bookofdays

steel rain

I wrote before about the villages being burnt, via Seymour Hersh. Now we have tape of an individual Marine  shooting an insurgent in Fallujah against orders,  "in possible violation of the Geneva Cooventions."

Seems to me Generva is buried under the rubble of the ruins of Fallujah.  The Times' Dexter Filkins writes beautifully, and to heart-rending effect, of the craters where homes once were, and fixes accurately on the implications of the military code for bombs --"steel rain"-- as he ends his article.

Isak Dinesen talks about speaking to Kikuyu tribesmen in rhyme, which they'd never heard before, and being begged for more: "Speak like rain again." Rain being welcome in a nation often plagued by drought. I imagine Iraqis hearing the voice of steel rain and brewing their own rhymes in response -- rhymes that those of us who don't know Arabic will never understand.

The steel rain fell, and fell. Telephone poles came down, their wires threading in and out of rubble piles. Fires burned out of control. Tanks rolled over cars. Hungry dogs roamed the streets.

The insurgents killed at least one other marine today - he looked into a room where half a dozen were waiting, and they shot him before dragging off his body and his gun. Marines recovered his body.

But however deadly the rebels were able to make this filthy dead-end in the desert, there was also something terribly pathetic about their stand. After the makeshift bunkers had been mercilessly bombed, a man in a white dishdasha emerged and tried to get away by crawling across the slag heaps. He was machine-gunned, he plopped to the ground, and he died where he fell.

Despite what appeared to be the collapse of the insurgency here, Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl cautioned: "This is not won yet. Now we have to rebuild the city."

Rebuild? Rebuild what? The mosque that is "no more?" The markets? Oh, we'll trust Halliburton and KBR to super-size them. Iraqis will be driving last year's Ford Escorts down the new 4-lane streets we build, and moving into tile-roof housing complexes like the ones you see on the West Bank.

The headline for Filkins' piece talks of a "new mission: building trust." Counselors of men who batter know better than to speak of trust while the victim is still bleeding. Meanwhile, the "pathetic" insurgents know time is on their side: they may even know Mao's aphorism about "tremendous patience."

Whatever war crime that first Marine reflesively committed, terrified by the situation his own commander-in-chief has created for him, is only synecdoche for this war as a whole. (Look it up. Literary terms are useful when reality goes beyond Orwell.)

 

one in six

of those returning from Iraq have post-traumatic stress already,  And as a psychologist interviewed by the L.A. Times noted in the piece I just linked to,  "These things tend to increase over time."

I feel like making a "One in Six" button.

every day is remembrance day

Lately, as I teach, I've been finding myself talking a lot about World War I.

First it was my humanities class (the one with the fastpaced syllabus from one Great Classic to the next) was getting to more modernist authors: I found myself giving the fairly standard what-the-Great-War-did-to-Europe rap, mentioning  the half-million dead at the Battle of Marne; the "shellshock" that prefigured PTSD (and Virginia Woolf described so beautifully , as I also told them); about the wave of writing and art that exploded, trying to absorb the shock  -- sometimes by conveying a reality that seems, at first, to make no sense.

Then, this week, I wanted to honor November 11, even if *none* of the schools where I teach thought it worth a  holiday. But first, therefore, I had to talk about Armistice Day.

That meant explaining the fact about "The Great War" that may be most inexplicable of all: that it was billed, and not completely insincerely, as "the war to end all wars."  An inconceivable concept, to this group of urbanites, many of whom have come here from even more violent places.

Armistice Day, then bornat the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month off 1918, was - outrageous! -- a day celebrating peace.

The switch to Veterans Day wasn't universal: Canada chose instead "Remembrance Day," a name that whispers in peace's direction, while too wise to declare its affections. I'm also, and perhaps inevitably, reminded of Yam Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day -- a day in April that's been a national holiday in Israel since 1959, and when (description from About.com):

At ten in the morning, a siren is sounded where everyone stops what they are doing, pull over in their cars, and stand in remembrance.

It's been described to me as not one siren but pandemonium, numerous sirens in different registers, a chorale of mourning and rage.

Honoring veterans requires memory, too.

