The Words of the Prophets Are Written on the Facebook Walls

Something is happening to how we perceive history. As you've seen, protesters took to the streets of Tehran, with their smartphones and pocket digital cameras bearing witness to tumult encapsulated into grainy viral videos, their voices fluttering in tweets and blogs while the Iranian government tries futilely to shut the whole thing down—surely a telltale sign they'd prefer to pummel the revolt without witnesses showing the world how they went about with the pummeling. Yet again, the world watches history unfold on the internet in the assumed position—hands behind the backs, fingers crossed, vaguely optimistic things will work themselves out for the best.

I was a kid when the violence of Tiananmen Square slewed its ugly face on the evening news twenty years ago in June. Honestly, all I can remember is the reel that burned a hole in our heads, and there it is forever: a man standing in front of a Chinese tank, a fate of torture and death all but certain, and as the tanks try to maneuver around him, he sidesteps again in their path. The scene is almost comical, if it weren't so deathly real. I was too young to consider running over him was an option.

Death and injustice must always have their witnesses.

I imagine the desperate hands punching fax numbers written on a crumpled piece of paper, as the police in riot gear and the child soldiers stomp up the stairwell. And then we were introduced to the coldness of the video camera. The silent spectator filming a scene he may have seen countless times already: a black man being beaten relentlessly by three white cops.

We are entering a new era in which nothing is unseen. The comedian tucked away in the comedy club spouting racists slurs at the audience, the tsunami wiping out the coastline, the Scottish hermit-songstress taking over our imaginations and our wildest Horatio Alger dreams, the aftermath of a hurricane and then of a human catastrophe waiting, stranded, with no sign of help arriving—we invite over our family and friends to see the digital streams, to take part in the people's history. Soon our heads are filled with this shit, and these streaming videos and images will never leave us, so that even as we are old, dying on stoops in rocking chairs, we will still see the starlet's beaver shot as she climbs out the limo.

We are living in real time, for better or worse. We are documenting our own history, and I hope we can document everything, so there will be as few questions as possible. For so many things that have happened I don't think I'd ever be able to find adequate words to explain why they had to.

Concerning Iran and the world, the idealist in me foolishly wants the passion of justice to burn the hearts of all men and women, so they no longer have a choice, and must change their lives and their governments. It foolishly wants the internet to render tyranny obsolete. It foolishly wants peace and foolishly believes peace will prevail.

But, for now, the realist in me is hedging his bets on evil, that when the network cameras return, the protestors will have returned home with their new government the same as the old government, as so many before them have returned home with their efforts lost and exhausted. And we will go back to the internet and again treat it as only a source that provides countless hours of pop-ups and money-shots and movie star rants, and I'll be just another voyeur bumping up the view count, as Wayne Coyne sings gleefully, "with loving hands knowing that evil will prevail . . . evil will always win."

We are superconnected now, and thank God for it and oh dear Christ for it. The internet's either our greatest weapon or a realization of some of Orwell's unhappier visions. We have all placed our heads atop the archaic torso of Apollo. History is ours now. Keep the cameras rolling.

A Desperate Plea

I bailed on NPR for sports radio as soon as Hilary bowed out, John McCain meandered from state to state, and George Bush's last and excruciatingly long days in office were limping to its shitty conclusion, very much like our last days of being a prosperous nation were, too. I was going to see how far my $10 would take Obama. I felt confident with my bet.

The morning show I listen to announced that the NL West will cede victory to the Dodgers. Though it's early May, the baseball season is now over in their division.

Then by afternoon today, the story broke everywhere that Manny Ramirez is suspended for 50 games due to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, or as he calls it, "His Medication". For people who don't quite get baseball--and I'll admit I can see where you're coming from, because I don't get golf or tennis or curling--they still knew this was history: the first time a ballplayer on possible track to the hall of fame medically confirmed to have used drugs (HCG). Clemens, Bonds, A-Rod were all accused of this. Supposing they were juicing or not, they weren't administered a test prior to a game and failed.

I'm not writing this to go over the implications, whether Manny will or won't go into the hall of fame, whether the Dodgers will win the pennant, whether he should be banned form baseball, yada yada yada. All I'm trying to say is, why the hell is Pete Rose not in the hall of fame? Why?

Seriously, Manny is sidelined 50 games for wittingly or not taking HCG, but Pete Rose places a bet on his team that they'll win--win, not lose--and he's banished from baseball, wiped clean from the books?

