Rumours of Glory
Page 46
In 2010 Ben Kiernan, professor of international and area studies and director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, and Taylor Owen, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, analyzed formerly classified data released by the Clinton administration that showed that the “secret” U.S. bombing of Cambodia between 1964 and 1973 saturated the small country with 2,756,941 tons of explosives dropped during 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. This is far greater than the entire estimated two million tons of bombs—including the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—dropped by all sides during World War II. In other words, it was the heaviest bombing campaign in the history of the world.
And that was just in Cambodia, a country the size of Oklahoma. Add in the two million tons dropped on Laos and up to three million tons dropped on Vietnam, killing an estimated four to six million people in the three countries, and what you have is one of the worst slaughters in all of human history. In 1995 the eminent linguist, philosopher, and MIT professor Noam Chomsky wrote, “The toll of Indochinese dead during the U.S. wars is impressive even by twentieth century standards. For these dead, the U.S. bears responsibility.”
The ugly spectre of empire still squats over Southeast Asia. Flying in a small aircraft over Cambodia, we saw a landscape made of bomb craters, albeit softened with the green of thriving vegetation, that pocked vast tracts of rich agricultural soil. The American bombing campaign plunged the country’s rural youth into an enraged collective madness, leaving them ripe to be consumed by the egomaniacal pathology of Pol Pot. This tiny nation suffered the full spectrum of human indecency, and yet, following the war, the prevailing atmosphere was one of quiet determination to move forward—not ignoring the past, but leaving the dead to bury the dead. There was talk, among international bodies, of war crimes trials or some legal reckoning with what was left of the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian government made some noises about it too, but people we met showed little enthusiasm for the idea. The absence of recrimination seemed miraculous. Whether out of forgiveness or simply a need to forget, the people were looking ahead, toward a life of peace most had never experienced.
In Cambodia I began a long lyric, collecting what we’d found in that devastated nation of beautiful, mostly young people who were beginning to stumble from the abyss toward a way of life their country hadn’t known for two generations. It took me awhile to complete the piece, another effort at poetic reportage.
Abe Lincoln once turned to somebody and said,
“Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?”
There are three tiny death’s heads carved out of mammoth tusk
on the ledge in my bathroom
They grin at me in the morning when I’m taking a leak,
but they say very little.
Outside Phnom Penh there’s a tower, glass paneled,
maybe ten metres high
filled with skulls from the killing fields
Most of them lack the lower jaw
so they don’t exactly grin
but they whisper, as if from a great distance,
of pain, and of pain left far behind
Eighteen thousand empty eyeholes peering out at the four directions
Electric fly buzz, green moist breeze
Bone-coloured Brahma bull grazes wet-eyed,
hobbled in hollow of mass grave
In the neighbouring field a small herd
of young boys plays soccer,
their laughter swallowed in expanding silence
This is too big for anger,
it’s too big for blame.
We stumble through history so
humanly lame
So I bow down my head
Say a prayer for us all
That we don’t fear the spirit
when it comes to call
The sun will soon slide down into the far end of the ancient reservoir.
Orange ball merging with its water-borne twin
below air-brushed edges of cloud.
But first, it spreads itself,
a golden scrim behind fractal sweep of swooping flycatchers.
Silhouetted dark green trees,
blue horizon
The rains are late this year.
The sky has no more tears to shed.
But from the air Cambodia remains
a disc of wet green, bordered by bright haze.
Water-filled bomb craters, sun-streaked gleam
stitched in strings across patchwork land
march west toward the far hills of Thailand.
Macro analog of Angkor Wat’s temple walls’
intricate bas-relief of thousand-year-old battles
pitted with AK rounds
And under the sign of the seven-headed cobra
the naga who sees in all directions
seven million land mines lie in terraced grass, in paddy, in bush
(Call it a minescape now)
Sally holds the beggar’s hand and cries
at his scarred-up face and absent eyes
and right leg gone from above the knee
Tears spot the dust on the worn stone causeway
whose sculpted guardians row on row
Half frown, half smile, mysterious, mute.
And this is too big for anger.
It’s too big for blame
We stumble through history so
humanly lame.
So I bow down my head,
say a prayer for us all.
That we don’t fear the spirit when it comes to call.
“POSTCARDS FROM CAMBODIA,” 1999
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/95.
Like “Put It in Your Heart,” “Postcards from Cambodia” references dream work, which was the source of the line “don’t fear the spirit when it comes to call.” It’s a plea that we remain open to the touch of the Divine, a reality that is so much bigger than our day-to-day selves. We spend excessive energy shutting ourselves off from spirit, distracting ourselves from it, and hiding from our inner workings, and it costs us dearly. The absence of a relationship with spirit allows us to do things like murder each other by the hundreds of thousands and play foolish power games among ourselves and between nations. The song is political and historical, yet it also exalts the beauty that humans are somehow able to maintain even in the face of misery. How can the two coexist?
