[Newspoetry] Re: Peter Folk's Comment of Thursday, June 13, 2002 5:56 PM

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear Peter:

Thanks for your note regarding my newspoetic response to Bush's declaration
that every hour of freedom was won for us by our wars...  I post these
declarations publicly, for their own sake, because I would not shrink from
defending freedom in its finest hours, when each moment freedom may be
breathing its last breaths, when it becomes a mere symbol, a grave
decoration, held in respect and remembrance, honored on holidays, and
ignored as the living that it once was.  What I think freedom is or may be,
here I do not say, as I dwell on the contrasting Bushism.

1.  I do argue, as against the bland Bushism, that war creates no freedoms.

2.  As war creates no freedoms, it follows that every hour of freedom, then,
was not won for us by any war.  That is, there would always be some hours of
freedom that come between any wars.  Here, the sense of the division of time
between wars becomes complicated, for when does time become "pre-war" and
when would it be "post-war"?  Is a third kind of (social) time between wars
even possible, say the time of peace, itself -- when society is neither
preparing for war, nor recovering from war, when war is not on its mind,
like some alleged secret perversion, some sinful obsession that dares not
name its self in public, that dares not come out of the closet?  Could we
even possibly know what time is "war" time, especially in the twilit world
of modernity and its crusading wars of mass mobilization against nameless,
faceless relatively minor enemies?

3.  As against this position, you suggest that I may not have addressed
another idea, possibly implicit in the same Bushism: namely, does Bush refer
to the idea that wars protect, preserve and serve the causes of freedom?
Well, I would have said that the same historicism that I recite -- in the
names of the wars by invocations of their ostensible causes and effects --
of their historical meanings, if you will, where the antecedents of an event
may purport themselves to be independent causations, which transform themsel
ves, in part, by the portal of that same event, into the effects of that
event (which then says that the presence of an event mediates, as a third
kind of time, every sense of past and future, even when that event itself
has become historical, as in the thesis that history is possibly haunted
just as it is hallowed, on just that account, alone) -- refutes, as well,
any argument about protecting freedoms, as well.  I noted, although even
news-poetry would be a poor place for caveats and footnotes, the exception
of the mess of WWII, for that war seems to be a tangle of issues that grew
directly out of the failures -- diplomatic and otherwise -- to bring a
sustainable, enduring foundation of peace into being at the end of the Great
War (WWI).

If we never understand why WWI was such a colossal failure, we shall never
understand how freedom itself became imperiled in the great crises of
freedom in most of the remainder of the Twentieth Century.  The first of
those great crises, of course, was that of WWII, itself.  The second of
those great crises was the cold war.  The third of the great crises which
could be localized in the problematics of the Great War has been the
decolonization-reglobalization struggle, in which war we should see that the
Al-Qaeda campaign is a small battle front, a trivial phase, a symptomatic of
the conflict.

But, who teaches history as if long term events may always be connected
causally, these days?  Almost no one in the West wants to suggest what once
seemed obvious to everyone: that there are times and tides to human affairs,
to quote the Great Poet.  Everyone today wants to believe in the Great Myth
of our Age: that it makes sense to talk about every aspect of history as if
it were always just a matter of decision making, and that somehow, all of
those things just happen, kind of simultaneously, as epiphenomenality
itself, in a collection of random, independent events, as if the events in
that system have no meaning, except what individuals choose to give to those
events.

(Indeed, what Fujiyama tried to say, a few years ago, could be taken
inversely as this: the end of history has come upon the West because it
refuses to believe that history is greater than the life of individuals who
are caught up in the traps of history.  The people of the West are
individuals who are caught in the traps of their own senses of slavery to
modernity, because they refuse the new freedom which post-modernity wishes
to launch (as it could found no ship as a building).)

Now, the individual thesis -- of complete freedom -- may seem to be
self-evidently true, when the individuals at issue make of themselves the
center of their own particular universes, to behave as if the world orders
itself, to the extent that it occurs to them at all, around the events of
their own lives.  (The possibility that freedom is an illusion is not one
that they desire to consider or to contest -- it seems self-obvious to them
that their conduct is always "self-chosen," without regard to the extent of
the influences that would be (otherwise) said to support or to oppose their
chosen ways of being.)  And, the confidence of the democratic assumption
extends to this statement: if mutuality and equality are recognized, then
what is said to be true for any one person is said to be true for all.  I do
not support that conclusion, for it has this sense, that the it support a
totalitarianism of democracy that is precisely the same as all other
totalitarianisms,  such as those more commonly known as "religion" or
"ideology" -- for all those also believe that whatever law rules one should
also rule all others (as the Golden Rule, perhaps; or Kant's legislative
rule).

