Gut Shot

The shirtless man who stumbled into the bar clutching his side and yelling, "I’ve been shot." His hand dropped away from his wound to reveal a splash of red that looked like a carnation pinned to his skin.

Forecast

The drought dragged on for years, and the people kept anxious eyes on the heavens.

“Oh to live under a cloud,” the priests said, but the fathomless blue of clear skies persisted.

Finally, roiling clouds gathered over the near dead earth and the ground received the downpour. Puffs of dust arose as, not raindrops but, spiders struck the terrain. They clogged the streets and swirled down the gutters into the sewers, and within days all yearned for winter when crabs would lie in brittle drifts against the sides of empty houses.

An Inconclusive Rant Regarding Christmas, Work, and Dread

As much as I looked forward to having 4 days off of work this Christmas Season, I am now facing down a Santa-sized portion of Sunday Dread when I consider returning to work tomorrow. Oh sure, the holiday was pleasant enough, which isn't to say it went off without a hitch. In my family it is derigueur to have at least one blow-out, one out-sized flare of anger and hurt feelings that then sours my outlook like a lingering hangover. It is as if some malevolent elf, astray from his dungeon at the North Pole, inflicts chaos into my silent night. Still, though, we did, I think, come to some unspoken accord and, the egg-shells notwithstanding, managed to move around each other with a minimum of friction and dollops of graciousness.

So what, you might wonder, is so bad about returning to work? I can only say that the lurking quality of the endeavor replete with a circus's worth of elephants-in-the room (a distinct breed from African and Indian elephants; larger ears, fragile egos, and mawkish sensibilities) provides a weighty atmosphere suitable for the composition of dirges and the promotion of pharmacological interventions. Such is the back drop in the "helping professions" in which I labor...

Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

Historically, Denmark has stood apart from the rash and reckless herd. It was Danish royalty who, during the Nazi persecution of Jews in Denmark donned the yellow Star of David in solidarity with the victims. How sad that now during the Climate Summit taking place in Copenhagen the Danish police have been granted the power of summary arrests and are exercising that power to suppress demonstrations critical of the manipulations by the world's wealthy nations to preserve profits over the welfare of people; how sad that Denmark has sided with a cynical conception of the Summit, one that elevates corporate profit as "law and order" against the preservation of the planet as "anarchy and activism."

To those of us in the U.S., long accustomed to such false framing of events, we might not even register the sadness of what the Danish Police are pursuing in the summary arrests of demonstrators. We accept without a flicker of doubt the assignment of the word "terrorist" to students in California who bravely and boldly seized University buildings protesting the state's economic blackmail threatening their education; and too many of us still believe as Joe Bageant recently wrote that "most terrorists just happen to live where all of the world's oil is." We live, as the title of Chris Hedges' recent book has it in an "Empire of Illusion", or as Henry Miller had it years ago, in "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare."

Long accustomed to the betrayal of our own ideals we may well scratch our heads in disbelief at the effrontery of those rabble-rousers gathered in Denmark who are trying to have their voices heard over and above the indifferent chatter of statesman.

Our abilities to deflect the costs of our rapacious appetites with the fog of consumerism and its resulting indifference to reality only demonstrates that , in the words of William Butler Yeats,

We had fed the heart on fantasy,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare.

And in Denmark, a cell door clangs shut on the conscience of the world.

Sick

“To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades the driving force behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable to those without it,” he said. “The public option is only a means to that end—and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish that goal.”

President Obama

Oh really, Mr. President? How very telling and explanatory when one stops to consider the current morass of the health reform debate.

President Obama’s characterization of the entire impulse of health care reform as an attempt to merely end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable preserves the primacy of insurance companies and sees as central the profit motive of those companies…just don’t make the cost too dear, please. It helps explain why single-payer gets scant attention, dismissed as being too disruptive to those already insured. What? This doesn’t square with the President’s own claims about the driving force of the debate. How would a system that would drive down the costs of the insurance companies making insurance overall more affordable be, at the same time, disruptive? This is to say nothing of providing universal coverage.

As far the ideal of universal coverage, I’d like to remind President Obama that it is this ideal—not narrow business interests, not a tweaking of insurance company procedures and practices—that has been the driving force of the health-care reform debate. Furthermore, it is in pursuit of universal health care coverage where the character and morals of our country that Senator Kennedy spoke of reside.

