Monday, November 25, 2013

An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving

  Thanksgiving has always, hands down, been my favorite holiday, probably because it combines three things: an exhilarating snap in the air as winter approaches, even in California, which Easterners imagine has no seasons; a community feeling that it is celebrated equally by all Americans; and a lack of sectarian religiosity and commercialism.  (Well, not quite the last—commercialism is creeping in with the recently invented atrocity of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when consumerism for Christmas kicks into high gear.  This year, many stores are not even waiting for 12:01 a.m. Friday to open for their pre-Christmas sales, but have invaded Thanksgiving afternoon.  Cartoons show buyers shopping while still gnawing on a turkey leg!)

  When I was young, the holiday meant to me a gathering of family and hours of playing with cousins, unencumbered with religious observances and replete with a luscious feast.  In college, it meant driving with friends from Boston to New York through the still-remaining glories of New England Fall foliage, to spend a few cozy days with family.  As I progressed through life, raising my own family, it became a joyful occasion for thankfulness that we had gotten through another year and were about to embark together on a new one.

  For all that, I always wanted to get a sense of how the holiday was celebrated centuries ago in New England—maybe not as far back as the first Thanksgiving in 1621, which was still under brutal conditions, but say a century or so later.  It was a very romantic idea, I knew, not likely to be fulfilled amidst the creature comforts of the twentieth century.  Nonetheless, in 1984, I booked the Thanksgiving weekend for my family in a small colonial-era inn in central Massachusetts.  After picking my son up from his college near Boston, the four of us drove to the inn through light flurries of snow.  Not enough snow to inhibit driving, but enough to imbue the trip with a dreamy aura and make me twice pass through the hamlet in which the inn stood—a hamlet so small that I must have been blinking my eyes briefly each time we passed it.

  The inn was authentically colonial, from its many-centuries-old stout construction, its multiple fireplaces, and its antique decor, down to the furniture, beds, rugs and quilts.  We quickly got into the mood of those older days.  Then, for the entire weekend we ate nothing but game with wild vegetables, all cooked according to old-fashioned recipes.  What could be more scrumptious than wild turkey on Thanksgiving, together with wild cranberries and such!  Our walks were through the woods surrounding the inn, their gorgeous Fall foliage whitened by a dusting of snow. 

  That throw-back Thanksgiving still stands out in my mind almost thirty years later as very special.  Although it wasn't at all like the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts in 1621, which celebrated survival in the face of enormous adversity, it was an almost surreal confirmation of an old American tradition started then.

  This year, I'm pleased that—despite Black Friday—the quality of the holiday I love so much remains pretty much intact.  I  hope you  have a good one!

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Fifteen Objects

  In January, I wrote about having met Richard Kurin, undersecretary for history, art and culture of the Smithsonian Institution, at a reception in San Francisco.  He gave a talk about the Smithsonian's amazing complex of museums and research centers and its collection of almost 140 million artifacts.  He also mentioned that he was writing a book to be called The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects.

  I was abashed at my lack of knowledge of the Smithsonian's sweep, which I tried to repair by visiting its website, particularly its Collections section, spending many pleasurable hours rummaging through what I called America's attic.  As I recounted in my January posting, I chose, in serendipitous order, fifteen objects from the attic that I thought should be included in Kurin's book.  Note that I magnanimously left him 86 additional objects with which to fill in the rest of America's history—as it turned out, from the Cambrian era until today.

  Kurin sent me an email a couple of months ago, letting me know that the book was soon to be published, and astounding me by saying "of the objects you named on your blog," which the hostess of the reception had sent him, "just about everyone is in the book.  For those that are not—there is another item that is included that gets at the same topic, theme or event. So you were spot on!"  That burnishing of my ego instantly impelled me to pre-order the book.  And lo! as if by magic it appeared on my iPad while I slept in the early morning of the publication date.  I spent the next two weeks engrossed in it.

  The book is in itself an objet d'art: lavishly illustrated, beautifully written, meticulously researched and intensively end-noted.  For those who like history per se, it can be read linearly as a chronological narrative.  For those who favor artifacts, it can be sampled at random, object by object.  Either way, the depth of description of both the objects and the history surrounding them will surely captivate you.  This is a must read for history buffs, lovers of artifacts, and aficionados of the Smithsonian.

