Cover
story Road least traveled
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff Washington
Mark Andersen took the least
traveled road among the roads less traveled. He came to Catholicism by way of
punk rock. Its been some journey, its stages marked by concert posters,
newspaper clippings and personal struggles that he recounts with irony and
humor.
Today, seated on a tilted office chair -- tilted because its
missing a wheel -- Andersen, 41, tall, fit, with close-cropped hair,
transformed through a series of conversions, works with the elderly poor of
Washington. He assists people in the depressed Shaw district with simple
things, like getting groceries. He coordinates volunteers, finding people to
telephone or visit elderly people who live alone. He also helps them in efforts
that are considerably more complex, like threading their way through
bureaucracies that provide essential aid.
On the wall of Andersens office at Emmaus Services for the
Aging theres a black-and-white poster from a Patti Smith concert.
Its an appropriate poster, an icon of the path hes traveled, for,
in a sense, Smith was there when Andersens journey started in his
bewildered teens.
He pinpoints the moment well, the moment his journey started. Its
memory is recorded in his work-in-progress autobiography, Dance of
Days:
A prairie wind blew the remnants of autumns leaves down
the streets of Plentywood, Montana. A longhaired kid in dusty jeans and cowboy
boots, crouching against the frigid wind, stepped through the doorway into a
tiny record store.
The heat of the cramped room that was Garricks Records and
Tapes caused the boys wire-rimmed glasses to cloud over. After taking off
his work gloves and wiping the haze from the lenses, he shuffled through the
bins, pausing to pick up one particular LP. The boy studied a stark black and
white photograph of a woman who had a defiant gaze and disheveled hair. As he
did, excitement flickered in his eyes, a faint smile crossing his face. It was
the record he had been looking for.
The year was 1975. The album was Patti Smiths
Horses. The kid was me. I was 16 years old, taking a break from
hauling grain to the nearby Farmers Union Elevator. The youngest child in
a farm family, I lived out in the countryside on the Fort Peck Indian
Reservation, fifteen miles from the nearest town or paved road.
I had grown up immersed in conservative Christian pieties and
love-it-or-leave-it patriotism. By the mid-70s I was estranged from those
beliefs, feeling suffocated by the narrowness of my world. From what I knew,
Patti Smith seemed like a kindred spirit. When I first played
Horses on my plastic dime-store stereo, it took only Smiths
deep sandpaper voice and the lines -- Jesus died for somebodys
sins/but not mine -- to know that I had been right.
From Patti Smith to the Kinks Im Not Like
Everybody Else, Andersen said that he found music that told him he was
not alone, that the pain he felt was real, that the world was insane, not
him.
A quarter-century later, experience has him told he was right
about that, too. The world is insane. Long before then hed decided he
stood for sanity.
He became the bogeyman in every Reaganites nightmare: a
political science master of arts motivated by punks hard-driving sound
whose lyrics attacked conventional society and expressed alienation and anger.
Andersens vehicle for expressing his rebellion was Positive Force, a
long-lived Arlington, Va., punk rock collective he helped found.
Early punk rock was about social transformation, said
Andersen, riffling through desk drawer files for more news clips, and
Positive Force was one of the very first organized expressions of this impetus,
this spirit in the punk rock world.
The impetus brought the FBI snooping around in the 1980s when the
collective papered Washington with Experts Agree: Meese is a Pig
posters. (Edwin Meese III was Reagans attorney general.)
The collective, only now closing the doors of its house -- though
not its organization -- was devoted to fundamental social change and youth
empowerment. Its motto came from the lost kid on the prairie: Isolation
is the biggest barrier to change.
Andersen grew up isolated, he said. I was facing a lifetime
of manual labor. I didnt fit into any of the social groups because I
didnt drink or use other drugs, I wasnt an athlete, I wasnt
part of the Christian kids anymore. Basically I had this music and certain
gifts that were intellectual gifts, mostly. But those werent highly
valued, he said, in Sheridan County, Mont.
High schooler Andersen went from wrestling grain into elevators to
wrestling with political science and history at Montana State.
Groups like X-Ray Spex, The Jam, Generation X, Siouxsie and the
Banshees, Stiff Little Fingers, all went with him on his dime store stereo.
