That Day. This Day

Calhoun's Cannons For Sept 11, 2014

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

                                      Seamus Heaney

This day, the airwaves are flooded with September 11th remembrances -- all those endless tape loops of planes and buildings and dust and chaos.  And death.  So much death.

I don't plan on watching any of the specials.  Nothing new there.  Just heartache and sadness, the old wounds. On  the TV news, the twin towers will fall again and again, each rerun more awful than the other.  The Falling Man, that horrifying signature photograph of a man who jumped from the burning heights, will still remain halfway between sky and earth  -- Schrodinger's cat in a business suit, permanently existing and not existing.  There is no saving him.  The script cannot be rewritten, the film unspooled. He will fall forever.

A day after that day, while the TV news was still filled with scenes of unbearable ugliness, without really being conscious of what I was doing, I went out and bought a wine-barrel planter and some flowers.  It was rather silly, this thought that the horror in New York and Pennsylvania and Washington DC, could be countered in any way by some petunias.  But there it was.  The need to put something of beauty, something living, into the ground.

Locally, Mr. Tutt must have felt a similar urge because within hours of the onslaught his huge crane appeared on the corner of Los Osos Valley Road and South Bay Blvd, a giant American flag waving  on the top of the crane's arm.  And on the truck itself, as if by magic, local citizens, driven as I was to somehow reclaim something living, something renewing, had started putting vases of flowers on the truck-bed of this touching, home-grown memorial shrine. 

But no amount of flowers could begin to counter the darkness that was unleashed on that bright blue day.  The stain of an unnecessary war upon a region already cracking apart from barely contained sectarian violence, state-sanctioned torture, murder, destruction, death;  the absolute worst human nature has to offer.  Osama had opened the box and the insanity was unleashed. Celebrated.  Reveled in.  A world gone mad. 

And so it remains today. Lessons unlearned.  Hard to disagree with Seamus: The world as an abattoir. Countless dead, all that pain and loss, and for what?  A new skyscraper pierces the heavens where the ghost of the Twin Towers stands: Business as usual.  Osama bin Laden is gone, his cerebral dreams of a pristine, purified caliphate degenerated into a sadistic British thug done up as a badass rapping Ninja Warrior holding a bloody knife in one hand, a reporter's head in the other.   You-Tube Jihad.   

Muhammad himself would weep in shame.

So on this day, no re-runs for me, thank you.  The past is irredeemable.  And, anyway, we have far sadder things to focus on.  As I sit typing this, the radio news has announced the latest U.N. report that the world's CO2 numbers are now well past the no-return, tipping-point numbers. 

Which means on this day, the dire consequences of global warming are now unstoppable.  Locked, and loaded, they have targeted all of us.  Ignoring science and dismissing our future, we have flown our own planes into our own Twin Towers.

It is a supreme irony.  Now, like The Falling Man, we are all Schrodinger's Cat.  And no amount of petunias in wine-barrel planters or crane trucks with flags and flowers will save us and our children from what's coming.

      

A Simple Prayer

Calhouns Cannons for September 15, 2012

Dear God, creator of Heaven and Earth, please, enough already with the Fundamentalists.  We got too many of them.

 

And they’re all running amok.  Political fundies who want to rule instead of serve.  They love thy rules, but as for loving thy people, eh, not so much.  Pinch-faced, purse-lipped, they forgot to read the part about eye’s of camels and loaves and fishes and doing unto the least of thy children. Instead we get tax breaks for the rich and food-stamp cuts for the poor. 

And Christian fundies?  Don’t get me started.  Take prayer.  Didn’t you have something in your Book about making a big phony show of public prayer?  Well, I don’t think they were listening and it looks like these, thy good children, will never rest until loud, public prayers to Jesus are mandatory in every square inch of the public square.  At supermarket openings, in the halls of justice, in schoolrooms, in city council meetings, with crosses or thy commandments manifesting anywhere there’s a smidge of space on a public building or on small and tall hillocks in the wilderness, until the only place to escape the Jesus flak will be to flee into a Jewish temple or a Buddhist retreat. And even there, don’t be too sure. The cross carpenter’s are constantly at work.

And what’s with their obsession with women’s private parts, anyway?  Instead of political debates we now have politicians competing to see how many forced vaginal probes they can stick into their state laws.  This isn’t governance, it’s obsession.  And sick obsession at that.  I mean, since the history of the world, Lord, did you ever think you’d see the topic of girls holding an aspirin between their knees served up during a Republican primary campaign?  Fundamentalists and now apparently Republicans are now all about the aspirin and tight knees. That’s a bad, bad combination.   

And don’t get me started on Muslim fundies.  They’re the perfect of example of fundamentalism squared, fundamentalism to the nth degree: unquestioning and rule-riddled, bound-up, blinkered, death-loving, women-hating, sex-fearing, life-denying, sad,  furious, frightened souls that even Mohammed (Blessings and peace be upon him) and his successful businesswoman wife (You go, girl!) would gape at in utter disbelief.

And there, Lord, is the problem.  You created a complex, fluid, ever-changing, beautiful, profoundly unknowable world.  And then you created humans with an overwhelming need to create what they think are safe, secure square boxes out of a non-squared, inherently unstable, constantly changing “reality.”  The result is human-created fundamentalism of all kinds – big, hard-edged, square, stick-in-the-mud boxes in the middle of a flowing river.  Then we hide in the boxes and delude ourselves into thinking they will offer us permanence and safety.

But instead of safety, those boxes turn into prisons.  Or worse: platforms of death.

So, enough, O Lord.  Time for thee to calleth thy own back home to thy loving bosom.  And don’t worry.  They won’t mind.  They have spent centuries making up stories about their wished-for, longed-for, blessed fiery ends – Armageddon! Tribulation! Rapture!  Holy Jihad! Paradise and Virgins!  So, you’ll be doing them all a huge favor.

And then maybe the rest of us can settle down into a saner world, a world of softer edges, kinder boxes filled with imperfect, more forgiving bunglers – human beings who have enough give in their world-view to know that the magic of the world is ultimately unknowable.  So there is no need to force ourselves and others into life-limiting made-up boxes.

Instead, I’m sure God won’t mind if, from time to time, we take off our new too-tight dress shoes and dance on the grass.  Or lie in the meadow to listen to the bees, smell the sweet clover and give thanks for the warm sun pouring down on us from heaven.