whyroots

This week, I’m thankful for the great cornucopia of American cuisine. And I don’t mean haute cuisine, nothing Alice Waters-like, nothing organic, artisanal, or macrobiotic. These things may be good, or even very good, but they are not what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for chili cheese fries, cheeseburgers, cheesecake, and grilled cheese. I’m thankful for Kraft singles, writ large.

Before I lived in Paris, I disdained these foods as not being “gourmet”; or if I did enjoy them, it was as a guilty pleasure. Now, these foods have become my Proustian madeleines. “Get over yourself,” says my friend Val. But oh! One mouthful of delicious pancakes, made with Bisquick smuggled across the Atlantic, conjures up fondest memories of the pancakes my mother made in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. Yes, the Disney conglomerate even made it to my family breakfast table -- a poignant addition to my patriotic remembrance.

But this being the week of Thanksgiving, the most important part of which is the eating, I’m thankful for pumpkin pie, turkey, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and of course, glistening cylinders of cranberry sauce.

-- Sarah Dalglish

French first lady Carla Bruni is beautiful, charming, cultured, and funny. David Letterman is drooling. Not for the faint of heart.

-- Sarah Dalglish

On a recent gloomy, windy Sunday, I bought a used copy of "The Savage God: A Study of Suicide." Compensating for the book's overly dramatic title was its flashy 1970's color scheme (maroon, orange, yellow) and the far-out typeface on the cover. Plus, the author was a close personal friend of Sylvia Plath. I plunked down my coins.

The author, A. Alvarez (no first name is given), has a diverse approach to his subject. The book begins with a prologue: an essay on the life, the death instinct, and the death of Sylvia Plath. As a friend and poetry critic for the Observer, Alvarez followed Plath's dark impulses through her poems. From sheaths of papers, she read him lines such as these, from the poem "Edge":

            The woman is perfected […]

            Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
            One at each little
 
            Pitcher of milk, now empty.
            She has folded

            Them back into her body as petals
            Of a rose close when the garden

            Stiffens and odors bleed
            From the sweet, deep throats of the night flowers.

At this point, reading slows down, interminable; the reader rebels against the sweet opiate scent of death. Plath was not able to resist: not long after writing these lines, she was lulled and then suffocated by the gas left running in her oven, leaving behind her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and two children. 

Alvarez knew Plath from a distance and yet so intimately, and his prologue is a beautiful -- and beautifully-written -- homage to the woman and her poetry. He speculates that Plath was able to hold on as long as she did perhaps because "she knew she was salvaging from all those horrors something rather marvelous," but, equally, he regrets her troubles and her death.

The book's remaining chapters are uneven. Alvarez follows the notion of suicide through history, revealing suicide not as we know it. As one must, he begins

with the Greeks, notably the Stoics, who saw suicide as an honorable end to life because chosen. The Romans were control freaks in death as in everything. To the Vikings, suicide was next best to violent death in battle: "those who died peacefully in their beds, of old age and disease, were excluded from Valhalla." Early Christians saw suicide as the key to paradise and signed up to become lion food by the thousands. And later Christians, beginning with Saint Augustine, made suicide anathema, a mortal sin -- the regime we're most familiar with today.

The anecdotes are enlightening in their breadth, particularly as our notion of suicide (or at least my own) is surprisingly ahistorical. For Americans, suicides are Willy Loman and Marilyn Monroe, tragic and somewhat pathetic figures. I'd venture to say that there is no concept of a "good" suicide in modern American culture, in contrast with a numerous early Western and non-Western societies, though we do not hear about these latter in Alavarez's book.

All in all, the book does not hold together as a single work, despite a promising beginning and erudite references to history, literature, sociology, and psychology. Even the last chapter on Alvarez's own suicide attempt (a booze and pills affair that left him blue and in a coma) adds surprisingly little to the book, though it is described eloquently and without undue pathos. But the material itself is not cohesive -- there are too many notions of suicide, too many understandings of "self-murder" -- it is much too large a subject to be contained in a slender paperback. Or instead of more pages, less: suicide may be most accessible through poetry. Plath:

            There is no stopping it,
            The blood jet is poetry.

