Considering Afghanistan

 

The US presence in Afghanistan belongs to the media now—to books and documentaries and  op eds—but what was it? An undeclared war, a country, a defeat? I think we’ll be collecting shards of our hollowed out and broken national values for a long time to come as dozens of answers are considered.

Afghanistan became the focus of retaliation for the attack of 9/11 twenty years ago, but it had already been a major staging ground for the US-USSR proxy wars. In fact, ironically, the CIA took credit for defeating the USSR in the Cold War by making it too impossibly costly in blood, treasure, and reputation to keep Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

This is not about the time before the US invaded, but about what happened afterward. At this point, consensus is that Washington took its attention on to Iraq and put Afghanistan on the back burner, and that’s where it stayed for the next twenty years. No one protested Afghanistan or marched against it or wrote protest songs about it. Still, how could we forget? Was it like parts of underserved cities in America where so many struggle to live and survive while the others continue in relative comfort and security? And yet American service people were fighting and dying there, approximately 2,300 over 20 years, and over 47,000 Afghan civilians.

The war wasn’t entirely invisible. It made great dramatic back-stories for TV characters like some doctors on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Resident.” A number of movies featured manly men doing manly things in camouflage or shirtlessly, usually undisturbed by local civilians unless they were being killed by snipers and drones. Afghanistan made for great seminars on how PTSD works, but it rarely showed up in news stories or presidential State-of-the-Union addresses. When the war was cited, it was always getting better, turning a corner, getting a new military boss. Congress people got their pictures taken there but never said much later at home—oh, but the Afghan women who folded away their burqas were always used to prove that what the US was doing there was great.

One aspect of the US role in Afghanistan cannot be overlooked: the oft-cited notion of nation building. Most people who brought it up sadly decried the possibility of success with various excuses about how the country was not ready for democracy, or it was too tribal. Occasionally, a more honest reason was given: the endemic corruption of a kleptocracy that grew more rooted every year as the US paid off, or tried to ignore, or winked at Afghan government behavior. If you’re unclear how that works, think of the schools that the US gave money to Afghan officials to build who gave some of it to contractors and pocketed the rest. Then the contractors pocketed their share, and so on down the line. By the way, that’s what so-called Afghan tribalism is about: the people you share your dollars out to. Anyone who wants more stories can go to the online reports of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) that warned clearly and repeatedly for years how ineffectively progress was being made and analyzed why.

Did none of the senators, congress people, generals, or whoever was supposed to be overseeing US work in Afghanistan ever read the quarterly SIGAR reports? Isn’t that their job? Twenty years and no one noticed how badly things were going? It wasn’t that mysterious, not really. 

Of course the US public has some responsibility but we did think the people in charge were doing their jobs. Especially someone like the current president who got his job on the grounds that he had lots of experience. Wasn’t he in government the entire two decades? Still, as US troops left and the country was taken over by the Taliban, he barely had time to wail, “But we spent trillions of dollars.” Maybe he can get some of the money back from the US companies who were paid to train the Afghan defense forces.

Or maybe the US government wasn’t that surprised. Maybe now that we have had twenty years to gain battle-tested forces and state-of-the art new weaponry, we don’t need a country to practice in. And we still have troops in over 100 countries. What was it Biden said about “over-the-horizon” capabilities making it unnecessary to stay in Afghanistan? I wager we won’t hear much more about that, especially after learning that the drone strike that was supposed to kill a terrorist in Kabul actually killed a family with children. The public has already been trained not to worry about what US drones and special forces do out there; our in-country dramas are far too distracting. Maybe the government has been doing its job and lots of us just don’t exactly know what that job is.

 

Gemstone: Aquamarine

 

CODA

 

 

To my knowledge, Seasons 4 and 5 of The Tunnel were not written or filmed. Coda takes place perhaps in Season 6.

 

 

Karl closed the file, set it in the box to his right meant for finished work, and considered the box to his left. He yawned. The prospect of his empty apartment was unappealing enough that he was tempted to open a new file, but then he decided a drink would do instead. He made sure he heard the click of the lock engage the office door before stepping out into the London night.

The Cock and Bull, on the ground floor of a well-appointed hotel, was too familiar to him for Karl to find its name either noticeable or amusing. Few other people were inside the darkened room. Most after-work patrons had gone and it was still early for the late-night clientele. Karl thought this time of the evening particularly favored solitary people.

The bartender appeared like a shadow. Behind him rows of bottles were lined like soldiers with uniforms of glittering gold labels on sparkling glass.

“The usual, Otto.”

Otto turned, disappeared, and then returned with a large bottle of ale.

