Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

To all vax-olescents: I’m not yelling because I’m mad. I’m yelling because I’m a dad!

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This week I read in The New York Times that many inoculated Americans are “losing patience with vaccine holdouts.”

That’s like saying that many parents are “losing patience with their adolescent children.”

That comparison may sound a little condescending, especially coming from the author of a new book called An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half.

But I’m also the loving parent of an adolescent child.

I’m loathe to call millions of vaccine-resistant Americans arrested-development adolescents. Indeed, one section of my book is called “We, Citizen: American Patriots Don’t Call Their Fellow Americans Nasty Names.”

So I’m not going to call the tens of millions of my fellow citizens who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves a bunch of arrested-development juvenile delinquents. And I’m sure some have reasons I cannot fathom, but should not insult.

And yet: Most of these vax-resisters, despite the adult maturity and emotional discipline that allow them to hold down jobs and raise families and support their communities, are exhibiting one or more of these decidedly adolescent qualities when it comes to a decision that could make or break the nation’s next year.

Or, as I call it, vax-olescent.

• An immortality complex. Like teenagers, many of these folks seem given to magically believing that even at their most self-destructive, they are indestructible.

• Callow arrogance. They’re smugly dismissive of any information from conventional sources; the more marginal the source, the more credible, to the vax-olescent.

• An authority complex. They are gleefully defiant because making other people mad gives them the sense of power and control they crave but rarely feel.

• Adolescent narcissism. Obtusely refusing even to countenance the notion of civic responsibility, they retreat to breathtaking self-involvement, so that they’re reachable only by members of their most immediate tribe.

• Sociopathic tendencies. To defend their untenable positions and execute their dangerous plans (and deny their own disappointment and self-hatred), they are capable of the most brazenly disingenuous, manipulative avoidance, excuse-making, trolling, passive aggression and gaslighting.

To paraphrase the sheriff in No Country for Old Men, if vaccine refusers aren’t adolescents, they’ll do until some get here. 

How, then, to deal with these people?

Well, how do you deal with any adolescent behavior? You point it out, you hash it out and then you wait it out while you sweat it out. You use your memory and your imagination to walk a mile in your child’s impractical shoes. You remind your child (and yourself) that really, you’re not yelling because you’re angry, you’re yelling because you are afraid—for the child and for the family. You find ways to say and to show (and to remember!) that you love the child, no matter what. And you try, and try again, to appreciate Olivia Rodrigo.

And of course the actual adolescent finds all of the above enragingly condescending, phony and hypocritical.

Just as their like-minded elders childishly resent “all politicians,” the academic “elite” and the “lamestream media.”

Well luckily, our vax-olescent fellow Americans are not actually teenagers; they are only behaving that way. So we don’t actually have to wait for their brain chemistry to change, for their fuckhead behavior to change. 

But unfortunately, we might have to wait until something terrible happens to them, or to one of those precious peers of theirs, to wake them up.

And that might require waiting until something terrible happens to the rest of us, too. 

In An Effort to Understand, I write about communication—not just with adolescents, but with all people: “It requires listening as much as it requires speaking. And deep listening. And constant listening. And careful listening. And imaginative listening. And repeated listening. And in our own time, if we are going to have a society that is worth living in, we must learn to listen, to hear, to sense with the tiny cilia of our ears and the tenderest membranes of our hearts—not just the words of our friends and family, coworkers and leaders, but their intent—their deepest intent, and emotional source.”

I’m sure I’ve done an incomplete job of that, in the six months since the vaccines have been available—and perhaps a result of this post, I’ll gain a more nuanced perspective than the one I’ve mustered here. (As often happens in tense conversations with my own actual adolescent.)

But if you’re going to have communication, the other person at some point has to listen, too. And the vax-olescents seem more inclined to stomp off to their room.

In any case, it’s not patience I’m running out of at this point.

It’s ideas.

Jessie Owens, “Raydolph” Hitler and Critical Race Theory: The case of the hysterical historian

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Goddamn if I didn’t get into it last week on Facebook about Critical Race Theory with Hal Gordon, the former Reagan White House speechwriter and also speechwriter to General Colin Powell. I’ve been trying to avoid CRT altogether, just as I managed to not bore you by adding my two cents about “cancel culture” or the 1619 Project. I like to bore my readers on my terms, not on Tucker Carlson’s.

