Monogamy, an essay in three parts

Part I -- How It Started

If you plan on reading Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" be warned that a small spoiler is contained below.

In the middle of Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" there is a love story. World War I has exploded across Europe at long last and our young lovers are fleeing across the countryside seek a safe haven.

Pretty standard fare...except this is Pynchon who never does anything standard. Our young lovers are Yashmeen, a European heroine with a head for numbers; Reef, rugged American adventurer from a very colorful Colorado family, and Cyprian, the Brit who has mooned after Yashmeen since college days despite the fact they were both, for most of their lives, confirmed homosexuals. It does change things, doesn't it? Except...it doesn't. Sure, at first Cyp is there more as an audience and Reef, he's sure he's far too macho to ever be gay, except, by the time Cyprian leaves the other two, it's very plain that all three love each other very much.

While I have mixed feelings about "Against the Day," I really enjoyed their story and, to no one's surprise, it got me thinking. When did we decide that love was a two-way street; that it needs to be confined to two people and two people only? Yash, Reef, and Cyp get away with it because the world's gone to war and no one is really paying any attention to them. They also get away with it because they are fictional characters in the book of a very liberated author who will let them. Still, Cyprian, realizing the world won't let their relationship survive the war, stays behind in a monastery so the two people he loves most can continue to be together.

Ok, I hear you, gentle reader, saying how could anyone so hard-bitten and cynical even have been interested in a love story? Is there really something that softens Mother's heart? Whether it's a combination of primary and secondary sexual traits that attract someone and makes them want to procreate and continue the species, or whether it's the compatibility of life scripts between people so that each individual finds and bonds with people they perceive as meeting their pyschological needs, let's acknowledge that we are attracted to some people more than others, that we emotionally bond with other people, that we find other people physically attractive, and when all of that comes together and is mutually held, we call it love and it is a good thing. Is it limited to couples only? Is that a blessing or a curse? Is not the companionship of more than one person better than the companionship of only one person? If romance between two people is good, would not romance between three be even better?

In my very unscientific sampling of my THH guinea pigs, I mean research group, it appears that most people, regardless of their other beliefs, have some need or desire for monogamy, here meaning a single relationship between two people. Even the resident anarchist leans towards monogamy. Two people. One life-time commitment. Exclusivity. But we didn't start out that way. Like most mammals, we started out a much less discriminating species.

Part II -- A Brief History of Monogamy

Back in the early days of humankind, groups divided themselves into men and women and pair off collectively, meaning all the men were one half of the couple and all the women were the other half. But then, we got civilized. One of the first things we did as civilized beings was to decide that property needed to be passed down to our progeny. For that to happen, we had be certain of who our progeny were. Thus, the male-dominated relationship wherein women could be killed for infidelity was established. Men had to have some degree of certitude that they were passing on their property, title, wealth, etc, to actual, real, blood descendants, and the way to do that was lock up and repress the women. So, we all got civilized and each man got to marry and bind his women to him, which eventually became just one woman. And thus all the wealth did stay in the family and life was good -- for men and their first-born sons anyway.

And what were women told? Women were told about true love. They were told fairy tales about how if they became submissive slaves, cheerfully doing all the household drudge-work, their prince would come and carry them off because he had a castle that needed a good cleaning by a cheerful submissive…or something like that, sometimes I get a little fuzzy on my fairy tale details. They were told good, virtuous, lady-like women put up with their men folk so they could experience the rewards of child-bearing, and that their men, deep down, loved them. If their man beat them, it was out of love. If they fooled around, well, it was probably something you as an ignorant woman did, so you better do better next time. What you didn’t do is get out and get yourself another man. Only brazen hussies and wicked, fallen women did things like that. Nor were you able get out and get by with no man at all. Good women did what they did for “love,” but it also kept them from becoming paupers, because they had no means of self-support. Remember, all that wealth, property and so forth was being passed down to male heirs. So good women did what they were allowed to do. They met a man, they got married, and then they had kids.

And that is where monogamy came from. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?

Part III – The Wow Finish

But wait! ‘Cause here’s where it gets interesting! In the post-WWII era, suddenly corporations discovered what valuable assets women are. Women are able to earn their own money, they can hire their own cheerful submissives to do the drudge-work, and have their own property, wealth, etc. to pass on to the progeny, and they know which kids are theirs because child-birth isn’t something you forget easily. What happens? In the words of Tammy Wynette, “Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes fin-al to-day…” Half of all marriages famously end in divorce. People wait longer to get married. Fewer people get married.

