The film is about an outré drag club run for decades in Portland by Darcelle XV (real name Walter Cole), a septuagenerian gay activist and a man. He and his burlesque crew do bachelorette parties for young women — many of them surburban, fundamentalist Christians — who are about to have very straight weddings and want to get wasted and rowdy before they tie the knot.

Film director Jan Haaken

Jan always looks beneath the surface. I got to know her years ago, when everyone was still arguing whether “recovered memories” of childhood sex abuse were “real” or “false.” Jan was underwhelmed by the question (though she was passionately against the witch hunts which the “memories,” or whatever they were, were creating on therapists’ couches and in police stations and court rooms). She was far more interested in exploring the political and cultural truths-or- consequences of this overheated phenomenon. She wrote Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, which explores those deeper truths. It’s the smartest book around on the subject, and the most feminist.

Queens of Heart is equally intelligent. Jan chose the title because she thinks Darcelle XV and her fellow entertainers function as psychiatrists for their public. Strutting around in over-the-top, slinky femme outfits, and shaking their falsie boobs in drunk customers’ faces, the male performers “are walking Rorschach cards, and they have to understand what they arouse in people,” Jan said while talking with me recently about the film. “What goes on between performers and audience is like a therapeutic encounter.”

Some of what the performers arouse is a level of public sexual aggression from their female audience that hardly comports with stereotypes about womanly decorum and passivity. In one scene in Queens of Heart, a cute, conservative-looking young thing marches toward a drag performer on stage and proceeds to slide her hand up and up and up to his crotch — much to the consternation of the dancer, who responds with tactful revulsion, like a woman who’s being harassed but has to make nice to stay on the job. Another dancer later notes that in gentlemen’s clubs, it’s illegal to touch real women dancers’ real breasts or genitals. But at the drag joint, it’s perfectly OK to go after fake women’s fake bits. In fact, fakery seems to be what emboldens the female customers. They know they’re touching men, but these men are clowns. Clowns who look like women, so tonight it’s OK to touch women, too. Then, tomorrow, those who did the touching will be dressed in white, tripping down the aisle at the local Assembly of God Church.

Couple at a drag ball. Diane Arbus, NYC 1970

“There’s a lot of this touching in the drag clubs by women,” Haaken says. “In women’s studies and what’s called ’spectatorship theory,’ the typical view is of women in sex clubs being preyed upon, and men doing the preying. But women can be predatory regarding gay men. I’m interested in breaking up the simplistic view of a dichotomy between the predatory male stance and the more innocent, female stance” Haaken says. “I was trying to take a fresh look by turning the camera on the audience, not just asking “Why do drag performers do this?” but “Why do people come? What are they experiencing?”

We talked about drag as “role inversion ritual.” That’s a term used by anthropologists to describe the way cultures institutionalize behaviors that reverse everyday social roles — the poor act rich and the rich act poor, for instance, or men dress like women and women like men — to momentarily create a sense of transgression, but ultimately to celebrate and buttress inequalities of the status quo. “Why aren’t Darcelle’s performances for straight people simply another role inversion ritual?” I asked, “something that even Rick Warren could have fun at?” “I think there are some people for whom drag clubbing is an inversion ritual,” Jan said. “But the way that performers at Darcelle’s talk back to the audience makes it different.” Indeed, they do talk back, “challenging audiences not to just passively consume,” as Jan puts it. Queens shows the performers poking fun at brides’ churchiness and their aspirations to marry in white, and challenging drunken male customers who throw macho weight around during the show. Still, Jan says, the club in itself is not the whole point. The point is the larger community of gay liberation politics, which is particularly strong in Portland. “For many people [Darcelle's] is their first exposure to what they understand is gay culture,” Jan notes. “If it were the only representation of queer culture it would be more problematic than it is nowadays.

Heavy messages like this are embedded in Queens, but it’s also got a lot of surface fun: great female impersonating, terrific music, and a sense of serendipity. Jan knows how to mix work and pleasure. To get money to do the film, she and her long time partner (a man) did a fund raiser at the club which included getting married — with drag queen Darcelle officiating. That’s not in the film, but its spirit lies beneath.

Queens of Heart is being distributed by Cinema Libre (click here), where you can order it for $19.95. It’s also available at Netflix and Amazon.

Mexican gambling top, often mistaken for a dreydl. So ... Feliz Hannukah!

Morten and I were at Bed, Bath & Beyond last night looking for Christmas cookie tins so he can send out his homemade Norwegian baked goodies to friends and family — including Scandos, boricuas, DR’s, and Jews. While he was poking through the shelves I spied a Martha-Stewart-fancy dreydl and took it over to show him. I love how in Hebrew, those dreydl letters nun, gimel, hey, and shin mean something all holy –“A Great Miracle Happened Here” — but the same letters, in Yiddish, are street corner crapshooting jive: “Take, All, Half, Put” (nem, gants, halb, shtel). Hey folks, in case you don’t know — dreydls are much less about magic olive oil and Maccabees than everyday, gut-bucket gambling — first in Rome, then Southern Europe, later in the Spanish colonies, and only much later in Ashkenaz Europe. (You can still find them in toy stores and junk shops, from Mexico to England. They have nothing, historically, to do with Jews or Hannukah. Unless you want them to).

So who needs candelabras and shameses? Give me the gelt any time! Shtel two nickels or two chocolate pennies. Nem halb of ‘em. Shtel a couple more. Winner takes gants (for more on how to make it work for you, see here). Now go make some latkes and get fat.

Bakery cookies, Upper Manhattan

Actually, there is one thing I like about the Hebrew. Morten’s last name is Naess (do not pronounce the “a”), which, I’m told means “place” in Norwegian, or something like that.

Antique English "put 'n' take"

But in my gente’s tongue, as I explained above, it means “miracle.” As in “Mort Miracle,” that slick shaygets of mine with the blonde hair, the thick calves and the bicycles. How could this Nize Girl resist? He looks great in a kipah! He’s been hanging around my family so much, he can say the brukhe over bread! His native language is Germanic, and you wouldn’t believe how much he helps me with my Yiddish homework. He is Naess Godol!

We’ve had the intermarriage going for a while, just like those gambling tops that have turned into dreydls because they walk like dreydls, quack like dreydls, and gamble like dreydls. Go look at the picture up top again (which I took earlier this month, in a toy store in a village near Puebla). Spanish “pon” means Yiddish “shtel,” which is English “put” — or, “Sorry, you lose.” Toma is nem is take. Good for you! Grab your gelt and eat some dulces. Pigging out in December, whether on potato pancakes or baked ham or tamales, expands the body and the spirit. Gobbling up everything edible, from other people’s cultures too, and gorging those cultures with your own, seems apt, if not brave, in the dark days.

Maybe talk of taking chances has always been a seasonal treat. Today I was reading the nostalgia section of the latest Forward and found this news clip from a century ago. It’s about goyim and yidn overstepping old bounds and mingling in the most intimate ways. It’s not exactly kind spirited, at least not on the surface. But look deeper and you see a gamble that’s worth celebrating. Along with things like my Yiddish homework and that nes Mort.

Cakes, Upper Manhattan bakery

Form 100 Years Ago in the Forward

One of the most active members of the Jewish community of Boston’s South End was a young Mr. Kadelsky, who not only belonged to a number of different Jewish organizations, but also was given the honor of reading from the Torah this past Yom Kippur and led the circuits around the synagogue on Simchat Torah. But it turns out that Kadelsky isn’t even Jewish. Earlier this month, at a meeting of his landsmanshaft, the Brit Avraham, a new immigrant showed up and was shocked to see Kadelsky, whom he knew from his town in Poland. There, Kadelsky was a Catholic Pole. When this news came up,the meeting turned into an uproar, and when all the members asked what was going on, Kadelsky fainted. When he came to, he admitted that he wasn’t really Jewish but had been raised by Jews, knew Yiddish and could even daven. The head of the landsmanshaft was upset and wanted to kick him out for lying, but Kadelsky said he wanted to be a Jew. To prove it, he was circumcised the following week.

