The Breaking Time

We will not walk in fear

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords thanking supporters after her first primary win, 2006

Earlier today, a gunman shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head in Tucson. She remains in critical condition, and at least five others are dead. The suspected gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, is in custody.

Giffords, a Democrat, was a supporter of causes ranging from gun rights to healthcare reform. Her backing of the latter saw her face death threats and vandalism.

She did not hide. When shot, she was holding a "Congress on Your Corner" event to aid her constituents with nuts-and-bolts questions. In last year's election, she fended off a Tea Party-backed challenge, including Sarah Palin targeting her district specifically in militant terms that are now the target of a backlash.

Despite rampant speculation, there is simply very little evidence right now concerning Loughner's motivations. Some information indicates he may simply be stark-raving mad, without affiliation to any recognizable cause. That does not make the events any less tragic.

I appreciate people trying to draw much-needed attention to the real-world consequences of violent rhetoric, but pre-fact conclusions leapt to in the wake of violent tragedy are often dead-wrong.

Instead, hope for recovery and justice. As more information comes out, judge and act accordingly.

Giffords refused to bow to fear. So press for every member of Congress to follow her example: call for them to hold a Congress on Your Corner event as soon as possible. Show that constituents and representatives alike refuse to let violent lunatics run our lives.

Everyone has the right to see their elected representative in peace. Bullets can't kill that. Fear can.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate their responsibility."
-Edward R. Murrow

Poems for Friday: That the Science of Cartography is Limited

Famine road in County Galway, Ireland

It is interesting to see other points of view, not simply for all the usual reasons, but because they end up placing common sights within an entirely new context. That fact has been on my mind this week for a number of reasons, contrasted with navigating between cities using directions spat out from a computer.

Looking out my window, I wonder what has happened beneath, what is forgotten in the piles of structured stones now breathing slowly in the half-snow. There are some views that will never be mapped. Eavan Boland has the heart of the matter here:

-and not simply by the fact that this shading of 
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, 
the gloom of cypresses 
is what I wish to prove. 

When you and I were first in love we drove 
to the borders of Connacht 
and entered a wood there. 

Look down you said: this was once a famine road. 

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass 
rough-cast stone had 
disappeared into as you told me 
in the second winter of their ordeal, in 

1847, when the crop had failed twice, 
Relief Committees gave 
the starving Irish such roads to build. 

Where they died, there the road ended 
and ends still and when I take down 
the map of this island, it is never so 
I can say here is 
the masterful, the apt rendering of 

the spherical as flat, nor 
an ingenious design which persuades a curve 
into a plane, 
but to tell myself again that 

the line which says woodland and cries hunger 
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, 
and finds no horizon 

will not be there.

It's Not There

There seems to be more focus on 9/11 this anniversary than in those past. For what it's worth, I think Ted Koppel has it exactly right. I wrote this piece a few years ago, after a trip to Ground Zero. It says all I have to say about the tragedy and its aftermath.

I first visited New York in 1997. I went as a gangly kid, smack dab in the middle of high school. It was a United Methodist Church trip. I was awkward, with that seething discomfort in one's own skin that's the hallmark of any adolescence. Many of the things I have become now were just seeds then, waiting to come into form.

While there, we visited the World Trade Center. I remember the elevator ride first. Long. On one side of me were two well dressed, burly Hasidic gentlemen, laughing. To the other a group of Asian businessmen, speaking in their own language. What they thought of the young group of wide-eyed Southern teenagers behind them, I do not know.

The view from the top was magnificent. It was before dusk, the lights had just started to come on. Spread out almost into infinity, the buildings were so vast and beautiful. I could see everything: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building -- everything.

It hit me right then: this was a miracle. Here spread before me were thousands upon thousands of peoples, ambitions, cultures, thoughts, foods, languages. All of it. And it worked.

It was chaotic, dirty and sprawling, occasionally even violent, but it worked. Despite all the critiques of humanity's venal nature all this managed to exist without rending itself apart.

Waves of immigrants, political turmoil, a civil war and the weight of three centuries had pushed onto it. New York was still standing there, strong as ever.

When I returned, it wasn't what was there that struck me, it was what wasn't. Just a space. Even if I had been an alien visitor, I still would have known that something just wasn't right, that there should be something there instead of a massive, gaping hole and a few ragged shards of twisted metal.