  Kurin's 101 objects run several gamuts—in time, from a collection of half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale fossils, to the Giant Magellan Telescope currently being built in Chile by a consortium led by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory; in size, from a small postal date stamp retrieved from the wreckage of the U.S.S. Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor, forever frozen at December 6, 1941, the day before the attack that brought the U.S. into World War II, to the huge Enola Gay bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, effectively ending the war; in culture, from esoterica such as Thomas Jefferson's cut-and-paste New Testament, purged of material he thought contrary to reason, such as miracles and references to Jesus' divinity, to the pop-culture of Mickey Mouse cartoons.  Each is accompanied by a lovingly written, fact-laden essay chronicling its importance from its creation throughout the rest of American history.  It's an 800-page tour de force, providing a unique insight into the story of America.

  So how did I do in my recommendations of fifteen objects for inclusion in the 101?  Here's my original unchronological list, on which I've inserted a √ mark against the twelve objects that made it into the book, and added an italicized note to the other three, indicating the closest matching object in the book.

å A piece of Plymouth Rock, representing the migration of Europeans to settle in America.
å Eli Whitney's cotton gin, which made slavery an economically viable and indispensable institution for the South.
√• Any one of Thomas Edison's many inventions—say the light bulb or the phonograph—representing one of the pre-eminent inventors in American history and the vast impact of such inventors and inventions on our civilization.
√• One of the early personal computers—a Commodore or an Apple—which augured the stunning shift to our now-webcentric lives.
å A Model-T Ford, the car that almost alone made Americans mobile.
å The Woolworth's "Whites Only" lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where in 1960 four African-American college students staged a sit-in, an event that helped ignite that decade's civil rights movement.
å The chairs and table from the Appomattox Court House that Generals Grant and Lee used when signing the documents ending the Civil War.
  •The pen used by President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.  (Emancipation Proclamation Pamphlet.)
å George Washington's Revolutionary War uniform.
å The Wright Flyer, which made the first heavier-than-air flight, an invention that further increased our mobility.
å The shuttle Discovery, representing the advent of the Space Age.
å The ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz," symbolizing both the power of the movies in our national culture and the advent of Technicolor.
√• The original Star-Spangled Banner from Fort McHenry in 1814—an emblem of the fight to defend the young America from invasion and the inspiration for our National Anthem.
  •A poster from the Longest Walk, a 1978 American Indian civil rights march from California to Washington, D.C., protesting the continuing devastation of reservations and violation of treaties and tribal rights that have characterized the fate of Native Americans.  (Gay Civil Rights Picket Signs.)
  •A barracks sign from one of the relocation centers in which Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.  (A piece of art painted by a detainee in one of the centers.)

  My ego, already burnished by Kurin's kind words in his email to me, fluoresced when I compared my list with his full list of 101 objects.  I felt as if I had aced an important final exam.  But the fluorescence dimmed considerably when I thought of Kurin's Herculean effort in choosing 101 objects from 140 million candidates, elaborating the provenance of each, and writing at length of its intimate connection with American history.  My few hours of poking about through the Smithsonian's website suddenly seemed very dilettantish compared to the years of effort, the thousands upon thousands of hours of exhausting labor, that I know he expended.

  But, hey, ego boosts are rare enough for me these days.  My ego is thankful for any it gets.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Young and Solo in Europe

  More reminiscing—I can't stop the flood of memories of my youth from overwhelming me.  Today I am in a reverie about my first journey abroad, in 1952, when I was an oh-so-young 22.  A memoir of most of that trip, spent in England at a summer job, is part of a previous posting [1].  But the summer also included two brief stays on the Continent, which were not accompanied by the self-confidence I had when I revisited the Continent ten years later [2].

  Flying across the Atlantic was uncommon in 1952—it was a long and uncomfortable flight on a DC6 propeller plane, which we would now call small, with refueling stops in Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland.  Almost everyone took a boat then, as I did.  My boat sailed from Hoboken, NJ, to which my mother and I drove in her car.  She saw me off with a mixture of hugs and anxiety on both our parts.  As I sailed away, still waving to her on the dock, I realized to my consternation that I had the keys to her car in my pocket!  I later found out that she—always one who planned for the unforeseen—had an extra set in her purse.  

  I learned an important lesson from that incident: there are situations when you cannot uncast the dice, so obsessing about their roll is futile.  I would be enisled for five days, unable to turn back the clock or the boat to return the keys.  Those who rush to and fro nowadays, accustomed to instantaneous action and response, cannot know the sense of total relaxation such a suspended state imparts: one is unalterably in the hands of Fate.  In this case, Fate was accompanied by the camaraderie of a boatful of boisterous youngsters like me, almost all on their first trips abroad, together with a seemingly limitless number of cases of Heineken beer.  (It was a Dutch ship.)

