Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  Very politely, Casey asked us if we wouldn’t mind shooting on a different range so they could practice with their short-barreled MP5s, little 9mm submachine guns preferred by many Special Ops units and SWAT teams. The MP5 is one of the most widely used machine guns in the world. (The logo of the infamous West German terrorist Red Army Faction featured an MP5 superimposed over a red star.)

  “If you’re still here in an hour,” Casey said, “come on back and you can try our stuff.” We did. They demonstrated some techniques and ran us through their training routine. It was, as we used to say, a gas. There was virtually no recoil, but the muzzle climb took some getting used to. When any gun goes off, the muzzle wants to go up. When you shoot one shot at a time, the muzzle rises and then gravity brings it down. When the rounds are coming out at a rate of nine hundred per minute, the muzzle wants to keep climbing. You have to be aware and forcibly hold it on target.

  I appreciated sharing the range with Casey and his crew because, in a small way, it made me feel we were comrades. Coming of age in the sixties inevitably meant harbouring a deep (and, I think, well-founded) mistrust of authority in all its manifestations, including law enforcement. Later I “mellowed” and told myself that cops are just humans with a particular job to do, though I didn’t find myself hanging out socially in their company. When I took up shooting I met a lot of them at matches, which was new, but we didn’t often travel in the same circles (except at security checkpoints).

  At the range, though, we were equals, and we treated each other with respect despite our disparate sociopolitical backgrounds. In this way shooting became an important part of my education. I was the leftie “rock star” with earrings and punkish hair, seen on the news supporting gay-marriage rights and Central American refugees. They, and much of the shooting community in general, were inclined toward law and order, crew cuts, and valorously manly self-images. We’d razz each other about whatever might have been in the news that day, but we ended up genuinely liking each other, which was a welcome novelty for me. The bridge was guns, but it wouldn’t have had to be. In most cases, all it takes to engage in open-minded interaction is willingness combined with an opportunity. Previously, I’d scan the political scene and wonder, “Where are all the honourable conservatives? There must be some, right? Holding conservative views doesn’t make you a rat.” But all I saw on TV were rats in suits. So where are they? I found them at the gun club.

  The most significant match I participated in was IPSC’s North American Practical Shooting Championships, in 1995, when I finished more or less in the middle of some three hundred shooters. That may not sound like much, but I was up against U.S. Border Patrol agents and people of that calibre. One shooter on my squad was a policeman from Brazil whose job was to chase down and kill kidnappers. I felt pretty good about my performance.

  People who don’t like the idea of using guns for sport should still want their police forces to take up practical shooting. The Border Patrol officers regularly train in pistol combat because they often confront virtual armies that are well equipped and well funded with drug money. But few municipal cops train this way, though it’s the repetitive training that allows an officer to employ a fast and accurate response to armed attackers and, more important, to avoid mistakes.

  Policemen and -women have a hard and largely thankless job to do. Most of them try their damnedest to do it well. Their frequent lack of practical shooting experience, though, is evident on the streets. In the early nineties, while I was in Los Angeles recording, a woman commandeered a city bus and took its passengers hostage. She stopped the bus in the middle of a major intersection and released the passengers after killing one of them, then sat there for hours with a .357 revolver and plenty of time. Local TV covered it as if it were a golf tournament, with “live on the scene” reporters appearing periodically to update us on the rather static event, voices lowered as if they were afraid of being overheard. The LAPD tried to wait her out for a while, but as rush hour neared they wanted their intersection back, so they boarded the bus and blasted away with their MP5s. (A cynic might say they were waiting until they could appear live on the five o’clock news.) They fired at least thirty-five rounds, three of which were recovered from the woman, now deceased. No one else was hit, but where did all those other bullets go?

  In August 2012, passersby in Manhattan didn’t fare as well. A man named Jeffrey Johnson killed a former colleague, Steven Ercolino, in front of the Empire State Building, shooting him five times. Two of New York’s finest confronted Johnson, and when he pointed a gun at them from just a few feet away, the cops unleashed a fusillade, killing Johnson and wounding nine bystanders. (The New York Times website offers a sixteen-second security-camera video of the shooting, preceded by a thirty-second ad for Mercedes Benz or fancy watches. What’s interesting is that Johnson had the drop on the officers and could have easily killed them both, but he never fired a shot. Suicide by cop, one assumes.) Examples of police ineptitude, even malfeasance, when it comes to guns are not hard to find.

  As a kid I was fascinated with weapons, but as a young adult I bore the same knee-jerk disdain for firearms that all my friends and peers did. I was against handguns. Whatever the fashionable political rhetoric was, I just bought it, because I didn’t think about it. In a way I had ignored my own instincts, my curiosity. It sparked back to life in Nicaragua when the soldier tossed me his Kalashnikov, but histoplasmosis is really what put the gun in my hand.

  My newfound enjoyment of firearms caused some consternation among my friends. Guns are inherently evil. What about the carnage? What about your leftist cred? I’m no fan of so-called special-interest lobby groups such as the National Rifle Association, which seems to me to be little more than a shill for gun manufacturers, but I do believe that responsible citizens of a democracy should enjoy the right to bear arms.

