How I Spent My Last Day on Earth Before Being Chopped Up Into Iddy Biddy Pieces

Don Quixote by G. A. Harker

The Department of Motor Vehicles, aka HELL.

A friend invited me to go swimming yesterday. I love swimming and this might be my last chance.

While I was swimming I gave her my wallet for safekeeping. When I got out, the wallet was gone.

Tomorrow: showtime.

I will be under the knife.

I really need the driver's license that was in my stolen wallet. The hospital will use the driver's license as my identification. No driver's license, no surgery.

Today is my last day in the body I was born in.

I wondered how I'd spend today.

Listening to sitar music, in lotus position, contemplating the big truths? Rereading old diary entries and reviewing my life? Contacting loved ones and sending them spontaneous poetry praising our connections? Watching "Hitler finds out" videos on youtube, that always make me laugh? Or in uncut hedonism: dancing boys, booze, slots, chocolate?

In fact I spent the day, from eight a.m. to three p.m., non-stop, running around the ninety-degree streets of Paterson, NJ, and Haledon, and Wayne, on an empty stomach – not allowed to eat before surgery – doing what I could to replace the contents of that stolen wallet.

I started at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

(Non-American Readers: the Department of Motor Vehicles is the bureaucracy that issues drivers licenses. It is also hell.)

I carefully studied the list of requirements for the replacement of a stolen driver's license. With the theft of my wallet yesterday, I have very few of the required documents left, but just enough: my old license, a passport, a bank statement, and a few other items.

Here's the thing, though. Government bureaucracies lie, and don't function properly. They are a monopoly, and when the DMV doesn't live up to its promises, you can't go across the street to its competitor. It has no competitor. That, in a nutshell, is why I don't support Obamacare.

I arrived at the Paterson, NJ, DMV at eight a.m. I showed the clerk my documents. She refused to accept them.

"These documents meet DMV requirements," I said.

"I don't care," the woman said, baring her teeth at me. She really did. She bared her teeth.

"You're getting angry. You just bared your teeth. May I please speak to your supervisor?"

Maritza, the supervisor, arrived. She, too, would not accept the documents. She said she wouldn't accept the bank statement because it was not in its original envelope.

I pointed out that the printed DMV requirements mention no envelope.

She told me to leave.

I walked to the office of Congressman Bill Pascrell.

I was searched and put through a metal detector.

I walked into Congressman Pascrell's office and was met by a plump-cheeked, thick-haired, hyper healthy looking white boy wearing a blinding white shirt and a tie as conservative as Pope Benedict.

Without changing a hair of his physical appearance, this young intern could easily play the part of Rolfe, the young Nazi, in a "Sound of Music" revival.

My words rushed out: "Achtung, Rolfe. I've just been diagnosed with cancer. My wallet was stolen yesterday. Everything was in there: credit card, driver's license, money. I need the driver's license to be ID'd at the hospital tomorrow. I have all the required documents as listed in the DMV official pamphlet, but they won't issue a license to me. They are using bogus complaints like that my bank statement is not in the original envelope. Please help me."

And Rolfe told me to leave.

Rolfe is one of those people born handsome and healthy and hale, who, when he opens his mouth to speak, without any of his features changing one micrometer, becomes unbearably ugly. "We can't help you. That is a federal issue. This is a state office. Go to Benjie Wimberly's office."

I collapsed. I turned to go. Somehow, I found some gumption. I turned around again, and became very heavy, too heavy for Rolfe to move.

"Here's the thing, Rolfe. People in this office know me. I've been here many times before. You know I really am Danusha Goska, not one of the many imitators. Wimberly's people don't know me from Adam. Help me, Rolfe. Or at least let me speak to someone."

Rolfe said I could sit and wait for Nancy Everett. I did.

Nancy came out. A lovely African American woman. She took me to a conference room. Photos of Bill Pascrell with lotsa famous people.

I splayed my identifications out on the conference table. I told Nancy the whole story. And then I put my head down on the conference table, shook, and sobbed.

Nancy said something interesting, "The facts are not important here. What matters is that you have the required ID."

She picked my IDs up off the table and left the room. I heard a fax machine. She re-entered.

"I'll call you," she promised.

I believed her.

I went back outside into the heat and ran around Paterson some more.

Paterson is poor. Many of us don't have cars. We live on the streets. The streets throng. An African American woman in flip flops and her daughter carrying home, to the projects across the Passaic River, a large pizza pie. Muslims in Pashmina shawls. Very, very thin, old people. I wonder who these thin, thin, old people are. Dying? Heroin? Life? I always smile at them. You must smile at people so thin, and so old, forced to conduct their business on, to escort their bird bones over, Paterson's teeming streets.

Went to the library. Saw the very gorgeous, very sweet, bald, African American guy who mans the front desk. "Miss Danusha," he greeted me. He always calls me "Miss Danusha." "How have you been?"

I was just there to replace my library card, but his face is so spiritual, so deep and so kind, I had to blurt it all out. "If I get better…" I started to say.

"You will get better," he insisted. "You will."

Ran through the fetid air and over the bloodied sidewalks of the "live kill" markets stocked with living chickens and pigs and fish, waiting their turn to audition for someone's dinner table. Heard the phone ring. Answered. It was Nancy Everett. She was as good as her word.

"Go back to DMV," she said. "Go back to Maritza. They will give you your license."