Sunday Scribblings: Keys

Pushed to the back of kitchen drawers, abandoned to empty purpose, are the keys to missing locks.

Perhaps in a stranger’s kitchen a wide-eyed youth discovers a cache' of shiny locks,

And stalking the world, liberated from myth, the mischief of the gods to which keys remain the signifier.

Sunday Scribblings

An excerpt from a co-workers monologue with a post-script of brief commentary

…maybe I shouldn’t have gotten that flu-shot, cause I’m allergic to eggs It asks if you’re allergic to eggs…do you have any aspirin? I have a headache, probably an allergic reaction What are you going to do this weekend I’m going out of town, well if I feel okay Do you feel okay What’s the matter Can I get more aspirin from you Someday I’ll buy you a whole new bottle oh, I owe you seventy-cents don’t I or is it a dollar There were only five people here this morning...

By day's end I feel as if I've been beaten about the head by tiny rubber mallets. AHHHHHHHHHHH

Eureka!

Having recently finished reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao I've been left to cast about for another book holding language that sizzles. I picked up Driftless by David Rhodes--a fine book, yet I set it down with my itch unscratched. Last night, however, restlessly searching my bookshelves, I found a copy of Barry Hannah's novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan and I was off to the word races! As I am only a few pages into the book I have no summation to offer, but I can offer my enthusiasm for Hannah's craft. As the poet Charles Simic remarks, " Hannah is the only novelist whose sentences I keep underlining and underlining..."

Guess I'll read with pen in hand!

The Past Month

Wow, what have I been doing for the past month that was so compelling as to keep me from posting on this blog? Digging into my recollections I find the events pass my attention like so much sand through a timer.

I've done some reading. Only yesterday I finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I'd encourage everyone with an interest in literature, language, and story to study this book. The Pulitzer Prize hardly seems sufficient for this narrative. The language crackles with intensity, with passion, and with the bi-lingual/bi-cultural perspectives of the characters therein. The book is very much an elaboration of the Derek Walcott line "...either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

I picked up Philip Levine's autobiography The Bread of Time--Toward An Autobiography. Levine first came to my attention when I plucked his volume of poetry entitled What Work Is and read the the title poem:

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is--if you're

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may no do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

Shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

Your rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it's someone else's brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, "No,

we're not hiring today," for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who's not beside you or behind or

ahead because he's home trying to

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you're too young or too dumb,

not because you're jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don't know what work is.

I wondered, then, of the man who could write in such a plain-spoken way and direct way about work, about love. I wondered of his upbringing--Detroit, Michigan, his education--studying with John Berryman and other luminaries, and his homes--Detroit, Spain, California.

I think, probably, the most consuming thing I've done in the past month is to have made the decision to return to school. I've danced around that decision for years now having considered a Master's in Social Work, a Master's in Counseling, a Master's in Psychology and finding the idea of specialization too confining, too narrowing at a time in my life when I am more able to have and hold wider perspectives. The Master's Program in Liberal Studies allows for study across disciplines, allows for the energizing clash of differing viewpoints, and allows for the enriching possibilities of synthesis.

I've otherwise occupied my time enjoying the harvest of our small garden, of meals enhanced with fresh tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers. And how better to enjoy these waning days of summer than in dining on the past efforts of Spring?

Writing and Reading as an Imaginative Act

The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer. Tim O’Brien



I have a simple criterion for fiction; it should delight. As a participant in innumerable writing groups, much of what I’ve read falls short of that standard. This isn’t because of the journeymen status of the writer, but of a lack of the writer’s imagination in the story. In the absence of the imagination the reader is confronted with mere words on the page. What can catapult reading from the act of “running eyes over words” to the experience of a “seamless dream” is imagination.

In our current “based-on-a-true-story” preference we evaluate our stories by their adherence to the facts. We frequently read critiques of such pieces singling out a lack of fidelity to “reality” as the damning dismissal of the piece in question. We confuse facts with truth, and in doing so diminish our expectations for fiction to those of mere reportage.

Tim O’ Brien’s essay Telling Tails appearing in the current Atlantic Monthly( and I urge you to follow the link. READ IT) explores imagination as the raison d’erte of a fiction writer. Good fiction is not merely a narrative, a plodding recitation of details that paint a scene in which the merely mundane events of life occur to a character. It is not a presentation of “sincerity” but, as Jim Harrison has argued, a presentation of the quality of the writer’s mind on the page, a presentation capable of engaging the reader.