It was too quiet. On a personal level, it is still hard for me to comprehend. The old view I remembered so fondly, the one that made me realize how breathtakingly huge the world was, is gone. Those Hasidic gentlemen beside me in the elevator may well be ash by now. The steel I trod on? Torn into nothing.

The world has heard about 9/11 nearly non-stop for the last few years. The event still leaves marks; pulls up old, raw emotions. I knew what was coming when I decided the visit Ground Zero and it's still hard for me to take in.

All the memories are tinged with a sadness, not just for the event itself, but for what has come after. How such an tragedy, almost so vast and terrible it defies comprehension, has become something invoked by fat cowards to justify torture, lies, greed and fanaticism.

In a better world, we would have the leaders we deserve. In a better world Osama bin Laden's head would be on a pike and George W. Bush would have been a washed-up political failure. In a better world the nation that miraculously came to be would have taken an awful tragedy as a reason to rise from the ashes, not a fear to cower from. In a better world we would not have forgotten who our true enemies were.

But we live in this one. Bin Laden still lives and we have thrown fuel on his fires instead of snuffing them out. George W. Bush was President for eight long years. Some days it seems that the same country that survived through so much is intent on undoing everything it has gained.

But New York still survives and so can we. What was torn down can be rebuilt, and one human can undo what another has done. There is a new age and a new generation in the workings.

The miracle I witnessed from atop the World Trade Center has gone nowhere and it waits to spring forth again, today or tomorrow.

Curious Search: Identity

Oh my, it's been far, far too long since I've done one of these image-binges-on-a-theme posts. So it's fitting that we start back with an excellent topic: identity. Below are a series of selected images that come up when that one, simple word's plugged into a search engine. 

Ironically enough, very few of these images had designer, artist or photographer identified. If you know anything about any of those I leave unlabeled, please let me know and I'll add 'em accordingly.

Enjoy!

A person prepares for gender reassignment surgery

Identity Cards, by Amili Gelbman

Madame Calivera's Corporate Identity Program, by Todd Schorr

Satoshi Kan, an amazing artist who tragically died today at 47, was no stranger to grappling with identity in a number of terrifying, beautiful and, in the end, utterly humane works. I'll close with the memorable opening of one of the best, Paranoia Agent.

Poems for Friday: Conversation

Ai, portrait by Bill Hayward

I should have done this far, far earlier. The great poet Ai, known for her starkly raw verse, died on March 20. Below is "Conversation." Read it. 

Could anyone alive survive it? The miracle is that, in a way, we do. Every day.

We smile at each other


and I lean back against the wicker couch.


How does it feel to be dead? I say.


You touch my knees with your blue fingers.


And when you open your mouth,


a ball of yellow light falls to the floor


and burns a hole through it.


Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.


Did you ever, you start,

wear a certain kind of silk dress


and just by accident,


so inconsequential you barely notice it,


your fingers graze that dress


and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,


you see it too


and you realize how that image


is simply the extension of another image,


that your own life


is a chain of words


that one day will snap.


Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,


and beginning to rise heavenward


in their confirmation dresses,


like white helium balloons,


the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,


and above all that,


that's where I'm floating,


and that's what it's like


only ten times clearer,


ten times more horrible.


Could anyone alive survive it?

A President's Day Offering

It is on this day that we pause to honor the founder of our country with this classic paean. Tremble, for truly he was more god than man.

Human Freedoms: the other side of Norman Rockwell

Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi). 1965

Today marks the 116th anniversary of Norman Rockwell's birth. Born in New York, Rockwell became best known for his idealized images of small-town life. He was shunned by the art world in his time and that impression has largely continued today. A commercial illustrator for the vast majority of his life, for many Rockwell is associated only with saccharine sweetness and stagnant tradition.

This is wrong.

Rockwell in many ways personified the spirit of the New Deal liberal; a populism that viewed the rank-and-file of American society not as bellowing nationalists or backwards hicks, but as citizens with the potential to reshape the world through honesty and common sense.

While a brilliant draughtsman, Rockwell cranked out plenty of dreck in his time but, especially later in life, turned his hand to powerfully indicting injustice in his own country.

The Problem We All Live With, 1964. Larger version here

The result were stunning masterpieces like the two paintings depicted above, and Rockwell's standing as the artist of the common American helped gain the civil rights movement valuable mainstream acceptance at a time when its call for basic human rights remained controversial.

Of course, Rockwell saw no contradiction between his Four Freedoms series and turning his brush to fight racism. It says something about how times have changed that those who find Rockwell's civil rights works in the present day, myself included, are at first surprised. Like Stephen Vincent Benet, Rockwell's reputation has glossed over his finest, most wrenching creations. 

