800 Words: To My 19 and 24 Year Old Political Selves (Part II)

January 2001. I co-led a group of students down from Hyde School in Woodstock Connecticut to Washington DC to protest the Bush inauguration. I moved heaven and earth to get the school to allow the students to go, and somehow was the one who ended up doing all the legwork to get them there and attracting all the firepower from teachers who wanted nothing more than to see this effort of ours fail. I sent a letter to the entire faculty of the school telling them in no uncertain terms that they were hypocrites for demanding higher levels of moral character from students while not doing what it took to help their students when they took the initiative to act morally. And if you understood anything about the climate of that place, you’d know that sending a letter like that is roughly as dangerous to your future as walking into machine gun fire.

The defining realization may have come from college, but the need for a defining realization came from Hyde School: the defining three years of my life to this day, and I expect for many decades more.

I don’t know what the Hyde School has become, it’s an experience that is more than ten years in the past. But at the time, Hyde School was a place which bred unreality. It prayed on desperate families and provided them with a ready-made doctrine for life as rigid as any religious or totalitarian dogma - and once those families were ensnared, it proved just as hard for them to escape. Like with any religion, there should be no doubt that there are many people whose lives were made better by its ministrations. But, like religion, the improvement of those lives was almost always effected at the cost of worsening the lives of others. Like all totalitarian regimes, it encouraged friends to turn against friends, contorted language so words would mean precisely their opposite, and weaponized fear as a means of conditioning students to love their tormentors. It was a feasting ground for sexual predators, both teacher and student, and was a place where bullies could stretch the full plumage of their inner sadists in ways that were completely sanctioned by the school. It utilized interrogation techniques that made the techniques which the Bush Administration approved at Guantanamo seem all too familiar, and used them far more liberally than the Bush Administration ever did. Hyde was a school, one of many in America for wayward youth, whose entire apparatus is built for the reconditioning of kids’ brains to alter their sense of reality. Now, before you accuse me of sounding like a raving conspiracy theorist, let’s put some things about Hyde in proper perspective.

There is no one in the world who needs their perceptions of reality altered more than teenagers, and particularly badly behaved teenagers. So for all its problems, let’s not exaggerate, and let’s give the devil it’s due. The majority of kids who ended up at Hyde were those whose conduct was so beyond redemption that a proliferant measure of the harshest possible discipline might have done some of them good - and a few of them probably needed still harsher discipline than Hyde afforded. Furthermore, it gave some children with a bent toward fanaticism and sadism (sentiments which, for the sake of argument, let’s admit might be used to advance virtuous causes so long as there are proper and ironclad restraints on how it is used...) the self-assurance they needed to face adulthood with a confidence they otherwise would never have developed, even if that confidence came at the expense of students who were less willing to give their critical faculties over to other people. But against the gains accorded these students must come the losses of the students who were more withdrawn, more isolated, more uncertain, and less self-confident, than their extraverted peers. No amount of public shaming, or barely disguised corporal punishment, or extreme mental pressure to confess to bad acts (often acts which never happened), will raise their sense of self - it will only destroy what little self-possession they have. If such students had fragile mental faculties to begin with, their ability to adequately process reality in any context would have been utterly demolished by a school which puts such stock in destroying a person’s previously held sense of self. So no, Hyde is not the Soviet Union. It may have ruined lives, but Hyde never killed anybody. Though if laws had permitted them...

This is not a post to document its various crimes and abuses Hyde committed, though I’m sure that post will one day come. I’ve already written about those years in certain ways before, though never in great detail. Hyde is like the proverbial elephant in the room of this blog, the experience of which stalks every post in ways I probably still can’t even imagine. Doubtless, had it been about any other subject, Hyde would have told me to document every single abuse, and denounce them all in the most humiliating and public possible voice (“The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable” was one of the most oft-repeated, and most terrifying, cliches which they parroted ad nauseum at their students. When I was a student, they even had it printed on a banner in the senior lecture hall.). But most of what happened there is so much stranger than fiction, so utterly bizarre and often in the most disturbing ways, that I couldn’t possibly do it justice unless I am operating at the very peak of my ability as a writer - something I’m sure I’m still a long way from achieving, if I ever do.

But the point of bringing Hyde into this post is to talk about one, particularly strange, facet of its culture - no stranger than any other of its many strange aspects: the radicalism of its views toward the outside world. Because Hyde School was a place which viewed the outside world as a beef stew of disgustingly corrupt influences, it naturally attracted people who agreed with their view of the world to work there. And because there were so many disagreements among the teachers about what was responsible for the corruption of the world, there was a seemingly unique agreement among adults who numbered themselves as members of both the Hard Right and the Hard Left to leave each other’s political disagreements alone in the classroom (at least we never saw them). English classes would be routinely interrupted by a teacher’s discursion about the plight of the Chilean minor against American imperialism, speakers would be brought in from local progressive organizations (and there are many in Rural New England) to talk about the existential importance of pacifism, history classes would be interrupted by a teacher’s frustrated digression that the contemporary world seems so intent upon oppressing Catholics, and our German-educated civics teacher would find nothing creepy or ironic about the innocuous fun of of beginning his class by calling role and making every student stand up and shout confidently “ICH BIN HIER UND BEREIT!”

Hyde was like a magnet for fanaticism of every stripe and every breed. And because it found something so admirable in fanaticism, it (rather amazingly to me now) tolerated fanaticism in its students, including some times when the fanaticism went against the ethos of the school. But then again, did it?...

There were two strands of high school teacher who found a perfect outlet for their convictions at Hyde. One was a typical right-wing fanatic: intellectually lazy, temperamentally belligerent, unthinkingly cruel and authoritarian - and they made up the lion's share of the long-term faculty. They believed in institutions, they believed in tradition, and attributed everything wrong with the students who came to Hyde as a case of a decadent world that granted them too many rights, too little responsibility, not enough discipline, and not enough punishment.  

But there was a second strand of fanatic, a left-wing fanatic, that was attracted to Hyde as well. At the time, these were my absolute heroes, and I worshipped the ground every one of them walked on even if they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) do much to protect me and others from the cruelty to which their smartest students were routinely subject. They were everything these other teachers weren’t; intellectually glamorous, rebelliously thoughtful, willing to see that some students needed a simple confidence boost and an ear to bend, and - most importantly - willing to concede that the methods of the school were extreme and unproductive, no matter how good the intentions of their administration.

And, clearly, these teachers gave something important to the school that none of the other teachers could have, or else they’d have been fired on the spot for their public disagreements with school policy. What they gave the school was intellectual credibility - miles of it considering just how dumb some of the other teachers were. These were bookish men and women who were intimidatingly well-read and often amazingly charismatic. Some of us often wondered what the hell they were doing teaching at Hyde when they should have been running for public office or writing books. And because Hyde didn’t have enough good teachers to oversee a real curriculum, the school gave these teachers the lattitude to teach in whatever manner they liked. Against all Hyde’s efforts to subvert it, students ended up receiving bits and pieces of a real education. Compared to the red tape they had to cut through in public school, a Hyde classroom must have seemed like paradise itself for those teachers. At least for a time...

These teachers tolerated the methods of the school, at least for a couple years, because they believed one and all in Hyde’s basic mission - which was, allegedly, the teaching of moral character. And like all fanatics, these teachers believed in themselves enough to believe that they could change the school’s entire ethos, an ethos which, with just a few tweaks could be a light unto all other schools in America (and make no mistake, when I was there, Hyde had extremely national ambitions). To teachers like them, a school like Hyde is corrupt only in its methods. But every one of them seemed to leave the school in a huff, completely disillusioned by years of their best efforts to reform the school into something more ethical coming to absolutely nothing. Somehow, these teachers could teach at Hyde for years, or even decades, without it occurring to them that the belief in the specialness of Hyde’s mission was precisely what sanctioned its teachers and ‘best’ students to act as cruelly as they did.

And the longer these teachers stayed there, the more appetite for fanaticism they clearly had. By staying at Hyde for years or decades, they’d made an unthinking, Faustian pact to sell out all the principles of tolerance and open-mindedness they claimed to hold dear, thinking that only by compromising on those standards could they receive their investments back in spades.

