December 29

What drew me into the novel I wanted to write was a strange phenomenon called the Ghost Dance, a fanatic belief among Native people, circa 1889, that Ian Frazier calls "the first American religion." How on earth, I wondered, could an entire people--just about all Native people west of the Mississippi--be so completely deceived, if deceived is the right word?

A Paiute named Wovoka out in Utah had a vision to which hundreds of thousands eventually subscribed. Dance and the elders will return, as will titanka, the buffalo. Come together as a people, refrain from strong drink, love one another, and all those white people will disappear tomorrow beginning a glorious resurrection of the old ways and the old good times. Thousands of Native people believed and danced, all over the American west.

The Lakota added this distinction: those who dance will not be harmed by the bullets of the soldiers. In a rain of gunfire, they will ride free as the wind.

The Ghost Dance scared lots of white folks, entertained others. At Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Lakota gathered to dance and the agent, Daniel F. Royer, deathly afraid, called in hundreds of backup troops. Meanwhile, from the north, a ragged band of Minneconjou Sioux led by Big Foot was moving south towards Red Cloud's camp just over the border in Nebraska.

Out on the open land of western South Dakota, Agent Royer's request for more troops created the largest military encampment anywhere in America since the Civil War, the Seventh Calvary among them, Custer's old regiment, whose memory of Wounded Knee, 24 years earlier was still vivid.

The fact is, historians can come up with a dozen reasons why there was a massacre 119 years ago today at a place called Wounded Knee; and while all of them make sense, none of them make reliving the horror any easier. And there is a bottom line: white folks wanted land the Native people thought of as home; and they got it--my own Dutch immigrant great-grandparents among them.

Some years ago, I stumbled across a handsome reprint of an old book by James Mooney, an anthropologist, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, a 1896 study Mooney did himself in an effort to understand the phenomenon. I bought it, read it, and then set out to write a novel that used the massacre as a backdrop.

That novel--Touches the Sky--changed me, because every December 29 I see that wide land along the creek called the Wounded Knee, hundreds of blue coats surrounding an angry and hungry people, late December, and the bloody madness that followed, the deaths of hundreds.

This morning it's cold outside here. At Pine Ridge, it's 18 degrees, although the wind chill makes it feel like five. Sometimes I wish I could coax all my students out to visit Wounded Knee in late December, to stand out there in the cold and the silence.

I'm not interested in white guilt, just history, just the story. For white America, Wounded Knee makes vividly clear that our history is not blameless. No one can stand out there on a cold December afternoon and not be humbled into silence.

Today is December 29.

And this was before the storm!

Self Check Out at Walmart

I’m no fan of shopping. In fact, I think that Black Friday is diabolical and that Christmas shopping is an inevitable vortex of death. I get sucked in every year but go down kicking and screaming “bourgeois” like a mantra. It gets so bad that recently my wife bemoaned my Christmas “morals” which weren’t making shopping any easier. In other words, I can be a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

But last week, after a trip to the dentist that only cost me $114 per kid, I needed to go to Walmart to get one thing, and I have to admit, I looked forward to going in. I bypassed the KFC/A&W, looked disdainfully at the diminutive Shopko, almost crashed at the odd intersections that funneled me toward the store, and finally stood before this monolithic Agora of small town America: a big, tan rectangular box with surveillance cameras on the top—cameras that were somehow comforting. If I were to get beat on the head and kidnapped, at least the footage would show up on the six o’clock news. Still, somewhere in my being, I anticipated the electric eye triggering the mechanism and rolling the doors back and leading me first into the Walmart foyer/mudroom and then the second set of doors opening into the huge bazaar, the hall of wonders that is Walmart proper. I felt some kinship with James Joyce’s narrator of “Araby,” though he at least had a name to conjure up wonder, “Araby.” I just had “Walmart”—perhaps the ugliest word in the English language.

But I had size, and size, as they say, is everything. Acres and acres of space and stuff just to wander around and get lost in. Somewhere in me, a la the supermarket sensations in White Noise, I just wanted to stroll down aisles and let the psychic date of product labeling speak to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t come in to spend profligate amounts. This was no Christmas shopping spree. All I needed was toilet paper. That’s it. Simple butt wipe. And what better place to get TP than Walmart? I was not feeding the corporate machine—this was about needs and necessities and totally justifiable.

I indeed found the toilet paper aisle, and then that other part of the experience of Walmart, or any shopping experience, began. Consumer anxiety. Which kind of toilet paper should I get? What’s the best deal? Should I go for the White Cloud because it’s cheapest? Or the Charmin brand because of name recognition? If I bought the White Cloud, wouldn’t I get home to find out it was thinner, less tightly rolled, and therefore not as good a deal? Did I want 8 regular rolls? Or 8 double rolls of 12? Or 12 rolls of 24? Or 6 rolls of 48? Or 4 rolls of 96? What did all these numbers mean?

In the midst of panic, my head cleared for a moment—middle brand, find a middle brand! I picked up some Cottonelle, twelve rolls of I’m not sure what thickness.

