I think the world would be a better place—or at least it would be in a better place—if we knew just how crazy we are. Every one of us has an attic or a cellar full of lunacies which, if known, would make us less formidable to each other, perhaps more likeable, or at least less unlikeable. (I save for another day dicier speculation about what things might be like if we knew each other’s desires).

One of the zanier secrets in the attic under my disappearing hairline is the heartbreak I feel upon seeing torn curtains blowing out of the windows of abandoned houses. I know these houses are trying heroically to hold on to the intimacies entrusted to them against the weathering and greedy suck of time. I know that I am familiar with these intimacies, that these are my former homes, and no one need tell me how impossible that is. It’s my lunacy, and there are plenty more where it came from.

I regard the relentless creep of concrete, the obsession with cutting down trees and mortgaging ourselves to China as dangerous as al-Qaeda, because they’re an assault against the repositories of everything we’ve felt, suffered, confided and celebrated. So now you have a little slice of my nutcake.

I recognize the creak of certain stairsteps in those houses, the broken glass and picture frames, the rocker moved from its usual place, mattress stains, chain wrenches, overrun orchards. Not when the artifacts show up in overpriced antique shops, but where they fell or were put down or walked away from. I remember the sepia people on the cluttered floor, the antique headlines. But I can’t, can I?

And if I confided this to you over church coffee you’d wonder whether to enlist a cleric’s help for me, wouldn’t you? Or if I remarked on it at the corner market I’d be yet another local kook to avoid, wouldn’t I? But since I’m saying it here, where a modicum of folly is licensed by the impersonality of the web, I’m safe, right?

But safe from what? Our usual insistence on appearing saner than we are, saner than the other guy, acting normal when we know we have no idea what normal is, except that it seems handed down to us by other fraidy-cats?

You know I’m a lot crazier than this timid little lifting of a sheet, and I know you are too, and I think it’s… promising.

If nightriding bushwhackers and jayhawkers were torching villages, murdering their inhabitants and raping children in Macedonia do you think the august thumbsuckers at the United Nations would whomp up the moral fortitude to intervene in force.

Could the UN possibly exist for any better reason than rescuing human beings from genocide? It would seem the answer depends on the color of the victims. This being so painfully the case, the entire human race must wallow in disgrace.

The people of Darfur in east Africa are being butchered while Big Media, Big Business, Washington and many another despicable world capital would have us believe that the bloviations of various oafs in Manhattan, such as Hugo Chavez and Achmed Achmedinejad, are more important than this monstrous ongoing tragedy.

The Arab street is enraged by a Danish cartoon, Pope Benedict’s hamhandedness, George Bush’s Dodge City mentality, and by a whole smorgasbord of grievances, but it cannot find its voice to condemn the horrific murder of innocent Darfurians by Arab irregulars, the janjaweed.

Mired in racism, choking on their own hypocrisy, the world’s leaders, East and West, cannot manage the decency, the conscience to save Darfur’s innocents.

Where are al-Qaeda’s smarmy fulminators on this particular piece of brutality? It’s a bit too close to home, isn’t it? Sudan, the janjaweed’s benefactor and provocateur, has been quite cozy with al-Qaeda’s two-faced thugs.

Where are the West’s suits with all their hifalutin oratory about human rights and dignity? Spluttering over their caviar, no doubt.

The sick fact is that the Arab World, the West, the subcontinent, and the Far East must go down hand-in-hand to utter ignominy for their odious failure to save their fellow humans in Darfur.

To do nothing about genocide is to condone it.

One of the scariest aspects of the controversy over how terror suspects should be treated is the Bush Administration’s insistence that this is a whole new ballgame the like of which the world has never seen. What hogwash!

Read the history of the Inquisition in Spain. The inquisitors of the Holy(?)Office swore up and down their torture of prisoners was to protect the state against Muslims and Jews intent on bringing it down. Their reign of fear engulfed not only the Muslims and Jews but Christians as well, because they convinced the Christians that they were committing patently un-Christian horrors in the name of saving the state.

Sound familiar?

More recently Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, in what has been called the nightmare decade was singing the same song: to protect us from Godless communism we had to suspend many of our traditional rights and processes in order to get at the truth. He ran his own inquisition until the courtly Joseph N. Welch stopped him cold on television, then a new medium. McCarthy’s tactic was the same as today’s White House—scare the American people into surrendering their cherished rights.

Does this sound like a whole new ballgame?