O’Brien insists this does not rule out realism. Only think of the widely read Hemingway story Hills Like White Elephants and you can see O’Brien’s point. All of the oft touted bromides of writing groups – the telling detail, verisimilitude—have their place in fiction, but they are not enough. As David Byrne of the Talking Heads so aptly put it:

facts all come with points of view/facts don’t do what I want them to.

And what I yearn for in fiction is that dream wherein I'm transported, and in the act of being so moved, am also transformed.

More Thinking Than Doing. A Report From the Land of Good Intentions

In the days since my last post I’ve considered writing on a number of topics. I’ve thought I’d comment on Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq as it skillfully places recent U.S. foreign adventures into historical context; I’ve thought about expressing my admiration for Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried. In my opinion this book is tied for 1^st Place with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American for best novel regarding the Vietnam War; Having recently (re)experienced a debilitating bout of back pain I thought I’d write more fully on that experience; I recently applied for a writer’s residency and thought the process worthy of comment; And in the past week, I’ve learned of a “new” approach to the treatment of addiction that looks promising, Integral Recovery and contacted its founder John Dupuy to explore professional opportunities.

All of that is to say I’m still here. Still churning with ideas and intentions. Still coming up short, however, on follow-through!

Theology

In Sunday School I was taught "Cleanliness is next to Godliness."

When I left dirty clothes on the floor of my bedroom instead of putting

them in the laundry hamper, Mom said, "Spare the rod, spoil the child"

and laid wood across my ass.

In contemplation, I admired the symmetry of my fingers

The middle ones longer than the rest.

Raising them toward God I said, "Things are sure a mess down here,

you old fraud."

I Need a Remedy For What's Ailing Me

In the absence of any upshot from last Friday’s MRI, I remain ignorant of causes and cures. I put a call into the doctor and I continue to wait for his call.

Yesterday, I returned to work. Within an hour I was a caricature of Igor, the hump-back lab assistant and major domo to Dr. Frankenstein, dragging my left arm after me like a sack of laundry and mouthing, “right this way, master” to my boss who looked on appalled by my antics. I wonder if Herr Doktor could bolt a new arm/neck onto my carcass and send me forth to frighten villagers and spawn a host of B-grade movies?

Speaking of entertainment, tonight, as part of the continuing celebration of 14 years of marriage to T, we are going to see Dr. John. I’m counting on this doctor to have a gris gris bag of musical voodoo with which to cure what ails me.

Vicodin

Suspecting a pinched nerve in my neck, my doctor prescribed vicodin. I undergo a MRI tomorrow.

Pushing through the pressure I feel between my eyes, I fall into a pleasant journey. I’m on a barge propelled by unseen engines that purr quietly enough that I can hear the languid current of this river swirl against the side of the craft. Towering trees of blossoms line the shoreline, and a garden scent floats on the air.

On board, a gazelle gently nuzzles my hand. Peacocks parade on the deck. I pass beneath the dark eyes of lemurs murmuring blessings. I’m uncertain of the destination, but having embarked from a place called Pain any other venue is fine, fine, fine.

The Lie: A Short Story

"You'll all be glad when I'm dead and gone," Vern told his family.

They laughed and turned up the volume on the T.V.

Vern returned to his garden, talked to the beans, caressed the tomatoes.

He died when the pumpkins broke into smiles.

His family ate weeds.

Some Thoughts on Writing Near the End of My Vacation

“Write smart now, Greg,” Rick said. “You’re getting hand-written rejection slips because your stuff stands out. Knuckle down. Bring it up to the next level.”

While it was pleasant to hear such encouragement from a published writer, my heart sunk. While Rick’s words rang true, and I knew intelligence and effort were required, I despaired at what it would take to follow his advice. The next day at my desk I reached down for that something extra and found….nothing. I packed away my manuscripts and turned my attention to earning a living.

For a number of years since then I’ve made forays into writing. I’ve done some good work, yet I did so without the corresponding thrill I’d felt previously. I felt split somehow, that all of the relative ease of creativity had been replaced by hard work that I lacked the heart for. On top of working a job and meeting my financial responsibilities I felt old and weak against the demands of the page, the drive of a narrative.

