Personal/Political – Page 29

March 21, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Stars and stripes

1. Burn, baby, burn

I remember the one and only time I participated in a flag burning. It was in the early 1990s, shortly after the Supreme Court struck down the Flag Protection Act of 1989. I was living in State College at the time. A fellow line cook at the diner where I worked – we’ll call him Rob – told me he needed some extras for his senior film project, and with my stereotypical hippie appearance at the time (long hair, beard, ratty clothes), I guess I fit the bill. He and his crew were making some sort of documentary that included recording people’s reactions to the public incineration of an American flag. The first time they tried it, he said, the mock demonstration was abruptly terminated when someone stomped out the flames and ran off with the flag.

My role was to act like an interested bystander. We gathered at the time specified – early in the afternoon, I think – right in front of the Allen Street entrance to Penn State’s University Park campus. There were plenty of people on the streets and on campus; it was between classes. Rob showed up with a three-foot-long flag and a can of gasoline. The cameraman and soundman took up their positions, and with very little ceremony, Rob stuck the flag in a little tripod stand, dribbled some gasoline on it, and struck a match. It caught immediately.

In just a few seconds, a hostile crowd formed on the other side of the street and began to make threatening noises. A huge man dressed in camouflage fatigues – an ROTC student, I guess – came racing down Old Main lawn, leaped the wall, kicked over the flag, stomped out the fire, and ran off with flag and stand before anyone had time to react. The crowd cheered. Then suddenly another big guy was looming over me, bellowing something along the lines of, “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING BURNING OUR COUNTRY’S FLAG?” He was nearly incoherent with rage, but it was hard not to catch his drift. I reacted with great courage and aplomb. “I didn’t burn it!” I said. “WELL, WHO DID?”

Fortunately, a genuine radical, with genuine guts, had showed up on his mountain bike just as the flag burning started. “I helped!” he lied. Much to my relief, the big guy turned his ire on this other longhair, who did his best to engage him in a debate about the First Amendment without getting creamed. Rob was happy. Not only did they get some better footage this time, he said, but it made the results of their first experiment seem like less of a fluke. “People will actually break the law and steal a flag to prevent its owner from burning it,” he marveled.

A better way to put it, I think, is that once aflame, a flag ceases to be someone’s private property and becomes pure symbol. As anthropologist Victor Turner once pointed out (The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Cornell University Press, 1967), symbols are both highly charged emotionally and deeply ambiguous. Unlike a sign, which stands for a known thing, a symbol escapes complete comprehension by those who employ it. In a ritual context, Turner maintained, symbols mediate between two poles of meaning: one social and normative, the other sensory and affective. Symbols allow “norms and values… [to] become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values. The irksomeness of moral constraint is transformed into a ‘love of virtue.'”

In the case of flag burning, ambiguity characterizes the ritual as well as the symbol. The U.S. flag code prescribes incineration as the best way to dispose of a flag. (U.S. Code Title 36, Chapter 10, Section 176 (k): “The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.”) Thus, intention is everything; to criminalize flag burning would be tantamount to punishing people for thinking the wrong thoughts. The paradox becomes two-fold, because freedom of expression is so central to our sense of who we are as Americans. This is probably just about the only area where flag burning patriots and flag stealing patriots can find common ground: both would agree on the centrality of freedom.

Regardless of one’s intentions, consigning a flag to flames betrays a passionate engagement with both of Turner’s poles of symbolic meaning. Those of us who are prone to second-guessing – wondering, Pilate-like, “What is freedom?” – have a hard time siding with either brand of patriot. Why do they have to take themselves so damn seriously, anyway? I don’t deny the value of symbols and rituals, but I think it’s essential to keep them in perspective. In a less regulated, more festive context, symbol-laden ritual tends to alternate with bouts of unrestrained laughter. Religion has gone downhill ever since they wrote the clowns out of the myths and out of the ceremonies.

2. Magic carpet

Last Sunday morning my buddy L. and I found ourselves sitting in a parking lot in front of a dollar store somewhere south of Orbisonia, Pennsylvania watching an immense flag rippling in the breeze, backlit by the sun. Neither of us is particularly prone to nationalistic sentiments, and if I had been alone, I’m sure I never would have succumbed to the temptation to pull off the road for the sole purpose of admiring an American flag. But L. had insisted, and since she was driving, that’s what we did – and it was wonderful.

