Mullen Remembers M*****d

In There’s a House in the Land, Shaun Mullen chronicles how a tribe of Vietnam vets and associated pals and gals made an old farm north of Newark, Delaware into an island of freedom. Like his earlier work, The Bottom of the Fox, Mullen’s House provides insights on the American Seventies. This time, however, he treats those of his contemporaries inhabiting the piedmont west of Philadelpha, PA to a wild and wonderful reminiscence. 

Thousands remember—and more wish they did—the Flag Day parties, with their roasting pigs, the house band Snakegrinder, the socializing of bikers with profs, the abundant garden among disused trucks and cars, the tanker-loads of Genesee Cream Ale, and the mountains of marijuana, much grown there. 

The Seventies were the shore the Sixties washed up on. Those who climbed out of the surf were left to rebuild the American Dream, shredded by Vietnam, JFK, MLK, THC, LSD. Who knows how many such islands of self-reliance and rugged individualism there were in America, but few had in residence an amanuensis as talented as Shaun Mullen.  Mullen shows that while American rules were shattered, American values persevered.

Mullen chooses a sort of roman-à-clef approach, changing almost all the names except his own, that of the band Snakegrinder, and the dog Meatball. I, receiving an advance copy for my tangential familiarity, will not fink, only that New Park is Newark, Delaware, and the New Park Tavern, portrayed in its piss-smelling splendor, is the old Deer Park Hotel. There, it is apocryphally reported, Edgar Allan Poe drunkenly cursed all who stopped in that village of philistines that they might never leave. Still, many will recognize lead singer “Edward,” who died on the railroad tracks while attempting to flag down a train, subsequently appearing in a dream to tell “Rafe,” the Weather Underground fugitive, to grab his kazoo and start singing center stage. Many bought belts from Doctor Duck’s leather shop, but few, beside myself, ever tasted a sub on a whole-wheat roll from his short-lived deli.

In episodes and thematic chapters, Mullen details the geology of “Kiln Farm,” the flora and fauna, the architecture, the dogs, the goats and other livestock, the roles the denizens filled and the crafts they practiced, the ambiguous status of women, the tragic crash that killed “Pattie” and her daughter “Caitlin,” and Mullen’s road trips to Aspen and the Florida Keys.

Eventually, the tribe moved on. They “didn’t so much grow up,” Mullen explains, “as succumb to the mechanistic gravity of the real world that compresses all but the roundest of pegs.” The vicissitudes of erstwhile freedom were neither good nor bad, but they accompanied some wonderful progress in education, ecology, and human unity. Hey, the shit-house Bible at the farm was the Whole Earth Catalogue, that “Access to Tools” for anarchists and late twentieth century pioneers.
There’s a House in the Land may shock or titillate, but Shaun Mullen captures the spirit of a time and place. Those who were there will chuckle and maybe weep.

Mullen will sign copies of There's A House In The Land beginning at 1 p.m. on Sunday, September 28 at the Blue Crab Grill in Suburban Plaza off Elkton Road in Newark. Snakegrinder and the Shredded Fieldmice, a popular Newark band in the early 1970s, will reunite for the occasion. The title of Mullen's book is from a lyric in a Snakegrinder song. (Postscript Sept. 8: Due to the high demand, a second show has been added at 8 p.m.)
Shaun Mullen blogs at Kiko’s House and The ModerateVoice.

Preface to 2nd Edition Autoplant

            On December 19, 2008, the last production shift at Newark, Delaware’s Chrysler Assembly Plant, scene of my 1992 Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, filed out, leaving behind their last Christmas cards, half-full coffee cups, production charts, cotton gloves, and dreams of sharing the American Dream.

            The world where the imaginary Big Man, Gravy, Billy Goat, Warthog, and a fictional version of myself had worked, sweated, and turned from mutual torment to solidarity was gone.

            Folks who have read or seen Autoplant may take it in different ways. Some may find it to be a cautionary tale about how some workers and students, deluded by 60’s revolutionary fantasies, disrupted industry and academia. Others may see it as some sort of a romance, a quest, complete with mythic characters, a dark night of the soul, and ultimate redemption. Still others may see an inspirational lesson in how ordinary folks, with all their fears and limitations, can apply the lessons of solidarity to improve their lives.  However you see it, the issues that led to their actions (or delusions) are repeating themselves today in new forms. Thus, and since the old edition is sold-out, it seems appropriate to produce this second edition. Fair warning to the squeamish: you’ll find adult situations and crude shop-talk here, but as I say in the monologue, “if the shoe fits, it’s your own damn fault.”

            Back when I wrote Autoplant, my concern was with how exploited labor produces spiritual alienation. Alienation—as in “inalienable rights”—means to make foreign or separate. Long story short: assembly lines separate us into little parts of production and only use little parts of our abilities, so we are alienated from our whole selves, spiritually carved up. And then the bosses  separate us from the value of the product by taking out some to buy supplies and machines, which they control, keeping a chunk in profits*, and returning a portion to us in wages and benefits, about 8% of the price of the vehicle for autoworkers. Alienation is what gave me the nightmares of dismemberment that I recount in Autoplant.

            Now, with deindustrialization, NAFTA, the Great Recession, and the firing of millions of us, we are even separated from the machines that were built with our labor. As the UAW anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin, describes it:

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;

Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;

            These days, instead of dreaming fretfully of infants chewed up in the jaws of a machine, I dream about Newark Assembly as a place of belonging, of harvest sharing, of that  “solidarity forever” expressed in the last line of that verse above:

But the union makes us strong!

