So I'm sitting here....

on the sofa bed that my inlaws sleep in when they are here and my son, home sick from school, s sleeping next to me. He's been sleeping on and off all morning and now into the afternoon, catching up on the sleep he missed last week before he went to his friend's house and also on the sleep he missed when he was there. And he has a fever, a small one, though I think it's getting worse, which means I will have to give him some medicine when he wakes up, but he has insisted that I sit next to him while he sleeps. This is one of his things lately, he doesn't want to be alone. He was telling me yesterday how he gets this "me feeling" when he's at school and even though he's among people, he feels completely alone, like there's no one else in the world but him--and he is articulating this at six years of age--and so we talked about how everyone feels that way sometimes. Then he said that he felt most alone when he was with more people and less alone when he was with fewer people, and I don't remember what I said to that or what the rest of the conversation was like, but as I write this and I think about what I've been reading all morning, the biography and poetry of the Chinese poet Huang Xiang, who lives here in exile, and about his experience in China, which was pretty horiffic, I am thinking about how we are all tested in different ways and at different times of our lives. He was tested and he emerged a writer whose work burns with a passion for life and for love and for justice. And I am thinking about what it takes for a writer to have access to language in a way that allows him or her to cut through bullshit--and I don't care what kind of poetry or prose the person writes. There is something in a writer that allows him or her, gives him or her, access to language, something in the mind, a habit of mind, a way of seeing, a kind of courage and fearlessness, or at least a willing to be afraid, to live openly with fear and not to hide from it, and maybe that's what feaelessness really is. Anyway, my son is now awake, and what I was thinking is that maybe this "me feeling" he talks about is a kind of test for him, and I wonder what it will mean for him to come out on the other side of it.

First time in weeks....

that I've had time to write here, which has been frustrating since I started this thing hoping I would be able to make it a regular part of my writing routine--what I really want, I think, is to keep a journal, but I just don't see that happening. I don't have the discipline anymore, and I guess the fact that it's been so long since I've written here is further proof of that. Today, though, there were several things that I read or thought about that I wanted to think about further in writing. One was this editorial in The Wall Street Journal by an Iranian woman about how seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. on TV transformed, or at least began to transform her ideas about the United States. Aside from the fact that it is a profoundly shallowly written piece and seems to me so obviously an attempt to offer an alternative picture of Iranians to the general public: i.e., Iranians are not all US-hating automotons who have been brainwashed by the mullahs; indeed, some of them are living here, even some who used to hate us but now don't because the greatness of our country has transformed them--aside from those two things, the argument is one that needs to be taken on. The author of the piece, Roya Hakakian, writes

To tell American history in its entirety is to disprove the fabrications about who an American is. To tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement is to tell the story of how arrogance was made to give way to justice by none other than a man who advocated peace. Against the grim and infallible image that is painted of America, this will be a truer portrait: colorful and human.

And of course on one level she is right. There is in this country the assumption that people can and ought to redress social grievances, that people who are deprived of rights should do the work of claiming those rights, that they have an obligation to so, and the means of addressing the kinds of inequities that the Civil Rights Movement addressed are built into the structure of our government in a way that they are not in many other places in the world. This is a truth about the US and it is important, though I don't think I have said this here as well as I might have. The thing is, though, that what this woman's argument overlooks is the fact that the oppression the Civil Rights Movement fought against was what laid the foundation that the US was built on, that there has not been, as far as I know, a single group that was not white and male that did not have to fight long and hard to have it understood legally, culturally and socio-economically that it was included in the semantic scope of the phrase "all men are created equal." In other words, it is not that the US was founded on these tremendously progressive ideals that have always been part of the mainstream of our culture. The US was founded on ideals that we would today consider profoundly regressive and oppressive and at least morally suspect if not completely wrong, and those values continue to hold sway in many ways. Witness the furor over gay marriage, or the blatant xenophobic racism of much of the so-called immigrant reform coming out of Washington. Or much of our economic policy. Last night on Nightline I heard a congresswoman talk about how the American people want to spend money on the military more than they want to spend money on anything else in this country, and how important it is to keep our military well-funded--she was talking specifically about the National Guard and the benefits they ought to be getting--because "you can't do democracy on the cheap."

Now, she is right that the people in the National Guard ought to be getting more benefitst than they do, but there is a big problem when "doing democracy" is equated with spending money on the military. Sounds like something right out of 1984. In fact, there is a great deal about what is coming out of Washington that sounds like it's right out of 1984. All the talk about how they are not going to reinstate the draft, and yet they are planning to go after Iran--and the way, according to Seymour Hirsh's article in the New Yorker, that they are restructuring the intelligence apparatus and giving Rumsfeld power to act beyond congressional oversight. And of course they are using the "war on terrorism" to justify this all. I am rambling here, writing scattershot, but this is very, very scary, and overwhelming, and I am sitting here in the living room with my son sleeping on the couch--actually, he just rolled over on to the little cushions I spread out on the floor in case he fell off the couch--and I am worried sick for him, for the kind of world the country he is growing up in his shaping for him enter when he is older.

And if we do end up going after Iran, it is hard not to be afraid for ourselves as well. I have no doubt the government will, if they have not already, set up a database of all Iranians living in the US, and will monitor their political and other activities, and will that mean they will be watching us? I don't even want to go there, really, but it's hard not to. Because of course our precious freedoms--and I mean no irony here; we are very fortunate in this country to have the freedoms that we do, and to have a system of government that allows us to act as citizens in the interest of protecting and enlarging those freedoms--but those freedoms become negotiable when we are under threat and it matters little whether the threat is external, i.e., terrorists, or internal, i.e., gay marriage.

And now I have gone on here much longer than I wanted to. I didn't even get to what I wanted to write about writing and translating. Ah well, that's for another day.