Grace Note

July 11, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in the Middle East, a mother’s voice cuts through the terrible din. The words belonged to Rachel Fraenkel, whose son Naftali had recently been kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank along with two other Jewish Israeli teens. In apparent revenge for these three deaths, Mohammed Abu Khdier, a Palestinian teenager, was kidnapped in Jerusalem and allegedly burned alive.

Fraenkel statement came after the traditional week of mourning for her son, and just hours after Mohammed’s funeral.

Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal and Nafali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem—the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country. . . No mother or father should ever have to go through what we are going through, and we share the pain of Mohammed’s parents.

You had to be listening to hear Fraenkel’s words over the bloodlust, the recrimination, the political exclamations, and the missile volleys between Israel’s cities and Gaza. It was a voice crying in the wilderness.

L’Chaim.

Samuel and Pearl Oliner began their book about rescuers of Jews and other victims during World War II with the following observation:

That people act in the service of their own self-interest is a maxim we are quite likely to accept. We are not even startled when they behave demonically. What we find difficult to accept or explain are behaviors that appear self-transcendent. (Preface at xviii)

Some of what is difficult “to accept or explain” comes from our reluctance to imagine the painful place that Fraenkel spoke from—to inhabit that sense of loss with her as she crossed a seething divide to grieve for another child who is tied by the cruelest of circumstances to her own. Because we hope it will never happen to us, that we’ll never have to find out what this kind of pain is like, we don’t take the five or ten minutes to envision for ourselves the possibilities that might exist beyond the pain. If we could be better at imagining “all the way through,” self-transcendence might be less of a puzzlement.

Sadly and far more often, graceful words and actions don’t break though the 24/7 overload to register with us at all. It’s the daily static of boredom, casual neglect, being hungry, bus exhaust, general shabbiness, deadlines, rudeness, fallen trees, gossip, bike riders yelling at cabdrivers, humidity, horniness, office chatter, cell phones, somebody complaining, body odor, feeling insecure, TV. The transcendent rarely breaks through it all, which means that on those occasions when it does, its break-through probably deserves its own place and time.

Prayer is partly the contemplation of exemplary stories, like Rachel Fraenkel’s: maybe on Sundays, or Friday nights after sundown, or at the end of the day before you go to sleep. Prayer never required a religion or specific words, but always calls for believing in something bigger than yourself, something that pulls you into a broader web of connectedness, and helps you to transcend the regular stuff of life.

Being quiet with your own ruminations is also required for prayer to happen, which reminds me of Tony Robbins tweet yesterday, that “Men prefer an electric shock to being alone with their thoughts.” (Silence is never as easy as it sounds.) Finally, it helps if you can recognize the intervals of grace that flutter like butterflies across everything else that clamors for your awareness.

They are often the places where hope can be found.

Characters Find a Theme

June 27, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” A half-dozen actors show up in the theater as incomplete characters looking for someone to finish their stories. In this absurdist masterpiece, the completion they find is disavowal, suicide, an accidental drowning, a great deal of confusion, and the playwright’s wondering why he ever agreed to get involved in the first place. Who would have thought that unfinished characters showing up today could find a more meaningful sense of completion in the most mundane of life’s details, but the characters in a pair of one act plays called “Sweating” and “Sleeping” (staged as part of Philadelphia’s on-going Solofest) did just that.

Steve Gravelle has hyperhidrosis, a condition characterized by excessive perspiration. We learn that one in 20 individuals is a chronic sweater, but Gravelle didn’t find anyone else who would admit to the condition until well into adulthood, so he mostly bore the stigmata of near-constant wetness alone. That kind of humidity can do something to you.

Standing in a basement under a cluster of blazing stage lights, he told us just what it was like in a series of funny, sad, profane, and revelatory vignettes, each concluding with his changing his shirt. As our own moisture gradually merged with his, it became like a crowded sauna down there, brilliantly setting the stage for Gravelle’s description of his time in a sweat lodge with a group of Quakers who had taken the ancient Indian ritual for their own. Gasping from breathing in and being nearly consumed by the intense heat, the experience ultimately produces a calm euphoria—a visceral arc that each of us got to travel with this very physical actor.

The sweat lodge story may have been the first time that sweating was good for Gravelle, but in a further advance towards acceptance, his marriage ceremony became another. In Philadelphia, the end of July better come with air-conditioning if you’re going to host a wedding reception here. But in a laugh from the gods that was aimed directly at him, electrical transformers exploded, turning the reception hall into its own kind of sweat lodge.

