about: home | Front Porch Review - A literary magazine for the young at heart and mind

about: home | Front Porch Review - A literary magazine for the young at heart and mind

by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue

It was in a meadow,
so as better to see
the sun's rays
drop like golden honey
on its homey
Good Housekeeping Seal effervescence.

Bolts of Silk: Some Errant Clouds by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue

Bolts of Silk: Some Errant Clouds by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue: Some errant clouds scud along the sky, While their shadows glide along the topography over hills, malls, rivers, ghettos, burbs. My...

The Step Down Revolution of Ted Cruz

      Texas elected its first Hispanic senator on July 31^st. Of course, Republican Ted Cruz has to face his Democratic challenger Paul Sadler come November, but in Texas we all know that's merely a technicality.

      So what kind of senator will Ted Cruz be? Since he's never held elective office, it's hard to know really. All we have to go by is his campaign rhetoric. While it's no news that what someone angling for political office says may not match what they do once in office, it's all we've got, so we have to take what he says at face value.

      In May in a speech to a Tea Party Express rally in front of the state capitol, Cruz, I hope by accident, quoted Bob Dylan when he said that “revolution was in the air.” But this is not your granddaddy's revolution for equality and democracy, it is instead a return to a mythic 18^th century America where all the Framers felt the same about limited-government so that you wonder what exactly did they debate in Philadelphia during the scorching summer of 1787 for four months.

      Talking to Tea Party sympathizers, I'm always amazed at their tenuous grasp of American history. Those contemporaries of Madison who were for a strong federal government, like Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party, disappear as if by magic. And while they insist on Madisonian government, they forget that Madison was a notoriously weak President who led us into a disastrous war against the British, and who very importantly had a complete change of heart about the efficacy of limited-government after the War of 1812. Yes, that Madison, whose name is repeated like a mantra at Tea Party gatherings, became a backer of a strong federal government.

      But in Austin, playing to the loud and profane cheers of the Madisonian Tea Party crowd, Cruz insisted on limited government. He would, he said, get rid of the Departments of Education, Commerce, and Energy. But he wouldn't be content with just gutting a fifth of the cabinet, he'd give the National Endowment of Arts and the IRS the boot, too. And to top it off, he'd audit the Fed and limit the power of the EPA.

      These proposals are, to put it mildly, extreme. They represent a fringe element of the Republican party that is, at least in Texas, now ascendant. But while the rabble-rousing words of a practiced orator like Ted Cruz will elicit cheers at any gathering of the Tea Party faithful, governing is not a political rally or a debate society. Speeches filled with glittering generalities like “liberty,” “freedom,” and “independence” may sound awe-inspiring to those who believe that what we need to cure our 21^st century woes is a “return” to limited 18^th century Madisonian government; but in a country of more than 300 million people with a 21^st century global economy, what Cruz proposes is not only unworkable but dangerous.

      Our most pressing problem today is our unacceptably high unemployment, effectively at 15%. A competent and responsive government would now be doing all it could to get people back to work. To do otherwise is cruel and unnecessary. In Paul Krugman's End This Depression Now, the Nobel-prize winning economist makes the case that the Great Depression taught us how to get out of a downturn in the economy. So our government's main objective now should be to prime the economic pump, but it is failing at this, not nearly enough has been done.

      And who's to blame for our government's inadequate response? According to economist Daniel Altman's Sabotage: How the Republican Party Crippled America's Economic Recovery, cynical Republicans in Congress are sabotaging the economy by holding up Obama's jobs bills. To what end? Why only to win the 2012 election, the American people be damned.

      If the federal government had been allowed to help the states and other localities keep their public sector jobs, unemployment would be much lower, and our economy would be well on its way to recovery. But while we are mired in double-digit unemployment, Cruz's ideology would not allow him to do any thing about it, only to push for deeper and deeper austerity. Think of England and Ireland, whose economies have lately shrunk, as prime evidence as to the destructiveness of that idea.

      And what of those resonant words spoken by Cruz, liberty and freedom? If the EPA is curtailed, we will have the liberty to breathe even more polluted air than we breathe now. If Obamacare is repealed, as Cruz desires, than the uninsured among us will have the freedom to be denied coverage for preexisting conditions and to die, I suppose. Some freedom? Some liberty?