Then we were out of there. Except for one thing: on the way in, at the sight of the KFC/A&W, I had said to my boys, “How about after Walmart we have root beer floats?” Now, clearer thinking set in. We had just come from the dentist and it was getting on in the afternoon—about 4:30. That meant supper was on the horizon and I didn’t want to make another stop or draw the ire of their mom.

Fortunately, one of my sons had seen the psychic data for the snack section on the way in, so I sidetracked us thusly. Then we had another consumer choice. Holiday Snack Cakes, Holiday Marshmallow Treats, Christmas Tree Cakes, Star Crunches, Cosmic Brownies, Devil Squares, Oatmeal Crème Pies. One son wanted one kind, the other another. I tried to sell them on Oatmeal Crème Pies, another household name I felt safe with. They both rejected it wholeheartedly. Then I directed them up to the Gummi Bear Fruit Snacks—small, savory, a non-appetite ruiner—and managed to strong-arm on them on that choice.

In and out of Wal-Mart with toilet paper and Gummi Bears, relatively untainted. As we headed to the checkouts, the aisles directly ahead of us were wide open but unmanned and labeled “Self Checkout.” However, I had some time, now that I’d saved myself a stop at KFC/A&W, plus “Self Checkout” scared me. What if I didn’t possess enough techno-savvy to safely navigate my way through? What if I did it wrong and got hauled in for shoplifting? What if I couldn’t figure it out and caused a traffic jam of fuming fast-laners behind me? And besides, wasn’t this so-called “self-checkout,” this elimination of the sacred human interaction between buyer and seller, exactly the evil part of Wal-Mart that I didn’t want to support?

I veered from the open self-checkouts for a line with only one patron in it, completely content to wait my turn, to wait for the human interaction with what seemed like a completely competent clerk. Plus, the woman in front of me didn’t have that much in her cart.

Or maybe she did. She had her cart about half empty when I pulled into line—and then I saw several cases of pop and assorted bargains underneath her cart. And then there was some matter about gift cards. She had grabbed some from somewhere between the gum and US Weekly but now there was some controversy about the clerk “loading them.”

“We can’t load them here because . . .” she was saying. And the woman wasn’t getting it. The unloading process had ground to a halt. Suddenly this human interaction thing seemed like not such a good idea. I had been standing here with two kids anxious for fruit snacks for all of 78 seconds but, by the looks of it, I had another 78 to go.

So I bailed. Headed for the self-checkout. How hard could it be? No harder than human communication.

I pulled into the nearest aisle where a nice gentleman, a shade older than I am, was just finishing up a purchase. I could watch him and learn and based on this knowledge I was sure I could make it through—-run the technology gauntlet so to speak.

Just as the guy was finishing, he muttered under his breath and reached back to the child seat area of the cart. “Sorry, I forgot one thing,” he sighed. He was as anxious as I was.

“No, problem, I’ve never done this before,” I confessed, I’m not sure why. What I meant was that, since it was my first time, I, too, might make a mistake, which meant I could understand his embarrassing predicament.

He went through a ritual of touching the screen, swiping a plastic card, moving his product—I didn’t see what it was, something small like a coaster or something—across the scanner, waiting, then moving on through.

“Sorry again,” he said.

“No problem,” I said magnanimously.

I moved ahead to the touch screen, which started with a picture from a point of view behind an animated character—like Lara Croft but not nearly that ridiculously voluptuous, more Walmart-ish—standing in exactly the position that I was at the register. Then a voice talked to me, walking me through the process: “Scan your first item,” it began. I did, something beeped, the price appeared on the screen. Success. On the metal edge next to the glass scanner there was a note that said, “Touch your purchase here.” I was confused. Did I have to touch the metal piece so as to “demagnetize” it or something, so I would not set off bells and whistles and draw the attention of security when I exited? I touched it. Nothing happened. Oh well.

With my second item, I had a bit more trouble with the scanning, but eventually I heard the magic beep again and my mind was put at ease. I swiped my card, punched in my secret code, bagged my purchase in the millionth plastic bag, and my quest was complete. I left through the automatic doors without bells and whistles, without guard dogs or the SS.

As I walked out, I saw the troublesome woman with unloaded gift cards just leaving her checkout aisle. I had saved myself at least thirty seconds: a very wise choice.
By the time I’d left, I felt as if I’d completed a quest: I’d been purged of something and I had toilet paper.

As I left with that bittersweet sense of accomplishment and frustration, however, I knew that at some point I’d probably return to buy a present or two. The experience would be my toilet paper experience on steroids, with an especially increased sense of emotional jostling.

With the rectangular box and surveillance cameras in my mental rearview mirror, I decided that Walmart is the opposite of a stable with a manger in it. And then I realized how cliché that realization is. Most of the stories I’ve read of the first Christmas paint Bethlehem as busy as a Walmart at Christmas time. “But there was no room for them in the inn,” gets rendered into “There was so much bustle, no one would even make room for the Son of God to be born.” And so the story becomes a parable for how the busyness of shopping overwhelms the proverbial “reason for the season,” a phrase that winds up being a commercial jingle among commercial jingles.

