Insouciance Rules

Connie Kronlokken

Don is in Europe for a couple of weeks, filming in hospitals in France, Germany and Spain with a small crew for Intel Corporation. Without him, there is less flurry around the house. I play loud Rastafarian music (mostly Bob Marley) in the mornings while I have breakfast and go dancing off to work. When I come home, the house is exactly as I left it. This morning the kitchen is covered with dishes left from a Brazilian dinner our friend Raquel cooked at our house last night, swordfish marinated in lime juice, and stewed with tomatoes, onions, peppers, cilantro and coconut milk. It was delicious over rice. Tonight my only job is to wash these dishes. Clearly, I am carefree these days.

Some nights I’ve gone walking around the man-made lake which is part of the Marin County Civic Center, a prominent feature of our neighborhood. It is hard to love this lake, which is surrounded by manicured lawns, a few trees and an asphalt path which one has to tread very carefully to avoid fresh duck poop. Aerator fountains gush up from the middle of the lake. Many ducks and geese obviously do use it as a stopping place. Last week, there were hundreds of Canadian geese, and the usual quotient of mallards and gulls. They are appealing, but I wonder why they choose this crowded man-made landscape as a place to meet. People feed the ducks here, of course, and it may be stocked with fish since I’ve seen people (boys, but also grown men!) with fishing tackle and more than one line in the water. But it isn’t big or deep, the landscaping is minimal and it just isn’t that pretty.

What is fun about walking around the lake is seeing the people who use it. Most of them were speaking other languages than English, parents with children, women walking together, people on bicycles or jogging. I imagine that they are used to “passeggiata,” the venerable tradition of the evening stroll in Europe, and are trying to maintain it here. Two sides of the lake form the grounds on which the county fair and other shows are set up, and one of the nights I walked a large dog show was in the offing. Huge mobile land cruisers were parked in a lot and a few station wagons.  People were sharing a barbecue, show dogs in attendance. I find my favorite spot, a bridge over a dry creek bed full of reeds, rocks and grasses (the most natural-looking spot), and do a slow tai chi set just after sundown. The sky turns violet and the air turns crisp. My limbs stretch and my lungs fill. As I finish, a man who is jogging stops to ask me where I take classes, but turns away as I explain we go all the way to San Francisco.

Last weekend I took all the books off the shelves and vacuumed the dust behind them. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time. We have limited shelf space, on purpose, and I know that Don thinks that some of the books, which don’t get taken down for long periods of time (the dust is evidence!), are unnecessary. We do cull both books and CDs every year at Christmas, making a big box of those we think we have heard enough of or can do without, wrapping them up as white elephants for family members. “Reduce, re-use, recycle, repair,” they say, and we do. Particularly fun for me was categorizing the books, which had gotten out of order. I find that we have lots of literature, quite a few photography books, some technical and film books, travel, history, and quite a sizable Asian collection (both literature and philosophy).

Another election year is about to begin. It feels like there must be some sort of cultural turning point this year, but what it will turn on is open to speculation. Reading Henry Miller I find that not much has changed since 1957, when he sat up on Partington Ridge, Big Sur, California, and wrote:

“As a people, we Americans have submitted to some perilous experiments. Ever since 1914 we have been trying to patch things up for the world. Not with a clear, clean conscience, it is true, but not entirely in hypocritical fashion either. In brief, we have behaved as a people would who have had more than their share of the good things of life, who have not been crippled morally, physically and spiritually by successive invasions and revolutions. Yet we have failed completely to ameliorate the harrowing conditions which beset the rest of the world. Not only that, but we ourselves have deteriorated and retrogressed. We have lost much of the character, the independence, the buoyancy and resiliency, to say nothing of the courage, faith and optimism, of our forefathers. Still a young nation, we are already weary, filled with doubts and misgivings, and absolutely at sea as to what course to pursue in world affairs. All we seem able to do is to give ourselves more injections and arm to the teeth. When we do not truculently threaten or menace, we wheedle, cajole and appease as best we know how. It is clear to all the world that all we really care about is to enjoy our huge piece of pie in peace and tranquility. But we know now beyond all doubt, and it is this which disturbs us profoundly, that we cannot enjoy our pie while the rest of the world starves. We cannot even have our piece of pie unless we aid others to have theirs too. (Assuming that they want pie and not something more substantial.)”

For Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker in August, 2007, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, who seems pro-American, may herald a turning point.

 “The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words . . . What [they] have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America. . . They all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. . . The election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era.”

At this point, without ignoring the rest of the world, it seems that America must grow up a bit and solve some of its pressing internal problems. Without a television, we haven’t been watching the candidates as they spar for story and space in the mediated culture, but one of my office mates, Jacque, who has watched some of them, says that Dennis Kucinich, without a chance in the world of becoming President, exhibits great cheerfulness and good spirits. He is an unincorporated candidate and is now mounting his second presidential campaign with nothing more than a strong grass-roots organization. He has been unequivocal about his demands for peace and is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Regarding the health care problem Kucinich says of the other Democratic candidates: “If you don’t have the courage to take on the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, don’t try to fool the American people by pretending to offer real reform. The Clinton, Obama, and Edwards plans will ensure that for-profit companies remain in control, and they will be rewarded and enriched with federal subsidies to reduce the prices they charge. Instead of gouging the consumers, they’ll be gouging the taxpayers.” Unfortunately, Dennis spends his time trying to get consideration as a viable candidate. The value of such a campaign is that it opens up issues for real discussion and points to the fact that we do have choices.

Personally I look forward to the “post-American” era, in which we begin to reconsider our roots, our phenomenal ability to solve problems and become grateful for the amazing quality of the sweet and sour pie we have been granted. Bob Marley had “only a porridge, the which I share with you.” The three little birds on his doorstep told him “Don’t you worry 'bout a thing, cause every little thing’s gonna be all right.” Bob Marley essentially refused health care, hastening his death to everyone’s loss, but that was all right too.

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