Category: Personal/Political

While I don’t necessarily agree with the old feminist notion that the personal is inescapably political, I do try and write about politics mainly through a personal or literary lens. For the rare exceptions, see Rants.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The legacy of March 10

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I spent most of the morning on a re-write of the current section of Cibola, which concerns a heavily mythologized but still probably historical act of genocide against a near neighbor. It turns out to be an appropriate date for such reflections. From the Japan Focus newsletter:

Sixty years ago today, on March 10 1945, the US abandoned the last rules of warfare against civilians when 334 B-29’s dropped close to half a million incendiary bombs on sleeping Tokyo.

The aim was to cause maximum carnage in an overcrowded city of flimsy wooden buildings; an estimated 100,000 people were ‘scorched, boiled and baked to death,’ in the words of the attack’s architect, General Curtis LeMay. It was then the single largest mass killing of World War II, dwarfing even the destruction of the German city of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945.

B-29 pilot Chester Marshall flew above the destruction, but not far enough: “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning,” he later told Australian broadcaster ABC. “I couldn’t eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said ‘What is that I smell?’ And it’s a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, ‘Well that’s flesh burning, had to be.'”

Even the city’s rivers were no escape from the firestorm: the jellied petroleum that filled the bombs, a prototype of the napalm that laid waste to much of Vietnam two decades later, stuck to everything and turned water into fire. “Canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames,” wrote John Dower in War Without Mercy. People who dived into rivers and canals for relief were boiled to death in the intense heat….

Robert McNamara, a former statistician who helped plan the Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids, went on to become US Defense Secretary (1960-68) during the war against Vietnam, where he authorized carpet bombing of vast swathes of the country with incendiaries and Agent Orange. In last year’s documentary The Fog of War, McNamara ponders the morality of victor’s justice, saying: “Was there a rule then to say that you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in a single night?”

The legacy of the March 10 raid though is what it bequeathed to the rest of the century: the trumping of political and moral arguments against mass civilian slaughter by military technicians and rationalists. As historian Mark Selden wrote: “Elimination of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant would shape all subsequent wars from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War and the ethnic conflicts of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, to mention but a few.” It’s a legacy we still live with.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

By the waters of Babylon

Here is an image that has haunted me for years.

Six hundred yards north of the “Tower of Babel” rose a mound called Kasr, on which Nebuchadnezzer built the most imposing of his palaces….Nearby, supported on a succession of superimposed circular collonades, were the famous Hanging Gardens, which the Greeks included among the Seven Wonders of the World. The gallant Nebuchadnezzer had built them for one of his wives, the daughter of Cyaxares, King of the Medes; this princess, unaccustomed to the hot sun and dust of Babylon, pined for the verdure of her native hills. The topmost terrace was covered with rich soil to the depth of many feet, providing space and nourishment not merely for flowers and plants, but for the largest and most deep-rooted trees. Hydraulic engines concealed in the columns and manned by shifts of slaves carried water from the Euphrates to the highest tier of the gardens. Here, seventy-five feet above the ground, in the cool shade of tall trees, and surrounded by exotic shrubs and fragrant flowers, the ladies of the royal harem walked unveiled, secure from the common eye; while, in the plains and streets below, the common man and woman ploughed, wove, built, carried burdens, and reproduced their kind.

Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage (Simon and Schuster, 1954 [1935]).

Even allowing for the obvious Orientalist slant here, it’s disturbing to think that any human being, no matter how heartless, could enjoy idling around fountains in full knowledge that slaves were actively toiling right beneath one’s feet, in the dark and in stifling heat, to keep them going. But isn’t it really just hypocritical of me to think that way, as the beneficiary of the equally invisible, equally dehumanizing toil of so many people in sweatshops abroad or in dead-end service industry jobs here at home? Who’s hanging in your garden?

Around the same time that I first thought to inquire about the reality of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I read Psalm 137 clear to its last couplet. This is, it must be said, one of the great poems of the Bible. Here it is in Mitchell Dahood’s translation:

Beside the river in Babylon,
    there we sat;
    loudly we wept,
When we remembered you, O Zion!
Beside the poplars in her midst
    we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors demanded of us
    words of song,
    and our mockers songs of gladness:
“Sing for us a song of Zion!”
O how could we sing Yahweh’s song
    upon alien soil?
Should I forget you,
    O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue stick to my palate,
    should I remember you not!
If I do not raise you,
    O Jersusalem,
Upon my head in celebration!
Remember Yahweh, O sons of Edom,
    the day of Jerusalem!
You who said, “Strip her, strip her,
    to her foundation!”
O Daughter Babylon, you devastator,
    blest be he who repays you
    the evil you have done us!
Blest be he who seizes and dashes
    your infants against the rock!

The Anchor Bible: Psalms III, Doubleday, 1970

This translation, while not perhaps as memorable as the King James version, and arguably spoiled by over-abundant exclamation marks, does clarify a number of points both minor (that the trees were poplars or aspens, and the instruments were lyres) and major (the parallelism between the rape of a feminized Jerusalem and a longed-for rape of Babylon).

Again, I think it’s well worth analyzing the shock and horror one feels after reading a Psalm that celebrates rape and baby-killing, especially if one’s heart has ever thrilled to other, less graphic calls for righteous warfare. Real war inevitably means that real innocents are slaughtered, and not always inadvertently. Even when the extinction of a people isn’t the explicit aim and soldiers are fairly well disciplined, there will always be those few – and sometimes whole battalions – who will go berserk and kill everything that wears the enemy’s face, in our name.

