When I turned the car ignition yesterday morning to start my commute, the radio came on and the first line I heard was a twangy call to arms: “We need a whole lot more of Jesus and a lot less rock and roll.”
I’d been thinking for some time of writing about my fondness for bluegrass music, but I’d struggled to come up with a “hook” that might make such as essay more than simply the banal equivalent of a Facebook “like.” I’ve found my gateway, I thought as I listened to the tuneful diatribe. I later would learn it had been recorded 52 years ago by singer/songwriter Wayne Raney, an Arkansan who’d died in 1993.
See, my personal sentiments are more or less the exact opposite of those expressed by the late Wayne Raney. Extending “Jesus” to describe the frighteningly expansive reach of moralizing Christianity into seemingly every corner of American life—as represented by everything from the battle over reproductive rights to the recent surge in the GOP presidential race of Rick Sanctimonious, um, Santorum—I feel strongly that we actually need a whole less Jesus in our national life, not more. And if I can define “rock and roll” as all the great early recordings that apparently were raising Raney’s blood pressure back in 1960—Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, the late Buddy Holly—I’d frankly love to hear more of that stuff on the airwaves, and would rather Americans spend their spare time rediscovering the Sun Records catalog than lobbying their lawmakers to ban abortion and prevent gays from marrying, based on the Bible or their reading of it.
In fact, there’s little about bluegrass music that would suggest I’d be a fan. (Its contributions to rock and roll’s roots notwithstanding.) As a genre, it historically has produced, and continues to spawn, a lot of Wayne Raneys. While many bluegrass songs don’t center on That Old Time Religion, many, too, are all about the wages of sin and the redemption that comes only through accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Which isn’t surprising, given bluegrass’s roots in the God-fearing hollows of the Appalachian Mountains in the early decades of the 20th century. But this means I spend a lot of time listening to combos whose message to me is not exactly encouraging. Last weekend, for instance, as I drove home from Starbucks, some True Believer started singing none-too-sympathetically into my ear about how the likes of me will be eternally gnashing our teeth and burning in hell as soon as the Son of God returns and “time is no more.”
But it’s not just the religious aspect of bluegrass music that makes it and me an odd couple. It’s the sound, the socioeconomic disconnect, seemingly everything. I mean, I grew up on a suburban cul de sac in New Jersey, lived for The Who in college, had Springsteen parties with my newspaper buddies in the ’80s, and for the past 16 years have lived in Bethesda Fricking Maryland, a town of attorneys and government workers where every bumper sticker carries some liberal, secular-humanist sentiment. If bluegrass music is all about the Righteous Path and the riotous fun of pickin’ and pluckin’ down at the general store, my white-collar surroundings are all about separating church and state and listening to Pandora inside one’s McMansion.
Not that Lynn and I live in a McMansion, or that I personally have moved, technologically, beyond CDs and radios. The point, though, is that on paper I would seem an unlikely candidate for bluegrass fandom. Yet, what station has become my go-to preset in the car? WAMU ‘s Bluegrass Country. Not only that, but one of my favorite programs on that station—105.5 locally on your FM dial, streaming at http://bluegrasscountry.org—is Sunday morning’s “Stained Glass Bluegrass.” Which, as it name suggests, is, well, “right church-y.”
Not that I’d call myself a real aficionado of bluegrass music. Although at this point I know a lot of the traditional and contemporary Big Names—the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Hazel Dickens, Ricky Staggs, the Seldom Scene, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver—and can recognize some of those artists when I hear them—much of the time I’ve no idea who I’m listening to. Or even what instruments are being played, beyond the obvious ones like fiddle and banjo. And I haven’t started buying bluegrass music, either. It’s still mostly what I listen to in the car or when I’m dressing for work, mixed in with public radio programming and local all-news station WTOP.
What’s bluegrass’s appeal for me? It’s energetic. The musicianship can be amazing and the vocals starkly beautiful. It’s heartfelt. Its themes at root are loving, longing, losing and hoping—and who can’t relate to those things? Death is a frequent visitor, just as it is in this blog. Bluegrass is hand-crafted and somehow not of this time. Which appeals to me, as uncomfortable as I am in this new century of sensory overload and nonstop connectivity. Also, the radio station I listen to has great hosts, whose folksy patter I enjoy and find soothing. My favorite DJ is an old-timer named Ray Davis who knew and taped many of the greats. He regularly plays songs recorded decades ago in the home-basement studio in West Virginia from which he now broadcasts.
In fact, this past week was the winter pledge drive, and one hour my buddy Ray was bemoaning the lack of callers. So, I opted to put my money where my radio dial was and ante up. It turned out that one of the thank-you gifts available at my giving level was Wayne Raney’s 20 Old-Time Gospel Favorites—featuring, yes, “We Need a Lot More of Jesus,” and other none-too-subtle pieces of lifestyle advice such as “Drifting Too Far from the Shore” and “Don’t You Want to Go to Heaven?”
I ended up going with Don Rigsby’s Doctor’s Order: A Tribute to Ralph Stanley. While I’m surprisingly comfortable being damned by my radio station to the eternal fires, I find I’d still rather my personal music collection cut me a little more slack.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
A Reading on Loss
I flew down to Savannah last weekend to visit my old friend David.
I rented a car. Went first to his place, then out to Tybee Island, where I toasted him at his favorite dive bar. Joined his parents and older sister at a reading of his poetry Saturday night in a tiny but charming bookstore in the historic district. Made a point Sunday of catching the early-morning sun over the marshes on Bluff Drive on the Isle of Hope. Thanked him for having turned me on to that beautiful spot—a narrow lane that’s framed by the water on one side and stately old homes and Spanish moss-draped trees on the other. It looks exactly like the set of a Civil War epic, and has served as one. Scenes from the 1989 film Glory were shot there.