  We docked in Le Havre, most of us then taking the boat-train to Paris.  On it, reality brought us down to earth with a thump: the still-omnipresent, depressing reminders of World War II.  The landscape was quasi-lunar, with craters pockmarking it everywhere, and the ruins of as-yet unrebuilt villages standing as signs of the carnage less than a decade before.  It was a blessing to arrive in undamaged Paris, which had been declared an open city by both sides.

  On this leg of my trip to Europe, I stayed in Paris only overnight, the following day taking a boat-train to Calais, then progressing by ferry across the Channel to Dover and on to London by train, and the next day to my summer job in Essex.  As I reported in [1], London had not at all been spared destruction, as had Paris; desolation from the Blitz was everywhere.  As a sheltered American now amidst it, I could not fathom what it must have been like to live there through the War.

  At the end of the summer, my exhilarating job in England completed, I returned to the Continent.  I flew to Brussels (my first airplane flight), spent a few days of sightseeing there, and then went by train to Munich.  Again the landscape showed the War's devastation, as did Munich itself.  What idiocy, I thought, that supposedly civilized people descend over and over again into such ruination!  I must confess, though, that I couldn't sympathize with Munich as I had with London.  I felt just a schoolyard indignation—"You started it!"  More sober reflection would have reminded me that children and others who had nothing to do with starting the War had nonetheless died horrible deaths in Munich as well as in London.  None of us, alas, is much removed from Paleolithic feelings of vengeance.

  After the spartan food of England, which was still rationed and lean after the War, my stomach was unprepared for the richer fare and heavy sauces of the Continent.  That, and my angst at traveling alone in countries whose languages I didn't understand, precipitated a debilitating round of stomach ailments that impeded my enthusiastic tourism.  By the time I reached Munich, I needed medical help, so I took a series of trams to an American military hospital, showed my passport, and pled for assistance.  (It was thankfully forthcoming in the form of an examination and medications.)   In Zurich, my next stop, I checked myself for two days into a clinic, whose nuns put me right, even with no common language between us; I could dredge up only a few words of Yiddish, which I hoped would have close cognates in German. 

  It was only when I went on to Paris for a week, joining a friend who had worked at the same company in England as I had earlier in the summer, that my health and equanimity returned to normal.  I stayed in a student dormitory at the University of Paris, and found I was able to eat its cafeteria fare, even to imbibe from the carafe of wine that magically appeared on each tray.  "A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine"—a new experience for me.

  As I said out the outset, my roving on the Continent in 1952 was not underpinned by the aplomb that my more mature self had on a lengthier junket there ten years later.  It would have been so nice for this naïf in 1952 to have had the ability of today's 22-year-olds: press a few buttons on a Skype-enhanced cellphone and seek succor from friends and family at home.  In 1952, when the only means of conversation with someone in the States was a public-telephone call, prepaid at $5-10 per three minutes ($50-100 in today's currency), I was forced to remain incommunicado—a frightening experience for the then-me, daunted to be so isolated for the first time in my life.  I felt a surge of relief as I returned to Le Havre, there to embark for home and familiarity. 

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Eve, Lilith and Astarte

  In 1945, my junior year at New York City's Bronx High School of Science, the school became coed.  The transition wasn't an epiphany for me about girls' equal rights.  It just puzzled me—why would girls want to study science or engineering?  "Female scientist" had a minimal credibility after Mme. Curie's work earlier in the century; "female engineer" was an oxymoron.  One simply didn't think of women in connection with these and most other professions.

  Captive as I was to the mores of the society in which I'd been raised, my attitude wasn't unusual.  Although I blush to say this now, I actually asked one of the coeds, while riding on the subway with her one day after school, "What do you plan to be: a secretary or a teacher?"  I plead nolo contendere to the charge of having been a dunderhead, claiming extenuation: I was merely parroting my elders.

  My topic today, however, is not sexism in the professions per se.  Rather, I want to explore the source that underlies sexism throughout society.  The book I discuss below has convinced me that, at least in the West, it is religion—the fundament upon which our civilization is built.  The hierarchies of the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and probably most others, are even at this late date almost exclusively male, and the few women in them are largely confined to the lower echelons.  Gender inequality in religion has invariably led to its flourishing in the larger society.

