…Washington speak. The latest catch phrase to fall back upon when there are no real answers…”at the end of the day.” ‘Speak’ to infiltrate the American thought process which Orwell predicted before our time with “newspeak.” Code language to soften the realities, make things sound and appear something other than what is, what really happened.

The plot thickens…

“At the end of the day”…“on the same page.” Variations on the Washington theme of “the bottom line,” “the fact of the matter is, ” and “faith based initiative”-- meaning God helps those who help themselves. Brought to you by the same folks who brought you “no child left behind“ and their real targets of mass communicative obfuscations: “weapons of mass destruction,” “enemy combatant,” “homeland security,” “shock and awe,” “pre-emptive war,” “slogging,” “democratize,” not to mention selected themes on the concept of “patriot” (once the name of a missile) to the “patriot act,” not to mention only those patriots who act-the “you’re either-with-us-or-against-us” kind.

“Bring it on!”

At the end of the day…We’re looking back--from our little corner of the world here on the tip of a northeastern Wisconsin peninsula. We’re looking forward. We’re checking our (im)pulses to see if we’re all on the same page, or how many pages are missing?

What’s the story?

Having taken the 2004 election by what they call a mandate, those in power continue to institute their vision by commandeering our language. They want a different story. A different ending. And seem hell-bent to tell it their own way, forcing their words, actions, promises down our throats.

Forgive the literary suggestions. But I’m a literary guy. This is destined to became a literary piece. This is my life. (Literary politics not withstanding) And I choose, at this point of time, to suggest a different telling of the tale. A story, set in both America and the Middle East hardly yet begun.

“Get over it!”--- another arrogant carryover from the selection of the President of the United States in Florida, in the year 2000. Where our story began.

But too many are not over that story yet. That what happened in the election of 2004 was the wrong ending. Given the true ending-we would not be where the story remains today, mired both here at home in divisiveness; and ‘over there’--in sand, torture, blood, body parts, and the smell of death (American, Iraqi, and insurgents) hanging over a gritty landscape, fighting a battle that began as a chicken hawk’s wet dream of preemptive war and turned into a surprise un-ending international nightmare…”at the end of the day.”

Language. Story….fiction. “Bring it on.”

Here goes.

Imagine in the next un-declared war, only true ‘patriots’ were made to serve and protect all those moral values they so cherish. Envision the battle lines:

In the frontline of attack: the president and his children, the vice president and his children alongside them. The cabinet heads and their children on both sides of the executive.

All the members of Congress and their children in the second line. And all the presidential advisers and their kids.

Behind them, the Supreme Court justices in their flowing black robes, mulling over the historic ‘case’ set before their very eyes, as the first shot is fired, and as the preemptive forces move accordingly. Shock and Awe! (Are you with me, Jesus?)

Scatter the high brass (all the services), through all the ranks accordingly, being sure they walk-the-walk (sorry, no protective vests available…”) and drive. And be sure those not putting their “boots-to-the-ground” drive Hummers.

Make room right about here for the Washington Think Tank people, who had the “foresight” and audacity to draw up the plans, put a country in harm’s way in the first place. Find a soft helmet to fit the big, hard head of Karl Rove.

And just behind them (though they probably deserve closer rank and proximity) spread the hate mongers of far right talk shows who pollute our American airwaves and minds-Rush Limbaugh maybe one step ahead of them all. What a company of cowards this would make…especially Rush deferred from previous military duty because of his, bad (big) ass.

Not far behind this group, marching to “Onward Christian Soldiers,” let the far right evangelical Christians assemble with Bibles in hand, chapter and verse upon their tongues, marching against the enemy, fighting at last for the Armageddon they’ve cherished and sought since they were ‘born again.’ Let them be born once again. And God bless them.

In the rear, far, far to the rear, only there let the public assemble at will, should they feel a preemptive war is one worth fighting for. But let this citizen’s army of volunteers be allowed to fight for whatever cause, only if the participants reflect a cross-section of the populous by race and class status. From the homeless blacks to the sons or daughters of Donald Trump-like folks. And they must be paired or they don’t go.