Sophy Naess's homemade church shortly before it was eaten

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Santa Claus is dead! At least, the charity Santa who was born during the first Gilded Age, and whose fantasies about the poor fueled Operation Santa Claus, an enormous, Victorian-mentality welfare program run for decades from the giant Post Office at 33rd Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. Yesterday, three months after the demise of the second Gilded Age, Operation Santa came to a screeching halt, thanks to additional dark fanatasies: this time about pedophilia. It used to be that middle-class and rich people pored for hours over hand written letters from the indigent, then went to the houses of the underclass to give them Christmas gifts. To do that, the donors needed kids’ names and addresses. This year, a registered sex offender did his poring and got his address. The Post Office found out and summarily shut down the entire Op Santa program, even though, in its almost 100-year history, it has never received a complaint of child sexual assault or abuse. Officials told the media that in the future, donors will have no access to children’s identifiers, which means they be unable to make deliveries to the slums. Instead, they’ll donate to anonymous recipients, and mail their packages at the post office. The PO said this will save the program. Not so.The success of Operation Santa Claus was always based on complex class relations and conflict, complete with reticulated fantasies that could only be satisfied by the letter reading, the name gathering, and those noblesse oblige home visits. Without all this, the program is kaput. In New York City alone, over a million poor families came to depend on the Operation for entitlements — warm clothes, toys, even schooling — that used to be dispensed by machine politicians or New Deal agencies. Today, the old ho-ho-ho pols are long gone. And now the country talks of a new FDR. It took a black man and an economic meltdown to get that conversation going. Now, thanks to a registered sex offender with disposable Christmas income and intentions probably equal to those of every other donor, the children and adults of America may be forced recognize that in this day and age, “No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.” Here is a piece I did foreshadowing all this. I wrote it five years ago, while Operation Santa Claus was still going strong. MIRACLE ON 33RD STREET from City Limits Magazine, December 2003

This holiday season, more than 200,000 letters from poor New Yorkers will plead with Santa Claus for toys, clothes, even school supplies. But how many will get what they wish for? It all depends on how visitors to a post office charity program decide who’s needy and who’s merely nice. > By Debbie Nathan

Dear Santa,I am the mother of three (3) beautiful childs of the 5, 13 years old and one of eight month (8)… The most important thing I want is to give my childrens happiness sadly enough I can’t buy the basic thing in life. I would be so grateful if Santa Claus would send things. Luis is 13, pants size 16-18 sneakers 9 coat sweaters = 16-18. Magdalena is 5 years old Pants = 6, sneakers = 13, coat and sweathers = 6 Emiliano is (8) month old pants 18-24 m sneakers = 4-5 Coat and Sweathers = 18-24 m. Thank you, Santa Claus for making dream be come true.

Three years ago on Christmas Eve, the New York Times ran a story about adults who encourage young kids’ faith in a roly-poly fellow who delivers toys through chimneys–even as grown-ups feel sheepish about promulgating the fib. A psychologist from Yale was quoted, reassuring parents that tots abandon the fantasy in a few years. Nevertheless, he warned, anyone “who still believes in Santa after that probably needs professional help.”

The Yale man obviously hadn’t considered Operation Santa Claus, an elaborate New York City ritual in which thousands upon thousands of locals write to the bearded legend each year and earnestly address him in the second person, though most writers are themselves old enough to have whiskers, or fertile wombs.

Consumers of populist media like the Daily News, The Post and Fox Channel 5 News are bombarded each December with stories about Operation Santa Claus, so they know it’s a seasonal charity drive run from the colossal James A. Farley General Post Office, on 33rd Street and 8th Avenue by the Macy’s flagship store. The same locales were featured in the film Miracle on 34th Street, and for the past several years, reporters have been urging New Yorkers to nurture Kris Kringle’s spirit by visiting the main post office between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

There, in a room decorated with cardboard Donners and Blixens, you can dip your hands into cardboard boxes overflowing with handwritten missives to Santa, penned by the indigent of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington Heights, Harlem and the Lower East Side. You can spread the letters on school cafeteria–style tables and pore over them for hours. Soon, according to one Operation Santa promoter, a letter will make you weep by “singing” to you.

Whether unbearably tragic or poignantly winsome, the song always includes a return address, and a request for a dizzying array of items: things like sweaters, X-Boxes, Play-Station 2s, Timberland boots, Game Boy Megaman Extreme 2’s, Yu-gi-oh trading cards, Bratz dolls, Phat Farm down coats, even computers and tuition for private high school. After wiping your eyes and shrugging off the big-ticket items, you take the letter to H&M or Toys R Us or Old Navy and buy what you can. Then you giftwrap your purchases and send them parcel post to the return address. Or, if you enjoy dressing like an elf and are not too fearful of places like Bed-Stuy and Fordham Road, you deliver in person on Christmas Day.

Last December, the tables were crowded for weeks with people waiting to be sung to, and the cardboard boxes spilled over with an estimated 260,000 letters–20 times as many as when the count was first publicized, nearly two decades ago. As always, the media last year implied that most letters were written by very young, low-income New York kids of all the darker-skinned ethnicities. In fact, as postal workers will reluctantly admit if you ask them point blank, many come from Latino teenagers–and even more are from Latina moms, like the one whose letter opens this article.

Writers like her are far past the age when people in cozy circumstances deem it normal to correspond with a nursery school myth. But like everyone else during the Christmas season, the poor want and want and want. In addition, they need and need the things they need all year: food, clothes, entertainment, education, a sense that someone among the unseen powers that be knows they exist–and cares. “Some years around Christmas time, I feel sad and lonely and need something to cheer me up,” says Judi Cabral. A quiet, round-faced 13-year-old, she lives with a big sister, a little brother and a mother whose husband left and who tries to survive by decorating cakes in the family’s down-at-the-heels apartment in Inwood. In past years after Judi has written letters to the post office, “people have brought me toys, sweaters and Barbies.” She shrugs while speculating that “maybe there’s a Santa somewhere.”

But the city’s middle and monied classes also seem needy. If the Topsy growth of Operation Santa Claus is any indication, more and more require contact these days with their socioeconomic inferiors, even if only once a year through the mail, and even if they carefully omit from the package their own name and address.

It should not surprise that these mutual needs play out so grandly in the Big Apple. Historians say the generous, gift-giving Santa Claus we know today was invented in Manhattan, expressly to help the poor and not-poor coexist with fewer tensions. Even today, that ambition may be St. Nick’s greatest legacy.
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Sharon Glassman is one of the not-poor. Petite and chatty, with red, Amy Irvingesque hair, she pours her heart and professional energy into Operation Santa Claus each year, though she’s not a postal worker. Glassman’s a performance artist who appears at corporate Christmas parties, where she delivers a promotional monologue about the program that’s based on her life story.

It starts with a witty description of growing up suburban and Jewish in the 1970s, in a barely observant family that not only lit the menorah in December but also exchanged Christmas presents and sang carols. As a teenager, Glassman wanted to feel Jesus in the holiday–something spiritual–which was missing even from Jewish practice in her home. She tried to “boyfriend” her way to holiness by cadging invitations to the houses and churches of her Christian beaux on December 24 and 25. She still didn’t feel inspired. She joined a Unitarian church. She spent a month at an ashram. Meanwhile, as a single, childless, thirty-something woman in New York, she was turning into a shopaholic. She wasted money on two lipsticks of virtually the same shade because one might look better in sunlight. She imagined that cashmere garments were whispering to her from store windows.

Then she found Operation Santa Claus.

