Photo by Flickr user caribb

This was my final essay for the USSC postgraduate course The American City. It has been slightly edited.

Blame the bluster. That’s how the Illinois city of Chicago earned its Windy City sobriquet, but the name did not arise from the local meteorological conditions. It was the young town’s windbag citizens, rather than its blustery weather, who earned it the title; and even as the city grew into its outsize self-regard, it never lost its cockiness or its confidence (Encyclopaedia of Chicago 2004).

Chicago does not shuffle; it swaggers. Despite — or perhaps because of — its severe setting, it retains an optimism even where there is cause for none; this is a city whose citizens endure freezing winters and sweltering summers, who took their city’s rude manufacturing foundations and built on them glittering skyscrapers and world-famous architecture. It is a city that, upon holding the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, sought to outshine even Paris, the old world’s most refined cultural centre. Chicago developed its fortune from unglamorous industries, such as the unrefined and frequently dangerous meatpacking plants that earned, from poet Carl Sandburg, the city the designation of Hog Butcher for the World. Chicago’s politics is famed for its sleaze, its venality, its dependence on connections and repaid favours, and yet, its adopted son Barack Obama navigated his way through its ranks to become elected 44th President of the United States on a promise of bringing change to a nation weary of inefficiency and corruption. Chicago is renowned for its cultural vibrancy, particularly the creative contribution of the African American communities in the city’s South Side neighbourhoods, where Obama first launched his political career as a community organiser. Chicago is riven with ethnic division; various neighbourhoods are distinguished as Polish, for instance, or African American, or Irish centres, but yet these neighbourhoods act as launching points for the city’s migrants to find opportunity where there was none before. The South Side, for instance, may frequently trap its citizens in poverty and segregation, but the political and cultural networks formed within these communities gave their citizens a self-determination unavailable in the Southern states from which they had migrated.

Chicago remains America’s second city, even as it slips to number three on the population scale, having been overtaken by Los Angeles during the 1980s. In many ways it is the quintessential American city, a booming, thriving centre in the very belly of the nation. The Great Plains — the nation’s famed bread basket — stretch out from its edges, the Mississippi surges through its hinterland, and Chicago swallows immigrants, both the intra-national and international, seeking their fortune. Neither the world renowned centre of commerce that is New York nor the sun-soaked pop-cultural playground of Los Angeles, Chicago’s conception is intertwined with that of its nation; unlike New York, or Los Angeles, which have larger than life identities separate to America, Chicago’s cultural fabric is woven from the same stuff as that of the United States itself.

Chicago’s paradox is in the tension between its base origins and its soaring ambitions; the stoicism prompted by the former and the optimism derived from the latter. It is a uniquely divided city, but the citizens of its patchwork neighbourhoods are united in — as was one of the central themes of the Obama campaign — hope. This essay will examine the means by which Chicago, in its real and mythical guises, reconciles these tensions. With particular reference to the city’s representation in Carl Sandburg’s poetry, modern popular music and commentaries on President Barack Obama and his connection to the Chicago political landscape, it will find that the contradictory conceptions of Chicago are actually inseparable; each is a part of the other.

In his poem “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg uses the city’s cruder foundations as a means of introduction. The first line announces the town, famously, as “Hog Butcher for the World,” and follows this with “Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.” Sandburg describes Chicago as America’s — and even the earth’s — unglamorous engine room; it does the dirty work of slaughtering pigs, bundling grain and distributing goods, while, presumably, the rest of the world enjoys the fruits of the town’s labour. Sandburg personifies this Chicago in the form of one its blue collar workers: “stormy, husky [and] “brawling.” Reflecting the brutal power of its factory labourers, Chicago, in Sandburg’s conception, is a muscular “City of the Big Shoulders.”

Sandburg acknowledges Chicago’s more severe aspects, and does not attempt to hide them. He concurs that the city is “wicked,” and relates stories of murderers who go unpunished, hungry women and children unable to feed themselves, and the destruction of wholesome farm boys at the hands of the city’s garish temptations — “painted women under the gas lamps” — artificially beautiful prostitutes illuminated by artificial light.

But Sandburg, like the city he seeks to portray, celebrates its baser features. He returns the contempt of his city’s detractors, and subverts its coarseness and brutality into points of pride. “I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city,” he declares, “and I give them back the sneer.” Sandburg personifies Chicago as a “city with lifted head,” a “tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities.” This Chicago still has the broad shoulders of its labourers, but that quality has become evidence of its strength and vitality rather than of any beaten down weariness.

Chicago is a site of restless and ceaseless activity (“Bareheaded/Shovelling/Wrecking/Planning/Building, breaking, rebuilding”), where construction and destruction are inseparable. Even if its pride is foolish — “under the terrible burden of destiny,” it laughs “as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle” — it is living testament to possibility and resourcefulness; “fierce as a dog … cunning as a savage,” it possesses the buoyant confidence of a vital and handsome young man, one “half-naked, sweating” with “white teeth,” a pulse under his wrist and “the heart of the people” beneath his ribs.

As the poem culminates, Sandburg stacks accolades on to the city as if they were fresh from a foundry, piled up and ready to be transported to the world. He runs Chicago’s unspectacular industries together as the tall bold slugger he alludes to earlier does, who “toil[s] … piling job on job”; abutting them against each other where previously they had been offset into careful, individual lines. Sandburg declares the city “proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation,” ending his declamation with a flourish. If his poem possesses a little too much swagger, or is too cocky in its rapid dismissal of Chicago’s flaws, this is unsurprising. Sandburg, as a Chicagoan, must also be “stormy, husky, brawling”; a man who laughs under the “terrible burden of destiny.”

Photo by Flickr user moacirpdsp

This Chicago is defined by its optimism; to adapt the title of a book by the Chicago politician and now President of the United States Barack Obama, Chicago has the audacity of hope. The President encountered the phrase through his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Obama, in his memoir Dreams from My Father, writes of the sermon in which Wright spoke of that audacity; his description of the Reverend’s words reveal the duality of stoicism and optimism central to the Chicago experience:

“As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountain-top, worrying about paying the light bill … [i]f a part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us and would fulfil its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how the spirit carried within it , nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.”

