Coffee heat rising

Books

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This morning a student sent over his latest paper, a response to an assignment in which I asked classmates to write a narrative describing their response to a tour of the campus library. This library, in addition to functioning as a busy learning center full of constant activity, houses a Southwestern art collection donated by an emeritus professor, and so there’s lots to see in there.

As he was charming me with his usual well-tuned authorial voice, he remarked in passing that although he had been attending the college off and on for the past three years, this was the first time he’d sent foot in the library.

Boink! Even dinosaurs have startle reflexes!

After an internal holy mackerel dialogue, I realized that even though the library is still the heart and brains of a college campus, there’s a reason my students seem to have set as their goal moving through two to four years of higher education without ever visiting a campus library: they can.

So much learning is available on-line, including full-text scholarly articles and books, that a good student quite reasonably can expect to get through most courses, writing creditable term papers and studying for challenging exams, without ever visiting a museum of books.

Frugalscholar, is that your hat in orbit overhead?

As I continued to read his essay and thought about his passing observation, I realized he was commenting, unconsciously, on something that has occurred to me, to at least one of my academic coconspirators, and probably to Frugalscholar: Why the heck are we keeping all these books in our houses?

Frugalscholar has shown the way to peddling scores of books online. Are we sitting on a small gold mine here, one whose financial proceeds would do us a lot more good than the decorator quality of a wallful of books?

Like many other academics, I have ceiling-to-floor bookcases in the living room and the family room, and of course the de rigueur six-foot shelf of reference works in the office (make that 18 feet). As a writer and then later as a younger editor, I used to have recourse to this library all the time. Even the most unlikely occupants of those shelves would occasionally be picked up, looked over, borrowed from. My library was an integral part of my work as a teacher, a thinker, and a writer. And I used one part of it or another every single day.

Recently, however, I’ve come to realize that I hardly ever open a book anymore. The only works I use at all are a few cookbooks…and half the time I get my recipes off the Internet—like everything else. When I write, when I grade papers, when I edit a client’s copy, when I check facts, I invariably use the Internet. The encyclopedias, the various dictionaries, the OED, the history and political science texts, the novels, the chronicles, the tomes of literary criticism and social history and science and mathematics: they just sit there gathering dust. Two walls filled with dust-catchers!

Truly, today I could get by with a computer and the following:

The Oxford Dictionary of French
La Petite Larousse
The Oxford Dictionary of Spanish
The Harper-Collins Dictionary of Italian
Collier’s Latin Dictionary
Cassel’s German Dictionary
The Compact OED
Random House Webster’s Dictionary
The Chicago Manual of Style
The MLA Style Manual
The APA Style Manual
The CSE Scientific Style and Format Manual
Roget’s Thesaurus
A couple of field guides to birds
A field guide to Southwestern flora
A few favorite cookbooks

And that’s it. None of these (except the recipe books, maybe) has an acceptable online equivalent. All the fiction? It could go. The classics are online at Project Gutenberg. Most of the contemporary fiction is eminently disposable stuff, occupying shelf space by default. The nonfiction tomes are largely out of date—maybe one in thirty is worth keeping.

Because Poisoned Pen Press keeps me supplied with light fiction (at the price, o’course, of having to edit the stuff), I hardly ever buy “airplane books” anymore—their detective novels supply all my bedtime and idle moment reading. Partly because I’m paid to read and don’t feel inclined to devote leisure time to reading and partly because I don’t have a helluva lot of leisure time, I almost never buy new books.

So…why is my house filled with books?

I asked La Maya the same question, and she responded with approximately my own sentiment: Books define our identity as academics. We keep them because they say something to others (and to ourselves) about us. Also, she remarked, a bookcase full of hefty tomes makes a nice decorator item.

Yes.

I wonder what on earth I would do with those big walls in the absence of running foot after vertical and horizontal running foot of books.