David’s voice followed me everywhere I went. He always was the kind of guy you had to strain to hear—a classic low-talker long before Seinfeld made that term a cultural Thing. I spent the years 1989 through 1992 leaning into him with my better ear, hoping to catch the gist. He could amp up the volume when he was introducing jazz records on air, or reading verse to a rapt coffeehouse audience, or, later, teaching literature to college kids. But in one-on-one conversation he tended to be mumble city, his words delivered in a smoky timbre that made women swoon and guys wonder if precision wasn’t perhaps overrated.
Our mutual friend Fred Johnson, who’d worked with him in public radio decades ago, sometimes calls him “Lonesome David.” He did so Saturday night, telling the crowd of family, friends and old lovers what they already knew and were attesting to by their presence—that the nickname is meant to evoke gait, mood, and cadence, not popularity.
David Starnes went from low-talker to no-talker almost five years ago, having died instantly in a head-on collision caused by a woman driving on the wrong side of an interstate highway. He was 64 years old. At a May 2007 memorial service packed with family, friends and one-time lovers, his father—the elder David—eulogized his only son as “the freest man I ever knew.” He repeated that description at Saturday night’s reading.
What he meant was, David lived by his own terms, not society’s expectations. He never married, never owned a home, tended not to remain at any given residence or with any girlfriend for all that long. Only in the last decade or so of his life did he finally earn a steady paycheck for a sustained period and assume a public role—that of an English professor at Georgia Southern University. Whether all that amounted to “freedom” or was more the confluence of restlessness, romanticism and fluctuating depression, I’m not sure. It made him his father’s hero—a word the elder David uses at any opportunity to laud his cherished son. How awesome, and how heartbreaking, is that? I can see it. But David’s brand of independence more echoes, for me, a line from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I might be misinterpreting that Kris Kristofferson /Fred Foster lyric, but I interpret “freedom” in that context as being the life one wears after having surveyed many ill-fitting hats.
I first met David very early in my three-year stint as a feature writer and editor at the Savannah Morning News. It was late 1989 or early 1990. I was 31, so basic math tells me David must’ve been 46. I’d worked into the evening one day, since I had no social life in Savannah. David had come in to write his freelance column on the local nightclub scene. I’ve never been good at describing physical appearance, but suffice it to say he was short, lean and ruggedly handsome. When he shook my hand, he seemed at once to trust me as his editor and announce himself as my first friend in town.
By the time I moved to DC in late 1992 he no longer was writing for the newspaper, but he continued to live an itinerant life filled with house-painting jobs, handyman’s work, literary and musical enthusiasms, ever-changing residences and briefly glimpsed girlfriends. I wouldn’t seen him for weeks at a time, but then he’d call and suggest we meet for dinner at a riverside restaurant in Thunderbolt or that aforementioned dive bar on Tybee Island. For all the mystery, masculinity and vague melancholy that made him so magnetic, his depth of interest in my life was meant to suggest that I, in fact, was the fascinating one. Per a comment I later would post on the funeral home’s memorial page, I never felt as cool as I did when I was with him.
We corresponded over the years and visited back and forth. After his parents moved to Northern Virginia he came up our way every so often. He got to know Lynn, and she him. She totally got what the ladies saw in him, but professed not to have been tempted. By letter and the occasional phone call, I followed David’s progress from 50-something college student to graduate to professor. I visited him once in Statesboro, where his home refrigerator was decorated with photos and postcards celebrating me and other friends, and where he proudly showed me his university office. I sat in on one of his classes. He engaged students in a clear, audible voice and they called him “Mr Starnes.”
Then one day I received an e-mail from Fred that David had been killed.
I never read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book about a scandalous local murder and the sordid underbelly of Savannah—mostly because, my friendship with David aside, my years there were so dull and pedestrian that I’ve always felt a little bitter about everything I apparently missed. Anyway, the “Bird Girl” statue on the book cover once adorned a gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery, an incredibly evocative place of weathered memorials, Spanish moss-decorated trees, sandy soil and marsh views that’s near my old apartment and was my go-to destination for mopey walks. Those perambulations sometimes would include the newer, adjacent Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which was where I found myself standing in May 2007 as David’s coffin sat poised to be lowered into the ground.
I revisited the gravesite last Saturday afternoon for the second time since the interment. The first occasion had been a fiasco a couple of years ago involving an ill-anchored bouquet that kept falling over and a lot of very awkward one-sided conversation. This time, while I felt compelled to audibly greet David despite my continuing near-certainty in death’s finality, I didn’t linger at his marker.
I did take a leisurely walk around David’s eternal neighborhood, though, and spotted some epitaphs and memorial bench adornments that I think he would have enjoyed as much as I did. One read, sensibly enough, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I was born. I don’t think it will bother me after I’m dead.” There was this sentiment, engraved on a bench on the cemetery’s periphery, overlooking the river and marshes that border the site: “Finally, waterfront property. This is as close as we can get.” On another bench, a drawing had a man reeling in a big fish. The tribute read, “Life enjoyed him.” It was signed by “Your favorite ex-wife, Linda.”
The big event this past weekend was, of course, the poetry reading, which in part was a book-signing without the signing, for obvious reasons. A faculty-mate of David’s had compiled and seen through to recent publication a second chapbook of David’s poems—the first having been published during his lifetime by a small university press. Family and friends read from both collections in the cramped bookstore space, many sharing personal anecdotes and remembrances. I read a poem that doesn’t appear in either book, but that David had enclosed with his holiday cards in 2004. It’s a sweet Christmas-morning story that speaks to his love of family. It was well-received by kin in attendance, as I knew it would be.
In fact, the main reason I’d flown down for the event was because it was almost certain to be the last group celebration of David during his parents’ lifetime (and perhaps ever). While David remains his father’s hero and his mother’s darling “Davey,” they, in turn, were far more vital to their son than one might have thought any set of parents could be to such an iconoclast. He always spoke reverently of them, which made me like them before we ever met. That would have been sometime around the turn of the new century, at their Annandale, Virginia, apartment. That was the only time we'd meet before they and I would reconvene at the memorial service, as it turned out.