(293-4)

Obama, almost paradoxically, finds optimism amid the poverty and hardship of the city; hope within, as Sandburg might put it, “the terrible burden of destiny.” He quotes the Reverend Wright consecrating the hardship of his day to day life, preaching of “The audacity of hope … [during t]imes when we couldn’t pay the bills. Times when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to amount to anything …” (294).

The passage closes Part Two of Obama’s memoir, the section titled “Chicago,” and the politician evidently considers this faith to be essential to his Chicago experience. The religious conception of hope Obama gains from Wright’s sermon is simpler and more sacrosanct than the tangled and corporeal swagger of Sandburg’s “city with lifted head,” which is indeed “proud to be alive,” but also “coarse and strong and cunning.” Outside the Church service, however, in the residences and organisations of the city’s Southside, Obama experiences the earthier aspect of the town, the one that not only prides itself on its hope, but also revels in its own audacity, as well as its coarseness, its strength, and its cunning.

Obama decided after graduating from Columbia University to become a community organiser, saying he would “organize black folks. At the grass roots” (133). In Chicago, where he pursues this ambition, there seems to be little way to organise anything other than at the grass roots. The communities he discovers are tight-knit, yet divided. The organiser who employs him, Marty Kaufman, describes the city by saying “Blacks. Whites. Hispanics. All working the same jobs. All living the same kind of lives. But outside the plant, most of them don’t want anything to do with each other” (149). Even within segregated communities, there are differences. Obama describes declining areas where there are “[d]istinctions between neighborhoods, then blocks, then finally neighbors within a block; attempts to cordon off, control the decay” (158).

The Chicago Kaufman describes and Obama discovers is supported by its strong communities, but constrained by the divisions between them. All institutions are possible vehicles for political activity. Kaufman tells Obama “If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base. With the unions in the shape they’re in, the churches are the only game in town.” The truism is borne out by Obama’s work once he reaches the city; he finds himself hindered equally by politicians who will not meet with him, unions who do not share his goals and church leaders who dislike the organisation with which he works. As Kaufman explains, “Chicago’s polarized and … politicians use it to the their own advantage. That’s all Smalls [an unco-operative Reverend] is — a politician who happens to wear a collar” (162).

Before employing Obama, Kaufman gave the politician, whom he saw as “young and black and interested in social issues,” some advice: “Find a political campaign to work for. A powerful patron — somebody who can help you with your own career.” As Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article Making It relates, after concluding his work as a community organiser, Obama did exactly as Kaufman had recommended.

In 1995, Alice Palmer, an Illinois politician from Obama’s Hyde Park neighbourhood nominated herself as a candidate for her local congressional seat, and Obama subsequently announced his intention to run for the state senate seat from which Palmer was departing. Palmer endorsed Obama, but when her congressional run failed, she asked him “to step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity.” Obama refused to do so, and garnering support from local organisations and power bases, he challenged the signatures nominating his former supporter for the seat. Obama succeeded in having Palmer removed from the ballot and won her seat unopposed. “That’s Chicago politics,” the New Yorker reports Obama as having said — with a sigh. Palmer also seemed to recognise it as par for the course within the city, saying “Anyone who enters Chicago politics and can’t take the rough and tumble shouldn’t be there.”

Making It details Obama’s rise through the city and state political structures, facilitated by his ability to build connections and gather support from a diverse range of powerbrokers. The article portrays Chicago politics as hyper-local, dominated by ruthless factionalism and tainted by the continual presence of, at-best, questionable operators. To navigate his way through it, Obama had to rely on the pragmatism and fierce self-reliance Sandburg attributed to Chicagoans, as well as some of the cunning. “Chicago is not Obama’s hometown, but it’s where he chose to forge his identity,” the New Yorker article says. Yet despite his reputation for carefulness, Obama shares more than a touch of his adopted home’s fondness for audacity. Having made his way through the city’s labyrinthine political operations, in 2004 he was set to give a now celebrated speech at the Democratic National Convention. Even prior to giving his speech, the politician was already receiving a favourable reaction from the public. “If you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow” Obama said, according to the New Yorker. “My speech is pretty good.”

Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention

Chicago’s glory is inseparable from its citizens’ humdrum lives. Just as Obama reached the American presidency by building upon interrelated webs of local connections, the city’s successes derive from the bonds between neighbourhoods, blocks, or even within specific buildings. Another Carl Sandburg poem, Skyscraper, constructs one of the soaring towers for which Chicago is known by illustrating the individuals who labour within it. Sandburg describes the “ten-dollar a week-stenographers,” the “men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar,” an architect, a watchman, a mason, all who out of their toil, create a teeming building that “looms in the smoke and the sun and has a soul.” In Sandburg’s conception, this embodiment of Chicago is fed by the entire city’s vast surrounds, urban and beyond: “Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.” The skyscraper reciprocates, broadcasting messages across the landscape, which Sandburg describes with allusions to modernity, Promethean vitality and unbridled commerce: “Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money.” The city constructs its extraordinary accomplishments from the mundane labour undertaken block by block and corner by corner.

Photo by Flickr user Storm Crypt

Nearly a century later, the Chicago rapper Common related the story of another part of Chicago in the same way. His song “The Corner” constructs a neighbourhood in the same way Sandburg constructed a skyscraper: from the lives of the people who populate it. “Uncles that smoke and … put blow up they nose” adjunct “niggas rollin’ in droves”; the narrator walks to a store and stops to talk to “hoes,” while his cousins hope rapping will provide them with economic opportunity. Over a dusty beat augmented with snatches of conversation and snippets of melody, as if the music were constructed from the neighbourhood it seeks to describe, a slam poet preaches “The corner was our magic, our music, our politics.” The corner draws life from the people who live around it (“these are the stories told by Stony and Cottage Grove”) and it, in turn, gives and takes life from those people. “The world is cold,” Common raps, but “the block is hot as a stove.” The meaning is twofold: the corner is a refuge from a harsh world, but also a site of conflict and danger (“the block is hot”).