  It’s important to examine the context in which guns appear. Some countries, such as the United States, have both high rates of gun ownership and high rates of gun killings. And let’s bear in mind that most of the statistics on this issue include deaths by suicide, which I think distort the numbers and are a different issue, tragic as they are. At this writing the United States leads all nations with a gun ownership rate of 88.8 firearms per 100 residents: almost one per person. The United States also suffers a high rate of annual gun deaths, 10.20 per 100,000 residents, according to U.N. statistics. In contrast, Canada has 30.8 guns per 100 residents (the thirteenth-highest rate in the world), and we annually lose 2.13 people per 100,000 to gun violence. Whereas that’s 2.13 per 100,000 too many, Canada has a lot of guns but a much lower rate of gun deaths than the States.

  The analogy deepens. Look at poor Jamaica: 47.44 firearm-related deaths per 100,000, but only 8.1 firearms per 100 people. Conversely, Germany has 30.3 guns per 100 people, much like Canada, but an annual gun death rate of 1.10.

  Guns are inherently dangerous, and the consequences of their misuse are devastating. Like many inventions (the TV remote, the Internet, the shovel), guns were invented to do a certain job, in this case to take life from a distance. Should we regulate guns because they are dangerous? Absolutely. Should guns be banned because they are dangerous? I don’t think so. By that line of thinking we should ban the internal combustion engine, which kills far more people in developed countries than guns do (though the United States is trying hard to close the gap), and that’s just from automobile collisions. Deaths from cars’ environmental effects are much higher, as illustrated by a 2010 Lancet study showing that more than two million people die from car pollution every year in China. Coal-fired power plants kill millions of people worldwide every year and saturate the globe with heavy metals such as mercury. (Shooting a gun also puts mercury into the air, but in insignificant quantities, unless you’re spending a lot of time in a poorly ventilated indoor range.)

  In his 2002 film Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore may have provided a partial explanation for the otherwise inexplicable gun violence in the
United States: a nation saturated in officially sanctioned violence is likely to see the unofficial violence trickle down proportionally into the general population. He argues that the United States was established through violence: the genocidal treatment of Native Americans and the theft of their lands, the importation and brutalizing of slaves (including many Native Americans), and two wars with the British. Next came Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, militarily backed legal fictions intended to justify stealing land and riches. The American Civil War appears to have stimulated the invention of the repeating rifle, among other weapons (although the Austrian army was using repeating air rifles as early as 1795), and established a milestone for carnage in modern warfare. Since then the United States has pursued a pattern of seemingly ceaseless wars around the globe, which continues to this day and has chalked up a death toll into the tens of millions.

  The United States is hardly alone in finding warfare expedient, even attractive. Pretty much every country in the Western Hemisphere except Canada has a similar history. The capacity for war appears to have been with us bipeds since our poorly remembered inception.

  There was good reason for the founders of the United States to create the Second Amendment to their Constitution. They understood that a complacent, poorly prepared population is an invitation to tyranny. In the context of the time in which it was written, the Second Amendment was appropriate as a defense against totalitarianism and the threat of foreign takeover. The founders could not have foreseen the coming pressure-cooker society that regularly defecates enraged and chewed-up bits of itself, bitter and embattled souls who feel they have to vent their spleen on the rest of us.

  These days you can’t outgun the authorities; they will always possess more and heavier weapons. Now it’s about information. An armed response to government oppression is not effective, except as an attention-getter. The thing that scares totalitarians most is people knowing the truth; otherwise, they wouldn’t go to such lengths to keep it from us. Even so, in a democracy, the police and military should not be the only ones who are allowed to bear arms. A best-case scenario might be if nobody were armed. But if one sector of society can have guns, then all should be able to.

  In large part, however, the gun-control debate, as fraught with urgency and passion as it is, is a distraction from broader issues such as social justice or its absence, exploitation, and the degradation of the environment. These problems are complicated by the presence of weapons, and that needs to be addressed, but gun control is hardly the biggest challenge we face.

  For me, taking up shooting was timely, and it circumstantially filled a void: I got into the sport around the same time that I fell into a writing dry spell. The way I have always produced songs is to write down lyric ideas as they come to me. But in mid-1988 I noticed that I was waiting fruitlessly for words to arrive. I found myself in a creative limbo that lasted until the end of 1989. For eighteen months, from the time we recorded Big Circumstance in July and August 1988, no good ideas went down on paper—my longest hiatus since I started writing songs in 1965. I wrote in my notebook from time to time, but nothing useful came to me. A year went by. No songs appeared.

  I started to wonder: Is it all over? Is this the end of my life in music? Some things simply run their course and peter out, and maybe the muse had just up and left. My notes from that time say, “Tired of music biz. What do I want? Outdoors: kayak, horses, open space, mountain, prairie, simplicity. I want time. Too stressed out.” I wondered: Should I report for reeducation, learn to do something else? I thought about art school. I always liked the idea of creating graphic novels. I decided that before I did anything too drastic, I would declare myself on sabbatical, “take a little time for myself.” On the grounds that I might just be suffering from burnout, I thought I should step away from things for a bit and see what happened. For me, 1990 would be the year of detachment.

