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“Parents who never showed their love, complain of want of natural affection in their children – children who never showed their duty, complain of want of natural feeling in their parents – law-makers who find both so miserable that their affections have never had enough of life’s sun to develop them, are loud in their moralizings over parents and children too, and cry that the very ties of nature are disregarded.  Natural affections and instincts, my dear sir, are the most beautiful of the Almighty’s works, but like other beautiful works of His, they must be reared and fostered, or it is as natural that they should be wholly obscured, and that new feelings should usurp their place, as it is that the sweetest productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked with weeds and briars.  I wish we could be brought to consider this, and remembering natural obligations a little more at the right time, talk about them a little less at the wrong time.”

- Charles Cheeryble, speaking on behalf of Charles Dickens, in Nicholas Nickleby

See him slouch
by the rail, there,
the Assistant State’s Attorney,
head like a doughy balloon

loosely tethered
by his tie of bright autumn leaves.
Facing us,
he leans against the rail,

arms braced behind him
as if to keep from toppling
into that void
where later the judge will float

above the court officers;
he describes the process
to us in our motley
as if we should be bored,

rushing through it,
avoiding eye contact,
almost visibly fearful.
I, his colleague,

later will be admonished
not to sully the dignity
of the State we represent
by standing among the summonsed

and the cheap suits
assigned to defend them.
I wait to walk beyond the rail
to the accuser’s desk

until she whom I accuse is called,
then silently attend the litany
of accusation and plea,
of “waiver” of “the rules,”

until it is my moment
to demand “the usual conditions”
for her freedom (her lawyer
explains them) and then add “and

a witness having been threatened”
(suddenly only air-conditioning
hums in the room) “special condition 14”
(the judge explains it.)

I was walking along Pearl Street the other day, by the liquor store.  Just ahead of me was a skinny, pimply, late adolescent in bermuda shorts and a white teeshirt on a skateboard.  Coming towards us was a big fat kid in a hoodie, about college age but something told me he was a townie, and his friend, a kid only slightly less weedy than the skateboarder.  As they passed me, the big guy said to this friend, “Whenever I see a kid on a skateboard, I want to punch him.  Is that weird?”

Please discuss among yourselves.  For extra credit, what would Dante have to say about this impulse?

Apparently in response to polls that show he is somewhere near 20% less popular among women than Barack Obama, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Romney has been claiming lately that 92.3% of jobs lost during the Obama administration have been women’s jobs.   In this context, a “woman’s job” is a job that was held by a woman.  The arithmetic whereby he arrives at this result is not entirely specious, in the sense that he divides one actual statistic into another actual statistic and the result is .923.  But I’m not here to talk about math.  There’s a Yiddish word – well, probably more than one – for somebody who makes such claims, and I want to talk about that.

The Bush Recession, if you will remember, started in the housing, construction, and manufacturing sectors, in large part as a result of the sudden scarcity of commercial credit that was part of the financial meltdown.  All this was well underway by the time Obama took office.  The jobs lost in this early phase were held primarily  by males.  State and local tax revenues were hit hard by the downturn, as businesses shrank and people lost income, but thanks to the much-maligned stimulus passed at Obama’s behest, which largely operated by passing funds down to state and local governments, the impact was softened for a while.  The stimulus might have been larger but for the Obama administration’s almost certainly correct political calculation that Republicans would block a larger package, even if the Democrats could be gotten to agree to it.  Then, when the stimulus funds began to run out, the state and local budget cutting began, led by Republicans devoted to downsizing government no matter what the cost.  The ax fell on teachers, social workers, health care workers, administrative staff – predominantly women.

“Chutzpah” is often defined as a quality best exemplified by someone who murders his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present you Willard Romney, who lays at his opponent’s door the baleful effects of his own party’s acts.

Tully Mountain and Renvyle Lough

A few years ago, I vacationed for two weeks in Connemara.  I stayed at a resort on the coast called Renvyle House Hotel, a place with some literary associations, and one day I hiked up a nearby hill, which they call a mountain.  This poem is my tribute to that place.   You can’t give the flavor of Ireland, I think, without reciting place names – most of those in the poem are pretty self explanatory, and if you really want to you can google them.  “Rusheenduff Lake” is a little private trout pond reserved for guests at the resort.  “The Bens” are a nearby mountain range, and the aroma described at the end of the poem is the very scent of Connemara itself, given off by burning peat.  Peat, for those of you who don’t know, is the product of accumulation for millenia of vegetable matter, preserved in the anaerobic environment of a bog.