Academic Murray Forman asserts the primacy of place in hip-hop, saying “Space and place are important factors that influence identity formation as they relate to localized practices of the self … in rap, the definition of one’s environment and the urban spaces of home terrain is a conventional aspect of the form” (2004: 155) Forman identifies that individual cities possess distinct sounds and discourses about space and place (2000:208-9) and that the local details in rap songs reveal spaces that are “simultaneously real, imaginary, symbolic, and mythical” (2000:217). Chicago’s music, and particularly its hip-hop, suggests not only the city’s actual features, but also the way its inhabitants live in, think about, and experience the city.

Notably, Chicago adopted hip-hop at a somewhat slower place than many other cities in the nation, and even when hip-hop did attain a cultural foothold there, for much of the genre’s history, very few artists from the city found national success. Throughout the 1980s, hip-hop spread from its New York roots to cities throughout the nation, but Chicago exhibited a level of immunity shared by few other American regions. The presence of an already established local style, the disco-derivation known as House, did much to contribute to this. The City of the Big Shoulders already had an inner-urban soundtrack for its patchwork of high density neighbourhoods and low-income housing projects, and so a natural breeding ground for hip-hop, the third most populous city in the nation and one of the primary foundries for black music throughout the twentieth century, ended up embracing hip-hop relatively lately.

House, an up-tempo, highly rhythmic genre, is party music; it is used as a distraction from the pressures of everyday life. It is concerned with the body and soul, and as Thornton notes, “whereas white or European dance music is about a futuristic celebration and revelation of technology … black dance musics are more likely to be rooted in local urban scenes and neighbor ‘hoods … These specific places anchor and authenticate music, render it tangible and real” (in Devereaux 2007). As music journalist Nick Barat noted in an article for the magazine Fader, “it’s easy to forget that house music is inherently an urban art form. Despite the fact that in the rest of the world, house was both appropriated by shirt-averse white folks and almost completely overshadowed by mainstream hip-hop, the sound was born in Chicago hoods and never really died out there” (2007). House, being specifically Chicagoan, acts as a cultural locus for the city, a shared liberation from environmental realities.

While the following theorising is only speculative, the initial and enduring popularity of house could well be due, at least in part, to the high level of poverty and violence in Chicago. Cities with similarly high levels of violent crime, such as Baltimore and Washington D.C., share with Chicago an appreciation for fast-paced dance music. Baltimore’s local style, a house derivative known as Club, is frequently portrayed by its city’s residents as light-hearted, fun music. A song by Baltimore Club DJ Rod Lee titled “Dance My Pain Away” makes this connection explicit, as does a quote by Baltimore rapper Labtekwon: “Club Music is not just ‘get high, wild out’ music. People use the music to dance and purge all the demons in their normal lives. We sweat our pain and sorrow out on the dance floor … We use this music as a point of refuge and cleansing” (in Devereaux 2007). It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that house music plays a similar role in Chicago’s culture; dance transforming hardship into transcendence.

This is in decided contrast to the more reflective aspects of Chicago hip-hop, illustrated by one of the city’s earliest rap songs, Sugar Ray Dinke’s “Cabrini Green Rap.” The rapper uses the song to commemorate a friend who was murdered in the titular public housing development. Entirely lacking the kinetic themes of house music, the song’s grim subject reflected, rather than transcended, the artist’s environment. Lyrically, it is a eulogy: “One of my best friends got shot in the back/Trying to get out of his Cabrini Green shack … I’ll never forget my man Larry Parkes.”

As hip-hop became more common-place within Chicago, the city put its own stamp on the genre. A dance music evolving from House, Juke, is known for having even more rapid tempos than its progenitor, in the range of 140 to 160 beats per minute rather than House’s traditional 120. “It caught on heavy at basement parties and teen events,” Barat says, and quotes a local DJ, Puncho, who explains the nomenclature: “’When we would be at parties, we’d hear girls like, ‘They jukin in there’ or ‘We gonna go get our juke on’’” (Barat 2007). Juking has a strong performative aspect; it is athletic, youth-oriented and competitive, features it shares with hip-hop dancing in general (Hazzard-Donald 1996: 510-11). Even when the out-of-town import of hip-hop gained a presence in Chicago, the city determinedly retained its local traditions.

Juke track “Watch My Feet” by Chicago duo Dude N Nem

If Chicago dance music, and hip-hop/dance hybrids are focused on the body and soul, its hip-hop has a distinct, though not exclusive, fondness for the intellectual¹. The city’s most commercially successful rapper Kanye West, used two lines to frame his career approach on his debut single “Through the Wire”: “What if somebody from the Chi that was ill got a deal on the hottest rap label around/But he wasn’t talking ‘bout coke and birds, it was more like spoken word.” West had indeed garnered a contract with the highly respected Roc-a-Fella label, and though his rapping was quite unlike the spoken word style of poetry that had simultaneously arisen from the Windy City’s streets, he does have a deserved distinction of being more complex than the average rapper, even if in true Chicago fashion, he retains a reputation for egoism notable even within a notably self-promoting genre like hip-hop (“I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go” he casually assures his listeners in one song).

Indeed the conflict between West’s spiritual desires and his material impulses are one of the central themes of his work. “You know what the Midwest is?” he asks in the devout “Jesus Walks,” and answers his question: “Young and restless/Where reckless niggas might snatch your necklace.” West, as Obama did, turns to the church to find hope within his city’s rough streets. He later puns on the Bible’s Psalm 23, saying he “walk[s] through the valley of Chi where death is/the top floor view alone will leave you breathless.” He conceives Chicago as at once daunting and awe-inspiring; the self-assurance the rapper displays throughout his catalogue is his version of, in Sandburg’s words “singing so proud to be alive and so coarse and strong and cunning.”