"Thank you!" I shouted into the phone, louder than a nearby chicken being strangled. "Thank you," said, emphatic, in all caps.

I went back to the DMV. I expected them to shoot me death ray looks. Instead, they greeted me practically with cheers.

"She's back," someone said. "Get Maritza." Maritza came forward. She was actually smiling. "Thank you," she said. "Because of you, because of what you did, from now on we will go by the pamphlet. Trenton called us. Our policy is now changed."

Wow. Wow. 

One of the new photo IDs taken today.

Top Ten Things Not to Say to Someone Who Has Just Gotten a Cancer Diagnosis. And Some Things to Say That Help.

Did you really just say that? 

I got some bad news the other day.

I then received more news, and it was even worse. Way worse.

And then the really bad news came in.

And then the floor fell out beneath me and I was holding on to the windowsills by my fingernails.

Robin stood by me.

A few days in, we were sitting in yet another hospital waiting room. She studied my face. "You're not eating," she observed. "You need to eat. Eat something. I want to see you eat. What do you want? We'll get it."

A few days later I realized I could no longer do my daily regimen of sit-ups on a bare, wooden floor. I needed a pad under me.

I'm a big-boned gal. I love my food. I went a couple of weeks without eating.

At one point, a hospital bureaucrat with the personality of liquid bleach being shot from a fire hose demanded my social security number. She demanded this in a thick New Jersey accent.

Every American my age knows her social security number by heart.

I stared at the woman.

She made that clicking sound with the tip of her tongue on the roof of her mouth and moved on to other questions, but kept coming back to the SSN. For a good fifteen minutes, I could not give her my social security number. She rolled her eyes at her co-workers staffing nearby cubicles, "Get a load of THIS one. They just WANT to ruin our day!"

I finally remembered I had a form – I had many forms – in my backpack. I pulled it out. My social security number was on the form. I gave it to her.

I will never be the same. After this news, I will never be the same.

***

I'm a verbal person. As it happens, even this new me is verbal. I need to talk about this. I study how others are talking about this. Even cancer, it seems, will be, for me, largely, a verbal experience.

I keep thinking about things that people have said to me that have really boggled my mind. Because I'm a verbal person, I want to blog about these statements.

You need to understand – I'm not trashing the people who said these things to me. They are all in my life for a reason, and I love them all.

Life is complicated. One of the people who said one of the worst things also said one of the best things.

***

Anyway. Cancer.

The boogeyman in the closet. I've been hiding all my life.

I'm from one of those families.

My Aunt Tetka died at 101. She was old when I was born, and she was old when I got my first gray hairs. She never exercised, ate, in my presence, only pastries served on doilies and sprinkled with powdered sugar, and never learned to speak English, the language of the country she moved to decades before I was born. My great grandfather, Gregor Cerno, ate smoked bacon fat and raw hot peppers, drank copious amounts of slivovice, and lived to be ninety-something, depending on whom you asked.

My grandmother, on the other hand, Mary Cernova Kerekova, who was an unforgettable presence in my childhood, died before I was born. I write about her in the essay "Silence." Grandma had cancer. Like my brother. My uncle. My aunt. My mother. My father. My sister. Me.

Grandma. Second from right. 

This is not my first time to the rodeo.

Mike Manning was tall and straight and brilliant. You should have heard of him by now – his unique contributions to math or science or journalism or politics.

Mike and I played together.

I vividly remember, being, what, 14 years old? Standing in St. Francis church during Mike Manning's funeral, asking myself, over and over, over and over, how can it be that Mike Manning is dead, and I am alive? He was so much cooler than I. Taller, stronger, smarter. Hodgkin's Lymphoma: The only fact in his beautiful young life that mattered, in the end.

After my brother Phil was killed in a car accident on my birthday, I really had this sense of "Phew. None of my other siblings will die for decades more."

My brother Mike Goska was studying to be a minister. Married, a son, a daughter on the way.

He knew, I think, and put off going to the hospital until the last minute.

I was a Peace Corp Volunteer in Nepal. This is how I got the news. I was teaching in a tiny settlement five days' walk from the nearest road. No running water, no electricity, no radio, no telegraph, no nuthin.

One night, I had a dream. A helicopter landed behind my house. Doctor Theresa, the Peace Corps doctor, my mother, and my sister got out of the helicopter. They walked up to me and said, "You have to come home. Someone is sick in the family."

The next morning I got out of bed, got my passport out of hiding, and told my headmaster that I would be leaving. He thought I was crazy. It was monsoon, I was at 7,000 feet, the trails were washing out and lush with terrestrial leeches. "I have to go," I said. When I finally got to Kathmandu and they showed me the telegram from the states, they wondered why I was not surprised.

Again, my brother Mike was studying to be a minister. He was surrounded by people who prayed. We all prayed. We prayed for a miracle. Mike was so young. His daughter, who would be named Lydia, was not yet born. His son Donald was just a toddler.

I don't know what happened to our prayers for my brother Mike.

***

My friend David Horne was an Eagle Scout, a devout Christian, and a gay activist. That is how we met. I was an active supporter of gay rights. I write about David in "Save Send Delete," pages 224-225.

One afternoon David and I watched "Bent" together in his home, which was actually a refurbished log cabin. Then we went downtown for falafels. He said he hadn't been feeling well lately. Like an idiot, I lectured him about his atrocious, Midwestern eating habits. It wasn't his eating habits. It was leukemia. He phoned me one day after he'd gone blind. I wanted to pull him back from the abyss, but I could not.