-- Sarah Dalglish

Is it overly optimistic to think that one day we’ll look back on the era when gays couldn't marry with the same uneasy pride and respect for progress that marks our understanding of the pre-civil rights period? First, Massachusetts and Connecticut, then California, then not -- and soon enough, there will be a Loving v. Virginia, if there isn’t a Plessy v. Ferguson-type misstep along the way. I'm taking the long view here.

Still, that future day is hard to imagine. Welcoming gays into the institution of marriage is quite radical: no civilization in history has done so, aside from the handful of countries that allow it today (Belgium, Canada, Norway, South Africa, and Spain) and a few scattered Roman and Native American examples. From a removed perspective, it is even an amusing paradox that so radical a proposition can stem from such conventional desires -- namely, the desire to pair up for life, and possibly raise children together. We are humans, and these are our ways -- for homosexuals as for heterosexuals. Will justice not prevail at least in those areas where it coincides with human nature?

Indeed, I feel a strange passivity toward this struggle because I think it cannot but succeed. This is an impulse to be resisted: Progress can’t come soon enough for people enduring injustice now. I'm reminded of the observation of Reverend Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on his colleague Martin Luther King in a recent New Yorker article: "Martin said the people who were saying 'later' were really saying 'never' … The time to do right is always right now."

How trite; how true.

-- Sarah Dalglish

In medicine, a progressive disease is one that continually increases in extent or severity. This is rather the opposite of what is meant by progressive politics, at least by those who adhere to its philosophy. Yet the comparison is not empty -- both uses of the word indicate a hot, unyielding move in one direction, ineluctable and necessary.

Boiled down to its essence, the nature of progressivism is contained in president-elect Barack Obama’s campaign slogan, “Change.” Progressivism looks forward, to the future, to a better time, to a future paradise not altogether dissimilar to communism as imagined by socialists.  Progressivism is not so doctrinaire, however; the belief in gradual but steady human improvement is rooted in the Enlightenment, of which Cartesian skepticism is an essential element. This orientation toward the future is inseparable from the leftist viewpoint, just as romanticism of the past, of traditional values, is characteristic of the right. Yes, progressivism is rightly the mantle of the left. While a “Republican progressive” is not an oxymoron, a “conservative progressive” certainly is.

But progressivism is also a philosophy of dissatisfaction -- how could it be otherwise? Behind the optimism of “we can do better,” lies the less pleasant, “what we have presently is flawed.” And criticizing one’s country is paramount to criticizing oneself -- a disagreeable exercise if ever there were one. Thus the very philosophical power of progressivism belies a practical pitfall. Americans are positive thinkers if nothing else. Is this why progressivism has flourished most during times of true hardship in America -- for example, following the two greatest financial crises of the past century? Perhaps things must be undeniably in the toilet for Americans to truly embrace “change.”

For our country's progressive ills, is progressivism the remedy?

-- Sarah Dalglish

Feeling good, feeling great -- feeling great, feeling good. It’s 2008 and in just a few short months, president-elect Barack Obama will become President Barack Obama, henceforth to be known not as 44 (that tired and depressing sobriquet) but as America’s first black president, the very symbol of hope and progress and the promise of America made incarnate. Feeling good, feeling great.

To our great pleasure, the youth vote is inseparable from Obama’s victory. More so than at any time in a young person’s memory -- the hot blush of the Clinton years, the bitterness and disappointment of the present millennium -- Barack Obama’s election has set us afire. Isn’t it so much more gratifying to admire, rather than to execrate? To feel akin with every damn one of your fellow citizens, even the McCain voters and Palin supporters among them? Feeling great, feeling good.

And hence Whyroots: a new era, a new constituency, a new man. So let us discuss. It won’t all be roses -- our handsome, young and suntanned president will err -- our democracy will once again falter. But we’re here now: let us be heard.

-- Sarah Dalglish