Culture Watch

Late at night, I was nearly asleep on the couch; the phone rang. Jay Leach, the Baptist minister from Houston. Did I remember him? In my grogginess, there was no mistaking his tone: At 74, Vassar Miller’s seemingly endless life had been eclipsed by a final silence.

Poet, self-taught theologian, disability advocate, and feisty woman—Vassar Miller’s life was a confluence of desire, hope, and dire suffering. Few writers have been so unfailingly honest and determined to chink from the bounds of American letters a place for themselves. Paradoxically, save the admiration of a dozen of our most respected poets, she went to her grave in virtual anonymity.

A poet who wrote predominantly in traditional forms, she was among a handful of post-war formalists who wrote on religious themes. When you consider this was during the height of the Beats and the Confessional poets, choosing to write in form was not an idle undertaking. To paraphrase poet and critic Hayden Carruth, to write a poem is an act of love; ergo, Miller wrote the poems that had to be written. Those who cherish finely crafted poetry about spiritual issues, the struggle to find one’s self amidst a mostly godless world, read Vassar Miller. Not just for her countenance, but for her unflinching attempts to name the experience of an invisible woman, as in "Meditation after an Interview":

I speak myself, and my name
is only smoke
and less than smoke.

Yahoo for Hackers

Danny Duncan Collum 5-01-2000

Like so many big events of the digital age, the February shutdown of all those major e-commerce Web sites (Yahoo, E*TRADE, eBay, etc.) didn’t make much of a dent in my real life.

Yes, we have a computer and Internet access. But the computer is not in our house; it’s in an outbuilding we turned into an office. It’s only 20 feet from our back door, but those 20 feet, and a childproof lock on the door, are enough to separate our family’s real life from the virtual one. We unlock the door for specific work- or study-related purposes and lock it again when the job is done. The only exception is e-mail for far-flung family and friends.

As it happened, the day of the great Web meltdown was very cold, and I was out late with a night class. So I didn’t even walk those 20 feet to check the e-mail, much less fire up Yahoo in search of the latest TV and movie news. (Hey, for me that’s work-related!) When I finally did hear the news, the significance (dare I say justice?) of the event was plain.

Left historian Michael Kazin told The Village Voice that the e-commerce guerrillas are the direct descendants of Abbie Hoffman, and he was right. There has not been a more perfect symbolic, made-for-media political act since Hoffman and company dumped baskets of dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Unhooking Ourselves

Joe Kelly 5-01-2000

As an activist in the girls’ movement and father of two girls, I’ve always known that far too many advertising images were bad for girls. In a brilliant and logical argument, author Jean Kilbourne makes the connection between the premises of advertising and the scourge of addiction. Denial is the most intractable symptom of addiction, and Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising is among the most potent interventions available for our addiction to advertising, consumerism, and the immoral ways in which our commercial culture so often undermines our integrity.

For years, Kilbourne has taken her powerful, funny, and life-changing presentations to college campuses, businesses, and the federal government. Now she has combined this huge mine of information, insight, and critique into one outstanding book.

As Kilbourne shows, we are what’s for sale. Media outlets aren’t selling products to us so much as they are selling us to the products’ manufacturers. It works—what industry would spend $200 billion annually on something that doesn’t work? All we have to do is read the pages of advertising’s trade journals, where we see media ads proclaiming "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free," or "We deliver Gen-X," or "One magazine delivers an audience spending $38 billion annually on American Express cards." It’s easy to see the underlying attitude that suggests that we use people as products and objects. This is the same mindset as pornography, and we are harmed in the same way by it.

On Both Sides of Forgiveness

Edie Bird 5-01-2000

In a country where Jesus’ words "the truth will set you free" are the mandate of a national commission, where forgiveness and reconciliation are not some vague religious ideals but national policy, it’s difficult to look into the lives of ordinary people and not find faith at work.

David Goodman, who traveled to South Africa in the dark days of apartheid in 1984 and then lived with his family for a year in the newly democratic republic in 1996-97, examines the dramatic changes in South Africa in Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa. He doesn’t set out to write about religion, but the church has left such indelible marks upon the South African landscape that he can’t help but touch on deep questions of faith.

The church played a key role in both the construction and the dismantling of apartheid, with Christians on opposing sides during the struggle. Now, in the process of national healing, Christians stand on either side of forgiveness, as victims asked to forgive their oppressors and as oppressors asked to repent of the crimes.

While the emphasis on truth telling and repentance, and forgiveness and reconciliation, highlights the positive influence of the church in South Africa, the church’s role in perpetuating injustice is central to the story of Wilhelm Voerwoort III. The grandson of H.F. Voerwoort, the architect of apartheid, Wilhelm made headlines when he forsook his family’s legacy of white separatism and joined the African National Congress. This conversion came at the end of a long journey for Voerwoort, who at one time wanted to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. He realized that apartheid was a brutal and unjust system while studying abroad in the 1980s. When he returned home, he realized his church had supported this injustice and kept silent about the atrocities committed by whites against blacks. He left the church and, consequently, alienated himself from his family.

The Fire for Survival

Aaron McCarroll Gallegos 5-01-2000

Last year’s anti-World Trade Organization uprising was a reminder that there are detractors from the Pax Capitalista that currently placates some Americans with e-money and numbs others with the not-so-cheap thrills of day-trading. With unfettered consumption and development largely unchallenged, Seattle was one of those rare signs that this economic boom is leaving in its wake newly impoverished people and a devastated environment that has never been in worse shape.

All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, by long-time Native American activist Winona LaDuke, is another disturbing signpost. This book implicates the current boomtown mentality flowing through America and cautions us to learn new ways to live in harmony with the environment and with our neighbors.

LaDuke examines the often heroic struggles of indigenous communities in North America and Hawaii to regain control of their traditional lands and resist the onslaught of "development"—which is rarely aimed at improving life for America’s Native peoples, but very often comes at the expense of their land and resources.

There are close to 200 environmental groups based in Native communities, most of them, as LaDuke says, "underfunded at best and more often, not funded at all." In these small groups, which lack the cash of their mainstream counterparts in the environmental movement (who, as this book points out, have rarely proved to be Native people’s allies), LaDuke found Native environmentalists who "sing centuries-old songs to renew life, to give thanks for the strawberries, to call home fish, and to thank Mother Earth for her blessings."