Welcome, friends and family, to September 2013’s issue of Synchronized Chaos International Magazine. This month our contributions reflect thought and analysis, taking apart and processing cultural phenomena and life experience.
Many pieces illustrate ways in which we understand and interpret our world, as our writers grapple with huge questions: how to empower the poor, how to find happiness, how to understand and prevent violence and repression, how to heal from trauma.
Elizabeth Hughes begins by giving us succinct descriptions of the books she reviews in her monthly Book Periscope column, capturing the atmosphere and style of each title. A ‘gut feeling’ initial reaction usually comes first as we make sense of something, and while this often changes or gets refined, it is crucial because it gives us somewhere to start. This month, her surveyed titles include Joe Writeson’s expatriate memoir From Jarrow to Java (on a beer scooter) and Aaron Cohen’s crime and suspense thriller Luke.
Other submissions deal with later stages of analysis. Poet Shelby Stephenson traces the role of firearms in American society through a long tone poem, “Forthwith – Lament: To Attempt a Meditation on Guns.” He wonders in writing how we went from an era where adults and children freely carried weapons for hunting and target practice to a nation where guns are banned from many public places, and people fear random violence at schools and theaters.
Many cultural artifacts can be used for multiple positive and negative purposes, like multi-layered symbols within a novel. And Stephenson takes a single object, a firearm, and uses it as a lens to track and ponder changing societal attitudes.
Christopher Bernard also focuses in on a particular civic function in his poem “The Taxpayer.” He connects the individual action of paying taxes with the broader effects of what that money finances around the world, illustrating the unavoidable connection in the modern world between the global and the local. When one already participates financially in international events, it becomes impossible to disengage from issues at that level. Also, when ordinary people participate in a systemic effort to accomplish something, even without their choice or full understanding, they can become less likely to critically examine their leaders’ goals and objectives. People want to believe they have been contributing to good, rather than ill, and may not then seek out information shining light on the inefficacy or wrongdoing in which they have played a part. So, by blatantly laying out the broader effects of individual actions, Bernard drives his point home, breaking through our mental blocks.
Poet George Sparling also deals with sociopolitical issues, evoking a state of paranoia in his piece. It is difficult to tell whether his protagonist is a victim of state repression or dealing with personal mental illness. By blurring the line between insanity and external oppression, the poet illustrates the mental toll of constant fear, psychological manipulation and invasion of privacy. Like Elizabeth Hughes, he identifies and describes a particular tone and sensibility, and then goes farther to create that feeling within his piece.
Creating a tutorial, or a guide to something, represents another way to digest it, breaking it down bit by bit into understandable steps. A teacher must master not only the material but also the learning process, how to explain and systematize material. Management professor and mammalian sociologist Dr. Loretta Breuning, journalist Janna Leyde, and fashion writer Mimi Sylte all deal with teaching and learning in their pieces.
Dr. Breuning presents a guide to natural mood management, identifying and describing the function of each of our brain’s ‘happy chemical’ neurotransmitters, chemicals that affect how we feel that are released in response to perceived situations. She provides a how-to manual for the mammalian brain, summarizing some of the information in her recent book, Meet Your Happy Chemicals.
Fashion student and upcoming designer Mimi Sylte interviews Sam Formo, leader and coach of Developing Skills through Independence, Networking and Empowerment (D-SINE). This is a San Francisco nonprofit designed to teach design, apparel construction and pattern-making to low-income, struggling people so they can create and sell their own clothing lines. Formo and Sylte converse about Formo’s own work in developing eco-friendly apparel, then move on to discuss education as a means to expand confidence and life options.
Journalist and yoga instructor Janna Leyde describes her middle-aged father’s work with a physical therapist, relearning how to walk, eat, speak and write after suffering a total brain injury. Her piece teeters between fascination, compassion and frustration, emotions many caregivers can share. The fact that she chose a section about teaching, out of a full-length memoir, He Never Liked Cake, to send our way, highlights the intensity of her family’s challenge: figuring out how to be a person, learning how to function and coexist with others, is hard work.
Most of our contributors don’t experience such a dramatic struggle as Janna’s father, but they, along with the rest of us, become new, larger people as we assimilate information and reinterpret our world.
Writer and critic Tapati McDaniels provides a detailed review of comedian Kamau Bell’s recent San Francisco performance of his new show Totally Biased, deconstructing and analyzing the logistics and setup of the event as well as the words that were spoken. According to professor Marshall McLuhan, the medium is an unavoidable part of the message, reflecting and expressing content along with the official presentation. So, as we see, the order in which people performed, where everyone sat on stage, and the schedule of the night contributed to the event’s ability to address and comment on race relations and showcase local talent.