The spoken word poetry West refers to in “Through the Wire” is slam poetry, a working class, literary counterpart to the musical form of hip-hop. It originated in Chicago in 1986, when construction worker Marc Smith arranged with Dave Jemilo, owner of a local Jazz club, to host a weekly poetry competition (Weber 1999, NPS 2008). Slam poetry’s focus is on the performance rather than the text exclusively, and its lively, declamatory and competitive qualities make it a distinctively Chicagoan art form, even as its popularity spreads around the world. At once high-minded, and in its working class origins, decidedly populist, it belongs squarely within the artistic landscape of the City of the Big Shoulders. Slam Poetry is designed to allow its participants to prove themselves before an audience, and it suits the Chicago propensity for bluster.

And Chicago has no shortage of braggadocio. In the mid-19th Century, the city’s politicians would boast of their hometown’s natural advantages, and the surety they had that Chicago would become the Metropolis of the West surely helped to make it so. Grasping at all opportunities to transform the city into a teeming centre of manufacturing and culture, they helped turn open prairie into a skyscraper forest of commerce and industry. In Chicago, even at the toughest moments, the mere existence of its self-mythology provides the basis for the city’s reality. The hardships and unglamorous surrounds of the city do not suppress the pride and ambition of its citizens; they fuel it. This is why even Chicago’s most inspiring successes seem hard-earned; the city’s greatness and poorness is constructed block by block, industry by industry and vote by vote.

Footnotes

¹This is necessarily an oversimplification. Chicago also has a history of gangsta rap, some of which exhibits less intellectual qualities. Nonetheless, I believe the city’s artists do tend to demonstrate a fondness for the cerebral.

References

Barat N. 2007, Pop Drop: Beyonce, Art School Girls and Warp Speed Bass? On the Floor with Chicago’s Juke DJs, The Fader (accessed August 15 2009)

Boyd J. 2004, Windy City, Encylopedia of Chicago (accessed August 15 2009)

Devereaux A. 2007, “What Chew Know About Down the Hill”: Baltimore Club Music, Subgenre Crossover, and the New Subcultural Capital of Race and Space, Journal of Popular Music Studies Volume 19, Issue 14: 311-341 [No longer available free online]

Forman M. 2004, “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City: Hip-Hop, Space, and Place” in Forman M. and Neal M. A. (eds) 2004, That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York: Routledge

Forman M. 2000, “Represent: Race, Place and Space in Rap Music” in Forman M. and Neal M. A. (eds) 2004, That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York: Routledge

Hazzard-Donald K. 1996, “Dance in Hip-hop Culture” in Forman M. and Neal M. A. (eds) 2004, That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York: Routledge

Lizza R. 2008, Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama, The New Yorker, July 21 2008

Lynn L (a.k.a. Common). 2005, “The Corner” from Be, New York: G.O.O.D. Music

National Poetry Slam 2008, NPS 2008 – History, Poetry Slam Inc (accessed August 15 2009)

Obama B. 1995, Dreams from My Father, New York: Crown Publishers

Sandburg C. 1916, “Chicago” in Chicago Poems, New York: Henry Holt and Company

Sandburg C. 1916, “Skyscraper” in Chicago Poems, New York: Henry Holt and Company

Weber B. 1999, Part Art, Part Hip-Hop and Part Circus; Slammers Shake Up an Interest in Poetry, The New York Times (accessed August 15 2009)

West, K. 2004, “Through the Wire” from The College Dropout, New York: Roc-A-Fella Records

West, K. 2004, “Jesus Walks” from The College Dropout, New York: Roc-A-Fella Records

West, K. 2007, “Barry Bonds” from Graduation, New York: Roc-A-Fella Records

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

“Americans care so much about their Supreme Court, they just really wanted to meet its next member”: Learning nothing about Sonia Sotomayor

“It congratulates its practitioners on their virtue, condescends to its beneficiaries, and corrodes the racial attitudes of its victims”: Ross Douthat on the future of Affirmative Action

“Whiteness is no longer a threat, or an ideal: it’s kitsch to be appropriated”: Gatsby, Puffy and Stuff White People Like in post-white America

Photo by Flickr user littlephil

Last week, I contracted gastro. It wasn’t fun. My digestive system decided it hated me, and staged a coup. I’ll spare you any of the more vivid details, because they really aren’t pleasant.

So, after being sent home from work on Tuesday and not improving through the night, I called my local General Practice at 8am on Wednesday. “Erin, was it?” the receptionist asked. “Where do you live?”

“Ultimo” I told her.

“Oh, that’s a shame, ’cause we just had a cancellation for 8:15, but I don’t suppose you could get here in time. How about 10am?”

That was fine with me.

“Dr. Naomi E. isn’t in today, do you mind seeing Dr Naomi G?” she asked.

I assured her I didn’t mind at all, and drove the (very) short distance to the GP at 10am. Truth be told, I probably could have made the 8:15 appointment, as Ultimo and Glebe aren’t that far apart, but I was thankful for the extra sleep.

You see, my doctor is so close to my house, and so accessible, that not being able to see her on less than 2 hours notice was an aberration.

(By the way, I love that there are two Dr Naomis at the practice).

When I got to the surgery, I noticed a new sign:

We have a number of new staff,
And as they may not yet know your name,
Please be sure to inform them when you arrive.

I wanted to take a photo with my iPhone, but there are strictly no phones allowed.

When I was called into my appointment, a few minutes late, Dr Naomi G. sat with me and talked with me about what was going on. She listened to my concerns and my symptoms. She asked about my life: what I did for work, in my spare time, and asked was I stressed. She assured me not to worry, that it was probably nothing, but she wanted to run X, Y, Z test.

“I see you saw the other Naomi last time you were here, and you got a referral to see your specialist” she said.

“Have you made an appointment yet?”

I hadn’t, which I shamefully admitted.

“I know life is really busy, but I think you need to make this a priority,” she told me. She wasn’t admonishing me, she was just reassuring me that taking a day’s sick leave was ok, and that this isn’t something I should postpone for the sake of busyness.

