Preface: Sometime around the turn of the millennia, an unfamiliar email address, which I cannot recall, possibly rooted at iq.org, Julian Assange’s forerunner platform to Wikileaks, contacted me anonymously asking if I would be interested in analyzing a trove of seemingly whistleblower or hacked documents for potential publication. I don’t remember how much I had heard of Julian Assange and his hacking and reporting at the time, a bit in passing I think — this was about a half dozen years before the launch of Wikileaks in 2006. But there was no name on the mysterious email, so in a fit of paranoia, I wondered if it were actually FBI trying to entrap. Possibly due to my outspoken anti-establishment views? Maybe something I’d written at the left-wing ZNet site? Outraged Letters to the Editor of newspapers in multiple states, both published and, especially, unpublished? I was being too suspicious, but an anonymous person or organization had come electronically knocking, with a vague, brief, and unclear request. What to do?
About three years earlier in fall of 1997, immediately after grad school at Texas State University in San Marcos, I moved to Arkansas and worked briefly with Little Rock New Party, and union organizers, in conjunction with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), all located in the same converted old house, along with the community radio station. New Party, which held several seats on the city council, sent me into the Arkansas Delta with the union organizers who trained workers to be organizers themselves. I also did research on forgotten issues in the State Capitol Building but mostly went house to house talking with residents in the beat-up streets of Little Rock, seeing what could be done to better conditions in the neighborhoods. In a powerful action with ACORN, most of the workers from the community house physically took over and shut down a major bank for part of a day downtown, a bank with racist lending practices. This action included physically occupying the bank lobby, chanting loudly, and then engaging back and forth in an argument over a lending chart, which drew out all of the many curious workers from their first and second level offices, plus the irate bank manager. We took care to first block the drive-thru stations with our cars — no sneaky banking during the shutdown. Restraining orders and legal threats followed against the ACORN leaders but the push on the issue was powerful.
Other weeks, we canvassed the streets and formed a very functional and decisive left-wing-right-wing alliance with the otherwise destructive anti-tax Libertarians, seemingly all-white, as we soundly defeated a jail tax referendum intended to build more cells to imprison more people, almost entirely impoverished black people. Hell, why fund full employment, basic income, and educational opportunities to create a livable society, when you can instead fund nothing and thereby increase and concentrate violence and despair and then pay to build modern-day dungeons for the part of the population that the bigoted capitalist system demolishes and despises? The popular vote was a great prison and police state defeat, notwithstanding that at one of the few houses where I canvassed where a white person lived, a big man stepped out onto his stoop with a bag of trash, then barreled down the steps and barely swerved to miss me as I tried to deliver my anti jail tax pitch. “I hope they lock them all up,” he said, going by me. He stuffed the trash into a can, and I went to the next house. The jail tax defeat infuriated the political establishment who huffed and puffed — tonally like the trash guy — in the days after the vote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about “social responsibility.” Was it just me or did they give off the vibe of skull-sucked and shallow yet murderous twits? Everywhere you might glimpse into the would-be conquering powers, it seems you see mad or panicked, brazen or plastic, bullying and deathly twits — holding forth confident, condescending, thuggish, or vacuous. Their mouths and lips move, their eyes are variously offensive, yet they act offended, lashing out and through to the end. If you’ve never been told with utter contempt to literally “Go home and die” at least once in your life (another moment in another state), you’re missing out. Some people are wildly confused or desperate, bitter or resigned. Others, you realize that most any hope for them went another direction and they just need to die off to end their toxicity. You should not kill people. The so-called “Death Penalty” — state homicide — is an abomination, a crime. And yet, a killing message is the foundational message that the establishment in countless manifestations of Empire delivers to people each day, and to the entire climate-collapsing world by now — Go home and die.
It was a busy fall. President Bill Clinton returned to his home state for an extended stay — to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1957 integration of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine — while essentially ignoring the poverty and resultant violence in the area. During the first three days of Clinton’s four day stay, four young men aged 17 to 23 were murdered in Little Rock not far from Central High School, on the streets where we worked. Governor Mike Huckabee spoke alongside Clinton at the commemoration. I include these details and more in the preface and body of a biting poem I wrote at the time about that bloody, discordant week: News From Little Rock. Probably it deserves its own post here at some point. Alexander co*ckburn published it at Counterpunch and simply noted, “Good poem.” It’s meant to bite in a way that leaves an impression, but it’s not enough, compared to the reality, a snippet. Some snippets should be books, some books movies, some movies TV series, some TV series life. Cycle anew.
Flash forward toward the mysterious email and then on to the first chapter of Homefront. At the millennial inflection, I was three years out of grad school, and post Little Rock and New Party, and though never arrested, had been kicked out of buildings in multiple cities with close friends and colleagues, including being shoved from a hotel in Albuquerque as part of a group thunderously hounding a conference room we couldn’t get into full of policy makers complicit in the murderous US sanctions against Iraq. Marched with Amnesty International at its Annual General Meeting in New Orleans in 1997, eight years before the capitalist-spawned Hurricane Katrina atrocity there. Traveled cross country in 1999 for the March on Washington against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and carried a handmade sign: North Atlantic Terrorist Organization. I was surprised not to see another one like it. There must have been, among the many. The sign was highly complimented by other marchers and called “the best sign.” Where were the other like signs? And better, those more biting? Other signs punched, and it takes all kinds, but if you don’t really call sh*t out — in about two words — one day you’ve got strategic bombing, the next day you’ve got genocide, and then the next the entire planet blows up. In this age of Terminal Empire.
