Blaming Unions: The Easiest Game in Town

And so, here we go. A teacher’s union is on strike–more specifically the Chicago Teacher’s Union–and the bewailing begins: the strike is hurting students; the teachers should put their selfish interests last; get back to work, don’t you know you are hurting the students? As I pointed out a few days ago, if there is one thing that unites our political parties and leads to a great, Kumbaya, sea-to-shining-sea holding of hands across party divides it is this: teachers are to blame for the supposed educational crisis in public education, and they, and their unions alone, should reform if our schools are to get back to work and get on with the business of making our students into the finest, able to compete globally with all those busy eating their lunches.

I have no doubt students are being hurt by the strike. I was the ‘victim’ of two teachers’ strikes myself: once in my first undergraduate  year when faculty at Delhi University went on strike for two months, and then again, in my second undergraduate year, when they went on strike for three months. By the end of the second one, I had lost interest in going back to attend classes, and skipped the rest of the year to study on my own for final exams. I did the same thing in the third year (there were no strikes, but I skipped most classes anyway). Needless to say, I did terribly in my undergraduate degree. (I wasn’t a terribly diligent student in any case, but I’m going to blow past that for now.)

Back then, like most around me, I blamed the teacher’s union. I knew little about the university administration and the prolonged crisis in negotiations between teachers and them, about governmental funding for higher education. My view of the world was narrow, immature and restricted: the teachers were the ones not reporting to work, they must be lazy, they must be selfish, they must, surely, bear all the blame.  I knew little about the poor salaries paid to my faculty (though I had an inkling of the poor conditions they labored under).  The teachers were visible; the university administration was not. There was a bull’s-eye painted on their union banner, and I aimed for it.

My memories of this reaction to the 1984-1985 strikes colored my responses to any mention of the possibility of a strike during union chapter meetings here at Brooklyn College. (A strike at CUNY has always, always, been a very distant possibility.) I remembered, all too well, the visceral, angry, poorly-directed backlash against them. But by then, I was a teacher myself, and had found out just what hard work it was (and the work of schoolteachers is orders of magnitude harder than that of university faculty), I had grown up, and understood a little more of the ecology of the university, its embedding in broader socio-economic-political realities. I had come to understand that if a teacher’s union went on strike, it represented a desperate, backs-to-the-wall measure of last resort.  Teachers would always find a way to keep coming to work, somehow, precisely because we knew students depended on us.   What they hoped for, more than anything else, was that those that paid their salaries, and controlled the destiny of students just as much, would participate in some, even if not all, of that concern. The burden of caring for the students rested on them too.

The reaction to the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike will be revealing: those that lazily trot out the ‘teachers need to get back to work’ line in preference to mounting any critique of the Chicago city administration will show, to me at least,  that facile scapegoating is still the easiest game in town.

Row, Row, Row Your Erg (Not So Merrily However)

Three years ago, when I first started training at Crossfit South Brooklyn, I was introduced to the ‘pleasures’ of the rowing machine (more specifically the Concept 2 erg). My coach, David Osorio, took us through an initial training session; I was struck by how a seemingly simple motion had several distinct components, each demanding attention to form if efficiency in the stroke was to be attained (and importantly, injury to be avoided). Shortly thereafter, I tried my hand at a few thousand-meter sprints, and realized quite quickly that the four-minute burst required was enough to leave me gasping, shaking, and quivering in most parts of my body. (Four minutes for thousand meters is an exceedingly laggardly time for good rowers, but I remember being absurdly pleased at getting under the mark.)

But my experiences with a thousand-meter row had not prepared me sufficiently for what would turn out to be the most dreaded of all Crossfit workouts: the 2K row. Just like the 800 meter run (and possibly the 1500 meter run), which brings together a sprint with a middle distance run, and as such requires a punishing pace to be maintained for longer than the body wants, the 2K row demands a great deal, and because of the structure of the rowing apparatus, exacts it in the cruelest possible fashion.