It’s an odd aspect of my relationship with David’s mother, Jackie, that we’ve been e-mail correspondents for a few years now but we never physically see each other, even though our homes are only about 10 or 12 miles apart. At any rate, she seemed delighted to see me at the bookstore in Savannah. She even snuck me a special thanks from her daughter Toni’s computer a few days later, while they were still out of town.
I e-mailed back that David would’ve done the same for me. I can’t imagine he’d have missed my memorial service, had our fortunes been reversed. Or any subsequent celebration of me that was within his logistic reach. Naturally, I do wonder what he’d have said about me. He’d no doubt have made me out to be far brighter, more talented a writer, cleverer and more interesting than I’ve ever considered myself to be.
My friend had all the attributes he’d have assigned me, and more. Though I can’t quite consider him a hero. He’d have rejected that label himself, I feel sure—mindful that freedom has costs for both the allegedly unfettered (see “Lonesome David”) and those who’ve been, well, cut loose (see "girlfriends"). But I will say the outsized loss I still feel speaks to David’s importance and uniqueness in my life.
The truth is, I couldn’t have stayed home last weekend—any more than I could have resisted a friendship that was so immediately and completely extended to me more than two decades ago.
I rented a car. Went first to his place, then out to Tybee Island, where I toasted him at his favorite dive bar. Joined his parents and older sister at a reading of his poetry Saturday night in a tiny but charming bookstore in the historic district. Made a point Sunday of catching the early-morning sun over the marshes on Bluff Drive on the Isle of Hope. Thanked him for having turned me on to that beautiful spot—a narrow lane that’s framed by the water on one side and stately old homes and Spanish moss-draped trees on the other. It looks exactly like the set of a Civil War epic, and has served as one. Scenes from the 1989 film Glory were shot there.
David’s voice followed me everywhere I went. He always was the kind of guy you had to strain to hear—a classic low-talker long before Seinfeld made that term a cultural Thing. I spent the years 1989 through 1992 leaning into him with my better ear, hoping to catch the gist. He could amp up the volume when he was introducing jazz records on air, or reading verse to a rapt coffeehouse audience, or, later, teaching literature to college kids. But in one-on-one conversation he tended to be mumble city, his words delivered in a smoky timbre that made women swoon and guys wonder if precision wasn’t perhaps overrated.
Our mutual friend Fred Johnson, who’d worked with him in public radio decades ago, sometimes calls him “Lonesome David.” He did so Saturday night, telling the crowd of family, friends and old lovers what they already knew and were attesting to by their presence—that the nickname is meant to evoke gait, mood, and cadence, not popularity.
David Starnes went from low-talker to no-talker almost five years ago, having died instantly in a head-on collision caused by a woman driving on the wrong side of an interstate highway. He was 64 years old. At a May 2007 memorial service packed with family, friends and one-time lovers, his father—the elder David—eulogized his only son as “the freest man I ever knew.” He repeated that description at Saturday night’s reading.
What he meant was, David lived by his own terms, not society’s expectations. He never married, never owned a home, tended not to remain at any given residence or with any girlfriend for all that long. Only in the last decade or so of his life did he finally earn a steady paycheck for a sustained period and assume a public role—that of an English professor at Georgia Southern University. Whether all that amounted to “freedom” or was more the confluence of restlessness, romanticism and fluctuating depression, I’m not sure. It made him his father’s hero—a word the elder David uses at any opportunity to laud his cherished son. How awesome, and how heartbreaking, is that? I can see it. But David’s brand of independence more echoes, for me, a line from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I might be misinterpreting that Kris Kristofferson /Fred Foster lyric, but I interpret “freedom” in that context as being the life one wears after having surveyed many ill-fitting hats.
I first met David very early in my three-year stint as a feature writer and editor at the Savannah Morning News. It was late 1989 or early 1990. I was 31, so basic math tells me David must’ve been 46. I’d worked into the evening one day, since I had no social life in Savannah. David had come in to write his freelance column on the local nightclub scene. I’ve never been good at describing physical appearance, but suffice it to say he was short, lean and ruggedly handsome. When he shook my hand, he seemed at once to trust me as his editor and announce himself as my first friend in town.
By the time I moved to DC in late 1992 he no longer was writing for the newspaper, but he continued to live an itinerant life filled with house-painting jobs, handyman’s work, literary and musical enthusiasms, ever-changing residences and briefly glimpsed girlfriends. I wouldn’t seen him for weeks at a time, but then he’d call and suggest we meet for dinner at a riverside restaurant in Thunderbolt or that aforementioned dive bar on Tybee Island. For all the mystery, masculinity and vague melancholy that made him so magnetic, his depth of interest in my life was meant to suggest that I, in fact, was the fascinating one. Per a comment I later would post on the funeral home’s memorial page, I never felt as cool as I did when I was with him.
We corresponded over the years and visited back and forth. After his parents moved to Northern Virginia he came up our way every so often. He got to know Lynn, and she him. She totally got what the ladies saw in him, but professed not to have been tempted. By letter and the occasional phone call, I followed David’s progress from 50-something college student to graduate to professor. I visited him once in Statesboro, where his home refrigerator was decorated with photos and postcards celebrating me and other friends, and where he proudly showed me his university office. I sat in on one of his classes. He engaged students in a clear, audible voice and they called him “Mr Starnes.”
Then one day I received an e-mail from Fred that David had been killed.
I never read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book about a scandalous local murder and the sordid underbelly of Savannah—mostly because, my friendship with David aside, my years there were so dull and pedestrian that I’ve always felt a little bitter about everything I apparently missed. Anyway, the “Bird Girl” statue on the book cover once adorned a gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery, an incredibly evocative place of weathered memorials, Spanish moss-decorated trees, sandy soil and marsh views that’s near my old apartment and was my go-to destination for mopey walks. Those perambulations sometimes would include the newer, adjacent Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which was where I found myself standing in May 2007 as David’s coffin sat poised to be lowered into the ground.
