What is there to win
if winning we will lose
gifts with which we start
this harrowing life?

I decline the race
against another’s best.
I am not defined
by others’ praise.

Life is not a contest
but an invitation
to stand in the fire
of the holy alchemist.

If it sells it’s good. Is that our culture’s motto? War sells. Arms sell. Sex sells. Cheap goods made by exploited humans sell.

Are we really too busy surviving to be concerned? Is life literally about ramming goods down each other’s throat? Do we really want to live to get the best of someone else?

Why do we hear the preachers’ blather about values, abortion, stem cell research, politics, and yet not one word about greed? Does their authority come from Christ or our own refusal to heed Him?

(Note: The Race, inset, oil painting, 1951, 43×31, Juanita Guccione).

I used to sit in a pure Sunday school dread of the clear, clean thoughts everyone else was thinking compared to my own inner darkness. There was a big white banner strung up in our Sunday school in Bayshore, Long Island, that said in black Gothic letters, Suffer the little children to come unto me. I was suffering alright, but I didn’t believe Jesus would want any part of me. After all, if He was God He certainly knew what was wrong with me.

Now, as an old man, I recognize that I didn’t know, I only thought I knew. This is the terrible lot of all children who have been, as we used to say when we were genteel, interfered with. They believe it has happened to them because they somehow brought it upon themselves. They believe their abusers are sitting there basking in their confidence that their victim were not fit to enjoy the company of decent people. The faces of the abusers were hurtfully bright. Their whispers were deafening. They lived comfortably by a standard to which I couldn’t aspire.
Once in a bustling mall I saw a young mother with a black eye, pushing a stroller as if it were a battering ram. As I watched she slapped the little boy walking beside her on the back of his head and hissed, Are you gonna get it when we get home! His home was a place where he’s going to get it, not a refuge. Get what? What his mother had so obviously gotten. I am no more able to forget that scene than I am the abuses that froze me in my tracks when I was in the custody of people posing as adults.

So this Christmas, having departed one inhumane century and emabarking upon what promises to be another, my thoughts turn to the children who have arrived here unwanted, who are starved and abused, who witness horrific scenes before they even know how to think about them, whose innocence is stolen every day, every moment, and who deserve to be welcomed as angels.

We cannot be a better world, no matter how much we talk about it, unless we suffer them to come unto us, unless we shelter and protect and love them. The horror of comprehending he or she is not loved is too much for a human being, perhaps too much even for an angel. And yet it is this comprehension in children that we’re so determined to blink away, because of course it’s an indictment in whose comparison the Nuremburg indictments pale.

When I consider the lights, the orgy of consumerism, the frenzy of mailing blessings to each other, congratulating each other on our good will, while I think of Darfur and Iraq, I fear the human soul cannot bear such paradox. Can we truly bear each other, can we bear our own consciences when we know such atrocities continue? Are they so far away that we can insulate ourselves from them with jolly Santas, shopping, singing and platitudes galore? With this dark void in our centers will we not implode?

And even if we could bear this monstrous paradox, there would still be children all over the world being abused, abandoned, ignored, deceived, denied.

Sometimes from the pulpit we’re told we may be entertaining angels unawares. Of course we are. We want them to shelter us, to bring us gifts, to make our Christmases merrier, to arrange our love affairs, to bless our undertakings, but do we shelter them, do we love them, do we tell them the truth, do we respect their unique gifts?

It took me a long time, perhaps a lifetime, to accept that Jesus meant me. How could I have understood that, how could any child whose innocence wasn’t safeguarded, whose gifts weren’t honored, whose sanctity was violated?

(Note: Painting shown is Christmas, oil on canvas, Juanita Guccione).

—DM

Sorrow and joy, but not in equal measure, are our lot. Some of it we arrange, some comes unbidden.

In my seventh decade I miss the trees, meadows, fields, streams, hills and vistas I knew and loved. They are gone to the terrorists of greed who will surely do more damage in the end than the religious crackpots.

