The Fall of the City

The cathedral was the last building to burn, even though everyone had long believed that, built as it was of granite, sandstone, and lead-mullioned glass upon a steel matrix, the towering edifice could withstand any possible fire, but the interiors of wood and silk, canvas and wood-panel paintings, candles and brocade, cheap plastic religious figures and objects—madonnas, crucifixes, rosaries, statuettes of saints, devotional shrines—guaranteed it would not withstand the flames that had climbed the sky for many days, and the long, final night, the sexton, last of the clergy to remain behind, was seen kneeling in prayer near the ruined consistory, weeping, the cathedral’s now useless keys still in his cassock pocket,

it had taken an entire week to burn the financial district, which surprised even the attackers, but paper had long been in disuse, in preference for the co-location of virtual documents, which took an unexpectedly long time to search and destroy, the hardware—from land lines and smartphones and laptops to notebooks and desktop computers and tablets—burning only at the very end as the walls of plaster, stucco, rebar, drywall and ceilings and roofs of soundproof paneling, tar, creosote paper and hardwood collapsed under the searing heat, and the skeletons of chairs, lamps, desks, lobby sofas, microwaves, reception and security guard kiosks and the like stood starkly like the burnt skeletons of animals caught surprised in a conflagration that raced like a herd of wild bison through a circus or a zoo, the employees had fled or been eliminated long before, and it is believed some had joined or already belonged to the attackers,

the mall was besieged early on the first morning, there was some controversy whether demolition explosives had been planted earlier, as the wreckage seemed too complete, not to say too immediate, to have been caused entirely by mortar attack, bazookas carried by young invaders or rioters (to this day, historians are unable to determine which), grenades, and a handful of drones carrying lightweight smart bombs, Target was the first to go up in a dazzling display of fireworks, followed closely by North Face, Eddie Bauer’s, Bloomingdale’s, Abercrombie and Fitch, and the multiplex, which was showing the latest Bollywood extravaganza, a slasher film, an animated jukebox musical, an indie transgender romcom set in Detroit, and the final installment of the Star Wars franchise, the ruins of the mall were quite picturesque against the sunset of that first day, reminding some of what the ruins of the Roman forum may have looked like after the sacking of the Eternal City by Alaric on the fateful day that officially ended the western empire, the marauders (or perhaps locals or a combination of both) looting amidst laughter and dance music (for some reason, the mall’s muzak system kept playing at full volume far into the night) as they vogued about in Donna Karam, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo, Ermenegildo Zegna and Prada knockoffs they thought were originals, the food court’s plunder—a gourmets’ delight from Ethiopian to Filipino, German to Chinese, a Quebequois bistro and a sushi taqueria—fed the looters for days,

a child named Poky Mars—a sandy-haired tomboy who liked to wear dungarees with suspenders—had been climbing, not long after dawn, the ancient hickory tree, almost as old as the city itself, that grew in the Howards’ backyard, despite orders from her parents not to do so, when she saw the first sign, her neighborhood was at the eastern edge of the city, where the cornfields awaiting harvest began, she had sneaked out very early because she liked to watch the sunrise over the far-off eastern mountains, but her attention, where she sat perched near the top of the tree not far from a raven’s nest, daydreaming about the clouds—one looked like a pink cow, another like a galleon in full sail, another, in purple and green, reminded her, unpleasantly, of the angry face of Miss Smythe, her sadistic math teacher when she was returning tests, was suddenly caught by the sound of a boom and a shaking of the earth and what looked like a fireworks rocket shooting over the high school playground three blocks toward downtown, its office towers standing like a row of cereal boxes in the dawn mist, it was Saturday and there was no school but it was nowhere near July 4 or Chinese New Year or Columbus Day (Indigenous People’s Day it was called now, though the Italians seemed to shoot even more rockets on that day than ever, and what did “indigenous” mean anyway? wasn’t she “indigenous,” heck she’d been born here!), so why would there be fireworks? a black blossom of cloud rose above the high school, Poky’s little jaw dropped: the school was on fire! at first she felt a little disappointed that it was not her elementary school, half a mile in the other direction, but then it occurred to her it might not be such a good idea for school to be bombed, or even burning, however much she hated it, it might have serious consequences for the neighborhood elsewhere that might extend even to her own house, especially when she heard a broken pattern of more booms, eerily like the beginning of a breakdance, and saw more rockets farther away zooming across the city like Roman candles on a birthday cake, and she carefully climbed down from her perch after peeking into the ravens’ nest one last time to see how the eggs were doing, till she reached the ground, and then ran as fast as her legs could carry her home as she heard bursts of gunfire, when she got home she found that her house had been lifted and turned upside down like an unsuccessful cake and replaced by a big hole in the ground lined with the wreckage of the basement rec room and the laundry room, the gutted remnants of the family car and the clothes dryer, a scattered set of blocks of a small-scale city she had spent weeks building, and something her father had always insisted on calling a doll, though it was not a doll, it was a Superman action figure, its face melted into an indecipherable mask from the blast’s heat, an explosion went off several houses down, and the impact of the air blast made Poky go momentarily deaf, there was no sign of anyone else in the neighborhood, and she wandered off in shock,

