Yesterday was the 57th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the first article reads as follows: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Here is what I have …
I saw my first lit-up house on Wednesday, rather lovely with swathes and swags of white light draped like crystals on a chandelier and the shape of a sleigh picked out in white and red on the front lawn. I saw my first lit-up house and my heart sank as I thought, “Oh, no, it’s going to be bad this year.”
So this is a cathartic essay, written in hopes of purging my expectation of seasonal despair. You see, I’m not a Scrooge. I’m a disappointed product of twentieth century American culture, and Christmas is for me the supreme symbol and expression of my alienation from that culture. Some years, it really pinches.
I grew up in an optimistic fifties suburb populated with the white ethnic veterans of World War II and their young families. The school I attended was one of those California Bauhaus bastards, thrown up without niceties to accommodate the fast-multiplying products of the Baby Boom. There were just a few other Jewish kids whose parents, like mine, were recent immigrants from the east coast, who’d taken advantage of the GI Bill to muster out in California and become proud owners of a tract home with its own little scrap of lawn, its scrawny sapling, its picture window looking out on more of the same. I could identify each and every one of those kids because we met up every December in the library, where we were sent while the rest of the class practiced Christmas carols.
Tuesday mornings I try to go to the local farmers’ market. Almost all the vendors are Asian or Latino, so there are lots of interesting herbs and vegetables to try along with the onions and apples. One vendor offers an ever-changing array of tree fruit from his farm in the San Joaquin Valley. He is …
I come from a long line of refugees. From Adam and Eve cast out of Eden to the exodus from Egypt and forty years’ wandering in the wilderness, the story of the Jews turns on exile and the yearning for refuge. My own maternal grandparents left Russia under cover of night to escape the pogroms …
For the past few days, these lines from Deuteronomy 22:8 have been resounding in my head with the regularity of a heartbeat: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet on your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.” A statement’s appearance …
My name is Arlene, and I’m a hypocrite. Remember on April 29th, when I wrote about how the “peak oil” documentary The End of Suburbia, when I wrote about my determination to put up with the inconvenience of a one-car family so as to minimize my complicity with Big Oil? Well, the shelf-life of that …
Controversies about public cultural funding continue to pile up, even though the amount of money involved is insignificant in comparison to taxpayers’ investment in such public-spirited priorities as prisons and weapons of mass destruction. Today’s New York Times carried a piece reporting that a House Appropriations panel recommends cuts of about half in current appropriations …
A good friend visited last night from New York. He’s thoughtful and well-informed, so I always enjoy talking about social issues with him. As in so many political conversations these days, it wasn’t long before we got around to blowing each other’s minds with the surrealism of everyday public life. Starting with the baffling case …
I have — as we say here on the left coast — trust issues. Not the mundane kind: I’m happy to give most people the benefit of the doubt, and more often than not, they prove trustworthy. I’m content to trust the roads to hold me and the sun to rise tomorrow morning. No, I’ve …
The “ownership society” paradigm the Bush administration invokes in its campaign to dismantle Social Security scares me in a very old and deep place, chilling my soul. When I feel the shiver, an image shimmers in my mind, fleeting as a reflection on water: an old woman, wrapped in rags, sitting at the mouth of …