I revisited the gravesite last Saturday afternoon for the second time since the interment. The first occasion had been a fiasco a couple of years ago involving an ill-anchored bouquet that kept falling over and a lot of very awkward one-sided conversation. This time, while I felt compelled to audibly greet David despite my continuing near-certainty in death’s finality, I didn’t linger at his marker.
I did take a leisurely walk around David’s eternal neighborhood, though, and spotted some epitaphs and memorial bench adornments that I think he would have enjoyed as much as I did. One read, sensibly enough, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I was born. I don’t think it will bother me after I’m dead.” There was this sentiment, engraved on a bench on the cemetery’s periphery, overlooking the river and marshes that border the site: “Finally, waterfront property. This is as close as we can get.” On another bench, a drawing had a man reeling in a big fish. The tribute read, “Life enjoyed him.” It was signed by “Your favorite ex-wife, Linda.”
The big event this past weekend was, of course, the poetry reading, which in part was a book-signing without the signing, for obvious reasons. A faculty-mate of David’s had compiled and seen through to recent publication a second chapbook of David’s poems—the first having been published during his lifetime by a small university press. Family and friends read from both collections in the cramped bookstore space, many sharing personal anecdotes and remembrances. I read a poem that doesn’t appear in either book, but that David had enclosed with his holiday cards in 2004. It’s a sweet Christmas-morning story that speaks to his love of family. It was well-received by kin in attendance, as I knew it would be.
In fact, the main reason I’d flown down for the event was because it was almost certain to be the last group celebration of David during his parents’ lifetime (and perhaps ever). While David remains his father’s hero and his mother’s darling “Davey,” they, in turn, were far more vital to their son than one might have thought any set of parents could be to such an iconoclast. He always spoke reverently of them, which made me like them before we ever met. That would have been sometime around the turn of the new century, at their Annandale, Virginia, apartment. That was the only time we'd meet before they and I would reconvene at the memorial service, as it turned out.
It’s an odd aspect of my relationship with David’s mother, Jackie, that we’ve been e-mail correspondents for a few years now but we never physically see each other, even though our homes are only about 10 or 12 miles apart. At any rate, she seemed delighted to see me at the bookstore in Savannah. She even snuck me a special thanks from her daughter Toni’s computer a few days later, while they were still out of town.
I e-mailed back that David would’ve done the same for me. I can’t imagine he’d have missed my memorial service, had our fortunes been reversed. Or any subsequent celebration of me that was within his logistic reach. Naturally, I do wonder what he’d have said about me. He’d no doubt have made me out to be far brighter, more talented a writer, cleverer and more interesting than I’ve ever considered myself to be.
My friend had all the attributes he’d have assigned me, and more. Though I can’t quite consider him a hero. He’d have rejected that label himself, I feel sure—mindful that freedom has costs for both the allegedly unfettered (see “Lonesome David”) and those who’ve been, well, cut loose (see "girlfriends"). But I will say the outsized loss I still feel speaks to David’s importance and uniqueness in my life.
The truth is, I couldn’t have stayed home last weekend—any more than I could have resisted a friendship that was so immediately and completely extended to me more than two decades ago.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Another Day in Dodge City
I was standing beside my car in a 7-Eleven parking one recent morning when I stunned speechful by a bumper sticker on a pickup truck preparing to exit the lot.
What I mean is, the message struck me as so infuriatingly, nonsensically aggrieved that I wanted to walk over, pound on the cab window and scream “WTF?!”
I didn’t do that, but I did ask, “What do you have to be mad about?” loud enough that I startled the neighborhood not-quite-right guy, who was distractedly presiding over the parking lot. The driver gave no indication he’d heard me. The pickup pulled into traffic and began rolling down the road.
The bumper sticker, now disappearing from sight, read, “I’m a Bitter Gun Owner—And I Vote.”
This was my reaction. First, this is America, which is to any semblance of sane gun laws as Syria is to civil liberties or North Korea is to frowning on cult-of-personality dictatorships. While technically the United States is a Western nation, when it comes to gun availability and the resulting violence, fatalities and incarceration rates, we stand alone as an Old West nation. On these shores, a shootout’s possible at any given time.
Second, I was thinking, this is Virginia. (I was in Alexandria at the time, and the pickup bore Virginia plates.) The commonwealth of Virginia has lax gun-control laws even by American standards. I knew for a fact that, among other things, Virginians are legally permitted to openly carry a holstered handgun just about anywhere. I also knew that, on the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s national scorecard, Virginia typically brings up the rear in comparison with more progressive states. (“Progressive,” again, being a relative term.)
What a quick bit of Internet research subsequently elicited was that Virginia’s exact Brady Campaign score is 16 out of 100. “Virginia has weak gun laws,” the Brady summary reads, “that help feed the illegal gun market, allow the sale of guns without background checks and put children at risk.”
As it happened, within hours of my bumper sticker sighting, the Courts of Justice Committee of the Virginia State Senate approved a measure that, if passed by the full legislature, would eliminate the state’s (presumably tyrannous) one-gun-a-month restriction on handgun purchases.
So, when I read that bumper sticker, my visceral rejoinder was, “Bitter? Really?! About what, exactly?”
When I next got to a computer, I Googled the offending phrase, seeking any available insight into what might sour a Virginia gun owner on a political system that all but legalizes a matrimonial state between citizen and firearm.
Ah! The bumper sticker made better contextual sense, at least, when the search results popped up. The sentiment’s genesis had been a speech Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, had given in April 2008 to a private audience at a California fundraiser. In an unfortunate turn of phrase, Obama had expressed his view that some Americans who feel economically dispossessed and betrayed by their government may “get bitter” in response, and may “cling to their guns or religion.”
