Between a Rocky and a Hard Place: How Rocky Balboa Taught Your Mom to Fear Black Men and Communism

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Between a Rocky and a Hard Place: How Rocky Balboa Taught Your Mom to Fear Black Men and Communism

 

by Dale Bridges

 

Every generation yearns to understand the one that came before it, if for no other reason than to publish essays on the Internet criticizing past cultural icons in order to prove to your parents once and for all that you didn’t just “fritter away” six years of college smoking weed and playing Frisbee golf—so there!

There are many respected academic methods of analyzing the social progress of large populations, but most of them are boring and involve math.  Therefore, the author would like to propose a theory that can be researched whilst eating potato chips on the couch.  The theory is this: One can trace the anxieties that have plagued the Baby Boomer generation by watching all six Rocky movies in succession.

Let us begin.

Movie: Rocky.  Year: 1976.  Fear: black men.

The author of this essay would like to state for the record that he loves this movie.  And not in some ironic, hipstery it’s-great-because-it’s-bad type of way either.  His love is sincere and eternal.  The dialogue in the original Rocky is fantastic, the cast is perfect, the cinematography is wonderfully understated, and it’s just a damn good underdog story.  In fact, if Stallone had stopped here, this author believes snooty film scholars would feel comfortable describing Rocky as one of the best boxing movies of all time without squirming in their seats hoping no one mentions Dolph Lundgren or Tommy Morrison.

As any first-year student of Rockyology knows, Stallone was a struggling actor and screenwriter before he penned the script that made him famous, and the inspiration for that script was a 1975 boxing match between heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and unknown white dude Chuck Wepner.  Ali won the fight easily, but the boxing world was shocked that Wepner was able to stay on his feet for almost fifteen rounds before a TKO was declared.  (It’s worth pointing out here that by this time in American history black men so dominated the sport of boxing that simply staying conscious through a title fight was considered an accomplishment for a white man.)

Today, Ali is widely considered a sports legend and beloved civil rights leader, but in the 1970s he was one of the most hated men in America.  He was a cocky, outspoken black man who converted to Islam, renamed himself after the Muslim prophet who founded the religion, and refused to fight in Vietnam.  He was the epitome of what racists call “uppity,” and he appeared to be proud of it.  White America couldn’t wait to see Ali get his comeuppance, and since no white man could beat him in real life Rocky provided that catharsis at the theater.

In the movie, Ali is represented by Apollo “The Master of Disaster” Creed, a bombastic black heavyweight champion who speaks in rhyming couplets, taunts his opponent, and is cynical about American patriotism.  Wepner may have been the inspiration for the script, but Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa is named after Rocky Marciano, the last great white hope.  Rocky surprises Apollo by knocking him down in the first round, and after that it’s an epic brawl that goes the distance, with Apollo barely edging out Rocky in a controversial decision at the end.

Basically, Rocky was culture porn for Baby Boomers in the 1970s who feared the rise of a new generation of strong black men and wanted to see them put them in their place.

Movie: Rocky II.  Year: 1979.  Fear: black men and feminism. 

If there had only been one movie, this argument would be mostly hypothetical.  Sure, there’s a direct correlation between Ali and Creed, Marciano and Balboa, but you can’t establish a theory of systemic racial fear based on one precarious example.  After all, at the end of Rocky, the white man wins the integrity battle but loses the fight.  However, with the second movie, the pattern is confirmed.  Integrity be damned; the Baby Boomers wanted to see the black man beaten once and for all.

The anxiety about feminism is a bit more subtle than the racial fear in the first movie but becomes apparent in the second.  The only consistent female element in the Rocky series is Adrian.  In the first movie, she is so painfully shy she barely even has a voice.  She hides her body under sweaters and hats; she seldom makes eye contact with anyone; and she’s powerless against the verbal and emotional abuse heaped upon her by her brother, Paulie.  It’s only when she starts dating a man that she learns to stand up for herself.

Rocky helps Adrian find her voice, but Adrian doesn’t necessarily have the same positive affect on Rocky.  Rocky’s trainer, Mickey, warns about women in the first movie, advising Rocky not to have sex while he’s training with the famous line, “Women weaken legs.”  The implication is that females have a tendency to civilize males, sapping their physical and spiritual strength, and transforming them into emasculated losers.

To solidify the point, the second movie begins with a series of domesticating moments: shopping for mens wedding bands, a marriage proposal, a wedding, clothes shopping, house hunting, and finally pregnancy.  Rocky has retired from boxing at the behest of Adrian, so he has basically been castrated.  He attempts to get work outside of the boxing ring, but he can’t find steady employment.  In order to pay the rent, Adrian goes back her job at the pet shop where they first met, despite Rocky’s claim that, “I’m the one who’s supposed to support.”

Meanwhile, Creed is taunting Rocky publicly, challenging his masculinity in an effort to shame him into a rematch.  Rocky, unable to provide for his family, makes the decision to fight Creed again, and when Adrian protests, he tells her, “I never asked you to stop being a woman, you know.  Please—I’m asking you please don’t ask me to stop being a man.”

“Being a man” in this case means making more money than your wife and beating the snot out of the guy who’s calling you a chicken.

Rocky starts to train for the rematch, but his heart isn’t in it.  He made the decision to fight unilaterally, but he’s not satisfied unless his wife adopts his point of view.  Paulie visits Adrian at her workplace and tells her that Rocky is going to get injured in the ring, and it’s her fault because she’s not being a supportive wife.  Adrian then tries to lift a heavy bag of dog food, faints, and is rushed to the hospital.  The baby is born premature (a boy, naturally), and Adrian lapses into a coma.

Lesson: if you work outside the home and fail to support your husband, you might die.

