George Orwell

Coal Mines, Unions, Big Business and (of course) George Orwell (Revisited)

February 27, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. –George Orwell

Quite by chance (no, really), I saw an old classic that had been languishing in my Netflix queue: like St. Peter allowing a purgatoried soul into heaven, I finally brought it to metaphorical salvation via my DVD player. I remember reading about it last year when I was devouring Hellraisers, the almost literally unbelievable account of Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris and their myriad escapades which can only be described as epic. The idea of Harris sharing screen space with Sean Connery was, suffice it to say, enticing. The movie in question, The Molly Maguires, did not do well upon its release and has become something of a cult classic –with an emphasis on the cult.

The story, in a nutshell, involves the gruesome exploitation suffered by Irish immigrants (and workers in general including, of course, young children because this was before Teddy Roosevelt, horrified by the depictions in books like Sinclair’s The Jungle, got inspired to seize some manner of control from Big Business and introduce those quaint concepts of regulation and workers’ rights: in other words, this story takes place precisely in the era that today’s GOP is aggressively working behind the scenes to bring us back to) toiling for paltry pay in the coal mines. If you are imagining an environment where safety was tenuous and the conditions were barbaric, at best, you are not incorrect. It is also a workplace where the owners controlled everything, including the breaks not given and the payment not rendered. In one illuminating scene the new employee (Harris) stands in line to get his weekly wages: the boss adds up the coal collected and announces the amount; Harris smiles. Then the boss subtracts the damaged tools, the wear-and-tear (a 19th C. version of “adminstrative fees”) and the final amount is reduced from nine bucks and change to just change. As Harris stands in disbelief the boss, flanked on either side by police officers, glowers at him and says “Next!” If that sounds too much like a bad out-take from It’s A Wonderful Life, check yourself: these are the conditions that absolutely existed, as men like Sinclair (and later, George Orwell –just to name two of the more famous and important examples) observed and reported.

The reason the movie was probably unsuccessful, and the reason the timing of my first viewing is serendipitous, is because of the subject matter: way before unions existed, circumstances were sufficiently dire that the use of drastic measures were required, and understandable. As a result, a group of protestors (or terrorists, depending on what century you live in and what newspapers you read) took to undermining the mine’s profitability by using incendiary tactics, literally. Harris, the “good guy” is a paid detective assigned to infiltrate this mob and help the honchos crush the uprising by killing the culprits. If this sounds a bit familiar, the story is based in large part on true events inspired by the reprehensible actions of the Pinkertons, who operated kind of like union busters before unions existed.

The movie is clever: by making Connery grim and uncharismatic (no mean feat considering this is Mr. Shaken, Not Stirred we are talking about) and playing up Harris’s roguish charm (yes–that is a cliche but if anyone could ever be said to possess roguish charm it’s the ever-ebullient but burly Harris), the viewer is almost conned into empathizing with, and rooting for the putative protagonist. Only after the film concludes does it finally –and fully– occur to the viewer: if the movie had been shot, or written differently we would be pulling for the “bad guys” all along. And that is the point. If the movie was told from the alternate point of view, it would have been preachy, unconvincing and free of emotional conflict. Which is exactly why it’s a good movie and most likely why it did not set the box office on fire. It also might make one recall the other chestnut (speaking of cliches) about history being written by the victors, the power of language to shape story and the mechanisms always at work to manufacture how reality is perceived.

I’m not certain if it has anything to do with what you study in college, or the type of person you already are (of course the two are not mutually exclusive by any means) but speaking for myself, I suspect that if you are a certain age and not already convinced that God is White and the GOP is Right (and anyone under the age of twenty-one who is certain of either of those things is already a lost cause, intellectually and morally), reading a book like The Road To Wigan Pier changes you. Reading a book like The Jungle changes you. Books like Madame Bovary change you. Books like The Second Sex change you. Books like Notes From Underground change you. Books like Invisible Man change you. Then you might start reading poetry and come to appreciate what William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” These works alter your perception of the big picture: cause and effect, agency vs. incapacity and history vs. ideology.

Put another way, even if you are open-minded and receptive to various sources of information, if your studies focus on economics, business or political science you are already being inculcated into an established way of thinking. Liberal arts education, if it has anything going for it (and it has plenty, thank you very little), reinforces and insists upon what Milan Kundera called a “furious nonidentification”. This does not mean to imply that all, or most, or even some of the students who embrace (or ascomb from) the ivory tower remain inquisitive and objective. It does mean that reading works from different cultures and different times inevitably denotes truths and facts (even if couched in fictional narratives) that are outside of time and agenda.

