Ode to a Conscientious Objector

In that fascinatingly repellent film, Death Wish, a man asks the redoubtable Charles Bronson what he did in the war (presumably Vietnam). "I was a C.O.," Bronson says. "A commanding officer?" "No, a conscientious objector."

What could be a more suitable day to celebrate the fate of a man who refused to fight in war than Memorial Day? Particularly if, like Olaf, apostrophized in e.e. cummings' great poem, he paid for his refusal with his life. Perhaps we should remember that, while military conscription (i.e., the draft) may be necessary during a time of national crisis, when many men might choose to object to military service for reasons of cowardice, exceptions should be made for those for whom fighting poses a genuine conflict of conscience. The battlefield is not the only place where victims of war are killed.


XXX

I sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

e e cummings

The Value of Money

Some time ago an informal poll was taken asking Americans, if they saw money lying on the ground, what denomination of cash would it have to be to make them reach down and pick it up. Most of the respondents said that they would not pick up a penny. Some said that it would have to be the kind of money that folds. And a few said they would not pick it up even if it were a $100 bill. The survey could be used to illustrate a variety of things, including the relative value of money, of people's prosperity, not to mention their honesty.

A few days ago I was watching a BBC interview of Philippine president-elect Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino, and I was once again informed that one out of every three Filipinos is living on $1 a day. No matter how many times I have heard it, that statistic does not sound real to me. Even after "living poor" here for two years and learning how much 1,000 pesos ($22) can buy me, I cannot think of what just 45 pesos ($1) can buy me, and if it would be enough to keep me alive.

First of all, if I were a Filipino, I could never get away with begging unless I were blind or crippled. If I were to seriously try and stretch that $1 a day as far as I could, I suppose that I would determine how much of a staple food, like rice or bread or bananas, I could secure for that amount. For 44 cents I could buy a kilo of small bananas. Pan de sal, a kind of small bun made from flour, water, and salt, goes for 4 cents a piece. And I could buy a big plate of cooked rice, with nothing else, at a carinderia for 90 cents. (Water comes free at carinderias.)

If I wanted something more substantial, a piece of fried chicken from a street vendor costs 34 cents. I could buy an 8 ounce sakto (plastic bag with a straw, to save on the bottle deposit) of Coke for 22 cents. I could even afford a value meal at McDo or Jollibee or Chow King, but even the largest town on my island has no fast food joints.

I suspect, however, that most Filipinos living on $1 a day are doing so within their extended families, where one bread winner provides for several people - children, child-bearing wives, and elderly parents. Within the safety of such a home, whether made of grass or cement, a multitude of shocks can be absorbed without causing serious hardship, including the great big one of living in a country where living on $1 a day is not only possible but necessary .

One of the most eloquent critiques of money was written by the intensely conservative poet Philip Larkin:



Money

Quarterly, as it is, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

- In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Interruptible

I vividly remember a movie that my mother took me to see in the '60s called The Cardinal. (1) Tom Tryon played an Irish Catholic priest who eventually (the film was three hours long) rises to the title of Cardinal. Near the end of the film there is a scene in which Carol Lynley, who played Tryon's sister, is having a baby. But the delivery is complicated and the doctor can only save the mother or the child. Tryon tells the doctor to save the child, and the scene closes with Lynley's uncomprehending screams as she is dying.

I recall that I was very angry when the movie was over and I asked my mother why on earth the man would sacrifice his own sister. My mother explained that it was the official policy of the church in such cases. I felt that if it was the church's policy, the church must be stupid.

Abortion "on request" (2) is illegal in the Philippines, just as it is illegal in many other former Spanish colonies in Latin America, like Costa Rica, Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile. Whenever reproductive rights legislation is proposed, leaders of the Catholic church, despite the constitutional separation of church and state, make their position on the subject abundantly clear. Contraception, according to the church, is acceptable only in marriage and only in the form of so-called "natural" birth control. Artificial contraceptive use is officially banned. So whenever a reproductive rights bill is introduced in the Philippines, it is quickly withdrawn.