And the radicalism of those teachers absolutely rubbed off on their brightest students. Most of the students at Hyde were as dumb as their dumbest teachers. But the smartest among the students, we prized ourselves like an elect who, having been through hellfire, had scores of wisdom beyond our years and understand the world in a way nobody else did (though how wrong we were...). It was not unlike the bond of soldiers.

Radicalism was the one outlet we had - moderation, apathy, uncertainty, were banished from our lives. At Hyde, skepticism was virtually synonymous with weakness, so better to be lauded for having causes to unthinkingly believe in with our whole hearts than to take the time required to think through what we believe. It is a dangerous, slippery slope, and many people who start young down the path to radicalism can never expand intellectually beyond the person they were at 17. Once you’re taught to disbelieve impartial facts, facts which hundreds of thousands of people in every generation devote their lives to collecting as best they can, you can invent whatever facts you like. If you read no books, you can still be a member of the Hard Right. If you read one book, you can still be a member of the Hard Left.

And so many of these students started down the path to radicalism, some of whom formed a political discussion club with us. Woe would have been the right-winger who’d have joined the club, because even I was often shouted down for having beliefs that weren’t sufficiently extreme. But fortunately, the political right wing students at our school were usually so uncurious and so dumb that that never happened. I’ve often wondered what happened to those other politically active students in the in the intervening years. Did their minds ever get past the infantile rebellion stage? Did they ever realize that the extremity of our beliefs set back the very causes we claimed to struggle for? Did they ever reach a point when the anger subsided and rational discourse found a home in their minds? I can’t imagine it did for too many of them, because Hyde created yet another obstacle in that all-important process.

800 Words: To My 19 and 24 Year Old Political Selves, Part III

At my birthday party a few years ago, a friend from Hyde came to the party whom I hadn’t seen in a while. We came to Hyde at roughly the same time, left with the same graduating class, and ended up going to college for four years in the same city. During college we became pretty firm friends, but during our time at the Hyde Hilton, our attempts at friendship with one another had been extremely ill-tempered. On-and-off friendships at Hyde were an all too common thing as each student tried to ascertain the likelihood of which friend would use the blunt weaponry of the school’s psychological apparatus as a means to turn a personal disagreement into an accusation of a character flaw that needed to be ‘corrected.’

And during all those years of our proximity, he and I clearly developed extremely different feelings about our experiences. There are many people who look back upon Hyde with fondness. I won’t pretend that part of me still wants to view anyone from those years who ever held his opinion as a ‘collaborator’, willing to throw the dignity of peers under the bus to feel better about themselves. But there is one crucial thought which stops me from playing such blame games: to yield to such bitterness would be no different than stooping to the level of that shitty place. The most crucial lesson which every long-term Hyde student must unlearn is that standing firm at all costs for what you believe against those who feel differently is a recipe for the highest possible disaster. Hyde would have had us know that the self-glamorizing feeling one gets from sticking to one’s principles through all trials is life’s highest goal, and that the ability to tell truths at the expense of a harmonious existence is something to which we all should do regardless of cost. But it is precisely that ability to compromise, the ability to adapt, the ability to settle for whatever life endows you, the ability to agree to disagree and to live within a harmonious existence as best we can with one another which enables life to go on. Without that crucial ability to compromise our principles, the world would only be a place of fanaticism, cataclysm, and death.

Like any pre-existing system imposed on other people, the Hyde ‘philosophy’ was not a thought through system, it was a substitute for a thought-through system which was supposed to do our thinking for us. ‘Trust the process’ was another of their favorite maxims, and on a 2-dimensional level, they were exactly right to repeat it. If only their students did everything within their power to submit themselves to their exacting standards - or those of Opus Dei Catholicism, or Orthodox Judaism, or the Muslim Brotherhood, or International Communism - humankind would live a happier, more fulfilling existence. But then, human beings wouldn’t be human, would they? And because humans are human, there are some humans who resent the messiness of being human especially badly. And they invent all sorts of systems which are supposed to correct human nature. But rather than correct it, they contort it.

Furthermore, my own behavior in those years was hardly perfect. Not in terms of the screwups which landed me at Hyde, the imperfections of those go without saying - and those screwups continued long into my stay at Hyde (more on that another time...). In this case, my greater regret is for the behavior of the person I became after those screwups were corrected. After two years at Hyde of... for lack of a better description … suffering and cowering, I joined up and did what I could against panic attacks and revulsion to appear ‘with the program’ and distribute the misery to others which for two full years before before had consistently been distributed to me. And I can’t lie, at times, there was a feeling not unlike pleasure which accompanied the administration of such cruel punishment and the ability to say such cruel things to others. I did what I could to convince myself that I was doing the right thing, but you can’t square a circle. We all have our inner monsters, and should we choose to let them out, the results will, and should, haunt us unto our dying hour.  

I don’t doubt that many people really believed in the virtue of the coercion which they partook in at Hyde, but any impartial witness to the school who saw those things they conceal from everyone who is not on campus would be horrified. Not that they ever would see it: Hyde went to comically great lengths to conceal their real methods from visiting families, from school accreditors, sometimes even from the parents themselves.But we still ought to answer the question: would these impartial observers be right to be horrified?

Well... probably, but we should not be quite so quick to judge. Hyde provided a service which many families desperately require to save their children from addiction, violence, and predators. We should automatically grant that the methods with which the school dispels these terrible influences happen to be at a slight remove from the medieval. But has anyone found a more reliable method?

I did not read George Orwell’s essay: Such, Such Were The Joys, until years after leaving Hyde. And while I certainly saw many parallels between his experience of English boarding school and my experience of American 'character education', I had to admit, in many ways, Orwell got it worse; occasionally a lot worse. At least there was a fig-leaf on Hyde’s corporal punishment in which they’d find loopholes in the law to let charges experience as much physical pain as they could possibly find - no doubt with some grateful parent/lawyer going over the details of their proposed legal and physical contortions with the same fine-tooth comb his son once used to cut cocaine. But so far as I know, no one was ever beaten outright (at least not by the school), we had three daily meals of which were never deprived, and the school never used sleep deprivation as a weapon (though I did stay up three nights in a row from stress many times).  Moreover, Orwell went to St. Cyprian as the reward for being a gifted lower-middle-class scholarship student, whereas most of us went to Hyde because we were upper-middle-class to wealthy children of privilege who found a way to abuse freedom on a level about which the most upper-class children of Orwell’s generation could never dream.

At the very least, this is progress at work. What happens in today’s most disciplined boarding schools is not the torture of Imperial England in which the very acts of savagery were still legalized. Instead, it is the torture of Bush-era Imperious America, in which torture is technically illegal, but the law itself is used to resurrect it in more insidious ways. What happens to the most severely disciplined students in today’s America is torture-ish, but certainly not torture by the standards of Torquemada or Saddam.

In some sense, we all judge from privilege’s vantage. I revile torture as much as any well-meaning liberal should. But were I on the front lines of intelligence gathering, were I subjected to the no doubt unbearable knowledge of what it takes to prevent the proliferation of weapons throughout the world, would I feel the same way? And even if I did, would I feel like I had any ability within my power to convince others of my  belief when they’ve seen all the same terrible things as I have and came to the opposite conclusion?

Thankfully, I’m not the father up all night, waiting to see if my kid survives the drive home after another night of heroin use, or waiting to see if the policeman will call me to post bail after my son was positively ID’d as an accomplice in a gang beating, or waiting helpless as my daughter comes home to reveal another black eye clearly administered by a boyfriend she claims she loves. Maybe I’d feel differently if I were that father. I’m lucky enough that I don’t deal with these people anymore. Am I in a position to judge those people who do deal with them and feel differently from me?

800 Words: A Brief History of My Weight

I don’t know where it is anymore, but I used to delight in showing friends my High School ID. I remember that it was the one day of my adolescence for which my face didn’t look like a pebble beach, I made sure to bend my school uniform with a loose-necked tie with an open collar, and I posed with shit-eating, almost thuggish grin. For two minutes of high school, I managed to convince the world that I was cool.

 And most importantly, I was 145 pounds – I managed to be both short and gangly. My face wasn’t particularly handsome, my thinness only emphasized my camel-like nose and Jay Leno-like underbite. But damnit, I was fucking svelte. Six months later, I was down to 131, and my wrestling coach was telling me to gain the weight back so I could get more muscle.