Three or four years ago I wrote a poem responding to a few of these images from the ancient Middle East. I tried to keep it ambiguous who was actually speaking, whose lament this might be.

SONG OF REQUISITION
Psalm 137

The land no longer ours
grows ever more vertiginous in the telling:
the holy hill steepens with each new song.
Its shadow creeps across fields
& olive groves, penumbra muffling
the clamor of school & clinic,
blotting out the once-busy markets
where we used to embrace like lovers at the end
of each slow dance of commerce.

Layer by layer the volcanic ash of memory
like a veil drawn between us & the present
erases all distinguishing features:
the raised letters on name plates, street signs,
the features carved on tombs & public statues.
Soon it’s impossible to tell whose heroes,
whose dead these stones are for.

And such lava flows of jealousy!
There’s no loss like ours,
no stillness as holy as the absence
of love & laughter. No song
quite like the melismatic wail
of an infant swung around by its ankles,
the frantic ululations of an ambulance,
the screech of an incoming mortar.

The waters of Babylon are profligate;
our tears there made little difference.
The only mountain was a simulacrum of paradise,
spilling with fountains & the seeds
of unknown flowers. But in the land
the Lord showed Abraham, no spring
can overflow without authorization,
& barred from the sea the Jordan hoards its salt.

Surely it was meant for us–
to bathe our wounds . . .

Posted on by Steven Bonta

Lament for the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka

From October 2000 to July 2001, my brother Steve was in northwest coastal Sri Lanka gathering material for a dissertation (Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil: A Case of Contact-Induced Language Change from Sri Lanka, Cornell University, 2004). He worked extensively with the inhabitants of a small, Catholic fishing village a few miles from the city of Negombo. Last night he sent the following e-mail, with permission to publish it here.

The news just gets worse and worse. It appears that most or all of the people who were my research subjects and my friends during my stay in Sri Lanka are dead. Negombo was hit quite hard, and the people whose language and lifestyle I documented lived in frail cadjun [coconut-leaf] huts within meters of the high water mark, on the sands of the beach. They knew nothing but God, family, and fishing, and have not, to my knowledge, dropped bombs on anybody or fought any wars on drugs or mass-produced pornography and land mines; yet they are all apparently dead and we remain. Not only that: I could not have gotten my status-conferring, income-enhancing Ivy League PhD without their help, whereas they got along just fine without mine – yet they are gone and I linger on, PhD and all.

Nor can I take any consolation in their being “human beings just like us,” because they aren’t like us, not at all. They have the same DNA, they have many of the same passions, to be sure. But they also have no comprehension of our wisecracking, self-absorbed cynicism; they are (though it sounds cliche to say it) blessed with a certain childlike absence of guile. They place community above all other things and choose not to trouble themselves with the world’s problems. They do not live their lives in “I can give you 15 minutes of my valuable time” mode, ever. They always treated me like a dignitary and usually insisted on preparing excellent seafood dinners, which they couldn’t afford. There was never any suggestion that they were ashamed of their humble living quarters. Their huts were always clean, and their clothing always neat. I paid to help them build a cistern of their own (an untold luxury) in the sand behind their hut. It consisted merely of a 15-foot deep hole lined with metal, but it gave them fresh water for washing and drinking for the first time, ever. I fancied that, in buying them a well – not to mention a pile of clothing and household goods I got for them right before my departure – I was repaying them in part for helping me achieve my ambition.

Now the well and the household goods, as well as the houses and inhabitants, are probably gone, along with those of tens of thousands of others like them, all alike in their poverty and simplicity, all utterly unlike us. Maybe the old, abominable racial theories are correct, in a perverse and unanticipated way, for there really do seem to be two completely different moieties of the human race: the one, perpetually lapped in comfort, snugly insulated from the brunt of mother nature (most of the time), and able and willing to unleash hellfire and bombnation on the other half at the slightest provocation, real or imagined; the other, perpetually under the yoke of the first, always fodder for the cannons, chaff for the economic downdrafts, grist for the millstones of mother nature.

Anyway, enough hyperbole. Suffice it to say, I’m really bummed about this. Call it survivor’s guilt or whatever, but there can’t be too many people out there who’ve seen their PhD subject matter obliterated.

Steve Bonta
27 December 2004

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Tyrannosaurus lex

Vocabulary for a New American Century

AMNEIZURE. A paroxysm brought on by the unexpected recurrence of suppressed memories. Example: “On being questioned about parallels with Vietnam, General Richard Myers experienced a sudden amneizure.”

CLAMDUNK. Jailing and/or fining reporters who refuse to divulge their sources.

DEBRIEFING. A slight sartorial adjustment made by most foreign nationals within a few minutes after leaving the Green Zone in Baghdad.

DISEMBEDOUINS. Nomadic journalists, often Arabs or disguised as Arabs, whose insufficient allegiance to any state makes them both feared and hated.

FALLUGE. Rapid descent of a slippery slope from military occupation to outright barbarism.

GREENHOUSE AFFECTATION. Pretending to care about global warming.

HYPOCRACY. A system of governance in which the rule of law only applies to suckers.

IMPURGENTS. CIA agents who refuse (or whose husbands refuse) to parrot the Bushite line, inviting a purge.

INSECURED AREAS. Sections of conquered cities that are “secured,” but remain full of resistance fighters.

MIDDLE CLASSIFICATION. A uniquely American way to eliminate poverty and social strife in two, easy steps: 1) Expand the definition of “middle class” to include all income groups below plutocrats, and 2) Give out “middle class tax cuts.”

