Looking for a good hospital to deliver my baby

It is in fashion among those with a grubby finger on the pulse of the times to engage in a ritual tipping of the cap to the bestial aspect of human nature. They greet news of murder, torture and plunder with a wry grin and say it has always been so. And so it has--although popular acquiescence to evil does exhibit ebb and flow, as if in sympathy with the phases of the moon. Given that their vision may have been dazzled by the particularly martian phase we now are in, I will not condescend to call them liars. But it seems to me that they are entirely too satisfied with the possession of their grimy little truth. They like it. It excuses them from making any attempt to fathom tragedy or conceive of suffering. It excuses them from reconnoitering the better half of their dual natures. Poor philistines, tawdry prophets of inherent vice!

Without knowing it, these savvy folks, pleased as peacocks to don the tribally tailored mantles of “progressivism” or “conservatism” or "libertarianism" are very dangerous people. They can be made to countenance anything, do anything. They, who never took stock of Enlightenment or Renaissance, who never sought light, these dim souls are squandering a heritage born out of herculean struggle against darkness, a heritage bequeathed to us by the heroes of the race. These people--and there are millions upon millions of them--do not know where we come from or what we have gone through or what we are losing. They content themselves with a doddering acknowledgment of the hell we’re headed for and esteem themselves so very savvy as they wink at evil and get on with business. I’m happy to say I’m not even slightly acquainted with the very cream of the elite, or their groveling enablers, for whom the outlook remains unclouded, those diabolical parasites who, if we credit their statements with earnestness, have absolutely no idea of the blight their gorging has wrought. I would like to single out an utterance of recent vintage by the great wunderkind Condoleezza Rice, who offered her best impression of Eichmann in response to heckling about her complicity in war crimes at a public event, quipping that “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.”

Would she could hear Dylan in Masters of War:

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy

And yet the criminal imbecility of a Condoleezza Rice cannot shield me from my own complicity. It’s true I may be predisposed by my excellent Nordic heritage to wallow in the dismal swamps of guilt--swamps that no amount of expiation can ever drain if one goes in for that despondent cycle. But today I have decided to throw my guilt up on a lift and realign it to run true. There is a self-flagellating bias in my guilt’s drivetrain. Why should I be feeling guilty about peccadilloes like wasting time, disappointing others, lacking the strength of my convictions, lacking self-respect, lacking the fortitude to transmute difficulty into achievement--why should I worry about a single personal failing when there is something unspeakably more urgent to feel abysmally, eternally guilty about: The very grim fact of my being an American? Why indeed? It leads me to a thought nearly impossible to conceive: The image of my strictly personal guilt weighed out on a scale against the towering mountain range of collective guilt. It is as if my very personhood is obliterated by the staggering criminality of my nationality. Unless I personally cross the threshold and commit acts of murder, rape, torture, property destruction and expropriation, none of my own little transgressions can rise to the level of the evil unequivocally represented by my American citizenship, and most of all, by my tax contributions to the American war machine. Every dollar I pay into Uncle Sam’s blood-spattered treasury represents my complicity in the supreme international crime of aggressive war, and in all the excruciating subsidiary crimes: The teratogenic destruction of Falluja using depleted uranium artillery; the everyday roboticized murder of villagers who may or may not have been rumored by a snitch to be possessed of the dignity to resist the invader; the water torture; the bullets in the back of the head; the gratuitous missiles fired at anything that moves from unanswerable death machines groaning in the sky; the abduction of bystanders to our concentration camp in the Caribbean; the destruction of families, childhoods, maternities, paternities, retirements, homes, shrines, hospitals, schools, universities, faith, hope, love--past, present, future, everything alike ground into nihilistic shards of irreparable loss by the insatiable machinery of domination. These next may rate a dim second morally, but as an American the crimes of America against herself do concern me some: The grinning destruction of my liberties, the squandering of my resources, the irreparable damage done to my name. To the extent that I am obliged to enrich the regime on the Potomac each fraction of a second devoted to earning my bread, it is hardly a stretch to say that every time I use my computer in a professional capacity I too am guiding drones from Creech Air Force Base to slay perfect strangers in their homes; or that every time I draw up an invoice I create a debit note to be settled in blood by our swarms of hired assassins and thugs--the pride of every red-blooded American, if I’ve understood the latest news cycle correctly.

Is it a stretch to say that every time I make an extorted remittance to the war chest I am injecting my peace-loving veins with the venom of murder?