The noisome beeps of earth-moving equipment are heard more often than birdsong. The breathtaking destructiveness and impracticality of the way we build detached homes is everywhere evident: fleets of pickup trucks running questionable errands, driving up costs, the devastation of an ecology we need to clean our air and provide us with pure water, the choking of the earth with pavement, the corruption of local government by developers…. the destruction of the English countryside demented the poet John Clare (inset).I think of him often as I witness the imposition of this harsh and degrading sameness.

The tacky McMansions we’re building, and the infrastructures needed to serve them, are so devoid of imagination as to make the sighting of a falling barn or even an abandoned gas station welcome. And why is the gas station abandoned? Probably because a leaking tank has irrevocably polluted the ground around it.

In almost every American county you can hardly walk a mile without being in the presence of a fuel spill, a sobering thought when you consider whether we would have gone to Iraq at all if it had been devoid of oil.

In my old age one of my bitterest sorrows is the scraping away of the natural things I have loved by remorseless greed and corruption. Yes, corruption, because thousands of commercial and residential developments would never have come to pass had not local officials been intoxicated by the odor of money.

Instead of educating our children to lead the world in science, medicine and technology, we have hocked ourselves to China to build houses and provide developing nations with markets they refuse us —leaving ourselves with an unsustainable economy.The splendors of the free market economy have been explained to us. But do we understand? Or do we simply hope somebody smarter than we are understands. Should we buy what we don’t understand, what others have either chosen not to explain or to spin? On this footing can a democracy stand?

Politicians remind me of magpies and mockingbirds. I’m permanently moved by Geoffrey Chaucer and Attar of Nishapur, both of whom wrote a Parliament of Birds. In the outgoing Congress there were quite a few Cooper’s hawks—splat, goodbye flicker. Predators. We could use more portly little juncos, solemnly observing the folly of their peers. Some industrious woodpeckers would help, too.

I’ve yet to see a politician who reminds me of the great blue heron who visits our pond. Gronk, don’t bother me, I’m here to eat. He doesn’t stay on message, he is the message. No wasted motion. He knows where the sun is and he casts no telltale shadows upon the waters. He gets snake, frog and koi. But the speedy little carrot stick, called the Orfe, eludes him. If the herons were running the country maybe we could get something done.

—DM

What must disparate cultures do when they haunt each other? Make war? Make love? Terrorize each other? All these things? Or is there some place, beyond the posturing, the studies, the conflict, where they can live in pure wonderment of their differences?

I think the Iroquois and the Mayans lived their lives without much if any bother about each other. I suspect the Slavs and the Zulus were able to achieve the same satisfactory ignorance of each other. But there is no way the cultures thriving under the umbrellas of Islam and Christendom can exist without haunting each other.

When Islam arose on the Arabian peninsula in the 7th Century Christendom was there, vast, surrounding, growing. There was a little wiggle room for Islam, but not much. When Christendom arose Rome was there, pervasive, omnipotent. There was almost no wiggle room.

This destiny to haunt another culture isn’t always as vast as the interaction of Christendom and Islam. It has minor echoes. There is no way the British impact on the Middle East and India can be erased, no way the English consciousness can be rid of its former colonials. There is no way Algeria can get France out of Algeria, long after the exit of the French empire, and no way France can expunge Algeria from its collective mind.

The echoes of the great hauntings of history can be isolated even more. Take England and North America—forever bound by their conflicts and their commonalities.

In the same way, Greece haunted Rome, and the Greco-Roman cultures haunt the entire West.

When I began my short novel Saraceno I thought only of a half-Irish, half-Italian thug in Hell’s Kitchen. He was handsome and murderous. My encounter with the young man whose story I wanted to embroider was unforgettable. Because he haunted me, because his fictive Mafia don called him Il Saraceno, the Saracen, I began thinking about the impact of the Saracens on Sicily and Italy.

I wrote the book, gave it a name, put it in a drawer, took it out years later and rewrote it countless times, until it was in my mind as good as it was going to get, and then it was published. In the years between 1989 and the book’s appearance last year the Internet had changed the world. There is nothing in Saraceno, as there is my other books, that required the kind of research for which the Internet is so deliciously suited.