Among the nations of the world, the Philippines is ranked 72nd in land area. If all its more than 7,000 islands, many of which are uninhabitable, were put together, the Philippines would only be the size of the U.S. state of Arizona. But the population of the Philippines is ranked 12th in the world. It is close to 100 million at present, but if the birth rate continues at its present level, the population could be 158 million by mid-century.

Abortion is, as one obstetrician put it, (3) a "failure" - a breakdown of existing preganancy prevention measures, and a last resort to contravene the birth of unwanted children. In the United States, where abortions are legal, the issue continues to attract controversy. It is regarded as "murder" by "Pro-Life" advocates and its practitioners, including women seeking abortions and physicians who perform them, "murderers". Morally, it is an intractable issue. Even if a woman seeking an abortion were completely apprized of all the ramifications that "pro-life" advocates emphasize, her decision to interrupt her pregnancy is still "murder".(4)

The direct consequence of the criminalization of abortion is simple: abortions will be carried out in secret, by people, almost invariably other women, who have no medical training and only rudimentary knowledge of obstetrics and gynecology, under unsanitary conditions that endanger the lives of the women seeking to interrupt their pregnancies.

Politically, however, the anti-abortion argument is as untenable as the pacifist argument. Pacifism, in which no resistance is made to an aggressor, is only feasible when one is prepared, as few pacifists have ever been, to accept the consequences. Gandhi, for example, was a pacifist who understood that if people do not die in war, they will have to die in other, less heroic, ways. He famously told an interviewer, when the Nazi death camps were discovered, that the Jews should have committed mass suicide. Astonishing as this argument sounds, Gandhi was able to accept the condition that the inevitable prospect of pacifism in the face of such unyielding aggression as the Nazis presented to the Jews was death one way or another. The manner of death, of course, is the only matter of choice to such pacifism.

Similarly, the only anti-abortion stance that would make sense is the one in which the deaths of women seeking illegal abortions is understood and accepted as an inevitable consequence. If one is not prepared to accept the legal interruption of preganancies, one must be prepared to accept the loss of life, of both fetuses and mothers, from illegal abortions.


(1) The Cardinal (1963) Directed by Otto Preminger.
(2) Some countries have compromised when an abortion concerns the life of the woman, or when there is proof of sexual assault.
(3) In the BBC News program My Country, Brazil: O Aborto dos Otros, which aired 15 May 2010. It is estimated that over one million illegal abortions are carried out in Brazil every year.
(4) An ironic consequence of the availability of artificial contraceptives to men and women, which the Church fails to notice, is that it diminishes the number of abortions, legal or otherwise.

Sunday Morning, May 16

We all know the Wallace Stevens of his great poems, like "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" (he was writing about his old Harvard professor, George Santanaya). But the Wallace Stevens who was born, like John Updike, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and wrote a few plays, left Harvard without a degree, worked as a reporter for the New York Tribune, then entered law school, graduated, practiced law, and finally settled for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company for the rest of his working life, is a total stranger to us. He wrote to William Carlos Williams that "my job is not now with poets from Paris. It is to keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby's chariot turning and that sort of thing."

He wrote poetry all his life, published discreetly until his Collected Poems appeared a year before he died. It included his later poems under the title, "The Rock," which contains the shattering "Poem At Seventy":

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were . . . The sounds of the guitar

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.
The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in a fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity.

A theorem proposed between the two -
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun's design of its own happiness,

As if nothingness contained a metier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired.

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular of being, that gross universe.


Stevens wrote these tenuous, outreaching words when he was very old, looking back on a time long since lost. But today, as I turn 52, they hold a kind of incantatory power. As if I, too, am looking back at a picture of myself at twenty, or even thirty. It's like looking at the dead.