The pacing for the 2K row is normally set up as a series of intervals: several ‘power strokes’–a pace slightly higher than the desired overall interval time–to begin with, followed by a settled pace till the 500 meter mark, then some more ‘power strokes’ followed by a settled pace again. This is repeated at the 1000 meter mark, and the 1500 meter mark, before finally, sprinting all out from the 1750 meter mark onwards.

My description above of the race strategy is quite impoverished; you’d do better to read my rowing coach, Nick Peterson, a former Olympian, on the same subject. Nick’s description of the physical demands of the 2K is quite apt:

Think of this as running as fast as you can for this distance, a mile and a quarter, while carrying a weight. Or, better yet, doing seven or eight minutes of deadlift high pulls, with 30 reps per minute – or 210-240 deadlift high pulls for time.

As I found out during my first 2K, nothing I had ever done before had prepared me for the misery of those last 250 meters: everything everywhere hurt and when I finished the row, I did not stand up, I merely unhooked the straps from my feet, rolled off the machine and lay there gasping like, yes, a fish out of water. My time: 8:07. Somehow, bizarrely, in an effort to convince myself I could do it at a sub-four-minute pace, I tried again a few days later, and came in at 8:05. It was as painful as the first time. (To my mind, this solo effort of mine ranks as my most impressive exercise endeavor ever.) Over the next couple of years, I’ve rowed a few more 2K’s, and have brought my time down to 7:46. I dream, someday, of making it under the 7:30 mark. Meanwhile, some T2-like creatures at my gym have banged out sub-7-minute times.

What makes the 2K hard compared to other Crossfit workouts is that: in time-limited workouts one can simply slow down and run out the clock; in workload-limited workouts one need only fear finishing last. Resting is not so hard to pull off. But in the 2K, there is no way to rest; you cannot stop, you are strapped in. And being strapped in to the machine means there is no rest for your contracted, lactic acid-infused muscles. So, there you are, attached to a demanding beast, one that will not let go till the required pound of flesh has been ripped out. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to sneak off to. The row has to be finished, and at a pace, which even if diminished does not let an aching muscle or pumping heart gain any respite. As I have often joked–rather grimly if I may say so–the closest I’ve come to seeing God has been in the last 250 meters of a 2K row. For this atheist, it is a frightening place to be.

Spaghetti and Curry Westerns

I’ve become used to catching up with classics late. The latest addition to my list of well-I’ve-finally-gone-ahead-and-done-it accomplishments is viewing Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon a Time in the West. A DVD of it was lying around in my gym with a sign that said ‘Take me!’, so I did, and watched it on Friday night.

I suspect Once Upon a Time in the West is one of those movies that, for me at least, will improve with repeated viewings. Not of the entire movie, I don’t have time for that, but of certain key sequences. Foremost among them would be the opening, set at the railway station, where Harmonica (Charles Bronson) makes his dramatic first appearance, and the family massacre scene, which introduces viewers to the ruthless Frank (Henry Fonda, cast against type as the ruthless killer).

The latter scene is of especial interest to anyone that grew up watching Bollywood movies. The chances are that such a viewer has seen Sholay, the longest running movie of all time in Indian cinema history. (Other movies, in this day and age of global distribution, have raked in more money at the box-office, but it is unlikely any of them will approach Sholay‘s attendance records, which include a five-year run at a Mumbai movie-house.)  A crucial scene in Sholay–a revenge movie like Once Upon a Time in the West–is a flashback to the massacre of a family by the ruthless bandit Gabbar Singh. For most viewers of the movie at the time, it was a shocking scene with a chilling conclusion that confirmed the Devil-on-the-earth persona of Gabbar. And it is inspired rather directly by Leone’s classic, in its grammar, its use of music, its final conclusion.  (This YouTube clip, subtitles and all, includes both scenes in full; the quality is not stellar but it is still worth a watch.)