All the while, music remained the touch-of-a-button hard-driving
reassurance Andersen needed long after hed gone through the
surly-at-home, semi-suicidal ponderings, years beyond the shoplifting charge
and the other scrapes.
Hed stopped going to church -- punk rock was as fierce
a frontal assault on those pieties as could be imagined, he said. Today,
though, he sees it differently. Looking back, the punk rock experience
was for me a spiritual journey, he said. Radical negation, negating
what seemed to be false. The positive side of that is searching for something
thats true.
Andersen was a good student, worked for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.,
and by 1984 was on the World Bank-CIA-State Department career track in the
masters program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies.
But punk rock was opening a broader field of possibilities even
than Johns Hopkins, for Andersen had discovered Washington and was appalled by
what he saw -- the poverty of it -- and in the nations capital. Although
he was on an academic track to becoming a Cold War warrior in the service of
the American Empire, he followed a different beat. The Positive Force
collective was born. Andersen had traded isolation for involvement. It was The
Clashs radical and creative social ethic versus Reaganomics. Johnny
Rotten and the Sex Pistols versus Meese.
Washington was raw shock, he said. A country
whose ideals were on these beautiful monuments, with homeless freezing to death
on the streets in their shadow. World War II veteran Jesse Carpenter froze to
death just across the street from the White House just after I moved here. It
broke my heart, said Andersen, a personification of the sort of bleeding
heart the Reaganites satirized and fought.
The Reagan administration, and its distaste for poverty programs,
was a great catalyst for political action, Andersen said. Reagan
and, for Andersen, Central America. He went to Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua and Honduras in 1985.
An El Salvador moment
Hotshot grad, the radical culturalist who knows all the
critiques, I was just humbled, he said. There was an El Salvador
moment that lingered, and Im glad for it, he said. Someone invited
Andersen to attend a gathering of Salvadorans battling oppression.
They met in a surprisingly large room under a church, people
drifting in over a long period so as not to attract attention.
But it wasnt a meeting. It was a Mass to commemorate the
15th anniversary of their San Antonio Abba neighborhood Christian base
community. Andersen recalls watching the people receiving the Eucharist.
In that moment I saw what Gods reign might be about.
The experience faded, but did not disappear.
Andersens Washington roots and activism sank deeper into the
issues, with The Clashs if I close my eyes it will not go
away telling him he had to deal with what he saw and felt.
There was a secondary element to the punk rock, too -- the clash
with the hippies, the anti-Vietnam generation, whom the rockers felt had sold
out. Hippie activist Jerry Rubin had become a Wall Street yuppie.
The Clashs Hate and War was self-consciously the
hippie love -- peace and love -- turned around. We were
saying, Look how you sold out your ideals, said Andersen.
You created illusions, not the least of which were drug illusions, as if
those were somehow the road to liberation.
Andersen, in his own words, stepped off the face of the
earth. He lived in the collectives furnace room, let his driving
license expire. I was radically estranged from society, he said.
Yet he was fighting to make some sort of peace between how he saw U.S. society
-- his revulsion at the sight of the poor, whether in El Salvador of the
District of Columbia -- and his sense of his own privileged possibility and
revolutionary tendencies.
His consciences goad was that punk rock was
challenging people to live by their ethics.
Punk was also anti-Christian in the era when the Moral Majority
and the Christian Coalition tried to define Christianity for Americans.
By the late 1980s, Andersen was shifting from the Washington Peace
Center to a part-time job at Emmaus, sponsored by five churches, housed in the
offices of the imposing National City Christian Church on Thomas Circle. He was
delving into new challenges as outreach coordinator for the elderly there when
Catholicism reared its strange spirit in several ways.
Ironically, Boston College professor Mary Daly was one of those
who kicked the door partway open. During that woolly radical
anti-Christian period, I was aware of her, Andersen said, and read
The Church and the Second Sex. That was nothing compared to
Dalys Beyond God the Father, demolishing the patriarchal,
repressive apparatus, demolishing Christianity, he said.