The cryptic email caused me to reflect on moments like these when you could push back a bit against empire, and I wondered if any of it could be used against me. At the time, I was living alone on the Mexican border, teaching writing and literature at a remote branch of South Texas Community College in Rio Grande City, Starr County, trying to keep up with 5 classes per semester, turning down overload classes at an even more remote Starr County branch in Roma, trying to write anti-Empire stories and novels, trying to figure out how to find a mate and establish a family, and thinking that if this mysterious email from out of the blue were legit, I probably had neither the time nor the expertise to do the work. But I also wondered if it were a trap. In spare moments, I liked to walk the edge of the fallow farm field along the wind-ripped STCC campus and look a mile south into Mexico and try to think things through — usually to no end. I let the email sit. And then after a couple weeks of at times nervous and torn reflection, I stupidly deleted the note permanently, without responding.
Life progressed in its own way, mostly grinding, sometimes gliding, sometimes leaping. I had the proverbial vivid dream of a fireball in the sky the night before the morning of February 1, 2003, when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry in East Texas. The next month my partner and I learned we were going to have a child, and the US invaded Iraq. Years earlier on September 11, 2001, I was driving the few miles to campus mid-morning to teach classes when I heard on radio the stunned reporting of the World Trade Center attacks in New York City. From the far distance, practically another country, it seemed the least surprising thing in the world, all of it: the horrific criminal attacks, the anger at the US, the US failure to do anything to prevent or defend. Then came the US revenge massacres and invasions and the virtual cover-up of the several stated reasons for the attack that laid bare US instigation and levels of responsibility. I assumed we had entered a new political era that morning on the quick drive between rental and campus, not likely to the good. It was suggested to the campus director that a panel about the attack be held at the school, and a congenial somewhat naive office mate immediately suggested that I be on it — a suggestion received with stony silence by the director who knew me too well. The panel was never held. Not to the good.
During the early days of the US invasion of Iraq, while I was deep into creating the antiwar novel, in class discussion some of the young male students expressed hope, even optimism, that the Iraqi army could hold out, that it was holding off the US Army, stopping the assault. They conveyed their strategic knowledge of the battle. Other students, more conditioned, seemed at least mildly embarrassed by this perspective. I noted that the US military was irresistible, given the basic monopoly on force that existed, total air power not least. The conquest and occupation would come at a cost, but it would come, swiftly and disastrously to the people of Iraq, and others. A bloodbath. Some of the young males seemed visibly dispirited by this view, while most students were mainly interested to hear who was saying what — facts and opinions, new, familiar, contradictory. Dare it be said — novel.
Life goes on for those afforded the chance. From the bank of a Roma city park one sunny summer afternoon, I watched a man from the opposite bank in the city of Miguel Alemán, Taumalipas with a bright yellow raft cross several young Mexican men to a densely vegetated island in the Rio Grande, or so I thought, very near the steep US bank. The raft empty, the man crossed back to Mexico. He was well-known on the US side, I later learned. I assumed the migrants would wait till dark to enter the US, but within a couple minutes three handsome young men came jogging up the steep and narrow concrete steps of the city park, in the brilliant light of downtown Roma. I was standing at the top of the steps and needed to move aside to let them pass. The first man barely slowed, nodded and smiled, we both did. I said, “Hi,” and they moved on. Another time, later in the year, same spot, a young Mexican-American Border Patrol agent — heavier and not as dashing as the migrants — pulled into the parking lot beside me and extended out his SUV window a pair binoculars so I could better see across the river into Miguel Alemán. He told me it was a popular crossing spot. “Oh, really?” I said. I didn’t tell him I knew. I had the look of a long-haired anglo outsider, but in a few months of class with the students and mere days or weeks of life along the border, you could get schooled quick. In 5 years and 50 classes, I taught one anglo student. She was quiet and on certain days seemed baffled to be there, possibly for many reasons. “My parents are hippies,” she told the class once during a discussion of family dynamics. She made a few positive distinctions between her experiences and the norms that prevailed in the discussion, before adding: “It has its own issues.”
I lived and worked in Rio Grande City at a time even then when the weather spent several consecutive months topping 100 degrees, each and every day, remarked upon even by local residents as rough. I happened to work there at STCC long enough to get vested in the teachers state retirement system — soon gutted by Republican Governor George W. Bush or Rick Perry. I also met long-distance a prison studies professor and prison teacher from a university across the country. We got married in a courthouse in Appalachia, after which she needed to sit down on a bench outside to keep from passing out. Nevertheless, she took a year’s leave and moved to Texas for my final year of teaching at what would soon become South Texas College, and our son was born mid-December near the border in a birth center run by nuns, in one of several small buildings by a goat pasture where birds stood on the goats’ heads picking bugs from their fur. It was a family affair. Our parents flew in from the cold north and were dazed and delighted by the palm trees and the tropical weather and the happy, if somewhat odd, circ*mstances. The morning after the birth my best friend from grad school in San Marcos (his roots in North Carolina) brought coffee and breakfast burritos that were deeply appreciated.
