Sherry Chandler

Firebombing, revisited

A day or two ago, I did a post about James Dickey’s poem, “The Firebombing,” and I was very pleased when Dickey’s son, Christoper left a comment. Here is part of what Christopher Dickey said:

Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about “The Firebombing” because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf

Christopher Dickey is an excellent war correspondent, a man whose writings we should all have given more heed. Maybe then we would not have gotten ourselves into the mess of Iraq. But as he says himself, mostly Americans just want to forget about the rest of the world.

Dickey also writes well and interestingly about his father. In 2007, I wrote a post here about his article “War and Deliverance.,” which appeared in Newsweek on October 2007 on release of the Deliverance movie to HD DVD.

So naturally I went looking for the article “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” Here is part of what Christopher Dickey has to say about James Dickey’s poem “The Firebombing:”

At my father’s poetry readings, he’d usually give a pretty long introduction to this poem “which attempts to come to terms with modern warfare and with the fact that for many people engaged in modern warfare there is no guilt, because guilt depends ultimately on contemplating the destruction that one is responsible for.

“So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it,” my father would explain to the audience. “The man in this poem has been twenty years ago a bomber pilot and has made firebombing raids on civilian populations over Japan. He is a decent fellow, like most pilots were, and are, and he’s thinking now twenty years later in his pleasant suburban home that he is the same person who burned women and children alive with jellied gasoline called napalm.”

As I have said before, and will probably say again, I was born during the firebombing of Dresden, though I didn’t know that until I was grown. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was one of the formative events of my life. And then, of course, there was Vietnam, which overshadowed my life from ages 15 to 30.

As one who had lived through Vietnam, I was horrified by the glee with which our nation welcomed George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War, the way we all gathered around our televisions to watch the smart bombs fall, as though this were some virtual reality game. And, in many ways, for us it was all a game.

Here is Christopher Dickey once again:

For more than fifty years after World War II, and more than thirty years after my father wrote that poem, technology, especially American technology, continued to dehumanize the inhumanity of war until, by the late 1990s, we were able to convince ourselves, at our great distance from the destruction, that such a thing could be waged as a war that was humane.

Now, that’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it. Because a humane war, especially one waged from a sanitary distance, is implicitly an EASY war. It doesn’t have to be righteous. It doesn’t even have to be memorable.

. . .

Have you ever heard the term “fire and forget”?

“Fire and forget” is a bit of military jargon that describes, say, an anti-tank missile that does the work of tracking and hitting the target by itself once you pull the trigger. The munitions the Air Force and Navy use today, the “smart bombs” and cruise missiles, might also fit into that same category. It’s about guidance systems. But “fire and forget” could just as aptly describe the way the United States makes war and the American people have learned to perceive it in the last quarter century. And it tells us a lot about some of the misguided fights we’ve gotten into of late.

Since 1981, we have carried out an act of war, on average, just about every year.

This article was written early in our current “War on Terror” — terminology that seems blessedly to have been dropped lately — before the “Surge,” before hawks were able to declare something like victory in Iraq, though it was published a few months after George W. Bush’s ridiculous “Mission Accomplished” stunt.

In the meantime, I hope we have learned some difficult lessons about the nature of war. I hope we have learned what Dickey, father and son, kept trying to tell us — that, though we ourselves may be detached from our war making and though we may consider our technological warfare humane, things looks considerably different to the people on the ground being killed and maimed.

As Christopher Dickey says:

If you’ve been on the ground at the receiving end of those American bombs, however, among the people who won’t forget, don’t get closure and can’t just change the channel, you know that much of the hatred of the United States in the world comes not from these leaders who are “jealous” of its strength, as some in Washington would have us believe, and not from people who “hate freedom,” certainly, but from those innocent people who’ve either been victims of America’s awesome, insouciant power, or fear that they might be.

Consider that word insouciant.

Though I have strong reservations about Barack Obama’s decision to try to go back to Afghanistan and “win” that war, I do applaud his willingness to put people on the ground there to help rebuild, to give our country a more human face. Civilians, too. I also have some reservations about using armies as nation builders, not because I’m against nation building, but because it blurs a line that ought not to be blurred.

Like, for example, when our civilian President salutes his military.

But we are still depending on our technological war toys. We’re still using drones that maybe are killing terrorists but definitely are killing their wives and children. We have young soldiers killing in Pakistan now without ever leaving the continental United States. For this work, we recruit the ones who are good at video games.