Instead of resignation to the absurdity, Gravelle had wrestled with his flowing pores for so long that (in this most sacred of life-moments) he ended up accepting his fate in an abandon of joyous dancing. My only regret was that he didn’t do more to show us his abandon in a rhythmic whirl of cast-off droplets, like a congregation’s blessing during Asperges.

Sara Nye is Gravelle’s wife, and the angle she claimed to illustrate her life was the tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune, embarrassing and occasionally appropriate times. These one act plays were staged in a South Philadelphia brownstone, and for “Sleeping” the audience repaired from cellar to upstairs bedroom with chairs arrayed in similarly claustrophobic manner, this time around an ample bed. Nye is a dancer and collaborator in the creation of spoken soundscapes that envelope a dancer’s movements. The recording of her soft-spoken narration here was underscored by lilting, almost hypnotic music, dotted (at least in the beginning) with strange exclamations and cries, presumably from somewhere in her unconscious.

Nye used the bed the way painter Francis Bacon locates his figures—as a stage for tremendous physicality. She gyrated, tented herself beneath the sheets, draped her torso over a corner, cosseted herself like a queen in the comforter, thrust her legs into the air, and caressed the sleeping pillow of her husband: all to illustrate how whatever she’s doing can be so easily overtaken by the oblivion of sleep.

While Nye’s precision was always supported by her gorgeously mesmerizing soundtrack, her reach was particularly assured when she read passages from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, only to have his beautiful cadences repeatedly broken off in mid-sentence by the doze that everyone who has taken freshman English knows only too well. In a nearly sublime conclusion that echoed the recent wedding epiphany below, the last time that Nye falls asleep, Gravelle tiptoes in to (quietly & tenderly) escort everyone but his sleeping wife out of the darkening room.

We’d all like a theme to make better sense of our lives. What did these unexpected viewpoints tell us about living, or tell the performers about themselves?

Sweating and sleeping in these ways set the players apart from the social norm, left them no choice but to see themselves as singular and slightly askew, and the places where they are supposed to belong differently. In tribal cultures, it is a common rite of passage to go out into the wilderness alone for a time, to think about your new role (as adult or wife, a recent hire or holy man) and what it will be like for you when you return. Each of these plays was a similar act of meditation. A deeply personal way to go out, so you can come back in and have it all make a little more sense.

Morality Play

May 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Many who watched Frontline’s The United States of Secrets (May 13 and 20, 2014 on PBS) did so wanting to learn what happened before Edward Snowden’s massive disclosure of documents about the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. It was certainly the promised backstory—the bits and pieces gathered over the years and now stitched back together—that made me want to watch. But even more than the story itself, I was repeatedly overtaken by some of the characters in it. There are Shakespeare plays have had less courage, duplicity, guilelessness, arrogance and decency on display.

You can watch and judge for yourself.

Still from The United States of Secrets — Still from “The United States of Secrets”

When you do, keep an eye on 3 characters in particular, all of whom will interrupt the sidelong glance you’d usually cast in the direction of government bureaucrats:

Diane Roark, long-time staff member of the House Intelligence Committee;

Thomas Tamm, attorney and Justice Department liaison to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; and

Senior National Security Agency manager Robert Drake.

On a stage filled with dissemblers, careerists, and preening journalists, it is hard to take your eyes off of them. However you view opponents of our government’s surveillance programs, there can be no argument that each of these individuals risked their jobs, along with the quality of their future lives, to stand up for what they believed in the face of terrible odds.

Truly terrible odds.

Prevention of another 9-11 is what propelled the US reaction (or over-reaction) in the ensuing years. After more than a decade with no major terrorist incident on our soil, it is easy—much too easy—to discount the concerns that we all had much closer to that terrible day about the reasonable costs of our personal safety in a free and open society. Indeed, the courage in this documentary is directly proportionate to a threat we could all barely fathom on 9-12, and in the weeks, months and years that followed. The question could not be more important. What should you do (and those we rely on to protect us) do or not do, when caught up in the grip of fear?

