Homage to a Breach

Again, the whale awakens me,
A monstrous blur boiling the
The depths beneath me.

And churns.

It sounds.

Down to sunless worlds,

Down gliding, down devouring

And waits.

Waits for my penance, heartbeats
Buffeting the edge of gull wings.
Breath clinging to grayness,
Foul and forever drifting,

And drifting.

The monster breaches now.
Violating the palimpsest,
Drowning the dissolute and the damned.

And stops.

Freeze-framed in froth interminable,
Suspended beneath a moon sliver.
And the dead eye beckons.

And beckons.

But I haven’t the courage. I am
A bloodless heart pumping colorless ink.
And I row on.

And on.

To join with humanness, my sameness,
On land lusterless and blear-witted.
But I will come again if
Only to pay homage.

If only.


- GB Sanford

 

 

RUSSO

Russo talks like his teeth hurt, a painful sucking in, every word a hiss that accents a lean efficient frame covered with taut grimy skin made swarthy and leathery by unquantified tours in these infernal climes. Serpentine: quiet, probing, fearless—venomous, a Professor Habilis of death. At home and ageless. He doesn’t hump his eighty pounds of killing gear like most Grunts, like me. He is artful, unfettered, and buoyant, a Chagall splashed on primordial jungle. And me: invalid and invalid, a scourge to those who know.

Know what?

I am new, a Newbie: An unblemished creamy white pubescene in crisp clean olive drab and an underbelly softness that belies my adolescent athleticism. Here, I rank a glee girl, naïve and terrified. Of what? Bullets, rockets, and bombs are distant pops, whoomphs, and thuds; ephemeral arcs of pale blue light and laser streaks writ against interminable heat haze, the gray wall of monsoon, the tenacious foreboding night. No more threatening than fizzy Fourth of July keeping—unless you’re unaccustomed, unwonted.

We stop. Russo, ensconced on a throne of rock, looks back at me, past the others. The slack-eyes of homo-cide, an examination without approval or disapproval, a dispassionate probing assessment, a knowing of reckoning.

It gets closer. The war? I don’t know. It. Something unnamed and ominous, a thick mute ground fog that slinks around the gnarled roots of ancient tamarind and banyan trees that nourish and harbor only what ought to be here by default. Not me! Not me! I want to say It gets closer in time but that’s not true. Time back in the world is marked by the familiar, the expected, the regular, the rhythms of life: systolic and diastolic, exhale and inhale, ingestion and digestion, coming and going, birth and death. It’s not like that here. It’s one big isolated cold stone. A dull thud. A kind of static mural where all things are at once, an “Is” that confines you to a singularity laced with the awful knowledge that you are in a vast sea of everything that is nothing: Corporeal-less. Pure existence.

It’s maddening, really, like a fish coming to the sudden realization that it’s in water only to be plagued by “Now what?” or “So what?” or “What to do?” The perturbation of knowing what it should not know: The principal substance of The Apple. The maniacal captain’s terrible white Leviathan. The one that got away? Impossible! It’s interminably here in all its dreadful whiteness—lurking just below the surface as still and silent as a crypt, the lifeless eye probing gray cold water for interlopers, those who dare not pare layers of glia to expose their reptilian core but take monumental pains to excoriate a pearl to fetch a dumb grain of sand. Highbrow thrives in illuminated halls and euphuistic art houses, not here where covert forked-tongued reptiles abound. Intellect here is a quick meal.

I want to know but I cannot formulate the question, construct an algorithm in the soft squish of my brain to collapse infinite probabilities to—arrive: To be the fish out of water croaking on a mudbank, gnawing at a rarefied substance that resists tiny Denovian teeth that will morph into the flesh tearing daggers of scaly brutes, the consummate savages of the Jurassic who will rot with arthropod and vegetable under the grimy skies of Wormwood—that hellish shard of heaven come to cede the slow crushing molars and the hissing vindictive incisors of Russo. Of us all.

