by W. E. Gutman
A man of culture can’t remember everything. He has the couth to forget the superfluous.
*
It is night that I must cross swiftly, like a turbulent river, not sunup. Fear and uncertainty seem to merge and fuse as darkness, like a black hole, chews up the scenery and swallows it. When morning returns, bringing with it the glare of day, I put my makeup back on, mentally rehearse my lines and get back on stage where men hold court and betray one-another and in whose limelight, predisposed as I am to indocility, I find beguiling and terrifying inspiration.
*
I turn on CNN. The face of evil is not always hideous to behold. Sometimes it assumes a wretched countenance, a visage so cleaved by discomfiture and incredulity that it conceals the malevolence in its deep, gloomy furrows and, for an instant, against all odds, it manages to inspire pity.
So it was when I glimpsed that bizarre feral creature that filled my television screen. But when arrogance and deceit resurfaced on his craggy features, when cunning reanimated his restless gaze with flashes of egocentricity and malice, pity turned to disdain for I recognized a man who knew no compassion, a heartless tyrant who had drenched his nation in blood and martyred his people into submission.
As I watched, transfixed, I remembered the corpses, thousands of them -- Iranian villagers -- men women, infants twisted like disembodied marionettes, frozen in place by death’s grotesque choreography. The spectacle still haunts me. VX [nerve] gas is mercifully swift. Mustard gas is slow and agonizing. It blisters the skin, then blinds, then scorches the trachea, bronchia and lungs. Death comes when organs turn to mush.
I then remembered the Scuds raining on Tel Aviv where my son Ron lived at the time. He was nearly killed when an adjacent building collapsed as he ran for shelter.
I revisit battlefields and torture chambers where thousands of Kuwaitis, Jordanians, Kurds and Shiite Iraqis lost their lives. And my eyes fill with bitter, angry tears as I learn of the senseless death of yet another young American in a hostile, alien land Americans can never tame.
There is a feature of evil that escapes scrutiny in times of tragedy, or in moments of mindless national jubilation. Sometimes evil gestates in the alchemist’s crucible, awaiting its maker’s pleasure. So it was with the hirsute beast that emerged from its lair. For many years the Butcher of Baghdad had been “our man in Iraq.” So long as it served our interests, we let him loose against his people and his neighbors. The geopolitics of hegemonic advantage has since shifted. He was tried and executed for war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Hurrah! But shouldn’t his Western overseers and handlers be indicted for begetting, then failing to abort, this ghastly miscreation? Will they ever be? The answer, like the question, is the stuff of allegory. There is truth in metaphor but no justice.
Absolute evil is unconquerable. It sired and survived the Crusades, the “Holy Inquisition,” the 30-Years War. It spawned the likes of Attila and Hitler, Stalin and the Shah of Iran, Pol Pot and Ceausescu, Franco and Pinochet, Milosevic and Osama bin Laden, to name a few. It continues to breed U.S.-backed despots in Africa, Asia and Latin America, all of whom, given the right political imperatives, will engage -- as they often do -- in acts of monstrous sadism against their own people.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, evil is “human, all-too human.” Like the phoenix, it will be reborn of its own ashes and endure long after the man from Tikrit is forgotten.
Much of what I hear and see on the news, and all that is left unsaid or that escapes the camera’s unerring eye, suggests less than a perfect future. Wars rage on in nearly every quadrant of the globe. Mankind’s appetite for violence is beyond measure. You can’t kill large numbers of people except in the name of virtue. So the carnage continues.