It is, therefore, easier then to make connections between Irish immigrants who worked the coal mines in Pennsylvania and Lithuanian immigrants who worked in the meatpacking plants in Chicago (Jurgis Rudkus, anyone?) and Mexican immigrants –especially the illegal ones– who labor in sweltering kitchens and frigid fields all across our country. It is impossible not to put human faces and real feelings alongside this suffering and start connecting the dots that define how exploitation works. All of a sudden, it’s less easy to espouse the impartial axioms of the Free Market and the immutable forces of commerce or especially the notion that (in America anyway) everyone starts out at the same place and those that work hard enough and say their prayers and drink their milk will attain vast fortunes without breaking laws, stepping on innocent faces and engaging in the oppressive pas de deux with Power (and the puny but influential people who possess it). Then, presumably, it goes from being merely disconcerting to outrageous that the weasels of Wall Street are back in business with billion dollar bonuses (thanks tax-payers!) and unionized public school teacher pensions are being blamed for America’s current deficits.

Which, in turn, brings us to Wisconsin and what is really at stake right now. First, before any discussion of current events can occur, one feels obliged to give serious props to Republicans: over the last few decades while they have dabbled in the vicarious thrill of foreign occupations and the odious gutter-dwelling of racial and sexual identity politicking, the cretins behind the curtain have focused on a handful of tactical battles in which they have more or less achieved their ends. For one, propagating the repeatedly disproven mantra –to the extent that it is literally taken as gospel– that any taxes at any time are always a deplorable idea.

The second is that the mainstream media has a liberal bias (they succeeded so thoroughly in this that once first-rate newspapers like The Washington Post now police their content so obsessively as to render them supine: their Op-Ed page is now dominated by whacked-out True Believers who would have been laughed out of conservative circles twenty years ago, back in the days when Bob Dole and his minions were devising health care reform that is now considered socialism).

The third is that government does not work: this is a neat trick in which, when they take power, they spend their time ensuring that this assertion is true, all while consistently expanding the size of government along with the size of the debt. Then, like clockwork, once the people have finally seen enough, a Democrat comes in to clean up the mess and they immediately become small-government deficit hawks. If I was a Democrat operative I would have Cheney’s infamous “deficits don’t matter” comment in multiple TV ads and viral videos. And I would definitely ensure that the first talking point would involve inquiring the suddenly chaste and sober program slashers like Boehner and Cantor (and all of the Tea Party fanatics, for that matter) where exactly they were during the years 2000-2008.

Finally (for now), with much assistance from an increasingly reckless, ambitious and soulless Democratic party, the demonization of unions has been a long work-in-progress. It’s funny, because as much ink has been spilled this week, it’s a perfect representation of all that has gone wrong for the so-called progressive cause that any of this hand-wringing and negotiation was necessary at all. An outstanding –and exhaustive– overview of how this came to be is available, courtesy of Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones: the piece is (perfectly) entitled “Plutocracy Now” and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The gist of his argument is that, during the last half-century (but with a vengeance beginning in the ’70s), as unions lost influence the Democrats simultaneously abandoned them as they courted wealthy financiers to fund their increasingly lavish campaign expenses.

What has long befuddled me is that, even if you can cynically concede that even Dems tred lightly before their corporate masters these days, it makes political sense to maintain a healthy relationship with unions. During the Tea Party shenanigans in ’09, I kept asking myself: when is our aloof and clueless commander-in-chief going to start reminding people that this big bad government has historically been the bulwark between the people and an Industrial Revolution lifestyle? Does it need to actually get to the point where the Republican Party literally says “let them eat cake” before people start to realize wages are stagnating, prices are rising and the only people getting fat are the wealthiest .01% (and Mama Cass)? Apparently it does. But even if the seemingly easy battle to prove the relative benevolence of government (or compassionate conservatism–ha!) is a non-starter in 2011, it should not require too much PowerPoint proficiency to compile a quick commentary about what unions have wrought: minimum wage, forty-hour work week, health insurance, pensions, vacations, sick-leave, etc. All of the things people assume exist in a vacuum, or were always just sort of there; or best of all, were the inevitable rewards of laissez-faire philosophy until big government came along and screwed everything up.

In any event, we could –and in different circumstances, should– spend a considerable amount of time bemoaning the myopia and apathy that led to what transpired in November (and the still-egregious and unacceptable capitulation of the tax increase in December), but the time may at long last be ripe for some sort of reckoning. If there was any doubt about what that imbecile Scott Walker is up to, and what naked partisan interests he wholly represents, yesterday’s embarrassing, enlightening prank call should sufficiently remove any uncertainty. People are finally waking up and seeing what is at stake (today collective bargaining; tomorrow social security!). Hopefully there is sufficient momentum to at least enable the marble-mouthed Democrats to cobble together some cohesive messaging. One would think the mere act of pointing out the truth would not require heavy-lifting and soul-searching (but those without souls, admittedly, can have difficulty here). Again, I do not count on any of these center-left pols to suddenly find religion, so to speak, but presumably they can grasp that there is a purely political advantage to being on the right side of the middle class, not to mention history.

