Popguns & Pacemakers

art by MONTY BORROR

[Robert S. Thompson, a gentleman on a bench on Main Street]

To the editor,

On November 11 we honor the veterans of our nation's wars.

Why?

Why honor the killing, the stealing of other nations' resources, not to mention the starving of our own people, for the military.

And our military does not protect our freedom with all this killing.

The members of the United States military are thugs, enforcers for the empire.

If we really wish to honor those who have given us the good life, look to those who fought and died and suffered prison to win for us the eight-hour day, minimum wage, to end to the Vietnam War.

In fact, America is enslaved by its military.

If it were not for the billions of dollars that go to the Armed Forces, for no good reason, we would have health care, a thriving economy, good schools, good roads.

If America survives the tyranny of the Bush-Obama era it will be because of those who are now fighting for our freedom, here, in the streets of America.

If America continues down its current path toward fascism, it will be at the will of the rich, by way of the hands of the enforcers — the police and the military.

If you are enjoying your freedom today — thank a protester.

- Robert S. Thompson

Well, hello and good morning.

I did not used to ever write about war in my letters to the editor. I much preferred sidewalks and curb and gutters.

But Thomas Moskowitz’ brother is coming home today, in a bag inside a box, and I am past tired of all this shit.

Tommy stopped by the other day and told me. He sat here on my bench with me for over an hour. We even took time to go into the café and Nona gave us free Coke and refills.

I really must tell you, before it is too late.

I couldn’t care less about your soybeans, your corn.

I could give a shit whether the hail destroys your new car, how much your gas costs.

Don’t talk to me about your football team, your hunting, your grass, your fucking kids.

Go watch your TV.

Eat your hamburgers, your donuts.

Your fries.

And die.

There are three-headed babies being born in Fallujah today because of the chemicals we used to kill. The United States won’t support the world court because we would be the first ones in the dock.

And you.

You talk about rain, about rhubarb, about the game, your lawn, your house, your damn kids.

Guess what?

There is a world out there.

And nobody gives a flying rat’s behind about your grass.

There are real things out there, bullets, war, poor families.

Your children are not real, not really, and your grass and your home and whatever else you have hanging neatly in your garage, are illusions, someone’s fantasy, and we really have no time for all that nonsense, not anymore.

I’m so sorry, but you will have to excuse me. I need to go home.

I need to lie down.

Goodbye.

[Tommy Michael Moskowitz, a kid on his bike]

H’llo.

I’m sitting on my bike on the sidewalk.

My brother is over there, inside that house.

Setting the world on fire.

That’s what Billy told me he was gonna do when he got big.

He’s big now, but he’s dead.

He’s in a box here inside Frog’s Funeral Home. Frog’s a kid in my class, not my class, he’s one year older.

It’s in their house, the funeral home.

I’m going to go ride my bike and remember my brother, and maybe to the park, but I don’t know yet.

“Billy Moskowitz, number 44.”

And then Billy runs out onto the field with the rest of the starting defense.

“Billy, have you washed your hands for supper?”

“Billy, could you please come up to the board and complete problem fifteen for us?”

“Billy, why do you do this to your mother and I?”

“William Maurice Moskowitz.”

That was when my brother graduated. They said his name and he turned when he was walking across the stage and he looked right at me and smiled.

I smiled back and we each gave the thumbs-up.

He looked right at me, out of that whole crowd.

He was already going to be a soldier by then. Because of that one day me and him was at the mall.

I wanted to get a Transformers action figure. If it wasn’t for me and those Deceptacons.

We went to the mall. We walked. It’s not that far.

The recruiter Army man came out by the pop machine and started talking to us about Mountain Dew and baseball.

He wanted to see my new toys.

Billy asked a couple of questions and then we went in to the recruiter offices to sit down and read sports magazines and eat little Snickers and Milky Way from a plastic Jack-o-Lantern.

Billy went to basic training in Georgia in the summer before school started.

He wrote a letter to Mom telling her everything was fine, all the guys  were great, and they were playing football in the barracks, using a bunch of rolled up green socks for the ball.

The letter he wrote to me told me to not tell Mom. It had teardrop stains is what it looked like. He said he wanted to go home. He was scared. He said the recruiter told him they don’t get in your face anymore, but that’s all they do is get in your face and call you faggot and pussy.

