On Seeing My Grad School Campus Again

Today I finally returned from my 16 day road trip with my wife and two daughters.  It has been a long, strange, tiring trip.  The sound of the Frozen soundtrack (played to placate my toddlers) is still ringing in my ears, and I feel like I have a bit of the white line fever.  We took a meandering path on the way to and from my Nebraska homeland, stopping to see all kinds of friends and family along the way.  On Friday we happened to pass through Champaign-Urbana, where I did my doctoral studies.

We had already taken an extended stop in Springfield to see various Lincoln sites and to have lunch with some friends from my grad school days who are living there.  I was hoping to stop in Chambana and take my daughters out of the car and walk them around the quad while my spouse took a well-deserved rest.  (I drove, she tried to keep them entertained.  Not sure which was harder.)  Toddlers being who they are, they had just fallen asleep in the back seat after a morning of being less than easy to deal with.  (That was the exact point at which I think they hit the wall, poor kids.)

I was not going to mess with nap time, so instead I drove through downtown Champaign, campustown, and the campus itself.  Earlier that morning I harbored ideas of going back into Gregory Hall and seeing if any of the profs were about.  Once I gazed upon campus again, I knew that such actions would be totally out of the question, and not just because my daughters were sleeping.

Unlike a lot of other people, I had a very pleasant grad school experience.  Until recent years, it was the happiest that I've ever been in my life.  I was living the life of the mind, young, and surrounded by great people in a town that was affordable and had a lot going on.  I knew that the job market was going to be difficult, but I had always put that in the back of my mind.  After leaving the nest I ended up in a dead-end, temporary "visitor" job for two years, then three increasingly unhappy years on the tenure track.  (I'll spare you the details, but my interpersonal relations at work were setting off panic attacks on a daily basis by the end.)  I gave up on my grad school dream and left academia at that point.  Gazing upon that golden campus, I felt an intense wave of sorrow.

Looking back, I was a completely different person in those days.  A vast gulf of painful experience has estranged me from that person.  While I am happy these days with my personal life and my job, my five years in the cauldron have made me distrustful, cynical, and even a little bitter.  My sorrow was the sorrow for losing the hope, belief, and optimism that I once had that I know will never really come back.  Of course, I am a whole lot wiser, pragmatic, and driven than I was back then, too.

I've come to see my decision to go to grad school to be, in the words of Elvis Costello, a "brilliant mistake." I had no clue what I was getting into back then, and from a financial standpoint, I fucked my life over pretty good.  I also developed my mind and gained friends who I wouldn't trade for anything.  I've met plenty of good people since I left the academic world, but none have shared the bonds of friendship that I wove back then.  I was lucky enough to see many of these friends on this trip, and today I was hit with the realization that it is not Champaign-Urbana or my old campus that means something, but the people I met there.  I'll continue to keep going great distances to see them, and will likely not bother to revisit my grad school campus anytime soon.

Jeb And "Moderate" Republicans

As I am sure you've heard, Jeb Bush pulled a Mitt Romney this week, accidentally letting his true thoughts out in public by saying that the solution to America's economic woes is to work more hours.  Considering that American workers put in many more hours than their peers in other affluent nations, such a statement would be a joke if some random moron on the street said it.  In this case, however, Jeb Bush is not only running for president, he is the son and brother of former presidents, born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  He is basically the last person that the majority of Americans want lecturing them on their work habits.

Mitt Romney's comments about the 47% of Americans who were "takers" (which he thought were private) did a lot to lose him the election in 2012.  What he said, as obnoxious as it sounded to most people, was actually a common talking point among conservatives well before he made it public.  Conservatives also think that regular working people need to be working more hours, but they won't come out and say it in those terms.  Instead they just let their policies do the talking: blocking family leave, trying to eliminate the weekend, undermining overtime pay, etc.  It takes someone as maladroit and gaffe-prone as Jeb Bush to make the intent of all of this much more visible.

Bush has also illustrated the problem with the "moderate Republican" brand.  Anymore a "moderate conservative" is someone who opposes gay marriage but doesn't spew hate about it, who is opposed to meaningful immigration reform but not xenophobic, but in economic matters supports policies that funnel more money into the hands of the wealthy and squeeze those at the bottom and the middle until their pips squeak.  The supposed "respectable" Republicans in the race for president (Jeb, Walker, Christie) are all servants of corporate America dedicated to slashing workers' rights and protections.  When it comes to economic and labor policy, there are no moderates in the Republican party, and the toffs to the manner born like Jeb and Mitt are too clumsy to hide their true intentions.  If anything, Bush's slip-up might open a door for Christie, a man with a true contempt for the working class who masks it behind a bloviating wall of fake populist bullshit.  In any case, the desire of the monied puppet masters behind the GOP not to have a repeat of 2012 just might seal Bush's doom.

A Place That Mattered Once

[Editor's Note: This is probably the last report from my hometown, thanks for indulging me.]

It's been good to be back home again, to see friends and family and enjoy a more relaxed pace of life than what's normal for me in the Northeast.  Sometimes when I come back to my hometown my adolescent feelings of resentment and boredom bubble over, but perhaps having my kids along has kept those feelings in check.

This time around what I'm feeling for my home town is a kind of melancholy, rather than anger.  Having my children here has meant going to local museums for the first time in over twenty years, and in the process being reminded that my hometown of Hastings was once a place that mattered.  It went from a little prairie settlement to a bustling town in a short period of time in the 1880s due to its location as the junction between the Burlington Northern and Union Pacific railroads.  With the railroads came commerce from the surrounding farming areas and factories (including a brewery) who wanted to take advantage of the proximity to transportation.  Hastings made bricks and cigars, beer and machine parts.  The many rail passengers passing through could get fine clothes at Stein's department store downtown.  Hastings was basically the most important railroad town between Omaha and Denver.

Around this time local boosters deemed Hastings "The Queen City of the Plains."  There are a lot of beautiful houses and institutions in my hometown built in the 1900-1930 time period, the town's economic heyday.  The Dutton-Lainson manufacturing company, still the biggest in town, built a large warehouse downtown after World War I that is still the city's tallest building.  Despite being a warehouse, it has some beautiful art nouveau touches, as you can see below:

The VB stands for "Victory Building," in reference to the nation's victory in World War I.  I often gaze upon this building as a symbol of a dream that never quite came to be.  During the 1920s the railroad was losing importance to the automobile, but the presence of US Highway 6 in town kept the city relevant.  The railroad also led the the town's last burst of growth in the 1940s during World War II, when the government located a massive naval munitions plant and depot in Hastings.  Its central location made it hard for saboteurs to hit and easy for trains on two different lines to get the ammo to ports on either coast. After the war, the growth stopped.  More damaging, when the interstate highway came through, it bypassed Hastings in favor of Grand Island, its rival thirty miles to the north.  There is a whole line of cheap, rundown motels on Highway 6 on the edge of town attesting the effects of this decision.  On top of this, the evisceration of the farm economy in the 1980s drained the local countryside of people and wealth, kneecapping Hastings' position as a commercial center.

The melancholy I have now is over the fact that my hometown is a place that mattered once, and that does not matter anymore.  Like rural Nebraska generally, it is in a position of irreversible decline.  Those who grow up here who get educated get out and don't come back, mostly because there just aren't opportunities for those who would even want to come back.  As in a lot of rural America, the raging against the dying of the late often takes the form of extreme religiosity and an ultra-conservative politics of fear and resentment.  

On this trip I've tried my hardest not to let those things irritate me, even if they do.  Instead, I've tried to focus on the good that has survived from Hastings' heyday past.  Having blossomed in the Progressive Era, Hastings has had well-supported and much used public institutions.  Yesterday, for example, I took my children to a park in the shadow of the Chautauqua Pavilion, built in 1907.

Before film and radio, speakers toured the country on the Chautauqua circuit, named for the town in New York where it originated.  Unlike most similar structures, Hastings' pavilion has survived, and civic events still take place there.  Growing up it was the location for church picnics and high school band concerts, though in former times Robert Kennedy and William Jennings Bryan had spoke there.  

I mentioned a few days ago that a bunch of vandals almost burned it down in the 1990s.  Perhaps the fact that Hastings is indeed a town with a bright past and a dim future is what arouses such hatred of its monuments.  I may have underestimated the dirtbag element in this town, they too know that this place could never again claim to be the Queen City of the Plains.

A Trip Back To My Childhood Church

I'm still in my hometown, and this being Sunday, I went with my parents to the old parish church where I received first communion and was confirmed in the Roman Catholic church.  It's a unique design from the 1960s, with a rotunda centered around an octogonal tower with wood lattice behind the altar.  Sadly the abstract sculptures used for the stations of the cross have been replaced, and the blood-red carpet swapped out for a whitish gray.  Growing up in this parish I thought that all churches were supposed to look like this, which meant I felt out of place whenever I went to a Gothic or Romanesque church.

While I attend Episcopal services these days when I go to church, I still enjoy visiting a place that played such a pivotal role in my youth.  However, I was a little worried about today, a Sunday coming right after the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage.  Indeed, the priest (fresh out of the seminary) had been tasked by the bishop with telling his congregation about the evils of legalized same sex marriage.  While the priest refrained from any denunciations of gay people, he still reiterated the tired old saw that Catholics who aren't in the clergy ought to engage in a heterosexual marriage and reproduce ad infinitum.  It's always interesting to get such advice from a man who has pledged himself to a life of celibacy.  Also interesting to hear priests lament the church's lessened moral authority as an indictment of a society gone wrong without any thought towards the abuse scandals.

Of course the sermon was full of fake facts and bad reasoning.  The priest actually said that more contraception leads to more abortion.  (Recent efforts in Colorado show quite the opposite.)  He also claimed that opposition to gay marriage in France is practically universal (it's not.)  The icing on the cake was the notion that the legalization of gay marriage is somehow oppressing the religious liberties of Christians.  In his view, and in the view of a great number of the congregants I'd wager, being able to use the law to smite sinners is a key religious liberty, and that's now being violated.

Despite the priest's youth, the whole exercise was a glimpse into how American Christianity -especially American Catholicism- is immolating itself.  While the pope has shifted his attention to social justice, the American church is still obsessed with sexuality and reproduction.  It is sticking harder than ever to its ridiculously old-fashioned ideas on these issues while broader social attitudes are moving fast in the other direction.  This is hardly the approach to draw in new worshipers or keep those raised in the tradition, especially young people.  Instead of acknowledging the problem, the response is now to claim that the world is broken and falling from the one true path.  If anything, today was a good indication as to why "ex-Catholic" is the second biggest denomination in America today.

July 4th Notes From My Hometown

In the past three years the meaning of the fourth of July has changed greatly for me, since my daughters were born on that day.  Their birthday, not blowing off fireworks or engaging in nationalism, has become my main Independence Day priority.  In any case, this year I had very little July 4th spirit.  The events of the last year, from Ferguson to Charleston, have been harsh reminders of this nation's failure to live up to its promises.

This year I spent the holiday in my rural Nebraska hometown for the first time in years.  While I wrung my hands a little yesterday, I was happily surprised at what I witnessed this morning.  My wife and I went out to Allen's, the local department store, to get party supplies.  Afterwards we drove downtown to the Blue Moon, the local coffee house, and grabbed some espresso-based drinks.  It's good to see such local institutions still thriving, and that the downtown has rebounded while the mall has fallen into disrepair.  Of course, most of the commerce is going down in the metastasizing tumor of box stores and Applebee's next to the highway on the edge of the north side of town.  You can still get away with pretending that it doesn't exist.

We took our daughters to an event at a local park, which reminded me of what's good about my hometown.  There was a nice, chill atmosphere of people mingling and saying hello, and catching up with those (like me) returning from out of town.  My hometown was really built up during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, and much of the public-minded ethos of the age has still managed to survive.  Some things had changed from my childhood, such as hearing Spanish spoken on a pretty consistent basis.  Changes like that are positive in my opinion.

Something else hadn't changed, something I wonder whether it is even capable of changing.  In my overwhelmingly white hometown, expressions of patriotism are as ubiquitous as the air one breathes, and thought about just as deeply.  I wondered today if anyone in the park with me questioned this nation's ability to live up to its highest ideals.  I also got chills thinking about how many of them might sympathize with the Darren Wilsons of the world rather than the Micheal Browns.

Back Home Again

Andy the Goose, one of my hometown's biggest celebrities

Today, after a meandering, week-long trip across the upper South seeing sights and visiting friends and family, I finally arrived with my wife and kids to my hometown.  It feels good to be back, but also strange.  This morning, as I was gassing up my car at station where I could look out across the vast windswept Kansas plains, I had a strange out of body experience, thinking about those mornings frantically trying to refill my MTA card while catching the express subway train in Penn Station.  Where I live now is in many ways very alien to the place where I'm from.