After my appointment, I went to the front counter. My bill was for $60, for a half-hour appointment. The government would pay about $42 of it (I think). I could have given them the forms, and the government would have paid my rebate directly into my bank account, but I wasn’t organised enough to have already provided my bank account details, so I had to take it to the local medicare centre.

I’ve only been going to this GP for a little while. Before, when I didn’t earn as much money, I couldn’t always guarantee I had the $60 up front. So I went to a doctor that “bulk bills”- a doctor who charged only as much as the medicare rebate, and got the money direct from medicare. There are lots of them, and it meant I never had to worry about having enough money to see a doctor.

But I got a better job, and a bit more money, and I decided I could afford the gap in order to get better quality care. That was an option. So I asked my brother, who is a medical student, if he knew of any good places, and he told me of a local GP with an excellent reputation, so I tried to book an appointment there.

As I work full time, naturally I tried to get a Saturday appointment. No, they told me. They only had a limited number of Saturday appointments, and they prefered you to have a one-hour, first-time appointment, so you can get to know your doctor.

So I made a mid-week appointment, took the requisite time from work, and sat down with my new doctor. She asked all about my life. Not just about my health background, though she certainly interrogated me on that. She asked about my job, my personal life, my uni work. She wasn’t being nosy, she assured me, she just wanted to understand what kind of pressure I faced, so she could keep an eye on me. I told her about my history of problems with my stomach.
“You know what,” she said. “Rather than just giving you a referral to your gastroenterologist, I’d rather you came back in, for a shorter appointment, so I can really understand the history of your stomach condition.”

Again, I made the appointment, and took her through the long history of testing and treatment that ultimately resulted in a Fundoplication- an elective surgery at a private hospital, which occurred when I required it, with the doctor I chose- almost 10 years ago. And in that single appointment, for which my out-of-pocket costs were less than $20, she became familiar with my whole history, and was able to provide wise guidance as to what I should do next.

This isn’t really a revolutionary story. I’ve no doubt many of my Australian friends have similar tales. But it is an example of the excellent balance that can be struck when talking about government-sponsored health care.

There’s all this talk in the United States, mainly from conservatives, about how woeful a public health care insurance option would be in the United States. They talk about “socialized Medicine”, and use “Canada” and “France” as curse words.

And they speak of the government getting between you and your doctor. The government paying a proportion of my fee in no way “gets between me and my doctor”. I have lived in the US with really good quality health care coverage*. But I have never, ever had a doctor like my current one. She knows me, she cares about my health in a holistic way, not just in diagnosing a particular problem. She wants to know about my past, and my lifestyle, and integrate it into her understanding of my health. On my third visit to her, I broke down into tears about something not directly related to my health, and she listened, and said that it was probably affecting me more than I realised. She gave some advice about how I might deal with me problems better, and assured me that any time I needed her, she was there.

We have a wonderful balance here in Australia. If you need health care and can’t afford it, you can get it. Everyone can get it. There are a multitude of doctors who bulk bill. And you can use the public hospital system. But if you have a little more money, you can choose the extra cover. The government doesn’t decide what access I have- they just set a level of access, and everything beyond, I have to pay for.

Is that “rationing”? Perhaps. But at least we all have access to pretty good basic cover. At least a major illness will not bankrupt us. But, at the same time, if we have access to the extra funds, we can use them and pay for extra cover. Oh, and if a particular treatment isn’t available here, the government will pay for us to have it overseas- a fact Glenn Beck grossly misrepresented in his recent rant (Do Australians go to the US for certain treatments? Yes. But he neglected to mention the fact the federal government provides funding for that).

I am thankful for a system in which I can access a basic level of care regardless of my income, where I can choose to spend additional funds if I have them available, and where I have both public and private hospital options. For that, I’m happy to pay an extra $1.50 tax for every $100 I earn. It’s worth it.

*I actually remember going to buy glasses, and as our health care scheme wasn’t on the standard approved list, so they had to go and call my insurer. They came back with a slightly dazed look, having never heard of a premium that covered so much!

Cross-posted to All Good Naysayers, Speak Up!

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

“They would be lionized by America’s Right, as similar Christian minorities, oppressed by tyrannical regimes, automatically are”: Glenn Greenwald on the Islamic Chinese Uighur minority.

“It’s like the Constitution …  the strike zone is a living, breathing document”: Why judges should not be like baseball umpires.

“Is Obama Improving America’s Global Image?”: Well, if you’re talking about within Kenya…

Next moment she found that what she was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. “Why, it is just like branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and hard was falling on her. A moment later, she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.

Entering America, even only in terms of considering it in a cultural sense, I feel like Lucy stumbling into Narnia. Not only is there the feeling of everything being the same but different, there’s also the sense of utter remove from the world I am used to, a sense rarely found in cultural artifacts created in many other Western countries. American culture makes sense out of American insularity; within it, the rest of the world seems impossibly distant. I am always attracted to items of Americana that capture this remove.

These items can be found in the most unexpected of places. Earlier this year, for instance, I was reading the classic Judy Blume young adult novel Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret. I had a good reason for doing so: I’d been denied the opportunity to finish it as a sixth grader, and it really is the kind of book you should be able to say you’ve read, even if you’d rather not say you read it as a 25 year old postgraduate student[1]. Lizzie Skurnick, writing at the self-described women’s Web site Jezebel said that, as an adult, she felt like she was spying by following the exploits of the pre-adolescent Margaret Simon. My reading was similar, but unlike Skurnick, I never even lived the experiences in question. To say that I felt slightly unsavoury in my perusal of this novel is an understatement.

But I’m not here today to discuss first crushes or menstrual cycles. What did stand out to me on my reading of this novel was a pair of passages that had a distinct Welcome to Narnia feel about them; paragraphs that distinguished this coming-of-age novel as something that was happening definitively in America, and not in some generic Western suburbia.

I was really surprised when I came home from camp and found out our New York apartment had been rented to another family and we owned a house in Farbrook, New Jersey. First of all I never even heard of Farbrook. And second of all, I’m not usually left out of important family decisions.