Filed Under: Film, Literature, Myself When I'm Real, Politics Tagged With: Charley Patton, George Orwell, I Shall Not Be Moved, Johnny Cash, Kevin Drum, Milan Kundera, Richard Harris, Sean Connery, The Molly Maguires, The Pinkertons, The Road To Wigan Pier, Wisconsin

Coal Mines, Unions, Big Business and (of course) George Orwell (Revisited)

February 24, 2012 By Sean Murphy 2 Comments

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. –George Orwell

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Charley Patton, George Orwell, I Shall Not Be Moved, Johnny Cash, Kevin Drum, Milan Kundera, Richard Harris, Sean Connery, The Molly Maguires, The Pinkertons, The Road To Wigan Pier, Wisconsin

A History of Violence*

April 12, 2011 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Fighting doesn’t solve anything. Everyone knows that. But then, the point of fighting is not usually to solve anything, it’s to settle something. There is a significant discrepancy between the two; ask anyone who used to (or still does) get into fist fights.

I was never that guy. Certainly I had some schoolyard scraps, but those were more wrestling matches at recess and I was semi-retired by fifth grade. I don’t believe I’ve thrown or received a punch since I entered middle school. It had a lot to do with self-awareness: I knew I was not a fighter, did not relish the idea of getting into fights, and did not particularly enjoy witnessing them.

I can’t overlook the role my mother played in the development of my penchant for diplomacy. Like most women, and mothers, she had an innate revulsion for cruelty and injustice. But more, she simply detested violence in all forms, the way most sensitive, evolved individuals do. Being a boy I did not, and do not, necessarily share that stance, or I do with some reservations. Hence, my tolerance and, occasionally, appreciation for realistic portrayals of mayhem in movies, or the otherwise indefensible spectacle of grown men trading blows in hockey games. But I did inherit an inability to comprehend brutality for its own sake, or the notion of deriving pleasure from someone else’s pain. Of course there is considerable ground between behavior most rational people abhor and activities (like fighting) that some people can rationalize and even celebrate.

Toward the end of S.E. Hinton’s book Rumble Fish the doomed older brother—a street legend who, like all tragic figures, sees everything clearly after it’s already too late—looks at the Siamese fighting fish and suggests that their violence is territorial, not instinctual. If they existed out in the river, they wouldn’t fight. This may or may not be true, but it’s an allegory for gang violence which is nothing if not a territorial battle.

It also, of course, speaks to the larger theme of violence being—among many other things—a consequence of timing, luck and location. My old man grew up outside of Boston, and all of my extended family still lives less than a half hour from the city. It was, and remains, a very blue collar, ethnic environment. As such, inadequate if revealing descriptors like old school, tough, and real were, and are, invoked. Even though genetics made me inclined to determine that the pen is mightier than the sword, if I had grown up in the same neighborhood my father did, there are ways I would be different. Too many ways to count, certainly. I believe it’s entirely possible I may have turned out much the same as I am today, but I also am positive circumstances would have ensured that I was harder, less reflective and more resilient. Put another way, the fact that I can even formulate such a hypothesis tends to bolster this theory, and was taught –and trained myself– to use my mind instead of my muscle, not as a calculated choice so much as an inevitable outcome of my upbringing. Mostly, I remain grateful I had the opportunity to succeed (and be allowed to succeed) without the old fashioned type of problem solving that impedes evolution.

II.

Writing is fighting, and few writers used their skills with as much focused indignation as George Orwell.

Orwell embodies an era when exploration (physical and intellectual), engagement with the world and an insatiable appetite for experience were not rites of passage so much as imperative points of departure. Of course it was, in many regards, a simpler time: no movie stars or radio-friendly pop singers; no prime time news anchors sensationalizing the story of the day. To a certain extent, we counted more on our writers (think Twain or Sinclair, or Dickens) to give us an unvarnished view of what was happening, hidden in plain sight.

In his harrowing essay “How The Poor Die” George Orwell describes his unexpected—and unpleasant—time at a non-paying hospital in Paris. It is a typically instructive discursion on the issues that obsessed Orwell, and which he wrote with more clarity than anyone else in the last century: poverty, class and the cultural machinations that perpetuate these conditions.

Having seen indigent, anonymous citizens carted in (and out) suffering from familiar and inscrutable diseases, one morning he notices that the older man across from him had passed away during the night. It occurs to Orwell, as he looks with pity at the pale, broken-down body, that he is witnessing an example of death by “natural causes”. And this manner of death, which so many of us literally pray for, is, he concludes: “slow, smelly and painful.” The lucky ones, Orwell notes, die at home (the truly lucky ones, he proposes, die in action, with their boots on).

Well into the 20^th Century, hospitals were very much like prisons (in the literal, not metaphorical sense); only worse—particularly for the impoverished. Being there, and bearing witness, made it possible for others to see what they could not otherwise understand. More importantly, it made it impossible for people to pretend that these conditions did not exist. Orwell, like Sinclair, Twain and Dickens, did his part to parade our inhumanity and force us to confront this collective shame.

So what? Well, would it be too quaint by half (or whole) to propose that writers in general (and poets in particular, per Shelley’s dictum) were indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Expertise earned in the field and conferred via the discipline of expression. The best writers could acquire an old-fashioned kind of authority; the type that conferred upon an individual the honor (and obligation) of expressing truths not beholden to party lines or privilege. The type of sensibility that was capable of creating 1984, for instance.