As what you might call a rube, i.e. a man who is not the full sovereign of any portion of his economic existence and who in his rubehood is obliged to pay fealty to the state, it is also my dubious privilege to enhance the likelihood of my own destruction at the hands of the avenging whirlwind sown by America’s prolific crimes each time I engage in economic production, each time I consume, each time I enjoy myself, and especially each time I travel in an aircraft. One word that occurs when confronted with this guilt is “unbearable.” Maybe so. But when my sad eye looks out on the myriads of Americans in whom time and circumstance have cultivated a taste for vicarious murder--or is it that something essential has failed to germinate in them?--it would seem to be a guilt all too easily borne. Certainly, history teaches that the first will one day be last, and cautions us there will come a day of reckoning for all the smug little Pontius Pilates in Middle America.

Where things get tricky is in the heat of this historical moment, on the downswing of our shabby imperial parabola, when someone comes along and decides he will not silently bear the guilt any longer, but determines to bring it out into the light of day. This is what creates friction, discomfort, gnashing of teeth. We do not wish to be reminded of the little monsters our nation has sired upon us through what I will not shrink from calling moral rape. Such a delivery is bound to be messy. One has trouble finding a willing obstetrician or midwife. True, there are certain abortionists of varying quality available to help us periodically get shut of the growing guilt through the purgatives of charity, good deeds, and organized shows of human feeling. Save Darfur. The mutant fetus thus purged is flushed clean down the sewer. We are relieved for a time. But only until we start to feel the guilt again gnawing away, growing, laying claim to our vitality, reminding us that we have been and continue to be violated at the very core of our humanity.

What cannot be countenanced is a clean delivery. The spawn of our complicity is too awful to look at. And yet perhaps a good regimen of obstetrics and neonatal care is the only thing for us now. My question is, how long could we go on as we have if all these monsters were brought out and held up to scrutiny? How much longer could the war machine continue to siphon off our vitality to feed its diabolical schemes? There must be a threshold past which, were we to cross it, the merry-go-round of permanent war would inevitably grind to a halt.

Some will hasten to add that any form of resistance to the masters of war will be purchased dearly. But is it preferable to go on living as unrepentant parasites on the blood of people who have done us no harm (even though rubes like myself hardly benefit from the blood-drenched farce of Pax Americana)? Everyone must answer this question for himself, and must go on answering it every day for as long as the illegitimate war machine continues to tear through its victims--of whom the loss of each is irreplaceable, and unforgivable.

I would not be displeased if I were to return to America one day and find that others had carried the intolerable monsters of their compulsory guilt to term, and that the groans and shrieks of these creatures had become, at long last, impossible to ignore. But I would be surprised. Even the Olympian gods resisted liberating their monsters--until the day came that they were undone by them. Not that I would stoop to compare the sickening spectacle of life in today’s America to the high times in the Pantheon. It’s coming more and more to resemble the murky regions where Ares preferred to hold court.

There. Am I absolved? Of course not. Just as I thought I had delivered my own personal creature of the dark I feel another one clamoring to get out. Could it be that it’s the same monster, that it managed to fuck itself into the spot where my soul should be in the space of how long it takes to write a sentence? Could it be that our national existence is a perpetual motion machine for the destruction of the human spirit? An ourobouo that has outgrown itself and turned not only on the wider world, but on the idea of life itself, which it is now preparing to devour in a final orgy of parasitism?

To get away from these uncontrollable metaphors for a moment: It occurs to me that the guilt can have no end. It really isn’t possible to atone for a murder, is it? You can never restore life to him whom you robbed of it. The crime does not vanish just because you feel contrite. It is the stain that can never be washed away, the evil that can never be amended. And as Americans, each of us is millions deep into that ledger of infamy. You will spare me your clamor to dispute the numbers when you recall--as if reliving a quaint dream you once saw in your childhood--that the murder of a single human being is an unpardonable crime.

