Death Comes to the Poetess

Well, we’ve come to murdering poets and poetesses, and how we’ve descended into the maelstrom of chaos and emotional pandemonium! The invasion of Venezuela and essentially the start of a war (possibly a world war), which was the trifling breeze flowing through the world stage over the weekend is today wafting through the next galaxy over. Now we’re worried about the murder of a poetess.

 

To stop being ironic, let me show you this:

 

  

 

The car belonged to Renee Nicole Good, who had just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school. 

 

She was driving back home from dropping her kid off at school.

 

Anybody out there ever done that?

 

Look at the car.

 

It’s kind of a mess, isn’t it?

 

Though not a complete mess by any means. Just the ordinary mess of a basically clean person who is running late and trying to put something nutritious in the damn lunch bag that her kid will actually eat. A woman who is stuck like all of us by herself raising a kid (husband died) and not planning to get killed that day.

 

So of course she has that green coffee mug in the mug holder which may still have a slug or two of coffee in it. You think the cops are gonna rinse that out?

 

Nah….

 

Then there’s that feather, which I have to say is a tip-off. Cars tell all, since they are a bit of the house that we detach somehow to move from home to elsewhere. Cars are not vehicles only. And you will never see a feather in the car of a woman pulling into her reserved parking as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You will never see a feather in the car of a senior partner in the firm of Cabot, Smith, Lodge and Brattle (the prestigious if imaginary legal firm in Boston, of course).

 

A poetess, however….

 

Well, Amy Lodge Lowell may have been the cigar-smoking poetess of highbrow Boston society, but most of us running out the door with our green coffee mug in one hand and our six-year-old son hopefully in the other hand (and the damn paper bag that has the “lunch” left back on the cutting board, of course, because how many hands do you think I HAVE, DAMMIT!)

 

So the problem Renee Nicole Good had, maybe, was that the lunch was on the cutting board, and the plums that her kid wasn’t going to eat now are completely inedible. 

 

This scenario is completely imaginary, but all of a sudden the world has invaded this poor woman’s life, and everybody is telling you exactly who she is (domestic terrorist / murderess not poetess / radical left-wing lesbian mom who needs a good fuck back into submission).

 

This woman is dead, and that’s her car up there, so her life is up for grabs, see?

 

I mean, she’s dead, so we might as well take her life, right?

 

I mean…

 

…she’s not using it!

 

So I get the car thing, because my sister-in-law has a car—imagine that!—if no six-year-old son.

 

Six-year-old son…

 

…wonder if he has a name?

 

…should I google him?

 

Nah—he still has his life and is using it, unlike his mother, who is dead and not using her life. Which means we can take it, of course.

 

Anyway, my sister-in-law is a poetess too, which is why she has the feather stuck not onto the dashboard or in the air conditioner vent but on that little barrier island where Renee Nicole Good’s green coffee mug (that the police still haven’t rinsed out—and that was two pages ago!) lives / lived.

 

Unless, of course, we are not following ancient Egyptian burial practices, in which case a poetess would of course have to be buried with her feather, that vital tool of the trade!

 

Carpenters have hammers.

 

Surgeons have scalpels.

 

Poetesses…

 

And of course mothers have green coffee mugs, usually capable of holding most of the Baltic Sea, since that’s how they get through their days. Amy Lodge Lowell, whose blood is so blue it makes lapis lazuli green with envy, may be buried with her humidor of cigars, but female poets of the modern day run about with…

 

You guessed it…

 

…feathers and mugs.

 

Surprising what a poet can do, and what a mother can do. Who would have thought, two days ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that this mother / poetess would not have emulated dear Amy Lodge Lowell, who publicly smoked cigars and conducted her lesbian relationships with a combination of arrogance and deference that only an entitled but still a do-gooding-spinster-from-Boston-Massachusetts could muster. And who won the Pulitzer in 1926.

 

Amy Lodge Lowell—and if the name doesn’t automatically stiffen your spine and wonder if your handkerchief is clean, then…

 

You are not from any part of Boston, where the names “Lodge” and “Lowell” are not names. 

 

They are auras.

 

They are legacies.

