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April 24, 2004
The Damn Noise!!
It just keeps going, and going. All morning. For Lewis' sake. The war is constantly on my mind and I'm tired of hearing what everyone has to say about it. Papa George W. The Left. The Right. The Middle. The News. The Pundits. The Celebrities. The people at work. The Man-on-the-street. Will everyone just SHUT UP!? PLEASE?? I just want to think what I think. I just want to feel what I feel. I want my experience without the pressure. I just want it to stop.
AND...AND...AND..I just want the reign of blood and oil and terror and tribes and religion diamonds and evil to stop, Where-everitis, whatever the reason. It just needs to stop. I don't care why it/they started. What difference does it make? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? WHATWHATWHATWHAT?????? My heart wants to explode out of my chest. I want to walk across the mountains and the ocean and the desert and twist the metal in my hands and scream into their ridiculous faces, All of them. You stupid vainglorious testicleheaded idiots. "WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?????" You are corn meal and blood. You are nothing but a cycle of endless pain and stink. On and on and on and on. You and your sweet innocent children after you. Sweet and innocent children until you take them and contort their brains down into their filthy intestines and their stinking guts up into their pristine heads until they think nothing but bloody foul shit. All of you. I don't care what your nationality, color, religion or creed is. You have taken your babies and fouled them. Shame upon you. Shame. I want to pull the grieving mothers and widows, the screaming children and babies into a big bombed out basement somewhere, pull a big blanket over our heads, and just say, "shaah shaah, it's all going to be ok now." But it never will, will it? Will it?
And what do we do my little patriotic Americanos? Hell, I don't even know. I can't even begin to comment on us because I don't understand us. I've never felt a part of us. Never been much of a Puritan though I have an ancestor on the Mayflower. (very scary.) I don't understand conservatives or Republicans. I don't understand lefties or Democrats. I don't even understand the middle anymore. I never have understood white people, even though I be one. I know I'll be very interested to find out the truth of why my friends are/have been sacrificing their children and spouses and siblings, because I'll be damned if the government is really doing it for "patriotism". I know my friends and their families are doing it for that reason. The government is not. The rich and powerful men and woman in the suits who drive around with tinted windows know nothing of bleeding and dieing.
The powerful in government don't remember that they are only blood and cornmeal. They don't remember that one day they will open their eyes and not be able to move. They will have a tube in every orifice of their body, and then some. They won't be able to move because every limb will be tied down. All the power. All the money. All tinted windows. All the armies. All the democracies. All that won't matter anymore. Then it comes back down to bloody foul shit. Endless pain and stink. And when they die, maybe their family cares and maybe they don't, but I'll be there at their bedside and I'll care because I have never forgotten that we're all blood and cornmeal. (OK, that was a very strange aside. hmmmm)
I found a book I thought I wanted to see, "Just Another War." It had war pictures in Iraq by a photographer named Kenneth Jarecke. He's always out there taking the pics that "the man" doesn't want us to see. (Who is "the man" anyway??) So, of course, I wanted to see them. Upon further research I found his pictures of Iraq are accompanied by poems and musings (?) (and doodles??) by some woman (Exene Cervenka) who is supposed to be somebody in the punk rock/esoteric/artsy/deepthought world. Yeah well whatever. Aaaaargh. Noise, noise, noise, noise, more damn noise. Here is something so personal to me that I can barely breath to think about it. War is something I've thought about constantly since I was a young child. The first poem I ever wrote was about war. I was 9. Most of the pictures I see are filtered by the government to be patriotic in some form or another. I wanted to see Jarecke's pictures. I wanted to absorb them. I wanted to feel them without anyone else’s noise. Without anyone else's punk ass doodle's. Who in the hell are these people that have to scream and slather themselves all over everyone else's space. Why can't I get these pictures sans doodles? Huh?????? I guess I need to spend more time on disgusting.com or something and sort through the crap. Lovely.
Posted by swift at April 24, 2004 12:01 PM
Comments
War has always hung just outside of my consciousness, an ephemeral presence that only pushes aside my glum narcissism occasionally. My Great-grandfather Monson (good ol' Olaf Wilford Monson - "I sing of Olaf glad and big," I think it goes) told occasional stores of World War I (things spilled on the boat ride over when you tried to eat, his company was gassed - mustard gas, I think). My Grandpa Bartholomew rarely, rarely told stories of World War II (at some point he served on Patton's staff in Africa, he and his companions drove over a landmine - luckily in a jeep - on the day my father was born, he ended up interrogating German soldiers during and after the war). My Grandpa Lee, who was in the Air force reserves, was killed in a plane crash with four other young pilots AFTER the war (my mother was two, her mother was pregnant with my uncle) and no one in the big, cagey government machine would ever come clean about what had really happened. During the Vietnam debacle my father managed to get a different deferment each time there was any possibility he'd be drafted (first a student deferment, I think, and then a family deferment and perhaps one other). So my people who really knew war were reticent to talk about it. And they're all dead now. Or I never got to meet them anyway. Then there are the wars during my lifetime. I was only three when the last American troops left Vietnam. We lived in Stanford, California at the time, and there were demonstrations and such at the school, but I was too busy riding my tricycle as far as possible from home before I got caught. And every war since I've pushed away to arm's length because it's too, too horrible. We did keep a "Say No to War" sign on our lawn this past year until it was obviously, too, too late. I don't know that I thought it would ever make a difference. It seems that public opinion has shockingly little effect on blood lust. I'm not sure what my point is - I guess I'm just trying to imagine war as more personal. But perhaps that's my point; I've always fought to keep it from being too personal. If I'd been only a tiny bit older (as you are) it may have been different. The first poem I wrote (about which I remember anything) was about a donkey who wore a pickle on his back (I believe his name was "Old Skinny Grime" and "all he ate was some milk and slime").
But I would join you (and your peace boy - don't ever question where he gets it) and the widows and the children. I wouldn't know what to say to make them feel better, so I would sing songs - probably stupid songs - until everyone cried it all out or laughed and cried simultaneously so that we all cried and cried with tears and snot and war running down our faces.
Posted by: Kate at April 27, 2004 3:43 PM
How do you make me smile and tear up at the same time, you amazing woman you? I think I should like to read about Old Skinny Grime. Do you still have the pickle or did Danbo eat it?
Posted by: Swift at April 28, 2004 4:37 AM