Thanksgiving

This Thursday in America is a big national holiday, Thanksgiving Day.

Like many of my fellow citizens I will do three very Thanksgiving Day type things:  travel, eat a big meal with family, and feel thankful. 

I’m thankful that I have a child who’s inviting me to have Thanksgiving at her house for the first time.  That my father is still alive and able to travel with us.  Thankful to have the money and time to travel there by train, the money to buy special foods that come with family memories, like creamed onion and mincemeat pie, and a warm place to prepare them.  Grateful for the health to be able to look back over 60 years of Thanksgiving memories and meals.  And say thank you. 

KmartMany Americans have much much less of the above blessings, if any.  Our economy is beginning to recover, but still one in seven Americans gets government assistance for food.  Wages are stagnant and the income gap widening.  Many stores, desperate or greedy, are opening earlier and earlier on the busy Thanksgiving shopping weekend.  Which means many Americans will have to work this holiday weekend.  Kmart is opening at 6AM Thursday morning and staying open 52 hours straight to maximize profits. I am grateful I don’t have to work on Thanksgiving.   I can chose the time and place of my meal with my family.

Like some Americans, I will go to a special Interfaith Thanksgiving worship service this week.  Thanksgiving is a pretty secular holiday, inspired by our history, rather than just one religion.  We do get a little sappy and amnesiac about our foundation myth on this day.  We still make our kids dress up like Pilgrims and Indians for school plays and act as if the history of whites and native people isn’t so tragic.

Challah BreadBut we can occasionally remember what we really do share as Americans and be thankful for that.  I remember helping to organize an interfaith Thanksgiving service with the Catholic and Jewish congregations in the town where I was a Protestant parish minister.  We concluded with a remarkable Thanksgiving meal.  Not in the social hall, but at the altar.  The Jewish congregation baked a huge challah thanksgiving loaf which covered the altar.  We sang “Come Ye Thankful People Come.”   We took an offering for the food bank and collected bags and bags of food.  And then we invited everyone up in a circle around the altar and we shared the challah bread, feeding each other.  The Catholic priest got a little nervous that we were sharing communion across sectarian divides.  The Benedictine monk from the school was glad his students were having a teachable moment.  I was just grateful we were together and feeding each other.

I’ve quoted before my favorite local columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle.  He wrote a Thanksgiving Day column some years ago that was so popular the paper reprints it each year with just a few updates on who and what to be thankful for this year.  A couple of my favorite sections:

Thanksgiving provides a formal context in which to consider the instances of kindness that have enlightened our lives, for moments of grace that have gotten us through when all seemed lost. These are fine and sentimental subjects for contemplation….

And the teachers, the men and women who took the time to fire a passion for the abstract, to give us each a visceral sense of the continuity of history and the adventure of the future. Our society seems determined to denigrate its teachers -- at its peril, and at ours. This is their day as well.

Even closer. Companions. We all learned about good sex from somebody, and that person deserves a moment. Somebody taught us some hard lesson of life, told us something for our own good, and that willingness to risk conflict for friendship is worth a pause this day. And somebody sat with us through one long night, and listened to our crazy talk and turned it toward sanity; that person has earned this moment too.

And a moment for old friends now estranged, victims of the flux of alliances and changing perceptions. There was something there once, and that something is worth honoring as well….

And thanks, too, for all the past Thanksgivings, and for all the people we shared them with. Thanks for the time the turkey fell on the floor during the carving process; for the time Uncle Benny was persuaded to sing "Peg o' My Heart"; for the time two strangers fell in love, and two lovers fell asleep, in front of the fire, even before the pumpkin pie.

Thanks. A lot.

(I’ll be taking a week or two off from Blowin’ in the Wind.  I thank my readers, and Dale.)

Copyright © 2913 Deborah Streeter

John F. Kennedy on Art: Not a Form of Propaganda, but a Form of Truth

John F. Kennedy reaching out to crowd in Fort Worth, November 22, 1963, 1963 Photography by Gene GordonPresident John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago this week.  The media is full of questions and reflections like: What would have happened had he lived?  What kind of president was he? Where were you that day?  What impact did his life and death have on us, and our nation?

Kennedy was a lover of art and culture.  He established the National Endowment for the Arts in 1961.  He knew and read many writers.  A special favorite was the New England poet Robert Frost, whom he invited to read at his inauguration in 1961.  Frost died two years later in January 1963, and in October 1963, Kennedy gave this speech, below, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where Frost had taught.

These are wise and bold words about art and artists, and about America.

This day devoted to the memory of Robert Frost offers an opportunity for reflection which is prized by politicians as well as by others, and even by poets, for Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.

In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this College and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem, but to our self-comprehension. In honoring Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.

Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been," he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it's hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

Second (smaller) Bedroom, Suite 850, Hotel Texas, Fort Worth, Friday, November 22, 1963 Thomas Eakins, Swimming (formerly, The Swimming Hole) Charles M. Russell, Lost in a Snowstorm – We Are Friends (formerly, Meeting in a Blizzard) Photography by Byron ScottThe artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets: "There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style." In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society-in it-the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having nothing to look backward to with pride and nothing to look forward to with hope.

Living Area, Suite 850, Hotel Texas, Fort Worth, Thursday, November 21, 1963 Eros Pellini, Nude, bronze (a.k.a., Lombardia Girl) Photography by Byron ScottI look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction. Robert Frost was often skeptical about projects for human improvement, yet I do not think he would disdain this hope. As he wrote during the uncertain days of the Second War:

Take human nature altogether since time began,
And it must be a little more in favor of man,
Say a fraction of one per cent at the very least,
Our hold on the planet wouldn't have so increased.

Because of Mr. Frost's life and work, because of the life and work of this College, our hold on this planet has increased.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Election Day 2013

Americans went to the polls this past Tuesday, as we do every year on the first Tuesday in November.  (Well, a small percentage of registered voters actually vote; in San Francisco key issues were decided by 25% of the registered voters and lots of folks don’t even register.)

This was not an election of big national import; few state or national lawmakers were on ballots – that’s next year, the so-called midterm elections.  And it’s still 3 years until the next Presidential election, 2016.

But that didn’t stop the media from endless speculation about what Tuesday’s results say about the current mood in various states and what might happen in 2014 or 16.

So here’s some election news and my two cents on trends we might be seeing.  (As always, read our friend Ed Kilgore’s daily political blog for analysis that is progressive, savvy, insider.)

• Chris Christie Two governors were elected, Chris Christie in New Jersey, a sort of moderate Republican and Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, a pretty progressive Democrat.  Christie was a shoo-in, had a very weak opponent, still has cred from his aggressive advocacy for the state after Superstorm Sandy almost exactly a year ago.  Lots of speculation that his ability to get a historically Democratic state to elect him twice has increased his standing as a possible Presidential candidate in 2016.  Add in that McAuliffe won, in a historically Republican state, defeating a Tea Party guy who ran on the old Republican tune of how awful Obamacare is, and how great guns are.   So the good Republican won, the bad Republican lost.  Lots of other factors, of course.  McAuliffe is an old Clinton operative and fundraiser, had lots of money and coattails. Would a progressive Democrat win without that assist?   Christie is the uber Jerseyite, belligerent, a little crude.  That might sell along the Jersey shore, but will it get him into the White House?  I don’t read a lot into either victory.  But confirmed Jerseyite myself, I am always happy to see folks from the Northeast, even Republicans, getting national attention.  It has been so refreshing to have a President for the first time in decades who is not from the South.  (Sorry, Ed, son of Georgia.)

• Marty WalshSpeaking of the Northeast, two new big city majors in Boston and New York who take over from mayors who have served forever, 12 years (NY) and 20 years (Boston.)  And in the case of NY, much more populist that their predecessors.  I know NY better, and Bill de Blasio could hardly be more different than current Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Public Advocate leftie de Blasio, married to a black former lesbian, made his campaign’s central theme the widening gap between rich and poor, strongly critiquing Bloomberg’s Republican hobnobbing with his own kind, the rich and famous.  New Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is a former machine shop worker and a strong advocate for labor.  One could read into these elections the voters’ concern about that ever widening inequality gap, especially in cities; skyrocketing rents, fewer families, less services, tattered safety nets.  As more and more Americans live in cities and the US becomes a more and more urban nation, the election of these new mayors may give hope to folks trying to level the playing field and continue an Obama type government, rather than a return to a Bush/Romney type oligarchy.

• Speaking of votes against the income gap, San Francisco voters strongly rejected a massive new luxury condo highrise on the Bay that would have exceeded waterfront legal height limits by over 50 ft and provided $5 million homes for that good old 1%.  The project had been endorsed by many local and state leaders and the vote against it was a big surprise.  Hopeful sign that the folks don’t want SF to become even more of a rich techie enclave?

• Coloradoans voted in favor of taxing their recently legalized marijuana, to bring in more revenue, but they voted down more money for education.  Here in my home area local citizens also turned down school bonds.  Our public schools are in big trouble, but voters, who are mostly older and no longer have kids in school, seem to be cheap and grumpy about students and schools.