Wendy Saddler processes big issues in her review of Dean Hartwell’s atheist manifesto, St. Peter’s Choice. She analyzes the author’s overall worldview as well as the specific claims he makes in this book, where he outlines why he decided not to believe in traditional Christianity. Understanding and hearing others does not require that we come to agree with them, only that we comprehend what they are saying and envision ourselves in their place. And a reasoned disagreement can promote thought and deeper analysis of the matters at hand, leading to a superior synthesis of ideas, if there is one to be achieved.
Our final contributor, Lorene Miller presents finished products of digestion, perfectly honed crystals of thought and feeling. Miller creates an individual portrait of an unusual character, describing her specifically and lovingly, down to her hair, her vegetarianism, and love for birds. Miller brings us back to the beauty of language and thought, to what we can find when we do the tough work of making sense of our universe. That, along with the practical need to understand and get along with others, and to communicate, inspires us to engage with our cultural ideas and personal experiences at a deeper level.
We at Synchronized Chaos Magazine invite you to accompany us on a journey of thought, sharing in these ideas during the change of seasons.
My dad’s life in rehab was a tedious schedule—brain injury curriculum: bed times, meal times, nap times, bath times, bathroom times, walks, therapy sessions, tests, workouts and pills to take. Pills after pills after pills, to be taken on the hour, with meals, at bedtime, three times a day. Pills you could see through and pills that left a powdery residue. Pills you could write on a chalkboard with and pills you could pop like a Gusher.
The grueling itinerary and his buffet of pills were elemental in getting him on track with his recovery, something that would give him shot at his old life. The accident had left us starting out from scratch, building him back into a real man, from medicines and mealtimes, rules and activities.
When people would ask how he was doing, I felt like I was spouting off rudimentary action verbs—simple action verbs, the kind you learn when you are first learning a language. He’d failed Spanish twice in high school.
Well, my dad has to relearn how to … walk …
A smiley man, what a human being would be like if he was crafted from a Care Bear, was helping him put one foot in front of the other. Down a path of parallel steel bars they went, as painful as watching paint dry, every day.
“’At’s it, John!”
I watched them, driven by the pure curiosity of how you teach a grown man to walk paired with the hope that he would do it on his own in my presence. The smiley man stood at one end, coaxing him forward, applauding his strength and stamina as he panted and sputtered, dragging his feet as if they were tied to cement blocks. As he made millimeters of progress, the cheery man clapped him on.
“You da man!”
Learning to walk, again, at forty-six. Funny how you can’t start out crawling.
Oh, he has to learn how to talk all over again …
“Gimme a kiss.” His first words, said to my mother, were spoken in a scratchy, coarse whisper the day he woke up from his coma. Now all he did was swear, grunt, bellow, holler, and hiss between spurts of breath, with poor diction on the few words he did choose to use. Never a complete sentence.
“John, you have to tell us what you want,” my mother would say to him. “We’ll get it for you, but you need to tell us what it is.”
“No!”
I suppose No! is a sentence, complete with punctuation the way he said it.
They have him learning to write …
At first, he scribbled all over the notepad we gave him. He was more impressed by the marks a pen could make than anything else. Then he started to write letters, out of sequence, but in his familiar, barely legible penmanship—choppy caps from an awkward lefty.
Janna
He wrote my name first, his first word. The pride felt backwards.
We have to help him learn to eat again …
Vanilla Ensure, cleverly designed to open with the same enjoyment of a pop can, was a recipe tailored to people older than my grandparents who had bodies that rejected nutrients and supplements. I popped the tab down and stuck a straw into the frothy, cement-gray liquid posing as a milkshake. I wanted to know if it was as chalky and awful-tasting as it appeared. I took a sip. Worse! How could he stomach them? He hated sweets, and I hated vanilla. The nurse told me he fought harder against the chocolate than the vanilla. Vanilla Ensures—two cans a day.
We’re hoping he’ll learn to read again …
He stared blankly at Dick-and-Jane style paragraphs and pushed flash cards off his tray. Books, magazines, and newspapers piled up in stacks around him. I thought about reading to him. How do you read to your father? What do you read to your father? What would he read to you? English poetry? American? How about Frost?
“Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though/He will not see me stopping here/ To watch his woods fill up with snow.”
He promptly fell asleep. A poem about snow in summer is stupid.
