The End of America, Book 5 (conclusion)

The End of America, Book 5, begins here.

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The End of America, Book 5 (conclusion)


What I value about America is B.B. King singing, “One day, baby...”

What I value about America is how, at Stonewall, blacks and whites, gays and lesbians and the transgendered fought back against police who intended to beat them.

What I value about America is that I’ll never be in a situation like that, but I’ll have to fight back in some other situation and who knows whether I’ll do as well.

What I value about America is when, on July 4th, the police arrest a drunken white man for shooting off fireworks on the sidewalk, he shouts, “I love my country I love my country,” as they handcuff him and pin him to the pavement.

What I value about America is the forgotten dead.

What I value about America is nunchucks.

What I value about America is that moment when it seems funny and that moment when it doesn’t.

What I value about America is laughing uncontrollably the moment I write, “it doesn’t seem funny.”

What I value about America is flirtation.

What I value about America is anything, anything, to keep me distracted so I don’t have to feel myself dying.

What I value about America is a new theory.

What I value about America is a smart young woman who spends a few years in the Philippines studying with revolutionaries after graduating from college and becomes more aware of the problems caused by globalism and poverty and devotes a number of years of her life to working for organizations which try to change U.S. political structures.

What I value about America is cynicism.

What I value about America is cross-platform computer programs.

What I value about America is the way I can feel “I’m making it through life” as if life is the work week and death is the weekend.

What I value about America is the cult of youth and disdain for the old and their wisdom, assuming that any of us at any age has any wisdom.

What I value about America is how the success of fast food has contributed to high obesity and depression.

What I value about America is Alaska.

What I value about America is desolated parts of its cities or hidden parts of its countryside where poor people, white or black or of many different cultures or backgrounds, live in decrepit apartments or on the street or in their cars or in a tin shack, hungry or out of work or both or carrying some small blunt weapon, and how the lives they live are still unknown in most of America.

What I value about America is runaway teenagers.

What I value at America is being told, at an afternoon barbecue, that “there are more wealthy people in China then there are middle class people in the U.S.”

What I value about America is getting the good stuff.

What I value about America is how many people, even in casual conversation, feel free to establish a point by quoting a study that nobody else has heard of and that may or may not exist.

What I value about America is how health insurance companies do everything they can to charge you the maximum and pay you as little as possible and kick you out if you actually get ill and not allow you on if you ever have been ill at any time in any way that anybody officially noticed.

What I value about America is that even though health insurance is a rip-off, it’s much worse not to have it.

What I value about America is the cheese sandwich, the tuna fish sandwich and the turkey sandwich.

What I value about America is companies who spy on employee e-mail.

What I value about America is the power of textbooks.

What I value about America is so many types of charts.

What I value about America is blurry boundaries.

What I value about America is one toke over the line.

What I value about America is the home credit crisis, with Bank of America and other corporations being sued by the San Diego city government for fraudulent loan practices, with people who have lost their money and their houses and who, in abandoning their houses, break windows and crack swimming pools and strip walls and pour concrete down toilets, and I value the mosquito problem that has developed in those neighborhoods because of the standing water problem created by the ruined plumbing, as if the aftermath of the collision between the naive and overwhelming desire for the American Dream Home and abusive corporate practices is an infestation of insects.
                                          
What I value about America is termite fumigation.

What I value about America is cliches about America that make Americans feel comfortable while at the same time saying nothing specific, and I value the way Americans often want to value America without valuing anything about America too specifically.

What I value about America is road trips. And given the cost of gas, road trips are more valuable than ever.

What I value about America is that “looking for a job has become a full-time job.”

What I value about America is office gossip.

What I value about America is the proliferation of credentials.

What I value about America is that “A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal.”

What I value about America is how often I’d rather be distracted than actually do the work I most want to do.

What I value about America is local brew pubs.

What I value about America is golf courses.

What I value about America is who’s lurking out in it, waiting for a chance.

What I value about America is shell games.

What I value about America is the skyrocketing price of gas and the way I can’t get out of my head the idea that even under these conditions, gas prices will go down in the few weeks before an election so that the American population will feel more optimistic, since when they feel more optimistic they’re more likely to vote Republican and oil corporations know that.

What I value about America is conspiracies and conspiracy theories, especially ones that suggest that the U.S. government is involved in bombing or poisoning the American people.

What I value about America is wondering about what sorts of Americans are more fascinated by John F. Kennedy or Lee Harvey Oswald.

