Everything, Etc.

This is going to be one of two consecutive holiday columns that has to be written 4 days earlier than usual so our Managing Editor can go on two separate 4 day spiked-eggnog binges. That means neither this column nor the next can be remotely topical. It occurred to me that there were two big non-topical topics I could cover, namely, Everything, and Nothing. Since Nothing is promising, I thought I'd save it for next week.

It may have been Ovid who first discovered the advantages of writing about Everything, who wrote the thing about "endives, radishes, and succory" and then continued on with stuff about curds, cream, liquor, plums, apples, nuts, wine, a goose, the desert, plains, a temple, marriage, altars, sepulchers -- oops, I left out dry figs, and dates, and wrinkled grapes. And lard. The point is, if you are prepared to talk about Everything you never run out of stuff to write. This is essentially what I was driving at a few years ago when I recommended to drunk or distracted writers that if they could think of nothing else to write about, they should write about egg salad sandwiches.

The egg salad sandwich constitutes a metaphor for everything. The bready things of the world, like the slices between which the egg salad sits, constitute metaphors for metaphorical-ness itself. We also are sure, by the way, that wine, beer, and hard liquor all constitute a metaphor, but I need a moment to get to it.

Getting back to the metaphor at hand, the thing that really says Everything to me about the egg salad sandwich is the egg salad. And the thing that screams Everything at me about the egg salad is the unspoken question, "What, a salad made out of egg?" If you can make a salad out of egg, you can make a salad out of anything. Hence Everything. Today, salads made from eggs. Tomorrow, salads made of refried beans and cheese raviolis. In a sandwich.

This is where the beer, wine and hard liquor come in. You got your metaphor for Everything in the egg salad sandwich. You got your metaphor for Everything Else in your spirit-based beverages.

Everything Else is logically part of Everything. Everything leaves Nothing out, so Everything Else is by definition included in it. But in practice, when most people try to think of Everything, they always leave Everything Else out.

Ovid's poem mentioned a goose. It did not mention a moose. This is partly because Ovid had never even seen or heard of a moose. If he'd mentioned moose in his poem everyone would have known for sure he was high when he wrote it.

Another way to put it is, Everything Else constitutes the possibilities you haven't encountered or thought of yet. They may be the answers to questions you have been asking for years, or they may be answers to questions you haven't dreamed of asking yet.

[Above Right: A hamburger "with Everything" which does not include radishes, endives, moose or marriage! Those would be among Everything Else!]]

If you're still reading, you are probably wondering how I am going to manage the obligatory connection to homelessness. It's easy! Homelessness is part of Everything, last I checked. The solution to homelessness is to create housing for everyone. The solution to the solution is the crux of the matter.

What do I have to say out of all the Everything Elses other than what I've already said, to get people to take the solution seriously? What combination of words, never before uttered by any human being, will unlock the locked neurons of members of Congress and the Administration, and the general public, and get them to see what is so plainly clear, that homelessness is ended by supplying places to live?

One of my favorite games to play when faced with dumb guys in college was to strike a match as if to light a cigarette while the guy was talking, and just hold it until it burned out in my fingers. Then I'd strike another, and another. Until the bonehead would notice.

Plain Right

Let's talk about justice!

Here at Real Change we are always talking about justice, but do we know what it is? My answer to that question is, who cares? All I care about is if I know what justice is.

Upon close examination and careful study and other redundant picking about of that last question, I realize that answering it is problematical, and hinges a lot on what "knowing" is. If by "knowing" a thing, I can mean I "know" what it isn't, well, then I am really on top of this justice thing. For example, justice is not a number 2 pencil. Nor is it an egg salad sandwich or a Ford Bronco or a genetically engineered grapefruit. Whereas, if to "know" a thing, I have to actually "know" what it is, I could easily be in over my head.

Part of what confuses me about justice is that I get it all mixed up with righteousness. I notice that I'm not the only one who does this. Perhaps that's where I should start.

Instead, I'm going to start with an idea of righteousness that was inculcated in me at the malleable age of three. At that age I had been wronged considerably by someone and I desperately needed to understand how that could be. An informal teacher of mine then taught me a concept that he wrapped in his own language, which concept he translated into English as "standing up happens."

Notice what he didn't say: he didn't say "sh*t happens, get used to it." What he also didn't say was, "God will set things right some day and slay your enemies; yea, verily, unto the seven times seventh generation of your enemies will He slay them." He said that whatever people are made to lie down will stand up. He said the rest of us have basically three choices. We can either help the fallen get to their feet, or we can be in the way, or we can be utterly irrelevant. But the standing up will happen. Get used to it. Standing up is a force of nature.