Orwell had the courage of his convictions: he enlisted, and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He took to the streets and lived as a hobo to better understand (and subsequently articulate) what life was like for those “down and out”. Over time, he learned the hard way that there are no easy answers. Undaunted, he doubled down on his commitment, using these events to solidify a resolve that changing minds was more effective in the long run than bashing skulls.

III.

You can’t combat cancer with fists or poetry; you can try it with chemicals and prayers, but like it is with most of our earthly affairs, it all comes down to timing and luck.

We thought we were lucky, at first. In many ways, we were: the diagnosis was made in time and the operation was successful. The cancer had not spread. Ten years ago, the doctor said, I would have sent you on your way. Now, knowing what we know, we’ll do chemotherapy to be on the safe side.

Better safe than sorry, we all agreed.

We got lucky, we said, a year later when no cancer had come back. We were lucky, we said, all through ’98 and ’99, and we entered a new millennium free and clear, the cancer a thing of the past, like the Y2K bug.

A few months later we were back in the hospital. It had come back.

It was, we all agreed, time to fight. What else could we do?

My sister asked questions, took notes and worried. My father talked with my mother, lived with her and ran point regarding decisions, directions and dealing with the obligations incumbent upon anyone who has repeated the words “’til death do us part”. I did my own note-taking, question-asking and behind the scenes improvising. Above all I envisioned the worst, hoped for the best and lost sleep like it was my job.

During the summer of 2002 when it sometimes felt like the walls were closing in (literally, as anyone who has experienced crisis-induced anxiety can attest), I dropped pounds I did not necessarily need to lose. I ate some good food and I drank some good drinks, but those miserable months frequently felt like one unappetizing, ill-digested meal. The worst days were when your stomach and mind simultaneously conspired against you: not enough nourishment and too much mental unrest will cause side effects even strangers notice.

Still, I knew what was at stake, and my primary responsibility, I felt, was to keep things as upbeat and optimistic as possible. This was certainly for my mother’s sake, but it was also a fairly pragmatic strategy. What good, I thought, could possibly come from giving up hope, or letting my mother see the insecurity and the dread that on certain days reflected the weather: thick and humid and getting hotter as the afternoons dragged on.

But we all reserved the right to despise this disease that was decimating the woman we loved. It’s not especially difficult to describe, and I suppose it’s not hard to imagine the defensive feelings that boil up when you see someone close to you suffering. The fury, at times, impotently craves an outlet.

My most fervent wish, which at times became an obsession, was to swap places with my mother and take her cancer inside of me. Not in the metaphorical—or even literal—sense of preferring to struggle in another’s place, although there was obviously that. It was not merely instinctual; it was personal. It was not simply a matter of wanting my mother’s agony to cease, though there was obviously that. What I felt was an unappeasable compulsion to engage with this enemy. In short, I wanted to kick cancer’s ass.

This was not a case of reactionary bravado or calculated displacement (though there were elements of both, obviously); this was something I would have given anything to orchestrate. There I was, in the very prime of my life, physically and perhaps more importantly, mentally; I was as strong spiritually as I’d ever been. I was ready, and ravenous to step into the ring. It was as though I had been working my entire life to prepare for this, to assume this responsibility.

For the first time in my life I craved violence. I needed to step in and deal with this bullying motherfucker. I wanted to hit it, chew it, swallow it, spit it out and step on it. I wanted to laugh at it, engage it on its own terms while taking everything it had to offer, and then bury it. I saw it and I wanted it.

Of course I knew the first signs of nausea would take considerable wind out of my sails, and because I recognized it I appreciated it, and that was truly what caused me to crave some semblance of satisfaction. I am more positive of this than anything else in my entire life: if I could have done it I would have, and I would have been ecstatic.

And like everyone else who has had these exact same thoughts, I was mocked by the fact that it is impossible. Not just the fantasy of some half-assed exorcism, but the inability to do much of anything about cancer. You can’t put your hands on it; you can hardly wrap your mind around it. It humbles us, eventually (inevitably) in terms of how little we actually control despite the ways we create and organize reality with clocks, calendars, words and games. All the rituals—including faith and love—that we utilize to combat the malevolent indifference of our universe are strategies, not solutions. Cancer reminds us we are ultimately just animals in a world that promises only one outcome, and for the majority of creatures populating this planet existence is cruelly fleet and ruthlessly efficient.

The worst part? You can’t make it personal. Cancer is only an organism, staying alive the only way it knows how. What can we do about that? Make it evil, invest it with the accountability for everything that can’t be reconciled or explained. This is why we created the devil; it is the central reason so many of us must believe there is a benign force supervising our affairs. It explains why, with the best intentions, we determine that each misfortunte is all part of a larger plan; one we can’t begin to comprehend. When you go from wanting to believe to needing to believe (in something, anything) it is easier to fathom how faith can quickly lead to violence. This helps explain how—and why—knowledge was scorned or suppressed, and why men of science were burned at the stake.

It’s Nature. It’s natural. It’s our nature.