We’ve been conditioned to still want, based on my unscientific sampling, one person to love us and choose us above all others. Yet, the reality for a lot of us isn’t a single life-time marriage, but serial monogamy, consecutive true loves, mates for every age and stage of adult life. How great of a leap is it, then, from consecutive relationships to concurrent ones, and if we can accept concurrent relationships, how far is it from there to shared relationships? Personally, I think it’s damn near impossible to find one person to love who loves you back. Finding two people to love you and to love each other: It seems like such a long shot. Thinking back among the world’s great lovers there are Neal and Caroline Cassady and Jack Kerouac; Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Mrs. Miller. Then there are all those so-called adult films that aren’t really very adult at all, and that 80-year-old man and his three young bouncy blondes on late-night cable. Doesn’t sound like a very promising group. But when you are going against a society that insists on pairing people up two-by-two, you are bound to run into difficulties. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe it could happen, but it would take an evolution of society far beyond what we’ve reached today.

Concurrent relationships would require less sense of ownership of another person than anything we’ve had since our cave-dwelling ancestors. Don’t we still make remarks about “sinking her claws” into a man or “slipping a ring on her finger before she gets away”? They would require a re-shaping of our mythology about true love, something else the unscientific sampling was fond of. To maintain our belief in true love, we will tell ourselves that only our mate is attractive to us and only our mate meets our emotional needs. Until that relationship falls apart and we go looking for another. And we will ignore the possibility that if we can love consecutively, we also are capable of loving concurrently, that there’s more than one true love out there, there may be a lot more true loves out there.

To get all the way to a shared relationship, we also would have to reshape the idea that there are straight people and gay people, and accept that there is straightness and gayness in all people, including ourselves. It has taken years to get some people even to accept that there are gay people and they have a right to exist, and there are still those clinging to the notion that there is something “evil” about homosexuality. So, yes, I think society will keep embracing monogamy, though I think it will become even more of an ideal and even less of a reality, and we will beat ourselves up about our failure to find it. Three will be kept in the domain of certain adult films, half-crazed literary figures, and the characters they create. Society will continue to enforce an antiquated system of ensuring that the only seed that finds its way to a womb is planted by the rightful owner and we will call it true love.

Eating with Chopsticks (left-handed)

The child, being mine, is as comfortable with chopsticks as she is with a fork. We go out for various Asian foods regularly and she’s offended if the serving staff brings her a fork, assuming she’s too young or too Caucasian to handle sticks. She learned from me and I learned so long ago I can’t remember when I learned. I said this to a friend of mine who then issued a challenge: next time I was having fried rice try using my non-dominant hand. It’s a good exercise and a good allegory.

Doing anything left-handed if you are a right-handed person, forces you to not rely on reflex, memory, or habit. You have to think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You have to pay attention to the choices and decisions you’re making. You end up, not only with a lap full of food, but with a new or improved perspective of something that was so automatic you had stopped thinking about it.

Too often, life is about getting to that level of comfort that allows us not to think. We get there and suppose we’ve arrived. We equate mastering one set of skills done one way with mastery of all. We get into ruts, routines, quagmires of boredom, both mental and physical. Let those ruts get deep enough and we can start missing what’s around us. Breaking away, taking a second look, following a different path keeps the view fresh and the mind sharp.

Here are a couple of examples:

I live in the suburbs and usually commute to my job in downtown Los Angeles on the train. From the sidewalk, downtown LA is like a small town. The buildings don’t require street addresses, they are known as Library Tower or Wells Fargo or Arco Plaza, and they can all be recognized but their sculptures or entrance ways. At sidewalk level everything is cozy and small, but every so often I have to drive into work and the whole landscape changes. Two-way sidewalks turn into one-way streets, and suddenly everything looks so big, one huge wall of concrete and glass adjacent to another. Looking out the windshield my little village becomes unrecognizable. I have to look for street signs instead of landmarks because a newsstand or a fountain disappears at 30 mph. It’s a reminder that where I work really is the second largest city in the country.

I’m a life-long liberal. I’ve always thought of liberals as the good guys. Or I did. One day, while surfing through the usual assortment of What Hath George Wrought, I see an article on one of the left-wing blogs about Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The author claims she is aghast that Romney is not putting for position papers on the hearing of Warren Jeffs of the Fundamental Latter Day Saints, a very small, fringe religious group that was alleged to be engaging in forced arranged multiple marriages between older men and underaged girls. The hearing was to determine if there was enough evidence to charge Jeffs. She wasn’t asking Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton to jump in with opinions about something that hadn’t gone to trial, hadn’t resulted in a conviction, but Romney, she insisted, needed to take a stand. Why? Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget how the left railed against people who thought John Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith would affect his ability to fairly govern the country. Forget how the left has fought to keep religion out of politics and out of government. Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget even that it has been more than 100 years since the Latter Day Saints Church renounced polygamy and that the Latter Day Saints Church as nothing, zip, zero, zilch, nada to do with Jeffs and his group, because Romney is a Mormon. I read her tirade and it was my turn to be aghast. I don’t want Romney to be President for a lot of reasons, but being Mormon is not one of them, anymore than Obama’s race or Clinton’s gender are reasons they should not be president. Liberals don’t generate this kind of guilt by implied association. And yet, there it was, in pixel and bits on the computer screen, a liberal behaving badly. Worse than badly: unconscionably. Being Left is not the same as being right. Lesson learned.