By contrast, justice is a force of humankind. Justice isn't about the standing up; justice is about the helping or the getting in the way or the being irrelevant. My teacher's version of righteousness, as uprightedness, was morally neutral. If uprightedness happens eventually, no matter what, there's no good or bad uprightedness, there's only early or late. But there's definitely excellent, good, mediocre, poor, and bad justice. There's timely justice, there's stingy justice, there's belated justice, there's Roman justice, there's English justice, there's Papal justice, there's martial justice, there's poetic justice, there's sweet justice, there's sour justice, there's even surreal justice, to the point of Kafkaesque justice.

Now is the time in this column when I like to turn to concrete examples, examples similar to bricks, only more cement-like, to illustrate my musings.

Here's an instance of justice and standing up: Rep. Robert Matsui died at the age of 63 on New Years Day. Matsui spent his earliest childhood in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Later he stood up to become a US Congressman for California, a job he held for 26 years, from 1979 on. One of his achievements in Congress was helping to gain the passage of an official apology for the wartime internment, together with compensation for the survivors. That would be justice. We should all honor his life and the justice he helped create.

Ironically, at the same time that Robert Matsui was dying, the Pentagon and the CIA were asking the White House to make arrangements to keep some alleged enemy combatants at Guantanamo in prison for life. Specifically, the Defense Department wants 25 million dollars to build a prison for about 200 detainees for whom there is likely not enough evidence to convict in a military tribunal, and whom the government acknowledges do not even have any intelligence to give up.

That would be bad justice, even Kafkaesque justice. I remember when it was supposed that Kafkaesque justice only happened in KGB dominated USSR and Soviet satellite states. Welcome to the new world. But remember this too: standing up happens.

Also Against Ending All Life On Earth

We here at Adventures in Poetry want to proudly go on record as being firmly opposed to eating babies. We are also against torturing animals, raping in general, pillaging, maiming, arson, stealing, and breaking other people's things for the fun of it.

We bring this up now because this week a bunch of folks suggested that I write today in support of the Seattle Times' decision last week to run Tami Silicio's photo of flag-draped coffins of deceased U.S. soldiers on their way home from Iraq. Yes I, Dr. Wes Browning, will personally stick my neck out right here on this page, and take a stand in favor of free speech and opposed to totalitarianism.

Let me sum up my position up right now, so that those of you who need no convincing can go back to eating your egg salad sandwich or making out or whatever you were doing before this column interrupted you: Totalitarianism, bad. Government propaganda, bad. Government censorship and lies, bad. Free Speech, good.

As you surely know by now, as it's been in all the papers, Tami Silicio put the Times on the fast track to its next Pulitzer by giving them the opportunity to defy the Pentagon's ban on printing photos of flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers.

I'll tell you how clueless I was. I was so clueless it never occurred to me that the Pentagon had a ban on printing such photos. Oh, I figured there was a rule against printing photos in which the identities of the fallen soldiers were indicated, sure. But surely not photos where you couldn't tell who was in the coffins.

But, no. Our government has a rule against it, and commercial military contractors like Maytag Aircraft are understandably afraid to defy the Pentagon that hires them, so they let Silicio and her husband go, and they would have fired her little dog too, if she had one and it was in range.

Now, some kinds of censorship I expect. I'm not saying I'm in favor of any kind of censorship, but I won't get all huffy about it if the Times is denied their First Amendment right to show naked people copulating on their front page. While personally I believe it should be up to the Times to decide whether that would be a good choice, I'm willing to let the opposition have that one.

But this instance of censorship is inexcusable.

Yet, the government is making an excuse, and we are forced to answer it. The excuse is that the photo could offend some people among the families of the dead.

Answer number one: Very few relatives of dead U.S. servicemen have stepped forward to claim offense in this particular case, probably in part due to the fact that YOU CAN'T TELL WHO THE DEAD IN THE PICTURE ARE, FOR PETE'S SAKE. Hello, you can't even tell if the coffins are occupied. Sheesh.

Answer number two: The freedom at the press is at stake here. The first amendment doesn't say its OK for the government to practice censorship if someone might be offended by something.

