– one reaction to the first Gulf War, 1991

This is not so much a report about an involvement in a protest as it is an observation and evaluation of one. My hope is that by now reason and calm have broken out between America and Iraq instead of war. And yet I fear we’re watching bloody images of men and women on both sides slaughtering each other over the price of a barrel of oil.

“I count thirty-four,” he said. “Not what we were hoping for.” He was tall, middle-aged, with red-blonde hair. He wore blue jeans, a heavy beige sweater and dirty running shoes. I didn’t get his name but he feared the military buildup in the Middle East even more than he feared the one in Vietnam. He thought it would make peaceful countries around the world enemies and divide opinion in the States as much, if not more, than had Vietnam. “All U.S. college and university affiliations in Rome, other institutions and friends, friends of friends…were told about this. It may take another terrible war to get them thinking again about what’s important.”

The reports from US and European news media were mostly negative. Neither Bush nor Hussein seemed willing to back down from the threats and counter threats they’d been making as the chief representatives of their countries, and war seemed a certainty on January 15th, the first day United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 authorizes the use of force. Word was being passed along to Americans that if you’re planning to return to the States then you should do it before the UN deadline. American institutions in Italy had already been threatened with attacks in the event of a war.

This protest by Americans living in Rome was held in conjunction with others in Paris, London, Bonn and Geneva. It took place across the street from the American Embassy on Monday, January 7, beginning at noon and ending at two p.m. It was warm, the sun bright; perfect weather. The protestors walked in a circle on the sidewalk on Via Veneto. Factoring in the noise from the putt putt engines of Fiats and Nissans and motorini, it was just within shouting distance of the tall, black iron embassy gates, where carabinieri and polizia protected it from intrusion. Some of the protestors held posters with the expected slogans: NO MORE VIETNAMS; SAY NO WAR IN THE GULF. They broke into a chant now and then: “No blood for oil” was the most popular.

The protest’s organizer was Susan L, an energetic and cheerful woman, who is also a medical doctor. She seemed undisturbed by the small gathering. She distributed leaflets, spoke to the few newspaper and television reporters, and talked to any interested passersby about the importance of showing that opinion in the States and around the world was growing against war.

She handed a leaflet to me. “This outlines our position,” she said. I read: “We condemn as much as anyone the Iraqi ‘annexation’ of Kuwait, and we are no supporters of Saddam Hussein. We support the economic sanctions… We are particularly alarmed at the suddenness with which the military buildup was undertaken… For these reasons we oppose the massive military presence in Kuwait…” And finally, these demands for the President and Congress:

1. Conduct no military offensive, regardless of the January 15th deadline, and make sure our forces are not provoked into drastic unilateral action.
2. Continue to support those sanctions voted by the United Nations that fall short of military action.
3. NEGOTIATE! Seek a diplomatic solution to the current crises that can be supported by our allies. It’s not too late!

“Why are you here?” I asked a short man with brown hair. He wore a gray parka and held out a copy of the leaflet to the cameras, photographers and those walking past. “I don’t think thousands of young people should be killed because two men are having a conflict of egos,” he said.

“That’s been a fact throughout history,” the woman behind him in line said. She was well-dressed, mostly in black, and carried a poster above her head: DON’T ATTACK IRAQ.

A few questions formed I didn’t bother to ask. Why have there always been leaders and a great many people to follow them whenever and wherever they’re asked to go, even if they’re poor and twenty and it’s to their deaths? Why is it leaders, no matter how good or evil, are recorded extensively in the history we read and are taught while the many who build the civilizations they’re given credit for are referred to in only a few lines? The reason, it seemed in that moment, was that the many had succumbed to the egos and ambitions of a few instead of following what was in their own hearts and thoughts.

History has been dissected and analyzed by some of the best minds of each generation, but any lessons or insights that might be drawn from that knowledge seem to go unheeded during confrontations such as the one between America and Iraq. It seemed that if there was one lesson that could be learned it was that individuals and individual events have a will and destiny of their own beyond history’s influence. This confrontation, and the individuals involved in it, were no different. How it’s resolved will depend on those in positions to say yes and no for all. Most I spoke with on this day felt both sides would say yes to war.

It’s inevitable humans will continue to confront and combat one another for power, wealth and pleasure. It seems less likely that they’ll unite to prevent such occurrences.

No one from the embassy came out to acknowledged the protesters, and that seemed expected. At the iron gate carabinieri held their fingers on the triggers of automatic weapons. In the Saudi Arabian desert over 600,000 troops and thousands of tons of hardware, two-thirds of both provided by America, were assembled for the purposes of winning a contest of nerves, or, more likely, a war. Across the street from the American Embassy in Rome thirty-four protestors, who didn’t think the troops or the hardware should be there for the reasons they were, walked in a tight, uneven circle.

