June 2010
A Mixed Bag
There is a crisis in our midst, many crises yet rains still fall in spring. Ryan clutched his bag of groceries and unlocked the passenger side of his truck. He liked the aroma of fresh baked bread that fills the air after a downpour, the gift of wild seeds spread by the wind and cracked open from the moist heat of day. “Ah, the manna of life,” he thought, “a feast to feed spring’s fever.” He breathed it in deep and again but stopped and looked up when he heard the horn beep. It was Steve, editor of the desert’s Sun Runner.
He shouted, “Don’t forget that story by the end of June. C’mon Ryan, give us some of that ole thunder...we need a few of us mad.”
Ryan shook his head in ascent and muttered, “A few of us mad? This whole place is nuts and everybody in it is too damn nuts to do anything about it but get more nuts for trying.” He put his groceries down on the floor, closed the door, walked around the front, unlocked his side and sat down behind the wheel.
“A story? You mean one with words in it—that kind of story?”
He thought, “What time is it, bedtime? Everybody’s already asleep. Something for the afternoon to calm us all down? Nobody gets mad anymore. Half the nation is tranquilized and who knows what the other half are on. Look what happened back in 2003 when Kerr-McGee was found dumping their stale Perchlorate laden rocket fuel into our water supply and nobody says anything except national security. We don’t hear from the hundreds of thousands of families afflicted with birth defects, deformities and disabilities that occurred after pregnant mothers dined on vegetables irrigated with Kerr-McGee’s Perchlorate and then nursed their infants on its thyroid and brain killing toxins. Shall we talk about ConEd’s current plan to irradiate the desert’s population with their profitable new proposal to erect high tension wires of death? Who will care or bother to sue especially after we’re all dead or dying from cancers, gone mad with inexplicable neurological disorders and left to rot through medical inattention?
“No. Something without anger, rancor, blame, aspersion, or complaint of any kind. Something well-adjusted, a little something to further my career, appropriate for retirees and young families with children to consider. No mention of things lost, thrown away, destroyed, ignored or of the political nullity, social apathy, religious insanity and sadistic visions of state-ordered torture that we, as a nation of torturers, must now wake up to every morning.”
He examined the moment and said, “Where does a man turn for sanity, for any clarity at all?”
He chuckled to himself when he considered that for ten percent of what we have thrown away on horror, lies and death, we could have made the whole world our friend and abolished war forever. “How? Maybe that’ll be the story. How America came together and realized the sort of paradigm shift that finds value in providing every American a job retrofitting infrastructure, cleaning up and replanting our wastelands, upgrading the energy grid, giving every kid a free college or trade education. Imagine supporting the arts rather than the nightmares of war. Imagine what the world would have looked like if, instead of war, we had loaded every boat, train, plane, ship, and truck with food, tools, medicine, books, fuels, machinery, communication equipment, and cash that was distributed wherever the needs were greatest. Peace is cheaper than war. Everybody wins including Mother Earth herself.
“Instead, we gave it all away in exchange for slogans, flag-pins, beads and the promise of a little salvation somewhere else. This barbarism demands blindness, ignorance of self and the world. It requires a docile, gullible population run much like addicts or chickens in an industrialized poultry plant. To ask where conviction, acts of will and the determination of a free and enlightened citizenry have gone is like asking where thirty-three and a third vinyl records went. Or whatever happened to farm fresh milk free of added hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, fungicides, chemical preservatives and the odd combination of industrial waste runoff? Shall it ask what kind of people willingly allow their leaders to sell them into such insurmountable debt that not even their grandchildren will know a debt-free breath of air—without a whimper, without ever asking to whose benefit?”
He shook his head when he came up blank, “A story? How about love and spiritual awakening, something indigenous to the desert. I’ll even bring a volume of Walt Whitman to recite aloud so I can hear him sing the joys of American life all so unencumbered, unindustrial and unpolluted. He’s not here to smell the smog from LA, Riverside or San Bernardino. He’s not here to drink the chemical sludge we’ve come to know as water. He’s not here to echo the wails of the latest stand of Joshua Trees just bulldozed for a parking lot. Come on Walt, don’t abandon me to what I see, to what I hear, to what I know to be the disaster it is. Teach me to love it all. Teach me to face this end of things, this disregard for life and the threatened end of all existence not like a coward who simply watches his dreams of a better world fall dead and defeated like his only child butchered before his eyes by the thoughtless hand of his own countrymen. Let me hear your American song of liberation here, now in these Joshua Trees’ uprooted screams as their prehistoric species are raked aside—garbage in what’s become of our magnanimous way of life.”
Ryan tried to snap out of it, “Hey! Settle on the love story. Make it a campy tale about what happens when Postmodern apathy puts on lipstick and meets the beast of patriarchy. That’s sure to grab the eye and engage the reader’s lurid interest. It’ll be a romance filled with sadistic schemes of murder, torture, sexual deviance and acts of the most vicious greed imaginable. It will be how together they screwed the world’s light into an endless and deafening scowl, scathing, screaming, howling, an infernal and eternal dark night in which all the world’s people not only lost their hearts and minds, but depleted their oxygen, went to sleep and never woke up again. It will be about The Rapture and all the New Age Delusions that we’ve come to suffer—except nobody will be alive to tell it.”
Ryan turned on the ignition, backed up and pulled forward onto the highway.
“Maybe it’ll rain again, soon,” he said.