Acedog's Scribbles & Bits

The Great White Hope

2012-01-11T14:51:00.000-06:00

I predict that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for president. I believe the fix is in. Somewhere a gaggle of old white guys—good old boys—have been tasked with choosing The Great White Hope; they’ve chosen Romney.

Romney will get the party nod not because he is the most knowledgeable about economics or foreign policy. So far his performances have demonstrated he has about as much depth as a wading pool. And it sure isn’t his ability to connect with audiences. To quote Robin Williams, “He has the warmth of a snow-pea.” Those who have dubbed him “the Rom-Bot” are closer to the man’s political raison d’etre.

What those wizened old bastards, waxing cynical in their dotage, are counting on is Romney’s ability to be the Everyman. Now, in this context what this means is Every White Man. I realize this excludes many progressive white people who, if they read this, would object however; according to the political arithmetic of electoral showmanship you are no longer really white. You are beyond the pale.

Romney’s appeal is to the pale, to the anemic, to the walking dead. It is an appeal of a blank slate upon which these unimaginative denizens can attach their hopes, their dreams, and their less than subtle racist visions of restoring the United States to greatness. For greatness read whiteness. And Romney, lacking much of a vital identity of his own, will not bleed through the layers of gauzy hopes projected onto him.

Romney stands ready with the image of the privilege he carries as a White Man to reoccupy what is surely thought of His Proper Place in the White House. And that warms the cold hearts of those geezers who have made Romney their man.

Found Faces

2012-01-10T17:56:00.000-06:00

The Myth of Morality

2012-01-08T11:11:00.000-06:00

I’m only several pages into The Forging of the American Empire by Sidney Lens and I’m already struck by his summation of the animating impulse of American Empire under the phrase the myth of morality. So powerful and all embracing is this myth that we have committed the lives of men and women and our economy to the pursuit thereof, blind to the reality that underpins it.

The grace notes of this myth are on full display in the campaign rhetoric of the presidential candidates. We hear of democracy, freedom, equality spoken against a star-spangled backdrop of political tradition and we think we know what is being said. But what does democracy mean in a context of disenfranchising voters, a feat that if accomplished turns those thus affected in unpeople. The unpeople according to George Orwell are those who are not considered, whose viewpoints are not just ignored but negated. What does freedom mean in a context of indefinite detention, an ugly provision of the odious Patriot Act granted continued life by Obama? And what can equality mean against an overall backdrop of privilege, a disappearing middle class, and institutional racism?

Those questions, however, if raised at all, are answered with an insistence in the primacy of the myth and with impatience for what is deemed obvious. As Howard Zinn, in his introduction to Len’s book, writes:

In early 2003, Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor, wrote in the New York

Times:

America’s empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and white man’s burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21^st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy.

Only someone blind to the history of the United States, its obsessive drive for control of oil, its endless expansion of military bases around the world, its domination of other countries through its enormous economic power, its violations of the human rights of millions of people, whether directly or through proxy governments, could make that statement.

As Zinn makes clear, we must ignore American misdeeds in order to derive solace from this “myth of morality.” We trumpet our bellicose international interventions in slogans such as “Freedom Isn’t Free” when, more to the point we should proclaim, “Free Markets (so-called) Are Not Freedom!”

Change the Channel

2012-01-02T08:55:00.000-06:00

...oh, and Happy New Year!

Two days into 2012 and I'm wondering if perhaps the world didn't end after all. Even after 10 days of time off in which I did little but eat and rest and read (with a little writing thrown in for variety) I'm left feeling weary and worn-out.

And while reasons for my exhaustion may include my advancing years, I'm blaming it on 2011. Think of the the multitude of significant events that took place in 2011. Without taxing my already low energies I think of the continuing economic crisis, the continuation of the most odious aspects of the Patriot Act, the continuation of Git-mo (I'm too tired to look up the proper spelling for Gwantomato), the entire host of GOP candidates for President...

As these events occurred I was subject to outrage. I ranted. I raved. I had long phone conversations. I wrote letters. I signed petitions. I tried, in short, to take a stand. But on what was I standing?

It seems a continual game of the Rabid Right to successfully bait the left with outrageous statements. And at this juncture I realize that I should trot out an example of such outrageousness, but I lack the strength to do so. So, lacking the energy to produce proper evidence I ask that you trust me.

Now that I've gained your trust, I want to say that the Rabid Right--and by Rabid Right I include the Republicans and Democrats-- is wrong. Wrong about what, you might ask? Well, don't ask; you trust me, right? Well, alright then...

As the past few elections have demonstrated, being in power is about tapping vast amounts of cash. Remember, Obama raised record amounts of $ from Wall Street. That's right, this so-called socialist raised a shit-ton of dollars from the seat of capitalism. And when the rent came due, Wall Street got bailed out. You might wonder what Obama got out of the deal besides a peculiarly shaped office from which to run the world, yet isn't that enough? And isn't that reason enough to spawn a host of power-hungry misfits to run for office? Strip away the rhetoric (I almost wrote high minded rhetoric but there is nothing particularly high minded about bigotry and greed ala' Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Newt Gingrich. And as for Romney...Well, tailor's dummies don't say much) and very little is left.

Or rather, what is left is injustice. Surprised? That's because the thick fog of bullshit usually hides that unpleasantness. And that is outrageous! And that exhausts me, and so I'll close now.

I wonder what is on T.V.....

"American! Why do you not honor your poets?"

2011-11-20T09:38:00.000-06:00

I found the title for this entry in Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. It was a question addressed to her by a caretaker of a Parisian cemetery where Smith had gone to pay her respects to Jim Morrison.

