Yesterday’s news

Sometimes when I am emotionally drained or intellectually exhausted from tedious work, I’ll pick up a random copy from my stack of old New Yorkers, leaf through them back to front, reading the cartoons and the poems and sometimes a few pages of an article that catches my eye. Sometimes the whole article.

These back issues are supplied me by a kindly friend. I have tried subscribing to The New Yorker but I feel too guilty when the issues pile up unread. All that great writing, going to waste. I have the same problem with Poetry. I guess I’m just not a magazine reader.

But there’s something soothing about reading yesterday’s news. It’s gone and it no longer has to cost us any anxiety (well, most of the time). Sometimes it’s even silly.

Like for example, this piece by Adam Gopnik in the issue for August 28, 2006, Read It and Weep. Do you remember when the White House used to issue George W. Bush’s reading lists to convince us that he was, in fact, a man of gravitas and not just wasting his summers fishing and skiving off? Sort of like all that brush cutting on his beloved ranch and trying to look Reaganesque. I don’t think he cut much brush this last summer.

Anyway, the reading lists were the silly part. The article was actually quite serious and engaging. It discusses Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which showed up on Bush’s reading list in the summer of 2006, and what Mr. Bush might have learned from it.

I read it just before going to sleep last night. Said Gopnik:

Camus, the President should be reminded, did not come by this wisdom cheaply or at a distance; he came by it from the center of modern history. As “Camus at Combat,” a new collection of his editorials—he was a working journalist—makes plain, the experience, first, of the Nazi occupation of France, and then of the struggle of Algerian independence against France led him to conclude that the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking. The way out of Meursaultism [central character in The Stranger] is to think about particular people, proximate causes, and obtainable objectives—not an easy thing to do in any circumstance and nearly impossible in the face of those ideologies, left and right, for which, Camus writes, “fear is a method.”

And upon awakening this morning, I encountered this poem in my reading:

For the Unknown Enemy

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

— William Stafford, The Way It Is. New & Selected Poems (Greywolf, 1999)

When stuff comes together like this, I think I should maybe pay close attention.

George W. Bush is no longer in the White House, but there are still those who want to retain control and power over us through our fear of the other, that abstract enemy, that ideological apostate.

This has been my constant drumbeat here on this blog: if you let them make you afraid, you let them control you.

__________

Unfortunately, our government is still sending us the message that, if your crime is egregious enough and your power great enough, you never have to be held accountable.