Maybe I’d starve if I tried to eat every day with chopsticks left-handed, but looking at what we know we believe, what we believe we think, and what we think we know, can nurture us in ways we never imagined.

It's not our freedom they hate

Author’s note: Wow! You’ve got to get up early in the morning if you are going to stay a relevant blogger. (I guess that’s why people always picture bloggers in their PJs.) So I had a blog started at the office, forgot to e-mail it to myself and now it’s irrelevant and I’ve got to start over.

I was going to avoid this until next month, but after the exchange over at THH (http://thehellhole.forumup.org/about414-thehellhole.html) and the release of Oliver Stone’s film (http://www.wtcmovie.com ) I guess now is as good as time as any to start touching on the subject.

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Yeah, let’s talk about 9/11 (or 11/9 for our Brit Pals – more than willing to make accommodations for you folks, you saved a lot of American bacon last week). Background: Mother was working in the financial services industry back in ’01 – mutual funds to be exact – and I was on a business trip and subsequently stranded for a couple of days. My boss at the time was one subway stop away from WTC and was one of those people you saw on CNN trying to outrun the cloud of debris caused by the towers’ collapse. The board members I was playing stenographer to in San Francisco were all lifelong New Yorkers who had spent their careers in the finance industry. Part of my regular job was to talk to people from the big brokerage houses in Manhattan, including some at WTC. The company had an office in Midtown Manhattan where a co-worker’s husband, who worked in Tower 1, was missing for 18 hours in the confusion, while the airborne scraps of lives cut short drifted over the river and into her front yard in Brooklyn. Financial Services is a small world; everybody knows everybody. Every aspect of our working lives was affected by 9/11, in addition to, just like the rest of the country, the very personal yet very collective experience of that day.

But here we are five very long or very short years later, and people, primarily media people looking for box office and/or ratings, want to have a look back. My initial reaction is “Back??? How on earth can you look back? We are still living it, still directly in the aftermath, the foaming blood-stained wake. How can you look back on events when they are still unfolding?” But in the new media with its never-ending news cycle, events must be pared down, and we are being forced to separate the events of the single infamous day from all the fallout, though it drifts down on us daily like some eerie, radioactive snow. And even so, I shrink from looking back to that day. This isn’t yet a scar that can be displayed after a few beers on a Saturday night. It isn’t even yet a scab that can be picked at to reveal bright pink layers of newly formed skin. To me, this is still one big, national, gaping, sucking, blood-spurting wound. As a nation we are hardly out of psychological intensive care where 9/11 is concerned. Yet the anniversary approaches and CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Oliver Stone, and probably the Home Shopping Channel, are demanding we explore everything from the jagged edges of torn flesh to deepest layers of shrapnel embedded in the tendon and muscle of our still recovering country.

And so, the first thought that comes to mind is the size, how really monumental the moment felt. There was no doubt that this was a moment of enormous human historic importance. Without consciously thinking it, I knew this was going to change everything. None of us in American who were live that day would be the same when we awoke tomorrow, given we were lucky enough to have a tomorrow. The second impression was how it seemed so incomprehensible. There was a disconnect from what we all knew and accepted to be true – that we were safe within our borders. True, only a few years before homegrown terrorists had blown up a building in Oklahoma City, but that single attack, followed by the quick identification and capture of the people responsible had, in some ways reinforced our feeling of invincibility. This was the act of local, homegrown whackos – 9/11 was, is, and remains, an act of war.

I can hear some people already, saying Mother, you old peacenik you! How can you say such a thing? You sound like that Shrub in the Whitehouse! Because, children, it’s true. I don’t think many of us realized then that war had been declared on us because the first strikes were distant – the USS Cole, the bombing of Embassies, the comparatively minor first attack on WTC. We didn’t see their importance. The media swept them away in what was then a 24-hour news cycle to be replaced by cloned sheep, Chuck & Di’s divorce, how Timmy was faring at Wimbledon. We didn’t know we were at war, but our enemies did. We had treated them like flies to be swatted at. We didn’t hear them except as a faint buzzing. We didn’t listen. We didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on in far-flung regions of the world. Now, we didn’t have to. Now, the war we didn’t know existed had been dropped on our doorstep. And afterwards, some might say even right up to this moment, Americans still didn’t understand who the enemy was, why the enemy hated us, where they were from, or what their history was, and so we are destined to remain in a war, and I’m not talking about the one in Iraq, neither side can win.