The comments sparked a huge controversy at the time and sent the Obama campaign temporarily on its heels. Even fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, then duking it out with Obama for the party’s presidential nod, made political hay of what she described as Obama’s “elitist and divisive comments.”
But to my recollection the backlash from evangelicals had been the harshest; I’d kind of forgotten the “guns” part of the quote. At any rate, Obama ended up winning the election, and he’s been steadily demonized by the political Right in countless other ways in the years since. That explained why I hadn’t made the connection to the speech when I read the bumper sticker.
What the Web search also suggested, unsurprisingly, was that the bumper sticker may well have been manufactured and distributed by the National Rifle Association. A brief visit to the NRA’s Web site—a momentary touch-down that nevertheless left me feeling only slightly less soiled than I might have by visiting the Man-Boy Love Society’s membership page—turned up a T-shirt the NRA had marketed in response to the Obama quote that bore precisely the wording of the bumper sticker. Gun owners had been urged to wear the T-shirt proudly, in order to show their “support for the NRA and the Second Amendment,” and, in the process, to “send an unmistakable message to legislators.”
My reaction there was, “As if Congress and the vast majority of state legislatures aren’t already in the NRA’s back pocket, or cowed into submission by its lobbying power!” Because the one compliment, if you want to call it that, that I’ll pay to the NRA is that they’re awesome at their job. This, to me, is evidenced both at the macro level—where the Second Amendment has become so sanctified in the national psyche that even so-called liberals don’t question its modern-day applicability—and at the micro level, where I’d never think of displaying a bumper sticker stating, “I’m a Bitter Advocate of Strict Gun Control Laws—And I Vote.” Why wouldn’t I? Not because it isn’t true, but because I’m genuinely fearful that some card-carrying, firearm-toting NRA member would shoot my car windows out. And possibly save some lead for me, depending on what kind of day he (or she) had had.
(On a related note, my other favorite bumper sticker I’ll never commission or display, for similar fear of violent reprisal, would read: “It’s Clearly a Choice, but Only Debatably a Baby.”)
Do I sometimes wish for the courage of my convictions? Sure. I mean, I’ve donated money to the Brady Campaign in the past, and I’ve signed the odd gun-control petition over the years, but I’ve never done anything notably public or strident. For one thing, the NRA has managed to pretty much convince me that Resistance Is Futile—that is, that I’ll need to move to Canada or Europe to ever live under laws that strictly or even meaningfully limit private gun ownership. For another thing, per my earlier allusion, gun nuts—of which this country seemingly has too many to count—scare the shit out of me. To put it colloquially, Them People Be Crazy.
I’ve been thinking this week, too, about the resignation from Congress of Gabrielle Giffords. A deranged gunman wielding a legally purchased firearm nearly killed her, did slay six people, and injured an additional 13 individuals in that January 2011 shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona. Politicians from both side of the political aisle wept a few days ago as they saluted the former congresswoman’s courage, marveled at her progress and wished her Godspeed on her continuing rehabilitative journey. For her part, Giffords vowed to return to elective office one day.
Nowhere in the Giffords exit story, however, was the need for sane gun laws mentioned. In the days immediately following the tragedy, that question got a nanosecond of airplay, but the predictable “Guns don’t kill people—people kill people” chorus quickly drowned out such talk. As it always does in this country. In a state like Arizona, any gun-control message never stood a chance, anyway. Arizona’s Brady Campaign score is zero, making Virginia look a surrender monkey in the fight for a Well-Armed Militia Nation. To be sure, Giffords herself was very much a pro-gun Democrat during her time in Congress. While it would be interesting to know if her views have shifted since her cranial encounter with a bullet, any personal change of heart would be immaterial should she indeed ever seek her old congressional seat. In the Grand Canyon State, you can’t advocate for gun control and win. Candidate Giffords presumably would keep any such thoughts to herself.
I recently happened upon a great op-ed piece on the upshot (no pun intended) of the Tucson tragedy. It wasn’t published in a prominent journal of opinion and wasn’t linked to Giffords’ resignation, but that event clearly was the reason the satirical Web publication The Onion had resurrected and highlighted the link. The faux essay by a made-up commentator named Ellen Crawford-Price was dated May 24, 2011, and bore the headline, “Let’s Just Go Ahead and Assume We’ve Learned the Lessons of the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting.”
The writer noted that she hadn’t “heard so much as a word” in the three months since the shooting about such briefly raised issues as gun control, America’s treatment of its mentally ill (a reference to accused gunman Jared Loughner) or the “inflammatory political rhetoric” that renders impossible any meaningful discussion of such matters. But that being the case, “Crawford-Price” continued with a benefit-of-the-doubt shrug, “I’m going to go ahead and assume that at some point we thoroughly explored those complex issues, resolved them, and now are living our lives based on the lessons we learned from the in-depth conversations I assume we had.”
She felt safe in making those assumptions, she continued, “Because, after all, if we had just brushed aside the life-altering assassination attempt of a congresswoman, as well as the death of a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl without seizing the opportunity to address our nation's glaring problems, then all the shooting victims would have died in vain, and all 300 million of us would be irresponsible, superficial hypocrites with the attention spans of newborns.”
That made me laugh.
But of course, the laughter was … what’s the word I’m looking for?
Oh yeah: bitter.
(Editor’s note: For a related post, read “Song Remains the Same,” from July 30 of last year. Sometimes I’m only belatedly aware that I’ve repeated myself. So sue me. Just don’t shoot me.)
What I mean is, the message struck me as so infuriatingly, nonsensically aggrieved that I wanted to walk over, pound on the cab window and scream “WTF?!”
I didn’t do that, but I did ask, “What do you have to be mad about?” loud enough that I startled the neighborhood not-quite-right guy, who was distractedly presiding over the parking lot. The driver gave no indication he’d heard me. The pickup pulled into traffic and began rolling down the road.
