DEADLEAFSPOTTING

DEADLEAFSPOTTING

Most leaf-peepers pay too much attention to how leaves look and not enough to how they fall.
Yesterday, the wind was blowing hard from the south and our willow tree, a stubborn holdout this fall, was releasing many of its leaves. Some blew so close to the house that they sliced past the kitchen window, headed downward, in a white-streaked way that made me think of the way some fish will strike shiny things that look nothing like baitfish but which have the right flash.
Like such fishing lures, and like the snowflakes that will succeed the leaves, they fell in spirals. Willow leaves are long and thin and not too stiff; while most went down heavy-end first, a few spun like mill wheels, with their spiral-staircase descent taking much longer. Something in the back of my mind said, “You once read that someone won a paper airplane contest with a simple rectangular piece of paper that lasted longest in the air because it fell in exactly such a steamboat-wheel fashion.”
Snowflakes have unique shapes, but also unique ways of settling to the earth. It’s harder to distinguish the differences in most cases, because the event takes place quickly against a white background, but there are times when snowflakes glom together and fall in small number, and at such times it’s easy to see and enjoy the variations in their spirals.
A lot of plants spiral on the way up, too. Do you remember that William Butler Yeats poem that anticipated the two World Wars, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ re full of passionate intensity.” “The Second Coming” begins with the words, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” “Gyre” was for Yeats a synonym for “spiral;
he was fascinated by spirals, considering them a key to the progressions of history. Our personal growth was like going up a spiral staircase, he thought: we go over and over the same ground, but each time gaining from what we have learned. These latter days, of course, we may be more inclined to think of William Carlos Williams’ “The descent beckons/ As the ascent beckoned.”
Not only do falling things descend in spirals, and not only is each spiral slightly different from the others, they differ in ways that can be arranged according to the Law of Large Numbers. Of all the laws under which we live, this is perhaps the most pervasive and powerful, and the most mysterious: it says that enough repetitions of the same phenomenon will fall into a distribution that can be described with “the bell curve.” We are most familiar with the application of this to the results of intelligence tests: a handful will score very, very highly; a few will have very high scores; more will have high scores; most will be in the middle of the pack; and the lower scores will thin out as they approach the lowest scores.
ANYTHING can be described by the Law of Large Numbers. But how? And why? To put it another way, even the more prosaic and seemingly obvious aspect of existence in this universe is at the same time spooky as all hell. Around All Souls and All Saints Days, when summer’s mad rush is done and fall’s dismantling is almost over and things hold still, they start to look strange.
They are. But only if you see them as things, says the Zen Buddhist.

LONG LIVE-D QUEEN

LONG LIVE-D QUEEN

Today, Tuesday Nov. 20, 2007, England’s Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrated their diamond anniversary having been married 60 years ago. During that time, we have been through Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G. H. Bush, and Clinton, and with any luck she’ll outdistance G. W. Bush as well.
This reminds me of a limerick composed by the great Welsh writer Dylan Thomas, which is said to have made him poet non grata at Buckingham Palace. To appreciate it, you have to understand that the song “Ich Dien” (I serve) is the official song of the Prince of Wales, probably because of Prince Philip’s German connections.
The last time I slept with the Queen,
She said, as she whistled “Ich Dien,”
“Please put the light out:
It’s royalty’s night out—
The Queen may be had—but not seen.”
Seriously, one must appreciate the Grande Dame’s ability to rise through change and through storm. It’s easy to see why 2,000 people came to the Diamond Anniversary fete—and why top American officials were not among them.

