There is a line from Francis Ford
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam—which sticks
with me for some reason: “The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed
wings to stay above it.” No doubt about it. This poem faces down the bullshit,
which in wartime correlates with numbers of dead people: “somehow our policy
bare // in eighteen costumes kept us unaware / that we were killing Asiatics
daily, / with the disgusting numbers given / on my front page, at which, my love,
I stare.” The parallels with today are obvious, with wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan still lingering (military advisors were sent back to Iraq
yesterday, and does anyone really think this isn’t a prelude to more war?), and
pressure for war with Iran, and yes, it’s all quite disgusting. Truly.
No need to go off on Vietnam—already
been done—and as for the Middle East wars now, others are handling that as
well, cutting through some of the propaganda and nonsense and bullshit
perpetrated by the war machine and select members of the war machine’s cadre of
elected government officials. Replace “Communism” with “terror” and it’s the
same old same old. I struggle with how vehemently to criticize it all—the bullshit,
I mean—because there’s so much of it and I don’t have wings. There are wars on the
environment, wars on education, on women, on unions, on African Americans, on
immigrants, on education at all levels, on the poor. But if you talk too much
about it—well, you’re being negative. And truthfully, that negativity creeps
into one’s soul and threatens to sour it. That’s why the Internet is so full of
baby animals: They’re sweeteners for bruised and soured souls. You cruise
through your feed and see Kansas’s economy sinking into the prairie over
ideological nonsense, or the University of Wisconsin being deliberately ruined
through partisan corruption, war ramping up again in the Middle East, secret
corporate trade deals formulated to make them bulletproof against regulation,
and plenty more to instill despair, while there you sit, wingless, under the bullshit
burying you, and then a baby sloth eating milky oatmeal, or a kitten getting
uppity with a great dane, or a sleepy meerkat, some happy dog jumping in a
pool, a crow solving complicated puzzles, somebody old guy rescuing a fawn from
a sewer, all this assuages your angst and you remember what a wonderful world
it truly is. Please don’t darken my day with mountaintop removal coal mining,
global warming, police brutality, Round-Up poisoning, Citizen’s United. I’m so tired of it, you think.
This has to be what’s behind B.’s
last stanza, so off-putting except for the appropriate but appalling bitterness
of it:
Better than the Buddhists
self-incinerated
a colossal strike: on military
targets
near eighteen Chinese cities.
That would make them think: as we
have stated,
an end to aggression will open up
new markets,
and other quarter-lies.
He’s not being literal. He’s not
advocating for a colossal strike, nuclear or otherwise, against eighteen
Chinese cities. He’s saying he’s sick of his news feed, or his newspaper in 60s terms, and would just please
God wish to have an end to it. And then he winds it up with a last parting
shot, pure bitterness in response to utter bullshit.
Well, it may sour us some, but I
think it is our duty to call bullshit to attention, call it bullshit with all
the power of invective we can muster, and it is our responsibility to know about
it. All we can. The bullshit. All of it. And, yeah, we can only change a
fraction, but like the glassblower I mentioned yesterday, who takes pride in
that one hard-earned fragment of blue glass—it took him all day to heat up the
furnace, melt the sand and pigments to glass, cook it, blow and spin it, cool
it, cut it, and deliver it to the window builder—he knows that working with a
hundred other glass specialists, they’ll together create something wonderful.
You can’t fix the world yourself, but you can deal with a miniscule corner of
it, fashion what’s in your reach to a pure, transparent blue. That’s enough.
But you have to know first. So, yeah,
a bitter poem about Vietnam. I need to know what the latest Tea Party governor
is up to in his state. The word “Monsanto” alone makes me ill, let alone its
chemicals. But I intend to know what they’re up to, and why, and if I can help
it, I won’t buy a damn thing tainted with their products.
Oh, and last night our rare
yellow female cat, Cassie, got on top of the aquarium, took a wrong step and
got her paw wet, and spent the next hour using her wet foot—which she rewet
several times—to give herself a bath. Oh my gosh, was that ever cute!
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