Fine art? The sum total of every book I could sell wouldn’t buy one Ed Mell painting. Maybe some Navajo rugs? They’d cut the echo, though not as well as all those books. I haven’t been up to the rez to price any of those lately, but one thing’s for sure: if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

So, what we have here is a lifetime of learning—or the metaphor thereof—reduced to interior decoration. The truth is, everything I once used books for has been transferred to a computer monitor.

For individuals, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our students, at least the ambitious among them, can access as much information in an hour as once took us half a semester to dig out. I can check a fact in 30 seconds, a chore that once could have taken me anywhere from 15 minutes (if a source was at hand) to a day or more (if I had to traipse to a library or archive to track it down).

But what about our culture, our society? Now, there I’m not at all convinced that the demise of the book and the rise of the Library of the Internet are happy developments. For one thing, paranoia tells us that censorship of online resources is even easier than censorship of print material. But the big repercussions, the scary ones, are economic.

• Who will continue to produce “content” if all creative and scholarly work is available for free on the Web?
• How many jobs will be lost when a print book is a rarity?
• How many graphic artists, editors, circulation drones and managers, librarians, printers, paper manufacturers, ink makers, and booksellers will be stocking shelves at the Walmart?
• How much more power will monied interests have over the intellectual and scientific direction of our country?
• And when an entire generation has never known the pleasure of reading for the sheer joy of reading, what will that mean for the entire economy of the developed world?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But the fact that we have to ask them makes me itch.

Image: Interior of the British Library, with, behind smoked glass, the King’s Library. Andrew Dunn, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Wages of Sin: Update

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So after class this noon I schlepped over to the Social Security Administration offices with several missions in mind: First to find out what they’re going to do to me for the crime of earning yet another $2,400 over the poverty-level earned income limitation; second, to ask where to mail the Form SS-31 to ensure that this year’s RASL payment is counted as pre-2010 income; and third, to find out what to do with the couple hundred bucks that Unemployment Insurance is apparently going to send me.

Yes. Unemployment Insurance. Last week I got a $25 check and a notice saying the Feds had told the state Department of Economic Security that some of last year’s recipients were entitled to more payments than had been disbursed. No explanation of why, or of why I should be among those recipients when, say, La Maya was not so blessed. But apparently they’re going to send about a half-dozen checks. These also represent 2009 income, UI for the furlough days GDU inflicted on us in the first six months of that year.

Well. There’s no way of getting DES to fill out and send a Form SS-31. You can’t reach them on the phone—they don’t answer telephone calls, and if you manage to get through to an answering machine, they don’t return calls. They’ve barricaded the employees behind locked doors and they don’t let the public in. So how exactly to communicate to Social Security that this little chunk of illicit income—made so because it racks up still more dollars above and beyond the permitted $14,160 earned income—represents 2009  money remained to be seen.

After sitting around for an hour or so, I got to speak with a live human being, a very nice gentleman who seemed (as they all do) pretty knowledgeable.

He said that even though the amount I’ll earn as a result of taking on another class this fall will exceed the amount of a monthly benefits check, they will not withhold more than one check. So I’m only out the cash for October, not for October and November. In January, they’ll bill me for the small amount left to pay up. The missing $111 Medicare Part B premium, payable in October, will be extracted from the November check.

So, that’s not the disaster I feared.

He also pointed out that despite losing an entire month’s SS income in September, overall for 2010 I end up with more money than I would’ve had with full Social Security and only the income limit of $14,160. While that’s so, I noted, that doesn’t do me any good next month, when I need the money to live on.

Luckily, there’s an emergency fund to fall back on. But diddling it away on utility bills, gasoline, and food is not what I had in mind: that money is there to cover me if I get hurt or too sick to work. And we do know that at my age, the operative term there is not if but when.

Presumably by the middle of next semester—if the college gives me three sections in the spring semester—I’ll be able to replenish the $975 that will have to be consumed next month to meet basic expenses and the extra $111 engrossed from November’s income for October’s Medicare B payment.

It’ll all work out over the long term. It’s just annoying, because it puts the eefus on my goal of living within my monthly means. And it does bite into my emergency savings.

Meanwhile, the Social Security dude was able to enter the data from the Form 31 from the state while I was sitting there. He said that issue is now settled.