I do not mean to dramatize my situation, or to elicit sympathy. What remains with me is the desire to write. It is bedrock I return to again and again; it is a way for me to be present. It is something I can’t not do.

As I return to Rick’s words, I get hints of meanings I didn’t at first discern. Perhaps writing smart is taking care of the story AND my self. It is about being present on the page AND in my life. It is about traveling with awareness from doing the dishes to writing dialog. And that kind of awareness in the midst of the activities of my life—be it writing or employment—IS knuckling down.

She Loves to Watch (how do you watch?)

In a previous post of a collage my friend Anno suggested some commentary accompany the piece. I'd prefer the viewer be allowed to read what, to me, is a strong narrative inherent in the images.  I realize, however, those images might not be as obvious in the posts as in person.

I'll resist dissection of this post, but offer by way of explanation the following by Charles Simic:

Everything's foreseeable. Everything has already been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be avoided. Even this boiled potato. This fork. This chunk of dark bread. This thought too....

My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows that. She says there's no god, only an eye here and there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy watching TV to burn her as a witch. 

All Those Who Strive For Freedom Deserve Our Remembering

Myth and Torture

 

I suspect that Obama’s recent about-face on the issue of releasing the so-called torture photos is more about preserving cherished cultural mythology than the stated “protection of our troops” from attacks in the far-flung reaches of American Empire. Shaken by the revelation of the torture at Abu Ghraib, the mythology that argues for American high-purpose on the world stage is shaken. Thus shaken, the debate has devolved into particulars; that is, Abu Ghraib, extra-ordinary renditions, and Guantanamo were aberrations occurring during the watch of a cowboy president and the only debatable idea is if such methods were effective in protecting the American people.

 

On one side of this debate is the bloviating former vice-president Dick Cheney claiming that the premium the Bush Administration placed on security trumped bothersome restraints such as treaties, human rights, and humane values. On the other side, President Obamarefuses to release the photos, breaking a prior commitment to do so, justifying his about-face with the platitude that “nothing new is revealed in the photos.”

 

In a sense, Obama speaks the truth. Even a cursory review of the history of American imperial development reveals that torture has been a constant feature, yet a feature obscured by an elevated rhetoric of divine providence. As Noam Chomsky reminds us in a recent article from Alternet, our national self-concept is framed by the phrase “city on a hill”, borrowed from the Gospels by the Puritan John Winthrop in 1630. Something of the “divine right of Kings” entered the American psyche, blinding us to our own worse excesses and providing a “civilizing and humanitarian” rationale to our expansionist project. In other words, the poor blighted peoples of the world need our intervention, and woe to those who resist. One need only consider the genocide of the Native American peoples to realize that as regards our national destiny, nothing will be allowed to stand in our way.

 

Yet examples distant from us in time are often met with dismissive shrugs. Even the more recent record from the 1980’s in Latin American—the disappearances, executions, torture, and death squads that operated and were funded by the Reagan Administration—cannot penetrate the distorted mantel of heroism with which Reagan has been draped.

 

Torture, as Chomsky reminds us, is a tool of empire. And for all of our embrace of “American Exceptionalism” as an animating force, we have in the past and continue through today to behave as interventionist thugs.  But like a knight of old defending the honor of a maiden, our national mythology will survive whatever revelations are allowed and the illusion of our virtue will remain intact.

 

 

Picturing Hell

 

 

GQ Magazine recently published a story with accompanying photos regarding intelligence briefings originating from the Department of Defense and furnished to The White House. The cover-sheet photos of these reports showed triumphant images of US. Military actions in the Iraq War appearing beneath biblical quotations. Frequently, these reports were hand delivered to The White House by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield.

 

Having endured several years of Rumsfield pronouncements I was familiar with his self-righteous rhetoric; with the revelations of these bible verse laden reports it is apparent that what I had considered self-righteous, Mr. Rumsfield himself (and presumably other top officials in the Bush Administration) considered RIGHTEOUS.

 

Certainly, Rumsfield isn’t the first government representative to seek to ally The Almighty to military adventures. The Bible itself is full of armies putting the unbelievers to the sword. A central symbol of Christianity—the Cross itself—moved to representative prominence with the vision of the Roman Emperor Constantine who, it is said, was granted military victory by his embrace of Christianity and by emblazoning the shields of his soldiers with the Cross prior to battle. Prior to this peculiar alignment, the religion of Jesus represented itself with symbols of life—fish and bread. From Constantine on, however, Christianity became known by the Cross, an instrument of torture.