By saying that the U.S. could not break its own laws to confront this threat, Roark, Tamm and Drake each challenged those they worked with in the government, as well as everyone in their chains of command (like vice-president Cheney) who were convinced that the fate of the nation would be undermined by their dissent. In order to do their jobs, these individuals were not only prepared to lose them, but also to be accused of having “blood on their hands” if their quibbling about legalities and moralities opened a fatal breach in the new “safety net” that was soon being assembled around us.

What they personally risked was like the excommunication that a former teacher of mine was threatened with when she encouraged a new dialogue within the Church about the nature of love; when she was told, in essence, “you cannot write about these things and be part of us anymore.” But being seen as “a Heretic,” “a Traitor” or “a Potential Murderer” didn’t stop (perhaps couldn’t stop) any of them, because they were not overtaken by their fears. Something even more basic and bedrock than that was involved, for better or worse.

You can catch a glimpse of these basic building blocks in Roark, Tamm and Drake. Because it is hard to speak from your conscience and easy to stay silent and go along, it can always be instructive to look in the faces of fairly ordinary and usually invisible people when they have simply refused to yield to larger forces.

My personal hope is that I can see in them something of my better self too.

Individuals who are working at the top of their games often learn about things that are far above their pay grades. Diane Roark was one of them, and in the immediate wake of 9/11 she started hearing about NSA surveillance of American citizens conducted without judicial sanction (that is, after a warrant arguing probable cause had been submitted and approved). She knew this was illegal, and began an impassioned harangue of her Congressional bosses. She argued with them. She documented what she kept learning and peppered them with memos. People connected to the government kept talking to her, because they were concerned too.

What Roark didn’t know was that the White House was also briefing her bosses on the House Intelligence Committee. She didn’t know that once these Congressional leaders were told about the new surveillance, how many of them felt that they could no longer exercise oversight, because the specter of having “blood on their hands” effectively silenced them.

Because Roark was unaware of this, she kept trying to convince her Committee members and, in an expression of frustration, was finally told to take her suspicions up with General Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA. Her bosses knew it was a dead-end, but the evasive answers she received and the assurance she finally got of authorization “from the top” made her more concerned than ever. She redoubled her efforts to convince somebody, anybody, that this program was “unethical, immoral, politically stupid, illegal and unconstitutional.” That was her job, after all. You can still hear the disbelief in her voice that the government she was working so hard to serve was acting in this manner. Roark resigned in frustration a year after 9/11, having dared to raise her voice, both loudly and clearly, when our leader’s fears were at their highest.

Thomas Tamm was the Justice Department attorney who submitted requests for warrants made by federal investigators to the special court charged with either authorizing or rejecting the surveillance of American citizens suspected of terrorism. In other words, he was literally one of the lynchpins in the pre-9/11 safeguards that had been established to protect citizens from being monitored by their government without probable cause.

Tamm came from a family of law enforcement professionals. His father and grandfather both held senior positions at the FBI. Like Roark, Tamm also started hearing about surveillance reports that were not tied to any standing warrant.

His immediate superior was repeatedly unresponsive when he raised his concerns with her (although she talked about probable illegality in a telling aside). Months passed and he went “outside his chain” to a Congressional staffer involved in government oversight but was stonewalled again. It was clear that the government was going around the job he was trying to do with a secret and unauthorized program. Unable to get any kind of response to his concerns from within the government, in a fateful move Tamm called a reporter covering post-9/11 security issues at the New York Times before, in the words of the narrator “disappear[ing] back into the bureaucracy.”

Angry about leaks to the press, Vice President Cheney’s office started a “manhunt for leakers” during this time, an initiative that continued under President Obama (despite assurances while he was campaigning that there will be “no more ignoring of the law when it is inconvenient on my watch”). His home as well as Roark’s were ultimately raided by the FBI, and both had their documents as well as computers seized. Both left their government jobs and endured years of uncertainty (and in Tamm’s case depression) facing possible arrest, although neither ultimately was. In the documentary, Tamm’s quiet sadness about these events is easily as compelling as Roark’s agitation.

Senior NSA manager Robert Drake was also alarmed when he started to suspect that his own agency was conducting warrantless surveillance. It was his job to find existing capabilities within the NSA that could be mobilized post-9/11.

The National Security Agency was chartered after World War II to ensure that there were no more surprises like Pearl Harbor, so it was not surprising that it had developed a program called “Thin Thread” that could eavesdrop on every American’s electronic communications, but with the built-in privacy protections mandated by law. (All personal data that the program captured was encrypted until a judge deemed that it could be read upon presentation of a warrant.) When Drake told his superiors about Thin Thread, he was surprised when they told him they were “going with another program.” He soon discovered that the other program was essentially Thin Thread without the legal safeguards.

