Absurdity, Allegory and China

Woke up this morning and can’t stop wondering about Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. I watched the whole affair, or at least until after the poem – which limped and did nothing for me. The CNN coverage held up well, though the Facebook aspect was totally lame. Though I knew beforehand that “The Dick” would be wheelchair-bound, my feeling now is that it was all pre-planned, another official ruse. He was the only one who arrived unannounced (or at least on my coverage), since I’d mentioned to my wife that I was looking forward to the crowd response to his arrival on deck. Would his handlers carry him in his wheeled sedan down the middle aisle, the Emperor of Wyoming, arriving?

But then, there he was, wheeled quietly in from the wings, down front and low down, a virtual non-presence, avoiding and avoidable. I believe his entrance via wheelchair was a compromise, an anti-pollution maneuver, an attempt to not spoil this day. A sneaking in and sneaking out. His final official slither.

“I’ve got a lot of rivers to fish,” he said. “So I don’t think anybody will feel sorry for me. They shouldn’t.” And I won’t. Never even crossed my mind. My wife, a Wyoming native and fisher-person, mentioned something about slippery rocks, fast currents, things happening before you even know they’re going down. I said that I’d thought that, too, but didn’t want to say it. Twenty years I’ve been thinking that: a hat and a sneer, somewhere downstream.

And yes, I think they should go after him. You can’t step back from the fear of future partisan retribution. That’s going to happen anyway. It took a quarter century to strike back for the Nixon debacle, and to think that this will not happen if we just let them fish and mountain bike into the future is naive. Screw ‘em all, and screw ‘em good. And screw their defenders. And then send them off to The Hague and let them sit behind a thick glass for the world to see and judge. That’s where they belong. That’s the way we get this thing back to where it so desperately needs to be. This is how we do our best to resuscitate the world. You walk away from this, you let it happen again. If our history tells us nothing else, it sure as hell tells us that looking away is a recipe for future disaster. Slavery and the inability to address it from the very beginning told us that. And it’s still telling us that, how much we need to not look away. How much we need to take a stand and make it stop here, so we can get our feet. Nunca Mas.

I wrote the following piece back in 1993, right after the Clinton inauguration, and it was published in a small journal (also now no longer with us) called The Free Cuisenart. Dick Cheney has been on my mind for a lot of years. I lived in the Bighorns nearly three decades ago, and I was onto him then, while he was still on the rise. He is our greatest public stain. And yes, today is full of lots of wah wah-pedaled hope, and maybe the lines of tribes may, in fact, dissolve (though I’m not looking for it in my lifetime), but the future will always have to deal with the mutants among us. So enjoy it tonight, but tomorrow’s a workday, and there’s a lot that needs to be done.  Obama knows the Constitution, and he knows how it’s been raped over the last eight years. And you don’t let that one get by. You never let that one get by. If you do, pack it in and give it back to the mutants and hang on to your hat as it all spins down into a glorious wreckage. We owe more to our kids than to let these criminals walk.  So, yes, I’m happy, but not stupidly so. It’s already tomorrow here.
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On the afternoon/early evening of Sunday, January 17, 1993, as President-Elect Bill Clinton was walking in procession across the Memorial Bridge on his grand entrance into the capital city, Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense under the direction of the outgoing president George H. W. Bush, was coordinating a Cruise missile attack on Baghdad.

This from the January 18, 1993 NYT – Raid on Iraq: Bush Launches Missile Attack on a Baghdad Industrial Park as Washington Greets:

But Pentagon officials said tonight that it was possible that one of the cruise missiles had slammed into the Rashid Hotel, a favorite of foreign journalists in Baghdad and the site of an Islamic conference. A Pentagon official said that some missiles had been routed near or over the hotel.

A Death
(1993)

It’s not the sneer as the Secretary of Defense talks of bombing Baghdad, and how he’ll miss his job after Monday; it’s knowing that he owns a ranch in the middle of Wyoming, is “Boss” to men with bad teeth who pinch snuff and know the kind of cold that freezes snot before it hits their ear-waxed upper lips.

In the warm sanctuary of his kinder East, comfortable and balding, he tells his colleagues who jog the Mall for the requisite chiseled look, tales of wind and ranching, of wild life and wilder men who age leathery like their saddles beneath the clear high-plains sun, for wages and the warmth of winter fire. “Real, by god, men,” he claims slapping his creased leg, then tells of how they call him boss, trust him implicitly, and believe, too, that Baghdad is full of dark and godless thieves.

There is never any mention of the families and the children; not the young woman, someone’s beautiful daughter, who went to work as she did each day at the al Rashid Hotel, dreaming of life. Of love. Of going home in the cool of the evening. But who, instead, died before the world’s eye, a numberless stray frozen in some awful blizzard.

When he leaves it will be with victory tales of war rooms not the war, of colored lights seductively winking across a plexiglas wall, of how they clapped each other’s backs long into the safe suburban night.

Tomorrow he’ll parade about in custom-fitted boots and tell the hired hands who jump to his orders and offer him the whiskey bottle as the cold sun falls into the Bighorns, that this is what right is, this is why wars are, this is what needs to be done to keep them free to ride.

© Jim Gourley, 2009