Evil Cornpone

It’s been two months since my last entry—the first of my new blog—but in my defense I can only note that the month skipped was March. March in Wisconsin in 2011. Not only have we met with the usual dreariness—no sun; little respite from below-freezing temps; our winter clothing soiled and smelly from overuse but too much like a second skin to discard—but also, an evil governor has run amok in our state.

I don’t use the word lightly. Evil. It conjures pretty much everything we should all be banding together to protest: false dichotomy, ideology, hyperpole. But I’ll use it here. Especially on a day in mid-April when sleet pelts my window, when the deck—so recently released from its snowbank—has been cobbled over in frozen nodes of hail, a crunchy fungus candy.

I’ve considered myself liberal since about the age of fourteen, when to me that meant telling the priest at my grandmother’s church that I just wouldn’t become a Catholic then, if it meant, as he said, that someday my husband would rule me. To be fair, I'd goaded the old man—born, probably, before women wore pants. As if I might, after one argument with one small town’s aging clergyman, reverse the Vatican’s view on the beginning of life. Now, eighteen years later, I never did become a Catholic and I’m not married. That’s a lot of time to have been running amok on my own, unruled.

But the truth is also that at fourteen, being a liberal did go pretty well with my clothes and taste in music. One warm spring day, family friends took me to see Bill Clinton. This was in the heady days, pre-Monica, pre-Rwanda, and I got to wear tie-dye and Birkenstocks, as if I hadn’t missed the generation I suspected I should have been born into. Oh, and my father was a Republican. That also made for reason enough, in 1992, to be a liberal.

In 2011, being a liberal has meant I only just recently emerged from six weeks straight on Facebook. Disappeared from the physical sphere of daily life, I hovered over streaming video of Madison, read and re-posted headlines and blogs, clicked endlessly on online polls—all while complaining about the ludicrous overuse of online polls by “news” organizations. Oh, and was caught up—snared, entangled—in tucked-away comment-room corners, decrying, ruminating, strategizing, bemoaning with like-minded friends—as well as sparring with friends, friends of friends, and even complete strangers. Living in four states in the last six years means my Facebook friends are spread across the country, representative of multiple moments of my life—yet there’s not a one of them now who doesn’t know in detail my views of my current state’s political crisis, nor my utter absorption within its daily drama. I’ve likely been blocked by some, though I’ll never know—just one more strange facet of “friendship” in the information age.

I did try to contribute to my cause more actively than through debate with my fellow citizens. I wrote to my representatives—copiously. I tore off letters to the editor, though none I liked enough to send. None said the right thing. None captured wholly and ultimately the swirl and the anger in my head. I patrolled the online comments sections of newspapers and joined local political action groups, housed, again, within Facebook. I wrote a protest poem that was published in a broadside collection and given as a gift to the “Fab 14,” the democratic senators who’d fled our state in protest of the Governor’s education and social service slashing policies.

And, I did go to protest in person, face-to-face, travelling the three hours to Madison twice, and driving the three minutes to march around my own town’s courthouse on two more occasions.

But after each event, particularly after the first trip to Madison—in the early days, when we were able to enter the Capitol itself, feel its echoing drumbeat, stand with frozen feet and iced fingertips on the scuffed statehouse lawn—I couldn’t wait to get home, login in, and find out what had happened.

How many people were there? We wanted to know. What were they saying?

So, two months since the governor’s first announcements about his budget bill—and just a few weeks since, let’s face it, our side lost—I feel a little like I’m emerging from a particular hysteria. Is that just what it means to be political in a democracy in the modern era? To get caught up within a zeitgeist, and to be carried along within a collective power?

“Who moved my cornpone, right?” A colleague said to me recently after I clucked something to him about how much the new budget’s pay cuts totally sucked. (Seriously, who thought they could find a way to pay us less?) Cornpone? I said, too quickly revealing a hole in my English major credentials. What he meant, this Americanist, was that we only care when it’s our money—our cheese getting moved. That’s what politics are all about. If he’d have just said cheese, I’d have gotten it more quickly.

