Being Deep in the Grooves of Your Past Lives

          

The Forces

by Michael Blumenthal
Who, having lived more than a moment,
hasn't contended with them? You go out,
dreaming a mastery of your own life, bending the brush
as you walk, kicking the leaves. Just yesterday,
in a numinous moment, you were king
of your own book, a blank slate that could strut
and choose, a walking freedom with legs
that could say, I am this, and - poof! -
you were it. But, today, you're your old self
again, deep in the grooves of your past lives
like a skier come late to a mountain who,
frictionless, almost, and full of himself for no reason,
glides down the path of all who preceded him.
Sure, you've grieved and mourned, you've lain down
on numerous couches, and, still, the childhood wishes,
with their minute, occasional lisps forward,
are waiting to greet you. Who hasn't come
to the place of the three highways and, thinking
himself a free man, taken the road toward Delphi
merely to wind up with his head in the lap
of his own mother? Who hasn't swashbuckled his way
into a freedom at once so terrifying and familiar
he thinks he's arrived at some island exotica
only to stagger up over a hill and see there,
before him, the old door, the mansard roof,
the white tiles, of that strangely familiar place
he has no choice but to call: home. Who among us
wouldn't gladly be the chooser, if only choice
weren't a vast road looping over and over
to arrive at the same place? So why not
make peace with it? Every mother is enterable,
and every father dead on some highway to Thebes
or some truck-stop heading toward Kansas or Manhattan.
So ski down the hill, friend, enjoy the fresh air,
the illusory high, the dark fact that something
chooses us over and over until we're chosen for real.

This magnificent poem was sent to me--along with a batch of other brilliant things-by a friend on my 51st birthday.

The Wisdom of Various 12-Year Olds, Torture, Honorable and Dishonorable Celebrations

A twelve-year old I know expressed a thought recently which made me rather proud to be her father. All the more so because (and later this made me question myself) I didn’t automatically agree with her. Certainly, it was a thought that cut against a common grain, and I am quite sure was not the “cool” thing to say in the 7^th grade (although—as I remind myself, and an consistently being reminded by circumstance—what the hell do I know about being in 7^th grade?)

What she said was, approximately, this: The celebration of Osama bin Laden’s death is disturbing. “I mean, a guy got shot in the head,” she said. “Why are people making that into a party?”

(She’s a very, very, very good writer, and if she keeps up this habit of critically distancing herself from everything around her she’s got a great chance of becoming a persistently melancholy, intermittently cantankerous writer of obscure journalism and a catastrophically obscure weblog.)

Oh, hi! Didn’t see you there. As I was saying…. she’s got a great chance of becoming a perceptive and nuanced interpreter of current events and an influential opinion-maker in the marketplace of ideas!! (Note exclamation points!!)

…..She’s right, though, some Americans could stand to check in with what exactly they are celebrating.  I read a genuinely moving account written by a World Trade Center survivor who had lost a great many friends and colleagues and only barely escaped death himself and who, upon learning the news, poured himself an Irish whiskey and raised a two-word toast to the now deceased leader of world-wide jihad: “Fuck you.”

That guy has a right to feel that way. But some others are pretending to a bloodthirsty righteousness not nearly so authentic. Here for instance is Sarah Palin “tweeting” her opinion about whether photographs of Osama bin Laden’s corpse should be released. “Show photo to others seeking America’s destruction. No pussy-footing around, no politicking, no drama; it’s part of the mission.”

How old is she, 12? And what the hell is she talking about, anyway?

Never mind. But along the same lines of people flexing their muscles about American prowess, etc. etc. etc., there is an extremely important debate now percolating about whether information obtained through the torture of detainees at Guantanamo was crucial to locating bin Laden. As Andrew Sullivan points out (for expert coverage of this debate see his blog http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-big-lie-.html), it is telling that some of the more degenerate voices on the right are now seizing on this moment of national victory to justify the torture policies of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld regime. I say that even if some vital information was produced by torture—along with the static of lies and misinformation and desperate babble that a tortured individual is bound to cough up—it doesn’t prove that bin Laden couldn’t have been tracked-down sooner or later using standard methods of military-detective work. There was no “ticking bomb.” And if capturing bin Laden was literally impossible without torture-derived information—which I don’t believe—then I’ll say it: it wasn’t worth it. My views on the subject of torture from three years ago are here http://www.lakewoodobserver.com/read/2007/06/10/outrage.

But I’m glad that this particular mission is “accomplished” and that this time the phrase isn’t a joke. And I am glad because this is the reason a great many very fine Americans half my age and younger went off to Afghanistan, some of whom are coming back with missing limbs.

But I’ll also check in with my own less honorable, partisan slant on this celebration. Because my strongest positive feeling about this is that it was a vindication of our President who has been vilified from the beginning as being in all sorts of ways off the grid, outside the norm, not an American. Socialist, Muslim, born somewhere else, “paling around with terrorists.” Or, alternately, naïve, sentimental, a “post-national multiculturalist,” unaware of the “dangerous world we live in,” unwilling to risk the use of force in a worthy cause. Etc., etc., etc.

I have always felt this is a serious misreading of the man, for which some people on the right would be really embarrassed if they were capable of embarrassment. Anyone remember the Pirates who kidnapped the Navy officer? The geniuses at Fox News spent several days wringing their hands over the fact that Obama wouldn’t do anything about it. Then a Navy Seal (who are these guys anyway?) pops the pirate in the head with a single shot, and it turns out it was on Obama’s order.

 So I can’t help it, I am enjoying the discomfiture of some of his opponents who now have no choice but to applaud the President for an accomplishment they would have liked to claim for their own.