And while any Republican senator Texas elected would be conservative, Cruz says he's on the side of no compromise. So we will have yet one more Tea Party Senator to gum up the works, to continue the ineffectiveness of the do-nothing 112^th Congress, which in the words of long-time Capitol Hill observer Norm Ornstein is the worst Congress ever. Brilliant!

      In a sane world, Texas, a majority-minority state with its most populous counties (Harris, Bexar, and Dallas) Democratic, would have a true two-party race for the Senate. But barring a small miracle, we are fated to be represented by an inexperienced ideologue, beholden to a fringe of the Republican party, whose main experience in government is, as Texas' solicitor-general, arguing for the trivial (a ten commandments monument) or the illogically cruel (trying to convince the Supremes that even though Texas had made a mistake when it sent Michael Haley to prison for 14 years for the high crime of stealing a calculator from Wal-Mart, that he still should not be released). It's fitting somehow that Texas is a red state. We all should be red from the sheer embarrassment of it all.

Not All Texans are Idiots: Annette Sanford: A Tribute

      The image of Texas has been besmirched as of late, from the decidedly not-ready-for-prime-time Rick Perry's fiasco of a presidential campaign to his recent channeling of George Wallace and blocking needy Texans from getting the health care they deserve, all so he can look tough to the mean-spirited and ignorant, otherwise known as the Republican base.

      Or, take Ted (I'm a nut-job) Nugent (Pulease!), from his paranoid blather at an NRA gathering to his suggestion that maybe the wrong side won the Civil War. Huh? To an outsider, it must seem that Texas is populated by right-wing, gun-toting, fundamentalist, homophobic, Neanderthal, know-nothings. I can't blame anyone for thinking that, since I live here, and sometimes I think it, too.

      Yet the truth is Texas is no cultural or intellectual backwater. We're home to a bevy of top-flight museums, research universities, fine dining, and other accoutrements of cosmopolitan life. The fact is a number of damn-fine writers also hail from our state, Mary Karr and Larry McMurtry, to name two. But the problem is we don't trumpet our best and brightest, just our dumber and dumberers.

      A case in point is this past January. One of our best Texas writers, Annette Sanford died, and I've been surprised that not much has been written to honor this gem of Texas letters. Maybe that's because she was, as Clay Smith once described her in the Austin Chronicle, “a deceptively simple writer.” Her best stories creep up on you like morning glory vines and before you know it you're surrounded by a kind of rough-hewn beauty often in a place you least expected. As writer Kathryn Eastburn wrote, she was “Texas's Eudora Welty, as fine a short story writer as anyone of her generation.”

      I didn't know Annette well. I remember only meeting her twice, but for me at least those meetings were important, if not providential. In 1989 I was a newbie high school English teacher at Victoria's Stroman High School undergoing the usual baptism of fire reserved for first year teachers.

      I will never forget that first day meeting my last period senior CLA (low-level) English class. Think Welcome Back, Kotter's sweathogs and you'd have a pretty good approximation of them. But, of course, this was the eighties, and all the girls had their hair teased up to what looked like to me a foot or more. And they all wore black clothes with dark eyeliner globbed on so thickly they looked like a casting call for the Bride of Frankenstein.

      On that first day my rookie knees were sure shaking, but, as has fortunately happened to me more often than not in my career, I grew to love my, as I wryly called them, pre-crime class. But, even so, when we started a career unit in the spring, I knew I needed more than divine intervention to get them, in the throes of senioritis, to do anything, much less a research paper in which they had to interview someone in the career to which they aspired. I figured I better to do an interview myself to show them it could be done.

So without a lot of thought, I realized I needed to find a writer nearby because that's what I've always wanted to do. That's when I decided to interview Annette Sanford. She was close, only about 40 miles away, and through my wife's family, I had a connection of sorts. Her brother, the late artist Charles Schorre, was a good friend of my wife's parents.

      It worked out, and on one of those beautiful crystal clear Gulf Coast spring days that are so sweet because they're so rare, my wife, 4-year old daughter, and I drove north on I-59 from Victoria to the sleepy hamlet of Ganado, Texas.

      There Annette greeted us at her door. She was a little more serious than I would've hoped, even stand-offish. She'd every right to be wary of us, since I was acting like some kind of literary groupie coming to ask that question all real writers hate: how do I do what you did?

