"Cradle of the Best and the Worst" USA

The first two days of this week were so inspiring to me that I'm still in a bit of shock.

Sunday, there was Gail Collins' article in the New York Times about the effort to have a woman's face on the new US twenty-dollar bill to replace Andrew “Indian Fighter” Jackson. She mentions some good possibilities – she herself would like to see Gloria Steinem there – and her readers/commenters suggested many others. Emily Dickinson – my first choice – was mentioned a few times, and Helen Keller. Could you just imagine Emily Dickinson on the twenty-dollar bill? With a line from her poem 788?

      But reduce no Human Spirit

      To Disgrace of Price.

Then there was Monday, and the appearance of Seymour Hersh's article in the March 30, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, entitled The Scene of the Crime: A Reporter's Journey to My Lai and the Secrets of the Past.

Hersh is the reporter who first disclosed that particular crime on March 16, 1968. This present article in The New Yorker is a sort of review and update forty-six years later.

Hersh relates here how he subsequently gave a speech at a college where Hubert Humphrey was teaching:

After my speech, Humphrey asked to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you, Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your job and you did it well. But, as for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’” Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened, and his voice grew louder with every phrase. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’”

Humphrey's resentment has pretty much epitomized the United States as I have personally known it over the course of my lifetime and as I have come to understand its history. It has committed these almost unimaginable crimes and slowly but surely the awareness of them has increased. The Viet-Nam war was one big My Lai, one big crime, so egregious that only a very few openly now deny it. But there is some level on which perhaps half the country is still repeating Humphrey to those of us who have fought the long fight for this awareness. Facing up to the reality takes a long, long time, particularly for those who have derived so much financial and other self-interested benefit from it.

But here we have the Collins article and people actually suggesting, openly, in the NY Times no less, that someone like Emily Dickinson or Helen Keller should replace the old Indian Fighter on the twenty-dollar bill! Elizabeth Warren? This is possible in the USA, but even if we do not succeed, it has been a priceless privilege to participate, and yes, a joy despite all the horror.

I can not embed the YouTube video of Leonard Cohen singing his "Democracy is Coming to the USA" but here is a link to it.

“Our Stupid Infantile Press”

Bill Maher's recent reference to “Our stupid infantile press” has stuck in my mind during the past week since he said it. I immediately feel skeptical these days of harsh words like that but I also felt immediate agreement with this thought.

I can not now remember the writer's name but I also recently read a journalist's defense of the “despicable press,” using the phrase sardonically. His reference was to Patrick Kennedy's famous indictment, “The press is despicable.” I remember our stupid infantile press responding to it at the time with “Patrick has a drinking problem” and I thought they had forgotten it, but I now see they have not forgotten it.

One of the reasons this has been in my mind so much is the perspective that comes from being near death, from which you can more easily see the trivialities for what they are, since acknowledging them as trivialities and idols of the tribe no longer endangers your ability to survive.

I've also just read Nicolai Gogol's Dead Souls, which seems more annihilating of such things than anything else I've ever read.

You read Gogol, then flip through the TV channels before you turn out the light to go to sleep, and you're struck by the stupid infantile newscasters trying to appear as if they  were otherwise. It's really draining just to watch them try to do it. It also seems as if every other, non-news, channel at that time of night has films with a lot of murders and gun-fire and pointing of guns at people's heads.

"...In That They See Strength"

Leo Tolstoy wrote a lot about war but there was one short passage that held special meaning for my entire life, beyond anything I would have expected.

I first read it at the time I refused to participate in the Viet-Nam war, but have thought of it many times over the fifty years since then. I lost the original source in Tolstoy's writings but was very pleased recently to find it in his “Two Wars:”

"The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so gross that they do not understand, and in their grossness cannot even understand, the significance and the influence of spiritual force. A charge of ten thousand pounds of dynamite sent into a crowd of living men--that they understand, and in that they see strength; but an idea, truth, which has been realized, has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, has become accessible to millions--that is according to their conception not force, because it does not boom and you do not see broken bones and puddles of blood. Scholars (it is true, bad scholars) use all the power of their erudition to prove that humanity lives like a herd, which is guided only by economic conditions, and that reason is given to it only for amusement.  Governments know what it is that moves the world, and so, from a sense of self-preservation, unerringly and zealously monitor the manifestation of spiritual forces, on which depends their existence or their ruin."

The most persistent and astonishing reflection that I have had over those fifty years about the “broken bones and puddles of blood” has been about how many people love and defend war. There was such widespread joy and celebration when World War One broke out – an almost inconceivable catastrophe. I think that anyone who takes seriously the stopping of war, very quickly has to face that reality – that people just love it and bring up every excuse they can to go for it and see strength in it and accuse you of weakness and cowardice and lack of perception and wisdom and lack of concern for your society's existence and future.

Truth Spoken by Elizabeth Warren: A Poem

She might not have conceived it as a poem but it is a poem. When the truth is spoken cleanly, simply, thoroughly, thoughtfully, it becomes a poem.

This jewel from Elizabeth Warren appears in an Huffington Post article, with a link to its origins, and with some excellent, well-worth-reading comments on it:

I'm worried a lot about power in the financial services industry and I'm worried about the fact that basically, starting in the '80s, you know, the cops were taken off the beat in financial services. These guys were allowed to just paint a bull's-eye on the backside of American families," Warren said. "They loaded up on risk. They crushed the economy. They got bailed out. What bothers me now, they still strut around Washington, they block regulations that they don't want, they roll over agencies whenever they can.