Veterans Day: Remembering Iron Bottom Sound

VETERANS DAY: REMEMBERING IRON BOTTOM SOUND

Back in 1942, between Nov. 12 and 15, United States forces in the South Pacific turned the tide of the war by blocking Japanese reinforcement of their forces on the island of Guadalcanal.
The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal capped a half year of fierce combat on land, on the sea, and in the air, during which the Armed Forces, at least, realized that all those cartoons about dwarfish Japs with bad eyesight were pure fiction. Japanese fighter pilots trained for spotting enemy planes by looking for the star Sirius during the daytime. At sea, Japanese naval commanders had far better binoculars than their Americans counterparts. Today’s official military history of that period puts it this way: “Inside and just outside Iron Bottom Sound, five significant surface battles and several skirmishes convincingly proved just how superior Japan's navy then was in night gunfire and torpedo combat
The Solomon Islands, of which Guadalcanal was one, run in two roughly parallel lines, and the seas between those lines became known as The Slot. It was like certain bars: if you wanted a fight, that was where you went. John F. Kennedy’s heroic actions after his torpedo boat went down resulted in a medal, and gave him a boost toward a career that included writing “Profiles in Courage”—a title that could have been applied to many during the time when, as “Tales of the South Pacific” put it, the Americans had to fight destroyers with PT boats, cruisers with destroyers, and battleships with cruisers.
James Michener’s “Tales,” which led to the musical “South Pacific,” should be mentioned in the same breath as Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” and James Jones’ “The Thin Red Line,” both of which also evoke the war against Japan. Michener’s book is unlike his later bloated epics, a set of linked stories filled with unforgettable characters, vivid depictions, and sharp symbolism. I recommend it to those who are, like me, fascinated by the period; it is not tightly gripping as Audie Murphy’s ghostwritten “To Hell and Back,” one of our unheralded classics, and doesn’t have the scope of Anton Myrer’s “Once an Eagle” (who incidentally fought three years in the Pacific Theater as a Marine) but to my mind it deserves major literary status.
The Americans also learned to respect their native scouts, especially Guadalcanal’s Jacob Vouza, who brought a downed American pilot through the Japanese lines then agreed to be a scout. He was captured while in Japanese territory, tied to a tree, and bayoneted in the arms, shoulder, throat, face and stomach to make his tell what he knew about the Americans—he said nothing—then left him to died. He freed himself, kept going through miles of jungle to the America base, and warned them about an impending Japanese attack, which led to the key American victory at the Battle of the Tenaru River.
Elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Allies went to Fiji to see if the men there would be good scouts. They set up an exercise during which the they would guard the base’s buildings during the night, and the Fijians would try to sneak up and mark the buildings with white chalk X’s.
They waited and they watched and no Fijians appeared. Lazy natives, they’re like children, you have to watch them all the time, why did we think they might make good scouts. Then, as a new day dawned, they began to see the white X’s: on doors, on equipment, and on each other’s backs.
This Veteran’s Day, I think of the men and women who fought and often died on and under and around Iron Bottom Sound, but also I think of the Japanese who died for their country, and of the natives, and of the Australian coastwatchers who reported Japanese movements up and down The Slot “Good luck,” they would say, “and good hunting.” Too often their luck was to become the hunted themselves and to die, sometimes very painfully.
World War II was the Olympics of warfare, a time when all nationalities showed that they were courageous and capable of great sacrifices, and should have gained each other’s respect. Much more than a big war, that era’s great cataclysm mixed what had been separate, and the flash of the atomic bomb fused together everyone’s fates. Now, as we go on pretending that we are better than the Iraqis and Afghanis, and creating bigger and stronger backlashes the harder we push, I’m glad my father, who flew in B-24’s as one of the Flying Tigers in China, doesn’t have to watch so many lessons from that time being washed away by waves of sentimental patriotism and silenced by the noisy cheerleaders of reflexive chauvinism. Allah help us all.

Beware: Poet at Work

BEWARE: POET AT WORK

Writing poetry can be hazardous to your health, and perhaps to others as well. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent some years writing poems rather than articles, and I can testify that doing so can put the creator in an altered state of mind where he (and possibly she, though I think of women as being more sensible than this) bumps into things, drops things, forgets appointments, and makes all sorts of bizarre mistakes.
A case in point: this morning I was looking out our back window at the Havahart trap, which we had set to catch whatever was stealing the sunflower seeds from our bird feeders, and which had finally caught something the day before.
“Honey, we got something in the trap.”
“What was it?”
“Well, it was gray, and white, and it had two wings.”
“A grosbeak.”
“I saw it at lunchtime, frantically flitting and hopping, so I threw on some clothes and went out and opened the trap, and it flew out. It made a beeline for the woods. Didn’t seem too much the worse for wear.”
“Remember the time we caught the neighbor’s cat?”
This morning, I was making my breakfast, and those two words “hopping” and “flitting” set off a poem—which turned into something about us complicated people wanting the birds to have a simple happiness—which the grosbeak certainly got, because it was damned happy to get out. Meanwhile, I realized, I had poured 10 too many artificial sweeteners into my cereal, acting out of habit as if I were making a full pot of coffee.
Let me reassure you, when this sort of thing happens while I’m driving, I pull over. The Leicester River turnoff, for instance, has seen a LOT of short poems written in its lifetime, and I told the people at the Leicester general store this was among the many public services they had provided the community.
At my alma mater’s graduate school, there’s a lady who first succeeded in slowing light to something like 38 miles per hour, then for an encore managed to stop it entirely before sending it on its way (probably not grateful like the grosbeak, but certainly making a beeline in a different direction). Poets do something like that with their subjects, slowing the stream of life to the point where everyone can perceive it more clearly, then releasing again.
Meanwhile, as a handful of lines get written, hours go by—not to mention whatever was on the calendar for such periods. If there were more people in the household, I’d put up a sign, “Beware: poet at work.”