In Love Santa, her recently published book about her experience, Glassman writes that one of the first letters she pulled from the boxes melted her with its direct request to Santa Claus for a modest gift.

“I walk around all day in these meticulous casual ensembles from SoHo and I’m lucky if somebody on the street says: ‘Nice red chenille sweater, baby!’… And now this little kid was offering me love…in exchange for a plastic toy castle in the mail.”

Glassman went shopping, with a few things on her mind. One was the sense that she’d finally connected with her spirituality by recalling something she learned in religious school as a child. It was the Jewish ritual of tsedakah, or charitable giving, in which efforts are made to insure that the receiver never learns the name of the person making the donation. The post office encourages donors to send gifts through the mail while identifying themselves simply as “Santa.” Glassman liked the tsedakahness of it all. She liked the selflessness of spending for someone besides herself. And she loved fantasizing that the kids she was shopping for were her own children. Chatting with salespeople, she would pretend to be a harried but loving mom.

By the time Glassman started her benefit monologue for Operation Santa Claus, in the late 1990s, she was calling herself “Tsedakah Santa” and, more frequently, “Undercover Mother.” She had campaign-style buttons made with a cartoon image of a trenchcoated woman, a la Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle. She started distributing the buttons at employee Christmas parties given by corporations like Nickelodeon. She covered tables at these gatherings with hundreds of letters supplied by the post office. The idea was for partygoers to pick one or two, then become “Undercover Mothers” themselves. Glassman is still doing the parties, and she’s pleased at how the letters move young New York professionals like her to perform acts of charity for the poor.

Her favorite indigent writers are those who express gratitude unreservedly and in advance. Often their thankfulness comes not at the start of the letter but at the end. Glassman recalls that one of the first missives that “sang” to her suffered from a ho-hum beginning. “Dear Santa,” it said. “I will be happy if you bring me just this castle for Christmas. But if you bring me a different toy, that will be OK, too. I will leave your cookies in the same place as last year.”

“I could resist that,” remarks Glassman in her book.

But when she got to “PS: I love you, Santa,” she couldn’t not go shopping. “There was no way,” she writes, “to give up on somebody this accepting.”
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And that’s the whole point of a ritual like Operation Santa Claus, suggests University of Massachusetts historian Stephen Nissenbaum. In return for taking from more affluent New Yorkers during the holidays, the lower classes offer people like Glassman acceptance–even good will.

“It’s like wassailing through the mails!” Nissenbaum chuckles gleefully.

To get the joke, you have to know something about his book The Battle for Christmas–a meticulous analysis of Santa Claus as a New York City invention. For centuries Christmas had been a bacchanal, a carnival, when peasants and servants–particularly young men–wandered around in inebriated gangs in late December. As they staggered about, they “wassailed.”

Today, dictionaries define wassailing as an early English custom that involved boisterous drinking during the Christmas season and toasting to someone’s health. This is not the whole story. Often, wassailing songs included “trick-or-treat”–style lyrics that threatened local poobahs with harm if they did not serve the wassailers their very best food and liquor. “We’ve come to claim our right,” goes one such song. “And if you don’t open up your door, We will lay you flat on the floor.” Indeed, wassailers would bang on the doors of mansions and even break in. Lords and ladies were expected to welcome this misbehavior and to personally serve the ragged revelers high-quality viands and alcohol. When that happened, the songs praised the rich. “God send our mistress a good Christmas pie…. With my wassailing bowl I drink to thee.”

According to anthropologists, wassailing was a “social inversion” ritual: a seasonal event when a group of people in power switch roles with the powerless. At first glance, writes Nissenbaum, it can seem egalitarian, even revolutionary, to see the rich wait on the poor and the poor eat like the rich. In reality, he points out, such role-switching helps perpetuate the status quo. It lets the poor blow off steam, even as it allows the rich to feel like good, caring people. Social inversion turns the world upside down for a few days in order to keep it aright the rest of the year.

But sometimes, changing economic and social conditions destabilize the ritual. When that happens, all hell can break loose–or at least it feels like it might. This, writes Nissenbaum, is what happened in early 19th-century New York City. People like Clement Clarke Moore, owner of a large tract of land now known as Chelsea, worried then about roving bands of Christmas drinkers. Not only did they bang on the doors of mansions and barge in, they also filled the streets with besotted aggression. More ominously, they were young, male and poor; and if they were not visibly resentful of the rich, the rich still stewed in their own imaginings. A specter was haunting Manhattan: the specter of the mob and the riot.

So Moore and other powerful men of the city–better known as Knickerbockers–invented a new rite designed to keep the riffraff at home during Christmas by redefining how goods should be distributed during the holiday. Heretofore, rich adults had given to poor adults. Now, grown-ups of all classes were to give to their own children–and not in the streets, but by their own hearths.

But how to persuade people to do something novel for Christmas, when the holiday and its traditions are supposed to be ancient and unchanging? Moore came up with the solution: Santa Claus.

He started by publicizing a poem he claimed to have written: “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which everyone still knows today (”T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the house…”). St. Nicholas was a 4th-century saint who was honored on December 6 in Holland. But the Dutch St. Nicholas was skinny and grim-faced, and he was as likely to give a bad child a birch-rod beating as a good child a gift. To retrofit him for 19th-century New York, Moore moved St. Nicholas to Christmas Eve, plumped him up, provided a sleigh and reindeer, and dropped his noir side. Within a few decades, St. Nick had become Santa, and Christmas was recast as a holiday mainly for kids–one that required lots of shopping in the city’s emerging plethora of stores.

To be sure, adults celebrating the new, Santa-ized Christmas also began with exchanging presents with their grown-up friends and relatives. And haves still gave to have-nots. But now, the favorite impoverished beneficiaries were children, and the goods they received were called charity. Unlike luxury goods that the rich had once handed to wassailers and now gave to their own children, charity consisted of necessities, such as basic clothing and food.

By the mid-19th century, a Victorian image had developed of the individual deemed worthy of charity. The ideal recipient was a version of Dickens’ Tiny Tim: a patient and selfless young child who displayed profound gratitude when receiving a donation, and whose appreciation bridged the gap between rich and poor.

By the 1890s, lavish and bizarrely voyeuristic events were being organized so affluent New Yorkers could observe children getting charity. On Christmas day during the first year of that decade, lunch was served to 1,800 poor boys at multi-story Lyric Hall, on Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Every floor was filled with well-heeled adults watching the hungry youngsters eat. Next year, the wealthy were invited to Madison Square Garden to watch 10,000 needy boys and girls pluck gifts that hung from the ceiling by ropes.
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Then there was the post office.

“Children have been sending letters to the North Pole at least since the 1870s,” says historian Nissenbaum. Traditionally, they were written by the very young, or by mothers of as-yet illiterate preschoolers, acting as scribes. Typical missives greeted Santa, assured him the writer had been good all year, and ended with a wish-list of gifts and a promise to leave refreshments for the reindeer. Some writers mentioned being poor and unable to afford presents unless Santa brought them. But in post office jargon, every letter was a “dead letter,” destined for destruction after the holidays.

It wasn’t long before the wealthy got a yen to read them.

In 1914, a New Yorker named John Duvall Gluck started the Santa Claus Association, whose goal was to boost belief in Santa by answering letters sent to the North Pole by poor kids. Several local charities encouraged the children they served to write letters, then passed them to the organization, which answered with gifts. In addition, the Santa Claus Association took poor boys’ and girls’ letters from the main post office. In 1928, however, the group was investigated for fraud, and the New York City postmaster stopped sending it letters.

The following year, New York City clerks in the postal service’s Money Order Division picked up the slack by culling letters from poor kids and passing the hat to send some of them presents. Soon, the public was being encouraged to assist by sending money. Then, in 1962, the post office decided to let people walk in off the street and choose their own letters. Operation Santa Claus was born.