A   thousand feet above the bay
a wind that kept its hand in the pocket where the knife was
and this being Connemara those grey humpy beasts all over the sky
four sided concrete column about waist high with a surveyor’s brass plate on top
rising at the summit out of a mound of quartzite shards
to which I’d added my one
now I leaned against it facing the wind like a reader at a lectern
the bay opened out below me
Crump Island flashed from olive drab to emerald
I still couldn’t make out the abandoned church on it
but the sea around it came alive and soon the whole bay glittered bluely
soon also the oil-paint stolidity of Renvyle Point had exchanged for pastels
Rusheenduff Lake as vivid as a caste mark
and who remembered chiaroscuro when pointillism was all the rage
after a while the sun rested its foot on my back and massaged my shoulders with its toes
but the wind still kept its hand in its pocket
the grey humpies flowed back in and mottled and dimmed
everything the Bens across the valley behind me lost their playful bubbling upthrust
cloaked once again in massive mysterious dignity
although their heads still were bare and if they’d had hair the wind would have teased it
saying come on lover when it gets dark come to my room
so I headed back down the spongy heathered slopes to Derryinver
past the occasional black crescent gashes where the turf had slumped from itself
and the criss-crossing sheep’s paths, thin black and straight
down to that spicy thick perfume of
thousands of years being burned to warm the present
ah, the slow, slow deaths where the pain is stretched so thin you can’t feel it
those are among the best, and they give off a fine, peaty smell
now for a bowl of chowder and some tea

Iranian Queen, about 500 B.C.E.

Dear President Obama,
I am distressed to read reports that the United States is considering Israel’s request to provide it with armaments to destroy Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities.  The request should have been rejected outright.  Despite suspicions, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Iran is engaged in making a nuclear weapon.  Even if Iran were doing so, the existence of such a weapon would not pose an existential threat to Israel, which has sufficient capacity of its own to render any attack suicidal.  Nor would the existence of such a weapon pose any threat at all to the United States, for similar reasons.  Slanderous allegations to the contrary, Iran’s government is not insane, and is unlikely to make nuclear weapons technology available to terrorists, knowing as well as anybody that what goes around comes around.  The thousands and thousands of Irani innocents who would die and be injured as a proximate result of an Israeli or American attack, the others who would be injured and would die as the result of Iran’s legally justifiable actions in self defense, the environmental devastation to Iran and beyond, the catastrophic impact upon the world economy, all speak against encouraging Israeli bellicosity.  There is nothing to gain, except perhaps a temporary disruption of Irani developments in nuclear technology, and incalculably much to lose.  In this case, as in many others, the Israeli right-wing government’s conception of its interest is contrary to the national interest of America, not congruent with it.  Prime Minister Netanyahu should have been slapped down when he said “You are us.”  No we’re not.  (I’m Jewish, by the way, for what it’s worth.  An American Jew.)  “I have your back, no matter what” is nice language for the schoolyard, and it sounds good in buddy movies, and I can understand the political calculations that make it an attractive thing to say to AIPAC, but it is inconsistent with your primary responsibility to safeguard American lives, property, and national interest.  It is most certainly not consistent with these goals to launch unprovoked wars of aggression in unstable parts of the world, as George Bush found out to all of our chagrin.

Sincerely,

Seth Steinzor

If you are walking along a dirt road in the country,
facing where the traffic would come from if there were any,
and you carry your gaze unfocused over your right shoulder,
you will see the occasional oaks and maples across the lane
slip on by, and there in the middle of that wheeling field,
harsh white stripe against the fresh plowed earth, a birch
around which it all seems to pivot, until the birch too
falls away, and things in the distance almost keep up,
that farmhouse out there, for example, you could walk an hour
and it would still be just within that part of the world
washed by your tears, but passing out of it, and looking
to your left it’s the same, things near by sliding by so fast,
and further out upon further out things nearly keeping up
with you, as if to the right and the left the wings of the world
seek to close around you but instead you are ejected ahead,
and the only way you can stop it all is to stop.  So you hold
the crunch of the road beneath your feet.  Everything’s silent.
A car rushes by – you didn’t see it coming, then it’s gone.
A bumblebee zoops among the black-eyed susans by the ditch,
that dip with its landing and rebound at liftoff.  A bird too far
away to identify says something.  No, there are three,
drawing halos around the cloud that rides toward the farmhouse,
the trees flutter in a breeze not strong enough to carry away
the mosquito that has found your left ear, even that puddle
in the broad part of the ditch before the culvert is streaked
by waterbugs vipping and skating their inscrutable purposes,
tout le monde pell mell relating space to time, the same
whether or not you add your own little movement.  So,
not being dead, you have no choice.  You must.  You do.