Yes, I, Evan Tucker, an adult who would run halfway around the world to avoid playing a team sport, was a high school athlete – and an absolutely terrible one. At my second high school, we were all required to play sports. In my first term I got stuck with football, and my coach put me on the line as a guard because I was so awful that he didn’t know what else to do with me. From elementary school recess until high school sports, I logged thousands of hours coerced into the realization of how terrible I was at football, and nobody could show me how to be otherwise. My coaches tried all sorts of things to ‘toughen me up’ like sticking me in the middle of a circle of varsity players who could tackle me from any side, or taking me aside after practice to push a whole contraption of tackling dummies by myself. But nothing worked, nothing at all. At the last game of the season, my team still hadn’t won a game all year, and we finally had the lead. My coach put me in for a single play during that game, and during that play the other team’s guard swept by me to tackle the quarterback and recover a fumble for a touchdown. The game ended with a tie.

 Wrestling was much more pleasant, but even in wrestling, I won a single match in two years. As my coach told me, I was New England’s foremost expert on the ceiling designs of New England Prep School Gyms. In order to make weight, we would have to go on five mile runs at five in the morning in the dead of the Connecticut Winter. I would wear five layers of clothing to sweat off as much weight as possible, and at least twice arrived back at school five pounds lighter than my weigh-in two days before.  I suppose you expect to hear that I hated every minute of this, but there was a sick part of my psyche that almost enjoyed this regimen. I was in by far the best shape I’d ever be, still acne-ridden but a couple muscles away from a real sixpack. I hated wrestling itself as much as football, but I occasionally enjoyed the excruciating calisthenics.

I suppose I can’t talk about my weight without talking about the high school itself which to this day controls my feelings about my body, a subject I try not to let come up on this blog too often. I avoid talking about Hyde in part because there’s far too much to say about it, and in part because I worry how some people might co-opt anything I have to say about it for their own agendas. I will say very simply, I don’t have any truck with most of the students who pick fights with the methods of that place. Nevertheless, few people will be happier than I on the day that the Hyde Schools are shut down for mistreatment of their students, and it’s only a matter of time before they are. To this day, I view Hyde as the defining experience of my life, as I imagine most people would who went there, for good or ill. Opinions on that school differ from student to student, teacher to teacher. But given the extremity of their methods, it is impossible not to have an opinion.

After three years at Hyde, a boarding school for bad high school students who’d exhausted normal options, I swore to myself that no one but me would ever make me do any physical activity for the rest of my life. When we all read the reports about the detention camp in Guantanamo, certain methods of theirs rang eerily true to the punishments which Hyde faculty administered (or that students administered to one another). The more I read about the methods of authoritarian regimes, the more similarity there seemed to the methods of extracting information to which Hyde students were subjected. The more I read how propaganda machines manipulate language to create submissive citizens, the closer Hyde seemed to such a model. One day perhaps I’ll write about my experiences there, but even now – eleven years after it was over, much of it is still too painful to revisit.

By no means should anyone compare the methods of a New England boarding school to a totalitarian regime (I feel ridiculous even writing that), and as someone whose grandparents lived under both Stalin and Hitler I should feel particularly sensitive to that sort of comparison. But even my father, a PhD in Eastern European history who spent a year living in Caucescu’s Romania, agrees that the comparison is not without merit. So have Eastern European friends to whom I described what students like us were subjected. Even so, on a basic level, it is absolutely ridiculous to make any comparison between Hyde and any sort of police state. Nevertheless, I can’t deny that in its own infinitesimal way, Hyde School gave me an insight I never wanted into what my grandparents endured.

The greatest benefit Hyde gave me was that it was the greatest possible training for a budding writer – forcing its (often fascinating) students to observe one another to the minutest possible detail. At any moment, any one of us could be accused of doing something wrong – sometimes truly and just as often falsely, and every student there had to evaluate whether or not another student could stab them in the back with these sorts of accusations. In theory, we were all supposed to evaluate one another to help each other achieve our best in all areas of our lives. In practice, such evaluation usually dissolved into a mob mentality in which bullies found an outlet to pick on weaker kids that was completely sanctioned by the school.

Whatever else Hyde did, it gave me one other benefit. In college I found out I was a much better student than I ever was before. But were I a still better student and have managed to get the PhD in political science I’d been contemplating in the years after college, my thesis probably would have been something on the nature and methods of authoritarian states. It was Hyde which endowed me with a lifelong interest in that endlessly fascinating subject, and I suppose that at least in those two ways, I owe Hyde an enormous debt of gratitude.

...But back to the weight problem. Even in my last year at Hyde, where for my last six months I managed to ‘trick’ the school into not making me play sports, I began to put on weight. By graduation, I was certainly well over a 150 pounds, perhaps even 165. During the last ‘punishment-workout’ I ever had to do at Hyde, a mere two days before I graduated, I did the one thing I’d avoided in three years of extreme physical activity – I threw up.

Six months later, my wrestling coach saw me for the first time when I came back to visit. The first thing he said to me was: “Tucker!....Step on the scale!” I was 184 pounds. By the end of my freshman year I was probably 190. By the end of sophomore year, I passed the landmark I thought I’d never reach, two hundred pounds. By graduation, I was 220.

I don’t doubt that there was an enormous confluence of reasons that made me gain so much weight in so little time; everything from laziness to medication to gluttony to anxiety played its own part. Like so many college students, I was eating like there was no tomorrow, drinking like a fish, and smoking like a chimney. All the healthiness I’d gained in those three years I happily gave up for the chance to be a different person. I felt as though I had three years of my life to make up for, and if I could help it I was going to enjoy every minute of it. I can’t say that I derived enough enjoyment to justify gaining eighty-five pounds in seven years (maybe forty-five…), but at least for days at a time, I managed to dispel the crippling fear, guilt, and insecurity with which 3 years at Hyde would leave any student with a shred of humanity.

After college, I went to live in Israel; and as Israel has done for a century of Jewish kids, it boosted my health - to the best it had been since before college. I found a workout partner who became a close enough friend that we’re travelling Europe together for a month this summer. The Harris is a good four inches taller than I, yet weighed less than 130 pounds. The experience of working out with him was everything Hyde was not. He never pushed me to overexert, was always understanding when I couldn’t complete a set, and our workouts often took three hours because we’d talk for twenty minutes between each exercise. By the end of my time in Israel, I was down to 190 pounds, and could do a strenuous, hour-long workout with no break that made me feel better by the end than I did at the beginning.

But when I returned to America, I had no idea what I was doing with my life; without a job, utterly without prospects, stuck in my parents’ house in Baltimore with no sense of direction. Within a year, I’d gained another 45 pounds. At this time five years ago, I was a full 235 lbs. It is, I vow, the largest I ever will be. For normal sized people, 235 pounds is not really that fat. But when you’re 5’4 ½, 235 pounds is enormous – not quite morbidly obese, but certainly obese with a capital O. Were I a foot taller, it would be the equivalent of being well over 300 pounds.

Most of this extra weight is carried my Falstaffian gut. My physique is surprisingly well maintained in other areas, but for years I’ve had a paunch to rival any sexegenarian. A pot belly usually comes with a greater risk of heart disease, and at my largest, I had all the symptoms of heart disease at far too young an age; pain in my chest, tingling in my arm, dizziness, windedness, and constant fatigue. On the other hand, I was eating some damn good food.

I can’t help that I love food – I love all types, all flavors, from the most gourmet to the grossest fast food.  If left to my own devices, I would probably eat every minute of every day. For whatever reason, my body has very little sense of when it’s full, and I can’t understand why people would leave some food on their plate untouched. What an alcoholic is to booze, I am to food. I long since gave up cigarettes with little trouble. I could even see myself cutting out alcohol completely with little regret. But the mere thought of limiting my food intake seems like a cross too great to bear.

In the last two years, I’ve been to two cardiologists, both of whom told me that I have no heart problems whatsoever. I do, however, have rather severe heart burn, terrible back pain, a probable ulcer, and still more severe hypochondria. The last few years have been a steady stream of constant diets and inconsistent physical activity – Atkins, calorie counting, biking, and weight lifting. Today, I start the severest diet of them all – a week-long ‘detox’ diet of nothing but fruits, vegetables and six ounces of protein a day that will hopefully take the edge off some of my most extreme cravings.  For all that effort, my weight has steadily yo-yoed between 225 lbs and 200, and never below 200.