What I value about America is that, at the Republican National Convention, every camera angle taken on the crowd seems to show precisely one African American.

What I value about America is lawn mowers you can drive.

What I value about America is how America wears me out just thinking about it.

What I value about America is that I could never run out of things to value about America.

What I value about America is institutional funding.

What I value about America is grammar manuals.

What I value about America is that even weather reports are designed to manipulate emotion.

What I value about America is dead baby jokes.

What I value about America is 11 a.m. check out.

What I value about America is corporate sponsorship.

What I value about America is Iggy Pop singing, in the 1970 song “No Fun,” “Maybe go out/ maybe stay home/ maybe call Mom/ on the telephone,” and that in America, boredom can be a function of privilege or a function of poverty but either way it empties the mind and soul a little at a time so that many people eventually come to the conclusion that it’s ridiculous to care too much about anything because nothing you care about matters to anybody.

What I value about America is isolation.

What I value about America is that whatever you think about America, someone in America or not in America might be dying, right now, because of what’s going on in America or what somebody thinks about America.

And I value, in America, the American poets who like to point out to other American poets that people in America or not in America are dying because of America, even though pointing that out doesn’t stop anyone from dying.

What I value about America is the struggle to wake up, to go to work, to try to help people or take people’s money or protect people or protect yourself from people.

What I value about America is not an abstraction but a question I face every one of these too little too big days, and that can be answered only by who and what I try to care about and who and what I don’t care about.

What I value about America is trying to figure out what matters and live a little with that every now and then, doing something about it or not doing something among all the other things I don’t want to do but have to.

What I value about America is that it’s easy, at any given moment, to forget about America, but that sooner or later I remember it again whether I want to or not.

What I value about America is the end of America and all the people who have imagined different ends for it, good or bad, and all the people who never want it to end, and I value the way that sooner or later, all of us say goodbye to America and to all the people who think about the end of America or who have never thought about it.

And I value about America that what matters most personally to me in the world, the people I’ve known and the animals I’ve known and all the others I haven’t known but who matter most anyway, and that it would be possible to have them all matter even if there was no America although I will never, even if it ends, be able to think about any of them without having the image of America stand in the way, whether the image is the Statue of Liberty’s raised hand or the Wounded Knee killing grounds or rows of corporate buildings standing greyly under Atlanta clouds or protestors along Pennsylvania Avenue with signs suggesting that America could still be as wonderful as it might have been but never has, and I value the disappointment of that dream’s loss and the need to find it somewhere other than America or to insist that even at this too late moment, America might still live up to it or even if not, might not so actively prevent it every time and everywhere it comes across it.

What I value about America is the whole sick surge of the desire for Heaven on Earth or the City on the Hill, and all the lies that have been told and the people killed in the name of that desire, and that wanting Heaven on Earth makes it unclear whether you want justice or to kill or just to be dead.

What I value about America is that, here in Carlsbad, only a few hundred yards from my home, I stand on the crumbling small cliffs above the ocean and watch the vanishing mythic sun as it leaves America, dropping below the edge of the ocean while nearby other people stand, some who come every day to watch the sun leave America, and I know how this moment is the most clichéd moment there is about California and the end of America, one that all sorts of people have mentioned, and I know that I’m never more than one of those people, and I know what else I think about although sometimes I don’t understand it but I never know what the others are thinking, the ones standing there, although of course I could guess and in some instants not be far wrong, their children or their car or the love they’ve always wanted but never had and are never going to, and we stand there awhile, watching the sun go and looking at each other while trying not to be seen doing it and wondering who else is here and what they might be thinking and whether all of us here are finally alone with our thoughts and with what’s left of the sun before it goes, just for today because it comes back tomorrow, probably anyway but who knows. And I value, in America, that once the sun is gone, people get in their cars and drive away or, like me, walk away because they live so close, all of us going back to lives that have nothing to do with each other but are unthinkable without each other, and a few yards back from the cliff I cross the Coast Highway at a crosswalk where the cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians although a few don’t until one makes the decision to slow and others do too, and once on the other side of the highway, walking on Acacia Street past the older, little beach houses and the newer beach mansions, almost always closed and empty, owned as real estate ventures by people who never live in them and don’t even rent them much, their huge windows showing me my own reflection and the Coast Highway behind me, I feel lost like the last man on earth and it’s pleasant and unbearable and suspicious, and feeling it and not knowing what to do except to write it I climb the stairs to my own darkened balcony, looking out at the low blue light above the leaf and twig choked pool that no one cleans or uses, and there’s enough twilight left in the shadows to allow me to find the lock on the door of the rented apartment where I live, who knows for how much longer.
                   