My sense is that “there was no room for them in the inn” is more connotative of callousness than it is bustle: a young woman nine months pregnant and no one will give up a spot for her? Perhaps there is that bourgeois element to it. Mary was presumably young, and Joseph and Mary were so working class, and they were from Nazareth nonetheless. And so they end up in a stable, or at least in some place where there’s a manger. We don’t actually get the word “stable” in scripture. One place on the internet claims Jesus was probably born in the ground level of a relative’s house, a section that housed the animals and thus had a manger. As a believer in story itself, however, I cling to tradition here: born in a barn, only barn animals for witnesses, wrapped in “strips of cloth and lying in a manger.” This setting fits the pattern of human callousness in any era.

I had started this essay intending to declare at this point that Walmart is the opposite of a stable, but now that I’m here I cannot do it so easily. Supposing a dirt poor couple—out of towners or even foreigners without health insurance—showed up in a small Midwestern town, and presuming a somewhat-difficult-to-imagine callousness that excluded them from a small town hospital, wouldn’t a Walmart be a logical place for them to take refuge? “Supposed ‘Baby King’ Born in Walmart’”—who couldn’t imagine that headline? Or bourgeois readers like me looking down on the child born there? Or, even more likely, the King could be born in the place of nomads and truckdrivers: “Winter Birth in Walmart Parking Lot Dubbed ‘Miraculous.’”

But that brings me back to callousness, disregard, busyness. Maybe Walmart is akin to Bethlehem at Christmas time because of these things. Remember the annual “running of the people” on Black Friday that left one individual trampled to death and many more injured? Beyond callous.

No, for the setting of the first Christmas, I’ll take the stable because it’s so countercultural. Because it speaks so loudly to human depravity and callousness. Because it’s so out of the way, so unworthy of even horrific press. Because wherever Jesus was born, it wasn’t a place that conjured up grandeur; there were no electric eyes watching, no surveillance cameras. Rather, where the King was born was marginal, because too many people went through the self-checkout in order to speed on their selfish little ways.

This Christmas season I’m struck again by the fact that “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

How absolutely callous of us. It’s no wonder they’ve banned nativity scenes from public places. Think of what they remind us of. Think of how absolutely countercultural a stable and a manger still are.

Avatar and Wounded Knee

I live in the middle of Sioux County, a town called Sioux Center, just a few miles east of the state line, drawn there by the Big Sioux River; but if anyone calls this place "Sioux Country," he'd be dead wrong, unless he were referring to what once was. Some folks with some Sioux blood may well be around, but the veins of most the populace run richly Dutch or Mexican. The Sioux are long gone.

My guess is few here think much about what once was--how, specifically, once upon a time, no white folks lived around here at all, and how, in fact, most of those who did roam the grasslands were red. It's true, of course. But, mostly, history is bunk.

I thought of that a great deal last night as I sat in a theater in Sioux Center and watched Avatar, the film everyone's talking about (which is why I went). For a while, I thought James Cameron had bestowed up us all a marvelous Christmas blessing, retelling a story that we need to hear, a story of land-grabbing that's as undeniable as it was inevitable, I guess, a truly American story--how this rich prairie turned abundant. Today, Sioux County feeds the world, after all. Who needs history?

But if you're Lakota, you don't tell the same story. Few of us white folk think much at all of them, even now, 119 years just about to the day from an bloody event that happened several hours west down Hwy. 18 at a place called Wounded Knee, an event that wasn't a battle at all, but a massacre.

There are times when Avatar, like a rich American parable, comes close to telling that story; there were times when I thought it a blessing.

But it's a movie, not a history lesson--entertainment, not truth. When it's all said and done, Wounded Knee is as forgotten as it ever was because even the most distinct parallels between what happened then and what never happened in the movie simply disappear amid all the marvelous spectacle. What drew me to see Avatar was what everyone is talking about--the spectacle of its phenomenal graphics; and it's incredibly impressive, even though we didn't even see it in 3-D. Often, amid the rich jungle, one almost forgets the story in the opulence of the fairyland. It is truly amazing.

But finally, what counts is the spectacle, what counts is the show; what really matters to Cameron and his audience is action/adventure. The real ticket is to a phenomenon almost toally capable of overwhelms the senses. He's creating experience, not trolling for truth.

It's a show, after all, and a marvelous one at that, a miracle in the making. It's a masterpiece of cinematic artistry, well worth seeing. That's what it is--a show. Nothing less, and, sadly enough, nothing more.

It as gaudy and excessive as, well, one might well expect. In fact, more so.

And it bears less than token resemblance to what happened just a few days short of 119 years ago just down Hwy. 18. When last night, it ended, I'm guessing no one in Sioux Center had a second thought about Wounded Knee.

Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?

As providence would have it, I visit my daughter’s classroom during what amounts to third grade composition. “Come on in,” the teacher beckons me. “We’ll be writing a paragraph—but you won’t see much teaching,” she admits.

