I’m slow, but I
just caught onto the obvious, that extremist Islam is the new Communism, i.e.
the new enemy of the United States. Has there been one that I missed? After
all, there must be an enemy. We can’t just get along together. We can’t get
along with ourselves, much less together. Later on, when there’s nothing left,
we’ll head out looking for a sunset and hope for clouds for a nice one.
Speaking in the pleasant tense, we’ll have poetry. Politics will be a bad
memory. Who thought up the war called politics? Barack O’Bush is proudly,
sadly, moving the correlative along, from the halls of Congress to the valleys
and peaks of Afghanistan. I’m an innocent bystander, enjoying my judgments,
having breakfast in bed, a new shiny object on the tray making politics and
sunsets alike immaterial. It’s an old silver napkin ring, the name “Jorgen”
inscribed in it, with a napkin, surprisingly enough, folded and threaded
through it. I last saw this ring Christmas day 1980. That was my first Christmas
with Ingrid, and Jorgen (pron. “Yourn,” if you can), who died in 1976, was
Ingrid’s father. Ingrid had her own ring at dinner, inscribed from childhood.
Her mother’s and brother’s were in possession of her brother, living in New
York but having his own Christmas. So Ingrid’s friend Lenora, who had joined
us, had a perfectly nice ring, with no name on it. I ask Ingrid why she
produced Jorgen’s napkin ring now, lo these twenty-nine years later. She says
she saw it in a drawer, and it was “just a moment of inspiration.” I don’t
believe her exactly. Inspired maybe, but over what? Over something you can’t
ever have? Like a father? I had been writing a letter to my own dead father, a
man the universe knows I never met, wrestling over how I want to view him, or how
I want to be perceived as viewing him. But all things end as they begin,
with “Water from the Moon,” an old Javanese saying meaning “something you can’t
ever have.” Now that water has been discovered on the moon, or so it is said,
we or I anyway will need another piece of poetry to describe such a definitive
absence. Barack did meet his father, but something is dreadfully missing
in his presidency. I suspect it’s himself. One day I said over the phone to my
friend DM, we elected “Rainman.” And he said you mean someone who could count a
precise number of toothpicks? He meant Dustin Hoffman staring at a spill on the
floor of over two hundred that had fallen from a box, counting them accurately
in a matter of seconds. Well not toothpicks exactly. But yes—a supernatural
aptitude. In Barack’s case, for writing and delivering speeches. But now that
he has introduced “evil” and “just wars” into the script to justify American
aggression abroad in protecting us from extremists hiding in some hills, the
spell he cast is gone, and he sounds like whirring propellers. I want him and
all his fellow warring politicians to realize that we’re not stupid: terrorists
are everywhere, even or especially in our own government and corporations, not
just in the Afghan canyons where we’re sending 30,000 troops to satisfy one
general’s fantasy of victory, or hundreds more orders for drones. Drones are
simply incredible. Their pilots sit in living rooms in such places as Kentucky
or Idaho and push buttons that kill people. Naturally these drones can ferret
out precisely who sent those nineteen suicide bombers to bring down our Trade
Towers. Is there a rule of law any more? Is there a sign of intelligent life
on earth? If there is, the LOCATOR surely could find it. He is my new Rainman.
He used to be on every Saturday night on the WE channel for a number of half
hour episodes. Then he was replaced by the Golden Girls, and now he
appears every Tuesday. His episodes are works of art, a form of poetry. They
are also somewhat trashy because they conclude without exception, predictably
and shamelessly, by appealing to our lachrymal glands. Troy Dunn, the Locator
himself, works out of a high-rise in Fort Myers Florida with a team in a
citadel of computers and telephones headed up by his mother. Incoming calls and
videos are processed to determine the next most promising seeker to link up
with a lost relative. Troy takes recommendations and makes final decisions.
Once a seeker is identified, he heads off in his cool corporate jet to
interview them. If he clears their motives, and they appeal to him, he gets on
the phone to “Mama” (who calls him “Buddy” sometimes) in Fort Myers to give her
what information he gleaned in order to help the team locate the seekee. It may
be little to practically nothing, like only a first name and a birth date. I
think he could find my father in the great beyond. On just one case, Troy might
crisscross the country several times making sure emotional contingencies are
aligned before arranging a meeting place. His supernatural aptitude is
warmth! Would I vote for him for president? You
bet! Would he sacrifice his principles to save his life?