The rights and due processes we laid at the feet of the five o’clock shadow from Wisconsin merely enabled him and his stooges to persecute people who didn’t agree with his politics. What he sought, at the end of the day, was a country without politics, with only one view, only one voice, only one governance. And that, as Welch helped us to remember, was not what 4,435 Americans laid down their lives for in The Revolutionary War. No, they fought for the right to dissent, to disagree with one another, and to be respected in the process.

The White House argues that we’re suspending only the rights of foreign terrorists so that our own rights can remain intact. But that’s not the way it works. You can’t torture—the White House worms around this word—foreigners and at the same time maintain to all the world that you stand for individual rights, for decency and humane treatment of all.

I thought of our treatment of suspected terrorists as I read about Pope Benedict’s foofaraw. He had quoted a late Byzantine emperor bad-mouthing Islam, and then his spokesman claimed he was only putting things in historical perspective. If he had really been interested in historical perspective he might have mentioned that while the emperor was in high dudgeon about the Muslims the church’s Holy Office was pulling people apart on the rack, burning them at the stake, gouging their eyes, pulling out their fingernails, and God knows what else—in the name of state security and the survival of the church. It’s a wonder the church survived its own murderousness and hypocrisy.

How much history do we need to remember? Not so long ago Josef Goebbels convinced the German people that extraordinary security measures had to be taken because a worldwide Jewish conspiracy threatened the very existence of the German state. And if you believed that, he’d sell you Czechoslovakia. But millions of Germans did believe it. The result was not only the death of human rights in Germany but the near extermination of one of the races of man, indeed the very race that gave Christendom its savior, along with thousands of Roman Catholics, gypsies, and political dissenters.

So must we really relive all these horrors simply because the Bush Administration has sworn to us that this is a new ballgame? A new ballgame when our libraries are filled with books telling us there’s nothing new about it? A new ballgame when we know better? And if we really don’t know better, can we call ourselves the rightful heirs of our Founding Fathers, or must we go down (way down) in history as the Americans who could not find a way to honor Washington and Jefferson in the face of Osama bin Laden?

Poetry is alchemy. The poem is its catalyst. The poet employs algebra—the Arabic root words are al jabara, the joining—to make an elixir to catalyze words unaccustomed to each other. The elixir combines opposites to create wholes that hold ideas in suspension. The whole serves the reader a new way of experiencing things. This whole becomes an instrument of the reader’s quest to comprehend the universe, not unlike the medieval

Poems hand over the fabled alchemist’s gold, the product of a transformation of disparate elements.Viewing the making of a poem in this way we can posit a model for the transactions of nations. The campfires of man are often at war with each other. The peoples of the world find each other’s shoes inhospitable. As fumbling leaders redraw global force lines to resemble the world, the people of the world find each other’s shoes inhospitable. It might be something more than an intellectual acrobatic to look to the Arab world for a way to hold opposing ideas in suspension so that reason can be balanced with faith.

The idea of algebra, the joining, did not come accidentally to a people profoundly interested in alchemy. The Arabs looked at Roman arithmetic and saw an inelegant melee of stick figures. They perceived that without the Hindu idea of the zero mathematics could not progress. Soon their own elegant numbers and the zero had paved the way for modern mathematics. At the same time Arab chemists—alchemy is merely the compaction of the Arabic words al khemya, the chemistry—were convinced that elixirs to catalyze warring elements could be found.

Here then from the Arab mind we have models for understanding the poem and the world.

The media have habituated the West to look for trouble from the Arab world, trouble in the form of fanatics who refuse to weigh faith and reason in their minds. At the same time we are habituated to overlooking our own fanatics who are just as unwilling to offer up their minds as catalyst and their rhetoric as elixir. To Arab contributions to mathematics we owe modern trigonometry and calculus; that much is the history of mathematics, but underlying these contributions is the exquisite conviction that ideas seemingly inimical to each other can be joined to make larger wholes that enable mankind to evolve.

Every time a poet finishes a poem an instrument is given the world to understand phenomena differently. The poet is honoring the Arab vision of a joinery of differences framing possibilities beyond us.
It is no accident that the troubadour tradition, dating from the songs of William IX of Aquitaine, came to the West from the Andalusian Arabs and their ring song that licensed the use of vernacular in poetry, and not just the Arabs of al-Andalus but the Christians and Jews who lived creatively under their aegis. The ring song exemplified the Arab genius for assimilating cultures and ideas. With its musicality and mnemonic refrain, often accompanied by dance, it rejuvenated Europe’s indigenous tongues and gave poetry range and lyricism it had lacked. It foreshadowed modern verse experimentation.

