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Let's hyperventilate!

Rumsfeld is right. I have become such a CNN junky. I watch the war news 16 hours a day on television and spend the rest of my time reading about it at CNN.com. I have strong opinions about what Aaron Brown has become. I recognize way too many retired army generals.

I know far more than I need to know about the 3-7th cavalry. Unofficial song: the Garryowen (I can even spell it!) Unofficial Martyr: General Custer. Battle cry: "Hoo hah!" And to think I used to credit Mad Magazine with inventing "Hoo hah!" along with "Axolotl?" and "What you mean WE, Kimosabe?" I know what a FARRP is. I know who the tip of the tip of the spear of the rolling wave of steel is, according to CNN's Walter Rodgers (namely the 7th cavalry, of course.)

Then, a couple of days into the conflict, I learned that "stay behinds are eating up our soft logistical tail" from retired Colonel David Hackworth. Thus I began to hyperventilate, precisely as Rumsfeld has described.

It's all those ups and downs of 24-hour coverage. It's the up of watching a rommel of tanks race across the desert a hundred miles unopposed, followed by the down of hearing about an ambush and capture of POWs, followed by the minor up of Gen. Myers calling our strategy "brilliant", followed by the extreme down of watching the British conduct "psychological warfare" as they bulldoze murals of Saddam. Like anyone's dumb enough to fall for that trick. ("Hey, where did big picture of Saddam go? Me guess war is over." – I wonder how much they're saying that in the outskirts of Basra.)

Is it any surprise I need a paper bag to breathe into? I am experiencing the fundamental stress that all thinking organisms experience when we need intelligence and all we get are unconnected facts. This is what I call an adventure in poetry. It's the anxiety that adheres to so-called military intelligence operations like peanut butter to the roof of a dog's mouth. We know all kinds of stuff, but we don't know what matters.

Let me give an example. According to our great spy agencies the Iraqis still had weapons of mass destruction as of March 19, when we started to shoot at them. The whole excuse for shooting at them was the presumed fact I just mentioned, coupled with the equally presumed fact that the Iraqis were willing to USE the afore-mentioned WMDs on us in the future.

But the question that mattered was HOW willing were the Iraqis to use those WMDs.

I mean, what the hell does it take to get an Iraqi to gas you? How much do you have to throttle one of these guys before he blows VX in your face? Don't they know we're conquering them?

OK, maybe by the time you read this the Republican National Guard will have gassed the 7th cavalry and given smallpox to the 101st Airborne, but that won't change the fact THAT THEY HAVE WAITED UNTIL WE WERE ON BAGHDAD'S DOORSTEP. That is not much of an indication of a "willingness to use weapons of mass destruction on us." That indicates instead an unwillingness to use weapons of mass destruction on us except as a last resort (which is by the way when I personally favor using them.)

Our "intelligence" got it wrong because the Saddam regime used weapons of mass destruction on "his own people", hence proving that he was evil, hence proving a willingness to use WMDs on us at the drop of a hat.

Well, that logic didn't work.

Apparently Saddam Hussein, who regards the Kurds as less than animals, respects Americans and British as moral equals who deserve better treatment.

Perhaps he sees himself in us.

What Wes Won't Do by Anitra L. Freeman

I have once more volunteered to do Dr. Wes's column for him, because he's tired.

Wes wants to take this opportunity to have me write about all those things that people want him to write about that he doesn't want to write about, because he's tired.

For instance, a reader would like Wes to write about the permanent adolescence of George W. Bush. This makes Wes very tired indeed.

Now other than thinking that this sounds like a very poetic title, "The Permanent Adolescence of George W. Bush," I wasn't sure that I agreed with the premise. Even when I was an adolescent female, I never despised adolescent males that much.

Would an adolescent male deal with his unpopularity by picking a fight with the first person who gave him an excuse? Well... But would an adolescent male be so determined to have a fight that no matter what the other person did to keep the peace he'd make up a new reason why it wasn't good enough? Well...

Okay, but do you really think he's going to grow out of it in a few more years?

Michele "For God's sake, Anitra, you've known me long enough, you'd better be able to remember that it has only one L" Marchand would like me, or Wes, or me being Wes, or Wes being me, or somebody anyway, to write about Ruth Lilly leaving a hundred million dollars of her pharmaceutical daddy Eli Lilly's fortune to Poetry magazine.

