DON'T TASE ME, BRO...

Another taser-related death this past week, this time, not of an ancient great-grandmother in a wheelchair, but of a healthy young man. Those involved with toting up the corpses count more than five hundred. Google "taser deaths" for their names and ages.

Tasers don't kill people. Cops with tasers kill people. Cops with other weapons kill people too.

In contrast to the United States, British police don't routinely carry lethal arms. Only a limited number of specialist officers are permitted to use guns in special situations. Britain's Home Office said being unarmed is part of the "character of the police" in the U.K. The "character of the police" chez nous is something rather different. With our taste for arms sales and permanent warmaking throughout the world, could we expect it to be otherwise?

In looking through SKULK last week for its 9/11 resonances, I came across this chapter I had forgotten about.  I present it for your bleak amusement:

EIGHTEEN
Modest Doubt Is Call'd The Beacon Of The Wise

Could they do this? Did they even approve of it being done? Violence? Large-scale, possibly lethal violence?

Teresa had never even hunted or fished with Daddy: the idea of threading a worm on a hook had always seemed too yucky. Richard had the comical habit of crushing plastic milk containers with his hands: stomping on them seemed unseemly. Now they were challenged to embrace something like...the Truth. Teresa heard Thomas Aquinas urging her from potency to act. Richard felt ripeness was all, and things were very close to ripe.

But both were now smitten by a sudden cloud of fear and abdication. And it was in this eddying cloud that they now accompanied WSU’s speaker, Rashid Khalidi, towards Levitt Arena on an otherwise cloudless early evening for his talk on “The New American Empire”.

Why book the Shockers’ home basketball court? Because Khalidi was tall in stature in the academic world? No. Because He was a Shocker (to some) himself? No. Because this was the summer session’s culminating major-speaker event? No. It was because Buildings and Grounds had for some reason denied Richard’s request for Wilner Auditorium, though its schedule seemed open. No matter, Richard thought, Levitt will be fine, if slightly less comfortable in the bleachersswirlin and folding chairs. Desmond Tutu had spoken there last year, and Khalidi would make a nice followup.

But meteorological cloudlessness was a poor predictor of the gathering storm: streaming up Hillside along with Rashid, Teresa and Richard, were tens, then hundreds of sign-carrying students and community folks. Some wore yarmulkas, most wore crosses, and a scant few sported kuffiyehs, the traditional Palestinian headscarf. Uh-oh, T&R thought, looks like a religious war. Khalid was unruffled. “My fans,” he reassured them.     Au courant, though. The yarmulkas and crosses seemed to populate the same side of the path, while the kuffiyehs and assorted peaceniks lined up sparsely on the other. Law enforcement was nowhere in sight.

ISRAEL BASHERS NOT WELCOME!; TERRORISTS OFF CAMPUS!; EXTREMISTS OUT OF WICHITA!; STUDENTS WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED!; A NAZI SPEAKER ON TISHA B’AV -- SHAME! SHAME!; NEVER FORGET!; CHRIST SHALL OVERCOME! read signs on one side of the walk.

DIVESTMENT FROM ISRAEL! TROOPS HOME NOW!; WAR IS TERRORISM!; GO SOLAR, NOT BALLISTIC!; ASSES OF EVIL (with pictures of the principals)!; ENFORCE U.N. RESOLUTIONS IN PALESTINE!’ ANYTHING WAR CAN DO, PEACE CAN DO BETTER! read signs on the other.

Both sides seemed to share a strong commitment to the exclamation point. The three of them ran the gauntlet.

The Levitt basketball court had a small stage constructed at one end, as for other large events like rained-out graduations, and Richard and Khalidi took their seats on the well-flowered platform. At 7:40, having allowed ten minutes to accomodate the late-arriving crowd, Richard stood to open the evening.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Students and Faculty, Members of the Community,” he began, “it gives me great pleasure to introduce the final speaker of our Contemporary Issues series, a man who himself has become a contemporary issue. Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said...

Some cheers and boos from the audience. Richard admonished it gently with his famous Grocho waggling-of-eyebrows.

“...Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature at Columbia University. Professor Khalidi has written more than seventy-five articles on aspects of Middle East history and politics including pieces in the New York Times [some boos], the Boston Globe [a different set of boos], the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. He has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a recipient of a Fulbright research award. He has been a regular guest on radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered [applause from the liberals], Talk of the Nation, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.
“His latest book, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, examines the record of Western involvement in the region and analyzes the likely outcome of our most recent Middle East incursions.
“Let’s give a warm welcome to our guest, and I’m sure that, in spite of the controversial nature of his topic, we will show him the respect and hospitality for which Kansas is so justly famous. Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Rashid Khalidi.”
General applause, with a scattering of boos and cheers. Operation Rescue, The Mid-Continent ADL and WSU Hillel stood up in back with their signs.