PABULIATIVE. Pabulum designed to serve as a palliative. Accent is properly placed upon the third syllable.

PSYOPSY. Intense “cross-examination” of selected members of a body politic to try and determine the cause of their seemingly inexplicable unrest.

SELF-FULFILLING PROFLIGACY. A deliberate plan to run up huge deficits in order to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury, forcing massive cuts in every conceivable non-military program, with the ultimate purpose of disabusing Americans once and for all of the absurd and irresponsible notion that government spending can ever solve anything.

SINERGY. The tendency of two or more evils in apparent competition to form feedback loops, resulting in an evil far greater than the sum of its parts. Example: Al Qaeda and the Bush regime.

TERRIF. Steep costs extracted, usually in maimed and slaughtered civilians, for importing small numbers of foreign resistance fighters (“terrorists”).

YELLOW-DOG REPUBLICANS. Republicans who would vote for an administration full of chicken hawks over a Democrat. Interestingly, a great many of them appear to be the children or grandchildren of the equally loyal, faithful, obedient and wet-nosed Yellow-Dog Democrats of yore.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Revelation

The first straw lands so gently it is barely felt. It is lighter than a lover’s kiss – or at least it seems so, because the heart doesn’t rise to meet it. Any straw can make one sneeze, of course, but this is not just any straw: it is the first. It has a mission. And I think we must recognize that it is not altogether unwelcome. Hope had been killing us, making us feel small and weak and Left Behind. What a relief, then, to know that we can abandon our burdens and take shelter here in this toasty warm inn, which seems to have plenty of room for everybody, except for dogs and Samaritans. Sure, the soldiers are kind of noisy, get a little obstreperous with the serving girls, but hey, boys will be boys. And we must remember, they keep us safe from those terrorists up in the hills.

The second straw is a little heavier, but still, one barely notices. Besides, why should the spirit let itself be afflicted by the trivial aches and pains of the flesh? Just look at the people who make the most noise about “oppression” and “injustice” and so forth: chronic ailers, every one of them. We could be living in a utopia and they’d still find something to complain about. We’re not, of course, but that’s only because utopia is impossible. Things are probably just about as good as they can get right now. We need to concentrate on defending what we have, because all the lazy, inept and just plain defective peoples of the world are jealous and want to take it away from us. Isn’t it a shame the way envy and greed can poison the mind, make people hate what we have worked so hard to build up here?

The third straw comes with a helpful reminder: All flesh is grass, it whispers as it lands between the wingbones. It’s considered a normal reaction at this juncture to weep a little bit. And why not? I have been touched by an angel! Book deals, appearances on Oprah: truly, the sky is the limit now. I may not have been to the mountain, but this seems so much more efficient. Bit by bit, the mountain is coming to me!

The fourth straw speaks a little louder – in fact, it sings. Yes, just like a cicada. It sits there on top of the others whistling its one-note tune, and one finds oneself admiring its ability to stay on message. We should all be so persistent! If even a straw can resist going whichever way the wind blows, how much stronger should be our own determination not to veer from the path – which is, after all, plenty broad.

Spare the rod, spoil the child, says the fifth straw as it connects with our sadly sagging shoulders. Stand up straight, soldier! Hold your rifle as if you mean it! With freedom comes responsibility. Every able-bodied citizen must take his or her turn, now, to defend the homeland. Those who refuse will be sent to prison camps where lazing about is not an option. But see how good it feels to discharge a firearm? Such sweet release!

The sixth straw lands with a roar like the ocean surf: The Lord is my shepherd, all the voices are chanting in unison. There’s no more waiting for the sweet bye and bye. History is coming to an end. The pastures have been grazed to the nubbin, the still waters are brown with silt, the dead zones are growing and merging. Species that cannot compete effectively in the new global marketplace are dying a merciful death. Stranger, tell the Lakedaimonians that we lie here awaiting their orders.

The seventh straw comes soaked in gasoline. I am the first and the last, it shrieks. Our nostrils fill with smoke. The rain is black with the fallout from burning libraries. Once in a while a large piece of ash drifts slowly down and we can make out a word or two before it crumbles to pieces against the rubble. I have seen two or three such messages with my own eyes, but I dare not repeat them. Americanization is now complete. This was the last straw. Any moment now, the trumpets will sound.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Three Days That Shook the Blogging World

It took me at least until Friday to fully absorb the impact of Bush’s “win” on Tuesday, and I was hardly alone. I’ll leave it to others to compile links from the better-known, political portion of the blogosphere. Bloggers of a cultural, spiritual and literary bent have reacted to last week’s election with no less passion. And I think it’s of vital importance that we not leave politics to the political. The price of distancing ourselves from politics and politicians cannot fail to be, as it has always been, an endless procession of snake-oil salesmen and psychopaths occupying the halls of power.

If we want a government that is truly “of the people,” we have to start acting as if we ARE the government. This would mean a huge sea change in our thinking, away from fear and paranoia and toward – yes – faith and values. It would mean engaging in honest and open dialogue with our friends and neighbors about our authentic hopes, dreams and fears – as opposed to the wet-dreams of money, power and alienated so-called freedom peddled by those who seek to keep us forever divided and thus easy to rule. It would mean taking responsibility for our own and each other’s well being. It would mean, above all, slowing down and re-learning how to live.