That is really frightening.

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By the way, today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, that man whose hindsight was much better than his foresight. Like all of us, I guess.

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I have discovered this site, James Dickey: Deep Deliverance, which I should have found before:

A personal site devoted to some of James Dickey’s writing, thinking, living and loving. Here you will find bits of his poetry, a few lines from his books, images of his life, and memories from his friends. If you are teaching James Dickey or studying James Dickey, this is a good place to start (c) Christopher Dickey

More stuff

The Last Moonshiner. Any comments?

Shenandoah turns 60 and turns digital.:

Shenandoah will publish in its usual format in fall 2010. In spring 2011, there will be a limited-edition anthology of poems published in Shenandoah over the last 15 years. And then will come the biggest change of all. “For the foreseeable future,” said Smith, “that will be the last print issue of Shenandoah.”

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, it will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”

The way the journal involves students in its work will be innovative as well. “The interns will not just observe and theorize about the actual editorial decisions, from design to contents to policies,” said Smith, “but they will also participate in the decisions, plus do things like screening submissions and blogging.”

See Death of a lit mag, and thanks to Edward Byrne for the news.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light

. . .

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

I’m not sure why Texas gets to hold our entire education system hostage but there it is.

On the other hand, the most Draconian version of Utah’s anti-abortion bill did not pass:

DENVER — A sweeping anti-abortion statute in Utah that would have allowed up to life in prison for a woman whose fetus died from her intentional or reckless behavior was withdrawn by its sponsor on Thursday and will be revised to be narrower in scope.

. . .

The sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah’s criminal homicide laws for a “reckless act of the woman” that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman’s “intentional” actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.

The bill was prompted by a case last year in which a 17-year-old who was seven months pregnant sought to induce a miscarriage by paying a man to beat her. She was arrested, but released by a judge who said seeking an abortion was not a crime.

Legal abortions, performed by a doctor, would not be affected by the old bill or its replacement. But Utah has statutes on the books intended to discourage abortions, including a parental consent requirement for minors.

My bleeding heart instincts say that any 17-year-old as desperate as all that should be treated with great compassion and not exploited as a poster-child for turning women into criminals.

Meanwhile, there’s this from Amnesty International. I would somehow feel more sympathetic toward the anti-abortion idealogues if I thought there was any real compassion involved. But I see little evidence of it.

Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the USA.

A total of 1.7 million women a year, one-third of all pregnant women in the country, suffer from pregnancy-related complications.

The report also revealed that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death — known as “near misses” — are rising at an alarming rate, increasing by 25 percent since 1998.

Minorities, those living in poverty, Native American and immigrant women and those who speak little or no English are particularly affected.

“This country’s extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

, , ,

“Mothers die not because the United States can’t provide good care, but because it lacks the political will to make sure good care is available to all women,” said Larry Cox.

Amnesty International’s analysis also shows a health care reform proposal before the US Congress does not address the crisis of maternal health care.

And then there’s this, an antidote to Oscar hype (though I’m pleased about Jeff Bridges):

The middle way

I have been reading Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964), a book recommended to me by that mad Kayaker John Lane.

Marx defines the pastoral ideal as a middle way between the evils of the city (oversophistication) and the equal evils of wild nature (this might be seen as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forest). He traces the ideal back to Virgil’s Eclogues and begins his examination of how the pastoral plays out in America by looking at The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s American Fable.” It always comes as a surprise to me to realize that the mythologizing of the New World reaches as far back as Shakespeare, but, as Marx points out, the promotion of the New World paradise had begun this early not only because Europe needed hope but also because men like Sir Walter Raleigh needed to raise money for their expeditions.

For Englishmen of Raleigh’s ilk, this New World paradise was Virginia. The other story, that of Puritans braving wilderness for their religious ideals, must also be factored in, but it is not the only American story.