The first taste was always the best. The rest were indistinguishable from thousands that had gone before but they were the rent paid to occupy a comfortable seat at the bar. They also kept company with his usual ruminations considering whether it was time to claim his pension and retire. The main obstacle to retirement was that he wasn’t that good at discovering amusing forms of activity.

“Cognac, please.”

Someone, a woman, had taken the seat beside him. She had an accent that he couldn’t identify but still sounded familiar. In principle, he wasn’t averse to having an encounter, but he was not in the mood to make an effort for whatever would be required. Perhaps he could save himself the trouble by resorting to grunts, throat clearing, and rude snorts.

“Hello, Karl.”

For a second – and only a second – he did not know who she was. Then he did. Of course he had known she would come to him some day, some year.

“Erika. What a coincidence. Of all the gin joints.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“I should probably arrest you. I’m still with the police.”

Since the idea was too absurd to acknowledge, she didn’t reply.

“I never got the chance to thank you for saving my life.”

“You needn’t,” she replied. “Call it collateral salvage.”

“I know, but I still appreciated it.”

He looked at her then. She continued to look at her drink, but a slight smile hovered at the corner of her mouth. Time had not ignored her, and the lighting in the room was an advantage, but she was still a very attractive woman. She had cultivated a younger woman’s face the last time he saw her, whereas now she had the look of someone whose authority needed little assistance from appearance.

“Do you want to know where – ”

“I’ve been.”

He could think of nothing to say, so he waited for her.

“I always meant to come back. Sometime. I hoped if the interval were long enough, she would forget the betrayal, or the memory would diminish.”

“I think you would have been welcomed.”

Now the silence had another quality, so Karl continued.

“I would have thought it a good idea. I know she loved you, and being Elise she had a difficult time accepting that. But every so often she would bring up something about poetry, or Pablo Neruda, and I would know she had been thinking of you.”

“She told me she didn’t read poetry.”

“I believe you changed that.”

“Thank you. Sometimes I would read a poem and if I liked it, I would imagine reading it to her and explaining why it was beautiful and why it had made me think of her.”

A group entered the Cock and Bull, and although they were not particularly noisy, they changed the atmosphere. The night crowd was arriving. Karl knew that soon Erika would leave and that made him very sad.

“What happened, Karl? What happened?”

He started to say, honestly he started, but then stopped. “I can’t. I’m sorry, Erika, I just can’t. Please. But she didn’t suffer. I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“Good. She said you were her best friend. I was a little jealous.”

“I think we were both surprised. I valued her clarity.” He paused. “In return I was teaching her the difference between sarcasm and irony.”

“She could have used more lessons.” For a while they were companionably quiet.

“I quit when I heard. When it no longer made a difference, I quit.”

“Clearly you needed no lessons.”

She laid a large bill on the bar. “I have to go now, Karl.”

“I wish – ”

“Yes?”

“I wish you could have come back, and taken her to some mountain covered in spring flowers.”

“Thank you. That is most generous. I console myself by remembering how impossible we were. My life – you know some of my story and what you don’t you can guess – my life has not been one in which love was expected. It should not have happened. Yet there she was, with astonishing innocence. Gratitude might be more becoming than complaint, but even so, my soul is not at peace with losing her.”

Then she was gone.

Karl recognized her final words as a reference to Neruda. Elise had shared them but he couldn’t remember the occasion. He added to the tip for Otto and left.

Gemstone: Rhodochrosite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A CALL TO AMNESIA

On July 3, 2020, at Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota, a speech delivered by Donald J. Trump created a convergence of historic, political, and moral significance. The location and cleverly calculated language of the speech revealed the current administration’s desire to shape a distorted vision of the United States.

As I listened to the speech, I had the feeling that Trump was declaring war, but by whom against whom was fuzzy. Since then my focus has sharpened and I now believe he was rallying those who want to continue believing the dominant national fictions against those who are demanding an honest accounting of what America has been in order to proceed toward true values.

No place outside the capitol embodies the white mythos of the U.S. as belligerently as Mt. Rushmore. A little over 100 miles northwest of Wounded Knee, which would be more honestly representative of American history, Mt. Rushmore is sacred to the Sioux nation as the Six Grandfathers and is still part of an unsettled land dispute. Consistent with their culture that did not seek to dominate the natural world, Lakota Sioux saw the area as full of spiritual power, of portals where one could contact the sacred. An entirely different cultural ethos carved into the granite of the mountain the heads George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, four white men who each served as president. This so-called Shrine of Democracy could more accurately be called a Shrine to White Colonial Imperialism. Washington and Jefferson owned plantations worked by enslaved people. Lincoln signed off on the execution of 38 Sioux men, the largest mass execution in US history. Roosevelt developed a policy of international national aggression underlying the motif of carrying a big stick.

The murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, one of many such murders of African Americans, set off waves of protest throughout the United States under the aegis of Black Lives Matter. Demonstrations held a mirror up for the country, a view welcomed by many as long overdue. Police were the latest iteration of the border patrol holding the line for a racist white nation against a nonwhite population. The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic had already laid bare institutional racism throughout the country by highlighting the disproportionate numbers of people of color who were sick and dying from the virus.

The demonstrators understood that the death of George Floyd was not an isolated incident perpetrated by “bad apples.” The police are volunteers in an institution that originally served slavery but since the Civil War has perpetuated racism. Statues of people who participated in enslavement and fought to maintain it were pulled off their pedestals. Trump, who mentioned nothing about the victims of police brutality and only fleetingly acknowledged the existence of Covid-19, chose to highlight the destruction of lumps of bronze and cement: “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

Triumphalist but meaningless language marked the speech: “1776 represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization” and “the most magnificent country in the history of the world.” Historians find both ideas erroneous, nevertheless DJT’s acquaintance with the truth is notoriously lacking. But the meaning of the words had nothing to do with the veracity of the speaker and all to do with creating an aura of bellicose superiority. This speech dismisses any notion that values have ever been transgressed, that wrongs have ever been committed. This is a call to amnesia.

After listening to presidential news conferences on the pandemic, I know that the sentences of the speech, grammatical and complex, were not crafted by the president, but by others who share his agenda. However, the coherent message belongs to the man. Woven throughout the text of the panegyric were the dog-whistles, code words, meant to remind his loyal base that he was still theirs: “the American family is the bedrock of American life,” “we are building the wall,” “America first,” and “[e]very child of every color, born and unborn, is made in the holy image of God.”

Throughout the demonstrations against police murder, a number of those dispatched to keep order, even police and national guardsmen, took a knee to show solidarity with the marchers in a gesture of moral unity. The Commissioner of the National Football League apologized for requiring players on the field to stand during the national anthem after a video from players named numerous victims including George Floyd and asked the NFL to condemn racism. Perhaps the most cynical use of coded speech at Mt. Rushmore was this: “We stand tall, we stand proud, and we only kneel to Almighty God.”

The entire speech was an attempt to stem the rising tide of awareness by white Americans at what Americans of color understand quite well: the American dream and the American promise that have been honored in words have been criminally neglected in action. DJT placed himself directly in the path of righting that wrong and called on his followers to join him.

"[A]s we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them."

While characterizing those who hope to build a more just and moral nation as either ignorant or criminal, the president absolved his followers from the hard work of committing all of us to making a more perfect union.

It is encouraging that monuments are coming down, monuments that were erected to maintain white supremacy and enslavement by other names long after the Civil War. Not until a true history of this country is uncovered, not until the amnesia of mythology is unflinchingly overcome, will the possibilities in the promise of July 4, 1776, be brought within reach of all Americans. When the Black Lives lost during enslavement and Jim Crow are named and enshrined in gratitude for their creation of America, when memorials at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek acknowledge the sins of imperialism, when walking the stations along the Trail of Tears is a true reminder of who Andrew Jackson was, then perhaps it will begin to be time to offer congratulations.

Gemstone: Black Onyx

THE OVERSTORY

I have never read a better novel than The Overstory by Richard Powers. In depth, vision, language, and intention the book is astonishing. Powers intends nothing less than to show humanity within the world that gave birth to our species, and particularly within the forest that has sheltered and nurtured us as witnessed by the many legends and myths from Yggdrasil, the world tree to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge to the Persian world tree Gaokerena. Powers even reminds us that tree and truth share a linguistic root. Like one of those images which appears in the foreground only to recede, the human characters of the novel often become background as the forest moves forward.

The human characters are a motley crew: Nick, the son of Iowa farmers who, by accident, have one of the last chestnuts in America to survive a blight; Olivia, electrocuted, who gains an ability to understand the language of trees; Douglas, a Vietnam vet, ejected from a bomber, who “tumbles into the branches of a banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.” There are more: the accountant, the forestry expert, the amateur actors, the gaming millionaire. Some meet, some fall in love, some become allies in the struggle to impede their narcissistic species’ “endless suicidal appetite” for destroying the forest that still sustains not only human life but that of species not yet even named.

