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

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.)

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

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

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 rituals for grief and mourning, which we regard as disturbed conditions to be “gotten over” as quickly as possible and otherwise to be presided over by quasi-medical specialists.  We use the word “closure” a lot, as if the process of accepting a loved one’s final and permanent departure were similar to putting a bunch of stuff away in a closet.  You hear it from the relatives of MIAs – “I can get closure once he’s properly buried.”  And the reporter holding the microphone nods sympathetically.   “How does it feel?” she asks.

Okay, I’m being unfair to TJ.  Late nineteenth century America, after all, was obsessed with death, and saw – I mean saw in its most literal sense – a lot of it.  That was a nation no less dedicated to the pursuit of happiness than is our present McRepublic, so obviously it’s not all Tom’s fault.  Some time in the twentieth century, among the many wrong turns our country took in the course of its unfortunate rise to becoming the World’s Preeminent Empire, we were moved to sweep mortality into the corner with all the other unexamined dust bunnies of our lives.  At some point, death was transformed from a fact of life, as it were, to a  mostly avoidable unpleasantness; from something waiting just around the corner to an unusual and distant aberration.  I’m a poet and lawyer, not a historian, but I would be willing to bet that this devolution in consciousness occurred about the time that medical science took its huge strides forward with the introduction of antibiotics and other technologies for the management or reversal of evitable forms of morbidity.  With every step forward, after all, we leave something behind.  In this case, it was the daily, present awareness of where we’re each and all of us going.  There’s always the hope, which no sane person in the age of curing by leeches and bleeding could have entertained, that Dr. House will apply the paddles and find the right pill and revive us to go forth and consume again.

Concurrently and probably not entirely coincidentally, people drifted away from traditional religion.  I think this is overall a positive development, but it also involved jettisoning the churches’/synagogues’ role in guiding survivors through the aftermath of a death without anything substantial to take their place.  Maybe the current evangelico-protestant revival has something to offer here.  I wouldn’t know; but my impression of those megachurches is that they have more to do with building community, providing unguilty entertainment, and policing sexual morality than with meeting the needs of the bereaved.  Maybe we could look to our new scientistic quasi-religion.  There is the medicalization of grieving, but I don’t think that a Valium prescription is really a viable replacement for socially sanctioned wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothing and draping of mirrors and dressing in black.  There are psychological counselors, but that is merely another form of medicalization, the treatment of an individual disorder – “I am going to help you return to functionality after the death of your mother.”  What we lack are social institutions and cultural procedures focused on the fact that we are going to die and the people who are important to us are going to die, too, probably before we do.

The whole thing makes it harder to die, of course.  Not only is the person with a terminal illness deprived of the support of someone who has skill and experience in dealing with the non-medical needs of someone in her situation; a scrim of medico-technological optimism descends between him and the recognition of what is actually going on.  Fortunately, in many places there are hospice programs, staffed with people who have lots of relevant expertise and, in my experience, who are full of lovingkindness and wisdom gleaned from a range of traditional and nontraditional emotional, spiritual, and technical resources.  One can see the process of cultural reinvention at work here.  We had abandoned the dying, but the dying are still in the world, and they have needs, and our culture is devising ways to meet them.  So far, so good, if you are a dying person and you have geographic and financial access to hospice.

That leaves everybody else.  Where do you go to scream?

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.