A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

Lit Crit

This goes out to all the ships at sea, as well as the folks in the 24 hour convenience stores, the people who , are at this moment, loading bundles of Monday's Ithaca Journal, fine patriotic rag that it is, into their cars for delivery. Imagine that as a second or third job, if you would. What time do those guys have to get up so that we can sally out into the cold Ithaca dawn to get our fair share of received truth, patriotic gore and Cornell hockey scores?

Ezra started to glance at Flaubert's The Dictionary of Received Ideas yesterday. Gustave, if I may call him that, defined Insult thus -"Must always be washed out with blood." He could have been talking about 9/11. Here's his definition of Invasion -"Must always bring tears to your eyes." He's writing from the point of view of being invaded; France and Poland are the doormats of Europe. Finally - War -"always thunder against it." Flaubert is obviously talking here about war from a European point of view. A liquor store owner in New Jersey recently dumped out a hundred gallons of French wine in protest of France's threatened veto of the Bush/Blair Iraqi resolution.

Times haven't changed. Flaubert might have had in mind Napoleon III's disastrous military adventure in Mexico, coinciding with our own Civil War, in which the French Emperor set up a minor Hapsburg on the throne of the US's southern neighbor. Maxmillian and his wife Carolotta ended up in front of a Mexican firing squad. ("Now {the French} don't seem so glad, now {the Americans}don't seem so bad.") Napoleon's war was ballyhooed by the politicians and talking heads of the time -Mexico "'The Mexican expedition is the greatest idea of the reign.' (Rouher)"

Flag -"the sight of it makes the heart race faster." No, things haven't changed. Rally behind the flag, support the troops, demonize the Enemy(Saddam, Osama, Kim, who tomorrow?), praise the politicians with the 'guts' to go it alone when the winds of dissent blow around their heads.

Received truths. Turn on the tv, log on to MSN, open the Journal and start reading today's download. Or, if you're a progressive, log on to Counterpunch, read The Nation, or In These Times, listen to WEOS. Don't log on to Ithaca's Indymedia. It's the activist equivalent of the State St. Diner in the middle of a blizzard.

While mainstream Americans hunger for the white bread of disinformation packaged by the media/government, progressives are like modern day gnostics. They seek the truth, the smoking gun, the tidbit of scandal that will prove a worldwide conspiracy involving the CIA, Israel, giant corporations with their tentacles all over the globe. "The truth shall set you free." But it won't change things. The truth has a way of being swept under the carpet, dropped back to the last page, embedded in the fine print. Government scandals since Watergate are now all followed by the word 'gate." Irangate, Contragate, Lewinskygate. A portal, passage., doorway. But there is No Exit.

Americans are hungry for information but short on empathy. One doesn't seem to have much to do with the other. We absorb every fact about the War, listen to all the talking heads who were ever a major or colonel in the US Army, memorize every weapon system but find it hard to appreciate what it must be like to have 2,000 lb bombs falling on our heads. Sure, we're just bombing 'leadership complexes ' with pinpoint accuracy over there in Iraq. Like there are no janitors working at that time of night, no cleaning women wiping down the marble latrines, no guy who just happened to be delivering the bagels?

We find it hard to imagine how other people in our own society live (unless they fit into a little cookie cutter mold and are just like us.) Why should it come as any surprise that we fail to empathize with Iraqi civilians, women and children? The guy who works at the A Plus lives a life that is basically opaque to most of the customers that come in to buy a 6-pack. The folks that wash the dishes at the Cornell dining halls, the people outside of Ithaca who work on our mufflers, deliver our papers, drive the beer trucks, make the donuts.

Narcissism was the mumps of the 20th Century. The common disease of the time. Now solipsism is quickly becoming the HIV of the 21st Century. As RB points out with pinpoint precision. (Ezra would like RB to team up with him on this blog sheet; RB is one of those biting cynics who typically delivers razor sharp barbs like Bush delivers Cruise Missiles. )

We're all doing our own thing, living busy lives, getting a degree that's outdated by the time the certificate dries, communing with the greenbacks, working our jobs or building empires in the air or sand. That's why it's convenient to get fast food information that satisfies your hunger but has no lasting nutritional value. The Ithaca Journal is our own little media McDonald's. McNews. Playing off and serving up received ideas.

The poets are the ones who really know. Like the one who wrote the 137th Psalm.

By the rivers of Babylon. there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Lord Byron revisited the Psalm back in 1815 in a version set to music. Of course, Bob Marley's melody is the one that started to go through Ezra's head the other day when George opened the skies over Iraq with shock and awe. The Israelites never had a monopoly on oppression, suffering and horror. Another poet circa 2000 BC wrote:

To overturn the appointed times,
to obliterate the divine plans,
the storms gather to strike like a flood.
to overturn the divine powers of Sumer,
to lock up the favorable reign in its home,
to destroy the city, to destroy the house,
to destroy the cattle-pen, to level the sheepfold;
that the cattle should not stand in the pen,
that the sheep should not multiply in the fold,
that watercourses should carry brackish water,
that weeds should grow in the fertile fields,
that mourning plants should grow in the open country,
that the mother should not seek out her child,
that the father should not say "O my dear wife!",
that the junior wife should take no joy in his embrace,
that the young child should not grow vigorous on his knee,
that the wet-nurse should not sing lullabies;
that on the two banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates
bad weeds should grow,
that no one should set out on the road,
that no one should seek out the highway,
that the city and its settled surroundings
should be razed to ruin-mounds;
that its numerous black-headed people should be slaughtered;
that the hoe should not attack the fertile fields,
that seed should not be planted in the ground,
that the melody of the cowherds' songs
should not resound in the open country,
that butter and cheese should not be made in the cattle-pen,
that dung should not be stacked on the ground,
that the shepherd should not enclose
the sacred sheepfold with a fence,
that the song of the churning should not resound in the sheepfold;
to decimate the animals of the open country,
to finish off all living things,
that the four-legged creatures of Cakkan
should lay no more dung on the ground,
that the marshes should be so dry
as to be full of cracks and have no new seed,
that sickly-headed reeds should grow in the reed-beds,
that they should be covered by a stinking morass,
that there should be no new growth in the orchards,
that it should all collapse by itself.
so as quickly to subdue Urim like a roped ox,
to bow its neck to the ground: the great charging wild bull,
confident in its own strength,
the primeval city of lordship and kingship,
built on sacred ground.
The people, in their fear, breathed only with difficulty.
The storm immobilized them,
the storm did not let them return.
There was no return for them,
The extensive countryside was destroyed,
no one moved about there.
The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames.
The bright time was wiped out by a shadow.

From the Lament for the Fall of Sumer and Ur.

The complete poem can be found at http://www.saragossosea.net/archives/001197.html -thanks to DB. (Some readers do contribute to ithacasucks, ya know.)

So, there you have it. Misery and lamentation by the Tigris and Eurphrates from two perspectives. Ezra is hoping that 9/11 wasn't a foretaste of a catastrophe that will be visited upon us for not trying hard enough to feel the other's pain, for ignoring the lesson that what comes around, goes around. Again and again.

Sorry, dudes, if the blog got a little blogged down today. Ezra just gets worked up about waking up and finding that this isn't just a bad dream.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:06 AM