No. No death here. The dead are afar, mythical permutations of being. Here, merely blood-greased gray-green heaps of laundry thrown down on fecund jungle floors; shadows slumbering on patchwork fields of new-green rice; pencil scribbles kneeling vacant and awry against altars of rock, tree, bamboo. To favor the dead is to flout life. To feel. They’ll have their revenge after all: Come as vapor that will infuse the mind to poison vitality. Pitch you into a hell impossible to sojourn when you stalked bipedal there. There, where attempts at clarity abet lunacy.

I want to ask Russo, force the moment to a crisis, not to ask why or how or where—but what and when. When will I know—It?

I look towards him only to see heat ghosts wavering above the dais. No matter—and no matter:

I cannot see my mother’s face, feel her gauzy cheeks against mine; hear her hands sighing against the leather of my Oxfords, her clinking and clanking kitchen aria that lays me down to sleep.

The klicks, the hamlets, the rice fields, the jungles, the destruction—the dead—do not pass. No ticks on a clock; no days, months, years; no waning and waxing moon; no rising and setting sun. Illusions all. Artful scabs on the brain that belie my affliction: Clarity.

I am become an absurd contagion, scuttling up and down main street all tattered tooth and claw—looking for home under a noxious rubble of tin and glass.

Sting and Boo: A Study in Draft Dodging

Once upon a time I met a Vietnam-era  draft dodger, a director of an overseas American school who was interviewing me for a teaching job. During the interview, I revealed that I was a Vietnam Veteran, which prompted the director, an affable and evenhanded man, to reveal his role during that war in as unpretentious way as possible. It was a hell of a face-saving effort. Damn courageous, I thought. Try as he might, however, his tale came out as an apologia, evinced by a profusion of inherent rhetorical features, the scrutinizing of which is the province and habit of old English teachers, like me. I felt sorry for the guy. He apparently assumed that I couldn’t cut through the pretense and, what was worse, that I cared an iota, or that I had ever given draft dodgers a second thought. I don’t. I haven’t (until now). They have their war. We have ours. And in momento courage (as opposed to the post facto courage we all have) if it came into play at all—played more in their court.

The guys who burned their draft cards and ran off to Canada to escape the draft and Vietnam were not cowards. Although I wouldn’t know, those acts must have been terrifying at that moment—like the hypersonic sting of a bullet flying very close by your head—the primal fear that resides in the nanoseconds of now, like when someone comes up behind you and goes “boo!” and you, saint or sinner, clutch your chest and holler “shit.” The difference is that “boo” demands an immediate unconscious reaction that quickly fades without qualification of bravery or cowardice until its re-telling, of course. On the other hand, dodging the draft was an extremely risky decision that had no basis in individual past experiences, experiences that wag their finger when you are on the precipice of repeat risky behavior, tales from memory that nudge you back from the cliff. Without those experiences, one consciously reacts with an informed decision against the hormonal chorus that says “stop!” To voluntarily step off the cliff is anything but cowardice.

The draft dodgers were not afraid of going to Vietnam. How could they have been? They had never been there—neither had I—and the networks’ sanitized two-dimensional black and white images of the war that flickered in our living rooms at six o’clock weekday evenings and narrated by the measured and mesmerizing voices of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley were seductive rather than repulsive to impressionable young boys—like the discount store toy aisle loaded with its farrago of plastic olive drab martial play things, cheesy icons of death and destruction—as were the braggadocio stories, an understandable defense mechanism, told by returning vets who were anything but terrified on the trip over in chartered DC-8s crammed with 250—one would have thought—partygoers. Paradoxically, the freedom bird home was as a tomb. In the meantime, we were no more like Billy Jack than, well, Billy Jack, nor did we evolve from an ability to jump up and kick your head off in a wink into a Rambo-type who could single-handedly take out, gorilla-style, a company of soldiers with a knife. We were hometown boys duped and dumped into a damn bad deal where fight or flight was our only chance. There was no time for parsing out morality—or honor. That job falls to Hollywood and The Hill.

Conclusively, the draft dodgers must have been brave boys, boys with solid conviction, who were no doubt dead afraid, who got the boo and sting when the edges of their draft card turned black, curled, and burst into flames, or at the very moment they crossed the border into Canada where, although they knew they could get a hot dog or slice of apple pie or watch a baseball game, they could never return to America and frolic with their families and friends. I can’t imagine it. Choice or not, that’s death!—not the mythical one way boat ride with Charon across Acheron. As one draft dodger put it who stayed put in Canada even after amnesty: “I speculate often on my Americanness. Even though I bitterly reject its politics, when I travel down south of the 49, I'm like a salmon. I know I'm in home water; I can taste it, feel it and smell it [. . .].”