Cancer reminds us that we are part of a natural order. Billions of organisms are attacked and invaded each day, all according to the cycle of life and death, the grim ushers in Nature’s play. We are aware of it, we can use science to explain it, we may even write poems about it. But we are pretty much powerless to do anything about it. This does not mean we have to accept it. Depending on how you look at the world, we fight every second of our lives just to live. Each breath we draw defies death; each thought we have outlives oblivion. Each time we give love we are defeating fear and hatred, the twin killers of compassion and connection. When we help others suffer through their final struggle with survival we may be fighting a battle that has already been settled. At the same time, we are solving the ultimate secret of our own existence: we learn how to conquer death by anticipating—and transcending—it. This is the battle we are all born into, and it is one we are fortunate to fight as long as we are able.

*From a non-fiction work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: A History of Violence, cancer, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, How The Poor Die, Mark Twain, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, S.E. Hinton, Upton Sinclair

Coal Mines, Unions, Big Business and (of course) George Orwell

February 24, 2011 By Sean Murphy 1 Comment

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. –George Orwell

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Charley Patton, George Orwell, I Shall Not Be Moved, Johnny Cash, Kevin Drum, Milan Kundera, Richard Harris, Sean Connery, The Pinkertons, The Road To Wigan Pier, Unions, Wisconsin

Born in the U.S.A. or, Every Day is Veterans Day (Revisited)

November 11, 2010 By Sean Murphy 1 Comment

I. Personal

Remember when Born in the U.S.A. was ubiquitous? The album and the song. Bruce was already big, but he wasn’t over the top. Born in the U.S.A. put him over the top and, to a certain extent, he’s stayed there ever since. Of course, people in the know understood he was already a legend before the ‘70s ended; in the early ‘80s The River and Nebraska cemented that status, but Born in the U.S.A. ensured that no one could ever ignore The Boss.

I already owned scratchy LP copies of Born To Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, as well as original (and shitty sounding) cassette copies of the oft-overlooked but brilliant first two albums (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E. Street Shuffle), so by the time Born in the U.S.A. hit the market, I was admittedly wary of the frenzied and new-fangled faithful joining the party. But other, more disconcerting forces were at play: the album, as good as it was, wasn’t that good. “Dancing in the Dark”, “I’m On Fire”, “No Surrender”, “My Hometown”? Eh. “Glory Days” was pretty much an instant classic, but (as is always the case with FM-friendly tunes, and never the fault of the artist) overplay hasn’t helped its staying power. But the big hit, the title track, the song that seemed to shoot through the dial 24/7, that one was a love or hate affair. I hated it. If ever there was an arena-ready anthem, this was it. And the muscle-bound Bruce from the video? Give me the spindly Serpico clone from ’78 any day.

(Interesting coincidence: Springsteen had a difficult time getting the track to sound the way he wanted it. Indeed, it was an outtake from his stark solo effort Nebraska. This is not unlike the origins of another overplayed song from the ‘80s, The Rolling Stones’ insufferable “Start Me Up”. That one was originally cut as a reggae-ish romp, before it devolved into the over-produced, if innocuous hit it was destined to be. “Start Me Up”, to be certain, is a lark, and it was—for better or worse—fated to be recycled for eternity at sporting events. “Born in the U.S.A.”, on the other hand, is actually a serious song and, as it happens, is much better than it sounds.)

Perhaps it’s my own fault, but it took several years before I even figured out the words Bruce was singing; perhaps it’s due to his overwrought delivery—equal parts marble-mouthed and shouting. Regardless, this is quite possibly Springsteen’s most somber song—and considering the era (Nebraska) it was written, that is saying a great deal. (And for the curious, it’s well worth checking out the (far superior) demo version that didn’t make the cut for the Nebraska album.) It made all the sense in the world, then, when Springsteen hit the road for his subdued Tom Joad tour in the mid-‘90s, he made the searing, stripped-down version of this song a centerpiece of the show. His hand pounding the acoustic guitar to simulate a heart beat at the song’s coda remains one of the most quietly powerful and emotional moments I’ve ever witnessed at a concert.

II. Polemical

Check it out:

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

(chorus)

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”

I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

This song is, upon closer inspection, a staggering achievement. With few words and admirable restraint, Springsteen captures the cause and effects of the Vietnam war from the perspective of an ordinary American, the afflicted civilian. More, he moves the narrator into the here-and-now, making the uncomfortable point that the war never died for the people who managed to live. Movies like The Deer Hunter and Coming Home dealt with Vietnam’s immediate aftermath—the dead or wounded—but not many artists (certainly not enough artists) articulated the dilemma of the working poor who returned from the front line to become the unemployed, or unemployable poor. The vets who ended up in jail, or hospitals, or sleeping under bridges. Or the ones always on the edge (this was, remarkably, a time when shell shock was still a more commonly used term than Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and, as George Carlin astutely pointed out, perhaps if we still called it “shell shock” it might be less easy to ignore), the ones who, by all outside appearances, could—and should—be finding work, and contributing to society, and staying out of trouble. As politicians of a certain party confirm time and again, you cease to be especially useful once you’re no longer in the womb, or no longer wearing the uniform.