When we were kids in the sandlot, we'd always say we bet that you couldn't hit it over the fence. We bet you can't beat him in a race. We bet you can't beat Mike Tyson in a fight. We bet the Cubs are going to let you down this year. And these were all good bets, real good bets. Pete Rose bet on his team to win regular season games. There are 162 of them. Being a manager of any National League team is a saintly gesture enough not to pick up some kind of vice to keep his attention.

Also, he didn't tell his guys to throw the series like the Black Sox, so he can make a little on the side. If the league is saying, "If you cheat to improve your game, you get slapped with suspension, a long one, but you'll be back by July," it can't deny Pete Rose his rightful place in Cooperstown as one of the greatest ballplayers of all time.

That's all I got for today. Pete Rose should go to the hall of fame. Oh, and so should Shoeless Joe and Buck Weaver. Buck Weaver, of course, in light of John Cusack's stirring portrayal in Eight Men Out, as this movie is the only history I'll accept of the 1919 Black Sox.

Old Deaths, Numbers

Old deaths don't terrify like the new ones, do they? Not to discredit the seriousness of Swine Flu, or any flu for that matter, but we need to calm down when the media ushers in the brand new way to die and put it in perspective with the more common, more likely to happen, old ways to die.

How easy it is to get worked up over an old disease, if the media dresses it up with a noun, in this case, an ugly noun, a noun that naturally puckers our lips when we speak it, as if we're sucking lemons: Swine. But we catch the old disease, the one that kills over 36,000 Americans each year, drink some OJ, watch some TV, miss a few days of work, and vomit now and again in a plastic bag-lined garbage can. So what. But we hear Swine Flu and our thoughts are racing. Oh my God, what is it? People are dying from it. Can I get it? What are the symptoms?

Science has taken out the terror from most of the old diseases. Plague, smallpox, polio, influenza all have lost a lot of our respect, despite nearly annihilating the entire human race several times throughout history. For almost two millenniums, we've had nothing to cure our fragile bodies, except leeches, insects, and the occasional crackpot idea that almost always led to certain death. The horror of these pestilences is tattooed to our DNA: "Ashes, ashes. We all fall down." We've never been an optimistic lot.

Today, however, even though 36,000 die a year from the old disease, we've convinced ourselves we're safe because we've got medicine. We've got Antibiotics. Take two a day for a week and call the doctor in the morning. What's scary about that? Not the numbers.

Four hundred thousand Americans die each year from smoking-related diseases and are replaced by new smokers. I can write 400,000 dead a hundred times, and still I won't quit smoking. I say it now, but it was years ago that I preferred its slow suicide, always felt the drug's completed work is years away, another lifetime I wasn't sure I wanted, as I was younger and didn't think too much on dying, didn't care too much for living, and knew enough of the old road I was taking, the road so many of my family traveled to its long, painful end. It brought familiar deaths, summed up with seemingly benign words, probably because they are as old as death itself: cancer, heart attack, stroke. How can these words scare me into quitting? I say that now. Smoking is a mistake, one that will probably do me in eventually. But I make mistakes all the time. I'm not sorry.

I'm with you. Any way I go through the numbers I can't see the faces. Alcohol kills approximately 100,000 . . . car accidents over 45,000 . . . on and on, these numbers. Day after day we die these old, familiar deaths with little protest. These are the deaths that terrify me. Am I numb because I don't cringe, no matter how grim the reporter's tone, no matter how many montages I see people wearing face masks, doctors checking blood and what now? It's not the same terror when the TV informs me the new flu has left 68 dead, especially when the casualties of a seemingly endless narco-war has claimed thousands and more. What's the right number that will make me worry? A thousand? A hundred thousand?

Because there's one thing I don't quite get in our recent history: where was our terror when hundreds died in the early eighties from AIDS, at that time just a nameless disease, a gay plague? Where did it go when young people kept dying and dying and dying while Reagan said nothing? Maybe I'm just looking at the numbers, but for us to be scared, does it have to be the right people dying, too? Does it have to take our mothers, daughters, and sons before we decide something must be done?

The greatest allies of pestilence are ignorance and indifference. AIDS has left a lot of our imaginations since the early nineties. It's now a disease that happens over there, in a world of malaria and cholera. It's not that we don't understand the mounting numbers of dead, they're just not the right numbers. They're not the numbers we care about.

As Camus illustrated beautifully in his novel, The Plague, the human imagination cannot fathom sheer numbers of death, unless you can make the immensity of it commonplace. Escort everyone from a crowded movie theater in a single line. One by one they are shot dead in the street. Move on to the next crowded theater and then to the next one and then the next one. Four thousand theaters of dead movie patrons = one year of smoking in America.