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Not in a million.
Would he lay it down for a socialized health care system? Absolutely. Does he
care about people in other words? Caring is what propels him! If there’s one
other man on the vast nothingness of TV who comes close, it has to be Bill
Moyers. Moyers was interviewing two fine progressive journalists recently, and
one of them was saying not to be too hard on Obama because he inherited a
really difficult situation. Then he went on to inhale the collective gasp on the
left: “I think one of the challenges of the president is to transform reality
rather than work within its parameters…[We] invested so much in this remarkable
figure…and we read our own hopes into him. We saw him as a potentially great
president. We saw this as a potentially transformative moment…where he could’ve
chosen to be the kind of president Roosevelt was.” The Roosevelt connection always
warms me. I’ve been bloviating over jobs, “Where’s the new WPA program?”
Roosevelt was our last supernaturally appropriate president. But not even these
Moyers journalists would think of linking Roosevelt’s enterprising
compassionate populist policies with his polio affliction, not out loud at
least. The weakness of his condition alone spells out—well, female. He needed
help standing up, and the news media had an unspoken pact never to reveal him
in his wheelchair. So is Barack too healthy? No I think we just misread him.
He’s too Rainman. He wants to impress us with slam-dunk hoops of writing. And
all we want right now is something crushingly sensible. Kennst du das Land wo
die Zitronen bluhn.* Ingrid gives me German and napkin rings. Danish is far too
difficult. It’s something else I can’t ever have. The rings, I must expatiate a
bit, account for something far more drastically missing in my life than the old
water from the moon proverb. That first Christmas in 1980, playing Jorgen, was
my symbolic introduction to European tradition. I had Christmases in America
with my mother and grandmother until I was eleven. We had no napkin rings, but
the Santa days were plenty traditional. After that, until 1980, all of them are
a blur. They’re blurry and forgettable. If I couldn’t have them, they held no
interest for me. I had long not believed in the Christian anthropomorphic
premise of this holiday anyway. And had begun privately celebrating the real
thing—the Solstice! I’m a Solstice worshipper. Oh I wasn’t completely immune to
the sentimental memory of early Christmases. And sometimes one would come
along. I remember one or two, here or there. A favorite was sitting outside in
Connecticut at a long table with an extended family that had adopted me. I was
way too old to be adopted. But I never thought so myself. I love adoption. The
Locator deals for the most part in cases of adoption. He started his business,
he announces before every episode, after helping his mother twenty years ago to
locate her biological parents. I’m pretty sure Barack was adopted by Michelle
and her mother. What kind of father did Michelle have? I don’t know. I’m an
innocent bystander, enjoying my judgments, seeking connections and poetry. When
I mentioned to my physical therapist one day that I’d been looking at Top
Gun, she glanced at me a bit uncomprehendingly, “You like Top Gun?”
She knows me fairly well by now. I said a bit sheepishly, “Well it has this
father thing in it.” The excitement of guys zooming around at high speeds in
the sky trying to kill each other aside, Cruise is out to prove himself against
a classified record indicting his top gun father, who bought it on one of his
missions. Since his father’s record was classified, Cruise has to find out what
the indictment was before he can stop flying dangerously irresponsibly, and
become an even better top gun than his father. But the movie has this great
line in it, spoken by the boss, the top top gun: “Although we’re not at war, we
must always act as if we are.” Barack’s “great white father” (McChrystal et al)
is not going to cut it for him in the end. Somewhere I read that he comes on
strong when he’s behind. If that’s true, we could stop holding our breath.
Future has history. And his is ours. He has only to claim his background, a unique
one in the annals of presidents. So strikingly different, it can seem coded and
inaccessible to the population. The locator could help out. A message for
Ingrid just came in from her Danish cousin Carsten, thanking her for her
birthday greeting, asking how we are—not how the rest of America is!J
Here’s a toast of silver rings to you, Carsten. You knew Jorgen. You must have
your own from childhood. We miss you and everyone. I’m slow, but counting my
steps every day. “Look Ma, I’m walking” must have a Danish equivalent. Think of
us driving out to the end of our landscape, looking for some ultimate poetry.
Wherever you are, clouds make nice sunsets.
Supernally yours, Jill
*By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre," Book III Chapter 1.
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