We shall see.

As for the weird burst of Unemployment Insurance, he said that UI is not regarded as earned income! And that issue is a nonissue.

So it goes. A couple of questions were clarified. It’s inconvenient and it’s going to make next month another straitened, penurious month, something I’m mightily tired of after three months without enough income to cover base expenses. But what the heck.

Not what I wanted to do with my afternoon. SDXB, who’s back in town for the nonce, had invited me over for lunch. That scheme was scotched. Tomorrow, maybe.

An artist is born

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Among her many talents, my friend La Maya is developing as a fine artist. For the past several years, she’s studied with several graduates of leading art schools, and she still works with a mentor.

Some of her work is beginning to look very nice! Her friends have been urging her to display through a gallery and to start marketing her paintings. In the past, when she was invited to display her work at area art shows, they’ve sold quite well. Check out this pretty miniature:

Not bad for a Ph.D. in sociology, eh? She’s only just learned how to make these photographs…it’s a little tricky to photograph a work of art. Click on the image for a larger view.

La Maya started by working in pastels. She’s done some truly lovely pastels, one of which resides on my family room wall. A year or two ago, she started working in oils and decided she really likes it. She says she’s interested in the way brushstrokes work to abstract the feeling and texture of the image.

Here’s the other picture she sent over:

This still life is deceptively simple. While she was working on it, I also tried to paint it—in fact, I draw well and in my misspent youth could paint pretty well. But I made a total hash of it! Hers developed into a good, credible work.

La Maya says she’s willing to sell one or both of these. If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments.

Shafted!

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Remember how those two women at Social Security told me it isn’t true that when you out-earn the poverty-level earnings limitation imposed on those who are forced to take SS payments early, the government takes away an entire month’s benefit check? That instead in the following year Social Security calculates what you owe in tax (it takes back $1 for every $2 you earn over $14,160, effectively a 50% tax), and you are given the option of either having the amount prorated over a number of months and deducted from your benefits in relatively affordable chunks or of sending the government a check to cover the tax?

Well, it turns out they were wrong.

After having told “Roselyn” that I expected to earn $14,900 this year, yesterday afternoon comes a notice in the mail informing me that my September check, which is paid in October, will be withheld, fuck you very much. Any amount that remains after the government calculates and confiscates the tax it thinks it’s owed will be repaid in January.

This will leave me $551 in the hole this month.

Feeling a little skeptical about “Roselyn’s” claim, as you will recall, I telephoned Social Security a second time on September 3, reaching one “Alison.” This CSR confirmed what Roselyn said and reiterated that the government’s procedure is not to take away an entire benefits check when it finds out you will exceed the earnings limitation.

Based on these two assurances, which were repeated several times by each woman during those conversations, I accepted a third course this fall, to run in the second eight-week session of the semester.

The pay for that contract will push my income high enough that Social Security will withhold not one but two benefits checks!

And that will put me $551 in the hole for September and for October or November, whenever they next get around to raping my income.

For God’s sake!

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t get out of the course the chair offered to me and I accepted. Piss these guys off, and they won’t hire you again. So, I’m going to have to eat an $1100 shortfall. I certainly won’t be eating food, since at that rate I can’t pay the utility bills and buy groceries.

There are two choices:

1. Withdraw enough from The Copyeditor’s Desk as dividends to cover the shortfall. Actually, the S-corporation will have to pay me a few hundred bucks as “salary” in December, anyway. A $500 salary amounts to about $600 taken out of the corporate coffers, because as my “employer” CE Desk has to pay its half of FICA and some other taxes. For me as an individual, the net comes to about $375. So to make up a net of $1100, I will have to withdraw about $2,000 from CE Desk, in combined salary and dividends. That’s about half the corporation’s present cash holdings.

or

2. Raid savings set aside for an extreme emergency in which I would not be able to work at all. The emergency savings fund is still in an after-tax bank account, and so no tax consequences would occur if I steal from it.