Such an advancement could not have come from a people hobbled by notions of singularity. The Arab willingness to catalyze and synthesize catapulted poetry, science, medicine and mathematics into the modern period. For this reason the adaptive Normans who invaded Iberia and Sicily were quickly Arabicized. They intuitively grasped what has become so elusive for us in the 21st Century, that ideas in conflict can be harmonized to create something better than they were separately.

—DM

I never thought much about pickup trucks until I bought one. I bought it because we’d moved to the country from a city and found ourselves hauling big sacks and unwieldy things. Once we had one of these American icons we began to think about who drives them.

After six years in the country—upstate New York to be exact—I’ve noticed that a curiously large number of pickups don’t have much in them except sour dead soldiers, assorted hair bungies and wrappers, crammed ash trays, and the detritus of too much living on wheels.

True, quite a few pickups have tools and other suggestions of plying a trade, and I always find these reassuring because they punctuate the depressing number of trucks that seem to constitute the sole purpose of living for people who withhold a decent living from barbers.

I’ve also noticed that gas stations are hardly the only places where pickups fuel up. The kind of bars that sport forlorn glass-eyed moose heads are favorite fuel depots, and it’s a lot cheaper these days to tank up there than at gas stations. At least in the short run.

Big wheels and tires are popular, but I hardly ever see the trucks sporting them operating in places where they’re needed. So I conclude the obvious, the drivers like to be seen as big wheels, which strongly suggests something small, dank and concealed.

As I walk along country roads I contemplate the dedicated purpose of these guzzlers: to litter the countryside with condoms, crushed cans, fast-food styrofoam containers, cigarette butts, and all the other signs of a throw-away society. I begin to discern the purpose of this redneck panache: it’s the chosen device by which a hapless underclass signals its contempt for a society that gives less and less of a damn for anyone who hasn’t been as successfully greedy as the people buying all those awful McMansions.

Why should all those manicured lawns and clever land conservancies remain pristine when society is trashing these otherwise invisible citizens? Why should we not feel their contempt for our indifference? Why should there not be as much inconvenience in our lives as there is despair in theirs? Why should the pickups not emit signs of their owners’ despair?

One of the most wasteful aspects of relentlessly suburbanizing America is that contractors are responsible for fleets of pickups running around picking up this and that at considerable distances, wasting time, fuel and money, and inevitably driving up the cost of everything. I once saw a contractor casually send a worker 20 miles one way to pick up a pack of roofing nails. This is not a rational way to live or do business, and yet it’s the business that has been supporting our lunatic economy. And it puts a mantle of legitimacy on all this non-profit trucking that we’re financing with borrowed Chinese money.

I once asked a farmer what all these guys in pickups do for a living? He said they live to gas up their pickups. And then? That’s it, that’s what they do, he said. Everything else is demeaning. What about trashing the countryside? Is it reserved for us newcomers, for people they perceive as being better off than they are? Well, I’d kinda like to say that, said the farmer, but the truth is they trash everyone, except their kin, and sometimes them too, depending on who gets who pregnant.

But not state police barracks? I chimed in helpfully. He smiled. Well, not them unless there doesn’t happen to be any cruisers outside.

What did he think about it as an act of contempt? Well, I’d have to think about it, he said. His notion has always been that their parents didn’t teach them any better. Well, that could be true, too, I said, but it seems to me there’s gotta be some anger there. What’ve the lazy bastards got to be mad about? he asked. I think maybe you’ve worked so hard all your life, I said, you haven’t noticed society’s not giving them much to live for. Hmmm, he said, ain’t been givin’ me very much either.

He’d been thinking about our conversation when I bumped into him a few weeks later at the recycling station. You know what you said about the guys in the pickups? he asked me. Well, in case you haven’t noticed they’re the dumb bastards who vote for Republicans. Hell, I said, I was sure you were a Republican, so I figured I’d keep my mouth shut about politics. Well, he said, I used to be a Republican when they cared about spending other people’s money, but now it seems the only thing they’re worried about is their own money. Yeah, you know, back when they weren’t budget-busting blue meanies, he added helpfully. He was using language that would pass muster at his church coffee hour and I liked him immensely for it.