Thin people simply never understand why a person would go to such weird lengths to lose weight. Why not simply limit your food intake and consistently get exercise? Why not indeed? Fat people have been wondering why they’re incapable of following these prescriptions for good health at least as much as their thin friends. There are only two options to believe – either fat people are simply lazy, or we have a biological problem that is not easily cured. Many people, particularly many thin people, believe the former. Perhaps they're right, but my experience tells me to doubt them. Bulimia is considered a disease, yet the condition still involves the somewhat involved process of a bulimic person finding a drain in which to throw up. In the same way, even if one has a choice to stop eating, perhaps one doesn’t. Alcoholism, compulsive gambling, anorexia are all diseases that involve a free choice as much as compulsion – yet they’re still considered diseases.

One day, I will be thin again. I truly believe this. I just hope it’s before I turn 35 or 40 or whatever age it is when ailments from bad body maintenance become truly irreparable. I want to be thin, really I do. But it’s goddamn hard. Asking me to stop eating so much is asking me to amputate one of the biggest parts of myself (no pun intended). It’s almost as though can no longer imagine my life as a thin person.

. 

Dear Abby - Beginning

Hi Abby,

It's been fifteen years. Fifteen and a half to be exact. The last time I saw you, I was literally about to graduate college. I was so shocked to see you in Bethesda, so shy, so unwilling to face old Hyde friends, let alone to the fact that I brought a freshman to High School Prom, even to my best friend walking with me who knew so much about Hyde, that I said within five seconds that I had to go right away. The second I left, I knew how incredibly absurd I was being, so I explained what was what to Marc in a Dunkin' Donuts, we got our donut and coffee, and we came back. Thankfully, you were still there, and you knew exactly how weird it was that I ducked out from someone to whom I'd once bonded like a sister. I don't know for exactly how long we talked, but that was the last time we ever saw each other.

You did rather well in life, not just for a Hyde kid, but for anybody at all. A photographer with work featured in Time Magazine and Slate. I saw the work on your homepage, it's pretty impressive. You certainly captured things in your subjects, and why wouldn't a person as empathetic as you always are in my memory elicit anything less from a camera? Even at fourteen, you silenced a whole room of students and parents with a poem at a student poetry reading I organized for Family Weekend, and we were all so shocked into silence by the quality that all Mr. Spaeth and I could do was ask you to read it again. To this day I remember, a refrain bookended it: 'At Eight-Thirty in the Morning," all the more miraculous for coming from your girlish, Jennifer Tilly-like voice, and oh how you excoriated me for making fun of it. Most Hyde kids were not exactly sharp knives, but there always existed a brilliant minority of Hyde kids whose personalities were too strong and original for a typical school to ever find the key to unlock their.... I'm not going to use those two words.... you know which ones.... I would imagine that many of the parents in that room thought you just another Hyde kid too odd for her potential to ever truly reveal itself in anything but artificial circumstances, but whatever the vicissitudes of the real world that flummoxed so many of us after we got out of the gate, you are one of the very few who got to show the wide world a small fraction of what you were capable. And in that sense, your life is so rich in meaning and success to any of us who have yet to discover how to show all that we are to anyone but the small coterie who know us. Whatever our unique potentials,... there... I said the two words now gimme a diploma.... so many of the rest of us are still mute to the world, the stories we can tell of what we have been through and the still worse things we'd seen others endure, completely yet untold.

With all the continual news of death surrounding us from ghosts of Hyde past, I would occasionally see a new picture of you pop up on social media, and feel a little relief when I saw it. You looked so well-adjusted and happy, and I would genuinely think to myself that if even if so many of us Hyde kids would die prematurely from every kind of reckless living, at least Abby would live to be a hundred; and now you're dead from cancer, which you'd apparently been suffering from in all those pictures, and I, who've advertised many of my illnesses so publicly, who've feared for my health for so many years, who am continually amazed that I've neither left the party yet nor been forced to leave, am still here, and look to be here for at least another couple decades.

I heard of Marissa's suicide in September of 2018, and it apparently happened in November the year before, hopefully she can tell you more about what lead to it than I ever heard. Not that you two were ever at Hyde simultaneously for more than three weeks or so, but when two people die so prematurely, I imagine them meeting up in the next world with friends of friends they discover through social media. If you two haven't met up yet, track her down, you're gonna love each other. Marissa was as brilliant as you, nearly as gifted a writer and one of the most brilliant visual artists I've ever met, she was more extraverted and outspoken, and she was funnier than nearly anyone I'd ever met... Life around her was a non-stop dinner party, twelve-hour conversations at a time in which the interlocutor never came up for air, only for the conversation to resume the next day exactly where it left off.

So yes, as close as I was to you, my dear Abby, Marissa was the love of my adolescence, entirely unrequited of course - 'I could marry you Evan, but I can't date you.' An old flame whose flame was extinguished in the span of a few weeks. I literally followed her to American University in DC, it was the best decision I'd ever made, made for entirely the wrong reasons. I made the best friends of my life, graduated with honors, seemed on the cusp of a basically functional life, while Marissa fell in with a drug crowd, and dropped out after two years. We barely saw each other at Hyde, at first I thought it was because she didn't make the effort to see me, and of course I was a little hurt, but the further away we get from those years, the more I wonder if it wasn't the other way around. At some point in those years I made the very, very conscious decision that Hyde was just a mirage in the life of a nice Jewish boy who should never have ended up in so bizarre and authoritarian a place. I don't know how deliberate it was that I cut loose as many Hyde friendships as I did, but I can't imagine it was any more than 20% by accident. And so at the end of sophomore year, we ran into each other and had one last lunch where she told me she was probably dropping out and apologized to me for having so broken my heart. The two of us went back to hang out in my room afterward. I wish I could say that anything happened, but my love of Marissa was always in the abstract, and when she left, I gave her one of my prize possessions to keep, my copy of Dante's Inferno that I studied in private with Mr. Spaeth, whose advice was that if you're going through Hell, the only way out is to go all the way down. It was the last time I ever saw Marissa. My greatest regret is certainly not that I was never her lover, it was exactly the opposite; that whatever hell she was going through, I so easily let her abandon our friendship so that I could spend more time finally being the kid at the front of the class whom I thought I always was yet had so little evidence until I was twenty. Like Sage, Marissa will always be another Hyde kid for whose downfall I feel in some ways responsible, even if my guilt is totally illogical, it's just one of a thousand things for which I feel terrible guilt for what I continually pray are illogical reasons.

...I'm finding this is much too painful to keep going. I pray I can find a way through this impasse in the next little while. Until then, onto the next project.

800 Words: Dear Sage - An FLC Letter

Dear Sage,

One of your murderers must now say goodbye to you having only heard of your murder two years after it happened.  Roughly six months after I broke off contact with you, you jumped in front of a train just like Anna Karenina. I hope it was as quick as you  clearly meant for it to be, but however quick it was, and whatever better place you may be in right now, I can’t help it if I feel responsible. I failed you, just as so many others did.

By your own telling, your parents were as ill-equipped to understand the nature of your illness as any parents could be.  You were left alone, utterly unattended, kicked out of community college and living by yourself on a miniscule stipend with barely a friend for comfort. It was then that you reached out to me. I cannot lie, I dreaded your phone calls – knowing that my nights would be over the moment you called because I first had to talk you up from your horrendous depression, and then listen to your rambling conspiracy theories about the resurrection of international communism or some class of illuminati you planned to join by enlisting in the CIA (never mind how contradictory your theories were). To hear this once-great mind which could write a Dante parody that would impress the original and expound on the greatness of Moby Dick or mathematics with an eloquence that could astound the world was too tragic to bear. Every time I hung up the phone, I could only think to myself ‘there but by the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go I.’