In the end, Adrian wakes up from the coma having learned her lesson and tells Rocky she wants him to win the fight.  His house in order, the white American male is now ready to beat the shit out of the mouthy black guy.

Movie: Rocky III.  Year: 1982.  Fear: angry black men and death.

One of the most brilliant aspects of the Rocky series is how Stallone is able to alter the formula just enough with each movie to keep pace with the evolution of Baby Boomer anxiety.  It’s also important to note that it is essential to the formula that Rocky is always the underdog; therefore, no matter how rich he becomes or how often he defends his title, the audience must feel sorry for him and believe he has to beat the odds in order to win.

By the time the ’80s rolled around, Ali had finally been defeated and he was beginning to show signs of physical and mental decay that would later be diagnosed as Parkinson’s.  Furthermore, sports writers and civil rights historians were discussing his legacy in a positive light, and he was starting to be recognized as a global humanitarian rather than a national threat.  Therefore, it was necessary to change the Rocky narrative.

But white America wasn’t ready to give up on its fear of black men just yet.  During the 1980s, urban squalor created black slums in many inner-city neighborhoods, where the drug addiction and gang violence that existed were exaggerated in the media.  The myth of the violent black man was broadcast into suburban homes every night on the news.

In the third movie, Rocky’s opponent, Clubber Lang (a.k.a. Mr. T), is all anger.  That’s his entire character.  The reason for his rage is never explained, presumably because it doesn’t matter where his anger comes from.  All the audience needs to know is that he’s black and he’s pissed.

At the beginning of the movie, Lang is a promising contender who wants a shot at the title, but Mickey keeps putting him off because he fears Lang will seriously injure Rocky.  Mickey (clearly the central father figure in the Rocky universe) has been setting Rocky up with easy bouts in order to protect him.

Finally, in front of a large crowd during the unveiling of the famous Rocky statue, Lang insults Rocky publicly, calling him a coward and stating that Adrian needs a real man (i.e. Lang) to please her in bed.  Rocky accepts the challenge (of fighting Lang, not of satisfying his wife sexually).  However, just before the match, Lang shoves Mickey during an altercation, and Mickey has a heart attack.  Rocky goes through with the fight anyhow, but he’s concerned about Mickey and, as we later learn, frightened at the thought of his own mortality.  Clubber knocks Rocky out in the second round.  Mickey dies.

The angry black man has killed the father.

In an interesting twist on the racial theme, Creed then replaces Mickey as Rocky’s trainer and teaches Rocky how to fight like a black man so that he can defeat Lang.  This demonstrates white America’s reluctant acceptance of black icons like Ali who are no longer in positions of power, while maintaining the fear of black men rising up to overthrow the status quo.

Movie: Rocky IV.  Year: 1985.  Fear: communism and the mid-life crisis (consequently, the author thinks this would be a great name for an indie band).

OK, so the symbolism in this one is so slap-you-in-the-face-with-a-bald-eagle obvious that it’s hardly worth pointing out.  From the opening shot where the silver boxing glove with the American flag collides with the silver boxing glove with the Russian flag and the screen explodes in a spray of fireworks, the references to Cold War fear, American patriotism, and fist-pumping Reaganism are not subtle.  In fact, this movie is so over the top that it could almost be seen as self-satire if not for the utter sincerity of the rest of the series.

So let’s skip over the communism analysis.  If you’ve seen Rocky IV and you’re older than, say, fifteen, the nationalistic propaganda should be clear.  If it isn’t, there’s nothing more to say here that will convince you.

(The author would like to make a quick comment on the fact that Ivan Drago is Rocky’s first white opponent, which means that in order to find something the Baby Boomers feared more than black people, Stallone was forced to turn to international politics.)

While the mid-life-crisis anxiety is not as blatant as the fear of communism, it ain’t exactly understated.  Numerous references are made at the beginning of the movie about Apollo and Rocky getting old.  Rocky drives the type of expensive sports car certain men purchase when they reach a certain age to compensate for certain waning sexual drives.  The only things missing are the plastic surgery and trophy wives, but perhaps that was a bit too on the nose for Stallone at this point in his career.

However, the most obvious example of a mid-life crisis is Rocky himself.  In the first two movies, Rocky resembles a normal male homo sapien, complete with chest hair and blue-collar muscles.  In the third movie, the chest hair is gone and he’s starting to look more like an oiled-up body builder.  By the time the fourth movie comes around, he is one of those hairless workout freaks who believes he can reverse the aging process with the right combination of vitamins, exercise, and, of course, steroids.

The Baby Boomers are pushing forty, their bodies sagging, their virility fading, but if they can just do enough hot yoga and find the right organic kale at the farmers’ market, they too will be able to defeat Ivan Drago and save the world from communism.

Movie: Rocky V.  Year: 1990.  Fear: getting old and being bad parents.

It is common knowledge that Rocky V is the festering boil on the tanned, well-toned ass of the Rocky series.  The writing doesn’t have the clear focus of the earlier movies, the characters are inconsistent, the acting is often soap opera quality, and it recycles too many plot devices from the previous films.  Also, the gratuitous use of rap and hip hop is borderline offensive in yet another “great white hope” fantasy.

To keep the underdog theme working, Rocky loses all his money to a fraudulent accountant and has to move back to the old neighborhood, and a brain injury from the Drago fight forces him into retirement.  He meets a hungry, young white fighter named Tommy “The Machine” Gun and agrees to be his manager.  However, Rocky gets so caught up in Gun’s career he neglects his son, Robert, who is struggling to fit in at his new school.  (We know the kid is headed for real trouble when Robert starts smoking cigarettes and wearing an earring.)  In the end, Gun betrays Rocky for George Washington Duke, a conniving black boxing promoter modeled after Don King.

Rocky V is an obvious attempt by Stallone to bring the franchise back to the beginning.  The director of the first Rocky, John Avildsen, is back; Mickey returns in a series of flashbacks; the Balboas leave Hollywood and move back to Philly; and Rocky even starts wearing the iconic leather jacket and wool fedora again.  It’s a cheap attempt at nostalgia.  The Baby Boomers are afraid of getting old, losing touch with their roots, and becoming bad parents.  If the point isn’t clear enough from the plot clichés, toward the end of the movie Rocky and Adrian get into their usual let’s-clarify-the-moral-of-the-story fight and Adrian screams, “Rocky, you’re losing your family!”

At first blush, Rocky V appears to contradict the racial themes of the first movies, but the fact that Rocky fights another white guy in the end is a red herring.  The main story is still the fantasy of a white boxer (in this case, Gun) beating up black men.  Yes, there is a showdown between the two white fighters, but the cathartic money shot doesn’t come when Rocky defeats Gun in a street fight; it takes place afterward, when Rocky knocks out the black boxing promoter, Duke, in a single blow.

Movie: Rocky Balboa.  Year: 2006.  Fear: outliving your loved ones and leaving a legacy.

Rocky Balboa is neither as good as the original Rocky nor as bad as Rocky V.  It is, however, a nice, clean final chapter in the series and an interesting conclusion to this theory.

Rocky is retired and Adrian is dead.  Rocky mourns his wife’s passing almost obsessively, visiting her gravesite regularly and returning over and over to the locations of their courtship.  He even owns a restaurant named Adrian’s, where he entertains customers by telling stories of past fights.  Rocky’s son, Robert, is a wussy corporate employee who is admonished by his boss in public and yearns to get out from under his father’s shadow.

The current heavyweight champion is a black boxer named Mason “The Line” Dixon (wink-wink nudge-nudge…get it?).  Dixon is undefeated, but he gets no respect in the press because he has never faced a difficult challenger.  A televised sports show runs a computer simulation of a fight between Dixon and Rocky in his prime.  Rocky wins.  (The movie also refers to a similar simulation called “The Super Fight” conducted in 1970 that pitted Rocky Marciano and Mohammed Ali.  In the simulation, Marciano knocked out Ali in the thirteenth round—which is also a white fantasy, in this author’s opinion.)

After seeing the simulation, Rocky decides he wants to fight again because, as he tells Paulie, “There’s still some stuff in the basement.”  We never find out what exactly he means by “stuff,” but it’s clear that Rocky wants to make sure his legacy lives on in both his reputation and his son.  Dixon’s manager offers Rocky an exhibition bout, thinking it will put to rest the rumors surrounding the simulated fight.  Rocky’s son begs him not to fight Dixon, complaining that he can’t establish his own life when his father is constantly overshadowing him.  Rocky then gives Robert a big speech about life being hard and not making excuses for your failures, a speech that many Gen Xers have heard from their Baby Boomer parents at one time or another.

Robert eventually comes around to Rocky’s side, there’s the requisite training montage, and then the fight.  Dixon dominates the first round but breaks his hand on Rocky’s hip in the second, evening the odds.  It’s an all-out brawl after that with both fighters swinging haymakers until the final bell.  Just like the first movie, Rocky loses in a close decision but wins the integrity battle for displaying courage and just generally being so old.

This is the only Rocky movie that gives any perspective to a black opponent (we have some empathy for Creed in III and IV, but only after he’s been defeated by Rocky).  Dixon is shown as a great fighter who has never been tested by a strong opponent, and when he finally demonstrates “heart” by going the distance despite his injury, there’s a modicum of compassion for his character, although the bulk is saved for Rocky.  Nothing much has changed.

In the end, Rocky remains a Baby Boomer fantasy world in which blue-collar white men dominate athletic competitions, women who work outside the home lapse into comas, communism is KOed by the independent spirit of democracy, age is reversed with pushups and body oil, relationships are restored by schmaltzy speeches, and any obstacle can be overcome with a melodramatic song about tigers and a five-minute training montage.

***

(The author would like to thank his fiancée, Michelle, for putting up with ten straight hours of Rocky movies.  He promises he won’t talk about Rocky for at least a week…  Or a month.  Two months?)

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: TOUCAN NEST BY PEGGY SHUMAKER

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FROM TOUCAN NEST
Poems of Costa Rica
By Peggy Shumaker


STRANGLER FIG

Cousins, then,
the myriad orchids
of the mist forest
and this towering
strangler fig.

Both start
tenuous life
as stowaways
tossed aside
by wind or wing

dropped
without anyone’s
noticing
high above
the forest floor.

Air plants,
epiphytes, bromeliads
plastered so heavy
some branches
crack, tumble.

But the fig’s patient.
It settles in,
sucks what it can
from leaf rot, from
breaks in bark,

drinks deep
from fine mist.
Then into air
fig tentacles
unfurl, aiming

toward the host’s
small patch of soil.
Fig leaves above
cover all else.
Not out of modesty.

Each fig takes its own
special wasp
to carry on,
wasp that swaps
pollen for protection.

Nearly gone,
the host lingers
within the fig
like the memory
of a difficult parent

who never knew
what she was taking on
when she got you,
mother who resented
being tied down,

mother whose face
you can’t quite
picture, mother
who changed so much
those last years

you barely knew her,
broken mother
asthmatic, wheezy,
who gave her all
so you might live.



HOWLER MONKEYS

The parents, like most parents, yell.
A lot. But little ones hang
by the tips of their tails,

sail off into space, misjudge
the next branch,
crash through

limbs and leaves,
catch
themselves,

carry on
as if they’ve got a lifetime
maybe more.

Mangoes ripe
right now
drip down their elbows.