      But taking my daughter, a 3-year old blond bundle of energy, proved fortuitous. Her presence melted Annette's heart. Annette sat us down and served us lemonade with old-fashioned sugar cookies with such aplomb that my daughter would remember it for years later.

      We also got to know Lukey, her husband. He was a big man, a retired letter carrier, equal parts earnest and self-effacing. You could understand how, as Annette explained to me later, he served as a counselor of sorts to some of the less-than centered writers who frequented writing conferences they attended together. I could just imagine him setting some confused somebody straight.

      He showed my daughter his huge jigsaw puzzle he was working on on a fold-out table in the living room and invited her to help. Truly, it was like a scene from one of Annette's stories where the older and wiser couple takes care of the younger and decidedly not-so-wise couple.

      After awhile Annette and I went back to her study behind her house to talk shop. She admitted she wasn't a quick writer; that it always took her a long time to get everything right. But she did get it right more often than not because her writing sticks with you. It's been years since I've read her stories, but I could never in a million years forget the sassy narrator of a “Trip in a Summer Dress,” and Miss Ettie of “Limited Access,” who because she wasn't born to let things waste, must watch TV 24-7.

      That afternoon Annette gave me some advice that's always stuck with me. She said that a writer had to get used to rejection. Her advice was to put each rejection on the wall, not to be scared of them but proud of them because they were badges of honor. I know that I haven't let my many rejections stop me. In fact, since Annette's been one of the few real writers who has encouraged me, I figure it's because of her that I still harbor any delusion that I can write.

      The last time we met was 1990 when she read some of her stories to my juniors. Since car chases or drive-bys was not Annette's forte, I had some trepidations. My usually antsy students, I thought, might get bored and embarrass themselves and me. But instead they acted like angels, sitting quietly as Annette read in her genteel Southern drawl, beautiful, demure, and bitingly intelligent, reminiscent of accents heard in a Horton Foote movie, like something from another time.

      After she read, I escorted her out of my class. Then in the hall all hell broke loose. Kids were screaming at each other, acting their absolute worst. I can't remember exactly when it was, but replaying it in my head I figure it must have been right before a holiday. I was embarrassed, but if Annette noticed she didn't let on.

      Like the 25-year veteran high school English teacher she was, she wore a calm smile as she walked through the bedlam. And that's another reason Annette Sanford has meant so much to me. She was not only a top-notch writer but a damn good high school English teacher, I suspect. I was more than lucky to have met her. When she died, not only the Texas literary world but the wider literary world lost a real gem. I just wish more people would have noticed.

A Teacher on the Art of Teaching

      At school’s midpoint I’m exhausted, frustrated, and distracted by a hundred or so fish nibbling on my lines, while papers to grade stack up like one of those illustrations for the national debt – all the way to the moon and back.

        I comfort myself with the thought that I’ll get it done. Haven’t I always gotten done this teaching thing – this half science and 100% art thing – for going on 20 something years now?

        But every year it’s the same. Halfway into it I wonder how am I ever going to reel in all these lines I’ve let loose in the pond of learning. Truth be told, high school teaching is an absurd calling. It’s Sisyphus trying to inch his boulder up a mountain with dozens of adolescents hanging on it, all the while asking, “Whassup, fool?”

Little wonder that in recent movies, teachers come across as babbling burnouts or malevolent sociopaths. Of course, I’m ignoring a whole cottage industry of filmdom, the inspirational-teacher movie wherein said teacher motivates the previously unmotivated in time – always just under an hour and a half – for the big showdown. Life would be pretty if it were so.

In real life, teaching means long hours, when despite all your training and knowledge, you are often thrashing around in the dark. Then a light bulb goes on. Sometimes over the students’ heads but just as likely over the teacher’s head.

Oh, I imagine I have inspired some students along the way, but I’m not fool enough to believe that’s all I’ve done. I’ve uninspired my share, too.

Perhaps, it’s the cold but lately my failures, not my successes, keep popping into my mind. Their faces rise like helium balloons, their eyebrows curled like two question marks, perpetually asking why?

During Christmas break, my family and I were dining at a Mexican restaurant when one of the waiters sauntered up to our table and introduced himself. Turned out he was one of my students from about twelve years ago. He was pleased to see me and when he asked if I remembered him, I, of course, lied and said yes.