It started as a low-key affair. Then came the 1980s. “I went to the post office and got my first letter after I heard Johnny Carson reading some on TV,” remembers Richie Aron, a mail carrier in Manhattan’s Murray Hill district who today is an Operation Santa Claus stalwart. Like Aron, many longtime donors say they first learned of the project while watching The Tonight Show 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Carson began publicizing Operation Santa Claus then. After all, Ronald Reagan was slashing public spending on anti-poverty programs, a policy later extended by the first President Bush as he urged Americans to downsize government and help the poor through “thousand points of light” acts of charity. Such acts were predicated on the idea that one ordinary individual could directly help another, without a passel of social entitlement policies, bureaucrats and social workers interfering. The new aid was up close and personal.

Meanwhile, things were also changing at the post office. In 1984, the first year the local papers paid attention to such things, Operation Santa Claus reported receiving 13,000 letters during the Christmas season. Subsequently, the increase was dizzying. Eighteen thousand in 1989. One hundred seventy-five thousand in 1995. The number peaked in 2000, when 280,000 letters arrived. The next year, the post–September 11 anthrax scare made people leery of strange mail, and only 210,000 letters were received. But last year, the tally had climbed back to 260,000. This Christmas, Operation Santa Claus officials say they will not be surprised if almost a third of a million letters pour in.
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If this year is like earlier ones, most letters will be from the poorest zip codes in New York City. Which means that if you hang out in these neighborhoods, a high percentage of the moms and kids you meet will be writers to Santa. For some reason, this is particularly true in heavily Latino areas. There, a tradition seems to have developed in which mothers with young children learn from women friends how to write to Operation Santa Claus–though they have no idea where their letters go, or who reads them. As the children approach adolescence, they start writing on their own. They, too, are clueless about the giant cardboard boxes on 33rd Street.

According to postal employee Pete Fontana, who has headed the program for several years, some 10,000 donors are expected to make the trek to midtown this year to read letters, and they will choose 30,000 to 40,000 to respond to. In addition, hundreds of corporations will ask for as many as 500 letters each, to give to their executives and staff. And Fontana hopes for a replay of last year, when several Broadway productions took 20,000 letters–actors passed them out to audiences after the shows. In all, Fontanta estimates that a fourth to a third of the letters will be answered.

That means up to three-fourths will be ignored. These are the letters that, in performance artist Sharon Glassman’s words, are “resisted” by people like her because they fail to “sing.” Abandoned after Christmas in the big cardboard boxes, tone-deaf missives are eventually destroyed. Meanwhile, out in the zip codes, their authors are sorely disappointed.

“I don’t know if I still believe in Santa Claus,” says Cristina Gomez. She is a high school student from Washington Heights who wrote last year when she was 15, asking for patterned pantyhose. “I don’t know where the letters go or who reads them, but I thought somebody would come to the house. On Christmas I stayed home all day. Every time the doorbell rang I thought it was him. I gave up at two the next morning.”

Nevertheless, many letter-writers eventually learn how to make their letters sing–to “wassail through the mails.” They are extraordinarily sensitive to their donors’ emotional needs–which are nowhere more apparent than at the cafeteria-style tables on 33rd Street in December. There, as some letter-readers wipe their eyes with handkerchiefs, others purse their lips, struggling to discern which letters are sincere and which are fake. They might as well try to figure out the exact meaning of a Rorschach blot. The more they mull over the ink, the more they reveal of themselves.
“You can tell the scams,” insisted Westchester resident Adam Fuchs last December, after he had read several letters at the post office and picked a favorite to answer. “Like one says, ‘Hi, my name is Sarah. I’m 2 years old. My mommy just went through a divorce; she’s very sick. Can you please send a fur coat?’”

It wasn’t the fact that a 2-year-old can’t write. Rather, Fuchs implied, it was the fur coat, which he considered too luxurious for a poor woman to request from charity.

For a mother or adolescent to ask for stylish, brand-name clothing indicates selfishness and cynicism to many donors–even though the Santas may themselves be fashion plates. Last year, two young women in their twenties, who could have been extras on Sex and the City, pored over letters and grew wary. “This one wants a specific pair of shoes, with this and such color,” one said, frowning. “I get strange feelings from letters like that.” Another was from a 17-year-old boy lamenting that he got only one present the year before, and asking for a North Face coat this time around. He “annoyed” her, the young woman said, because “at 17 he should know” not to be complaining and asking for trendy clothes.

Donors also get nervous when a child requests a toy they consider vulgar, antisocial or frivolous. “One letter asked for ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” noted Jemma Roberson, a Harlem resident who was studying for a real estate career last year when she visited the post office with her toddler and toy Yorkie to read letters for the first time. Roberson wasn’t sure she wanted to give the boy the violent video game he asked for. “But is it right to substitute something else if the request is from the heart?” she mused. “Or is an adult taking these gifts–and maybe even selling them? I’m torn.”

Universally, donors say they are moved to go shopping by letters that express selflessness and the desire for goods that are useful, uplifting and not too ostentatious.

“Here’s one from a girl who says, ‘All I really care about is my family and don’t worry about me,’” said one of the Sarah Jessica Parker types. “I might adopt her.”

“Once we took a letter from a girl who wrote for her sisters but didn’t ask for anything for herself. We got her a Gap gift certificate,” said Flushing resident Cathy Webster, a graduate student in French literature at NYU. With her psychologist husband, Webster answers four to eight Operation Santa letters each year. “The first letter we ever took,” she said, “was from a single mom with a child in kindergarten and an infant. She asked for some clothes for herself, but mostly for the kids. It was very compelling.”

“In the one I’m taking this year,” said Adam Fuchs, “the kid is looking for a teddy bear for his sister and a teaching game–something that will help educate. That’s legit.”

“The ones I respond to,” says Bill Cressler, “start with ‘Hi Santa, how ya doing?’ Which I love. And they end with ‘Take care, Santa. Tell your wife I said hello. Love,’ and then the kid’s name. Beautiful! Beautiful!”

Cressler is a tall, bald, bearded man in his sixties who usually is executive assistant to the president of a real estate company, but takes off during the Christmas season to work at Radio City. For the past dozen or so years, he has been visiting the post office during the holidays and reading up to five dozen letters at a sitting. Participating in Operation Santa Claus, he says, takes him back to his own childhood in an impoverished but loving family in post-World War II Philadelphia. Unmarried and with no sons or daughters of his own, he enjoys conjuring a sense of family by participating in Operation Santa Claus.

Besides, he says, it’s essential to show disadvantaged New York kids that more affluent people care about them. “They’re not like I was when I was young. I didn’t know I didn’t have anything. Now they all watch TV and know what they’re missing! We cannot leave them feeling like that!”

These days, Cressler avoids letters from single mothers. “They’re often hard and self-centered: just I, I, I,” he said. At the same time, he is drawn to letters from children who seem to be living without fathers. “The kids never mention dads,” he says–another reason men like him should help.

But the help comes strictly during the Operation Santa ritual. Cressler never tells letter-writers his name, address or phone number, because hearing from them during the rest of the year can provoke intense anxiety. “Six years ago,” he said, “I sent a package with $200 worth of gifts to a single mother and put my phone number on it. She started calling me two or three times a week with ‘I have a $260 medical bill that welfare’s not paying. Can you pay?’ This went on for months. I said, ‘You’re abusing a wonderful program.’ She said, ‘If you have enough money to send me the stuff you did, why can’t you spring for another $260?’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because I don’t have it!’ I said, ‘But my taxes take care of that.’ I felt like Scrooge! Other people I’ve spoken to at the post office have told me they made the same mistake, of giving their phone number, and people called them for months afterward, asking for money.”