On albums like Nebraska and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen presented stories of the dirty and the desperate, the men and women straddling the line between paychecks and prison, the ones wrestling with the hope and glory inherent in the mostly mythical American Dream. All of them had a story, and many of them were archetypes from small towns and big cities all across the country. But “Born in the U.S.A.” might be the first instance where Springsteen takes a topical dilemma and wrestles with an entire demographic: the veterans with “nowhere to run (and) nowhere to go”.

Of course, in an irony that could only occur in America, none other than our PPP (proudly patriotic president), Ronald Reagan, (or, more likely, his handlers) utterly misread the song and tried to appropriate it as a feel-good anthem for his 1984 reelection campaign. Predictably, Springsteen protested. But what Reagan and his opportunistic underlings heard was, in fairness, the same interpretation so many other Americans shared. And who cares, anyway? It’s just a song after all. And yet, it is a shame that such an effective, and affecting, observation was celebrated as representing the very facile values (unthinking nationalism, unblinking pride) it calls into question. Again, Springsteen and his band deserve no small amount of artistic culpability for marrying such stark lyrics to such a buoyant, fist-pumping, car commercial sounding song. People hear those martial drums and think of John Wayne instead of Travis Bickle.

III. Political

Why bring politics into it at all, one might ask? Music can be, and certainly is, enjoyed regardless of what it was intended to inspire. If a song moves you, or manages to make sense in ways that directly contradict the artist’s design, beauty is forever in the eye of the beholder. On the other hand, as George Orwell noted, “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”. Put another way, “Born in the U.S.A.” is still relevant because the issues it confronts are still relevant. We not only have (entirely too many) struggling veterans from last century’s wars, we will have no shortage of men and women who have fought (or are currently fighting) in this generation’s imbroglio. History only makes one promise, and it’s that it will ceaselessly repeat itself.

And so, even as our ill-advised adventure in Iraq reaches its inevitable endgame (and our unrequited affair with Nation Building in Afghanistan chugs along with no end in sight), we will only be in the initial stages of dealing with the veterans who need care and attention. We won’t count the ultimate cost of “mission accomplished” until we consider the lives lost and the walking wounded, tallied up alongside the untold billions of dollars. The Democrats can’t create miracles, but they can continue to ensure that the people owed the most won’t get the least. (We will concede that when it comes to bumper-sticker braggadocio, no one pays lip service to soldiers, country and Christ like Republicans, but a checkbook and a soul always trump empty sloganeering.)

Remember this, when the small-government-soundbite hyenas crawl out of their tax-payer fortified foxholes to decry liberal “big spending” programs. Remember it’s these programs that, in addition to paving roads, building schools and providing health care, attempt to secure some support and solace for our broken soldiers. And remember, in two, or four, or forty years, these same craven war pigs will once again wrap themselves in the American flag; these same armchair generals and couch potato patriots prepared to fight to the last drop of other folks’ blood will be the ones seeking to slash the programs designed to save the ones burning down the road.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen, George Orwell, Nebraska, Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle, Veterans Day

Message to Obama: This is This

November 30, 2009 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

8 servicemembers ceremony

I guess there are a few suckers, like myself, who are holding out hope that the worst kept secret in Washington (i.e., the expected announcement from our president about another escalation of troops into the Graveyard of Empires) is yet another instance of Obama’s effective/annoying strategy of floating out a rumor to get a “read” of the public mood before shucking and jiving, then surprising the always-obtuse Beltway media bozos. Of course, that Clintonian triangulation on steroids act got stale a while back (certainly before and during the protracted death spiral of the public option which, to this day, Obama has been unconscionably quiet about endorsing –which leaves intelligent people with little evidence to counter the assumption that the public option in particular, and meaningful health care reform in general, is not terribly high on his personal radar. Which, of course, is more than a little disappointing, and disenchanting), between his waffling over how to handle the Wall Street catastrophe and his, well, dithering on the Afghanistan stalemate.

(Isn’t it depressing how easily Iraq has fallen back off the radar? What exactly is being accomplished there? Andrew Sullivan has a reliably succinct, and clear-eyed assessment of the muted returns on our considerable investment of lives and dollars:

All the surge did was provide a face-saving way for the US to create enough temporary security to leave. Given the chaos of the first four years of occupation, this was an achievement. But the achievement was in preventing total humiliation for the US, not anything close to victory or success stable enough to leave with anything but another civil war as the likeliest outcome. But the US didn’t leave, Obama took the neocon advice, and is still hanging on to the notion that a stable, democratic, self-governing Iraq is possible after only six years of occupation, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, 5,000 dead Americans, countless wounded and disabled vets, and up to $3 trillion in taxpayers’ money.

As Obama appears to be intensifying the lost war in Afghanistan, with the same benchmark rubric that meant next-to-nothing in the end in Iraq, he does not seem to understand that he will either have to withdraw US troops from Iraq as it slides into new chaos, or he will have to keep the troops there for ever, as the neocons always intended. Or he will have to finance and run two hot wars simultaneously. The rest is here.)