I don’t want to limit myself to links alone here, because how many people would take the time to click on them all? But by settling for longish quotes, obviously I won’t be able to include more than a small fraction of what’s out there. Please feel free to e-mail me (bontasaurus at yahoo) with suggestions of possible additions to this anthology. And please keep in mind that these quotes, suggestive as they are, represent in most cases just one facet of one argument selected from among several related posts, and that many are followed (and some prompted) by readers’ comments fully as interesting.

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

Looking at today’s front page, I was drawn into an AP photo of a young campaign volunteer sitting, head in hands, on the steps of a rally stage in Des Moines, an “Iowans for Kerry” sign hanging behind her dejected form. She’s not from Keene, this Iowan campaign worker, but in my imagination she could be, an idealistic co-ed in faded, fringe-tattered jeans, sneakers, and a white linen jacket, a curious mix of little-girl dreams and grown-up disillusions. “Nervous Wait,” the caption reads: there’s an entire story in those two words, isn’t there? All that picture and all that caption needs is a storyteller, even a Fucked Up one, to step out of the shadows and get her hands moving. The first 5,000-some words might have been Total Bullshit, but the beauty of writing lies in the next line, the next word, where there’s always a chance to change and start entirely anew.

Hoarded Ordinaries

My America is liberal, tolerant, interested in globalism; in my America religion is post-triumphalist and universalist and coexists happily with science; in my America all people, regardless of sexual orientation, are entitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship, marriage among them. But my America is a marginal America, and the bulk of the nation feels differently. The chasm which divides us is deep and I don’t know how, or whether, it can be bridged.

I’m giving myself the day to grieve, and I’ve been moving steadily through those five stages everybody talks about. I know that despair is neither responsible nor tenable longterm; action and faith are called-for. I hope that by tomorrow, or by next week, I’ll be able to take a deep breath, look at the situation clearly, and figure out what I can do and which stone most needs my shoulder.

Velveteen Rabbi

It’s tempting to indulge in unconstructive name-calling. Lord knows I’ve done far more than my share. But it is statistically rather unlikely that half the electorate in the US is composed of either the feebleminded or sociopaths. There are millions of good, honest, sincere people in the US who voted for Bush because as far as they could tell, he best reflected their beliefs about right and wrong.

At least a few of these people will have their worldviews shattered due to the actions of the man they voted for in the next four years. They will need us. If there is an opposition to articulate a cogent, humane alternative to the lying and looting that will characterize official US policy for at least the next four years, the screwed-over will have a constructive place to channel their outrage.

Creek Running North

There are nice things about this little historical moment, this pause between disasters. On the residential streets of the Castro, strangers usually don’t greet each other, often avert eyes. This is partly an aspect of “cruising” behavior, partly an adaptation by ordinary residents to other people “cruising;” I’ve accepted that it’s not a rude habit, just a big-city inevitability.

But last night, everyone I passed gave a nod. In a subculture often defined by posturing and distancing, everyone was allowed to be lonely, frightened even, just for one night …

Creature of the Shade

Thursday, November 4

I don’t accept a lot of how this looks. It is true that many people in this country voted for Bush. It is true that when you look at the big red states and surrounding clusters of blue we look like a country full of dopes in the middle and the south. But I think that’s too simple. If you look at the numbers on a state by state basis the numbers are close. I don’t accept the idea of a conservative mandate.

There is no doubt that the next four years will be difficult. There is no doubt that this dubious notion of morality exists and that there is a vigourous conservative Christian coalition. But I want to keep resisting ideas that divide things into simple and alienated terms. And I don’t want to be in such a hurry to feel better.

I found myself working pretty hard to keep my emotions from becoming overwhelming all day yesterday. I am too often overwhelmed by my emotions. But I’m certainly not interested in not feeling. There are reasons to be sad. There are reasons to be angry.

The electoral college map is an example of how ideas can be sold. People aren’t that easy to color code.

I never feel fully competent when writing about things like this. I often feel like I’m not being clear. And that may be because I don’t like to take the big stand too often. I like to keep the notion of complexity in play. Part of complexity is that there are moments when things get simple and I have and will take a big stand now and then. I often feel like I’m jumping from the macro view to the micro view and trying to stop and every point in between.

What I can say with confidence is that there are a lot of great people doing a lot of great work. I think a bit of despair is inevitable and not such a terrible thing and I like the idea of us all gathered for a plaintive wail. If you’re wailing, I’m wailing with you. And then we can make a joke and have a giggle and make some plans.

Fatshadow

It’s not like Larissa really understood what was at stake in the election…but she’d worked so hard for Dunbar, she’d come to believe in whatever it was that he stood for and sincerely believed it was better and more well-intended than whatever it was that the other guy stood for. Larissa had been raised to believe in causes for the sake of belief itself: her father often quoted to her the lyrics of a country song that advised “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Molly, Larissa believed, hadn’t really stood for something: her desire to become a paralegal was motivated by her desire to find a man and start a family, so she’d somehow gotten sidetracked into achieving the latter without any of the former. One day after Dana had stopped working for the campaign, Larissa had sat quietly stuffing envelopes after the other campaign workers had gone home. In the quiet of an empty campaign office, illuminated by a single bare light bulb hanging over the long folding table where she worked, Larissa vowed to Do Something with her life, to somehow Make a Difference.

Hoarded Ordinaries

. . . There are fiftyninemillionseventeenthousandthreehundredeightytwo
People I’d like to condense down into one box,
Down into some three ingredient recipe some
Simple formula for this vote that separates me
From you
Good
From bad
Make it small enough to describe, control, dismiss
Language of a sixth grader, language of an election
Language of a soundbite.
As if a page of words can explain the feelings, motives
Histories, beliefs of fiftyninemillionseventeenthousandthreehundredeightytwo
Individuals who are not me.