the entertainment district was laid waste that first Saturday night: dance clubs, saloons, bistros, trattorias, all-night cafes, concert spaces, movie theaters, a combination night club and swimming pool called The Oasis, a multiplex club called the Glashaus, an all-night bar called The Living End, with, at its outer reaches, rave warehouses, “secret” party spaces with closed guest lists, marijuana dispensaries, and drug and sex clubs—crushed under the weight of the attack and burning in the silence after the pleasure-seekers were caught in the midst of their revels, the streets lined with the gutted contents of the costume departments of the city’s main theater: faux Victorian top hats and Edwardian deerhunters, plastic medieval chainmail and dacron Elizabethan hose, gangster fedoras and oceans of nineteenth century crinoline and taffeta enisled with berets and flapper togs, newly fashionable hats and old-fashioned shoes, expensive purses and cheap pocketbooks, dancers’ tights and power bras, elaborately laddered jeans and ripped T-shirts imprinted with nonsequiturs like “Obey,” “Guess,” “So What,” “Who Cares” and “This Property Is Condemned” and tea roses sold by ancient crones under midnight street lights to shy lovers, carnations torn by passionate fingers from youthfully formal lapels, and Technicolor bouquets of artificial flowers that never, ever die, to say nothing of a trash of plastic wine glasses, party favors, broken anklets, lost nose rings, popped ear flares, smashed DJ mixers, kicked-in loud speakers and dance lights, and a salmagundi of party debris, and fled in panic in growing arcs of terrified young people (both young and would-be young) just out for a good time after a hard, pointless week at a poorly paid job that never will pay off their student loans, their mortgages or their credit card debt, working for bitter, middle-aged men and old widows who spent their days, drooling over online stock accounts and waiting for death: the flower of civilization,

historians could never decide for certain the initial cause of the city’s collapse: an invasion, a revolution, a financial collapse, a rebellion by the poor or revenge of former natives, or even a natural disaster: an earthquake, a hurricane, a plague, a tsunami (the city lay on a low river plain only a mile from the coast), there were signs of any and all of these possible causes, though none were conclusive, entire careers were devoted to explaining the city’s sudden fall after centuries of a thriving civilization, careers that usually ended in the bitter feuds that dominate so many theoretical discussions, libraries of forgotten books, and ruined reputations, but, inch by bitter inch, they were able to reconstruct at least a plausible sequence of some of the events, and even the personalities of some of the inhabitants during those final days,

the rich neighborhoods to the north were on fire fairly late in the apocalypse, a blanket of smoke, fuzzy gray and brown, covering the resplendent homes of the wealthy, the tongues of fire dancing like teenagers on a binge of hatred for school, parents, and the obscene world they were inheriting, yet the main library, on the opposite side of the city, was attacked by tanks a week earlier, which supports the idea that the fall of the city was caused by an invasion, however the discovery of remains of Molotov cocktails and IEDs in the ruins of department stores downtown suggests local rioting, though these may have been provoked by, or may themselves have provoked, an invasion by the city’s envious neighbors,

Max Sheffield, a small, fat watchmaker with a wispy mustache and melancholy eyes, and who had only one more year before retirement, watched in horror from the barbershop where he was having his hair cut, as jewelry store row, his own store among them, with its long lines of glittering storefronts with coruscating sets of precious stones set in silver, platinum and gold: rubies, emeralds, topazes, opals, agates, and some of the most prized diamonds in the world at the time, was shattered by machine-gunfire in an apparently well-prepared attack, perhaps (it is theorized) in a drive-by shooting from a fleet of trucks that caused a wave of shattered glass and jewelry to swell along the street, the fire that followed melting down the jewels and precious metals, in the frenzy of the moment or in contempt for the rich city and its baubles, into a great, useless lump among the charred remains of the stores, a day earlier the airport runways had been pocked with mortar craters, the terminals rammed with armored trucks and gutted by shelling, the air control tower was blown up in a spectacular explosion seen a mile off the coast by a fishing crew on their way to the cod banks,

Michaelmas Breed, captain and ship owner, crossed himself reflexively three times, though he had not been a practicer of the faith since he lost all belief during Hurricane Ivan when his best friend was swept into the storm as he tried to save Breed’s younger brother trapped between the ship’s hull and its single rescue boat, the ship continued north and returned several weeks later past the silent coast, its hull groaning with cod,

the west of the city, where the ghettoes began, is still believed by some, though the claim is controversial, to have been the true origin of the city’s collapse, either because it was the last part of the town to be destroyed, or was the most thoroughly, as only the faintest remains of a vast collection of structures in themselves of modest dimensions—small apartment building, modest homes with tiny yards, shops, cafes, groceries and drug stores, beauty parlors and barber shops, movie theaters, diners, lounges, pizzerias, clubs, motels, music stores, quick-loan vendors, parking garages, gas stations, two fire stations and a lone police station, scores of bars, dozens of churches, and a large graveyard (the only thing in the city untouched by the disaster)—remained after the conflagrations swept across that part of the city, leaving behind an enormous emptiness where before there had been a large if not thriving community, there is a counterclaim that this total destruction happened not because this area was the ultimate source of the collapse, but because it was its original object, the inhabitants being the target either of invaders from outside or of rioters and vigilantes within, who sought the expunging and annihilation of the impoverished inhabitants as a blight on the city and a cause of the mysterious disaster that one day drove the rest of the city’s population out of its mind with lust for vengeance, even though it was the poor who had been the first, and the most deeply, to suffer from the city’s evils,

ironically enough this had been one of the earliest areas of the city to be settled (after its original founding as a colonial outpost, a century before the revolution that led to the country’s founding) by escaping slaves from the south, over the generations that followed the city’s fall, the footprint of this area looking at first like a great chess board swept clean of its pieces by the exasperated loser, was overgrown by grasses and manzanita-like brush and became a favorite haunt of quail and coyotes and wild deer, its nights echoing with the call of owls as they hunted for mice, the city’s only living descendants,