I saw Sholay in 1976 in Hyderabad. Buying tickets for it in Delhi was next to impossible; it was sold out for weeks in advance, and I was growing increasingly frustrated by my inability to join the select gang of those that spoke glowingly of its unbridled shoot-em-up action, a tempting vision for a nine-year old boy. Our summer vacation that year took us to South India, where local enthusiasm for Sholay, set a couple of notches below the North Indian version, gave us just enough breathing room to procure tickets for a matinée. My mother accompanied my brother and myself to the movie; for weeks afterwards, we happily repeated its lines and staged many of its scenes in our backyard.

But I remained spooked by the massacre. I had not seen anything quite as ruthless and cold-blooded like it in the movies till then. I had imagined there was a line they would not cross but this scene blew that naive impression out of the water. Call it my coming-of-age, the end of my innocence. In the movies, that is.

Note: Ramesh Sippy, Sholay’s director, had made no secret of his desire to make a movie inspired by the Hollywood western. This included bringing in Hollywood stunt directors Jim Allen and Gerry Crampton to supervise and direct some of the Western-inspired action sequences: horsemen–yup, Indians!–attacking a train, and horsemen–Indians again!–attacking a village (in lieu of a wagon train).

The NYPD and Israeli Police: Perfect Together

As my writings on this blog will show, I am not terribly fond of the New York City Police Department. Among other things, it is excessively militarized and has a very poor record on civil liberties. (I am not going to go into an exhaustive listing here, but a quick perusal of the link above should help the curious reader.) New York City residents are by now used to opening the morning newspaper and reading of yet another shenanigan, another abuse, another report on operational incompetence. Sometimes these are deadly, as today’s story about a bodega worker being shot dead by the Finest indicates. What is truly bizarre about this appalling record of general malfeasance is the contrast with the NYPD’s self-image: strutting, cock of the walk swaggering international terrorist fighters, keepers of the peace.  For one of the worst things about the aftermath of 9/11 has been the elevation of the NYPD to a fleet of Batmans in Blue. (And like Batman, they often find themselves ranged against those that might disturb the tranquility of the city’s banking operations.) As such, the NYPD thinks a great deal of itself. It aspires to be more than just a silly city police force; that’s for folks who aim low. No, it aspires to be an Interpol, FBI and Mossad rolled into one.

The latest story then, about the NYPD opening a ‘branch’ in Israel should come as no surprise, but it still manages to evoke wonder. Why is a ‘branch’ of a city’s local police force being opened in another part of the world? I think of banks, department stores, gyms and fast-food chains opening branches, but a police force? How does this improve New York City’s policing?

Unfortunately, I know the NYPD’s answer to that last question and it terrifies me. Presumably, they are there to ‘learn’, to ‘study local tactics,’ to share ‘methods and techniques for enforcing law and order.’ Unfortunately, their choice of locale and their partners in this enterprise are precisely the wrong ones for us citizens who will soon have to bear the brunt of this wondrous exchange of knowledge. Because if you want to co-operate with a police force, you might want to find one that is not associated with a nation that is engaged in illegal occupation, a business that, as an Israeli friend of mine once remarked, ‘is a national sickness, one that renders every national institution corrupt and complicit.’

Perhaps the NYPD will learn how to put up checkpoints, conduct grossly invasive searches–sorry, on that one, they will presumably teach the Israeli police a thing or two or three–and send themselves even further down the path of the militarization that they so obviously adore. Perhaps they will learn new interrogation techniques, especially refined and honed for dealing with a population viewed as the Other. The Black and Latino population of New York City trembles in anticipation; it’s bad enough to be Walking While Black in this city, but imagine what would happen if policing in this city induced a wholly new sensation for a select portion of this city’s population: What it feels like to be a Palestinian at a West Bank roadblock.

Are We Inventions or Discoveries?