By the way, it probably would offend George W. Bush's sensitivity were he to read this column (which can't happen 'cause he don't read, he only looks at pictures) if I were to say that he deserves to be impeached for dealing with the Saudi oil producers to influence the next election. Should I therefore be prevented from saying it? No, because the importance of being able to say such things outweighs any offense it may give George W. Bush.

I care much more about the feelings of the families of fallen servicemen than I do about those of Bush, but the principle remains the same. Their feelings, whether appropriate or not, don't trump the national interest. And in this case the national interest does not lie with the Pentagon. It lies with freedom of the press and the freedom of speech.

Egg Salad

One of the things that I do to help up-and-coming writers, even those who just want to write One Great Novel & take the money and retire to Fiji never to write another word again, is urge them to try to become a Master Poet like me. I tell them that when you see the world through the eyes of a poet you'll be that much more grateful for the eyes you have, not least because yours are still in their sockets and not being passed around for people to look through.

Just last night for example, someone mentioned flowers. I was immediately overcome by my Muse. In fact Cindy (ancient Muse of Other) went stark raving wild, she tried to sit on my face, I said no, please no, you're a muse, it wouldn't be right, it's like a cross-species thing, but she's a powerful Muse, she works out with weights. Finally I burbled out, "I saw a pretty little rose! / It was a sight to see! / I bent to smell it with my nose, / and it did puncture me!"

If you can write like that you are ready to write just about anything. Now all you need is something to write about. This is the second thing I always tell up-and-coming writers. I say, always have something to write about. I know that's sounds a little abstract to a lot of you, and some of you may be thinking to yourselves, "Dr. Wes is getting too abstract for me again, I just wanted to read more about Cindy sitting on his face, while I finished my egg salad sandwich."

I say in that case you have something to write about, you've got your egg salad sandwich, you've got your dreams. Now let's work on the rest of you people.

To begin with, what do you have to say for yourselves? Huh? “Egg salad?”

See how easy that was?

OK, I know some of you missed that. Tell you what, we'll try a little role playing. Pretend I have an MSW, and you are in a program I'm running. Let's say the state put you here and if you don't do everything I tell you to do I will report your non-compliance to the state and you won't get any money on the 1st and you won't be able to pay your rent.

So by the 15th, while everyone else is celebrating the fact that they make enough money to pay income taxes, you'll be sharing a piece of egg salad sandwich with your new room-mate, a large hungry rodent named Chuck who will live with you by a dumpster that you would have wanted to call Ulan Bator, by and by, but Chuck would have fought & defeated you in committee, so even that dream will have been dashed.

So you decide to comply after all, and now that we've got that little lame rebellion out of the way, I tell you I want you to try a little role playing. So I give you a hypothetical situation. I say, let's say you're oh I don't know a mathematician doing advanced mathematics research at an advanced mathematics research place, say, in Zürich Switzerland, and let's say you have spent the last few hours talking with some really old guys who actually knew Albert Einstein when he went to school there, and Carl Gustav Jung when he taught across the street, and that James Joyce guy back when he had an apartment in the neighborhood.

And these old guys, let's say, tell you all about these dead people and you soak it all up, it's stuff that's never been written down before. And while you're all talking it gets to be tea time, and Fräulein Hilda Denklosigkeit brings in tea and teacups and a platter of weird looking pastries, or cookies or something, you can't tell what they are, except that they were definitely NOT made in America.

OK? Got all that? NOW what do think you should write about? Do you hang with these old guys, take more notes, and write the definitive biographies of Einstein, Jung, and Joyce? Or do you write your own personal memoirs, reminiscing about your glory days in Zürich? Or should you write that long extended fantasy that was inspired by the time the cleaning woman came into the men's room while you were "busy" and your eyes met, and you thought, "Oh, if only she were Hilda Denklosigkeit, and not just the cleaning woman, here to scrub the urinals..."

Or do you write about your craving for egg salad sandwiches?

Answer: None of the above! What you do instead is forget all about it, come back to the US, torture college freshpeople by making them pay attention to algebra for fifty total hours of their lives, then wake up to your evil ways, spend the next twelve years of your life in therapy, live on the streets for four of them, drive a cab for five of them, lose your mind, work in a work shelter program for two years, spend six years working nights as a janitor, lose your job, take up art.

THEN you wake up one day, and say, I got to talk to people about this. There you go, you've got something to say! Just don't ever forget the part about the egg salad sandwich, you'll find a way to work it in eventually.

Next I want to see you all break up into small groups and role play amongst yourselves, taking turns as the social worker, if you all can handle that (But I don’t want you to think you’re being pressured in any way...)