No wonder we found ourselves rootless…
for we’ve become
the
very roots themselves, -- the lie can never
take
root and there grow under a truth of sun
and
therefrom bear the fruit of truth
--
Gregory Corso, from “Elegiac Feelings American”
I was a child of the suburbs, where it
was not necessarily easy to find something useful to do. My parents’ home rests
on one of the last streets completed before World War II interrupted the rising
tide of Cape-Cod style two bedroom homes that had been appearing all across the
rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. My mom was a nurse at a unionized
hospital for forty years; my father a real estate agent who helped start a
school for agent certification. Growing up, I shoveled snow from the sidewalks
and driveways of the original generation of Ridge Avenue homeowners, those who
purchased their home brand new, back when every tree that towered over my
childhood had yet to sprout. Much of Aston Township had been apportioned to
farms and families in William Penn’s original charter, and through the 1800s,
generally remained a rolling, agricultural countryside populated by farmers and
mills: sustainably quaint, economically localized, and necessarily social.
Detailed in the comprehensive nonfiction work Rockdale, my corner of Delaware County was historic, some of the
first organized and sustainable communities in the new continent. In high
school, I became only partially aware of
how thick with pavement and history my suburban streets were: the next
development over was built following
World War II, specifically as temporary housing for veterans returning home.
These cinder-block miniature ranch homes are still intact; each now bears the
mark of its inhabitants, past and present: new light fixtures, roofs,
landscaping and fencing, and the soft glow of light fixtures from behind thin
steel-framed windows.
While Philadelphia and Chester had larger industrial facilities lining the Delaware River (we would have lost World War II had it not been for the oil produced and refined in Marcus Hook and Chester, PA, an old timer told me), the region that would become my suburban home was, until those suburbs arrived, sustainably quaint, economically localized, and social. The shadow of the city of Chester defined my environment: the petroleum-based economic hub of the 1940s had become far less useful during the 1960s and 70s. Crime rates soared as businesses closed; homes left vacant became liabilities for municipalities, lacking tax revenue like never before. Growing up, I caught only a few glimpses of the row house where my mother was raised; I remember driving down 21st Street in Chester with the car doors locked, as she pointed out the street corner at which she mistakeningly left her clarinet and came back to find it still there hours later. I knew Chester mostly as being the urban array laid out beneath the on-ramp to the Commodore Barry Bridge, and usually saw it only when driving across the bridge, heading east into New Jersey, and probably down to the shore. My mother’s parents left Chester in the early 1960s, as my grandfather’s successful traffic light installation business allowed them to relocate to a split-level mini-mansion, in the still-developing countryside of West Chester: a version of ‘white flight’ that demarcated the growing edge of the suburbs in southeastern Pennsylvania. In 10th grade, Civil Disobedience was a principled and inspiring essay, but hard to apply to our lives, of part time jobs and marching band; in 11th grade, the Advanced Placement English teacher, Joan Skivo, was a Catholic nun on a second career, and had us analyze the lyrics to the Indigo Girls’ “Galileo,” while she beat us over the head for months with the Yeats quote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I will be forever grateful to her for establishing a sense of how to accomplish social change through patient, willful, creative challenge, an aspect of the examined life that would become a lifelong quest. In high school, however, my peers and I had little else but the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind behind which to rally, its cover bearing an image we all understood, and did not, I believe, see as parody: 'here we are now/entertain us.' As adolescents, my friends and I thought we understood the relationship between our pursuit of wealth and the security of a contenting future, one at the very least that would be lived out on the tree-lined streets of our parents, where we would gain our own mortgages, employment, and wallet full of economic obligations. In reflection, it seems that every harbinger of our future-- that one day we might inherent the bustling town of our parents, and in passionate intensity, cram our lives full of luxury, fast food and convenience—was implicit, understood. The film Clerks was important, as it satirized the ethical purgatory that may lie in our futures; lacking all but empathy for the members of our self-sanitizing communities, we quoted Michael Douglas’ character D-FENS in Falling Down, as we wandered around and became young adults. At high school graduation, the mystery of worlds beyond our own—the strange city on the other side of a commuter rail ride, the dense weave of residential and commercial lots along MacDade Boulevard that would morph into South Philly, and the flat stretches of South Jersey—was in sum to be feared as much as it was to be discovered.