But when I groaned, “Why New Jersey?” I was told, “Long Island is too social — Westchester is too expensive — and Connecticut is too inconvenient.”

So Farbrook, New Jersey it was, where my father could commute to his job in Manhattan, where I could go to public school, and where my mother could have all the grass, trees and flowers she ever wanted. Except I never knew she wanted all that stuff in the first place.

The new house is in Morningbird Lane. It isn’t bad. It’s part brick, part wood. The shutters and front door are painted black. Also, there’s a very nice brass knocker. Every house on our new street looks a lot the same. They are all seven years old. So are the trees.

It is not just the references to the locations on the Atlantic seaboard — though they do help. It’s the specific narrative of white flight told in the transition Margaret’s family makes to the New Jersey suburbs. Magaret explains the move to us in terms of self-realization; her father can more effectively control his life by spatially seperating his domestic and professional activities and her mother has a blank slate (trees, flowers) upon which to develop her and her family’s life. The wide-spaces and architectural conformity of the New Jersey exurbs is understood to be a step up the ladder, even if Margaret approaches it with a level of ambivalence Skurnick relates to the character’s impending adolescence:

Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible….was there ever a greater metaphor for the terror one feels at the onset of pubescence? … But, in her merest, timid request, the person of Margaret Simon … puts her finger exactly on how it feels to start to grow up. It’s not like an exciting trip to Radio City Music Hall with Grandma. It’s a long, featureless ride in the other direction, culminating in an blank exit ramp off a highway into a town without anyone you know.

Skurnick’s description is in itself uniquely American, too; she uses geography to seperate the domestic suburbs from the commercial and cultural hub of the city, and her reference to a “blank exit ramp” is telling in that she defines locations by their relationship to Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. (It is doubtful, for instance, that a Sydneysider would describe Parramatta or Blacktown by referencing the roads one takes to get there.)

American Suburbia is, for the Simons, like it was for a lot of Americans, a means of greater self-determination, a place where citizens could choose what elements of the wider world to incorporate into their lives instead of having them thrust upon them by the close proximity of the urban environment.

There is also the matter of Margaret being “able” to attend public school in New Jersey. Is this because of a lack of private schools in her new area, or does it carry the implication that while the middle-class, assumedly white, New Jersey schools were acceptable for a girl like Margaret, the more-diverse Manhattan public schools were not? After all, there is a reason why white flight was known as white flight.

So Margaret’s family, right from the beginning of the novel moves up by moving out, creating a secure environment, hermetically sealed environment for Margaret to live out her bildungsroman.

And yet, it isn’t only boys, ‘burbs and boobs on our young American protagonist’s mind:

“Oh Gretchen!” Janie said. “You and that Hebrew school business. Can’t you get out of it?”

“I’d love to,” Gretchen explained. “But I’ve got one more year and then I’m through.”

“What about you, Margaret? Do you go?” Janie asked me.

“You mean to Hebrew school?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t go,” I said.

“Margaret doesn’t even go to Sunday school. Isn’t that right,” Nancy asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“How’d you arrange that?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m not any religion,” I said.

“You’re not?” Gretchen’s mouth fell open.

“What are your parents?” Janie asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“How positively neat!” Gretchen said.

…

“But if you aren’t any religion, how are you going to know if you should join the Y or the Jewish Community Center?” Janie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it. Maybe we won’t join either one.”

But everybody belongs to one or the other,” Nancy said.

I love that Janie’s immediate concern about Margaret’s lack of religious association concerns how it will affect her socially. Janie isn’t worried that Margaret is amoral, and she doesn’t try to convert her: all she wants to know is how her new friend will resolve the difficulty of choosing which youth-targeted activities she will participate in.

It lends credence to my view that in America, religiousness is the default state; even if Margaret isn’t any faith, she is assumed to be something. When she tells her friends she is not, she is treated as an exotic oddity (“How positively neat!”), and she spends the rest of the book unsuccessfully trying to correct her idiosyncracy.[2] Religion in this passage has nothing to do with God or the reason for existence or the afterlife — or creation theories, or school prayer, or abortion, or any hot-button political or theological issue. It’s just a neutral marker of who you are and what sort of things you do in society. Try to imagine a group of Australian twelve year olds having the quoted conversation. It’s very difficult.

I do find it awkward that the  elements of American society that I see as being distinctly representative of the country as a whole are white and suburban. There is nothing about Margaret’s Jewish, New York grandmother, for instance, that is in the slightest bit unAmerican. Indeed, she is almost an American stock character. And yet there remains in my mind (and, I believe, in the minds of many millions of other people) a picture of America that is more Farbrook, NJ than Manhattan.

But if this picture of America was ever true, it is changing. Increased Hispanic immigration, intra-national migration changing the face of the country’s cities, and a more diverse political base have created an America that looks something not quite like the opening pages of Are You There God… Yet even now, those interstate exits, identical houses and casual discussions of religious affiliation pull me in through the wardrobe doors.

[1] But hey, I understand Sonia Sotomayer was doing much the same thing, so if it works for a SCOTUS nominee…

[2] In a not unusual display of American individualism, she eventually decides she can follow her own path.

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

Attached to this blog post was supposed to be a PDF-scanned photocopy of the front page of the ‘presidents’ section of the 1991 edition of World Book Encyclopedia. You know the one. The black and white one where Presidents George Washington to (then) George H.W. Bush were displayed, 1 through 41, portrait-style and impressive. Such portraiture is not, in the end, attached, because I remembered that I gave away my World Book set a couple of years ago to a friend of a friend’s kid who, my parents told me, needed it more than I did. Indeed, if that friend of a friend’s kid did not, in 2007, have the internet and easy access to Wikipedia then I guess they are right. Instead, what is attached is a JPEG image of something similar to the one in my erstwhile World Book set.
 
Look at it carefully. This version includes Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, and is somewhat out of date because our boy, Barack Obama, is yet to be included. But that is immaterial. I am trying to be nostalgic here, and this image is close enough to the Cold War-era one I had as a kid. Look at the distinction on these presidents’ faces and think about how powerful they were. Looking at them in chronological order is like examining the ringed layers in an old Sequioa tree trunk. These guys made history!
 
