Alison Oatman

The 53 Percent

February 13, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

For now,the factions of the left seem to have found an accord. But to regain any power in Washington, they will need to sway the center too–including some of those women who voted for Trump. The white women of the left, many of whom are just now finding their footing as activists, have been eager to dissociate from that group. Mention the 53 percent, and they’re quick to tell you that they’re of the 47. But of all the people who marched in Washington last month, they may be among the best positioned to reach across that aisle. “I know of no other time when it would be more important,” Barbara Smith, the black feminist and leftist, told me. “That’s not my work to do, but somebody ought to do it.”
–from the 2/12/17 NY Times Magazine article “How a Fractious Women’s Movement Came to Lead the Left” by Amanda Hess

Who are those 53 percent of women who voted for Trump?

I attended a town hall meeting yesterday sponsored by the Retake Our Democracy group here in Santa Fe. It was informative and quite frightening at times. A woman who teaches listening skills got up and said “Either we are all going to die, or we are going to learn how to live with one another.”

After about an hour, the room broke up into discussion groups. The choice was between a “Rattle the GOP” group (by far the most popular), a “Community Conversations” group, a “Youth Outreach” group, a “Cultural Outreach” group, and a “Soda Tax” group (this last one convened to discuss taxing sugary drinks in order to fund a universal pre-k program).

I chose the “Cultural Outreach” program because because my other choice–“Rattle the GOP”–just felt like tapping into more of the same perpetual outrage “we all” live and breathe now.

“Cultural Outreach” was a small group of about ten people–mostly white women over fifty. We went around the circle and introduced ourselves. The only skill I had to offer was a pitiful command of Spanish. (Earlier a politician had announced that there was a dearth of Spanish translators when it came to important legal documents.) Others spoke of the Native American and Muslim communities they were peripherally connected to. A Mexican-American woman emphasized how much fear immigrants are in.

Then a woman of color spoke up and said “outreach” was exactly the wrong word. Before you just enter our communities, you’ve got to undercover years of your own conditioning to the “invisible” tenets of white supremacy. There has to be trust, and it takes a long time to build that trust. She suggested getting people to come together over food or through art projects. There was absolutely no need for “white knights” to come in and save the day. This all made perfect sense and I was glad she had spoken her mind.

Then I read the NY Times article and it resonated–especially the words, “Mention the 53 percent, and they’re quick to tell you that they’re of the 47. But of all the people who marched on Washington last month, they may be among the best positioned to reach across that aisle.”

Is it my calling to hang out with conservative white women who voted for Trump?

Would that make an impact in the undercover spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickle and Dimed”?

I don’t know, but it’s a bizarre notion on the verge of an idea.

Truth, Lies, and Democracy

February 10, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

A hand went up in the back of the room. “How can he do that?”
“Who do what?” asked Miss Gates patiently.
“I mean how can Hitler just put a lot of folks in a pen like that, looks like the govamint’d stop him,” said the owner of the hand.
“Hitler is the government,” said Miss Gates, and seizing an opportunity to make education dynamic, she went to the blackboard. She printed DEMOCRACY in large letters. “Democracy,” she said. “Does anybody have a definition?”
“Us,” somebody said.
I raised my hand, remembering an old campaign slogan Atticus had once told me about.
“What do you think it means, Jean Louise?”
“‘Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.'” I quoted.
“Very good, Jean Louise, very good,” Miss Gates smiled. In front of DEMOCRACY, she printed WE ARE A. “Now class, say it all together. ‘We are a democracy.'”
–From “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

David Frum has a good article in the March issue of The Atlantic called “How to Build an Autocracy.”

This is one of its scarier paragraphs: “Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it–and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans–these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.”

At the same time, the press will be weakened into nonexistence: “…modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist.”

From quotes Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen: “Lying is the message…It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

The article ends with a (not too specific) warning that we must defend liberty “with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them.”

Like the former speechwriter for George W. Bush that he is, From makes his last words dazzle with a “what-can-you-do-for-your-country” pinch in the rear: “What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.”

What would Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch say? Finch would have said something morally uplifting like this to his precocious daughter Scout–the protagonist of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” What I would pay to be in his soothing company right now.

There are always people on the right side of history. That’s why I’ll be focusing on social novels here. (According to Wikipedia, a social novel is “a work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel.”) We are talking about everything from “Hard Times” to “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Native Son”…and pretty much every book Dostoevsky wrote.

I took a long hiatus to prepare for some courses this semester, but I hope there are still a couple of readers out there!

The Loveliness of the Long-Distance Runner

January 4, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

I expect that this winter I’ll run another marathon somewhere in the world. And I’m sure come next summer I’ll be out in another triathlon somewhere, giving it my best shot. Thus the seasons come and go, and the years pass by. I’ll age one more year, and probably finish another novel. One by one, I’ll face the tasks before me and complete them as best I can. Focusing on each stride forward, but at the same time taking a long-range view, scanning the scenery as far ahead as I can. I am, after all, a long-distance runner.

My time, the rank I attain, my outward appearance–all of these are secondary. For a runner like me, what’s really important is reaching the goal I set myself, under my own power. I give it everything I have, endure what needs enduring, and am able, in my own way, to be satisfied. From the failures and joys I always try to come away having grasped a concrete lesson. (It’s got to be concrete, no matter how small it is.) And I hope that, over time, as one race follows another, in the end I’ll reach a place I’m content with. Or maybe just catch a glimpse of it. (Yes, that’s a more appropriate way of putting it.)

–from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Focus and perseverance. According to Murakami, these are two winning qualities in both a writer and a runner. I could go on about how exercise is important for one’s creativity. (Why, think about the Romantic poets hotfooting it around the Lake District.) As a friend said to me on my first hike in New Mexico, once you start walking, everything petty falls away. The brain needs this reset.

Murakami has written a solid memoir yet in the end his quest seems ephemeral. The book deals with training regimens and the anticipatory joy of running each marathon, along with the inevitable muscle cramps and disappointments. Why does he do it? He seems to get a lot of satisfaction out of testing himself. He’s not particularly interested in the outward trappings of success. He gets his marching orders from within.

The book is tinged with sadness–the familiar sense that much time has passed under the bridge, that things will never be as they were. Like a naked tree in winter, he shivers and mourns the loss of his leaves. This is a book about searching, much less about finding. But there is a gentleness to it that almost resembles pleasure. The long-distance runner never exactly arrives. But he keeps on keeping on, the best thing to do in any case.

Madman in the Woods

December 6, 2016 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
–From “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

In rereading Walden for the first time in twenty years, I see how much he was rebelling against social conditioning and mental sludge. His vow to live deliberately had more to it than simplifying his lodgings and his diet. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he writes. We are trapped by an enormous amount of peer pressure and willful make-believe.

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices,” he writes. “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

He tells us to read the classics in their original languages (“I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature.”), to beware of technology (“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”), to value our private opinion of ourselves more than any public opinion (“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”) and to stop checking the news (“Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”)

The practice of eating animals is another example of how we are blindsided by what is accepted as normal behavior: “I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

I think Thoreau’s main enemy is the deeply human need to be approved of by others. We do things because everyone else does. We think things aren’t possible for us because we see ourselves through the lens of those maintaining the status quo. We are pack animals desperate for “likes” on Facebook. We are terrified of rejection. In rereading Walden, I see that Thoreau’s act of boiling everything down to its essence is an act of rebellion against social rules and regulations.

He moved into that tiny cabin in 1845 as a way of separating himself from the multitudes and trusting that voice inside his head. I’m sure his closest neighbors thought he was a madman.

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