“There’s nothing wrong with voting based on self-interest,” a union representative once said to a group I was with, giving a shrug. I had just joined the bargaining committee of the adjunct faculty association at the community college where I was teaching. We were in a training session, learning how to caucus, and I had just given the only thumbs down to the question of whether we felt seniority rights should be a priority. I was the only member of the committee younger than 55, the only one who, had we been at a restaurant, would have been ineligible for the senior discount. I’ve never felt such a swift and immediate reversal of a group’s collective opinion. Minutes earlier it had been all love and sunshine, all we need more young people and new employees to come out and take an interest.

But of course I don’t want to believe my politics are solely based on my own self-interest—not solely, not primarily. And certainly not that they would be based on my own interest at the expense of anyone else’s. When I was fourteen, I wasn’t arguing with the priest because I wanted an abortion, but because I thought women—each woman—should have her own say.

So maybe that was self-interest, pure and simple.

But self-interest or not, cornpone or cheese, it’s the aftermath of events in Wisconsin these days. Even though Sarah Palin is scheduled to appear in Madison today, and even though I saw plans for a Harley rally. It’s been weeks since the height of the drama. The CNN cameras are gone, the protestors have packed up their sleeping bags, the Democratic senators, the “fab 14,” have returned to the state. Prank callers posing as the Koch brothers don’t seem to be calling up Governor Walker anymore.

And we lost. The take-home pay of public employees slashed, and their abilities to ever bargain it back curtailed. Other proposals are sailing through: to cut $900 million from K-12 schools and more millions from the Tech Colleges and Higher Ed, to end mandates for recycling, for insurers to cover birth control, to cut back the state’s Medicaid program and reduce the earned income tax credit for the working class. Meanwhile 2/3 of Wisconsin corporations will still not have to pay taxes, nor do any new corporations, who’d like to relocate here. Meanwhile, a law for everyone to have an ID at the voting booth (one with a stable address) seems to many of my fellow citizens like a pretty good idea.

We even lost the Supreme Court race—our candidate losing by just 7,000 votes, with voter turnout about 1.5 million. And never was there such a campaign as that for a state supreme court race—millions of dollars pouring in from out of state, TV ads as if we were electing a Supreme World Commander—as if what happened in this one local race, supposedly nonpartisan—would indeed sway larger mechanisms, tip bigger scales.

The snow is piling on what just yesterday was newly greening grass in my yard. It’s clinging, plopping tiny wet hats on trees’ new buds, stiffening and freezing the first Daffodil shoots.

I’m trying to think about cornpone—to put money and politics into the sphere where they belong, where they should belong in a human life: beneath family, beneath friends, beneath good health and warm food and a cat on your lap, his tail tucked to his chin and his tiny internal motor humming.

But it has just felt for too many weeks like—I did say it at the beginning and I’ll say it here again—an evil has descended.

Super Bowl Sunday

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in Packerland, and this year, against the odds, we’ve got a team on the field. I’ve said I’ve been waiting for a reason—sign, inspiration, angle—to start a new blog. What other than an unlikely Packers season, one that began with a loss to the Cleveland Browns, included another to the Lions, and ended in a wildcard slide to a Super Bowl ride, to signify that I may in fact, finally, have made a wise move: returning, after nine years, to my home state?

I am not a real football fan, of course. This caveat must appear up front. I’m not a real fan compared to the fans of Packerland—those who would not delay a baby name selection as that might delay the placing of that name on the season ticket holder list. I may even have said some things recently and publicly about the morality of a sport that, especially when viewed through TV's warp, encourages us to cheer for debilitating injury. (Years down the road, we’ll be able to say it: we didn’t know anything back then! And they did get paid so much, didn’t they?)

