Warring Thoughts

The word warrior once held a dense meaning for me. Unlike viridian and iridescent and saffron which decorate the language like twinkling lights in pine branches on a dark night, warrior came with an entire mythology. Warrior was a portal through which I entered a different world, a magic term that released a cornucopia of vision and emotion. This was in the Eighties and Nineties when the concept of a woman warrior was still a novelty. Much of the women’s movement was rooted in the left and the left still took a large measure of its self regard from having opposed the Vietnam War and many leftists had done so by donning a pacifist mantle. A woman warrior was certainly a contradiction for an anti-war pacifist.

Yet how could I give up the Amazons, woodland Artemis or armored Athena? In the conversation that sparked this essay, I was reminded that I was not the only one who was attracted and inspired by these archetypal figures. They inspired Monique Wittig, Sally Gearhart and Mary Daly to name lesbian women’s movement writers, and speculative fiction writers like Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy, CJ Cherryh and Marian Zimmer Bradley. The concept of the woman warrior gained traction until she leapt fully leather-armored into the cultural zeitgeist in the form of Xena: Warrior Princess.

I was still struggling at that time on two fronts with how to make a realistic fiction of a time and place where both women and men chose the roles they wanted. First, there was the fact that, other than Amazons, I knew of no historical or semi-historical recorded culture to use for reference. So I made one up and far enough in the past for such a place to be plausible. I don’t for an instant regret how much reading I did for this, pushing my knowledge of prehistory farther and farther back. Still, after a few seasons of Xena, I realized that my imagination hadn’t lacked knowledge as much as it had images of women capable of defending their own survival.

As an aside, I’d like to suggest the Boudica series by Manda Scott as what I would have liked to write if I had been a much better writer than I am. The four books are an extraordinary evocation of a Celtic resistance to Imperial Rome. Scott’s story is only one example of the fine fiction that has flourished in the ground prepared by the women’s movement.

Despite learning that a woman warrior was quite plausible, I still had to consider the problem of violence. It was wrong, wasn’t it? For a time I thought of the warrior as answering a call, accepting a vocation. I imagined the shaggy musk oxen creating a circle around the calves to protect them from the wolf pack. I imagined ancestral women donning horned skulls so as to no longer appear easy prey when they stood guard at the edge of the nightfire light. I read of women who took up weapons to resist fascism, colonialism and imperialism. I hoped that etymology might help me resolve the problem of violence by allowing me to merge warrior and guardian. At the root of guardian in Indo-European you will find *wer- which gave rise to watch out for, to ward, to be a steward, all having the meaning of protect and defend. At the root of war is *wers- meaning to confuse, to mix up. The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories notes that “Curiously, no Germanic nation in early historic times had any word properly meaning ‘war’…. The Romanic-speaking peoples took Germanic werra ‘confusion, discord’ as the closest term.” (p.545)

Perhaps etymology could not absolve the warrior’s vocation, but this would not be the only instance of a need to embody competing purposes, in this case to protect and to harm. Indeed, perhaps that’s why a number of cultures surround the warrior with ritual. In Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko tells of a young Laguna Pueblo man returning from WWII whose experiences must be mitigated by sacred traditions before he can regain his wholeness. In Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron it is said that several generations of peace are needed to cleanse and heal the damage done by war.

Just as images of women warriors proliferated through the Nineties and then exploded in the Oughts, so did the use of the word warrior slip into wider usage to refer to soldiers. Perhaps one of the most poignant meditations I’ve come across is a collection of anguished poems by Frances Richey, The Warrior, centering around her son who became a Green Beret. She remembers her boy, I perceive an arrogant and callous man, not substantially different from others who now call themselves warriors.

I accept that I am not a pacifist, may never truly have been, and that I am not so much anti-war as anti- specific wars. History does not sustain for me a belief that societies and cultures can survive without defenders. Not in the real world. However I can no longer find in “warrior” much of the meaning that once inspired me. My warrior was no soldier and fought for no state.

This is not simply the shifting of a definition. Meaning, for me, is much more than definition. At its best, meaning is the emotion of the instant you understand something, sudden and bright as lightning. Meaning is when you change because now you know, the portal through which knowing takes you to another place, a new land, a further world.