I’ve seen bigger flags, but rarely on short enough flagpoles for one to fully appreciate them. As we watched – completely straight and sober, but feeling more stoned by the minute – the flag seemed intent on demonstrating some elemental principle of travel. It became a country unto itself, complete with its own square of sky. Slow waves of wind beginning out among the stars found endless inventive ways to pass through the striped field, the alternating strips of crop and fallow following the contours of a land continually in flux, like a plowman’s dream of dancing deep in the soil.

Travelers pursue similar fantasies, I think, in regard to the road: that we can dispense with an intermediary and ride it like a magic carpet. Unlike rivers, roads can take us anywhere and everywhere. When we think about individual freedom, we think most often about freedom of movement; riding the parallel highways scored across the American heartland, we dream of blasting off into the stars. It is this fantasy, I think, that has spawned our American love affair with the automobile, with such disastrous consequences for air and weather and unfragmented wildlands.

And as a matter of fact, the flag my friend and I were ogling last Sunday was the mascot of an automobile dealership. The sign said Patriotic Chevrolet. Of course, one can argue about how patriotic the car cult really is. But if Turner is right, that a symbol derives much of its power from hidden or unknown meanings, then presumably all sorts of fantasies contribute to the flag’s powerful hold on our imaginations.

But none of this crossed my mind at the time. I was simply enjoying watching the wind play with a large piece of brightly patterned, translucent fabric. A flag, like any beautiful thing, is always more than mere sign or symbol. Even before it becomes something in which we can invest meaning and emotion, it entrances us by giving shape to moving air – the original and nearly universal template for what we call spirit. A kite can do the same, of course, or a poplar tree, or a field full of swaying grass. They return us to the waters of our birth. We long for immersion in the medium far more than in the message.

3. Going with the flow

Little has been written about the sheer sensuality of a flag in flames. The appeal of a campfire is nearly universal, and what can be more mesmerizing than staring into a fireplace? For any flag with as much red on it as the Stars and Stripes has, “fire” must already be numbered among its covert meanings. Our bellicose national anthem’s central image is of a tattered American flag lit up by a nighttime battle – “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” and so forth.

If a flag first attracts and holds our attention because of the way it gives shape to the invisible, all-pervasive flow, setting fire to it makes the connection literal. When the smoke and flames disappear, the flag disappears with them. But has it really been destroyed – or simply translated into the realm of the invisible and the eternal?

Symbols may not permit outright destruction, but they can die from neglect, or suffer slow perversion. The U.S. Code attempts to forestall the latter by, for example, prohibiting the flag’s use in advertising. I wonder what the reaction of that “Patriotic Chevrolet” dealer would’ve been if we had stopped in and informed him that his use of a flag, far from demonstrating patriotism, put him in direct violation of the flag code?

My (in)actions at that mock flag burning years ago were not among my proudest moments, and I did my best to forget the whole incident. But a few months later, I found out from a film-buff friend that I had been the star of Penn State’s annual airing of student films, the Can Film Festival. “That was the funniest thing in the whole festival!” he enthused. “A bunch of us recognized you right away, just standing there off to the side. I was like, ‘Hey, it’s Bonta!’ Then that fuckin’ Nazi got right in your face. I didn’t burn it!” he mimicked. “Everyone just about shit themselves! It was awesome.”

March 17, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Outline found on the backs of several napkins

Ideology of “Growth” (IOG)
– assumption of no limits: metastatis, envelopment rather than development
– only thing that increases over time is the PAST
– Past is intangible, inexhaustible, infinitely malleable (unlike real matter)
– IOG keeps focus on FUTURE – distract attention from what is happening in the present —> rapidly converted into more past
– consumer economy obliterates attention – should be numbered among:

EXTERNALIZED COSTS
– everything of actual (subsistence) value
– e.g. clean water, clean air, healthy soil, entire web of life
– also family/community values, public space
– some of these may soon only exist in the past

WHO IS THE CONSUMER?
– fiction of marketing
– spectator (rather than participant)
– temporary container of waste products
– permanent loser/debtor, b/c of externalized costs —> sucker
– transient human resource —> statistic
– target of crime, terrorism —> “body count”

BUT we are not consumers!!! To realize this is to bring about:

UN-TELEVISED REVOLUTION
– impossible
– essential
– any attempt to fill void w/out challenging void-creating machinery (i.e. “wants”) is FUTILE
– Love, God, Family, Community, Wilderness, etc. all equally susceptible to commodification, i.e. conversion into vacuums
– televised revolutionaries —> “Everything sucks” simply feeds the IOG