Is my identity determined by my choices and my actions? Or does my identity determine the choices I make and the actions I take? Do we make up ourselves as we go along, each choice and action working like a brush of paint, a chip of the sculptor’s chisel, a sentence of the writer, bringing ever so slowly a human work of art into view? Or are these artistic maneuvers driven by the artwork itself, leading us to slowly find out who we are, who we were all along? Do we ‘merely’ become who we are? Are we invented or discovered? (The question of which of these views Nietzsche was committed to has often caused much debate among those who read him.) Perhaps we are a bit of both, part invention, dynamically created, and part discovery, revealed by our intellectual and moral commitments.

Our answers to these questions reveal a great deal about the kind of entity we take ourselves to be, one supposedly the subject of ethical theorizing. And, thinking about the choices we make and the actions we take–that is, the kind of person we become and make ourselves into–and their placement within the network of choices made by others is of course, one of the concerns of ethical and moral theory. Our choices and actions do not, after all, exist in isolation; they bear on others, affecting the trajectories of their lives, the contours of their decision-making.

This influence goes both ways so that the unilateral picture which we might have had in mind when we began asking our questions above acquires further complexity: we might be locked into a co-determining relationship with other moral agents, our identities slowly constructed in a tightly coupled complex system made up of interacting agents. One of the perils of living an inauthentic life, as we come to learn (hopefully) quickly, is that it can make others’ lives false too. (Consider for instance, the gay man, repressing his desires in order to fit in and conform, marrying and ‘settling down’. all the while not-belonging, looking elsewhere, and making himself and his partner–and sometimes his children–live a lie.)  These considerations, do not, though, detract from the central linkage of the question ‘Who Am I?’ with the question ‘How Should I Act?’ or more broadly and traditionally, ‘What Is the Right Thing To Do?’

These rough approaches to framing the ethical issues surrounding the question ”Who Am I’ underwrote some of the discussions my students and I participated in last week (in my Philosophical Issues in Literature class, which I wrote about earlier this week.) Teasing them out from a reading of literary works has proven as invigorating as I hoped and has served to confirm my intuitions–bolstered by my experience in using feminist science fiction on my reading list for Philosophy of Feminism a few years ago–that literature can help us think philosophically by dramatically illustrating the bare bones of a philosophical problem, and by locating it within the very particular concerns of beings just like us.

Monument Valley and The Familiarity of the New

One of the strangest, and yet entirely unsurprising, reactions to seeing Monument Valley (my journey to which had served as occasion for rueful wonderment at the continued plight of the Native American), is a sense of familiarity: I’ve seen this before, somewhere, somehow. Among the curious welter of emotions too, that the Valley evokes is a sense of relief of finally having tapped into the source of images–moving and still alike, their provenance seemingly shrouded by mystery–that have brought that locale to my attention over the years. (Some fourteen years ago, I had driven through the American West, and on seeing signs for it, had declined to take a detour, dismissing the possibility with an arch ‘It’s just a tourist trap.’ It still remains a ‘tourist trap’ of sorts, but one you’d do well to be ensnared in for a while.)

For most, the source of entrenched Monument Valley images is the Hollywood Western, the products of which genre I have often had the pleasure of sampling over the years. This was an indulgence more often succumbed to in my childhood, but I remain susceptible, even though I have grown up, and supposedly developed a more mature and nuanced appreciation of its associated mythology. The director who did the most to stoke the Valley’s legend in cinema was, of course, John Ford whose ‘Magnificent Seven’ (Stagecoach (1939); My Darling Clementine (1946); Fort Apache (1948); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); The Searchers (1956); Sergeant Rutledge (1960); Cheyenne Autumn (1964)) did a great deal to establish the West as stage and backdrop for a particularly American brand of romantic, rugged heroism. (I do not recall my first cinematic encounter with Monument Valley but the most memorable one remains J. Lee Thompson’s Mackenna’s Gold, in large part because its Super Panavision 70 production ensured some wonderful panoramic shots in its opening minutes. The movie went rapidly downhill afterwards.)

