Uncivil
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth,
upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from
her mouth, giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at
the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag
over his head, as he masturbates the proposition that all
men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated,
can long endure. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners
are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come
to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those
who are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals
who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It
is altogether fitting and proper that the photographs tell
it all. England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner;
both are grinning we should do this and giving the thumbs-up
behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent,
piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate
- we can not hallow this ground. There is another photograph
of a cluster of naked prisoners. The brave men, living and
dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our
poor power to add or detract. Then, there is another cluster
of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front,
taking photographs. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried
on. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded
male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera,
posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on
another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave
the last full measure of devotion - smiling, arms crossed
- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom;
and that this government of the people, by the people, for
the people, shall not perish from bending over. The earth
too, is smiling.
ord. weds.
Global opposition to injunctions can be seen on the model
of
hypochondriacs and are only exceptionally granted when a
court is satisfied that the allegations are untrue. When the
culture of humans finally starts to care about rows of
numbers and get their tax returns done to fame we release
a
salty, protein-rich fluid from our lachrymal apparatus, our
facial muscles contort, and we emit sobs. But why free
markets, and free religion? A market economy needs not just
democracy, but the most clever and funny language on earth,
with echoes of Bob Hope.
Either you freeze to death in it, or maybe the old code of
insult, honour, and revenge lives on. But as the Greeks
knew, an obsession with honour can lead a donkey or a bus
into Hollywood.
American philosophers want to see scientific fact at the
center of their high ideals. Their grasp of radioactivity
is
most famous and Goya's Black Paintings in the Prado have
stirred the soul of many. But the snickering snobs?
Commercial logos saturate our world, and this is one love
affair that's been on-again, off-again forever.
Romanticism comes in two kinds: pre-sex and post-sex. With
time running short, Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of
social progress, Noam Chomsky, a brilliant debating
tactician who can twist facts to his advantage, film school
ain't what it used to be. Ingmar Bergman and Children of
Stalin's Kremlin can be believed when banditry, and
kleptocracy, badly need security agents. Great philosophers
want us to avoid sugar but their real problem is created by
rules for writing textbooks and avoiding original ideas.
Disposable dishes, fax machines, milk in frozen bricks,
candy made from rayon underwear, and house cleaning with a
fire hose: for 800 years the Magna Carta has been venerated.
Dangle her upside down over your back, with her thighs
squeezing your neck, her arms around your torso, (timing
enough to build the Three Gorges Dam, bending enough to
create a vast, murky brown lake), silence has a nice ring
to
it, but it's stuck between the blandly obvious and the
absurdly utopian.
Laugh at these sticky, fat, two hundred guineas if you will.
Loving God, letting the activists riot, imagining a gizmo
you fit onto your head. Plug in, turn on, twiddle dials, and
you're an instant genius. Piping-hot talk. Part of the
history of the Enlightenment.
The usual scene: humane civil society in a brothel. One by
one, communism, sexual freedom, TV, agnosticism, and
progress, confronted by hungry rats, lurid, insensitive, and
mean-spirited, one is struck by a lack of joy. People are
too scarred, too wary to believe, "God is dead but my
hair
is perfect."
Driven to extremes, parental love begins now to look like
many people have trouble with big words like disparage or
disrespect. Neurologists think that intervention from the
spirit-world, within hours, isn't a thing, but dwells in a
heaven of platonic perfection. They fly, swim, burrow,
float, trot, walk, jump, gallop, and run, unhinged by
praise.
"Falling in love is the nearest most of us come to glimpsing
utopia in our lifetimes." Freud would not want the
indulgence we give to the serpent's fruit, a discipline that
was once dominated by "maps and chaps." In solitude
every
man has consolation, but sucked in by shallow media culture,
art and its history, sober and solemn like war or law,
should be written with grace and wit.
When all is said and done, we can be fairly confident that
simpletons sell well. A longing for clarity in a too-complex
world, seen in a mirror, mutated into rollicking porn, the
roar of testosterone in a lurid world of menace, sex, and
heroism, enriched white bread will insist torture,
starvation, and looting.
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the
income
tax," said Albert Einstein. Tax is all dark clouds and
dazzling sun. Some say Hollywood stars such as Jean-Paul
Sartre remain distinct. Biology may not have the status of
chemistry and physics, but consider the size of gorilla
testicles - a parallel universe side by side by its very
nature instigated by elites. It is democracy in action. A
crowd of fawning, frightened, and corrupt "half-men,"
cowboys who can deliver a calf, fix a fence, and put out a
prairie fire, all before lunch. They don't share feelings,
unless they have Netscape but after that investors want more
than just sex.
There is reputation, along with a good salon, beauty,
status, wit, and conversation to help to make better bullets
(fired into you), design safer cars (you'll be crashed in
tests). Maid to order. While Third World women look after
kids minding their barnacles, falling into disuse, another
ugly fissure that divides the universe.
There's an inversion today of the ugly and ill-kempt,
glamorous and perfectly coifed, under great pressure to be
"creative" and "express themselves," but
not having been
taught the skills to do so. Human beings look the other way,
a godsend for conspiracy theorists who are convinced the
world is run by books but all our current habits of living
and presumptions of mind are stupid delusions. The arts and
the fatigue they cause is an easy explanation for road
accidents, medical mistakes, space disasters, you name it.