*
The mercury tops 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The blinds are down and the shades are drawn but the scorching sun sneaks through the slenderest crannies like meddlesome fingers of light in the cool semi-darkness of my living room. I choose silence over speech, solitude over fellowship, contemplative inertia over aimless motion, simple meals in my kitchen over a full-course dinner in some crowded eatery. In limbo, I see two people struggling for dominance: an embittered old man graced with diminishing convictions, consumed with resentment and anxiety, and a boy in an old man’s skin still aiming at the stars. Melancholy, a predator, pits one against the other. It conquers by dividing. My demons lurk in the shadows, always ready to pounce. I know how the psyche works, how brittle a mechanism it is, how prone it is to breakdown. But I also learned that neither psychotherapy, nor miracle potions can do, even collectively, what a stiff dose of will power, determination, impatience and disgust will achieve. When I’m down, I have two choices: marinate in my own toxic juices -- and pay the psychosomatic price of despair -- or snap out of it and collect the dividends of self-conquest. I can’t afford to surrender to melancholy; its intrusions infuriate me. Melancholy is an expensive, narcissistic and debilitating extravagance in which only the idle and self-absorbed can luxuriate. Wonder drugs may do wonders for the mentally ill. The emotionally skewed, the existentially maimed, I tell myself, must learn by strength of character and sheer force of will to exorcise the ugly specters. But the more one tries not to be like one’s father, the more one is fated to resemble him. Hard as he tried, my father never found his “place.” I don’t expect to find mine. Perhaps such sanctuary can only be glimpsed when one is not looking. We must both have looked too hard where things are not.
*
Some places escape concealment or disguise. They are there in plain sight, stripped of all allegory, like the corner butcher store or the cobbler’s. The commodities they trade, however, can neither be eaten nor worn. They rise, banal and smug, monuments of idolatry amid a wasteland strewn with graven images. They are the temples of falsehood in whose sanctum sanctorum are manipulated the fears and obsessions and hopes and chimeras that haunt us all. Freedom from dogma is bondage, they insist, absence of faith is a sin, they warn, and so sinners and slaves flock to their altars to be released and cleansed. I do not have to look far for these places. They teem and multiply, while school buildings crumble, hospitals shut down and concert halls go silent, in a frenetic contest against the wickedness and corruption that thrive unchecked in city council chambers and on the thoroughfares of the bustling bedroom community in which I now live. There are, in fact, more churches on this “high desert” plateau than crabs up a whore’s ass but there’s very little religion in these holy abodes, only unbending credos and every sect’s ironclad conviction that it alone knows the path to “God’s Kingdom.” Their billboards, like movie marquees or roadside election-campaign posters, all proclaim to be serving Christ the Savior. All promise grace through communion, but their parishioners would rather burn in hell than pray in ecumenical unity. Factional differences, some trivial, others colossal, hinder the advent of Christian oneness. It is easier to idolize Jesus than to walk in his footsteps. Living by example, free from coercive codified doctrine, is infinitely harder than surrendering to spirited emulation. This is why they all meet to watch each-other sit and stand and kneel and cross themselves and bow their heads and swing their arms in ecstasy and mindless synchronicity. Hallelujah! Rituals and repetition reinforce the illusion of harmony and commonness of purpose. The fervency of their performance earns them the sham esteem of their peers and, provisionally, the clean conscience they crave.
Man is seduced by histrionics; he responds to gestures, not reason.
On Sundays, arrayed in their finest apparel, pious souls spill out of freshly waxed cars and gather in solemn formations in their respective houses of worship to chant in vacant-eyed monotones words so often uttered that they have been stripped of all meaning. When services conclude, a few of the faithful mosey on to the local 7-Eleven for a cold drink, a snack, a pack of cigarettes, perhaps a paper or periodical. These model citizens, their ears still ringing from some exalted homily or sacred hymn, reconnect with the profane world but they are
safe, at least while on the premises, from the vulgarity and degeneracy that fester outside. For one, the erotic publications that once graced the racks of this convenience store are gone. If religion is divisive and exclusionary, it is not devoid of aggregated interests. Canonical differences aside, the neighborhood faithful, their innocence imperiled by the First Amendment, got together and forced management to rid the store of all offending titles. They called this auto-da-fé an “application of democracy.”
