My name is David O’Rourke. I am a writer. It might be common in a personal note to say that I have been writing for over fifty years, but it would be untrue. Even more, it would be foolish. A half-century of living in our world goes beyond any labeling. During the course of these years, I have found that understanding my life - which is what I do - has been helped by writing down my impressions. For when I write things down I am initially unclear, relying on quick overviews that allow me to get to the end of the sentence. And then looking at what I have written I can see that it says little. But at least it tells me that, whatever it is I have written must be important to me. Why this? Where did this come from? What I have discovered over the years is that these following questions - which is a conscious choice. - and where they lead has opened my years to the discoveries and adventures that are my life. It is these that I write about.

I write in the first person, probably because I live in the first person. That is more than a numeric statement. Twenty years ago I wrote a memoir which I called The Story of an Accidental Outsider. Looking back now I realize that there was nothing accidental about it. That outsider status began when I was a kid. But it took me awhille to realize it. I started the memoir while living for part of each year (the warm part) in the Republic of Lithuania, where I had gone to live and work just five years after the Soviet tanks had left. Living and working and teaching in what, for fifty years, was paraded by Moscow as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. I had been recruited to be part of an effort by the head of my Dominican Order to help battered people of little or no interest in the West restart lives as single individuals. As often as not the Baltics were confused with the Balkans, another region of no interest. They did not trust Americans whom they saw as carpetbaggers come to exploit them. And since I knew so little about the Soviet government and history I did not know why.

I went to Lithuania after well over thirty years as a priest, most of them spent in a-typical jobs by most standards but typical of our life and work in Berkeley. And the differences in my situations ended up focusing my mind on the roles of language in undermining the civil and human rights of so many people in the country. And now I write about it. But I don’t write theoretically. I write not only in the first person but I write from the first person.. So let me offer here a brief look at what that means. I look at language as a human creation. Today in America we are in the middle of a tough battle to extend - and to keep from extending - civil and human rights to people we have grouped together using intentionally new demeaning labels. And the labels themselves were created drawing on pseudo-sciences, like notions of race. So from here on, I am in the first person. And I carry my opening idea into a note about democracy. Languages are a human creation. We created the languages. They work for us. But who’s “us?”

That has proven to be a tough question - maybe the toughest. And tough because it has taken so long for me to see it as more than a question. Looking back I can see how I have come to see that our questions about ourselves are little more than our settled self-impressions looking for a way to come out into the open. I recall a rainy morning in many years ago. New to Eastern Europe. Walking alone in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It was now to be my home base if not my home for a while. I had made my way to the Philharmonic Square since I knew it was right in the very center of the old town. A windy, rainy gust caused me to look for shelter, and the options of several sidewalk cafes right across from the Philharmonic let me know that I was where I should be. It was 1990. My cafe-shopping skill developed sixty years earlier in Paris told me that the two cafes with printed menus on the windows and clean white tablecloths were not for me. But the third one- plain front, glass tables, paper beer-ad coasters, the guy in black with a rumpled towel over the elbow - was such an easy choice. I do recall sitting in delight bordering on amazement looking out into this really elegant new world and wondering how I had been so fortunate to end up looking out at it with no agenda other than my own interest.

Ideas don’t really go anywhere. From standing still to discourse to questions and then more discourse to back to standing still. I am a storyteller, a writer. Not a novelist, more a journalist. in that I do not seek to create realities. We use images, and images do not have to be established. They really can’t be. They don’t have proof, they have contexts. And that is a crucial difference. I do not want to create people and situations. I want to see what there was inherent, at the core, of their functioning language and it’s value imagery that determined - before any conscious determining - their public morality. Public language has verbal icons that, by their very use alone, determine the moral contours of public dialogue.

Which it also gets back to the ‘who’ us’ I mentioned above. It means going back many years, but going back to really interesting events - back o my student days in Paris in the Spring of 1957 when Guy Molley’s government was falling, or being overthrown. And it was over what by then was the really disastrous events in the War in Algeria. France then was just a few years beyond the losing war and loss of Indochine (Viet Nam) and now the battle was for Algeria which many saw as an integral part of France itself. Battles were being fought out between the students and the police right in the heart of the university quarter, on the Boulevard St. Michel. I lived on the Boulevard St. Michel. I was young, not yet 25, alone, and not smart enough to hide far away from a war that was not mine. A semester of that life - plus the arrival of thousands of Hungarian refugees fleeing their own simultaneous revolt - hammered both contexts and the languages of political revolt and the flight from lethal terror at me on a daily basis.