But on this Sunday morning, here in the Philippines, I am drawn to the sentiments Stevens expressed in what many regard is his "breakthrough" poem, called, coincidentally, "Sunday Morning":


Sunday Morning

1

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

3

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

4

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.

8

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.


Divinity must live within herself. The idea is more than a little old today. The brilliance of this day is, for me, utterly undiminished by the absence of God. Without Him, it is even more brilliant, since, like me, it cannot last. Here, in my island solitude, unsponsored, free, I feel almost happy.

Dead Man's Curve

Here in the Philippines, hazardous stretches of road are designated by signs that bear a curious warning: ACCIDENT PRONE AREA. A preponderance of motor accidents in one place would provoke warnings against reckless driving anywhere else. But for Filipinos, as well as many other Asians, the road itself is prone to cause accidents. Especially if any people have died in the accidents, the area is believed to be populated by restless spirits who may be jealous of the living.

Late one night one year ago, a popular young Filipino actor named Richard Gutierrez was driving his sports car at excessive speed through one such area when, somewhat predictably, an accident occurred. Gutierrez was driving, with his personal assistant in the passenger seat, when the sports car left the road. Gutierrez sustained a cut above his eye, but his assistant was pronounced dead at the scene.

Released from hospital the morning after the accident, the actor's celebrity family held a thanksgiving mass, after which he made statements to the tabloid press to the effect that his survival of the accident with only a minor cut was no accident but divine intervention.

As if the mass thanking God for Richard's survival (and, coincidentally, his assistant's death, as it were, in his place) were not crass enough, the young actor was quick to pronounce the coincidence a sign that he was spared in order to fulfill some greater design.

The young widow of his assistant was less certain of the hand of God and hired a lawyer to look into the matter. When young Richard's prior citation for reckless driving, in the same vehicle no less, was found, and an excellent case for negligent manslaughter was in the offing (no pun intended), Richard was less concerned with the prospect of going to jail than of the damage that the negative publicity might do to his good name.

Needless to say, an out of court settlement was made to the satisfaction of both parties. Young Richard's star continued its rise in the firmament of Filipino celebrity nobodies just as God intended. But the highway curve that took the life of his assistant remains just as before, its menace undiminished by road improvement, poised to take more lives should they take no heed of the sign.

Postpartum

Vote-buying must be one of the oldest election tactics in history. As soon as one man, one vote became common practice, somebody decided that paying someone to vote a certain way was easier than making alot of campaign promises that were impossible to fulfill.

If I were unsure of the amount of vote-buying going on here in my Philippine island province before the election on 10 May, I have been provided with ample evidence of it in the two days since, as the capitol city near my home was overrun with people from the outlying areas thronging the markets, buying whatever isn't nailed down.

The amount of cash purportedly paid to every eligible voter was up to a few thousand pesos, which translates into about $50. That's alot of money for people who expect to make that much in a month. When you consider how many voters there are just on this island, it means that the candidates probably shelled out a few million pesos apiece.

Last week, Imelda Marcos, who won a seat in the Philippine House of Representatives, told a government official involved in negotiations for a settlement of the ongoing plunder case against the family, that her riches could bring an end to all poverty in the Philippines. Nobody bothered to ask her what on earth prevented her from doing so.

A Hill of Beans

While watching the film Death Proof again the other night, I began to see certain consistencies in Quentin Tarantino's work: his encyclopedic knowledge of classic '70s crap music (much of it R&B, which wins him street creds); '70s crap martial arts movies; and '70s American crap TV. With these three elements, all crap, Tarantino concocts his brazenly insupportable plots that try strenuously to assure us of his virility, hipness, and cinematic genius.

I saw him a few years ago on the Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts, and he mentioned that, as a filmmaker, he had already scaled Everest. It took me a few moments to figure out that he was referring to Pulp Fiction. I doubt that anyone who has actually climbed Mount Everest would think of comparing the experience to such a crassly clever movie.