He said they march and march and sing songs about killing people and they … Oh, God. He said his bunkmate tried to commit suicide by hanging off their bed, and he said two guys from his unit raped a kid from another unit and now they’re in the base jail, stockade.

We all went there, Mom’s brother Rick drove, to his graduation.

Billy was supposed to have a free day before graduation but he got in trouble and had to clean something with a toothbrush. We sat in the motel room, all of us, watching golf on TV and going to the bathroom and listening to car doors open and shut in the parking lot.

But Billy marched past and he looked at me and smiled. I don’t think he was s’posed to. He supposed to look tough.

Then we got to take him home with us. We stopped at the first KFC. Everyone else got the buffet. Billy and I got a bucket of original recipe and got our own table and we didn’t look up until it was gone.

Billy went back to school for his senior year the next week, but he was already too old for school.

My brother went to World Cultures and Chem II and Spanish III.

He sat there and spoke when called on, but he was thinking the whole time about war, about war movies and war songs and him the one charging through the line or running away, him the one rushing into the surf or pushing his way to the back of the landing craft.

It was him lying on the floor of the jungle screaming in pain and his crotch a sticky bloody mess, and all he really really wants is to take a hot bath and put on new Christmas pajamas and drink hot cocoa and be warm.

He thought all the time about war.

And then he left.

Me and Mom drove him and then we waved at him and the others on the buses leaving town. We followed in the car for almost an hour. We stopped and Mom cried by the side of the road. Then we came home and she made us grilled cheese sandwiches.

Billy wrote lots of letters, especially when he was still here, over here in this country.

He told us about the more training he was doing and the guys he knew and he smoked a cigarette once. “Never again,” he said. Mom said she hoped he sticks to that, they’re not good for you.

Then he took a big plane over the ocean.

It was so big, he said.

It was hot there and he smoked cigarettes. He said, don’t tell Mom. I didn’t.

There were teachers at our school who patted me on the shoulder, the head. They smiled. They knew my brother had started smoking. I didn’t tell them. Somehow they knew.

The priest said Billy’s name once from the altar. Not the altar, the … thing … the stand, the thing there where he stands.

Anyway, I don’t know. We didn’t use to ever to go, but now Mom says I have to.

Well, maybe not anymore now.

I don’t even know if Mom will go outside anymore, now.

I dug the paper out of the trash.  There was a big headline with Billy’s picture. It was different, not his senior one or the football one, just different.

There were some men here in soldier’s uniforms. That’s kind of why I left.

They had my brother’s stuff in a box.

Mom sat down on the couch and pulled out the stuff.

There was some letters, and pictures, a key ring, and a jacket. On the back it said something about terrorists and kill them and Mom laid down on the couch and the men left and I waited until she fell asleep.

Nobody’s out.

Everybody’s home.

I don’t want to go home.

[Nona, the waitress]

These people. These people have everything on their minds but public service.

My impression is they have power and the keeping of that power on their minds. We imagine that people who seek public office want to work for the social welfare and would naturally want to know the truth, but so often and for so many years we have been disappointed by putting our faith in our political leaders.

We have a semblance of representation, but not in reality.

Nobody asks you if you want to build more prisons. Nobody asks you if you want to bomb children in Iraq. Nobody asks you if you want your money to go to the poor, to schools, to roads.

Nobody ever asks.

So sometimes, sometimes you just have to tell them.

Every year we are asked to pay our taxes, send in our forms, pay for the bullets, the bombs that kill the children, the men and women.

We are given no choice.

Just as we were given no choice as children whether or not to rise before class and say the pledge of allegiance to America's wars.

We're not children anymore.

Our acquiescance has real consequence.

We pay to have people killed so that America and America's businesses may expand influence and market area.

I don't want to believe that.

I want to rather believe in the America I believed in when I walked alone into Mrs. Steele's kindergarten class and saw written across the giant blackboard in gigantic white chalk letters: President John F. Kennedy.

But.

They killed Kennedy and America has never been the same since.

But the ideal remains.

The dream of a good and just America remains.

We may never get there, but we must try.

We must try.

[Robert S. Thompson]

There are quite a few letters in the papers these days.

Mostly they are popguns and pacemaker patriots as I call them, but there are a few.