Gem: citrine

Dumb Intelligence

Fair Game [2010]

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune ends his review of this film with the simple tribute: “And it’s about something important.” After Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) published a report that sixteen words in the 2003 State of the Union Address by President George Bush were untrue, someone leaked to the press that his wife, Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), was a CIA operative. The revelation changed the story from “Did the President lie?” to “Who is Valerie Plame?” The film moves easily from the international stage to the domestic as it portrays the lead up to and then the consequences of this strand in the Bush Administration’s determination to force a war with Iraq. Most viewers will appreciate the film’s intelligent handling of large amounts of complicated background information about matters like yellow cake uranium and aluminum tubes, but more problematic is the suggestion that the CIA was the unwilling victim of pressure from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Even so, I still felt a fly-on-the-wall enjoyment at watching the powerful people in the imperial capital wield their massive portfolios. Sean Penn is very good as Ambassador Wilson who will not be silenced by corruption, but Naomi Watts is stunning in her ability to portray a woman whose silences are necessary and nuanced, stoic and ironic, and finally, charged with emotion. I left "Fair Game" wishing it could be required watching for every American.

[Gem rating: Obsidian]

Dark? Or Early?

I was slogging through the Dark Ages (sometimes known as the Early Middle Ages) with God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 by David Levering Lewis when I got sidetracked by Helen of Troy, but before I get sidetracked again (a random reader’s affliction) I want to consider some aspects about the period between the end of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages. As an aside, let me say that Lewis brings a movie director’s lively sensibility to staging his narrative; at one point he almost makes you hear a celebratory Te Deum ringing through a cathedral full of nobles and high religious figures in all their holy-day finery.

Since I was taught that Rome conquered most of the “known world,” I thought of the empire as a kind of island, so the revelation that, prior to the rise of Islam, the Roman and Persian empires engaged in 700 years of confrontation came as a surprise. Not only were there two empires of comparable weight, their borders were quite porous, allowing a continual exchange of goods and ideas. In particular, refugees avoiding the consequences of heresy fled from one side to the other. This cross pollination would continue even after the western empire shifted to Constantinople and Islam conquered Persia.

Curiously, it seems that “Europe” probably owes its name to an Eastern vantage point; a number of Semitic languages including Phoenician have words suggesting “sunset,” or “west,” or “going down” that are similar. Even if the name is actually derived from the Greek legend of Europa, who was carried off by Zeus, Europa was a Phoenician princess.

I was looking for more insight into common life in Europe during the so-called Dark Ages because several books ago, I was given Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici and it was so full new information that I wanted to get a broader base before going on with Federici’s specifics. Trying to find traces of daily life in the Early Middle Ages is like wandering through thick fog with only the constant clash of warfare for guidance; you long to stumble into some clearing with a humble cottage. Most historians tend to dismiss the cottage as a hovel and the common Dark Age folk as living short, brutish, hungry, frightened, ignorant lives. I doubt this. Someone had to provide the basics so all those noisy battles could be fought by men with expensive arms and armor riding big horses.

Don’t get me wrong. I love stories with horses and swords, and while I was reading David Levering Lewis I was reminded of a favorite branch of SF that creates fictional worlds of kings and knightly sagas like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The actual post-Roman continental history strikes me as even more exotic than made up worlds. What reader of such wouldn’t be thrilled to discover Lady Plectrude, Liutprand the Lombard, Chindaswinth, or Princess Swanachild from Toxandria or the Fens of Drenthe? Nor does it seem that Dark Agians were much concerned with supporting self esteem since they gave each other names like “the Short,” “the Bald,” and “the Adopted”; Charlemagne’s mother was known as Bertha Goosefoot.

Roger Osborne’s Civilization: A New History of the Western World suggested more information about what’s behind those arrows used to describe the Barbarian Invasions - you remember, the arrows labeled “Angles Saxons and Jutes” and “Visigoths” and “Vandals” and the texts that explain these were the routes taken by waves of barbarian hordes. Osborne is more like a plane ride than a slog as he takes you through three to four thousand years with a nod to the previous six, and keeps the trip interesting with unusual perspectives. He caught my attention early by explaining that a surprising amount of “customary” or folk culture may go back to the earliest times because, contrary to the usual narrative, there probably weren’t huge population shifts: “Archaeologists now believe that the people of southern Britain retained the structure of their society through the Roman occupation and, from the fifth century onwards, adopted the culture of a relatively small number of Germanic incomers and migrants. The result was a combination of British and Germanic cultures - the resulting language, for instance, was Germanic in vocabulary, but Celtic in construction. The same process may have happened in the area of the low countries and northern France where the Franks, an originally west Germanic people, spread across the old Celtic lands of Gaul.” (p.41)