So, until a few days ago, it never occurred to me to research this book I had already written. Perhaps because I needed a rest from a new novella I was writing I began toying with the word Saraceno. I knew, of course, and had known, that it was the Italian word for the Saracen, the Arab, so my initial response was to use Saraceno as a keyword. It produced innumerable hits. I knew it would. I was just fooling around.

But then I had an inspiration. What if I punched in the words del Saraceno? That’s what I did, and the whole haunted world of the West’s encounter with Islam unfolded before my eyes. There was hardly an Italian noun to which del Saraceno could not be somehow attached–restaurants, wide places in the road, operas, novels, crimes, weapons, hotels, spas, ships, horses, villains, tragic heroes like Othello, you name it. It was stupefying.

Italy’s experience of its long encounter with the Saracens, people of the dawn, literally altered its consciousness.

But the America I knew as a boy, the America I’ve known throughout most of my manhood, was not similarly haunted. We are haunted by the Iroquois and the Sioux and the British, and all our immigrants, but it remained to Europe to experience the Saracens. That was Europe’s job, Europe’s fate.

But then we became conscious of running on oil, and the fundamentalists of the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, started calling the shots. Suddenly America inherited Europe’s hauntedness and even set out on its own to find ways to be haunted by the Saracens, and to find ways to haunt them.

They were no longer the precious domain of the Arabists, to whom we listen not. They were crackpot terrorists, crazed fanatics, and whatever other foolish name our own ideological think-tankers could come up with. It isn’t convenient of course to dwell on how many cracked fundamentalists we and the Israelis indulge. Only Islam could have dangerous wingnuts.

And even if we could bring ourselves to dwell just a little on the nuts, what about the bolts? Would we be willing to admit—and would Muslims be willing to admit—that greed has more often than not played a role in the many clashes that make the words del Saraceno so familiar to Italians?

All very well for us to say we want to bring the glories of our democracy— which we inherited from the Greeks courtesy of the Romans—to the Arabs, but what about oil, what about arms sales? What about an economy based on enriching fat cats at the expense of the general populace? An oligarchy of oil?

And could the Muslims ever concede that the lightning-swift expansion of Islam was driven as much by econo-imperialists as by devout worshippers?

Could the Spaniards ever admit they raped and pillaged America in the name of bringing Christ to the heathen, who had their own gods and whose accomplishments in many instances outshone the Spaniards? What they brought was a superior ability to kill.

And what about the Crusades? The Arabs are still calling us Crusaders. We’re still painting them as benighted nuts. Neither culture gives the other the immense credit it deserves. And yet, no matter what murdering phonies like Osama bin Laden, no matter what land-greedy Israeli expansionists and money-grubbing corporations say about their ideals, our two cultures are forever bound and haunted by each other, and that will never change.

It would be helpful if, instead of trying to hornswoggle each other and ourselves, we examined our real motives, with all their well-nigh impenetrable layers of darkness—if we could say, Okay, our impact on each other is enormous, where do we go from here?

Ah, but that would be a five-hundred year leap forward, at very least. Yes, perhaps, but we could leap five hundred years backwards to find a model, and it wouldn’t be Western democracy. No, it would be a caliphate—yes, that word that sounds so dangerous on President Bush’s lip—in Cordoba in al-Andalus. Not what Osama bin Laden has in mind. Much too tolerant and liberal. Not what we have in mind, either. Much too authoritarian. But once in al-Andalus there was an almost magically inclusive society where Muslim, Christian and Jew advanced human evolution with breathtaking strides.

It has been called La Convivencia, and in the last hundred years a great deal has been written about it—understandably, since we have just emerged from one of the most disastrous centuries in human history, and this century is not bidding fair to be much different.

What can La Convivencia teach us? Perhaps its end can teach us more than its beginning under the great Umayyad caliph Abd-ar-Rahman. The end was this: simpleton fundamentalists brought it down. It was too beautiful, too visionary. They couldn’t stand it.