In his chapter “The Garden,” Marx examines what has come to be called Jeffersonian agrarianism. But Jefferson had precursors and one of them was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), de Crèvecoeur’s farmer finds in his Virginia farm the pastoral “oasis of rural pleasure” described by Virgil. But while Virgil’s shepherd lolled under a beech and played his pipes between Rome and the marshland, de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has

Eastward . . . Europe, encompassing l’ancien régime, an oppressive social order of “great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing.” Westward . . . the dark forest frontier where something “very singular” happens to Europeans. Their lives being “regulated by the wildness of the neighbourhood,” ther become “ferocious, gloomy and unsociable.” As he describes the frontiersmen, they are “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals” — native American Calibans. [p. 111]

I have been spending a lot of time with these Calibans in the West of Virginia (Kentucky) in the last year and de Crèvecoeur had a point. Frontier Kentucky was a brutal place but the brutality, it seems to me, came not from men who had gone native but from those who were determined to drive the natives out in pursuit of de Crèvecoeur’s ideal.

And yet, the ideal itself doesn’t seem so evil.

Though it may be that it is an aristocratic ideal. And always, even as far back as Virgil, one that is somehow exclusive. See this passage from Moses Austin’s journal:

I cannot omitt Noticeing the many Distress.d families I pass.d in the Wilderness nor can any thing be more distressing to a man of feeling than to see woman and Children in the Month of Decembr Travelling a Wilderness Through Ice and Snow passing large rivers and Creeks without Shoe or Stocking, and barely as maney raggs as covers their Nakedness, with out money or provisions except what the Wilderness affords. . . . can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they Know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky, . . . the Promis.d land . . . Milk and Honey. and when arriv.d at this Heaven in Idea what do they find? a goodly land I will allow but to them forbiden Land. exausted and worn down with distress and disappointment they are at last Oblig.d to become hewers of wood and Drawers of water.

In the end, even de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has to pull up stakes and light out for the territory, driven out by the hostilities of the American Revolution. de Crèvecoeur himself went home to France, where he got caught up in the French Revolution. He was a French aristocrat and he had his problems there, though he managed to survive with help from his American connections.

John Lane suggested that I read both Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, and though I am not very far into the Marx book, I think I can see why. Harrison begins Forests by saying “The story is full of enigmas and paradoxes.” And so it seems is the story of America.

Season’s greetings

Click on the image to read my message to you this long night season:

A is for Anne

On this date in 1637, Anne Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony “as being a woman not fit for our society,” her heresy that of being a woman who presumed to interpret scripture and to teach her interpretations.

The occasion of this anniversary seems an appropriate time to post a review I wrote but somehow never managed to get placed in a magazine.

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Penelope Scambly Schott. A Is For Anne. Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth. A Narrative Poem. Cincinnati: Turning Point, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-933456-68-3. 140 pages. $17.00

A Is for Anne is the story of a woman and a frontier, a struggle to graft a new society onto the twisted stock of the old, a confrontation with wilderness without and within. Penelope Schott has undertaken a verse biography in the form of titled vignettes, most written in the voice of the 17th century Puritan dissident, Anne Hutchison (1591-1643). Although each of these vignettes resolves, Schott conceives of this work as a single poem.

The narrative moves from Hutchinson’s hornbook primer days, home-schooled on trial transcripts by her dissident father, through her emigration to Massachusetts Bay Colony and her own trials for heresy, to her violent death at the hands of Native Americans when, at age 52, she was living as an outcast in New York state.

The book also includes a chronology of Hutchinson’s life, a prose denouement describing the fates of other characters, and a bibliography. All of this makes quite a bit of weight for a poetry book to carry, but I think Schott pulls it off. She has approached historical narrative in poetry in two previous collections, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman (University Press of Florida, 1999) and The Pest Maiden: A Story of Lobotomy (Turning Point, 2004).

The voice in A Is for Anne is lively, and the formal element of the verse muted. Schott is fond of consonance, internal rhyme, and inconsistent end rhyme.

But I at twenty-one
am old to marry. And plain

and much too tall. Of all
acceptable young men,

not one so tall and clean
as William Hutchinson
— Francis Marbury’s Last Will and Testament

Anne’s voice is often delightfully “saucy.” For example, in “I Like It Well” (p. 38), she discovers the joy of sex: “…It’s a wise God / devised this jointure of the flesh. / I applaud His gentle rod.”

Schott’s lines are short and she leaves space on the page, being fond of couplets and single-line stanzas, using indentation liberally. Hornbook formulae recur throughout: A is for Anne, J is the cross whereon Jesus died, Q is for Question, Z is a barred gate, G is for God Who has never failed me. Some of the poems seem to be taken verbatim from historical sources such as trial transcripts and journals. Other speakers include Hutchinson’s daughter, who was abducted by the Native Americans, and Anne Bradstreet, who came to Massachusetts four years earlier than Hutchinson.

