Syzygeist

"Walking Papers" by Sandra Hochman

Take this as a slice of New York Life, where just about everything interesting that happens is unexpected. 
I am in an East Side Hospital, waiting for my turn with the physical therapist to work over my recently operated-on arm. They have reattached a detached bicep tendon (thank you, Little League, for your demands on aging fathers) without which you have no working bicep muscle. 
Overheard down the hall is an ever-so-New-York-kinda-voice of an elderly(?) and possibly Jewish woman complaining of pain in her foot and imminent steps to be taken with a podiatrist to make shoe inserts that will alleviate the agony of her Plantar Fasciitis.
Wanting to help the world - one painful step at a time - I intervene to confess that I have had that condition, tried the useless podiatrist and inserts, then benefited from counsel from an internist I met sailing in Maine who said Forget the Podiatrist. The answer to your condition is Birkenstocks. 
I wear them almost all the time now to occasional odd looks which I ignore because my foot is no longer killing me, thank you. In fact the bad foot in Birkenstocks now works as it once did. Birkenstocks work!
I deliver this news to the woman in the hallway and soon discover she is not just any random woman of New York but a highly accomplished writer - Sandra Hochman, Pulitzer nominee for poetry, author of "Walking Papers" (Viking, 1971), the first of six novels, several books of avant-garde poems (Earthworks, Love Letters from Asia), Year of the Woman ((1973), an early and controversial documentary about the early women's movement, and most recently author of an imminent Broadway production based on her children's story, "Timmy the Great."
Some weeks later Sandra invites me to her 75th birthday party in a towering but small apartment on East 79th Street. By then she has read "Into My Father's Wake," the book that I sent her as sort of a get-to-know-me present between writers (and hoping she might offer some helpful advice). She responded like the teacher and mentor she has often been to others (she started the "You're an Artist Too" foundation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to teach poetry and song writing to children aged 7-12 and ran it for 15 years) generously saying she admires my book and wants to help me get it published.
I do not make a point then of saying that it has been published (Amazon) because she comes from a world where only real publishers (Viking et al) count. "Self" cannot be a valid publisher in the world in which she came of age - despite the advent of the New Economy. 
And as I will learn over our first lunch together, she has been very close with poet Robert Lowell and novelist Saul Bellow and other prodigious writers (including Philip Roth) of the officially published world. I am coming to believe that this rare literary woman's life should be made into a movie (what about a musical?) about women who have lived three-quarters of a century but seem to have had half a millennium of experience in that time, and remain far, far from dead. 
By now I have secured a copy of "Walking Papers" from the New York Society Library and what do I discover? A tour-de-force of language and imagery and a highly independent woman's consciousness, often delivered in poetry-as-prose, lyrical commentary on ideas and feelings that spill out as vivid experience. This is a wonderful, rare and often very funny book that was way ahead of her time. 
"Walking Papers" should be dusted off and read by any woman who thinks her own deeper feelings of post-divorce rage and fear and scars of a lonely custody-fight childhood and frustration and despair regarding the ways of men, lovable and treacherous as they can be, or the elusiveness of enduring love are unique to themselves. And men should read it to learn that yes, women think about those things too.

Moreover, "Walking Papers" stirred me to remember break-through writers who moved me when I was a much younger student - Alain Robbe-Grillet comes to mind, whose rule-breaking style made his work uniquely modern and changed the way many people thought about fiction. 
So I marvel at this chance encounter in a hospital hallway that brought me to a breakthrough novel of its time that still has the power to inspire after all these years. How did I miss "Walking Papers" the first time around? Why weren't students of fiction like me forced to read it? (Some issues of feminism might be at work here.) 
Thanks to a couple of sore feet, New York life gave me a second chance.

9/11 Threat? Looking back, not ahead!

Despite the attention being paid to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the past may well be beside the point. What is in front of us is much more important than what is behind us. 

The Twin-Towers attack, notwithstanding its individual tragedy and economic and political impacts, both domestic and international, distracted us from the future that we wish to create and put us at risk of not being able to create it. "It" is, broadly speaking, a better world than we found when we got here - inside and outside our borders.

Nations, like communities and families, must decide how to allocate resources to sustain the present and build for the future. Getting the enemy to mis-allocate resources to a fatal degree is an old and clever strategy. Many in the military and elsewhere believe we caused the Soviet Communist system to collapse by forcing them to overspend on defense when they could least afford it. 

Al Qaeda has effectively done that to the US. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, we overreacted at a time when we could not afford to devote so many resources outside our own domestic challenges. (Defense spending under Bush jumped from 3.6 to 6 percent of GDP). We launched a war into Iraq on a false pretext. Homeland security exploded. And Obama has held to that overall trajectory, upping the ante in Afghanistan against the informed counsel of his own Vice President. (And we continue to fire drone missiles into countries against whom we have not declared war, killing innocents along the way.)

According to the National Priorities Project, the United States has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of that, homeland security spending alone has cost $635.9 billion. Funding for homeland security has risen from $16 billion in FY2001 to $71.6 billion requested for FY2012. Defense spending for 2012, much of it predicated on the terrorist threat, is projected to reach $703 billion, or roughly 5% percent of current projected Gross Domestic Product. That's also a little more than half of the $1.3 trillion deficit.

If even one trillion seems unfathomable, that's because it is. How big is one trillion? Maybe this will help:

If you had started spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars (CNN reports). Actually, you would have spent roughly the equivalent amount the US plans to spend on defense this coming year. A mathematician puts it like this: "1 million seconds is about 11.5 days. 1 billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years."

So $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security in one decade represents an allocation of capital that is unprecedented in human history (the entire US economy in one year is worth about $12 trillion).

Could the US afford $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security over the last decade? It would appear not, on the face of it.

It's not that nothing should have been spent, but the focus outward on the terrorist threat that might arrive here has managed to ignore the inward needs of the US, which are beginning to play out now with greater force. 

Thomas Friedman recently noted the convergence of four negative conditions in the world today: power arrangements radically changing in the Middle East; Europe struggling to save its financial house; China teetering for reasons of its own; and the US in a political stalemate as its currency weakens, its economy grows less competitive and its fiscal order resembles that of an early developing country.

Presently the President and Congress are fiddling, unable to agree on spending or cuts or taxes - the CBO currently estimates a $1.3 trillion deficit for 2011, the third largest in 65 years - or priorities that should guide our actions for a stronger future. 

The US simply has to get its act together if it is to serve as a linchpin of healthy democracy, an engine of growth and a purveyor of freedom in the world. Freedom in this case would mean an environment where individuals are free to pursue and to realize their dreams. And that would mean we are investing wisely and well in our future, not squandering resources out of fear, imprisoned by the force of memories better left behind.