        After all these years, I forget their names the minute the door hits the jamb on the last day of school, but usually I recall faces. Yet his face was so different, I didn’t recognize him. But he did remind me of one of my greatest failures, a student I had about the same time.

       This boy was in my newcomer class made up of immigrant students who had just arrived in the U.S. He had a face that loved to smile and was always a quick one with a quip. Though he was one of our slower students academically, he was always good at any games we played, but forcing him to write was like chaining him to a hundred-ton ball. Oh, how his face would drop if he had to sit still in his desk and write.

       To this day, I can’t explain the why of it, but somehow we got crossways. And I got the fool notion that what this kid needed was some tough love delivered by yours truly. He needed to get with the program, and I was just the teacher to do it, even if I had to drag him screaming into the belly of this beast called English.

       It didn’t work, my being hard on him. It clammed him up, completely shut him down. He refused to learn and later stopped coming to class altogether.

       But he was not a dropout. He was a kickout. I kicked him out. Oh, maybe he had problems in other classes. And maybe he wouldn’t have made it anyway. But just maybe he could have. I’ve seen enough students who have come to us barely literate in their own language somehow grasp this crazy, contradictory English language.

      The last time I saw him he was a street vendor, a paletero, hawking paletas (Popsicles) near the school. I knew then that I’d failed him. Still to this day, he is like a pebble in my shoe.

        But don’t get me wrong. I don’t wear his memory like a hairshirt to remind me of my utter baseness. I don’t dwell on my failures, but for my students I have a duty to think about them because, strange as it might seem, I like teaching – this messy work of half inspiration, sometimes 100% desperation.

        Yet, I have to admit, it’s never been easy for me. While, I guess, there are some who were born to teach, I’m not one of them. I didn’t get into teaching because I had an overwhelming desire to be around teenagers. In fact, just the opposite was true. I figured I could stand them until something else better came along, but, the truth is, at the end of every school year, I feel blessed to have been around so many fine young men and women.

Yet invariably when I introduce myself as a high school teacher to other adults, the person to whom I’m being introduced will lean forward and, in a very sympathetic voice, whisper, “I am so sorry.” They needn’t be really.

To hear on some frigid, wind-blasted morning, the sound of one previously suspicious and slow moving student finally taking the bait is more perfection than most people get in a lifetime. And I am lucky to hear it, if not every morning, more often than I've any right to expect.

Governor Vaginal Probe, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Stupid Laws

   
     There is another way, my fellow Texans, to see the abomination of the legislative process that was the last legislative session. As my grandmother used to say, what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander, or was it a rolling stone gathers no moss. I don’t know. 
      Anyway, turnabout is fair play. If and when Texans return to sanity and stop sending Know Nothings, birthers, and assorted wing-nuts to Austin, sane people could be in control, and they could do unto the self-righteous rednecks as they have done to us.
      For example, if a governor pushes for billions of dollars to be cut from education, he would have to teach for one week in an inner city middle school. MIDDLE SCHOOL, BWA, HA, HA, HA! Yes, teach forty middle school kids in the midst of hormonal tsunamis all crowded into one small classroom without air conditioning. Oh, especially after lunch. And he’d have to be videotaped, and get no help from assistants or any “non-essential” school employees. I bet he wouldn’t last a day.
      But why stop there? Any governor who would cut Medicaid would have to spend a week at a public hospital emptying bed pans and taking blood pressure, holding the hands of those who were dying and comforting the grieving loved ones. Then he’d have to look in the eyes of a mother whose child will die without medical care and tell that mother, “Sorry, we can’t help your son.”
      Or how about any governor who’d allow industry to spew more pollution into our already foul air would have to spend a week camping next to the smelliest refinery in Pasadena (or, as we called it growing up, Stinkadena) with his own children or, better yet, grandchildren by his side.   And when his kids &/or grandkids are hacking away with asthma, maybe, just maybe, he’ll finally get it and understand why pollution controls are important.
      Or, yes, any governor who would cut taxes on businesses and the rich just to get more campaign contributions would have to spend the holidays with those people whose services would be cut or jobs would be eliminated because of his corruption.
      And finally, any governor who would push for women to be raped by a transvaginal ultrasound wand because they wanted to have an abortion would have to himself go to Planned Parenthood, take off his clothes, bend over, and be stuck in another orifice with a ten-inch wand. That'll teach him!
      So like Slim Pickens, riding a bucking bomb, I say, “Yahoo! to asinine laws, just ours, not theirs.” 