June 2008-June 2009

Nada Gordon and K. Lorraine Graham Burn Down Los Angeles: Sunday, January 2

Well, in fact they might just give a reading. But you never know, and whatever they do, this is going to be a fascinating, can't miss event.


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The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

NADA GORDON & K. LORRAINE GRAHAM

Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 7:30pm

The PRB@The Public School
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA

Doors open at 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm

$5 donation requested

Nada Gordon is the author of several poetry books: Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, and foriegnn bodie-- and an e-pistolary techno-romantic non-fiction novel, Swoon. Her new book, Scented Rushes, is just out from Roof books. A founding member of the Flarf Collective, she practices poetry, song, dance, dressmaking, and image manipulation as deep entertainment. She blogs at ululate.blogspot.com.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming, (Edge Books), recent work has appeared in Eleven Eleven, the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels.  She lives in Carlsbad, CA, with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at spooksbyme.org.

The End of America, Book 5 (continued)

The End of America, Book 5, begins here.

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(The End of America, Book 5, continued)


What I value about America is the way human overpopulation in southern California is helping crows become the dominant bird species.

What I value about America is news about sex slaves.

What I value about America is B-film shockers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

What I value about America is constant media coverage of the media.

What I value about America is Bomb Pops. Do they make those any more?

What I value about America is academic conference cash bars.

What I value about America is trivia game shows.

What I value about America is phrases like “Love It or Leave It.”

What I value about America is that while we may not have any more Mountain Men living in rustic shacks with their Indian Brides, we have plenty of guys in designer camouflage gear shooting prairie dogs with high-powered rifles.

What I value about America is tradition.

What I value about America is feuds and grudge matches.

I value, in America, professional wrestling and skateboarding and surfing and extreme sports and any and all instances of male bodies pitted against each other or the elements of nature, especially those that feature sponsors and endorsements. And I value instances of female bodies doing the same though they seem to get less sponsorship, which must mean that some people value them less but I’m not one of those people.

What I value about America is how much Americans are willing to pay to look at each other perform, especially in various degrees of undress.

What I value about America is fabric and upholstery freshener sprays.

What I value about America is the Conqueror Worm.

What I value about America is a couple on a balcony screaming at each other in the afternoon sun, their voices ragged with rage, the woman shouting repeatedly, “Get the fuck out of here.”

What I value about America is the certainty that what I value about America won’t be understood.

What I value about America is all sex all the time.

What I value about America is that some will call this poem elitist and some will call it too ironic and some will call it leftist and some will call it not leftist enough and some will say that what I value about America is based on the fact that I’m a white man and some will say that the poem is worthwhile and some will say that it’s not. And some will say that the poem fails to draw a clear distinction between moral and immoral action, or between useful or un-useful political action, and some will say its refusal to draw clear distinctions defines a necessary ground for moral or useful action that more cut and dried distinctions can never manage and some will say that it doesn’t.

And what I value about America is that neither me nor anybody else can say if writing this poem has any value, to anyone in America or anyone not in America but who might be interested in America, beyond whatever value it has to whoever might read it and do something with it and whatever value it had to me writing it.

What I value about America is that it’s two continents with many countries, not just one country, and if I don’t mention that, someone else will.

What I value about America is the sax solos of Lester Young and Charlie Parker and how Parker initially learned from Young but that, by 1946, when they played together at the Philharmonic, Parker was just beginning to be famous and Young, eleven years older, was battered by syphilis and alcoholism and his time in the U.S. military when he ended up in jail and was probably beaten, and how because of that in 1946 Parker could play more sharply than Young, who despite his growing frailty played an emotionally powerful if technically flawed solo before and after Parker’s two great choruses in “Lady Be Good,” and Parker’s fame increased because he had surpassed his own main idol and had become the most important original genius in jazz and yet only eight years later would be dead, actually dying before Young, who though already ill by the time Parker was rising to fame outlived him by four years.

What I value about America is CDs with endless alternate takes.

What I value about America is Internet cowards who leave hostile anonymous comments on other people’s blogs.

What I value about America is the firm conviction of many Americans that they, and they alone, are the last honest person in America.

What I value about America is people’s eagerness to take their clothes off.