Don’t just say, Hey, you Muslims, learn this lesson. That will only lead backwards. Say, rather, Hey, you Christians, hey, you Jews, Hey, you Muslims, Hindus, Maoists, all of you, learn this lesson. You don’t have to be right at everyone else’s expense. That’s all it takes, simply to realize that.

———————————————

Here is a minute sampling of the ways the Saracens
have left their imprint on Italy and Sicily, to say nothing
of the thousands of families whose name is Saraceno.

Hotels:
http://www.saraceno.it/
http://www.jpmoser.com/villaggiosaraceno.html
http://www.saracenohotel.com/

Business:
http://www.agferrari.com/index.php/ilsaraceno.html

Film:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053253/

Tourism:
http://www.grottadelsaraceno.it/

Pop culture:
http://www.falchidelsaraceno.it/

Entertainment:
http://www.43places.com/entries/view/401480

Media:
http://www.43places.com/entries/view/401480

Sports:
http://www.comunitamontanaappenninocesenate.it/eventi/palsarac.php
(Inset: Othello’s Description of Desdemona, James Clarke Hook, oil on canvas, ca. 1852).

Who wants a military that thinks it can’t win?

Good question? Okay, so why should we believe outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush when they say they’re just doing what the commanders on the ground recommend? Isn’t the President the decider, the commander-in-chief?

Is it reasonable, is it even sane to expect our generals in Iraq to say, Mr. President, it’s true we haven’t exactly rung up a big win here, but we think we ought to get out anyway?

Who can imagine officers who have devoted their lives to winning wars for us saying such a thing?

Never mind the commonsensical fact that getting their next star depends on not running afoul of the suits calling the shots in Washington?

It’s as crazy to expect these guys to take the rap for what the President calls cutting and running as it is to expect all those retired generals on cable television to take to task the men and women with whom they’ve served. That’s why they frustrate us with their circumspection.

The President and his defense secretary have sold us more than one bill of goods, but the notion they’re just responding to what their commanders in the field recommend is such a whopper one can hardly imagine even the most cowed press swallowing it. And yet, with little indigestion, that’s exactly what the press has done. Again and again the President has said he will do what his field commanders recommend, and again and again pundit and reporter alike have failed to ask, Mr. President, when have we ever had a general or an admiral say he wants out? Not even Mr. Lincoln’s McClellan said it.

Those men and women are trained to win. They want to win. We expect them to win. But they don’t make policy. If they did, we wouldn’t be a democracy.

Twice in my lifetime a weak Congress has abdicated its responsibility to declare war. Or not. Twice it has given presidents the nod to wage illegal wars. That’s bad enough. But now we have a president who says he’s going to persist in an illegal war until his generals say otherwise.

So we’re waiting for hell to freeze over, because we have the kind of military commanders who never say die, and the President knows it. They should never have to say it. Once they’re engaged in a war they expect to win it. It’s up to the politicians to say, This is a mistake, we should get out. It’s not up to the generals.

The President is the author of a squalid con in which some, but thankfully not all, our generals are lamenting lack of support from the home front. They should never have been faked into a corner where they feel constrained to say such a thing. I’m not condoning their saying it, but it points to this Administration’s cynical ploy.

To hide behind our generals, to set them up as straw men for a bloody mess created by politicians is a national disgrace. Their obligation is to win, but their civilian bosses’ obligation is never to send them into wars they can’t win, never to send our soldiers into harm’s way amid lies and half-truths.

The generals have said too much. That’s their fault. They’ve been ill-used and set up as fall guys, and that’s the President’s fault. And he seems proud of it. We should never coerce our generals into serving political aims. We should never convey by back channel and implication that their careers may depend on backing up stonewalling and lying politicians. They deserve not to be politicized.

We have dishonored the noblest military in the world. They’re trained to be Spartans (Leonidas, Spartan king, inset). We should know damned well they’re never going to say, Let’s get out of here.

That’s up to us.