When it was over Ms. L told the group, now circled around her, “There’s another march on the 12^th. I hope to see you there.”

(1991)

One of my improvisational responses to the Words of the Day I receive daily from Dictionary.com (psephology) is forthcoming in The Satirist.

Two of my improvisational responses to the Words of the Day I receive daily from Dictionary.com (diktat and frisson) are forthcoming in Vol. 3 of The Transnational.

– excerpt from fiction published in Overland, “False Documents” issue, 2018

SUMMARY REPORT TO THE COMMITTEE BY THE PROCUREMENT GROUP OF THE LOST VOICES OF FRESH KILLS LANDFILL AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2082

APPEAL FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDING TO CONTINUE MANUSCRIPT ACQUISITION

Example C:

UNTITLED FRAGMENT #4

– handwritten, three ring binder, many pages badly damaged and unreadable, date unknown

Keywords: politics, mystery, travel, fantastic tales, agents, unnamed women, kinky sex, state secrets, undercover

Excerpt:

“She was messing with me. Leading me around like a toy on wheels being pulled by a string. Did I know the difference between communism and capitalism? Of course I knew many and I was about to educate her, but I never got the chance. Under capitalism man exploits man, she said, under communism it’s the reverse. That’s when I thought you put her up to it, Peter. It was your pathetic humor. What were the possibilities? She had to know me or know about me, live around here. We shared the same airspace. I knew that much. Or, and this crossed my mind, it was the wife of one of our old college pals who despised our politics and was working for the Bureau, or maybe someone gone mad with the latest release of the alumni directory.”

“That’s potentially a long list,” I interjected.

Gordon said, “I can shorten it to about five.”

Here Martin’s improbable story screeched to a halt and he didn’t appear disappointed. Nothing he’d told us explained his four month disappearance. Why did I expect it would? Without another word he pushed his chair back and headed toward the bathrooms. He must have needed some time to decide where to take this absurdity next.

The empty mug was warm in my hands. The cigarette smoke had glazed over Gordon’s eyes so they appeared to be tiny skating rinks. I refilled my mug.

“You know the name of the game he’s playing.” Gordon asked the question I knew was building in him. “It’s not charades.”

I met his eyes and read my own interpretation on his face. “He’s having a nervous breakdown. You know he’s always been on the verge of one.”

“Do we ask the names of his prescriptions and the doctors signing them over to him?” Gordon said.

I had the fleeting thought Martin was going to do something horrible to himself in the bathroom. He’d put the blame on us in a note he’d tape to the mirror, citing years of verbal abuse. I didn’t say anything to Gordon. And just as well. Martin was back in no time, “Refreshed,” he said. More surprises were on the way. Another pitcher was delivered to our table in response to Gordon nodding his head. It’s arrival didn’t interrupt Martin, already back into it.

“I know this isn’t easy to believe,” he said. He put a hand on the manila envelope he’d set on the table as if a bible he was swearing an oath on.

“Certain circumstances aren’t possible.” I said. “Such as free love. Honesty from you.”

“Months ago I thought that too,” Martin said. “There are situations, realities…” He went out searching for something he couldn’t find and put a stop to it by taking a gulp of beer.

“You can tell me until you’re blue that this building and the Empire State are the same size or that certain dictators were good men with honorable intentions, but you’ll never convince me,” Gordon said.

“People once thought the Earth was the center of the universe,” Martin said. “I may not have been able to convince you back then it wasn’t, but I think I could now.”

“You’re going to tell us you can make people come back from the dead?” I said.

“Very perceptive, and no longer impossible you know?” Martin said.

Gordon and I threw our heads back and rolled our eyes.

“It’s against reason,” Gordon said. “We’re organisms with natural life spans. With hearts and brains that stop functioning when we die.”

“What do you think you’ll sound like by the end of the next millennium?” Martin said.

“So everyone living and born from now on will occupy the planet forever?” Gordon said. A finger circled the rim of his mug.

“They’re all going to retire to Brooklyn too,” I said. But my attempt to lighten the mood failed.

(1994)

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character… a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will.

No, that’s not an anti-National Endowment for the Arts rant out of Newsmax or the RNC. Those words are from page one of Henry Miller’s “prolonged insult” also known as Tropic of Cancer, a novel centered on Miller’s desire to portray his exuberance for living even if life for him at the time included poverty and failure. Considered shocking when it was published in Paris in 1934, few people today would be appalled by anything in it. But back then it had to be smuggled through U.S. Customs with Jane Eyre covers and started a thirty-year censorship debate that ended with a Supreme Court decision that inadvertently cleared Lenny Bruce of obscenity charges as well.