Blowback?: Will 2012 Be Our Year of Living Dangerously?

      When the late Chalmers Johnson, scholar and author of the Blowback trilogy, first learned of the attack on the twin towers, his first thought was not of Osama bin Laden but other possible suspects, many other suspects, in fact.

      The date, 9/11, led him to believe it was a group of Chileans, since that was the date the duly-elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 with our government's help. But he also thought that other victims of American empire might well have been the culprits: Okinawans, Greeks, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Palestinians, Congolese, and the list went on and on.

      But Al-Queda it was. Then ensued an awful decade when the US with great expense of personnel, money, materials, and international reputation fought Al-Queda. By the end of 2011, most of Al-Queda's leadership were arrested or assassinated. But if you think we are now safe, think again.

      The US with its more than 500 military bases around the world is a global empire, and that very fact not only drains our treasury, it creates enemies. And not only do we have the above list of potential terrorists, what I would call the ghosts of imperialist adventures past, but over the past ten years we've made even more enemies with a foreign policy so mind-bogglingly thoughtless that to paraphrase the under-appreciated American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, our centers of power are “a kind of spiritual kindergarten where bewildered infants are trying to spell” peace “with the wrong blocks.”

      In the past decade, we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, killing thousands (many of whom were innocent civilians whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time), while displacing millions. But that's not all. The Obama administration's use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan has killed hundreds of civilians. And this we blithely call collateral damage?

      The US hasn't stopped there. It's also dropped bombs in other parts of the globe, Somalia and Sudan, for example. Most Americans wouldn't know about those little factoids with the constant drumbeat of “news” of the Kardashians and the latest sexting scandals. (Whose body part is that really?) 
     Most don't even realize that we are now engaged in a so-called low-level conflict with Iran that includes assassinations, sabotage (unleashing computer viruses), and bombings, what the old fashioned amongst us would call acts of war.

      I sincerely wish this list was complete, but it's not, not even close. It could go on and on. Every year our government makes more and more enemies. And one very understandable reason that people turn into enemies is because, go figure, no one likes to see their relatives and friends killed. Plus, when you are grieving, the idea of vengeance makes pretty good sense. Think about it. If our relatives and friends were being murdered by a foreign power as they were driving to the store for a six pack or attending a wedding, we'd feel the same way. We'd want revenge, too. In fact, we would demand it.

     And if you're not American, the only way most people can get revenge is what our military calls asymmetrical warfare, or, if it's done to us, we call terrorism. Since the US military is too big to fight face to face, the idea is that you make those in the US pay for what our leaders did. These terrorists do not hate us or our way of life. They hate our political elite's cruel hubris, its heedless foreign policy.

      Our 9/11, Madrid 2004, and London 2005 are examples of asymmetrical warfare. And, up to now, we have been very fortunate that no huge terrorist attack has occurred in the US since 9/11, but the chance exists that in 2012 our luck might just run out.

      Let me be clear. I don't defend those who commit mass murder. The killing of civilians by us or others is wrong. To understand why they commit terrorism, does not absolve them, nor does it absolve us.

       Also, I am no prognosticator, no seer with a crystal ball or even a Mayan calendar up my sleeve. I have no inside information. However, I would advise anyone considering going to the 2012 London Summer Olympics to seriously rethink their plans. Perhaps, no terrorist attack will mar the 2012 Olympics; but if I had any family members going, I would tell them that London is too big a target to keep safe, and way too easy to get to. 
     The unfortunate fact is that every year that we bully one group or another is another year we need to  understand in the deepest way that we might soon face another possible terrorist attack.

      Of course, I hope with all my heart that I am wrong, and 2012 turns into a banner year of world peace and dialogue. Really.

      So will 2012 be our year of living dangerously? My answer is that with an empire, every year is a year of living dangerously. And if we continue this empire, our children and grandchildren will also very likely be at risk.

      My greatest wish for the new year is that the US will finally and completely reject empire and be a normal country. We cannot be both a democracy and an empire. We have to choose before the decision is made for us. But the grains of sand are falling in the hourglass. Our time is running out.