Later that same year I held my mother in my arms as she breathed her last breaths.

And then Rabbi Laurie Skopitz … I write about Laurie here.

The Jews have a song, "Dayenu." Enough. When it is enough, God?

***

And I've been waylaid by some monsters myself.

No, not cancer.

Worse.

Ha! How's that for one-up-man-ship?

It's a long story. After a very ugly event on the campus of Indiana University, I was stricken with an inner ear disorder.

Inner ear disorders are "orphan disorders" with little research, little funding, little attention, and no publicity. Symptoms vary. One woman I "met" online walk up one morning stone deaf. But, unlike me, she never vomited.

For me: for years I vomited uncontrollably. I was intermittently, completely, paralyzed. Not only could I not move, I could not think about moving. Thoughts of movement brought on more vomiting. I vomited so much I needed intravenous hydration. Nystagmus, an involuntary eye spasm, rendered me close to blind. I couldn't read, couldn't recognize my own face in a mirror.

I had "good days" when I could walk around outside, read, and eat. I couldn't predict when those good days would occur. Because I did have those good days, I was denied SSDI.

I lost weight. Unable, on my best days, to move quickly or place my head below my heart, I lost muscle tone. I lost all my friends. I lost my life savings. I lost any hope for any kind of a future.

I traveled from doctor to doctor, in three states. Surgeons operated three times; the first two were experimental; the last pro bono surgery by Richard T. Miyamoto at Riley Children's Hospital "killed" my ear.

I knew that surgery worked when I went the next week without vomiting.

There was no welcoming committee to ease me back into normal life after that surgery. I moved into an empty apartment and had to beg friends and charitable agencies for a spaghetti strainer, a chair. I lived in that apartment for a year without a telephone, a computer, a television, heat or hot water. It was Bloomington's worst winter. There was ice inside my windows. That's re-entry after a catastrophic illness when you have only yourself to rely on.

I am still deaf in the affected ear. I still use a cane to walk, for balance. Otherwise, I'm fine. I got my body back. I lift weights and do sit-ups and walk miles every day and enjoy it, knowing how hideous it is to be inside of a body and to be unable to move.

In other words, no, I don't need this cancer diagnosis to teach me what a miracle a healthy human body is, or what it is to be poor, or to be a medical guinea pig.

What is God thinking?

When will I have been educated … or punished … or disciplined … or life experienced … enough?

***

So, as I said, I need to talk about this, and I've tried, and I've hit some snags in my attempt to communicate, and I wanted to blog about that. So, here they are. The top ten things not to say to someone who has just gotten a cancer diagnosis:

1.) "The problem: you are Catholic."

I've been Catholic all my life. I'm used to anti-Catholicism. Blaming the Vatican for cancer is a new one on me, though.

2.) "Your religion stinks."

I can't talk about my diagnosis without talking about my faith. And even so much as mentioning my faith is an invite to some to point out that Jesus was a phony charlatan who just wanted sex with his followers, like Mary Magdalene, and I am a self-righteous idiot and hypocrite for believing in him in lieu of any other "desert nomad."

Yes, yes, the people who jumped at the chance to say this to me shortly after learning of my diagnosis are my friends, they do care about me and they are good people. I could theorize for hours about why people say things like this at moments like this, but I don't want this blog post to become a thousand pages long.

3.) "My religion is better than yours, and IF YOU DON'T WANT TO DIE OF CANCER, use this opportunity to start practicing my religion now!"

Interestingly enough, this email did not come from my Jehovah's Witness friend. She has been discrete and has not used cancer to try to get me to become a JW. Although she uses every other opportunity.

No, this message came from a friend who has converted to an Eastern religion. One that is better than mine. One that if I practiced it, I wouldn't be in this fix! Om and namaste and lotus blossoms and all that.

4.) "I'm an old-timer. I know the system like the back of my hand. Just do what I say, kid, and everything will be hunky dory."

I've been poor all my life. I'm the very worst kind of poor to be in America – an educated, articulate, American-born, white, working woman with no addictions, no arrest records, no child, and who works on the books. The conjurers of salvific government programs hate us. Again, topic for a whole book.

In other words, *I* know the system. I know what it is to fight for charity care in a hospital and be told that it isn't for "people like you. It's for people who are really poor."

There is a subset of know-it-alls out there who are convinced that they have the system figured out, and whenever I broach the topic of what it's like to be told, oh, say, that I have an illness that might kill me and that I can't get health care for that, these self-identified experts jump up eagerly and insist that they know. They know the form. They know the bureaucrat. They know the agency. They know the process. They don't, of course, but they do know how to stop any productive discourse dead in its tracks.

5.) "I KNOW someone who had EXACTLY what YOU HAVE and she just DIED a long, slow, horrible, lingering death!"

The person who said this to me had no clue what my diagnosis was.

6.) "I KNOW someone who had EXACTLY what YOU HAVE and it was a snap! It's a really easy one to cure! It's NOTHING!"

The person who said this to me had no clue what my diagnosis was.

7.) "Tell me EXACTLY what they are going to REMOVE and what procedure they will be using and how long the surgery will take and whether it will be chemo or radiation and what PERCENTAGE CHANCE they give you!"

Watch an episode of the old TV show E.R. But don't ask me questions like this. This is medical porn.

8.) "You are not alone. No man is an island."