What I value about America is summer. Especially summer weekends at the beach. And even more especially the nostalgia that gets attached to the idea of summer and how that nostalgia, when I was growing up, was put to work in television ads for lemonade.

What I value about America is making things into opposites that don’t have to be opposites.

What I value about America is everything people say about America and everything they don’t say. Which, you have to admit, gives me a lot to value.

What I value about America is the connection between mining strikes, the Carnegies, police and private security brutality, and the creation of the public relations industry.

What I value about America is the kind of life people have to live when they work at convenience stores and fast food restaurants.

What I value about America is its borders.

What I value about America is all the ways there are to make money—sometimes a lot, sometimes a little—off ideas about its borders.

And the way, in America, some people want people to come up from Mexico to work for them and some people don’t want people to come up from Mexico to work, and some people want the one while saying they want they other.

What I value about America is how it seems there’s a way to wring cash out of just about anything. Especially things that hurt other people.

What I value about America is con games and that it’s not clear how many of us are playing them.

What I value about America is that some people may think I’m writing this for the money.

What I value about America is career advancement.

What I value about America is that even people who don’t give a damn about freedom, justice or equality still have to say they do if they want to succeed in politics. But I also value the fact that having to talk about those concepts doesn’t mean you intend to do anything about them.

What I value about America is hypocrisy.

What I value about America is the way a mercenary organization like Blackwater can have a CEO who says he wants to get the company out of the security business as a cover for the organization’s future mercenary activities.

What I value about America is how difficult it is to know what goes on hidden behind the spin.

What I value about America are its many and constantly evolving types of stalkers: sexual stalkers, workplace stalkers, government stalkers, celebrity stalkers, Internet stalkers, even intellectual and poetry stalkers.

What I value about America is ordinary, hard-working Americans, the phrase “ordinary, hard-working Americans,” and the differences between the two.

What I value about America is that everybody in America is allowed to create any religion they want with any beliefs that they want and promote it as much as they can.

What I value about America is Hank in Alabama, Nate in Alaska, Barbara in Arizona, Katy and Matt in Arkansas, Dodie and Kevin in California, Noah in Colorado, Steven in Connecticut, a whole bunch of people in DC, Amanda in Delaware, Vernon in Florida, Laura in Georgia, Susan in Hawaii, Martin in Idaho, Lisa and Bill in Illinois, Joyelle and Johannes in Indiana, Cole in Iowa, Anne in Kansas, Dana in Kentucky, Bill in Louisiana, Carla and Ben in Maine, Tina in Maryland, Elisa in Massachusetts, Gina in Michigan, Elizabeth and Jeff in Minnesota, Tim in Mississippi, Jonathan in Missouri, Prageeta in Montana, Bill in Nebraska, Sherre in Nevada, no one I can think of at all in New Hampshire, Stephen in New Jersey, Joy and Bruce in New Mexico, Kristin in New York, Ken in North Carolina, no idea in North Dakota, Cathy in Ohio, Susan in Oklahoma, Allison and Jen in Oregon, Linh in Pennsylvania, Rosemarie in Rhode Island, David in South Carolina, no idea in South Dakota either, Amy in Tennessee, Hoa in Texas, Lance in Utah, Ruth in Vermont, Reb in Virginia, Nico in Washington, Tom in West Virginia, Roberto in Wisconsin, and Danielle in Wyoming

What I value about America is Marxists.

What I value about America is the gnawing emptiness I feel when trying to write about what I value about America, and I value that the way I’ve been managing to get the energy to write is to make myself annoyed and find people to be annoyed about or to fill myself with longing and find people to long for.

What I value about America is my lack of inner emotional resources.

What I value about America is how difficult it is to like and help other people, and how that difficulty for so many people can override their own better intentions.

What I value about America is how often I’ve been told the joke, “Stress is what results from not kicking the shit out of someone who heartily deserves it.”

What I value about America is bathroom homily plaques.

What I value about America is how it’s possible for people to be marginalized and privileged at the same time in different areas of their lives.

What I value about America is advice columns.

What I value about America is my need for love.

What I value about America is how talk about true love is often a cover for the fact that in order to be happy, people need a fulfilling web of human connections of which romantic love is really only one element.

What I value about America is happiness studies.

What I value about America is how friendship is not really an element of the American dream.

What I value about America is that hard work is considered more important than thoughtful or effective work.

What I value about America is that dividing life into work and leisure makes both unbearable.