Four months later, with our infant son, and with my partner’s sister, husband and their infant daughter and two other small daughters from Colorado, we paid a few dollars at the Roma and Miguel Alemán crossing, and, with only adult IDs — drivers’ licenses — and no passports, walked on bridge above the Rio Grande into Miguel Alemán to eat and shop and explore. The children played in a little park. We made a day of it. Young men sold umbrellas in a fried intersection to hold against the brutal sun. The neighborhood was impoverished and otherwise much like cities in central Mexico, I was told, never having traveling far into Mexico myself. This was post 9-11, but before security visibly tightened. People crossed daily back and forth mainly for economic reasons, to go to the less expensive doctors in Miguel Alemán or to shop or eat, and visit family. The same Mexican dish you might order on the American side was made with higher quality and tastier ingredients on the Mexican side, the cheeses and sauces and tortillas, the pinto beans, everything. Later, the increased militance and the scandalous wall-building by the US along the precious river through the wilds and farmlands and city areas was heartbreaking, repulsive, and brutal — the barbaric wall, the weaponization of Empire along its scandalous borders and boundaries.
For migrants, the cities of Miguel Alemán and Roma were convenient crossing points compared to the Chachalaca Nature Trail behind the high school at Fort Ringgold near the river in Rio Grande City. In this sprawling natural area, I liked to walk and jog past the chachalacas, javelinas, and the occasional skinny ocelot. Here, crossers emerged wet and bedraggled and sounding like bears cutting through the crackly dry woods of mesquite trees, brush, cactus. Having the luxury of the sandy trails, I was far less noisy, and invariably surprised crossers rather than vice versa whether they were moving from the river into the US or walking toward it, on their way back to Mexico. They seemed often weary, going both ways. The crossers were always polite or disinterested in meeting, not uncommonly tired and wet in the Rio park, while fresh and dry in Roma, but in the heat you could dry quick. The undeveloped park trail was actually a wide sandy path through scorched woods and prickly pear cactus patches that the border patrol occasionally cruised in SUVs. I liked to walk the narrow side trails to the river edge for the soothing green-brown flow and the lush vegetation of the banks. The javelinas, comically, you could smell their pungence before you could see them amble across the trail or snout through brush. The Border Patrol always made me nervous, but the one type of encounter on the trails near the Rio Grande that caused me to turn around and go the other way were with the tarantulas. After moving from Pennsylvania to Texas for grad school, I had been astonished by large speed-jumping spiders in San Marcos, and even though tarantulas were not great jumpers, I didn’t care how wide the loop path was — if I was walking on it and came upon a tarantula, I turned around and went the other way.
Meanwhile in the classroom, one of the most rewarding experiences I think for both myself and the students was prompting them to write a personal narrative of themselves or their families. Sometimes at first hesitant and unsure, it seemed they then always leaned in thoughtfully and often eagerly to the recountings. They conveyed heartfelt and wide swaths of experience across two countries, as well as in many states for those who seasonally migrated for work. There was recurrent compare-and-contrast between the seemingly relaxed-paced time of the past, of their grandparents, to the fast-paced time of today. They felt pressure to be quick. And truly much of the border region, that long and flat Lower Rio Grande Valley was fast-paced, high energy, young, growing — surely even moreso today. A very different vibe from the Navajo Nation area where I had previously taught, despite key similarities. Every essay was different. One student went into great cultural detail about how “My father went into prison a Mexican, and came out an Indian,” to the kind amusem*nt of her classmates, in the course of discussion.
I often thought about the deleted email and soon wished I could undelete and follow up. Even more so when about a half decade after receiving it came the founding of Wikileaks, and I realized who and what this too-cryptic and too-clipped email must have been. I felt angry and foolish for deleting it, missing out on an anti-Empire activity that I might or might not have been good at. Much later, I would readily understand how in 2012 for nearly two months Glenn Greenwald was baffled and initially blew-off Edward Snowden’s first contact efforts. In 2016, four years after Julian Assange was mendaciously hounded into asylum in the Ecuador Embassy in London, I wrote an anti-Empire, anti-Trump novel where the disembodied persona of “Justice Assured” plays a telling role. Eventually I thought to try to send the novel to Assange through his great ally John Pilger, but by that point Pilger said it was “not possible.”
In part, I’ve tried to live to learn what might be useful to know as a partisan novelist. What filled the decades were social change issues and causes, partisan literary efforts, and more efforts, plus some modestly monetized passions. In no particular order, I lived and worked in northwestern New Mexico, teaching in and along the Navajo Nation, and worked more briefly in Arkansas, and for nearly a decade in Texas, before moving to West Virginia. Born in Pennsylvania and raised there on a remote defunct farmstead, I tried to get out and about to at least minimally research and experience first-hand — by car, bus, and foot — almost every US state and the three countries on the continent. With a friend I visited Bergen-Belsen death camp in northern Germany (complete with an appalling culture-still-in-denial moment there), and I regret in particular missing out on opportunities to visit a colleague in Kenya and more extensive travel in Mexico.
But I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and in 2003, in South Texas, after having unwittingly missed an electronic opportunity to help expose the lies and depredations of Empire, I wrote the explicit anti Iraq war novel Homefront about the US invasion of Iraq, led by the ignominious President George W. Bush, former jet-fighter in the Texas Air National Guard. It was happening again. I remembered standing in the Penn State student union in 1991 watching with disgust and repugnance on the big screen the live US bombing of Baghdad, led by former CIA Director and then President George H. W. Bush, the father of the future President George W. Bush, who himself was a real jet-fighter, fake cowboy, and brute tool of Empire. It was the same damn thing a dozen years later, even worse, with a different President but even the same damn name. Who says the US is a democracy and not an oligarchy? 2024 is the first year in nearly a half century that there is no Bush, Clinton, or Biden on the presidential ticket, since 1980 — and it only ends now because Biden is dying in office. Amazingly, given how destructive Clinton and Biden were, the Bushes were the worst of the miserable lot.