So I suspect that the “short, brutish, hungry, frightened, ignorant lives” of the common people was not so much. Another reason from Osborne is his description of life after Rome. The towns that disappeared after Roman withdrawal “were not natural settlements springing out of a need for trading, access to crafts, meetings and communal defense; they were elements in an organizing framework, there to defend an occupation and administer an empire. When the troops and the officials went, their purpose dissolved.” (p.111) And later: “This decline of urban life has been taken as a sign of the collapse of civilization. But cultural, economic and social activity had not disappeared, it simply moved elsewhere; into hamlets, villages, monasteries, estates and country houses.” (p.166) Daily life became local and something like what it had been before Rome.

I don’t suppose many people wake up wondering if the Dark Ages were really dark and what difference the answer might make, but I find it interesting to pursue just how what I once thought was true is actually an origin myth. Origin myths don’t exist to fill in blank spaces but to support and justify some belief. Terming the ethnic cleansing of Spain of its Jews and Moors as a Reconquista, a Catholic European Reconquering, some six centuries after the last Arian Visigothic king had lost power there, is to insist on an inevitable rebirth, just as the American Thanksgiving holiday celebrates how the Native Americans happily handed over their blessings and treasure - and land - to Europeans. I’m not through pursuing new theories of the early Medieval era, but I’m keeping in mind the notion that most of what I was taught was an academic construct. Nor does it hurt to take another look at the class part of classic.

Gem: Amethyst

Jack

I would have liked a burning ship

To bear you toward the setting sun

Mourned by wind and flame

And a keening cry of love -

I long for grief's full measure

To match your loyal heart,

And if I had your grave

To lie upon and weep

There I'd reside and dream

Of all the roads I had your company.

Gemstone: Jade

Dazlious

“Snow Cake” [dvd; 2006]

I like Sigourney Weaver so I got “Snow Cake” from Netflix and it was a totally unexpected delight. Weaver plays Linda, an autistic woman who has lost her daughter -- Linda would say she didn’t lose her, she died. Through a set of absolute rules, Linda has managed to create a precarious space for herself in her small Canadian town. Alan Rickman enters Linda’s beleaguered space as Alex, a weary, haunted soul. Carrie-Anne Moss as Linda’s neighbor provides the third side to this unlikely triangle. Midway through “Snow Cake,” Sigourney Weaver explains the rules of Comic Book Scrabble to Alan Rickman -- you can make up a word but you have to use it in a sentence. She then spells out “dazlious” and provides a description that makes it clear why this movie is itself thoroughly dazlious.

[Gem rating: Imperial topaz and fire opal -- for the “sparklies”]

The Wrongest Wrong

The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer [Anchor Books, 2008, 2009]

In her essay, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” published after her death in At the Same Time, Susan Sontag considers the photographs from Abu Ghraib. Like many appalled and disgusted Americans she was quite willing to believe that the “highest levels” of government were responsible, albeit indirectly: “It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle.” I believe that she got it wrong. I’m not quoting Susan Sontag in order to set her up but to show how difficult it was and still is to accept the truth of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In other words, Sontag believed that the photographs of Abu Ghraib showed the by-products of a flawed policy rather than stood as evidence that torture was the policy. But then, she did not have the benefit of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side.

Torture was not a by-product; Bush administration officials actively pursued unethical, immoral and illegal methods for dealing with prisoners taken after September 11, 2001. Jane Mayer has collected and sorted through an Augean Stables full of information in order to lay bare the record. I doubt that criminal charges will ever be brought in an American court, but charges of war crimes were filed against six Bush officials in Spain in 2009. The officials are: Alberto Gonzales, former US Attorney General, John Yoo and Jay Bybee from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense for policy, William Haynes II, chief counsel for Donald Rumsfield, and David Addington, chief of staff to US Vice President Dick Cheney.

