For your edification and entertainment, I give you
Emily Post.
One's Position in the Community
"FIRST of all, it is necessary to decide what one's personal idea of position is, whether this word suggests merely a social one, comprising a large or an exclusive acquaintance and leadership in social gaiety, or position established upon the foundation of communal consequence, which may, or may not, include great social gaiety. In other words, you who are establishing yourself, either as a young husband or a stranger, would you, if you could have your wish granted by a genie, choose to have the populace look upon you askance and in awe, because of your wealth and elegance, or would you wish to be loved, not as a power conferring favors which belong really to the first picture, but as a fellow-being with an understanding heart? The granting of either wish is not a bit beyond the possibilities of anyone. It is merely a question of depositing securities of value in the bank of life."
Emily was speaking of a different time and a different place, and of course, a different type of community than this. But there is echo here, on this site, of her theory of depositing securities, building equity in community. We mingle inside an amazing organism. Dailykos has all the elements of a neighborhood, a chat line, a community center, a rowdy stock exchange pit, a boxing ring. There are artifacts of an extended national party line, as in telephone party line; that is, where when you pick up your phone you may hear your neighbor talking away to another neighbor. Those of you who are younger than I may not understand this reference, but there was a time when one could choose a private line over a party line for your home telephone, but only if you had something to hide. If you're a fan of syndicated "Mayberry, RFD" shows, you may have noticed that the show had a pseudo-party line with a local operator as the friendly phone line commodore. When I read other's comments, I often feel as if I've picked up the phone and listened in on another conversation; since it is a party line, I'm mostly welcome to join the chatter. I envision, fancifully, the diarist as the commodore of the conversation.
Parts of the architecture here harken to La Belle Époque of the Paris salons of Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach; places where Picasso, Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, Hemingway, Chopin, and others would find themselves immersed in food and wine, sparkling wit, amazing art, long-winded soliloquies, passionate debate. We need salons today; blogs are the modern day salons, eh?
I can select my own personal smorgasbord of diarists here, nibble from a table of buttery topics selected through the random political whistlestops of my own brain. I can leisurely (at least in my own mind, as much as time permits) stroll through diaries and comments ranging from nearly every topic in the world, hot off the press, timely and intelligent.
There are characters galore - personalities as active and vibrant as my crusty old neighbor across the street who only dresses in threadbare gray twill workpants and a sweaty and stained ribbed men's undershirt, but who has the most marvelous vocabulary of Dutch swear words one could likely hear outside of Amsterdam. Even when I have no pictures (from the occasional "Meet your fellow Kossack" diaries) to place with a username, I often make up my own faces. I'll stop there for now and just let you imagine what I see when I read usernames like occams hatchet, or The Baculum King, or flumptytail - what great names all! And how I imagine other's brains are working and thinking and analyzing, and what is important to others and how much things matter, and why we care.
I lived on an urban neighborhood block like this at one point in my life in the latter 1980's - a real physical neighborhood, where the houses were spaced evenly apart on 75' by 100' lots, simple and cleanly defined early twentieth century Craftsman houses. It was one of those gems of a neighborhood in Northeast Portland, a place where houses haven't been torn down for 1960's ranch boxes. On my particular block, on both sides of the street, there were around 16 houses, eight houses facing eight houses. There were around six to eight families with children the age of my two older kids, and the rest of the houses were occupied by either retired grandparental types or single young professionals.
Each summer for that sadly short span of four years that I spent there, we had a block party and gated off the street so that the toddlers and older kids could play freely for an afternoon and evening. Beer, potluck, Big Wheels, frisbees, lawn chairs, barbeques, yard umbrellas, the whole shebang. Everyone watched everyone else's kids for a day. We talked politics, we argued sports (when are those Blazers ever going to win?), we compared early microbrews, we wished there was an IKEA (young and struggling families with small children, all), we bemoaned the lack of good daycare and talked minivans, but owned old diesel-belching Volvos). We liked one another and were of an age and it was soooo comfortable. Life would continue this way forever and there would always be a neighbor you could complain to next door, or another parent would take over at the drop of a hat. Nothing is forever.
"Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain."
Nicholson Baker
I can't believe I actually quoted Nicholson Baker.
Four doors down the street, good friends of mine lived with their one daughter (they now have three kids, as do I), a beautiful child who was in the middle of years between my two kids. They were very good friends of ours and I worked with the husband at the Multnomah County library in the reference department. We often traded kids for running chores, or held communal birthday parties; we all kind of lived in one another's pocket. I had a habit of stopping by their front door a couple of times a week late at night after the kids were abed and Bill and I would sit on the front porch or inside in the winter and each of us would slowly drain a short shot glass of Port or a decent sherry, while Jane sipped tea. My husband at the time usually went to bed before 10 pm, and I, being the lifelong night owl that I am, was drawn to others who appreciated those late night hours and could go for a round or two of personal or political gossip and chatter.
"Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers."
Howard Thurman
This is what I find on Dailykos, minus the Sandeman's port - so sad. Community essential to me now. There are real people up here in this atmosphere, people of depth and breadth, of heart and soul, of thoughtfulness and angst, of diversity and great opinion, of bitterness and anger and rage. People of action. People of conscience. People of community. People of choice.
No one frowns at you here when you talk "politics". You may get yelled at. It's all good.
Seemingly random, yet artful placement of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy"; situated here because this is one imaginary wall in a room of this salon.
Did I neglect to mention the Fight Club? It wasn't a conscious omission. Many of us head on out to the alleyway and beat on each other or ourselves, or trolls, or generally idiotic pundits, or Lieberman, or (fill in the blank), kicking and punching out our disgust and our frustrations, flinging out a left hook here, a left hook there. When blows land, there results a powerful and resonant impact. Some come out to fight in the neighborhood on a daily basis; some are security guards, patrolling the street in the event of appearance by unsavory characters, those who normally dwell over there, you know, over on the other side of reason. We live on a street paved with layers upon layers of the Constitution and the Declaration and Proclamations and Self Evident Truths. What we have fought for already, and bought and paid for, is constantly under threat of regrade by those who want the topography redeveloped, trees cut down for a better view to the other side of knowledge and experience, sidewalks changed to redirect the foot traffic on to a dangerous detour. Those folks want one-way streets; where only hard right turns are acceptable. To them, I say gently, "get the fuck out of my town."
If your community is to give you admiration and honor, it is merely necessary to be admirable and honorable. The more you put in, the more will be paid out to you. It is too trite to put on paper! But it is astonishing, isn't it, how many people who are depositing nothing whatever, expect to be paid in admiration and respect?
Emily Post
Please excuse the horrid language, Ms. Post.
This place, this Dailykos, is the Autobiography of Time and it's being written as we mark the hours and the days. There is a here, here.
Note to bluestatelibertarian: I hope you find your next physical community very soon - there is one out there for you.