Two problems: I am. I have two friends who are being very good, but they are friends, and their first priorities are their own families. They owe me nothing. I know what it is to do something like this alone, and it's not pretty. And these statements are clichés.

9.) Disaster movie emails.

How to describe these – they are their own genre.

One of my friends, a man I do love, and have much reason to be grateful to, all of a sudden, after I broke the news to him, started telling me about all these disasters in his life, including his sister's health problems. Funny thing – I've known him for seventeen years. I didn't even know he had a sister. He's never talked about her before.

A woman I barely know sent me a three thousand word email – that's a very long email – detailing every bad thing that had ever happened to her in her life. House fires. Runaway pets. Eczema. Psoriasis. A date who didn't show up for the prom. (I love this woman. Good woman. Weird email.)

I got quite a few of these communications. This was at a time when I was still staring into space, unable to eat, unable to remember my own social security number. People were drowning me in their own disaster news, news they felt no pressing need to write me about the very week before I got the diagnosis.

10.) Unsolicited advice.

No need to explain this one.

11.) Quack websites. New Age beliefs. Conspiracy Theories. Cures advertised on late night programs about alien abductions. What have you got to lose?

***

I've heard some good things. Here they are:

1.) Robin said, "Helping you is helpful to me."

That was the single best thing anyone said to me in this. Robin knows I am a save-the-world type, at least in my fantasies, and it is killing me to be so needy. She used my own psychological make-up to get me to accept much needed help from her. God bless her.

2.) "I'm here for the duration."

I reminded my friend Otto that death from cancer, should it come to that, is not pretty. He insisted he'd stick around through the baldness and decay I know all too well to be prominent menu items.

3.) "I'm praying for you."

More grateful than I can say to facebook friends who are praying for me. I got through one especially dreaded test by picturing their faces, saying their names, blessing them, and thanking God for them. Just that meditation process got me through a test I never thought I'd be able to complete.

I am very grateful to the citizens of Markowa who will be offering up a mass for me in September. I spoke in Markowa, Poland, last summer.

I "met" a lovely woman online. Her name is Claire Bateman and she is a poet. She told me she'd pray for me, as did others, and that means a great deal to me. Claire sent me a photo of a candle she'd lit for me. I cherished that photo and clung to that image to get through that day's tests.

Photo by Claire Bateman

4.) "You have affected my life."

This came from a complete stranger, a man who found and read "Save Send Delete." He sent me one of the most beautiful emails I've ever read. It was genuinely artistic photo of his sons, and a note on how reading "Save Send Delete" had had a positive impact on him, and, by extension, on his family. That is the kind of validation that makes one strong in the face of death. He encouraged me to live, though, so I could write more. That is the kind of prod that makes you want to march forward, in spite of it all.

5.) "I will clean your house and bring you food."

Thank you to my fellow adjunct professor, Janice, who sent me this email even before she knew the complete diagnosis. She just intuited from a note that I dropped her that someone big was up, and she knew exactly what I feared and what I needed, and she jumped in. God bless her. She's a devout Catholic, by the way.

6.) "I will research for you and share what I discover." Several people did this. I remember, now, Michele, Christina, Eva, Robin, of course.

7.) "Would you like me to take you to Skylands?"

Skylands is my favorite place on earth. I don't have a car so I don't get there often. Chris, Antoinette, Otto, Robin, all offered to take me. I'd stay alive for that.

8.) "I know you just got some very bad news. I don't know how you are feeling. I don't know the best thing to say. I want to be supportive. I know it will probably be hard for you to ask for anything. Please know that I am here. I am standing by. I care. I have a car … a house … some free time next Tuesday … a brother who knows somebody who works in that hospital … No rush. Whenever you are ready, please know I am standing by. If you just want to sit next to me for a while and just breathe, we can do that. And when you are ready to ask for something, even if it's a bit odd, run it past me. If I can do it, I will."

9.) "I'll be okay."

It bothers me tremendously to think that what's happening to me might hurt the people I care about. I need to hear that – that they'll be okay, no matter what happens to me.

10.) Laughter.

I'm glad people still laugh at my demented sense of humor.

11.) "Someday your writing, including Save Send Delete, will be discovered."
Hey, one can dream.

Batman: Sick Product of a Sick System

I hated "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises." I posted the review, below, on the International Movie Database in 2008. 

"Batman: The Dark Knight" is a tacky, trashy, mindless, ultra violent, pointless piece of garbage. It will bore anyone with a mature mind. "The Dark Knight" consists of one sadistic, pointlessly violent scene after another. There is no point to these scenes except to extract money from the pockets of sheltered teenage boys who have had no experience of real life, and those who think like sheltered teenage boys who have had no experience of real life. "The Dark Knight" is a drug. It pushes violence and sadism. That's it. That's what you get for your ten bucks.

"The Dark Knight" is a sick product of a sick culture. What's the difference between a blockbuster death-fest like this, and an act of actual terrorism? The terrorists who crashed planes on 9-11 killed over three thousand people. How many deaths do films like this contribute to? How much suffering? Pointless, ugly, violent, sadistic movies peddle violence as the drug of choice to mindless consumer hoards who lack discrimination, life experience, wisdom or balance. Teenage boys who hide out in their parents' basements playing video games and having no experience of three-dimensional reality see a movie like this and conclude that the world is like this: cool criminals torture passive victims and meet no resistance. Hey, Thanks, Hollywood, for flushing your refuse into young male minds. Let's call it cultural terrorism. Ka-ching. How much more violent and sadistic will such films have to be in the future to make that cash register sing? Let's up the ante.