If possible, Drake was even more dogged than Roark or Tamm in his efforts to convince his superiors to stop the warrantless surveillance. Unlike them however, as he continued to raise concerns his job duties were taken out from under him. He bypassed his chain of command and wrote directly to General Keith Alexander, by then the head of the NSA, that the warrantless surveillance program was “out of control” and needed to be “reigned in.” In the meantime, his worst fears were being confirmed by the New York Times’ reporting.

For 4 years, the stonewalling continued and his frustration festered. Drake ultimately reached out to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. Before long he too was caught in the same dragnet for leakers as the others. When the FBI raided his home, for hours all they wanted to talk about with him was the press reports, and all he talked about in return was how law enforcement should be pursuing lawbreakers elsewhere in the government.

Prosecutors decided to make an example out of Drake, indicting him in 2010 under the Espionage Act because he allegedly had classified documents in his home. He exhausted his financial resources on his defense. After repeatedly threatening him to plead guilty, his attorneys successfully argued that the documents in question had previously been made public by the government itself. On the eve of his trial, all serious charges were dropped. Drake was required to pay a $25 fine for misuse of his government computer.

Roark, Tamm and Drake raised concerns about warrantless surveillance and assumed the attendant risks because the proper handling of intelligence gathering was at the core of their jobs. It was their business to know what was legal and illegal, and unlike most others in the government, they raised their voices and never bowed before the strenuous efforts that were made to stop them from doing so.

Whether they deserved what their principled tenacity brought them or suffered in vain is not for me to decide. On the other hand, when your work—your very job description—brings you knowledge of wrongdoing, you essentially have two choices: to raise your voice and assume the risks, or to remain silent and go along. The morality play that is The United States of Secrets is really about some of the ordinary characters who made the more extraordinary of these two choices.

Lying With Your Job

March 11, 2014 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Recent weeks and months have provided several reminders of how often people lie with their jobs.

Priests, lawyers, policemen, doctors, parking enforcers, tax collectors: guardians of ethical and lawful behavior, with power that comes from standing over the rest of us in their appointed roles. The obvious disconnect between what our supposed guardians tell us to do, but don’t manage to do themselves, can be either tragic or comic.

The problem (I’m afraid) is when we stop being surprised by confrontations like this. When they no longer make us either laugh or cry–or even matter.

The part of the world where I live—the malodorous Northeast Corridor—produces more than its share of “now you caught me’s.”

Of course, punishing commuters from a place where the majority of voters didn’t vote for you by complicating their commutes (As governor, I will perform the duties of this office faithfully, impartially…) is currently getting the most press. But others compete “like hell” for the ink.

Hermit Gosnell (whose oath as a physician included having the “utmost respect for human life from the beginning”) was recently sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for systematically killing babies born in his West Philadelphia abortion clinic, and the priests of the Philadelphia diocese who preyed for years on altar boys, their brothers and occasionally sisters (after vows of chastity) are regularly profiled as they traipse through our justice system.

Of course, there are plenty we can snicker at when they lie with their lesser jobs too, a hook that a cable network recognized several years ago when it started broadcasting “Parking Wars,” a real life comedy about the men and women who ticket and tow our cars here. Each one of these “enforcement officers” is like a bank for the Philadelphia Parking Authority, writing several times their annual salaries in violations each year: but that speaks more to their motivation and our resentment.

Last month, it was Mwanamke Jordan, (at least until recently) PPA’s Deputy Manager for Ticket Enforcement, who gave the still suffering public here some comic relief. As profiled in our newspaper of record, Deputy Jordan recently had her own car “booted” (a dreaded device that disables you from driving your car until you pay all the parking tickets and penalties that you’ve accumulated). Her picture here is from an earlier newspaper profile which began: If Mwanamke Jordan’s love life were a reality TV show….”

Last but hardly least in the Comic Division is Richard Cosentino—not for what he did, but for his picture when he got caught. Cosentino, a former NYPD sergeant received more than $200,000 after claiming that he was allegedly “too depressed to go outside” after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. In January, he and 81 other ex-cops, firefighters and corrections officers were busted for allegedly soaking taxpayers for $21.3 million for stress-related injuries they fabricated so they could collect disability payments. Allegedly.