In a large novel where every dense, poetic page requires attentive reading, I think my favorite story is that of Nick and Olivia when they ascend the trunk of Mimas, one of the last giant old-growth redwoods, scheduled to be turned into lumber. They hope their presence can prevent the destruction of their host. High in the branches they discover a new world: “Fog coats the canopy. Through an opening in Mimas’ crown, the tufted spires of nearby trunks stand swirled in the gauze of a Chinese landscape. There’s more substance to the grayish puffs than there is to the green-brown spikes poking through them. All around them spreads an Ordovician fairy-tale. It’s morning like the morning when life first came up on dry land.” 

But The Overstory belongs to the trees. There are the Apple trees whose fruit appears in so many mythologies: “myths are basic truths, twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.” The Eastern White Pine once “giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet straight up…that stood in endless stands that darkened the air with pollen each spring.” Britain gained lordship of the seas by making these pines masts for “their leviathan frigates.” The Chestnut: “the tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country.” And many, many more. Indeed the notion that trees are merely lumber is understood as sacrilege long before the end.

It is the character of Patricia Westerford, a botanist, who clarifies the vision of the novel. She sees that trees and humans, after billions of years, still have a quarter of their genes in common. Laughed out of scientific and academic circles because she dared to assign behavior to trees, behavior such as intention and communication, Westerford goes on to discover the deepest truth of all: “There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships.”

The Overstory suggests that life may probably find its way despite what people are destroying—after all the planet has experienced near-total extinctions several times before—the question is whether humans will survive. “Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It’s a big question to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.”

Submitting to the Destructive Element

“No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how to be.” Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

Wentworth is the popular Australian series set in a women’s prison that has run for six seasons and will soon begin a seventh. I started watching because I saw that Danielle Cormack played Bea Smith, the central character, and I remembered her as Ephiny, an Amazon on Xena: Warrior Princess. I was hooked from the beginning. Besides extraordinary writing and acting, the series also portrays two of the finest lesbian love stories that I have ever watched.

Bea Smith is sent to Wentworth for attempting to kill her abusive husband. She arrives woefully unprepared for a milieu in which violence and corruption are rife on both sides of the bars. Subplots accumulate but Bea’s story dominates, and in the first season Bea stumbles toward calamity through accident and choice with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Staff are nominally in charge, however Wentworth’s prisoners are actually ruled by a top dog whose tyranny is ameliorated only by the character of the top dog herself. Several women will take on the crown throughout the series but the first one Bea encounters is Jacs, wife of a drug kingpin. Bea’s naïve mistake is to believe that she can touch the softer side of Jacs only to learn that there is none. By the end of Season One, Bea has lost much more than her naïveté.

I think of Season Two as demonstrating the theme from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim: “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” Prison itself is a destructive element, largely through violence—sudden, shattering, ubiquitous, ever imminent violence. The top dog of this season is Franky, openly gay, played by Nicole da Silva. The prison also has a new governor, Joan Ferguson, surely descended from Nurse Ratched, who intends to solidify her position by playing Bea and Franky against one another. Bea initially has no ambition to unseat Franky, but Franky knows her power cannot be maintained by ignoring even unintentional threats.

Single-mindedly pursuing her own agenda, Bea sinks deeper into the prison’s moral quagmire. Her rise through the inmate hierarchy corresponds to her personal deterioration as she hardens her heart, losing her aversion to violence and to using people. “You’re a natural,” Franky tells her by the third season. “You think it’s all for a good cause. Your type’s the worst of all.” Throughout the series, Bea’s struggle to hold onto power battles her broken moral compass. In one scene she instructs Maxine to watch carefully lest a third woman hurt herself and be moved out of reach into medical. Maxine replies that there’s another reason: the woman just might hurt herself. Another chilling theme of Wentworth is that an offer of protection almost always portends disaster, or as Franky tells Bea: “You’re not the great protector, you’re the grim fucking reaper.”

The third season begins the first of the two outstanding love stories. As Bea falls further into Wentworth’s morass, Franky begins a struggle toward personal accountability and parole. Her ally is the prison psychologist, Bridget Westfall, played by Libby Tanner. Their burgeoning attraction avoids becoming a cliché and, throughout the series, Bridget and Franky’s courageous struggle to love in spite of the separation imposed by legal rules and iron bars is portrayed with pathos and heart. The story also reveals how the world of the inmates may occupy the same space as that of the staff, but living as a prisoner requires radically different codes, strategies, and behavior. Despite extraordinary empathy, Bridget has only the least inkling of how being a survivor requires compromise and self-distortion. “You do what you got to do to survive,” Franky tells her, “because if you don’t you have shit done to you.”

