After Father's Day

My father and his father. (And sister.)

Late, but here is a Father's Day anecdote: I am tall, as is my father. It runs in the family; at six feet two inches I'm on the shorter side for the Gentrys. I'm not sure if the tallness is genetics or clean living. One would normally presume the former, but if you meet the extended Gentrys, who are the descendants of  homesteaders in Western Nebraska and are inveterate community volunteers, teetotalers, Boy Scouts, Methodists, country doctors, and so on, you get the sense that Mendel was wrong. (Which might explain why I'm so short, for a Gentry.)

But tall in the normal scheme of things, and thus the anecdote. I have no idea how old I was or what the context was, but my father and I were standing in a crowd watching something, and we were near the front. Noticing that we were blocking the view of those behind us, my dad said something to the effect of, "we're tall people, it's important for us to stand in the back so that others can see." And so we moved to the back.

That's pretty much my dad in a nutshell. 

On Father's Day, when everyone is posting pictures of themselves with their fathers, or writing heartfelt status updates about what their fathers meant to them, it seems silly to pile in with more, and in the face of #nodads it seems gauche and naive. But this Father's Day, how can I not? Because as everyone in my social media circles know, for the first father's day I am myself now officially a father in the technical sense of the word. Our son was born on June 5, and he is currently sitting next to me in his vibrating monkey chair, swaddled up for his morning nap while his mother is upstairs sleeping off a night's worth of nonstop feeding. Objectively and without exaggeration I can say that he is the cutest baby every born. Meet Wilfred:

So yes, how can I not write about fathers and their sons; it's all I think about right now. The semester and my book project seems very far away. Even the little repairs I need to do on the house we just bought, or the dinner I should cook for tonight, they seem off on the horizon. All I can do is look at Wilfred to make sure he's still breathing, and wonder why he's making that strange sound, and dear god surely it's not already time for another diaper change.

That shift in attention makes me think about something I learned from my dad. My father spent the first part of his career as an executive for a health care company, with the daily suit-wearing and company car kind of life you'd expect, and tremendous security. Then, when I was a teenager, he left that job for a series of more experimental pursuits—some consulting jobs, some internet ventures, and teaching classes at local colleges on an adjunct basis. It meant much less consistency, and coupled with my mom losing her job due to downsizing in the 1990s recession, it meant much less financial security.

But even as a teenager, and amplified today, I'm so proud of my father for making the choice. It's not so much the particular choice, but the act of making it. I imagine it would be so easy to do well in school, jump through all the right hoops, get a good job, and rise up the ranks, and eventually make it to the top. Certainly that's what we academics hope for, to a tee. We were all good at school, and good at impressing the right people and working hard, and we doggedly cling to our assumption that we can be happy if we just jump through the right hoops. But as plenty of smart people have pointed out, we academics too often conflate "happiness" with the simple act of having a stable middle-class job, with the correct title.

And we are just dreadful at making choices to actually be happy. We roam around the world living in horrid little places, we divorce ourselves from our loved ones on opposite coasts, we spend the the best years of our lives in abject poverty. We cultivate a snobbish mentality of personal elevation to hope against hope that there is some sort of uplifting intellectual reason for all of it. Certainly so much of this can apply to me. It's a devil's bargain, where either you spend your decades doing this for nothing, or you spend your decades doing it for that stable middle-class job. I've been on the job market since 2007 or so. I've been lucky to have had full-time work at some great institutions during this time, and even more lucky to have a partner with a real job to fill in the gaps, but the luck has never extended to having the correct job title of "tenure track." 

Maybe it will still happen, but I'm kind of over the whole thing. This spring, after the latest round of job market disappointments, we decided to just say, well, fuck it. (Sorry--another way I am like my parents is I don't swear often, but sometimes the sentiment fits.) No more living temporarily. She's got a great job, we live in a great city surrounded by family and friends. My own job is great in its way, even if it's not tenure-track. So we bought a house in our favorite neighborhood in our favorite city. Given the state of the academy, maybe I won't be able to continue in my current position forever--that's what you lose when you're off the tenure track, the security--but if that happens, I'll figure something out.