We are surprised because Rockwell's style of liberal populism, to go by the mainstream narrative, seems a contradiction. Narrow-minded jingoism has, often falsely, become associated with rural America by just about all sides of the political debate, whether they endorse it as the true face of the country or turn up their noses dismissively. Both reactions, for different reasons, are disgusting.

So Rockwell's most powerful work seems now the gospels of a particularly faded variety of American Dream. And it was a dream, that much is clear, but it had its accomplishments. It is hard not to regret the day it lifted, or veered into nightmare.

One final piece of Rockwell's sticks with me. It is his 1961 representation of the Golden Rule, including his usual farmer figures standing alongside an array of races and religions. Some of the faces are hardened, old with poverty or work, staring ahead as if to remind us that Rockwell carefully dubbed his freedoms human, not American, and those who violate them do so at their own risk.

A farewell to the People's Historian

My tribute to the recently departed Howard Zinn is up at Coilhouse:

Activist academics are a dime a dozen, but what set Zinn far above most was the balance of a deep commitment to his ideals with both humility and perspective. He refused to replace old dogma with new and resisted the easy mythologizing of the oppressed. While he did not pretend that A People’s History (or any other) was objective, he meticulously researched his facts and readily admitted mistakes and oversights.

The result was a history that could be cheered and argued with, but never ignored.

Zinn did not rest on his laurels. A People’s History went through five new versions, as he constantly incorporated new events and discoveries into the narrative. Tireless in his activism, he fought against new wars and injustices that he saw as part of an ancient pattern. In his final interview, he spoke eloquently of the nigh-total ignorance of America’s long history of involvement in Haiti, and how it shapes our public discourse today.

In 2005, he returned to Spelman College, from whence he’d been expelled in the ’60s for his rabble-rousing, and delivered a passionate speech calling on the next generation to resist the easy urge of apathy. There is one line in particular that stands out, a sharp point on his decades-long struggle to make us more aware of the tales that shape our lives:

“The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies.”

Also, this. A thousand times.

Haiti

A body lies amid rubble in Port-au-Prince after the Jan. 12 earthquake. David Morel, Getty Images. From the Boston Globe's heart-wrenching series

An earthquake in Haiti has killed 50,000 people and left many times that fighting for survival. Relief organizations are scrambling to deal with the damage, and donations are needed. There a thousand problems in the world now, but this one is particularly horrendous. Here are six ways you can help, some as simple as a text message and $10 on your next phone bill. 

Others have, and will, write at more length about this disaster and its aftermath far better than I. I don't have much to say, except the following.

As with all media blazes, this will die down. As the weeks roll on, we will cease our linking and pleading. There will be back-patting about the social media moment, some of it justified, much of it stupid. 

We will go back to conversing about the future, about shiny new devices, possible societies and using technology to better enable well-fed voters to yell at their elected representatives about potholes.

But for much of the planet, we may as well be talking about unicorns and starships. Massive swaths of humanity remain in desperate subjugation, one bad day away from total ruin. Any future worth a damn has to change that.

Poems for Friday: Things that might have been

Photo by Catherine Jamieson

When I was a sophomore in high school, I discovered the poetic fragments of Sappho, white hot shards that summed up lust and yearning so perfectly. I searched for more, only to find that time and Roman literary fashion led to the slow annihilation of the vast majority of her work.

There will only ever be one Sappho; it was heartbreaking to discover that most of her insights were lost, probably forever.

It is a hard lesson: that we can throw everything into something only for it to vanish. People die, and mature human beings accept this. The thought of our works — everything from nations to paintings — crumbling is far more painful. One of the only comparable pains is thinking of what might have been done, if at some point the wind had gone a different direction, or an argument ended a different way.

Yet we do not live in those worlds, but in this one. 

Jorge Luis Borges was a remarkable poet, as well as a brilliant narrative writer. He understood the vicissitudes of time and chance far better than most. Here is his ode to everything lost and never-made in our personal histories.

I think about things that might have been and never were.

The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write.

The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed

As soon as he corrected the Comedy's last verse.

History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross.

History without Helen's face.

Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon.

Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South.

The love we never shared.

The vast empire the Vikings declined to found.

The globe without the wheel, or without the rose.

John Donne's judgment of Shakespeare.

The Unicorn's other horn.

The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once.

The child I never had.