Shortly before being interviewed for this article, Cressler had spent several hours digging through the cardboard boxes until he found just what he wanted. “Dear Santa and Miss Santa,” began the missive that sang to him. “I am writeing you this letter to let you know that for Christmas if you can seand me a bike for Christmas. My name is Steve and I am 13 years old…. Think you! P.S. Merry Christmas. Your friend, Steve.”

Cressler didn’t trust the postal service with a bicycle, and he couldn’t find Steve’s phone number through Information, which he would need to arrange a personal delivery. Normally he calls the letter-writing child’s mother so he can “meet her outside the apartment building and give her the box; I want her to get the credit for being Santa.” Since he couldn’t contact Steve’s mother about the bike, he opted to send smaller gifts through the mail. He had no desire to actually meet the boy. Cressler never lays eyes on his young beneficiaries; instead, he enjoys “fantasizing how happy they’re going to be when they open my presents.”

Other donors put on Santa outfits and go into children’s homes. “Two years ago, a white couple from Long Island woke us up at 7 in the morning on Christmas,” recalls Josefina Cabral, a 35-year-old Dominican immigrant who lives with her three children in a noisy, scruffy apartment building in Inwood, and whose husband struggles to support the family as a wholesale candy salesman. “They had two children and they were wearing strange hats.” (”Mom, those were elf hats!” Cabral’s 7-year-old daughter explained, in Spanish.) “A woman came and brought a Christmas tree,” recalled cake decorator Dionora Fernandez, Cabral’s sister-in-law, who lives in the same building with her daughter Judi and two other children. “Another time, a man came with a boy and a girl.”

Donors who enact these visitations take pleasure–and often feel a sense of communion with–the reciprocal performance of their beneficiaries. Cathy Webster remembered delivering presents to a single mother in Astoria. “She came out to meet us and started crying, and I started crying, and she hugged us.”

Sometimes beneficiaries disappoint their donors. Fuchs recalled dressing up as Santa a few years ago and going to Jamaica, Queens, to deliver a package to some children whose mother had written on their behalf. When he gave her the gift, “she started screaming at me because she didn’t get what she wanted.” Ingrates like this mother, Fuchs said, make him “a little jaded.”
_______

But more often, supplicants play their roles perfectly, even when they compose their letters. Which is an amazing feat, considering that many have spotty writing skills, and such sparse contact with elite New York that they’ve never been to midtown, much less the James A. Farley General Post Office.

Take Steve Rivera, the 13-year-old who charmed Bill Cressler by greeting “Miss Santa” in his letter, and signing off as “Your friend.”

“Miss Santa was my idea,” says Daniel Rivera, Steve’s big brother. City Limits interviewed the two recently in Bedford Park, a rough part of the Bronx where graffiti often sports the word “gunz,” and apartment building foyers reek of urine.

Daniel and Steve, now 15 and 14 respectively, are friendly, talkative boys still waiting for their growth spurts. Their two-room apartment is so cramped that their parents sleep in the living room. Their mother is disabled, and their father, who worked for years as a machinist, now has arthritis and asthma and is jobless. The brothers have been sending letters to Operation Santa Claus since they were toddlers; their mother used to write for them. Some of her women friends showed her how, and suggested model wording.

Some of the language may have come from boilerplate letters–such as the epigraph of this article–that circulate throughout New York City. Each year, people sitting at the post office’s cafeteria tables cluck in bemusement at all the different pages torn from notebooks and all the various handwritings that say exactly the same thing: The most important thing I want is to give my childrens happiness sadly enough I can’t buy the basic thing in life…. Thank you, Santa Claus for making dream be come true. Postal workers are stymied about where this letter, and many other models, come from. Some are xeroxes of xeroxes of xeroxes, passed out at welfare offices, homeless shelters and schools.

Joseline Ovalles explains her technique. A Washington Heights mother of two preschoolers whose husband earns minimum wage in a factory, she learned about Operation Santa Claus shortly after immigrating from the Dominican Republic a few years ago. “Some friends told me about it,” she says. “I don’t write English, so at first my 10-year-old niece would translate for me and write the letter. Now a friend’s little girl does it.”

Last year, Ovalles began her letter by talking about how her two sons “are what I love the most,” but “because of some economical problems I can’t give them what they ask for they need a little bit of everything which is the reason why I’m writing you this humble letter.” After listing the children’s clothing sizes, Ovalles asked for coats for herself and her husband. She closed with, “Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year! We thank you beforehand.”

With letters like this, she gets packages every year. In addition, a little girl learns how to pen the maximally effective missive to Santa.

Boys learn, too. Today Steve and Daniel Rivera write their own letters, and take pride in coming up with just the right tone.

“Santa has a wife, so mention her,” advises Steve. “And when you ask for a gift, you should write, ‘I really need it, but if you can’t send it I’ll understand.’ And don’t ask for nothing too expensive.”

“I asked for Allen Iverson sneakers last year and didn’t get anything,” comments Daniel.

“That’s because you were greedy–they cost too much!” retorts Steve.

In Washington Heights, 15-year-old Cristina Gomez has similar advice. “A good letter is one that asks, ‘How are you doing, Santa?’” she declares.

“The most important thing,” says 13-year-old Judi Cabral, “is to write that you’ll be grateful whatever they send.”

“And it’s not just about yourself. You should ask for things for your mother and brothers and sisters. If you do that, they’ll send something for you, too,” says Cristina.

“If you want a brand-name sweater like Old Navy, never ask for Old Navy, because you’ll never get it,” says a Mother Cabrini High School student who didn’t want her name used. But if you don’t ask for a brand-name, they’ll probably like you and send you a gift certificate. From Old Navy.”

Who is they? For Steve Rivera, Santa “used to be this rich man in England who helped the poor, but he died a long time ago. Now, we think of Santa as good people who love us.”

But just being Steve doesn’t guarantee a present. Nor does just sending Santa a letter. Sure, it helps to write a good one. But it’s even better to write a good one, and a good one, and a good one, and a good one….

“It’s like the lottery,” says Steve. “The more letters you write, the more chance you have of someone seeing some. Then you have a better chance of getting presents.”

With that in mind, Steve and his brother each hand-write as many as 50 identical letters every year to Operation Santa Claus. This is not an unusual number, and the blizzard of multiples bedevils the post office. To combat them, visitors to Operation Santa HQ are instructed to bring their chosen letter to a clerk sitting at a computer. She keys in the beneficiary’s name and address, then checks to see if they have already been selected. If so, the donor is advised to toss the letter and find someone else to send gifts to.

Problem is, many people simply walk out of the post office with their favorite letters, without bothering to check the computer first. In addition, according to Operation Santa spokesman Fontana, corporations and Broadway call asking for thousands of letters on very short notice. “We can’t weed them then,” he says.

As a result, people who write lots and lots of charming, heartrending letters cash in on Christmas day. “If I send six or 10 letters I get two or three boxes,” said Ovalles. “The time that we got a personal visit from people dressed like Santa,” notes Dionora Fernandez, “we also got two packages in the mail.” “It’s wonderful to see the joy on my little sisters’ faces when the presents come,” says 13-year-old Manuel Cabral, who has written dozens of letters for them.

But what about all the kids whose families are as needy as the Riveras, Cabrals and Ovalleses, but haven’t learned to wassail? Often in one family, not all children who write receive an answer. This has happened to Steve and Daniel. “It’s hard,” they say, “because then Mom has to buy for the one who didn’t get anything.” Kids also compare notes after Christmas with their friends. Sadness and jealousy can plague those who didn’t hear from Operation Santa Claus, while others did.

More often than not, even the unlucky can rely on parents and relatives for modest gifts that serve as consolation prizes in a bad Operation Santa year. That’s not true, though, when the writing is done as academic work.
_______

“SCHOOL LETTERS? ANYBODY WANT SCHOOL LETTERS?” yell postal workers during the waning days of December as Christmas draws near. These are giant manila envelopes, each crammed with dozens of missives from the city’s impoverished P.S.s and I.S.s.