Khalidi began with many thank yous for the honor of the invitation, invited questions and discussion after his talk, and launched passionately into his topic.
“Since September 11, we've heard a lot about the ‘intelligence failures’ that left the United States unprepared for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But these failures were not simply the result of poor espionage or bureaucratic incompetence. They reflected a deeper failure to understand a region and its historical wounds, a number of which--though not all--were inflicted by the Western powers.”

Serious pre-uproar among the audience. Khalidi remained calm, but did respond:
“I hope you will agree that the future of America's relations with the Arab and Muslim world depends a great deal on public education. Yet the very people who are in a position to perform this vital task have instead found themselves under siege from the media, from extremist pressure groups and craven politicians. Our crime? Challenging those formidable authorities on the Arab world, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon.”

Standing and yelling from the audience:
“Anti-semite!”
“If you don’t like it here, go home!”
“Nazi Jew-killer!”
“Terrorists off campus!”
Richard stepped forward, and took the mike from the lectern.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this kind of behavior will have reverberations country-wide. Internationally. This is an institution committed to academic freedom! Please, please, reserve your comments until after Professor Khalidi’s talk, and then keep them polite. Believe me, the whole world is watching.” He inserted the mike once again in its holder and took his seat. Khalidi, continued, apparently unflustered.

“Back in 1992, a decade before 9/11, a group of right-wing thinkers from the administration of the first George Bush created the Project for a New American Century, PNAC. I strongly suggest you google them, and study their documents closely. Their platform demanded that the United States take advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union to achieve unchallenged, unchallengable domination of the planet, and control of its dwindling resources. They called on America to substantially increase its military budget, to deny other nations the use of outer space, and to adopt a more aggressive and unilateral foreign policy that would allow it to act offensively and preemptively in the world. The elimination of states like Iraq figured prominently in this grand vision.

[Applause and a quickly abating “U-S-A! U-S-A!”]

“In a widely-circulated 1998 letter to President Clinton, the members of PNAC -- Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, Richard Pearl, Robert Zoellick, William Kristol and Francis Fukayama among them -- challenged the president to move forcefully and militarily to remove Saddam Hussein.
[Again some applause, with annoyed shushing from the liberals.]

 “And in their defining document, “Rebuilding America’ Defenses”, written in Sept 2000 -- a full year before 9/11 -- they acknowledged that the process of transformation was likely to be a long one, absent -- in their own chilling words -- ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.’ One year later that event would arrive.”

It was time for the Blintz Brigade, a group whose motto was “Cream Pies Are For Cream Puffs!” From left and right, two nightmare gaggles of gabardined clowns invaded the platform, firing blintzes at the speaker, splattering his dark suit with crème fraiche (“For The Blessed, Nothing But The Best!”), and greasing the ground with doughish offal.

Now a blintz is no mere crêpe. The baked and semi-hardened dough raised second-degree welts and third-degree contusions on Professor Khalidi’s face -- and let loose bedlam in the audience.

Richard sprang from his seat, and Teresa ran up on stage to help battle the clowns. In the arena, folding chairs clattered as the yarmulkas attacked the kuffiyehs, and the crosses attacked them both and one another. Neutrals scattered at first, then tested out testosterone in random directions. Even women have testosterone.
Enter the campus police. Exit the campus police. This was more than they could handle.

The uproar grew from forte to fortissimo as the entropy increased. The clowns had disappeared. Poof! On stage, Richard and Teresa were madly wiping down the distinguished professor with hankie and scarf.

Sirens without, and onto the stage poured the burly Wichita police in an overly-tactical rear-entrance maneuver. With macho seriously compromised from slipping all over the spent blintz shells, they nevertheless succeeded in throwing an orange net over Teresa, Richard and Khalidi before confronting the audience. This latter they did from the edge of the platform, using academy sharpshooters to practice with the new paint-ball and itch-powder 12-gauge shotguns. The chaos on the court was enhanced by scratching and sneezing and wiping of semi-enameled eyes.
Paint transmuted into war-paint, during which the orange-net enforcers, donning ski-masks, resorted to the old-style tactics of punching, kneeing and kicking their capturees. “This is what you get when you fuck with us!” one blue-garbed protector informed Teresa.

Yet more sirens, and more again. The Kansas State Police had not had a chance to try out the $5.3 million worth of advanced tactical weapons they had amassed from the Homeland Security Gift Shop and Cafe. The gym-space echoed anew with concussion grenades; rubber bullets bounced off walls and public; bean-bags (aka FBs, or “flexible batons”) crescendoed the havoc while wooden dowels percussed from skulls to floor.