During that grim first year of the second US invasion of Iraq — to quickly complete Homefront in full and in parts pre and post invasion — I tried to meet self-imposed deadlines by writing all night at times, then staggering without sleep in the morning past my appraising partner, newly pregnant and more-newly married, to teach classes at STCC. I need not have rushed, as I was unable to get any interest in the antiwar novel, or any part of it, in the publishing world, largely for the reasons I detail below.
So why post the opening chapter of this two decade old antiwar novel now? First, it’s always a time of war for the US, whether cold, hot, drone, economic, or otherwise. Second, I need to fill a Substack gap. Within a couple weeks, I hope to keep to the schedule and post the next chapters of the anti Empire novel serializations of both Most Revolutionary and Loop Day but neither one might happen this week, due to a time crunch — so instead I post below the opening chapter from Homefront, published DIY in 2006. Outraged and sickened by the criminal and catastrophic US invasion of Iraq, I wrote Homefront in 2003 as fast as I could during the first year of the US assault and conquest but it turned out to be a taboo endeavor that found no agent nor publisher despite my many queries and submissions, and despite purposefully writing the partisan novel in the style of conventional literary realism to try to negate any defensive or aggressive and expected academic and corporate accusations that the novel is “propaganda not literature.” Turned out, I should have written a sheer fantasy novel about penguin invasions or something, as far as the publishing world was concerned. You know, defang the thing.
No magazine nor journal accepted any chapter or other excerpt ever — even in much later years — despite my many attempts with commercial mags, lit mags, you-name-it. The few establishment voices who responded at all to the final draft of the novel did so with praise but being conditioned viewed this “very good” and “thoughtful” conventional literary novel as “genre” and “ideological,” and therefore technically broken — a seemingly consensus establishment conclusion. Homefront was politely, respectfully declined by a couple of the most liberal US establishment presses in New York for that ostensibly aesthetic reason — the only stated criticism among various compliments. This was back when you might actually paper-mail manuscripts to editors at publishing houses, as I did, rather than email materials to the gatekeeper literary agents, which is the pinched degree of access today. A letter from one of these editors, I think at Norton, though complimentary on the one hand, otherwise asserted that Homefront was in the wrong form, that it was ideological and therefore suited for nonfiction. I was so disgusted by this standard rationalization — this ingrained establishment de-intellectual mantra — which I had painstakingly tried to preempt by using full-on conventional literary style — that I never replied to the editor, seasoned and kind, who tried to educate me.
I suppose I should have responded with a gentle suggestion that the editor might want to check their assumptions about whose ideology was actually getting in the way of creating and publishing humane literature — antiwar ideology and perspective, or “war of aggression” and invader ideology and perspective? With a decade’s worth of first-hand lit-world experience by then, I knew how tough it was to interact and argue with that kind of deeply held intellectual falsehood — let alone to fight through and fend off conscious discrimination and unstated bans by the owners and editors who rule above the true-believer hires and functionaries.
Three years after DIY publishing Homefront, I used my ongoing direct and secondary research to write in detail about the sociopolitical literary situation past and present in Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel, which, after DIY-publication (again, but this time online), received immediate establishment recriminations that not only helped prove the point but that also, curiously, amused. Some stuff, it seems, you cannot make up. When reality splinters in ways too preposterous for even fiction writers to image, you know that society has not gone through the looking glass but become glazed within it.
For explicit topical imaginative work to be valid in establishment eyes, it must be considered to be non-ideological, and in a neat coincidence, if such work too-pointedly challenges the establishment, then it is called ideological and is dismissed. Something similar is true in journalism and in criticism (and in life generally), to differing degrees and effects. Terry Eagleton notes in Literary Theory: "Radical critics . . . have a set of social priorities with which most people at present tend to disagree. This is why they are commonly dismissed as 'ideological', because ideology is always a way of describing other people's interests rather than our own." In establishment formulation, “other people’s interests” in literature are often dismissed by using smear and scare words like “partisan” or “polemic” or “propaganda,” or “ideology.” Readers are solemnly or sternly advised against such bad form, bad content work — often whether it is much divergent or not — for their own best interests in literature and life.
Thus the establishment both denies its own powerful partisan lines, ideologies, and propaganda and implicitly tightly defines them. It’s run-of-the-mill, cultural conditioning, mental cleansing, sometimes conscious, sometimes zombied. US state criminals can be relieved, as I’ve noted elsewhere, that explicit antiwar novels are an aesthetic impossibility — especially those that revolve overtly and directly around a war of aggression: "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself all the accumulated evil of the whole," in the words of the judgment of Nuremberg.
After Homefront I think I’ve yet to write fiction again strictly in the style of literary realism — one of many great styles, though which, for the better or the worse, can make for a tough slog through grim reality. Sometimes “one of the damn thing is ample,” notes literary critic Rebecca West in perfectly broken grammar, in The Strange Necessity. That said, when the full reality of the “damn thing” eludes you in the first place, you need a more conscious recreation of the actual world, and of our actual lives and deaths within it — to better know and feel, move and shape, create and confront. And we can do much of this every day, we need to, to one extent or another, as best we might, in the ever fluid and corrective fashion, the truth seeking nature of our minds, and by the strong and vital work of our bodies, and active hands. And we need to do this here on the homefront, if not beyond.