Let this be the real beginning of a story about to unfold. Let the reader imagine the setting. Iran, perhaps? Or North Korea? Who knows where it will lead, how the plot twists and turns? Or the denouement-“at the end of the day.”

Given this fiction I suspect the language to re-enter the American culture, born in the front lines, filtered through the mass media, might begin to reflect a cleansing of the Washington speak our leaders prefer, a reality determined to recapture honest, human feeling. Something akin to the remembrance of things past such as: “War is hell.”

Fast forward (and backward) to the language and stories necessary to tell the stories of our time. The ‘real news.” The real stories we need will never come from Washington, especially with the language manipulators at work fulltime in the Bush White House. No more tinkering with American usage…no more making all bad news sound and look good from where they comfortably sit and play war with young American lives. No more confessional excuses: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.”

At the end of the day…the time of events…sooner or later, enter: The Writer, boldly. The poet, the photographer, the freelance journalist. The ‘artist.” Those with eyes wide open who saw it, heard it, felt it, and possessed the talent to shape the story artfully and possessed the conscience not to bear false witness.

I anxiously await the real news from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first novel that captures the human scene the way Crane’s, RED BADGE OF COURAGE, Hemingway’s, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, Mailer’s, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD: “Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach... All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.”

I await the short stories and poems. The work of photo-journalists.
All the devastating images of the horror of war our leaders have been protecting us from, The invisible dead and maimed. The number of dead and wounded “on the other side.”

Maybe there’s an Ernie Pyle out there. Or an American war correspondent (un”embedded”) as good as Michael Herr who will write a book as accountable as Herr’s own Vietnam experience, DISPATCHES; “If you get hit,” a medic told me, “we can chopper you back to base-camp hospital in like twenty minutes.’ “If you get hit real bad,” a corpsman said, “they’ll get your case to Japan in twelve hours.” “If you get killed,” a spec 4 from Graves promised, “we’ll have you home in a week.”

No Washington soft-speak there.

Maybe there’s a Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in Iraq riding in one of those coffin cars called Hummers. Maybe we can set our story in his hands, heart, and mind:

“I think the climax of the book [SLAUGHTER HOUSE FIVE] will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby…The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And the this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and the he’s shot by a firing squad.”

And if not a Vonnegut, please, a Joseph Heller: “There was only one catch and that was CATCH-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions … Yossarian was moved very deeply by this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”

God Bless America, and may He give us a Tim O’Brien wandering the desert over there, carrying all these things in his mind, hoping to live to bring the story home, write it so we would know it, feel it, not forget it--THE THINGS THAT THEY CARRIED:

“I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering turns into a kind of rehappening…The bad stuff never stops rehappening, replaying itself over and over…Sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for…joining the past to the future …Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

So as we gather at the end of the year, Brethren, let us not forget that Tolstoy wrote WAR AND PEACE hoping it would be the last war on earth.

Maybe the story’s never over. Or the manner in which nations explain it to suit their own ends, while citizen soldier-writers live and die to tell it as it was.

We’re a people at war with ourselves on so many fronts who even knows what the storyline is?

Did the Vietnam War ever end? Must American politics sink so low, (one foot marching on to war in the Middle East, the other still stuck in the muck of a South East Asian rice paddy) that it sees fit to smear the character of an opposing presidential candidate, one of its own Vietnam War heroes, for fear the power base may shift, and the true American story continue without all the fiction?

How soon before the Iraqi writer emerges to tell it from his side, I wonder?

It has taken years for the stories and poems to seep from the pens of the Vietnamese people.

Huu Thinh, born in Vinh Phuc province, drove a tank in the Vietnam War. It took thirty years (last year) for a book of his poems, THE TIME TREE, to surface.

Asking

I ask the earth: How does earth live with earth?
--We honor each other.

I ask water: How does water live with water?
--We fill each other up.

I ask the grass: How does grass live with grass?
--We weave into one another
creating horizons.

I ask man: How does man live with man?
I ask man: How does man live with man?
I ask man: How does man live with man?

At the end of they day…the same question. Only echoes. No answers. No end.