Last Saturday, Edwin Peña, my Little Brother, graduated from San Francisco State University. Congratulations my Friend.
I want to quickly add that the story didn’t start with Edwin, it started with his mother, Martha.
Martha Silva was born on a ranchero near Durango Mexico, she was one of eleven children. Like millions of other people born in poor, rural, Mexico, Martha uprooted her life and moved North, coming to the United States on a Work Visa in the 1980’s.
A couple of years later, shortly after her son Edwin was born, that visa lapsed and she was faced with a dilemma that has been faced by millions of people. Whether to return to Mexico legally or to stay in the United States without papers. Martha’s son was born in booming Silicon Valley, in Stanford Hospital, he is an American, America is all he knows. Martha stayed.
There are lots of immigrants that come to America while they are living high on the hog and they continue to, but most make huge sacrifices. Almost always, those sacrifices are made for a return that will only be realized by the next generation. That is our collective American Story, almost all of our ancestors came here for a better life, not for themselves but for their children. When Martha decided to stay she became part of that collective, part of the American Story.
Martha Silva worked cleaning houses, she started her own HouseCleaning business, and she raised Edwin as a single mother. When I first met Edwin he was in the 4th or 5th grade and we were introduced by Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area.
I fell in love with Edwin immediately. He was sweet and earnest, intensely interested in the world and in love with sports. Today, he is a man and every bit as sweet and earnest, he is still interested in the world and he is, what I would call, a jock. He is an outstanding young man and he just became the first member of his family to graduate from college.
Michele had her DNA tested a couple of months ago. She has about 1.2% Neanderthal DNA, about 2% Densovian DNA – which is very surprising at first glance, but may be the source of her bright blue eyes – and, of course, 96.8% good ol’ Homo sapiens from East Africa. It got me thinking how H. sapiens sapiens– our biggest genetic contributor, basically us, in other words – moving out of Africa could have interbred with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Denisova hominins both of whom left Africa about two hundred thousand years earlier.
That small group of H. sapiens – I’m going to drop the second sapiens – migrated out of Eastern Africa, into what we used to call Asia Minor, about sixty thousand years ago. They were people with almost the same DNA as us, they were anatomically modern humans, but they were very different. They were the people we all evolved from, very dark West Africans as well as very white Finns, Chinese and Native Americans, everybody. If the few hunter gather tribes that still exist are any guide, they lived in small groups, suspicious of outsiders, and ready to fight (even today, hunter gathers spend the majority of their time fighting, getting ready to fight, or getting stirred up to fight).
As an aside, in all likelihood, our 96.8% ancestors, the smart ones, moving out of Africa into Asia Minor, were dark skinned and the Neanderthals, the less smart ones that they ran into, were light skinned. End aside.
When they met, it was not a love match like Romeo and Juliet. Think more like Boko Haram raiding the pastoral Nigerians. They probably fought and the DNA evidence strongly suggests that the intermixing of Sapiens and Neanderthals came as a result of Neanderthals stealing the Sapiens’ women. Women were currency, they were booty – sorry, I couldn’t resist – the spoils of battles.
Mad Max: Fury Road imagines this brutal world of kidnapped women in a post-apocalypse landscape with cars that are as mutant as the people driving them. The basic conceit is that the “brides” of a warlord, Immortan Joe, have been set free by another badass, Imperator Furiosa, played by a one armed Charlize Theron with a buzz cut. The movie is like Gravity in its simplicity and episodeity. A long, evolving car chase across a desert landscape, improbably complicated, and then a break and another long, different, car chase and another break and another…. To quote The Telegraph, Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire.
The chasers are religious fanatics who believe that they will go to Nirvana if they die fighting for Immortan Joe and the chased are the women. The movie makes it clear that the hellish afterscape is a result of and perpetuated by men. As an aside, I once asked a woman why she thought men ruled the world, she didn’t even hesitate before saying Because they are bigger and stronger and can kick the shit out of any woman who doesn’t like it. I think that I had sort of expected a men are more devious and aggressive type answer and I tried again, a couple of days later, asking another woman the same question; I got almost the same answer, again without any hesitation. I have learned to not ask women that question again. End aside.
“There’s a great opening line in a book called The Go-Between, which I often quote: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Denise McCluggage.
Denise McCluggage, ski-racer, racecar-driver, and writer extraordinary, died a couple of days ago at 88 and, as I sit here, I am tearing up. Both for her and for a lost world that I am a little ashamed I feel so attached to. It is hard to talk about Denise McCluggage without talking about that lost world that she embraced and defied with talent, humor, and enthusiasm. It was a world dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Men, so entitled that it seemed like the natural order of things. It was the world before Nixon lost to Kennedy, the world of the first season of Mad Men. It was also a time when few enough women wanted to be equal to men that they were not a threat and McCluggage was often the only woman in the room.
Denise McCluggage was born in small-town Kansas in 1927, became a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle in its heyday, and dirt track auto racer after graduating summa cum laude from Mills College in Oakland. She moved back east to race sports cars big time and backed into becoming a publisher of Autoweek. She moved to Europe to race and write about racing and, in the process, she hung out with the best drivers in the world. McCluggage never made much money but she always lived life on her terms, enthusiastically and fully.
She was a suburb skier and an even better driver, but I remember Denise McCluggage as a sports writer before there were women sportswriters. She was a great storyteller and probably the best way to talk about her is to let her do the talking.
Originally, I’d ride around Europe with Phil Hill, who got a new Beetle every year. I was headquartered in Modena like most everyone else. Then I got an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, which I raced, including at the Nürburgring. I don’t remember what happened to it, but I went back to bumming rides. I had gone up to the Nürburgring with Alejandro De Tomaso and Isabel Haskell, because I was sharing an O.S.C.A. there with Isabel. The car broke in practice. Henry Manney III offered me a ride to Stuttgart, where I could wait for Isabel to put my passport on the Rapido train from Modena. I had suddenly realized I’d left it in my helmet bag, which I’d stowed in the race car.
So I hung out in Stuttgart for several days, and I visited Mercedes, and then Porsche to see my friend Huschke von Hanstein. There, he had a Porsche 356 just back from a show somewhere. It had an unheard-of electric sunroof and knock-off hubs. It could not be sold in Germany, because knock-off hubs were illegal for street use. He suggested I buy it. Like every other time I bought a car, I had exactly enough money in the bank to cover it–in this case, $3,000 (1959, remember?). I never thought that now I had nothing left. There was always something else down the road. Unfortunately, I’m still like that. By the time my passport arrived, I’d bought the Porsche and was ready to head for Modena.
She was sensitive and funny. The world will miss her, I already miss her, so here is one more sample, writing about Saudi women not being able to drive:
I felt the depth of the cultural abyss one day in the south of Yugoslavia when I was doing the Liege-Sofia-Liege rally in the mid-’60s. I was driving a Ford Cortina with Anne Hall, and we’d been caught in the momentary aspic of some crowded village near the Albanian border. The population was heavily Muslim. Few women were in the crowd and those few were swathed head to toe in black. Only their eyes were visible. At one curving junction, we stopped again for hand carts, bicycles, and trucks to clear. A nearby post of black slowly turned and stared wide-eyed directly at me–interrupted perhaps in her usual lowered-eyes mode by the fact that she had seen a woman–driving a car.
I starred back, in stunned awareness of an odd coincidence: the shape of our windshield and the shape of the eye-opening in her black covering were the same extended oval. We two women, probably having arrived on this planet at close to the same time and in much the same way–kicking, naked and wet–now looked through similar ovals on very different worlds. The brief but somehow endless moment broke. We turned back to our diverse worlds. I, the Woman Driver. She, the eyes-only mystery.
After resisting it for the last six months or so, I have started reading Nuremberg Diary, by G.M. Gilbert. Ed Cooney has been pushing me to read it, saying – over and over again – that it is fascinating and revelatory. Gilbert was the prison psychologist during the Nuremberg Trials and the book covers the trials – mostly – in the words of the indicted. Ed is right, the book is revelatory and strangely fascinating.
All the German World War II characters villains we have been reading about and seeing in movies, ever since 1945, are here . General Jodl, Field Marshal Kettel, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering are here, of course. There are the thugs like Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Himmler’s Security Forces – including the Gestapo – and intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, Chief Nazi philosopher and Reichsminister of Eastern Occupied Territories. I have been reading about these guys for years, but it has always been in the context of what they did.
With Hitler and Himmler dead, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering is the embattled leader, trying to save the Nazi’s and his own reputation. He both denies the horrors of Nazism and justifies them as the geopolitical necessity of Germany defending the west from the scourge of Communism. A couple of the prisoners, Albert Speer and Hans Frank in particular, are horrified art what they have done, but most of the prisoners either try to deny what happened and what they did or excuse it.
Except for Hitler, I really did not having a sense of who they were. This book was written in 1947 and it has that easy story-telling style of the period even though most of it is in the words of the people on trial. We have been taught that these are evil people – the Nazis, the World War II German military leaders, the prison camp guards – that they are the definition of Evil. Goering fits the picture perfectly, but most of the characters in this book just seem to have been sucked into something much more powerful than they are.
My default position is not to believe in Evil and I usually think of people doing evil things, not being Evil but reading the prisoners own words, as banal as they are, tries that belief at times. When Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, says You can be certain that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning. – But Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong., it is not easy to believe he was only led astray.
Although it may be time to let go of World War II and the Nazis, reading this book bring it to life again.
Martha Silva was born on a ranchero near Durango Mexico, she was one of eleven children. Like millions of other people born in poor, rural, Mexico, Martha uprooted her life and moved North, coming to the United States on a Work Visa in the 1980’s.