HOMEFRONT (2003) - an (explicit) antiwar novel
CHAPTER ONE — QUEEN OF SHEBA
They were not crowded but grouped comfortably in small formations on the back porch — a lofted plank deck, half a decagon braced across the entire wall of the house and hanging far out over the yard, a bone-breaking drop to the sidehill below.
Farther beyond, the valley fell away into apparent infinity, an impressive view, although what most of those gathered on this commemorative occasion welcomed more was the spring warmth for which they felt gratitude.
They were gathered at the home of Aaron Thompson, who had been killed exactly a year ago during the opening weeks of the US invasion of Iraq.
Soon afterward, Carolyn Thompson had found herself with her husband on the front stoop of the house telling the media assembled on the grass and on the dirt and gravel drive that her soldier son Aaron had died for — "He died for all of us," she said, when in fact, as she now knew, it would have been far more accurate to say that Aaron had been killed by all of us, that Aaron and the rest of the foot-soldiers had been sent as cannon fodder, however lethal, by the government of the United States and by the powerful corporate forces that drove and staffed and otherwise held large purchase on the government, and that Aaron had been killed by everyone in the US who had let the government, the corporate media and other cheerleaders carry out the illegal and otherwise criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq — an act on the same moral level as that of the conquest of Iraq by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, nearly 800 years earlier when his invading legions overran the Middle East. This was the way Carolyn understood the context of her son's death, now.
Carolyn had begun to see the fiction for the fact in the misleading reports on TV, on the radio, and in print, and what was more, she had heard it on her own lips — "He died for all of us."
She knew better now. Because of. Not for.
What a bitter, nauseous thing it was to Carolyn to learn the barbaric reality of how and why her son had been sent to kill and be killed on criminal grounds by official Americans, many elected, many not elected, who created, supported and directed the invasion. One of those elected officials happened to be family to Carolyn — her first cousin, Senator Sam Washburn, who stood across from Carolyn on the deck today, leaning against the part of the railing below which the ground fell most steeply, as Carolyn could not help but be aware. Senator Sam Washburn stood opposite Carolyn who had placed herself in front of the sliding glass door, the lone entrance to the house.
Carolyn's youngest daughter Ellen had flown in from college, and Jamie was there, the daughter of the Senator and Ellen's close friend. Carolyn's elder children were there as well, Ruthy and Mike who lived nearby, along with their young children playing in the house and traipsing about the yard. Carolyn's parents had come over too, Joanne and Bernie, as had the reporter from the city paper who interviewed them all, Lynn Jackson. A few neighbors were also in attendance, as was Aaron's friend from the military, Juan Garza, who had been sitting by Aaron in the Humvee when it was hit by the rocket-propelled grenade that killed Aaron. They were all gathered on the deck today.
And Carolyn thought if you looked hard enough you might even see a few of the Iraqi people standing around — warriors and civilians both — including Iraqi children who might be off playing in the house and yard with the Thompson family children.
Given the deck's extraordinary height, when the wind on stormy days whipped and the rain lashed and Carolyn had stood at the glass door looking out across the boards this past year, she had felt as if she were riding through some vast and dangerous sea on a giant ship, on the Titanic, it could have been, or a battle cruiser.
When the Senator placed one hand on the top plank of the railing and gestured with his other hand while making a point, Carolyn felt again the reality of the death of her son, the reality that her own country had set him up, the government and the powers that drove the government, not that the government was really her government, not that it much represented what she valued, except fictitiously, she had come to understand more and more.
If her country had not invaded, Aaron would not have been killed, not that she felt it was the country that had invaded, not that it was the people — the people who had been flat lied to and misled and overruled.
If great pains had not been taken to mislead the people of the country, there would have been far less support than even the limited amount that the official liars and manipulators and true believers of a fantasy America in a fantasy world were able to whip up.
And there he stood, Senator Sam Washburn, Carolyn's first cousin, talking with her husband and some others. He stood across from her now, by the railing, nothing between him and infinity but what might be fragile wooden boards, except that Carolyn knew the wood to be sturdy and protective. Her husband and sons, Mike and Aaron, had built the deck themselves.
It might as well be the President of the United States standing there. Carolyn would prefer that — she would prefer that any opponent of hers not be a cousin but a stranger. Unfortunately, life was not always so compliant.
Carolyn stared at the railing, at the top plank and avoided looking at the hand of the Senator on the board. She considered instead the nails that held the railing together.
A few nails. All it took sometimes was a few key nails and the whole thing came apart, or was sealed tight forever, whatever it might be, a railing, or, say, a coffin.
A few nails and the railing was no more, though the deck would remain. A few nails and the coffin was closed tight forever. A few nails, a few bullets, a single rocket-propelled grenade.
Carolyn's eldest daughter Ruthy came over and put a hand on the fist of Carolyn that clenched a bottle of juice, and Carolyn watched her own fingers relax and then release the bottle on the table, and she pulled slightly away from Ruthy and stared again over the valley.
She could scarcely think of a single person missing on this solemn occasion, a person who might help make the moment more affirming of the memory of Aaron, who might help salve the pain of the loss if not Carolyn's outrage at her son's death, an outrage which she had no intention of giving up, an outrage which she had decided in recent months to acknowledge and reinforce as appropriate, an outrage that, as she understood now, at the very least, might likely see her through every single day of the rest of her life, and through each remaining year — of which she meant there to be plenty.
Carolyn picked up the bread knife.
She had even smiled at the Senator when she invited him here — at least she thought she had smiled, tried to force herself to do so through lips she felt turning to bone, and now there he stood.
"Mom?" Ruthy said. And Carolyn began to cut the bread.