The Plot? Heath Ledger puts on a ridiculous series of ticks, costumes  and make-up and tries really hard to get taken seriously as a master criminal / master actor. There is no real performance there because there is no real life there. In one scene, Ledger, a slight young man, murders a very large, muscular, professional criminal, and a black man – white supremacists will like that part – with a pencil. No. In real life that would not happen. Nor, in real life, would a man who shoots his every accomplice be able to do any of the things Ledger does in this movie – blow up hospitals, rig boats for explosions, etc.

The movie is utterly implausible. This won't matter to its fans, who live in the fantasy world of video games and internet sites devoted to their fantasy. These fanboys talk only to other fanboys who worship films like this as they do. In their solipsistic little computer-generated echo chamber, "The Dark Knight" is the greatest film ever made. These fanboys have no contact with anyone not exactly like themselves, and can't see any flaws in their judgment. Though saturated in violence, these fanboys can't even see why a skinny guy like Ledger murdering a muscular, hardened criminal with a pencil is a silly, nasty, scene that exists only to up the sadism ante, not to have any relationship with reality. Though saturated in violence, these fanboys would panic at the merest contact with the real world, with the real violence occurring in places like Iraq, or federal prisons.

Christian Bale is an interesting actor and was fun to watch in the previous batman. He's hardly onscreen here. There is nothing interesting about the sets or costumes, and as for the special effects, how many chase scenes and big explosions have been onscreen recently? Nothing new. Nothing interesting.

The Fate of a Homosexual Boy in Muslim Morocco by Abdellah Taia

Mummified remains of an Incan child sacrifice, pre-Columbian Argentina.

"No one saved me ... "

I read Abdellah Taia's essay, excerpted below, in the New York Times the other day. It is one of the saddest, most haunting, and most beautifully written essays I've ever read.

***

A Boy to Be Sacrificed
Abdellah Taia
Published: March 24, 2012
New York Times

In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone's blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me — not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth. A "zamel."

Like everyone else, they urged me into a terrible, definitive silence, there to die a little more each day.

How is a child who loves his parents, his many siblings, his working-class culture, his religion — Islam — how is he to survive this trauma? To be hurt and harassed because of something others saw in me — something in the way I moved my hands, my inflections. A way of walking, my carriage. An easy intimacy with women, my mother and my many sisters. To be categorized for victimhood like those "emo" boys with long hair and skinny jeans who have recently been turning up dead in the streets of Iraq, their skulls crushed in.

The truth is, I don't know how I survived. All I have left is a taste for silence. And the dream, never to be realized, that someone would save me. Now I am 38 years old, and I can state without fanfare: no one saved me.

I no longer remember the child, the teenager, I was. I know I was effeminate and aware that being so obviously "like that" was wrong. God did not love me. I had strayed from the path. Or so I was made to understand. Not only by my family, but also by the entire neighborhood. And I learned my lesson perfectly. So deep down, I tell myself they won. This is what happened.

I was barely 12, and in my neighborhood they called me "the little girl." Even those I persisted in playing soccer with used that nickname, that insult. Even the teenagers who'd once taken part with me in the same sexual games. I was no kid anymore. My body was changing, stretching out, becoming a man's. But others did not see me as a man. The image of myself they reflected back at me was strange and incomprehensible. Attempts at rape and abuse multiplied.

I knew it wasn't good to be as I was. But what was I going to do? Change? Speak to my mother, my big brother? And tell them what, exactly?

It all came to a head one summer night in 1985. It was too hot. Everyone was trying in vain to fall asleep. I, too, lay awake, on the floor beside my sisters, my mother close by. Suddenly, the familiar voices of drunken men reached us. We all heard them. The whole family. The whole neighborhood. The whole world. These men, whom we all knew quite well, cried out: "Abdellah, little girl, come down. Come down. Wake up and come down. We all want you. Come down, Abdellah. Don't be afraid. We won't hurt you. We just want to have sex with you."

They kept yelling for a long time. My nickname. Their desire. Their crime. They said everything that went unsaid in the too-silent, too-respectful world where I lived. But I was far, then, from any such analysis, from understanding that the problem wasn't me. I was simply afraid. Very afraid. And I hoped my big brother, my hero, would rise and answer them. That he would protect me, at least with words. I didn't want him to fight them — no. All I wanted him to say were these few little words: "Go away! Leave my little brother alone."

But my brother, the absolute monarch of our family, did nothing. Everyone turned their back on me. Everyone killed me that night…

Abdellah Taïa is the author of the novel "An Arab Melancholia." This essay was translated by Edward Gauvin from the French.

Linkto the full essay.

Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, and My Own Dark Night of the Soul

Reading the news about Jerry Sandusky, Penn State football coach and serial child rapist, and Joe Paterno, football coach hero and enabler of Sandusky, is hitting too close to home for me. I'm nauseated. I'm tearful. I'm fighting a crisis of faith.

Something too much like this story happened to me. And the news coverage makes it fresh in my mind.

I talk about a lot of this in "Save Send Delete."

***

After receiving my MA from UC Berkeley under Alan Dundes, a truly great scholar, I went to Indiana University in Bloomington for the PhD. Berkeley did not offer a PhD in my field.