Was there reaction? You bet!

Anarchists in the crowd organized an ad-hoc protest by stripping naked and arranging themselves non-hierarchically in a peace sign, and were soon trampled by old hippies in tie-dyes and pony-tails shouting ancient slogans, and threatening to call the ACLU.

This was too much for the mid-level officers, who up till now had let the rookies rock and roll. Out came the temporarily-blinding strobe lights, and then the Tasers which, in case you haven’t been following, fire barbed darts which deliver a 50,000 volt jolt. Those hit lose muscle control (including sphincters), and collapse instantly. The gym floor became littered with bodies, clothed and un-.

Still there was resistance from the quickly-erected holding pens. Insufferable: chanting and most provocative of all, videotaping and flashbulbs. It was time for DARPA-level crowd control using weapons that had never been used, not in Wichita, not in Kansas, not in the continental United States, save possibly at the U1a Facility at the DOE's Nevada Test Site -- and maybe not even there. Semi-conductor lasers to create plasma “flash-bangs” stunning and disorienting the target; heat-compliance weapons -- directed-energy prototypes that would instantly raise body-temperature to an intolerable level. Taser-type darts variously tipped with four varieties of incapacitating, psycho-active drugs.

But alas, before any of these could be brought into play, the gym lights went out. The clowns had struck again. Several hands copped major feels on Teresa. This was not to her liking. Richard’s hammerlock was tightened through the net, and Khalidi was only just recovering from the baton-twirling routine especially for Ragheads. Then the sprinklers came on strong, dampening the mood and the firepower. And a Jewish clown laugh-track filled the room, with arena loudspeakers cranked up to max -- which is pretty loud.

Then silence. Blackness and wetness and silence. The evening seemed over. The police withdrew, fading out under cover of darkness, walkie-talkies crackling obscurely, diminuendo to nothing. The audience walked, limped, staggered, crawled, swam for freedom.

The next day, the Wichita Eagle quoted Mayor Mayans as declaring the police action “a model for homeland defense,” and noted that all officers had demonstrated “a tremendous amount of restraint,” and were thus able “to refrain from arrests.”

Of the three on the platform, one began to entertain modest doubts about remaining in his adopted country, while on a related subject, the other two harbored no more doubts whatsoever.

UNHOLY GROUND

Here it is 9/11 again, and the world is all caught up in a debate on whether our "attackers" are being "insensitive" in demanding a presence at "ground zero" -- or two blocks away, or twenty, or on the island of Manhattan.

Although I'm a fiction writer, it's hard for me to get involved in this debate concerning counterfactuals, sides taking passionate sides on the ethics of a fairy tale. Though it is interesting to thrash out whether Jack was right to steal the giant's magic harp, the fact is that there was no giant; there was no harp; there was no Jack. At least not as real people in this marvellous story.

While there may have been some middle-easterners involved in some way (though the evidence is unclear), the concrete-set notion that "19 Arab highjackers with box cutters attacked us" is -- to anyone who has looked at the physical and circumstantial evidence -- perfectly silly, and certainly not grounds for an anti-Muslim crusade.

This is not the place to present the mountains of evidence against the "official story" of 9/11. For a brief fact sheet on the collapse of the three buildings, one might go here: http://ae911truth.org/news/41-articles/365-ae911truth-in-mainstream-tv-free-dvd-.html

Suffice it to say that planes do not "vaporize" upon crashing, and steel buildings do not symmetrically collapse at freefall speed from airplane strikes or fire -- or from no airplane strikes and tiny fires, as in the case of Building 7.

I began serious study of 9/11 issues back in 2004 after my reading of David Ray Griffin's first book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. Here is my review from back then: http://counterpunch.org/estrin05252004.html

In the six years since, I have read many articles, watched many videos, and had endless discussions with smart people about this issue. And I've concluded two things:

1. The official story is transparent junk.
2. It's very difficult to get anyone to question it.

And while firm conclusions are a bit evasive -- at least around the edges -- about who actually "did" 9/11, much evidence points to those with motives, materials, authority, and opportunities to pull it off.  The prime suspects combining all these are personnel and agencies of the US government. But it will take an independent investigation to look into that. Nevertheless, it is very likely that "ground zero" is not only not "sacred", but is rather intensely unholy, smelling of sulfur.

Given #2 above, it's not likely that an independent investigation will happen soon -- at least in the US.

So what should a novelist do?  Since the MSM will not cover it, I decided to write SKULK, a comic novel about 9/11 issues. Maybe, I thought, the material could get beyond the truther choir out into the fiction-reading public.  An end-run, as it were, around let's-not-go-there-ism. Though the story is ridiculous (but rich), the websites mentioned by the schemers are real.  Were a reader to be curious enough to check them out, he or she would be standing at the edge of a vast sea of real information generally out of public view.