Oh right, I said appreciatively, they’re voting for folks they think are as angry as they are, only they haven’t figured out the only thing the people they vote for are angry about is not being able to take more from the voters. We fell silent for a moment, and then I said, Ya think they vote? Well, I’m just supposin’ they do, the farmer said. I vote so early on election day, he said, I wouldn’t know.

Well, you know your own town, I said, not letting him off the hook, do they or don’t they vote? Sure they do, he answered brightly, ya see it all over your lawn, doncha?

The more we know about history the better we see that the foreign policies of nations are shaped less by what is right than by greed. President Bush says we are at war with Islamo-fascism. This is oil policy. The fact is there have been few periods in the histories of Christendom and Islam unplagued by terrorism.

The early years of our nation were troubled by seagoing terrorists from Tripoli, Algiers and other Muslim enclaves. And the entire Muslim world has been savaged by Christian colonialists. Religion had little to do with either, but it provided handy camouflage for rapine policy.

The hypocrisy on both sides of this divide stinks to each other’s heaven, whether it comes from Osama bin Laden, that smoothed-tongued shuyster, or George Bush, that pugnacious Goebbels. And those two are merely the latest and in some ways the most pathetic of a long line of hornswogglers.

And we should not exclude Israel, a nation founded on acts of terrorism, as an unindicted co-conspirator, claiming the moral high ground as well as the Golan Heights.

Nor should we give a pass to the Hindu and Muslim moral cripples of the subcontinent, killing each other because they lack the courage to live decent lives and the imagination to make them interesting, and blaming their gods for their behavior.

All three religions have produced enough words to feed hog heavens of fanatics. Compassion, love, mercy, peace come to mind, but the killing and land-grabbing goes on unabated, and the self-righteousness metastasizes. The armed crackpots of each religion, selling each other guns and bullshit, have rarely resisted the sick compulsion to steal each other’s jewels, whether it be silk, pearls, trade routes, oil, bread, human beings, or simply the march on mendacity. The Muslims stole Christian, Zoroastrian, Hindu and animist lands in the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful. The Christians stole Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and animist lands in the name of the one true God and His immense desire to embrace the heathen as His children.

It didn’t matter to the Spanish conquistadors that the Incas were vastly better engineers than they were, or that the Mayans were better mathematicians, just as it hadn’t mattered to their forebears that Arab Spain, the fabled al-Andalus, was a superior and more just civilization than their own, with its murderous Holy Office.

Did his faith stop Vasco da Gama from murdering Muslim pilgrims? Did his faith stop Mehmet II from slaughtering the Christians of Constantinople? And where was their commitment to a civilized society when in 1948 Jewish terrorists assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations truce observer, or when they massacred innocents at Deir Yassin?

President Bush would have us believe, in his immense contempt for common sense, that an entirely new phenomenon confronts us in his ridiculously named Islamo-fascist. What were the Barbary pirates who for more than 300 years terrorized the coasts of Europe and the world’s merchant fleets if not terrorists, slavers, hostage-takers, liars and the whole lexicon we are now hurling at al Qaeda and its damn-fool wannabes?

And were the Vikings selling Girl Scout cookies when they sacked, looted and slaved throughout Europe? Did not practically every Christian prayer for more than 200 years conclude by asking to be spared the fury of the Northmen? Or were the Vikings simply entrepreneurs?

As long as we are unable to take the long view we will continue to trip over our propagandistic views and fall on our faces—all of us, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Maoist, and yes, fascist. That is what has happened in Iraq. We have tripped over our shortsightedness and gotten not a few innocents killed in the process.

The more Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al Zawahiri, George Bush, Tony Blair and all their ilk pontificate ignorantly about what they know not, the more cogent they sound, the more we should remember that neither their words nor their sincere faces can withstand the broad and blazing gaze of history.

We are prone in the West to say smugly that Arabic is a hyperbolic language and must be taken with a grain of salt. But hyperbole is hardly the only abuse to which one may put language. Remember the job William Shakespeare, that Tudor servant, did on the Plantagenets? Remember that years later that squalid feat was almost matched by Walter Scott? Remember all the grandiose American claptrap about manifest destiny that disguised genocide? Remember the self-righteous priests whom the conquistadors brought with them to spread the Christian message of love while they spread murder and disease?

Remember, that’s all we have to do. Spotty amnesia is not terminal, unless of course we enjoy it.