• Also here on the Monterey Peninsula the big issue was Measures K and M; how much development to allow on Fort Ord, a huge army base that was closed 20 years ago.  Since then a Cal State campus has been built there and other public type facilities have renovated some of the old barracks and other army building.  K would have allowed for a lot more development, including a racetrack with gambling.  M would have set aside even more than the current 80% of the former base dedicated to open space and prohibited cutting down hundreds of old oaks.  (All this very simplified.  I’m not even trying to explain the issue of the veteran’s cemetery that both K and M would have allowed.  Or not.  Depending on whose incendiary flyer came in the mail that day; we got over 30 mailers on K and M.  “Support our vets – vote for K!”  “Keep out organized gambling crime, vote for M!”) Naturally I voted for M, against K, along with the liberal leftie’s, Sierra Club etc.  But surprisingly BOTH K and M were defeated.  I think there was so much bullshit being thrown about in both camps, people were just disgusted.  I can see that.  I just hope it doesn’t keep folks away from the polls for the important races in 2014 and 16.

• In the Senate, Rand Paul is fighting plagiarism charges, and Ted Cruz is pretty quiet after his failed attempt to shut down the government.  So the Tea Party is in a bit of an eclipse.  Nearly all 7 Mormon senators actually voted last week in support of job protection against discrimination for LGBT folks.  (They still oppose marriage, but they can empathize with the problem of job discrimination based on identity.) 

So there are some hopeful signs, but there’s still lots of time left in this game…..

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Irene, Navajo Guide

Spider Rock“The wind people have been busy here,” Irene said, scanning the steep redrock cliffs, contorted and swirly, the sculpted walls and buttes of Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. 

Carved by wind and water from ancient rock called Navajo sandstone, the deep canyon is sacred to Irene’s people, the Dine, as the Navajo call themselves.  Spider Rock, giant red twin towers deep within the canyon, is the center and source of the Navajo universe.  Atop these spires Spider Grandmother spun the world into being, flinging her web wet with dew into the sky.  Dewdrops became stars. 

Our week in southwest canyons began and ended at US national parks; Grand Canyon and Zion.  In between we traveled to a different country, the large, tri-state semi-autonomous Navajo Nation. Canyon de Chelly was designated a US National Monument in 1931, to protect it from bounty hunters scavenging the ruins left by 5 different native peoples who have made the canyon their home over 2000 years.  US Park Service employees run the visitors center at the entrance.  (Like all national parks it was closed for a few weeks early this month thanks to Sen. Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.) 

But the Navajo Nation itself manages the canyon.  Like so many aspects of the tense and tragic relationship between the US and native peoples, there are written and unspoken rules about who can and can’t do what.  It took us a while to figure out how to contact the required Navajo guide in order to visit the canyon floor.  Luckily for us, that meant we got to spend four hours with Navajo elder Irene as she skillfully maneuvered her Chevy Suburban through the deeply rutted sand and slippery washes and told stories of this sacred place.

Irene was our Spider Grandmother, spinning tales of wonder about the canyon and her life and her people.

Monument ValleyAs a child she spent summers there helping her family tend the sheep that are central to the Navajo way of life.  (Sheep were everywhere; we saw beautiful woven blankets and ate delicious mutton stew during our stay inside the park at the Sacred Canyon Lodge, the first Navajo-run concession in the park.)  To become a certified guide she took some courses in geology and archeology, but she pointed out that her knowledge of the quicksand places came from kid knowledge, fooling around in the sandy unpredictable streams.  Likewise she knew history from sitting at desks and on grandmothers’ laps.

“In high school they taught us the Spanish explorers sought the three G’s: Glory, God and Gold.”  “But,” she added, “I think they left out one of the G’s: Girls.”  The all-male Spanish bands raided native villages for women; violent counter-raids by the Pueblo and then Navajo led to centuries of warfare.  Irene also took us up a side canyon, Canyon del Muerto, named for an 1805 massacre by Spanish invaders.  By 1863, when the US had acquired the land, Army officer Kit Carson led an attack on the remaining Navajo and marched them away to an internment camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  In the canyon he destroyed their homes and fields, and cut down their precious peach trees.  (In a desert barren landscape this canyon can be surprisingly fertile in summer, except for drought years, which are more and more frequent.)  Four years later the relocation was deemed a failure and, unlike many forced relocations of native folks, the Navajo were allowed to return to their cherished homeland, Canyon de Chelly. Irene said the scars of these “Long Walks” still sting, but the shared identity and unity from that ordeal helped bring about the semi-autonomous Navajo Nation. Families live deeper in the canyon than Irene took us. They have been replanting peach trees.

Irene lives in many worlds.  Navajo. American.  She also repeated stories told her by visitors from Europe and China.  She always bought it back to stories, her own stories, her daughters and grandchildren, and her people’s stories, like the story of the wind people who shaped and carved the canyon. 