However, if I get sick or hurt so I can’t work—and we’ve already seen that, as possibilities go, this is not as remote as one might think—then I will have that much less to cover my needs. As it is, emergency savings combined with Social Security would just barely cover expenses for one year. Take $1,100 out of it, and it’ll cover a helluva lot less than that: maybe 10 months.

God. What a mess!

Why did those two women tell me a phony story? Did they lie on purpose? Did they think it was funny to deliberately mislead some old lady and plunge her even deeper into poverty? I’m quite sure of what they said, because I asked both of them to confirm it, and I wrote it down as they were speaking: I have almost verbatim notes of our conversations.

Here’s how this shakes out, projected dollar by projected dollar:

Because the community colleges, like GDU, outsource their payroll to PeopleSoft, paychecks come in at cockamamie times. My second paycheck in October, when the third class kicks in, will only cover one week, and so I won’t have enough to cover my expenses that month, either. Apparently I’ll make it up in November (this assumes they rape me in September, which they’ve announced they’re doing, and then again in October, not in September and November). But meanwhile, between now and the middle of November I have to cope with a shortfall of over $1,000!

While it looks as though I’ll be flush as Croesus in November and December, that extra money has to be saved to cover the month-long winter break, when I’ll have no pay, and the penurious summer, when there’s a good chance I’ll have no teaching income.

{sigh}

What on earth to do?

Probably it would be better to take the $500 annual “salary” from the S-corporation in September or October; this nets about $375. It’s required, but there’s apparently you can pay it to yourself whenever you please.

Defraying the shortfall with a CE Desk “paycheck” would leave $725 to to make up out of savings, but with no tax consequences. That much remains in the S-corporation’s account, and so if a really dire emergency came up, the money would still be there. It’s your basic theft from Peter to pay Paul.

Assuming, though, that nothing awful happens over the next year, because property taxes have dropped a bit, I should be able to use that savings to help replace the $725 raided from the emergency savings fund. If I drop the umbrella on my car & homeowner’s insurance, the two cost reductions combined could be put toward the lost $725.

If the gods smile and I get three sections a semester next year, I should be OK. A summer-session course would guarantee OK.

But it looks like we’re talking just OK here. Short of taking a large drawdown from long-term savings that are still struggling to recover from the crash, we can forget any fantasies about vacations next year. 🙄

On the other hand…it’s a nice opportunity to go back on the half-off diet!

Puttering around, catching up…

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Shameful neglect of the blogging project! The fast-bloating set of chores and goals and paid work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, and so I’ve let Funny slide a bit and, at least for the nonce, given up on the Half-Off Diet. Decided to let “Fear and Loathing” sit at the top of the site for a day, because it strikes me as one of the best things I’ve written in a long time and because quite a few people kindly left comments. Half-Off? Well…I’m afraid my dieting habits have tended to “Twice On” the last couple of weeks! {sigh}

The low-desert summer’s unholy heat is slowly fading. The past few mornings have been gorgeous. La Maya and I have crawled out of our air-conditioned boxes to restart our early-morning constitutionals, and it’s finally cool enough in the evenings to walk Cassie before 10:00 at night.

La Bethulia, an accomplished gardener, is planning her fall and winter crops, and of course I can’t let that go unchallenged. It’s been a busy couple of days, despite the crush of student papers, the ad-selling scheme, and various client projects.

Yesterday morning after a breakfast meeting followed by a drive to a client’s office but before it got too bracingly warm (the thermometer eventually rose to 108°), I dropped by Baker’s Nursery, my favorite purveyor of garden goods, to pick up a rat bait station. Of course I couldn’t resist a few packages of seeds and some plants…

Back at the ranch, I managed to pull out some old onions (or possibly garlic chives? don’t think so…think they’re overgrown LGOs) from a big pot. Used part of a bag of potting soil to transplant the ficus and its attendant decorative plantlets into that big pot, a Costco plastic number that looks convincingly like terra cotta.