So for this 9/11, I thought I'd share a short section of  SKULK in which Skulk -- Teresa Lee Skulkington of the Connecticut Skulkingtons convinces her boyfriend, Prof. Richard Gronsky, of Kansas State University, that America needs a "teaching moment", and that 9/11 truth is it.

Our heroine was originally modeled on Ann Coulter, and this scene germinated after I was told (I cannot vouch for this) that AC was -- improbably -- a Deadhead! So here, in a chapter called "The Wheel", our dynamic duo, high on Uncle Sam acid tabs, are recovering from a complex trip. Gronsky's pet project is to get Kansas to secede from the union. I'll explain anything else that needs explaining in [square brackets].

****************

And at the seventh hour, they rested. The Dead cd had been retired. Richard lay sprawled out on the couch, eating green, green guacamole, singing to himself his favorite verse from Carmina Burana over and over like some tape loop at Kaufmann’s. [the department store where a mysterious year-round Santa Claus works]
Rex sedet in vertice
Caveat ruinam!
Mmmm, mmmm, mmm, yowsa...
Nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam.
“Yes.”
She, on the other hand, was over-tired-revved, sitting in the chair, her arms around her knees, her head down, wrapped in teeming brain.
“You know that article you read me?”
“Unh unh.”
“The article about the kid and the water?”
“No. What kid? What water?”
“Hydrogen oxide or whatever.” [a conspiracy theory about the government putting di-hydrogen oxide in the water]
“Oh, yeah, yeah. What about it?”
“The Free State of Kansas is never going to happen...”
“What do you mean?” he loudly objected.
“Hold on there. Hear me out, hear me out.”
Richard closed his eyes.
“The Free State of Kansas is never going to happen -- without some kind of shock, some huge consciousness-raising about the true state of things.”
“Isn’t Dubya enough?”
“No, no, no. Read your own goddamn Frank book. [Skulk has come down to Kansas to disprove Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas?] Rove has got the status quo sewn up. We’ve got to break...”
“Could we talk about this tomorrow?”
“This is tomorrow. Look at the sky. And you’ve got an eight o’clock class. So perk up!”
She poured what was left of the chardonnay in his lap.
“Look,” she continued, “the American public is very sweet -- especially Kansans -- and Love is All -- and all -- but they’re...I don’t want to say ‘stupid’. Let’s just say they’re a little hidebound in what they take to be the present. The official version of the present.”
“Let’s give ‘em all some Uncle Sam...” he suggested.
“Yeah, well they’ve had too much Uncle Sam already. They need to -- what do you academics say? -- unpack him. See what’s really in there.”
“But that’s ridiculous. They won’t,” Richard observed.
“They will if they are shaken up enough. Enough to see through some of the more obvious lies.”
“Like?”
“Like all the 9/11 stuff, liberal bonehead. What could be more explosive?”
“They’ve already been shaken up by 9/11.”
“Yeah, and they’ve circled the wagons. Around Dubya and the gang.”
“That’s predictable. People always support...”
“But what if they realized that Dubya and the gang were the ones that did it? I mean in some way did it?”
“What?”
“9/11.”
“Unh unh. I’m not going there. And no one else will either.”
He rose exhaustedly to his feet and began pacing.
“Look,” she lectured, “who ordered NORAD to stand down? Have you seen the early photos of the Pentagon? It’s only a little, tiny hole. Where’s the plane? Melted? Where are the engines? Engines don’t vaporize from burning fuel. How did two giant skyscrapers…”
“Three.”
“Three -- collapse from fire when no steel buildings had ever collapsed lake that before in the history of buildings? C’mon. Weren’t you suspicious when you saw all that on TV?”
“No. I was horrified.”
“Hey, these are the guys that took us into war to stop Saddam from dropping nuclear bombs on us. And they’ve got people still swallowing it.”
“These are the guys?? These are your buddies, your father’s friends. I can’t believe you’re saying this! You! Ms. Fierce Right-wingnut.”
“Yeah. Well that was then and this is now. Post. Don’t you want to see the Free State of Kansas?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So we need to shake our dear citizens out of their lethargy. Fight the mass psychosis.”
“How?”
Teresa sat down in Richard’s place.
“I don’t know.”
“Good.”
“But I do know this: Things seem pretty benign here at home, right? -- at least for Dubya and the gang.  But a haystack soaked with kerosene also looks benign. It doesn’t smell that way -- but then neither does the country. But it appears content to just sit there -- until you toss in a match.”
“And you want to be the match.”
“We want to be the match.”
“The 9/11 stuff.”
“What else? It’s the smoking gun.”
“I see.”
Richard plopped down next to her on the couch. They both sat in silence for several minutes, each concerned with conflagration.
“What was that place called with the French name that John Brown...where somebody slaughtered somebody else?” she asked out of the blue.
“Marais des Cygnes,” he answered, Swamp of the Swans. Why? You thinking of slaughtering somebody? Your once-beloved vice-president, when he comes to speak at Raytheon next week?”
“No,” she said, taking him seriously. “That would bring down a police state big time. Homeland Security über Alles. No, we need some kind of teaching moment. And it can’t be seen as a terrorist act.”
“A teaching moment.”
“You’re supposed to know about those. I just thought it was a nice name.”
“What?”
“Marais des Cygnes.”
“Oh.”
“It’s like you and me. You the swamp, and I the swan."