This past weekend I visited two old and dear friends, one of whom is expecting to survive cancer.  The other is not.  It was a sad visit, but not depressing.  I don’t think I’m quite ready yet to write about why that should be so, but it has something to do, I think, with my friends’ courage, decency, and gentleness, and also something I noticed when my mother was facing her extremity, that is, a lack of fear on the part of the dying about what we who fortunately are not yet in that situation find most terrifying about it.  There is something fortifying about being in the presence of a person who, having achieved a reasonably unflinching acceptance of what must be, is liberated to become more fully herself in the face of it.  It creates a space in which intimacy is easy, intimacy from each person’s core, while at the same time spontaneity and playfulness are encouraged.  People around the sick person relate to her and to one another in a manner which, in other circumstances, except for the unhappiness, we would look back upon as ”having a really great time.”  We take joy in each other.  It is a reminder that joy and happiness are two very, very different things, of which joy is by far the greater because it is a species of love.  It’s hard to talk about these things without one’s cadences becoming biblical and one’s vocabulary becoming highflown.  When that happens, as it just now did in the last sentence but one, I feel I’m losing the real sense of what it was like, of what that sacred space was all about and what made it sacred.  It’s important to focus on particulars.  So… the conversation turned at some point to the question of an afterlife, as conversations tend to do in these circumstances, not so much because the dying person can bring any particular authority to bear but because it is presumed by the onlookers that it is as much on her mind as it is on theirs.  As if a dying person didn’t have plenty of more pressing things to think about.  My friend quickly and offhandedly said that she thinks it “remains to be seen.”  Someone asked her if she believes at all in any kind of deity, or higher spiritual power, or transcendent reality.  She got very quiet and thoughtful.  We all waited for her, while her oxygen machine flumped away in the background.  After a long, long pause, she said, “I think it’s very important to be nice.”

Due to current events in my personal life, I have been thinking again about how poorly our culture prepares us to deal with death and with people who are dying.  Not strange, I guess, for a nation founded on the pursuit of happiness.  People wonder why I put Thomas Jefferson in hell in To Join the Lost.  Mostly, it’s because of his hypocrisy as a slave-owner who not only knew that he was doing wrong, but knew the degree of evil that it involved.  But I could have put him there for this seemingly benign phrase as well, which shackles the body politic to a warped, limited vision of the human condition, easily subverted into greed, lust, and the quest for satiation.  A people dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is not going to have a lot of time and thought to spare for such unpleasant things as death.  They’re going to shove it aside into hospitals and nursing homes; prettify it in funeral parlors; hide it in closed caskets that no one is allowed to welcome home from Afghanistan and Iraq; have broadcast journalists censor it from Syrian twitter feeds as too upsetting for the average viewer.  We have no emotionally satisfying Read the rest of this entry »

A Fat Rich Elderly White Guy Who Wants To Be President

It is gratifying, for those of us who enjoy our schadenfreude warm, to watch the Republican presidential contestants expend upon each other the slyly ad hominem vitriol they normally save, to the betterment of our political discourse and in service of the nation’s preservation,  for the defacement of their electoral adversaries from the other party.  One can perhaps attribute this delightful leveling of the playing field at least in part to the recent return to prominence of Newt Gingrich, a character who sometimes seems to have sprung straight from the pen of Charles Dickens on one of that Master of Snark’s more sardonic days.   Newt has the gift of bringing others to his own level, just like what happens when you flush.  I’m prompted to these thoughts by the recollection that last week, television ads aired in support of Gingrich famously twitted Mitt Romney for the sin of speaking French.  Today we learn, from David Bromwich’s article in the New York Review of Books, that Newt’s Ph.D. dissertation relied on sources in that very language.   What a nice smile he has, though: a shark with a full belly.