The Revenant

Today I woke to the memory of an encounter I had on a train from Potsdam to Berlin over ten years ago. A rangy man of noble countenance who wore his balding hair in a long silver ponytail came in through the button-operated doors separating my car from the one to the west. He wore a red jacket and carried a binder crammed with papers. He sat down across from me. What I was reading I do not remember. Maybe something by Heinrich Böll. After a moment the man excused himself and asked me whether I would like to buy a book of poems. I said I was broke, pleite, which wasn't strictly true. He said surely I had enough change to make a token contribution in exchange for his humbly printed but well-conceived cycle of poems. I fidgeted and said I really wasn't interested. I wished he'd leave me be. He insisted the poetry was good, and that he needed readers. And money, if only just a little. I channeled my best philistine miser and told him I would not buy it under any circumstances. Nor, cutting off his modified offer, would I consent to read it for free. I do not remember how long his earnest rap and my flinty reception of it went on before he raised himself indignantly and said that he was a learned man, a cultured man, and it was only because of the anti-humanist values held passively by fools like me that his gift to the world, born of magnanimity, had to suffer the indignity of being reduced to an act of abject beggary. He huffed down the aisle and I tried to put him out of my mind with an obliviate soak in the pool of mass-produced text resting in my lap. It worked until this very morning, when he came rushing back. The revenant wreck of a poet. I would like to say that I have not yet shed all the rational sandbags conferred by my Rockwell-meets-Descartes upbringing on the leaky levee of what is really a mysterious and torrential existence; at least not to the point of easily crediting noumena like curses, omens or clear fault lines of destiny, but as an author my task is to find meaning. Either that or to manufacture it out of whole cloth when it is found scarce, threadbare or demure. I did not have to go searching for the revenant poet; he came to me very soon after I published my first book, as I was setting out to find an audience for it. Yet it is still with a certain self-conscious and modestly guilty sensation that have begun to wonder whether one day I’ll find myself filling that old phantom's shoes. It may not be on a train in Germany. I may not be addressing a foreign student of my own language. But I may by then have committed completely to the hazards of a creative existence freed from the blind toil that passes for life in our depraved civilization--the internal logic of my chosen path will one day force me to choose between seizing the sword with two hands or letting it go from the one that holds it now. I may well be in the position of having to bring my wares directly to my envisioned readership, hat in hand. But what am I saying? That's what I'm doing already! My efforts may run aground on the same loathing, the same narrowness of mind, the same miserly philistinism I showed on that long ago afternoon in my exchange with the old poet. I'll be he and my old self at once, if you like, authentic author and faithless reader both. And while I may not deserve that rejection generically, as an author, I will deserve it specifically for the cold shoulder I turned when once I had the chance to help a worthy man along the twisting path of his art.

This tentative parallel assumes that we both were/are worthy of readership and recognition, which may or may not be the case. The real question is, how can you ever know if you reject a personal appeal to open the cover and turn the page? How can you ever know if you lack the curiosity (and maybe even the courage) to read a piece of samizdat when it lands in your lap? Of course, it may not be as elegant or simple as all that. What am I saying? Of course it isn't. I have left out consideration of the relative strength of the appeal. Consider Henry Miller, back when he was patrolling the Lower East Side with boxes of candy to finance his abortive literary efforts. His entreaties provoked the mockery of a table of well-heeled merrymakers, but their mockery only made him blow his stack and launch into a torrent of rebuke. So powerfully indignant was he that they relented in shame and invited him to share their board of mussels and champagne, buying his wares down to a man. Miller did this with candy; books would have been a cinch. Suppose the Berliner poet had been more insistent or more gifted/charismatic? Would not our speculative destinies have taken a different turn?

Maybe. But I want to return to the notion of telos touched on above. The more I think about it, the more I believe that there was some reason for my encounter with that man, and that there is meaning in reflecting on him now. Not long ago I read something in a Canadian periodical about encounters of this kind. The writer claimed that every man, at the moment marking the end of his youth, has an encounter, whether real, imagined, phantasmal or remembered, with another man who makes him the person he will be until he dies. The writer referred to this other man as a magician. The image I came away with was the proverbial ‘tap on the steering wheel’. I am not ready to concede the end of my youth just yet, nor am I ready to admit that this man half-met will be the one to perform the final calibrations on my life's trajectory. What I will allow is that these expiatory reflections can be of some use in improving my own receptiveness to chance encounters of the literary kind, and perhaps also in smoothing the way for myself and others who are trying to persuade a hesitant readership to open the cover. My revenant in mind, I will board a bus, train or ship with a box of freshly printed books. My appeal will be direct and without shame or equivocation: Buy my book, please. Currents of my heart and soul and bile undulate through its pages. It's good, I'll say. And if enough people just like you buy it and enjoy it, you will have laid track for a literary locomotive raring to bring more and more books to the salubrious light of day. And, I'll ad with a wicked grin, if by failing to heed my entreaty you perpetuate the scorn and suspicion that hang like a miasma over the badlands of independent artistic production, who knows what parched watershed of personal destiny you will have crossed into.