*******************

How much Uncle Sam will it take to get people to understand the workings of Uncle Sam?

WHAT'S A JEW TO DO (WITH YOU)

 you, in this case, being the arch-conservative Catholic composer, Anton Bruckner, next to Wagner, Hitler’s favorite, whose birthday it is as I write?

I knew I wasn't supposed to like Bruckner when, in my Jewish-guilt ridden, self-assigned curriculum, I decided to spend a summer listening to and learning all the Bruckner symphonies during my back and forths to Bread & Puppet. But it turns out that the orchestration is such that I often could hear only the upper half of the sound over the interstate tire noise. So I gave up that project, to fill in my Bruckner gap more slowly, as it comes.

For The Education of Arnold Hitler, my novel about a really sweet guy with a really shitty name, I knew I'd have to write a section on Bruckner, so I listened up on the Seventh, and wrote the following. Evelyn Brown, Arnold's new girlfriend, a performance artist investigating evil by playing at neo-Nazism, and Arnold, have built him a bunker under an on-ramp onto the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx out of stolen cement blocks and plastic sheeting. They have a bunker-warming for their little love nest as follows:

“Whatcha got for music?” he asked.              
“Bruckner, what else?”             
“Ah.”               
She switched out the light.  There was only the ghostly glow of distant streetlamps through the mirror film.  Arnold crawled in under the quilt.             
“I brought you the slow movement from the Seventh Symphony.”  She was somewhat slow herself. “Here.”               
She pushed PLAY, and the small room was filled with the rich sounds of low strings and horns in C# minor, a long, sinuous phrase culminating in surprisingly masculine chords, and lapsing back into a gentle feminine ending, serene, consolatory, moving.             
“Nice,” he said. “I’ve never heard Bruckner.”             
“You told me that.  I thought this would be a good place to start.”            
“Beautiful, but so sad,” he said, as the melodies spun out of the original germ.              
They lay there silent, sipping their glasses as the harmonies and textures grew ever richer, and the keys slipped by until one amazing moment when the music, with a thrilling shock, slips and falls a half-step to climax streaming out on C major, filling the dark room with light.            
“Jeezuz!” Arnold muttered,.               
The music quieted, and the movement ended with a transfigured major version of the opening funeral music, a majestic threnody framed by the sound of Wagner tubas.  They were silent for a long time after it finished.             
“The Nazis dug him too,” Evelyn finally said, “his monumental scale, grandiose, lavish, spiritual...  They’d play him in Dunkelkonzerte -- lights all out, sacred space. Listening to Bruckner was like going to church.”              
She snuggled in under the quilt.               
“His most famous piece, that,” she murmured. “They played it on German radio after Hitler died, after he was burned to a crisp.  Hey, you wake?”              
She nudged him.  No answer.  She pulled off her clothes and lay her body against his as the kitties and bunnies watched the night.

OK, so Hitler and the Pope notwithstanding, Bruckner writes some fabulous music, even for a Jewish ear. So did Wagner, the fulminating-enough antisemite.

Which brings up the larger, long-standing, subtle, difficult question: can one detach an artist's life from his or her works? Celine is a great writer, but a murderous maniac (as was Gesualdo). Heidegger was IMO the most important philosopher of the 20th century, and ended his inaugural address as rector of Freiburg Universtiy with three "Heil Hitler"s.

What are people, Jews especially, supposed to do with this gorge-rising stuff?

One approach has been "if you can't beat 'em, recruit them" -- as in this scene from my novel, Golem Song. Alan Krieger gives his shiksa German psychiatrist girlfriend a present of Arthur Naiman's wonderful little book, Every Goy's Guide To Common Jewish Expressions, Also Recommended for Jews Who Don't Know Their Punim From Their Pupik.  I'll save you some space: Open the link if you like. It's pretty funny.