I didn’t hear of Miller until I was out of college. For good reason I suppose. His stream of consciousness narrations really may be a gob of spit in the face of Art. “Literary” was a word and concept that disgusted him. It wasn’t until I was freed from undergraduate classrooms that I was introduced to Tropic of Cancer and subsequently all of Miller’s other books.

At the time I shared a cabin on a lake in Northwood, New Hampshire. A postcard setting, which will forever mean isolated to me. I was there in retreat from the inner-city grid and grind I’d lived in up until then. That was popular to do in those days. To want to be close to nature. To breathe clean air and hike mountain trails and handsaw cords of wood to feed into the stove that kept the cabin warm. To live deliberately as was Thoreau’s intention at Walden Pond. “To front only the essential facts of life,” he wrote in Walden.

Back to my introduction to Tropic of Cancer, a book as far away literally and atmospherically from Walden and self-sufficient living as could be.

I was in Hamden, Connecticut visiting my cabin mate David’s family. By our third day there we had shared enough of our weed with his four siblings to run our stash dangerously low. With the intention of refreshing our supplies, David drove us across town to the address of a guy he had known since he was a high school junior and a steady supply of pot was needed to get through years of public schooling that were too easy for him. Still in the business, the guy had good stuff at a decent price and that remained the basis of their relationship.

Recently, David reminded me his name was Jeff. Jeff had long hair, a beard and seemed humored by most everything, the metallic snap-pop of a can of beer, a bag of Oreo cookies spilling out on a table. His apartment was a funky hippie pad that might now be seen as a set piece in a stage play about the anti-war movement, campus protests, tuning in, turning on and dropping out. It had the standard props: framed Matisse prints on the walls, a bronze Buddha on the coffee table, head shop items that included bongs and hash pipes, exotic plants hanging in the windows.

We were talking about books when Jeff turned away and went to his bookshelf.

“Take it, take this up there and read it, you’re going to like it,” he said.

I accepted the worn paperback he had two copies of. It was Tropic of Cancer. Our next transaction was costlier, the exchange of our cash for his weed.

In a 1938 review, Edmund Wilson wrote that Tropic of Cancer was historically important. Thirty years later Kate Millett bashed its male chauvinism. I wasn’t aware of any of that. I didn’t know what the book was about or what to expect. At the cabin I was reading everything I could buy for cheap at yard sales and secondhand shops. Everything I’d missed out on during my mostly classical Jesuit university education: revisionist histories, biographies, classic American novels, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Lessing, Pynchon, Solzhenitsyn. I assumed Tropic of Cancer would be an interesting addition to those and that was the reason David’s longtime supplier gave it to me.

Back in Northwood, under the spell of that most excellent weed, I sat on the rocker by the wood stove and read those 300 pages in an afternoon. In fact, being stoned might be the best way to do that for the first time. Whatever. It worked for me. I was intrigued and humored enough by the vulgar and rather depraved escapades of the narrator, a close acquaintance of the author I was sure, that I reread it a few days after that. In that quiet, rural isolation Miller was just the right antidote. So much so I couldn’t keep from imagining myself in Paris living hand to mouth and writing something wildly irreverent of my own.

Over those next months I went back to Tropic of Cancer so often I could quote from it. In fact, I can still bring up a few passages, including this one: “The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”

Freed from any editorial restraints of the 1930s (its working title was Crazy Cock) Tropic of Cancer was an assault on literary and moral convention and that’s what I was drawn to. It was a prolonged middle finger to authority, prudes, killjoys, decorum, greed, the established order. God was insufficient. War was the only true obscenity. The world was a cancer eating itself away. Our heroes had killed themselves or were killing themselves.

I was entertained enough to set my other reading aside and go out and find Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, Nexus, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Black Spring. As I was recalling that time in Northwood for other reasons, I found myself thinking how Miller’s books had made the move with me from there to Cambridge but didn’t continue to New York a decade later. As much as I’d relished his wild prose flights and the disreputable underworld his narrators knew so well, away from the cabin and pot smoking their shock and awe wore off. My exuberance for his exuberance fizzled like a punctured balloon. Groveling for meals, fucking prostitutes, and a disregard for the life and death matters going on around him those years stopped appealing to me as entertainment even as the freedom he expressed himself with continued to attract.

I saw how his “ordinary” characters were, as Orwell stated in his essay Inside the Whale, “neither the manual worker nor the suburban householder, but the derelict, the declassé, the adventurer, the American intellectual without roots and without money.” They were neither for nor against. They were neutrals. Which in my thinking at the time was another true obscenity.

Recently, when I considered rereading Tropic of Cancer to find out if that opinion might have changed, it was a thought that didn’t get very far. I’m pretty sure my reaction to it would be hostile. And I’m content to keep the agreeable memories I have about reading it back then in Northwood just as they are.

(2000)

My non-fiction piece “Hacker” appears in bioStories.