“And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin'”
-Dylan on Guthrie*
Certain people react together like chemical fireworks. Sometimes, it’s a surface level heat rash, when one element causes the other to break into irrational, babbling fits of Crocodile Dundee-style incapacitation. Other times, the two combine together so intensely that a new amalgamation of both is created, often accompanied by screams then later by diaper rash. My own reactivity levels are quite mellow; never quite able to ‘bring the heat’ as hydrogen did, but too chummy for the ice-man act of carbon, I become the equivalent of the art gallery compound agent: mixing slightly, cheese and crackers at hand, then suddenly out the door and forgotten, the rare Dupont phantom for whom M and M remain candy pieces, not I saw U’s.
Occasionally, the flint strikes with success. One colleague, in particular, has an uncanny way of lighting me up. The setting, more often than not, is the metro carriage. When the two of us are placed within speaking distance of one another, other passengers (read: audience members, a.k.a. the Grand Jury) soon take notice. He and I (let him be ‘He’, let I be ‘I’) may begin with small talk, but invariably find ourselves engaged in vigorous debate on rather serious, weighty issues. Social democracy. Institutional reorganization. That thing they call Capitalism. As hand gestures broaden, the tone acquires furious animation and my eyes begin to resemble molten volcanoes. He, being of Eri-opian (Eritrean and Ethiopian, or Half-and-Half) heritage but also having grown up in Baltimore city, is not nearly as prone to public theatre, relying more upon understatement and partial concession.
Our most recent topic, Microfinance, actually drew the participation of a middle-aged African-American who belongs to a microcredit group at the Washington hospital he works at. He caught a portion of my spark - I could see it in the way he nodded approvingly in rhythm to my raking rhetoric. But even my new partner element’s own testimony to the practical benefits of this modern economic aberration had little effect upon He, who appears convinced that resource scarcity and conglomeration are the only inevitability.
To such argument I chided (glaringly short of authenticity): “Lost child…you need to rediscover the teachings of your Black soul!”
He responded in his usual slightly less bombastic fashion: “Let’s just say you are slightly more ‘free spirited’ than I.”
As per usual, a nuisance dead rut had thwarted any rational conclusion to the discussion. He didn’t believe microfinance can work, and that didn’t sit well with me at all.
I could see that the night’s white coat experiment, as much exertion as might be committed to task, would end only in mutual negation, but for the addition of a secret biological mixture we shall refer to only as ‘K.’ Equipped with the sort of firebrand passion and a mind-warping conversational style that relegates others to the outskirts of the Personality Table, she happens to possess what I believed could be the magic that would transform the stonewalled heart of He into something that much more closely resembles…well, me. This magic, otherwise described as “being Black,” could be the ingredient our colorful but otherwise fruitless debates have been missing. And more straightforwardly, after some softening up (at least by our politics-as-sweet-talk standards) with happy hour banter about ordering clothes from Africa and Oromo separatism, He appeared sufficiently warmed up.
Tryst was the setting; B52 (house coffee/baileys concoction) the catalytic potion. As K locked our target rogue realist down, leaning forward far enough in her chair to square him off, their faces barely a foot apart, I leaned back smugly against another colleague. The process of conversion, or at the very least, reconsideration, had begun for He the Hapless. We chatted idly about our love lives, Snoop Dogg and nutella, vacantly watching the currents flow on the other side of the table. If I had a watch, I would have checked it. Being a tired drunk, I probably yawned instead. A snapshot of city opportunism we were: three children of Abyssinia and one trans-generational nomad of Hainan Island and Guangzhou, all children of Maryland’s public high school system, four tiny atoms of margarita-electrolysised idealism in a city of power-wielding deal-makers.
Magic potions, scientific formulae and disarming Black beauty combined, however, were not up to the challenge of evangelical lefty-moralist conversion that night. After efforts to raise the realization (and roof) through melodramatic mime acting were to no avail, I finally conceded that the fireworks had not resolved the argument’s fire just yet. I suppose there’s always the next Red Line train in two weeks to continue that. And besides, these are the kinds of conversations that should be flowing across the lips of conscious young students in lounges throughout our rainy, café tabled cities. At the close of the night, He and I lay slung against car windows, arguments forgotten, explosions momentarily extinguished, leaving only K, who was softly singing to an audience of two:
“Got a mind, That lends me a strength, So I ain’t afraid to stand/Got a love, So deep in me, Can’t be stopped by any man”**
-------------
*Bob Dylan - "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie"
**Amel Larrieux - "All I've Got"
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Specters
From a Moving Train
Being a college student brings with it a number of freedoms. Such freedoms, however, often find their boundaries in the form of severe economic limitation, you know…being broke. Such a predicament lands the university Young in the nervous space between Urban Professional and Urban Poor. We may dress in J Crew and pretend that our PDA fiddling is really important, but our cheque books and ATM cards are not replenished nearly as well as our white collar buddies. In fact, in your average working week, the Spanish-speaking lady behind the counter has added more to the national GDP than most of us. And so it is that somewhere along the short-track to the chunky paycheck and all the right professional circles, the DC student reluctantly meets the backroom crowd behind the show-curtains of the city.