The establishment of the imagery of a particular place in cinema (or coffee-table tourism book, National Geographic documentary etc) brings about the confusion that infected my first glimpse of the Valley. It was a confusion that seemed familiar; I had experienced it before while visiting Machu Picchu. There too, on reaching the ridge over the Urubamba Valley, I sensed deja vu, so iconic had those images become. Indeed, at that time, I had stood still for a few minutes after taking in my first views, just to make sure I was engendering an experience considerably different from that available via the glanced-at photograph.

Did this familiarity turn the visit to Monument Valley into a gigantic disappointment, a colossal ‘is that all there is’ moment? Not in the least. The movies and photographs leave out a great deal: the heat, the sound of the wind, the feeling of the fine, gritty, red dust beneath my feet, the glare off the sun on the rocks, the varied colors, contours, textures, splits and cracks of the rock walls visible only from up close. The two-dimensional flatness of the movie or photographs is dramatically replaced by an immersion that ensures that once the shock of the familiar has worn off, a new journey awaits.

The images you take back with you look just like the ones in the coffee books, but with a vital difference: you personally know the photographer, and that intimacy cannot but infect the visible  landscape with its own distinctive stamp. (Click for a larger image below.)

United Against Teachers on Teacher’s Day

The Facebook statuses of some friends of mine who live in India acknowledge September 5 as the date for the observance of an Indian holiday, not, I think, ‘observed’ with any particular enthusiasm in the United States: Teacher’s Day. (A confession: I did not realize there was a Teacher Day in the US till I looked up Wikipedia and found, in the entry for that topic, the following note for the US: ‘National Teacher Day is on Tuesday during Teacher Appreciation Week, which takes place in the first full week of May.’ I apologize for this oversight, but the occasion does not seem to have figured on my university-based radar at all.)

Back in India, if memory remains functional, the observance of Teacher’s Day was occasion for some rather interesting role-reversal: our schoolteachers took the day off, twelfth-graders took on their role as keepers of the peace, and the rest of us dissolved into giggles. (Or whatever it is that young boys do to indicate suppressed hilarity.)

But if an American ‘Teacher’s Day’ were observed during this year’s election season, it would have a decidedly somber air to it. For if there is an issue that unites our two political parties, bringing them together in a frenzy of bipartisan agreement, it is that teachers are to blame: for the ills of the educational system and the trials and travails of public schools, for the seemingly never-ending tales of low student reading and math scores in the face of international competition, and if the spectacularly misinformed Waiting for Superman is to be believed, for poverty, crime and social collapse in inner-city neighborhoods as well.

There isn’t much, it seems, that cannot be solved by simply busting teacher unions, getting rid of tenure and making it easier to fire teachers. Everything would magically become better, negating the effects of broken families, poverty, inner-city crime, declining social services and the like. (The mysterious business of how, Finland, that over-achiever in the world of primary and secondary education, manages to maintain its head honcho position despite a completely unionized teaching force should be sidelined for a bit while we indulge in this pleasant fantasy.)

In this regard our political parties are united, with nary a hint of obstructionism. As Diane Ravitch noted in her critical review of Mitt Romney’s school plan (‘The Miseducation of Mitt Romney’, New York Review of Books, July 12, 2012, Volume LIX, Number 12):

Apart from vouchers and the slap at teacher certification, Obama’s Race to the Top program for schools promotes virtually everything Romney proposes—charters, competition, accountability, evaluating teachers by student test scores. If anything, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been as outspoken on behalf of charters and test-based accountability as Mitt Romney. And, like Romney, Duncan has disdained the issue of reducing the number of students per teacher. [Link in original connects to Ravitch’s critical assessment of Arne Duncan in the New York Review of Books.]

Obama had promised us a new ‘coming together’ of the American nation. Well, at least when it comes to teachers, we finally have it.