This was easy for Camus. He could not escape the numbers. No one in Europe 1940 could. They were dangling by the necks from trees, riddled with bullets in alleyways, dragged away into the night and buried in countless unmarked graves. All I had was a history book that reflected a few mostly tame black-and-white photographs of the war and this mind-boggling number, 50 to 70 million dead. I stared at that number. Tried to compute it. Fifty to 70 million living human beings, who were born, were loved and cared for by their mothers and/or fathers, caretakers, the state, some had brothers or sisters, some had lovers and friends, some had nothing, some had everything, and now all were entombed together in a number, a speculative number at that, in some poorly written history book for half-awake American students. Gone again, as the teacher instructs us to turn the page.

Pestilence or war. I'm convinced one of these or a combination of both ultimately will put an end to our blip of existence on this small, inconsequential, uncharacteristically green and blue planet. Yeah, we've read Frost's poem and are flipping a coin, heads: it's fire, tails: ice. Ice shelves the size of New York falling into the ocean. An asteroid spiraling from space, set on a course as old as the universe itself, all dressed up for its date with the Earth. If you gotta go, you gotta go.

I'm still hedging my bets on the old deaths, the ancient virus or our ancient wiring. The microscopic death that crawls inside our membrane walls to devour our cells, or the death spawned from an idea that passes the mind of a killer. Perhaps the idea's burrowed deep in the genetic makeup even before a person's born, a ticking bomb always there, a math equation that leads to zero. Just waiting, until it's brought to life by a few old, dependable chemicals, or a sharpened blade, a lit fuse, a smoking gun, an exploding star. If anything, history teaches us we're incredibly proficient at killing each other and equally skilled at watching others die.

The Shepherd King

In November 1975, the Pathet Lao, with the help of the Soviet and North Vietnamese Army, overthrew the monarchy in Laos, forcing King Savang Vatthana to abdicate. The king later died in captivity at a labor camp, the details of his death are sketchy. The queen, The Crown Prince, and many members of the royal family, either starved to death or executed, were never heard from again. A lot of question marks appear instead of actual dates of their deaths.

In my first post, I recounted how my wife's uncles decided, like many Laotians, to cross the Mekong River into Thailand. They left on a makeshift bamboo raft. They had served in the Air Force, helping the Americans in their unconfirmed secret war in Laos, and thus did not have much of a future in the new Laos. By their accounts, as they paddled across the river, the victorious communist soldiers stood on the shore, drinking heavily, laughing, as they took pop shots with their rifles at the fleeing rafts. Her uncles crossed the river. Many did not. Regardless if their account is accurate or just worked-up mythology, the Mekong, as we know, is bloodied with many lost souls, either by drowning or from many years of war.

This was not only a tumultuous time in American history, in which we retreated from Saigon after years of fighting in Vietnam, Cambodia, and many other parts of Southeast Asia, confirmed or not, but it was also a deadly time to be left behind. A Cambodian friend of mine showed me a black-and-white photograph of him when he was no older than three years old. His mother looked like an old woman, whose face and vacant expression bore the visible scarring from witnessing Pol Pot's genocide, an AK-47 strapped on her back as she held her child in her arms. Compare this to your childhood photos.

As far as what was documented, Laos did not succumb to genocide in the same way Cambodia did, where mass graves are still being unearthed, but it was in no way a peaceful existence for those who opposed the new communist government. So, if you weren't communist, it was in your best interest to get the hell out.

Yet, in the early eighties, like Cuba, Laos allowed a mass exodus of its people whose hearts were not in the communist revolution, and most families went in separate directions, either to France (as they were already familiar with French from years of their occupation that led up to the Vietnam War) or the United States. My wife bounced around from refugee camp to refugee camp, from Thailand to the Philippines, until some missionaries bought her family plane tickets to the United States, where her uncles were already establishing a new life.

There's a continuing chapter, however, in which the rightful heir to the throne, Prince Soulivong Savang, fled Laos in the same manner as my wife's uncles and now resides in France, trying to gather support for a return to a democratic monarchy. He has family in the States, whom he supposedly visits now and again. Somehow, when I heard this story, I got the impression that he chose a simple life, herding cattle or sheep. I could see him with a cowboy hat, overlooking the grazing livestock on the open plains of Nebraska, even though this wasn't the case. Nevertheless, I cannot believe this commonplace existence is the ending of this king's story.

