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

At home in the library

I used to think I had something in common with the coffee-shop crowd, but now I’m coming to realize that my true place, if I have one, is at the public library. You know, that odd refuge from consumerism where you can’t buy things, only borrow them. Where people come to read or doze rather than to see and be seen and get wired on expensive, caffeinated beverages. I may not borrow many books — largely because public libraries aren’t very well stocked with the kind of obscure things I read — but I like knowing that the place is run by free-speech radicals who make an effort to welcome everybody, even those who cart their spare clothes around in shopping bags.

The library is full of my kind of weirdos: people who read books. You could say that about people at the local Barnes & Noble, too, but here in the library it’s quiet in a way few other public spaces can ever be, and I’m sure that freaks out people who require constant stimulation. Also, from what I’ve seen, the crowd at B&N and other bookstores skews toward the upwardly mobile. As for coffee shops, I’ve noticed they tend to cater to distinct segments of the population: businessmen in one, Christian conservatives in another, liberals and leftists in a third. In the public library, by contrast, you can meet almost anyone — but in an introvert-friendly atmosphere that discourages much beyond friendly nods and murmured greetings.

I suppose in part because of where I grew up and went to school, I’ve always been pretty comfortable among people with whom I have little in common, and I’ve been surprised by the extent to which Americans have retreated into tribal enclaves, afraid to rub shoulders with “Rethuglicans” or “Dumbocrats.” Me? I’m a little wary of going out in public at all, to be honest, knowing that 65 percent of Americans support drone warfare, 51.8 percent believe that shopping constitutes a form of therapy, and 74 percent believe a better place awaits them when they die.

But my sense of alienation retreats a bit when I read (at the library) that 57 percent of American adults also apparently still read books for pleasure, and about 50 percent visit a library or bookmobile at least once a year. Then again, if libraries weren’t popular, those who advocate their elimination probably wouldn’t work so hard to cut off their funding. Along with national parks and Social Security (also both threatened by privatization schemes), they are one of the last great bastions of democratic socialism in this country.

That said, my caffeine levels have dropped to a dangerous low. And the ragged looking man (worse even than me) on the other side of the Quiet Zone has really begun to snore.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Arms race

The thing I think I’ll remember most about this summer in northwest London is the constant sound of gunfire. Fortunately it’s all from video games.

Civilians die by the hundreds in Gaza, Syria, and countless other conflicts, but in the “realistic” MMORPGs, the casualties are mainly if not exclusively other players. The bombed-out hellscapes are a given. It feels almost innocent.

But while the teenagers played war, Rachel and I watched all four seasons of Game of Thrones, which our mutual friend Jean Morris — a fan of the show — aptly described as “adrenalin porn for aging hippies.” The graphic violence and frequent nudity and sex did feel gratuitous, though the show was gritty in many other ways as well. What we perceive as realistic helped the supernatural elements from seeming too wildly improbable most of the time. It all added up to good, escapist fun.

But last year on Facebook I remember Dylan Tweney pointing out in reference to Game of Thrones that the drug cartels in Mexico are also fond of putting enemies’ heads on pikes. It made him uncomfortable, he said, that we would take pleasure in such a spectacle.

What does it say about us that we are so entranced by violence… and that we conflate graphic violence with realism? Perhaps there’s some law that states that the grimmer the world becomes that one is trying to ignore or escape, the grimmer the escapism too must become. Perhaps we are locked in a new kind of arms race: between reality and imagination. But if so, is another world still possible? And do the still, small voices of a greater-than-human, numinous reality still stand a chance?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Effigies

This entry is part 82 of 91 in the series Toward Noon: 3verses

Clouds hide the top of Ice Mountain
and it looks like a real mountain again,
no turbines in sight.

Below, the ugly subdivision
where a black family once woke
to a burning cross.

I find a shed antler on the powerline,
a twisted Y like the bottom half
of a stick figure.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Gary Barwin’s poem for Rob Ford

Is there anything that hasn’t already been said about the man whom mainstream media organizations now routinely refer to as “Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor”? Of course there is! On his excellent serif of nottingblog, the surrealist Canadian poet Gary Barwin recently posted “Dear Mayor.” It begins:

I imagine skinning you
and you romp around the city
guts only

we won’t save taxes
think of the costs
protecting your insides

dear Mayor we stretch your skin
a blanket around us
keeps us warm for winter

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dirt Farmer

Where other farmers sell grain, I sell soil, attractively packaged in ornamental coffins. Though this is the middle of Iowa, urban hipsters drive hours to buy it — “Heated, not treated, to remove Monsanto’s seed.” They pose for pictures next to my two-story tractor. I dress the part and don’t mention the ground-penetrating radar, how it shows me all the lies of the land as I drive my specially modified harvester. Instead, I talk about the healing properties of a mud mask, especially when it cracks in midsummer to let in the sun. My Lithuanian grandmother swore by it! When the soil is gone, will I sell rocks, they want to know. No, I want to say, I will sell the empty space to you to put all your goddamn garbage in. It’ll be the last landfill you’ll ever need. Instead I laugh and say in my best hick drawl: This here’s Iowa loess, son. Ain’t nothing but soil all the way down.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The weight of inequality

Parmanu:

In the days that followed, I found myself thinking often of the common man on the street and the gap between us. I imagined people – the elevator boy, the waiter in a restaurant, the pizza delivery guy – looking at me, sizing up my net value, and comparing it to their own. On streets I often hid my camera. I sensed a strange notion of guilt, for things I possessed and they did not. I found this condition disturbing, and I wondered how others like me coped. I spoke with some friends.

