Ishmael Reed

[Joseph Tracy]

Because of Nader we have cleaner air, safer cars and safer food and more protection from unsafe products. I have a hard time matching that and so does Obama and what about you? Do you really think the people in Afghanistan cares which political party is leading the occupation and killing.  You can't even defend Obama, Henry, though I have listed his crimes again and again. You only go on about the horrible Republicans; they never  could have done a damn thing without the Democrats.  

Last week I went to Washington to be arrested with veterans who have served in our wars and who are asking to converse with the President. He was too busy. Too busy  parroting the generals, too busy cutting deals with fat cats, too busy selling the country to bankers, too busy pimping weapons and war and drones and lies about clean coal. Here is what Chris Hedges ( over a dozen years as NYT war correspondent) wrote about the event; it is worth thinking over:

Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail
by Chris Hedges
The speeches were over. There was a mournful harmonica rendition of taps. The 500 protesters in Lafayette Park in front of the White House fell silent. One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there until they were arrested.

The solemnity of that funerary march, the hush, was the hardest and most moving part of Thursday’s protest against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It unwound the bitter memories and images of war I keep wrapped in the thick cotton wool of forgetfulness. I was transported in that short walk to places I do not like to go. Strange and vivid flashes swept over me—the young soldier in El Salvador who had been shot through the back of the head and was, as I crouched next to him, slowly curling up in a fetal position to die; the mutilated corpses of Kosovar Albanians in the back of a flatbed truck; the screams of a woman, her entrails spilling out of her gaping wounds, on the cobblestones of a Sarajevo street. My experience was not unique. Veterans around me were back in the rice paddies and lush undergrowth of Vietnam, the dusty roads of southern Iraq or the mountain passes of Afghanistan. Their tears showed that. There was no need to talk. We spoke the same wordless language. The butchery of war defies, for those who know it, articulation.

What can I tell you about war?

War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us as human beings. War is necrophilia. The essence of war is death. War is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. It is organized sadism. War fosters alienation and leads inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away from the sanctity of life.

And yet the mythic narratives about war perpetuate the allure of power and violence. They perpetuate the seductiveness of the godlike force that comes with the license to kill with impunity. All images and narratives about war disseminated by the state, the press, religious institutions, schools and the entertainment industry are gross and distorted lies. The clash between the fabricated myth about war and the truth about war leaves those of us who return from war alienated, angry and often unable to communicate. We can’t find the words to describe war’s reality. It is as if the wider culture sucked the words out from us and left us to sputter incoherencies. How can you speak meaningfully about organized murder? Anything you say is gibberish.

The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the amoral decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct and fund war, hide war’s reality from public view. But those who have been in combat see death up close. Only their story tells the moral truth about war. The power of the Washington march was that we all knew this story. We had no need to use stale and hackneyed clichés about war. We grieved together.

War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre perversities, innovative forms of death to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. I met soldiers who carried in their wallets the identity cards of men they killed. They showed them to me with the imploring look of a lost child. 

We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion of the crowd and the intoxication of violence. You survive war because you repress emotions. You do what you have to do. And this means killing. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, is often self-destructive. But once the survivors return home, once the danger, adrenaline highs and the pressure of the crowd are removed, the repressed emotions surface with a vengeance. Fear, rage, grief and guilt leap up like snake heads to consume lives and turn nights into long, sleepless bouts with terror. You drink to forget.

We reached the fence. The real prisoners, the ones who blindly serve systems of power and force, are the mandarins inside the White House, the Congress and the Pentagon. The masters of war are slaves to the idols of empire, power and greed, to the idols of careers, to the dead language of interests, national security, politics and propaganda. They kill and do not know what killing is. In the rise to power, they became smaller. Power consumes them. Once power is obtained they become its pawn. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, politicians such as Barack Obama fall prey to the forces they thought they had harnessed. The capacity to love, to cherish and protect life, may not always triumph, but it saves us. It keeps us human. It offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is the only antidote. There are times when remaining human is the only victory possible.

The necrophilia of war is hidden under platitudes about honor, duty or comradeship. It waits especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction. In the Arab-Israeli 1973 war, almost a third of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes—and the war lasted only a few days. A World War II study determined that, after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” In short, if you spend enough time in combat you go insane or you were insane to begin with. War starts out as the annihilation of the other. War ends, if we do not free ourselves from its grasp, in self-annihilation.

Those around me at the protest, at once haunted and maimed by war, had freed themselves of war’s contagion. They bore its scars. They were plagued by its demons. These crippling forces will always haunt them. But they had returned home. They had returned to life. They had asked for atonement. In Lafayette Park they found grace. They had recovered within themselves the capacity for reverence. They no longer sought to become gods, to wield the power of the divine, the power to take life. And it is out of this new acknowledgement of weakness, remorse for their complicity in evil and an acceptance of human imperfection that they had found wisdom. Listen to them, if you can hear them. They are our prophets.