Tomorrow
has yet
to occur to them.


                              Río Sarapiquí



ANHINGA DRYING HER WINGS

Purely practical, we know,
her need to hold herself open

to let what sun she can catch
ease the river from her wings.

And yet. And yet.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

See Peggy Shumaker Read in New York 8/20/2013:
Tuesday, August 20th
Word for Word Poetry welcomes Red Hen Press
Bryant Park Reading Room
7:00pm – 8:30pm | Bryant Park Reading Room, 41 W. 40th St.
42nd Street & 6th Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Featuring Peggy Shumaker, Ron Carlson, Evie Shockley, and Tess Taylor

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~



Today’s poems are from Toucan Nest (Red Hen Press, 2013), and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Praise for Toucan Nest: “This is a book of burnished, lapidary attention. Its poems—vibrant with seeing, quickened with soundwork, subtled by insight—peel open landscapes both outer and inner. The costs of our human presence and extractions are in these pages, but also the radiant return of human awareness. Toucan Nest is a unique account of encounter, imaginative inquiry, and expansion.” — Jane Hirshfield, author of After and Given Sugar, Given Salt


Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Toucan Nest grew from an eco-arts writing workshop in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press. Please visit her website at www.peggyshumaker.com.


Editor’s Note: Having had the pleasure of both sharing Peggy Shumaker’s work on the series before and seeing her read, I could not pass up an opportunity to both feature some pieces from Shumaker’s latest collection and to strongly encourage those of you who are in the New York area to go see her read on Tuesday. Red Hen Press is a fantastic publisher renowned for the quality of the women writers they publish, and Shumaker’s reading on Tuesday promises to be both powerful and moving while taking you, as Toucan Nest does, on a vibrant journey.


Want to see more by Peggy Shumaker?
Come see the poet read this Tuesday, August 20th, in Bryant Park
Poet’s Official Website
Author Page at Red Hen Press

An Open Letter to North Carolina’s Governor

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Dear Governor McCrory:

In light of the new law allowing concealed weapons in bars, I’d like to propose to you and your cronies (McCrory’s Cronies has a nice ring, doesn’t it?) a law that would allow open containers at gun shows. If people are going to be given the chance to make stupid decisions with firearms while drinking, I think it only fair that people also be allowed to make stupid decisions about the purchasing of firearms while drinking.

I know what you’re thinking: Genius idea, right? Indeed, sir! This will boost sales for your NRA lobbyists, and that means more money for you and yours, Governor. Show me a drunk who hasn’t ever thought “Man, I’d love to have an AK-47 or a Howitzer right now,” and I’ll show you a man who has never been drunk at a gun show.

This will also keep us safer. No longer will women in bars need to fear the bad pick-up line—any jerk who asks “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” can now be taken care of, quickly and efficiently, with one squeeze of a trigger. Those obnoxious college kids with their Sex on the Beaches and Vodka/ Redbulls? I think we know what happens to them if they get out of line. Same for the secretaries on Margarita Monday, and those asshole grad students who always win Trivia Tuesday. No need for bouncers, either—Clint Eastwood over there drooling with one eye open and seventeen bourbon straws on the table in front of him can take care of any trouble, or Chuck Norris dancing with his pool cue in the corner can.

It will also keep people fearful. The more people in bars with guns, the more shootings there are likely to be, which, in turn, will make others think they need a firearm to mosey on down to the local watering-hole and have a wine-spritzer or a Zima. Which means more gun sales. Until everyone owns a gun. All of us, and we all stay home, safe and sound on a Saturday night, peering out the window, drunk as the last lords of creation, wondering what might be gunning for us—our firearms, like our bottles of bourbon, within easy reach.

Sincerely,

Paul Crenshaw

***

Paul Crenshaw is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was a Fred Chappell fellow. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2005 and 2011, Shenandoah, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.

Secularism and Compartmentalization

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Secularism and Compartmentalization

by

Kenneth Nichols

Nearly twenty years ago, my loving father spent some of his evenings coaching my T-ball team in the fields behind Reynolds Elementary. Early in his tenure, he knelt and told me that I wouldn’t be able to play shortstop as much as I wanted.

“Why not?” I asked. “Aren’t I a good fielder?”

“Of course you are,” he said. “But everyone needs to get a chance and a coach must be fair.”

Parents are renowned for their perfectly natural ability to compartmentalize: to exempt certain people and situations from rational thinking in order to avoid the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that would result if the truth were confronted in earnest. Many parents believe, in spite of evidence, that their child is the kindest and most intelligent around.

The phenomenon, for better and worse, carries over to the political realm. The secular worldview varies from most other popular modes of contemporary political thought in that clarity of thought is favored over the strict adherence to the dogmatic base of an ideology. To make a policy judgment, the secularist doesn’t consult a moral code established by dubious and supernatural authorities. Instead, the secularist seeks to purge him or herself of flawed thinking that is pitted with fallacious logic.

For example, should Americans have the right of same-sex marriage? Secularists consult the Constitution, the deep well from which our rights are derived, and find that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law. In the interest of thoroughness, we may ask, “What’s the harm?” and find none. Those who claim otherwise are appealing to tradition, making a priori assumptions and otherwise demonstrating that their convoluted thinking, if represented visually, would resemble an M.C. Escher pen-and-ink drawing.

Given the importance of logical thought in governance, it seems problematic that Representative Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is the only open atheist in Congress. On the other hand, it’s not very hard to come up with a Catholic lawmaker whose voting record reinforces abortion rights. (John Kerry was famously excommunicated for violating this Church doctrine.) Another Roman Catholic, Louisiana Senator David Vitter, voted to broaden the use of the death penalty in spite of the fact that he ostensibly prays to such a victim each night.