 

The critic George Steiner in his book “In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture” implicates monotheism in providing psychological wounds to human kind still being worked out in our civilizations. The graphic representations of hell-fire and damnation, prominent in our Western Tradition provide the “rough sketches” for Inquisitions, pogroms, Death camps, and the current idea of a “permanent state of war” waged on terrorism. In a linear conception of Time such as we understand History, all life moves toward a final reckoning, an Apocalypse, an End-Time.

 

The dangerous hubris of what the Rumsfield reports reveal is the identification of narrow national interest with complex symbology, manipulated for geo-political gain via the U.S. military. The military itself, having been evangelized, increasingly views itself as doing “God’s Will.” Theology these days comes form the barrel of a gun.

 

Religious language of any religious tradition is laden with metaphors, which, if taken literally, become dangerous realities of degradation and domination. Subtleties of language are ignored at great peril. Onward Christian Soldiers marching AS to war—a reference to spiritual battles, becomes in the zealot’s mouth justification for holy war.

 

As the poet and novelist Jim Harrison remarked, “There is no such thing as a free metaphor.” I fear we will be paying the price for the appropriation of these metaphors for generations.

Hints for Oedipus

From the Closet of History

That world! These days its’ all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?

Denis Johnson

Emergency

Jesus' Son

Last week Democracy Now observed the 39^th anniversary of the massacre at Kent State when four students were shot and killed. I was in eighth grade, confused and shocked by what the Ohio National Guard' assault on students that day. Education, I was taught, brought opportunities and lead to a richer fuller life. The startling images of dead students stood as refutations to the lessons I’d learned.

It was a strange time. Protests against Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia thundered across the country and around the world. High schools and middle schools twitched with unrest as the student bodies thereof absorbed the division of the greater society around them. As I walked down the hallway of Otsego Middle School, a discreet black armband on my sleeve, I was grabbed and slammed against the lockers. “Are you with those ass-holes in the streets?” Wild eyes and hot milk breath of blooming adolescence blew in my face. I had no words for a response. Otsego was a small town, and this incident lay between myself and my assailant throughout our high school years. It rode with us together once when he picked me up as I hitchhiked my way home. It was summer after graduation. He was headed off to the Air Force Academy. I later heard he dropped out. I heard he was dismayed that the Academy wanted to remake him, change him; and to his way of thinking he was everything they’d want him to be.

* * *

The great Brazilian theatre pioneer Augusto Boal died last week at the age of 78. Founder of the renowned Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal was serving time in prison when I visited Brazil in the summer of 1973.

At seventeen I was excited to see again Jose’ the exchange student who the year previous had lived with and enriched my family. He introduced us to wine, broadened my appreciation for music, and told me stories of pristine beaches populated with scantily clad, beautiful women. At 17 how could I have not been excited to go to Brazil?

I knew other things of Brazil, a darker history of military coups, imprisonment, and a governing body of generals; the Brazilian flag proclaimed “Order and Progress”, but it was a progress to be done without progressives. Students, union leaders, intellectuals, artists, and actors were rounded up and sent to the gulag or exiled.

In honesty, however, the country’s underside didn’t much impinge on my awareness. I wandered the beaches, slack-jawed at the beauty I saw. In a small beach side village, macumba drumming pounded into the night, and walking the beach the next morning I found bouquets of flowers washed up onto the shore. As I bent over to pick one up, Jose’ warned me off. “Macumba,’ he said as he made the sign of the cross. Yet for all of my blissful absorption in beauty, a darkness of authority and repression was part of the atmosphere. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets, and military bands blared strident, brassy marches. I was counseled to keep my papers with me always.

Walking downtown with Jose one day, we were clowning: a string of puns, wisecracks and one upsmanship. Zinged by a cleaver retort, I affectionately grabbed Jose around his shoulders.

“Stop it,” he said.

Of course, I continued to hold him and started to shake him slightly, laughing and pushing him to and fro on the crowded sidewalk.

“Stop it,” he insisted, looking over my shoulder.

“Stop it,” I mocked him, laughing all the louder and, truth be told, enjoying the ease with which I was physically besting Jose’.

“Greg. Stop it now. We could be arrested by the soldiers for this.”