What I value about America is working for the weekend.

What I value about America is how stunning it is to be so lonely even when other people know and love me.

What I value about America is all the ways to be inaccessible.

What I value about America is Detroit.

What I value about America is people who are sure they’re right.

What I value about America is all the really cool Canadian writers even though I know that Canada has a similar set of problems to any capitalist democracy as well as a few unique ones of its own.

What I value about America is Quebec: the city, the old town, the province, the small shore towns running up the St. Lawrence River, the wilderness and mountains and inland fjords and the small cold inland industrial towns like Chicoutimi, which I visited in summer when the day was sunny and humid and light sparkled off gas station walls.

What I value about America is Lac Ha Ha.

What I value about America is the way governmental oversight organizations, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Department of Health and Human Services, sometimes provide oversight and sometimes prevent it, requiring oversight of the oversight, which sometimes doesn’t work either.

What I value about America is sleeveless tees.

What I value about America is the exorbitant cost of women’s clothing.

What I value about America is that, after some years of the conservative training that became more common during the George Bush years, more and more young women in America say that having a baby is natural by which they mean that they shouldn’t use birth control, and so when they’re having sex they’re more likely to get pregnant casually, and sooner or later of course the man runs off, whether they were married or not makes no difference, and because of the idea that birth is a natural thing that happens to women, the women think it’s their obligation to raise the child or children on their own and they don’t even go to court trying to get paternity payments.

What I value about America is women who write well or play music well or paint well or work well in politics or community organizations and who are making decisions to do what they want with their lives, either with men or with other women or with whoever they want to be with, and I value the women who don’t know they have these options or who are prevented by their families or their upbringing from having these options or knowing they have them, and I value women who think they know what their options are when they don’t.

What I value about America is how many people think feminism should be over with when they don’t even know what it was or is.

What I value about America is when the fish people rise from alluvial mud.

What I value about America is what it must have been like to be the only Surrealist in Minnesota, and what it must be like, now, to be one of four or five of them.


(to be continued)

The End of America, Book 5 (continued)

(Pictured: The Statue of Liberty and the Encina Power Station, Carlsbad, CA. Separated at birth?)

The End of America, Book 5 begins here.

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End of America, Book 5 continued



What I value about America is that little spongy pad not much bigger than the tip of a finger which falls off a space craft, a failure costing several hundred million dollars and causing several experienced astronauts to spend hours replacing it because otherwise they’ll never return to earth.

And I value those friends who can’t keep a secret and when you’re involved romantically with somebody new always wants to tell that person about all the other people you were involved with.          

What I value about America is liking my friends and not liking other people’s friends, or else it’s not liking my friends and liking the friends of others.

What I value about America is spicy jalapenos.

What I value about America is salmonella warnings.

What I value about America is that the snake with one hundred heads jumps right out of the treasure chest.

What I value about America is pirate movies.

What I value about America is car dealerships.

And RV and SUV and motorcycle and pretty much every other kind of dealership.

What I value about America is my girlfriend.

I value photographs of Mom and Dad, Pappy and Grandma, Uncle Joe, and the dog.

I’m not sure about Uncle Joe though. What I value about America is a story that someone once told me about their Uncle Joe: “One time when we had a pool party of friends, neighbors, and relatives at my house. Joe disappeared for awhile with one of the neighborhood boys, and later that afternoon several people saw the boy run home crying. I barely noticed at the time and never thought about it again until years later when my brother, who had a long history of alcohol problems, drug abuse and difficulty holding jobs, called me drunk and crying and accused Joe of having molested him and several other neighborhood boys when they were children. He said my parents had known but refused to admit it. My brother never mentioned it again and since both my parents had died, I never found out what was true.”

What I value about America is family secrets.

I value, in America, the guy who says that says insurance salesmen have the kinds of values that make for great fathers and the guy who responds to him by saying his own father was an insurance salesman and a drunken lout who ruined his mother’s life.

And I value the 50th anniversary of Bob and Jeanette Smith, married in Kansas City, Missouri at the age of 18 and who still live just outside it, and who for their golden wedding party were greeted by their five living children (Steve, the sixth, had died in a car wreck), thirteen grandchildren and two great great grandchildren, as well as numerous friends, and who all weekend hugged heartily and laughed heartily and felt gratified and loved, and who looked forward to attending the wedding of their grandson Jeremy later that summer.

And I value the way, in America, when families like that appear in the news they’re always white families even though there are also Latino and black and Asian and Indian and Pacific Islander and Arab families who might be described a similar way.

