The Golden State

“I read your letter in the paper,” I tell her. Ed slaps Cindy’s back and hoots and Cindy looks defiantly at me even though I think my tone of voice is neutral and she says “Well I’m not really one to write a letter to the paper but I just felt it was right now that the supervisors are gonna put it to a vote.” “You know my Grandma Cora worked for the BLM,” I tell her, intending it as a mild rebuke. “Damn near everybody worked for the BLM in this town,” Cindy says. “But the head honchos don’t live here and they can’t keep telling us how to run things.” “My uncle Rodney wrote a letter too,” I say. “He says the North State needs a lot of government support.” “Well Rod works for the Forest Service don’t he,” says Ed, just as Cindy says, “If we had some industries up here we wouldn’t need the state’s money.” Ed nods. “We can’t all be pencil pushers,” he says, which is unjust to Uncle Rodney who is outside or in his truck about half of most days. Ed must see me narrow my eyes because he then says, “Hey—I love Rod. We go all the way back to kindergarten.”

Everyone’s sense of propriety spurs us to move on. I ask Cindy where she’s from intending it to be a courteous neutral question but she’s from San Bernardino, way south, way way south. Flatlander, I think, with the tiniest tribal thrill, and she obviously is sensitive to notions of authenticity herself because she adds, “Been up here ten years, though,” and I say, “Ah,” and she says, “I came up with my ex. He’s gone now but I knew this was home as soon as I got here” which strikes me as remarkable, to have that reaction on your first visit.

Ed asks me what I do and Cindy tells him that I work at the University. “You teach down there?” he says, which is what most people justifiably think might be the primary activity at the premier public university in the state but is not in fact the case. “Not exactly,” I say. “I work at a research institute for Islamic societies.” “Like ISIS?” he asks me. Which, Jesus. At the University it is basically considered indecent to mention ISIS unless it is in the form of a question like “Whither Transnational Movements in the Age of ISIS?” “No,” I say. “You know, like any country where there’s a shared Islamic past. Like Turkey or Morocco or, uh, Jordan,” trying to name places where there will be fewer bad associations. “Or Indonesia,” I add, since this is technically part of our mission along with manifold places in sub-Saharan Africa which are all horribly underrepresented in the Institute’s programming due to the many swirling complex currents of religious studies area studies history anthropology political science and how they do and do not interact and do and do not reflect and refract aspects of scholarship and society.

“Well what do you-all think about ISIS?” he asks. I wish we were on campus and I could defer to Hugo or Meredith since it is really against protocol for me to talk about Issues as opposed to Programs. I am supposed to plan and find funding and administer, not have Ideas, although paradoxically I would never have been hired without a demonstrated interest in Ideas, since Hugo and Meredith are terrible snobs about credentials and need someone to write their research proposals and keep them company and Karen was a marketing major and has never left the country. That said I don’t really know anything about ISIS, what I do know is a hundred Turkish verbs that begin with k, but I have half-listened to many lectures and panels that I try to recall now. “Well, a lot of people don’t think that ISIS really counts as an Islamic group,” I say as I suck down my drink, quickly because the taste of almonds makes me gag. “They kill a lot of people who are Muslim.” “But they’re running a whole country on Islamic Law,” Cindy tells me. “That’s the whole thing they want.” “There are a lot of different interpretations of what Islamic Law means,” I say. “Some people think they are actually operating more like a nation state, like they decide what they want to do and then they find the justification for it later. Like, the uh, U.S. does.”