Gregorio Epinez (forty-seven though these days he felt like eighty) witnessed the attack on the barrio, on Thursday afternoon, from his garage and junk business, as the neighborhood was bombed after being strafed by (in the belief of the scholarly consensus) fleets of old propeller fighters from the previous global war, his shop was on the main drag, and he was shocked to see (he and his neighbors had believed the invasion or riots were local, and would never extend to the barrio: what was there to steal here? Nada, chingada!) the streets lined with ruins of 99-cent stores, religious bookshops, restaurants serving posole and pupusas, Yucatecan and Salvadorean, Peruvian and Mexican cuisine, rags of chinas poblanos from second-hand clothing marts, the wreckage of lowrider and pimp cars (his main clientele, Jésus Maria!), the remains of a mariachi band—a black, silver-brocaded short jacket, two huge sombreros festooned with crocheted parrots and flowers, a cracked violin the color of lipstick with a broken-off finger board hanging by its strings, and a caved-in bass guitar—in an alley across the street the band had been running down to escape (Gregorio had seem them fleeing, half-covered with flecks of piñata ribbons from a quinceañera where they had been performing), the faces of the wildly colorful murals the neighborhood was becoming famous for even outside the city—celebrations of native heritage, the beautiful and forever irretrievable past, the parade of history that was a promenade of ghosts, as well as bizarre and defiant evocations of the present and challenges to the future (these were partly what made Gregorio feel so old)—mutilated with bullet holes and blasted into fragments of stucco and brick by tanks (the signs of their treads left clearly on the soft tar of the streets) that invaded later, and the ground forces that fought from street to street (Gregorio hiding in his garage and watching cautiously through the filthy, long-uncleaned windows of his garage) until the entire area was subdued, the populace terrified into paralysis and silence, or death, the fires lit that later that evening overtook the buildings still standing, including Gregorio’s garage and the churches in ornate colonial gothic or more austere century-old styles, whose bells had rung in tocsin when the attacks began, though, as so often, too late, Our Mother of Guadalupe on the faces of several of the churches, in her long oval lapped in white, gold, and blue, her mild gaze lowered toward her long-suffering children, the churches themselves blasted by shell and rocket to prove there was no safety from destruction and no hope for escape,

the richer neighborhoods to the north were besieged the next day, after the firestorms had leveled the ghettoes and the barrio, almost as if the attackers had wanted either to terrorize the rich with the spectacle of what was coming or to lull them into a sense of false security before the inevitable devastation befell them, or possibly (as a third school of thought has it) for purely logistical reasons, as they could not destroy all of the city at once and had to prioritize, Gina Melodi, a young doctor who had just moved into a flat in a handsomely renovated manor from the last century, on Sumter Lane, had gotten up late after pulling all-night duty at the ER of St. Stephen’s Hospital, which had been taking in spillover from the overloaded local hospitals, and was standing at her front window at noon in her bathrobe, drinking coffee and trying to wrap her head around what was happening to the city (all communications with the outside world, including the internet, had been cut off in the opening hours of the disaster, the television and radio stations had been dead since last Sunday) when she smelled what she thought was burning wood, she opened the window and looked out, inhaling the curiously invigorating scent of burning pine, before seeing to her alarm a tree at the end of her block lit like a torch and an amorphous wall of gray smoke rising between the flaming tree and the three condo towers several blocks away that crowned Prior Hill, where many of the city’s wealthiest people resided, an explosion rocked the hill as she watched, and 789 Prince Street collapsed like a twenty-story tower of children’s blocks, and Gina, startled, dropped her coffee down three floors to the eerily empty street where the liquid left a black stain like a premonitory charring and the saucer and cup shattered, frightening the neighbor’s schipperke, which had been sleeping, oblivious to the destruction of its world, on the building’s front stoop, the dog dashed off on its little legs, barking, toward the burning tree, and Gina hurriedly dressed and, gathering a few things she needed or treasured—her cell phone, her diary, and a commodious old college purse stuffed with “junk”—she fled her building just as the attackers were beginning a building-by-building search-and-destroy mission on her block, bursts of machine gun fire made her panic and she ran, losing her floppies and running barefoot through the terrifyingly vacant streets to the base of Prior Hill, where there was a park and a homeless encampment where she thought she might find either shelter or rescue: the destroyers of the rich would surely leave society’s poorest and most helpless and destitute alone? she had treated many homeless over the last two years working in ER: surely some of them would recognize her and let her join them and help them, or at least hide among them? but when she reached the encampment, her feet bloody, her face smudged with smoke from the burning neighborhood, all she found was a waste of ashes under a forest of charred and blackened trees and a single untouched bench, on which she crouched like a terrified, feral cat, she stayed there all day until late in the evening, in the night she heard a nightingale singing,