Both of these lawmakers (and countless others) abandon the teachings of their Church to vote in the manner they feel is best for society. The cause of this disconnect is the same for all individuals who employ compartmentalization in an effort to exist in both the real world and the fantasy of their choice. In a 2013 article for Scientific American, Dr. Michael Shermer claims that people construct “logic-tight compartments…analogous to watertight compartments in a ship” that allow otherwise intelligent people to hold improbable beliefs such as global warming denialism and that the attacks of September 11th, 2001 were an inside job. (Dr. Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things is a treat for anyone who wonders how someone as brilliant as Dr. Linus Pauling could believe that large doses of vitamin C could prevent and cure cancer.)

As I said, the ideal of the secular process of thought is an understanding of the world that is devoid of delusion. The secular individual seeks to understand the universe on its own terms, not his or her own. Alas, we have evolved to be pattern-seeking animals. Our very brains engage in perpetual civil war: the left side remembers and calculates and the right side determines what the data means. The Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey indicates that only 16.1% of Americans identify as unaffiliated with a religion. What are pure secularists to do?

It seems that we must take comfort that we have many allies whose powerful minds are laden with Shermer’s “logic-tight compartments.” No less a secularist than the late Christopher Hitchens adored his friend Dr. Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and is now Director of the National Institutes of Health. At first glance, Dr. Collins may inspire fear in the heart of the secular progressive. A self-professed atheist, Dr. Collins converted to Christianity after a patient merely asked him about his religious beliefs. After attempting to defend his lack of belief, Dr. Collins said “suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking.” Most any atheist or agnostic who has engaged in such an informal debate will agree there’s a big leap from “there’s no evidence to suggest that a supernatural deity may exist” to Dr. Collins’s fallacy-laden understanding of atheism itself: “If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove his existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason.”

Is it time to ring the alarm bells and to lament that someone such as Dr. Collins is in such a position of power in the scientific and political community? Not at all. (As a skeptic, of course, I’m open to changing my mind should sufficient evidence present itself.) Dr. Collins stridently rejects intelligent design, the concept best described as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” Dr. Collins, I understand, has not stood in the way of embryonic stem cell research. (Sad to say the same can’t be said for Congress.) Dr. Collins, a breathtakingly intelligent man, has compartmentalized his beliefs, devising a philosophical construct in which religion and science are—to him—not only compatible, but complementary.

Perhaps the immediate goal of the secular community should be to point out that our fallacy-prone friends and authority figures engage in this compartmentalization. Many Christians who chant, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” still eat shrimp, wear cotton/polyester blends and refuse to “take up serpents” and understand that drinking poison will kill them. Belief in any aspect of the supernatural, religious or otherwise, requires a person to put these beliefs in one of Dr. Shermer’s “logic-tight compartments,” where it will be safe from reality and reason. So many of these valises have already been cast away—slavery is illegal, women have the vote, miscegenation is only a problem to an irrational few—more are sure to follow. The resultant cognitive dissonance causes unpleasantness at times, but this societal conflict is a necessity if the United States is going to continue its path toward fulfilling the secular ideal laid out in its founding documents. If you read the accounts of those who protested Loving v. Virginia, it’s clear that they were very upset. Those who are on the wrong side of history and of secularism deserve the same response: “Too bad.”

Wanna check my Shermer quote? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-minds-compartments-create-conflicting-beliefs

Pauling. Isaac loved the man, but I think he was bummed by this. http://mostlyscience.com/2013/02/logical-fallacies-and-you-what-you-need-to-know-when-doing-your-own-research/

Pew. http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations

Collins quote: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-strange-case-of-francis-collins

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PAUL NEMSER

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

4.28.13
MEETING YOU AFTER CHERNOBYL
By Paul Nemser


The last frozen day had come and gone, and we were
sleeping in the elbows of trees in the elbow of a town,
our sutures all sunken together as if we shared one wound,
as if we had climbed from a single pit

like a race of dinosaurs grown from a fused lump of eggs
that had slept in valley ice for three shifts of the North Star,
as the leaves undecorated the last few branches
which were skinny as bat bones or the bones of a squirrel.

There were cattle blotched with waning alphabets.
And there were eyes that had seen too many lights,
so we didn’t recognize the wells
we had drunk from all our lives, nor

the creek that flowed with clothes and flesh,
nor the seeds brought from all over the countryside,
from knived sacks in waterlogged barns, from pods
trembling on grotesque grasses.

We talked to each other until we could not talk.
It was gobbledygook, was joy, nothing to remember:
We would not be overrun like ants by a larger horde of ants.
The darkness would not come closer.

A dog would lift its howl to where the wind left
the tablecloths—crumpled, clawed up, drying in the sun.
A phalanx of trucks that had jostled our vertebrae
would sound like bubbles in a bottle.

I never missed you so much as waking from that sleep.
And I dream of you now lingering barely below ground,
all your twenty fingers warbling together as on flutes.
My pores open to you as to rain.

Years give way to lakes of white dust, to unyielding dirt-land.
The snouts of oxen stain pale as marble
when the beasts haul blades through the hardness that remains
of what decades ago had been garden.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Paul Nemser’s book, Taurus, chosen by Andrew Hudgins as winner of the 2011 New American Poetry Prize, will be published by New American Press in November, 2013. His chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, will be published by Mayapple Press in summer, 2014. Nemser’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Fulcrum, Per Contra, Raritan, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Rebecca and practices law in Boston. Some of his family came from Chernobyl.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is one of those thoughtful, emotive, beautiful lyric poems that better expresses itself than I ever could. Some days the poems just speak for themselves. Are you listening?