She had once thought of this man standing before her as a senator cousin, but now Carolyn regarded him mainly as a cousin senator, a nice enough person privately whom she had no problem with in conventional moments such as this, for he was polite and good humored, a gentle father and husband, an amiable uncle, serious at times, caring and diligent too, a convivial man who liked sports and music and pets and most anything else that regular people typically liked. He was an almost every-people kind of person. There was nothing wrong with him from that perspective, she thought. Like most folks he was reasonable and compassionate in many moments. He could be personable or prickly. He was the kind of person who gave people a sense that there was much reason to think of him as a good man — as Carolyn thought too, at least in reference to this private side of his person, the way folks generally tend to know and think of others, to the extent that they do.
But to say that Carolyn had nothing personal against Sam would be inaccurate, for though she held nothing of her cousin's private side against him, what she knew of it, she understood that there was far more to a person than what they did directly face to face with you, there was what they did to you and to people in general indirectly — there was what they did to everyone, to the public, and there was no denying that this other side of the Senator, his public side, his political side, had facilitated the death of Aaron.
There was no denying that the public side of the people in Congress was largely responsible for the death of her son, since support for the attack and occupation of Iraq was strong in the legislature, while not nearly so much among the citizenry.
Carolyn had learned that unfortunately and to its great discredit, Congress represented the people only when it felt it could dare to. Otherwise Congress did not go far or at all against the ruling dollars that funded the campaigns and dominated the decision-making at almost every level.
Even more undemocratic and more repulsive to Carolyn was the fact that the president represented the people even less than Congress since the concentration of money could be focused even more intensely on a single position, the top position, thus tightening the grip of non-elected ruling wealth — one of the many ongoing deeply anti-democratic traditions of America — and it burned her all the more now as she thought of Aaron who had helped build this deck she was standing on.
How late it was that she had learned the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Jay had made plain that "the people who own the country ought to govern it" — as they did today. Carolyn had come across that little detail this past year, having looked more deeply into the country's past, as she had had cause to.
And she had found out in no uncertain terms that wealth ruled in the form of the corporate-state plutocrats and like-minded folk willing to do their bidding either to better gain and maintain lucrative and comfortable corporate and academic jobs, or simply to identify themselves with some mythic notion of greatness in this country, America, even if a lot of flag-worshipers themselves enjoyed precious little prosperity or other benefits from their faith.
The official position of Senator Sam Washburn, support for the invasion and conquest of Iraq (and its massive oil fields), was the position of Congress in general and by and large. There had scarcely been a dissenting voice raised during some of the votes to fund the atrocity. Of course this congressional and executive support that had killed Aaron was also killing, disfiguring and disabling the sons and daughters of many other families in the US, not to mention the far more greater killing of the people of Iraq and the accelerating spread of violence and chaos and desperation there due to lack of security, lack of jobs, lack of medicines, lack of even electricity, and the failure of the invading forces to establish non-abusive let alone decent conditions of life.
It had all led, quite predictably, to an even more ferocious resistance in Iraq that was gaining the ever-increasing support of the population, despite the bombings, beheadings, and other brutality by the resistance — so hated were the country-destroying American invaders and those who sided with them in the power-grab for which there was no end in sight and for which there never had been an exit plan, because no exit had ever been intended.
On the contrary, Carolyn had learned that from the start the US had been intent upon building fourteen permanent military bases for the purpose of dominating oil-rich Iraq from now until Kingdom Come, or until there was oil no more. That was the actual plan that US forces were still trying to implement — morality, carnage, and the fate of the world be damned — and never mind the views of the Iraqis.
Totally Dominant or Totally Dead seemed to be the US model. Carolyn understood it now, the real standard for much of US action in Iraq and the world. For this, her son had been sent to kill and be killed, as Carolyn had gone through the great pain of finding out. Because of this brute madness, Aaron had died. For this homicidal and potentially suicidal endeavor, Aaron had been led by official America.
Possibly she could be forgiven for dwelling on it.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Recited day after day during her school years, the Pledge of Allegiance came bitterly to Carolyn's mind as she watched the Senator reach for his glass of soda on the railing. What did it mean to swear loyalty to a strip of cloth? Was it not a form of idolatry and brainwashing? Carolyn knew that her eldest daughter Ruthy had come to think so.
When school started again last fall after Aaron had been killed, Ruthy gave her children permission to not recite the flag pledge if they chose. Ruthy had explained her views to the teachers and to her children, and her children had both decided not to say the pledge, and it made Carolyn wonder more than ever what was normal, decent, and right — and what merely appeared to be and was tolerated for no good reason or no real reason at all, and worst of all what went on for terrible reasons, in actuality, with terrible consequences of the sort the Thompsons knew now only too well.
The ongoing atrocity was made to look so normal-decent-and-right that Carolyn wondered if there was something equally horrible behind the apparently normal desire of the Senator to be here today with his extended family in this area of his youth. Carolyn hoped the Senator had wished to be invited for the conventional reasons of being one with family, difficult as family could be.
This was what Carolyn had sensed inside her cousin senator, but given his role as Senator, not as cousin, not as Sam, Carolyn felt she could not entirely be sure of his real motivations regarding even the killing of her son, especially regarding the killing of her son, though she had no direct evidence that the Senator would use this trip home to family for political gain.
Should she make anything of the fact that she and Glenn rarely saw the Senator in person, so busy was he off in Washington or touring the state?
How was she to know for certain why he and his wife and daughter had come to the old church for the commemorative ceremony for Aaron?
