The Rabbit's Prayer: But First They Have to Catch You

It used to be respectable to learn from Nature, although that has fallen out of vogue-- deer stupidly refuse to adapt to motor vehicles, and fur, fish and fowl alike have shown themselves pathetically unable to fit in with a system dominated by asphalt, Dick Cheney and Monsanto. Adopt the wisdom of the animals? The Native Americans' embrace of casinos filled with clouds of blue tobacco smoke only shows that they've finally wised up and joined the party. If the polar bear didn't want to become extinct, he would would have planned for the future like the rest of us. And if military planners succeed in their quest for the robot soldier (127 billion being spent on something called the Future Combat Project), it'll be our turn to learn what it's like to be a raccoon in the headlight.

And yet, and yet... the book of Nature, when it's not paved over but read with care, contains undiscovered cures for cancer (oops, that plant just went extinct, sorry) and biological marvels of technology beyond human ken. If humans could make an elevator cable with the strength of a spider web, we would ride elevators into space instead of explosive rockets. The unassuming kangaroo can put a fertlized embryo into stasis for years at a time before it is born, effectively suspended animation. Jim Harrison learned a principle of Zen from watching his cat: "When a cat doesn't know what to do, it sits down."

The motto beneath this picture is the rabbit's prayer from Richard Adams Watership Down. Like most gifts granted to mythic heroes, it contains both a boon and a curse. The rabbit hero El-ahrairah was the last to receive a blessing from God in Adams' lapine mythology, and with a sauce familiar to owners of house rabbits, the trickster told God he could just bless his rear end, and so in a dangerous world where everyone else has the weapons and the money and the lawyers and the bulldozers, the rabbit-- "prince with a thousand enemies"-- was given the means of escape.

This is a world of killer apes, unspeakably cruel to the small things of this world. The voice of a woman named Zawadi Mongane is on the BBC testifying about unspeakable atrocities. Her children were killed; she was forced to hang her own baby. She lives in absolute poverty now because of the stigma attached to rape victims in the Congo. She stays alive because one daughter had been overlooked and still needed her. This is a world that makes good people live like weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk.

I think of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms", a clear definition the difference between the Western democracies and fascism. "Freedom from Fear" was one of the planks. Norman Rockwell made a picture: two small children lie asleep while their parents hold a newspaper filled with war news. No one is going to be raped or murdered or left behind. It was our credo, once, for about five minutes back in the Forties. It was a Tuesday. It ought to be our credo now, recited like the Pledge of Allegiance, but now we are an empire, and we only "rescue" people and "give the gift of democracy" if they're sitting on an oil reserve. The worst thing about a world of monsters and lawyers is that they force the rest of humanity to become lawyers and monsters just like them. The Cherokee, as I recall, tried adopting suits and ties and farms and churches and newpapers, they even tried the Supreme Court, and it didn't do them a damn bit of good against a man like Andrew Jackson.

Never mind the Hollywood Indian talking about Brother Bear and Sister Mountain Lion and busy Brother Beaver. There's not much they can do against a court order or an AK-47. What should I learn from watching my little rabbit brothers and sisters? When Sophie our house rabbit went into the dark, she went kicking, angry and grunting at her illness when it wouldn't let her stand up straight, but still kissing and nuzzling my hands to the last. She never was sad a moment in her life. All the races in her cosseted life had been for fun, mock assaults on our startled cats, ear shaking laughter when she outwitted an imaginary foe. Now she was running from death, and she saw no reason to drop her insousciance because she was going to lose this one. Pluck.

The robot soldiers are coming, papered with writs drafted by lawyers like Douglas Feith, and no one you know is going to own one. If the storm clouds break over your house, God grant you strong legs and daring.

(Rabbit print by Zanfandel, available at DeviantArt, which if you've never been there before, is the widest ranging online gallery for amateurs and professionals alike.)

