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

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.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Disposition matrix: fragments

the melancholy of a straight line of same-sized trees

the principal’s chair like a golden cloak

how many roads

running toward the shooter, shouting

the vacuum of grief quickly fills with kitsch

I went to bed hungry & woke up full

“Would you like ketchup with your freedom fries?”

survivors at Virginia Tech described him as looking almost innocent in his scout uniform

I dreamt about writing a book titled war canoe

dried wildflowers could be incorporated into a quilt full of names

all young males in the target area are presumed to be terrorists

the terrible coolness of indifference

how many roads must a man

both of them running, pitching forward

according to the Washington Post, the expanded kill list is known as the “disposition matrix”

the melancholy of angels that never learned how to pollinate

“How many bees would you like?”

in my dream I loved how the deserted street felt to my bare feet

the children hidden like stowaways in lavatories & closets

coats from the Army-Navy store

a fisherman’s sweater knitted to look like fish scales

just as bullet points rarely liven up a slide presentation, the sound of a gun is far duller than you’d expect from the movies

it was dark before I reached the end of the block

“How would you prefer we got rid of the crows?”

after the power comes back, the clock can’t stop blinking

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What’s mental illness got to do with it?

Coyote Crossing:

There’s just one particular form of mental illness that’s been found to be shared by a significant number of spree killers. It’s depression. At least a tenth of people in the U.S. have it, or have had it, myself among them. And there’s no conclusive causal link between the depression and spree killing.

You are not normal.

There is no normal. You may well be happy and well adjusted. I hope you are. I often am as well. But every single person is neurologically distinct. Normal is semantic, an arbitrary boundary on the bell curve between peak and long tail. Mentally ill, if it means anything at all, just means landing on the wrong side of that arbitrary line.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poems vs. bullets

Today I happened to remember I’d written a poem in the voice of a hero from a previous school shooting. Romanian holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, blocked the doorway to keep the gunman from entering while his students got out through the windows, “into the garden.”

Let’s get real, you say. What good can poetry possibly do, faced with these kinds of horrific acts? I’d reply that anything that helps to deemphasize and demythologize the role of the killer can’t hurt. I tend to think that the mass media’s focus on the killers not only ensures that they will be remembered, but also encourages other violent, antisocial types to emulate them knowing they’ll get the same kind of notoriety. And notoriety might sometimes be just what such troubled young men are after. I love old-time murder ballads as much as anyone, but I think it’s time to put those behind us and stop feeding a gun culture that romanticizes lone killers and vigilantes.

I don’t believe that news reports should be censored, so how to combat the sensationalism? By elevating and memorializing those like Librescu who resisted, and who led truly exemplary lives besides. I hope it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing songs and poems about Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung and the other heroes of the massacre.

More than poems of mourning — which are also necessary, and which we poets are always Johnny-on-the-spot with after every major cataclysm — we need poems of celebration and defiance. We can’t allow the killers to dominate our memories of these events, just as we can’t allow the gun fetishists to continue to hijack public discussion of the role of violence in our culture and how to change it. If we do, to coin a phrase: the terrorists will have won.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Educational Films

This entry is part 13 of 22 in the series Alternate Histories

In elementary school, sometimes we would drop everything & watch movies in the middle of a slow afternoon, old educational films from Coronet, Encylopedia Brittanica & Disney. My favorites were the ones with time-lapse photography. A great boat would take shape in minutes as scaffolding expanded like notebook doodles & workers leapt & swarmed as quick as thought. Or the classic: the wonder of a bud becoming a bloom, shedding its petals & swelling into a fruit.

Most educational of all were the rare occasions when the teacher would decide to feed the film back through the projector as she rewound it, so that everything went backwards at high speed. The law of gravity was replaced by the law of levity. We laughed & laughed as raindrops rose from puddles & cars sped through intersections in reverse gear without a single crash. You had to pay attention; everything happened so fast. I saw an oak shrink, furl its first green flags & curl up, the acorn closing around it like a healed wound. I saw a collapsed building rise from the dead, bullets return to their guns like homing pigeons & an ashen cloud condense & give birth to a bomb.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Imagining an Iraqi imagining us

I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. Though a note on the post says it’s a rough, first draft, I ultimately decided it didn’t need further revision. (Please click through and read the whole poem.)

From a Distance:

God knows how many times
I have stood frozen in the hot street
with rifles pointing at my crotch

& watched myself – small
& impossibly thin – in the oil-black
mirrors of their sunglasses.

They never take them off, not even
to enter a mosque. God knows
they are easy to hate.