a theory held by a minority of scholars is that the city’s destruction was caused by an uprising of the homeless against those they saw as their oppressors and the ultimate causes of their destitution: the wealthy, the powerful, the banks, unscrupulous money-lenders, greedy landlords, and the like, or at least that the destruction began in one or more of the city’s many homeless camps—because, even though the city was the most prosperous of any in that part of the world, it also contained more poverty and destitution, more misery and despair, than any other conurbation of comparable size, a common phenomenon of inordinate prosperity that historians and economists continue to puzzle over to this day, the principal evidence for these theories is that the largest such camp, on the southwestern outskirts on the north bank of the river that cut through the city on its way from the eastern mountains to the sea, was the last part of the city to burn, possibly by counter-rioters or the last desperate holdouts of the devastated town,

the wharfs were attacked on the morning of the second Monday, Bill “Blue Tooth” Kelly (called that because of his uncanny ability to suss out where the political winds were blowing—“It was as if Bill had a Blue Tooth connection to our president’s brain”), a stocky Ulsterman and leader of his longshoreman’s local, was holed up under the hatches of the Amos Cooper, a freighter registered in Panama, owned by a Singaporean, manned by Yemenis, captained by a Dutchman, and trading between the city and the Côte d’Ivoire, a trade that was rumored to include refugees from the Sahel who were reduced to debt and sex slaves once they landed at their often unknown destinations, when sounds of shouting and gunfire swept the port Kelly ordered his men (and one woman: Nancy “Sassy” Brigg, a tough Mississippian with a roving eye and a vocabulary that could teach a sailor the refinements of cursing) to stay below as he clambered up to the main deck to see the dock overwhelmed by the attackers, half the ships in berth were already on fire, the container cranes were lined up along the docks like great white horses, gazing wistfully through siege and smoke toward the distant sea, he was hit by a rifle bullet moments after reaching the deck, falling down the hatchway and breaking his neck as he landed at Sassy Brigg’s feet, the refugees in the belly of the Amos Cooper (the rumor in this instance was correct), whom the longshoremen had gone down to release and help bring ashore while they still could (they had been forgotten for almost a week), began pouring out of the ship in a seizure of fear and a kind of hysterical hope, now that they had finally landed in the new world, engulfed, as it was, in the same insanity as the old: blood, fire, fever, guns, brutality, war, and destruction without end,

the city’s Chinatown was demolished that Wednesday amidst the sounds of lamenting in Cantonese, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uighur and a dozen local dialects as the festoons of Chinese lanterns floated, unanchored, into the sky like the enormous tail of the Great Dragon that had failed to protect them, the art school and the music conservatory were attacked on the following day, followed by raids on the modern art museum and the museums of natural history, the state historical society, and of crafts and decorative arts, all of these institutions clustered together, as the result of some folly of city planning concocted in a delirium of optimism two generations before, in the same downtown district, the observatory, the anthropological museum and the university were invaded near the end of the second week, by which time they had long been vacated and stood abandoned and defenseless as the attackers moved from building to building on the old classic campus, torching the buildings one at a time, including the magisterial library with its unique collection of the country’s founding documents and original manuscripts of some of the nation’s greatest thinkers, writers, composers and poets, its one hundred thousand books, many unique copies of long out of print editions, in three and a half hours of leisurely but thorough devastation, the city’s parks were not spared and, as they were covered with brush as dry as kindling after the recent drought, were burned to the ground, churches, synagogues, Buddhist and Taoist temples, pagan ritual sites, spirit meadows, zen gardens, the Druid lodge, and the Wicca center, all were leveled with what seemed to be especially malicious zeal, the local television and radio stations (which had been captured and taken off the air, perhaps by sleeper cells or sympathizers of the revolution, early in the collapse), the opera house and the symphony hall were among the last structures to be razed, the auditoriums of the latter exposed to the air like the meat of an egg or a beef heart exposed to the brutal light, followed by the Roman-styled court house and the Beaux Arts city hall, at the end of the second week the marauders swarmed the square that fronted the city’s oldest and most prized edifice, its cathedral, which had been built four and a half centuries earlier on land donated to the Catholic church by the city’s official first settler, Averrhenius Frober, who had not in fact been the first European colonist to settle the area, that was done by a man whose name is lost in the fog of the past, and who had settled, alone (if one does not include his horse, his dog and a sway-back cow), near the river some sixty years before the city’s founding, three years later a second European, finding the soil and climate good for cultivation, settled half a mile away, on the bank of the same river, the two men quarreled over the exact border of their property (a spring of sweet water that flowed into the river and frustratingly changed channels each year, depending on the rainfall in the mountains), which led to a murderous confrontation one night resulting in the deaths of both men, Averrhenius Frober came upon the remains of the two properties, and later of the two dead men (in mutual embrace at the base of a young hickory tree, each of them clutching the knife that had killed the other), and, taking over the properties after burying the men in unmarked graves, turned them into a thriving farm and later on an outpost for other colonists, settlers, trappers, and travelers into the still unexplored interior, a town grew up around the outpost and, later, the greatest city on the continent,

