Everything Is One Thing

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TODAY'S QUOTES:

"Everything is one thing."

-- from "After the Fall" by Arthur Miller

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"We're not talking about what we're talking about."

-- ibid.

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Friday
April 13, 2007
"EVERYTHING IS ONE THING" -- for Dr. Jane

Dear Jane,

I'd write to you more often if I could manage to focus the voice within me on a single subject long enough to "spit it out." Instead, it seems nowadays as though all that voice can keep its mind on (that voice which does the writing for me) is a dozen or so things at once. Which is what reminded me of today's title quote (above) from Miller's "After the Fall," one of his later plays which fictionalizes his marriages, including the brief one to Marilyn Monroe. I promised myself that during this period of however many months it turns out to be that I'm assigned here at "the board building," I'd devote as much time and energy as is feasible to drafting pieces of THE TOOLMAKER'S OTHER SON. Each weekday morning as I wake up, however, and go about my inner "pre-writing" of whatever may come out as words later in the evening, I feel the attention of my inner voice, my writing voice, drawn away from memoir and, instead, toward the sorts of insights, opinions, observations, meditations, philosophizings, etc. which you've been finding in your mailbox in recent months.

On the local news at noon today, while Marie & I were eating lunch, we learned of a young unmarried local woman who'd given birth on her parents' basement floor and immediately murdered her newborn babe by stabbing it over a hundred times. "Whatever became of infant adoption in America?" I asked Marie. So, Jane, what has become of it? Harry & Margaret loved to remind me of the hoops they were compelled to jump through in order to adopt me in 1949. (As well it should have been, of course.) I'm asking you this in your capacity as an anthropologist. I realize that sometime in the 1970's & 80's, it became pandemically fashionable for young American women (particularly within the lower socioeconomic strata) to (mostly pretend to) take a stab at single parenting, with their offspring more often than not ending up being (usually, mostly) haphazardly raised by the grandparents (meaning the young mother's mother).

Meanwhile, Jane, what became of all the public and private, religious and secular channels for the Harrys & Margarets of the 70's, 80's & 90's to adopt healthy young infants born inside these United States? I realize that I'm probably revealing a shameful degree of naivete in humbling myself to ask you this question. But I'm not completely blind; and part of what I've been seeing plainly has been that just a little over 100% of the American babies born to working class and lower class single mothers of EVERY race would be better off being adopted and raised by the 21st century equivalent of Harry & Margaret. All the evidence leads us to conclude that each and every one of these single mothers would be better off as well -- as would American society as a whole, not to mention biological "fathers" of these unadopted infants, many of whom end up in the 21st century version of debtors prison as a result of their inability to keep up their "child support" payments.

All that I've just insinuated as backdrop to the question I've asked you, Jane, must now be hidden within taboo and buried deep beneath "We must not say so" -- since I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat and civil rights activist who's not even supposed to be thinking these thoughts, because it might offend the pseudo-feminists and sundry other pseudo-liberals.

YOUR NAPPY-BRAINED BASTARD COUSIN,

Galen

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