The third impression I’ll save for the moment and move to the fourth – shame. Too quickly, many in our nation moved from the shock and horror of the day to hatred. Not some new hatred of some new enemy. No, these were old hatreds being allowed to come out of the closet under the guise of patriotism. These were the days when most Americans didn’t know an Arab from a Persian or a Sunni from a Shiite. Sadly, what some people did know were “camel jockeys,” “towel heads” and worse. We couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map, but we were more than willing to blow the shit out of it. I remember the impatience of the American public – when are we going to start kicking ass? What’s taking Bush so long? I guess he’s made up for that lost time by now, hasn’t he? While what felt like a slight handful of us were asking for patience, were looking for alternatives to violence -- to stop the escalating cycle of violence begetting more violence before it could start -- most of America wanted instant retribution. Suddenly our neighbors couldn’t be trusted because they were dark-skinned, spoke with a foreign accent, didn’t wear the same clothes we wore. Certain businesses suddenly had far fewer customers. Where I live, a man was pulled from his vehicle and beaten, his assailants believing him to be from the Middle East. They only realized their mistake when their victim’s pleas for help were uttered in Spanish. He was recently arrived from Mexico, the country of his attackers’ parents and grandparents. The nation was spoiling for a fight. Something needed to get blown up and fast. Subsequently, we blew up Afghanistan, we blew up Iraq, we allowed Israel to blow up Lebanon and Gaza, and for some people, apparently all this is still not enough. And the enemy, the enemy whose war we could no longer ignore five years ago, that enemy continues to grow stronger and will eventually act again with the same boldness because we still don’t seem to understand who we are fighting or why. We still don’t listen. We still don’t learn.

But let’s go back to that third impression. Impression No. 3: The hope of that day. New Yorkers pulled together. Americans pulled together. From here in the United States it felt like the whole world pulled together. There was a website that displayed messages and images of support from everywhere, from tiny Greek Islands to the island-continent of Australia, from always friendly Canada to former enemy Russia, from trusted ally Britain to not-always-trusted China. That day, wandering San Francisco in search of an open restaurant, people were friendlier. They remembered the manners their parents had taught them. People were the people they always knew they could be if they tried, and they stayed those people for weeks afterwards. Americans had the goodwill of the world, and I’d say a majority of them deserved it in those first early hours of this new world we were going to have to live in from now on. So many people died, and those who survived will always carry with them the images of those lost. To this day, I honestly, truly believe there isn’t a single American who wants those deaths to be in vain – no matter what political stripe we wear, no matter if we are pro-war or anti-war, no matter where we live or what direction our lives have taken these past five years. We want for those that suffered so terribly that day to be able to rest their spirits knowing that somehow, at some point, their deaths will have meaning. I remember thinking at the time that this new dawn would grow to shed its light on a new era of peace; that people had at last realized that we are all connected, we are a global community, and the plight of one is the plight of all.

Five years on, with all that goodwill squandered by our government and the country bogged down in an ill-advised, poorly executed, downright shameful war, that thought would be almost comical if it weren’t for the tragic truth that we are all connected and the plight of one -- be it an Iraqi shopkeeper in Baghdad, an American exchange student in Beirut, a grandmother in Tel Aviv, a stockbroker in Manhattan, a working mom in Los Angeles, a musician in Great Britain, an economics major in Denmark, or a motorcycle-riding hell-raiser in Delaware – is the plight of all, but too many people are still years of bloodshed, hatred, ignorance, and intolerance away from realizing the truth of it.

Five years ago, I wasn’t a particularly political person. Five years later, I feel a moral obligation to voice my dissent with this government. Five years ago, this country was a place for freedom and optimism. Five years later, it is a place of unreasoning fear, stained to its soul by the shame of becoming too much like its enemies. Five years ago, I couldn’t believe what was happening. Five years later, I can’t believe it hasn’t happened again. Five years ago, I couldn’t conceive of an attack within the continental US. Five year later, the next time is only a matter of time. I hope that when we are finally able to have a real look back, say in 50 years, when the whole story of 9/11 has played out, in Afghanistan, in Britain, in Iran, in Iraq, in Israel, in Lebanon, in Pakistan, in Palestine, in Somalia, in Syria, and in the United States, that this oftentimes hopeless-looking situation we face has reached its conclusion because ultimately people recognized, rescued, and recovered the hope of that day. If so, that hope, that unity, that humanity becomes the lasting legacy of 9/11.

Just a Simple Question

Do you think there are more "Terrorists" now, in mid-to-late 2006, then there were pre-September 11th, 2001?