the day after the burning of the cathedral, the city was a waste of ruins along the banks of the river that divided it, and the attackers or invaders or rioters disappeared with the city, whether from mutual destruction or from mutual agreement now their task was accomplished, or by merely fading away into the surrounding forest and countryside and far-off mountains, it is unlikely historians will ever know, at the end of those two weeks of destruction, the Howards’ neighborhood and property were in ruins, but the old hickory tree was untouched and stood for many years after the destroyed city was abandoned, after much time had passed the ruins were overrun by brush and vegetation, so much so that its very existence had been forgotten, but the hickory remained, tall and flourishing,

one day a young man passed by on a long journey seeking a purpose for his life, and, seeing the thriving tree after his struggle through the dense forest, decided to rest at its base, where, gazing up into the thick branches and leaves where a young girl used to watch the dawning of the sun and a raven’s nest used to be, he found he understood something he had never understood before, and from this discovery emerged, in the fullness of time, a religion that, after being ignored for several centuries, gradually came to dominate half the world for the next two thousand years, but not long after the young man left the vicinity of the tree where he had achieved enlightenment, to bring his new truth to a suffering and bewildered world, someone cut down the hickory tree and burned it, using it to smoke a large salmon he had caught in the nearby river: the salmon was delicious.

_____

Christopher Bernard is the author of A Spy in the Ruins, Voyage to a Phantom City, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs, Chien Lunatique, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, and other books, including two books for children: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia. “The Fall of the City” originally appeared in a slightly different form in Caveat Lector, the webzine Bernard founded and co-edits.

The Creation of Hope


Take a memory.
Add a thought,
a handful of questions,
and five tears.

Add the wings
of a mourning dove, 
a cruel caress,
a love, a lie,

a betrayed promise,
an aimless rage,
three sleepless nights,
and seven years.

Place in a pan, that,
each summer wide,
is ten winters long.

Finally, dust 
with a cloud of doubt.

Place in the oven
of a heart that is broken,

and bake for an hour
or a lifetime.

*

You will know it is done
when the stars are brighter
than when you began,

when the sea chants
to the sleeping hill

and blind with morning
is the sun,

when the birds dance
in the sky and shout
with castanets
gold and shrill,

when the snake slips
from its curdled skin,

and the chrysalis 
peels back to free
the Monarch’s brief,
painful beauty,

and you see an angel
cross the sky,
its wings transparent
as a dragonfly’s,

when, with the sun,
the old earth leaps
in the savage dance
of all beginnings,

and you wake, weeping
with a wild joy,
wondering where
your despair has died.

Take a spoon
of distant sigh,
silver whisper,
finch’s cry,

and feast on it,
o dearest love,

on the shortest day 
of the longest year, 
at the darkest hour 
of the deepest night.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first two stories in the “Otherwise” series: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and 
The Judgment Of Biestia.

The Singer in the Café

She stood, a tall half-child, thin as a breath,
a face as white as a cloud at noon,
a profile cut from polished shell.
I saw there was something strange in her eyes.
	
She bent over her guitar’s neck,
carefully picked out a form of sound
in which she placed her voice as far 
as nearness is when love is found.

It was as though she had lost nothing.
Polite,
she did not insist. She offered free
what she had found in the warm night:

a thing as small as it was bright
in the forgotten light of her desire,
a shy truth tempered in 
a dark fire.

At the end, she bowed, smiling radiantly
toward the rising waters of applause,
then, bending down, after a quiet pause,
from the floor, raised her white cane carefully.


Footprints in the Sand

On the rumpled beach
two perfect prints
where a little girl briefly stood,
with a hint of defiance
in the angle 
of the delicate hollows
perfectly delineated among diminutive dunes
smeared like sandy paint
with a palette knife.
And then she dashed away.
But Robinson missed his Friday,
and I kick myself for my typical absent-mindedness.

They would have made a perfect photograph,
those small prints on the beach:
a poetic composition
rich with symbolic meaning
to frame and hang above a mantle	
or in a discreet hallway.  
But the only camera I brought
is the one that darkens this page.

I smell clam shells, ozone, wood fires.
I see beachcombers like scattered crumbs,
the evening turn the sun into woven glass.

And kick myself again
as I am immersed in the shadows of the night.

And I imagine her say,
that young girl where she pauses,
or perhaps she just thinks it:
How far does the horizon go
beyond the edge of the sea?
There, there I’ll go! . . .
before jetting off in her madcap 
dash across the sand.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

The Achilles’ Heel of Liberalism: Rights vs. Responsibilities

By Christopher Bernard

The Tragedy of Rights

We live in a civilization whose power has so outstripped human wisdom, and so strained our moral sense, that it threatens our own existence. Though human extinction is unlikely, a collapse of the human population over the next century is almost certain: the heat waves of recent summers, and Hurricane Beryl, the earliest level 5 hurricane ever recorded, are merely a few of the stark warnings nature is giving us. Everyone knows the tedious clichés of horror we face, though few seem really to believe them – from the climate crisis to nuclear war, from the dangers of artificial intelligence to those of microplastics and forever chemicals, from the destruction of biodiversity to the depletion of nonrenewable resources, from the death of vast swaths of the oceans to the collapse of the Gulf Stream and a potential thousand-year winterization of Europe.