Well, about a dozen years ago I was in France with a young friend who is good at keeping me glued together and functional on my trips to Europe. We were in Avignon, a lovely historic city on the Rhone River in the heart of the Rhone wine district. We were staying in an old and elegant house dating from around 1650. It is a perfect place for Californians because the restaurant is out under the trees - just like we do here. But, just as in my on student days, there was serious rioting in Paris with injuries, violence, arrests, and some destruction. The pictures in the paper, and the posters being hung up around town, showed again the usual cries for Liberte, Egalite, et Fraternite. Liberty and Equality. All wonderful, beautiful, holy, spiritual. Who can object?. And none of it means anything real. But then of course, that’s never the problem. The problem is always Fraternite. And that’s where the rubber hits the road - or, seen within the Revolutionary city in which we were staying, where the guillotine blade hit the neck. Which Brother Is In Charge? In a church of Religious Orders - like mine - the really serious questions are how to script the ways in which a brother or coterie can garner the most clout to call the shots that associate them well with their stated collective goals. Men, including young men, want to be in control of the contexts of their lives even if for no reason other than to make sure that no one else can call them to account. And by then my narrowness of both work and mindset had allowed me to be of use in ways that allowed me to be of sufficient public use to choose my own work.

Another starting point. One central to this writing. Language is not about ideas. It is about images. What the language does is turn words and verbal rites into symbols that carry the power in them. An example. The Jefferson School Kindergarten. Just turned five, I was marched down Rutherford Avenue, around the corner onto Livingston, and delivered into Miss Olivo’s kindergarten class. There were about thirty of us. That also meant delivery into a new world with its own language. Nothing new about that. The youngest of five boys I was accustomed to delivery - often day by day - into worlds where I was of minimal interest to the landlords and so I created my own and so I went about peopling it, and carefully keeping it and me out of and off everyone else’s turf.

That turf had little room, or desire, for another resident. But Stalin, Roosevelt, Hirohito shook up their mainland very early on in a way I never wanted to, sending the landlords off and out of my world.. If I were interested in any of them enough I suppose I had enough images in my memory to fake-up some local tales. But I guess I wasn’t And they were gone. Their turf was now vacant land.

That was not as difficult as it might seem from here.. that been delivered and word words and linguistic symbols not simple. So after many years at this omplex. because the human And we create them in order to work for us. Languages are very purposeful. But in the course of creating them we slip the languages and the words that give them life and movement into our world in among the ancient and symbols that have been there for ever.. Democracy. Authority. Money. Getting Even. These are words that have been there as long as people. Of course they are no such thing. They’re almost as new as Chevies and Beer. But we need to look at them as though they’re older than dirt.

Now there is one new word,, one that has really set me to writing in the last thirty or forty years. It is a brand new word by language standards. But is is presented as probably the oldest, archaic, foundational, indispensable word in the Western world. It is why I write. Race. Race really is a new word. It didn’t exist really more than a few hundred years ago. But it had to be seen as ancient. It had to be old, going back to the organizations of human life, because our whole world - politically, economically, religiously, culturally and you name it - uses race is the organizing principle that everything we do and have and live in and with - is built on. Where would we be, where would our civilization be, if it turned, the one unifying ground piece, the whole idea of race is a fake? A human invention? And not only a human invention but a really recent one? Where would American politics be? Where would racial quotas be in our schools and all those thousands of jobs keeping track of them be? And Public Television and Master-race Theater and St. Patrick’s day and all of Queen Victoria’s wacky world be? To say nothing of Lowenbrau and Kielbasy and Auschwitz and Governor George Wallace of wherever it was?

So this is what, I have been writing about for the last twenty-five years or thirty years. But I write about images, not ideas. And I describe images because ideas in our world of monetized knowledge and its sales forces are the products of folk with little or no culture. The images, by contrast, at least the ones that I am stuck with, will not turn me loose from the human terrors they still shout out in their quiet daily way. So, with this brief intro spelled out, I think it is time to go to work, drawing the fields of images I have been lucky enough to have wandered in at times when my mind and memory wanted to pay attention. Some of this here is repetitive, but I think its concrete sense may be helpful to understand where I have been.