What I value about America is how it seems impossible to include, even if only in a brief mention, all the different kinds of cultural backgrounds that people in America have.

What I value about America is how many Americans talk about the value of family while simultaneously seeing their families as little as possible, sometimes only on holidays during which a lot of depression, anxiety, and outrage is directed by Americans at other members of their families.

So when you ask me what I value about America, I’m going to have to say I value conflictedness.

What I value about America is warm July breezes off the ocean.

What I value about America is poets criticizing each other endlessly and harshly.

What I value about America is conventional standards of beauty, which make it easier to decide whether people are attractive before you even know them.

What I value about America is the cult of the baby.

What I value about America is the CPUSA, SWP, the AFL-CIO, the US American labor movement, and the SEIU (even their actions at the 2008 Labor Notes conference in Detroit), and all the work these movements have done to better the lives of working people and all the problems they’ve sometimes caused by supporting questionable positions in maneuvering for power and by disagreeing among themselves and with each other about how to better people’s lives and by not always being sure what the best ends might be.

What I value about America is exhaustion and feelings of emptiness.

What I value about America is starting over.

What I value about America is my right not to try.

What I value about America is that instant of knowing it’s not going to work, whatever it is, even though I’ve spent hours or days or weeks trying to make it work, but it’s not going to, it never is, and I’ve been fighting it for awhile and then the instant of knowing arrives and it’s devastating, like nothing is going to work ever again, and I’m right about that, nothing is going to work ever again, and I have to set it aside and not think about it but it’s all I can think about because what else is there to think about if nothing is going to work ever again, which it isn’t, yet eventually I forget about it and start up again at something else, whatever it is, that may work or may not work but probably won’t because nothing ever does, and so the instant of knowing is the instant of going on, the instant of forgetting and repeating and knowing what won’t work but then being unable later to remember even the most obvious and unavoidable facts.

What I value about America is the obvious and unavoidable facts and our ability to know them and forget them.

So don’t ask me what I value about America because I’m going to have to tell you and then we’ll both have to know.

What I value about America is all the flimsy appliances I use that are made in other countries under work conditions I never have to see or know anything about.

What I value about America is slang.

What I value about America is the right not to understand anything anyone is trying to say.

What I value about America is instructional films about car wrecks designed to scare teenagers into driving more carefully.

What I value about America is the death wish.

What I value about America is property and privacy.

What I value about America is slogans.

What I value about America is good people doing bad things.

What I value about America is perpetual war.

What I value about America is Justin from the trailer park, or Manuel from the barrio, or Reggie from the ‘hood, or Rochelle or Debbie from their apartments with their mothers, or Francisco the son of an insurance salesman or Elbert whose brothers work the docks, all of whom or any of whom sign up with the Marines because they need something or are looking for something or want to contribute something or protect something or are angry enough to take something out on someone, and who after a few weeks or months of training in “You Are Your Rifle” and how to do what they’re told and use a few pieces of electronic equipment and humiliate each other for stepping out of line or for having different cultural backgrounds or just for existing, find themselves on a street in Iraq where children wave to them or hide and adults come up, loud and friendly because they want to make sure that no one thinks they mean any harm to the young Americans with the weapons, and this goes on for awhile and it’s more than one hundred degrees every day and there’s nothing to do and they’ve been trained to fight, not just to sit and watch, and one day under the leadership of a man who has developed a nervous blink and who uses “fuck” and “raghead” in the same phrases over and over, they’re asked to clear a neighborhood where a few hidden people are firing rounds at them, and then Justin, or Manuel, or whichever one of them because it could be any, turns a corner and is startled by movement from behind and screams and shoots and more or less tears apart a woman who had thought she had heard something, one of her children maybe, and stepped out only half-intentionally into the alley, and then Elbert or Reggie, or whoever it is, knows instantly that he’s killed someone’s mother and that he, not anyone else, is the person who doesn’t belong here and never should have been here, and then several months later, exhausted and unable to sleep, he takes his rifle out one night and shoots himself, becoming one of the many suicide casualties of the war.