I was reminded of this question this morning as I read in the New York Times Robert Haas' account of being beaten by baton wielding police while attending the Occupy Berkley protest. This former U.S. Poet Laureate had gone to the demonstration with his wife to observe and to plead with the police for the safety of the students. Such intentions earned him bruised ribs and the consideration of what he refers to as contingencies, things that don't necessarily have to be so.

And I wonder what would it take for us as a nation to honor our poets? Where might we go as a people who respected the vocation of vision not tied directly to a bottom line? How might a polis be that could embrace the tension of disonance? What might it mean to encourage the production of poetry in our children, in our workers, our politicians, our elderly?

Such questions, I realize, are dismissed as naive. Life is serious requiring hard-headed men making pragmatic decisions. Even so, I found the fullest answer to why we don't honor our poets in Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift:

The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, "If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either."

So what little honor we allow poets, if honor it may be called, is to damn them with self-justification, it is to pity them. As should be obvious in the illustration of Haas' experience at Berkley, pity is a brutal emotion employed to maintain the disadvantage of the pitied.

The Iowa Straw Poll...What a Riot!

2011-08-14T10:08:00.000-05:00

In the aftermath of the London riots many in the United States are asking, “Could it happen here?” There is fear in the question, an acknowledgement that if such events could occur in Great Britain with its civil social traditions what portends for us whose civil traditions are of a less restrained variety?

I’ll intentionally ignore the precedents of riots linked to political and social unrest on both sides of the Atlantic, not because I don’t think history should be ignored but because my point is more to the point of what has been called “the commodification of dissent.”

One need only consider the recent Iowa Straw Poll where Michelle Bachmann emerged as the front-runner in a pack of political midgets. Fun House mirrors furnished by the largely corporate media exaggerate to chilling affect Ms. Bachmann’s victory. And as outrageousness eclipses any vital political discourse, other charlatans join the fray. Enter Rick Perry, the anointed candidate from Texas!

What I’m suggesting is our political process has degenerated to the “cult of personality” and that our campaigns are but exercises in vanity for those who parade, not ideas, but hubris. Once in office these egoists rum amuck behind the façade of patriotism, behind engineered catastrophe, behind self-righteous religiosity, and behind a fear promoted for the continued enrichment of the privileged. With faux outrage they loot the public coffers for their comrades in the private sector and ride roughshod over democratic ideals.

So, while the pundits continue to dissect the etiology of unrest in London, I’ll hazard this premise; in the United States we’ve domesticated unrest, tarted it up in ersatz Christian piety, shrouded it in notions of outraged elitism, and, every 4 years we run it up the flag-pole to see who’ll salute. And in a culture primed for spectacle the candidates can count on the bedazzled populace to make the appropriate gesture.

The Bathhouse

2011-07-26T19:22:00.000-05:00

That bathtub in which Grover Norquist wishes to drown a shrunken government is crowded with children, single mothers, and the many colors of the poor. They circle the drain. The middle class have their collective toe in the water while the rich snap their naked buttocks with twisted towels of dirty dollars.

Back in the U.S.A.

2011-06-24T13:09:00.001-05:00

I don't mean to mislead anyone; I know that most pieces that have a similar title begin with acknowledgments of gratitude to freedoms, football, stars and stripes, or some such iconic shorthand for "goddamn it's good to be back where things are done right!" So, don't say I didn't warn you. This ain't one of those pieces.

I always experience a bewildering sense of alienation when returning from abroad to the United States. I recall while still a high school student recently returned from Brazil, and at a dentist appointment the hygienist said, "I bet you're really glad to be home." When I demurred, she became quite aggravated, and as her fist was clutching sharp, pointy dental implements I let her rant and scrape the foreign debris from my teeth(a bright smile is important in America, after all!). Even at that tender age I detected a brittle, overly sensitive national image.

The mere mention of people leading rich, fulfilling lives outside the borders of the U.S.A. often provokes, I've noticed, rabid jingoism in my fellow citizens. Their bombast seems to always implicate me in some kind of anti-american stance when all I'm really trying to suggest is that throughout the world people live according to different norms, speak different languages, follow different religious traditions (or none at all), and count their existence as worthwhile. I struggle to see how this makes me anti-american.

I'm not suggesting, either, that other countries don't have problems, corruption, etc. that make, by comparison, America the "best country in the world." But as the comedian Dennis Miller once quipped (back in the days when he was funny!) "claiming that America is the best country in the world is like being valedictorian of night school."

Perhaps, all I'm really trying to say here is "do we have to be so thin skinned?" Do we have to trumpet our xenophobia as a virtue? Can't we admit to our fears that, say, for example Finland has a more democratic system than do we? Or that Cuba has a health care system that serves the people and not profit motives? Can we acknowledge these and other foreign factors and work to make things better here without condemning and or threatening foreigners?

As for me and my alienation, well, perhaps it is just me. Maybe I'm not as cock-sure and yankee-doodle damn dandy certain of American superiority. And maybe, as has been suggested to me, I should live elsewhere. For those of you who embrace such intolerance I welcome you putting your money where your mouth is and send me a check so I may relocate elsewhere. For the more reasonable among you, let's talk.

War and Afterwards

2011-05-30T14:39:00.001-05:00

The widespread jingoism which arises on Memorial Day usually sends me into hiding so as not to ruffle star-spangled feathers of sentimental hawks. Yet this year, I'm going out on a limb and perch next to a few hawks and remind them of a history that I think deeply enriches this day and makes room for those who have served their country in the armed services and room for those who have not served with a weapon but who do the hard work of peace-making.