Many of us believe that there’s a lot more going on right in front of us, within us, and in the cosmos than our rational minds can grasp. To access this reality requires surrender—the death, or at least the substantial reduction, of ego. It may require prayer—though, like “understanding” or “love,” the idea of prayer can mean any number of things. Even if it’s just gazing at the night sky, being awed by the scale of everything, savoring the perception that we are a tiny but unique part of the flow of an infinite universe, we can receive this profound and beautiful mystery.
Unfortunately, humans have an instinct built into us that drives us to tell others about our spiritual discoveries and beliefs and convince them that they need to see what we’re seeing, and in the same way, or they are wrong. If they don’t agree with us or conform, we have to fight them.
Over and over, we repeat our mistakes. Genghis Khan killed ten million souls and apparently sired half of Asia. Just doin’ his job. This is the history of humankind. We were born, as a species, with the paranoia of prey and the aggression of predators. As soon as we became societies, with surplus, we found more reasons for fighting each other. We must always have had it in us, but it started meaning something in a big way when there were larders to raid. During this approximately ten-thousand-year period, humans have enjoyed peace for only short periods or in particular places; war appears to be our default condition. The inclination to war may have begun as an aberrant mutation, but it has proved itself to be a dominant trait.
Should we give in to this tendency and stop putting energy into th
e attempt to find another way of being? Absolutely not. Somewhere in the din, God is trying to reach us. We have a place in the cosmos, but we won’t find it through fighting. Fighting is perhaps our most effective distraction from our proper duties as human beings. It cuts us off and prevents us from listening to the whispers of the spirit, as well as listening to our neighbours. We hear the distorted voice, the one that told Gaddafi he was the saviour of Africa, the one that sends us out to battle so often for nothing. But the real voice, that of the spirit, is saying to us: Be quiet, listen, feel. Be kind. Accept differences, even those of Divine belief, for there is no “truth” in these things, only lessons. Learn from the differences. Feed your neighbour. Take your anger out on an untilled field. Liberally apply compassion, especially to yourself, for if we’re not compassionate about our own foibles and screwups, then we can’t authentically be compassionate toward others. We’re all in the same foundering boat. It’s our scars that unite us.
For me, the scale of the horror of Cambodia transcended any presumed or predictable reaction or emotion. For the victims, the people confronted by it directly, blame and anger might very well be a part of the picture, but we didn’t encounter much of this sentiment. As in southern Mexico in 1983, it seemed as though I felt it more than the victims. I haven’t got a very good handle on this aspect of large-scale violence, but it seems that a sympathetic person once removed is more likely than are the victims of violence to be driven by a kind of proxy sense of outrage, to seek vengeance, retribution, or “justice.” Perhaps it is something akin to survivor’s guilt.
In Cambodia we found a stillness, a remove from the horrors of the recent past. Even the tower of skulls memorializing the killing fields somehow radiated peace. Cattle grazed on the mass graves; boys played soccer on them. In the hospital for amputees in Phnom Penh, what we saw, in addition to the ingenuity brought to bear on the manufacture of prostheses, was a joyously raucous game of wheelchair basketball.
The exception, maybe the worst place I’ve ever visited, was Tuol Sleng, the onetime high school converted by Pol Pot’s regime to an interrogation/torture centre. Tuol Sleng is a black hole that sucked all human goodness into it, leaving an event horizon of pure evil that chills the heart of everyone who goes there. In four years the Khmer Rouge “processed” 20,000 people at the prison, each victim beginning his or her final journey by being photographed. Today visitors peel through albums of mug shots, peculiarly formal portraits documenting an endless procession of goggle-eyed souls who well understood the short future that awaited them. The Khmer Rouge ran 158 such prisons from 1975 to 1979, and created 309 mass-grave sites and an estimated 19,000 grave pits to accommodate the results, each pit holding dozens or hundreds of souls.
Today Tuol Sleng is just a building; most of the rooms are empty. But visitors are inevitably enveloped by a darkness that overpowers even the brightest of days. It’s not just knowing what happened there. You can go a lot of places and know what happened, like the Gettysburg monument, a memorial to the fifty-one thousand people who died in that horrific battle of brethren. But Gettysburg doesn’t have that feeling. It, too, is now just a field—a former killing field, to be sure, but among the heroic statues and rigid obelisks and complaining tourists, you don’t feel what took place there. Tuol Sleng has not shed its menace. The pain, the fear, the screams, the horrid indignities, the torturer eating lunch between electric shocks—it’s all there, clinging, palpable, personal.
In my personal frame of reference, the only thing that can compare with Tuol Sleng is the former Gestapo headquarters in Cologne, a typical small office building with a basement full of barred cells, in which, during the Nazi period, hundreds of prisoners languished, awaiting interrogation. The city of Cologne has preserved the prison as a museum. You can enter a couple of the cells, walls covered with graffiti in every European language, people writing to loved ones they will never see again. I went there twice—the second time with Colin Linden, who cried.