Richard Cosentino 553x369 — COSENTINO AND HIS TUNA

Does the non-stop perp walk of these stories and pictures (and all the others like them) deter us? Deter me or you? Is there any moral dimension left in them at all?

At this point, I’m reminded of that timely update of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in Quentin Tarrantino’s Inglourious Basterds. It comes in the very last scene, where the Gestapo’s Hans Landa (who goes from exposing Jews “like rats” to “ratting out” the Nazi leadership to the Allies) is now about to get his reward: a nice little place “on Nantucket” for all his help. It’s the moment right before his freedom, where Lieutenant Aldo “The Apache” Raine takes out a ridiculously big knife and carves a swatskika on Landa’s forehead. Why? Because you just shouldn’t get to change “your clothes” so easily afterwards.

It might be different for the oath breakers and job hypocrites if others could see it on their foreheads too, like soot from Ash Wednesday.

Different for all of us.

Tallying Up

December 28, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s the time of year to tally up what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t, what we might have done differently, or not at all.

Perhaps because of that, Todd May contributed an op-ed to the New York Times a few days ago in which he pondered the notion of good years, best or “peak” years, and years when you’re simply rolling downhill toward your final whimper.

For me, I’d like to think that I’m on an upward trajectory, that I’ll continue to engage and grow, and that tomorrow will be better than today. But it’s more than my optimism and sense of purpose. A lot of it also has to do with how the world engages back.

photo by Susan Melkisethian — (photo/Susan Melkisethian)

Everyone will agree that Edward Snowden had something of a peak year in 2013.

Yesterday, when Professor May was interviewed on NPR about his op-ed, John Hockenberry mentioned Snowden in his introduction, noting that he may never have “another change the world moment” like he had in 2013. But when he got into his Q&A, Hockenberry thought it was at least “conceivable” that Snowden could “acquire an influence that could give him as big a year, say in 10 years, as he had this year.” May disagreed, noting that the American government will never let it happen, a point he elaborated upon in his op-ed.

Snowden’s actions, regardless of whether one supports them or not, have had a prodigious impact on the debate about privacy in the United States and will likely continue to do so. They have had roughly the impact that Snowden wanted them to have. That is, they have altered how many of us think about our relation to the government and to our own technology, and because of this, they infuse this period of his life with a luminescence that will always be with him. He will not forget it, nor will others.

There is an assumption I would like to make here, one that I can’t verify but I think is uncontroversial. It is very unlikely that Edward Snowden will ever do anything nearly as significant again. Nothing he does for the remainder of his life will have the resonance that his recent actions have had. The powers that be will ensure it. And undoubtedly he knows this. His life will go on, and it may not be as tortured as some people think. But in an important sense his life will have peaked at age 29 or 30.

I don’t know about that.

Like many of you I am “at 6s and 7s” about Edward Snowden, and like most of you l viewed his “Alternative Christmas Message” this week in the hope that it would help me sort through my impressions. I realized that while I had seen his picture a thousand times, I had never heard his voice. Indeed, almost no one had.

Was his message “Hyperbole? Self-marketing?” Hockenberry wondered in his interview. Well, maybe. But then again, maybe not.

The part of me that believed Snowden had spoken a kind of truth to power that no one else had dared to speak could find both sincerity and conviction in him and in his words. That part of me believed him when he said that he repeatedly raised his concerns about the extent of surveillance with his superiors. Only when they did nothing, did he turn to the press to find out whether the rest of us would see the stakes involved in the same way that he did.

So as we hear Edward Snowden’s voice and tally the costs (if any) of 5 months of asylum on his face, it’s equally hard to believe that he’s already begun his slow descent into irrelevance. We will keep talking about how much privacy we are wiling to sacrifice to be safe because it is one of the great conversations of our age. More than anything, it is Snowden’s continuing willingness to contribute to that conversation and our continuing engagement with his thoughts and actions that will determine the pitch of his trajectory.

Was it a good year, a peak year, or a way-station to irrelevance? It comes down to the same two factors for all us: our willingness to keep raising our voices and the connections we forge with others by doing so.

As I watched Edward Snowden’s counterpoint to the Queen’s Annual Christmas Greeting, I was pretty sure of one thing:

He, for one, doesn’t think that his peak year is behind him.

Grace Note

Characters Find a Theme

Morality Play

Lying With Your Job

Tallying Up

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