The original title of Memorial Day was Decoration Day. Started after the Civil War it had the twin purposes of Remembrance and Reconciliation. Remembrance was a call to remember those soldiers who, on both sides of the conflict, lost their lives; Reconciliation was to build a peace, peace on an ongoing basis.

My father is a WWII Veteran. He is proud of his service. It was service that contributed to the halt of fascism. It came at a great price. He was lucky in that he was not physically wounded. His wounds did not show in a missing limb or worse. He was able to move on with his life, or so it appeared. His wounds emerged with a temper wired to a hair trigger tripped by domestic incidentals such as missing car keys, a crookedly mowed lawn, a spot on his trousers, spilled milk. Then and at other seemingly insignificant occurrences his anger would spill out in a loud, profane utterance and he would be white-lipped with rage. He would try to displace responsibility for his own emotions onto his children, onto his wife, onto some "goddamnsonofabitchincocksucking" other. Later, he would seek solace in the garage or in his garden. Still later he would collapse into his recliner and withdraw behind a curtain of newspaper.

Disorder was an enemy, yet the range of what was proper and correct was so narrow and so ill-defined at the same time that my brothers and I were constantly trespassing upon the minefield of his emotions. His scars were passed onto us; his trauma--transfigured, yes--became ours.

His trauma was vague to us and all encompassing. We grew up seeking clarification, some clue from Dad, some essential architecture upon which we could hang what had become our emotional baggage. Sadly, he was unable to even admit to his confusion and the currents of alienation he experienced from his own family.

Memorial Day became, for me, an obstacle to working this stuff out. I worried about sounding ungrateful regarding Dad's and other veteran's sacrifices. I worry less about that now. I know that any observance of war time duty that does not at the same time seek reconciliation is a glorification of war and a justification of policies, often policies based on greed or fear, that serve not the American people but the narrow interests of a few who remain, by and large, the storm makers for the weather we all end up facing.

Jousting at a Windbag

2011-05-26T21:21:00.000-05:00

In Minnesota a despicable bill has passed wherein the electorate will vote on proposed changes to the Minnesota Constitution that will define marriage as between a man and a woman.

I sent a letter generated by the Human Rights Campaign to the Minnesota Legislature urging them to vote against this procedure. I received an answer from Senator Parray. And then I replied.

Dear Senator Parry,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I take heart and thank you for pointing out that "there is nothing currently in state law or the state constitution that would prevent the legislature from enacting addition rights for same-sex couples or authorizing civil unions." Can I count on you to sponsor such a bill or to support such legislation in the near future assuring parity of civil unions with marriage?

Sincerely,

Gregory Chamberlin

--- On Mon, 5/23/11, Sen.Mike Parry <Sen.Mike.Parry@senate.mn> wrote:

From: Sen.Mike Parry
Subject: Re: Your actions have consequences
To: "Sen.Mike Parry"
Date: Monday, May 23, 2011, 10:03 PM

I want to first thank you for your email. I know that it has been a frustrating time these last few weeks, and I am happy to see that you are still willing to participate in dialogue with your legislators.

While I am sure you understand that the “Marriage Amendment” bill puts the decision to amend the constitution on the 2012 ballot, I want to be clear that this bill does not change a single state law or have a single impact on the existing civil rights of any Minnesotan. Furthermore, there is nothing currently in state law or the state constitution that would prevent the legislature from enacting addition rights for same-sex couples or authorizing civil unions. A "yes" vote on the bill means, yes, the legislator wants all Minnesotans to decide whether or not to amend the constitution. A legislators' vote on the bill says nothing about their position on same-sex marriage, but will say a lot about their interest in letting the people have a voice in this issue that is important to many Minnesotans.

I would also like to take point with the idea that we are somehow neglecting our jobs. While I can understand that it may look this way on the outside, it’s just absolutely not true. Being the chairman of the State Government Innovation and Veterans Committee, I can tell you that I worked with senators and staff day and night to provide a budget for Governor Dayton that would right-size state government, promote agency efficiency, and do so without raising a single dollar in taxes. We are increasing spending by 6%, something the other side of the aisle has been very quick to mislead the public about. And all the while, the DFL has not offered any budget bill to speak of, any redistricting map to speak of, and they voted against Dayton’s tax increases.

While I can certainly understand your frustration because I share that same frustration, it is not in us that you should find it. The majority party sent a complete budget package to the governor’s desk, and he has decided that he will not sign them. But even worse, he won’t even work with our offices to find a solution that he will sign. We have been transparent in our entire budget process, and the Governor refuses to work with us on any points.

Again, I do understand your frustration; I don’t want a special session either. I would suggest that in these final hours of the legislative session, you contact the Governor’s office (which he has shut down for the night on the last night of session) and tell him you want him to work with us just as we are trying to work with him.

Again, thank you so much for your email. I really appreciate you taking the time, and I hope that we can continue to keep the dialogue open.

Senator Parry

Senator Mike Parry SD 26
State Capitol Building 309
75 Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd
St. Paul, MN 55155
(651) 296-9457

My Reply:

Dear Senator Parry,

Sincerely,

Gregory Chamberlin

As of yet, Senator Parry has not replied.

Caught in His Ear

2011-03-27T16:41:00.000-05:00

Bombs exploding, the cries of the wounded, the last gasp of the dying.
This desperate cacophony won't be dislodged by a Q-tip, or by anti-biotics, or
by a doctor's hand.

It is the soundtrack to his memories, to scenes he wishes he could delete
And to which he adds his own lament.

Doctor My Eyes

2011-03-16T13:00:00.001-05:00

A week ago an intern where I worked came into the office and announced she has Pink Eye. She was instructed to return home and not return until she was free of this malady.