My daughter sits in the back row, between two boys, at the heavy desks of green metal construction, a thick particle-board top and orangeish—How do you spell “orange-ish” and why isn’t it a word?—surface. These are still the desks of the military-industrial machine, I can’t help but think, blunt, heavy, ugly and barely functional. I can scarcely remember seeing an uglier desk. My daughter’s desk happens to have her two cubbies on the right side, one on top where I see she’s got her pencil box neatly stashed and the larger one below where she’s got her books neatly ordered. Unfortunately, the desk of the boy to my daughter’s left is positioned exactly the opposite, with the cubbies on the left, meaning they are sitting directly next to each other, but really directly on top of each other, a total invasion of space. So much for a room—or even a space—of one’s own for my aspiring writer.

The teacher proceeds to explain the assignment: the students are to write a paragraph for the local newspaper that has this first line: “During the Christmas holidays, I like to . . .” The teacher writes the sentence on the board in immaculate letters. This first line will help them get going, the teacher explains, and they are to fill in half a page with whatever they would like.

“What do they mean by ‘holidays,’” one student asks, “Christmas and New Year’s?”

“Well, I might substitute ‘vacation’ for ‘holidays’” answers the teacher, suggesting they think both about the days themselves and the break from school in between.

“Make sure to write things that are interesting,” she encourages them. Do they open presents at grandma’s house? Put that in. Do they drink eggnog by an open fire—how many of them have had egg nog? A half dozen hands go up in the air; my daughter raises her hand and looks at me questioningly. There’s clearly some prestige in saying you’ve had eggnog and liked it. “We had that eggnog shake from McDonald’s,” I whisper, “I’m sure that counts.”

Then we’re back to the paragraph. “Make sure not to start each sentence the same way,” the teacher says, exemplifying with a series of rapid-fire sentences beginning with “and” that are the model of monotony. “Would that sound very interesting?” she asks. A scattering of “no’s” and head shakes are her answer. “And make sure to write just about Christmas,” she continues. “It wouldn’t make sense to say, ‘and I like turkey for Thanksgiving,’ would it?” Again, head shakes.

“When you’re finished, bring them to me and I’ll read over them to see about mistakes,” the teacher says, “because the newspaper will print them just as they are. Grandpas and grandmas like to see mistakes when they print them—they think they’re cute—but how do you feel about them?”

“Embarrassed,” someone says. Yes, this is third grade.

Finally, they’re off to writing, the teacher trouble shooting. One student asks about the spelling of a word, another is told to use a period; another girl, just two desks down from my daughter asks a question that gets the reply, “It doesn’t matter, just write.” I sneak a look at the girl’s paper. After about five minutes or so she hasn’t written anything yet. The boy next to my daughter is also stuck on zero.

My daughter starts with something about presents. Then she writes another generic memory about the Christmas tree. I know I shouldn’t taint the waters but I can’t resist. She needs her memory jarred. “What do we do Christmas Eve, Sommer?” I ask her. Ah, a question—that’s not forcing her hand. It’s leading her. The question references our family’s Christmas Eve practice of sleeping by the Christmas tree. It’s about the most distinctive thing we do. Surely, she would have remembered it on her own anyway, right? Then again, considering the time constraints—the teacher has apologized profusely for forgetting to do this assignment earlier, it’s due today—maybe not.

She writes quite a long sentence at my suggestion and then she stops again. A few students get up and approach the teacher’s desk to have their paragraphs proofread. Others still have nothing written.

“Where did we spend Christmas last year, Sommer?” I ask, again prompting here irresistibly. “Oh, Denmark.” She writes. “How do you spell that?”

“Do you remember New Year’s?” I can’t stop myself. In Copenhagen at midnight on New Year’s Eve, there are no state-sponsored fireworks. Rather, everyone—and I literally mean everyone in a city of millions—buys fireworks and shoots them off at any street corner or park they can find. And I’m not just talking bottle rockets and sparklers. I mean the really big showery flowery ones, the glittery rainy ones, and the shock-and-awe sonic boom ones. Surely, this will be memorable to Sommer—and make for memorable writing. And now I’ve tainted the piece irreparably. It’s probably a little show-offy, I think to myself: “When I was in Denmark . . .”

So I decide I better leave before I jerk the pencil from my daughter’s hand and write it the way I want it. It’s been quite a lesson. I’ve seen students with trouble getting started, students staring in horror at a blank page despite having been given a first line, students concerned about their audience. I’ve seen students challenged to stay focused, students prompted to use memorable details, students temporarily road blocked by spelling and punctuation. I’ve seen students confronted with proofreading and deadlines and the assembly line process of writing with others on top of them.

Still, I’ve witnessed the act of creation. My daughter typically has a sharp memory, coming up with things from the past that I’m surprised she remembers. Put on the spot, however, the past becomes an indistinct blob for us all. Writing cultivates the ground of the memory, brings things to mind that might otherwise slip away, crystallizes them and organizes them and concretizes them in a way that makes meaning of them. As I look around the room, these students are making the Christmas traditions of their childhoods, shaping lumps of indistinct memories into days and moments that they decide stick out, that they decide are meaningful for some interior quality inherent to the experience itself and now exposed by the power of the third grade mind.

So I go home to grade papers from college writers who face some of the same problems as third grade writers: getting started, writing varied sentences, staying focused, using memorable detail. And then I’ll sit down to compose this essay, struggling with the same things—should I really leave “orangish” in? How should I spell it?