Your calls became more frequent, your obsessions still odder, and then you left a message on my facebook wall and my voicemail so creepily bizarre, and spoken in such an inhuman monotone…. I seized the opportunity and did the ultimate immature signoff – the facebook de-friend – and never returned your next hysterically emotional voicemail, the tone of which will now haunt me forever.  After that, I half expected you to show up on my doorstep unannounced for a year afterward. When that never happened, I figured that you did what we all had to do at Hyde – you found a way to keep going. Against odds that seemed overwhelming, I and so many others we knew found ways to keep clawing at life even after the thousand times when we thought it might as well be over. Perhaps I’ve become too accustomed to the thought that life, as difficult as it is, can be endured.

Yours is the tenth death of a student I’ve heard of from my time at Hyde (that I can remember): Ian Worth, Maggie Miller, Al Vico, Jeff Boiselle, Scott Thomas, Drew Llewellyn, Jon Ogan, Meg Lavin, and Rob Ebling (the last one I now realize I forget where I heard it, …though I eventually told you, another terrible mistake I made since he was a good friend of yours…). One mutual friend of ours tells me he’s heard of at least five more deaths. Of the people I just named, the only people I was particularly friendly with were Al Vico and Scott Thomas – and neither were particularly close. The rest of them I felt somewhere between a vague liking and vague contempt. Nevertheless, every one of those deaths made me sad. At a New England prep school whose enrollment was rarely ever over two-hundred, ten by age 30 is a terrifying figure. Perhaps it’s acceptable when you think of the high-risk behavior involved in arriving at Hyde in the first place, but it’s still far too many. I used to think I’d hear of another death every year. But I heard about you and Meg Lavin on the same day. As we reach our thirties, will the death tolls now increase to two from year to year? And which of my old friends is next? Is it me?

Even had you not reached out to me, and even had I not spurned you, I believe your death might have hit me harder than any other person’s death from those years could have. From the moment you arrived on campus, people commented on our similarities – in appearance, in demeanor, in the way we talked, in our interests. We were far more alike than I am to my own brothers, and to then see someone so close to a mirror image of myself reduced to such a state as yours… how could I bare to hear from it?

How the hell did kids like us fall through the cracks so far as to end up at Hyde? We didn’t need 2-4, we needed valets. I grieve for all those kids we’ve lost, but I grieve for you more – because you were smarter, because you could have contributed more, because the world will never know how many dark places such a brilliant mind could illuminate. Of all those cruelties Hyde perpetrated, was there anything so cruel as to tell smart kids whose problems originated in part from encountering bullies that our problems were no different from theirs’? The bullies at Hyde always flourished, because they found new ways to bully everybody else. But the smart, introverted kids who just needed a little patience, we were more bullied than ever – with even the moral high ground stolen from us and given to them.  

The true believers at Hyde were not evil, they were just idiots – dangerous idiots, but idiots nevertheless. They weren’t interested in money, they were interested in converts, and they believed every word they told us. They were weak people who needed a system to fall back on as badly as you did at the end. Had their lives taken different paths, they would have fallen back on Opus Dei Catholicism, or radical Islam, or fascism, or scientology, or any other system which tells them that they could destroy a person’s sense of self and build a new, greater one in its place. And if the process of making that greater self entails monstrous cruelty in the service of a greater good, they administer it happily. If ideals are turned into crimes, the crimes are always justified. Those Neanderthals truly believed that they would make their students’ lives better, and another cruel irony is that in the cases of some particularly dumb students, they probably did. But for others, they made lives so much worse. The true believers lied to us by saying that they were doing good, and the smarter people at Hyde lied to the true believers by telling them we believed their idiocies. I was too depressed, crazy, delusional even, at that point in my life to keep up the wall of doubt to everything I was told – sometimes I even believed their lies. But you, far more self-confident at that point in your life, were never taken in by those morons, and oh how I envy you now.

Yes, Sage, I envy you. I don’t envy your end, but I envy your mind. The average Hyde kid was not exactly a genius, and any conversation with someone of above-average intelligence in those years was worth its weight in gold to a kid so starved for real education as I was. But to this day, I maintain that your mind at its best could have held its own with the highest of Harvard and MIT. I was a mere LD kid who could (and can) only operate the right-side-of-my-brain, but your mind was a pristine engine. You could have succeeded in anything – as a scientist, mathematician, writer, businessman, lawyer, whatever you decided to do. But like so many brilliant lights in this world, it came in fragile casing – and by the time you returned to my life, the bulb was broken.

Would you have gone off the deep end without Hyde? Almost certainly. Hyde already has enough to answer for without being called to answer for the things it didn’t do. But I can’t help it if the thought occurs to me that you might not have gone that far… Hyde is the last organization that should be consulted in how to deal with mental illness. And I’m absolutely convinced that anyone already nursing such an illness is that much more likely to contract a worse one by being there. All those years, you were clearly nursing the potential for an illness far greater than we even knew. Some people with great minds have all the luck; their brilliance is born to the right circumstances, nurtured correctly by family, noticed by the right friends, and they end up getting honorary degrees at Yale. Others end up ramming themselves into a train, forgotten by the world even before they had a chance to be remembered.

Would anyone who knew us then have thought that you’d be dead and I’d be the one … at least remotely approaching a success? Like you, I live alone. Unlike you, I have a family that is reasonably understanding of our condition. I don’t know how much help I am, but I’m a partner in the family business, I have more friends than I ever know what to do with, I have creative outlets, I have a second job as a choral conductor and also free-lance as a violinist. I write every day, and I have never known a better remedy for keeping the dogs at bay. For the moment, I can honestly say that life has blessed me rather well, and now more than ever I can only wish that it did the same for you.

Six-and-a-half years ago, I watched a friend and neighbor sink further and further into depression – every day withdrawing a little more into his private world until he finally no longer responded to people’s queries. I recognized the symptoms, but I did nothing – thinking that as it does for me, the black dog would somehow let up before it became too serious to return from.  One day, I was stunned to find him coming into my room, he was even talking, telling us ‘I’m going away for a while, you won’t see me for a long time…’, I was too stunned to say anything back, and yet I still did not put two and two together. An hour-and-a-half later, Alex had jumped to his death from his fifth-floor apartment in Southern Israel. How could I be so blind, yet again, to the symptoms? I cannot fool myself any longer, it is all too possible that one day the person with these symptoms will be me, and other people will be just as blind. I have no way of knowing if or when, and it certainly won’t be any time soon. But even in my most joyful moments (and I’ve known enough), I can no longer forget that that agony may lurk round the corner. Nevertheless, to this moment, I can still say to the Black Dog and all its bites, ‘Not Yet!’

Depression is the cruelest of all possible illnesses; I truly believe that and probably always will. It is the only illness in the world that renders it impossible to recognize any way in which we are still blessed. It cuts through all rationality and all reality, causing us to see the world only through its prism – and like barbed wire, the harder we try to free ourselves of its tangle, the more it entangles us. There is no thinking oneself out of depression; there are only small preventative steps which we can take that can hopefully appease it. Because for all our developments in science, we still know barely more about the human brain than we did in the Middle Ages.

I have to be realistic, one day, this illness may claim me just as it did you and Alex. If this illness were ever to return with a virulence I’ve still never known, I can only hope that we meet in a better world – a world we can both embrace with nothing but joy. Wherever it will be, if it’s not a world without depression then I don’t want to go. There, flying spaghetti monster be praised, our minds can no longer torment us. Goodbye Sage and I hope you’re happier now. We all do.

Love,

Evan

800 Words: The Gym - The Most Depressing Place in America

I’ve not had access to my bike for the last two days. So in the midst of this rare health craze of mine, I’ve found myself returning to that place I hate more than any other, that place which is everything wrong with America made manifest, that place whose neurotic narcotics double our direly needed necessity for healthy living, a place where our addictions know no bounds, and a place which stultifies our health and stunts our spiritual growth into heart-diseased automatons who lose any ability to distinguish the joys of living from disgusting engorgement. It’s not the fast food restaurant, it’s the gym.

I hate the gym. I loathe the gym. I abhor, abominate, detest, despise, disgustize, rancorize, revulse, resent, scorn and spite everything about the gym. It is the black beast of my existence. It clinicizes physical activity and bludgeons the joy of being in shape into the most excrutiatingly mind-numbing, irritating, boring activity upon the face of the planet. It forces us to stay indoors when we should be using our primal urge for physical activity to put us back in touch with the natural world. It forces us to watch the spectacle of people more in shape than we will ever be show off their muscular physiques for their glory and our despair. It forces us to watch the equally sad spectacle of people so out of shape that they can never get back into it make futile attempts to prolong their short journey to the cemetery.