I had no money. Previous to grad school, I had been a working class child of Eastern European peasant immigrants. I had worked through college as a nurse's aide. After graduating I served in Peace Corps twice. I came back and worked, with just the BA, as an adjunct professor in an inner-city Community College, teaching English to new immigrants. Nurse's aide, Peace Corps volunteer, inner-city English teacher: you don't make a lot of money at any of those fields. And, I had already spent a lot on tuition at UC Berkeley.

I told the department at IUB (Indiana University Bloomington) that I would really need some kind of work in order to survive as a PhD student. They put me to work for a Professor. Let's call her Prof. X.

It was immediately evident to me that Prof. X wasn't all there. She assigned me bizarre, Sisyphean tasks. One day she told me to go to the library and find research on children.

Anyone who knows anything about research will know that this is a crazy request. No one looks for "research on children." You look for research done in the last year on the impact of food dyes on fourth graders' test scores – something specific like that.

I attempted to communicate this to Prof. X. She became flustered, and angry, and then just told me to sit in a room with a desk in it. And that was it. For an eight-hour work day.

One day I got a phone call. My father was dying.

I told Prof. X. She said I couldn't leave. She needed me to type up the program for a conference she'd be hosting.

That night, I cried. Around two a.m., I went out into the street and threw an empty bottle against the pavement. Then I went into the house, got a broom, and swept up the broken glass.

I had learned at UCB: There is a pecking order on American university campuses, and it has little to do with hard work or intelligence. It has everything to do with politics. I had learned from what statements got laughter and applause, and what statements arouse protest, from who got funding and who did not, from whose research drew praise from professors, that I, a working class Polish Catholic, had no status on this or any other American college campus.

I had two choices: I could go to my father's deathbed, and lose the chance to get the PhD that I thought would enable me to give voice to my people's concerns in academia and in the wider culture, or I could let my father die without me, and get the PhD, which, of course, would be, suddenly, exposed as completely hollow.

I decided to go to my father's deathbed. He died just as my train was pulling in to Penn Station. I stayed for the funeral, then turned around and went back to Indiana. I missed only four workdays. I had plenty of time to type up the program for the conference. I began doing so.

My boss began to behave badly toward me.

I won't go into detail here.

A few days before Christmas, I couldn't take it anymore. I went to a dean. I have never cried so hard in my life. People would later ask me how my ear burst. It may have been this episode of crying.

I told the Dean I was leaving. I had begun to pack my bags.

The Dean moved me into an emptied-out office on campus. She told me she needed me to stick around.

"We need someone to testify against her," the Dean said. "Someone like you, with nothing to lose. Someone with no pension, no scholarship. You see, she's been doing stuff like this, and worse, for years, but no one will speak out against her, because no one wants to be accused of being sexist or racist." Prof. X was an African American woman.

This Dean began sending me on a round of appointments, appointments that lasted till the end of the spring semester.

I was to meet with the top officials of the IUB campus. These meetings would be announced to me at the last minute. I was just to report to room ABC at such-and-such a time.

I sat in leather chairs in rooms with heavy curtains. I met with people in suits and gleaming shoes. It was always the same: dates. Times. Actions. What exactly did she do to you? I had to tell the story, over and over again, to complete strangers. And then I would be dismissed.

Over and over again, I heard. I heard these exact words, from these officials' own mouths: she's a bad person. She's done much worse to others. She almost killed one person. She's a sociopath. But no one will speak out against her because no one wants to be accused of being sexist or racist.

All these good people knew. And they did nothing. Because it might inconvenience them.

I began to find it hard to walk down hallways. I heard a popping sound in my ear. I began to vomit uncontrollably.

I did not realize it at the time. My life, as I knew it, my hopes for the future, were ending.

My inner ear burst. For the next several years, I would be chronically ill, often completely paralyzed, not only unable to move, but unable even to imagine movement. Nystagmus rendered my eyes all but unusable. I couldn't read. I couldn't even recognize myself in a mirror. I would lie on a couch, all day long, in a fetal position, rising only to vomit.

And so began a new round of appointments. I went to doctor after doctor. They denied me treatment. They didn't know anything about vestibular disorders. They couldn't treat me because I didn't have health insurance or money. Or they experimented on me. Inner ear disorders are "orphan diseases": little studied and little understood. The experiments were not successful. My symptoms continued.

A judge who had just been removed from the bench, for a time, for unfair treatment of female claimants, in spite of supporting testimony from physicians, career specialists, an IU official and a nun who came to testify for me, turned down my SSDI claim.

I had no income for years. I lost my life savings. Every sock I wore in those days, I found on the street. I got food from a food bank. At times, I stole food.

I wrote to everyone I could think of to write to: Oprah Winfrey, Polish American organizations, Senator Lugar, Evan Bayh. Mostly my attempts to get help were ignored. Sometimes I received insulting replies.

I tried to contact the priest at the church where I attended services – and where I donated volunteer labor. I needed a one-on-one conversation. Why can't I get medical care? Why is God doing this to me?

Father was always too busy, the secretaries always said.

During all the years I went through this, in spite of numerous efforts, I never was able to find a priest who would talk to me.

A friend said to me that I had to suffer at the hands of Prof. X because I am white, and therefore guilty. I deserved it, somehow, and Prof. X was correct to do what she did. She was just getting justice for slavery.

"My only friend is darkness," as psalm 88 says.