It is, suffice it to say, incredibly discouraging to think that Obama feels that a “modest” increase in troops will deliver anything approximating positive results. On the practical front, it’s a non-starter; on the political front, it is backwards bordering on masochistic. Does he think for one second that this move will buy him an ounce of credit or goodwill from the obstreperous (and increasingly single-minded) Republican base? Does he believe the chickenhawk ship of idiots (including, but not limited to Dick Cheney, Charles Krauthammer and John Bolton) will cut him any slack (and more importantly, why would he give two shits what any of those imbeciles think? Indeed, since those guys have been wrong about virtually everything they’ve blathered about over the last eight or so years, isn’t it intuitive to grasp that a position opposite of theirs practically guarantees success?) will get on board? Does he think this craven pandering to the mythical moderate demographic will satisfy anyone? (Not that anyone needs to be satisfied; that would be reducing the very real affairs that mean life and death for those involved to pure political gamesmanship, and we’re all better off when we leave that to Republicans, and we’re best off when we keep them out of office, where they are unable to keep the war machine chugging.)

In sum, this tactical cop-out would signify neither change nor anything that anyone can believe in. And that is where it gets ugly: Obama loses his base over this, and it’s over. Which is why it’s difficult to believe a man of his intelligence could fail to fathom this. And this is what this is all about.

I have opinions (few of which would surprise anyone who speaks with or reads me semi-regularly), and I’ve occasionally opined in the past, here, here, here, here, here, here and especially here.

So I’d rather step aside and let some well-equipped and quite persuasive writers put some things in perspective.

It is a ceaseless source of chagrin that the name George Orwell gets name-checked (by both the hard-left and the hard-right, proving that he was a genius and can be all-things-to-all-people as only the true iconoclasts, the genuinely original thinkers of their time, are capable of being) so often but when you talk to people (especially people who work in or around politics) you come to understand that they have not only not read 1984 or Animal Farm, but they have not read anything else, either. Of course, coming into contact with Orwell at a formative age and engaging in some honest fashion with the truths he told almost a century ago, might have prevented these same people from wanting any part of the political scene…so it makes a sad sort of sense to realize how ignorant –in the literal sense of the word– these cynics and true-believers actually are. None of which is to imply that if they did read Orwell, now, it would prompt or compel any type of epiphany. But it would certainly cause confusion and uncertainty. And, as anyone who knows anything about politics (and the people who partake in the circus) well understands, confusion and uncertainty –which often lead to their unspeakable cousin nuance– are anathema to contemporary political hacks.

Nevertheless, it is important to point out that history predictably and inexorably repeats itself, and that many answers to our seemingly (and maddeningly) unanswerable foreign policy conundrums were articulated in stark, unequivocal fashion long before any of the actors in today’s world stage were born. Orwell’s indelible (and, it would seem, largely unread) evisceration of empire building (not just the practice itself, but the corrosive effects it has on the occupants’ hearts and souls), Shooting An Elephant is mandatory viewing. At least it must be for anyone who aspires to be taken seriously about any convictions they may have regarding our Sisyphean undertaking in Afghanistan:

As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East.

That was written in 1936.

orwell

The next piece, which –without putting too fine or, I hope, melodramatic point on it– should be required reading for anyone who is ardently for these war(s), or has never had a family member fight in a war, and perhaps especially for the folks who don’t have a particularly strong opinion one way or the other, comes courtesy of Chris Jones in Esquire. This one, entitled The Things That Carried Him, won a well-earned National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. It is a shattering piece, and would give considerable pause to anyone with a half-functioning heart or brain.

“Honorable transfer,” they call it, the last in a series of military handoffs, when the Army finally turns over a dead son or daughter, husband or wife, to his or her family.

Staggers stole away behind the hangar to read his Bible. He had confronted grief for most of his adult life, but he had to get his head straight. He had somehow seen this future for himself while standing at the lip of a mass grave in Bosnia a decade ago, had seen it in the faces of two hundred men, women, and children massacred and thrown in a pit. “That was a spiritual moment,” he said. “That’s when I said I will follow this calling that you’ve been pestering me with, God, for all my years.” Since then, he has worked as a sheriff’s chaplain, and alongside one of the Army’s casualty notification officers, and in the trauma room of a city hospital. Most recently had come his tour in Afghanistan, where he had missed the birth of his youngest son to pray over the bodies of the sorts of men he hoped his son might one day become.

Today, though, was new and it was different: It was not a farewell but a return. Today would be about framing a reality that was only now coming home. “I was thinking, What would I want for my wife and kids if I were the one not to make it back?” Staggers said. “I would want someone to give them 100 percent of their attention and preparation.”

When Sergeant Montgomery’s family arrived from Scottsburg a short time later, and after Don Collins Sr. had parked his hearse and opened the door, Chaplain Staggers introduced himself and did his best to prepare them for what they were about to see. He went over the mechanics of the ritual, but he also tried to steady them for the emotion that would follow. There might have been times over the past week when they felt like they were in a movie, actors playing parts. That feeling would end this afternoon.