The packages represent whole classes of young children with rickety writing and serious needs. Each reflects a teacher’s attempt to help her indigent charges get warm coats for personal use–as well as pencils, even books, for their resource-starved classrooms. Few individual donors can afford to act as Santa for a classroom, so the post office tries to find corporations to sponsor the packets. But with a dearth of willing businesses, teachers are hard pressed to write letters that “sing.”

Often it’s clear that students have dutifully parroted their instructor’s embarrassed idea of what one should say to the nonexistent Santa. (”I would highly appreciate it if you can use your strength to get me a set of reading books with tapes,” wrote every 6-year-old in one class in the Bronx.) Teachers–and sometimes principals–typically append their own appeal, such as this one from the Bronx’s P.S. 68, “The Edward A. Fogel School for Critical Thinking and the Arts,” where writing to Santa has become a schoolwide language-arts project:

Many of our parents tell their children you do not exist so that the children will not be disappointed on Christmas day. Imagine, Santa, how painful and difficult this season is to many of our children. The heartache of waking up Christmas morning and finding that even you Santa could not make their wishes come true…. Our school uniform is burgundy so a burgundy pullover sweater for boys and a burgundy button-down sweaters for girls would complement their uniform.

Some teachers are superbly attuned to the demands and desires of corporate charity. Ellen McGovern is a reading specialist at P.S. 306, an impoverished grade school in the West Tremont section of the Bronx. She started having her students write to Operation Santa Claus several years ago, when she was teaching in a poor neighborhood in Manhattan. It wasn’t long before a company responded. In subsequent years, she sought out more firms and began helping other teachers organize letter-writing. Today, McGovern estimates that annually, 700 classes in New York City solicit help from Operation Santa Claus. McGovern is such a pro at recruiting corporate donors that “I’ve had years when every student in my school has received a gift.” She works hard each year to renew commitments from companies such as insurance firm CBS Coverage Group, Inc., the magazine Southern Accent and the watchmaker Rolex. She knows what makes a good pitch. (”Companies really enjoy getting letters from children in their own handwriting. And businesspeople like letters that refer to them as “Santa” and “Mrs. Claus.”)

But other teachers are like the teenagers who stay up all night waiting for the Santa who never comes. Udelia Price teaches second and third grade at P.S. 270 in Clinton Hill, in Brooklyn. Back in the late 1980s, when Ellen McGovern first told her about Operation Santa Claus, Price was teaching in Manhattan and had good luck with the post office program. “Once I got a check for $500 to buy the kids stuff. I got notebooks because we didn’t have enough. And I took the kids to Chinatown,” she says. Price keeps her own letter short and low key: “Dear Santa, I am writing to you in hopes that you can help some of my students…. Whatever you have to share would be greatly appreciated.” That used to be enough. But now that she’s in Brooklyn, “We haven’t gotten anything for the last four years.”

Price is beginning to question what she’s doing and its effect on her students. “It’s not like children in this area really believe in Santa. I tell them we’re writing to him and that the people answering letters are his helpers. But then nothing comes, even though sometimes another class in this school gets something. Last year my students asked, ‘Ms. Price, why didn’t we get anything?’ I told them I didn’t know. They asked me over and over. I’m starting to think we’re writing these letters for nothing.”

Those who trek to 33rd Street each Christmas season would no doubt disagree. Just find more Santas, they’d say. After all, for people like postal worker Richie Aron, Operation Santa is all about preserving “that innocence children have before they face the world.”

But is it innocence to teach kids a new form of wassailing–one that bears a remarkable if addled resemblance to grant writing? Thanks to Operation Santa Claus, the poor are now pitching themselves as magical realist schlemiels, and the not-poor are pretending to be realpolitik magicians. Maybe this is what philanthropy has come to in New York and the nation. Maybe it’s what it always was.

Migrant child's drawing of her illegal crossing

I just made another work trip to Mexico, starting with the bracing metropolitan capital then heading to aching villages in the South. The US State Department has a travel advisory out for Mexico. It’s mainly because of drug-trafficking related violence on the border. But Americans are avoiding the interior as well. One still sees German, French and English tourists, but hardly any gringos. Apparently, if they’re not afraid of getting shot, they’re afraid of spending money. Or being knocked off balance by frantic thoughts and slow tears.

Abandoned bedroom, southern Mexico, of a boy who immigrated North

The Mexican term for “recession,” “depression,” or whatever the hell we dare call it, is “La Crisis.” It’s affecting everyone. The great taxi driver listening- and talking-post informed me that in the popular neighborhoods, little grocery and clothing stores are closing for lack of clientele. “They used to buy three rolls of toilet paper, now they buy one. To last the same amount of time.” And the taxistas themselves — this one is a former accountant, that one a philosophy prof who lost his job. They cluck and sigh and hunch the steering wheel like passive aggressive boyfriends. I kept waiting for road rage.

Paqueteria in Mexico taking orders for Upstate New York

The paqueterías are really suffering. These are the mom-and-pop hustles where a guy with a green card and old van shleps all over some place up North, let’s say the Bronx, picking up gifts of clothing and electronics and $20 bills, driving them all down once a month for delivery to mothers and wives and sisters and kids — then trucking the villagers’ gifts in reverse.

I watched one night late while a paquetero’s wife jammed innumerable plastic bags into her husband’s van. The two would be leaving at 5 a.m., importing their community’s shipment of love to the North: roasted pumpkin seeds, seasonal de-winged and fried grasshoppers, cow and goat cheese, penicillin, peanuts in their shells, homemade meat jerky, festive bread hatched with red icing and crucifixes, Viagra. He and she would drive for three days, eating at Kentucky Fried, snoozing at rest stops, conversing bitterly and easily according to their long years of matrimony, piling on sweaters and socks past the Carolinas as the air grows bitter with gringo December. “There are paqueterias everywhere in the US,” she said. ” We are all competing, but lately we’ve lost more than half our business.” The people are leaving, she said: going home to Mexico, which will have nothing for them when they get back: no jobs, no food, no hope. Or the people are staying but moving around. “Where to?” I asked, and her leaden specificity amazed me. “Ohio. Philadelphia. Passaic.” “Passaic??” “Yes. They say there’s a meat factory there.”

She left before I had a chance to spirit her to an Internet cafe so she could watch this video (click here). Other Mexicans who saw it fell down laughing, slapping their knees.

Every day fat dailies in Mexico City, and skinny ones in the provinces, talked of Obama, the American stock market, a huge program of public works, Hugo Chavez. December 12 approached and for days before, the villages unleashed explosions louder than narco attacks: medieval gunpower volleys in high honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Women cooked cinnamon-laced gruels and wrapped tamales to feed those who would march in the daily romerias. Makeshift parades of the old, young, halt, lame, able-bodied, female and whatever males were left wound down main street, their votive candles glowing in the twilight like babies’ eyes. Grandfathers in wheelchairs played adagios on battered drums and tubas.

The Mexicans marched sacredly, stolidly. At the self same hour up past the Carolinas, their kin busted noisy, profane ass in America’s agrobusiness fields, commercial kitchens, chicken factories, MacMansions and — as some newsclips got it slightly and delightfully wrong — the “Republic of Doors and Windows.” Back south, I watched the moneyless, Dark-Age processions and loved and hated them, as deeply as I love and hate the Enlightenment cash rituals and the bloody stigmata of my republic’s body politic.

This summer I was at the Carnavalet, a museum in Paris that reprises that city’s history, with emphasis on the events of 1789-1799. The coolest thing there is the collection of French Revolution tchotchkes — everything from sans culottes paper dolls to lumpily glazed plates and mugs celebrating “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” as well as

this lovely “Bastille doll house,” complete with toy guillotine that would probably decapitate a petite fille’s finger, or maybe a rat.