(Nice little side story: when I wrote Arthur, asking for permission to quote his book in mine, he wrote back, "Permission is for goys. Fair use is for Jews," and gave me...what?... who knows? Anyway a "Sure, go ahead.")

OK, so Beethoven was Jewish, black jazz heros are Jewish, all the (Good!) antisemites were Jewish, but what about Netanyahu? Lieberman? the politics of the current state of Israel?  Are THEY Jewish?

Here's what Alan Krieger's brother writes him -- interspersed in a scene from Golem
Song in which the Ursula of the link above, takes Alan out to a French restaurant (Alan is very bad at French restaurants):

So, yes, what's a Jew to do? What are any of us to do? It's worth writing novels about.

COVER UPS

Photo by Donna Bister

Dionysus reigns! Our front porch is overwhelmed with grapes red and white, leaves bristling out like mad conductor's hair, fruit hanging in a wall of Eat Me.

The only trouble is that under those grapes are our signs listing the numbers of the dead -- military and civilian -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, the data output of our locally popular National Bad News Service, a neighborhood landmark, and source of urgent conversation.

Not that the autumn grapes are the only thing hiding those numbers. There is the year-round assault by language, the misdirection of "winning hearts and minds", of Operation Enduring Freedom, of "bringing democracy" and the upgrade from Bush's "War On Terror" to Obama's more Harvard-y "Enduring Struggle Of The Forces Of Moderation Against Those Of Violent Extremism." A fog of language as dense as the fog of war, year round, and thickening.

Yet rereading Thomas Pynchon's 1973 masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, I came across a passage that makes me think that our numbers themselves, in deep mid-winter, standing stark against red, clear and nasty as can be -- are themselves false fronts for a reality more hideous even than war. In the context of WWII, Pynchon writes:

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to nonprofessionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death is a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. (p.105)

It's a little throwaway passage, a remark by one of the characters, not a thesis, not the point of the book, not some commie peacenik agit-prop. Just, oh, you know, the underlying truth.

I think I'll add it to the explication of the numbers posted on one of our golden-yellow porch posts.

FAITES CE QUE VOUS VOUDREZ

A happier 148th if you can, Claude Debussy.

The 17th and 18th century paved his way: the motto (in the celebrated words of Kant) "dare to know." And enlightenment thinkers did just that, opening new vistas of science and a rational understanding of the universe.

The l9th century intensified the motto: "dare to master"--and the financial might of capitalist industrial revolution empowered the quest for domination of the natural and political world.

With his revolutionary message, Beethoven epitomized this vision of human creative power. Take a theme and develop it, twist it and explore it, find its inner possibilities and squeeze them out, prod its reflexive interaction with the tool of the will--the creator transformed by its history. With Beethoven the "development section" of classical sonata from grew to engulf the work, and from Beethoven sprang Wagner's manipulation of leitmotifs, and Schoenberg's permutations of the twelve-tone row. The message: man the master.

My favorite Debussy image is of the young man at a concert, whispering to a friend, "Let's go--he's beginning to develop!" What? Leave at the most exciting, revealing, genius-testing moment? What does this guy want? A little insight from his school days when he submitted a composition to his professor which flouted all rules. When asked what rules he observed, he said, "None--only my own pleasure!" "That's all very well," was the retort, "provided you're a genius." We don't know what grade he received in this battle, but we all know who won the war.

The premiere of The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun helped initiate the birth of a certain kind of modernity--some would even say post-modernity--in which there were no grand rules applying, no agreed-upon values, no fixed forms.

As the music flows from moment to moment, mood to mood, at its own "pleasure," eschewing "development," embracing only the barest symmetrical form, so do we flow as a culture: enveloped in our private dreams, resisting "government," despairing of "solutions," heedless of what may come, going with the flow.

Twenty three centuries earlier, Chuang-Tsu wrote "Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man?" More than a century ago, Debussy dreamed his prophetic dream. And here we are today.Is it an accident of fate that Debussy died in agony, of cancer, in the middle of a war?

CHILD ABUSE -- HERE, THERE, AND LIKELY EVERYWHERE

There have been several large studies on the effects of occupation -- bombing, physical injury, house demolitions, tear gassing, house searches, etc. -- on Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza (Google palestine/children/trauma/). A few studies look at the rather smaller numbers of traumatized children in the southern Israeli towns bordering Gaza who experience occasional rocket attacks. (Google israel/children/trauma/.)

All studies demonstrate what might be expected from such direct and witnessed exposure: concentration and attention deficit, memory problems, and various levels of post-traumatic stress disorder. War, as they say, and as shows up in their drawings, is not good for children.