And it was precisely the fear of familiar and familial death that kept us hopeful in Vietnam—perhaps alive— rather than that darky death from which no one has returned, although too many people confuse that death with the heaven and hell scam and live lives in pathological fear mitigated by proselytizing but mostly by the joy of shaking the dust off their self-anointed feet when others don’t buy. The draft dodgers weren’t buying the Uncle Sam scam (substitute heaven and hell with give me liberty or give me death) heavily backed by those of us who also chose, drafted or not, and faithfully fell into ranks behind that avuncular jingoist and marched off, leaving the draft dodgers under the shade of maple leaves in an exacted shame. Of course we weren’t afraid either. Until our boo and sting moments came under the dripping dark of triple canopy jungle—with an exacted shame all its own.

Patriot

11/30/2018

My insinued heart a petulant child

Sillystrings these feathery rice

Shoots that lay me down slack on

A bed of sky. Strange I’m numb

And quiet and slow watching my

Blood percole and transude into

Bubbles tiny and red: “Corpuscles”

From seventh grade Science lab:

That girl swelling beside me with

cobalt eyes and ballet slipper lips

smiling while I bite and bite

And bite at rufescent bubbles

Tiny as Einstein’s sorching little

Rascals: The destroyer of worlds

That fashioned me a fish out of water

To croak on a mud bank “Put me back!

I cannot abide a world where the

Janus-faced placate he died for

His country” while my eyes grow

Milky and stale. Where my blood of

Their blood rivules away in mud and

Rice muck witness to no One no

Thing save for the muted white cloud

That presses ever softly on me now.

What’s Going on in the Brains of Trump Supporters?

A précis--with minor changes--from “The Psychology Behind Donald Trump's Unwavering Support" because I know that Trumpites wouldn’t read the full article.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The state of being under-informed or misinformed and being completely unaware of being under-informed or misinformed. In other words, one’s ignorance is completely invisible, so whatever you know makes you a self-realized expert in your nonfactual opinion about what you don't know. Or, in other words, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority that comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability.

Hypersensitivity to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. The fear response is automatic and not influenced by reason or logic. Many conservative brains will automatically light up when confronted with fear, like the fear mongering Trump induces by portraying Mexican and Muslim immigrants as imminent dangers. Trump supporters’ knee-jerk reaction is to seek safety in the one who promises safety. First you create the need for a hero, and then you pretend you are that hero. Donald Trump is the candidate who is offering the most extreme measures for protection. 

Terror Management Theory

Instilling meaning and value in life with religion, politics, national identity, et. al. without reason, logic, empathy, and compassion (fear is selfish) as a means to ward off the fear of death, an existential terror that resides mostly in the unconscious when threats are not imminent. When these people are unknowingly reminded of death, which happens after fear mongering, they will strongly defend those who have the same maligned worldview. When fears of death are aroused, people are more likely to embrace leaders like Trump who provide a false sense of psychological security by making their citizens feel like they are valued contributors to a great mission to eradicate evil. Hence, the Make America Great hat that sits atop the brains of Trump supporters.

High Attentional Engagement

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump is outrageously entertaining and his showmanship appeals to many Americans' addiction to entertainment, particularly reality shows. Trump supporters may even disagree with Trump’s message but will vote for him anyway because he’s fun. He's a clown.

What can reasonable people do about this?

Just vote Blue.

The Perils of Career

Although they swap around in our commercial soup, there are obvious distinctions between the modes—job, trade, profession, career—of how we earn our daily bread and some not so obvious distinctions, especially between profession and career where subtle differences can have huge and resounding implications in America’s most prized institutions: Government, Education, Finance, Health Care, Energy, and Justice to name just a few.

