Saturday, April 22, 2017

Not Fearless Enough?

© whotv.com

I am disappointed in Fearless Girl, that bronze figure in front of the iconic Charging Bull sculpture on Wall Street. Ok, it is my fault, actually. I took her symbolism in an entirely different direction than the artist who created her intended. Still, I find myself angry at the artist responsible for the bull wanting to evict the innocent child standing in defiance before his angry bovine. I wonder if this is just the beginning of art depicting culture wars.

When I first saw images of the pony-tailed pixie, I was delighted. My assumption, a naive one it turns out, was that she was a literal stand-in for the proverbial little guy. You know, those of us whose investment portfolios consist of a PayPal donate button on our blog, and two to four lottery tickets when the pot gets big enough to remind us there is a lottery. Those who in no way, shape, or form can participate in the stock market. That is who I thought our heroine was standing for.

Come to find out, the point of the diminutive Miss was to draw attention to the lack of women on corporate boards, let alone the near absence of females running those boards. Oh, boy. Oh, girl! While I am no sympathizer for male privilege, I could still feel my heart sink at this revelation. Not only that, but the statue was commissioned by one of the world's largest financial firms: State Street Global Investors, based in Boston. What I had thought might be more of a monument to the Occupy Wall Street protests turned out to be not the slightest bit sympathetic to the working class. She was installed on March 7 of this year, on the eve of International Women's Day, so I probably should have made the connection.

A circular plaque at her feet proclaims "Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference." Conveniently, the "SHE" is not only gender-relevant, it is the acronym for State Street's fund's NASDAQ ticker symbol. I see, so she is an advertisement as well as (instead of?) art. To its credit the fund itself tracks the stocks of more than a hundred companies that State Street sees as exemplary leaders in promoting women in the corporate sector. The pure artist in me still views this as a sell-out.

Meanwhile, the creator of Charging Bull is snorting at having his creation upstaged by the kid. The original intent of his statue was to provide an uplifting symbol in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash. He donated the 3-ton work, and friends helped him install it in the middle of a cold winter's night, right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. It was almost removed by city officials who deemed it a traffic hazard and "nuisance," but public pressure resulted in the statue being relocated to its current place in Bowling Green Park, two blocks away.

© USweekly.com

The Sicilian artist, Arturo Di Modica, worries now that the meaning of his sculpture has been corrupted by the little squirt-in-a-skirt, saying that the bull now symbolizes male chauvinism. Hey, if the hoof fits....The bull will always symbolize to me how the ultra-wealthy throw their weight around. The china shop is the local economy, your neighborhood grocer, mechanic, hardware store owner, and every other business you used to be able to rely on before they got swallowed up by big box stores, and even bigger agriculture, banks, and fossil fuel barons. There is a wasteland in the wake of that bull, and we all know it. We still fear it, save for the few that occupied Wall Street for awhile, and maybe Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; but they still think the stock market can be regulated. One could argue it should be slayed.

Fearless Girl currently has a permit from the city to stay put another year. I do like that outcome, but when her time has come, if it comes, perhaps we should replace her with a matador sticking a few blades into that son-of-a-beast. When I win the lottery, or get enough blog donations, maybe I'll commission that statue. Heck, I'm even willing to make the bullfighter a woman.

Monday, April 10, 2017

The Life Sentence of an Unhappy Childhood

© Teach-through-love.com

The other night I stumbled upon the movie White Oleander airing on television, near its beginning. I cannot say I like films like this, but I admire the writers, directors, cast, and crew willing to take on the subject of psychological cruelty, and the agony of undoing the hell that parent-child relationships can often bring. The ramifications of one's upbringing are profound, and so variable in their outcome that stereotypes are useless.

Children are unable to stand up for their own right to peace, quiet, dignity, and love that does not come out of parental selfishness. The result is denial of their situation, and latent hostility towards others. By the time they are teenagers "acting out," or twenty-somethings bobbing and drifting in the debris of their past, the damage is done. When strangers, or even friends, ask what happened, or how did you get here, your response is to ignore them or change the subject. Then you hit thirty-ish and you begin to recall the past with the clarity of an unsubstantiated alibi. After all, up until now you had been conditioned to believe that you murdered your own childhood. Suddenly you cannot help but tell your story. You become the crusader, but you still couch your own pain in a "desire to help others." As the battles dwindle and the war wanes, you are left with a vacancy unfilled, and go back to the flat-line flow that is your life, punctuated here and there with good times and devastating bouts of depression, for your remaining days....or until your parents free you by their own passing.

