The arc of history

I've been troubled lately by how often Martin Luther King's quote "The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice" has been invoked in the Proposition 8 aftermath. It was something nagging at me that I couldn't quite name, but as I marched with a surprisingly small clutch of protesters in San Francisco the other day, it started to dawn on me. And then I went looking up the quote on line and found that Dr. King actually said something different:

"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Apparently in later speeches he would drop in "history" for "moral universe" on occasion, but I think it's still valuable to judge the line as it first came to him.

The moral universe is a very different thing from history. It seems to me that history is made up of events, of narratives we tell ourselves about whatever culture we belong too. Despite all of the serious scholarship in this area that would make you think it's a purely academic pursuit, it is essentially a story we want to tell ourselves. The moral universe is something else again. It's something distinctly human and that seemingly can exist separate from events. For instance, you could say that World War 2 was hardly bending history towards justice. It was truly horrible on that level. On the other hand, the moral universe was heightened during the war, with as many raising the level of their moral action in the face of such immorality. Anyway, it's a loose concept, and I'm sure it's got holes.

But my real point about this is that talking about history having an arc that bend towards justice seems like a capitulation to me. A way to stay passive and complacent, and yet still to consider oneself moral. You can read the news, be outraged, and then assuaged that eventually good will prevail. Not that one has to create good, or to bend history oneself, but that history bends towards justice of its own will. Even the added timespan of "long", is reassuring. It gives you the sense that you might not even see it in your lifetime, but justice will happen, so you don't have to feel bad about it right now. As I looked over the meager and easily distracted crowd in Yerba Buena Gardens and heard several speakers refer to King's quote, it seemed that was exactly the wrong mood to put people in. In fact, the arc of history itself points where we tell it to. If it's a story our culture tells, than it's made up of our actions, the same as your stories about jumping in a lake naked on New Year's Eve are your history. And if your actions are standing around and watching while waiting for history to bend, that will be where history will go.

There's also a massive assumption implied that there is an arc to history at all. Imagine you are a Native American. How would that quote sound to you? Does history really bend towards justice? For whom?

As a documentary filmmaker, I constantly have to re-address the idea of history/story/reality. And I do believe in the power of stories. I just don't believe they all bend one way or the other.

I can, however, accept that the moral universe always (or at least mostly) bends towards justice. Our revulsion and horror at what was done to Native Americans has certainly changed how we perceive native peoples and made it very difficult to be an openly imperial power. While it's doubtful the Muwekma Ohlone will be given back San Francisco any time soon, morally we are a different people than those who took the land in the first place. But it took massacres and genocide and eventually hard scholarship and activism to bring about this moral arc. Is this the route we yearn for with gay rights and gay marriage?

This was really heightened for me today with reports that many gay rights groups are angry about a federal suit brought by two prominent lawyers on behalf of some California couples who want to get married. They feel like it's a disastruous move, giving the conservative Supreme Court a chance to set back gay rights decades. They want to go to the ballot and work on changing minds and hearts and winning state by state. On a certain level, I really understand that thinking, why risk a total shutdown when so many small victories have piled up recently?

On the other hand, I heard a lot of speeches go like this on Tuesday:

"Are we ready to fight to get a ballot measure passed in 2010 or 2012?!"

That has to be the least inspiring line of all time. A couple loves each other. They want to get married. Now. How does that speak to them? The either/or of it is almost comically terrible. Here's another great quote from Dr. King as long as we're slinging those around:

"For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This 'wait' has almost always meant 'never.'"

I think it's wonderful that people are working on a ballot measure...taking the long view, the more they get out in public and speak to this issue, and the more young people (who don't give a shit) take over our culture, the more likely a distant ballot measure will be to succeed. But why be upset by other efforts going on now? If the Supreme Court is going to constitutionalize inequality, than this shit will be flushed out in the open. There's no sense in hoping big daddy SCOTUS doesn't notice you while you work around the margins. This struggle's genesis belongs firmly in the moral universe, but its success rides on how much we are willing to put our bodies on history's wheels and make them turn towards justice. Using Martin Luther King's quote as a way to preach patience ignores the fact that he died because he couldn't wait. And neither should we.

Playing Endlessly

This Sigur Ros song makes me feel like bursting...I love it more than I've loved a song in a long time. Not just like, wow, that song made me feel melancholy. Or, what a great riff. I just love it. Today I put it on in the car and started singing to Cati what I was making up as the translation of the lyrics...something along the lines of "It's a new day, everything is good, it's getting better, your wife loves you, death ain't so bad, life is wonderful, the sun shines" etc...She giggled understandably, but I still felt like bursting and crying and smiling all at the same time. Sometimes music just does things to me I can't explain.

Well, I came home and looked up a translation of the lyrics, and I was stunned to see I wasn't far off. Was it my ancient Icelandic blood translating, or is it just how the music itself is entertwined in the words? You be the judge:

Við spilum endalaust (We Play Endlessly)

We drove all around
Through sun and pebbly dust
We all saw so much
Even the cradle and asphalt of the world

We played
(hopelandic)
We played
(hopelandic)
We played

The day flows, ever-young
Endless, and the brightness
Smoke stings the eyes
It pops up in my head and now I remember it

We played
(hopelandic)
We played
(hopelandic)
We played everywhere

We all saw so much
Saw all and everything in a new light
The day flows, ever-young
It pops up in my head and now I remember it

We played
(hopelandic)
We played
(hopelandic)
We played everywhere
(hopelandic)

We play endlessly
We play endlessly together
We play everywhere together
We sing all together

(hopelandic)

God and love and us

I'm really confused tonight. I watched the Obama inaugural event today, and though there was lots of pomp and boring stuff, there were also a couple amazing moments...a Bob Marley (yeah, the dread wearing, spliff smoking, revolutionary Bob Marley) song was sung on the steps of the Lincoln memorial (during which will.i.am said "niggas get irate"...another first, I'm sure), Pete Seeger, the 89-year-old former communist folk singer who was indicted for not naming names by HUAC, was there to sing "This Land is Your Land", and the our city's own Gay Men's Choir backed up Josh Groban and Heather Headley.

But as it was nearing an end, after Obama was done speaking, I reached for the remote and Cati stopped me, reminding me that Gene Robinson, the openly gay and controversial Episcopalian bishop was supposed to speak. So overwhelmed by seeing the old labor-loving, rabble-rousing Pete Seeger there, I had forgotten one of the main reasons we had turned the damn thing on. But there was no Robinson. We figured invocations are on at the beginning, that we must have started it late, so I rewound. No Robinson. WTF?

A real bad feeling started to come over me. So I started poking around on the web. Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed. Not only that, but the Gay Men's Choir apparently was the only choir or performer or speaker for the whole night who were not identified in the credits. And then, someone else reported that there had been a technical malfunction, and actually many of the people who were there couldn't hear Gene Robinson. So, the great olive branch, the thing that was supposed to show Obama was a uniter, and was willing to include all sides, had fallen with a depressing thud.

Both Cati and I were quite upset. We have personal reasons to be mad about the LGBT element, gay friends who are married, etc. But here's another thing...Gene Robinson is a bishop of one of the dominant and established churches in the United States, and in fact the one Cati grew up in. Pretend for a minute you don't know if he's gay...how many churches would be ok with a snub like that? Would they dare risk this with Rick Warren? What the hell were they thinking?

Trying to soft pedal this as well as we could for ole Obama, we figured HBO was being cheap and/or bigoted, and probably made a last minute goof. But then it comes out that HBO is actually denying it was their decision at all, that the Inauguration Committee decided to make the invocation be part of the "pre-show". This could get quite ugly. I imagine Obama will have to work fast, not just on behalf of offending the LBGT community, but also 2 million plus Episcopalians.