NEEDED: ANTIBODIES
– immune system works by beating invaders at own game
– examples: questions vs. answers, free love vs. lust/greed, public libraries vs. bookstores, wild places vs. zoos, playing games vs. watching sports, DIY networks vs. commerce
– laughter most effective weapon against void (IOG can’t be conquered through argumentation)
– spontaneous healing: logic of participation (“magic”) as full partner to discriminatory logic
– autopoiesis

HOW TO GET THERE
– build respect for authentic past (unknowable) & nature —> cultivate awe
– apophatic method: negative growth
– slow food, slow lane, living deliberately (not just “doing without”)
– more pleasure, not less —> more things give pleasure, giving itself is source of pleasure
– more “goods”, not fewer —> many small things/beings in place of one or two big abstractions
– plenty of energy

March 16, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

A likely story

A light rain is falling outside the offices of the National Chamber of Converse, where the current occupant of the position known only to the Secret Service as POTUS has convened a special meeting with his cabinet of curiosities. A pair of common or English sparrows is busy mating on a high ledge. The male hops on and off at three-second intervals, unseen by anybody but the omniscient narrator.

I know you won’t be surprised to hear that the streets below host an obstreperation of demonstrators. They wave signs printed in yesterday’s newspapers’ Franklin Gothic, sable, with exclamation points rampant dexter. “NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN!” they trumpet, and “NO REST FOR THE WEARY!” The briefer messages seem to be the most popular: “NO OUTLET!” “NO SHIT!” And of course, “NO WAY!”

A flat-chested man in a suit of clothes is trying to push his way through to the entrance, without success. It’s as if he isn’t even there.

The usual small knot of counter-demonstrators tries to make up for its lack of numbers with an unconvincing show of outrage. Their problem is, they don’t actually believe in outrage. Let your hypothetical camera zoom in for a close-up of a telegenically tall, clean-shaven woman chanting into a megaphone, “Chill. Chill. Chill. Chill. Chill,” as her comrades brandish their crudely lettered signs: “Hold Everything.” “Beg to Differ.” “Word.” “Consider the Source.”

“Consider the lilies of the field,” says an argumentative cop. He’s been spending the past week investigating a pedophilia case, and frankly, he’s feeling a little testy. What’s the use of all their new high-tech, non-lethal riot-control gear if they never get a chance to use it? Homeland Security is more interested in radical sheiks than radical chic. “What is it with you people, anyway?” he wants to know.

For her part, the female sparrow is beginning to think she wouldn’t mind a quiet life out in the country somewhere – or failing that, at least a crumb from a crumpet. Unbeknownst to her, her erstwhile paramour has just managed to fly straight into a window, and is lying dazed on the sidewalk. The clean-shaven woman notices him and stops her chant, bending down for a closer look.

“What is it?” “What’s wrong?” The other counter-demonstrators stop brandishing for a moment and crowd in. She lifts the sparrow in cupped hands and, seeing its nictitating membranes raise their curtains, begins to sing to it. She has a classically trained soprano voice; it carries clear across the street to where the flat-chested man stands stock-still, listening to a lullaby he hasn’t heard in thirty years, ever since his youngest sibling graduated from the high chair with flying colors.

The moon’s the north wind’s cookie, the babe is in the forest green and all that. In a few minutes, the sparrow will recover well enough to fly away, fly away, oh glory! – even mate with a few more partners before the blood clot in his brain finally finishes him off. No one will be around when that happens, but fortunately his heavenly father keeps an eye out for just that sort of thing. Or so they say.

The cops will receive contradictory orders on whether to try out their new, fresh-ground black pepper spray. The demonstration will turn ugly and begin looking for someplace to take a leak. A man holding his pants up with a strip of cured hide from a large herbivore will take a turn at the megaphone while the clean-shaven woman lets the flat-chested man buy her a double latté at a nearby coffee shop. They will sit at the counter, where she will use several napkins and a black felt marker to outline her theory about how negative growth is the engine of the gift economy.

She is, after all, a counter-demonstrator.
__________

Tomorrow: Her outline.

March 10, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The legacy of March 10

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.

January 10, 2005 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 . . .

December 28, 2004May 31, 2016 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

November 22, 2004 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.

November 19, 2004 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.

November 8, 2004September 9, 2013 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 electionâ€¦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.

November 5, 2004 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.