Erich Maria Remarque's “Im Westen Nichts Neues” ("All Quiet on the Western Front”)

This book should be read by every first-year high school student, before Shakespeare or math or science.

It's a first-hand account of an 18-year-old boy's going off to fight in World War One, and has stood the test of time. There are a lot of other books about the basics of that war, like “The Good Soldier Švejk," but this one has especial depth and perspective.

Here are three quotes from “Im Westen Nichts Neues” that were especially exciting to me during my recent reading of the book:

• p. 10: "And perhaps more of us thought as he did, but no one could very well stand out, because at that time even one's parents were ready with the word 'coward'; no one had the slightest idea of what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas people who were better off were beside themselves with joy, though they should have been much better able to judge what the consequence would be.”
  
  
• pp. 11-12: ...”The idea of authority which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and manlier wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to believe that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. The bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they taught it to us broke into pieces...We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.”
  
  
• pp. 266-267: “How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their handreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is...
  
  “I am young. I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.”

First Days of May and Selecting Bush Twice

The first days of May here in Dayton, Ohio, have been ineffably beautiful: new leaves and buds and blossoms, fresh and light green leaves, perfectly clear skies way beyond anything I could express, more so than ever. I really should be out in this priceless sunshine right now, just looking at the flowers and grasses and trees and skies.

I find it all quite shocking, so much so that I wonder why it is that, now, at this point in my life, it is all so surpassingly and excruciatingly beautiful. 

I suspect that the “excruciating” word holds the key. It is, unfortunately or fortunately, only possible to appreciate something by contrast, by knowing the opposite perspective, the opposing reality.

Appreciating, perceiving, these astonishing, priceless, perfect May days is probably due in my own particular case to my experience one year ago this month of coming close to death because of a bicycle accident, from which I have still not recovered. But there was also “The List” I was composing a few nights ago. I made a list of some of some of the almost-incredible horrors which I doubt that I shall ever fully fathom:

• The USA selected George W. Bush as their President – twice.
  
  
• The Viet-Nam war, and following it by the Iraq war, and the Afghanistan war.
  
  
• Pat Buchanan on TV recently, smiling and gloating over the fact that the USA voted in every state except Massachusetts for Richard Nixon, a known criminal who was unconscionably pardoned, over George McGovern, a known decent man who said that the Senate walls reeked with blood.
  
  
• Recently reading “The Good Soldier Švejk” and “All Is Quiet on the Western Front,” particularly the bit about the widespread joy when that war broke out.
  
  
• The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.
  
  
• Fox News, Limbaugh, Malkin, Savage, Falwell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Bremer, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al.
  
  
• Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman.
  
  
• The Christianists and the Jihadists.
  
  
• The oil and coal industries, and the bankers, and the medical industries.
  .
• The “You-can't-ask-me-to-stick-my-neck-out” Academy and the Media.

Please add a contribution of your own to my list.

Inebriate of Air, Debauché of Dew

“Inebriate of Air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew – “

That’s how I felt on waking on this perfect Easter Day in Dayton - the way Emily Dickinson describes it.

And yet, and yet, I find myself in the middle of this delight, thinking of a young man who knocked at my door yesterday morning. He was about eighteen years old, a college student, who announced that he was part of a group of students who had started a house-painting business, and that he was knocking on doors in my neighborhood in search of work. He had a well-organized presentation; a printed hand-out; a hopeful, respectable manner; and that Ohio face.

I myself couldn’t use his service, for I had recently painted my house. Most of the houses in my neighborhood, which is poor, are owned by slumlords who will not put a penny into maintaining their properties unless you seriously threaten to take them to court. I tried to tell this young man about the house three doors down from me that really badly needs painting. I told him the name of the guy who owns it, a “respectable” lawyer here in the city, who made the excuse to me for the shabbiness of his property that “My wife told me not to put any money into that house.” The dearest little five-year-old girl and her mother live there, by the way.

The young man didn’t acknowledge what I was saying, and as presentable as he was, I could see that he didn’t really care what I was saying, either. He had this uncomfortable look on his face as I was talking, and most likely thought I was an eccentric and an old fool. Ohio!

My heart went out to him nonetheless. I felt for the two-hundredth time in my life that old question of how it is that anyone can bring a child into a world like this. But then, for the two-hundredth time I came to see that the message of Easter is true – “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” is followed with appreciation of how much better it is all designed than we could have imagined.

There is this simply astonishing Psalm, #22, that begins with those exact cries of those who feel forsaken, but ends with words, “They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.”

"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.