Runs and bikerides, even pool activity, give us the solitude and slowness we direly need in our too quickly run lives. But at the gym you’re at the mercy of whatever inane conversation goes on around you - and inevitably there’s some right-wing pontificator who shouts his opinions to a captive audience. Every attempt to read on the treadmill or the exercise bike comes to grief, every attempt to feel good about lifting weights comes to ruin when some know-it-all tells you you’re doing it wrong, and then shows you another completely wrong way of doing the same exercise. At least some people can wear earphones to drown out the noise, but for a musician like me who already has tinnitus, that’s impossible.

I started going to gyms when I was thirteen. I was even complimented on my newly burgeoning physique by my grade school gym teacher, a teacher who watched me cry many times after accidentally getting hit by a ball I was far too uncoordinated to follow. She said that by high school I was going to be more in shape than anybody I knew. She was both absolutely right and absolutely not.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I started to go more and more often to the Owings Mills JCC. I loved feeling pumped, I loved that a nerd who was lucky not to get picked last in gym class could feel athletic, and I loved that there were the kind of older teenage girls there which a horny younger teenager (and horny old men) loved to oggle. I used to fantasize about talking to them, for I was a simple boy with little knowledge of the world and its miracles.

When I was about fifteen, I stopped going and found myself gaining weight at an alarming rate. I’d been taking ADHD medications since I was eight, and was often told that I was in danger of serious weight gain. My mother had heard that a friend of hers got a trainer for her overweight son at the gym of the Pikesville Hilton who helped him lose quite a bit of weight. I went to the gym, and that’s where I met Kathleen.

Kathleen was twenty-one, a petite blonde shikse from Glen Burnie, whom for reasons I could not fathom worked at the Pikesville Hilton. She constantly wreaked of cigarette smoke and had a giant, multicolored tattoo on the small on her back. She was constantly telling me how much she couldn’t stand the other trainers. Half-hour sessions turned into two hours as she regaled me with stories of her ex-boyfriends and how much her girl-friends slept around. I was in love.

One of the most heartbreaking moments of my adolescence was when Kathleen told me she was leaving the Hilton for a better job. Going to the gym after Kathleen as gone was simply pointless. Not that it mattered. A few months later, I was at Hyde School in Connecticut, and I would be whipped into shape whether I liked it or not.

Physical activity was Hyde’s default solution. There was nothing in their minds which it could not solve. If a student needed to be disciplined, they’d be coerced into doing regimented, military-level workouts for three-quarters of an hour. If a student didn’t do their homework, they were made to run laps around the building. If a student was disobedient rules, they could be made to do physical activities for hours at a time - along with any other student unlucky enough to be around at that moment.

It was illegal for Hyde teachers to slap us or use canes, so they used the pain from physical activity as a form of torture - and it was most certainly torture, torture was precisely the point of what they administered. But even though it was torture, some people thrived on this routine, and developed a lifelong (and no doubt rather morbid) passion for physical activity. For a little while it appeared to many that I might have been one of them. I was a svelte (though not sexy) one-hundred thirty-five pounds, and the immense amount of sweat gave me an acne-pocked face like a pepperoni pizza. There were many times in wrestling we were coerced into doing a ‘six-minute drill.’ For those who don’t understand what a six minute drill is - it is a period of physical activity so intense that it approximates the physical exertion one must exhaust in a six-minute wrestling match. In itself, that is not terrible, and doubtless exactly what’s used for wrestling teams around America. But one day, as punishment for a few students arriving late, our coach required us to a ‘twenty-five minute drill.’ The equvalent of four full-length wrestling matches in a row. At the end of the drill, he put the latest kid in the middle of the room - a kid from Hyde’s abortive Middle School who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. We were ordered to look him dead in the eye, strike the floor with maximum force with our arms and yell out “Thank You Kevin” every five seconds. The poor kid stood in the middle of the wrestling room, sobbing as we all directed our exhausted hatred at this poor little boy. Shortly thereaftetr, he seemed to undergo a personality change, no longer a happy-go-lucky boy but one of the most rebellious teenagers in the school. I often wondered what happened to him, but I can’t imagine he ever got over that day, it’s probable that here was yet another soul Hyde set irrevocably on a poisonous path.

One of their favorite exercises was what they called the ‘block’. You keep your feet running in place at full speed, and then you dive into the floor with your hands being all that stops your head from hitting the ground while your feet remain the air until a half-second later. You’re then expected to get up from this - all in less than a second. One day, for our perceived inattentiveness, the entire wrestling team was made to do five-hundred of these in a row. If that doesn’t sound so bad, try doing twenty of them in a row and see how you feel. At the end of it, the captain of the Varsity Wrestling Team, still the most impressively muscular person I’d ever met, came up to me and said ‘Holy shit man, that was not right.’

Another technique of theirs was called the ‘wall-sit.’ A wall-sit in itself in no way terrible: physical therapists use it to help their patients stretch and build up endurance. However, fifteen minutes to an hour of wall sits without a break is most definitely is a form of torture, and bears an eerie though admittedly curtailed resemblance to the Bush Administration’s Guantanamo technique of not letting prisoners sit down for twelve hours at a time (at least they could stand comfortably if they liked).

If we were wrestlers, we were often expected to go on mid-winter runs at 5AM. If we were disobedient, we were expected to have 5:30 military level workouts - come winter come summer. Exposing prisoners to extra-cold temperatures has always been a favorite technique of authoritarian organizations.

But even now, I expect there are some people who will see all this and say ‘this is not so bad and certainly not torture.’ It’s not surprising, these techniques are designed for people like you to say exactly that - just as the Bush administrations techniques were designed to do and no doubt just as many, many organizations in charge of discipline design themselves around the ‘civilized world.’ Like those at Guantanamo, I suppose it’s possible that we deserved no better than we got, but people should still be aware of what transpires in their back yards, and I don’t think they are.  

I’ve gone over the next part before. I swore many times at Hyde that nobody could ever make me do physical activity ever again. And I stayed all too true to that vow. Six years after I left, I was a hundred pounds heavier than my wrestling weight. I suppose that one could argue that perhaps Hyde was a special case and not indicative of larger problems in the society that allowed it to exist, but I would argue that what went on at Hyde was simply a byproduct of a macho society grown fat with ill-gotten muscle on its own testosterone. We’re a culture that caters to sports - American industry may disappear tomorrow, but professional American sports leagues have enough money from overpriced tickets and merchandise to outlast the rest of America for a hundred years. And we’re bombarded with so many airbrushed bodies on television and the internet that many Americans assume it profits them nothing to get in shape if they can’t look like Arnold Schwartzenegger or Kate Moss. Our country’s turned into the physical equivalent of the Eloi and the Morlocks. It often seems as though everybody who doesn’t look beautiful topless looks like a living room sofa. Can you blame us fatties? What hope have we of getting in shape when we’re told that if we can’t work a miracle with our bodies, we might as well stuff our faces on Chipotle?

I don’t ever want to be in wrestling shape again. I don’t want to be an athlete. I have no physical ambitions beyond the ability to play senior-league softball in my mid-seventies should I so choose. I want a normal body. I want to weigh somewhere in the area of one-hundred sixty pounds, and I want to weigh that before I’m incontrovertibly bald.

Two summers ago, I lived in Bethany Beach Delaware. I was between places, and needed to move in with my parents. But my parents’ heavy plaster ceilings were caving in. We had to move to my parents’ beach house, and since I’m in the family business, I had no reason not to move with them. Not a single friend came to visit me that summer - and in the long run, that didn’t matter much. For the first time in ten years, I was physically active in a meaningful way.  We had two bikes, and I would ride them all over the Delaware Coast. To Ocean City, to Rehoboth, to Bethany Bay, to Georgetown, Milford, Delmar, and Millsboro. I felt as though I knew every streetcorner within ten miles of our beach house. After the ride, I’d come home and we’d eat fish every nigh - hardly a single land animal consumed for nearly the entire time I was there. I was suddenly thinner than I’d been since my year in Israel.