***

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story, "Young Goodman Brown," that describes a Puritan man attending a witch's Sabbath one night and finding all the good people of town present. He becomes cynical. He becomes convinced that there is no goodness in the world. Because, after all, the people who represented goodness were all exposed as bad.

And that's what's killing me in this Joe Paterno / Jerry Sandusky coverage. All those "good" people on the Penn State campus. The deans, the administrators, representing goodness. All bad.

Power is what matters.

Appearance is what matters.

Goodness is just a sham to enable power to do what it wants.

***

One of the people I wrote to was State Senator Vi Simpson. I didn't expect much. She was a state senator. Not very powerful.

Her legislative aide, Rick Gudal, read the letter. He responded. He was on the case for years, until Dr. Richard T. Miyamoto, at Riley Children's Hospital, in Indianapolis, performed a pro bono surgery that permanently stopped my symptoms overnight.

***

One Palm Sunday in Bloomington a man turned around to shake my hand during the "Sign of Peace" ceremony. I gasped when I saw his face. I refused to shake his hand. He was one of the IUB officials I had been sent to to testify.

That one gesture – not shaking that one man's hand – was my one moment of … what … revenge? Certainly not justice.

I met with IU official Deborah Freund. She asked me directly what I wanted done to Prof. X. I had been alerted that that question would come up during our meeting, and I had been told to prepare an answer.

I was, and am, a Christian, if an often-doubting one. I said I wasn't interested in revenge; that that was not the Christian way. In any case, Prof. X struck me as more reptile than human. I don't mean that as a schoolyard insult, but, rather, as a diagnosis. Prof. X demonstrated for me the concept that evil is not so much a presence, as an absence. She seemed the void, her skull an empty can. Nothing there. How do you punish emptiness? Insert something?

I wanted to say to Deborah Freund, and I hope that this is what I actually said, "Prof. X is the smallest particle of this ugliness. The larger part is all those 'good' people who knew exactly what she was and enabled her, because to take a stand against her would inconvenience them. That is what needs to change."

***

It's now many years since these events. In the interim, some of the folks who knew me back at IUB have googled me and become my facebook friends. They are, for the most part, leftists. They festoon their facebook pages with evidence of their commitment to glorious causes. Sometimes they berate me for not being part of the movement.

And I think, but I never say this out loud: For years, you knew me in Bloomington. You knew I often couldn't walk or see. You never once offered me a ride. You offered me no support in my search for health care. You never visited me on a day when I could not move. You just ignored everything I was going through, because it was too much a downer. And now you lecture me about your glorious leftist cause?

I don't say this to them. I guess I've just said it here.

***

My crisis of faith comes back to me as I read about Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky, as I confront all the "good" people at Penn State who could have done something, and who did nothing.

When those who represent goodness are exposed as empty suits, one is tempted – by the Devil, I, as a Christian, believe – tempted to believe that goodness itself is mere show.

I know that that is not true.

I remember Rick Gudal.

In the essay Political Paralysis, I write about a Bloomington man, Mark Braun, who stopped on a snowy day to give me a ride when the illness was striking me as I was trying to walk home and I began to weave, visibly, on the street.

There is goodness out there. A goodness that is reflective of God, the source of all goodness, so says Psalm 16.

I remind myself of the victim who had the courage to speak publicly of what Jerry Sandusky did to him. I focus on his courage, on his determination to help other victims. Not on all the noise and hoopla of glorious Penn State, all those six-figured deans and administrators who publicly represent goodness and are just the fancy cake icing hiding putrescence.

I am telling myself this.

I am struggling against the sense that all goodness is just show. That all that motivates and animates the world is power.

I always try to end blog posts on an upbeat note. This is my upbeat note: my tradition, the Judeo-Christian one, is there. It beat me there. "Eli eli lama sabacthani?" "My only friend is darkness" "O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more." My tradition gives me voice and acknowledges the darkness. That is no small thing, one discovers, when confronted with it.

Islam is Beautiful, but Catholics Like to Torture

Just another day at the beach for us Catholics. 

I recently blogged about Molly Linehan.

Compare that blog entry with Prof. Robert Orsi, the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University.

Two years ago, Prof. Orsi denounced the Catholic church as repressive and on the side of torture. See here. And here.

First Things Blogger RR Reno asks, "Can we imagine a chair of Jewish Studies who repeats simple-minded slanders against Jews: rootless cosmopolitans, money grubbing shysters, and other libels? Orsi’s comments operate at the same level."

***

In "Save Send Delete" I talk about what it's like to be a low-status college professor who also happens to be Catholic and Politically Incorrect. When I talk to my friends about what goes on on college campuses, I think, sometimes, they think I am making it all up. It's all too Alice-through-the-looking-glass for them.

You mean people – students, teachers – get punished for asking real questions? You mean people face prejudice because they are Catholic? You mean you are not allowed to mention the bad things that members of certain protected groups have done, from Communists to Muslims, without facing some backlash from a superior?

Yeah. A lot of the time, that's exactly what it's like.

Why is it that way? One big reason. The Golden Rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules.

The fight for funding in academia is slightly less decorous, slightly less competitive, than a school of sharks thrashing over chum. There are too many PhDs out there, and not anywhere near enough jobs or funding.

