Rumours of Glory
Page 45
As I stare into the flames
filled up with feelings I can’t name
Images of life appear —
regret and anger, love and fear
Dark things drift across the screen
of mind behind whose veil are seen
love’s ferocious eyes, and clear
the words come flying to my ear
“Go on—put it in your heart —
Put it in your heart”
Terrible deeds done in the name
of tunnel vision and fear of change
surely are expressions of
a soul that’s turned its back on love
All the sirens all the tongues
The song of air in every lung
Heaven’s perfect alchemy
put me with you and you with me
Come on—put that in your heart
Come on, put it in your heart
“PUT IT IN YOUR HEART,” 2001
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/92.
The biggest surprise of 9/11 is not that it happened. The New World Order has not been universally welcomed. Given the untold millions of lives around the planet wiped out, with apparent indifference, by the United States in the span of a single lifetime, the bigger surprise is that something like it didn’t happen sooner.
There can be no justification for the indiscriminate destruction of innocent lives that was the World Trade Center attack, but the nation that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” has perpetrated thousands of 9/11s across the globe. There’s bound to be some blowback. The attackers were Arab, but they could have been from any number of places, including but not limited to Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Egypt, Chad, Congo, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Iran, Afghanistan, or Iraq. They could have been generationally oppressed and disproportionately incarcerated African American youth from Harlem or Watts or Cabrini-Green, or a few of the millions of Americans who live in poverty, their children experiencing hunger every day while their not-very-distant neighbours quaff $10,000 French wines on million-dollar verandas overlooking the East River. (A 2012 study by New York University economist Edward N. Wolff found that 20 percent of Americans own 89 percent of the country’s wealth, a perfect recipe for conflagration, as demonstrated time and again throughout history.) Yet it turned out that most of the hijackers, as well as their purported “leader,” Osama bin Laden, were from Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally and one of the world’s wealthiest countries. What is that? Wasn’t this family on hand-holding terms with then president George W. Bush? Something fishy was going on in Texas.
What’s also unsurprising, however deplorable, is the way that the U.S. government is now significantly turning on its own people. Not just dissenters, but everyone, through comprehensive and unprecedented surveillance systems as disclosed by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden in May 2013. (Snowden also revealed similar hanky-panky on the part of the agency’s British and Canadian equivalents.)
And in June 2013, the New York Times reported that, in addition to spying on its own people and purported enemies, “the N.S.A. has bugged European Union offices in Washington and Brussels and, with its British counterpart, has tapped the Continent’s major fibre-optic communications cables.” This comprehensive spying operation, even of its closest geopolitical allies—which attorney Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, called an “illegal program . . . [a] huge, massive surveillance system of every single person in the world, conceivably”—should have been predictable (and, in fact, has been predicted by any number of speculative fiction writers, from the fifties onward) because a state lurching toward totalitarianism, as the United States might be, will seek to accrue to itself ever greater power in all forms, and information is power.
Unless U.S. policy makers take action to prevent the consecration of a permanent surveillance state, such accrual will likely lead to an ever-tighter lockdown on the basic rights fought for and long enjoyed by Americans. At that point, the enviers of America will have succeeded. As Snowden himself said, the Obama administration, even more than that of George W. Bush, has laid the foundation for the implementation of “turnkey tyranny.” History is now.
Contributing to the sense of being stuck in a horrid dream was the image of President Bush, on 9/11, sitting in a Florida classroom full of little kids, reading a children’s story called The Pet Goat for a full seven minutes after being informed by his chief of staff, Andrew Card, that “a second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” (Bush was told about the first plane while en route to the school.) You’d expect the commander-in-chief to leap up and scramble the fighter jets or at least get on the phone . . . to someone. Maybe he didn’t want to alarm the children.
According to a 2004 investigation by the New York Times, Bush “was told more than a month before the attacks of September 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes.” The Times reported that intelligence operatives delivered this news during a “secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001.” He was on vacation.
If he didn’t know what to do in the first minutes after the attack, or during the month when he had advance warning of it, Bush seemed to have it figured out shortly thereafter: “The search is under way,” he said, “for those who were behind these evil acts. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them. Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.” He should have added “or anyone who resembles them,” because whereas Bush never really did accomplish this goal, the United States did indeed hunt down plenty of people and punish them, mostly hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis—some estimates put the toll at more than one million souls—who died during the U.S. invasion of 2003 and subsequent occupation.