  I was propelled into this line of thought by email correspondence with my son's sister-in-law, Ruth.  Raised Catholic, in her twenties she searched for a religion where women were equal.  (Interestingly, she is the namesake of possibly the sole woman in the Old Testament who made her own decision about which god to follow.)  Finding no religious equality anywhere, Ruth decided that "religion was a confidence trick of the highest order."  She mentioned a 1970s book by Merlin Stone that she'd read at the time, When God was a Woman.  It's still available digitally; I found it an illumination.

  Stone tells a fascinating story.  She starts by pointing out that male domination of the Abrahamic religions began with the male-fabricated myth of the Garden of Eden, where God created Adam in His image, and as an afterthought created Eve to serve as Adam's helpmate.  Eve immediately showed her inferiority by defying God and precipitating the Fall.  Women have paid dearly since.  Listen to the much later New Testament (I Timothy 2:11-14):

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.  But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.  For Adam was first formed and then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

  Christianity, of course, went on to be dominated by a celibate male priesthood preaching the concept of Original Sin stemming from Eve's infraction.  Mystical Jewish writings like the Zohar, probably influenced by a passage in Isaiah cited below, postulated that Adam had had a first wife, Lilith, formed from the same dust as Adam, possibly even before him.  She—alas for patriarchy!—became the first feminist, asserting that she had been created equal and refusing to be subservient to Adam.  She fled Eden, later to be tormented by angels and turned into a she-demon, eternally surviving among us to tempt men into sin.  The Lilith experiment having failed, God tried another, creating Eve from one of Adam's ribs as his more passive but still sinful helpmate. 

  Is it any wonder that Western civilization was brainwashed about the relative standing of the sexes by the two Testaments and the generations of males who interpreted them?  Women never had a chance.

  It wasn't always this way.  Stone goes on to document that, before Abraham (who putatively lived some 4000 years ago) and his male God Yahweh, the Goddess Astarte (Athtart, Ashtoret, Ishtar, Ate, Asherah, Attoret, Anath, Elat, Hathor, et al., in various ancient languages) was almost universally recognized as the principal deity around most of the Mediterranean and even farther afield.  Contrary to the pernicious image of woman that was to be attached to Eve, Astarte was revered as creator, law-maker, healer, wise counselor and prophet.  Correspondingly, societies having Astarte as the principal deity tended to be matrilineal and matriarchal—property and inheritance ran through women, as did the management of affairs of home and state. 

  The evidence Stone presents for the ancient dominion of the Goddess is compelling. Wherever excavations of upper Paleolithic, Neolithic and early historical sites have found evidence of religion, it has usually been accompanied by idols of full-breasted goddesses, often surviving emplaced in wall niches.  The oldest Sumerian tablets tell of a principal Goddess, mother of all other gods, and this myth propagates to subsequent cuneiform records of early antiquity.  Those and other writings—particularly in ancient Egypt and by later classical Greek and Roman historians—testify in addition to widespread matrilinealism and matriarchy in those times. 

  It was only during the third and second millennia BCE that the tide turned, as waves of invasions by Aryans from the north (later called Indo-Europeans) descended on the Near East, bearing with them a male supreme God, patrilinealism and patriarchy.  Stone posits that these incursions brought to Abraham the seeds of his religious tenets, since he was born in an invaded area.  As the Old Testament progresses, Yahweh commands the destruction of all images and worship of Ashtoret (Astarte's Hebrew name) wherever found, which was done with a pitiless wrath, especially as the Israelites conquered Canaan.  In the passage from Isaiah mentioned above, Lilith (who in myth was one of Ashtoret's priestesses) is represented as a night monster.  Even as late as the Koran, Stone finds ongoing evidence of the influence of the Goddess and God's animosity toward her: "Allah will not tolerate idolatry … the pagans pray to females."  Soon God had completely supplanted Goddess in the Western world, and patriarchy correspondingly replaced matriarchy.

  It was one of the West's many catastrophes.  In a posting last year, when asserting that the fairer sex is fairer in both senses of the word, I looked to a future where women could lead us with a feminine sensibility.  "Maybe in another generation or two," I wrote, "when it hopefully will not be so difficult to climb the ladder while carrying along a feminine worldview, we will have a world whose ethos is completely different, and better."  I wasn't talking about the Margaret Thatchers and Angela Merkels of the world, who got to the top by beating men at their own game.  My model is Eleanor Roosevelt, who didn't have to become masculine in order to reach the heights, and therefore was able when there to maintain her feminine discernment and responsiveness in effectively addressing society's needs. 

  What kind of society could have been built over the millennia if God had been a woman all along?  Or was it inevitable that the collective testosterone of men would have overcome Her ministrations anyway?