The purge was swift, bloodless, like laser surgery. Overnight, it seems, many publications vanished. With more room on the shelves, periodicals that had never fully shown their faces, but were there, lurking behind the promise of gargantuan tits and peach-skinned buttocks, unfurled their colors now, flaunting surreal covers. SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. GUNS & AMMO. BOWHUNTER. SURVIVALIST. EXTREME FIGHTING. WRESTLEMANIA. Instead of leggy sirens and beckoning groins and nipples aroused and vaunting, magazines dish out the bizarre and the grotesque, along with death and gore and bloody faces, smoking firearms and twisted limbs and virtuosos wielding knives that can kill in less time than you can say Jerry Farwell.
Newly crowned dynasties of Elmer Gantries are hijacking America’s psyche (while rifling through its pockets), and fresh troops of rapt soul-robbers infiltrate then exploit the coercive power of government. Despite its implied secularism -- “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” -- the U.S. is loath to protect against the intrusion of religion into the body politic. Religion is spreading its tentacles ever wider, deeper and tighter into the fabric of governance than ever before. Although the U.S. Constitution also guarantees freedom of religion, “… or laws prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” it has spinelessly failed to stop religion from muscling in on the affairs of state.
“Church and State,
Greed and hate: --
Two baboon-persons
In one Supreme Gorilla.”
Aldous Huxley
I look around me. The kingdom of God, I muse, is a place within the heart. It is everywhere. Often, it is nowhere.
*
I buy a long-stem pink rose, secretly delighting in the symbolism, and I retreat home. I sink in my easy chair and listen to Debussy. Dulcet aromas and fragrant harmonies waft like elves on a gentle breeze as the moon pales and Paris stirs from its reverie. Debussy enchants me. His otherworldly music softens the sounds of day. I partake at all hours as if it were an antidote against the dissonance that stalks me now that Paris is but a memory. Yes, Debussy and Ravel and Fauré. In Stravinsky’s Firebird, I fumble through the ashes of my own rebirth. In Schoenberg’s Verklãrte Nacht, I seek paths to final transfiguration. Luciano Pavarotti sings Nessun Dorma and Que Gelida Manina, and I weep. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony overwhelms me with humility and exultation. So does Mozart’s Requiem. The last stirring phrases of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture fill me with sorrow then elation. I mourn the senseless death of thousands of Napoleon’s soldiers as the cannonade drowns out the Marseillaise; grieving turns to euphoria as church bells celebrate Russia’s victory. Never has a painting, poem or novel touched me the way music does. Music stirs me to the very core of my being. I rate composers on their capacity to enthrall me or make me weep. Seeing people cry also brings tears to my eyes. I watch them crying in Kosovo and Kandahar, Jerusalem and Jenin, Tehran and Tegucigalpa, Baghdad and Bucharest, New York and Nagasaki, Istanbul and Islamabad. Much is happening to make humankind shed tears of woe and bitterness and anger.
PART FIVE
TREADING WATER
Onward to the past
WAITING FOR GODOT
When I worked as a junior editor at a magazine in New York, I befriended an elderly Irish gentleman, Daniel Moran, the advertising sales manager. Dressed exquisitely in silk shirts and ties from Sulka, wearing spats and gabardine suits made to order at Abercrombie & Fitch, and sporting a monogrammed silver-handled cane, Moran was a kind and perceptive human being.
One day, as we were taking a long piss in the men’s room after lunch, Moran, with no further preamble, turned to me and, looking me straight in the eye, said:
“Willy, if you don't do it while you're young, you never will.”
It took 40 years to realize that “young” is in no way defined by age alone but by the élan vital, the creative force that helps move life from a treadmill to a stroll filled with meaning. Moran had been careful not to define “it” and I didn’t ask. He knew that personal inclination and choice dictate “it” and I had enough imagination to seize on the untold potential of a cogent generality.
Moran had often said that he wasn’t afraid to die. Instead, he’d expressed regret for all the unmet challenges and opportunities that death would deny him.
“There's so much left to do.”
He died a month later of a massive heart attack. He was 70. I was 24.