Veterans day is not just for old folks, I told my students. New veterans are coming home every day. Like the wounded ones Bush finally visited this week at Walter Reed Hospital and others like them, who are coming home missing limbs, or jobs, or health care; who have memories imprinted on their eyelids that I fear imagining. A veterans day is for the brave members of Operation Truth, including the ones who spoke to my friend Brendan Costello in WBAI on Thursday - joined by perhaps the prototype winter soldier, Ron Kovic (I had the privilege of watching him confront Colin Powell in San Francisco in 1995, when Powell had only the deaths associated with Gulf War I, and the war crimes he witnessed and ignored in Vietnam, to be held to account for -- not the incineration of a nation, on our TV screens this week). It's for non-combat vets of all stripes, too, including the civilian counselors who are the first responders when interpersonal violence is the source of trauma.

And Veterans Day is still a crappy occasion to appoint someone who doesn't believe  in observing the one protocol that might prevent their torture. should they be captured, as the nation's chief legal voice. '

Sorry to bring this back to Gonzales, but when even Joe Biden, who has the most to lose,  is playing dead on this, I feel the need to keep raising the so-called  "cry in the blogosphere."  Expecially when smarter bears than I see the dude as  headed for a Supreme Court nom.

Robert F. Kennedy, who, as attorney general, helped ease the Cuban Missile Crisis and enforced desegregation orders,  is not just turning in his grave: I can only imagine he's researching becoming a golem, to come save us from this shallow callow cruelty.

p.s.

A few more things on Gonzales:

Patrick Leahy told the Associated Press he didn't think the nomination was controversial. And this is a Democrat from Vermont. Howard Dean, can you apprise him? (Then again, Dean punted when we asked him, during the primary campaign, about the International Criminal Court.)

The Center for Constitutional Rights (usual suspects, I know) has a news release summarizing the basics.

And Jeanne at Body and Soul pointed me to MadKane's limerick:

But Does He Like Naked Statues?
By Madeleine Begun Kane

The Geneva Conventions are quaint,
Said Gonzales. A scholar, he ain't.
But he's Dub's nominee
For the post of AG,
Where no doubt he will rule sans restraint.

our worst face, right away

(Notes to visitors from the No on Gonzales petition: This post, written the day they announced Bush's  choice of Gonzales, was followed by many more; just click on the "Ethics" category, or "Military,"  and the others will turn up.]

So as I ran this morning through Fort Tryon Park in thirty-one degrees, I was thinking about the post that would break this week of mourning and quick punts; how to talk properly about listening to John Edgar Wideman, who said wisely on Friday that the government knows "only two uses of language, and they're related -- to lie and to sell things," and connect it somehow to the astonishingly quick onrush of Republican bad news, including the Iraq martial law/Fallujah bloodbath, the proposed appointment of Dr. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration’s  Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, and the talk of Social Security and tax "reform."

Then Ashcroft resigned, and we all knew something even worse was likely coming. Once the easy-to-mock lightning rod, with his covering of the breasts of statues and his tenor voice enlivening Fahrenheit 911, was out of the way, what stealth evil could be put in his place?

As it turned out. they didn't bother with stealth. They went for the author of the torture memo.

All the chat on the news is of how the appointment of Alberto Gonzales, an old Texas adviser, rewards Latinos who voted for Bush. (That story - with its exploitation of anti-abortion sentiment and careful neglect of many key issues for people, especially women, of color deserves a lot more words than I feel capable of giving it right now).

The stories make only cursory mention of Gonzales' main, visible contribution to our time:  the infamous "torture memo" that set the stage for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. (If all this is unfamiliar to you, see Seymour Hersh's reporting for The New Yorker or Tim Golden's series last week in the Times.) The blood of numerous prisoners, from Texas (see below) to Cuba to Iraq, is on the hands that may take the oath - and thus on mine, too.

Here's the face of Bush II to the world. We value this work so much, we'll elevate its principal author to the highest legal office in the land.   If you have any doubt that the memos come from Gonzales, look at his record pushing executions back in Texas. Compassionate conservative, my a**.

I am sick to my stomach. This appointment  makes this the official face of the U.S. government.

Thank god for the heroes who put up the Sorry Everybody website. They have over 500 images up now: we should all be contributing to it.