To use the bathroom …
My father was wetting the bed, wetting his pants. Was I supposed to potty train him? I was fourteen and had never pissed anything before—myself, my pants, the bed, nothing. And he was shitting the bed at forty-six.
When my father had to go to the bathroom, his body was not able to keep up with the pace that he wanted to move. He’d lean his torso over the side of his bed and forget to swing his legs out from under the sheets to properly plant his feet on the ground.
“Dad, hey … hey …”
As he teetered, I came closer, my arms stretched out. I wanted him to reach for my help, but he just swatted at me, flirting with his imbalance.
“Hang on!”
If he fell, the weight he might put into my arms would be a bridge to cross if I ever got to it.
“Get!” he said, still leaning forward, still forgetting about his legs.
He leaned, pulling pillows, cords and sheets with him. He didn’t want help from his kid. But I was petrified of him falling. That fear has never gone away.
I would watch him struggle and dodge his swats, and my mind would roll horror footage. His head cracking open on the floor, or the doorframe, or the pavement, or the porcelain sink. Me, sitting in a pile of blood, holding together the two sides of his skull. I’ve always been well aware that all this damage was a closed head injury, but my mind wanted more gore. Me, hopeless, his blood dripping down my wrists, to my elbows, staining everything. He would die. And I would just cry. Years later, when Dexter became a hit, something felt too familiar. I’m aware how fucked up these notions are, so messed up they keep me apart from the actual reality.
And then in reality, his legs always caught up, he’d charge towards the door, looking like some kind of primate rather than a father, sights set on the door handle, which would always catch him. Once he was inside the bathroom, I could breathe again. The design was built for his reckless behavior, and with the door shut, my opportunity to help was over. What he did in there was out of my league and into my mother’s. Knowing what she did for him made me queasy.
She did everything. She cleaned him up and dressed him the same way you would a baby. A giant, cranky, helpless baby man. She would get a washcloth and run it under hot water in the bathroom—the sign for me to leave the two of them in the room and shut the door on my way out. She would lift his gangling appendages one by one, turning and rotating each of them at the joints, bending his elbows and knees. With the warm washcloth, she would wipe down the limp, pale skin that clung to nothing more than his skeleton. Then she’d turn him over, put medicine on his bedsores, and rub his back with lotion, checking for bruises. Sometimes she would have to change his diaper. He wore a diaper, because he frequently did not make it to the bathroom in time. I could not dream of having such love for someone.
That August, my father quit loving me. “Hey, Dad, can you just try some for me?” I asked, picking up a plastic container that looked like it should hold pudding rather than six ounces of watered-down orange juice.
“No!”
“This will help you get stronger, so you can walk and do things like—”
“I don’t want it!”
“Dad, you’ve got to eat something today.”
“No!”
I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and conjured up the caretaker Janna, a patient and firm woman, like my mother.
“Please. Stop yelling at me.”
“No!”
I jabbed a hole in the foil cover with the straw and set it down in front of him on his tray, which hinged around him in bed like a school desk. He stared at me. He shoved the tray away, swinging it wildly. The orange juice cup slid like a beer mug on a bar. I cupped it, catching it midair before it fell to floor.
“I. Said. Yes.”
I set it down in front of him, again. He picked it up with a quivering grip, took a huge breath, puckered his lips around the straw, and sucked. One long suck until the pudding container was empty. He set it back down and removed the straw.
“Thanks, Dad.” I smiled at him.
He put the straw back in his mouth, sat up straighter, and leaned towards me. I walked closer. What was he doing with the straw? He had always chewed on things: toothpicks, wads of paper, swizzle sticks, grass blades, straws. Still holding the straw to his lips, he looked at me. He pulled the accordion end straight with his free hand and took an audible breath through his nose. I leaned towards him.
A stream of orange juice hit me in the forehead. It trickled down my face. I stood, mouth agape, in complete stillness, taking in the sticky droplets clinging to my eyelashes and the warm streams running down my neck, soaking into my shirt.
He chuckled and threw the straw at me. It glided through the air, just like the paper airplanes he taught me how to make as a kid. We’d fly them through the rafters of the living room and kitchen. Mine were often duds. His ascended effortlessly, picking up air currents I never knew existed in our house.
I walked into the bathroom, braced my arms on the sink, and looked in the mirror. My hipbones pressed against the porcelain. It hurt. I hated him; I wanted to. I hated being sticky. I hated that he was always throwing things, at people, at walls—food, forks, books, pens, spoons, pillows, insults, fits, tantrums—all the time.