Yesterday, I was in the copy room when the Operations Manager asked me, “Does my eye look red?” Indeed it did.

Shortly thereafter my eye began to ache and itch, and I told myself I was being dramatic in imagining things. This morning, however, my eye feels as if a cruise ship has anchored in its blood-red waters. A visit to the doctor confirmed my suspicions.

So as I spend the day in quarantine, remaining contagious until the prescribed eye-drops eradicate the catchiness (24 hours), I read that Michigan’s Governor Snyder has at his disposal emergency powers with which to appoint corporations and CEO’s, should he see fit, to run communities. This can be imposed by his decree, this subversion of democracy. No elections need by called or held, and as I understand it, no appeal possible.

This planned action echoes the agenda made more famously obvious in Wisconsin by Governor Walker and reverberating through, I hear, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Florida. These actions are trumpeted as necessary measures with which to restore the economy. They are really the continuation of a giant swindle in which wealth is transferred upward.

This nonsense gained traction under Reagan and has remained the wet dream of the wealthy ever since. Suppression of worker’s wages, decimation of unions and labor laws, rigging of the market to benefit the top 1 to 3 % of the population, disenfranchising of significant portions of the electorate, and now a naked power grab by Governor Snyder.

Optimistic observers of the political scene predict that student and worker outrage as occurred in Wisconsin will become the take away lesson eclipsing the audacity of Walker and his minions. I hope they are right. Recent calls for a general strike sound a pleasant echo in my ears.

Yet, as I squint out at the world such clarity eludes me. The boundary between government and corporation is fuzzier than ever, and the boundary between politician and businessperson even more blurred. Years ago it was said, “The business of America is business.” Now, it appears that the poor and workers have been given the business. I grope about for a corrective, a remedy that, like the eye-drops my doctor prescribed, eradicates what he diagnosed as an invasive infection.

"Arizona"

2011-01-10T16:55:00.000-06:00

The Elite

2011-01-10T16:53:00.000-06:00

They look down

but never get down

'Else the little people

would spit in their eyes

Three or Four Cigarettes

2010-12-22T10:31:00.000-06:00

I recall a passage from the Journals of John Cheever that speaks to my current condition. It goes something like this I'm sitting in a yellow chair smoking three or four cigarettes. I don't smoke, but the vague agitation of Cheever's entry, the restless paralysis, rings true for me. There is plenty to do: pack for holiday travel to the in-laws, clean the house, meet my son for lunch-- all these tasks and more line up like gates, the passage through which would convey an imprimatur of normalcy. And yet I do nothing. Maybe I'll take up smoking.

Seeing Red

2010-12-13T13:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we were caught behind a red-rust colored Camino, the rear of which was covered with celebratory messages of bloody salvation. Covered in the Blood of the Lamb read one such bumper sticker; Blood red is the color of Redemption read another. Ice and snow obscured the complete text of several other stickers, yet I was able to see that blood figured into the narrative of each one.

Today, while browsing the shelves at the library, I saw two middle age men hovering round a computer, discussing quietly to themselves the message on the screen. Eaves-dropping, I was able to pick up the disappointed tenor of their conversation. It seems that the web-site they were considering proclaimed the body count of the pending Biblical Apocalypse has been over-estimated. These two were discussing the relevance of Biblical citations to projected fatalities, and I thought I saw one of them doing a summary tally on his fingers as if to recheck figures against his shattered expectations.

Imagine the poor guy who owns the Camino; he may have to downshift the tone of his bumper stickers to something less ghastly, and seek a message of life rather than one of death from his chosen tradition.

That such alternative messages are inherent in Christianity is, of course, available. My seminarian wife tells me that up until the 10th or 11th Century, life affirming images of Jesus were more representational of the faith. These images depicted fountains and rivers as representational of what IT was all about. Of course, the ascension of the cross as the dominant symbol of Christianity began with Constantine and gathered momentum with the "conversion at the point of the sword" theology of Rome. In our day and age such gore becomes the fodder for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, the violence therein pornographic in its appeal.

I offer these observations not to create controversy and not as a believer, but to offer a reminder that, starting next week, more light will be coming into the world, the days reaching however feebly at first toward Spring. And that process, that hope, is more easily glimpsed when we wipe the blood from our eyes.

Seeing the Storm Out in Style.

2010-12-12T16:11:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's winter storm left many people stranded far from home. Local news outlets interviewed travelers over-nighting at the airport in Minneapolis. They appeared on camera, putting a brave face on their discomfort as they attempted to settle in for a night sleeping on the floor.

My night was far less uncomfortable. I got stuck in the parking lot at work when I tried to leave for home. Abandoning my car, I hiked a half-mile or so to the Westin Hotel in Edina where my wife had made a reservation for me. I had a lovely dinner at McCormick and Schmick's and then ascended to my very comfortable chamber to pass the evening before the large screened TV where I enjoyed the movie The Girl Who Played With Fire. Please, don't worry about me, I'm fine.

"Feel Good Capitalism"

2010-12-09T09:23:00.003-06:00

It's everywhere these days. Purchase a cup of coffee, a magazine, an automobile and be assured that a portion of the profits thereof are put toward a market based world of salads and sun. As a way to assuage the guilt of consumerism these gestures provide point of purchase forgiveness for exploitation, obscene profits, environmental degradation and a host of neoliberal terrors. Given the psychological reach of such efforts, it's a wonder that a medium cup of dark roast has room for cream!

