Hilary vs. Trump: The Oligarchical Dream Race

Hilary vs.Trump = Oligarchical win- win: A Trump win can be blamed on Bernie supporters and used to discredit progressive ideas for another decade or a more.  A Hilary win can be used to legitimize a continuance of neoliberal policies while ensuring the silence of most of her supporters over continued economic devastation, war and extra judicial killing. 

What I want to say tonight...

Tonight I am feeling overwhelmed.  I am overwhelmed by a corporate media who has been relentlessly campaigning for the idea of the inevitability of a Clinton nomination for about a year now.  I am overwrought from reading seemingly endless reports of votes denied, flipped, stolen or just disregarded.  I am distressed by the corporate media’s blindness to these stories.  Rather than suggest or even look at the possibility that something might be seriously wrong with our democracy, they hold televised vigil waiting for “The Donald” to give his next inarticulate public rambling in front of a microphone.  I am disheartened when only the news stories with attacks on Sanders gain traction while story after story about decades of Clinton corruption are ignored.

Here I sit in my overly large Bernie hoodie, sadly looking at the cat who is looking at the dog.  The dog is curled up in a ball looking sideways at us both, and she looks as dejected as I am tempted to feel.  Yet, what I want to say to everyone I know, and don’t know, who believes in the ideas Bernie stands for is don’t give up.    

1)  When Bernie started to run, we knew this wouldn’t be easy, and he has done better that probably anyone could have guessed a year ago.

2)  A vote for Bernie is more than just a vote for an individual candidate; it is a vote for a vision of what we would like our country to be.  

3)  To me the fundamental difference between Sanders and Clinton supporters with similar policy preferences is their understanding of how change is accomplished.  Clinton supporters seem to see change as more of a top down and incremental process.  Sanders supporters recognize change as the inevitable outcome of movements that start from the bottom and do not give up.  As recent evidence of this, I point to the marriage equality movement and the $12 and $15 minimum wage laws passed across the country.    Historically, I look to FDR and the New Deal.  Yes, there was a devastating financial crisis in the 1930s, but there was also an active left that pushed hard for policies that would benefit ordinary people.  

4)   I wonder if our country has ever really been a democracy.  What will it take for the evidence of democracy's demise to be so overwhelming that it can no longer be ignored by the corporate press?  I wonder if this cycle might bring us close to the tipping point.  This emperor has been hanging out in his birthday suit for a long time now.

5)  I choose hope.  Wealthy interests that like our political system just as it is do not want the majority of people to vote.  They have been going to a great deal of trouble to prevent many of us from doing so, so I will vote.  My vote may not be counted or may be changed electronically, but I will do it with great enthusiasm anyway.  

I will vote for a candidate whose ideas and integrity I believe in rather than engaging in another soul destroying bout of voting for the practical or least worst candidate.  I choose hope by continuing to voice my support for a man whose ideas I agree with wholeheartedly, no matter how fiercely all the talking heads and respectable people in the media tell me it is fruitless.  I choose hope by vowing to continue to work for those ideas regardless of the outcome of this one race.

I choose hope because I do love my country and my planet.  They are both in danger, and I want them both to be here for a long time.

To those who say, “Don't you care about stopping the Republican menace?”  or “We need to unite the party,” I say, I’m not interested in uniting behind a party that doesn’t represent me.  If the party can change and discard some of its corporate moorings, I will consider it.  Living in California, I know my vote doesn’t count for much according to the pundits, but my vote matters to me.  I hope it matters to you, too.  Damn the torpedoes.  It is time to vote for someone I actually believe in. 

I can't stop reading news articles about Bernie Sanders

I can’t stop reading articles about Bernie Sanders.  The last time I was this obsessed with the news was during the Occupy protests.  I avidly consumed news of them.  After visiting the Los Angeles encampment around city hall, I felt solidarity with these people. They brought me hope. 

As soon as I heard Bernie was running, I was in.  At best, I thought he might help to push the main stage candidates into a bit of lip service for progressive values.  But now the favored main stage candidate is no longer a sure thing.  She is running scared because despite a near silence in the main stream media, Bernie’s message is being heard.  And this message resonates with people. And this brings me hope.

My cynical soul says the corporate powers either haven’t figured out how to shut him down yet or they are letting him continue for some reason of their own.  At the same time, some small part of me dares to hope, to say that this time it is possible for things to be different.  Our world is in a different place than even a decade ago, and masses of people are yearning for the movement that Bernie symbolizes.  Bernie has been singing the same song pretty much for his entire political career.  The difference now is that much of the country is ready for this song. 