Even at the time, it seemed clear that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and that the Bush charges of “weapons of mass destruction” and “harboring terrorists” were fabricated. That Iraq had a lot of oil, and that Vice President Dick Cheney had a conspicuous fondness for the stuff and for the riches it brought his companies and cronies, were threads largely sidestepped by the mainstream media. The connections were obvious enough to millions of other people across the globe, though, including many independent media sources, which reported on them in real time. (According to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, KBR, a subsidiary of Cheney’s company Halliburton, was the “single greatest beneficiary of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” earning a tidy $32 billion from 2001 through 2009. Scahill writes that in May 2009, April Stephenson, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, “testified that KBR was linked to ‘the vast majority’ of war-zone fraud cases and a majority of the $13 billion in ‘questioned’ or ‘unsupported’ costs.” In 2007 Halliburton sold off KBR, which then won another contract, this one worth $50 billion, for military support services in the Middle East.)
America’s assault on the Middle East was strikingly biblical. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the lifeblood of Eden, ran red with the blood of innocents. Mesopotamia was set on fire as two-thousand-pound bombs hammered at the birthplace of civilized law. Eleven thousand cluster bombs shredded the children of Abraham. Depleted uranium (and possibly white phosphorus) munitions caused birth defects among people whose forebears discovered aspects of modern medicine more than one thousand years before Christ. In 2013, Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail told Democracy Now, “We are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear bombs were dropped on at the end of World War II.” For most Iraqis, the “liberation” of their country brought only pa
in.
What we saw in Iraq was the world’s most muscular military unleashed by avaricious plutocrats, hiding behind the schizophrenic proclamations of a cartoon president. “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful,” said Bush. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” (That trenchant observation was delivered during the 2004 presidential signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill.) He squinted and grinned and gaffed, hunted down “evildoers . . . bad guys” he’d seen on the “internets,” and unleashed terror from his command post at the golf course. The Bush cabal wielded Texas-style justice all the way to Cayman Islands tax shelters. Hi-yo, Silver. “Bring ’em on.” The world wept.
The village idiot takes the throne
His the wind in which all must sway
All sane people, die now
Be lifted up and carried away
You’ve got no home in this world of sorrows
There’s a parasite feeding on
Everybody’s bag of rage
What goes out returns again
To smite the mouth and burn the page
Under the rain of all our dark tomorrows
I can see in the dark it’s where I used to live
I see excess and the gaping need
Follow the money—see where it leads
It’s to shrunken men stuffed up with greed
They meet and make plans in strange half-lit tableaux
Under the rain of all our dark tomorrows
You’ve got no home in this world of sorrows
“ALL OUR DARK TOMORROWS,” 2001
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/93.
A couple of people have asked me, “What does that mean, ‘All sane people, die now’?” I was thinking of the Federico Fellini movie Satyricon, which captured, in a droll historical metaphor, the nature of seventies Western culture. Satyricon was set in a fictionalized ancient Rome, but it portrays modern forms and sources of angst that people confront today. The only characters in the movie who seem at all sane are a wealthy couple who live in a villa outside Rome. They commit suicide because they see no place for themselves in a world falling into madness around them. Their only choice is to depart. “All sane people, die now.” Get out while you can, because it’s not going to get any better. Which is not at all a recommendation.
I wrote “All Our Dark Tomorrows” in the art studio Sally and I shared in Montpelier, Vermont, two years before the United States invaded Iraq. Montpelier is forty miles from Burlington and is surrounded by woods and state parks. It is the only U.S. state capital in which you can’t get a McDonald’s hamburger. While Sally painted in her disciplined way, I pretended to write songs, as I was in something of a dry spell. But pretend long enough and you become it, so I got a few decent songs out of the time spent.
Sally is the photographer who provided dozens of images for the Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu album package design by Toronto graphic artist Michael Wrycraft. In 2007 Wrycraft’s striking creation—which superimposed the title across the entire cover, each letter incorporating a different photograph—enjoyed some cross-cultural attention when the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, featured the album in its fifty-year celebration of Helvetica, the sans serif font created in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger.