Whatever the reasons, the Senator stood now by the railing at the highest part of the deck.
Even voting against her cousin senator would be of no use, Carolyn knew. She could not vote against the Senator, not because he was family, but because his opponent was an equally strong advocate of the invasion and occupation. Incumbent candidates like Sam rarely lost anyway. Even if they did, opposing candidates who had any chance to win in the big money nominating system were often as bad or worse than the incumbent.
And it was called democracy.
And Carolyn was the Queen of Sheba.
Carolyn whitebread Thompson of European descent. Was it not obvious how extremely rich, powerful and black she was, just like the mighty Queen of Sheba traveling from her wealthy Empire in ancient Ethiopia across the wide lands to marry an equally powerful ruler who had the reputation of being the wisest and best of all kings?
Yes, indeed, Carolyn stretch-the-paycheck Thompson must actually be the Queen of Sheba if America was really the land of the people, by the people, for the people.
And her husband Glenn — who had helped build this splendid deck and much of the house — he was even better known throughout all the wide world as King Solomon, wisest of mortals, whom the Queen of Sheba had traveled from afar to challenge by quiz and then to marry.
Yes, just as Carolyn was the Queen, so was America a functioning democracy, where everyone was able to meaningfully participate in how things were done, what got done, what decisions were made.
The only problem — and it was beginning to bother Carolyn the Queen more and more — there was something wrong with King Solomon. It seemed to Carolyn that now after several decades of her glorious marriage to the King's wondrous self, mighty and matchless as the King might be, it seemed to Carolyn that the wise King could have by now figured out some way to get rid of the potholes at the end of driveway. And yet it was not so.
Carolyn wondered if she should give her venerable King a few more years before she walked down the royal drive, carrying a pick-axe and a shovel to see what the hell she could do about the problem herself.
Queen of Sheba. American democracy. Oh, yes.
Her son, Aaron. Dead.
Carolyn stared across the deck. What harm could it do to act like the Queen of Sheba for a single day, Carolyn mused, or even for a single moment of a day, if only in a small way here on the deck among family and friends where Carolyn felt she might very well like to rise in judgment as had been prophesied of the Queen, that she would rise in judgment of those who committed horrible deceptions and wrongdoings upon the people?
Just so, Carolyn felt she might like to rise up to full power, if doing so was not too grand a notion — which, thinking of Aaron, and thinking of all the others killed and maimed and all the billions of dollars of time and energy wasted, and all the infuriating deceit, Carolyn decided that any rising up on part of herself and others would not be so much a gesture that was grand as one that was directly to the point and long overdue.
Much of the public, including herself, and maybe everyone, as far as Carolyn could see now, had been in some part deceived by the mass of manipulations, but were they not as a public also too often merely inert, asleep, disorganized, sailing sweetly or cynically, reckless or mindless, down long rivers of denial in life, if not rivers of ignorance, if not long rivers of vast irresponsibility both civic and human?
How had she failed? Carolyn wondered. And how could she and everyone fail less in the future? How to succeed? How to save the Americans and Iraqis of today? How to save the Aarons of the future?
The Senator leaned away from the boards while otherwise staying in place opposite Carolyn, one hand flat on the top rail, responding mechanically, it seemed, yet not altogether without energy and deep-stored conviction, to some comment Glenn had made. Carolyn wondered what it concerned. Probably the economy. The economy that was shot to pieces, Carolyn sensed, and understood further that the economy no matter how good it ever got for some people was always shot to hell for a good chunk of the rest, the way the system was set up. Where was the democracy in the economy?
Carolyn stared across the deck and gripped the knife.
And then the first slice of bread fell on the cutting board.
And Carolyn placed the knife carefully for the cutting of the second slice.
And her daughter Ruthy who had been standing nearby this whole time, she moved back to her group.
It would be a few moments yet before Carolyn felt she would be able to get herself ready to interact with everyone — that is, with anyone — she meant, with someone — that is — with him.
Carolyn tried to think of ways in which her cousin senator might be viewed in his professional life as a sympathetic figure.
Nothing much occurred.
Finally she remembered that many of the policies of the Senator were not quite as bad as those of his likely opponent in the fall election. Carolyn squeezed the knife.
And she thought again of Aaron, and that was the end of her speculation about the positive qualities of the Senator.
An election was coming up, and no congressperson had lost to the invasion a closer relative than the Senator had in Aaron, and as a consequence of this fact, Carolyn wondered again if the Senator might be here today for political reasons.
"We're a more political family now," Carolyn had informed the Senator in the process of inviting him over with his wife and daughter after the morning church service. She explained that he was welcome to join them provided he did not mind being asked any questions that folks might raise — which Carolyn herself might likely pose, she had meant to imply.
She had called the Senator "Sam" at that moment, "Sam, we're a more political family now." And so they were. Carolyn wondered if this afternoon was not the exact right time to be openly political, to develop and live the public side of her person, to discuss issues that mattered to her, to everyone, to raise the specter of her dead son, to speak of ravaged lands and people and the increasingly fragile world, to speak again and again of her dead son Aaron.
The Senator's presence had at first distracted Carolyn from doing an efficient job arranging the bottles and cans of drinks around pieces of fruit and loaves of bread on the table beside her, but now she was determined to steelher armand slice through the bread more firmly, more quickly. She was determined to be strong, soldier strong, like Aaron. She meant to be strong like her son had been strong and she meant to join the others with whom she hoped to feel more fully the welcome weather today, freeing everyone from the house with its walls pressing in. She tried to understand how nice it was to have her cousin senator come by on this special day of commemoration. How very nice. Carolyn worked the knife and kept telling herself, imagining, how nice it might be, there on the back porch high above the ground.