When I moved to Baltimore, I blanched at buying my own bike for months. The expense was simply staggering to me. Who is going to pay $9-1200 for a decent bike? Day after day, I would walk outside to find a gorgeous, endorphin releasing day, and mourn how easily this could be enjoyed with a bike. In June, I finally balked, and I found a halfway decent bike for $400. And it was on that very day when I took it out for my first ride that I bumped into my old friend D-------’s running group, thereby causing the chain reaction which caused the ever-increasing social life I now have in my new city. The riding season for beginners was practically over, and I swore I would do better this year. Unlike last year’s March, the weather was dingy, grey, and forever 40 degrees, a true Smarch if ever there was one. Finally, April came and the weather warmed, and I’ve been out virtually every day.  

Suddenly, the joy is rekindled. On that bike, I’m ten years old again, riding on the Gunpowder Trail in Hunt Valley at speeds faster than any ten year old should ever go. I have literally shouted for joy in crowded streets on that bike. In just three weeks, I’ve bonded to that bicycle to the point that it’s become like a symbol of freedom and hope to me. On Saturday, I biked across the city - a distance I thought impossible a mere day before. I’m outdoors, I’m mobile, I’m seeing Baltimore - truly seeing it - for the first time, and for the first time since I was sixteen, I’m enjoying physical activity. I don’t know if I’ll feel that way in early July, but come rain or shine, cold or hot, I want to be on that bike.

Musical Explanation 3/20: Shostakovich 13th

June 2000. I am 18 years old, much of it is still too painful to write about and probably will always be, but I am emerging from the most bizarre six months of my life. Trapped 300 miles from home in the kind of place that that kids like me should never be trapped, and driven nothing short of delusionally mad - the walls of reality totally shattered, the pieces of which I will never entirely be able to reassemble.

In a way we were all assured we'd never be from the safety of upper-middle-class Jewish Baltimore, I was a first hand witness to the one thing, the single thing, which Pikesville Md. was built to prevent - how ideology, yet again, could drive our worlds mad. It was the very end of the twentieth century, and in our infinitesimal way, we in Woodstock, Connecticut were first-hand witnesses to a G-rated version of the century in which literally billions of men, women, and children experienced far more than nearly anyone reading this ever will - numbering among them my Bubbie and Zaydie, and even they far less than hundreds of their relatives, including their three-year-old daughter, who experienced the ultimate twentieth century fate.

Try as I might, these little scribblings of mine could never do justice to the admittedly small ways I saw ideology corrupt the souls and sanity of hundreds - showing a hundred kids whose anger that could never be quenched a way in which their bullying could be completely respectable, and turning another hundred kids into guinea pigs, turning kids who simply needed a little extra care and love into tortured animals.

Even with the provisos I put in place, this will no doubt seem like an absurd hyperbole of what those years were like. Particularly if you were one of the bullies, you'll think this nonsense. Perhaps if you were one of the bullied, this description will seem all too familiar and perhaps not go far enough. If you spent some time as both, and I at least spent a bit on the other side of that ledger, you will forever be haunted by the ways you were turned into the very thing that so recently caused you agony. I spent my final year at Hyde doing my best to convince myself that their lies were true, all the while doing my best to privately conceal the encyclopedia of psychotic delusion that grew in my head like a cancer after January 2000, and has not completely let me alone now for more than fifteen years afterward. I wish there was a way, any way at all, to make Hyde answer for this. I have no doubt that many people who came through its doors experienced much worse effects of their time even than I  Of course, I know as well as anyone, to compare Hyde to the Soviet Union or a fascist state is absurd in just about every conceivable way. Hyde tortured its students - and yes, it was most definitely torture by any humane legal definition. But Hyde never killed any of its students. Nevertheless, had the law sanctioned it, to this day I have little doubt that many there could convince themselves such an act was for the greater good.

I am not a good enough writer, nor will I ever be, to explain how ideology corrupts people into believing the most insane things, so for a moment, I will turn this post over to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was in June 2000 that I could return home and get to the Meyerhoff, in so many ways my spiritual home from the time I was four years old, to hear Yevgeny Yevtushenko read his poetry, and to hear 13th Symphony of Shostakovich which set his poems to music. Music, art, as always in my life, saved me. Sanity stared me in the face, and over time, I was ready to look back.

Our orchestra's new music director, the Russian alchemist Yuri Temirkanov, was on the podium, and the message he transmitted to us that night screamed to us and scorched the ears. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews came to Baltimore, replacing the dying-off Holocaust survivors with a whole new generation of foreign-seeming Jews whose haunted looks darkened the streets. How many hundreds of those Soviet Jews were in the audience that night? How many of them saw the ghosts of the dead and broken they left behind? How many of them remembered the terror they lived with every day?

It was so much more than a concert. It was communion. It was clarity. The century of death was over. The century of terror was about to begin, but at least this century's giving us a fighting chance. The scars will always be there, but whether we are Holocaust Survivors or Soviets whose brothers and sisters were sent to the Gulags, or their spoiled grandson who experienced far less than a percentage point of their horror, we are still here. We can still bear witness, and the bastards cannot stop our protests.

This post was supposed to be about this weekend's BSO concerts...


(Yuri conducting it, starting 22 1/2 minutes in. But too low a level and without English subtitles...)

800 Words: An Ambition for Culture - Part 4

IVa.

Hyde School. Winter term. I’m about to turn nineteen. Through some miracle of mercy, I’m granted an independent study to write the most abstract and absurd possible theater piece to be performed at the term’s end. As usual throughout my life, I had a grandiose idea for creating a world-changing piece of art that had no hope of materializing. My head was filled with concepts from Beckett, Boulez, Brecht and Artaud - and I’m sure I didn’t understand the first thing about any of them. True to the grandiose ambitions that have followed me at every stage in my life, I wanted to ‘create’ a ‘new’ kind of ‘theater’ that was so spare and ‘primal’ that all our basic assumptions of what constituted theater, art and life itself would be challenged. In truth, the idea was nothing deeper than Andy Kauffman, only much, much more pretentious.

So I came up with a title for the piece called ‘The Purgatory Machine,’ and finding a way to perform it had obsessed me for a whole year previously. So obsessed was I by it that I used my free hours to take naps while the rest of the school played sports. In my defense, I’d long since given up on making The Purgatory Machine a reality and simply prayed that nobody would remember that I’d basically ditched sports for a term. Nobody seemed particularly interested in what The Purgatory Machine was, which is just as well considering that I couldn’t explain it to them, particularly to my advisor, Mr. Edwards. I had spent the entire year trying to get students, teachers, even janitorial staff interested in this so that somebody might volunteer to be a part of its performance. Finally, we get to two weeks before performance time and my advisor needs to see an outline. I knew exactly what it was in my head, but I could not explain it to anyone. So I just write up an outline of the whole piece in two hours - the whole thing is a page and a half long. To my utter shock, my advisor sends me back an email saying in all-caps “THIS IS SUPERB!”. I can only surmise that he was just happy that the piece was a real thing and that I wouldn’t have to be held accountable for doing nothing, because superb it certainly was not.

And so I corral my advisor and three underclassmen to be the other actors in the piece. For two weeks, we rehearse in our spare time. The action includes lots of time in which the audience looks at a bare stage, sequences conducted in pitch dark with non-verbal grunting noises and fights choreographed between us so as to confuse the audience into thinking the performance was completely breaking down. Three days before the performance, one of the performers drops out, “it’s just too weird” he tells me. They had no idea what we were doing and I got all sorts of protests from the actors. They were right to protest, I also had barely an idea what I was doing. I wanted to tell a myth that explained the capabilities of human endeavor, language, science and philosophy. When it came time for curtain, I simply told the performers ‘if we do not get half the audience clapping and half booing, we have failed completely.’ Mr. Edwards introduced it to the audience by saying ‘We can promise you this, it will be something!’

The audience was clearly confused. A third of the audience was laughing (with or at us....did it matter?), a third was shushing the laughers, and another third sat in utter silence. To my disappointment, I did not get half the audience to boo. And to my terrible dismay, the audience gives it an ovation. More intellectual students came up to me afterwards to offer their own interpretation of it, that it was about ‘evolution’ or ‘creation’ or ‘concsiousness’ or whatever else. Some less intellectual ones came up and said ‘I didn’t understand it, but that was really funny. I didn’t think I would like it, but I really did.’