The violence in Wentworth has taken me to some interesting reflection. The aversion that Bea exemplifies at the beginning rests on class privilege maintained by the state’s insistence it has a monopoly on violence—the rationale justifying prisons in the first place—and on the gendered presumption that the fair sex needs others, i.e., men, to protect them.  A subtler class struggle occurs between Franky and Bridget and is not resolved until Bridget crosses the last line where she is allied to the system that separates her from Franky.

In the fourth season, the story of Bea and Allie comes to the foreground. Bea’s hardened heart has begun to show cracks even before it’s touched by Allie, but that is far from opening to trust another person. Played by Kate Jenkinson, Allie’s attraction to Bea steadily deepens. “I’m not gay,” Bea tells her to which Allie replies, “I don’t care what you are.” In an interview in Curve, Jenkinson says, “So in my mind I always imagined Allie, it sounds silly, but I imagined her as this big warm blanket. You know when you’re being held by someone that you love, it’s like all of the worries in the world just magically disappear?” Initially put off, I quickly realized how patriarchally prejudiced I was in not recognizing that offering comfort, love, and support is active, is a choice, is to be valued.

It would be possible to compare other stories of lesbian love awakening amid difficulty – among others I’m thinking of “Aimee and Jaguar.” Love overcoming obstacles resonates strongly with lesbian experience particularly because the world’s homophobia may be residual in some places but there is plenty left. What makes the stories of Bridget and Franky, of Bea and Allie, so special is the affirmation of connection, the insistence on caring and loving and loyalty, an elevation of affection. This is what makes love stories so persistent. We understand beyond words that love is the only thing that can ever save any of us in a broken world. 

I’m prone to finding meaning in shows I like very much, and it would be easy to consider Wentworth as a parable of the larger world. The series has its share of melodrama and coincidental moments that make you shake your head, but then wait a moment or two and there’ll be another moment of brilliance. I’ll just end by saying that Wentworth rewards watching by thoughtful, intelligent, superior quality storytelling and wonderful characters. Oh, and that the best thing about a women’s prison drama is that it has lots and lots of women in lots and lots of juicy roles.

Gems: Turquoise and obsidian

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The Witch Elm

This is the best of Tana French's books and I have read them all. She is a wise writer and a deep thinker and I found the book hard to put down. French claims wanting to portray the effects on individuals who are impacted by a crime and its investigation -- and she does this -- but in addition she uncovers webs of connection. In particular, the main puzzle in this mystery lies in the narrator's knowledge of his own sense of identity and responsibility, knowledge which shifts and changes throughout the story. I not only recommend the book, but suggest that a reader take note of information from the very beginning. A friend of mine called it insanely brilliant.

After a very short interval, I re-read The Witch Elm, which I rarely do, and was astonished at how subtly French set up the story and its web of consequences. I only want to add to my original thoughts that I find this book a study in how privilege works. Toby, the narrator, claims he is "lucky" but he takes that to mean that he deserves his good fortune -- which exists only because he begins as one of patriarchy's favored children [male, well off, straight, and so on]. I am very sorry for those readers who missed the complexly imagined levels of meaning in this terrific novel.



Stone: Hawk's Eye

Thoughtless Usage

I would really like the current repetitive and essentially meaningless use of the term “tribal” to stop. It is used as shorthand to stand in for opposing political sides that are marked by thoughtless or automatic hostility. I would prefer to hear something like “mob” used to mean a group that is easily led and given to unpremeditated behavior. A mob, or mobbish behavior, would at least conjure up images of a group that is prone to violence and has a history of being irrationally driven such as a lynch mob. Using “mob” would also have the advantage of not distorting a reference to a group that has much worth admiring.

A loose dictionary definition of a tribe is “a division within a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect.” These affiliations of people can be more or less neutral or can be a chosen relationship rather than one that occurs automatically.

In the US, a tribe is most commonly conceived to be a traditional group of Native Americans, and in no small part this renders the current usage racist. Such intent may be far from a user’s mind but nevertheless political usage carries a reminder of the first European colonizers’ enmity with native peoples. There is no reason to rehearse that history here other than to point out that the deadly violence generated in succeeding centuries was made to seem inevitable, and this notion of inevitable hostility is still carried by the word in today’s political climate.

But tribe need not refer only to an ethnic origin. An accurate meaning of a tribal experience might refer to people who share a common history, or a common belief. People of a tribe join together, among many purposes, for mutual comfort and survival, to enact a common culture, to create a home.

Using the word “tribal” as a careless stand-in for automatic opposition in this current political time is not just a semantic error, but part of the danger that increases daily. When Hannah Arendt accused Adolph Eichmann of banality that permitted his capacity for evil, she was referring to just this sort of thoughtless language that maintains stereotypes while sliding past any real meaning. 

Gemstone: Blue topaz