On the first occasion, I was accompanied by an elderly volunteer docent who had been an inmate. She had been, and remained, a Communist and was interrogated under torture for it by the Gestapo for a couple of months. They eventually sold her as a slave to the Ford Motor Company. She spent about a year working for Ford, and then Ford sold her to a family that had a dry-cleaning business. She said that was better because the family was kind and treated her well. The Ford connection shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the allegiance of large corporations to profit, no matter the human cost. In 1998 The Washington Post reported, “When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company documents extolling the ‘genius of the Fuehrer,’ according to reports filed by soldiers at the scene. A U.S. Army report by investigator Henry Schneider dated September 5, 1945, accused the German branch of Ford of serving as ‘an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles’ with the ‘consent’ of the parent company in Dearborn [Michigan].”
In Cologne, as in Cambodia, the anger had nowhere to land. There is no one to blame, just the sad immensity of the human capacity for ruin.
We eventually made it to Angkor Wat, the twelfth-century Buddhist temple and the world’s largest religious monument. Our guide at Angkor Wat was a twenty-two-year-old Khmer man who had known only two years of peace during his lifetime—the preceding two years. He took us on a tour that skirted the numerous areas around the ancient temple complex that were mined. I said something about getting your leg blown off, and he said, “It doesn’t really blow off. It’s more like it gets jellied.” (Our discussion was translated by Luong Ung, a Khmer-American woman who worked for VVAF and was the national spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.) Our guide said he had once been walking with some other children and one of their mothers, and the lady stepped on a mine. It didn’t blow her leg off; it just kind of mashed it from the knee down so that it had to be amputated. This happened, and continues to happen, to many thousands of people in Cambodia and other places polluted with land mines. (The problem was aggravated in postwar Cambodia by the grim phenomenon of some farmers digging up mines and replanting them to keep neighbours’ cattle out of their pastures.)
People think of this stuff, create these instruments of destruction and pain, then go home to their families, pets, hobbies, and “reality” shows. Yet a country like Cambodia, which is finally finding itself in a state of peace, can’t live that peace, can’t grow food, and can’t get its economy going again, at least not in any sustainable way, until the mines are cleared, which takes an agonizingly long time. Meanwhile, the Gap, Nike, Walmart, and other corporate vultures swooped to set up sweatshops in Cambodia shortly after the 1997 amnesty. To such entities, the inability of people to feed themselves merely makes for a cheap labour pool.
At the time Emmylou Harris added her gorgeous vocal harmonies to “Postcards from Cambodia,” she too was deeply involved in the campaign against land mines, as the Chicago Tribune noted when it interviewed her before a concert: “[J]ust hours before the show, Harris did not choose to talk about her 27 Top 10 hits, her 8 gold records, her triple platinum album, or her 7 Grammys. Instead, she spoke of . . . her involvement with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.” By then, several of us in the “entertainment” industry were likewise badgering whatever media might listen, and our audiences, to encourage the United States and any other country that hadn’t yet signed the Ottawa Treaty to do so.
The following year, Emmylou joined Steve Earle and Bobby Muller in organizing a series of shows called Concerts for a Landmine Free World. I was honoured to be on the bill for many of these events, along with Mary Chapin Carpenter, John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Kris Kristofferson, Sheryl Crow, and others. The concert series commemorating the signing of the treaty ran every fall for several years, until President Bush’s war agenda rendered pointless the efforts to get the Pentago
n to consider dropping a weapon from their arsenal.
At the same time, my own concerts following the release of You’ve Never Seen Everything may have bordered on bleak for some listeners. To the extent that there is a “message” in the songs, it is one of hope, I think, though it’s hope in the face of a pretty dark local reality. When I perform songs I feel what’s in them, and I performed all the dark stuff, including the title cut—written one month before 9/11—along with “Postcards from Cambodia” and “All Our Dark Tomorrows.” There was balance with other songs from the album—“Open,” “Don’t Forget About Delight,” “Everywhere Dance,” “Messenger Wind”—but the shows weren’t as cheery as some might have wished. People would enter the venue in a mood of happy expectation, and then, “Ohhhh.” Still, some listeners tell me that they find even the darkest songs uplifting, as they verify our feelings and soothe them with the balm of community. That is the hoped-for reaction.
The darkness is there because it exists, and what exists is what I try to write about. I learned long ago not to be afraid of the dark, that it can sometimes be a friend. Fans who have stayed with me over time have shown an admirable capacity for putting up with my shifts and changes in direction, and the occasional long-exposure snapshots of darkened rooms infused with hypodermic light. They get it, and I’m grateful for that.
Nobody’s making me say this
I’m talking to you
Been travelling seventeen hours
Irradiated by signals, by images
of viruses, of virtues
like everyone
Like exiled angels we swing out of the clouds
Above night city —
Fields of light broken by the curve of dark waterways
On the other side of the world
an unhappy teenage girl sets fire
to herself, her house, her neighbourhood, and some that dwell therein
Sorry simulacrum of sad dawn
You’ve never seen everything
Sleep of the just, sleep of reason, any damn kind of sleep please!
I’m trying to balance on a sloping bed in Naples