I’m really no smarter than a third grader.

But I’ll jar my memory, spur my imagination, publish it on the blog for a couple of readers max, and it will be worth it.

Passionate purple tulips

That Ricky Ian Gordon was a songwriter should not have surprised me. I found this poem in my morning e-mail yesterday and loved it somehow, in part, I'm sure because wonderful poems that perform such delicate rhythm and rhyme games are not so easy to find, even though Frost used to say--I think!--that writing poems without rhyme was like playing tennis without a net. Most poets, or so it seems to someone who isn't one, don't imprison themselves with such formalistic silliness.

Anyway, Ricky Ian Gordon, who's a gifted songwriter, I'm told, sticks delightfully with both standard rythym and rhyme through this wonderful little saga.

The Tulips by Ricky Ian Gordon　

The tulips at that perfect place

crane their necks with liquid grace

like swans who circling, collide

within the lake this vase provides.

They stood like soldiers, stiff, before

as if they had been called to war.

In two days more, when petals fall,

I will entomb them in the hall

with trash; the morning's coffee grinds,

old newspapers, and lemon rinds.

It's bitter that such loveliness

should come to this,could come to this.

The first two lines make it clear that this piece of writing is quite self-consciously traditional. What follows immediately suggests that Mr. Gordon is conscious not only of rhyming rules but of fooling around with those rules as well: collide and provides are no perfect match, but as entertained as I am by the first four lines, I really don't care if he chooses to fudge a little. I'm in.

I don't quite see collide, however, as if a flock of swans--or is it a gaggle--run into each other mysteriously? Yet, where they are is a "perfect place?" Takes a better interpreter than I am to create the image. No matter. Like I said, I'm in.

What's clear is that he's toying with ye olde trope of ubi sunt--"where have all the flowers gone?"--because they are dying, sadly enough, those passionate purple tulips, as all tulips do, and flowers, and, well, all things.

And it is, to him, just as sad as it was to poets forever--that beauty's stay is so momentary--bitter, he calls it. And it is.

And he hammers that bitterness home with the last two lines: "should come to this/ could come to this," two lines which deliberately alter the rhythm and then, as if that weren't enough, jam the rhyme into our sadness by pointed repititition.

Okay, I admit it: I'm loving the music. On we go.

But now their purpleness ignites

the room with incandescent lights.

Their stamens reach their yellow tongues

to lick the air into their lungs

through stems attached to whitish manes.

The pistil stains.

But they're not dying yet--there's relief in that fact for all of us; so let's gather the tulips while we may and make some hay while the sun shines. Good night, they're bright, he claims, as tulips are, and hearty too. Maybe I'm wrong or shouldn't say it, but there's a little Georgia O'Keefe here. He's messing around just like she did, suggesting some swelling human passion with all those stamens and stems, all of which means he can't bring himself to quit this passionate madness in just four lines--this one has five. Maybe I'm just a dirty old man--old for sure.

And even though there are no bees

about the room for them to please,

I take them in like honey dew-and buzzing now,

I think of you...

The honey dew escapes me, but the playful suggestion that he's a honey bee is sweet and comical, and in line with just about everything anybody knows about love poetry's traditional overstatement. In love, most of us are downright fools. Why not bees? Sure.

And with the last line--"I think of you"--we know exactly where we're at--this is plain old heart-melting love poetry. Sure, now bring it on home, Mr. Gordon, I'm saying.

And then this:

I think of you who bought me these,

at least,

I wish you had,

as that might ease the ache

of passing hours.

A love is dying, like these flowers.

Aw, rats. He's woven a world that's blessedly cartoonish, only to blow it away in a single line--"I wish you had."

Just like that we're helplessly back in real time, the incandescene of those passionate purple tulips dimming by the minute, the lover somewhere gone out the door, the world in seething, solitary silence.

And yet he can't help himself, so he ends with these flowers, dying though they may be, which is to say, I think, at least we had 'em, didn't we? At least they were here for awhile. At least we got a glimpse, however fleeting, of what joy is.

There isn't a darn thing new about this poem. Some undergrad could put together a collection of great poems of all time with an identical theme. Identical.

But it is dear, as are all of its ancestors. Willa Cather used to say that there's only a couple of stories around; we just keep telling them over and over and over.

We're like children that way, I guess. And that's not all bad. And there's something to the music, too.

Reading Tiger Woods: the Legend, the Myth, the Man

Really. Tiger Woods has been sleeping around? Really, his relationship with his fembot wife from the Swedish Bikini team was a sham? Really, the man whose father proclaimed he was the messiah not just of golf but of the world is an egomaniac? Really? Really, the man who spends his time traveling the world and playing on the nearly ubiquitous but penultimate man-made landscapes that must add up to“the geography of nowhere” and who lives in what I can only imagine to be the ultimate gated community of Windermere, Florida, has a woman in every port? Really? Really, the man who scores of fans admire for his conquests of these landscapes is also notching his belt with female conquests? Really.