 

They are very old, very simple, very rich homes of the sort of people who do NOT buy their silver, or the oriental rugs that gleam on their polished walnut floors.

 

Old things handed down, you know.

 

Like the trust fund.

 

Anyway, about Amy Lodge Lowell…

 

Wasn’t I talking about her?

 

Let’s take a look at her, sitting where she should be…

 

 

 

This was from a Time magazine article, probably exactly 100 years ago. That’s when Amy Lodge Lowell…

 

…you know the Lodges from the old poem about Boston (“the Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God”)

 

…anyway, that’s when Amy Lodge Lowell, the cigar-smoking-poetess from Boston won the Pulitzer.

 

She was a Lowell, and also a Lodge, of course, which means that she had the very old, very clean house with those old things like the heavy silverware that is always polished and gleaming and the oriental rugs, which are so beautiful that the sheep would die to give their wool for it.

 

Amy Lodge Lowell may have been a cigar-smoking-poetess, but she conducted herself like a lady (lesbian). We will always remember her sitting in her chair, deeply unfashionable for 1926 but she is a Lodge AND a Lowell and do you think she cares? Of course not! She’ll sit wherever she damn well pleases and smoke her cigar like a lady.

 

Whereas Renee Nicole Good did the unthinkable, the unimaginable. She dropped off her kid (name unknown, since why take his name, which is about all he has? Father is dead, Mom was living with her female partner, now it’s all gone to shit…)

 

Anyway, this mother dropped off her kid, looked at him disappear into the school, stuck the feather back in the dashboard, slugged down the penultimate gulp of coffee (gotta rinse that mug, boys!), encountered Federal agents in the street outside her home, turned her car into a deadly weapon, and then had to be killed at point blank through the open car window by this guy…

 

 

Well, I’m not going to tell you his name, because he hasn’t been identified formally or charged or indicted or held to trial and found innocent or guilty. So we mustn’t ever, ever, judge him guilty—though shooting a driver through the open window of a car that is obviously trying to speed away from you puts most of us at legal risk. It’s hard to explain tire tracks to the judge, to say nothing of ALL the videos we have seen, since dudes?

 

We all have cell phones.

 

Anyway, the heroic man above, having only a moment before escaped death at the hands of (or the car of) a feather-waving, mug-gulping poetess…

 

He took her out.

 

Had to, and seeing her blood-stained air bag which was left at the “crime scene” right under the six-year-old’s window for most of the day, for GOD’S SAKE!

 

…settle down, Marc…

 

Well, I’ve taken a healing gaze out at the calico cat lying on the hot asphalt of the parking lot behind the club.

 

People left white roses in the dirty white snow that even clean cities like Minneapolis have to endure.

 

The white roses…

 

The dirty snow…

 

And a foot print—very male, very boot—crushing a drop of blood from the car / weapon of the poetess / murderess.

 

The poetess is gone.

 

The feather—and her child—remain.  

 

 

Binding History

I remember feeling uneasy about it as I typed the words, a month ago, which I remember were something like…

 

         “perhaps it’s wildly optimistic, but…

         …have we turned the corner?”

 

Meaning: has the country finally come to its senses? Have they come to see Trump for what he is, which is the complete opposite of whatever they thought they saw in a television show? Will they dosomething about him, for whatever of a multitude of reasons? Shit—if the Republicans want to discover, tomorrow morning, that Trump has Alzheimer’s, and that the lighthouse of his genius no longer shines so brightly…well, I’ll jump on that bandwagon. They can name every building, street, town and male child after Trump for the rest of time, and I’ll be totally cool with it.

 

I did it with Reagan, I can do it with Trump.

 

Anyway, the Christmas spirit seemed to have wormed its way into little Marc, or maybe I was just exhausted. I certainly wasn’t realistic, which was curious, because I did peer out the bus window at all of the destroyers that popped up in San Juan harbor on their way to Roosevelt Roads. I wrote about them last year, if anybody remembers what that was like. I even was going to get off the bus, one morning, just to take a photo. Ah, one of the many little voices I should have listened to.

 

Trump is a dry drunk who has never touched a drop of alcohol—a view I thought was my own, until it turns out his chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, shares it. And with drunks, everything gets turned upside down. Usually, with normal people, things are not as bad as they seem. Things will right themselves, after a bit.