This perpetuated, and perpetual, guilt, vindictiveness, distrust, and dishonesty is the legacy of generations upon generations of parents ill-equipped to raise a healthy child because they were not brought up in a sane environment. The coping skills of blame, shame, withholding of love and affection, infliction of punishment, and the examples of smoking, alcoholism, and other behaviors are handed down time after time after time.

We have been instructed to believe that the hallmarks of a broken childhood are reflected in the adult child through substance abuse, and indeed the twelve-step programs and anonymous groups can be places to begin silencing the echoes of the parental recordings playing endlessly in your mind. You finally begin to see the "buttons" and start the long process of rewiring or disconnecting them. You react with a little less intensity when one of them is pushed.

Still, social dysfunction, in all its many forms, is the overwhelming result of following the patterns set forth like the ruts from wagon wheels lifetimes previous. Maybe you never have an enduring, loving relationship with someone else. Maybe, like me, you become unemployable, because you see the social structure of the workplace for what it is: every employee's attempt to make up for their childhood of want, woe, and war....and that includes yourself if you are not wary, or willing to expend the enormous amount of energy to just "deal." Lather, rinse, repeat.

Our childhood senses and minds lack the filters that come with maturity, and we accept everything our parents dole out as fact and reality, not the products of a disillusioned personality, itself the victim of its own trauma. There is no end to the insidious strategies invented to insure that a parent maintains control of their child. Surely the world would fly apart if the chain of child-rearing incompetence were ever to break. We cannot afford, hell, survive, the exposure of our flaws, nor properly articulate their origin. We were just kids when we learned how to parent.

At the end of White Oleander, the mother marches into a life sentence at a real brick-and-mortar prison. She finally relented from pressuring her daughter into testifying, thereby setting her offspring free from the prison she created in the girl's mind. Rarely is it that easy, that metaphorical, that decisive. Most of us still spend our days methodically sawing through the bars with mental files, provided we even recognize the cell that we are living in.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

"Jobs" and Other Trigger Words

© Alternet.org

Remember when "sound bites" were all the rage, both in the popularity of their use and in the anger they incited in journalists? Those were the good old days. Today, politicians can use just a single word to evoke an emotional response that sways voters to support them, or to dismiss issues and concerns of their opponents. Is our collective attention span as citizens so short, and our reluctance to do a little homework so great, that we will allow ourselves to be so easily manipulated?

We are all familiar with certain trigger words. "Jobs" for example. We hear someone utter just that word and our gut reaction is "Good. Jobs are good. He/she is going to do something about creating jobs. We need more jobs." It is a word that reduces every other concern to something meaningless and expendable in the interest of creating....jobs. We never ask "how many jobs?" or "how long will those jobs last?" or "will our locally unemployed be qualified to do those jobs?"

The implications of "jobs" means that environmental health, and consumer and labor regulations may need to be sacrificed if you want more jobs. We all understand this by now. That is how powerful a trigger word can be. All of these emotions, issues, and actions can be triggered by just a single word. "Crime" is another. We understand that when a government official or political candidate says they will be tough on crime, it means that we will lose at least a bit of our privacy through surveillance, security checkpoints in public buildings, and data retrieval from our communication devices.

"Taxes" are perceived almost universally as a bad thing, and the word is now almost synonymous with "stealing" from our wages (income tax), purchases (sales tax), home ownership (property taxes), and every other aspect of our lives. Taxpayers have not been properly educated in the collective benefits we receive in exchange for taxes. Public education, parks, roads, public transportation, libraries, museums, zoos, and a host of other public services and facilities could not exist without support from taxes.

Still, politicians promise "no new taxes" or "tax cuts," meant to spell "relief" and appease those at the lower end of the wage scale. The reality is that most of those cuts are inevitably granted to those individuals and corporations, that are already highly prosperous. Tax law is another tool to redistribute wealth to the wealthy elite, the way it is currently being written and executed. We are so conditioned to think of "tax relief" and "tax cuts" as beneficial to us, that we don't think any more about it, we just react positively even though most of us will not see meaningful changes to our bank account.