And what I value about America is the poets who argue that none of this should have happened, that Debbie or Francisco or Justin or Elbert or Rochelle should have known better or should have been able to go somewhere where people would have told them not to become Marines, that people have an ethical obligation to understand that you shouldn’t confuse future opportunities with signing up to murder people in distant parts of the world, and the poets, some of whom have no real potential soldiers to tell these things to, argue with each other about them or march in protests or learn the history of labor unions and social alternatives, and meanwhile future Justins and Manuels stop joining the armed forces so much, at least for the moment, because almost everyone has figured out by now that there’s no sense in going to Iraq, except of course for those so-called leaders who either still think that there’s something to be gained or, more likely, realize that they’d lose their jobs if they change their minds and they’d rather have someone else die than lose their jobs.

So if you value America like I do, you’re going to have to value a lot of people and ideas and events that are difficult to value, and you’re going to have to understand that saying you value something doesn’t mean you know how you value it, and how you value it is the question that you’re trying every day to answer.

What I value about America is the three baby hawks in the courtyard who have now gotten older and who play and fight with each other in the grass, picking up sticks in their talons as a way of learning to hunt.

(to be continued)

The End of America, Book 5

(opening excerpt; to be continued later)

What I value about America is mass produced black tee shirts with mythical lizard images.

What I value about America is meaningless choices between gas stations and the worthless distinction called “Super Unleaded.”

What I value about America is the waitress in a coffee shop who by my third day of vacation in Palm Springs already knows what my order is going to be, and also the high school boy who works there and who, when I come back for the second time in a day, says, skeptically, “You again?”

What I value about America is any cranky opinion you want to have.

What I value about America is the leaking pump in my toilet bowl.

What I value about America is my ability to comment on the rest of the world without ever having to go there.

What I value about America is that instant when two people in a car sail out over a cliff, look back at the ridge where the police have gathered to watch them die and silver-streaked rocks glint in the sun, and as the car heads towards the ocean below they think to themselves that America never seems so beautiful as when you say goodbye to it.

What I value about America is hard drive crashes.

What I value about America is giving directions.

What I value about America is the way I don’t have to know anyone well.

What I value about America smells like cheeseburgers.

What I value about America is staying with friends for a few days in a house on the Susquehanna River and driving into Front Royal in the evening for dinner because even in the Shenandoah Hills there’s one good Mexican restaurant.

What I value about America is the hawks born in the trees in the courtyard of my apartment complex who think of the apartment complex as home.

What I value about America is lunch meat.

What I value about America is the way freedom of speech means that every organization gets to decide for itself what it’s unwilling to listen to.

And the way that anybody who calls somebody else an asshole thinks they have a right to a response.

What I value about America is going to work in the morning.

What I value about America is the way my whole life I’ve been told what America is.

What I value about America is the constant feeling I have that I never want to talk about America again.

What I value about America is, of course, American cheese.

But only when the slices are individually wrapped. Otherwise they all just stick together.

What I value about America is a woman who sits in the back of the class, says nothing, turns in a decent paper then disappears for weeks, shows up again at last and sits silently for a few more weeks and turns in nothing, then finally e-mails the professor on the last day of class saying “I’ve done all the work, can I still turn it in?”

What I value about America is the way Americans are asked to consider everything in terms of value. And in terms of the value of America.

What I value about America is the struggle between environmental groups trying to clean up the ocean and a corporate push to develop desalination plants to pull drinkable water out of salt water.

What I value about America is that activists hand out condoms, and roadhouse bathrooms have condom machines.

What I value about America is pop music.

What I value about America is the Charleston, the bunny hop, and the mosh pit slam.

What I value about America is all the ways to waste time on the job.

What I value about America is the struggle between sincerity and insincerity.

I value the way, in America, claiming to be sincere can be a way of saying “I have the right not to know what I’m talking about” while claiming to be insincere can be a way of saying “I have a right to feel this has nothing to do with me.”

What I value about America is comfortable running socks.

What I value about America is immigrants working for sub-minimum wage.

What I value about America is tequila and beer specials beyond the Mexican border.

What I value about America is the vision of a future in which one day all of us, no matter our race, class, or cultural background, will be working retail.

What I value about America is the way football season, basketball season and baseball season overlap so that year round, most evenings of any week, I can watch a game that I like at just that moment when I’m too tired to think.

What I value about America is Friday night parties.

What I value about America is oral narratives about its factories.

What I value about America is the fish taco in San Diego and the chicken wing in Buffalo and barbecued spare ribs just outside Dallas.

What I value about America is low fat salad dressing.

What I value about America is the impossibility not only of giving any issue a fair hearing but even of agreeing what a fair hearing means.

What I value about America is the stranglehold of the two-party system.

