A lyric by Stan Raines (with a twenty-times-revised explanatory essay appended)

I write him letters
When I cannot sleep
When the I-Pod dreams
Won’t come.

I draw him pictures
When I have the time
Of my cat dancing
Across the lawn.

He doesn’t come
From my home town,
But I know he loves
The homeland.

I’ll see him soon,
I know I will
In five years
Or maybe twenty.

Writer’s note: This is the product of too much caffeine, this time from chocolates thoughtlessly consumed last night while I watched a terrible production of “Andromeda Strain,” or whatever it was, on the A&E channel (which certainly does not live up to its name). I should know by now that TV remakes of old films are always downgrades, and it’s going to be low production values and hack acting all around.

Besides the caffeine, there was a peculiar whistling in my breathing no matter which way I lay, and, whatever the blockage was, I couldn’t dislodge it. It may have been some image in the movie–there certainly were enough “warrior” types around–that got this thing going in my head, but there was also a thought about how distant most of us keep ourselves from the warrior nation rising in our midst and how this was only possible by keeping those warriors vague in our minds, so we don’t have an opportunity to
realize what a threat they are.

Already it is commonplace to assert that we owe our rights to soldiers, that we can only mouth off the way some of us do (and in particular, as I do) because soldiers have made sacrifices for us, and, usually, we are left to compare them with the bleeding Christ on the cross and recall the parting line, “Forgive them; they know not what they do.” So our new warrior class and their supporters suffer the supposed insults and slings we subject them to out of a true nobility that those of us not in that class or not on our knees before that class will ever understand. We are too protected.

This raises the problem Joseph Conrad identifies in The Heart of Darkness when he makes that bad, bad joke at the end when Marlowe tells Mr. Kurtz’ beloved that the last words out of Kurtz’ mouth was her name when in fact Kurtz had whispered, “The horror! The horror!” European civilization– and the USA is nothing if it’s not an extension of European civilization, Bill O’Reilly’s cowardly assertion notwithstanding– is built on the suffering of others, including the men we send out to rape and pillage the rest of the world for its resources. I have quite foolishly pointed this out in conversation at various cocktail parties and it always raises a chuckle and a pat on the head for my naiveté, or a hostile reaction more in line with the new life we’re building here in the modern police state.

I say fuck the warriors. And I mean all those proud officers who tut-tut everyone else as having a serious existential problem that will not allow anyone else to understand their situations. One of the primary tasks of civilization is to rid itself of professional warriors–in previous incarnations known as royalty, although the royalty of our day have become a soft class of professional leeches, much as the so-called capitalists have. That’s one of the reasons, I think, that my own generation, the much discussed and often reviled Boomers, accepted the draft so easily until, it turned out, the aforementioned professionals lied their way into the hearts of the political class and gave us the unjust war of Vietnam–we accepted the draft to de-professionalize making war, much to the chagrin of people like Dick Cheney, the cowardly son of a bitch who had better things to do, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who made clear that, despite the obvious inneptitude of the so-called professionals, he had no use for the common man and a draft was out of the question.

I have tremendous sympathy for the current generation of enlisted folks. They’ve been fed and have swallowed a set of deadly untruths. I grew up with the sword of the draft over my head and did my turn when it was my turn based on another set of untruths and have had to live with the consequences, as have many others in my generation.

But I boldly assert that we have rights not because of soldiers, but because we exercise those rights, and when we cease to exercise them, they disappear. Of course, with Scott McClellan telling us to be careful what we say and the fascist radioheads out there to jump all over anything they see as out of line, we begin to limit what rights we will exercise, and that is at the heart of their disappearance. Too many people follow the double-speak line of our current warrior worshiping leadership and therefore believe the Limbaughs and O’Reillys rather than their own lying eyes; and then, out of the guilt that is thus created, these self-limiting folks tell everyone around them to get on their knees to this new royalty and shut the fuck up. They’ve given up their right to speak the truth and quickly became incapable of saying it or recognizing it when it bites them on the ass.

I also ended up watching a re-run of Little Big Man last night, too. It has it’s faults, but there is a movie. But who, in our current environment of the primacy of official goodness, will grant the central premise of that story? That white folks throughout the conquest of the West (beginning with the conquest of West Massachusetts Bay) have been a greedy, rapacious, murderous bunch with a distinct talent for denying the humanity of their victims? Winners don’t necessarily write history, you know. But survivors always do. Of course, their telling very often makes the survivors into heroes, and thus, creates the central problem of history, which, in this country, we do not address.

We raise our kids these days with no sense of actual history. Go read an official text for a public school Texas history course. Those need to be retitled Texas mythology courses as should all of our public school history courses. We believe the myths and fuck the facts. That’s one of the reasons there is such an emphasis on the time lines and “heroic” figures and de-emphasize on the facts of the day. We fail to come to the understanding that our forefathers were just a bunch of folks very much like us making decisions just as we do, not always thinking things through and always with an eye to our own advantage.

So this poem is a paean to that state of affairs. It’s a lyric, to be sung by a youngish girl about that which she does not know in fact, but only from the mythology we’ve constructed to protect her from reality long enough for her to become a truly tempered modern American. It’s limited in its imagery because we’ve limited the education we’re giving our new little budding warriors and slaves. There were a couple of other verses that came around after I’d jumped up and scribbled the present lines down, but I preferred to lay still and find sleep. Perhaps they’ll come around again.