The perversion of American values and procedures began in Afghanistan soon after 9/11, and the target was an American, John Walker Lindh. On December 9, 2001, an official in the Justice Department in Washington received an email question from Afghanistan as to whether Lindh could be questioned without a lawyer present. Jesselyn Radack, the official, did not know that 19-year old Lindh, with a bullet wound in his leg, was being kept in a shipping container, naked, blindfolded, duct taped to a stretcher. She did know that his father had retained counsel and so she advised that questioning without counsel would be improper. Her advice was ignored. When Radack attempted to correct the record as stated to the press by Attorney John Ashcroft, she discovered that the pertinent emails were missing. She was subsequently told to find another job, which she did, but she was able to make copies of the emails available to Newsweek. Years before the retaliation against Valerie Plame, Radack found that her new job offer was rescinded, criminal investigations were begun against her in the states where she could practice law, and she was on a no-fly list requiring full body searches. Jesselyn Radack has written her own memoir, The Canary in the Coal Mine.

Detail is the strength of The Dark Side. Mayer cites marker after marker of the descent into sanctioned torture. She makes the narrative connections necessary to understand links between the CIA taking prisoner interrogation away from the FBI, the extraordinary increase of extraordinary renditions, the suspension of Article 5 military hearings, the designation of prisoners as unlawful combatants, the “golden shield” of legal protection created by the secret John Yoo torture memos, the reverse engineering of the SERE program, and much much more. Never in doubt is the responsibility of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, who “set up the most powerful vice presidency in American history.” Addington and Cheney were determined to expand presidential power and they engineered the process by which America became the “first nation ever to authorize violations of the Geneva Conventions.”(p9) They did this by controlling who saw President Bush and what he read: “Addington’s would be the last box before paperwork reached the President. According to another lawyer on the White House staff, he would ‘review every proposed executive order before it reached the President for his signature. Frequently, he would rewrite the entire thing.’”(p63)

Camouflaged by euphemisms like enhanced or harsh interrogation are the following procedures: water boarding or partial drowning, subjecting prisoners to extreme heat or cold, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, striking with open hands, handcuffing in physically painful positions for such long periods that prisoners were forced to soil themselves, administering enemas, threatening with death, threatening family members with death, enforced nudity, using fears like fear of dogs, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation -- and this is only a partial list of forbidden methods that were often used in combinations. That some of these were visible at Abu Ghraib is evidence that the “few bad apples” were most likely operating under CIA instigation if not outright orders. The CIA’s General Counsel, Scott Muller “insisted that every single action taken by the CIA toward its detainees had been declared legal by John Yoo. With Yoo gone, it fell to Goldsmith [Yoo’s successor] to figure out exactly what the OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] had given the CIA the green light to do and what, in fact, the CIA had done.”(p288)

Jack Goldsmith, Yoo’s successor in the Office of Legal Counsel, is one of a number of people whom Mayer credits with impeding the administration’s illegal activities. In a bizarre and dramatic episode reminiscent of a scene from “The Godfather,” Goldsmith and James Comey, Deputy Attorney General, made a late night rush to the hospital bed of Attorney General Ashcroft in response to an alarmed call from Mrs. Ashcroft. They arrived in time to prevent White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, from bullying Ashcroft into signing a renewal of an illegal wiretap program. (Alberto Gonzales was named Attorney General in Bush’s second term.) Singularly alarming is Mayer’s subsequent comment: “[Comey and Goldsmith] were so paranoid by then about the powerful backlash they had provoked inside the administration that they actually thought they might be in physical danger.”(p.294)

Another figure given credit is Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, whose response to the abuses at Guantanamo is noteworthy. He made no distinction between torture and cruelty: “‘If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America.’”(p218) Unfortunately, Mora’s attempts to rectify Guantanamo were circumvented by Yoo, Addington, and William Haynes, General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense; these three are now part of the Bush Six and under investigation in Spain.

From grade school, I was taught that torture is the wrongest wrong, not that I needed to be taught since every child instinctively fears cruelty. Torture was the nightmare practice of barbarians and savages, of Nazis and Inquisitors, of thugs and criminals. Before and after the pictures from Abu Ghraib, rumors of deplorable practices against prisoners were loud enough that denials were being forced from various government officials. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is absolutely necessary for clarifying the need to accept how the law was broken and who broke the law. John Yoo is on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; in May 2010, Jesselyn Radack was still under a disciplinary referral that was filed against her in the District of Columbia Bar. This is wrong.