IVb.

I am named for my great-grandfather, Avraham Katz. Since Jewish genealogy is a very difficult pursuit, there isn’t all that much about him that’s verifiable. I do know that he was born around 1892 in a town near the Belarus-Lithuania border called Maladzyechna. Around the time of the Russian Revolution he married a local girl named Tirtza Gordon. By 1920 they were married and Tirtza became pregnant with my Bubbie, Malkeh Katz. Would Malkeh grow up in a war-torn country or would she grow up in a place that gave her a chance to know peace and prosperity? And so for the entire year of 1920, my great-grandparents waited in the Free City of Danzig to find a ship that would take them to America.

Like almost all my immigrant relatives, Avraham (now Abe) Katz was a Baltimore shopkeeper. Like all my immigrant relatives, he worked his way up from nothing. He made sure that my Bubbie had a full education put her through both college and graduate school.

Though he had no formal education outside of the Cheder, Abe himself was a well-rounded man. Bubbie once described to me how her father would send her around Baltimore to comb the libraries for every Yiddish and Russian book she could find - and apparently he had a particular fondness for Tolstoy. When I first read The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, I could not escape the thought that my great-grandfather must have been very much like Grandma Lausch. Abe Katz was barely a lower-middle-class resident of the tenements, but he believed in culture and believed in the importance of imparting its power to his daughter. In the late 30’s when the Metropolitan Opera used to come through Baltimore, he used every spare penny he had to make sure that my Bubbie could go to every one of its performances. He was also a huge fan of wrestling. He would go to as many matches as he could find in Baltimore. My mother tells stories of watching him shout at the TV whenever a wrestling match was on.

Aside from my Hebrew name, his great legacy is Mollie Witow, my Bubbie. Now 90 years young, last month was the first Baltimore election in sixty-two years in which she was not a judge. She has spent her life in pursuit of the culture to which her father gifted her. No concert in Baltimore is left unheard, no movie unseen, no book unread, no gallery unviewed, no country untravelled, no academic lecture unlistened, no community college course untaken. But no girl from Patterson Park could be as highbrow a snob as a description like that could make you think. Over the years, she and I have gone together to baseball games, to see Lewis Black at the Baltimore Improv, to eat tuna sandwiches at every diner in Baltimore. She once even asked me to go to a Matisyahu concert with her (there are some things you won’t even do for your grandmother...). The most enthusiastic I have ever seen her after a movie was when she came to our house after seeing Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. When her parents came to America, it was so my Bubbie could live a life exactly like the one she has.

IVc.

Fourth or fifth grade. I’m sitting in the Krieger Auditorium at Solomon Schechter Day School with a room full of kids no older than eleven or twelve. An actor comes onto the stage. He tells us that he is a nearly blind old man named Claude Monet who cannot see any of our faces. He proceeds to tell us his life story - his joys, his sorrows (mostly sorrows) and his passions. With every new story comes a new painting which he places upon the easel. Every new painting provokes a massive gasp through the audience - as though every student in that auditorium seems overwhelmed that something like a Monet painting can exist. Monet will never overwhelm many of us again.

IVd.

Hyde School. I’ve just turned seventeen. It’s taken me six months at my new school to meet my best friend of those years, Chris Wyton. At that point, I still have no idea whom Alec Wyton is. I only know is that I’m hanging out with a kid I’ve barely said a word to for six months, in spite of the fact that we’re known as our grade’s ‘music guys.’ As music guys, the conversation is mostly about music and I pretend, as I often do, to have any idea what rock people are talking about. He tells me to get my violin, he leaves to get his guitar. Five minutes later, we’re outside of Hyde’s Cultural Center with the 1,100 seat theater which the school barely uses. He starts playing. I have no idea what the song is. But after thirty seconds I get the harmonies and I improvise around it. No sheet music, no preparation. 1 Corinthians 15:52

IVe.

January 2001: I and a few other Hyde students risk expulsion (I come closest) to compel the school to let a group of 16 students go down to Washington DC and protest George W. Bush’s inauguration.

Nine months later: I'm at AU. And as we used to say, “9/11 changed everything.”

June 2002: I go back up to Hyde to see the graduation of my friends in the next class. I’m talking to a radical friend from Hyde and an even more radical teacher. The teacher storms out of our conversation when I say that I could see why the Afghan Invasion might be a good idea.

February 2003: I’m an active supporter of the Iraq War on the most political campus in America (by a few million miles). Shouting matches are a thrice daily occurrence for all of us. Friendships between all sorts of people both pro and anti grow strained. One or two break apart.

September 2004: My friend KW and I are being interviewed on AU radio for being the only liberals on campus who support the Iraq War.

November 2005: I arrive in Israel a full-fledged liberal hawk who constantly rails at my political friends for opposing our wars, therefore betraying the liberalism of FDR, Truman and Kennedy. I can quote Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff and Kenneth Pollack to them in my sleep (and probably did). I’m about as close to neo-conservatism as you could get while still claiming to hate neocons. But when you’re in a seven-month sojourn into the desert with weeks spent camping, fiddling with guitarists every day,drinking at the bars until 5 every morning, even your most tactfully worded support for war can sound like support for General Franco.

July 2006: I return from two-thirds of a year in Israel on the very day the Lebanon War begins. For eight months, I dithered over whether to become an Israeli resident in a manner that would impress Hamlet. Finally, I make up my mind to come home and rebuild my life from the place where it started. Even with a war raging, it’s a decision I instantly regret. Some of my best friends in the world are still in Israel. I have no job, no prospect for a job, and no desire to look for a job. Instead, I obsessively update a blog on the Israel/Lebanon War which I’m fairly certain was never read by anybody. I have twenty or more posts a day, often just cutting and pasting the texts of articles into posts (properly attributed of course). Most days I have a post of my own which goes upwards of 3-5000 words. I didn’t even know that I had 3-5000 words to say about Israel, but I certainly thought I did at the time.

Everything written on that blog is long since lost to that graveyard where deleted blogs go when you’re in too embarrassed by your writing to save it to a flash drive. But at the time, it all seemed terribly important. I’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool Israel ambassador gleefully seizing any opportunity to debate a tangentially Israel related topic. Back in Washington, I get plenty of chances - particularly when the alcohol is flowing. It usually starts with an innocent comment, my retort ‘whatd’ya mean....’, the entire room except the offending person leaving and one of them poking their head into the room once every half-hour to check if I’m done yet.

On July 29th, 2006, I receive this letter.

Dear Mr. Tucker,

My name is Mal’ak (a pseudonym), I'm a 18- year old university student (well actually I still did not start studying but hopefully I will at La Sorbonne).
First of all, I would like you to know that I found your writing great. It displays great knowledge about the Middle East. But I think you were bit biased. I'm not saying this because of anything, (I actually hate what Hezbollah did), I just think that writing should never be biased if it is meant to intensify the truth. Well, I know I'm still young and un-experienced but I think you missed a very important issue which is childrren.

Mr. Tucker, don't you think that innocent civilians and especially children, on both sides(whether in Lebanon or Isreal) are the ones who are paying the price? I actually think Hezbollah are making a very big mistake by creating mini-hidden bases between houses in Lebanon.

I trully believe that this war has been planned for, like most wars now. Besides, where is Iran from all this? Isn't it the main catalyst in this crisis?

I'm sorry if I disturbed you, I just wish we could exchnage opinions because I'm really very intrested in discussing this event with you.

Thank you for reading my email.

With high hopes you will reply to me,

Thus begins one of the most fascinating friendships of my life. Mal’ak is a Palestinian business student living in Amman. She never did get to La Sorbonne, but that made her all the more remarkable. She parades her commitments publicly in a country where public commitment means much, much more than it does in the United States. She’s an extraordinarily talented artist whose work could astonish the world if somebody were smart enough to notice her talent. For five years we’ve been sending letters to each other, the only day we’ve even so much as g-chatted is the day Mubarak falls.

January 2007: I’m back in the States, taking poli-sci grad classes at Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore campus. How the fuck could I have supported the Iraq War?