But I’ve known Hal for 30 years. He attended the first conference I ever put on. I’ve put him on stage to talk at many speechwriting conferences over that time. And what he has always talked about is history. One of the most erudite people I’ve ever met, Hal can recite long passages from history’s speeches from memory. In terms of raw historical knowledge, he’s spilled more on his tie than I ever drank.

Hal is a little too much of a Great Man Theory guy for the taste I’ve developed as a Studs Terkel acolyte, and a lot more concerned about Marxism than me and he does love the British royalty. Still, when it comes to American history and rhetoric, Hal is pretty compelling, at the lectern or in print.

So when he became increasingly hysterical about the 1619 Project and then Critical Race Theory over the last couple of months, I found it particularly troubling. In a typical post last week, he said that public school teachers “are brainwashing children to become the Red Guards of today’s Cultural Revolution.” And when I questioned that, he replied, “I’m convinced that if present trends continue, five years from now we will be living in the People’s State of America. The government, the academy, the media, the corporations, the military and even the churches have all been infected with the Critical Race Theory virus. It’s the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

As my teenager would say: Wait, what?

Does Hal Gordon really equate Mao Zedong’s mad domination of China with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ influence on America?

Or is he just fighting fire with foaming at the mouth?

Depending on the answer, a guy known for historical perspective has either lost his, or is willfully throwing it away.

In either case—seems like a bad sign!

Because of course a common historical perspective is what we desperately need in America—and it’s what we’re all fighting about—so we can figure out what in hell to teach our kids. And even in the most constructive spirit, it’s a hard thing to do, to tell a nation’s children a fair version of centuries of truth, in blood and water and metal and flesh. Any nation’s children, let alone the rescue mutts that make up America’s children.

So how do you go about doing it?

I’ve been struggling with this one since my own daughter Scout was in first grade, 11 years ago. For Black History Month, she was assigned a profile of Jesse Owens. It was supposed to be a family project. So her mother and I taught her about Owens’ victory at the 1936 Olympics, at the famous displeasure of the man Scout kept referring to as “Rayolph Hitler.” We took her to Owens’ grave, on the South Side of Chicago. And over lunch at Army & Lou’s Soul Food restaurant, we tested her knowledge. Her take on white supremacy was totes adorbs. Her Black teacher’s aid cried at the video we made.

I was frustrated at the prospect of starting Scout’s education with a tidy, inspirational American myth and then gradually adding further complexities and come-downs, as she got older. At the time, I wrote here on Writing Boots: “I reckon we’ll wait until next Black History Month to tell Scout that Owens actually felt more egregiously snubbed by President Roosevelt, who ‘didn’t even send me a telegram.’ Third grade? That’ll be the time we talk about how Owens was unfairly stripped of his amateur status and had to scrape together a living hustling for black exploitation films, racing against horses and running from IRS agents.” Is that what history is going to continue to be in this country? Happy myth, spoiled?

So when Hal Gordon complained that history teaching is becoming political, that seemed like the least of the problems, and the most obvious:

Wasn’t teaching political, I wrote, when I grew up, “learning how George Washington could not tell a lie. It seemed like we spent three years on Helen Keller and four minutes on Harriet Tubman, let alone the Tulsa massacre, etc, etc. I agree that the re-‘centering’ of history teaching in America that the 1619 Project insists on is a difficult problem, intellectually and even logistically. I also agree that America, as much as it is an ‘idea,’ is also a ‘story.’ And if this particular nation can’t agree on a common narrative (or at least acknowledge the truth of parallel narratives), then it strains to find a common civic ideal to hold it together. I agree these are things to be concerned about. But WORKED ON, not screamed at or wished away in hopes we can go back the that old saw about the cherry tree. Come on, man. Dig deep.”