So to end I will say that I pray for Bernie.  Every day I pray that he will remain safe, and I ask that he will maintain his integrity.  As citizens why shouldn’t we vote for and work for the world we really want?  If we don’t at least try, we will have no idea if this better world could be possible.

a new life

It is amazing how quickly one can just walk out of a life.  “Welcome to your new life,”Jeoffrey said as I began to struggle with my second paper jam in the famed RISO machine.  Yes, it is a new life.  For the first time in my adult life without being a student, I am working primarily in an office.  It has been a little over 20 years since I first started working as a professional singer, 25 since I taught my first piano student and 26 since I was first paid to accompany someone on the piano.  I’ve also spent 15 years directing various musical ensembles. 

I turned 40 less than a month ago, and this is the first birthday that I have been unhappy to see.  Looking at my life thus far, I have loved my work. On the whole, I have loved the people I work with. Over the past year I have lived apart from my partner.  We’ve been together for over eight years now.  Circumstances aligned to make his moving to another city for a job inevitable.  I resisted.  I held on.  I spent a year in a dingy little apartment sleeping next to my piano and doing as much work as I could while I was there so that I could spirit off to be with him and our pets as much as possible. 

Again, I loved my job.  Child of a mismatched coupled whose marriage seemed to never have been happy, I swore I would never give up my life for a man.  Never.  I considered these jobs as my prized possessions, as my life.  Over the course of the year and through the inevitable march of time, the luster of these activities dimmed.  My professional singing life was plagued my social unease and personal insecurity.  I loved to sing, but I often distrusted many of my colleagues.  My inadequacies as a teacher magnified in my mind so that I would find myself praying for a good successor who could fulfill all of the needs for these children that I myself felt I was failing to do. 

Over the course of the year apart, I prayed for the right situation.  I dreamed of a perfect situation, thinking that with enough work and preparation I could land in a new city with a situation as great as that which I had developed over years in the old city.  I applied and interviewed and auditioned for many jobs.  I applied for jobs in which my training, experience and years of graduate school would say I was qualified for.  Some jobs were offered, but for salaries that were insulting or under conditions where I was certain I could not have been an effective teacher or leader.  Finally, as I had given in to starting another year in the old place but this time with a large commute, everything opened up.  It was quick and hardly painless, but as I look on the events of the past week there is a strange sense of déjà vu and almost inevitability about them.

In wondering about one’s future, in musing about ‘how will this part of my life end?’ sometimes there comes a quick small thought, and you think to yourself with almost horror, oh no.  I don’t or I won’t leave like that. I’ll be this or more that.  I’ll do it right.  And then, sometimes years later, that actual thing happens and in a dim place inside you remember that reflection of the future that came unbidden once some time ago.

Then in the next moment, you realize that what you had feared may have happened, but the earth is still turning.  The sun still comes up in the morning, and the dog needs to be walked.  In the next moment you see that the majority of external circumstances in your life that you had claimed as yourself no longer apply.  But here you sit.  And really it doesn’t seem so bad so far.  You start to wonder if those notions you’ve held about yourself make it easier or harder to relate to others.  (You look at the dog sleeping and pray she wasn’t poisoned by one of the many dangerous looking things on the street that you tried unsuccessfully to keep her away from.) 

You know that you’ve had a rich and full life in other places, and you pray that you will be able to build one in this new place, even if it doesn’t look like the ones before did.  Somewhere inside you think that you really don’t want that again.  It was fantastic, but in retrospect my life in LA resembled an arc.  It started very low with those first few months in an ill-advised doctoral program where I weekly considered just piling my stuff back into the Hyundai and driving back across the country to New York, that shining past where I imagined all had been wonderful.

I didn’t pack up.  I stuck it out, worked the four simultaneous jobs, eeked by until I found better employment.  By that time I had personal reasons to stay.  Work came. Clarity helped me to jettison unnecessary graduate school. Professional opportunities came.  High profile opportunities even, and all the while I could step back and see the trajectory of the arc.  I could see where it would most likely go, yet I rode it all the same.  I resisted but persisted.

It was time to go.  I week ago, through my crazy tears on the phone to my boss, I finally admitted the inevitable out loud. Finally there was at least a financial net to catch me, and I jumped. 

Waiting for the end of the world

 

End times.  How many sects have come and gone predicting the imminent end times?  We are still living with the writings of Jesus’ followers that predict the end times in apocalyptic color.  You must watch for the master will come in the night and take one but not the other. How many sects have come and gone with their warnings of the fire, judgment or alien landing around the corner?  They wipe themselves out when their fervor does not come to fruition as they believed.  Sometimes they wipe themselves out in anticipation.  

