'm feeling a little drained from fighting sick all this week. (Sick said with emphasis, a remonstrance to my lapse of thoughtfulness). Truth be told, as Michael would say.

And though it's impossible to know if it's just my perception or really the case, I swear it was ten minutes since she last referred to her health. But we got back into the car, put on some tunes; I packed the beautiful, solid bluegreen glass pipe I'd bought in

Tofino, and we kept heading south.

And now here I am back in Toronto. It's good to be back, but I feel it's going to be a strange summer. Bri is graduating this month. Jake, having become disgusted with his days spent doing hits of Ty's pot-crumbs from the gravity-bong he rigged up, has 226 moved to Guelph. He likes it there, and anyway that's where his girlfriend lives when she's not doing whatever woodsy job it is she does; he's gotten some sort of job doing communications for another NGO. Eshe is waiting to hear from Master's programs;

Leslie waits to hear about her PhD. Most nerve-wrackingly, we're waiting to hear if Ty got into medical school. Jamie is doing an Independent Study on Marx and Hegel, talking about tarrying with the negative.

Which is, I'm thinking, what we all must learn to do.

So I shall leave it here, having probably maxed out your in-box.

Write soon. Much love, Sam.

Excerpted from July 7 2005

So you have run from helicopters, thrown your body into capitalism's path and halted its motorcade for almost two hours. I love thinking of it - your weightless moment. Early dawn, Snickers bar in your pocket, dodgy anarchists dodging the chopper's spotlight in the wet Scottish field -1 imagine your hands spread wide at your sides as your arms pumped, you wheezing all the way to the road. Good for you my dear Joe; why not? At least you were there, you saw the measures taken to prevent your protesting (and the measures taken to comply with the State by the protesters); you saw the factional skirmishes over whether to back up from the police line or not, and the impotent rage of some, the well-directed rage of others; and the mothers who smiled from behind their garden gates in the town. That's all worth something I think. And if the motorcade went through eventually anyway, if the meetings were held and deals made, well, what did 227 anyone expect? Whatever else, the tinted car windows of the men representing the world's great powers couldn't block you, the bulk of you, from sight. And the cars didn't drive over anybody; no one was clubbed. You got closer to the fence.

But I can see how you would feel it was pointless. On the one hand it's so encouraging. On the other...

What to do? The alternative summit sounds like it was interesting, but then I remember it's probably comprised of all these distinct groups - socialists, communists,

Greenpeace, UNICEF. That terrifying dive into the alphabet soup. Which letters will be my life preserver, or yours? Whenever I'm at a rally I'm always looking at the literature, the different organizations. Most are untenable for some obvious reason or other - too

Marxist, too angry, too Christian; the pamphlet will be too poorly written to take seriously. Some less so. The best I've found so far was literature from the Humanists I met at a Six Nations rally in Queen's Park recently. But something keeps me from going to a meeting. Time, of course, though it shames me to say it. Other people make time.

It's not just time; it's that I don't feel like I can act on something I barely understand.

Case in point: Mike and I watched a documentary called Girlhood, about two girls in the youth justice system in the States, and when it was over Mike noticed that the film was partially funded by George Soros.

After a few minutes conversation I was seized by one of those spasms of optimism. Do you think it's possible, I asked, That people will just get to the point that absurd wealth actually becomes disgusting to people? Like, what if it were just taboo to have too much money? And people wouldn't like you. No regulations, laws, nothing like 228 that but just social forces. I mean, it seems to me that unless you're religious or too poor to care because your life is hell, everyone these days is pretty aware that we're kinda fucked - the environment, constant war. People know, and what if, after a few more nasty wars and a good long depression or whatever it is we're likely to live through, what if, after that, people became intolerant of insane amounts of money being concentrated in one place? It is fucking crazy, like, totally irrational. So maybe we can learn that, as a species, if the conditions are right. A radical revolution in values, like Dr. King said. If all rich people did like George Soros, that would radically change the world. And if everyone does it, there's no incentive not to do it. You'd just be a pariah, if you were like super-uber-wealthy and didn't put the money to some use.

Well yeah, Mike said, But how do you get people to do that? Like, Soros isn't the richest guy in the world - he's not even in the top ten.

I wanted to know how he made his money so Mike looked him up on the

Wikipedia. Stocks, something, Black Wednesday, and I wanted to know what was that so

Mike read it aloud to me, stopping to put it in layman's terms. Which I did understand, and am intensely grateful to have someone who'll explain these things so clearly and well; and I'll be following along for a good while but then I get distracted by Mike's wide, bright eyes, the length of him flung on his chair so boyishly as his deep voice good- naturedly intones these complicated ideas and then the words he's articulating, the silly words begin sounding meaningless. Inflation. I think no matter how many times inflation is explained to me, I'll never understand it. But I keep trying because this is how the world runs and I'll have a moment of glory remembering Trade Deficits and GDP 229 Deficits, a flash of knowing these things for Labour and Globalization class, parts 1 and

2. Mike so valiantly explaining, yet again, this business of buying and selling money, interest rates. And I listen and think I understand but then I'm thinking how I'll describe this moment to you, curled on the couch, the room's 1930s warehouse hue and forgetting already the meaning of inflation, the way stocks work, the way I've already lost the name of the Nicaraguan waiter that killed the dictator who we studied so lovingly, knowing even then that we'd forget.