There are several possible reactions here:

• "Why did she leave that much money to POETRY!?"
• "Why didn't she leave the money to Real Change? WE publish poetry."
• "Why is everyone so shocked at big money being given to poetry?"
• "So, is the magazine going to pass any of that on to the poets?"

Let us cut to the chase here. As the purported purpose of this column is advice to poets, I would like to advise that in my opinion the time for the unionization of poets has at last come. Somebody who publishes poetry finally has some money. Since, under the administration of a permanently adolescent male, people who read poetry are soon not going to have any money at all, selling self-published chapbooks is no longer the lucrative gig that it was supposed to be. Getting paid by a rich publisher is much more dependable.

Stan "A Published Author" Burriss would like Wes to write about the quotations etched in the stone of the triangle at the Second Avenue Extension. He believes that Wes could say something about these quotations that would touch you, the readers, warmly.

Wes is against touching people warmly without their prior permission. And he doesn't know where you've been.

My objection is that if writing can't speak for itself, it needs to be rewritten. So next time you are at the Second Avenue Extension, look. I didn't realize the writing was there myself until Wes told me.

Don't ask Stan about this. He won't remember. Ask him about Rumi.

Then there are the standard things that Wes is asked to write about regularly.

The inside scoop on everything wrong at "fill in the blank" shelter:

Folks, homeless people have been murdered on the streets of Seattle at the rate of one every three months this year. Nobody has been murdered in a homeless shelter. Like sex, as long as shelter is by consent, the worst there ever was wasn't really bad at all. Compared to the alternative.

Every rally in Seattle that ever was:

Like poems, these speak for themselves. Like poetry, they could always use more attention. But for us to tell you how great they were is preaching to the choir. I have another suggestion: how about for the next rally (you can find it in the calendar section) you take along one or two friends who aren't convinced of the cause yet?

I don't want to write about any of those things. What I want to write about is Congrescent Singulitarians. I have just discovered that there is a website for Congrescent Singulitarians. I would like to announce that, in retaliation, I am beginning a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Words.

Write On!
© Anitra Freeman 2002

Everything Reveals Everything

Last issue I talked about my cab driving history. Since then I have been met with deep, penetrating questions by my readers. Questions such as, "What?" and, "So how was it?" So I have decided to keep at it a while longer.

The nice thing about cab driving is that it's just like everything else. So if you talk about it enough, eventually you've talked about everything else anyway. That's why poetry works!

Take fear for instance. Fear is a big subject these days, what with Home Security, snipers, Saddam, et al. Rather than talk about fear of Iraq I can talk about cab driving. It's all the same.

I began cab driving in fear of it. I was just quitting a job that had been making me ill, and I was looking for something completely different. That day, the newspapers were all about a cab driver who had been shot to death for the fun of it, in South Seattle off of Rainier Valley. The murderers were still at large. I read the stories and immediately thought, "That cab company will be needing a new driver," and I signed up with them that Monday.

There was training, and the next thing I knew I was set loose on the whole of Seattle to drive cab anywhere I wanted in the city, six nights a week, twelve hours a night. I was expected to work where the business was, but now a new fear set in. I found I had a powerful dread of working unfamiliar neighborhoods. I lived in the Rainier Valley dispatching area. That was the area I knew, so that's where I worked. Even though the murderers were still out there.

Isn't that just the way it always is, folks? You back away from one fear and another one is breathing down your neck right behind you. I think a grand unifying philosophical principle is involved here. Some day vinyl may be implicated, also.

But back to the fear. The thing we all do in cases like this is ask, "Where are the police? We need police to catch these murderous thugs." All right, I'll tell you where the police were. They were all over Rainier Valley doing their drug busting and breaking up domestic violence, all the stuff you see them doing on Cops.

And guess what the police do when they are breaking up a fight in a family and they need to get one of the parties out of the area? Do you think they haul them out in a patrol car? No way. They put them in cabs and ORDER the cab drivers to take them somewhere, and don't pay the drivers.

One day I was ordered to take a teenage girl who had been beaten by her father to Harborview Hospital. Trouble is, she and her sister who came along didn't want to go to the hospital.