I must admit to a number of things about Tiger Woods and this incident. First, I must admit that I have been a Tiger fan. I am not a golfer but I watch golf when Tiger plays, especially when he is either “making a charge” or atop the leader board. For whatever reason, I thrill to watch Tiger destroy a course and the field of primarily pasty white golfers plus Vijay Singh and a handful of Asians. I especially like those type of runaway victories that smack of godhood, like when he destroyed the hallowed Augusta National only a few short years into his pro career, deconstructing (a non-English teacher would probably say “destroying”) a course that has since been remade and so remains the idol of the game.

I was also a sucker for Tiger’s one-legged victory in the US Open just before announcing he had a torn ACL and would undergo season-ending knee surgery. The greatest of athletes seem to have this in common: they are able to perform at championship levels when mere mortals could not. Like Jordan’s flu-performance against Utah in the NBA finals, which I remember clearly, or Willis Reed’s legendary appearance after a knee injury, which I wasn’t even alive for but can understand the legend. In this way, too, Tiger is transcendent, and I ate it all up.

I must also admit that when I heard about Tiger’s affair(s), I laughed. All the signs were in place for exactly this sort of thing—the messiah-status created by his father Earl Woods, his marriage to a bikini model, his general egomania, his occasional swearing outbursts that blatantly disregarded both social norms and role model status.

Tiger Woods’ Deconstructive Power

Despite all these despicable traits, however, I lionized Tiger in my own mind. Why? Tiger Woods is soon to be 34 years old, my own age; he’s a Gen-Xer, like me. In many ways, he is symbolic of my generation, especially as he has smashed perhaps the final high place of the white sporting world: the sacred ground of golf.

This is what I will call the deconstructive power of Tiger Woods, and some personal experience does enter into my feelings about Tiger at this point. For two summers during college, I caddied at one of Minnesota’s most prestigious golf courses, Interlachen Country Club. Interlachen is too short and too landlocked to host a modern PGA tournament, even though in 1930 Bobby Jones famously skipped a shot across the water of number nine to win the third leg of his triple crown.

Today, however, or at least when I caddied there in the Nineties, Interlachen was still a stronghold of the old boys’ club. I heard both women and minorities derided there. A woman I caddied for dubbed my Colombian-born friend, “The black,” not the worst of sins, perhaps, but symptomatic of how removed their world was from people of color.

For two summers at Interlachen, I kowtowed for tips, carrying two bags at a minimum price of $30 each, times two rounds per day for an absolute minimum earnings, assuming the weather was good, of $120 a day. (My best day was probably around $230. Yes, there’s money in golf and I have prostituted myself for it.)

The one Tiger joke I heard then, as he emerged into the professional world, came from an old woman at least in her late seventies, one of my early and poorly paying “loops.” I don’t remember how the body of the joke went except for the general question-answer format, but I clearly remember the punch-line. It went like this:

“What do you call Tiger Woods as a professional?”

And the answer: “A Thai-Coon.” Lovely, a legitimate race word coupled with a racist slur that together referenced the majority of Tiger’s ethnic makeup: his mother is Thai and his father is African-American, with some Cherokee and even Chinese blood.

“Ha, ha,” the woman laughed after she delivered the punch line and hit her crap tee shot wide right. “I love Tiger. I think he’s great.”

Yes, don’t you just love him?

I loved Tiger Woods because, if there was anything that Gen-X could offer the world, I thought, it was Tiger, a one-man wrecking ball of the vestiges of white privilege in Western culture. This was our issue; it was Cobain-esque in its own way:

With the lights out it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us,
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

Okay, it’s a stretch, but I guess Tiger was that racial amalgamation that seemed to defy all the social structures that seemed broken to our angst-ridden generation. After growing up with discussions of why African-Americans couldn’t play quarterback, I saw Tiger as an in-your-face answer. After one of Tiger’s early Masters’ victories, after hearing Fuzzy Zoeller joke that Tiger should serve “fried chicken” and “collard greens” at the Masters Club Champion’s Dinner, I pulled all the more for Tiger. Tiger would rule the white man’s game and prove the white man didn’t rule.

So I pulled for him. My wife pulled for him. Millions pulled for him. Even my mother-in-law—she’s Lao—pulled for him, citing his Thai blood.

A Psychological and Archetypal Reading

So, yes, I bought into the myth of Tiger Woods; I helped make the myth of Tiger Woods. An important part of the myth was the name itself: Would Tiger, named for the ultimate predator, be Tiger if he had instead remained Eldrick? This begs another question: Was Tiger born or was he made by Earl Woods’ self-fulfilling prophecy? Whatever the case, by age two, with predatory nickname in hand, Earl and Tiger had found their way onto the talk show circuit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHkA_983_s). This was to be more than fifteen minutes of fame, however. Child prodigy was only the beginning. Tiger won an unprecedented three U.S. Amateur titles, then turned pro to more of the same. Then in 1996 came the Sports Illustrated article where Earl Woods declared Tiger a messiah to unite the races:

"Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl Woods said. Really? And the elder Woods’ answer:

"Yes, because . . . he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power" (Smith, Gary. “The Chosen One.” SI 23 December 1996. Online.)