Oh, to be in New York, with a Hot but Sensitive Sugar Mama and Tickets to See Chiwetel Ejiofor in Othello

If jealousy is green-eyed, what color is envy? Chartreuse, maybe, or viridian. Access, that's what New Yorkers have. I envy East Coasters this week because Chiwetel Ejiofor is appearing as Othello , with Ewan McGregor as Iago. I first saw him as the nameless Alliance operative in Serenity, and my artsy friends as the desk clerk/physician/taxi driver in Dirty Pretty Things.



Never mind my prejudice against most actors and the theatrical profession as shallow, pretty things, the irresponsible babysitters of the modern American soul. Ejiofor's performances are layered, man. He played a nameless, remorseless, True Believer villain in Serenity, one of the biggest one-dimensional cliches in action films, but between Whedon's writing and Ejiofor's performance, the character is frightening and plausible, one of those clean-cut functionaries who were drawn to support dictators overseas because democracy is so messy. When these professionals find themselves being used for specious ends by a Nixon or a Bush, a Cheney or a Kennedy or a fictional Alliance, they rationalize murder-for-hire with a made-up samurai code, and if you understood the big picture like they do, you'd be all too happy to ensure that those little brown people die beautifully. You hate the character's guts and want to see him die for what he's doing to your friends, laugh when he's confounded-- nobody does Brer Rabbit against the monsters like Joss Whedon-- and almost feel sorry for the son-of-a-bitch when his nose is rubbed in the vileness he's defending.

What could an actor like that do with a text as layered as Shakespeare? Both London and New York are giving this Othello good reviews. Apparently Ejiofor catches the sweetness of the character, that part of Captain Othello's soul that forgets about soldiering and discovers joy and tenderness: "O my soul's joy!.... Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee-- And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again." -- which makes it all the more heartbreaking when chaos comes, and he, base Indian, murders a pearl worth more than all his tribe. The New Yorker review noted that Ejiofor was young for the part-- Othello is, after all, an older man finally settling down with the first woman he's known that wasn't the colonel's lady or a camp follower-- but that Ejiofor's dignity carries it off. Imagine what he's going to do with it when he's of an age to fully empathize with Othello's tenderness-- and subsequent horror-- at being granted the grace note of Desdemona in a violent, lonely life.

Maybe next year they can trade parts, with Othello set in a Southern military town, and the insecurities of a po' white Othello risen to military success, but naive about women, who makes the mistake of thinking the whole world honest because he himself is honest. Has anyone ever tried an all-black Othello, with the dynamics of race taken out of the mix? A high-yellow Iago and a dark skinned Othello? I've no idea what Ejiofor would do with Iago, but I'd like to see him try.

Some days I regret not being in the cultural center of things, usually when wading through the slushpile with a manuscript clutched to my breast, trying to forge a connection with publishers and agents. It's both startling and energizing to go to a convention and find myself surrounded by people smarter and more talented than myself, being able to chat with people who have the same concerns and awareness of a larger world than the one between their legs or ears or bellies.

But I don't envy these artists the struggle with brute survival a creative life requires in Chicago, Washington, or New York. A one room apartment costs more than our entire house and modest garden, no parking, no pets, no room for a pet, and certainly not a menagerie. A trip for a gallon of milk is a polar expedition. My buddy Wayne has to endure freezing bus stops, trains, automobiles and shank's mare for a trip to the post office that take me five minutes, fifteen if I decide to walk. Living in a college town helps; between magazine subscriptions, decent coffee beans, an understanding library and newstand, cable and the internets, there's not much intellectual stimulation lacking in Kalamazoo if you've sense enough to seek it out. Our neighboring suburb of Portage, a Republican enclave that never saw a development scheme it didn't want to suck, seems determined to turn itself into Houston North, with asphalt as far as the eye can see, travel times twice that of Kalamazoo, and a corresponding diminishment of lifestyle.

And I wonder if being in the center of things brings a distortion to thought that we escape in the flyover provinces; you only have to turn on five minutes of what passes for network commentary to see that for all their vaunted connections, money and power, their blind spots are greater than ours, with more catastrophic results. The janitor knows more about the boss than the boss knows about the janitor.

"Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it": The Death of Pinochet, and a Fictional Call for Justice

AP- SANTIAGO, Chile -By EDUARDO GALLARDO, Associated Press Writer- "Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who terrorized his opponents for 17 years after taking power in a bloody coup, died Sunday, putting an end to a decade of intensifying efforts to bring him to trial for human rights abuses blamed on his regime. He was 91... Supporters saw Pinochet as a Cold War hero for overthrowing democratically elected President Salvador Allende at a time when the U.S. was working to destabilize his Marxist government and keep Chile from exporting communism in Latin America... But the world soon reacted in horror as Santiago's main soccer stadium filled with political prisoners to be tortured, shot, disappeared or forced into exile...Pinochet's dictatorship laid the groundwork for South America's most stable economy, but his crackdown on dissent left a lasting legacy: His name has become a byword for the state terror, in many cases secretly supported by the United States, that retarded democratic change across the hemisphere. ..."



From PANDORA'S BASEMENT, one of my unpublished novels:

"The ferryman has parked his barges under the bridge by the Durant Hotel, and the dead are coming up from the river. The Flint River is lined with concrete, but the papyrus boats found their way from the Styx to the Flint just the same.
The dead crowd along both sides of the road like Baptists at a church picnic. Hundreds more are coming out of the empty Durant Hotel, the eyes of its abandoned windows black and broken. A few are still dressing, looking down at us through broken glass.
The dead start climbing into cars and trucks. I slow down and thread my way through. I try to use peripheral vision and not stare too closely at the things they carry, their instruments of martyrdom. A Chilean with his hands broken embraces a guitar and climbs into the car ahead of me. A pretty little nun coughs and spits out a glob stained with dirt, throws a shovel in the back of my pickup and hops into the truck bed with a grateful nod toward my rearview mirror.
When we drive past Jack’s house, all the papers he had hidden there blow out the windows in a kind of funnel cloud, and flow after us like a dragon made of government memos and manila folders. Jack’s paper trail is trailing us. ...

"Jack went down to clean things up again after the politicians made their mess, to make sure that nothing would come back on Kennicot Copper or Pepsi or AT&T. First there were the killings in 76, and then the disappearances, killing everyone that might have anything to do with an event, a common mistake, really, fairly common among murderers. There are always people who try to erase an event by killing everyone connected with it.
Amanda’s birth parents Jack found their apartment in Santiago, saw the family photos of a bearded young man and a pretty dark haired girl . Perversely he took their photos and put them in one of his boxes, as if they were better than him and he wanted to eat their souls.
She’d be older than me. She'd be my age.
She would be, wouldn’t she? If theyd let her live out her life.
Amanda was one of those children who'd been stolen from their mothers during the Chilean coup. Leftist young men were killed; their young wives, if they were pregnant, were kept alive until they delivered and then tortured to death. The babies were farmed out to childless fascist couples, who raised the children without ever telling them who they were.
Hundreds of Chileans now in their thirties had been stolen by pious goblins, and the monsters that they called "madre" and "padre" had murdered the people who'd loved them first. holding hands and making promises while they still dreamed in their mother's womb. The true mother and father had been thrown out of helicopters flown out over the ocean, or died screaming and gasping and choking on blood and wondering about a god that didn’t answer, because the god that uncle Jack has made will stop at nothing to make the world love him....