 

Not with drunks, and not with Trump.

 

Well, the boats were in the harbor, and little Marc was on the bus peering at them through the window, and it should have been obvious right? I’m the guy who keeps wondering what the Germans, back in the 1930’s, thought about that railway built into that enormous forest that sheltered that temporary camp that was both huge and yet not possibly big enough to accommodate the endless trains crammed with people (arriving) and chillingly empty (leaving).

 

And that awful smell of something burning—ugh!

 

The Germans didn’t “see” the concentration camps that were in their backyards and that some of them must have helped build. I didn’t “see” the warships that were floating in front of me.

 

I mean, who could imagine that “we” were going to send a strike force into Caracas, Venezuela in the middle of the night, enter the compound where the President of the country was sleeping with his wife, kill the thirty Cubans who were providing security for them, and then seize the president and his wife, put them in handcuffs and fly them out of the country.

 

This is America, dudes, where we do the subtle / hypocritical approach. Artificial Intelligence has just told me that the phrase “give us your oil or we’ll bring you democracy,” entered the public discussion in the first decade of the century in response to the Iraq / Afghanistan wars. Then, tired old Google gives me the first search entry result, which is this!

 

 

Well, I have no memory of writing about medical sadism, or publishing it in http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com but it certainly sounds like something I’d say. And if all I’ve done in my life is given the world that phrase, maybe it’s enough.

 

The raid was bad enough. The news conference, in which he outright admitted that the invasion was all about the oil, was horrific. Having the ambassador to the United Nations come out the next day and openly admit to admiring and hoping-to-implement the Monroe doctrine with its “spheres of influence,” was nauseating. Hearing that Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba might be next was horrifying.

 

The lack of subtlety was one thing, the lack of planning for the inevitable day-after was another. The idea was that “all” of the big oil companies were going to invest billions, if not trillions, of dollars in a country seething with resentment at foreign interests extracting the wealth of the country while its residents are in grinding poverty and misery. Even assuming that the oil companies are willing to do that, and that they are able to provide security for the enormous workforce that will be needed, what will keep the Venezuelans from nationalizing the petroleum industry, once all those dollars / Euros / pounds / shekels have made the oil fields / refineries / whatever-else all bright and shiny again? Putting little questions of patriotism and pride aside, the best thing for Venezuela to do might be to let the multinationals rebuild their system, and then take it over again.    

 

Nothing about the plan made any sense, on the face of it. Maduro was horrific, but leaving his vice president in power, and being willing to “work with her,” raises big questions. Delcy Rodríguez went from vice president to “acting president” of Venezuela overnight, but the real question is when, if ever, she agreed to play Washington’s stooge.

 

Well, you, Dear Reader, know how it all worked out, or how it didn’t. You’re like God, Dear Reader. I’m supposed to be writing this damn story, but you know the ending and I don’t. I am “driving” this damn bus which has a mind of its own, and you are the passenger, who knows where we’re going.

 

I sure don’t.

 

So there was little Marc on Saturday morning, looking at YouTube, which had clips entitled “Maduro Seized,” and “US Illegally Removes Maduro from Power,” and my non-caffeinated brain dismissed it as AI generated fake news. Worrisome, but not serious. It took twenty minutes for it to occur to me to check The New York Times, or the BBC, to see if the insane had materialized.

 

It was like getting kicked in the stomach.

 

And it was that same, sickening feeling that I used to have when I woke up hungover from the night before. I had started the day before vowing, at last, that today was the day I was going to lick it. I was going to put down the booze and straighten up and get my life in order, open the front door and step into the sunlight! Instead, my head was pounding and my cell phone was harboring hurt responses from the people I had drunk-texted the night before.

 

Putin had won, once again.

 

Trump is probably just a “useful idiot,” and not consciously under the control of the Kremlin. I suspect that he’s in that large group of people who know that they’ve misbehaved, that there’s probably plenty of evidence of that misbehavior, but who doesn’t know exactly what the Kremlin knows or has. Only that they have it—whatever it is—and that it’s probably bad.