In a heightened extension of market perversity, the United Nations has bought into and is promoting the idea of carbon offsets and markets as a means to preserve forests worldwide. The process works like this: Corporation X can "offset" their polluting by purchasing a forest elsewhere thereby preserving, or so say the promoters of this scheme, the ecological integrity and biodiversity of the environment, and offer economic incentives to indigenous people who happen to inhabit the purchased forest.

The head of the World Bank supports this plan (of course, he also promoted The New American Century which lead us to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars), The president of Ecuador supports this plan asserting against all evidence to the contrary that the "owner entities" of the world's forests "can be controlled," and more disturbing except as evidence of the desperation of caring people the world over, Jane Goodall supports this scheme.

Many indigenous peoples the world over are less enthusiastic. They wonder by what authority their lands are being sold out from beneath them? Unable to produce a recognizable deed--thousands of years of stories, traditions, and stewardship don't count to those whose imagination has been shaped by an affirmation of individuality via purchases in the market--these folks face the prospect of becoming squatters on their own land.

Any hint at regulations designed to limit market intrusion/greed are met with dire warnings of the failures of centralized economies or diminished as mere wishful thinking. The market is how the world works these days. You might wish it otherwise, but we have to be reality focused. This argument passes muster the world over and so accustomed are we to this bludgeoning that we are reduced to shouting, "Thank you sir! May I have another?"

Eclipsed in this abusive dynamic, what Naomi Klein has aptly called disaster capitalism in her book The Shock Doctrine, are any ideas of meaningful change. The market may be how the world works, but carbon offsets and markets never ask the question, For whom does this world work? Issues are framed to preserve current power structures; wealth continues to get transferred upward, Shell Oil continues to buy governments (see here), corporations continue to pollute, and people of the land, stewards of the Earth, become displaced, illegal, and unwanted.

All this is, the enthusiastic cheering to the contrary, nothing new. What is being preserved is the ability of transnational business to out maneuver governments the world over, to shape markets exclusively toward "bottom line" considerations, and to lull us into a guilt ridden sleep. I just might need that cup of coffee!

The View From the Cushion....

2010-12-08T06:54:00.003-06:00

To keep myself from chasing after passing fancies

I sit still, let the distractions find me,

move in, exhaust their lease,

and leave me behind

Breathing in, breathing out.

* * *

Seeking refuge from strong winds

I watch my breathe rise and fall.

From the plaster wall I face

An owl casts a stern gaze over his hooked beak.

I am not concerned, and he flies away.

Overheard in a coffee-shop

2010-11-22T14:41:00.004-06:00

"So, can I give you a check?"

"Sure."

"I'm placing an order today."

"How much you gonna get?"

"Probably an entire case."

"Split it with me?"

"Sure."

"Kind of worried about the Feds turning up at my door."

"Why?"

"All those Republicans..."

"Oh man, you're just paranoid."

"No, man. They've got serial numbers on all bullets now."

"Oh fuck you, they do not."

"They could."

'Man, you worry too much. Nothing we're doing is illegal.

"Yeah, but those republicans are weird."

Well, sure, but shit man. No worries."

"How many rounds do I get if we split a case?"

"I don't know...500, a thousand."

"Cool. Wish I had someone to go shootin' with."

"Take your girlfriend."

"She's against guns."

"Take her anyway. She'll see shootin' is fun."

"That's what I tell her."

"I take mine shootin' all the time. She loves it."

"Wow. Maybe I could go with you guys...."

"Well, it's kind of a private thing..You know, just me and my girl."

"Oh, yeah man. I get it."

Heat

2010-08-08T16:47:00.000-05:00

The heat today is as solid as a wall, and walking outside I'm struck by the weight of the air. It oppresses any quickness, and what breeze there is barely moves the foliage. The sizzle of cicadas fills my ears like the sound of heavy meat frying in a pan. I slump into a chair beneath the shade of an umbrella, an unread pile of books on the table before me.

Sweat pours into my eyes, and my Southern born and raised wife tells me I must be more still; the only movement is my fingers across the keyboard of my laptop. Time has stopped. It will always be this warm, this humid. I wish my skin off of my bones. The futility of a sigh escapes me.

Effortless Effort

2010-08-02T20:49:00.000-05:00

For several years a statue of Buddha on the grounds of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center has inspired me. When I first noticed him he was already showing signs of wear, his surface crumbled by year-round exposure to the elements. I admired the perseverance even as the figure chipped and flaked and appeared to dissolve into the ground.

Years have passed and this statue is much the worse for wear. Halved in height, his legs reduced to rubble and the rubble swept away he now leans against a tree for support. Yet for all of the statue's infirmaries his serenity is constant.

A Monk Told Me

2010-07-18T14:18:00.000-05:00

Zen practice

left a hole in my heart

that I try to keep empty.

Insight

2010-07-08T09:11:00.000-05:00

I sit at the table reading a book of Harrison's poems. The air-conditioning switches on and begins to hum and whirl. It is on because my son is home for a visit, and his blood runs hot. He lives now in Montreal where it is typically cooler, a balm to his internal heat. The people there speak French, lips pursed as if blowing on invisible bowls of soup.

I think I finally understand poetry.

Conversation With a Stranger in a Coffee Shop

2010-06-11T09:20:00.000-05:00

Where were you stationed?

I wasn’t so much stationed as sent, the names of places secondary to the mission. Hell, they wouldn’t even tell us what country we were in. Central America, I gathered. We crossed some borders in support of an objective, blasting the hostiles sometimes. Other times having to pussy-foot ‘round some rag-tag cluster of rebels when we coulda as easily taken them out. Three years of that shit and I got out. Hard to find a job, though, when the only skill I had was shooting people.