The tears and grief, the halting asides, the catch in the throat, the sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the only language that describes war. This faltering language of pain and atonement, even shame, was carried like great, heavy boulders by these veterans as they tromped slowly through the snow from Lafayette Park to the White House fence. It was carried by them as they were handcuffed, dragged through the snow, photographed for arrest, and frog-marched into police vans. It was carried into the frigid holding cells of a Washington jail. If it was understood by the masters of war who build the big guns, who build the death planes, who build all the bombs and who hide behind walls and desks, this language would expose their masks and chasten their hollow, empty souls. This language, bereft of words, places its faith in physical acts of nonviolent resistance, in powerlessness and compassion, in truth. It believes that one day it will bring down the house of war. 

As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light: 
And with no language but a cry.


Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. 




On Dec 20, 2010, at 5:59 AM, Henry M wrote:

> Tracy, how can you confuse Nader's talk with actually doing anything?  Obama talked about what he wanted to do if elected, but couldn't follow through.  I doubt he knew how powerless the POTUS really is until he was in the White House.  
> 
> Nader is just a gadfly gassbag. If he isn't in the pay of the right, he might as well be for all that he had "done."  He keeps people from supporting viable candidates.  How can anyone who has the slightest idea of deconstruction be so naive as to confuse words with action?
> 
> AsB4,
> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
> Henry Mu
> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
> 
> 
> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Nobody expected the wars to end in a day but Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan. Other nations are leaving,  many atrocities have been revealed, Obama has the power to change what we are doing and he has not.  THEY are not the republican party. That is baby talk. The impotence you feel is probably from doing nothing but supporting one of the 2 war parties. Your assertions about Nader are crap, he has been making a difference and sticking to his principles for years. 
> 
> On Dec 19, 2010, at 7:25 PM, Henry M wrote:
> 
>> By childish, impractical standards, all Presidents of the US have have been "mass murderers," and if Ralph Nader were elected tomorrow, he would be just another one.  That conflation BS only helps THEM.  It leads to a death-spiral of impotence, which they love. 
>> 
>> AsB4,
>> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
>> Henry Mu
>> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> You may choose to vote for a mass murderer because you think his heart is in the right place, but all you will accomplish is the continued reign of violence.  I understand your choice but will vote for someone clearly opposed to imperial warmongering , mass murder, spying without warrants extraordinary rendition and the rest of the duopoly agenda. Palin works for the same people Obama works for.
>> 
>> 
>> On Dec 15, 2010, at 5:55 AM, Henry M wrote:
>> 
>>> I've been saying exactly those things, Albert, but the Nader-voting lefter-than-thou crowd says that I must be a running-dog-lackey for the bourgeoisie, and the right just knows that I'm a Socialist.
>>> 
>>> AsB4,
>>> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
>>> Henry Mu
>>> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 3:33 AM, Albert Rolls <alprolls at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Is Obama far enough to the left, perhaps in his head but not in his actions. Does that mean I'm not going to vote for him if he's the guy on the ticket. Hell no. I'm voting because if the left doesn't vote the right gets into office and what use is that to me or anyone else, even a whole bunch of people voting for the right. And to just make the contrast between Obama and what you get when the left doesn't vote because the goddamn middle is what used to be the right see what Obama did with the meals-for-kids program this week and then remember that Reagan wanted to define ketchup as a vegetable so that the meals-for-kids program in the '80s could save money by substituting ketchup packages for costly vegetables. And don't think that shit doesn't have a lasting effect (beyond the malnourished generation of kids from low-income families that have to suffer through it. I saw a chef on a cooking segment of some morning news program (a Saturday program, I think) remind the audience that ketchup was a vegetable: that was less than ten years ago. If the left doesn't vote because Obama is a dissapointent, we get Gingrinch, Huckabee, Palin, Romney or whoever. I don't need a president whose only use is to rallying people against him/her. Those people will do more damage than someone whose hopes are at least pointing in the right direction.
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>>>> Sent: Dec 15, 2010 2:41 AM
>>>> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>>> Subject: Re: Ishmael Reed
>>>> 
>>>> Joseph Tracy  wrote:
>>>>> Ishmael Reed may enjoy sucking on his own member participation in Scam Obama, (Yes we can , If massa says it's OK). But I will not be joining him.
>>>> 
>>>> yeah, as a pacifist I'm disappointed in Obama, well, not really
>>>> "disappointed" because I didn't expect him to court assassination by
>>>> repudiating Bush's wars (although wouldn't that be cool! maybe they
>>>> wouldn't kill him off, who knows, it'd be a heckuva ride to try and
>>>> find out...but he never said that was his trip)
>>>> (more's the pity)
>>>> 
>>>> Reed's "coolest guy in the room" isn't saying coolest guy in the world
>>>> - that'd be, like, oh, Desmond Tutu or Pharoah Sanders...somebody like
>>>> that (Tom Waits?  Thomas Pynchon's in the running too...)
>>>> 
>>>> Hippest dude in a very uncool room, Obama...
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> "Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind.  The
>>>> second is to be kind.  And the third is to be kind." - Henry James
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
>