True godhood on the golf course followed the prophecy. Then there was a queen for King Tiger. Now a harem. All of which makes complete sense.

If Tiger was to be a modern day messiah as Earl declared, then he had to be a messiah of the global capitalist dispensation. Thus Tiger achieved global celebrity on all continents, the press of crowds of men and women rising above even rock star status; thus he won championships on several continents and the path is now being cleared for him to win a gold medal in the Olympics; thus he is the face of a billion dollar economic empire; thus he married an international bikini model; thus his indiscretions included the new global technology in the form of “sexting”; thus, once again, Tiger makes his home nowhere and everywhere, on the ubiquitous golf course and in the ubiquitous gated community. I would dare to say that Tiger is rootless and identity-less.

Furthermore, Tiger is a messiah of a secular, postmodern age. This means, true to my Gen-X admiration of him, that his multiracial pedigree and global citizenship is his validation. It also means that his morality points us not to some higher moral plain but rather to the idea that man is the measure of all things: Tiger lives by his own moral code—he is above mere mortals in how he can be expected to live because of his genius. I would even venture to say that this is how we as a culture want him to be—nay, this is what we’ve groomed him to be.

Consider the television and film archetypes that modeled Tiger’s promiscuous behavior. On a lesser, comic scale there was Sam Malone from Cheers, a now laughable would-be stud but an Eighties star nonetheless. More significantly, there was Bond, James Bond, whose utter isolation as a pawn of Cold War governments leaves him nameless, placeless, loveless—and yet the ultimate lover. Bond’s character is an archetype, a character whose legacy stretches back in literature to at least George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose characters from the comic Don Juan to the serious if melodramatic Manfred were “terrifyingly attractive”--and typically as good with the ladies as Byron himself was. Biblically, of course, we can stretch back to Solomon if we’d like. In any case, Tiger Woods is a type of Byronic hero for our day and age, a Wild West gunslinger (clubslinger?) who blows into town for a time (tournament) and after a short stay rides into the sunset with another notch in his belt.

What I’m arguing is that Tiger’s actions are exactly what we as a culture expect—no, demand. He’s playing the role perfectly: he is a genius yet uncontrollable, dominant yet dangerous; he’s from nowhere and everywhere. And his modern-day harem is the ultimate status symbol, the ultimate object of conspicuous consumption reserved for the elite. His behavior, if he can emerge from this “scandal”—it’s really not a scandal, simply plot development for Entertainment Tonight—relatively unscathed, will only add to his status in our culture, not detract from it.

My cases in point are other athletes who’ve emerged unscathed—even triumphant—from would-be scandals. Tom Brady, before his knee injury and the decline of the Patriots, garnered cultural praise for his playboy fatherhood status: an AP article on a preseason game lauded Brady for attending the birth of his child with his ex-girlfriend, an actress, then flying to the preseason game and leading the Patriots to a victory, all the while getting more press for dating Giselle Bundchen, a supermodel.

There will be no better proof that this is the kind of behavior we want from our heroes than what it will take us to forgive him, which is simply this: more winning. Remember Kobe Bryant’s alleged rape case several years ago? Wiped clean as soon as he returned to championship form. Only if Tiger follows the formula of Mike Tyson—namely, he starts losing, tattoos his face, and bites Phil Mickelson’s ear off—will he lose face with us as a culture. This goes to prove that other corollary of global capitalist culture: no press is bad press. If Tiger Woods emerges from this and continues his run at major championships, we will chalk it up to his godhood, and this episode will in the future be noted in trivia questions that document Woods’ messiah-run: “In what year—the same year that Tiger Woods didn’t win a major—did word of Tiger Woods’ multiple affairs first break?”

Naturalism and Metanarrative

If I’m arguing that Tiger is merely the product of our age, an archetypal character in some metanarrative of human existence, then I find myself having to reconsider Tiger as a character. Perhaps Tiger can’t help it—his behavior, I mean. Perhaps, as with the characters in Naturalist fiction, Tiger is simply a victim of forces greater than himself. Perhaps Tiger is simply another Tess of the D’Urbervilles—or, more appropriately, Alec what’s-his-name, the upper class slime ball who takes advantage of Tess. If this were the case, if we consider Tiger a sort of pawn in a larger story, then the measure of Tiger’s worthiness, true to the best naturalism, is how he conducts himself in the face of these forces: if he acts with nobility and dignity, which might include anything, I suppose, (depending on one’s perspective) from a public apology to making up with his wife by giving her a lot of money to “brave” acceptance of his outcast status (very Byronic) to rehab for sex addiction to claiming he has a medical condition that’s part of his very nature to fatalistic suicide (both very naturalistic). I would be willing to bet on which path he chooses. Any of them will draw press and since no press is bad press, any of them will do.