There are the almost comical paintings of the first 7 presidents up to Andrew Jackson. Number 8, I believe, is the first portrait photograph of Martin Van Buren. For your information, he was not a great president. None of the presidents from him to #15, James Buchanan, were. Then there is #16, President Lincoln, The Great Emancipator. As a kid I knew from The Simpsons that Honest Abe was a great and benevolent Civil War-era president, but only recently when I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals did I truly appreciate how great he was. Read it. Please. So we have something to talk about.
 
Since I’ve begun pimping books, what made this presidential obsession worse was Louis Phillips’ Ask Me Anything About the Presidents, a book I inherited from my grandmother, who was an American history teacher. It is an interesting and funny book peppered with little-known factoids about the presidents. Going back to our list again, did you know that #17, Andrew Johnson, was a drunk? And that #18, Ulysses S. Grant’s favourite snack was pickles soaked in vinegar? No. 19 Rutherford B. Hayes was apparently an ambidextrous impresario who could write simultaneously in English in one hand, and Hebrew in the other. You should see the cartoon illustration of Hayes doing just that in Louis’ book. I still chuckle when I think about it.
 
You cannot see it in this version, but in my 1991 World Book, #22 and #24, Grover Cleveland, the only president ever to serve two non-consecutive terms, was actually reproduced twice, sandwiching #23, Benjamin Harrison. Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of #9, William Henry Harrison, the one who died in office after a month because he chose not to wear an overcoat or top hat while delivering his 2-hour inaugural address, dying of pneumonia. Lesson to future presidents: don’t be cocky. Keep your addresses short.
 
Who was the fattest president? No. 27, William Howard Taft; who was also the only president to later serve as Chief Justice of the United States, a job he much preferred even while he was president. Unlike some of us, he had choices. And look! There is “Silent Cal” – #30 Calvin Coolidge – who was so nicknamed because he was so reticent that at a party once two ladies struck up a bet to see if they could get more than two words out of him. President Coolidge, up to the challenge, responded by saying, “You lose.” If you didn’t like his laissez-faire economics during the Gilded Age, you must at least admire the efficiency of his smugness here.
 
People often ask me why I like the United States so much and I respond almost too glibly by saying, “Why wouldn’t I?” But seriously, anyone who likes history and appreciates how history can be shaped by anyone if they work hard enough knows that there is glory in it. Ask #32, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is the longest-serving president and who was the only president elected 4 times. He was a silver spoon-fed child of the New York aristocracy who grew up a Democrat because he knew that the Depression required swift governmental action to help the poor and the suffering. He also did all of this in a wheelchair, and if that doesn’t bespeak a yearning for greatness, then you probably don’t know your American history.
 
If you ask me who my favourite president is, I would say that it was #33, Harry Truman, because HBO got in early and made the first ever biopic on a president I ever saw, which obviously made an imprint. A close second is #35, John F. Kennedy, because more than most presidents, he was urbane and witty and knew how to put words together, or at least hire people who knew how to put words together (shoutout to Ted Sorensen); and if you set aside his salacious character flaws, he and his family deserve massive props for making public service cool.
 
I will skip a few and end with #39, Jimmy Carter. I am currently in the process of revising history to resurrect his reputation. I am still researching on it, and do not quite have a complete grasp on his presidency, but at the moment I’ve got Jimmy Carter’s back. As a believer in human rights, he ‘practiced what he preached’ about US democracy, helping to bring peace to parts of the Middle East and Latin America, and upheld the view that if Americans were for freedom within its own shores and among its own people, they should be for freedom everywhere. As an Australian student of the United States at the United States Studies Centre, we can only hope that all presidents share this view.

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

By Jonathan Bradley

OK, I’ve written about Martina McBride’s 1993 song “Independence Day” on 4th of Julys previous, but hopefully I won’t repeat myself on this one. There is a lot to say about the song; the Fourth is the day the story of the American founding, usually an unspoken but everpresent subtext in American culture, is brought to the surface and becomes something acknowledged, explored and celebrated. Art that uses this day as a motif forces ideas implicit in American life to be made explicit. If nothing else, you get an idea of what Americans think it is to be American.

I began thinking about this song recently when, during the our Key Issues in American Culture class (at the United States Studies Centre), Erin, the USSSoc’s President, proposed that in addition to the story of the Revolution and subsequent drafting of the Constituion that is the prevalent founding narrative of the United States, there existed an alternate story of the nation, which used the Bible as its founding document. Erin’s idea suggests two Americas: one based on liberty and self-government, the other on (Christian) faith. I like the notion, because it helps reconcile some of the more egregious paradoxes in American life.

McBride’s “Independence Day” combines both stories of America so naturally that on first listen, it isn’t clear how unusual that combination is. The central conceit underpinning the song is that it is a telling of a personal story using the symbols of the American natonal story; a woman, tired of her husband’s abuse, revenges herself on him by burning their house down (it’s not stated, but I suspect he perished in that fire). And it all happens on Independence Day.

McBride explicitly sings about the woman’s “revolution,” the verse references the lyrics of the “Star Spangled Banner,” and the chorus begins “Let freedom ring…”; this is hardly an allegory designed to be subtle. But apart from all the patriotic detritus floating around the track, there is also a strain of the religious as well, something that has nothing to do with the uprising against the British forces or self-determination. The song’s violent act – a fire – has Old Testament rather than military overtones (though the lyric “She lit up the sky that Fourth of July” also hints at fireworks), as does the idea of swift and destructive action being an appropriate punishment for sin. The lyric preceding the title in the chorus makes the song’s religiosity even more evident: “Roll the stone away, it’s Independence Day.”

Wait, what? “Roll the stone away?” Exactly what does the Resurrection have to do with the American Revolution. But this reference, seemingly airdropped into a song about something entirely different, works. McBride, starting off with an allusion to America’s birth, transforms it into a reference to American salvation so naturally this disconnect is barely noticeable. The America of “Independence Day” is a state safeguarding individual freedom while similtaneously being God’ beacon of liberty guiding the world.