Yardwork

2010-06-07T14:37:00.001-05:00

Autumn leaves are swept away with a broom of tears.

Now, the ground is ripe for forgetfulness.

All Too Familiar

2010-06-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

Colonizing efforts seek always to obliterate the peoples they dominate. My sister-in-law, a Ukrainian, was prohibited from speaking her native language by the dominant Russians during the Soviet Era. A former co-worker of mine, a Crow Indian, was prevented from speaking her people’s tongue by the priests and nuns of her elementary school. There is no shortage of historical examples of cultural suppression. Conquered lands and conquered peoples themselves are to be a tabla rosa on which a victor’s history of imperial aims is portrayed through a whitewash of benevolent intentions.

This peculiar and predictable narrative continues to play out in Prescott, Arizona where an artist’s mural at an elementary school in a predominantly white neighborhood has come under censorious consideration. The artist’s inclusion of a Latino child prompted a request from school administrators to “lighten” the complexion of the child. The reason cited by these administrators is, they claim, artistic considerations.

Given the demographics of Arizona’s population—a Latino majority—you might not think the inclusion of one dark hued face in a mural would warrant outcry from a Caucasian enclave. It is a dismal commentary on Arizona, and by extension on the United States, that the presence of a non-Caucasian cannot yet be seen as representational of community and continues to be viewed as provocation.

Portraits

2010-05-16T18:10:00.000-05:00

I visited the home and studio of my friend the artist Paul Nehring on an autumn day. Among the many curios laying about I saw several casts of faces on the ground.

Here they lay, the perfect opportunity for a "portrait." I wouldn't have to worry about the subject blinking, moving, or otherwise ruining the shot.

As bad luck would have it, however, my camera's battery wore down. I recall snapping these two shots quickly and hoping there was enough juice left for the camera to function.

Faces in the Trees

2010-05-14T11:25:00.000-05:00

In the woods around the tiny clearing plaster casts of skulls lay on the ground. Some lay face down, empty eye sockets full of earth; others lay on their sides as if at rest; still others incline to the left or to the right as if quizzical regarding the origin of a sound echoing among the trees. Finally, there are those skulls who stare into the tree tops awaiting the ripening of the faces growing there, guessing at their intention.

Civic Lessons

2010-05-10T11:13:00.000-05:00

We were to rise from our seats, all of us in 3^rd grade, place our right hands over our hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. All but one of us took to our feet. Sandy remained seated with her belief that any such oath taking was a form of idolatry forbidden by her faith.

In full voice the teacher swooped down on Sandy and attempted to yank her to her feet. She pulled on Sandy’s body while Sandy clutched her desk. The desk, with attached chair, clanked and banged against the floor to the rhythm of the teacher’s exertions, while the words from my mouth spun like dust-motes in the sunshine.

To Adam Smith

2010-05-09T10:30:00.000-05:00

I am an ipod

An iphone

A laptop

My wallet groans.

It’s not keeping up

It’s coming to be.

You can’t be yourself

Except as commodity.

Regarding May Day

2010-05-07T12:12:00.001-05:00

I wish I'd have been aware of this in time for May 1st. I offer it now. It is from The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano and is entitled Forgetting.

Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world's tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.

Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.

"It must be around here, " they tell me. But nobody knows where.

No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.

May 1st in the only truly universal day of all humanity, the only day when all histories and all geographies, all languages and religions and cultures of the world coincide. But in the United States, May 1st is a day like any other. On that day, people work normally and no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss.

After my fruitless exploration of the Haymarket, my friends take me to the largest bookstore in the city. And there, poking around, just by accident, I discover an old poster that seems to be waiting for me, stuck among many movie and rock posters. The poster displays an African proverb: Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.

For My Stillborn Sister

2010-05-03T15:03:00.000-05:00

What? What? I’m related by blood to a phantom. She ages slowly and bears the bruised knees of childhood.

She opens her mouth and swallows my unanswered questions. Her eyes are bright with reflections of emptiness.

Character from a blank book, she erases what could have been; her absence is my presence. She holds unheard history.

Words on the Wind

2010-05-02T10:55:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago I hung a string of Tibetan Prayer Flags from our back yard fence. They are wind-blown, tattered by rain and sun, and faded to pastel shades of red, blue, yellow, and beige.

They flutter over tulips now shed of their blossoms, and wait for the roses to bloom.

I hope for some divine intervention to ease the eyesore of our back yard. We inadvertently applied an agent-orange like defoliant, thinking only that we'd applied some weed-killer. It looks as if the hounds of hell have been pissing on the grass.

I think I need larger prayer flags.

Blurry Images, Clear Memories, and Heavenly Music

2010-04-18T12:01:00.000-05:00

I last saw Chick Corea in Kalamazoo, Michigan back in the 1970's. Then, he was taking a break from his heralded jazz-fusion group Return to Forever by playing improvisational piano pieces. My appetite for these pieces had been primed by my introduction to both Corea and improvisational piano by my dear friend Anne.

Mr. Corea has lost none of mastery over the years. He roams the keyboard with a certainly that yields magic, blending styles, riffs, and rhythms in a seemingly effortless performance made all the richer by the crystalline contributions of Mr. Gary Burton on vibraphone.

Mr. Burton, his hands sometime a blur, two mallets in each hand, exchanged leads with Corea. Together they wove a magic carpet of sound. I couldn't help but recall my introduction to Burton's music by Lenny, my college roommate.

Burning Away the Fog of War

2010-04-09T13:53:00.000-05:00

Much gets excused and rationalized during wartime. The disgusting particulars of murder, rape and execution get obscured by the widely accepted caveat of "That is War." Yet some specifics poke through the numbing justifications. During the Vietnam War the image of the Saigon Chief of Police executing a suspected Viet Cong guerilla seared itself into the consciousness of many Americans. Many more who having seen the photograph or film clip began to question America's role and purpose in Vietnam.