The dead all had scraps of paper in their hands— a news article, a press release, a photo, some piece of ephemera from Jack’s collection. Each of them held a folder with the name of their murderer printed carefully in Jack’s grease pencil. The ghosts started moving in among the living.
A good looking man— almost dark and handsome enough for me to resent him— was holding transcripts of Henry Kissinger talking to Kennicott executives about the necessity for realpolitik in the era of the Soviet menace. Another scrap described copper industry profits sweeping up after a coup in Chile and Argentina. He held his scraps of paper in both hands and scanned the faces of the crowd, trying to find a match.
I recognized the clippings in his hand. They were part of Uncle Jack’s collection: Jack’s underlines drawn in sanguine pencil, my yellow highlighters and circles drawn with a pale blue highlighter out of Justine’s purse.
The handsome man finally saw someone he recognized. The ghastly silence continued to surround us but we could hear him speak without sound.
—Where is my child? Donde esta mi hija?
— I don’t understand, the Pepsi executive said with a pale face.
—In the stadium. I was herded with the others into the stadium. My wife was pregnant so they took her away in the black vans. They broke my hands.
— Who took you away? What? I don’t understand what you are talking about.
— When Allende won the election. He was threatening to nationalize the copper mines— Kennicott and Anaconda—and A T and T and Pepsi. You complained to the American embassy and Nixon and Kissinger told the CIA to have Allende thrown out a window. Where is my child?
—I don’t—I promise you, this has nothing to do with me
— We were college students. She was pregnant. The black van took her to a place with a picture of Hitler on the wall and after the child was born, they tortured my wife until she died because she was a leftist college student. Donde esta mi hija?
He never shouted at the sweaty man in the expensive suit, just kept repeating his question and saying these awful things.
— We were college students. They took me to the stadium and they broke my hands and they laughed because I was crying. They shot me when they were bored.
He reached out and gently pressed his ruined fingers into the rich man’s hand. The young student held both the suited man’s hands around his own ruined ones, like a Sunday go to meeting embrace. He made the rich man feel the way the bones gritted together and bent unnaturally. He was explaining to the man as you would to a confused child who’d accidently hurt a brother or a sister.
— Mi novia was pregnant. They took her away in the van. They kept her alive until she had the baby. There was a framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall while they tortured her. They put things in her because they thought she probably voted for Allende. Donde esta mi hija?
— I don’t know where the baby is. I don’t know what baby.
— They took the baby. They gave the baby to a fascist family to raise as their own. Where is the baby?
The handsome man kept asking the same question, but softly, very softly. The pale man in the good suit kept trying to evade the ghost’s direct gaze and the dead you man kept wanting to know, Where is the baby?
— That was a long time ago. Before my time.
— My mother still has our picture pinned to her dress. The picture was taken at a party. Our eyes are red from the flash. I have my arm around my girl and both of us are smiling. It was a good night, you can tell from that picture. We don’t know that we’re dead yet.
Maybe the dead were finally rise up and strangle the well dressed men and women in the pit. Maybe some eldritch horror beyond description would open up and swallow them all. Maybe all they wanted to do was ask some simple question over and over again...."

The military coup, the murder of the Chilean Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the murder of the elected president, and the torture and murder of thousands of dissidents and the kidnapping and indoctrination of their children, all this began on September 11th. A lawsuit filed that day against Henry Kissinger on that day in 2001-- for his complcity in those murders-- was knocked off the front page by the sound of the Twin Towers and the wall of the Pentagon falling. The Erineyes, the Kindly Ones, the Furies had come at us sideways.

SAMUEL JOHNSON on HENRY KISSINGER

... So I'm researching Henry Kissinger for a non-fiction comic on the Middle East-- specifically Kissinger's comment, after inciting the Kurds to rebel against Iraq and then leaving them undefended against Saddam Hussein, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
... and I stumble across this by Dr. Johnson: "Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

Why is Henry Kissinger considered a deep thinker? Because everyone says so. Why is his supposed intelligence (to paraphrase) "respected by friends and foes alike"? Because everyone says so.

I put it to you that a diplomat who leaves almost a million people dead in his wake is not a successful diplomat, but a master of public relations and image enhancement.

But then, I'm not as smart as Dr. Kissinger, and consequently have no right to criticize or question. How do I know this? Everyone says so. It's a common assumption.

Arguably, the deluded naked emperor was better educated and more experienced than the rude child who pointed and jeered at the pimples on the emperor's pasty ass. Everyone says so. It's a common assumption. I'd just like someone to do the math some day comparing the number of lives Kissinger saved while making the world safe for American interests, and the numbers killed directly or indirectly by his arrogant decisions. Kind of like a Nobel Prize earned run average.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture 2005

Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech is printed here, and you can see a video of him giving the lecture here. Some excerpts:

"In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

"I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?"
....

"The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

"I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s. The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

"Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch."
....

"The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

"Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

"I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'"
....

"Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

"Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

"The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves."

"....Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish."

".... A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician...."