Rosalea Barker: An anniversary

Ten years ago this week, I stood in the immigration line at Los Angeles International Airport staring at the ceiling. I’d been instructed to do so by the immigration officer, who said it would help me make a good impression of my inky thumbprint for the federal files. After inspecting the copious paperwork of my Diversity Visa, which gave me Permanent Resident status, and a quick examination of my lung x-rays—required to keep out folks with TB—he sent me on my way with the advice to “buy a California Lottery ticket. The prize is $8 million, and today is your lucky day!”

I never did buy the lottery ticket. It was the middle of the night, my flight from Auckland had been delayed five hours by fog in Sydney so I’d missed my connecting flight to New York and had to stand in a long line at the domestic terminal to be re-booked on another flight. Moreover, the summer heat and the crowds of people even at that time of day were overwhelming.

I was sent to a nearby hotel for a few hours’ kip, and on my return discovered that the flight I was supposed to go on had been overbooked, so I probably wouldn’t be able to get on it after all. Eventually, after a walk-through of the passenger cabin, the gate agent told me there was a seat. It turned out to be the worst one in the plane, in the center of the middle row of seats where—I soon discovered—air conditioning doesn’t reach.

Welcome to the U.S. of A., where everyone believes you’re lucky to be here, that riches will miraculously appear, and where you’re expected to silently suffer the greedy practices of corporations like the airlines that overbook flights despite the inconvenience it causes their customers. Well, of course, you can take it out on the airline employees, but you can bet dollars to donuts that no-one you elect to Congress is going to stand up for your rights. You have to rely on the media—and, nowadays, bloggers—to tell you how to do that for yourself.

But I don’t really want to gripe. I do consider myself lucky to be living here, and even luckier to have a job that puts a roof over my head and food on my table. Many millions don’t—including, by the end of this week, a few of the people in a work unit close to mine. As everyone in the workplace looks askance at every other person, wondering who is next for the chop, something a friend told me just before I left New Zealand still rings in my ears.

When I asked him why he gave up a great job he had in the States, where he could have become a U.S. Citizen and stayed forever, he told me, “Because no matter how long immigrants live there, they’re never considered to be Americans.”

Well, I understand that. After all, I’m from a country that coined “Pommie Bastards” as a term for English immigrants, and myself often resented the success that relative newcomers to Aotearoa/New Zealand had in undermining the steps taken since the 1970s to truly honor the Treaty of Waitangi’s pledge of partnership between Maori and European settlers. Newcomers just didn’t GET it!

Prior territorial occupation breeds a natural kind of resentment, so I’m not surprised when I encounter it here—though I have to say that in the context of the immigration debate in California and Texas, it’s rather more complex. As an Hispanic comedian once said, “My family didn’t cross over the border; the border crossed over them,” referring to how those two states were created from land previously administered by the Spanish.

I arrived in the States naively thinking that I was, for all intents and purposes, as American as the next person. After all, I grew up on I Love Lucy, The Monkees, The Streets of San Francisco, Bill Cosby, and the entire canon of Hollywood movies, and that’s all there is to U.S. culture, right? That and TV dinners. As for politics, oh, sure, I knew the U.S. had a different political system, but at its heart it consisted of people voting for their representatives, so it couldn’t be that different. Could it?

My first wake-up call in that regard—reminding me I was but an ignorant immigrant—came in 2000 at an informal lecture about voter registration. During question time, I put up my hand and asked, “Why do you have all these separate county-level entities registering voters and not communicating with each other? It would be better to centralize it in a government department and have them do it, like the Justice Department does in New Zealand.” People literally swiveled in their chairs, mouths agape, to stare at the fool who’d asked such a dumb question.

“Have the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT run elections?” asked one person in disbelief, “You must be kidding!”

Well, of course, there is no index entry for “elections” in the U.S. Constitution, because no one in the federal government, aka the Executive Branch, is elected by the voters. The President and Vice President are elected by Electors from each state, and those Electors are voted for within the individual states. Heads of departments—both within and outside Cabinet—are appointed by the President. And though their appointment must be confirmed by the Senate, the large majority of Senators are simply “confirmed” over and over again themselves at the polls every six years, as a result of the gerrymandering of Senate districts. In fact, it’s only been since 1917 that Senators were directly elected.

But the person’s disbelief wasn’t because they thought I didn’t understand that the U.S. has a parliament that doesn’t give rise to a government; the problem was that I didn’t understand the depth of distrust people here have of the federal government. That distrust expresses itself on the one hand with claims that the feds are taxing too much and spending it on “entitlements”, and on the other that they’re not responsive enough to states’ needs. And you could find plenty more reasons for railing against the federal government in every line item of any 534-page Appropriation Bill.

Madison’s dream of a republic of republics was a dream of cooperative federalism. Instead it has become coercive federalism, in which states have become dependent on federal funds. In no small way, that dependence is the result of individual representatives and senators “bringing home the pork” by adding their supporters’ pet projects into any bill they can slip it into. Not to mention the bragging rights state governors gain by bringing federal money to their state.

Successive Administrations have increasingly used the power of financial coercion to interfere with states’ ability to deal with issues such as health care, education, transportation, and environmental protection in their own way. The power given to the President to promulgate Executive Orders, and to departments to promulgate regulations with no input from either Congress or the country at large, are just two more reasons why the federal government is distrusted so much.

Damn! This was going to be a much more personal reflection on the past ten years. I was going to tell you about the phases I’ve been through, and the phrases I’ve abandoned. I ride in elevators, not lifts; set my oven to broil, not grill, to make cheese on toast; and I no longer “go to the toilet” or “go for a tramp in the bush.” In the first case, it’s considered impolite to talk about the hardware in the bathroom, which is typically where a toilet is in the U.S., rather than in a separate room as in other countries. And in the second case, I’d likely be arraigned for admitting sexual assault.

As for the phases: I started out by joining groups and taking courses that would help me understand my new environment. There was a lot to learn—how to spot poison ivy on a hike in the woods, what not to do if you came face-to-face with a bear; civics courses to understand the political life of the country; history courses to help me understand the culture.

I embarked on that learning adventure with enthusiasm ten years ago. Today, I find myself beaten into the state of mind I think most people in the U.S. live in: I’m a baby-bird nester. I go to work. I come home to my nest. I turn on the television news and sit there with my baby-bird mouth open waiting to be fed thoughts and opinions I don’t have to think up for myself.

Even my enthusiasm for trying to change the way people get elected has waned over the years. It has sagged under the weight of knowledge of all the ways in which elections in the U.S. are always about the pre-selected candidates and never about the voters’ choice. From restrictive ballot access rules to infiltration of the largest minor parties by agents of the two main parties; from voter caging to black box voting; from gerrymandering to the high cost of political campaigns, there is no avenue unpaved by bad intentions in the political life of this country.

So sit down and shut up, everyone, and be grateful for the TV dinner being handed through your screen by talking heads who make a very nice living, thank you very much, by avoiding the hard questions and, instead, just pimp themselves out to whoever’s press release has top billing that day.

To all those reporters and citizens out there who are steadily trying to erode that bad paving: Keep up the good work! Maybe one day I’ll get my energy back—perhaps an overdose of Red Bull and Blue Bull will do the trick—and then I’ll lend my shoulder to the wheel again. But after ten years, it feels more like a rock than a wheel—and a Sisyphean rock, at that.

--PEACE--

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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