“We know inequality as an abstraction, and we think we understand it. But putting a number to it, not statistically but in the context of an everyday situation, is something else.”

I was with an ex-colleague who now divided his time between the corporate and social sector.

I continued: “This is what happened when I gave that figure to the barber – I put down a number that made the gap between us explicit. Before this incident I ignored these people, now I think of them everyday.”

“I see what you mean,” he said.

“You live here – how do you cope with this on a daily basis?”

“I deal with it by contributing to social causes. And I tell myself that to do this, I need to keep a certain level of prosperity – good clothes, a car, an apartment, and so on. I need to keep myself satisfied, so that I can have an impact on others.”

“Hmmm.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The real Boston Marathon

Hoarded Ordinaries:

The Boston Marathon is Massachusetts’ annual holiday of helping, and it’s that willingness to help, I’ve decided, that chokes me up every year. All of us, deep down, have the urge to help others: to feel like we have made a difference. Cheering on a marathon runner—especially the ordinary folks at the back of the pack who need encouragement—makes you feel like you’re somehow contributing. Maybe someone is beginning to tire or cramp; maybe someone’s inner enemy is saying “Quit” or “I can’t.” When you cheer on a marathon runner—when you hold out a cup of water, an orange slice, or a freezer pop, or when you wave your sign or hit your drum or hold out your hand for a high five—you’re holding out hope that we, collectively, can somehow help a stranger. Maybe at a particular moment of need, you can offer exactly what’s needed: the right words, or a heartfelt bit of encouragement.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Inaugural poet as useful idiot

Craig Santos Perez (Kenyon Review blog):

Why banish poets from the empire if empire can use poets towards its own ends? Use poets to wash over the empire’s crimes, use poets to feign respect for humanity, use poets to poeticize the ideology of empire. Blanco’s poem, “One Today”, is a poem of American exceptionalism and immigrant exceptionalism—of “one empire” built by many settlers on native lands. There it is, Mr. President, sitting there, for USE.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Seven (very) short stories about drones

Read the whole series on Storify (and be sure to check out the Pro Publica report Cole links to at the end, which is both thorough and non-ideological).

Teju Cole has gotten big on Twitter the right way (in my humble view): using Twitter as a creative medium. His growing follower count is an indication that there’s a real hunger for this kind of thing; I do hope more writers will follow his lead. While I’ve personally grown a little weary of his relentlessly grim small fates, there’s no denying their literary quality and inventiveness. And I do love his occasional Twitter essays (or whatever you want to call the above, which is less polemic but more devastating than its predecessors). A just-published essay, “Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?” by Sam Twyford-Moore cites and quotes from a couple of Cole’s other Twitter essays, in case you missed them.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The end of the world as they knew it

Before this farce of an apocalypse spiritual awakening passes from memory, I’d like to take a little more time to think about what the end of the world means for a civilization. One of the odd things about the New Age obsession with misinterpreted Mayan “prophecies” is the unwillingness to actually learn from the Maya themselves, who are not only still with us but who have managed to preserve an impressive amount of their traditional knowledge, and have not been especially shy about sharing it with curious anthropologists. New Agers like to see themselves as freed from the shackles of Judeo-Christian thinking, and love to pay lip service to indigenous wisdom. But reading books like Time and the Highland Maya, by an anthropologist who apprenticed herself to K’iche’ Maya priests, or the Popol Vuh, translated by her husband with the same priests as consultants, might challenge one’s preconceptions, and definitely requires sustained grappling with a very different worldview.

This unwillingness to learn from other cultures is deeply rooted in Western Christian culture. There’s a good Christian/Greek word for that sort of willfully ignorant pride: hubris. And for at least one outpost of Western civilization, such hubris — along with rigid conservatism, extreme religiosity, environmental degradation and a changing climate — brought about the end of the world as they knew it. I’m talking about the Norse settlements on Greenland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb95CWvo3z0

If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (which I don’t necessarily recommend — it’s full of facile argumentation and poor scholarship), you already know the outlines of this story. But this documentary, produced for the PBS series Secrets of the Dead back in the millennial year, does an excellent job telling the story in the words of the scientists who finally pieced it together. And it was great to hear from the Greenland Inuit, who arrived a little later than the Norse but survived the Little Ice Age just fine. “Apocalypse? What apocalypse?” Which, come to think of it, is probably also what the Mayan peasants were saying when their parasitic city-states were collapsing 1000 years ago.

(By the way, if you’re interested in documentaries about the vikings, there are a number of other good ones collected on the new sagalicious page over at Twisted Rib.)