But returned to Wisconsin, I’m remembering how we need football in the winter. About now, many rules of the universe are turned inside out, like how I see in the snowy driveway, every morning, animal tracks but never any animals. And we, the human-animals, are suffering under lockdown. The snowbanks make chutes of our streets, tunnels between work and home. Safe and smothering, the world has been made over, like a bowling game with the bumpers in. Get him, I feel ready to holler. Would you hit that guy? Hours before game time on Super Bowl Sunday, I can see the neighbor hacking with a garden hoe at the snowpack at the end of his driveway, festive in his green and gold parka, and all that slicing feels right, the sun off the white waist-high drifts like thousands of sparkling knives.

Strangely, it was leaving the state that made me a Packers fan--even the type of fan I am, hesitant and lackluster, but still claiming of the name, like a lapsed Catholic. Once out of state, it came out too often that I’d been born in Green Bay. And after all, I wasn’t not a fan. I wasn’t a fan of some other team. I knew the difference between a down and a touchdown, and in the English major and Arty crowd I ran with, that was something.

After all, some of them followed baseball. Others liked Quidditch.

But even as some mix of nostalgia and the twisting pride of an expatriot began to change me, there was never any fooling anyone back home. We didn’t even get most of the games on the West Coast (thus saving me the question of whether I would have watched them). And somehow (but like I had game time set in my internal clockwork) I regularly made the mistake of calling home mid-third-quarter, usually on a third-and-one.

Are you kidding? My parents would ask. They picked up because it could only be me.

And once, I flew home during a Monday night game and didn’t realize it until mid-descent, the pilot circling low over a lit-up Lambeau as if trying for a glimpse at the scoreboard. My parents lived then an hour from Green Bay. My mother and sister solved the problem of my retrieval by driving in early to catch the first half at a bar near the airport and came to collect me at half-time. We went right back to the bar for the third quarter. I was happy to do so, if mostly for the deep-fried cheese curds and the joke of it, and because in those days (an English major a lot like many a Packers fan) I didn’t pass on a trip to a bar. Still, everyone at the Pearly Gates must have been able to smell it on me: my knowledge of the roster didn’t go deeper than the famous quarterback. Not long after that, my entire extended family set to arrive at my parents’ house for another game day, I declined to wear the borrowed jersey my mother laid out on my old bed while I was in the shower.

Now it’s been nine years since I left, and six months since I returned. It’s three and a half hours until the Super Bowl kick-off. And, strangely enough, this year I’m the only one of my immediate family members home in the state.

My parents still live north of Green Bay, but spend a few months of each year volunteering at a park in Colorado. This week, they’ve been helping a group of visually impaired downhill skiers, which is about as funny as the fact that I’m the one here, relaying news of how many inches of snow, how the village of ice fishing shanties sprung up on the bay near our house.

And my sister and her husband live out of state, in Kansas. Yet today, they’re in Texas, at the Super Bowl. T. was the first to see the announcement of their plan on Facebook about 8 p.m. on a Friday night. I was not out pre-tailgating or entering contests for tickets, but in bed already with a novel. I missed the Packers parade the next day too. And, three days later, the victory party at the stadium. I will forget even to watch on TV.

Game Day, my sister posts pictures of her brother-in-law and then of herself wearing a makeshift championship belt. They began tailgating in the stadium parking lot about 11. Now, it’s just hours before the game. I’ve been writing about my feelings about the team, my relationship to my home state, what it means to come home. She posts a picture of herself palming a football, in sunglasses and shirt sleeves in the Texas weather. She posts again. Ahman Green just walked by, and asked if he could take a picture with them. He wanted to wear the belt.

T. is a Bears fan. A fair weather Bears fan at that (which is better? Or worse?). Between the two of us, we don’t own a scrap of green or gold. I think about the jersey I left on the bed at my parents’ house. I try not to remember my mother’s face when I walked down without it.

I wonder if she thought I would put it on that day? I wonder if she thought I’d move back home.

It’s like Christmas, but we don’t have a tree. We didn’t bake any cookies.

T. puts hand on my shoulder, interrupting my typing. “We could go get a Bloody Mary,” he suggests.

And you know, it’s the Super Bowl. It seems like the least we could do.