Earlier this summer, the ficus blew over in a monsoon, breaking its real terra cotta pot. It was so rootbound that its dirt just clung to it in a clotted ball. M’hijito lifted it into another pot about the same size, and, pushed way in under the back patio cover, it managed to stay alive through the remaining horrific heat. Just now it’s shivering with joy to have more room and fresh soil.

The pot recovered from the struggling ficus, which itself is a pretty good-sized terra cotta pot, was refilled with the rest of the potting soil, along with another large pot and a smaller wall pot reclaimed from a wad of dead roots. Decided to use the pots only to hold herbs, and so now we have a new parsley plant, a new sage plant, and a vigorous young basil plant, ready to burst into growth. This is what happens, you  understand, when fall is spring: in Arizona plants thrust out joyous foliage in October.

The basil on the west side is two or three years old now, and it’s getting tired. Really, it’s an annual. But where the weather’s mild and the human is willing to haul the pot into the house during frosts, you can make it behave like a perennial by cutting it way back now and again. Like a rose, it responds to pruning with new (delicious!) growth. But there’s a limit: no matter what, basil doesn’t last forever.

I’m thinking when I get around to tossing that aged basil plant, its pot can hold some chives, summer savory, and maybe a new thyme or tarragon plant.

But for the nonce, I planted a few parsley seeds in the pot with the sage and basil. I love parsley, especially the flat-leafed Italian type. Baker’s was billing its parsley plants as flat-leafed, but the one I got looks curlier than flat. Besides, parsley bolts to seed at this time of year, and so that plant won’t last until it gets cool enough for parsley to live a long and productive life.

One of the things I’ve missed over the past straitened summer has been parsley. I’ve stayed out of grocery stores pretty  much—have grazed out of the freezer and off the shelves, and what I’ve bought has come from Costco, whose limited fresh produce offerings do not include parsley. So it will be nice to have the stuff growing out there again.

Into the pool to cool down around 11:30 a.m., by which time I was thoroughly fricasseed. This is the nicest time of year for pool swimming! The water has cooled down enough to be refreshing, and the sun has slipped behind the devil-pod tree, so a fair amount of the pool is shaded. It is absolutely lovely. It took a half-hour and a couple of dips to let the water soak the heat out. During that time I noticed the pump wasn’t pushing water through there very fast, and from there observed the pressure gauge was into the “clean me” range. Another day…

In the afternoon around reading stoont papers I cooked some of those golden Mayan beans, planning to make a soup. Out of onions (another item that hasn’t been on the shopping list all summer) but still managed to flavor up the beans with celery, carrots, garlic, rosemary and thyme from the garden, dried herbs, and a few aging tomatoes. Just as the beans had reached the desired stage of doneness, La Maya called and invited me over for an impromptu dinner.

Well, given a choice between bean soup and La Maya’s incredible cooking, it was off to her restaurant with me and Cassie! She fixed a fresh pesto sauce with a mountain of basil from their garden, served over pasta. Awesome!

So this morning the beans still resided in the fridge. And a great many chores remained to be done.

Before getting started, though, I decided to have a real, decent meal for breakfast: defrosted a piece of steak, wrapped some asparagus in tinfoil, and tossed both on the grill to cook. Served those up with one of the pears liberated a couple days ago from Costco, now ripened to glorious juiciness.

Having enjoyed that and a cup of pretty darned good coffee, moved the car so I could climb into the attic up the folding stairs in the garage. Sally’s Handyman had come by to secure the loose screens and close up any other suspicious openings, by way of keeping new rats out and locking any resident rats in. A few days ago I’d bought a pair of Tomcat rat traps, a lot safer to use than the Victor traps, which are just gigantic mouse traps. I’ve never been able to set a mouse trap without snapping my fingers in the damn thing. Snap your finger in a rat trap, and you’ll end up with a busted finger…or no finger at all.

The plan is to trap any rats still hiding in the attic, if any are up there at all (it’s now beginning to appear not, thank goodness!), and then to pizzen any visitors that climb up the paloverde overhanging the deck roof before they get a chance to try to break in. It will be easy for me to climb a ladder to the roof over the deck and plant a rat bait station up there. A rat station holds the rat poison inside a box with a rat-sized entry that’s too small for a cat and unattractive for birds, thereby minimizing the risk to the neighbor’s pets and one’s favorite singing bug-eaters.

This is a nuisance, but far less nuisance then getting rid of a covey of little roommates after they’ve already moved in. So today’s first project was to bait the traps with peanut butter and haul them into the attic. That went quietly and I did not whap any fingers in the things.

Onward:

• Hauled the untouched sticky rat traps (proven useless in the past, but they were all I had) down from the attic and out to the garbage.
• Backwashed and recharged the pool filter.
• Dragged the hose to water the plants.
• Cut back the dying thyme plant, which is mightily infested with hated bermudagrass.
• Preserved some of the surviving stems that bore still-living thyme leaves.
• Loosed the opening salvo against the hated bermudagrass.
• Cleaned up the resulting mess; hauled the dead shrubbery out to the garbage.
• Sprayed weeds growing in the alley along the back wall.
• Figured out how to bait the rat station, approximately.
• Walked the dog.
• Dropped in the pool to cool down, again.
• Made the bed.
• Cleaned up the kitchen.
• Started the laundry.
• Shoveled several piles of old student papers out of the closet in my office, filling the gigantic blue recycling barrel about halfway up to its top.
• Gagged the shredder on the wads of paper the school sent containing former students’ ID numbers, scores on placement tests, and grades on earlier efforts at remedial English, ESL English, English 101, and English 102.
• Decided that paperwork should be treated like clothing: if you haven’t looked at it in a year, throw it out!
• Shoveled the first 20 or 30 junk messages of the day out of the e-mail.
• Wrote this post.

And so to work… Back to reading student papers, a pastime that occupied time until about half-past midnight this morning.

🙂

Image: Cynodon dactylon (hated bermudagrass). Bidgee. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Fear and Loathing in America the Beautiful

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My father, a Texan born in 1909, used to say he was a bigot and proud of it. He used the N-word freely, and he had a pejorative for every race, ethnicity, and nationality on the planet.

He had a bizarre cosmology of race, a hierarchy in which Asians ranked highest as most evolved among the human family, followed by whites (in his time, Latinos were regarded as white, more or less: highly sexualized whites who liked bright colors, so my mother said), American Indians, Blacks, and, at the bottom of the ladder, hybrids of all sorts. The Arabs among whom we lived were scarcely better than monkeys, he believed, because they were the product of intermarriage between African slaves and light-skinned Semitic slave-owners, and so inherited the worst of both breeds.

Even as a child, I used to marvel at the strangeness of this construct, its basic metaphysical weirdness. It wasn’t until we came back to the United States and I was halfway through junior high school that the vicious wrongness of his thinking revealed itself to me.

In San Francisco, I attended an urban school that was about a third white and Asian, a third black, and a third Latino. At the start of the seventh or eighth grade, I don’t recall which, the school assigned an African American girl to share a P.E. locker with me. I was put out not because of who she was but because I had zero desire to share anything with anyone. But when my parents found out that the sharee was black, they charged down to the school and demanded that I be assigned a white lockermate. The principal, to his lasting credit, said “thank you very much” and ignored them.

Before long, the young girl stopped coming to school, so in effect I had our locker to myself. Two or three months later, she resurfaced, with a horrifying story. Her clothing had caught fire in a kitchen accident. In her terror, she ran through a glass sliding door before anyone could catch her. She had been in the hospital for weeks.

So it was brought home to me, forcefully, that this was not some sort of subhuman creature but another early-teen girl, just like me. A living, breathing, feeling, fragile human being.

Not until I was in my twenties did it cross my mind that my father’s fierce bigotry toward everyone not like him—a broad, inclusive bigotry that took in women and homosexuals as well as people of different races and nationalities—was rooted in fear. He feared the Other, and that fear, being unmanly in a time when men were men or else, manifested itself as hatred. He feared the Other more than he hated the Other. What I couldn’t figure out, didn’t understand for many, many years, was why? What was he so afraid of? What about a 13-year-old black girl is frightening?