Want to read more by and about Paul Nemser?
Read poems from the forthcoming Taurus on Blackbird
Two poems in White Whale Review
Poem in Unsplendid
After publication in November, 2013, check out Taurus on Google Books

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RAUL GUTIERREZ

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LIES I’VE TOLD MY 3 YEAR OLD LATELY
By Raul Gutierrez


Trees talk to each other at night.

All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.

Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.

Tiny bears live in drain pipes.

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

I will always be there.


(Today’s poem originally appeared on Heading East, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Raul Gutierrez, Founder and CEO of Tinybop, is an entrepreneur with a 20-year history in technology and the arts. Tinybop was born out of a belief that all kids are explorers. His hope is to build a company where ideas, design, and engineering come together to delight, inspire, and educate children. Raul was born in Monterrey, Mexico, grew up in Lufkin, Texas, and now lives in Brooklyn, with his wife and two young boys.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem has universal appeal. It captures the magic of imagination, and of love, before ending with a turn that both surprises and speaks to the heart. It is the kind of work that one reads, and shares, until it takes on a life of its own. It has been translated into over ten languages; just this week it was translated into German! (Check it out below.)

Today’s post is dedicated to my husband, who found and shared it with me, and to Natasha and Darren Brown. It is your inspired parenting that Matt and I both thought of when we first read this piece.

Want to read more by and about Raul Gutierrez?
Heading East – Mexican Pictures
Read today’s poem in Deutsch (German)!
Follow Raul Gutierrez on Twitter

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: THE BAAL SHEM TOV

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TWO SOULS
By the Baal Shem Tov

From every human being
there rises a light
that reaches straight to heaven.
And when two souls
that are destined to be together
find each other,
their streams of light flow together,
and a single brighter light goes forth
from their united being.


(Today’s poem is in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here today accordingly.)


The Baal Shem Tov: Rabbi Yisroel (Israel) ben Eliezer (d.1760), often called the Baal Shem Tov, was a Jewish mystical rabbi. He is considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. (Annotated biography of the Baal Shem Tov courtesy of Wikipedia, with edits.)

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is a quote from the Baal Shem Tov that gives rise to the age old question: What is poetry? If poetry is beautiful lyric that speaks to the human condition, that considers love with eloquence and a care for words and ideas, today’s quote is most certainly that. Today’s post is dedicated to my husband, with whom I am beginning a journey as a “united being.” May we shine brightly together from our single light.

Want to read more by and about the Baal Shem Tov?
Wikipedia
Jewish Virtual Library

Three Poems by Karen Carissimo

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Dream_City_Jumbo

Quarantine

Kahului, Maui, 1900

At the edge of an island, shore
shave to bedrock, bulwarked

by tide, sweat clouded our eyes,
our bodies disguised in the markings

of plague. Gauze of darkened fog
uncurled a taste of sweet rot

from burning cane. We heard wind
splitting stalks across fields,

heard hard-breathing horses dragging
wooden wheels over sand and gravel

as we lay in sheds like spent animals.
Inside this other island, one voice

among us spoke of God and the devil
as one faultless being, spoke of dawn

gathering light from great distances,
from each border we crossed,

the single body of us yet to rise
past these walls into a lowering sky.

 

***

Serenade

If I could invent anything with words,
with music, I would be with you.
It’s Christmas, and the rains are chilled
by gusts from icy shores. I think
of places where war has taken our world

into fire. God turns from such agonies,
human, desperate. I ask only you, will you
take my hand, leave your home? I don’t have
much time. Soon I’ll be sent to another island,
or to a city in Europe where snow falls on starving

men. I offer very little. I’ve worn the same shoes
for seven years. Damp cold is always lifting
through the soles of my feet. I walk past
your window, shuttered. Your father refuses
the sight of me. If this war ends, wait for me

at the cove where we met, where waves
roar in with courage, recede in fear. Wait
on the hot sands during summer where you never
wear your white ruffled dresses. Kiss me
there, or glimpse my dark form passing you, gone.

 

***

Swipe Wine

Kahului Camp, Maui, 1924

Molasses, water, and yeast turned
clear as gin bottled and buried
in dirt floors of quonsets under cots.
In this wine, a numbed delay
of pain to the backs of field hands
from black snake whips of lunas.
Songs of blood thirst rang, drunken
rage in the camps rose as workers
circled in revenge, one blow given
for each bear mark on torso, on limb.
Weeks without rain, cane brittle
as kindling, they pulled the luna
off his horse as shade deepened
toward evening, beat him through
drifts of dust, ten pounds
of stalks dropped on the body,
flame lit in the coming night, winds
carrying thick smoke muffling the cry
of a man gone missing, the singing
drowning the sound of the sea:
Watch me flee, I am done,
I am done cutting cane.

***

Karen Carissimo was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Mills College and The University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Puerto del Sol. Her fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, and her nonfiction in The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is currently at work on a novel and a second collection of poems. The above poems appear in her debut collection, Dream City.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LET’S GET LUCKY!

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MANUELA

In the bleak hours of an afternoon in Spain,
I sprung free from my grandpa’s kitchen,
the smells of peppermints and pears, and headed
to town for an afternoon of people watching.
The streets were hand-cut paper forests, flush
with tawny kids in flat sandals and psychedelic
friendship bracelets. Feminine footwear obsessives
in custom-made minis smoothed on rice vapor
lotion, delicate contessas fit for a summer wedding,
see-through and filigreed. I dreamed of leaving home
for an evening at the Tropicana, sexy and dazzling
in a glamorous dress—understated, ethnic girl
plucked from an under-the-radar haven; someone’s
graceful holy grail, soft ephemera on his fingers.