And those were going to be the last words of this post. Until, after a pause in our conversation, Hal wrote back: “I have been giving some sober thought to what you said about making a good-faith effort to teach American history in a way that gives young people ‘a properly profound sense of the complexity of this nation’s story.’ I think that that is a noble sentiment—one with which I can agree. In fact, I think I already have. When I read what you said, I found myself thinking about a post that I wrote exactly one year ago about a way to resolve the controversy over the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.”

In this post, Hal brings his old scholarly rigor to bear to come up with “Frederick Douglass’s Solution to the Emancipation Memorial Controversy.” Read it for yourself, but it strikes me as an absolutely perfect example of the kind of honest history revision—and narrative integration—that a thousand historians of all backgrounds and perspectives need to set about doing, the best way they know how.

And I told Hal so.

And Hal replied, “You and I certainly do agree that a society like ours needs a shared sense of history. I think that a shared sense of history is one of the few things that holds us together as a nation. If you think about it, we have no monarchy, no national church, and no common racial or ethnic identity. It is our commitment to our shared ideals and our common experience that makes us one. As I said in my post, what thrilled me about the proposals to modify the Emancipation Memorial is that if implemented, these proposals would give us a memorial that would go a long way towards ‘telling the whole truth’ and would be one in which all Americans could take pride. Surely that would be a helpful step in bringing us together.”

There is much for the helpful to do, as long as helpful, we are willing to consistently be.

Saner citizens of a crazy nation

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When you check into any mental health facility, they put you through something they call the “intake assessment,” where you list your mental health history, as factually as you can, so all the staffers you’ll deal with there have a common set of facts to work from.

After the horror of George Floyd and the screaming American aftermath, I was feeling a little crazy myself. So a started to do an “intake” of my own. A race intake.

I’ve always had this feeling that well-meaning Americans like me think it’s mostly Black Americans who have had traumatic and confusing experiences, and white Americans who should sympathize and trouble-shoot, from a position of relative orderly calm.

But I think growing up white in America drives you to a kind of madness—easy to conceal by changing the subject and discouraging others from “focusing on race.” And I think accounting for it and copping to it is one step down the road toward being able to see white supremacy as something more subtle than hoods and swastika tattoos.

Or something like that.

I sent this to a Black friend awhile back. She asked me what was the point. Beyond what I’ve drunkenly slurred above, I didn’t know, and I don’t still.

White reader, Black reader, maybe you can help.

***

The first Black person I ever met was in kindergarten. And I was confused, because his name was Chuck Green.

There was a famous TV show about Daniel Boone, popular in reruns when I was maybe in first grade. I don’t remember the words to the theme song, only to a parody that kids my age—six years old—would sing: “Daniel Boone was a man, yes a big man. But the bear was bigger, so he ran like a n— up a tree.” (Did they—we?—know not to sing that around Chuck?)

The next Black person I remember meeting was Angela Clark, who was the only Black kid in my class of approximately 270 kids who matriculated through the public schools of the white upper-middle class town of Hudson, Ohio. I know not one more thing about Angela beyond what I have just said, aside from that she was … quiet?

[Hudson, Ohio, was once home to the abolitionist John Brown, and also a stop on the Underground Railroad. When I grew up there in the 1970s, there were more plaques than Blacks. My mother wrote in a literary journal that she wanted to move at one point, because “the only blacks the kids see here are on television.”]

The mechanics at the Marathon station on Main Street were Black—Everett and Coleman. My dad too-frequently described them as “good friends of mine.” I can’t remember if I overheard my mother calling him out on the statement, or if I just sensed her skepticism. 

She was 15 years younger, and had dated a Black man in the late 50s or early 60s, in Detroit; he was arrested on a trumped-up jaywalking charge, for being with her, she said. She considered herself—especially in opposition to my comparatively old-fashioned Republican dad—a progressive on these issues. This photograph, from her time as a high school camp counselor in 1957, made her scrapbook.

And in 1964, working as a copywriter at an ad agency, she wrote a newspaper ad. “If you feel sure civil rights is moving fast enough,” began the headline over a grainy black-and-white photograph of a racially ambiguous child in a crib, “try to imagine your children waking up Negro tomorrow morning.”