Canyon de Chelly, "Navajo in the Canyon" by Edward Curtis, 1904I thought of Irene the next day at the Visitor’s Center at nearby Monument Valley, another Navajo-run concession on a federal site.  A display about the dramatic rock formations there included an official sign explaining the local geology in two paragraphs.  One described sedimentary rock, volcanic rock, erosion.  The next told a story about the ancestors and the wind people and the rain people.  

One last thought on the tense and tragic and complicated relationships between peoples in this region.  The Monument Valley Visitor’s Center devoted a large section to cowboy actor John Wayne, whose many films made in that Valley celebrated the violent victories of cowboy and cavalry over the native folks.  I guess the Navajos are happy to make money off him as well as their fine blankets. 

But why was Irene wearing a team sports jacket that read across her back, “Cowboys”? 

Did anyone win?

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

The Big Canyon

Grand CanyonThe first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon, members of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, were annoyed that this vast chasm prevented them from continuing their search for the fabled riches of the Seven Cities of Cibola.  When they returned to Spain they were court-martialed for coming back empty handed.

It was another 300 years before more white people ventured into this huge desolate area.  The war victory over Mexico gave the US new Southwest territories and the US Army surveyors in 1857 wrote, “The region is altogether valueless…Ours has been the first, and doubtless the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality.”

But just ten years later, 1869, John Wesley Powell, the first white man to take a boat down the 900 miles of Green and Colorado Rivers through the canyon area, wrote, “The maps read ‘Big Canyon,’ but I believe it should be called The Grand Canyon.”

This week I am one of 5 million annual visitors to this National Park.  Our summer Back Road Café road trip across America is back for a brief reprise.   I’ll probably write next week about the rest of my trip, to Canyon de Chelley on a Navaho reservation, and Zion National Park in Utah. 

As soon as we got in the rental car in Phoenix and started seeing exits like “Horse Thief Road” and “Bloody Gulch Highway” I knew I was in the old cowboy west, even though these exits featured Home Depots and In & Out Burgers.

But Northern Arizona is indeed desolate and remote and surprisingly unimpacted by all those 5 million visitors.  This morning’s sunrise over the canyon, I saw twenty other people in an hour.  I gather only 5% of all visitors stay over night.  It’s like visiting majestic temples or cathedrals; get there early before the tour busses, take a nap midday, stay as late as you can, savor the quiet beauty.

Indeed the Grand Canyon is very much like a cathedral, and its grandeur inspired early explorers and surveyors like Powell to assign surprisingly religious names to various buttes and points.  Some of my favorites: Wotan’s Throne, Krishna Shrine, Zoroaster Temple, Buddha Temple, Isis Temple, Tower of Set, Point Sublime, Cape Solitude, Sheba Temple.

John Wesley PowellTurns out Powell had studied the classics in college (at Oberlin College in the 1850’s, before serving in the Civil War where he lost an arm –made those Colorado River rapids even more challenging) and could easily imagine powerful gods inhabiting and ruling this almost mythological realm.

He also honored with place names the native folks whom he met and who aided his explorations: Nankoweep, Coconimo, Havasu and Matakatamiba.  No doubt those folks already had their own names for these places, but at least their legacy lives on on our modern maps.

Powell’s dramatic and deathly ride down the Colorado rapids in 1869 is legendary, but rarely do we hear about his important government service.   He worked for two major agencies in Washington. He was the second director of the US Geological Service, and he was the first director of the Ethnology Department at the Smithsonian Institution (later the American Indian Dept.)  He hoped to preserve and protect the land he had helped to open up, from the inevitable western expansion and destruction.  At the Smithsonian he  helped publish an important study recording over 100 Indian languages.  And he lobbied Congress tirelessly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to allot western land parcels, with their crucial rights to scarce water, not by the traditional 40 acre plots but instead to follow watersheds contours, along rivers and springs.  Eastern legislators could not comprehend a land of limited rainfall.   Railroad robber barons wanted towns along the rails, including agriculture development, even asserting that “rain follows crops.”  Mercifully our environmentalist President Teddy Roosevelt fell in love with the Grand Canyon and helped protect it as one of the first National Parks.

Wallace StegnerI learned about Powell’s science and advocacy in a fascinating book by iconic American writer Wallace Stegner, best known for novels, but whose non-fiction is as important.  It was on my last trip to the Grand Canyon ten years ago that I bought and read Stegner’s Beyond the 100^th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.  Today I admired the Powell Memorial overlooking the Tower of Set and the Bright Angel Trailhead.

At an evening program around a campfire a ranger said that since we were lucky enough to be here for more than one day, “find your special Grand Canyon place, and just sit there as long as you can, hours, watch the light change, the sounds and smells, the animals, the colors.”  I found my special place and thanked Powell in my heart for his search for knowledge, his love of mythology and his attempt to protect our country, and our west.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter