Popes and Peasants

How do you change a culture? My day job has me chewing on that pickle, as one of our goals is to make campus cultures far more tolerant of dissenting views and – as I just said at a meeting in Berkeley – we find ourselves pleading for financial and moral support for the work of truth-seeking from a culture of nihilism.

I suppose the loss of Pope Francis has me thinking about cultural shifts, too, as the ultra-conservative American Catholics want to retake the papacy, and each day now the old grey mere prays that happens, while I hope we get another Francis, at least. But then why do I care? I’m not Catholic except by their rules, and Francis wasn't able to reset the culture much anyway.

Culture has always been an emergent property of hoards, after all. And it seems to be much more so because of media, including the “social” variety. There might have been a hope once of a pope or a president or a mayor or police chief or (heaven) a poet setting a tone, shifting the feel. MLK. JFK. JP2. QEII during the war. Rachel Carson. Eleanor Roosevelt. Hitler, if we want a satanic example.

But the Huge Orange Nugget in the White House is not even so much an original influencer as a mere product of the media, a processed turd extruded by the whirring machinery of the Murdochs and Musk and Act Blue. It is hard not to feel as if we have all somehow shit him out together following an ugly late night of jumbo nachos and neon novelty margaritas.

You try not to mention him, but then the Narcissist-in-Chief works his way into every conversation. My dentist and dental hygienist keep me for fifteen extra minutes because they know I believe in truth (I used to run a newspaper) and they need to ask me if there is still a reality, given him. My doctor and I get into the conversation on “What the hell happen to our reasonable parents?” as she fulfills my request for five tablets of Xanax to get me through the next year, and when I get to the pharmacy, I discover she’s written for 30.

With his graffiti tag of a signature, he ties together in a landfill heap of all the things of which we are reasonable afraid. The climate. The markets. The Chinese and the Russians. The bots, the bugs. The income gap widens into a gulch, into a coulee, then a canyon, heading to become the Mariana Trench, and how long can the uppers divide the lowers before the lowers figure it out? (My son marched in the May Day parade with his grad school union, and just in front of him marched the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)

It is always when I am at 36,000 feet that I consider the extraordinary and narrow window of history in which I have existed – in which I, as a child of a shoeless peasant girl and an emaciated tenement boy, own several nice homes, hold a PhD, and fly right past Lewis and Clark to land at SFO in a few hours. It’s impossible not to assume it will all implode. And that it didn’t have to.

When you end up in History, as I did, you can’t pretend civilizations don’t end. So I think about what comes next. When any human can be convincingly conjured online in face and voice, when the real news sounds insane enough (fluoride bans, realtime Signal bombs, the Oval office redone by Liberace) that you have no idea whether that whitish thing they’re telling you to stand atop is concrete or meringue, where do you go?

And I keep concluding one thing: you go local. As I said in Berkeley: Trust is built locally and lost nationally.

You must necessarily disconnect from the King, except for when the taxman cometh (and maybe he won’t, as he’s been laid off), and you scrape together your daily bread, attend to those dying and being born and acutely injured, and try to find sleep at night. The chickadees will wake you at four-thirty to tell you they are still here, and so are you.

So it is that you have not been hearing from me. I have reading to my mother from James Herriott, cooking up the pigs and chickens grown by my friend Farmer Scott, and helping to prepare the garden for garlic, potatoes, dill, dahlias, and zinnias. The latter are important because they feed the bees neighbor Walter has housed in our backyard. He comes in his bee suit and I peak out the third-floor window and see him there with his smoker. I go down to talk to him when he is done, giving him empty jars to refill for the neighborhood.

Then I walk down to Chris’s house to borrow her wheelbarrow because we have ten yards of mulch to scatter about the yard and three neighbor kids keep coming over to work the garden with me. Those three (ages 12, 11, and 5) tell me about their cats, their schoolwork, the camps they will do this summer, and I tell them stories about our pet rats and say maybe we will get the garden train fixed up this year so they can run it for the littlest kids in the 'hood.

As I return the wheelbarrow, I stop to talk to Sarah whose wife Amy won’t let her plant tomatoes in the front yard because (Amy says) you don’t do that, and I laugh and remind Sarah that, just down the street, we are all doing it. Sarah knows who I am though I don’t know her. “You send us those neighborhood newsletters,” she says, and I realize I had better restart those.

The point is driven home as I’m pulling creeping Charlie in our front yard and a man comes by with a toddler in a stroller, and he we say hello to each other, and the toddler asks, “Whose that?” and his father answers, “That’s Alice,” and I have no idea who he is. “Who’s Alice?” the child asks next, and I find myself hoping his father’s answer will tell me how he knows me, but his father just says, “That’s Alice, of course.”

The mother of my three children helpers comes to get them at the end of a few hours, because they need to go to a cousin’s birthday party, and she asks me when free yard waste pickup is for our side of town, and she asks me when the new neighbors arrive. I answer her questions. I'm going to the nursery later, I say, to get indeterminate tomatoes, and does she need anything? Yes, she says, pick me up one Sweet Autumn clematis, please, to fill out her patch. And when I deliver it to her later, I smile and laugh at her flag: Tax the rich. Have a Nice Day.

It all feels as a portend, an edict: Tend your gardens. Never mind the earthquakes and the syphilis and the king.