But what are the chances that one of the fiftyninemillionseventeenthousandthreehundredeightytwo
Is more like me than I dare to believe?

Division. There is page after page of problems in the homework packet
He spends hours putting one number into another, finding remainders
Subtracting until there is nothing left, neatly solved.
We say division is the wake of this election
But this is nothing like the methodical effort of
Dividing one hundred into fiftyone percent and fortynine percent,
Dividing the map into twohundredseventynine red and twohundredfiftytwo blue
Dividing my neighborhood into Bush signs or Kerry signs
The signs no one has taken down because
This is who “I AM” this is who “YOU ARE” this is how we disagree
This is the gulf we have to cross . . .

A line cast, a hope followed

It’s kinda heartening, though, ain’t it? On the morning after this political disaster, there are people out there searching for beefcake and boobs. It reminds me of that Larsen cartoon where there’s a city in flames and people running and cars jamming the streets and then there’s this dog with his nose to some spot on the ground, with the caption, “And then Ralph found something interesting.”

3rd House Party

Friday, November 5

I happen to believe that the liberal choice framework and some form of secularist culture are the better options. I’m cautiously optimistic that secularism is too widespread for any move toward Falwelltopia to ultimately succeed. But the cultural revivals among Native American tribes suggest that all may not be lost for cultural conservatives. What’s necessary is for them to focus on a reconstructed conservative culture that is compatible with and appealing under the liberal framework, rather than seeking to reverse that framework or forcibly eliminate their competitors under it. To do that would require offering an alternative to the weaknesses of secularism (such as the alienation created by consumerism) rather than attempting to imitate secularism’s successes (such as with self-consciously “trendy” pop evangelicalism).

debitage

I have far more in common with those evangelical Christians than I have in common with my parents, with most of the professors who taught me, or with most of my political allies. I don’t believe that life is about maximizing wordly pleasure. I don’t believe that this world can be fixed (though I believe, maybe inconsistently, that it’s our duty to try to fix it)….

But there is a way in which I think they are wrong. I don’t think the hollowness is out there, in some parcel of wicked politicians or biased journalists or rancorous academics. It’s in almost all of us, and it won’t be fixed by just voting in people who stand tall and say that they pray a lot. The problem is not — particularly — that our leaders are hollow. It’s that we are.

mole

Ship of State

The red Valdez breaks through the shipping lanes
advancing towards Bligh Reef while Hazelwood
vacations on his ranch. His crude oil drains
the wilderness of soul and livelihood,
past Rocky majesty, from western sea
to bright blue liberal Massachusetts’ coast.
We question constitutionality
of missions not accomplished in this most
protected ecosystem, question spills
of cargo–not just business enterprise,
but hearts and minds, endangered blood, free wills,
and meant for more than suits to televise.
Remember cutthroat trout, the common loon–
you can’t impeach this fucking mess too soon!

grapez

Since about Halloween, I have been on a sugar binge. Then, today, the bread was definitely like adding insult to injury. Already lethargic from the sugar, I now also feel achy in the joints … and I won’t even go into the other symptoms … from the bread.

I also feel dulled, as if I had lost a few IQ points myself in the process. And yet, I haven’t been able to stop eating. That, and reading blogs all afternoon and evening.

All this gluten and glucose … I think this might be the secret recipe to get with the program, to join that majority in front of the TV set.

alembic [ellipses original]

I am horrified and frightened by the emotions I have raging inside myself, emotions that I have clearly been caging in my heart for years. I am profoundly disturbed that my writing flows most smoothly when I write as a screaming, bloody raven instead of a peaceful, happy frog. The frog was boring, but pleasant. The frog was safe. The frog was being boiled alive in her own complacency, but she was happy and she had friends and safe, easy friendships. She posted silly quizzes and pictures of kitties and chirruped happily about the lovely world she lived in. Her sorrows on the whole were small ones, or her own personal burdens to bear. Occasionally she would stamp her little frog feet in anger, but this entertained her friends and charmed them.

Now I am a black, bloody raven, beak dripping with gore. And I wonder if that gentle green frog will ever return. Somehow, I doubt it.

Frogs and Ravens

The game was called “five good things.” The object was to come up with five good things about George W. Bush. It was harder than I thought it would be! I recommend it to any Kerry-supporter, or anyone inclined to think of Bush as “pure evil.” He isn’t. No one is.

the vernacular body

One reason I stopped blogging at the end of the summer was in great part because of this sense of something in myself dissipating into the light of the screen and my muscles forgetting the stop-motion of walking and immersing myself in the arms of other living things. I had found myself following one contention to another through the cerebral world of blogs and the internet, arguing and sitting alone fuming and gradually darkening my mind with clouds of imagined wrongs. I wasn’t dealing with real people or learning more about living in the real world of nature. The very purpose of my feet and fingers, eyes and ears escaped my notice.

So I must stop myself here before I dive back into the water; I do not want to live my life fighting ghosts and demons. I want to learn to engage them and talk. I want to discover what it is that binds us all together and actuates language. Bush preaches hate and warmongering and revenge and absolutes. He refutes the mystery. And so many have fallen in step behind him, taking up his chants and marching to the beat. That is not how I want to live my life. That is not how I see the living things around me or how I want to greet other people. Not in the language of defeat and bloodletting.