If we truly believed in the coming of these disasters – as unambiguously as we believe it when we see a truck barreling toward us at an intersection – we would, of course, respond, if only in pure reflex. But we obey another cliché: like a deer in the headlights, we freeze in panic. We don’t know what to do, or whether doing anything is even possible: every door seems locked, every path closed. We feel trapped in a society, culture and political system that seem to allow of no fundamental change, even when they threaten the destruction of ourselves and the system itself.

The humiliating irony is that we even know why this is so: a comparatively small number of people are making an enormous amount of money and acquiring a vast amount of power from the current political and economic order, and they either cynically don’t care what the future threatens (“After all, I’ll be dead, so what do I care what will happen to people I’ll never know? After all, I don’t owe anyone anything”), or they naively think they will escape its worse consequences (“The rich can always protect themselves. We’ll build bunkers in New Zealand or colonies on Mars if Earth gets too hot. We’ll just have to get out in time”).

How did this come to be? Is it just a result of forces beyond our control? Are we merely the result of the beanbag of fate tossing us back on forth between powers we have no influence over? And yet one thing above all things is clear: we made it happen. Collectively and individually, we are responsible for it.

And there lies an irony indeed.

At the heart of our world are two closely linked values that are foundational to our culture and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights: the rights of the individual and the maximization of personal liberty, the foundational ideas of liberalism, both left (“progressivism”) and right (capitalism, “neoliberalism”). Who can argue with the idea of personal freedom? We all love our liberty and are touchy about anyone who wants to take it away from us. These ideas are fundamental to the politics of a culture driven by the values of the Enlightenment – of science, reason and freedom – that began, four centuries ago, in the France of René Descartes and the England of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; a culture that continues to dominate the modern world – a world that has created a wealth of prosperity, power and knowledge undreamed of in previous human history.

The selfishness of the rich is, of course, no new story: it goes back to the dawn of history and has powered our sense of human evil since biblical times (Radix malorum est cupiditas – “the love of money is the root of all evil”). But never before our time did we deliberately – and to borrow a decidedly appropriate legal phrase, “with malice aforethought” however much we have fooled ourselves, with generations of economists, into believing that this was a private evil that would yield a public good (as if a private monstrosity could yield anything but a public monstrosity however cunningly disguised) – never before now did we make human selfishness the principal driver of social life, never did we put it in the driver’s seat and let it take the rest of us wherever it wanted, in the innocent hope that all would be well, because, after all, either human beings are naturally good (as Rousseau believed) or the “invisible hand” would apportion goods equitably (as Adam Smith believed) or our natural vices would cancel each other out if we just constructed a political system cleverly enough (as our Founding Fathers hoped).

What? you ask, indignantly. What does a culture of liberty and human rights have to do with a culture based on selfishness?

But a culture that values my liberty as its highest good is a culture that makes my selfishness its only good.

One of the reasons we can see no way out of the labyrinth we have made, where every path seems to lead to an almost certain catastrophe, is that we are committed to a set of ideas that hobbles the very way we think. And at the core of those ideas is precisely the priority we have given to the rights of the individual over every other good. And this is what defines “liberalism” that, with its variants of “right” and “left,” is the dominant philosophy of our time.

Liberalism has believed that by prioritizing such rights we would be able to create a just social order and a more or less happy community. When those results did not happen, and they clearly have not, liberalism believed it was because it had not sufficiently secured those rights; it discovered new “areas of oppression” (on the left, groups oppressed by bigotry and prejudice; on the right, actions limited by governmental restraint) and moved heaven and earth to be rid of them through various forms of “liberation” and “empowerment.” And yet these “liberations” and “empowerments” have not succeeded in creating a more just social order; on the contrary, they have simply added to the economic inequalities and social and political insecurities that define our era. We have descended into a war of rights that can have no end because no group is able to gain a definitive victory – and all are headed toward defeat because the civilization we have created on the back of the liberal dispensation is headed for certain collapse – the only question is when.

There is, nevertheless, one possible way out of this moral dead end, and one that has been available to us from the beginning. And that is to place human responsibility – for oneself, for one’s community, for humanity as a whole, for life on earth – at the moral center of society; not our rights, but our obligations; not our freedom to do whatever we feel like, but our freedom to take on the burdens of the world, explore it in its infinite mystery, defend it when attacked, improve it where it can be improved; to love it with a genuine love, a love that is action and not mere feeling – for its own well-being, not just for what it can do for us. And, if and when we fail, to be penalized, immediately and inescapably.

The Myth of the Autonomous Individual

The doctrine of “rights” is based on the idea that the basic social unit is the autonomous individual. But no one is born an “autonomous individual”; we are born weak, dependent babies completely incapable of taking care of ourselves, into families that must take care of us or we will die: each of us is the result of the mating of a male and a female, and at the beginning of our lives we are entirely dependent on the female, our mother, for our very existence, and not just for a few days or weeks, but for years. We are born as part of a community, not as individuals. We have no “rights,” but we do have clamoring needs. If our parents only cared about their rights and did not put their responsibilities to us first, we would have been very dead very quickly. That is a hard fact – the kind that both neoliberals and progressives, indeed that all liberals – run from like the plague. Because fact is authoritarian; it imposes its will and does not care whose rights it scorns or whose feelings it hurts. The truth is a hard task master, but it is also a dependable one.