I fled, without a drivers’ license, to a small-town college in Vermont, hitching rides with friends back to South Jersey and finally Aston, where I worked at a car wash, wearing a blue jumpsuit and working alongside the recently-incarcerated. I learned, inside of a liberal arts curriculum, some of the reasons behind environmental activism; a writing major, I wrote an experimental novel, trying to describe and understand my own flight, from the suburbs and into the mountains. When I moved away in 1997, I never returned to the same street again. With every trip home, more new and youthful families had moved in, as the elderly were dying off and the homes were each going on to the market and off again. New owners came and replaced the original asbestos siding with vinyl, cut down some of the trees that had started to reach over the roofs of the houses; they planted new trees and shrubs and hedges and added porches in the front yard or back, dormers in the roof where there had not been before, and redecorated postage-stamp half-acre plots, with profits made by keeping busy in the bustling, near-city world. A friend who stayed behind and ended up working at a community college information technology department coined a phrase to describe his hours at work, beneath desks repairing and replacing computers: times “when the man has his foot on your neck." Like the bank protestor in Falling Down, in June 2001 myself and three friends moved into a house together in rural Vermont, seeking any and all work. We found roles, but none were as useful to the economy as we had hoped to be: not economically viable. After graduation I found a job at a camera store that was to close within two years, where I developed some of the last rolls of film some of us ever bought,. During the holiday rush of 2001-- a time when everyone, it seemed, was interested in capturing and preserving their present-tense moments-- I sold digital cameras to young families, newlyweds, and grandparents. Jobs and people have and do drift, in and out of usefulness: some of my fellow college graduates have gone on since, to administrative assistant positions, gas station cashiers, teachers, farmers, spouses, nurses, summer camp employees, and award-winning Bank of America call center representatives.
Except for one house, my parents’ suburban street has almost completely turned over, and a new generation mows the same lawns. The last original owner, Virginia “Ginny” Garrison, has recently had a security system installed; everyone else on the street are the relocated children, or the children’s children, of some initial suburban generation, and who may bear a different expectation of safety and community than those who had come before. A few homes on my parent’s street are vacant; one is bank-owned, abandoned by its underwater owners. My grandfather, forever seeking to understand new technologies, did not live long enough to install a red-light traffic camera, or any other surveillance equipment on any public utility pole; my grandmother passed away before the class-action lawsuit was presented in court, that found the makers of her blood pressure medication guilty, of rushing to market a product without proper clinical testing. As camera sales and the film processing business quickly dried up during the spring of 2002, I sought new work, as a night desk clerk at a condominium rental complex in Killington. The admonition that comes at the close of Kenneth Patchen’s poem “Street Corner College” rang through my head, as no one checked in, and no one checked out once the snow melted: “we have nothing to do/nowhere to go/nobody.” My fellow graduates dissipated, into a world that was and remains in transition, increasingly post-industrial. The down-and-out condition of intellectual, if not spiritual and economic, poverty that gripped us then came alongside legislation that whittled down our exacting freedoms: following the passage of the Patriot Act, new limitations on our abilities to express our passionate intensity may be, in the name of security, necessarily curbed. As the Starr Report tried to debunk the moral character of the President of the United States, the post-9/11 world has had at its core an even more stinging critique for Generations X, Y, and Z: even if we were to pursue economic success from infancy to adulthood, we shall likely be drowned by the pursuit alone. The temporary government housing-turned-permanent is not success; the hull of a celebrated grocery store shopping plaza not twenty years old now sits vacant, replaced by another across town, victim to fickle public interest, now an unaffordable and empty relic of a fleeting capitalist moment. Part of the down-and-out condition of the twenty-first century may be the inherent bravery necessary to endure our shifting economy—to acknowledge and better recognize the psychic and psychological change that comes as our bodies outlive million-dollar facilities, and perhaps to see our communities’ economic viability with a better clarity than is available to the global institutions of power. Maybe we are in the process of discovering along our streets, and within ourselves and each other, a repurposing and retooling. My love for my hometown is accompanied by my hope for it to be most useful, beyond previous generations’ aspirations of privilege and luxury, beyond any ‘flight’ response, but to promote individuals' direct confrontation with the unfamiliar.