The bumper sticker, now disappearing from sight, read, “I’m a Bitter Gun Owner—And I Vote.”
This was my reaction. First, this is America, which is to any semblance of sane gun laws as Syria is to civil liberties or North Korea is to frowning on cult-of-personality dictatorships. While technically the United States is a Western nation, when it comes to gun availability and the resulting violence, fatalities and incarceration rates, we stand alone as an Old West nation. On these shores, a shootout’s possible at any given time.
Second, I was thinking, this is Virginia. (I was in Alexandria at the time, and the pickup bore Virginia plates.) The commonwealth of Virginia has lax gun-control laws even by American standards. I knew for a fact that, among other things, Virginians are legally permitted to openly carry a holstered handgun just about anywhere. I also knew that, on the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s national scorecard, Virginia typically brings up the rear in comparison with more progressive states. (“Progressive,” again, being a relative term.)
What a quick bit of Internet research subsequently elicited was that Virginia’s exact Brady Campaign score is 16 out of 100. “Virginia has weak gun laws,” the Brady summary reads, “that help feed the illegal gun market, allow the sale of guns without background checks and put children at risk.”
As it happened, within hours of my bumper sticker sighting, the Courts of Justice Committee of the Virginia State Senate approved a measure that, if passed by the full legislature, would eliminate the state’s (presumably tyrannous) one-gun-a-month restriction on handgun purchases.
So, when I read that bumper sticker, my visceral rejoinder was, “Bitter? Really?! About what, exactly?”
When I next got to a computer, I Googled the offending phrase, seeking any available insight into what might sour a Virginia gun owner on a political system that all but legalizes a matrimonial state between citizen and firearm.
Ah! The bumper sticker made better contextual sense, at least, when the search results popped up. The sentiment’s genesis had been a speech Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, had given in April 2008 to a private audience at a California fundraiser. In an unfortunate turn of phrase, Obama had expressed his view that some Americans who feel economically dispossessed and betrayed by their government may “get bitter” in response, and may “cling to their guns or religion.”
The comments sparked a huge controversy at the time and sent the Obama campaign temporarily on its heels. Even fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, then duking it out with Obama for the party’s presidential nod, made political hay of what she described as Obama’s “elitist and divisive comments.”
But to my recollection the backlash from evangelicals had been the harshest; I’d kind of forgotten the “guns” part of the quote. At any rate, Obama ended up winning the election, and he’s been steadily demonized by the political Right in countless other ways in the years since. That explained why I hadn’t made the connection to the speech when I read the bumper sticker.
What the Web search also suggested, unsurprisingly, was that the bumper sticker may well have been manufactured and distributed by the National Rifle Association. A brief visit to the NRA’s Web site—a momentary touch-down that nevertheless left me feeling only slightly less soiled than I might have by visiting the Man-Boy Love Society’s membership page—turned up a T-shirt the NRA had marketed in response to the Obama quote that bore precisely the wording of the bumper sticker. Gun owners had been urged to wear the T-shirt proudly, in order to show their “support for the NRA and the Second Amendment,” and, in the process, to “send an unmistakable message to legislators.”
My reaction there was, “As if Congress and the vast majority of state legislatures aren’t already in the NRA’s back pocket, or cowed into submission by its lobbying power!” Because the one compliment, if you want to call it that, that I’ll pay to the NRA is that they’re awesome at their job. This, to me, is evidenced both at the macro level—where the Second Amendment has become so sanctified in the national psyche that even so-called liberals don’t question its modern-day applicability—and at the micro level, where I’d never think of displaying a bumper sticker stating, “I’m a Bitter Advocate of Strict Gun Control Laws—And I Vote.” Why wouldn’t I? Not because it isn’t true, but because I’m genuinely fearful that some card-carrying, firearm-toting NRA member would shoot my car windows out. And possibly save some lead for me, depending on what kind of day he (or she) had had.
(On a related note, my other favorite bumper sticker I’ll never commission or display, for similar fear of violent reprisal, would read: “It’s Clearly a Choice, but Only Debatably a Baby.”)
Do I sometimes wish for the courage of my convictions? Sure. I mean, I’ve donated money to the Brady Campaign in the past, and I’ve signed the odd gun-control petition over the years, but I’ve never done anything notably public or strident. For one thing, the NRA has managed to pretty much convince me that Resistance Is Futile—that is, that I’ll need to move to Canada or Europe to ever live under laws that strictly or even meaningfully limit private gun ownership. For another thing, per my earlier allusion, gun nuts—of which this country seemingly has too many to count—scare the shit out of me. To put it colloquially, Them People Be Crazy.
I’ve been thinking this week, too, about the resignation from Congress of Gabrielle Giffords. A deranged gunman wielding a legally purchased firearm nearly killed her, did slay six people, and injured an additional 13 individuals in that January 2011 shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona. Politicians from both side of the political aisle wept a few days ago as they saluted the former congresswoman’s courage, marveled at her progress and wished her Godspeed on her continuing rehabilitative journey. For her part, Giffords vowed to return to elective office one day.
Nowhere in the Giffords exit story, however, was the need for sane gun laws mentioned. In the days immediately following the tragedy, that question got a nanosecond of airplay, but the predictable “Guns don’t kill people—people kill people” chorus quickly drowned out such talk. As it always does in this country. In a state like Arizona, any gun-control message never stood a chance, anyway. Arizona’s Brady Campaign score is zero, making Virginia look a surrender monkey in the fight for a Well-Armed Militia Nation. To be sure, Giffords herself was very much a pro-gun Democrat during her time in Congress. While it would be interesting to know if her views have shifted since her cranial encounter with a bullet, any personal change of heart would be immaterial should she indeed ever seek her old congressional seat. In the Grand Canyon State, you can’t advocate for gun control and win. Candidate Giffords presumably would keep any such thoughts to herself.