A great deal of time passed.

Toward the end of his life, he admitted to something profoundly ironic: his grandmother was a Plains Indian. His mother, whom I never met, was half-Indian. His brother had made noises to this effect over the years, but my father vehemently denied it, said Ed was full of beans. This interesting revelation took on more poignancy when one day a young man rang his doorbell and said he’d noticed my father’s name on the front door. The visitor was working on the roof at the retirement home where my father and his current wife were living and, since the name was a little unusual, he worked up the nerve to introduce himself, because his last name was the same. He came from a whole tribe by that name. And he was a full-blooded Choctaw.

Well, helle’s belles. My father was outed. I have no idea what his father was or what he looked like (though my father was distinctly Indian in appearance, with high cheekbones and black hair that stayed dark until after he was 80). My grandfather ran off when my father was born and before long was found dead by the side of a road, an apparent suicide. But whatever the details, ultimately the truth was that he—my father—himself was the Other. What I do know is that the family was passing as white and that my father clung to that identity. He clung to it with some desperation.

But still I didn’t know why was he so afraid? Why was he possessed of such fear that it invaded his soul, curdled into hatred, and took up permanent residence in his heart and mind?

One’s children are slow on the uptake, no? It takes a long time to grasp a parent’s humanity. Sometimes it takes the odd intervention.

Yesterday I was editing a forthcoming book by novelist Donis Casey, Crying Blood, due out in February 2011 from Poisoned Pen Press, and very much enjoying it. The characters live in Texas during the 1910s, the time when my father was a boy. They arrived there from the same part of the Deep South that my father’s family came from, and they behave and sound much like my father’s family—though a bit more enlightened, given their author’s immersion in the culture of the twenty-first century. Casey has a real gift for character and voice: her people sound exactly like my father and uncle did.

Along about the end of the book, we learn that the protagonist, rancher Shaw Tucker, has a great deal of Indian in him, having come from a family “woven through with Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry from as early as anyone could remember.” His mother was the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee woman.

But he was raised to be White. In fact, even though he was an enrolled tribal member, he was White enough in blood and looks and way of life that the U.S. Government never bothered him. No one had ever come to take his children away and put them in boarding school. No one had ever proscribed his movements or told him where he had to live, or how. Shaw Tucker was White and he viewed the world in the way of a White man.

Well, now. There’s something to be afraid of! Your children kidnapped and hauled off to boarding school, there to be assimilated into an alien culture. Your way of life extinguished and your people forcibly removed from their homelands. That would have been the experience of my father’s parents and grandparents.

Why did I never see this? It seems so obvious. He wasn’t afraid of all the people he’d taught himself to hate. He was afraid of what he wanted to be.

He wanted to be white, whiter than the whites who were his forefathers’ mortal enemies and exploiters. More precisely, he needed to be white, so that he could have a shot at decent jobs and the same kind of freedom the majority of Americans took as their born right. The contradiction must have twisted around and around inside him and finally come out as hate. Bizarrely metamorphosed hate.

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The present discourse on immigration rings of my father’s language. I can hear his voice in every pejorative: “illegals,” “Mexicants,” “beaners,” and in every random news story that commenters turn into a racist tirade. The new N-word is “illegals,” and the new “greaser” is “Mexican.” It’s as dreary as it is disturbing.

So what are we, as Americans, afraid of? What terror inside the American soul writhes around and comes out as hatred? My Muslim students tell me of experiences when they personally have been the targets of hate and threats. Latinos and Indians, citizens of the United States of America, say they dread being stopped by the police, hassled, and made to show papers.

Whatever it is, we need to get over it. The current fear and loathing of the Other, to the point where citizens express distaste for small brown-skinned children, is dragging our polity and our people back to the 1950s, when it was OK to utter the N-word in polite company and grown men and women thought it made sense to raise hell when a white kid and a black kid were assigned to share a locker for 40 minutes a day.

We have met the Other, and he is us.

Image: Choctaw woman. Public domain.