Alison Oatman

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.

Dear Robert,

Every night I watch your “Resistance Report” and it is often the brightest fifteen minutes of my day.

You channel pure Charles de Gaulle in your book-lined bunker. Remember the 1940 Appeal of June 18th (“L’Appel du 18 juin”) in which the leader of the Free French Forces said this:

“But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!”

A resounding non, non, non!

Thanks to you, I now have my own copy of the constitution. I yearn for the weathered passport book-like edition you showed us on air, but I purchased a thicker annotated one.

You make what feels like a descent into the raging flames of hell seem like an afternoon at the beach.

Last night, you explained that you understood bullies like Trump since you had been shorter than the other kids in school and therefore subject to merciless teasing. I think this experience must have shaped your world and steeled your will for the good fight.

You say Putin will be Trump’s downfall. I hope you are right…and sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, would you be free to discuss the Emoluments Clause over martinis? I hear that the word emolere means to grind up in Latin–and was used to refer to payment for a miller for grinding corn.

Ah well, it’s all grist for the mill.

xoxo

Alison

He did not regard Jean Louise as a sister. In the years when he was away at the war and at the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love. She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him. He would protect her; he would marry her.

–From “Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee

Say it ain’t so!! A twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise (a.k.a. Scout)–all grown up compared to where we leave off in “To Kill a Mockingbird” when she is in her eighth year–described in mushy terms as “intensely feminine”? Does she need a man to “protect her” when she was always the first to pull a punch in grade school?

This woodenly delivered novel is actually a rough draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird” set in the fifties instead of the thirties. Clearly Lee was a songbird without a tune when she penned “Go Set a Watchman” in 1957. Scout’s heavily inflected Southern drawl is what makes “To Kill a Mockingbird” sing. So why publish a lousy earlier version?

“Go Set a Watchman” was discovered in 2011 in a safe deposit box in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville. Lee said about it: “In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called ‘Go Set a Watchman.’ It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.”

However, there is a great deal of doubt as to whether Lee (described as “in a wheelchair in an assisted living center, nearly deaf and blind”) really understood what was going on. HarperCollins ended up having a field day with this manufactured “literary event.”

The only thing I take away from this is how well Lee fine-tuned her craft in the three years between the two novels. I think it is Anne Lamott who says every book needs a “shitty first draft.” It’s a miracle that Lee turned the sludge of “Go Set a Watchman” into the fragrant Southern blossom of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

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!