Now it also offers an enhanced sense of cultural identity
and self-esteem.
Themes are big and bravely expounded. Stories feature a cast
of amorous and libidinous technologies. We still keep a
pantheon of heroes. The demand for one who does will get
rich, like being fired-up for romance with that perfect love
who's just moved on. Once you realize the earth will be
finally swallowed by the sun and the universe is doomed, the
environment seems a rather trivial concern. The quest for
certainty is a false path, one bound to abridge the richness
and scope of human experience, unworldly, abstract, over-
confident and desiring moral purity.
Why are we in the West so quick to excuse thuggery and
whitewash the crimes of megalomaniacs? Literature, a dead
art? Hardly. It will instruct and inspire long after books
by our angry, arrogant, and obtuse generation of critics
have turned to dust. Post-post poets give us the poem
without the baggage of meaning: the liberated poem itself,
naked, streaking down the freeway. Victorious modernism is,
as the words of Derrida and Habermas reveal, so far the only
definite result of a giant with its staggering economic
power, and cultural hegemony.
We think, we analyze, we debate. We worship at the Temple
of
Reason. And where does it get us? Comfort in happy childhood
memories. If you go beyond bawdy and tear all the veils
away, you get Empires. They have a noble mission to
enlighten, civilize, and bring pot, and soon they'll be
legally interesting. Writing needn't have clear messages or
erupt into slogans in order to exert a subtle political
power over us.
But what about the fact that manuscripts are supposed to
be
the most obvious place to celebrate prizes? Manufacturing
and technology can only earn profits if they serve the human
desires of beauty and pleasure, pulling down the house
rather than be survived by what Europeans need. But does
this make any sense?
Time was when book publishing was a profession for
gentlemen. They were interested in good literature. That was
then. Now is the social condition where nail polish remains
a stark backdrop for any study of language. Literacy
perishes. Just learn to fake it. Who should be the first?
It
ought to be an audacious millionaire who first gives up
smoking, then booze and women, goes vegetarian. A mediocre
interpretation by an unknown one is intense. Left to his own
devices, the ordinary naturally eat raw carrots and brown
rice. Yet wild passionate sex exists. It can even exist in
marriage.
The administration needs a demon or, failing that, some bozo
out in the boondocks. Personal magnetism and irony is not
cynicism. Intellectual versatility has never been
understood. So why are TV talks with authors so lame? Well
TV interviewers seldom have time to read the outdated world
of the weepie.
Super volcanoes! Chemicals! Germs! Killer asteroids! Sudden
climate change! Voracious black holes: it's what we now
expect from our kids, our books, and ourselves. Ugly,
slovenly, inaccurate English makes it easier for us to have
bad writing and is useful not for expressing, but for
concealing and preventing thought.
Vaunting can be defeated by cold reality and globalization
moves apace, but one feature of life ties us to the nation-
state: language. We need an international tongue. Stretch
out the genome and there is only a 1.2% difference between
chimps and us. But that gap happens to include the
possibility of all of human culture.
In a liberal society, we must control our passion for
freedom and discipline it toward larger purposes. Our
humanity is ultimately larger than our dissent and the
highly coloured rumours about royal affairs which have
surfaced recently in the tabloids. In a justice system that
honours the right to argue rather than truth, any result is
possible. Male chimps were the first ones to get this going
- conveying a political message as tormented poetry. The
world needs more consciousness-raisers.
Or does it?
Bio:
AnnMarie Eldon, an identical twin, evolved from cryptophasic
origins in once densely industrialised Birmingham, England.
Since September 2001, juggling various personae interiorae,
US/UK homes and children, she endures relative domestic deprivation
and hormones to achieve successful adult differentiation within
the mediocrity of a picturesque Oxfordshire market town.
Her work has, is or will be(en) found at 5 Trope, 91st. Meridian,
Ampersand, Anemone Sidecar, Aught, Blazevox, Caffeine Destiny,
Can We Have Our Ball Back, Carnelian, Conspire, Del Sol Review,
Duct Tape Press, elimae, eratio, eScene, Fire, Impetus, Junket,
Lily, Locust, Megaera, Marlow Poets, Meeting of the Minds,
Melic Review, Mipo, Muse Apprentice Guild, Music eBook, Niederngasse,
Numbat, Ophelia's Muse, Pedestal, Poets Against War, Poetic
Inhalation, Poetry Kit Magazine, PW Review, Reflections 2003,
Rock Salt Plum, Salty Tears, Sentinel Poetry, Snow Monkey,
Tears In the Fence, tin lustre mobile, Three Candles, Tryst,
Verse Libre Quarterly, Wandering Dog, Writers' Hood, xPressed,
xStream.
She is a 2004 Pushcart Prize nominee and is published by Anchor
Books, Forward Press and Triumph House. She edits Web Del
Sol's Writers Block and is contributing editor for Sentinel
Quarterly. She will feature in the forthcoming Women of the
Web Anthology.
