Keystone XL, the 114th Congress and the Question of Life

The new Republican-majority Congress has taken office and announced as their top priority the approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of the US. Why? After all, the project is a demonstrated Life destroyer. The tar sands extraction site in Alberta resembles a bombed and desolate moon. It is devastating the local communities of First Nations peoples who have for 12,000+ years depended on the neighboring forests, rivers and lakes.* The carbon released through burning the fuel extracted in Alberta would bring a concentration in the Earth's atmosphere that would result in "game over for the climate," in the words of retired NASA physicist James Hansen.

And so again, why? The answer, I believe, is more fundamental than an issue of greed or Ayn Randian ideology. The answer lies in a fear of Life. Life – in its abundance, its dizzying diversity, its unpredictability and its beauty -- is something that terrifies them and that they loathe. They seek to kill it. They are more demented and dangerous than we imagine in our naïveté. They pursue the Sixth Great Planetary extinction with great alacrity. They may not fulminate their loathing with the eloquence of Captain Ahab, but make no mistake: they are his kin and they seek to take us down with them to the briny depths.

*http://www.ienearth.org/what-we-do/tar-sands/

Broderick

Verse – Am/E/Ab/A

The future’s doing tricks in my yard

The ocean’s puking broken toys

Monster legions float above me

I found a snake in a broken clock

Clocks don’t tell me what my name is

My name’s a thing I can’t recall

All the things I said before

Make no sense when I awake

Chorus– Am/E/F#m/E

When I awake

Verse

I confess, I did the right thing

I admit, you’re in the wrong

My shoulders ache like armadillos

Armadillos walk at dawn

Dawn’s a time that smells like flowers

Flowers aching in the dawn

Dawn’s a time that smells like flowers

Flowers aching in the dawn

 Chorus

Aching in the dawn

On the Sullen American Teen

The sullen disposition of the American teen is not a mystery:  He/She senses, looking around at the adults, that what lies ahead is a rigged game where something called "happiness" is chased, but never realized. He/She observes that well-being cannot be realized within a pressure-fueled complex consumer-driven society.  The American teen knows all of this intuitively and resents the adults above who seem to have accepted this state of affairs. Most adults that the teen sees appear as sad figures resigned to a grim fate, as cowardly & broken souls.  And this is why the teens are depressed. This is why they are rageful.  In fact, the teens' depression and anger are a sign of health. They indicate that the youth yet retain the original life spark -- that it has not yet been extinguished. Their withdrawn and often gloomy temperament should actually give us hope:  it is a form of resistance, a posture of rejection of The Lie. 

Two Movie Scenes

1. The scene in "The Departed" when Jack Nicholson as the gangster Costello sits down beside Leonardo DiCaprio as the deep undercover agent William Costagin for the first time. It is at a lunch counter in a corner store in South Boston. One of the most melancholy yet joyful songs ever written, "Let It Loose," by the Rolling Stones plays -- the ragged sounding electric guitar wavers through an effects pedal like a prizefighter bloodied but not beaten. The piano engages the guitar almost as a dance partner – a step forward, one backward, locking arms, an embrace, a release. We feel, at this moment, all the longing of these two men crystallized to a point. Each has pursued his own truth by means of a lie.

2. The scene in "Heat," directed by Michael Mann, when the criminal Robert De Niro sits down to speak with the detective Al Pacino for the first and only time. They share a cup of coffee at a large roadside diner outside of Los Angeles. We sense that there is, somehow, love and respect between these two men. It is tragic they will never be able to become friends; their destiny is to live as enemies and, we sense, to pursue the logical end of this enmity: the death of the other. Their contrasting destinies are shown in their exchange --

Pacino: Don't you want to live a normal type life?

DeNiro: What do you mean by a normal type life? Ballgames and barbecues?

Pacino: Yeah. Ballgames and barbecues.

DeNiro: No. No.

A Turning (for Kirk Hauptman)

"If it makes money, it’s good." 

As children we knew this was absurd.

We knew this afloat on our backs
Free and drifting 
For the first time alone
In cold Lake Michigan in sunlight.

They said --
The standing lamp broadcasting
Ghoul-golden light as it was pronounced -- 
To go against this  

Would cause us to be penniless
And to starve.

We accepted this 

And gradually went mad.

Years pass
As a pale car fade
Into the eastern haze and
We sense now A Turning.

We sense that we may now recall 
What we knew as children.

Sometimes I hear within the chambers of my skull

Metal girders creaking and bending,

Wailing under the weight of something impossible.

Sometimes I can see in my mind’s eye 
The beginning of the fall of a building,

And then the mid-air pause that it holds 
Before it collapses inward upon itself
In a whoosh that is both rapid 
And traceable in real time.

Kingdom of Soot

In the Kingdom of Soot

Where the beggars lie

You can fly like a lemon

Through a hole in the sky

Wander like an onion

Past the broken moon

Sleep in the shadow

Of a wooden spoon

In the Kingdom of Soot

With your ragged wand

You can draw a circle

On the black silt pond

Eat your jambalaya

From a cracked, tin bowl

Holler at the window

Like a blind black mole

Well I saw Emma

She was wringing out the wash

Hunched like a rabbit

In an old tan cloth

Pouring out the water

Tortoise shells

Knocking on the doors

She was ringing all the bells

Portrait of Cheney, Vice President

Eyes devoid of pity. The glance always sidelong, never granting direct engagement with the interlocutor. 

Though he likes the phrase, "corridors of power," he knows he operates in a realm subterranean to them. The hidden bunkers where all is preserved in a state of cleanliness and order and where the peeping eyes that pry and may discern some segment of the labyrinth cannot see. 

He knows the bombers that hum gray in the night. 

His is the joy of Iago. No folksy, cornpone drawl is needed. Leave that to the stammering, pitiful Texan. That lanky draft-dodger is the perfect side show. Such serendipity to be paired with him. 

The Vice President. And he remembers watching the MGM films 
on the Roman empire in his youth. His friends longed to be the boldly heroic gladiators and respected the swift, stunning power of the Emperor. He trained his eyes on the cloaked men, those whose faces transmitted neither fear nor pity. They would lean over and gently whisper into the Emperor's ear. Events would transpire and still no change in the gaze of the advisers.