"Popguns & Pacemakers" — Patriotism, in a small town, and other tales of The Great American Westerly Midwest Read online

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.