Laughing~Knees

I don’t want to think any more about the election. I’m grateful for the disaster, insofar as it disrupted me, and put my own small life into perspective. It temporarily threw me into a state of confusion and anger and fear. It made me want to rage against the decision, to do something huge, to scream and rant and fight and cry.

I’m feeling more settled now. It’s not apathy, or despair, or resignation: rather, I’m remembering what I’ve written here before. The most radical thing one can do is to stay present. There is nothing so important as remaining grounded in oneself, in being compassionate, and understanding, and wise. This does not mean doing nothing. It means doing everything. It means being human.

Nomen est Numen

Finally, one of the most eloquent reactions is completely wordless, just fifteen stark photographs gathered under one title, Into the Night, from Paula’s House of Toast. Check it out.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Three mornings, A.D. 2004

November 3

Clear sky, bright sun, high whistles of cedar waxwings gleaning wild grapes from the treetops. With the news of the election swirling in my head I am walking, walking. Last night’s rain pools in the makeshift cups of broad, curled oak leaves that have not yet learned how to lie flat against the ground. The ridgetop gleams with a hundred thousand miniature lakes, each with its separate sun & a plan for evaporation. If there’s anything else to see, I don’t see it. When I get back to the house, my boots are soaked.

November 4

Crawling in the dirt under my house to wrap the heating ducts in fiberglass. I wear a face mask against the dust: a hundred and fifty years have passed since rain last fell on this patch of mountaintop soil. I worm my way as far up as I can, bending and twisting into positions I’d never attempt with a lover, hug pipes to stretch ribbons of duct tape around rolls of insulation. Strands of pink fiberglass worry their way through my clothes like porcupine quills, turn my eyes blood red. I’m filthy. I itch all over. When I crawl back out into the cold drizzle, I pull down my face mask and take several deep breaths, then drain my bladder. I get my dad to help me beat the dust from my clothes. Where there’s smoke, they say, there’s fire. I’m not so sure.

November 5

A dried stalk of common mullein rattles in the stiff breeze, seeds loose in their pods like teeth in the belly of a rat. This wind leaves nothing alone, scouring the field, roaring on the crest on the ridge. In every direction I can hear new squeaks and moans from snags freshly toppled into the limbs of the living, there to rub and chafe throughout the long winter. Overnight, most of the oaks lost their leaves except for the scattered clumps where squirrels had made their summer nests. Now this fine mesh of branches against the sky, this lovely empty net can’t hold a thing. Right there where the two planets – Jupiter and Venus – had been shining side by side like a cat with mismatched eyes, now there’s only a large dark cloud with a rose-colored belly. It keeps right on going. The sun comes up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Staying put

To all those U.S. citizens (myself included) who have been talking about going into self-imposed exile: it ain’t that bad yet!

Or maybe it is. But where you gonna go? The actions (and inaction) of the most powerful empire in world history are felt in every corner of the globe, from the North Pole to the bottom of the sea. Don’t you think that, as a voting, taxpaying citizen of the imperial power, you have a moral obligation to stay and try to make a difference – at least until the Bill of Rights is completely suspended and your life is physically in danger?

Much as I would love to relocate now to Canada, or maybe Ethiopia, I don’t know how well I’d do apart from this place – this deeply conservative, Republican area – where I’ve put down roots. We deny the power of attraction to the land at our own peril, I think. Displacement may be one of the most demoralizing of human conditions. And internal or external refugee status is a sad reality for hundreds of millions of people around the globe. In all too many cases, their uprootedness is the direct or indirect result of U.S. political and economic hegemony. Rather than exile ourselves, shouldn’t we do what we can – however little – to help end the exiles of others?

The great Spanish poet León Felipe wrote this about having to flee Spain in 1938 after the defeat of the Republic:

Y AHORA ME VOY

Y ahora me voy sin haber recibido mi legado,
sin haber habitado mi casa,
sin haber cultivado mi huerta,
sin haber sentido el beso de la siembra y de la luz.
Me voy sin haber dado mi cosecha,
sin haber encendido mi lámpara,
sin haber repartido mi pan…
Me voy sin que me hayáis entregado mi hacienda.
Me voy sin haber aprendido más que a gritar y a maldecir,
a pisar bays y flores…
me voy sin haber visto el Amor,
con los labios amargos llenos de baba y de blasfemias,
y con los brazos rí­gidos y erguidos, y los puños cerrados, pidiendo Justicia fuera de ataíºd.

NOW I AM GOING
by León Felipe

And now I am going, without having received my inheritance,
without having lived in my house,
without having tended my garden,
without having felt the kiss of the planting season and of the light.
I am going without having shared my harvest,
without having lit my lamp,
without having broken my bread . . .
I am going without having been given my estate.
I am going without having learned anything more than how to shout, how to curse,
how to trample on berries and flowers . . .
I am going without having gained a single glimpse of Love,
with my bitter lips all flecked with foam and blasphemies,
my arms stiff and straight and my fists clenched, begging for Justice beyond the confines of the coffin.

*
Re-reading my own writing from last spring, I think: who was this too-clever chap who was able to spin such inspired bullshit? Whatever happened to that sense of black humor I had? It’s been so long since I’ve felt frightened enough even to want to whistle in the dark. Now, it’s as if the tune got stuck in my throat. I listen to a scratchy old recordings from another, more desperate time in the nation’s history: Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Son House, singing woke up this morning with the Jinx all ’round, Jinx all ’round, round my bed, singing can’t tell my future, now, you can’t tell my past. Well it seem like tomorrow, baby, sure gon’ be my last, singing about canned heat, singing about alcohol and jake, but still singing the sun gonna shine in my back door someday. The wind gonna rise and blow my blues away.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Voting by signs

I got up this morning on the left side of the bed.