I have had jobs, jobs that I liked and jobs that I didn’t like although there didn’t seem to be much difference in their doing because my motive was to do the work, be paid accordingly, and live like hell on the weekends. I have never had a trade although at one time I wanted to be a plumber because not only did it pay well, it also seemed to pay, from what I could observe, even larger dividends in pride, independence, and ownership. I just retired from the teaching profession which I never regarded as work but as passion. I used to tell my students that the best part of my day was with them. Although I didn’t make much money at it, actually less than I made on the job, I absolutely loved it because it came with a spiritual resonance of altruism, that the endeavor was directed to the well-being of others (profession comes from the Latin professiō; the taking of vows upon entering a religious order, a public acknowledgment). I suppose doctors, among other professionals, must feel the same way in their service.

I have never had a career, nor did I want one, because career did not resonate with my character. It was just not me anymore than the job I did eons ago was me. Career seems to have a general and transitional quality about it rather than one of focus and steadfastness (career comes from the Latin carrāria meaning “road”). Even though career people may have come from a profession, the profession serves as the first credential rung in the ladder and a step to get past on the journey up. The principal of the school had to teach to become the principal but he or she is no longer a teacher. There is no “principal profession.” Professionals must continually practice their art to qualify. I would take no comfort in a cardiologist, who, while inserting a stent into my heart, ups and tells me “Jeesh! I haven’t done this in years,” no matter how high he or she perches on the career ladder.

Another more volatile distinction between profession and career is their respective degree of accountability. When the teacher, nurse, pro athlete, actor, et al slip up it is often the case that they are shredded by the public simply because they are visible. People quite naturally do not like to feel diminished by those around them and tearing professionals down, especially once blood has been drawn, is an American sport. I distinctly remember in public schools how some classified support staff often made concerted, furtive efforts to “get” a teacher and how students roared with laughter when I erred. Additionally, because professionals are in service to the public it logically follows that they are—and should be—accountable to the public. However, once a professional steps up on the career ladder into administration and the corporate elite, they not only disconnect from their profession but they disconnect from the public. Teachers, for example, receive—and rightly so—significantly more accolades from students, parents, and peers than do administrators. Careers, like it or not, are for the sake of the career, for the road up and, consequently, even though society benefits greatly from those upward dynamics, the price to society comes at the loss of a huge body of accountability—and therein lies the danger. Once an impropriety in an institution reaches the career camaraderie —or originates among their ranks— up the ladder it goes and then as far as you and I are concerned, which isn’t far: Nothing. Whatever the impropriety was gets lost circulating in the official loop like clothes on the spin cycle and outlanders, the public, are assumed to be none the worse off—until, of course, someone retrieves the laundry and then down the ladder it goes lickety-split landing in a back-alley dumpster too grimy and scary to rummage in or on some suitable and unsuspecting scapegoat (The Penn State Scandal comes to mind). Of course, once the impropriety hits the streets, the damage to real lives ends up as the shibboleth “scandal” that wafts into the blue like early morning haze. The elites know this.

Transparency and accountability of 21st century lexical vogue are carelessly tossed about catchwords used as palliatives for what ails America’s institutions rather than practiced as effective policy. It’s almost as if the words function as the career administrators’ Freudian yalps of pent up guilt for protecting career for its own sake. The way to keep and hold career administrators and the corporate elite transparent and accountable is the same principle that keeps the public-at-large honest. The consequences of exposure.

Deep Behind the Lovely Dark Eye

I am sitting with Fahed in one of the rooms of his palatial home reviewing his essay when his mother slowly winds her way downstairs and asks me timorously in broken English if I would come upstairs. I am confused because I am never invited outside this room where I meet with Fahed for tutoring sessions. I have met both parents who are kind and gracious to a fault. I follow Fahed’s mother upstairs and into an opulent room where a very large TV is playing. Fahed’s father, who is a high ranking official in the Kuwait Navy, rises to greet me and shakes my hand. He is stone-faced and when I turn to the TV, I see why. At first I can’t make it out, and then I see one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City billowing smoke out of several floors and then I see a plane swerve and deliberately crash head on into the other tower. I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. Is this a movie? The scene is played over and over and the commentary and the rolling script is in Arabic so I don’t know what has really happened. Is this an accident? And then Fahed’s father translates the Arabic for me and I hear “America is under attack.” Fahed’s father in utmost respect and care says “This is very, very bad. Would you like us sir to take you home?” I tell him yes, I had better go, and they both avert their eyes from mine.