I recently happened upon a great op-ed piece on the upshot (no pun intended) of the Tucson tragedy. It wasn’t published in a prominent journal of opinion and wasn’t linked to Giffords’ resignation, but that event clearly was the reason the satirical Web publication The Onion had resurrected and highlighted the link. The faux essay by a made-up commentator named Ellen Crawford-Price was dated May 24, 2011, and bore the headline, “Let’s Just Go Ahead and Assume We’ve Learned the Lessons of the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting.”
The writer noted that she hadn’t “heard so much as a word” in the three months since the shooting about such briefly raised issues as gun control, America’s treatment of its mentally ill (a reference to accused gunman Jared Loughner) or the “inflammatory political rhetoric” that renders impossible any meaningful discussion of such matters. But that being the case, “Crawford-Price” continued with a benefit-of-the-doubt shrug, “I’m going to go ahead and assume that at some point we thoroughly explored those complex issues, resolved them, and now are living our lives based on the lessons we learned from the in-depth conversations I assume we had.”
She felt safe in making those assumptions, she continued, “Because, after all, if we had just brushed aside the life-altering assassination attempt of a congresswoman, as well as the death of a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl without seizing the opportunity to address our nation's glaring problems, then all the shooting victims would have died in vain, and all 300 million of us would be irresponsible, superficial hypocrites with the attention spans of newborns.”
That made me laugh.
But of course, the laughter was … what’s the word I’m looking for?
Oh yeah: bitter.
(Editor’s note: For a related post, read “Song Remains the Same,” from July 30 of last year. Sometimes I’m only belatedly aware that I’ve repeated myself. So sue me. Just don’t shoot me.)
Monday, January 16, 2012
Corps Values?
Like most Americans who aren’t idiots (more about Rick Perry shortly), I was appalled and saddened but hardly shocked when video recently emerged of four US Marines urinating on the bodies of several dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Or, as I prefer to de-sanitize this morally indefensible desecration, pissing on corpses.
The reaction among US military and civilian officials was swift and appropriate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta immediately condemned the Marines’ actions, and the military promised an inquiry. Clinton called the incident “absolutely inconsistent with American values.”
But was it? As several commentaries I’ve read in the days since have pointed out, American values, particularly in the realm of war, don’t seem quite what they used to be. In cased you missed it, I’d like to quote a few paragraphs from an op-ed piece published in yesterday’s Washington Post that summarized better than I ever could have the disconnect between our collective outrage and the messages we’ve been imbuing in our fighting forces. The following words were written by Sebastian Junger, an author whose best-selling 2010 book War chronicled a year he’d spent embedded with US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, and a director whose film Restropo, released the same year, also focused on that conflict. The ensuing was excerpted from an essay to which the Post affixed the headline “We’re All Guilty of Dehumanizing the Enemy.”
“There is a context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.
“When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults—and political leaders—talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions—achieved through torture—will not stand up in court.
“For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad—not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.”
That doesn’t by any stretch absolve the responsible parties. But I do think it’s important and instructive to contextualize their actions, as Junger so concisely and powerfully did in the preceding paragraphs. I feel obliged, too, to add that I readily concede that it’s easy for me, never having served in the military, to say that even the hell of war would never compell me to unzip my pants and splash yellow contempt on a lifeless adversary. As Junger pointed out elsewhere in his essay, our soldiers in various ways are encouraged to regard the enemy in dehumanized terms, because “otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings.” Is it such a leap to go from satisfaction in a job well done, in that context, to taking a sort of sick pleasure in it?
But I do think “sick” is the key word there. I was ruminating on all this in the shower yesterday when the name of a movie I’d nervously but eagerly rented from a video store many years ago popped into my head. In those pre-Internet days the title alone had earned the film considerable infamy: I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978, it's a revenge fantasy in which a young female novelist seeking a quiet place to write in rural New York state is savagely raped by a group of young men and then proceeds to murder them in increasingly brutal fashion: hanging one, leaving another to bleed to death in a tub after slicing off his penis, dismembering yet another with the blades of a speedboat.
I still remember that I was as self-conscious about renting it as I would’ve been had I placed on the counter a porn flick. But then, of course, I Spit on Your Grave was simply a different kind of porn. I’d rented it for all the reasons adolescent and arrested-adolescent guys (I’d have been in my 20s then) did and still do a lot of things: for the promise of exposed breasts, the expectation of lots of blood and the titallation of glimpses at the forbidden.
The movie delivered on all those counts. It was very graphic for its time and fully merited its word-of-mouth infamy. But it also had an effect on me I hadn’t at all expected: It ultimately grossed me out and really made me think.
Most of all, it made me think about the cancer of retribution and vengeance, even when it’s arguably merited and is dispensed in response to the worst sorts of atrocities. For a low-budget movie that was populated with no-name actors portraying prototypes more than recognizable people, the film did an excellent job of pressing my buttons. Having squirmed through the brutalizations of the victim, I initially delighted in the unconflicted sadism with which she turned avenging heroine and Got Even. But then a funny thing happened. Regret and shame gradually overtook me, to the point that when I unceremoniously dumped the video in the store’s overnight slot early the next morning, I felt sullied by the entire experience and mad for having allowed myself to be so thoroughly manipulated.
What I thought about as I stood in the shower yesterday were the similarities between the cinematic I Spit on Your Grave and the military I Piss on Your Corpse. Sure, one could argue—as the drunk-with-revenge Marines in that now-infamous video surely did—that those murdered Taliban fighters Had It Coming. That they, or their cronies, had killed American soldiers. That, given a Taliban culture in which beheadings and all other manner of brutality toward one’s perceived enemies are not uncommon, the deceased, had they survived, might well have lifted their robes in a similar situation and Done the Same Thing to Us. But does that make it right? Does that make it moral?