What I value about America is the meaning of what “is” is.

What I value about America is that equal numbers of U.S. citizens get incensed over an out-of-wedlock blow job and a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.

What I value about America is greasing the palms.

What I value about America is men who live for the thrill of debate.

What I value about America is innuendo.

What I value about America is jazz, blues, folk, and rock and roll.

What I value about America is that the Duke and the Count and the King are musicians.

What I value about America is the bars and restaurants within a few blocks of the beach where people order tacos and nachos and pizza and beer and margaritas, even the bright yellow creamy Mango margaritas, and through the echos under the high ceilings they talk loudly about football teams and cars and boats and the price of gas and broken marriages and how much they want to get married again, and they show off tattoos and breast implants and wear tee-shirts that advertise their interests and laugh in a way that sounds half like they’re having fun and half desperate, then finally they step out to the parking lot full of oversized SUVs and drive drunk the few miles back to their vacation rentals.

So if you ask me about the end of America and what I value about America, you’ll have to listen to the answers.

(to be continued)

Kate Durbin reading at Agitprop in San Diego December 4

Agitprop Reading Series, in North Park, now has a blog where you can get information about past and future readings.

Kate Durbin, a fascinating young poet who has one of the most unique and stylish stage presences around these days, will be reading at Agitprop this Saturday night. Fans of the gurlesque should especially take note and come out. The evening also features an art opening celebrating a new website by Susy Bielak.

For more details, including how to sign up on the mailing list and receive future announcements directly, visit the Agitprop Reading Series Blog.

Agitprop Gallery
Saturday, December 4, Reading 7pm, Art Opening at 8pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              619.384.7989      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Importing Facebook to My Blog: Facebook Aphorisms 2010 (excerpts)

 

 

In my ongoing transition to a world of Multiple Platforms, a lot of my written social and aesthetic commentary this year has been in the form of aphorisms (and sometimes anti-aphorisms) potentially meant to become Facebook status updates, although many never do. I find myself writing more of them than I would ever put on Facebook as well as writing ones that, because of their content, I also wouldn’t put on Facebook.

So in the spirit, or perhaps anti-spirit, of putting blog posts up on Facebook, I’m now putting some of these Facebook status updates (some which never otherwise appeared) up on my blog.

And I might put up more of them later.



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Dear Humans: Why should animals be friendly to you?

There’s a fine line between being laid back, repressed, and depressed.

I have the habit, probably bad, of liking people who like me and thinking they must be smart and have good taste.

Too many people would like individuality for themselves while granting only sociology to anybody else.

Either art, literature, and music have profoundly changed your life or they haven’t. Where do you stand on that issue?

The unending conflict between social norms and exploratory ideas in art and literature.

It felt a bit like being decapitated.

Today’s peace and quiet is neither.

Anything could become a cliche, but only some things already are.

Given your interests, I suggest you start doing documentary and skip the poetry part.

Your radical selfishness is actually just the same old selfishness.

Too many poems try too hard to imitate poems.

Too many poems try too hard to be poems.

Your music sounds so relaxed and precise that it seems like anyone could do it, except no one else can.

The guilt and trepidation that always comes with being exhausted.

Slang phrases like “my truth” and “relatable” try to pretend that a person’s subjective impressions are objective conditions by which other things and people must inevitably be measured.

Another one of those model husband turns out to be brutal asshole problems.

Enforced optimism imposes a culture of wishful thinking.

What is your interpretation of the phrase “settle down”?

Creating an anthology called The Generalized Grump: The Art of Criticizing Everyone While Saying Nothing Much. No trouble at all finding 800 pages of that.

My authenticity comes from being neither from the good or the bad side of town.

I like the writing of many sad, desperate poets, but that doesn’t mean they should be made into heroes, which would be, of course, to romanticize.

Too many people want themselves to be complicated and the world to be simple.

In this country, where many people construct fantasies about how much the government controls them, many people also fantasize about how much power to change anything the government actually has.

Overheard on a plane: “They’re from San Diego, so they don’t know how cold San Diego is in May.”

Intriguing detail from Gettysburg: 1863 newspaper editorials from London, Chicago, and even nearby Harrisburg making fun of Lincoln's "silly little" address. Ah, reviewers (and I'm one of them).

There are degrees and differences in poetic disjunction. It’s not just “two things that don’t match.” It’s how they don’t match that counts.

Saying that “politics is stupid” is still part of politics, and part of what makes politics stupid.