I have this feeling more often than I'd like with Barack. Lulled in by soft and indefinite words, like him including "gay and straight" in his speeches, and then finding out that he once supported gay marriage, before running for national office. Or him saying he would restore our standing in the world, and then giving out hints he might reserve "special interrogation methods" for "special circumstances".

I have been trying with all my might to just wait until he's actually president to criticize. This, after all, is just a bunch of fooferall that normally I would pay no attention to. In fact, maybe that's what this moment was about, just a reminder that we don't really belong watching shit like this, anthems and flag waving and all that. For a moment I thought this was really going to be for everyone...Pete Seeger, Bob Marley, etc...

I think we in the left, or liberal center or whatever the fuck it is I belong too are going to have a real morality check here. Are we willing to throw gay people under the bus because finally some other minorities are getting their due? Are we willing to amend "We Are One" to exclude some people?

When I saw "Milk" I started crying uncontrollably for a few minutes afterwards. The feeling that washed over me was about Prop 8...I felt so ashamed. As I said to Cati "I had my moment. All my life I've been waiting for a struggle like this, prepared to throw my body into the cause. And I didn't. I think I was....embarrassed." And that was all I could actually get out.

Since I was a kid, I've been saturated in the mythology of the activism of the '30s and '60s, and wondered if I'd be up to standing for the downtrodden when that moment came. And, other than a few donations and a day of volunteering, I had watched it all happen. After watching this happen today, and seeing Pete Seeger up there on stage, and hearing Bob Marley's words, and seeing those wonderful diverse choirs, I could see a real clear choice in my head. On one side--be happy, be satisfied. This is an amazing event, and look how far we have come. On the other--Obama himself is asking us to ask for more. How can I say the words with him "We Are One" and know that some people I love are not included? How can a moral person possibly be still? In some ways, this is a challenge I have not experienced in my adult life--reconciling words that echo through my own mythology, MLK, Roosevelt, etc, being spoken by the president of the united states, and my own radar that those word are not being fully realized. It's a potent confusion, and I imagine I am not the only person thinking it. When you run a POLITICAL campaign on inspiration and unity and inclusiveness, you are playing with fire. Those are not equivocal clarion calls. One doesn't say "We Are One" and make people cry about coming together, and then walk away from an oppressed people without consenquences.

Since they were so liberally quoting Martin Luther King today on the eve of his birthday, I'll sign off with one Obama and all of us would do well to really hear:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

I am the enemy

Last night I was out for a beer with my old friend Stas, and at one point we went outside so he could smoke. There were a couple young women handing out flyers for the new "Che" 4-hour opus by Soderbergh, and Stas struck up a conversation with them. Turns out they work at the Lumiere theater, and told us that their manager had been fired and that there were cuts happening all across Landmark theaters in SF so they wouldn't have to shut any theaters down. I said that, as a filmmaker, it was always frightening to see screens shutting down. She gathered up all of her 19 or 20 years and said "Well, you can just show your movies at art spaces and outside and have music and stuff. That whole stuffy 'You sit here and we'll entertain you' crap is all dead anyway. It just gets in the way of real art."

I think that was my first bonafide moment as the old guard. Not that I'm against new ways of showing movies, not by a long shot! We had a great screening against the side of a building in Temescal (Oakland), but we certainly did show our movie in stodgy old theaters. Stas (who is Russian by birth) got to talking about Chekov's "The Seagull" (one of my 5 favorite plays of all time), and I remarked how funny it is that with great works of art as you get older they shift in meaning. When I was younger, I identified strongly with Treplev, the young and passionate and terrible playwright, full of anger at the old forms. And now, with one conversation, I had become aligned with Trigorin, the mature, skilled, but complacent writer. And there are echoes in there of the very real conflict between Dostoevsky and Turgenev, whose relationship had a similar tension, though Dostoevsky is obviously not the shapeless mess that Treplev is.