I provide this personal history in part to explain the impact of James Gandolfini, the actor who portrayed Tony Soprano in the HBO series The Sopranos: because his hometown looks a lot like mine, and maybe yours. The elongated city-burb that now stretches from New York to Baltimore might as well be North Jersey, and my old stomping ground—the last exit in Pennsylvania on I-95—has faced many of the same social, economic, racial, ethical and criminal challenges depicted in the show. Sociologists and scholars—if there are such roles in the future-- will likely be studying episodes of The Sopranos in years hence, to better understand the effect of individuals’ good and bad choices, during a period of transition, from industrial to post-industrial within a capitalist society. With ethical precedents established by the atrocities of the twentieth century, the setting of the Sopranos was not unlike Delaware County, and the Tri-State area (or, for example, the Tri-State Mall, just over the line in tax-free Delaware): a place where the falcon cannot necessarily hear the falconer, where attempts at organizing systems of control and power that challenge the status quo are not typically successful, and, despite a seemingly-limitless reserve of the inherent bravery and moral sense necessary to confront economic and social conditions, most characters seek to define a comfortable level of resignation. The fictionalized account of a organized crime boss illustrated for many the compassion and self-love required by our hardened and hardening world: as the mob boss wades in his backyard pool, able finally to realize true compassion for a family of migrating ducks, all of us were delivered an example of a universal lust for meaningful resonance with the non-human, natural world, something no amount of money or power could buy. Outside of the swimming pool, the character of Tony Soprano may have epitomized a certain kind of response to the psychological climate that still characterizes my suburb, giving life to the down-and-out condition and strain of constantly having to look over one’s own shoulder, forever guarded against the passionate intensity of the idle and underemployed, and working for the best possible outcome for his neighbors and friends. In Tony’s world, one’s own decisions and active choices were likely to contribute to one’s future conditions of economic viability; meanwhile, the entropic and often cruel world was likely to continue its haphazard pattern of interconnectivity between individuals, many of whom faced insurmountable internal and external challenges, and thus struggle with self control. Across six seasons, no one was spared from the grip of circumstance: not his compassionless mother, his educated yet professionally aloof shrink Dr. Melfi, his wife or his children, or any of his business associates, friends, or lovers (with still ten episodes left, my father said he looked forward to the show being ‘put out of its misery’). The dementia and paranoia that scrambles the motives of his uncle, Junior Soprano, become part of Tony’s heroism: the father survives a questionably-accidental shooting by a family member, living on to console his son, following his attempted suicide. He lives to see his daughter, Meadow, pursue a career in law, asserting and defending a set of ethics regarding fair and equitable housing—working within established systems and institutions, unlike her father.
The news of the sudden death of James Gandolfini came among other news that spoke of cries for social justice in many corners of the world: the headline interrupted the continued search for a former government contractor, following his revelation to the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper, of a massive domestic surveillance program run by the United States Government; anti-government protests raged on in Spain, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere; hunger strikes amongst detainees at the United States’ facility at Guantanamo Bay were getting scant media attention; that morning, a network of domestic surveillance drones had come to light. That evening, with all hopes of a Sopranos feature film gone, I realized the extent to which the actions of the characters in the show would become ridiculous, given the newly-revealed magnitude of our digital security state. Many of the scenes in The Sopranos (or the Godfather films, for that matter) may be inherently different, based on our passive and collective participation in willing and unbeknownst-to-us networks of information. Gandolfini had been on vacation in Italy; it was following a meal of fried shrimp, when the actor retired to his six-hundred-dollars-a-night hotel room, that his heart simply gave out, at age fifty-one. Recognizing that the final moments of the last episode of The Sopranos—his last look over his shoulder, as a familiar and hopeful rock anthem played—would be the last time I ‘saw’ Tony is itself a challenge: in this relatively-heroless post-industrial society, what power might the strongest of us come to ascertain? The psychological torment of being ‘always on call’ in order to protect and provide for his family become as much a part of Tony Soprano’s downfall as the external forces at work in his environment. It hasn’t mattered for a long time, whether my theory that the long-forgotten and unresolved plot line involving the Russian mob in season four is actually what comes through the door of the diner, at the abruptly-truncated ending of the show. Underwater and under surveillance as much as Tony ever was, we are capable of swimming because we have to be, in order to provide the best conditions possible for those we love and care about-- always bearing the hope that the valuable possession we mistakeningly left behind on the street corner is still there upon our return, and that conditions will prevail, and simultaneously, that we will survive the walk down that street today.
Two days after Gandolfini’s passing, I
was at a critical pedagogy conference hosted by Manhattanville College, where the keynote speaker was 1960s radical-turned-educator Bill Ayers.