We have mostly been spared the photographs and news clips of the brutality of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan by the curious practice of "embedded reporters" and the abdication by the mainstream media of their Constitutional duty to inform the citizenry. Yet the recent disclosure of two stories, one having occurred in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan, provides the kind of illusion-ripping clarity necessary to understand war's horror.

By now, many of us have seen the video of the circling helicopter over the Baghdad suburb and the execution of the civilians on the ground. Those of us with stronger stomachs continued to watch as two men exit a van to aid the dying civilians and too are shot down. And as a "bradley" rolls onto the scene it runs over one of the fallen, said to have still been alive.

There are no photos or video of which I am aware that recorded the ghastly murder of Afghan women; perhaps the words describing the event are sufficient to scorch indifference. I urge you to read them.

Taken together, the revelation of these two events cast light onto what war, any war, is about--namely, the violent eclipse of humanity. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his landmark book On Killing argues that soldiers, in order to kill, must overcome a strong instinctual prohibition against killing a fellow human. The reluctance to do so is exhaustively accounted for in Grossman's book by studies that measured the firing ratio of soldiers during combat. In large part, the military, our military, has taken seriously this reluctance to kill and sought through training to overcome this human instinct. The results of these improved methods of training are all too evident in today's headlines.

I believe the troubling incidents of returning soldiers reveals what many of them have said; having been taught to kill, they just can't turn it off. And so the bodies of innocent Iraqis and Afghans pile up over there, and the carnage of suicide and violence pursues our returning soldiers, and the obfuscating garment of policy and patriotism cannot soak up all the blood on the ground.

The Burden of Civilization

2010-04-05T11:54:00.001-05:00

I just returned from the library where a book I'd placed on reserve arrived. Said book is Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civilization.

While every book "reads" better with an empathic reader, the above title--weighing in at at least 10 lbs.-- requires more than empathy; it requires a weight-lifter! Already staggering beneath a list of titles awaiting my attention, I left Empathic Civilization on the shelf.

Adult Children

2010-04-04T12:14:00.000-05:00

Whose child descends the staircase casting longer and longer shadows

As you blink into the light?

Anxious for touch, ever fleeting,

And like a current of air, he is out the door,

Stepping into a day of which you won't see the end.

A Consideration of Some Clutter

2010-04-04T08:56:00.001-05:00

Preparing for the Easter Holiday, Tresca separated the books littering the coffee table into "his" and "her's" piles. This morning I scooped up my stack of titles and deposited it on my desk.

Scanning the spines I see an inventory of my recent obsessions. Several titles concern what might be called "Men's Issues." There is "The Hidden Spirituality of Men" by Matthew Fox, and because I enjoyed that book I picked up another volume by Fox--not specifically related to the genre-- called "The Reinvention of Work." Having never read Robert Bly's pioneering volume "Iron John" I picked it up for a bargain basement price. Echoing the mytho-poetic focus of those books is Moore and Gillette's explication of male archetypes entitled "King Warrior Magician Lover." A slim volume with the off-putting title of "The Way of the Superior Man" by David Deida peeks out from this tower of words contributing a scant half-inch to the height of the pile.

Foundational to this monolith is Ralph Freedman's inches thick biography of Rilke entitled "Life of a Poet Rainer Maria Rilke." Periodically bogged down by the poet's somewhat suffocating humanity, I added "The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke" to my considerations, and, as always when I read his work, I rediscover divinity! Cheek by jowl, W.S. Merwin's recent title "The Shadow of Sirius" sits quiet as mist and as light as sunshine.

Topping this spire is a recent purchase I first heard of while reading Chris Hedge's brillant book "War is a Force that Give Us Meaning", "On Killing; The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.

The as yet unread book "The Taming of the American Crowd" by Al Sandine spans time from stamp riots to shopping sprees.

And more a pamphlet than a book is Marshall Rosenberg's "Practical Spirituality."

No doubt as Spring merges into Summer my interests will shift and other volumes will contribute to the clutter on my desk and to the lived in look of my home. As yet, I am too restless in the seasonal novelty of warmth and light to apply myself in a disciplined way to the array of topics that catch my attention. And then there are writing projects related however tangentially to these books that disturb my cozy, addled, sun-soaked satisfaction...

The Green Fuse

2010-04-02T14:40:00.000-05:00

I'm staring out the window and I swear I can see things growing! Tulips thrust through the insulating layer of last Autumn's leaves, and a green tint spreads across the ground. "April is the cruelest month" wrote T.S. Eliot, and while this might have accurately described a chilly Parisian Spring day, in Minnesota--at least this year--April is a delight!

Holy Week Meditation

2010-03-29T15:23:00.001-05:00

At the library today I plucked two DVD's from the shelves, and holding one in each hand I had to smile. One was titled "Factotum" and was based on the gritty stories and life of writer Charles Bukowski. A gritty, realistically rendered depravity typifies Bukowski's work, peopled as much of it is with barflies, hookers, alcoholics, the unemployed, and the unwanted; The other title was "Into Great Silence", a documentary film illustrating the life of monks practicing in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps.

At first, I reflected on the obvious duality of Flesh and Spirit. I was reminded of the life of Nikos Kazantzakis author of Zorba the Greek, Report to Greco, and The Last Temptation of Christ to name a few of his titles. Kazantzakis lived a life of division, pulled toward contemplation, reflection, and writing yet longing for what he considered to be an active engagement with wine, with women, and with the world. So pronounced was this conflict within him that, living outside of Vienna and sequestered from a woman he loved, he impulsively left his retreat to find this woman, but was struck by a terrible, suppurating swelling of his face while searching for her.