Talking to Stas in general was bracing, as we were joking about girls or something, and he teased me by saying (he had read this blog) that of course I thought that, because I was just overflowing with complacency. Reminded me of the whole paradigm of generational tension, the conflict between comfort and revolution that flavors so much of the Russian literature that I love. I think my generation (or maybe just me) has had such a slow maturation that those lines have been blurrier...it took until I was 40 to finally be brought up short by a firey young woman.

I was like that about theater when I was younger. I used to rail against the tyranny of comfortable seats, how old folks needed to be taken care of so they could have a nice snooze while your play was going on! I literally felt like I was suffocating in a normal theater, like they were trying to cram their soft cushions down my throat. And yet I never managed to turn that disdain for being treated nicely into a watchable piece of theater. At the end of my first year at NYU, in fact, when I stopped railing and awkwardly experimenting and actually just directed a fairly realistic scene from Sam Shepard, it was a real thrill.

And yet who do I love more in the end, Dostoevsky or Turgenev? Old Fyodor has owned entire years of my life.

It occurs to me that arguing for the grace of maturity is a very comforting thought...Not much of a challenge to ones spirit.

My poor ticker

Saw yet another movie tonight where someone has both a bad heart, and...you guessed it, problems of the HEART. "The Wrestler" has been getting major accolades, especially with the beat-up Mickey Rourke making his comeback as the beat up Randy The Ram, who is also making a comeback. There is a formula at work here...the unraveling of yet another shambling mound in yet another corner of ramshackle Americana. It's a classic Sundance-style indie film, gritty and genuine without really having a point. Anyone who doesn't know exactly what's going to happen after 15 minutes or so has never seen an American indie before...Me, I felt cheated at the end. That's all?

Sometimes I get really effected by the physical nature of a film, however. Rourke's big, scarred, surgically altered mask-like face has hung on me since the movie ended. When I got home I laid down to give my wife a goodnight hug and felt so huge and male. I wonder what, on an electrical or chemical level is happening when you come out of a film feeling so different. Staring into his big mug, blown up huge on the Metreon's screens was enveloping. Somehow I felt thick, older.

The movie is about being used up, about a life lived for youth and what happens when youth is gone. Despite its predictable nature and silly ending, it got me to pondering on how little I fear age. I fear death terribly, but aging doesn't bother me that much. I'd love to always be able to run and exercise and all that, but otherwise I like the idea of wisdom and learning and calming. Turning 40 this year didn't really affect me much, I actually feel more spry than I have during some depressing periods in my past. Vigor is partially attached to age, but it's also attached to motion.

I feel like my parents' generation (though not necessarily my actual parents) has spent a lot of time trying to retain the energy and spontaneity of youth, of the thrill they felt in the '60s. Maybe it's because I belong to a late-blooming generation who grew up under the more limiting cloud of nuclear threat and multiple recessions, but I feel happy for the trappings of maturity (late as they may have come). We got a washer and dryer on Craigslist this weekend, and I was positively giddy. Yow.

Lucky

Sometimes I just marvel at how well things have gone. It's so easy to slip into disgruntlement, and so much harder to be optimistic and recognize how good things are. I have a wonderful wife (it still makes me giggle saying that word), I'm doing work I love, got good friends, great apartment, etc. This year, I had a movie and a book come out. Both separate dreams of mine, and both accomplished nearly simultaneously. And yet sometimes I can go into a funk. It's usually about things outside my control...the economy, crime, politics, disasters in other countries. I have this talent for knitting together several events into a tapestry of despair. It's amazing how quickly that kind of stuff can just unravel into dust on the air if you look at it hard enough.

I've been thinking a lot about a similar subject, having to do with our neighborhood. When we first moved into the Mission, there were a couple shootings 10 blocks away or so, and an article came out in the Chron about a gang war/killing spree in the area. We were terrified, of course, and spent the first several weeks tiptoeing around, worried at night, etc. Part of the problem was that we'd been living in a more residential neighborhood for a year and got a little softened up. But also, there was this cloud of fear we walked into. Well, as time went on, we noticed there weren't really any menacing folks around, people were walking freely, and we relaxed a bit. Now we're at the end of the year, and the Chron puts out a map of the homicides for the last two years in the city...There were exactly the same amount as 2007 overall, and basically the same amount in the Mission. Now, all murders are bad things, and the number is higher than anyone would want it to be, but nothing had actually changed. We had been whipped up into this "Mission is in a frenzy of blood" worry, and in fact it was just the same amount of dangerous as it has been.