But now I myself must face the question I’ve raised. Is Tiger a victim of forces larger than himself? If so, does this clear the way for me personally to pull for him once again? It’s an interesting question. My gut tells me I won’t, that I don’t pull for slime balls. Of course, doesn’t the fact that I won’t pull for slime balls illustrate that I myself was looking for a messiah in Tiger Woods? That my definition of messiah includes sexual morality but not swearing or egotism (very Gen-X of me) but that nonetheless I was looking for a messiah, perhaps recast in my own image? Haven’t I just argued for several pages that Tiger’s a product of his age, that he’s been manufactured by a global capitalist culture and is therefore somewhat less individually culpable than he might be? On both accounts, yes. And isn’t Tiger still able to destroy the idols of golf with a flawed character? Yes, but it would have been better for him to maintain moral superiority while doing it. That’s what Jesus would have done.

You should hear great irony in that last line.

I hate naturalism. I hate thinking that there are forces greater than ourselves that can pop us like a pimple. I hate thinking that I might be carried along by a narrative in which I play an unwitting part. This, as I understand it, is quite American of me. As an American, I want heroes who are themselves a force of nature. I want a hero of unbending will.

Wait a minute. There I go again.

Perhaps the scariest thing in all of this is how we (I) construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our (my) heroes. And how scripture and Christ deconstruct them all. Ultimately, in Tiger Woods I can see the mold for how we (I) cast my idols and how the narrative of scripture and example of Christ casts them down. There is nothing new under the sun after all.

So will I pull for Tiger Woods after this? Certainly not like I used to. Really, I won’t pull for anyone quite the same again. Until the next time someone emerges who transcends the game itself, whose sterling character is above reproach and . . .

Lord, help us (me).

Willa Cather, 1874 - 1947

I have two bricks in my office, two bricks I dug up from a desolate spot on the prairie, the homestead where Willa Cather's family first put down roots in Webster County, far south central Nebraska, just a dozen miles north of the Republican River. The town in which she grew up--her father was in insurance and real estate--was Red Cloud, a town that has little going for it these days other than its being the home of one of the nation's finest novelists.

I've been to Red Cloud often. I used to take classes every other year, in fact, a gruelling marathon of travel that started about five in the morning and didn't end, back home, until midnight. No matter how long it took, students always loved the trip.

I have Cather to thank, I believe, for my deep respect for the Great Plains. My Antonia will always be one of my favorite novels, in great part because Ms. Cather creates a character in that novel, Antonia herself, whose epic strength and courage make her one of the most memorable literary heroes--or heroines--of all time. Tony Shimerda, looms over that wide open landscape of that novel like some behomoth cottonwood.

Twenty miles north of Red Cloud, you can still walk around the deserted homestead where the prototype for Tony Shimerda lived. In a sweet moment late in the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits, Tony's children come bounding out of a storm cellar not far from the back door of Tony's farm home. Often, my students would pose, like this, sitting on the door to that old storm cellar.

Just driving through the stark and open prairie of the Divide, where Cather both literally and figuratively grew up, is, today, still like entering her world, the place where she found the greatest inspiration of her lifetime. "It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang— and one's heart sang there too," she wrote in The Song of the Lark.

Willa Cather will never be just a novelist to me because what she did in her writing is evoke an entire world and dress it forever in the exacting livery of time and place with such accuracy that she, paradoxically, gave it away to all of us, wherever we left our own childhoods. She will always be, to me anyway, Red Cloud, the small town amid the prairie's red grass hills. Willa Cather could leave Nebraska, and did so frequently during her lifetime; but the plains she loved never left her. They not only found a place what she wrote--they were themselves her finest work. Even in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a New Mexico novel some consider her best, the Great Plains are there, outfitted in dusty, desert camouflage.

It's her birthday today, born in 1873. If I had my druthers, I'd climb into some stout winter clothes, grab a couple of students, and head west and south right now to see her world this afternoon, adorned in its first snow. But I don't; another trip will have to wait for another day.

I'll just have to dust off those old homestead bricks.

.

Ms. Emily

I spent most of yesterday with Ms. Emily Dickinson, hours and hours, in fact, but not enough. If I were simply to dedicate a week to doing nothing but reading her work, or a month, or a year, come retirement, I wonder just how long it would take me to tire of her, or her, me. I suppose I would eventually, but my guess is that, finally, frustrated, I'd simply throw in the towel. She can be so enigmatic.

On the other hand, she can be transparent as a schoolgirl.

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requirest sorest need.

There's room for just about everyone in her passionate fantasies--

Inebriate of Air--am I --
And Debauchee of Dew--
Reeling--through endless summer days--
From inns of Molten Blue --

But why the almost endless dashes and on-again, off-again capitalization? And what on earth does she mean sometimes, about death, for instance?

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--

And why didn't she ever finish? Why is there several versions of the same poem with no clear preferences marked? And what does she want to say sometimes, when the words simply don't line up in any fashion most of us can understand? "A Bird came down the Walk" (328) ends when Ms. Speaker offers a crumb but the bird leaves. Here's how she describes it:

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home--

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam--
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

I read yesterday somewhere that sometimes reading Ms. Emily is like being present in the mind because sometimes her poetry is really poetry in the making. Something about that description I like.

About faith, she was all over the map. Sometimes angry, sometimes accepting, always a cynic. I don't think I'll ever understand her, but there's always more than enough to keep me trying.

This morning, I'm thankful for yesterday--most of a day, once again, for the 35th time, with Ms. Emily.