One thing she mentioned though, just in passing, said
Andersen, was, There are some who argue that Jesus was a
feminist. To which I say, basically, yes. I checked her footnote to
Leonard Swidlers article, Jesus was a Feminist, sought that
out, and it began the revolution. I began to see Jesus as distinct from the
doctrines of church, that Jesus life and teachings were still a prophetic
critique and challenge and a revolutionary one. It began to open my heart. The
second part was reading the late Penny Lernouxs The Cry of the
People, a journalists 1980 account of U.S. involvement in
oppression of the poor in Latin America. I had seen in some philosophical
sense that Jesus might not be the enemy, he said. Lernoux made it
clear that there were people in Latin America living out, at the risk of their
lives, the notion that Jesus might have revolutionary possibilities to offer us
for the present time.
Jesus the commie punk
Influenced by Swidler, Andersen wrote in Positive Forces
Off Center magazine an article titled Jesus Was a Commie
Punk. It was designed, he said, to engage folks in the underground
in a re-assessment of Jesus as friend rather than foe.
Jesus was re-engaging Andersen, too. Andersen met workers such as
Marie Dennis (now with the Maryknoll Justice and Peace Office in Washington)
and Franciscan Fr. Joe Nangle of the Assisi Community, whom he accompanied on a
Pax World Foundation trip to the Middle East.
But key, he said, was meeting Meridith Welch, a Vincentian
volunteer working at Emmaus. She gave me a window into the very vibrant
Catholic volunteer network. She works with Youth at Risk in Boston now.
Bottom line is one day we were hanging out at the Vincentian
volunteers house, talking about this stuff, said Andersen,
and she invited me, as they were heading out the door, to a Mass for Jim
Lindsey, incoming director of the Catholic Network for Voluntary Service, at
Catholic University.
During the Mass there was a litany of saints. It included people
like Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero, César Chávez and Mitch
Snyder.
I felt a little like I was back in that church building in
San Salvador. They had a litany of saints.
Andersen wondered if there was a Catholic place for him in
Washington. Welch suggested he try St. Als -- St. Aloysius,
the Jesuit parish on Capitol Hill. One Sunday, Andersen went.
I had come home, he said. The upbringing
Id had, the values Id received through the gospel, had basically
oriented me toward seeking the truth. Hed arrived without denying
the crucial role punk rock and the collective Positive Force still play in his
life. He went through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the
churchs official rite for new members. It was a great
experience, he said because the group at St. Als was small, with a
lay leadership team and priest willing to listen to a lot of
questioning. They would keep guiding the discussion back to the
essential, he said: following Christ, through a challenging and
open-ended Catholic vision.
These days Positive Force volunteers, along with others from
Howard and George Washington universities and local churches, work with the
Emmaus elderly.
A decade ago, it was an unkempt, testy Andersen, hair awry and
dressed in raggedy clothes, still living in a ramshackle commune, who applied
to Emmaus for a part-time job as street outreach worker in the Shaw
district.
Emmaus director Diane Amussen must have detected something
beneath that exterior, Andersen said. Her faith in me was a
precious gift.
Soon he was a fixture in the peoples lives in rundown Shaw,
with seniors who ran out of food or medicines or needed someone to talk to or
help fight the drug traffickers taking over the building.
He tells of fixing a vacuum cleaner in one apartment while
homicide squad detectives dug errant bullets out of the refrigerator from a
fatal shooting next door.
Another time I helped convince a desperately ill and
paranoid 94-year-old blind woman, haunted by the ghosts of abusive relatives,
to let an ambulance take her to the hospital, he said.
He had become a member of what was known locally as the SWAT
team for the elderly.
Andersens concerns for the District of Columbias
persons at risk dont end with the elderly. Read behind some Washington
Post headlines, such as the 1998 candlelight procession for slain
prostitutes. Note the organizers and sponsors: St. Aloysius, Asbury Methodist
and other churches -- and Positive Force.
Counterculture still
He carries the message where he can.
When the Washington archdiocesan young adult ministry organized
its recent Jubilee Justice and Service Challenge for 20- to 30-somethings
from across the D.C. metro area, Andersen was on the fliers inquiring,
Would you like to meet other young Catholic adults, learn more about your
faith, and serve those in need? with his e-mail address
(emmausdc@aol.com) and phone number (202-299-0429) listed as contact
points.