My differences with the land of my upbringing have been with me for a long time, but now they seem more stark than ever.  I am not sure how much this has to do with me changing, or with my hometown changing.  I do sometimes get the feeling that life in my hometown of Hastings, Nebraska, has become coarser and meaner.  I then remind myself of my hometown's strange habit of destroying its most cherished symbols.  The town has a beautiful old chautauqua pavilion that was almost burned to the ground by vandals in the 1990s.  Fisher Fountain, which combines jets of water with alternating color projection, was long a pride of the town.  In the early 1980s someone dynamited it.  Last but not least, years ago a local man found a baby goose with malformed feet.  He helped that goose by making it shoes, and Andy the Goose quickly became a cause celebre, and soon even appeared with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.  Some horrible person then went into Andy's pen at night and broke off his wings, killing him.

There is a vein of awful darkness in this town, obviously.  I just feel like it is closer to the surface than it used to be.  This town feels more and more like Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life when George sees what it would have been like had old man Potter took over.  Then again, maybe I'm wrong.  In any case, over the next few days I will be making some reports from the "heartland" and will be thinking a lot about politics and social change.

Some Thoughts On VIsiting The Clinton Presidential Library

I remember reading this issue of Rolling Stone in 1992 and getting excited about a Clinton presidency. 

I am currently on a long and extended road trip between New Jersey and Nebraska, with the ultimate goal of arriving at my parents' house in time for my daughters' birthdays on July 4th.  We decided to take a long detour through the South in order to visit friends and family, which has been a great experience.  Today we were just concerned with getting down the road, and stopped in Little Rock.  In the spirit of seeing things along the way, we decided to go down to Bill Clinton's Presidential Library.

I was more interested in examining its narratives and approach than anything, especially having visited the museums for Truman, Eisenhower, Ford, and Carter, had plenty of things to compare it to.  It was hard to do this, mostly because two toddlers are not the best people to take to a museum when you want to linger over exhibits.  It ended up not being too hard, because the narrative of the museum was about as subtle as Rip Taylor.  There was almost nothing about Clinton the person or the usual array of presidential paraphernalia, and a whole lot about his policies and legislative accomplishments.  It basically boiled down to "look what a great job Clinton did as president!" but in the kind of overly extensive, policy wonk overkill way that Clinton himself was often criticized for.

The tone was very different in the introductory film, which we saw last because, again, traveling with toddlers means having to bend a bit to their iron wills.  Clinton himself narrated a magnificently corny piece of agitprop showing leaders like King Hussein of Jordan and Nelson Mandela praising him.  Clinton himself lays it on thick, using the same effortless, charismatic appeal that allowed him to survive scandals and gain a high level of popularity by the end of his term in office.  It was the kind of thing meant to have you standing up, shouting "four more years! four more years!"

I even got enthusiastic, but just for a second or two.  I then remembered how his administration had pushed through NAFTA, cut the social safety net, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, gutted banking regulation, and supported mass incarceration policies.  Clinton's cynical triangulation strategy after the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress meant that actual progressive legislation became a dead letter from that point onward.

Despite those sour feelings, I also felt a wave of nostalgia for the time between 1993 and 2001, when I went from being a high schooler to a grad student and passed through the young adulthood's ring of fire.  That kind of thing is probably inevitable with a early-middle aged guy like myself, but there was something a little deeper there, I think.  The exhibits threw me back into the world of the 1990s, and reminded me what a feeling of hope I had for the future back then.  The Cold War was over, and democracy appeared to be advancing all over the world, including the former Soviet Union.  When America exercised its power abroad, it was often in positive ways, such as ending genocide in the former Yugoslavia.  Perpetual war, as we have experienced for the past 14 years, was barely conceivable.  The economy was not showering its benefits equally, but it was growing in a big way.  Gun control was actually possible, both in the form of the Brady Bill and in the assault weapons ban.  The Oslo Accords created hope for a path to long lasting peace in Palestine.  I thought a lot about the long, post-Cold War peace that could have been, and the last fourteen years of war and paranoia.

I see little in the high political world today that gives me much hope for the future.  At least more people are taking to the streets these days, but those controlling the levers of power are deaf to their cries.