So that's why I think about my father's choice a lot, and how amazing it was. In the midst of success as defined by career progress, to actually say to yourself: maybe I should be doing something different. How often do we take control of our lives, especially by giving up control? Like my dad, I'm able to do it for a number of reasons, most importantly because I have a loving and supportive family. (The amazingness of my mom is a whole other blog post someday.)

So that's one father's day lesson that's particularly apt for me this year.I don't know what sort of big lessons Wilfred will get from me someday. My current master plan is that he should be either a poet or a painter, so I'm occasionally reading modernist poetry to him while he sleeps, and pointing out to him that our new house has an attic with good light, should he need a studio. Oh, and if his parents' genetics succeed at all, he will be a really good rower, and so he should really get on soon that so he can get into a good college. 

Actually, I'm beating around the bush. You know how we're always talking to ourselves, in our heads? Maybe carrying on a conversation, or narrating our activities, or asking ourselves questions For me, it's always felt more specifically like writing in my head. I'm always trying out particular turns of phrases, or crafting little stories to explain what I'm doing, to myself. Just a silly habit.

For the last year or so, as I've been writing away in my head, I've crafted one particular sentence that I keep refusing to ever put down on paper. Sometimes, in the midst of trying to write an email or grade a paper or carry on a conversation, it's the only sentence that comes to me, and I have to swallow it back down and remember where I am. But after Father's Day, it's too much not to write: my father is dying of cancer, which is the hardest sentence I've ever had to write.

This is no great surprise for many who know me, as my dad has been very open with his illness, and in fact has his own blog where he explores the vagaries of diagnosis and treatment. He has sarcoma, which is cancer of the soft tissue, and unfortunately is rather rare so there's not much in the way of data for crafting a prognosis. So when I write that my father is dying of cancer—there it is again—it's hard to know what that means with precision. Maybe there will be some miraculous occurrence, but more likely time is limited. The word is "terminal," I believe.

I didn't want to write that, not because writing makes it true—it's true enough without writing—but because of the novelistic clichés of it all. My son being born, my father dying, and my career at a crossroads. The irony is that I feel miraculously self-assured as a parent. I don't mean to be blasé about the upcoming challenges, but I have this strange inner sense of self-confidence that I will mostly do the right thing. And although I don't know where my professional career will go in the future, for the first time in years I'm comfortable with that not knowing. I might not have the correct job title, but there's actually nothing in my life that I would want to change right now.

Except, of course, facing the loss, some day, of the person who made these strange self-confidences possible.

Me, in 1980.

New Year's Day in Philadelphia

I feel distinctly, and uncharacteristically, unable to assemble coherent critical thoughts about the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. Having lived in this city for five and a half years, I have of course been to see a few of the parades, especially to show out-of-town visitors. The main feature of the parade is that it is rather boring. You hang out on Broad Street, fighting off pretzel vendors but not much in the way of crowds, and wait for a long time. Occasionally, a group of costumed performers amble up the street, set down some cheap-looking sets and props, and do a lackluster little song and dance number easily bested by your average high school marching band. Everything seems a bit ragged and homemade. It doesn't make much of an impression on you, but it's one of those things that make Philadelphia kind of cute in an earnest sort of way.

My experience with the Mummers is a pretty typical one. Let me interrogate that experience a little bit, however, because my engagement is ultimately mediated by some crucial factors. This is going to seem silly, but here's the literal geography of my Mummers experience, a map of me walking from my home to where I viewed the parade:

Philadelphians will look at this map and immediately predict the point I'm about to make. For the rest of the world, here's what this map means: I live in Fitler Square, a small affluent neighborhood in the western half of Center City. My walk down Spruce Street, up 20th, through Rittenhouse Square, and then down Locust takes me through the most famously and visibly wealthy part of the city. The streets I walk on are lined with beautiful old brownstone mansions and expensive apartment buildings. I walk by nearly all of the most noted institutions of high culture in Philadelphia, all built in the 1850–1950 glory days of the city: AVA, Curtis, St. Mark's, the Academy, the Walnut Street shopping district, and the Union League. From my final vantage point I look to my left and see the towering City Hall, and to my right to see the Kimmel Center.