Los Angeles in the 21^st century is obsessed with The Big One; a modern day doomsday fantasy with  science as the new gospel backing the obsession.  When the 5.1 hit while LAMC was on stage last Saturday, I fully confess to letting my own personal quake fantasies go nuts.  While I did my best to keep my eyes on Dutoit – the choral benches rolling beneath us – I imagined what else might be going on.  I did not remain fully present in the performance.  The audience’s noises were bigger than the rolling and some did leave, though we did not stop.  I also remember thinking that I would rather be there at the concert hall than almost anywhere else.  It is a big modern building, only 10 years old, where everything would have had to have been designed and constructed with earthquakes in mind.  Even the big façade pipes on the organ are designed to move rather than break in a quake.  

So, yes, it was cool.  I secretly congratulated myself on having the luck to have been on this call to be able to have such an experience to add to my trove of personal stories.  Even though they too shall fade, my stories are one of my largest collections of earthly riches, things I stock up on and accumulate, like too many dresses or sweaters, to the neglect of other more important matters.

When I got to my car, I was silently thankful that nothing more had happened than what did.  My car was still there, unharmed and ready to take me home to a wonderful boyfriend and two colorful quadrupeds.  Life in Los Angeles continues as it has pretty much uninterrupted since the white man first came.  I may take more seriously, though, the call to prepare and fill a few water bottles to store in the back of a closet, just in case.

Why I tell no one about this blog

From time to time I think about this blog and what I have written, and I want to share it.  Yet, I feel that if I knew certain people were looking at it I would feel the urge to censor what I write.  Part of me longs to be known yet another part of me feels a great freedom in what and how I write by virtue of the fact that I have told no one I know about the blog.  Which is of greater value to me?  For the time being, it is still the freedom.  If I stranger were to read what I write, this doesn't seem to scare me. For those I know to read what I write feels like an act of public exhibitionism.

Being Chosen

My recent singing enterprises, and certainly since I last wrote in my Blog Inconnue, have been more successful by a certain standard.  I've been working to focus my energies in better directions, and lo and behold, good things just started happening!  I've been singing much more, being paid for it and/or appreciated much more and the work I have been doing is in general much more fulfilling than the majority of projects that had been occupying my time before. I am very thankful for all of this. 

Within one of the organizations I sing for I have recently been what you could call 'promoted' for next year.  This means many more concerts and more money.  Again, I am delighted, but this organization has a very stratified hierarchy amongst it's singers.  For me to make this jump means that someone else is still waiting.  It also means that those already of the higher status may now be looking at me as a potential threat to their own status as defined by number of gigs, solos, 'first calls', etc. 

The major difference for me between this year and previous years, is I've been working not to look at the world so much through my lenses of desire for the esteem of others.  I've been able to focus more in the moments of music making without so much of this other crap consuming my mind.  I've been a lot happier. 

Today in this organization's last commitment for the season, I was singled out as one of a few to double another part.  Normally the same groups of people do these things, but today I was suddenly one of them.  This is not a big deal, but in a large and status conscious group, I know that I would have been thinking things if someone I didn't know who had been quietly singing away for a while but not sticking out was suddenly named instead of me!  Why her?  I am a better singer than she is.  I have a better voice.  I KNOW I would have been thinking these poisonous things or wondering then if she had been promoted in some way, because those on the lower levels don't know who is joining the higher ranks for the coming year until they go to sign in for the first gig of the new season, see their name on the same old side of the roster and see their friend's name on the other side. 

Even in this moment I think to myself, what madness this is!  Worse than this is the fear that I will come to perceive myself as somehow 'special' because of a move up the totem or a singling out. 

I've been down this path before.  I've been the 'flavor of the month' with solos and opportunities I may or may not have been ready for and I've been a vocal pariah held responsible for many things out of my control.  Truth has never been in either of these extreme perceptions, but I fear falling under a spell.  I love singing and singing with others, but a choir can be a seductive organism.  They have their own codes and ways of speaking.  They often develop great pride in themselves and think that others see them as importantly as they see themselves.  How I have been down this road!!  I don't want to do it again.  I want to sing, connect to God through that song, maybe move someone and then leave it there.  I don't want to start valuing myself again based on the skewed criteria of the choral mob.  Oh, how I've done this before, and how hard it has been when it is all gone - the community, the job, the reinforcement, the sense of who I believed myself to be!  I know I am not that.  I enjoy singing and the act of singing makes me feel great joy, but I AM NOT anyone else's view of me or my perception of their perception of me.  Can I jump onto this wheel again, enjoy the ride but yet stay centered in my awareness that I am not any of this??