Yet there is another area of child abuse, not generally labeled as such, both here and in the middle east, with which we must also be concerned: educating children toward paranoia and retributive violence.

Whatever your position is on the Israel/Palestine situation, I heavily recommend that you watch these two ten-minute YouTube segments by an Israeli filmmaker, documenting a state-sponsored high-school trip to Auschwitz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f07FI-gdzBI&feature=PlayList&p=D1F5236042F4E86B&playnext=1&index=33

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKSlp8cDC9s&feature=related

Auschwitz/Birkenau is a hair-raising experience. Hair-graying, too. My companion assured me at the time, that I had a few grey hairs afterwards -- my first -- I hadn't had before that afternoon. The key question, however, is what does one understand and take from that experience.

My own feeling is that these Israeli children were battered and reduced in emotional capacity going from the before to the after. See what you think.

It's not hard to connect such an "educational" experience with such consequences reported here:

http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/07/the-summer-camp-of-destruction-israeli-high-schoolers-join-in-the-destruction-of-a-bedouin-town/

America's children have little direct experience of war, occupation and lethally threatening violence, but their lives are full of virtual exposure via film, video, music, and electronic games. In a way, their cart precedes their horse: they are learning the response before the stimulus.

Consider this NPR piece on an Army Experience Center:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128875936

Your tax dollars at work, training children to deal with terrorists who -- the adults likely assure them -- hate us for our freedoms.

One Marine boot camp chant I've come across recently goes like this:

“Throw some candy in the school yard,
Watch the children gather round .
Load a belt in your M-50,
Mow them little bastards down!”
(http://www.counterpunch.org/white1023.html)

Nice. I'm sure the indoctrination in the Experience Centers is not as strong or vicious as among the Semper Fi boys, but the subtler brain-washing may be more extensive and effective.

I don't know what kind of chants they use in the IDF, or in jihadist military training, but I assume it's all similar -- child abusing "education" preparing children for the abuse of children and others.

AWESOME DAYS OF AWE

August 6th: Hiroshima. August 9th: Nagasaki. Three days in between.

The days between close-set giant pillars take on special significance. Whatever the current behavior of the state of Israel, most Jews know such spaces well.

The ten days between Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, are not actually holidays, but mark a special period of time -- what are called the Days of Awe.  They are a kind of spring cleaning in fall, a purification of one's world and soul so that on Yom Kippur the Jew can faced the Eternal with all worldly issues in place.  And what is the main strategy for this cleaning?  It may surprise you.  Asking and giving forgiveness.

The tradition of the shtetels -- those small eastern European Jewish communities depicted in Fiddler on the Roof -- was that in the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur people would ask forgiveness of everyone they had wronged that year.  All the little, and sometimes the big, wrongs that had been done in the community were brought out into the open, confessed, made good if possible, and forgiven.  The entire community felt cleansed and pure.  Perhaps not everyone was that honest.  Like folks everywhere, not all Jews had the courage to beg someone's pardon or, when they themselves were asked, to give pardon with a full heart.  But they found it a lot easier to do than we would today.  While we have much more information now than they did, we don't know as well how to say "I'm sorry." But in those simple villages, to avoid a world full of hate, people often took the ten days and went knocking on the doors of any estranged friends, and cleared their personal paths, and those of the community.  The world was cleansed for Yom Kippur -- the "Day of Atonement".

And on that day the naked human being was scheduled to go mano a mano, godwrestling with the Eternal.  Tradition has it that on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed your name in either the Book of Life or the Book of Death. That's why the concern for measuring up.  But the verdict on Rosh Hashanah was not final.  You had the ten days in between, and especially Yom Kippur, to change the Judgement.  But at the end of Yom Kippur, the Books were closed. 

And so it is understandable that Yom Kippur be a full day of prayer without food.  Five separate services take place during 25 hours -- like Muslim practice -- but with little or no pause between them.  The idea of the fast is this: when the human body has paused from its natural acts of life, and history has suspended its normal ups and downs, the spirit can be utterly reborn.  We don't really do fasts in America.  We're better at pig-outs.

And sin -- or evil, for that matter -- is not a very popular concept in the contemporary American heartmind. Yet some concept of estrangement from the Truth has been common to most religious world views. The acknowledgment of sin is a crucial part of the Yom Kippur service. 

"The Cloud Over The Culture" is the punning title of an extraordinary article by Paul Boyer (1985) which appeared on the fortieth anniversary of dropping the bombs. In it, he asserts, as do I, that although "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" are such familiar words -- banal even -- the United States "has yet to assimilate fully what those words represent in its political, cultural or moral history."