This was not as straightforward as it sounds. I had to push the bed away from the wall to get out on that side.

At 5:00 a.m. the moon, symbol of wisdom, cast a fairly strong light despite the thin cloud cover. The truth will out, as they say.

As I sat outside drinking my coffee, I could hear water trickling in the spring and in the stream. That’s very unusual for this time of year.

The first train whistle was from the east, just three short blasts.

It’s 6:30 and I have yet to hear a single white-throated sparrow sing. According to birders’ onomatopoeic lore, its song says, “Oh sweet Canada, Canada, Canada!” Not that Canada would necessarily be a bad place to live . . .

Instead, the song sparrow seems eerily insistent this morning: “Hip hip hurrah, boys! Spring is here!” Spring in November? It’s possible!

In fact, the long-range forecast from the U.S. Weather Service calls for mild temperatures and sunny skies starting tomorrow.

Yesterday afternoon the great-horned owl began calling well before dark. It began in the deepest part of the hollow, but as darkness fell, it moved higher and higher up the ridge.

For my first breakfast I peeled an apple, keeping the peel all in one piece. When I was finished, I passed it around my head three times in a clockwise direction and let it fall to the floor. It landed in the rough shape of the letter “D” if you sort of squinted a little. Not “R”. And certainly not “W”!

It’s said that if you dig a hole when the moon is waxing, you’ll have more than enough dirt to fill it up. But if you dig a hole when the moon is waning, you’ll never have enough dirt to fill the hole you’ve dug. The moon’s on the wane, Mr. President. You might want to think about patching things up with some of those pesky trial lawyers.

When I went out to take a leak just now, a crow flew overhead from north to south. Hey, where’s your usual gang of obnoxious friends? It held its tongue.

Too late I realized that I had pulled my left boot on first, contrary to the superstition. Well, I don’t believe in any of that stuff, anyway. Luck is where you find it – and what you make of it.

Still, as a poet I must admit to some, slight belief in word magic. What we say influences what we think and how we act, insinuates itself into the very fabric of reality! Yep. Therefore, I’m calling this election for John Kerry BY A LANDSLIDE. Alert the media.

Now let’s all get busy and put the “ex” back in “Texas”! See you at the polls!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

After the show

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Blogging the Appalachians

 

Appalachian Week continues at Via Negativa with a reminiscence from my troubled youth (as opposed to my troubled middle-age).

Naked to his waist, the skinny white kid from Duncansville, Pennylvania doesn’t sing, he scream-vomits. His torso contorts in paroxysms of stylized rage as he gasps for air, hurling each phrase at the sweat-drenched audience:

EVERYTHING’S BEEN DONE

EVERYTHING’S BEEN TRIED

NOTHING

WORKS

And with that the band kicks in. In front of the makeshift stage – one end of the basement roped off with yellow CAUTION tape – the human maelstrom resumes. Someone scales the speaker stack and leaps off, trusting in the kindness of strangers to keep him from hitting the glass-strewn floor.

We’ve reached the bottle-smashing stage of the evening. At these parties, everyone wears boots for a good reason. By the end of the night, my housemates and I will have an inch or two of shattered glass to sweep up. I watch anxiously from the rear as people swing from the exposed pipes like punk Tarzans.

My friend Bill, hanger-on and roadie, stands against the wall to the left of the stage, a big grin on his face and a 12-pack of Milwaukee’s Best under one massive arm. This is his second twelve-pack of the evening. He averages seven minutes per can – I’ve timed him. As he finishes each can, he crumples it and tosses it into the mosh pit. Like tossing a cat into the spin cycle – it’s always fun to see what direction it will fly out in.

It’s all good, clean, violent fun. In this particular corner of the punk rock underground, hippies, straight-edgers and metal heads are tolerated; only homophobic rednecks and racist skinheads risk getting their asses kicked. There does exist, however, a sharp but unspoken social division between the kids who grew up in the suburban bubble of State College and those from anywhere outside it – self-confessed hicks from bumfuck nowhere. Most of the former come from comfortable backgrounds; their parents are professionals, and most of them can expect to be the same someday. In their politics as in their musical tastes, they are sophisticated purists.

Not so the hicks. For them, the stakes are much higher. The two punk shows I attended in Altoona had a more desperate and dangerous tone than these friendly basement bashes in State College. People entered the mosh pit expecting to get hurt; there wasn’t any rasta-style pogoing or ironic variations on the tango. If anyone can be said to have – as the punk anthem puts it – “no future,” it would be these kids from the rust belt and the sticks. Good factory jobs are disappearing – not that too many of the folks on stage or in the mosh pit would accept that such a thing could exist in the first place. Meth labs are sprouting up in the more remote hollows where moonshine was once distilled.

These are the rebels, the misfits. Every society has them. The Appalachians, with their history of extreme individualism, seem to have more than their fair share. Contrary to stereotypes, mountain people are among the least likely to attend church of all surveyed groups of Americans. During the Civil War, it was in the mountains that families’ loyalties were most sharply divided.

There’s little sense of regional identity, no cultural pride. These kids profess nothing but scorn for parents and siblings who listen to Hank Williams Jr. and live for Friday night high school football games. They cultivate an exaggerated mimic of their native accent, to the delight of the State College kids for whom rural white culture is an oxymoron. In a moment of levity between songs, the singer raises his arms in a mock Nazi salute and calls out: “To you’ns I say . . . ”

“FUCK YOU’NS!” the locals shout back.