The family is the heart of the social order, not the individual. We are not autonomous individuals and we never were: we live within an intricate web of interdependencies without which we could not live at all. We easily forget that and equate humanity as such with apparently autonomous adults – but there are no such things as “autonomous adults” except as a legal fiction; adult human beings are as deeply embedded in dependencies as the smallest infants, though it is not always as noisily obvious. Liberalism made the fatal theoretical mistake of harping on the “rights” of the individual. If we held to a truer metaphor – of humanity as dependent on our parent, the natural world, on the universe itself, with responsibilities to the natural order to help keep it healthy and well so that we too may thrive – obligations, in other words, to the “gods” that created us – we would find it easier to make responsibilities primary; indeed, we might even go further and make rights not something we are born with, but something that we earn after fulfilling our responsibilities. Though this might seem too rational, and certainly too radical, to the liberal dispensers of our world!

But the touchy ego of the western male, the driver of much of western culture and civilization, likes to forget its first humiliating dependency; it likes to think it was born, fully formed, from its own brain, a secular Athena from the Zeus of matter. It takes its ego as primary, not as one of nature’s legal fictions that was once a great convenience when creating a conscious, freely choosing, partly self-creating living creature, but that may have become a bit too big for its breeches and may need to be retired soon.

We have not even looked at the deceit wrapped up in the doctrine of “rights.” The idea, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that “we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” must count as one of the most hypocritical statements in the history of political philosophy: if those rights were indeed “unalienable,” we could not possibly allow capital punishment or war (which deprive vast numbers of people of the “unalienable” right of life), or incarceration of any kind (ditto the “unalienable” right of liberty), or the impoverishment of tens of millions of people (ditto of the “unalienable” right of the pursuit of happiness) while a handful of billionaires soak up most of the wealth of an entire society. So much for “unalienable” rights! How typically “liberal”: the words sound so nice, so generous, so wonderful, but nobody actually believes them! Only the terminally naïve think we should actually believe or, heaven forbid! act on words we claim to live by. After all, the Declaration of Independence is only a piece of parchment slowly fading away in the National Archives, something we quote every July 4, then put away like a babbling senile uncle no one has to take seriously so we can get on with the real business of life: beggaring our neighbor . . .

Liberalism, with its privileging of the autonomous individual and his freedom above all other social values, has been, sadly, like communism: “wonderful as an idea” (“unalienable rights” on the one hand, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” on the other”) “but it’s hopelessly unrealistic.” Yet, in the case of liberalism, for a time it seemed it might work after all, with a generous tweak here and there. And it almost did, piling up prosperity, knowledge, and power from the late eighteenth century to our own paradoxical time. But all the time it was turning into a monster feeding on the globe’s resources and poisoning it with our waste, making the only planet where life is known to exist, and where a sane human being might genuinely wish to live without being confined to a technological prison on a lethal rock orbiting a murderous sun, potentially uninhabitable by the cunning ape that now dominates it. There is another irony: a “catastrophic success” indeed! Not that we weren’t forewarned, from the early socialists (and at least one French chemist) to the environmentalists (“environment”! but there is no “environment”: there is only the natural order within which we live; human beings are natural through and through – though we have become one of nature’s most destructive elements: a species of fire, lightning, hurricane, earthquake: one of the more savage pruners of evolution).

Responsibilities Versus Rights

Enlightenment thinkers rarely examined the role of responsibility in the social order. Montesquieu was one of the few, and his book L’Esprit des Lois was an important influence on the Founding Fathers. The one limitation on the privileging of rights in the American political system has been the doctrine of the rule of law; but a central weakness of liberalism has been its failure to see that this doctrine flatly contradicts the primacy of personal liberty – and the doctrine of the rule of law, though implied, is not in fact to be found explicitly stated in either the Declaration or the Constitution. It would have been different if Thomas Jefferson had included “and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable responsibilities, among which is respect for the rights of others,” for example. But alas, the idea seems to have slipped his mind . . . or perhaps these words would have been a little too sensitive for a slaveholder, or indeed for any employer!

It is one thing to examine what one has the right to do, quite another to study what one ought to do. And this is thorny because it imposes the necessity of defining the good, something liberals claim to be reluctant to do. Certain obvious social goods could be defined: social peace, orderliness, predictability, the adjudication of conflict and reduction crime, the fostering of social trust. But Enlightenment philosophers were often reluctant to go into greater detail, even though a substantive definition of the good is implied by any assertion that rights are socially desirable. And soon we see one of the foundations of liberal self-deception, most patently in the one of the greatest of all philosophers of liberalism, John Stuart Mill: the liberal claims not to define the good but claims to be open to all definitions of “the good”; the liberal is “tolerant,” “open-minded” – until he meets a definition of good that refuses to tolerate something the liberal, airily, claims is no evil at all (but who gets to define what is evil? The liberal claims “evil” is only what “harms.” But who gets to define “harm”? Only the liberal . . .) – and the “tolerant” liberal is suddenly no longer so tolerant after all. The liberal’s claim to have no substantive definition of the good is then seen for what it is: hypocrisy when not self-deception.