The doctors increased his medications. Now the mesh net at the head of his bed had a purpose.
“Mom, what is that for?”
My father lay silent, sleeping in his mosquito net.
“Well, he gets very angry, and he needs restrained.”
“By a net?”
I now felt stupid for the first day I saw the net and for secretly wishing to see destruction in action. It was the same thrill I felt when the local programing was interrupted by the “severe weather warning for Mercer County,” tornadoes spinning frighteningly close, touching down and maybe tearing some barn, stretch of woods, or house to shreds. The imminent sense that something powerful and dangerous was about to happen. Hurricanes hitting the coast, thrashing through beach towns. Crazy men confined in mosquito netting—exhilarating.
“If you let him be, he’ll try to escape, and he’ll hurt himself.”
“Oh, so it’s kinda like a net cage?”
The netting looked like something that belonged on a ski boat, white and waterproof, something made to withstand the elements—thick, shiny cotton thread and chunky metal zippers. Inside, his feet and hands were bound in white nylon straps, thick as seat belts, which kept him from moving.
“He can get pretty nasty, Janna,” said my mother, trying to explain the reason for what I was seeing. “It’s one of the stages that they say he might go through during recovery.”
Combative.
I thought about the summer Fourth of July picnic at the Riegs’ when Nicole, Steven, Lisa, and I had found a rabid raccoon trapped in the drainpipe that ran under the street. We spent hours entertained by fear and a gripping curiosity, shining a flashlight in the pipe to watch it flinch and hiss, trying to fight and climb its way out. It darted from one end to other, flailing and screeching. Trapped. Combative. Eventually, someone shot it.
“So it’s kind of a good thing?” I asked, fingering the zipper.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if he is going through the stages.”
“Janna, he’s pretty nasty.”
There was nothing I could say. There was nothing nice my mother was saying about my father lately, so maybe there was nothing I wanted to hear. I didn’t see him that much. With school around the corner, I was busy dealing with ninth grade, finding adolescent worries that I challenged to be as important.
The net confinement only lasted a week or so. After the net cage was rolled back up, his anger lessened. He was calming down and starting to talk to us in full sentences—all good things, nothing major. Maybe he was moving through the stages.
In the first days of the accident, when death was the biggest thing to fear, a nurse gave me a book. Simply because I was the fourteen-year-old whose dad had just come out of a coma and now had a brain injury, and according the Glasgow Coma Scale, at 5, he was just two points shy of being in a vegetative state. The book was supposed to help me navigate what could happen if (and when) he woke up. When a Parent Has a Brain Injury: Sons and Daughters Speak Out.
It was a poor excuse for a book—a pamphlet, really. In the hospital, I paged through it, but the writing was boring. I was not able to relate to people talking about dating their boyfriends and bringing their father home and getting into drugs, so I put the book in my desk drawer, thinking I might have a need for it someday.
Janna Leyde is a writer and certified yoga teacher in Brooklyn, NY. She has a master’s in journalism from NYU, and He Never Liked Cake is her first book.
Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD, is the author of “Meet Your Happy Chemicals,” “Beyond Cynical,” and “I, Mammal.” She’s Professor Emerita at California State University, East Bay, and a Docent at the Oakland Zoo. Her blog, “Your Neurochemical Self,” is hosted at PsychologyToday.com.
When your brain releases dopamine, endorphin, serotonin, or oxytocin, you feel good. But soon the spurt is over and you want more. Unfortunately, happy chemicals were not meant to surge all the time, but the more you understand the job your happy chemicals evolved to do, the easier it is to live with their ups and downs.
Here’s a strategy for stimulating each of the happy chemicals. First we’ll see what turns them on in the animal world, and then look at practical ways of stimulating them in today’s world.
1) Dopamine (Embrace a new goal.)
Approaching a reward triggers dopamine. When a lion approaches a gazelle, her dopamine surges and the energy she needs for the hunt is released. Your ancestors released dopamine when they found a water hole. The good feeling surged before they actually sipped the water. Just seeing signs of a water-hole turned on the dopamine. Just smelling a gazelle turns on dopamine. The expectation of a reward triggers a good feeling in the mammal brain, and releases the energy you need to reach the reward.
Dopamine alerts your attention to things that meet your needs. How you define your needs depends on your unique life experience. Each time dopamine flowed in your youth, it connected neurons in your brain. Now you’re wired you to meet your needs in ways that felt good in your past.