On the other hand, here is the official parade route:

As you can see, the Mummers' walk is rather precisely perpendicular to my own walk. Beginning in the depths of South Philly, the Mummers perform their way a solid three miles up Broad Street to the judging platform by City Hall, before adjourning to the Convention Center for more performances. If nothing else, this explains the rather listless performances up in my neighborhood; the guys have been walking for several miles, and are saving their energy for the performances that matter.

Needless to say, however, the real fault line here is the cultural intersection of these two literal routes. South Philadelphia is the traditional home of blue collar Philadelphia, my own neighborhood the traditional home of white collar. While today members of the Union League sit outside on the balconies of their club house to enjoy the festivities passing by (and indeed, hold fundraisers for the perennially underfunded parade organization), that peaceful intersection belies a long history of cross-class conflict, often still very present. Last year, for example, Philadelphia magazine, which caters mostly to the suburban Main Line crowd and wealthy Rittenhouse dwellers (like me), called for "getting rid" of the Mummers. (As the Naked City blog amusingly put it, "Philly Mag Conundrum: Hates Mummers, Loves White People.") As both an outsider to Philadelphia and as a card-carrying member of the elite, the Mummers Parade is not for me, but aimed at me.

 

The Philadelphia Mummers Parade is of course just one in a long line of such carnivalesque spectacles, a history I don't need to rehearse here. Susan Davis's excellent history (extracted in American Quarterly if you have JSTOR) gives the context of this particular parade, which originated in rambunctious nineteenth- century Christmas street celebrations corralled by the beginning of the twentieth into more orderly New Year's Day pageants.

Most carnivalesque spectacles depend heavily upon upending various oppositions, from political power to race and gender. The traditional Bakhtinian idea is that in a carnivaleqsue performance, the normal order is reversed. The poor become kings for the day, and masks are worn to disguise true identities. As Davis points out, for the Mummers upending these oppositions has expressed itself since the nineteenth-century in both drag and blackface performances. And this is where yesterday's Mummers Parade got interesting.

I spent New Year's Day at my in-laws in DC, so I was not a spectator this year. But through various social media outlets—and crucially so; as usual the traditional coverage in the newspapers and local TV stations remained silent on the subject of politics—I began to hear about some interesting performances.  First came from Mark Segal, the publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, and a longtime local activist, writing on his (public) Facebook page:

OK America, the nations largest Drag Parade is now on the street. It's the Mummers parade in Philly, and we are officially in the "Wench divisions." Thousands of drags, mostly non gay, but this year a surprise. I'm honored to be a judge at Conventon Center at 5p, [sic]

So, we have an interesting acknowledgement on the part of the Mummers that there is some sort of relationship between Mummer drag and and gay drag. Thinking somewhat hazily about this, I would see this as part of the mainstreaming of a certain kind of gay activism in Philadelphia over the past few years. Segal, for example, has been involved in creating a senior housing complex oriented towards LGBT people. Anytime you're successfully working with construction and federal funding in this city, you're going to end up involved in the upper echelons of mainstream municipal political power, and Segal is now a regular player in that sort of world, of which obligatory fealty towards Mummers is an annual ritual. And, I guess it can go the other way as well; the Mummers paying a small kind of tribute to the political success of (a certain kind of) gay activism by including Segal, and also, I gather, a small contingent of "actual" drag queens in the parade itself.

The other stories that began trickling my way on Twitter and various blogs was more fraught with unease. There seemed to be one performance that involved fake American Indians stealing jobs from an Asian Indian call center, somehow involving Gangnam Style. More striking, however, was the performance by the Ferko stringband, titled "Bringin' Back Those Minstrel Days." Apologies for the quality of this guy's YouTube video shot off a TV screen, but you get the idea.