SUMMER

I could write a paper on the topic of lip balms,
groovy grandma that I am. With ’60s playfulness
and a flapper’s flounce, I stick to the Great Gatsby,
intensive scalp treatments, and statement-making
tchotchkes. Cat boxes and flea markets don’t
satisfy me; I roll around in sea foam suede, take my
Rolls Royce on an unexpected trek around Morocco.
I’m more of a jump-or-you’ll-miss-it haute hippie,
a sucker for patent trim and embroidered-in-Bali
sequined corsets. I’m looking for a biker-gone-boho
grandpa—rugged but genteel, with an air of London
street-cool—for stomping through exotic gardens,
splurging on tie-dyed wedding cake. Two spicy,
rock-and-roll piglets rubbing bohemian noses.


VANESSA

How often can you wear a bleeding heart
and get away with it? I spend most of my time
getting calls from complete strangers who want
to run around with a Fitzgerald heroine, architectural
and sweet, unbearably twee—or an unstoppable
rock star, a morbid candy-colored centerpiece,
loose and right at home in a disheveled bed.
I step into another world and feel like nothing;
off-hours, I’m a timid violet with a limp handshake
that peeks out of my coat sleeves. No one ever
detects the potential of a wispy girl lost in her clothes,
so I audition for drama, slip on some sugar. The line
between adorable and alarming gets thin, thin, thin.
I slouch and watch the layers flutter, lit from within.


Today’s poems are from the forthcoming Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, Fall, 2013), and appear here today with permission from the poet and the press.



About the Book: Getting Lucky is a collection of sonnets culled from the editorial copy of Lucky, a newsstand publication about shopping and style. By adopting the magazine’s gendered and glossy language, Nicole’s poems explore contemporary ideals of beauty and femininity, as well as female-specific narratives we see in media, culture, and everyday life.


Editor’s Note: Let’s Get Lucky! It’s a beautiful love story. A small press dedicated to publishing women poets meets the kind of witty, thoughtful, cheeky gal whose poems literally step out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Both are determined to give voice to the underrepresented. In seeking out a luminary to spearhead today’s female poetry contingent, the publisher finds a poetess who brings the cultural misogyny inherent in today’s society to its knees. While wearing a fabulous pair of heels.

The arts, in America today, are in grave peril. Poetry in particular is under-read and scathingly underrated. A Corporatocracy is on the rise, and the core of humanity is being marginalized. There is no money in art, and less money for the arts. Those of us who write poetry, who publish poetry, do so out of pure love and unwavering passion. We depend on our community for support—to read our work and to enable its very existence.

Getting Lucky is a fantastic, cutting-edge book that critiques the culture of fashion and shallow materialism by giving feminism a whole new meaning. Spooky Girlfriend Press is a self-described “tiny two-person operation” with huge vision and an impressive track record of publishing forward-thinking, critically-acclaimed works. The two have come together to make magic, to make dreams come true, and they need your help.

Via Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform that empowers ideas, Spooky Girlfriend Press has started a campaign to fund the making of Getting Lucky. Take a stand for art today. Show the world that poetry matters. Help the voiceless sing from the rooftops. Our government is not going to do it. Big corporations are not going to do it. It is you—readers of poetry, writers of poetry, lovers of the underdog, believers in vision and heart—who are going to make the difference. Donate to this campaign today and let’s Get Lucky!


Nicole Steinberg is the author the forthcoming collection Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013) and Birds of Tokyo (dancing girl press, 2011), and the editor of Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011). She is also the founder and former curator of Earshot, a New York reading series for emerging writers. She hails from Queens, New York and currently lives in Philadelphia.


Help Nicole Steinberg and Spooky Girlfriend Press Get Lucky!
Donate to Getting Lucky‘s Indiegogo Campaign

Constitutionality of Recent SCOTUS Decisions — DOMA and Voting Rights

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NelsonPhoto

Constitutionality of Recent SCOTUS Decisions — DOMA and Voting Rights

by Matthew Nelson

The Supreme Court has been getting a lot of attention lately. With the deluge of end-of-term decisions over, it seems everyone is taking turns surveying the damage. But while most commentators ask “helping-or-hurting” questions – How big of a setback was the Prop 8 ruling for marriage traditionalists? Did racism win the day at the University of Texas? – I want to draw attention to a different set of questions raised by two of the year’s biggest decisions. These decisions, on gay marriage and voting rights respectively, offer an excellent opportunity to revisit our government’s famed system of “checks and balances” and ask just what we expect the various branches to do to get along.

In United States v. Windsor, the Court struck down a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that prevented even already-married same-sex couples from receiving the benefits of a federally acknowledged marriage. It did so because it found that the law violated the so-called “due process clause” of the Fifth Amendment. So far, so good – this much accords well with our ordinary conception of how the federal government works – the legislature enacts laws, and the judiciary reviews their constitutionality. But in order to get to a place where they could even rule on DOMA’s constitutionality, the Court first had to answer a strange procedural question – was there even a real case to decide?

The problem was that the two sides seemed to agree on the correct ruling. Both the plaintiff, Edith Windsor, and the defendant, the U.S. Government (as represented by its Executive Branch), agreed that the law was unconstitutional. Accordingly, Ms. Windsor ought to be entitled to a refund of more than $350,000 in taxes that she was forced to pay on the estate of her deceased spouse, Thea Spyer, because under DOMA her same-sex marriage did not qualify her for surviving-spouse tax exemption. This led Justice Scalia, in oral arguments, to ask why the case had made it to the Supreme Court at all. What made it different from a debt-related lawsuit where the debtor agrees he owes money but just refuses to pay? In that case, there is no case – the debtor owes the money, no questions asked.