He quotes the American Catholic Bishops' 1983 Statement on Nuclear War:

After the passage of nearly four decades and a concomitant growth in our understanding of the ever-growing horror of nuclear war, we must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945.  Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons. (My emphasis)

Sorrow.  Remorse.  It sounds Days of Awe-like.  How very, very strange it is that we -- as a nation -- have never done that.  Not once, in now sixty-five years. Not even the teensiest bit.  Un-Amerkin.

We have consistently refused -- and still, even now, refuse -- an absolute and explicit "no first use" nuclear weapons policy. One of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project observed that

If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory?  Hiroshima has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated.

1945 seems so long ago.  We were a nation in genuine and legitimate relief from a dreadful war.  But what tenacity there is in the myth of American innocence, the belief that we are somehow set apart from the world, our motives higher, our methods purer.

It is this constant myth that prevents us from having any national Days of Awe, that keeps us from expressing sorrow over the event.  And, as the Catholic Bishops so insightfully express, without that sorrow, we cannot go on, we cannot build a world safe -- from ourselves.

New National Holydays

Let me therefore beat the drum for some pre-Labor Day labor.  Down with innocence!  Up with memory, confession, sorrow, apology, healing!

I hereby propose a new national holiday, modeled on the Days of Awe, but occurring in August, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Like the Days of Awe, they would be bounded by two momentous events, would celebrate those events with appropriate ritual, and would feature redemptive tasks to be done in between. 

"It could never happen," you say, "too serious.  It runs against the American grain to do that kind of self-criticism."

Maybe, maybe not.  We have our solemn holidays, in places still solemnly kept.  And besides, we may be growing up as a nation.  Engaged in five current wars, with Iran coming up, the peach fuzz is off our cheeks.  Obama's fairytales notwithstanding, we know we're not in Kansas anymore. 

The vast majority of people realize we can't go on as we are -- exporting jobs, exploiting foreign workers, making wars, eviscerating and polluting the planet. "Change" has become the buzzword to win elections. 

The Christians have taught the world to acknowledge a December season of Peace.  Is it too much to imagine that churches and synagogues, national organizations and neighborhood groups, schools and universities could slowly grow a late summer holiday to express the profound sorrow the Catholic Bishops recommend -- a mindful holiday to witness and grieve, to assimilate a painful part of the past, to dissipate the cloud over the culture, to ask and give forgiveness, to sing in chorus "Hiroshima, Nakasaki. Never Again", and to be able to go on, safer from ourselves?

The religious historian Mircea Eliade has made a distinction between sacred and profane time.  In sacred time, historical events gradually come to partake of the permanence of myth, while in profane time they gradually lose their grip on people and become merely material for historians and the technicians at Disney World.  I am calling for a holiday that would change Hiroshima and Nagasaki into universal myths, deeply grounded in sacred time, permanent stop signs on the road to destruction.  Four new holydays, making things whole, healing.

Here's how it might go.  On August 5th, supper is a Japanese meal, which Americans would learn to make as beautifully as we do a turkey dinner.  The event would have a ritual component like a Seder, in which symbolic foods are eaten, and history is thoughtfully reviewed.  Each family, each congregation, each school would develop its own texts until some key themes and treatments became solidified.

The morning and afternoon of the 6th -- Hiroshima Day -- would be a time for fasting, or some special breakfast, with a ritual observance at 8:15 AM.  During the 6th, 7th and 8th -- our three days of awe and repentance -- individuals would consciously perform expiatory tasks, personal and interpersonal, as in the Jewish Days of Awe, but also social, holding teach-ins, attending peace events.  If a weekend fell between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would be special services at churches, synagogues, mosques. Morning and afternoon of the 9th is again a special time of fasting. 11:02 is observed, and everyone gears up for a big celebration in the evening, at which international foods of all kinds would be prepared -- a huge community festival.

What I'm describing is a full-blown, big holiday.  Things don't begin that way, of course.  We might just start by thinking about it for a few years, by recognizing that in fact something important did occur on these days.  Then, who knows what would grow -- in individual hearts, in individual families, in individual congregations and institutions.  Were something like this to get underway, in ten years we'd have Good Housekeeping printing August peace recipes. 

We postmoderns like to play with history.  Now we can play in its real mudbath, and actually get dirty -- a death-defying vital alternative to psychic numbing.  Would the New Days of Awe change anything?  I can't imagine otherwise.  The power of confession has been known to the Catholic Church for centuries.  If anything has sustained the even older Jewish community, it has been the inspiration of the High Holy Days.  The Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca.  This stuff has both a track record and the power of newness-at-large.  Like an exotic virus spreading in a vulnerable population, the power of guilt could quite transform postmodern American culture. Revelation through genuine memory, then Teshuvah, turning and Tikkun, healing.

Or shall we just go on making wars?