[Gem rating: black onyx, hematite and bloodstone]

The Return of Navajo Boy

“The Return of Navajo Boy” [dvd; 2000]

I love how the desert presents itself as one thing but, if you come closer, it can open again and again until you understand that the first view is only a façade and that so much more remains hidden than is ever revealed. At first “The Return of the Navajo Boy” appears to be about what it means to the Cly family to have a silent film, “The Navajo Boy,” brought to them by the son of the Anglo filmmaker. Elsie Mae, the oldest living member of the Cly family, once again sees her grandparents, her father, her mother, and her baby brother who was taken by Christian missionaries. For Elsie Mae, the film is a way to show younger family members their history and traditions. It also contains a healing ceremony for Elsie Mae’s mother who died of lung cancer, one of the diseases that plague this part of Utah's Monument Valley. Thus, for Elsie Mae’s brother Bernie, the film becomes part of a strategy to organize and pressure the government to make just compensation for uranium mining which continues to poison the area’s water and land. Footage from an insufferably smug and patronizing Kerr-Magee promotional film highlights the environmental racism that is far from limited to the heyday of the mines. Then the story twists again and one more layer is revealed as the fate of the lost baby brother is discovered.

[Gem rating: banded onyx, turquoise and obsidian]

Burnt Oranges

“Burnt Oranges” [dvd; 2005]

The flavor of a burnt orange is smoky and bittersweet, and so is this invitation to share the sensual, nurturing experience of a journey home to Argentina. Still, we are reminded early in "Burnt Oranges" that there is a distinction between “what we remember and what cannot be forgotten.” Poetic narrative, written by Monica Flores Correa and spoken by Silvia Malagrino, structures the film and is based on letters by the two friends who fled their country at different times. Precise, wistful and nostalgic, the narrator hopes to find the Buenos Aires of her past and understands that we are all exiles from the homeland of memory, but her evocation of exile is more than simple sentiment. Malagrino left at a time when countless other Argentineans were being disappeared during the “Dirty War,” and the journey to reclaim her past becomes part of Argentina’s journey to find the Disappeared. Up to 30,000 people were killed by the military regime that came to power in 1976.

At the heart of "Burnt Oranges," we find the Mothers of the Disappeared, the women who refused to deny that their children were missing. When no one else could resist the regime, they came together in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo and marched to demand the truth from their government. I cannot say enough about them, these ordinary women who showed extraordinary love, courage, strength, and resolve. Through these women, the film takes us to the profoundest truth of memory: the Disappeared never ceased to be present. The Mothers came together and reached through their common loss to give their vanished children new life and meaning, and to wrench a precious serenity from unimaginable pain.

Deftly weaving image and music to narrative, editor Sharon Karp engages us emotionally and visually in Malagrino’s journey home. When the camera rises from the streets of Buenos Aires to the sky, the sun itself echoes the central image of the film. "Burnt Oranges" extends the documentary genre to explore the dimensions of truth, memory and love, and the relationship of these to sanity and resolve. If the true work of history is to construct memory that can resist the coercion to erase the past, this film performs superbly. [edited by author]

[Gem rating: moonstone with emerald]

Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams

“Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams” [dvd; 2006] The film begins with the camera showing faces in a group of women listening to one of them tell her story of the Bosnian war. The legacy of war is the theme of this movie and at its heart is Esma and her teenage daughter, Sara. Their relationship contends with all the usual tensions that beset a teenager and a single mother, but there is a further complication. Sara believes her father is a “shahid,” a war hero who died defending Sarajevo, but in fact, Esma became pregnant in a Chetnik rape camp. Mirjana Karanovic as Esma and Luna Mijovic as Sara are spellbinding as they struggle to hold on to the love that connects them. In a time when the necessity for historical truth defies hopes of reconciliation with heartbreaking frequency, this film reveals the dilemma at an excruciatingly intimate level.

[Gem rating: fire agate]

The Story of the Weeping Camel

“The Story of the Weeping Camel” [dvd; 2003] is for people who like animal stories and faraway places. Nominated for an Oscar, this documentary shows the dilemma of a nomad Mongolian family whose Bactrian camel rejects her newborn. The film offers a view of the daily life of a contemporary culture with roots still nourished by a deeper source. When the camel colt visibly begins to weaken after its mother thwarts all the attempts to make her accept and feed the baby, the herders try one last method, music. The improbable - to a Western mindset - solution is quite wonderful and soul nurturing to see.

[Gem rating: dark pink tourmaline]

Greetings, Earthlings.

This is the first post.

7/12/2010