Dad grew up in the twenties and thirties in the very southern, southern Ohio town of Middletown. He told us stories about an all-day cleaning woman/cook named Mamie, who would fix him sandwiches to eat when he ran a block home from Lincoln Elementary. She would also make the family dinner in the evenings, before going home to presumably make dinner for her own. Dad spoke of her fondly, in the same tone he used when he talked about Everett and Coleman.

Dad’s younger brother David, my uncle after whom I was named, employed a similarly versatile servant named Esterleen, starting in the 1950s and lasting until at least 2000 (!).

“Leen,” as she was called, was wonderfully friendly to us kids whenever we were down there—friendly in a super-smiley way that no white person had ever been friendly to us. She cooked for us on holidays, and we had only passing thoughts about what her own family was doing for dinner on those nights, and whether they missed having her there. She would take a break from her cleaning chores every afternoon, and watch one or more soap operas with my Aunt Zodie—and a lot was made of that. Anyway, David and Zodie always called her “family,” and took pride that they paid her to cook for special events even when she was well past her prime.

(We weren’t in Middletown all that much, but Esterleen sure is vivid, and I am astonished to be old enough to be able to tell you this antebellum-sounding tale in the first person.)

Uncle David told me that when he was a kid in the 40s, the public swimming pool on the Black side of town was called “the ink well.” He added, “Terrible!”

I don’t know what age I was when my dad first shared his theory that there was nothing inferior or superior about black people or white people, but that each just had a visceral, perhaps natural disgust toward the other race. There was no disparagement of Black people in our house, but my younger sister did remind me of our shock one day in the car when Dad got mad at a Black motorist and shouted (not so the man could hear), “You … monkey’s uncle!”

Dad loved “The Cosby Show,” though his ad agency had hired Bill for some commercials and he was supposedly a big asshole to work with.

After an almost perfect Republican voting record beginning with Thomas Dewey, Dad, then sick with pancreatic cancer, voted for Barack Obama for president, and cried in disbelief afterward that he had lived long enough to vote for a Black man for president. Just barely. He did not live to see the inauguration.

In college, I saw Do the Right Thing. It was stranger to me than Alien.

Soon after I moved to Chicago, I rode the Lake Street El past the hulking, dismal Henry Horner Homes public housing projects, while reading the book about life there, Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here. It seemed to me that I was looking directly at the biggest problem in America.

At my first job, in the early 1990s, two Black employees—they were actual sisters—marched into the CEO’s office one day in January and said loudly enough that people outside the office could hear, “Hey, how about you make Martin Luther King Day a company holiday and give everybody the day off?” Startled, he said, “Okay?” And from then on, we had MLK Day off.

Someone closely connected with a Chicago police detective in Black neighborhoods told me that the police routinely beat confessions out of suspects with phone books because they don’t leave marks, and because the police’s attitude was, “They’re going to say we beat ‘em anyway, so we might as well.” 

In our late twenties, my wife went to work as a school teacher on the West Side of Chicago, and started bringing poor Black kids home, to sleep in our house when there was too much trouble in theirs. I went along with this, despite extreme and not fully understood discomfort and resentment. I took a special interest in one of the kids, a sweet and handsome teenage artist named Bryant. He liked to drive around in the decrepit, roofless truck I had at the time, because he liked to admire himself in the big side mirrors.

One day as we rattled down Division Street, Bryant casually asked me why I drove such an unreliable bucket of bolts when I didn’t have to. I said I liked the adventure of it—because you just never knew what was going to happen! 

“Dave?” he said, cautiously.

“Yes, Bryant?”

“Sometimes, I think white people don’t have enough problems.”

***

What my Black friend actually wrote in response was, “What does this mean? What do you want us to take away from this? I can see the tangled history with race. But what have you discovered? What has that tangled history left you with? What would you like us to do with this, become because of it, learn from it?”

No. It’s not a teaching document. It’s a learning document, for me, and for anyone who knows me. If it moved you to do an intake of your own, on paper or in your head, I think that would be terrific. But that, too, would be mostly for you.

But to Bryant’s question of two decades ago: I think white people have plenty of problems—especially those of us who want to get to the end of our lives having become (let alone having raised) saner citizens of this insane nation that we love, nevertheless.