It did not occur to most philosophers of rights (Nietzsche being the most notable exception) that a regime based exclusively on expanding rights must inevitably lead to massive inequalities of wealth and power, and the oppression of the weak and poor by the rich and powerful, unless there was a means to protect rights when rights clashed, inevitable in such a system. The only way to prevent these oppressions and adjudicate between rights would be to enforce a regime of responsibility, not only to honor one’s own rights, but to honor the rights of others as well – above all, to make that responsibility the primary consideration in every social encounter. Two things would be required: a system of power governing society dedicated to the imposition of responsibility, since free people will do whatever they can to avoid it – and a culture that internalizes a morality of responsibility, often via religion, in its members: both a physical and a spiritual governor for the sometimes wayward animal that is the adult human.

An understanding of rights must be linked to one of responsibilities, obligations, duties, until responsibilities are enshrined, not only in enforceable law, but in a society’s moral code and assumptions. And responsibilities must be prioritized over rights; there needs to be, at all times, an unambiguous priority between them. Responsibilities are innate; rights must be earned.

But this is, as they say, a “hard sell.” In a society drunk on its rights, on its “freedom,” no one will want to hear it. As mentioned above, there has been an attempt, in America in particular, to claim the “rule of law” as the necessary basis for freedom, but laws are no better than the human beings who create them and those who enforce and adjudicate them – and human beings are very weak reeds indeed. At the heart of law is rapacity, selfishness, amoralism, greed, thirst for power, and hunger for revenge – with every so often, a drop of human empathy and wisdom, for human goodness may be weak and easily intimidated, but to deny it exists would be merely to concede victory beforehand to the monster that lurks, side by side with the cowed saint, in every human heart.

We have learned, through numerous studies in the psychology of children, that human beings are reflexively altruistic: our natural impulses are to help others. This is no veneer of virtue; it is our moral bedrock. We instinctively abhor injustice, suffering, and oppression and reflexively seek to end them. I would go further: we hate selfishness of all kinds, including our own. The last thing we want to do, when, in childhood and early adolescence, we are still ruled by our inborn impulses, is to think primarily about “number one.” Further, we instinctively desire to live in a moral order, in a place of justice and truth; we are appalled by injustice, duplicity and moral anarchy. Indeed we hate and despise these things – and above all, those who would impose them on us.

Selfishness, on the other hand, is learned behavior – our experiences teach us to be selfish. We become selfish out of a sense of self-preservation and only as our last option. Our first moral pleasure is helping others; our first moral temptation to evil is when we see a thread between our pain and someone else’s smile – and we see our own instinctive altruism as naïve, even perilous to our survival.

But the fundamental problem of a “rights-based” social and political order is that it privileges precisely those instincts we hate in others and ourselves. It is thus no wonder that such a social order leads to a hysteria of insecurity followed by a pervasive sense of nihilism and despair: when we are forced to think primarily, and sometimes exclusively, about ourselves, and to see others as either real or potential enemies, and always as competitors, we are going to end in rebellion against a social order that enforces mandatory selfishness. Yet the liberal order has placed the “self” of humanity at the center of the universe, the “self” of the nation and community at the center of humanity, and the individual “self” – “me,” in a word – at the center of the community. The liberal order has revealed itself as a kind of moral vacuum parading as the highest good, “progressive,” “vindicated by history.” Yet the liberal order is now well on its way to destroying itself and the world it has made. This, after all, is what evil does, what evil is: self-destruction.

Liberals are chronically unaware of this because they fail to make a distinction between their putative goals and the results their endearingly well-meaning but often damaging policies have actually had. When their policies lead to disaster, rather than critiquing the policies or the assumptions underlying them, they double down on both, insisting they will succeed in contributing to human flourishing if only more such policies are imposed throughout the social order. Liberals of both right and left – neoliberals and capitalists, and leftists and progressives both – have fallen, or rather leapt wholeheartedly, into the same trap. Yet when anarchy is imposed on anarchy, the result is unlikely to be a just social order. Capitalism, the economic avatar of liberalism, is the war of all against all; progressivism is its political counterpart. The notion that either one of these could possibly end well is the kind of irrational hope that could only result from certain forms of secular education, from business schools to the postmodern humanities.

Nevertheless, I refuse to give up hope. We are not nature’s most cunning species for nothing. And if we wake up in time to our responsibilities (especially our first and most important one: to protect life of our home, planet Earth), perhaps we will conquer our own worst impulses and survive; perhaps even thrive in a world where we will have earned the right to be happy.

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Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His most recent books are the first in the “Otherwise” series of children’s books – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia.

The Good Father

He is the mountain anchoring the horizon.

He is the sea holding candles for stars.

He is the law on the tablet of wisdom.

He is both wind and the sheltering wall.

He is the stone foundation of homeland.

He is the sun raising day to the sky.

He is the rock his son builds his whole soul on,

and his daughter gets her wings from his eye.

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist. He is the author of two children’s books, If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – the first in the “Otherwise” series.

The Hallucination

It tracks the edge of the wilderness
inside the skull of the mind,
tongueless yet obstreperous,
shouting like King Ubu lost in Poland.
It is shocking how unshockable it is.
The raptors of consciousness
gather in its many caves,
the blue shells of their eyes
do not blink.
Argus is its only ancient commentary,
though Medusa is to come. 
Count its eggs, those tiny mausolea.
The mice in the garden gave it all their stories.
The mountain flowers are frozen like so many monkeys
in its zoo of gazes. The coyotes themselves
are whining to get in, you can hear them every night.
The ravens shake their beaks and coolly smirk
at the madwomen staring at their hands that are holding nothing.