But the Executive Branch disagreed…kind of. Although they refused to defend DOMA’s constitutionality, they insisted on enforcing it and requested that the Court continue with the case as if everything were normal. However, because the Executive refused to defend the law, the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group from the House of Representatives had to step in instead. Their representative, Paul Clement, pointed out that this convoluted scheme had already led at the District Court level to “the most anomalous motion to dismiss in the history of litigation: A motion to dismiss, filed by the United States, asking the district court not to dismiss the case.” Justice Kennedy noted that that is enough to “give you intellectual whiplash.” Indeed.

From here things return back to normal. The Court decided to look past the legal acrobatics necessary to keep the case alive, and went on to strike down DOMA’s key provision. But let’s not follow them there. The behavior of the Executive Branch should give us pause. The Executive argued that it had a constitutional duty to uphold and enforce duly enacted laws, such as DOMA. On the other hand, it did not believe DOMA itself to be constitutional. What this leaves us with is a contradiction: a claimed constitutional duty to uphold an unconstitutional law.

This goes against not only logic, but also the intent of our “Founding Fathers” in drafting the Constitution. As Akhil Reed Amar notes in his detailed “biography” of the Constitution:

Accustomed as we are to seeing the judiciary – particularly, the Supreme Court – as the sole and unique interpreter of the Constitution, many modern Americans might bridle at the idea that the framers envisioned the president as America’s first magistrate, with important and independent authority to construe and defend the Constitution. Yet even Court-centered observers should recall that a president’s principled refusal to enforce a law that he in good faith and after careful consideration deemed unconstitutional could often be the vehicle for bringing an issue before the courts…Even if the case could otherwise reach the judiciary, a henchman president executing congressional orders that he believed unconstitutional would often be placing an expensive burden of initiating litigation upon an innocent private party rather than upon a powerful (and to the president’s mind, offending) legislature.

Readers sympathetic to President Obama might balk at the idea of calling him a “henchman president.” After all, he and Congress are not always on the best of terms. We can even come up with a number of sound political reasons why he might have done as he did. Perhaps further antagonizing Congress would have cost him more political capital than it was worth, especially given that he anticipated that the Court would set things straight. But this strategy ought at least to give us pause. Do we want a president who bends over backwards to have his cake and eat it too, even at the possible expense of basic constitutional justice? On the other hand, we may not want the alternative renegade president who loses his legitimacy in the eyes of Congress.

The question may not be as simple, moreover, as whether or not the president lacks “the courage of his convictions,” as the Chief Justice put it. We might understand Obama’s actions here as a good-faith attempt to respect the will of the people. Obama is but one man, while the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the (Democrat) president who signed DOMA into law were many. To refuse to enforce a duly enacted law might seem hubristic, not only to Obama, but to the American electorate as a whole. And here is where we must face the difficult questions entailed in the separations of powers. If we laud Obama’s support of gay rights, must we also laud his bow to Congress? Just how independent do we want the Executive and the Legislative Branches to be?

Thankfully, we don’t have to (or perhaps, frustratingly we don’t get to) approach these questions in the isolation of a single case. Another major ruling, Shelby County v. Holder, also raises questions about deference and political strategizing between branches. In Shelby, the Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which defined certain districts that would be required to get approval from the federal government before making any changes to voting procedures to make sure the changes were not racist (either in intention or in effect). Only the formula for determining which districts were covered was struck down, the actual pre-approval process (Section 5) was left unchallenged. The problem, as the Court saw it, was that the formula was outdated. It did not include states or counties based on the discrimination they were guilty of now, but on discrimination at play in 1964. According to the majority’s mantra, the law “imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs.”

Many have noted that this effectively cuts the legs out from under Section 5. An op-ed for The New York Times nicely summarizes one common understanding of the Court’s ruling: “The court pretends it is not striking down the act but merely sending the law back to Congress for tweaking; it imagines that Congress forced its hand; and it fantasizes that voting discrimination in the South is a thing of the past.” That the ruling deals a major, perhaps mortal, blow to Section 5 is obvious and not very controversial. What is striking is that everyone seems to agree that this fact is relevant to the ruling – not just that the Court knew it, but that it should have acted differently for that reason.

Let’s consider the implications of this carefully. In effect, such a stance suggests that not only should the Court consider each part of a law separately to determine its validity, it should also take into account likely political fallout in Congress of the decision. If it did so in this case, it would see that Congress would likely never agree on a new formula for Section 4. Accordingly, it should have decided that the need for an effective Section 5 was great enough that Section 4 should not be examined at all, because to do so would jeopardize Section 5. I don’t want to suggest that this reasoning is necessarily wrong. I only want to emphasize the extent of its implications and just how far it deviates from the normal picture of an autonomous Court that coolly and judiciously picks apart laws to determine where, if at all, they fail a constitutional test.

Of course, it is possible that Section 4 is constitutional on its own grounds, but most critical attention has conspicuously avoided that question and relied on a logic similar to the one above (an exceptional case, that perhaps comes close to establishing Section 4’s constitutionality, but tellingly fails to even mention it, can be found here). Let us also bear in mind that many who hold this position, including Justice Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion, are at pains to mention just how close to unanimity Congress came in 2006 when renewing the Voting Rights Act, and how diligently they pursued renewal. This deference to Congressional consensus is tricky, because it leads in the opposite ideological direction in the DOMA case.

This is why it is important that we see these cases as more than just isolated moments that help or hurt our favorite causes. They are also part of the much larger, on-going processes of Supreme Court jurisprudence and federal governance. There is a wide variety of stances we can take – from three branches with blinders on, each ignoring the other, to everyone bowing to Congress unless their job description explicitly tells them to do otherwise. The proper solution is probably somewhere in the middle, but it is worth our discussing how we should figure out where.

***

Matthew Nelson is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois. His interests range from Modern Sanskrit to Martin Heidegger, but his dissertation focuses on translation as a form of cultural memory in contemporary India.