ERIC SWALWELL, CESAR CHAVEZ & ME

The growing pains of a changing society and the reading of a short story by Kate Chopin called The Story of an Hour, published in 1894.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

It's story time with Mitch Juzrich. Today, The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, published in 1894. Kate Chopin is considered an early feminist writer well before the word feminist was in wide use. She was from the American South, and she wrote about women's sexuality outside of marriage and the confinements women faced in the conventions of society. The story of an hour is a short story, a controversial story as much of her writing was in her time, about the uncanny liberation that comes from a husband's death. I read this story as two more of the all so mighty men in society have fallen due to allegations of sexual abuse. Eric Swalwell and Caesar Chavez, the latter posthumously. Murals have been painted over across the country and schools renamed away from that great American saint, Caesar Chavez, who has fallen from grace. Eric Swalwell in the matter of just a few days went from the fast track to governor of California to outcast and potential inmate over charges of his own sexual abuse. It's all so Shakespearean. Which is another way of saying it's not so unusual. Unlike Chavez, who died when I was still young, I knew Swalwell, who's a tad younger than me. I've sat down in his Washington, DC office to interview him. It was in his office that I saw his young staffers sitting behind desks on the phone with constituents, pretending to write down their complaints and comments. But they wrote nothing. My one vivid memory of Eric Swalwell made more vivid for I had dropped some LSD, was when I took a stroll around Lake Merritt in Oakland on a dark and rainy day. Just on the other side of the lake, I see this bright, white, muscular body wearing only small black running shorts, black socks, and sneakers in a full gallop around the lake. It looked like the white Hulk. He shined in the darkness of the rainy day. Fifteen minutes later, here comes this almost naked white, bulging man running fast in my direction. It was Eric Swalwell, and I shouted, Hey, do you remember me? And he stopped and said KPFA, right? That's it, I said. I was not hallucinating this, though the visuals of this white Hulk might have been enhanced by the drug. I'll admit to that. But I never hallucinate something that is not entirely there. He stood over me breathing hard, not gasping, but confidently. I was surprised a congressman would take a run outside in the rain, wearing nothing more than skimpy shorts, socks, and shoes. Clearly he was into his body, and he wanted, I think, others to be impressed by it too. Looking back at it now, it's not surprising he sent photos of himself masturbating to other women. But when I first heard about the allegations of sexual abuse, I was surprised. He was cordial. He always came off, whether on television or in person, as awkward but respectful. In person he was nice. He proudly told me he just dropped off his reelection papers at the Alameda County Courthouse just a block away as though it was a big deal. As though it was historic. But I didn't care. I've known too many lawmakers to care, and I was indeed high, and I needed to get out of this public conversation with an almost naked congressman. So I gave him a smile and said good luck, and went on my way to find my own fairies and camis in a nearby Japanese garden on a stormy day. This is when I'm supposed to denounce Eric Swalwell for the number of sexual abuse charges made against him and to publicly demonstrate my shock and moral outrage, the same way he denounced Bret Kavanaugh. But despite my initial response and upon further inspection, I'm not surprised. Nice guys rape too. If hashtag me too means literally every woman, then that's a lot of men implicated too. And instead of casting my moral anger outwards in a performative ritual to keep suspicion away from me, I'm forced to look inward and grapple with my own complicity and involvement in a culture where sexual abuse was not just tolerated but encouraged. When I was a young man a long time ago, it was commonly said that women play hard to get and that a no was not actually the end of the chase. We attended parties with alcohol because we thought drinking increased the likelihood of getting lucky. We lionized Bill Clinton, Wilt Chamberlain, and Hugh Hefner because of course a king should have his harem. Nobody wanted to be the guy in a group of male friends who was the last to lose his virginity. It was a mark of shame. You had to do what you had to do to get that V off your forehead. There were limits, but not many, and we could always say the other person shouldn't have put themselves in that situation. People understand, and at the time, they did. When I was a young man, I came up right to the line. I know I did. And I wonder if I passed the line. I might have. I too was a part of the problem, and perhaps now as an older man, I still am, though I'm trying not to be. But it's deep. It's in the way we were raised. It's implicit misogyny, and to really recognize it, we have to own it. I don't mean to indict all men. I'm sure if Barack Obama was a serial abuser, we'd all know about it. But I do believe most men have been complicit somehow in a culture that normalized sexual coercion. That doesn't mean men are bad. It means we have lived in a society and in a world that encouraged the subjugation of half its people, and if the goal is to create a society that is truly equal, then we must unlearn these behaviors and teach new behaviors to the younger generation. So when I hear about Eric Swellwell and Cesar Chavez, a nice guy and a saint for justice, I am not surprised. The public shaming is deserved, and hopefully it both scares and educates others from such acts, though I also hope society learns to allow for the reintegration of the outcasts. Not for them, but for us. Men should denounce sexual abuse and teach younger men that it's not okay. We must be unequivocal, but we should also take a good look inward rather than expediently cast aspersions towards others whose behavior we may have replicated if we were in the position to do so, if we too were powerful. The truth is the shift is happening, and while we regret our past behavior, take solace in knowing that we are also participating in the shift. The growing pains for men in this shift are indeed painful. Physically strong men aren't quite as needed as in the past, and their privileges are no longer unquestioned. Times have changed, and when the change demonstrably is better for half the population, then ultimately it's better for everyone. It is painful to look back at one's past with a new sense of what was right and what was wrong. If there are words I can offer to young men, it would be don't trick yourself ever into believing you can get away with harming another. Even if you legally or socially do, the memory of it doesn't pass. And in time, it haunts you. Speaking of haunting, let's get to this wonderful and strange short story by Kate Chopin. One way I have dealt with my own regrets from the past is by reading a lot of women writers, especially fiction in an attempt to understand and emotionally feel the world in a different way than I always have. Fiction is a great vehicle for understanding the inner world of another because the emotions expressed are relatable. Again, this story is called The Story of an Hour. It was published in 1894, 26 years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing the right to women to vote. It's a story about freedom and how the death of a husband presents a whole host of emotions competing with one another. But this story ends with a deadly twist that shows perhaps it was before its time. So without further delay, The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. Today The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin published in 1894. Knowing that misses Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences, veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brentley Mallard's name leading the list of killed. He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend, in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden wild abandonment in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself, she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all a quiver with new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a pedaler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her, and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it she did not know? It was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will, as powerless as her two white, slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself, a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Free free free.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death, the face that never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely, and she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for her during those coming years. She would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. And yet she had loved him. Sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter? What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being?

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Free body and soul free she kept whispering.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. Luis, open the door. I beg you, open the door. You will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake, open the door. Go away. I'm not making myself ill. No. She was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richard stood waiting for them at the bottom. Someone was opening the front door with a latch key. It was Brentley Mallard who entered, a little travel stained, composedly carrying his grip sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry, at Richard's quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But Richard's was too late. When the doctors came, they said she had died of heart disease. Of joy that kills.