There are a few.

Here, let me read two of them to you.

Please, sit down.

If you have time?

Oh, that’s marvelous, thank you, it will take just a moment.

Okay, uh, here, here is the first one.

Dear Editor:

I have a neighbor across the street.

We have watched each other out our front windows for forty years.

Their son played ball in our yard.

Last week that son's boy came home in a body bag in a box in the belly of a big Boeing, back from Baghdad.

That is nothing to "b" joking about.

I am not.

But I will not "b" quiet, either.

I have talked to my neighbors since then, on the sidewalk in front of the house, and again on the side steps of St. Mark's after Mass.

They say Billy died because he loved freedom.

That's nonsense. He loved basketball.

They say he had his head blown off his shoulders, his legs cut off at the knees, lost his hands, to make us free.

Of course, that's not true. But what else do a heart-broken grandmother and grandfather have to hold on to?

Someone needs to speak for Billy, perhaps speak to him, to tell him the truth, because we lied to him his whole life.

Billy died because of us.

Me. You.

We told him it was good to go.

Fr. Cyril, either by his legendary silence, or the flag next to the altar, said it was good to go kill children and call that fighting for freedom.

She never met Billy, but Cindy Sampson, our new editor from Iowa State, told him the same by the stories she ran, and the headlines and the photos and editorials, so patriotic, so deceptive, so self-serving.

We all told him, go, go, it's a good thing to do.

We whispered, go kill, go shoot, go murder and steal, and we'll all call it "fighting for freedom."

And when we hear in the big city newspapers and TV after thousands and thousands have died that there was no reason to die — we'll dig our heels in the front lawn grass and still call it fighting for freedom.

And when our grandchildren hit the ball into the graveyard and come back and ask us about the headstone with the flag on it and the same last name as theirs — who was that?

We'll bite our tongues and clench our fists and look anywhere but into their trusting eyes, and we'll tell them Billy died fighting for our freedom.

Just one more. I don’t believe I know this person either.

And I Laugh

There's a photo on the Internet that makes me laugh.

A little brown boy holding a silent scream forever in four-color.

Ha.

The horrified little fellow now has no arms or legs, or brothers, sisters or parents, and I laugh out loud.

I laugh at the Marines, being all they could possibly be in God's creation, at their tough-man commercials. The Army of One. What a hoot.

The rough-guy coaches and players who let this boy die — what comedy watching them feel strong while letting the real battles be fought by little guys with sticks and bicycles.

The boy has a bandaged head.

He looks so scared his hair might turn white, as in a Hitchcock film, and it sort of makes me chuckle.

I laugh at the ministers here in town and here on this TV saying bless our troops as they defend our freedom.

I laugh at the ministers here in town and here on this TV saying bless our troops as they defend our freedom.

I laugh at the well-schooled and coifed newspaper columnists with their earnest close-cropped photos in four hundred papers read by forty million people in forty million cities.

And I laugh.

The boy is flat on his back on dirty cement, with his stubs hastily wrapped in Ace bandages, surrounded by the world trying to get a look, by photographers and people on their way to work and out to dinner.

We are nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing!

Because this boy now has no arms.

No legs.

Nothing we will do today will mean a thing because we have ripped the arms and legs from this boy as if he were a fly and we are us.

This boy who could be my boy, lying there at the feet of the world and the world looking the other way.

Goddamn us.

Please.

Give us what we deserve.

If you are a just God, rain down fire and hell upon our heads. Lightning bolts upon our backyard decks and rivers of excrement down our smooth, well-scrubbed streets.

Please, dear God we pray.

When I awoke this morning I thought it essential to the world order and being right, and a good person, that I shave, help out with the dishes, be on time, and drive on the right side of the road.

Do a good job. Be pleasant.

Smile.

But now I just can't stop laughing.

The world thinks it still matters, and that's kind of funny in a way.

There, the flag flying over the Catholic elementary school and the yellow ribbons tied to the light poles on both sides of Main Street.

Stray cats wearing yellow ribbons around their necks, roaming the night, looking both ways before crossing the street, as if it mattered.

You are never so wrong as when you damage a young boy.

We sit down here like the Who's in Whoville celebrating the coming of War Season while this boy lies on the cold floor.

Tee. Hee-hee.