  With the turning dial of the year beginning to creep toward Christmas, and the creative dry spell remaining solidly in place, I began to feel that, for the first time, I should spend the holiday season away from extended family. For most of my life, especially as a kid, Christmas was a point in the year that I always looked forward to, a pivotal event around which the rest of the year moved. But from the early eighties on, with the divorce, the joy of the season was eroded by the annual need to negotiate where, with whom, and for how long Jenny would spend the holiday. The stress of that grind put a damper on the season. This feeling decreased with time, and as she grew older Jenny had her own ideas on the issue, but Christmas never quite recovered.

  Earlier in 1989 I had started dating a woman named Jennifer Morton. I was already well into riding lessons, and it turned out that Jennifer had some experience with horses. Something put it in my head that she and Jenny and I should escape to Arizona, to a dude ranch, and see what Christmas in the desert was like.

  My two Jenns and I spent a week and a half at Tanque Verde Ranch near Tucson, at the edge of Saguaro National Park—a dramatic setting comprising nearly a hundred thousand acres of wild, rugged, spiky upper Sonoran desert. The quality of the air, the light, the almost ceaseless wind, the towering saguaro cacti, and the quiet were spectacular. It was the perfect linchpin on which to hang a year of regrouping. Every day we rode horses into the ranch’s adjacent wildlands. Here was a landscape that asked nothing of me but to appreciate it, which I did, soaking it in. The broad sky, the vistas rendered razor sharp by the dryness of the air, the smell of horse sweat, and the creak of saddle leather were a balm to the soul. I went out after dark with a handheld night vision scope. Didn’t see a damn thing—only the pale greenish shapes of Jenn and Jenn, out among the ghosts of looming saguaros, mesquite, creosote bush, coachwhip, soaptree yucca, and jumping cholla, vegetation all heavily defended with spikes, thorns, bristles, and hooks of every size and shape. This is why cowboys wear chaps.

  I was thankful to be there, and I found myself mentioning that to God. In that moment my perspective on the world and how I fit in it began to recover from the battering I’d given it over the preceding few years. Be in it but not of it, or, as it says in Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” These are tall orders, for we are of it. We were made that way, devised and constructed to be in it and of it. If you’re not in your body, how are you going to hear the whisper of the Divine, the visceral nudge we call a hunch? How else but through the deepest feelings can we convince our literal and fashion-bound minds to receive these boundless truths?

  To get a bit of relief from the harsh beauty, we forayed into Tucson. Daughter Jenn got her ears pierced, and I had a new hole punched in my left ear, to go with the two in the right. In the afternoon glare a man approached us out of the black shade of an alley. He had an old army musette bag over one shoulder, from which he produced a .357 Magnum revolver.

  “Want to buy it?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t know where it’s been.”

  That night, elbows braced, we stomped around the mosh pit while a punk band performed in a club whose stage was an open loading dock. Freight trains passed, groaning and roaring, five feet behind the drummer. If it had been any other music it would have been a disaster, but the sounds and imagery went together well. The single song I can recall now had only one line, repeated over and over: “fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.”

  A few days after arriving in Arizona, on Christmas Eve 1989, in the driest place I had ever been, my dry spell came to an end. I wrote a song. Somehow just knowing there was nowhere I had to be had cleared the psychic landscape sufficiently for words to return. “Child of the Wind” is the song of a nomad, a magpie spirit enamored of shiny simple things, inclined, and fated, to keep moving: toward discovery, toward understanding, toward God, and definitely toward the next gig. The song celebrates landscape and power, nature and human connections, but most of all it honours the myster
y.

  The next morning, Christmas, I awoke to a beautiful surprise: snow. Big, fat flakes the size of silver dollars floated downward across the landscape, settling on bushes and rocks for just a moment before vanishing into nothing, not even forming drops of moisture. I woke up my gals. We walked to breakfast with snow coating our hats. For an hour or two the snow kept coming. Here was a gift, a White Light—of human connection, of the earth, of God—arcing at us from every frozen facet.

  In the year that followed, I wrote more than a dozen songs, most of them showing up on my 1991 album Nothing but a Burning Light, the first of two records I made with legendary producer T Bone Burnett. Again, in a weirdly decadal fashion, my life was about to drastically change, driven by a singular constant: heavenly interference with my poor judgment.

  I love the pounding of hooves

  I love engines that roar

  I love the wild music of waves on the shore

  And the spiral perfection of a hawk when it soars

  Love my sweet woman down to the core

  There’s roads and there’s roads

  And they call, can’t you hear it?

  Roads of the earth

  And roads of the spirit

  The best roads of all

  Are the ones that aren’t certain

  One of those is where you’ll find me

  Till they drop the big curtain

  Hear the wind moan

  In the bright diamond sky

  These mountains are waiting

  Brown-green and dry

  I’m too old for the term