Amazing how social movements for centuries have inspired the popular manufacture and sale of gobs of memorial junk. It’s about shopping! But it’s the kind even Reverend Billy would like.

And now we’ve got Obamarabilia.

I was strolling down 125th Street in Harlem earlier this week on an October-magic afternoon. Outdoor vendors rule on 125th, and lately it’s hard to walk three feet without passing another winsome tchotchke dedicated to Barack. Many are crafted by people from the neighborhood. Here’s the Obama light switch plate, made by H.W. Clarke, owner of Art World of Harlem. His street stand is near Malcolm X Blvd. and he says the plates are “going like hot cakes.”

And how about this “You’re the Bomb” framed poem? It’s offered by a poet who calls himself Battery Man. He’s been street-vending his rhymes for years.

To me, this Viagra-like “Bomb” thing seemed off kilter for Obama and Michelle. (Like, what’s with the “New York” reference, when they’re from Chicago?)

I asked Battery Man and it turns out the poem originally graced a different picture. But recently he saw the Michelle-and-Barack photo and was deeply inspired to hook it up with “You’re the Bomb.”

He recited the poem for me right on the street, in booming voice, declamatory pose and without missing a word or cadence. I couldn’t resist buying a copy. I love it when some person — in this case Obama — becomes so symbolically dense that his or her image overloads the conventional imagination of folk artists and craftspeople. When that happens, the image leaks out, like water from a overflowing bucket. It sloshes onto other cultural references. It’s wet and sloppy and joyful. I’m glad no one wants to clean it up.

I showed “You’re the Bomb” to my folklorist friend Emily Socolov. She had an idea: “Let’s go on Etsy.com and see what else we can find.”

(Obama bowling pin from Etsy.com)

Etsy.com is a site where craftspeople sell their labors of love. It’s way better than CafePress, because you can do a lot more on it than just decal things onto teeshirts or mugs or buttons. On Etsy you make things out of popsicle sticks or wires or dough or thread or any damn thing. Etsy has a product-search engine, so I keyed in “Obama,” “Palin” and “McCain.”

The latter two have only a couple dozen pages of products for sale. Obama has more than a hundred. I looked at all of them, which took awhile but was like visiting a 2008 Olde Curiosity Shoppe. If Obama gets elected and responds to the needs of the kind of people who made these tchotchkes, he’ll probably get 100,000 more and some will end up in his future Presidential Library.

Plaid "Illinois" pillow from Etsy.com

Obama briefcase

Van-Go-Bama

Michelle Obama (a la Frida Kahlo?)

Or in a folk art museum, along with works by Howard Finster and Grandma Moses.

I knew it would be standing room only at the Nation’s and the Brecht Forum’s “Emergency Forum on the Economy,” on Friday night. So I made plans to go downtown early. I decided to drop by the New York Stock Exchange first, to gauge the mood on Wall Street.

I arrived in late afternoon. The market had tumbled hundreds of points in the morning, then leapt up, and finally drooped again, just before the bell. Traders were emerging from the vault-like NYSE building. The looks on their faces reminded me of that scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where passengers stagger into the airport after surviving a crash that almost happened but not quite.

These guys had a weekend’s R&R to look forward to. Then, back to their hell on Monday. Besides them, there were a lot of tourists on the street, including a French family muttering “tres bas,” and bevies of TV reporters with their sound crews and trucks. There was a Jesus proselytizer advertising the end of the world, a bag guy with a little American flag playing a baleful flute, and two girls dressed like death or “the specter haunting Europe” or Satanists, staring fixedly and weirding out the whole street, including those brokers.

The whole thing made me hungry for some affordable comfort food so I walked over to the corner, on Broadway, and bought a little plastic bag of candy from the immigrant Russian lady who’s been out there selling gummie bears for a decade. I wondered how her business is these days. I’d just read an article in Slate about how, during economic downturns, rich guys go to pricey prostitutes more than ever — but rather than shtupping, they just want to talk … presumably about their high blood pressure, ulcers, and their broke-ass wounded macho. But, I asked myself, when things go from bad to worse, do brokers need low-cost sugar more than high-cost Sweetie?

“No way,” my informant sneered when I showed her the photos in my camera and asked if she has this type of person as customers. “This men? Hah! Never. Never they buy from me. My candy is dollar twenty five, these men have no little-bit-cash for me, instead they have big million, not keep in wallet, they no buy! Only buy from rich, rich like them, they sell they not for me!”

Then I hopped a train up to the Nation/Brecht Forum meeting. What a relief.

Bill Grieder started things off, reminding the audience that the old order is wobbling and now is the time for the Left to start thinking big about how to act big. Doug Henwood opined that capitalism’s current crisis isn’t a hoax or a scare tactic. It’s very real and very capable of bringing down not just the ruling class, but the rest of us as well. Which is why the bailout was needed, as much as it stinks and now needs retooling. Naomi Klein had a few ideas about what we can do quickly. “Nationalize Exxon,” she suggested, or better, “internationalize” it, in order to distribute all those megaprofits downward — to us — instead of upward.

Klein also pointed out that Barack Obama’s main economic advisor, whom he talks with every day, is the Goldman-Sachsite and Greenspanian Bob Rubin. She said the Left should be immediately demanding that Obama fire Rubin.

The beautiful and corundum Frances Fox-Piven also spoke. As a culture, we’re at the same place now that we were in 1930s, she said. For years lately, Wall Street and Free Marketers and neoliberals have convinced ordinary people that their view of the world and our place in it is right, proper, moral, visionary. Now, as in the 1930s, their class is exposed as fools and charlatans, and their rhetoric stupid and empty. The Great Depression unleashed social movements — of the unemployed, for exmaple, and especially of labor — which pushed Franklin Roosevelt to redistribute capitalist wealth. To a point. Now there’s a chance for a rerun. And who knows how far it will go this time.

But, Fox-Piven warned, don’t expect the end of capitalism tomorrow, much less the beginning of socialism. The phrase “Roman Empire” crept into her talk, as well as the idea that we’re looking at years of decline. “Harsh” was also a word she used. As in: Times are going to be long and tough. As in: We’re going to be doing a lot of political work.

What else is new.

So far there has been one demonstration on Wall Street to protest its rescue at popular expense. Despite the fact that it was planned in only a day or two, it was big. Here are some photos of what people had to say then:

Now, a second demo is in the works. Given the long lead time, it should be larger.

It’s scheduled for Friday, October 16, right by Federal Hall, across the street from the Stock Exchange.

For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils under the foundations of Wall Street, opening fissures in the walls of marble. Lenin told his comrades the profit-insatiable capitalist would eventually sell the people the rope to hang him with. Now he’s sold us the rope — and we’ve hanged ourselves. But the salesman, too, is gazing nervously at the gallows.

It’s an infidel’s Rapture, the End Times as foretold by the Prophets Karl and Vladimir.

So why do I feel so blah?

Read more at Judith’s blog: www.judithlevine.com/blog

And speaking of End Times, my blog buddy Daniel Radosh will be speaking in New York next week, about his book Rapture Ready, which is all about fundamentalist Christian tchotchke- and pop-music culture. I understand Dan will be drawing lessons from all those commodities to discuss Sarah Palin’s rhetorical tchotchkerai — like, how certain things she says that sound harmless and rubbery, like these cute little guys, actually refer to scary political shit. The lecture is at St. Francis College, at 180 Remsen Street in downtown Brooklyn, on October 16 at 6 p.m. It’s free.

****

And speaking of rhetoric, Christ, get me Rewrite! A half-banner New York Times front-page headline today reports that the federal Treasury — the U.S., that is — “MAY TAKE OWNERSHIP STAKE IN BANKS TO EASE CREDIT CRISIS.”

“Take ownership stake in”??

Isn’t the correct (and much pithier) expression “NATIONALIZE”?