The starkness of this apparent choice, so tortuous to Kazantzakis, made a great impression on me as a younger man. I dreamed, literally, of being a monk and taking some flavor of holy orders, but knew I could not tolerate the discipline. I was blessed with beautiful girlfriends, and refused to see them--or any other woman--as impediments to what was called a holy life.

I figured this conflict was without resolution, demanding allegiance to one or the other way of living. Then, probably twenty years ago, I heard something that at once expanded my understanding and collapsed duality; I heard the expression, coming from Buddhism, "Samsara is nirvana." This expansion of perspective united what appeared to be opposites. It leveled the playing field. No longer did the either/or conundrum perplex me.

And standing in the library today, these different DVD's in hand, I again realized that barflies and monks, hookers and the holy share a common endeavor called life, and that is sufficient to regard them as one.

When the Living is Easy

2010-03-28T09:50:00.000-05:00

In Minnesota summer is a brief yet thorough thaw from a near ever-present winter. As it approaches, tender green shoots poking through the earth, plans for this brief season tease my ambition.

There is the garden to ready and plant. Last year's bountiful crop of tomatoes and squash have inspired plans for expansion to include raspberries and carrots.

There is a themed-plan of study to undertake, recent interests leaning toward masculine archetypes and spirituality.

There are body-based meditative practices I've encountered and tried, and that provide me a settling-in-coming-home experience.

There are two writing projects. Both of these--one fiction, the other a memoir--have been fallow for some time and invite further effort.

Yet, with plenty to do I long for sun-soaked leisure, sun-light filtering through a glass of pinot-grigio, bird song in the bushes, and the company of friends of family.

Dead Dogs in Miami

2010-03-05T06:06:00.000-06:00

"I can't take it anymore," is the refrain heard from the natives of Miami who are coping, or not coping, with cooler temperatures.

"So cold the fuckin' iguanas are dying; the manatees are struggling...

"Wait," I said, "The iguanas are dying?"

"You bet your ass. They're freezing and fallin' out of trees, frozen, four-legged popsicles." Fallin' out of trees and layin' dead in the streets. Dogs are eatin' 'em and dying. Fuckin' frozen iguanas are killing dogs! I can't take it anymore!"

Pages From My Visual Diary

2010-03-01T17:01:00.000-06:00

Some Heat in January

2010-01-31T16:14:00.000-06:00

Last night, T and I went to see Estaire Godinez at the Dakota in Minneapolis. Backed by Serge Aku on bass, Peter Schimke on keyboards, Erik Leeds on saxophone, and Stokely Williams on drums, the fiery rhythms took the chill out of the arctic night.

Democrats

2010-01-24T13:03:00.000-06:00

I've been drifting away from the Democratic Party in recent years, probably every since Bill Clinton cozied up to Big Business and sold out working people.

The tendency of the Party to cannibalize its older constituency of workers and unions to curry favor with its new corporate masters has reached levels to provoke revulsion in anyone who recalls the reputation of said Party as the "party of opposition."

The recent criticism of centrist democrats directed at progressives over the further dilution of health-care reform is but another example of behavior beyond the pale.

Diet

2010-01-10T15:51:00.000-06:00

She rails at him about his heart,

foretelling a constriction, a grave marker on the

course of his life.

He tries to coax enjoyment from this lean

fare,

And even as his waist shrinks

He loses his heart's content.

Strategy

2010-01-02T20:53:00.000-06:00

(Pre-) Historical Theology

2010-01-01T15:18:00.000-06:00

My back into the New Year!

2010-01-01T11:02:00.000-06:00

Walking home from a lovely dinner at Samba, a new Brazilian eatery in Hopkins, I stumbled on the uneven icy surface of the street and wretched my back. By the time I got home, shuffling through the frigid temperatures like an arctic Igor, grumbling and cursing, I collapsed into bed at 9:30 p.m. and fell into a restless sleep.

It is a new year, and there can be no birth without pain.

Gut Shot

2009-12-31T14:00:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-27T20:45:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-27T12:25:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-14T10:06:00.000-06:00

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

2009-09-10T06:53:00.000-05:00

“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

2009-09-06T09:01:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

…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!

2009-08-26T07:39:00.000-05:00

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

2009-08-24T08:22:00.001-05:00

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

2009-07-23T12:24:00.000-05:00

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

2009-07-16T07:47:00.000-05:00

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

2009-07-07T23:07:00.000-05:00

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

2009-07-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-06-25T15:10:00.000-05:00

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

2009-06-15T09:12:00.000-05:00

"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

2009-06-13T11:18:00.000-05:00

“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?)

2009-05-29T16:10:00.000-05:00

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

2009-05-25T15:07:00.000-05:00

Myth and Torture

2009-05-22T11:39:00.000-05:00

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

2009-05-18T10:07:00.000-05:00

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

2009-05-15T11:10:00.000-05:00

From the Closet of History

2009-05-11T11:28:00.000-05:00

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

2009-05-06T14:43:00.001-05:00

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

2009-05-01T10:10:00.000-05:00

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

2009-04-29T06:52:00.000-05:00

The Folly of Kings: The Delight of Death

2009-04-28T07:26:00.000-05:00

Combine for Today

2009-04-27T14:45:00.000-05:00

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

2009-04-26T17:18:00.000-05:00

Prayers for the Return of Persephone

2009-04-22T10:45:00.000-05:00