Early Warning Signs of Fascism

List of the Month: Early Warnings Signs of Fascism

I don’t buy many posters, for the same reason I don’t buy many maps. Books, pictures, craft items and artworks have already taken over what wall space we have.
But when I saw this poster, I grabbed it and bought it, not caring about the price. It was the store’s last, I was told, and the store soon went out of business. So I don’t feel I am violating anything by sharing the poster’s essentials here.
First, though, some essential introductory material.
Back in the Depression, Huey Long was believed by some to be the “smartest and most dangerous of American demagogues.” It was a time when many looked with envy at Germany, where there wasn’t unemployment and things seemed to be booming—though these protofascists soon heard the boom behind that arms-industry-driven economic revival. Long, before he was assassinated, was once asked, “Do you think we’ll ever have fascism in America, Huey?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Only here, we’ll call it anti-fascism.”
I’ve been worried about American fascism ever since I saw the polls in the late 1960s showing that a majority of Americans would have supported rounding up the hippies and Vietnam protesters and putting them into concentration camps. For decades, it’s been a staple of pollsters to show that most people would not accept the Bill of Rights (the first amendments to the Constitution) were it proposed today.
But I went beyond worry when I heard the Cheney-Bush administration talking about Islamic Fascists. Through the years, these political engineering geniuses have perfected their use of preemptive accusations, deflecting criticisms by accusing their opponents of the same thing. A case in point would be their attack on Democrats for supposedly fomenting class conflict by drawing attention to the growing disparity between lower and higher incomes, and saying that Republican pro-rich and pro-corporate tax policies were the main cause. By now, the growing division between rich and poor has become a staple of economic research—the economic revival since the dot-com boom of the turn of the century has apparently benefited only those in the top 20 percent—and it’s clear that the Democrats were being accused of causing something that had a very different cause, to which they were only reacting.
Clearly the Islamic fundamentalists are not like the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; indeed, in many ways they are more like American fundamentalists. But calling them Fascists would equate 9-11 with Pearl Harbor, in the same way that calling those three nations an Axis of Evil (do you remember which three Bush tagged as such?) attempted to link the Islamists with World War II’s Fascist Axis.
So what is fascism, really?
Rather than quote dictionary definitions, I’m going to cite the findings of Lawrence W. Britt—the conclusions listed on the poster. After researching seven fascist regimes—Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia—in April of 2003, he distilled 14 “Early Warning Signs of Fascism.” This is a list to print out, save, compare with current events—and possibly buy one of those bumper stickers saying “IF YOU AREN’T APPALLED, YOU HAVEN’T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION.”

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism.

2. Disdain for human rights.

3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.

4. Supremacy of the military.

5. Rampant sexism.

6. Controlled mass media.

7. Obsession with national security.

8. Religion and government intertwined.

9. Corporate power protected.

10. Labor power suppressed.

11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

14. Fraudulent elections.

As the shaggy dog story about the Foo Bird says, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

WRAP-UP OBSERVATIONS FOR OCTOBER 2007

WRAP-UP OBSERVATIONS FOR OCTOBER, 2007

When you hear that “Cerberus Capital Management” now owns the Chrysler auto company, remember that in Greek mythology, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards Hell.

We’d better make sure our bridges are in good repair, because with all the wartime cutbacks in social programs, a lot of people will be living under them.

Ideas that could make someone a million dollars: mouse-flavored catfood.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time—just ask anybody.

Reply to a telephone caller offering a consolidation loan who insisted she was not a telemarketer: “By any name, it smells the same.”