Buying ‘Used’ and Loving It

It’s a bit of a perfect storm, really, of triggered memories and associations: Larry McMurtry’s post on selling second-hand books makes me think about my recent travels out in the American West, which included a small book-shopping spree at a used-book store in Boulder, CO. And thinking about that in turn reminded me that whenever I travel in the US, I find myself obsessively hunting for the nearest used-book store and brewery combo. (Boulder had plenty of both; a week or later, I found myself in another town that did well in both those dimensions: Madison, WI. While we are at it, I might as well make note of two other outstanding cities in this regard: Chicago, IL, and Portland, OR. )

Like any reader with a half-way decent reading career, I’ve frequented second-hand bookstores and have purchased used books for my shelves.  Without the used book and its associated stores, my forays into the world of reading would have been considerably less venturesome and rewarding. Indeed, so significant has the used book been in my book reading and purchasing habits that there have been some years that have seen me buy only second-hand books. At those times buying ‘used’ has become a hard-to-break habit; books can come to seem not quite right if they don’t have a ‘read’ look and feel to them. But this tends to be a cyclical thing; I return to only wanting to buy brand-new books, reveling in their biblio-virginity as I carefully transfer them to my shelves.

To explore a travel destination has meant, as noted, the tracking down and mapping of its bookstores, with careful notes made on a variety of desiderata that enable its ranking in the Grand Used Book Store Parade: knowledge and courtesy levels of staff; quality of stock; organization of stacks; the usual suspects.  Like a true academic philosophy snob, I also trot out an evaluative criteria all of my own: Does the store stack ‘philosophy’ books with ‘religion and new wave’? Are the ‘philosophy’ books just ‘self-help’ and pop psychology? An affirmative answer to the first question does not sink the store the way an affirmative answer to the second does. (I continue to steadfastly fantasize and daydream about the perfect travel writing assignment: to boldly travel–by plane, train and automobile–from one used bookstore to the next, room and board paid for by a sympathetic, deep-pocketed, commissioning editor at an imaginary book-lovers magazine.)

My shelves, like those of many other bibliophiles, creaks under the weight of unread purchases, and my panicked reckonings of reading speed, number of unread pages, and my life expectancy grow ever more desperate every year. There is only one way to assuage such anxiety: to carefully convince oneself, that in this endeavor, like so many others in our lives, one acts not just for the limited span of our life but for that of others as well. This enables a rather grandiose vision of my dilettantish book purchasing: I am putting together an Inheritance for Future Generations.

That’s the ticket: keep buying, someone will read ’em.

Finding Philosophy in Literature

This semester, I am teaching Philosophical Issues in Literature. PIL is one of Brooklyn College’s so-called upper-tier core courses; all graduating students are required to take a pair of these. Unsurprisingly, just about every student registered for my class told me during the first day’s introductions that they were taking the class because of a pair of familiar reasons: a) they needed an upper-tier core to graduate and my section had slots available and b) this section worked best with their academic and work schedule. (This ‘confession’ out in the open, I made my usual promises to try to make a core course as painless as possible.)

So, not Philosophy of Literature, but rather philosophy in literature. The former subject concerns itself with rather more traditional philosophical concerns: the nature of literature, fictional objects, the semantics of fictional works, and so on. The latter seeks to show philosophy may be found in literature, how authors do philosophy via their literary works, how indeed, a coherent philosophical vision can be presented in a variety of literary formats. In reading literature,  ‘morals’ can be drawn; metaphysical and ethical theses uncovered; aesthetic standpoints elicited. The anthology I have chosen as my text for the semester features extracts from novels, short stories, poems and plays; a blurb on the back suggests that as much philosophy may be found in a good novel as in anything written by Kant or Mill. I agree; it’s why teaching this class has long been on my short list of ‘want-to-take-this-on-at-some-point’ items.