This is how the conditions of the world are determined, these numbers, this disembodied money flying through the air, and I can't understand it. I'm annihilated by it. As far as I can tell, the world is strapped to trapeze artists who can never see the rope they're hurtling toward. All laws of reason dictate that sometime they will miss.

All I was trying to figure out was whether Soros' wealth was acquired through immoral means. I assumed probably it was, and it was taxpayer money - a billion or so dollars of it - that he enriched himself with. But that wasn't his fault, as Mike explained it; he didn't steal from them, it's just how the market works.

So, Mike said after we'd finished the Wikipedia entry, Soros is obviously a weird kind of genius. But you just can't count on everyone seeing the world like him.

Okay, who's the richest guy in the world after Bill Gates?

Warren Buffet maybe? He's like the trading guru, one of those guys who just has a special talent apparently and almost never makes the wrong call.

So, the Devil basically.

Actually he's not that bad. Very strange. Sees himself as some kind of populist. 230 So I Wikipediad him too, and he didn't look as bad as I thought. Born in 1930, same year as Soros.

1930 was the year to be born, I said. Bad for your parents, good for you.

Oh sure, you get to cash in on that post-war boom - you're young, the U.S. is flooded with money.

You were too young to actually go to war -

Well remember, Mike said, Only like 400 000 American men died in World War

Two. Their population was like a hundred and some million. It was a big deal, I mean, enough to have an effect on the country, on people's minds; pretty much everyone knew someone who fought, but. It wasn't like a lot of people, not compared to some countries.

Inconceivable, this, the sheer number of dead or shattered men; what would it be like to live in a place where men had been made scarce because of war? Almost everywhere but here, I realized, that had been the case at some point in history. This continent the only one where, by now, the greatest part of the population has no personal knowledge of war. You'd think we'd be so much happier than we are, us North

Americans.

Thusly was I occupied as Mike was saying Oh yeah, it's easy to make money when it's flying around like it was then, technologies being developed, people looking around saying I need a man who can do this, knows about that — it was like Alberta everywhere.

Which made me laugh. But, I said, It's all goofy, it just is. Why does it have to be like this? 231 Well, because there needs to be a rate of exchange. It's no good if you need your shoes fixed and you have to find something the shoe-fixer wants in order to do it. It's cities: in cities you need a common means of exchange. And so pretty much as soon as you have agriculture -

And he explained it to me, me trying to focus on that and not the fact that agriculture also brought us cats, another theory of Mike's affirmed by Wikipedia earlier that night. Our symbiotic relationship with felines makes me happy, because in realizing they're good for eating vermin we also figured out they have itchy little heads and make a comforting noise when you scratch them.

Aw shit, I said, I don't understand. I don't understand why we need this super- complicated hocus-pocus that only a few people have access to in order to make the world go. Like, what do we really need, as a species, what do we really need that makes this weird necromancy necessary? Man, the greatest thing in William Morris's News

From Nowhere was how work was treated. It was exactly how you and I envision it in our most Utopian moments, but where for a minute it seems possible because it's not all that outlandish - everybody has different skills and does various jobs according to desire and capability, and what's needed in the community.

Right, said Mike. But we have to work toward a stippled and multifarious society, it doesn't happen all at once. It'll take hundreds of years, it'll grow in fits and starts here and there. But now's the time to be talking about it.

Well clearly, since we are. Since we can imagine it. Though I guess people have been imagining it for a long time. In News From Nowhere, no job is all that awful, and 232 even the hardest jobs - farming, for instance, is done happily because people are working for themselves and each other. No one gets by without doing anything because a) they get bored and b) society works to rehabilitate people who are having trouble. There's no money because everything is done free and everything is provided by the people's work.

There could be no great surpluses, and no destitution. That seems perfectly rational to me.

At which point Ty came in saying Rational? What's fucking rational, nothing is rational. (And he flung himself onto the couch, groaning. The MCAT is in a month and he's freaking out; and as if the MCAT isn't enough, he and Michelle aren't speaking, and her relationship with the pink pencil crayon guy is driving Ty berserk; also, because he has to pay the bills, he's spending more time than a prospective medical student should on getting the Kozlik's Mustard man - who he befriended at the St. Lawrence Market - an expanded factory that's up to code for him to start supplying major supermarkets... God knows how Ty knows how to do shit like that). Except maybe you guys, he said. The way you guys love each other, that's rational. Oh why can't Michelle love me, Sammy, the way you love Mike? Am I really so awful? Why doesn't she like me, why does she just want to hurt me. I need her. I have to write this test and I need her. I don't even want to sleep in my bed. I'm glad you guys are home. It's been lonely.

So passed our first night back from Timmins.

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