The guardsmen had carried enough caskets to deduce, from what their arms told them as they grasped the handles and lifted, something of the person inside. They know if the dead soldier was big or little, and they can also make a good guess at how he died, whether he was killed by small-arms fire or a helicopter crash or an IED. Sometimes they’d lifted caskets and been surprised by the weight of them — wooden caskets are heavier than metal, and that combined with a strapping young man can make for a considerable burden, several hundred pounds — and sometimes there was barely any weight at all, and they knew that inside the casket was a pressed uniform carefully pinned to layers of sheets and blankets, between which might be nestled only fragments of a former life, sealed in plastic.

APTOPIX Kennedy Memorial

Finally, from the Feb’09 Esquire, Michael Paterniti’s The Garden, which looks at the lives (and livelihoods) of the crew who dig the graves (and perform the myriad custodial obligations) at Arlington National Cemetery.

“Football is like war,” he says. “To win, you’re going to have to gamble a little. But in war that’s gambling people’s lives. “Sometimes I just can’t fit it in my head,” he continues, “I see these stones out here, see that some kid was 18, 19. These are babies, man. Babies. And they could be any of us.”

The feeling somehow becomes more acute and immediate out in the living memory box of Section 60: Before one headstone sits a tin of Copenhagen; before another, a bottle of half-drunk bourbon. There are packs of Newports and laminated pictures of wedding days, births of children, and buddies during good times. There are condoms and lipstick kisses on the marble headstones and colored stones on top and, in the nearby trees, glittering seasonal juju: blue stars or tinsel, American flags or stuffed bunnies. Leaning against one headstone is a birthday card with the picture of a little boy who has just learned to scratch out the name Daddy, three years after Daddy’s death. And then there are the scrawled notes from friends and wives that say I miss chillen with you brother and I wish we were together, you fussing over my pregnant belly and buying me those awful coveralls to wear like we planned.

And, on hotel stationery, this note from a mother: Hello son, I miss you so much it hurts and sometimes I’m so proud I can’t stop smiling. You were a great son and I am very proud of you. Some times I feel your presents and some times I see you in my dreams. Those are the best times. We are together again and I get to give you those hugs I love so much. Well, I’ll get in touch with you again real soon and please make more visits to me in my dreams. I would really like that. Love you Son, Mom xxoo.

garden

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Afghanistan, Andrew Sullivan, Chris Jones, Deer Hunter, George Orwell, Iraq, Maggot Brain, Michael Paterniti, Obama

Ars Moriendi

February 1, 2009 By Sean Murphy 2 Comments

Or, the art of dying.

Of course, a treatise like this made a great deal of sense in the 15th Century, while memories of the Black Death still lingered in the collective consciousness. And while we look at drawings such as the one above, now a quarter of a millennium old, we might not be wrong to wonder how much has changed.

For one thing, the focus now is on living. Death remains an inviolable condition of life, but dying at a young age, usually in a grotesque, violent or horrifying fashion, is no longer the prevailing standard (at least in countries and areas with electricity, running water and hospitals). Today, we’re more about self-actualization and, while that could be the subject of cynicism, it is inexorably a sign of significant human progress. And if we think of self-actualization as the art of living, and we define a full life as one that invokes few regrets as it ends, we are ultimately creating documents (our lives) to review, presumably with satisfaction, at the final analysis. This, then, might be the more accurate contemporary application of this concept–the art of dying: not something to practice with proper reverence at one’s death bed, but an active process undertaken throughout one’s existence. If, to die properly means a life well-lived, or a life lived to its fullest, or at least a life lived as fully and exhaustively as possible.

Where does art and those who create it come into this picture? Artists are no different than anyone else. Not just in terms of how they go about living and, eventually, dying, but even in the ways they practice, however imperfectly, their vocations. In fact, I’ll take the contrary view and assert that, in many regards, it’s easier for the artist. That is, an authentic artist, truly committed to his craft, can (and must) filter out the time-sucking detritus and ceaselessly focus on the task(s) at hand, the work. Each project (the short pieces that take days, or hours, or in our blog-centric world, minutes, as well as the features or stories or novels that one’s in for the long haul, however long it requires) demands investment: of time, of energy, of concentration, of resolve. And the results are often directly proportional to the seriousness and integrity with which the project is invested.

Living well can be an art in and of itself, not unlike the act of creation–on literal and figurative terms. A life, especially a life that involves the lives of others (friends, family, spouse, offspring) is inevitably comprised of millions of urgent and banal moments: the exigencies of existence that are forgettable as they are necessary, the way individual drops of gasoline fill a tank and keep the car running.

In his essay Why I Write, George Orwell explains that “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” Once again, contrary to the facile image of a wild-eyed artist churning out work in frenzied, passionate bursts, the summation of effort that comprises a completed novel is full of quotidian drudgery: page after aborted page, revision after turgid revision, an eternity of silent moments spent searching for the inspired line. Sentence upon sentence the pyramid is built out of optimism, self-absorption, concentration and chaos. Kind of like a life.

There is more to say here, and I didn’t even get to Hunter S. Thompson yet.

To be continued…

Filed Under: Ruminations in Real Time Tagged With: Black Death, George Orwell, Götterdämmerung, Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Dying, Wagner