If the classroom discussion that took place in the second class meeting is any indicator of how the semester will go, I’m inclined to be cautiously optimistic that my pre-semester enthusiasm for the class was justified: while some students appeared initially reticent about discussing the assigned readings (extracts from Invisible Man, Puberty Blues and Giovanni’s Room), yet others were remarkably enthusiastic, and as the class progressed, had pulled in other students with their responses to the material.  A provocative reading sometimes generates a provocative response, and then it’s off to the races. By the end of the class, we had made interesting connections between the repression of homosexual identity and the internalized self-diminution of the black man in Jim Crow America, between the immigrant’s struggles to maintain coherence in his twin identities, the dilemmas of the conscientious objector, and adolescent struggles to adjust to peer group pressure. Among other things.

While the extracts in the textbook are grouped according to philosophical themes–such as self-identity, duty to others etc–and accompanied by little primers to the issues tackled in them, I am inclined to let the initial reading be a  trifle unguided so as to be able to elicit slightly unmediated responses to the text. My hope is that this will broaden the scope of our responses to the readings and make the ensuing class discussions even more eclectic. My class is set in Brooklyn; my students are a remarkably diverse group, and they promise to bring to their readings of the classics a singularly unique standpoint.

It promises to be a great semester.

Lunch in the Navajo Nation

On 10th August, I drove north on US-163 toward Monument Valley (on the Utah-Arizona border). We had spent the previous night in Kanab, UT, and thus, in keeping with the Hollywood western theme, were headed for a rendezvous with John Ford‘s playground. I had noted that the Valley lay within the Navajo Nation, that the ‘Monuments’ were located in a Navajo Tribal Park. We were driving through the Nation in the afternoon, and lunch beckoned. Like all good travelers today, we checked our Yelp app for local recommendations. We were informed that we were in a ‘food desert’ and that the only decent eating establishment was to be found in a chain hotel. We checked that venue out but were told it was closed and would only open, much later, for dinner. A little later, we spotted a sign for a  restaurant and pulled over. The interior decor was unsurprisingly, uninspired; the menu’s offerings even more so. Rather startlingly, they were quite expensive. (Among them was a ‘Navajo taco‘ priced for ten dollars; the story behind the Navajo taco’s fry bread is well worth a read.) We settled on a ‘mixed’ plate that would let us sample a taco and a tamale.

To put it mildly, the food that was served to us was inedible. We were looking at a plate of ‘poor people’s food’: singularly non-nutritious, and expensive too, just to add insult to injury. The meats on it were tasteless (indeed, we were not sure that the substance we were consuming was ‘meat’), the breads limp, the sauces watery, and the ‘salsa’ served on the side had been prepared from tomato paste. That last item made our food edible for we were able to smother the plate with enough of it to add some flavor; without it I would not have had the courage to wade through its offerings. We were also, incidentally, in a ‘dry’ locale so I could not wash down my lunch with a beer.

We looked around to see if this ‘restaurant’ was only frequented by tourists able to afford its offerings. Not so; a few locals were also seated around us. At that moment, it all came together; the heat and the glare outside; the ugly sprawl of buildings, shop-fronts and pick-up trucks; the bad food. The grimness of the ‘Nation’ was a little unrelenting.  Somehow, we forced a few morsels down our gullets, settled the check, and, still a little shaken, left.

The immiseration of the Native American is supposedly well-known to us but to be confronted with its various manifestations is still an experience  that has not lost its capacity to induce shame. There, in the simple business of a lunch at that eating establishment, we had come face to face with it.

Later that night, we drove into Moab, playground of mountain bikers and outdoor adventurers of all stripes. After checking into a motel, we found a microbrewery and drove over for dinner. As I drank my first beer, a rather delicious Belgian ale, and perused the menu’s sundry offerings of salads, sandwiches, steaks and the like, I pondered my distance, physical and circumstantial, from the meal I had been served earlier that afternoon. We were just a few hours north of the Navajo Nation, but seemingly on a different planet.

The American West remains one of the most beautiful places in the world, one still containing testimonials to staggering acts of cruelty committed within its confines.