Here’s where Texas Gov Rick Perry comes in. Rather than condemning the uniformed urinators, he reserved his umbrage for the Obama administration—accusing it of “over-the-top rhetoric” and “disdain for the military.” While being careful not to outright praise the soldiers for a Texas-sized arrogance one sensed he admired—Perry does still have a terminal but not yet dead presidential campaign to consider, after all—he took a break from the stump yesterday to tell CNN that the corpse desecration had been, in fact, nothing more than a “stupid mistake” made by a quartet of guys who are, after all, “just kids.” There certainly was nothing criminal about their actions, Perry added—the Geneva Conventions be damned.
Just as I wasn’t surprised that some US soldiers would take pride in relieving themselves on dead men, I wasn’t surprised that Rick Perry felt compelled to defend such behavior. In fact, given that he has vigorously defended waterboarding during the Republican presidential debates, his comments about the Marines’ actions are more or less what I might have scripted him to say. But I will add this: His words make me want to spit in his eye.
Unlike Rick Perry, however, I would stop there.
The reaction among US military and civilian officials was swift and appropriate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta immediately condemned the Marines’ actions, and the military promised an inquiry. Clinton called the incident “absolutely inconsistent with American values.”
But was it? As several commentaries I’ve read in the days since have pointed out, American values, particularly in the realm of war, don’t seem quite what they used to be. In cased you missed it, I’d like to quote a few paragraphs from an op-ed piece published in yesterday’s Washington Post that summarized better than I ever could have the disconnect between our collective outrage and the messages we’ve been imbuing in our fighting forces. The following words were written by Sebastian Junger, an author whose best-selling 2010 book War chronicled a year he’d spent embedded with US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, and a director whose film Restropo, released the same year, also focused on that conflict. The ensuing was excerpted from an essay to which the Post affixed the headline “We’re All Guilty of Dehumanizing the Enemy.”
“There is a context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.
“When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults—and political leaders—talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions—achieved through torture—will not stand up in court.
“For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad—not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.”
That doesn’t by any stretch absolve the responsible parties. But I do think it’s important and instructive to contextualize their actions, as Junger so concisely and powerfully did in the preceding paragraphs. I feel obliged, too, to add that I readily concede that it’s easy for me, never having served in the military, to say that even the hell of war would never compell me to unzip my pants and splash yellow contempt on a lifeless adversary. As Junger pointed out elsewhere in his essay, our soldiers in various ways are encouraged to regard the enemy in dehumanized terms, because “otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings.” Is it such a leap to go from satisfaction in a job well done, in that context, to taking a sort of sick pleasure in it?
But I do think “sick” is the key word there. I was ruminating on all this in the shower yesterday when the name of a movie I’d nervously but eagerly rented from a video store many years ago popped into my head. In those pre-Internet days the title alone had earned the film considerable infamy: I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978, it's a revenge fantasy in which a young female novelist seeking a quiet place to write in rural New York state is savagely raped by a group of young men and then proceeds to murder them in increasingly brutal fashion: hanging one, leaving another to bleed to death in a tub after slicing off his penis, dismembering yet another with the blades of a speedboat.
I still remember that I was as self-conscious about renting it as I would’ve been had I placed on the counter a porn flick. But then, of course, I Spit on Your Grave was simply a different kind of porn. I’d rented it for all the reasons adolescent and arrested-adolescent guys (I’d have been in my 20s then) did and still do a lot of things: for the promise of exposed breasts, the expectation of lots of blood and the titallation of glimpses at the forbidden.
The movie delivered on all those counts. It was very graphic for its time and fully merited its word-of-mouth infamy. But it also had an effect on me I hadn’t at all expected: It ultimately grossed me out and really made me think.
Most of all, it made me think about the cancer of retribution and vengeance, even when it’s arguably merited and is dispensed in response to the worst sorts of atrocities. For a low-budget movie that was populated with no-name actors portraying prototypes more than recognizable people, the film did an excellent job of pressing my buttons. Having squirmed through the brutalizations of the victim, I initially delighted in the unconflicted sadism with which she turned avenging heroine and Got Even. But then a funny thing happened. Regret and shame gradually overtook me, to the point that when I unceremoniously dumped the video in the store’s overnight slot early the next morning, I felt sullied by the entire experience and mad for having allowed myself to be so thoroughly manipulated.
What I thought about as I stood in the shower yesterday were the similarities between the cinematic I Spit on Your Grave and the military I Piss on Your Corpse. Sure, one could argue—as the drunk-with-revenge Marines in that now-infamous video surely did—that those murdered Taliban fighters Had It Coming. That they, or their cronies, had killed American soldiers. That, given a Taliban culture in which beheadings and all other manner of brutality toward one’s perceived enemies are not uncommon, the deceased, had they survived, might well have lifted their robes in a similar situation and Done the Same Thing to Us. But does that make it right? Does that make it moral?
Here’s where Texas Gov Rick Perry comes in. Rather than condemning the uniformed urinators, he reserved his umbrage for the Obama administration—accusing it of “over-the-top rhetoric” and “disdain for the military.” While being careful not to outright praise the soldiers for a Texas-sized arrogance one sensed he admired—Perry does still have a terminal but not yet dead presidential campaign to consider, after all—he took a break from the stump yesterday to tell CNN that the corpse desecration had been, in fact, nothing more than a “stupid mistake” made by a quartet of guys who are, after all, “just kids.” There certainly was nothing criminal about their actions, Perry added—the Geneva Conventions be damned.
Just as I wasn’t surprised that some US soldiers would take pride in relieving themselves on dead men, I wasn’t surprised that Rick Perry felt compelled to defend such behavior. In fact, given that he has vigorously defended waterboarding during the Republican presidential debates, his comments about the Marines’ actions are more or less what I might have scripted him to say. But I will add this: His words make me want to spit in his eye.
Unlike Rick Perry, however, I would stop there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)