No geopolitical problems were going to be solved this afternoon on the deck of the Thompson family house. Or so it seemed. Aaron's buddy Juan Garza would not magically pull out of his pocket the torched papers he had found on his friend after the RPG had ended his life. Aaron's older sister and brother Ruthy and Mike would not press the Senator on the illegal and immoral nature of both the invasion and the ongoing occupation of Iraq. Journalist Lynn Jackson would request an interview only if she could do so unobtrusively, on this commemorative occasion. Aaron's father Glenn did not want to question the Senator closely for fear his wife would find it inappropriate. Aaron's younger sister Ellen intended to speak her mind but to the Senator's daughter Jamie, who was already aware of her line of reasoning. Everyone was rather clear on where everyone else stood. There seemed to be little if anything more to say, and even less to do here in the privacy of the Thompson residence, until Carolyn's mother Joanne approached the Senator and said in her typically strong and clear voice how proud not only she was of his work as Senator but how proud the whole family was and how honored they all were by his taking time to be with them today.
The knife fell out of Carolyn's hand.
It clattered off the edge of the plate, skipped from the table and smacked onto the deck. "That's ludicrous," Carolyn said to the bread. And there was silence.
Joanne began speaking to fill the void, but Carolyn cut her off, saying again, saying it louder, "That's ludicrous," looking first at her mother and then staring at the Senator. Joanne attempted to speak again, but Carolyn spoke over her, saying, "I don't think so, and I don't want to think so, and I'm not going to think so. All I can say is it took some real guts for you to even wish to show up here today." She looked directly at the Senator. "The war on Iraq, and the occupation, is an obscenity. And you supported it and still do, and I don't have any respect for that. And my mother is one of the few people on this porch who does. I want that made clear. That needs to be made clear. That ought to be made clear."
As if to help hold his tongue, the Senator glanced at the deck for a brief moment, and then he nodded at Joanne. "I thank you," he said, before facing Carolyn. "I'm sorry that politics come between us."
"Are you?"
"I'm very sorry for the loss of Aaron."
"You're sorry."
"It's a terrible thing. I can't imagine, of course."
"Do you want me to help you understand? Aaron is dead. Can you understand that?"
"Carolyn."
"Mom."
A few people reached out to her with their voices, but no one actually came over — possibly because of the steel it was easy to sense exploding out of her — how steady and strong she looked.
"You destroyed a country, Senator. And tens of thousands of Iraqis, at least. And you enflamed sentiment against us. Aaron is dead. Iraqis are dead. More are dying. And as a consequence our country is less safe than it was a year ago. And poorer too. In every way imaginable. Most people do not support the occupation when made aware of the facts and did not support the invasion in the first place. And you — you're doing your job the way you choose to do it, and feeling 'sorry'. Well, that's nice."
No geopolitical problems were going to be solved this afternoon on the deck of the Thompson family house, as far as Carolyn Thompson could see, but at least one personal situation was going to have its day.
No one stepped in.
"I'm going to ask you to leave, Senator. Please do so. Your wife and daughter are welcome to stay."
Cousin to cousin, Sam faced Carolyn. "You're kicking me out?"
"Do I know you?" Carolyn asked. "Do I want to? Does anyone want you to bring the whole rest of this house and town and country and world crashing down on top of us? Why don't you go find another country to represent, Senator? You're certainly not representing this one."
"We have a different understanding of the facts."
"I wonder."
After a moment, Carolyn picked up the knife from the deck.
She wiped it off with a napkin.
Then she continued to slice the bread. It was good bread, good crust, with a hearty texture inside. Good ingredients. Good taste. Nutritious. It was the best bread there was, Carolyn could not help but think, the best bread she had baked in a long time.
It was so good that when she finished cutting the loaf, she served herself the first slice, took a bite, and savored the taste. It almost made her smile. She looked around and noticed Sam had gone. Everyone else seemed subdued. Then she made a quiet announcement, one that carried. "It's good bread over here, everyone. Made it myself. Please help yourselves." She picked up a drink and stepped aside as people came over to the table.
Carolyn went to the railing and looked out at the contoured shades of charcoal that were the bare treetops near and far, framing the valley, a valley into which she had gazed often this past year. She would still have to vote for that damned cousin senator of hers, she realized — not of course because he was family but because for now there was no better alternative.
Maybe soon there would be a better choice. Her name was not Washburn, it was Thompson, but maybe she should put that name in play the next go around — or support some name like it, some name that stood for what was worth standing for. Maybe her name could play well enough to make a point at least, to rally support for the organizations and voters and positions that ought to be supported. Well, she would have to see. She would have to think about strategy — time and effort, resources and consequences.
Carolyn stood at the railing and imagined she was staring all the way into Iraq where Iraqis were being killed by the tens of thousands, by American troops and by American policies. And American troops, many of them young, all of them misled, were dying by the dozens. And then Carolyn saw only Aaron, and she felt him to be close by, if so far away that it gutted her.
She was the host this afternoon. Let others speak of Aaron to the extent that they would. She would listen. And she would look all the way into Iraq and beyond as she might, and she would continue to think things through. She had thrown the Senator off the deck and out of her home today, cousin or no. She would have to think about that too.
She would likely try to talk to the man and see what might be salvaged. She would have to give it some thought. She would have to see.
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