A group of teachers has gathered in the courtyard of the teacher’s residences that we have mockingly dubbed the Golden Palace. We stand in a loose circle around the school’s owner, a rotund Kuwaiti woman, and her accomplice, a Kuwaiti man who does not have a title. We shift our weight and shuffle our feet and look disconsolately at one another. No one speaks. I finally tell the owner in a sturdy and straightforward voice that we need our passports, that they should not have confiscated them in the first place. It’s against US law. She tells her sidekick to get our passports and then does what she can to console us but blows it completely when she blurts that really stupid administrator’s cliché used to mask self-serving motive: “We have to think about the students.” Her motive is profit. If we leave, there is no American School.

Most of my students are from Islamic countries: Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Bahrain and then some. They are wonderful and respectful young people and I enjoy being with them and I think they reciprocate those feelings. However, on this day after September 11, 2001, I am shocked at their behavior. They are jubilant. It’s as if school was suddenly let out for summer vacation. And then I am reminded that these are Muslim kids and they have an inborn hatred for Israel and for America by association and that monstrous hatred has emerged from its unconscious cave. They are in the halls cheering and they are oblivious to “American” in their school name and there are oblivious to me, their teacher, who they profess to honor and even love. They are hysterical from an inborn hatred that they feel licensed to fully express, a victory celebration for an inarguable criminal act. They file into class and become subdued once they cross the threshold although I notice sideways glances laced with smiles. Without compunction they ask me ad lib how I feel about the bombing of the World Trade Centers. I feel I have to say something but I want to fall back on “this is not the time nor the place for that discussion” but it is. It most surely is.

“At this point,” I tell them, “I only know that some three thousand innocent men, women, and children were incinerated and crushed yesterday over an ancient hatred between Arabs and Jews although I am relatively sure that most of the victims and their families and friends did not share in that hatred, and I am most certain that their deaths will not advance either side’s cause although I am certain that more innocent people will die before it is over, but it will never be over. Will it? It won’t ever be over because you cannot even identify your hatred and therefore you cannot rid yourself of it and it will grow fat within you. Did you forget that while you were out in the halls celebrating the deaths of nearly three thousand Americans that I too am an American? Yes, you look down at your feet now not in deserved shame but in sheepish embarrassment. Please note that it took me to remind you because you were too caught up in the jamboree of your loosed hatred to be considerate towards me and all the other Americans around you, your teachers, your principal, your counselor, and some of your peers. And by the way, there were three hundred seventy-one non-Americans killed in the attack, Arab nationalities among them.” A lovely sweet covered Egyptian girl raises her hand.

“Yes, Miriam.”

“But sir, people die every day. Why not Americans?”

I am stunned at first and then I realize that she has not framed her question the way she’d like and I understand her dilemma. She wonders why Americans in general are living lives of relative privilege, comfort, safety, and autonomy while Palestinians live lives of dispossession and squalor and suffer and die needless barbaric deaths. But I can’t answer her question in a way that won’t just add to her quandary and I don’t want to risk being glib or sarcastic. What I really want to tell her is that once the smoke clears from past conflicts that arose from America’s unwavering defense of its ideology--right or wrong--what emerges is an America that has a unique, unspoken creed of humanity that has forgiveness at its center and where a never-ending suffocating shroud of hatred cannot form. In spite of charges of imperialism, the Marshall Plan in Europe and SCAP (Supreme Commander of Allied Powers) in Japan helped those countries, onetime foes not far removed, rebuild and become US allies and economic powers in their own right. So I am honest in another way, which always works. “I cannot answer that satisfactorily, Miriam, but I wish I could,” and I flash a smile. “Okay, so please take out the review questions that are due today and let’s go over them.”

While students are flailing with notebooks and rustling papers, I am thinking about what Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp said in the movie Tombstone: “Run! Tell all the curs the law is comin’! You tell em I'm comin’—and hells’ comin’ with me, you hear?”

Texan George W. Bush is the US President. And that scares me.