The book was, of course, written with feminist intent. Anne Hutchinson’s was a nonconformist voice in a society established to enforce conformity. She was an outspoken woman and a midwife in a misogynist world. Hutchinson confronted woman hatred at all levels, from James I, who ascended the English throne when Hutchinson was 12,

Now we will get King James
He hates midwives and mystics in churches and kitchens
He says: The more Women, the more Witches.
—The Big News of 1603

to the Puritan ministers for whose spiritual leadership the Hutchinsons braved the new world,

What our Ministers Seem to Think

that the open mouth of a woman
is the womb of foul Error

or:

that the womb of a woman
is a vile mouth of the Devil

But Schott’s Anne Hutchinson is neither a modern woman nor one we would find particularly cuddly. Even Anne Bradstreet steered clear: “She frightens me, this pious scholar I once so greatly admired” (p. 75). Hutchinson found pleasure in the marriage bed but she found ecstasy in God, and she was willing to brave the wilderness, late in her life and with young children, rather than compromise. Schott has given us the thorny complexity of a saint.

__________

A is for Anne won the Oregon Book Award for poetry. It is a book well worth your attention.

Katrina + 4

It was four years ago today that Katrina struck New Orleans. I wish I had something significant to say about that.

The last 8 years have exhausted me with outrage, and while I do not want to relax now and let crimes be swept under the rug, I find our current government’s willingness to do just that highly demoralizing.

The pattern of my lifetime has been this: if your crime is high enough and heinous enough, you will not be held to account but rather rewarded with more power.

To quote Sharon Brogan: Outrage is tiring. Perhaps that’s the plan: exhaust us with lies.

Which Dave Bonta counters with a quote from Martial: Anger suits the rich as a sort of thrift— hatred’s cheaper than the meanest gift.

And I’ll quote one of my favorite Tom Waits lyrics, from “Get Behind the Mule”

Well the rampaging sons of the widow James
Jack the cutter and the pock marked kid
Had to stand naked at the bottom
Of the cross
And tell the good lord what they did
Tell the good lord what they did

Sometimes I wish I believed that to be true.

Deforestation

As I noted on July 25, the Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico considered irony to be the death of civilization, that is to say, cities. After the cities fell, the benighted forests would return. The final irony, says Robert Pogue Harrison in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, is that we were not to be that lucky.

Vico believed that nature and history followed two fundamentally different laws. Civilizations rise according to the “ideal eternal history” of institutional evolution. They eventually fall by virtue of a law of entropy which brings about disorder in the system as a whole. Once the cities fall, the forests return and reclaim the ground on which they were founded. For Vico nature was a closed and stable system of self-regeneration. He never suspected that civilization’s law of entropy could contaminate or compromise the domain of nature as a whole, nor was he in a position, historically speaking, to suspect such a thing.

Some two-and-a-half centuries later, we now know that what Vico says about the reforestation of the civic clearing is not only inaccurate but also ironic. While forests did indeed reclaim part of Rome’s civic space during the early Middle Ages, the same is by no means true for most of the illustrious ancient cities that had their origins in the once densely forested environment of the Mediterranean. It suffices to travel around Asia Minor today and visit such cities — Ephesus, Miletus, Aphrodisias, Priene, Pergamum, Side, Kaunos, Halikarnasos, etc. — to see how nakedly they lie under the open sky. There is little in the vicinity to hide the celestial auspices now. The lucus* long ago lost its limits, and from its wide-open eye one can see today not only the ruins of a great ancient city but also those of an even more ancient forest. One face, one race. So many deserts. [pp. 57-58]

Meanwhile, a correspondent has sent me a link to this story at CNN: Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods. It seems relevant, somehow, to Harrison’s point:

(CNN) — Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth’s climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia’s Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate.

It is perhaps another small irony that the battle that finally wrested the lands of Ohio and Kentucky from the indigenous nations was called the Battle of Fallen Timbers. (Though the timbers were felled by some species of natural disaster.) Today is the anniversary of that battle.

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*The lucus was a clearing, an “eye,” in the forest, which was “the original site of our theologies and cosmoloties, our physics and metaphysics . . .” [Harrison, p. 11].