Moran bequeathed a priceless testament that, to this day, is a source of inspiration and uneasiness. I’m pushing 75. I know that I must do “it” now. After much inner-debate, I rejected my father’s admonition -- “don’t look for things where they are not.” I would like to believe that he hadn’t referred to some physical realm but to an abstraction that does not exist outside the self. But his injunction contained an epistemological ambiguity, an inhibiting alternative to the empowering and open-ended exhortation, “Seek and ye shall find” that compelled me to abjure it. Like Heraclitus’ down-to-earth warning -- “You will not find the boundaries of soul by traveling in any direction, so deep are the measure of it,” my father’s counsel left me with no wiggle room, worldly or transcendent. As such, the advice became its own parody. No one knows where things really are. If I do not seek them “where they’re not,” I risk never finding them.
*
For over 50 years I wrote about other people. Engaged, impassioned and often combative, my brand of journalism -- enemies of the truth call it muckraking -- focused on the follies, triumphs and absurdities associated with the human drama.
Beginning in 1991, when assignments first took me to Central America, I also dedicated my investigative reports, news analyses and commentaries to an in-vivo dissection of the deep and intractable social ills brought on by dynasties of military and plutocratic civilian regimes that continue to incarcerate minors with adult felons, murder homeless children, engineer the assassination of indigenous tribal chieftains, oversee the expropriation and sale of ancestral lands to foreign developers; regimes racked with political harlotry, corruption, ineptitude; regimes insensitive to widespread misery and discontent; regimes that have revived death squads and slave labor; regimes embroiled in fraud and lies; regimes that keep extending the hand of beggary while the elite lives in Babylonian splendor.
I’ve since broadened my focus to cover, here in the U.S., what I perceive to be injustice, political chicanery, deceit, greed masquerading as generosity, self-righteousness disguised as faith and crass military adventurism marketed as essential to “national security” or the “establishment of democracy.”
I was in my early fifties and involuntarily “retired” (anyone considered “overqualified” understands the sting of unemployment) when I decided to chronicle my life, a story replete with adventures and calamities, and to comment on the world as I saw it, immune from an editor’s blue pencil or the ever-present threat of censorship. Satirical, politically incorrect in the extreme, devoid of simplistic rationalizations, what I compiled in more than 20 years of writing and rewriting and agonizing self-doubt is an accolade to independent journalism, an homage to my family, and an honest personal testament of self-scrutiny in which I unabashedly bare my soul with neither pedantry nor false modesty.
No, this was not a burst of male menopausal narcissism, exhibitionism, catharsis or the hope of a ticket to literary fame and posterity. I was driven by a compelling urge to tell all, often with brutal candor and self-deprecation, to relate a personal story that spans four continents and seven decades, and to do so in brushstrokes that deliver an unvarn
ished canvas of the people, places and events -- reality stripped naked -- that marked my life. I minced no words. I spared no sensibilities. I took no prisoners.
I turned 74 in late September, 2011. I did almost everything I set out to do -- not always as planned. I had an adventuresome, often peril-filled life. I traveled widely, lived in several countries and immersed myself in countless cultures. I was a sailor. I learned to fly. As an obscure journalist more interested in discovery than fame, I must believe that my articles, commentaries and investigative reports -- all inspired by George Orwell’s definition of freedom, “the right to tell people what they do NOT want to hear,” -- touched, stirred and even incensed someone, somewhere sometime. Finding a funeral wreath propped against my Casa Grande hotel door in Guatemala City several years ago dispelled any doubt that some people would have liked to keep my exposés entombed or, in extremis, to bury the messenger.
My greatest victory, I believe, has been one of self-conquest -- reaching emotional and spiritual independence, shedding absurd beliefs, living in the present and fretting as little as possible about things I can’t control. This might not be a “Carnegie” success story. I’ve amassed no fortune, didn't become a captain of industry. I moved no mountains; nor did I ever aspire to do so. If we measure success in terms of wealth and material possessions, I'm an abject failure. If self-realization is the fruit of self-acceptance, then I’ve triumphed. Last, I was a struggling agnostic for most of my life. I have since come out of the closet and breathed the oxygenated air of emancipation by proclaiming my atheism.