 

But even if he knew his behavior had been irreproachable, Trump was susceptible to so many other approaches. There was his grandiosity, and wouldn’t expanding American territory to include Greenland (to be renamed “Trumpland,”), Venezuela, another island (the biggest) in the Caribbean be the best and easiest way to shoot to the front ranks of US presidents? 

 

There was the lack of any moral compass, which can always gum up the works.

 

There was his belief that the rules applied to the suckers, not to him.

 

There was his ignorance of any history, including his own.

 

There was his avarice, because when Trump’s rich friends do well…well, it works out well for all of us, doesn’t it? At least, it works out well for Trump, who likes to have happy, super-rich friends surround him. 

 

Can you blame him?

 

In the end, convincing Trump to invade Venezuela was like persuading kids to steal candy. Ridiculously simple, and very convenient, too. Putin can stick Ukraine and Belarus and Latvia and anything else left over from the old Soviet Union back under his belt.

 

From a military point of view, the raid was stunning. From any other point of view, the thing made no sense, unless you seriously considered—as I would never do—the foolish idea that maybe Donald Trump had just gotten pissed off at Maduro, who had begun “dancing” in a red hat to the 80’s music that Trump loves, with its memories of the discos and the parties. Trump got it into his head that Maduro was mocking him, and even though Trump had admitted, a month ago, that Maduro was willing to “give him everything,” that wasn’t enough. Trump had to send the military in and remove him.

 

Trump is damn close to removing the whole damn world order, and if that sounds pompous, it should. I was taught about the “world order,” the way I was taught about God, meaning that I was in fifth grade, or so, and able to grasp simple concepts above “yes” or “no.”

 

The simple concept was that after two horrific world wars in the first half of the century, nobody could endure the idea of any more such wars (especially involving nuclear weapons) in the next fifty years. So we Americans (insert patriotic adjectives / descriptions) had put together an entire system of international law, and had built a place on the East River in NYC for all the 180-plus nations of the world to come and settle their petty little differences, though if they had just listened to US…

 

…never mind.

 

Well, we set up the United Nations and we created NATO and we kept things pretty much in order, except when there were “regional wars,” which nobody really bothered about, because unless you were Gazan or Syrian or Ukrainian or whatever, well, who cared?

 

I mean, if you can’t even find the damn country on the globe….

 

The adults might see nations in terms of foreign policy and “spheres of influence.” Well, we didn’t understand spheres of influence in fifth grade, but we knew about the bullies in the sandbox. You had better have the teacher (God) on your side or a bunch of your friends (NATO) when the bully started pushing kids out of their corner of the sandbox.

 

Well, the United States had gone over to stupid old Europe and straightened things around (insert sigh / heavenward glance and “once again!”) and then come back home and with Yankee pluck and generosity had rebuilt Germany and Japan and created the framework for a century of peace and prosperity (except for the people living in the “regions,” who kept on having their wars).

 

They gave us the oil, we gave them the democracy, and weren’t we all happy?

 

Miss Steensland explained all of this to us, and we all nodded our heads and took it for granted that all of the rest of the world had listened to Miss Steensland, too. Or they had had a Miss Steensland. Or that Miss Steensland both knew everything and controlled everything, which should have been the case, since when you are in fifth grade and Miss Steensland is your teacher, and she is explaining “the world order” well…

 

…you need Miss Steensland to be in control.

 

And indeed, I still need Miss Steensland to be in control, and am privately horrified that she just stopped, a decade ago, which is when she let Donald Trump come down the elevator and unpour his nonsense onto the world stage. She had done pretty well all of those long, boring, peaceful decades. My Uncle Deet had to go off and fight World War II with nothing more than his unread Bible (that little detail I don’t forget) but Donald Trump and I didn’t have to. We had to invent bone spurs to avoid Vietnam.

 

Well, Miss Steensland is somewhere doing, probably, awful and illicit things, since no fifth-grade teacher would ever set up a lesson plan in which the class activity was invading another country, removing its awful leader, and then imposing its will upon the citizens. 

 

Miss Steensland is in a crack house, doing “favors” for gentleman to get her next fix.

 

Fortunately, Dr. Heather Cox Richardson is at hand, and I have no worries..

 

None whatsoever!

 

…about her.