While the institution did not especially tout or publicize the controversial
figure’s appearance on its website, the Masters of Fine Arts program hosted a
two-day gathering that focused remarkably on writing, as a means of
establishing a more clear understanding of one’s effective work and role in the
world. In his talk, Ayers—the 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year, and a
recently-retired professor at the University of Chicago—spoke generally, about
discovering the motivation within oneself, to change the world. Much of the
language used by Bill Ayers sounds like it could be taken from the New Jersey
Star Ledger’s top ten Tony Soprano quotes (the Star Ledger was the paper Tony
retrieved each morning from his driveway, until he stops the practice early in
season six, due to constant interactions with the government surveillance truck
parked on the street):
“you can’t act ethically if you don’t
open your eyes”—“fight to change yourself as you fight to change the world”—a
“blizzard of labels frames our thinking”—the “clichés with which we communicate”—“act
on the world, in order to learn”—“the dogma of common sense”—“privilege
anaesthetizes you”-- “being conventional is not the same thing as being
ethical”—“whenever you settle, you know you’re wrong.”
Aside from making jokes about drones
outside the window that nobody laughed at, Ayers challenged the few dozen
writers and teachers in attendance, to follow rules established by Mary
Oliver, in a terse list-of-advice poem: pay attention, be astonished, tell others
about it, and, Ayers added, doubt and question what is discovered. One key
adversity to be better recognized, according to Ayers, is our use of language; without providing
much specific comment on the media (interestingly, as Ayers’ comment on Obama
deserving to be brought up on “war crimes” had gained the attention of the
Drudge Report earlier in the week), Ayers described the language of power and
influence as being suspended between poetry and narrative, relatively
inaccessible to many sectors of society. While nobody at the conference spoke of George Orwell, Bill Ayers drew the crowd’s attention to the
importance and legacy of the1964 Freedom School Curriculum, calling for its use
in public classrooms, as a means of confronting both the “questions and
contradictions” that continue to pervade our communities. Both the “questions
and contradictions”—about where we came from, and where we are going—will save
us, said Ayers. “The contradictions will save us.” In one small example of new
ethics of social responsibility, he praised then-governor Mike Huckabee’s
initiative, to print every public school student’s Body Mass Index on their
report cards; when challenged by a difficult question from the crowd to speak
more about how this initiative would promote community, Ayers drew connections
to Michelle Obama’s nutrition programs in schools, but also noted the important
question, of “who owns the foodservice contract?” Asking critical questions to existing structures of class and power is a skill many of us may seek to hone. To what extent may any
individual resign to a selective blindness, to ignore the challenges of
connection and community in society—as Tony was able to accomplish, in his
relationship with his mother, his wife, his business associates, and the public
at large?
One of the most resonant episodes of The Sopranos involves a brutal portrait of ‘vulture’ capitalism: a degenerate gambler insists on his inclusion in Tony’s high stakes, private game (at which Frank Sinatra, Jr. makes a cameo), and, extended a line of credit far beyond his means by one of Tony’s crew, the guy loses not only his daughter’s college fund, but ownership of his successful ‘big-box’ sporting goods store franchise. By the end of the episode, the business’ lines of credit have been far overextended (Paulie Walnuts grins as he carries cases of imported wine, delivered to the store), the inventory liquidated, and the hulking shell of the store left empty. The guy leaves his wife and child, heading to Las Vegas. Across all seasons of The Sopranos, no character extends a line of credit ('points') that even comes close to being as much as many credit card companies and private lenders are willing and able to charge: by direct mail, some organizations located on native reservations located within the United States have started advertising lines of credit and immediate loans at percentage rates of 200% or more. Separate arguments in favor of capitalist, corporate responsibility, and in recognition and full scrutiny of a global system of economic inequality, are needed, to be refined, challenged, and revised; also, individuals must assert themselves, their beliefs and ethics, through making choices that will sustain them, as they act on their own behalf, and, at times, on behalf of their community. We must all commit to living beyond our mere achievement of maintaining a quiet desperation or ‘passionate intensity.’ But we must also honor those generations before us, and understand that the power dynamics established by the Bill of Rights may not yet have been distributed equally, and that we—through our action of residency alone—are individually and collectively integral to helping define the next manifestation of this democracy, more perfect or not. Like James Gandolfini’s character Tony Soprano, we to learn to stop teetering between humility and heroics, lest our fear and panic cripple us, but to be bold, as we seek better understanding how our actions affect and impact those around us, and our neighbors, and characterize the legacy that will be the paths we trod on now. Despite foreclosures, insolvency, and economic viability, it will be our children, and their children, that will be each other’s neighbors, in total the next group to transition into, and live out long days beneath, the roofs of these little pink, blue, green, black, white, and yellow houses. And they, and we, will probably live as well within webs and networks we have yet to imagine.