I felt like such a tool. It reminded me of that segment in "Bowling for Columbine" about fear, and how useful it is to keep people divided and distracted. Caution and safety are a great plan, but being governed by fear is not. And I had gone for it hook line and sinker. Grr...I had even worked in journalism, I know full well that no editor is gonna go for a story titled "Mission goes three months without a single homicide." But still, I'm so gullible for drama.

I'm not advocating for being a pollyanna and just embracing every gangster you see and putting flowers in their hair, but there is a way to just stay focused on what you actually observe around you. For instance, apparently the economy is collapsing, but actually most of the people I know make enough to live on. Why is it embarrassing, why do I even have to explain that I'm not a pollyanna because I feel slightly optimistic? Or maybe a better way is to say that I'm not really optimistic, but I'm willing to wait and see what happens. I can see forces going toward the light and forces going toward the dark, and when I'm really honest with myself I don't really know which way things are going to turn. Just two years ago it looked like all was darkness, and then Obama won. But meanwhile the economy goes into a tailspin. Which is the real frame of mind? I don't know, but there's just as many reasons to choose either darkness or light. Choosing darkness sure seems safer though.

Good and gone

Why is it so hard to be compassionate when you feel some sense of put-on? Like most people, I hesitate to give money to bums on the street, knowing that whatever they say most likely the money will be used for drugs or alcohol. It seems like the very essence of compassion should be that you love and help and rescue regardless of what the other person is generating emotionally. If they're asking for help, they probably need it, whatever it is that they are actually telling you. My choice is usually to turn people off rather than maneuver through this ethical thicket. My grandma was a really dramatic person, and it was often hard to tell when she was really ill or in danger or in need of help. Every couple of years she would pronounce that she was probably going to die soon, or that something horrible was going on, but somehow the cataclysm never came. I certainly did what I could to help, but after a few tearful panics about losing my grandma, I started feeling wary. When she did eventually get ill and die, it was obvious to all that it was real this time. Yet even still, until she was prostrate in the hospital and moving in and out of consciousness, I had a hard time letting go and really mourning and doing what I could to help.

The thing is, people who cry wolf or drive up the drama even when they are really injured or sick or in need, really do need help. It might just be that they need attention. Or in the case of the bum on the street, I remember a great moment in the sadly departed TV show "Sports Night" (Aaron Sorkin before West Wing) when one of the sports anchors is worrying over this same issue. His boss says "I always give them money. Who are we to decide what it takes to live on the streets? Wouldn't you want a beer? Don't you often need one now?"

Is this an American quality, because we have so many shucksters here? Or is it the opposite, that we are a fundamentally naive and also decent people, who love to help but need the giving to be pure? Every time there's clearcut tragedy, people pour out there hearts and lives. Katrina, 9/11, the tsunami in Asia, people gave blood, raised money, sent clothes, showed up to help. Those very same people (I include myself) would step over a tattered bloody person on their own sidewalk without a second thought. The complexity of helping someone in that state is overwhelming.

On a personal level it is too. People who overdramatize (and lord knows, I probably do to) make it hard to open your heart. I really respect and admire people who just give people whatever they need without question, who give sympathy freely. Or even more amazing are those who ignore the shallower demands and give what's really needed without being bothered by lack of gratitude or attempts to con or anything else. We're such selfish creatures, we need so much to have a narrative arc to our compassion, an arc that leads to a lovely and glittering pot of gratitude. Some day, perhaps I'll scatter compassion around like wildflower seeds, not caring if they sprout when I'm not looking.