Well, I shouldn't commit kidnapping just because the Seattle Police order me to. The girls wanted to go to a 7-11, so that's where we went.

Wouldn't you know it? The father drove up in his Caddy right after we got there, and the sisters proceeded to fight over which one of them would have the honor of shooting him in the face with a pistol they were carrying.

After one of them waved the gun in the father's face and after a passing gang (I'm not kidding) intervened and took away the gun, the police showed up and lined everyone up against the wall but me. I was the only witness willing to cooperate. Without me the police couldn't prove anything.

I was all set to witness the whole thing when the officer put the girl who had brandished the gun back in the cab sitting right next to me, in the front seat, and she pretended her finger was a gun and stuck it in my ribs. Or I thought she was pretending. But I couldn't be sure so I started to get out of the cab, to get a little away from her, when the same officer karate kicked the door on me. In that one blinding instant I learned always to fear the police.

Suddenly I couldn't remember seeing anything. There's poetry at you again.

Dear Poetry Editor

Many people seem to have gotten the impression that yours truly must be the poetry editor for the Real Change. They write letters to me that begin "Dear Poetry Editor" and ask me to please see that their latest septina or paean to the changing seasons or a pantoum they wrote in college gets printed in the Real Change. They usually ending with "sincere thanks", or an equivalent.

In fact the other editors won't let me be poetry editor. For example Anitra Freeman, on whose kitchen floor I have slept, says to the idea: "Yeah, right." Similarly Stan Burriss, editor and poet who frequents these pages, has responded with: "not in this life, buddy". The only such role the editorial board has seriously considered offering to me is that of "bad writing editor", making me Keeper of the Round File, based on my demonstrated proficiency in the genre.

I was reflecting on all of this recently, oh about half an hour ago, right after I noticed that I had a column to write by the morning and the bars were all closed. It occurred to me that we all write badly at times but that not all of us are able to be truly awful on a regular basis.

Or are we? Is there, out there in the world, on the streets - you know, apart from this office - a vast untapped potential for bad writing that we weren't aware of?

After all, it's a matter of will rather than talent. Is the will there?,

This inspired the following brief unscientific quiz intended to flush out the will to write badly.

Bad Writing Quiz

1. Choose the statement that seems most accurate.

a) In order to begin writing, the tunes have to be so cranked up you can't hear yourself think.

b) You have to ply yourself with liquor (or chocolate, or whatever) first.

c) You never remember starting to write. You just wake up in a ditch in Tukwila next to a manuscript. The manuscript is in your own handwriting.

d) You have never even seen your writing. Your writing personality refuses to share his/her memories or thoughts with your normal personality.

e) Other ____.

2. You have written (check all that apply): * a love sonnet, * a sex sonnet, * an S&M sonnet, * a stalking sonnet, * a free-love sonnet (with extra lines), * all of the preceding.

3. Which best expresses your attitude toward rhyme in poetry?

a) It happens. Get over it. Get on with your life.

b) Poets who never rhyme are state enemies. They seek to rip apart the our country's social and moral fabric.

c) Poets who always rhyme lines are fascists.

d) Other ___.

4. For the purpose of this question, imagine that you belong to a writers' workshop, whether you do or not. Which would characterize your involvement?

a) You would facilitate the meetings.

b) You would dominate the meetings.

c) As soon as the meetings start you would go to the bathroom, you would go to the bathroom and not come out until it was over.

d) Other ___.

5. When you speak you find that (choose one):

a) people hear you but don't listen.

b) people want to jot down every word, to cherish your words forever.

c) people leave the room.

d) None of the above. You don't notice what other people do.

e) All of the above.

Quick and easy scoring: If you answered "other" or "all of the above" in almost every case, you not only are capable of writing badly all the time, but you probably would prefer to, and all you need is to find somebody to print your stuff. Good luck!

Prolonged painful agonizing scoring: mail your answers to me, Dr. Wes Browning, at 2129 2nd Ave. Seattle, WA, 98121, , and, down the road, when I can't think of anything else to write about, I may evaluate your quiz in excruciating depth and print my conclusions. So be sure to include your full legal name, address, phone number and hope I don't use it.