Dopamine motivates you to seek, whether you’re seeking a medical degree or a parking spot near the donut shop. Dopamine motivates persistence in the pursuit of things that meet your needs, whether it’s a bar that’s open late, the next level in a video game, or a way to feed children. You can stimulate the good feeling of dopamine without behaviors that hurt your best interests. Embrace a new goal and take small steps toward it every day. Your brain will reward you with dopamine each time you take a step. The repetition will build a new dopamine pathway to take the place of the habit you’re better off without.
2) Serotonin (Believe in yourself.)
Confidence triggers serotonin. Monkeys try to one-up each other because it stimulates their serotonin. People often do the same. This brain we’ve inherited rewards social dominance because that promotes your genes in the state of nature. As much as you may dislike this, you enjoy the good feeling of serotonin when you feel respected by others. Your brain seeks more of that feeling by repeating behaviors that triggered it in your past. The respect you got in your youth paved neural pathways that tell your brain how to get respect today. Sometimes people seek it in ways that undermine their long-term well-being. The solution is not to dismiss your natural urge for status, because you need the serotonin. Instead, you can develop your belief in your own worth. People are probably respecting you behind your back right now. Focus on that instead of scanning for disrespect. Everyone has wins and losses. If you focus on your losses you will depress your serotonin, even if you’re a rock star or a CEO. Build serotonin by focusing on your wins!
3) Oxytocin (Build trust consciously.)
Trust triggers oxytocin. Mammals stick with a herd because they inherited a brain that releases oxytocin when they do. Reptiles cannot stand the company of other reptiles, so it’s not surprising that they only release oxytocin during sex. Social bonds help mammals protect their young from predators, and natural selection built a brain that rewards us with a good feeling when we strengthen those bonds. Sometimes your trust is betrayed. Trusting someone who is not trustworthy is bad for your survival. Your brain releases unhappy chemicals when your trust is betrayed. That paves neural pathways which tell you when to withhold trust in the future. But if you withhold trust all the time, you deprive yourself of oxytocin. You can stimulate it by building trust consciously. Create realistic expectations that both parties can meet. Each time your expectations are met, your brain rewards you with a good feeling. Continual small steps will build your oxytocin circuits. Trust, verify, and repeat. You will grow to trust yourself as well as others.
4) Endorphin (Make time to stretch and laugh!)
Pain causes endorphin. That’s not what you expect when you hear about the “endorphin high.” But runners don’t get that high unless they push past their limits to the point of distress. Endorphin causes a brief euphoria that masks pain. In the state of nature, it helps an injured animal escape from a predator. It helped our ancestors run for help when injured. Endorphin was meant for emergencies. Inflicting harm on yourself to stimulate endorphin is a bad survival strategy. Fortunately, there are better ways: laughing and stretching. Both of these jiggle your innards in irregular ways, causing moderate wear and tear and moderate endorphin flow. When you believe in the power of laughing and stretching, you create opportunities to trigger your endorphin in these ways.
5) Cortisol (Survive, then thrive!)
Cortisol feels bad. It alerts animals to urgent survival threats. Our big brain alerts us to subtle threats as well as urgent ones. The bad feeling of cortisol will always be part of life because your survival is threatened as long as you’re alive. Cortisol especially grabs your attention when it’s not being masked by happy chemicals. You might have a sudden bad feeling when your happy chemicals dip, even though there’s no predator at your door. If you can’t get comfortable with that, you might rush to mask it with any happy-chemical stimulant you’re familiar with. Your well-being will suffer. You will lose the information the cortisol is trying to give you, and your happy habit will have side effects. More cortisol will flow, thus increasing the temptation to overstimulate your happy chemicals. This vicious cycle can be avoided if you learn to accept the bad feeling you get when a happy chemical surge is over. You need unhappy chemicals to warn you of potential harm as much as you need happy chemicals to alert you to potential rewards. If you learn to accept your cortisol, you will make better decisions and end up with more happy chemicals.
Dr. Loretta Breuning may be reached at lbreuning@comcast.net and welcomes thoughts and comments.
The fashion industry is the second most waste-creating industry in the world, right behind weaponry. However, San Francisco is a forerunner in the sustainable fashion world, and Sam Formo has made his home here with his new concept of a zero-waste pattern, which earned him placements for awards and exhibitions internationally. Along with his industry-changing ideas, he also has founded D-SINE, a non-profit that helps down-and-out men and women change their quality of life for the better through learning fashion design.
D-SINE stands for “Developing Skills through Independence, Networking and Empowerment”. Formo combined his work in Social Services with his talent of passing on his skills to others. His pupils have found themselves in a tough position through homelessness, substance abuse, sex work, or incarceration. I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Sam about his work and his wardrobe.