In fact, this evening I just heard BBC’s TV news show — the one that airs in this country — refer to this story as “partial nationalization.” Guess that’s just “British English” though. Wonder what weird, inflated, gutless expression the Post, the Daily News and other US MSM will use?

Well, if that’s corny, then long live corny. And to get in the corny mood while reclaiming our honesty, why not listen to some on-point music?

Over the generations, capitalist disasters on Wall Street have inspired cool (and corny?) popular tunes. To hear some right now, just follow the audio links in “The Sound of the Market Crashing,” a piece by me in today’s (click here) New York Magazine.

And for more on songs, cartoons, plays, and other artifacts of Wall Street love, ridicule and loathing (depending on whether we’re in a bull market, a bear market or a totally road-kill market), read historian Steve Fraser’s brilliant book “Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life.”

It’ll definitely help in the Clear Understanding department, and it’s also a lot of fun. Fraser is the one who dug up most of those songs I tracked to the web. Here’s what he has to say about the huge Crash, also in The Nation (click here):

“Breakdown in the 1930s elicited contradictory emotions and behavior. Despair, apathy and resignation were widespread. So too were more phobic, meanspirited reactions. But the era is perhaps best known for the repoliticization of millions of formerly inert citizens…The relationship of concentrated wealth to democracy, equality and the hierarchies of power, normally hidden beneath the myth of American individualism, was suddenly exposed to the light of day. Such revelations transformed the national psyche and gave the era its special frisson.“

Which included the music, of course. Now it remains to be seen if and how we’ll write the new songs.

Trig. (Palin says it means “truth” in Old Norse. Of course, it’s also short for the thing you cock to fire a gun — in US English.)

And Track. Bristol. Willow. Piper.

Compare those techno-sporto-Anglo-Saxo onomastics with Barack Hussein and his daughters, Misha and Sasha. The Baracks sound a little like that sad, creepy chapter in Freakonomics, where the elite, white authors warn Negroes and trailer trash that naming their kids Lashawnda, Kondaleeza and Brittany will keep them down and out, so their only hope for success is blue-eyed, freckly monikers from lit crit and the Bible, like Zoey, Tovah and Zach.

But for the past several years now, white people of various classes have been bypassing squishy and porny-sounding Noah and Sierra. A decade ago when I was living in Alamo Heights, a heavily Republican, yuppie neighborhood in San Antonio, I noticed my neighbors were naming their boys hard, clean things like Madison, Tyler, Hunter, Carter and Austin. Dead presidents, Confederate cities, and medieval English trades. Even more striking, female babies were getting the same macho treatment. And still are. Look at the 150 most popular girls’ names for this year and you see Taylor, Morgan, Bayley, Avery, Kennedy. As for Madison, it’s higher on the girl’s name list than the boy’s. Still, the boys have Jackson, Parker, and Chase.

Chase could be the financial institution, and I think this is what such names are about. Defensively, they evoke white people’s yearning for crisp, steely, take-no-prisoners clout and wealth. Black people are often accused of violating social dignity by naming their kids impulsively, purely on the basis of some word they heard just as the cervix dilated to 10. (Recall the urban myth about maternity ward nurses throwing their hands up after a new mom from the projects names her baby girl “Urine.”). But the new white names sound just as improvised. And they have a basic, flashcard-vocabulary sound that’s easy to expand on. Back in Texas I started my own list.

It includes (for boys): Banker, Hampton, Dow, Prep, Crew and Cheney.

For girls: Annuity, Gramercy, Spa, Coach. And now a new one: Palin.

It’ll be interesting to see if our current market collapse leads to new practices. Remember all those baby “Franklins” and “Roosevelts” from the 1930s? I knew a boy in Houston named Karl. A middle-aged friend’s sister is Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards). What could come next? Since there’s no mass movement or leadership yet, I have no idea. The closest I can come to imagining is kindergarten boys named Chomsky and Head Start girls answering to McKinney.

*****

US-Mexico Border Flash: A new trial is now scheduled for October 21, for Nicholas Corbett, the Arizona border patrolman accused of murder in the killing of Mexican immigrant Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera (also known as Francisco Dominguez Rivera). For more information on who Francisco Javier really was, see a piece I wrote for The Nation in late March, posted on this blog (click here) and also available in its original format from The Nation.

***

Days of Awe(ful) Department

Speaking of names: LaShanah Tova! from LaShawnda and Tovah or maybe just Barbie

Men browsing “French postcards” by the Seine

Hey folks, I’m back! — after some annoying website problems and a summer vacation from the blog. In July I traveled with my family to Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Paris and points east again. We were doing family things, including finding my great-grandfather’s shtetl near Kovno (now Kaunas). It was a great trip and you can see pix here. I’ll be posting more later about my “sex-pol” and Yiddishkeit adventures. Stay tuned for puberty exhibits at a French museum, old photos of hysterical “extase” at the Bibliotheque Nationale, bubble gum and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany … and getting smiled at and yelled at when I spoke mameloshn in Hamburg and East Berlin. All that up next, probably in the next post or two.

Meanwhile for this one. If you’re in New York on October 4, do attend a fun fete to celebrate and support the awarding of the first Sex-Positive Journalism Awards (of which I’m a winner for my reporting about Kurt Eichenwald and Justin Berry: click here for my winning article).

The party will be Saturday, October 4, from 6:30-9:30pm,
in the downstairs lounge of Splash, 50 W. 17th Street, New York.
(www.splashbar.com)
$5 cover

Mingle with your favorite sex-positive writers and advocates, and support the mission of Sexies awards so they can continue into 2009! The first 100 attendees will get a gift bag of goodies from the Sexies sponsors.

Meet first-place winners Amanda Robb (”Abstinence 1, S-CHIP O,” New York Times), Debbie Nathan (”Hysteria, Exploitation, and Witch Hunting in the Age of Internet Sex,” Counterpunch … to download and read, press here), Jill Bauer (”Never Too Old for Sex,” Miami Herald), Daniel Engber (”Naughty Nursing Homes,” Slate), and Alysha Rooks (”Between the Briefs,” Res Gestae, University of Michigan Law School), as well as many of our other fabulous winners.

Meet the stellar Sexies judges! Attending the award ceremony will be: Carol Queen, PhD, writer, speaker, educator, and activist with a doctorate in sexology; Liza Featherstone, journalist and author of “Sex, Lies, and Womenís Magazines” (Columbia Journalism Review); Judith Levine, journalist and author of the award-winning Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex; and Doug Henwood, contributing editor to The Nation. Judith Levine will talk about her experiences with the media when Harmful to Minors was released.

There will also be a silent auction and raffle to support the awards. The fabulous prizes include:

• original art by Julio Aguilera and Sophy Naess;
• signed copies of books by winners, judges, and supporters;
• sex toys;
• gift certificates for sexy pleasures; and more!

Don’t miss out on this chance to support sex-positive journalism and take home something you’ve always wanted. Prize donations are still being accepted. Contact Miriam at info@sexies.org if you have a donation.

Also, make a weekend of it! For those who are interested, Oct. 3-5 is also Polyamorous Pride weekend in New York City, and PolyNYC has planned a packed schedule (none of which overlaps with the Sexies party!). There is a cuddle party Friday night, a rally and picnic Saturday afternoon featuring Sexies winner Tristan Taormino as keynote, an afterparty, and a reading and book signing on Sunday. More information here: http://www.poly-nyc.com/pride/

The Sexies are the brainchild of journalist Miriam Axel-Lute, and were brought about in collaboration with writers, readers, and activists from The Center for Sex & Culture and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. Corporate sponsors include Babeland, The Playboy Foundation, Xbiz, UltraVirgo Creative, and Splash. More details are available at: www.sexies.org.

Remember to send in your entries for next year’s awards whenever you read something sex-positive: www.sexies.org/submit.php.