A casual visitor might be slightly curious as to why her late-night fellow train-carriage passengers look so very different compared to those power-stepping suits she spent the day people-watching with fascination. But more often than now, she won’t be. Rather, she’ll dismiss their weary, furrowed brows for that of TV President Martin Sheen on “West Wing” marathons back at her room. Or for the picture of the Capitol building which caught the pigeon, just as it flew off!, offering a satisfying action shot for her amateur flickr album her friends will eye at work. Nobody takes pictures on the metro. That is, except for artsy blurred shots of the approaching train, or when “I was, like…sooo wasted.” And yet the metro is perhaps the last remaining major point of contact between the owner class and the owner-servicing. These are the specters Marx once wrote of, haunting the City of Grey Suits through long graveyard shifts and bleary-eyed commutes.
It’s always struck me as ironic how people bicker about what’s going on “over there” (by which I mean on CNN), and how the Bruckheimer school of movie-making always involves protagonists resolving their problems by making the big, aerial-pan-over the-Capitol shot –worthy trip to DC. All the while, the majority of Washingtonians: Black, struggling, neglected – remain essentially invisible to the world at large. While streams of well maintained, over-committed professionals enter the Northwest quadrant between mid-morning and have fled for the comforts of over-priced condominiums by six, this hidden service class operate on a less traditional schedule.
If one pays close enough attention, the soul of the DC specter reveals itself on weekday evenings, becoming increasingly tangible as the period between trains lengthens. For 12-minute spans, it is present, if still largely hidden, as if the quiet giant of power-wielding Washington, whom almost all of them serve, may suddenly turn angry. At 16 minutes, the specter fleshes out, and at 20 minutes plus, it’s unveiled in the dangerous open, letting down its ever-present guard as midnight approaches. Scanning the carriage, one begins to see further into the wells of despondent, vacant eyes, normally so closed off and resilient. We see through ragged uniforms and unwashed faced, into the struggles of the silenced.
One look is a window into a world many of us have never known. There are 70-hour weeks, children with worrisomely weak immune systems, drug-infestations and incarceration. In two laborer’s eyes I taste the hollow hunger of economic pittance. They eye other passengers with a gaze filled with a thousand moments of glass ceiling taps, heard by no one, from phone calls home to tumultuous Salvadoran towns, they whistle the tune of millions of fringe-dwelling star-chasers.
They depart at their inner-suburb stations, flickering images becoming transparent once more. Before tomorrow’s rush, other shadows shall slide slowly through the aisles of each carriage, mopping spills, trashing newspapers.
And as daylight breaks, they rise with their demons already descending upon their shoulders, to greet another toil-filled day in the shadows of the visible.
Being a college student brings with it a number of freedoms. Such freedoms, however, often find their boundaries in the form of severe economic limitation, you know…being broke. Such a predicament lands the university Young in the nervous space between Urban Professional and Urban Poor. We may dress in J Crew and pretend that our PDA fiddling is really important, but our cheque books and ATM cards are not replenished nearly as well as our white collar buddies. In fact, in your average working week, the Spanish-speaking lady behind the counter has added more to the national GDP than most of us. And so it is that somewhere along the short-track to the chunky paycheck and all the right professional circles, the DC student reluctantly meets the backroom crowd behind the show-curtains of the city.
A casual visitor might be slightly curious as to why her late-night fellow train-carriage passengers look so very different compared to those power-stepping suits she spent the day people-watching with fascination. But more often than now, she won’t be. Rather, she’ll dismiss their weary, furrowed brows for that of TV President Martin Sheen on “West Wing” marathons back at her room. Or for the picture of the Capitol building which caught the pigeon, just as it flew off!, offering a satisfying action shot for her amateur flickr album her friends will eye at work. Nobody takes pictures on the metro. That is, except for artsy blurred shots of the approaching train, or when “I was, like…sooo wasted.” And yet the metro is perhaps the last remaining major point of contact between the owner class and the owner-servicing. These are the specters Marx once wrote of, haunting the City of Grey Suits through long graveyard shifts and bleary-eyed commutes.
It’s always struck me as ironic how people bicker about what’s going on “over there” (by which I mean on CNN), and how the Bruckheimer school of movie-making always involves protagonists resolving their problems by making the big, aerial-pan-over the-Capitol shot –worthy trip to DC. All the while, the majority of Washingtonians: Black, struggling, neglected – remain essentially invisible to the world at large. While streams of well maintained, over-committed professionals enter the Northwest quadrant between mid-morning and have fled for the comforts of over-priced condominiums by six, this hidden service class operate on a less traditional schedule.
If one pays close enough attention, the soul of the DC specter reveals itself on weekday evenings, becoming increasingly tangible as the period between trains lengthens. For 12-minute spans, it is present, if still largely hidden, as if the quiet giant of power-wielding Washington, whom almost all of them serve, may suddenly turn angry. At 16 minutes, the specter fleshes out, and at 20 minutes plus, it’s unveiled in the dangerous open, letting down its ever-present guard as midnight approaches. Scanning the carriage, one begins to see further into the wells of despondent, vacant eyes, normally so closed off and resilient. We see through ragged uniforms and unwashed faced, into the struggles of the silenced.
One look is a window into a world many of us have never known. There are 70-hour weeks, children with worrisomely weak immune systems, drug-infestations and incarceration. In two laborer’s eyes I taste the hollow hunger of economic pittance. They eye other passengers with a gaze filled with a thousand moments of glass ceiling taps, heard by no one, from phone calls home to tumultuous Salvadoran towns, they whistle the tune of millions of fringe-dwelling star-chasers.
They depart at their inner-suburb stations, flickering images becoming transparent once more. Before tomorrow’s rush, other shadows shall slide slowly through the aisles of each carriage, mopping spills, trashing newspapers.
And as daylight breaks, they rise with their demons already descending upon their shoulders, to greet another toil-filled day in the shadows of the visible.
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