Political Correctness rules on campuses today, and those who tell you how "beautiful" Islam is and how torturous Catholics are receive endowed chairs and occupy velvet-lined chambers and alternate universes graced with job security and health insurance and paid sabbaticals that the rest of us toiling, sweating, low status galley slaves can only dream about.

I'm not blogging about this to protest criticisms of the Catholic Church. I've criticized the Catholic Church loudly enough and often enough to receive hate mail from those more loyal to Rome than I. I'm not here to tell you all Muslims are terrorists; I grew up with Muslims. My county in NJ has one of the US' highest populations of Muslims. As I talk about in "Save Send Delete," I've had Muslim friends, lovers, students, coworkers and bosses all my life. A Muslim man drew my blood the other day. (And he did a great job. I felt almost nothing and the needle prick has disappeared.) I was able to chat – VERY briefly – with him in Arabic, and commiserate with him about the dire fate of his loved ones in Homs.

Rather, I'm protesting this grotesque reality – to say, on a college campus, that there are some sound reasons for criticizing Islam, and there are some sound reasons for admiring some aspects of Catholicism, is a risky thing for a professor or a student to do.

National Catholic Reporter: Americans Demonize Muslims; Christians Must Learn "to Recognize the Humanity in" Muslims

Zafran Bibi and her daughter Shabnan. Photo by Greg Bearup.

Molly Linehan. Source.

The National Catholic Reporter, winner of the "General Excellence" award from the Catholic Press Association from 2000 through 2011, published a July 2, 2012 article entitled "12 Catholic Women under 40 Making a Difference." Molly Linehan, 35, a graduate student, was one of these twelve women. Linehan is the Alwaleed Bin Talal Scholar at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

In the profile of Molly Linehan, The National Catholic Reporter alleges that Americans engage in an "amazing" "continuing demonization of Islam." Christians need to learn "to recognize the humanity in 'the other.'" "The Other" is a charged social science term. Its use implies that Americans and Christians have selected Muslims to demonize, dehumanize, lie about, and irrationally hate.

In Pakistan, Linehan witnessed "the beauty of Islam, especially its own strong sense of social justice."

Jesus would approve of Linehan's work promoting Islam, she said, because "Jesus witnessed nonviolence to us."

The discerning reader will have noted a few problems with this National Catholic Reporter article.

There is no amazing continued demonization of Islam in America. Yes, there are marginalized people who say socially unacceptable, extreme things about Islam in private conversations with trusted friends and in anonymous internet posts.

Were these same people to make these statements publicly, in conversations with a wider circle of friends or in public statements, these people themselves would be demonized. They would be fired. Ask Juan Williams, who made a mild, public confession of his own nervousness when boarding a plane with passengers wearing Muslim attire. Williams was fired and he was demonized. He was fired even though everyone knows that everyone – including the most Politically Correct holier than thou travelers – including Molly Linehan – including the staff of the National Catholic Reporter – share Williams' anxiety.

Islam has been inoculated against public criticism. One can say the most egregious things about Catholics, about Evangelicals, in recent years, as anti-Semitism rises, about Jews. One can joke about people with Indian accents and about Buddhist meditation.

One cannot criticize or joke about Islam. Ask Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris, who had to "go ghost" – who had to enter something like the witness protection program – after she innocently suggested an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day."

The inoculation of Islam against criticism, against even jokes – never mind the "amazing continued demonization" that Linehan and the NCR fantasize about – is not just an empty social convention. The inoculation of Islam against criticism has a body count.

Just one example: there was one red flag after another in the career of Major Nidal Hasan. For heaven's sake, Hasan made a powerpoint presentation arguing for jihad. His fellow officers saw this powerpoint. They saw multiple other red flags. They did not speak up about this loose cannon about to fire on innocents, because they were afraid of being labeled "Islamophobes." The Fort Hood Massacre is the result of this fear of being labeled an Islamophobe.

Molly Linehan speaks of the "Beauty of Islam" and the "social justice" in Islam she encountered in Pakistan. The National Catholic Reporter did not pause to quiz her about this line. They might have.

The majority of women in prison in Pakistan are in prison because they were raped.

That is not a typo.

Islam's beautiful social justice requires that four adult Muslim males witness a rape for it to count as a rape. Otherwise, a woman who complains of rape is confessing to adultery, and, in Pakistan, she is punished. Zafran Bibi is just one such victim.

Another form of allegedly Islamic justice in Pakistan is gang rape. Mukhtaran Bibi is but one of the more famous victims; there are countless others, including Christian girls.

Robert Spencer has kept a careful eye on the impact that the tens of millions of dollars Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal has lavished upon Georgetown University. His reports can be accessed through the google search here. In brief, Spencer alleges that, in line with an ancient, international proverb, students and scholars at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding "sing the praises of him whose bread you eat." Hindi offers an even less attractive, more telling version of this proverb: "Be a slave to him whose bread you eat." In America, we are more likely to say, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you."

Spencer's concerns can be summed up thus: Because the Saudi prince lavishes so much money on Georgetown and its students, the recipients of the money become Public Relations agents for Islam. They close their eyes to any honest assessment of Islam, and emphasize flattery of Islam. If any problem arises, they blame the big, bad, Americans, the big, bad Christians, who "demonize the other" who are blind to Islam's beautiful justice, who need to be coached on "Muslim-Christian understanding" by recipients of millions of Saudi petro-dollars.

The National Catholic Reporter.
Twelve Catholic Women Who Are Making a Difference.
Molly Linehan Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Scholar.