4.  So, the fact that no war has yet destroyed everything does not mean that
any war ever preserves anything like freedom.  Freedom has a possibility to
resume its appearances -- to be recognized when those who bestow recognition
upon it stop being distracted by war -- after those wars stop grabbing
headlines away from freedom, but, in any case, freedom never ceases to be.

5.  Freedom is never preserved by any war, but it may be perverted and
corrupted by war.  After the interruption of a war, a society may not know
how to resume its ante bellum ways of life -- not only has the economy
become materially dislocated and distorted (the production apparatus of the
society has been directed to produce war goods, and also may have been
attacked, damaged and even destroyed by "enemy" forces), but the same
dislocation and distortion has also happened to the society during war (its
leadership principles have become more favorable to authoritarian gestures,
starting with the salute of respect on down to servile, submissive, craven
escapes from freedom, in refusals to challenge city hall or the corporate
manager, in the go-along-to-get-along
ideas of mere meager animalist survivalism).  War preserves no freedom; on
the contrary, it creates, fosters and perpetuates environments that are ever
more hostile to freedom.

6.  Well, I could go on, bashing Bush for Bushisms, for his so-called
tribalisms triumphant in the over-valued shouting of the so-called truths of
truisms.  I could go on to say that freedom is a matter of thinking what
must be so, regardless of whether one desires it to be so -- and that is
most true of things like popularity -- that no truism that celebrates war as
a way of life or a service to life ought to earn from us any praise.  The
proper attitude toward war is to recognize it as the great evil that it is,
to work to end that evil, to pursue peace at any price, if true and lasting
peace is thereby to be gained.  I would wish Bush to recognize the ugliness
of war, that almost everyone as a soldier who dies in such things thinks
that he or she dies in service to some great cause, and that this truth is
an ugly one because it is, paradoxically, a belief held by all of the
soldiers on both sides of the front line.  If this idea is true, that
everyone is fighting for some great truth, then
why is it that no one believes that truth has the possibility of triumphing
peacefully?  (One must answer this question uninfluenced by the
psychodynamics of propaganda, which always aim to provide every society with
a devil theory of the other side -- and, please note, ours is a society that
has taken propaganda most seriously as a kind of specialized marketing
science: we have become the greatest society of liars in history because we
have made lying (ie, marketing) an acceptable and profitable way of life for
many.  (History will think of this America of our own age as the Great
Society of the Biggest Lies and even Bigger Liars -- where lying itself
became the primary artform of public discourse, when truth became a casualty
of war.)

7.  Why does almost no one in the West today believe in the good course of
history, the inevitable ever-upward triumph during the progress of time,
that reason shall someday be strong enough to rule, by itself, sans
bayonets, bullets, swords and missiles?  Have we had too much war in the
Twentieth Century, so that we no longer know how to believe in reason
alone -- do we need a long recovery period, do we need therapeutic
rehabilitation, to shed cynicism and restore faith?

8.  Did my newspoem argue against everything Bush might have said or only
against the most obvious wrongs that are evidenced in his speech?  I do not
know.  I do know that Bush never said, on that occasion, "We fought that war
to preserve freedom."  Even if he had said
that, which would have been nearer the truth, I would have written much the
same newspoem as the one that I did write, and therein I would answer that
version of Bushisms after the manner of the ideas herein indicated, after
the style that my newspoem there upon expressed.  For, Bush does not come to
criticize war, but to praise its folly as the glory of our civilization. For
me, such praise of villainy shall -- I hope -- always seem to be wrong.

9.  An Epitaph for My Mendacity:
Oh, it would certainly be something,
to read the posted poems of others,
and never to find any of those better,
never to find my own poems moving,
walking out on me and away from me,
like pedestrians, hikers and joggers,
in a hurry to go somewhere special,
or only around the block and back.

So many write better poems than I
that you'd think me to be ashamed
of my own poverty of fine imagery,
an inability to express deep beauty,
beneath the silky textures of skins,
picture texts of immortal treasures,
words that make your tongue sing
the tingle that brands its flavorites.

Why do I sing despite all my shame
that some others do it much better?
I poeticize the same way that I eat,
for I have hunger, as do all others,
And were I not to eat and digest,
and defecate, if you'll pardon me,
then I could not go on living at all,
mere transmute of food, wasting fat.

Well, thanks for listening,
to this longer remark,
in utter opposition to wars,
both ours and theirs,
Donald L Emerick