More Wideman and a Nov 11 post later.

yeats - more than bethlehem

Like half the nation, it seems, I've been busy quoting Yeats' "The Second Coming," especially the first verse:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Is"the best" then the contemptible members of my demographic who didn't vote? The "worst" Rove, or the Christianists who are taking last Tuesday as a mandate to push hard to scrap the Constitution as we know it? For solace, though, I thought of this other Yeats poem (even though I'm reminded that Yeats himself was an ardent fascist, of a peculiar sort).  I can't articulate why it consoles, except to remind me that our dramas, as passionately as we commit to them, are not the center of the universe.

Lapis Lazuli

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie bearen flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or On shipboard,'
Camel-back; horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instmment.

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

About that concession......

Here's the speech we all wanted to hear, given what's happened. Tomorrow I'll write about my marvelous evening with John Edgar Wideman, but in the meantime, go to the post marked "Concession":

Healing? We, the people at risk from terrorists, the people who subsidize you, the people who speak in glowing and respectful terms about the heartland of America while that heartland insults and excoriates us... we wanted some healing. We spoke loud and clear. And you refused to give it to us, largely because of your high moral values. You knew better: America doesn't need its allies, doesn't need to share the burden, doesn't need to unite the world, doesn't need to provide for its future. Hell no. Not when it's got a human shield of pointy-headed, atheistic, unconfrontational breadwinners who are willing to pay the bills and play nice in the vain hope of winning a vote that we can never have. Because we're "morally inferior," I suppose, we are supposed to respect your values while you insult ours. And the big joke here is that for 20 years, we've done just that.

and now for something completely different

I can't believe I'm promoting a cable premiere, and perhaps my motivation is rather selfish; the more thinking people outside the anime-fan community (like me) actually see this thing, the more people I can talk to about it. The mix of hard stuff (loss of family, military government, genocide) with silly, comic-book elements is worthy of Shakespeare, or at least the best Monty Python.

(To learn why I recommend it, see this post; or for a summary of the show, look here.)

At least it has nothing to do with the election.

other end of the day: the long haul

So I had to take that mix of grief and fear and make myself do something useful, since I was about to talk to undergrads at City - knowing that the majority of folks in these particular classes were that group I was yearning for last time, first-time voters for Kerry. I knew I couldn't walk into that classroom a basket case: I had to check in and see how they were feeling, and present it in some sort of context. I felt a little like teachers must have the day after 9-11; it also required me to step away from mourning long enough to *find* that context.

Of course, they were very sharp, and just as when they're discussing Keats or Phillis Wheatley, they raised points I'd missed: "Everyone who actually experienced 9-11 voted for Kerry. What were these other people thinking?" and (I loved this one) "Everyone who votes for Bush should go to Iraq!" (echoing Eminem's "Let him impress daddy that way").

I ended up talking more about 1964 than 2004: about the rebirh of the conservative movement and the machine that Karl Rove perfected, even though he didn't build it. "There's lots of work to do, " I said.

And now I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. More later. including obout Kerry's concession.

though p.s. -- an apology: I misspoke about the youth vote. It did rock.

taking a deep breath

That thing with feathers is now bleeding itself.

I'm trying to stop crying. I'm trying to believe what Kos wrote for the Guardian UK: that this is the beginning of a new left machine. I'm trying to sort out all the information about spoilage: voter registrations in the trash in New Mexico, 250K provisional ballots in Ohio. But what's also clear: the kids with cell phones didn't show. And my demographic, 30-44, voted less than last year. We opened it up for the 4 million evangelicals (organized illegally!) who followed Bush's poisonous gay marriage amendments.

I thought I was writing a blog pleading with John Kerry not to concede, to stand up for the people who waited till midnight to mark paper ballots in Ohio. But we have two new Senators who want to ban abortions completely and the incipient incineration of Fallujah. I'm having trouble summoning the activist in me, fighting off the shadow that hurts. And now I've run out of time to articulate further what today feels like and what I think it should mean to us.

How do we sort this out? How do we hold something in our hearts? Should we think of emigrating? I hope someone comments today: the only way to emerge from this darkness is side by side with other secular heathens. Can we do it? Howard Dean, can we still take our country back?