The concept of safe anchor always has appealed to me. It’s hard to find, sometimes because of our own actions, sometimes because of choices others make, often due to a complicated mix of elements that only the brave dare try to unravel.
I feel so much joy in having reconnected since last spring with my former employer, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
I am very lucky considering who I am (unconventional, at times to the point of being difficult to understand and occasionally to deal with) and how I roll (with considerable free spirit and strong inner direction, perhaps occasionally too much so, ha). Not tribal, very individualistic, yet open to listening and somewhat educable. Largely impervious to intimidation but very empathetic and responsive to actions if I’ve figured out a reasonable basis for them.
I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts how I went within the space of a year (2009-2010) from cringing at seeing some archivists make fun of me on Twitter to deciding I could learn from that. And even plunging in to using social media myself, come what may. I’m enjoying the challenges of blogging very much. My blog has evolved over the last year or so and will continue to do so. But it always will be a niche blog. I’m okay with that.
Last Sunday, when I attended a lovely brunch reception at NARA, I remembered exactly where I was fifty years earlier — March 25, 1962. At the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. In the balcony section with my sister and my parents. Admission $1.80. Watching for the first time during its initial theatrical release the film version of Leonard Bernstein’s New York City musical, West Side Story. Seven years later, I saw the 1968 revival at Lincoln Center in New York. The poster from the 1968 production was included in an exhibit at the Library of Congress.
I was born in Manhattan and lived during my first few years in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of the city similar to that depicted in the film. I’ve always liked New York City and have gone back to visit often after my family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1954. The photo below shows Eva and me during the Nixon administration in our old neighborhood in the West 50s near Columbus Circle.
West Side Story tells the story of two warring street gangs and young lovers from rival factions who are caught up in the deadly rivalry between the teenagers. I saw the movie several times at the theater, once not far from the school I was attending at age 11 in 1962, Congress Heights Elementary School. My sister Eva and I joined the boys in our class in running up and down the playground, snapping our fingers and singing snatches of songs from the movie. I’ve never been tribal by nature so I didn’t side with either of the gangs, the Jets or the Sharks. I was drawn to Tony and Maria, who sang of a safe haven in a number called “Somewhere.”
“There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us.” But of course there wasn’t. Death separated the lovers in the end, just as it did in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. During the 1960s and 1970s, Eva and I both sketched many scenes from West Side Story. Among other pictures, I drew the leaders of the two rival gangs, Bernardo and Riff. Eva sketched a scene of confrontation between the two gangs and the girl friends of some of the Jets dancing “Cool.”
In high school, I noted the way students separated themselves into distinctive cliques identifiable by attire. It is very hard to artificially combine elements that see themselves as distinctive and separate. (Creating a uniform culture in a federal agency is very challenging, too!) My brand new high school opened in 1965 with two classes, freshmen and sophomores, drawn from different feeder middle schools. The kids had expected to go on to two separate long-established high schools. It took a while for the students from different neighborhoods to accept that they were together in the same new school. And to accept a common identity. During the first year, there were so many fights, administrators had to beef up security and have guards patrol the halls.
And then there were the cliques. Some of my sketches from the late 1960s captured the collegiate, block and mod styles evident among many of the students. Me? I had a small circle of good, close friends but belonged to no clique. I marched to the beat of my own drummer, not entirely fitting in with any group. Yep, a bit of a misfit and loner, even then. None of my readers are surprised, I think! Already back then I was an observer, interested in how people saw and presented themselves and curious about their choices. No surprise that when I entered college in 1969, I majored in history, which covers conditions, cause and effect.
I have a pretty wacky sense of humor and love to laugh, as did my late sister, like me a NARA employee at one time. But most of the movies for which we sketched scenes during our high school and college years were dramas with sad elements or complicated stories rather than comedies. Eva drew a sketch in 1970 (we both crossed our 7s Euro style back then) of a scene from Two Women. The film depicts a mother’s failed effort to protect herself and her child from rape by marauding soldiers at the end of World War II. Sophia Loren won an Oscar in 1962 for her portrayal of the mother. As the careful 3 x 5 cards I wrote out during my high school years show, as a teenager, I read a lot about World War II–not just military action, but about politics, diplomacy prior to the outbreak of war, resistance, efforts at escape.
I read a lot of biography from childhood on. One of my carefully preserved cards from my high school years shows a quote which surely was meant to comfort me during the difficult years when kids often pick on each other for not fitting in! When I catalogued that I had read Bette Davis’s autobiography, The Lonely Life, I noted a quote from her mother, “It’s the best fruit the birds pick at.” Hah!
I’ve always tried to be honest about my failings and later came to realize some of the taunts I attracted I might have brought on myself. At times I dressed a little too differently, sometimes retro before wearing vintage styles became fashionable. At my ten year high school reunion I showed up with my Farrah Fawcett hairstyle in 1979 and shared stories of my employment at NARA on disclosure review of the Nixon tapes. I was stunned and grateful when some of my former tormentors actually apologized to me then for their past actions. Brave and a sign of maturity. Yet I also realized I myself appeared more conforming in 1979 than I had in the late 1960s. Life really can be tricky!