Mimi: “How would you describe your personal style?”
Sam Formo: “I have roots in the punk scene, I have some edge. I like to have one little thing to stand apart from the rest. I’m obsessed with shoes, my closet is full of them.”
M: “How would you describe San Francisco’s style, and would you say it’s unique to other major cities?”
SF:”San Francisco has a very laid-back style. It’s gotten a lot better. I’ve lived in New York City where there is more style, not just fashion. Here everyone looks homogeneous, hipster.”
M: “How do you feel about menswear getting more attention recently?”
SF: ” It’s great! It’s about time- it needs it.”
M: “Do you have a favorite designer?”
SF: “I like Margiela. My favorite pair of shoes is by Dries Van Norton. They last so long, I love them!”
M: ” What are you really excited about wearing this fall?”
SF: ” I don’t follow trends so much!”
M:”Do you have a routine when you get dressed in the morning?”
SF: “I start with the shoes. I decide what shoe to wear for the day and the rest falls into place.”
M: “Tell me about D-SINE.”
SF: “It’s a twelve week incremental program with an end goal of generating income through making one’s own line of clothing.”
M:”What is a typical meeting like?”
SF: “Well, we meet up once a week for three hours. We check-in, get to work, conceptualize ideas, inspiration, mood boards, and translate it into design.”
M: “Why do you care about helping down and out people?”
SF: “I have experience from hardship and have overcome a lot of adversity. I want to help them make better decisions, reduce the harm in their lives. This inspires me. It’s my favorite day of the week. It comes from a very personal space, and I am learning a lot about myself.”
M: “Do you have advice for someone who wants to start a non-profit, or something similar to what you are doing?”
SF: “Get help! Have a solid idea and a plan. Make a business plan, find funding. You have to love it.”
D-SINE meets once a week at the St. James Infirmary. If you would like to help with donating a sewing machine, muslin, tools, or your own time, please feel free to contact Sam through the group’s Facebook page! www.facebook.com/pages/D-SINE/468300883260792
Mimi Sylte is a fashion student in San Francisco, currently working at nonprofit runway shows in Seattle and serving as a staff writer for Synchronized Chaos. She may be reached at jacintasylte@gmail.com and appreciates tips and thoughts for further columns!
“even if they’re me” (faunlike, nerdlike, he grinned).
The taxpayer, uneasy, returned his grin.
He didn’t mind, no, he got it, the need
in a warlike time
for deeds like these:
security required less liberty.
He had nothing to hide—
oh no, not he!
He wasn’t guilty,
though he felt mildly terrified.
Then he thought, “But that’s what
they want us to be!
The terrorists, that is.
They want us to be horrified, scarified, terrified!”
And he felt properly edified, dutified, mollified.
A penny went
to a caterer in Livermore,
and another to a weapons maker’s part-time chauffeur,
a penny to a Homeland Security clerk,
another to a therapist of a faceless veteran
(his face had been blown off on a road near Najaf),
a penny sequestered
the winter before.
And the taxpayer nodded
shrugged, grunted, and sighed.
He grumbled, “There’s a war on,
it’s not played like canasta.
They want to kill us,
so let’s first kill them.
What would you do, huh?”
A penny went
into the pocket of a drone jockey
who showed his mojo in the snowy state
better than at the local bar,
where he was known to play none too shabby or shoddy darts,
by crashing wedding parties in the Yemen hills
8,000 miles away into a thousand body parts.
A penny went
to the pension of an enhanced interrogator
who, under W., tortured Khalid,
and persons of interest in Waziristan and Kut,
and lives, under Obama,
anonymous, retired,
on the farthest flung of the Florida Keys.
A penny went
to the SEAL who killed bin Laden,
a penny to his boss, his ace buddy, his driver,
to the helicopter pilot who dropped him at Abbottabad’s savage gate,
a penny to a special op at Lahore,
a turned jihadist in Somalia,
a janitor at a black site in Iraq.
A penny went
to a recruiter in Davenport,
Tracy, Laramie, Charlotte,
Peoria, Duluth,
Boise, Stockton, Detroit,
to collect young men and women
“to teach them to kill for me.
Because I pay them.
I pay them all.
I am their paymaster, their leader, their boss.
They do what I pay them to do.
I am Taxpayer.
And what I pay them to do is to kill.”
And he bravely clicked Send My Tax, next April.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins (www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins) and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).