(Interestingly, despite the genuine patriotic joy expressed in “Let freedom ring!” and the almost disturbingly pugilistic “Let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning,” the song has an, at best, ambivalent conclusion, one which suggests none of the characters emerge better off. The house-igniting woman appears to be psychologically damaged by the abuse, and when the narrative concludes, she has lost her home and her daughter. This “Independence Day” has not the triumphant victory America usually celebrates each July.)

But what makes the song truly compelling is that, quite apart from all thematic complexity, it is a sharply drawn story with strong characterisation and resonant lyrics. The setting itself feels classically American without being trite. It is told from the point of view of the abused woman’s daughter, and there’s a nice sense of the mundane in between the more dramatic moments in the song. “I was just eight years old that summer, and I always seemed to be in the way,” McBride relates, making herself a universal observer (what kid doesn’t know what it’s like to feel in the way?) to the plot, and enabling her to narrate it with a candid remove. And she situates herself in what feels a highly naturalistic circumstance: “So I took myself down to the fair in town/on Independence Day.” In between the grand notions of America as God’s Country and America as Land of the Free sits these small scenes of America as a place where kids run off to the fair on a national holiday. Very often, these portrayals of the United States are incompatable. McBride glues them together the way — well, the way they’re glued together in real life America.

And if you’ve made it this far, do remember that on this Independence Day, the 4th of July 2009, the USSSoc is throwing its own celebration, at the Australian Youth Hotel in Glebe. Do take a look at our invite, and do join us.

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

Our wonderful Communications Director, Jonathan, has instructed us talk about anything American.  Anything American.

There’s so much to chose from.  I thought of writing about TV Shows, about books, about poetry or music.  But that really doesn’t make any sense.  What I should talk about- what I will talk about- is how I wound up here.

Granted, I’m not that interesting.  But I think the story is.  Well, perhaps interesting is a stretch.

I started following American politics a long while back.  It’s not a really remarkable introduction.  But a few years ago now, just after I started working at a certain football club that will not be named, I was starved for intellectual stimulation, really of any description, and so I started reading more about this interest I’d long held.  I liked Obama a lot, even before he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, so I started reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog.  Sullivan liked Obama.

I certainly wasn’t unaware of the blogsphere prior to encountering The Daily Dish.  In fact, my friend Bec and I tried (and failed) to keep a football blog.  But here blogging was something else.  It wasn’t a glorified, public diary.  It was journalism.  It was the democratization of publication.  It was a new outlet for reporting and commentary.  It removed politics from its rarefied world, and put it into a language- and medium- with which I could engage.

I had found my calling.

Perhaps.

So I read and read and read some more.  I read articles and posts.  I discovered the glory of the RSS reader (and for those of you who haven’t yet, it’s well and truly worth the effort).  And then, through Sullivan, I discovered a new blog.

Ezra Klein.

Suffice to say, back on my home blog (plug: http://www.naysayersspeak.com, which has been quiet for a while, but is back, I promise), Ezra Klein has had a fair bit of good press.  To be totally honest, I had a bit of a crush on him at the start.  (Not that you would ever have guessed that).  Now, that’s well and truly faded into a kind of admiration and appreciation for the writer who taught me a huge deal about digital journalism:  how to read about issues, how to find digital information, and how to write about politics in an immediate manner.

It’s been a year and a half since I discovered Klein’s blog.  He’s now at the Washington Post (was formerly at the American Prospect).  I started my own humble blog with grand aspirations but humble results.  But I’ve learned in the process the importance of the United States in developing digital democracy.  It truly in the centre of an emerging movement- a movement that empowers individuals.  It make the entry point for participation very low- all one needs is access to a computer, the internet, and some literacy skills.

It’s something that is bound to make democracy more robust as it develops.  I genuinely believe this development could be one of the most important in the history of representative government (read my appeal for an Australian digital political culture here).

So I wound up at uni, originally with the intention to study exactly that development.  The MA in US Studies has proved to be far, far more than that, and better than I could have expected, but it’s nice to remember, sometimes, the history.

So if you haven’t delved into the American Political Blogosphere yet, below are a few useful links:

Ezra Klein:  My favourite.  He writes an Economic and Domestic Policy blog.  He’s incredibly good on health care.  Also on one of my favourite issues, food policy.

Matthew Yglesias:  Harvard graduate.  He has written for a range of publications, including The Atlantic.  He’s kind of a generic liberal blogger, with interests in transportation policy and foreign policy.

Andrew Sullivan:  One of the first real American political bloggers.  He’s a little bit conservative, a little bit libertarian and a little bit liberal.  Occasionally histrionic, and certainly self-important, but a genuinely significant figure in journalism.

Will Wilkinson:  A libertarian, but not a contrarian, Wilkinson’s ideas are well-thought and interesting.  He poses some interesting questions for the liberal about the legitimacy of government involvement in a range of issues.

Spencer Ackerman:  The guy has attitude, but he’s awesome.  Actually, the guy has attitude AND he’s awesome.

Glenn Greenwald:  Worried that the administration isn’t respecting your consitutional rights?  Chances are that Glenn Greenwald is too.

Bloggingheads TV:  Bloggers skype each other, record it, and talk about stuff.  It’s way more interesting than it sounds.  This is my favourite episode ever.  It’s very dated, but it still makes me think.

All USSSoc blog posts reflect the opinions of the writer, and are not reflective of the views of the USSSoc.

And, as a special addition to this news bulletin, the USSSoc would like you to check out this rare correspondence, which USSSoc Vice-President Dean Fernandez uncovered at the National Archives in Washington DC only very recently, between Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. “The correspondence,” Fernandez explains, ”was written circa 1782-1785 when both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson served their young country overseas; Adams dispatched to the Dutch Republic to obtain loans for the Republic, and Jefferson seconded as America’s ambassador to France.

Download [PDF]