Positive Force represents counterculture. Still.
Washington is gentrifying. House prices are soaring. Andersen is
at the center of countering the implications of those trends for the poor.
Emmaus and Positive Force are collaborating on creating a community center in
Shaw. Elements envisioned are a Catholic Worker Bookstore/Peter Maurin Center;
a performance space, art gallery, anarchist info-shop and archive; Emmaus and
its work for the elderly; the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington
and Jews United for Justice, and the Washington Peace Center.
The hope is, said Andersen, the center will
become a venue for bringing not just Catholicism, but the punk-radical arts
community, direct service, interfaith understanding and justice work and
community organizing.
The idea, he said, is to try to break through
the barriers -- age, race, culture, faith -- as well as transcending the arts
versus service, versus culture wrangle, and provide a model for a just
community renaissance, as opposed to gentrification.
As a Catholic -- he formally took the Eucharist at the Easter
Vigil in 1997 at St. Als -- he does not see himself as an ex-punk.
Andersen is punk still, though more quietly aflame. Fame has never been the
spur. His personal hopes for what the Catholic church might be in the new
century are high. To him, the church making peace/amends with the Jewish
community is an important priority.
He believes Catholicism needs to open itself to punk energy along
with new ways of celebrating Mass, being church in ways that bring in
what is real and true in youth culture and counterculture -- through the
possibility, indeed the necessity of the inculturation that the spirit of Jesus
represents.
If Jesus is back in the forefront of Andersens life, Patti
Smith is back, too. She dropped out from public life with her husband to raise
their children, and recently returned to performing.
Andersen and Patti Smith have perhaps been on parallel tracks. The
concert poster on Andersens office wall is current. Her song People
Power has lyrics drawn in significant measure, Andersen said, from the
messianic banquet images in Isaiah.
Andersen, the advocate for the elderly, remains close to his
convictions. As his autobiography reaches the end of its final draft, hes
linked up with a New York publisher who came out of the New York punk
scene.
Beyond its role as a personal tale, the autobiography is
provocative, compelling social history.
Its also a handbook for those pushed onto, or stumbling
along, a road less traveled. With only, at first, music of alienation as a
traveling companion.
Arthur Jones e-mail address is
ajones@natcath.org
Iconography of
punk |
Punk, or punk rock, source of
international iconography that developed and flourished in the last half of the
1970s, is first and foremost a harsh, driving form of shock rock.
Punk, its label taken from prison lingo, is also an attitude and a style. The
latter may be best known by the brash forms it took on the street: shaved or
partially shaved heads, spiked hair, odd-colored hair, pierced body parts and
lots of black.
As an attitude, punk signifies teen
rebelliousness and alienation, façades for a movement that critiqued
consumerism as it celebrated and attempted to reclaim the inner city. The inner
city spirit sometimes took the form of squatting -- taking up
residence in abandoned buildings and the like.
Musical icons included Patti Smith and
Television, whose performance base was New York, and the Sex Pistols, who
inspired British youth and made Britain one of the movements hotbeds.
Other well-known punk groups included The Clash, X-Ray Spex, the Damned, the
Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
In the 1980s, some U.S. youth
influenced by the punk movement described themselves as hardcore,
using a façade of alienation as a cover for their disavowal of tobacco,
drugs and promiscuous sex. The grunge movement, characterized by
slovenly dress, was another outgrowth prevalent in the late 80s and early
90s.
According to www.britannica.com,
the Encyclopedia Britannicas Web site, punks highest point of
impact came with Nirvanas success in 1991, a success that coincided with
the rise of Generation X. Members of that generation, born in the 1960s, often
identified with punks charged, often contradictory mix of
intelligence, simplicity, anger and powerlessness, according to the
Britannica article.
Its underlying philosophy of social
transformation rarely developed into organized action, but street
demonstrations against the World Trade Organizations meeting in Seattle
earlier this year had at their root some of the punk movements
concerns.
--NCR
Staff |
National Catholic Reporter, November 10,
2000
|