Bill grins at me from the other side of the room, hurls a beer can in my general direction. That means he wants to talk. I elbow my way through the crowd. “Hey, you fucking hippie!” he calls out affectionately. “What’s up, faggot?”

I am allowed to say this only because I know him – not that Bill is ever shy about his homosexual tendencies. And we both enjoy the shocked looks this garners from the politically correct State College kids.

“Fuck any sheep lately?”

“Hell no! I’m too busy with my sister!”

Bill hands me a beer, then motions me to lean in closer. “Chris just bought a huge bag of pot. Come on out to the car right after the show!”

“Is it any good?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Nah, not really. It’s local – just what some guy grew up on Wopsanonnack. You have to smoke a ton of it before you feel anything. But the price was right!”

*

My housemate Darren comes over, grinning from ear to ear. “Hey, did you see that old guy with the cane? He was great!”

It seems that Darren had been sitting out on the front stoop the other afternoon, enjoying a breakfast beer, when an old fellow walked by and gave him a friendly glance. I guess Darren figures that anyone who can see past the pink mohawk is O.K.

“Hey, where are you going?” he called out.

“Just walkin’ home, son, just walkin’ home.”

“You look like you could use a beer!”

So they sat and talked for an hour or two, Darren said, and the old guy waved his cane about with excitement as he described the fun he used to have when he was Darren’s age – the whiskey he drank, the fights he got into, the hearts he broke. So Darren invited him to stop by the next evening. He had never heard of punk rock, but it sounded like a good time, he said.

He showed up around eleven, just as things were getting going. Darren said the guy stood at the bottom of the cellar steps for a few minutes, taking it all in with a gleam in his eye. Then he leaned his cane against the wall and waded into the mosh pit.

“He isn’t very big, you know – but then, neither am I. He just did whatever I did, bouncing off people and having a good time. His arms were turning around like windmills!”

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“Oh, he said he had to get home. Said his wife was gonna beat his ass, so he might as well get it over with.

“He broke his glasses, though,” Darren adds mournfully. “I offered him some money out of the cover fees, but he wouldn’t take it. He said he thought he should pay us – he’d never seen anything like this!”

*

The bowl is basic industrial – the kind made from copper pipe fittings. The cannabis is, as advertised, weak. More drunk than stoned, we pledge eternal friendship. What this means is illustrated by reference to some of the State College kids. “That one guy, K., he acts all friendly ‘n ‘at, wants to hang out. But every time he gives you a beer, you know he’s keeping track.”

“Fuck that!” the drummer says. “If you’re friends, that means you don’t keep track! Right, boys?” A chorus of “Hell yeahs!”

I pipe up with the old saw about how you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. “We do!” Bill says, and he and the bass player proceed to pull snot from each other’s nostrils. I stand corrected.

“Here’s what we say,” Bill informs me. “‘You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, and you can pick your friend’s nose. But you can’t roll your friends up into little balls and flick them against the wall!'”

“Wow, man,” I say, playing the blissed-out stoner for their amusement. “That’s so far out!”

*

Five in the morning, and nearly time for bed. I’m sitting at the kitchen table listening to the life story of a 17-year-old girl from Huntingdon. L. has blond hair, a classically thin, Appalachian face, pale blue eyes and a perpetually anxious expression. I know her older brother pretty well, but this is the first I’ve had much of a conversation with her.

Tonight she seems especially woebegone. I gather that she has been sleeping with Darren, off and on, but tonight he’s got someone else in there. “I’m really not looking forward to the drive back home,” she says sadly, shooting me a hopeful look.

I know some men find this kind of vulnerability irresistible. Me, I’m fighting the urge to give her a reassuring pat on the head. I murmur something sympathetic, I don’t remember what. But it’s all she needs. Soon I am hearing more than I really want to know about domestic violence, incest, an abortion last year. Her every sentence ends tentatively, a rising intonation inviting agreement, affirmation. “Oh geez,” I say. Or, “Wow.” “Damn.” “Holy shit.” At appropriate junctions I follow up with questions, remembering the lesson my father – a recovered shy person – had taught me: always ask people about themselves.

At six-thirty I walk her to her car; she’s good and sober, as am I. We shake hands. “Hang in there,” I say. Her eyes are a little damp. Only now, some twelve years later, does it occur to me that she may not ever have been listened to quite that way before.

*

I think she made it. I ran into her once several years later, and she told me she was a sophomore at Penn State, following her brother’s lead. She still seemed pretty clueless, but then I’m not one to talk.

As for the other 17-year-old girl I didn’t sleep with that night – the one who lay passed out on my bed in a pool of her own urine the whole time I was listening to L.’s life story – she died later that year in a drunken accident. Partying in a strange house, she opened what she thought was the door to the bathroom and tumbled down a steep set of cellar stairs, snapping her neck.

A lot of the people I used to party with have died, for some reason. I can’t get over the thought that, in some fundamental way, I failed them. The few people from that scene I still keep up with were all State College kids.

The last I saw Bill, he had grown a mustache and no longer shaved his head. “I hang out at the redneck bars down in ‘Toona town now,” he said. “There’s fights there every night! Bodies go flying, people get knifed – it’s great!”

“You’re as full of bullshit as ever, I see.”

“It’s true! I just stand there and watch, you know, and drink my beer. You can get used to anything.”