The title of today’s post comes from a recent essay by Professor Timothy Burke. I like the way he reveals doubt at his blog. It reminds me that what sometimes is possible among academic bloggers is rare in Washington. I’ve come to accept that Washington is a tough place to work, not just for me, but for anyone who truly is solution oriented, innovative, creative, and bold. So much in DC locks you down, constrains you, limits you. Yes, it is a complicated place to work, many moving parts, with a mix of reality and masquerade between which we all have to learn to distinguish. And with which we learn to deal or tolerate. We learn to save our real selves for other places, in our hearts and minds.
Consider the candor with which Burke discusses his goals in teaching and whether he should get involved in issues involving the larger community in the area around Swarthmore. As I read it, I thought about the participant in this past week’s interest group forum in the McGowan Theater who urged NARA to act as a think tank. But NARA can’t transform itself into a think tank willy nilly! So much about Washington, its rewards systems, the political environment, and the enablers of the current way of doing things would have to change in order for it to do that. I don’t see the people beyond Fedland out there willing to do the heavy lifting of studying cultural elements and heightening situational awareness to advocate for that.
Burke’s voice is brave even in academe. I understand Fedland constraints and obligations. Outside Fedland, we could use some help and then some. But the blogosphere largely feels like a timid and conformist place to me. Unofficial rewards systems outside Fedland influence actions as much as bureaucratic ones do in Washington! Perhaps I am frustrated because despite having worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, I am a child of the turbulent but very vibrant 1960s.
Will I ever see anyone out there write like this about issues related to my beloved NARA? No. Yet the concept of safe haven is critical to addressing so many elements that affect the National Archives mission. Look at what Burke writes in considering “Bystander Training and Other Acts of Management” at Easily Distracted:
“Inside the curriculum, my first and last commitment as an academic is to create a safe space for unsafe thoughts, to explore different sides of difficult issues, to let heresies and orthodoxies walk hand in hand, to open up conversations wherever possible, to problematize and perturb. And to try, however I can, to make room at the table for all sorts of identities, all sorts of ways of seeing and being, while trying to make sure that everyone has to deal with their share of challenges and doubts. I think that’s how I add value as a teacher. If I were to expand or extend that ethos into community, I feel as if it would be unwelcome. I also think that’s the only way to move beyond students being “managed” or deferred in their demands or complaints.
It makes me nervous to consider that move. I tried a bit earlier this semester by sending a quite critical email to a group posting anonymous fliers in my building about compensation and other administrative policies and immediately doubted that I had done the right thing. I think some of my students would laugh to hear that I find this extension into community life an intimidating prospect, but I do. Intimidating partly because I hate to disappoint or criticize students that I like and admire. The group back in 1998 that was upset about the Intercultural Center included some students who are among the people I’ve felt most fortunate to teach and know in my whole career. Intimidating too because I can’t decide if it helps or hurts to play the role of a teacher in this context. Older people are cautious for good reasons and bad reasons, but maybe it never helps (right or wrong) to try and tell someone younger that they they’re making a mistake. Maybe that’s what’s educational: try a campaign, make a demand, create a project and then try to figure out why it didn’t work out as you’d hoped it would. Maybe faculty should just stay away for that reason.
But that leaves our administration having to carry the weight of community as an intentional project. And that can lead to long-term institutional changes that everyone with an interest in the long-term will regret. Case in point from this week’s fallout: some students want the Dean’s Office to insist on officially mandated “Bystander Training” that will instruct students (and others perhaps: these things have a way of spreading) how to act if you’re a bystander when an incident of racism, hatred or discrimination happens in your presence.
The whole idea bothers me enormously. First, because I think there’s not much evidence that extensive drills or rehearsals of what to do in the case of emergencies or incidents that are by their very nature idiosyncratic when we actually experience or witness them does much to produce optimal or ideal responses. Secondly because I find the idea of optimal or ideal responses in this case severely troubling. “Bystander Training” takes a profound, ancient ethical problem: am I my brother’s keeper? and tries to turn it into a cleanly technical matter, the province of a technocratic system and a command hierarchy. If there’s anything that we should be debating, making messy, exploring, it’s “what are my obligations to other people, and how should I live up to them?”. Equally and relatedly, “what do some words and symbols and acts mean to other people, and how should we come to know that?”
To say you’re uncertain, to wonder what the right course is–how very refreshing. Looking at people in your own country as enemies, as David Brooks pointed out in a recent column? Ah, much easier. Even in elementary school, I rejected that path. Yet I recognize it affects so many things I care about.
Misfit? Maybe. Comfortable in my skin? Absolutely. The safest haven is in my head! One where I can lay me down and build my own bridge over troubled water.
