According to the legend the way I heard it when Coltrane first came out to play back in North Carolina they blew him off the stage. He wasn’t ready. There was this woodshed out back of his house and he went into that woodshed and he practiced and practiced until he was THE John Coltrane. Got back on stage and said “Now blow this.”
That’s what my crowd calls it when you dig in for some serious work or intense craft development. Going into the woodshed.
Been out of pocket lately you may have noticed. Trying to dig into the summer woodshed and its been heavy slogging. So determined to get maximum novel use out of these next couple of months that I don’t have time to do discretionary writing. At the end of the day Im still trying to clock novel hours. 6 is minimal, 9 is good, 12 is in the zone.
Unfortunately Im still in that stage where the novel concept is still growing so the harder you work the deeper you dig yourself into the hole of raw manuscript.
Just this morning had to reconcept my slavery section, in large part because of what I figured out teaching Beloved this semester about dramatizing a period of Afroam history that is inherently dramatic and a period upon which every serious black writer has to make a statement.
Ah but evil is evil and one cannot be so deep into the woodshed that you lose track of whats going on back in the world. This Iraqi prisoner situation been on my mind for a variety of reasons.
The Red Cross and other folk have been saying there is a problem with the prisons for months now but nobody paid attention until they saw the pictures. When the Red Cross complained about Abu Ghraib they were told by military authorities that policies there ‘were part of the process.’
If it hadn’t been for the pictures the Bush Administration would have stonewalled like they do all their mistakes. They do it everytime. Just out and out lie to you until they get pressed to the wall.
But the pictures made it graphic in a way words could not.
Words and Pictures. I remember my girl Doris Jean Austin used to preach about how fiction had to maintain its cultural primacy in a media driven world. That’s part of why Im into the internet and into hypertext and letting it influence my print work. The generations of the future are going to process information differently and Im determined to stay on the cutting edge.
Bush and Co claims that they did not know of these abuses. Its more like they did not care. Did not consider their treatment of Iraqis a bad thing. (They havent been treating Americans much better lately) What they didn’t know is that there were pictures, evidence they couldn’t lie away.
And if Bush actually didn’t know about it, it is just further evidence of his total lack of, 'curiosity' I think is the prevailing euphemism here, about the consequences of his obsessions. And if his cabinet actually don’t keep him informed of these things they show about as much respect for him as I do.
The administration has tried to say this abuse is an aberration but apparently its been policy. And whats interesting, if not farcical, is the very general, the former commandant of Guantanamo (that paragon of penal restraint), Maj Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who initiated this policy of MPs softening up the prisoners for interrogation, is the one they just sent to clean up Abu Ghraib. They just don’t get it do they.
The Administration still refuses to make it clear who was in charge (apparently some of their privatized civilian mercenaries) or to release the information about the more serious charges of murder, beating people to death (as they did one Baha Daoud Salim according to the Red Cross), raping women and little boys and other such hands-on sexual abuse. Even apparently the 'improper use of a corpse'. (Who the hell knows what the improper use of a corpse could possibly be.)
The Bush Administration will try to stonewall these more horrific crimes too but they have learned best to give just enough so they can say we told you about this. We didnt really try to hide it not really.
Are we really that surprised that there is evidence (pictures and videos) of more than just humiliation but rape and murder and ‘crimes against humanity’. Surprised maybe at the evidence but not that abuse happened. No. It was almost inevitable.
These kind of abuses are almost inevitable in a war and one of the primary reasons to avoid war when its not critical, specially a bogus war in which you are the overwhelming power and can pretty much do what you want to do with a weak enemy (listen up Israel).
Folk wonder how regular people, regular Americans, allowed themselves to do this, but in a closed environment like that, its like those initiations that get out of hand, you start off with a little sadistic fudging with no checks and balances and before you know it you are in the realm of what Arendt called the banality of evil.
There are demons within us all, just waiting for the right nurturing environment. An environment clearly encouraged by the Bush Administration. If anything its refreshing that some soldiers like Pvt Darby, the whistle blower here, were able to resist the pressure to dehumanize them. Turns out Bush might be right after all and this is a fight between Good and Evil. The Evil within.
In the words of that great philospher Pogo Harmonious "We have met the enemy and he is us."
The real crime here is that the Administration has set up prisoner maltreatment as policy, from the initial declaration that the Geneva Convention would not be applied to the prisoners at Guantanamo to the efforts to deny Americans declared enemies of the state any recourse to law or lawyers strictly based on Bushs declaration of them as such. I thought the whole point of the Bill of Rights was to protect the little guys/gals against just this sort of arbitrary abuse by the powerful.
What I find most interesting is that the two at the center of it all, this Fredericks and Graner, are in real life prison guards. This is probably a reflection of what all those black prisoners in the US have to go through every day. Reminds me of the Beloved scene of Paul D kneeling on the chaingang. Waiting to be fed.
Also ironic that Saddams Abu Ghraib has become an icon for American brutality. We keep running out of justifications for invading Iraq. The war on terrorism failed when no Iraqi terror connections were found and lo and behold, the invasion, as feared by the reasonable, has inflamed Islamic rage. No WMDs were found so the rationale morphed into ridding the world of the evil of Saddam Hussein and imposing "Democracy". The Iraqis can perhaps be forgiven if they question Americas benevolence at this point. We have it seems only replaced homegrown evil with an imposed one.
This brutalization of American soldiers and policy is likely to increase the longer they are there. My Lai was not as much an aberration as it was played to be and neither is Abu Ghraib. This brutalization of the American dream is all the more sad because this war was so damned discretionary. All of a sudden we are in a real war where there was none. All those dead folk, American and Iraqi, should be laid at Bush’s door.
Another interesting point about the role of media these days is that these folk took these pictures in the firstplace (what were they thinking?) because these days folks are accustomed to digital recordkeeping - digital cameras and camcorders and burning CDs. Media is a powerful beast and it will not be leashed. If the mainstream media refuses to serve its function (kudos to CBS and Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker) then guerilla media must step to the plate. Both Words and Media are sacred instruments that will not be denied.
But the Bush Administration will try to keep those photos from the public and well they should. When I went to check this out on Google News, the global narrative, the world media was much more concerned about this than the domestic media. Fortunately this is still a democracy, in spite of all the Bush League efforts to cripple it, and eventually those photos will come into the light. Another chip at Bushs Teflon coating.
The election of 2004 is one of the most important elections ever to my way of thinking. I do not like the current direction of American character. This mean and fundamentalist America is not the America that I love. But even more than the election is our responsibility to give the American people an alternative vision to the one they are currently caught up in. That we Progressives of the Third Way work to forge a new vision of American character. A new shining city on the hill. That we get our work done.
Alienating the entire world does not contribute to our National Security.
The I Ching gives two modes of engagement for the superior personality. 2) Working in the court to affect public policy. 2) Withdrawal to work on self as a model of future possibility. A cycle of woodshed and engagement. A model I have found useful for us politically inclined writers.
I guess one image is worth a 1000 words after all. Part of the reason I have become so ‘selective’ about what I do with this Rootsblog. I am a Nommo Master and when I speak I speak in Words of Power. I don’t have time to do useless Words. I am reminded of that Talmud quote that says words should be weighed and not counted.
Even thinking about it makes me eager to get back into the woodshed. I tend to think these internet Words have a limited shelf life. A good novel is forever.
Unfortunately I got to rewrite a piece about a 1000 times before its good to go. I got to do about a 1000 okay/bad words for every good one. Best I get back to Work.
Be Well. Maintain Struggle.
Word by Rickydoc
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