            Ironically, my present employer, the University of Delaware, which played so prominently in Autoplant as the dream “gymnasium” from which I wandered to the nightmare of assembly line dismemberment, has purchased the Chrysler site. UD intends to use it as a new hub for high-tech research, business, and academics. New jobs are unlikely to be blue collar or even local, however, as tenants of such industrial parks tend to import their employees in-house and in any case will only be hiring those with technical and advanced degrees. Alternative purchasers, industrialists who might have re-hired Chrysler workers, were discouraged from bidding on the site.

            You see, UD is a bit of a hermaphrodite enterprise: both public and private, depending on which gender suits it on any given occasion. For example, according to the News Journal (24 Oct 2009), “[i]n a footnote in the bankruptcy court filing, attorneys for Chrysler noted that other potential purchasers may have been reluctant to ‘take the risk’ of buying the property because UD had the possibility of gaining the land, under state law, through eminent domain and has publicly indicated a willingness to use such rights [of a public enterprise] to secure the property.’” Not only that, but UD is giving most demolition and re-construction contracts to out-of-state and non-union firms. UD argues that their Board requires that they take the low bid, typical of any private enterprise. Prevailing wage laws that would induce them to hire local union firms are only for public institutions.

            The greater significance of UD’s shrewdness in nailing this deal is how replacing blue-collar with lab coat jobs is seen as part of the inevitable evolution of the global economy. Those jobs are gone forever, it’s time to get over it, start your own business, or retrain after some twenty or twenty-five years out of high school. You can do it all on your own lonesome. After all, ain’t individual responsibility the American Way? Now, many Chrysler workers are making it, but some just barely, and some have become economic evolution’s collateral damage. Personally, I’m doing OK. I retired in 2001 after thirty-one years, and now I’m “teaching more than a minutes worth of Shakespeare” at UD.

            Time was when folks would admire us in our UAW-emblazoned jackets as men and women who worked hard, had fought the boss shoulder to shoulder, and had won a fair share of the wealth we created. We might not be genteel and sophisticated, but our solidarity was an inspiration to any regular working Jane or Joe who believed she or he could fight for a better deal.

            Somewhere along the way, about the same time industrialists were shipping jobs overseas and investors began gambling on credit default swaps, solidarity became the big enemy.  According to current fashion, if you combine your strength in unions to make the boss pay you a fair wage, then you are a thief and a socialist. We’re led to believe that any guy big biz pays more is merely taking from the guy big biz pays less. We’re led to believe workers should let the infallible market set their pay in the same mysterious way that hedge managers and oil barons do. And don’t blame the banksters for the economic melt down. Instead, blame Arabs, blacks, gays, feminazis, immigrants, ACORN, taxes, and unions, such as those representing government workers.

            The month that I write this, March of 2011, the nation and the world is seeing what solidarity can do. In Egypt, men, women, middle class, poor, young, old, Muslim, Coptic Christian, socialist, and traditionalists combined to topple a dictator. In Wisconsin, teachers, sewer workers, pencil pushers, students, firemen, and cops are confronting an oil baron’s flunky, the Governor of the state, who has attempted to strip them of fundamental human rights.

            Now, Autoplant is not a Bible for revolution; it has more to do with redemption. And while I wanted to let Americans know what hard work means, Autoplant was largely motivated by a desire to make sense of what I experienced at Chrysler, to laugh about it a little, to apply some of what I know about poetry, and to reclaim parts of myself I felt I was losing by working there. With this second edition, I am hoping that I, along with my UAW Chrysler sisters and brothers, can reclaim some of what we have lost since Newark Assembly was shut down.

            Sparking a new revolutionary spirit wouldn’t be so bad, though.

*See “The Crisis at Chrysler 1979 at the beginning of chapter 3

Toward an Ecology of Local Literature

     What does a behemoth publisher like Bertelsmann AG, the German firm that owns Bantam, Doubleday, and Random House, have in common with an agricultural giant like Cargill, Inc.? Besides the obvious, that they are both transnational corporations, they both replace local harvests with bio-engineered invasives.

     Unlike “frankensoy” shipped from China, of course, literature in this digital age does not leave a long carbon trail, unless China is where it is printed. Hence, I do not object to disseminating the multicultural garden sprouting from the soils of every bioregion or under the feet of our migratory human race.  It’s a vital part of thinking globally.

     What I object to is the silence, the engineered inability to sense the here and now, to lift one’s nose and sniff the rot in the local breeze. What does a neighborhood smell like when a bank owns all the politicians and peddles bunko credit? What does the water feel like as it slowly heats the proverbial frog?

     Non bio-engineered local writers may ask, “If we don’t submit to altering our genetic codes, how will we earn our daily bread?"

     We know how the current publishing model promotes only block-busters and their imitators, how books by unknown authors get but a few months to justify space on the global book shelves before being remaindered to the dollar store or extinguished in the shredder.

     How much less might a local writer find a market, with his provincial interests in, oh, say, some biker tased and gunned-down by cops as he rolls forward vomiting on a city stoop and the attorney general whose dad is the Vice-President of the United States saying it’s OK or some black chicken catchers at a downstate farm replaced by machines after they sue for years of stolen wages? What local business or multinational corporation headquartered here would bankroll that sharp nose?

     What state grants would do more than keep a non-bioengineered native writer chasing a perpetually receding horizon?

     Here’s what we do. Local progressives activist: read and promote local literature and use it as an organizing tool. Reformist non-profits on the sugar-tit of corporate grants: utilize local literature to generate a common vision and uncommon strength. Local writers: turn from all that “how” of writing you get with MFAs and workshops to the “what’s going on” you get when you turn on your senses and engage with your neighbors. Using both cyberspace and local space, meet, collaborate, and forge deep alliances.

     When each local community sows its political and cultural seeds in its own soil, we’ll weed out the corporate invasive strains and reap literature that’s alive and change we can smell, taste, and see.