I could go on and on just listing more trigger words and phrases like "immigrants" and "Islam" and "pro-choice," "pro-life" and "clean energy" and so forth, but I give my readers credit for being able to recognize the intent with which those words are chosen and used, like so many verbal bullets and bandages to provoke fear and loathing, or calm and soothe in order to create false empathy. Each side of a given issue knows exactly what the other side means when it uses a trigger word. The same word can be interpreted completely differently depending on your party or ideological persuasion; and used as a hostile epithet or a badge of honor.

How do we get over this language barrier? Can we? Honesty. That is the only answer. When my parents were divorcing, back in the 1970s, I remember the phrase "the best interest of the child" being a mantra. In contested divorces, when a parent says that, it really means not only that they believe they are the best parent to have custody, but that the other parent having custody is the worst thing that could happen to the child. Cloaking selfish interests in language that suggests altruism is repugnant and intolerable. We have to start speaking honestly and fearlessly.

Be honest in why you object to a public policy, political viewpoint, or other issue that ignites your emotions. Only when we see each other's real motives are we going to make progress, and take action acceptable to the majority.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Book Review: Vulture

© ForeEdgeBooks.com

Even if you do not already admire the Turkey Vulture as a master of sustained and effortless flight, and its willingness to consume the deceased animal life that would fester and overwhelm us were it not for these efficient scavengers, you will find Vulture: the private life of an unloved bird University Press of New England, 2017), by author Katie Fallon, to be well worth your indulgence.

Experience informs the advocate, and Fallon does a superb job at weaving her personal life experiences into the narrative of this story. The natural arcs would be the life history of her subjects, from egg to adult; or the migratory journey of a vulture. Indeed, Fallon employs these natural rhythms as elements of continuity; but it turns out not all Turkey Vultures do migrate, a fascinating aspect of the diverse biology of the species.

Familiarity cannot breed contempt in the case of vultures because people, including avian scientists, are simply not familiar with these birds. Much of the content in Vulture represents new information, acquired within the last decade or so, resulting from tagging studies. Vultures cool themselves by urinating and defecating on their feet, which quickly corrodes the metal ankle-bands used by scientists on other birds, hence the need to apply the wing tag strategy instead.

An unexpected and welcome element to the book is the frequent addition of information that applies to other vulture species. The Turkey Vulture is the main character, but our avian hero is also employed here as a messenger for other vulture species all over the planet. Fallon shares her own globe-trekking adventures as they relate to other vultures, like the Egyptian Vulture in India, where the birds have vanished from a sacred Hindu temple they once visited like clockwork. Old World and New World vultures are not as closely related as one might imagine, but they suffer, unfortunately, from the same conflicts with humans.

It is easy for advocates of any orphaned or maligned species to be overly zealous in their efforts to educate; or be too sternly admonishing in addressing those people who lack an understanding and respect for other life forms. Fallon should be commended for reining in her emotions while still managing to be assertive in her opinions and policy recommendations when it comes to vulture "management" here in the U.S. She backs up her statements at every step, and also informs the reader when there is a need for more study to conclude whether a given assertion can be proven.

Fallon should not be compared to any other writer. She confesses to her admiration for Edward Abbey and other predecessors, but her writing stands on its own merits, with a unique and welcome new voice. This book enjoys the personal qualities of a memoir, but those insights and life events are used like spices in a favorite recipe: Not as a dependent "crutch" or overwhelming element, but instead adding just a touch of flavor and eloquence to the literary dish.

This book is about vultures in the human world, but nowhere in the story does the human aspect overly intrude. The great birds are front-and-center, consistently painted in a positive and empathetic light. It is to Fallon's credit that she is able to coax the reader into the same love affair with vultures that she herself enjoys, without romanticizing her subject to the point of putting off her audience. As a male reader, I find this a tricky path that Fallon negotiates with precision and consistency. Her research is far-reaching and impeccable.

Vulture ends with an afterword that leads readers to the next step: their own advocacy for vultures and related birds of prey. It may seem naive to believe that one book could generate enough momentum to result in a surge of sustained interest in promoting vulture conservation the world over, but I have high hopes. Fallon seamlessly integrates the plight of vultures into the landscape of wildlife conservation in general. What we do for vultures we do for the health of entire ecosystems....but don't take my word for it, read Vulture for yourself.

Turkey Vulture over western Massachusetts