Augusto Boal was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured before being released into exile. Years later, after the rule of the Generals passed, he was allowed to return. He continued to work with the oppressed, to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, to have the experience of oppression speak through him. His work spread around the world, his dream reaching beyond Brazil; a dream of freedom for the world.

Rest in Peace, Augusto Boal!

Mercy

O'Lord have mercy

On me amidst the ersatz and illusions.

Let down just the hem of your garment

And let me touch the genuine article.

Our National Medicine

I’ve enjoyed making collages lately, bemused and sometimes shocked by the juxtapositions of images and the context that emerges from combining disparate elements. Sometimes my mind struggles to achieve a broad enough view to encompass, say, the image of Henry VIII and a crowd of war refugees from the conflict in Dafur. What narrative could connect these persons, these historical moments?

 

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate collages especially as I attempt to get my mind around the torture issue as it is played out in the media. The startling juxtaposition here is that torture emerged out of a context of “spreading democracy”, and that the active agent of that effort, the United States, views itself as “a city on a hill” a beacon of freedom and justice. At once the instances of torture were viewed as the work of a “few bad apples” who were certainly acting outside of the established protocols. Then, a messy trail of memos indicated that torture was a matter of policy, the implementation of which was justified for the sake of “national security.” These are, after all, dangerous times that call for “enhanced techniques.” And now that we have moved toward calling water-boarding what it is, namely torture, our leaders tell us that we should, however, “move forward” with the pressing need to address “current” realities.

 

This call to “move forward” is consistent with the ahistorical mindset of America; we take pride in our past to the extent we ignore its darker troubling traditions. And so we tout our occupation and conquering of what is now the United States, what we still call our Manifest Destiny, but never fully allow ourselves to consider the displacement and destruction of the native populations and cultures or the enslavement of a people whose toil and suffering made our wealth possible. Our “approved history” is like gauze to cover the deep wounds to our national psyche. In a way, leaping across time to the shame of U.S. torture, what is coming to light is hemorrhaging through this veneer, this gauze of exceptionalism.

 

According the Professor McCoy at the University of Wisconsin Madison, the United States has a history of utilizing “enhanced techniques”, torture. On this morning’s Democracy Now he traced a lineage of horror that includes the infamous Phoenix Program of the Vietnam Era and the Death Squad practices common from the 1950’s forward in Latin America (practices that the United States funded, trained, supported, and participated in). Following the disclosure of these events there was an outcry of disapproval, a wringing of hands, and then…amnesia.

 

The critic George Steiner in writing of the genocide of the Jews by the Nazi’s pondered the agonizing reality of Time that allows for such a horror to occur alongside the occurrence of happiness. How can a moment hold such contradictions? We struggle with the intimacy of such moments, and the failure of our moral imaginations leads—as it has in Europe and elsewhere—to denials that this genocide occurred at all.

 

That our national history holds similar contradictions provokes in us the shrill notes of patriotism, the brash refutations of Limbaugh, Hannity, and others who assert, “America does not torture.” Our national inability to look history in the face and attempt to reconcile our highest ideals with ugly realities distorts and perverts our politics, our economy, and our faith in democracy. The modicum of outrage mustered gets muted by cries of traitor or by blanket assignment to membership in the “blame American first crowd.”  Forgetting becomes the only way out of shame, and so “moving forward” toward the future becomes the prescription, and “real Americans” only open their mouths to swallow this bitter pill.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NYC Library and T-Rex

The Folly of Kings: The Delight of Death

Combine for Today

Waking later than usual this morning, I peel away the sleep. I recall a restless night of dreams while writing in my notebook, flashes of images throughout the day: my father manipulating tendons on my younger brother’s hip in a room so refrigerated that, I’m told, I complained aloud in my sleep; shadows, and a sensation of fleeing something; skeletons and laughter.

 

Later, around mid-day my son accompanies me while I run a household errand. It is a familiar route, one we’ve taken together often over the years. I drive through memories: adolescent frustration and worry, tight-lipped rides of stewing anger, hurt feelings and hot tempers---Like signposts. Milestones.

 

Back home it occurs to me that my dream regarding my brother had to do with my father’s senior worries. He is old. He wants to be certain his sons are positioned to take care of themselves, that they have standing…that they can stand on their own.

Persephone Dreams of her Lover

Prayers for the Return of Persephone