Whoa, right? As you'll see in a lot of commentary around this performance, actual blackface was apparently banned starting in the 1960s, although it has cropped up occasionally since then. But if actual blacking up has been rare, the discourse of blackface minstrelsy has nevertheless provided the foundation for the world of the Mummers, just as much as drag. As many scholars argue, the entire enterprise of reversing the "natural order" in the nineteenth-century parades hinged upon creating whiteness out of blackness, of melding together working-class immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere into a position of power by defining themselves against black Americans. Just as the drag performances of the Mummer Wenches deepens the inscription of masculinity into its performers, the blackface performances deepens their whiteness. Today they usually paint their faces any color besides black to avoid the official ban, but the point is the same. One often hears the argument that blackface minstrelsy still lies at the heart of a great deal of popular culture in this country, which I think is mostly true, but in the case of the Mummers Parade, minstrelsy lies even closer to the surface. The Ferko performance simply makes this heritage explicit.

I can't read into the hearts and minds of the Ferko band's intentions, although as Samantha Melamed points out, some of the signs carried by the band were literally copied from a web site called "black-face.com." And it is not hard to suss out racial context for their performance; simply go to the comments section of any newspaper or community bulletin board having to do with Philadelphia, find an article having to do with a black person, or crime, or schools, or sometimes just the existence of the city itself, and you will find your context. More so than in any other city I have ever lived in, there is a raw, grotesque, openly-racist resentment on the part of some white citizens (frankly, seems to be mostly ex-citizens who now live in South Jersey) of the mostly-black political establishment that is thought to run Philadelphia. Ironically, that attitude puts the Mummers in the reverse of their nineteenth-century position. Blackface is no longer parody of those below themselves on the ladder of political power, but parody of those imagined to be above. Again, I can't read the minds of Ferkos, nor do I know any of them personally, and for all I know the intent of their performance was merely ignorant of history. The context is unavoidable, however.

Needless to say, a lot of people got pissed off, and rightfully so. Samantha Melamed at the City Paper covers the controversy, including a link to some of the original 1960s blackface controversy and a predictable quote from the Ferko people. ("heritage blah blah blah never occurred to us to be offended blah blah blah.") A particular interesting reaction is that of Joey Sweeney at Philebrity, who makes the provocative move of calling upon all of us nouveau Philadelphias (such as myself), the ones who are gentrifying this city, to reject this peculiar heritage. On the other hand, some have seen the inclusion of identifiably-gay drag as evidence of liberal progress; historian Jonathan Zimmerman's piece for the Inquirer sets up a narrative of such progress, in which this year's inclusion of gay drag is matched with the official ban on blackface as "another welcome blow against bigotry." Zimmerman is uncritical (and his history a little vague) but for another queer defense of the mummers, see the poet CA Conrad's writing in response to the Philadelphia magazine attack mentioned above.

What to make of all this? This is where the fast-moving landscape of race, class, and sexuality, pressed down by the weight of history, renders me somewhat speechless. The ease at which some members of the gay community gloss over the blackface issue in favor of some limited kind of notion of "progress" troubles me, but so does my own position as someone who is very much the target of the Mummers tradition, and an outsider to that history. Ideally there would, I think, be some sort of "oppositional spectatorship" as Tavia Nyong'o puts it in his writing on racial kitsch, but as he points out even at its best that kind of oppositionality might not be "overcome its ability to reproduce scapegoating." (388) And in my limited experience in Philadelphia, there has not been such oppositional work; I'm not aware of attempts (please let me know if there have been some!) by African American performers to undermine Mummers blackface through further parody and commentary, and that's quite understandable. It's one thing to curate collections of racial kitsch, but another to be faced with actual living racist kitsch.

We find ourselves mired in this political stasis where on New Year's Day in Philadelphia, the black and white, and the poor and wealthy remain poised to attack one another. It would be one thing were this limited to New Year's Day, but we also have to read these divisions against the myriad other faultlines of the city: the neighborhood battles over gentrification in Point Breeze, the assaults on Asian kids at South Philly High, the labor disputes of the Goldtex project, the continuing defunding (by the state) and privatization (by the city) of the public school system, just to name a few. And the epic minstrel show that is the United States of America continues on.