A welcome creative catalyst for the record was the unexpected invitation from Andy Milne, a skillful and interesting young jazz pianist and composer, to collaborate on a couple of song ideas he had. I had done almost none of that sort of thing since the sixties, and the time seemed opportune. Andy, a Canadian based in New York, was thirty-one years old when we met. We got together at the home of a friend of his in New Hampshire and spent an afternoon poking and prodding at whatever themes came to us. Andy wanted to make a song about economics and greed. He wrote out some lines of lyrics, but I couldn’t step into his vision enough to figure out how to develop them further. I had the germ of a concept for a song on a similar theme: a riff on fashionable economic theory that became the song “Trickle Down,” which he liked enough that he was able to turn it into the kind of exciting and rhythmically challenging composition he and his band, Dapp Theory, were known for. Our other collaboration was written from scratch from a set of reflections on the motion of subatomic particles as symbolic of, and related to, the pas de deux between each of us and the Divine. It started with a few lines, and ran with it, giving birth to “Everywhere Dance.” We tweaked the songs some and then recorded them for Dapp Theory’s 2003 CD Y’all Just Don’t Know. We recorded quite different versions for You’ve Never Seen Everything.
Picture on magazine boardroom pop star
Pinstripe prophet of peckerhead greed
You say, “Trust me with the money—the keys to the universe
Trickle down will give us everything we need”
Brand-new century private penitentiary
Bank vault utopia padded for the few
And it’s tumors for the masses coughing for the masses
Earphones for the masses and they all serve you
Trickle down give ’em the business
Trickle down supposed to give us the goods
Cups held out to catch a bit of the bounty
Trickle down everywhere trickle down blood
What used to pass for education now looks more like ignoration
Take the people’s money and slip it to the corporation
Yellow rain golden shower pesticide firepower
Summon feudal demons of sweatshop subjugation
Workfare foul air homeless beggars everywhere
Picture-phone aristocrats lounge around the pool
Captains of industry smiling beneficently
Leaky hull supertanker ship of fools
Trickle down give ’em the business
Trickle down supposed to give us the goods
Cups held out to catch a bit of the bounty
Trickle down everywhere trickle down blood
Takeover takedown big-buck shakedown
Schoolyard pusher of the anything-for-profit
First you got to privatize then you get to piratize
Hooked on avarice how do we get off it?
Trickle down give ’em the business
Trickle down supposed to give us the goods
Cups held out to catch a bit of the bounty
Trickle down everywhere trickle down blood
“TRICKLE DOWN,” 2001
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/94.
Sally and I had some really good years together. We shared an appreciation of dark humour. She was good medicine for my battered psyche. She introduced me to yoga, which I practiced assiduously for a number of years. She also hooked me up with Marc Bregman and his Jungian-based therapy, a connection that continues to offer ever-deepening understanding of how spirit and body work.
In early 1999, Sally and I were part of a small group that ventured to Vietnam and Cambodia on a “fact-finding” excursion on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. I was recruited by VVAF founder Bobby Muller, a dynamic former U.S. Marine lieutenant who, in 1969, while leading an assault in North Vietnam, was shot through the chest and paralyzed from the waist down. Not long after returning to the States, Muller founded the Vietnam Veterans of America, then the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, a politically edgier spin-off of the former. He was also a cofounder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which is how we met.
Muller invited me to witness firsthand VVAF’s work in Vietnam and Cambodia, where, as in neighbouring Laos, American forces left millions of tons of unexploded ordnance, including land mines, scattered across farms and villages.
Meghann Ahern, daughter of Emmylou Harris and Brian Ahern, and I jamming with a Cambodian musician blinded by a land mine
photo credit: SALLY SWEETLAND
In Vietnam, “800,000 tons of unexploded ordnance [is] thought to re
main hidden in the grass and jungles,” according to a 2012 report by The Christian Science Monitor. “In 2007, the Vietnam Ministry of Labor reported that there had been more than 104,000 civilian casualties due to contact with UXO, with more than 38,000 people killed. In Quang Tri province, 84 percent of land is affected by UXO, making it the worst-hit in Vietnam.”
Then there’s Cambodia, which not only endured a massive U.S. bombing assault during the Vietnam War era, but subsequently suffered under a lunatic dictator, Pol Pot, who murdered and starved to death nearly two million people in four years. Cambodia then fought a war against Vietnam until the signing of a Paris peace agreement in 1991. Despite the agreement, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces maintained a guerrilla insurgency until 1997, when the Cambodian government declared a general amnesty for the fighters, virtually all of whom turned in their weapons and melted back into the population. The amnesty finally ended three decades of war initiated by the United States, which itself followed ninety years of French occupation that ended in 1954 with the battle of Dien Bien Phu.