Why didn't the last heir to the throne return to his country with legions of followers to overthrow the communists? I mean, even if he failed and was killed, his story of bravery would be an epic tale retold for ages.

Prince Soulivong had written to the U.S. Senate in 1998, stating that he was willing to put the past behind and work on reconciling the government into one that will bring peace and justice to the people of Laos, including the Hmongs, many of whom faced (and still face) the brunt of the communist government. The Senate issued a resolution that Laos act in accordance with the heir's request and adopt a democratic government and also investigate human rights abuses to the Laotian and Hmong people. Yes, another story of us saying, "please stop," and the other country saying, "no", with no further recourse.

In July 2001, the royal flag waved briefly before being taken down. Still, there doesn't seem to be a mass of people in Laos clamoring for the return of their king.

During Lao New Year, which ended a few days ago, I read a recent article about Laos written by a political prisoner who called upon the government to recognize and accept basic human rights for its citizens. Unfortunately, it seems, not much has changed.

I called him "The Shepherd King" because I first imagined him tending sheep and trying to forget his royal roots, as though it were a dream he had many years ago. But now I imagine him tirelessly working within international governments, each day amassing signatures of so-called important dignitaries, still believing he can convince the world that this should not be the history of Laos, with few listeners.

The world most likely feels they have enough on their plates to give an ear to a onetime prince, over 30 years removed. But how Shakespearean the thought, the Return of The Shepherd King, crossing the Mekong River amidst the Naga Fireballs lighting his path, the dead souls rising up to the hem of his gold-encrusted pah-hang, poised to reclaim the throne.

That's a story for a different era, though. In this one, the lines are already drawn, and no one has an interest in remapping the world. So, while Laos maintains its way of life as it has for centuries and its expatriates sing of their beloved country, their king stands at the ancient bridge between West and East, certain which side he should be on, but unsure who still cares.

Through A Glass, Darkly

I don't know when it first started, but my in-laws seemed to have found a way to put my youngest daughter to sleep. I used to play her a song, Bon Iver's "Skinny Love," maybe a strange and tragic song to play to a one-year-old, since it concerns a mental breakdown of a loved one (The first lines are: "Come on, Skinny Love, just last the year / Pour a little salt we were never here / My my my my my my my my / Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer. . . ."), but perhaps she has since caught onto the lyrics and now only wails when I play it. So, I asked, "What's the secret?"

My mother-in-law said, "Just tell her 'spider's coming,' and she goes right to sleep."

Spider's coming. Again, I had to revert to terrifying her into sleeping.

But it worked. I would say "spider's coming" and she would pull up the covers to her chin, close her eyes, not even peek, and soon enough, she slept.

My wife was concerned that creating the image of a spider crawling toward her to eat her if she didn't sleep seemed extreme. My other daughter, however, jumped on this, and embellished the horrific attributes of this imaginary spider. "Spider's coming, B! He's as big as our house, with giant fangs. If you don't sleep, he will get you. And he will wrap you in a bed (web). And he will suck out your insides. And he will chew your bones clean."

I hate to say I was impressed with her morbid description. She looked at me for approval, and I replied, "Uh, yeah, now go to sleep."

And she slept.

One day while my daughter slept, and I finally got a chance to write (yes, the real motive for my insistence in her taking a nap), I thought about Through A Glass Darkly, one of my favorite Bergman films, in which one of the story-lines consists of a second-rate writer using his daughter's emerging mental illness for his own literary gains. And then there's the ending, that brilliant ending, of course (and I'll be clandestine for those who have not had the chance to watch this masterful film and just leave it at that).

Perhaps since the beginning of time, we terrified our children into sleeping, recounting how witches will bake them into gingerbread, how wolves will slip into the gowns of their grandmothers to eat them, how queens take them away from us to a snowy hell, leaving a shard of ice in their hearts. Then again, maybe I'm the only one who is still doing this, still telling his children these types of fairy tales without sparing them the scary parts. Even my off-the-cuff fairy tales are remarkably grim, despite my best intentions to sugarcoat them mid-sentence.

There was a recent story in The Telegraph about the growing concern these fairy tales had on our children's imagination (See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4125664/Traditional-fairytales-not-PC-enough-for-parents.html). Nevertheless, it's a tough balance between giving them a saccharine-laced Disney childhood, which I feel is equally dangerous since it doesn't teach them morality or consequence, instead of telling them something that will scare the hell out of them into being moral.

But my wife's concerns are legitimate. The last thing I want for my daughters was an irrational fear that followed them throughout their lives, much like all my irrational fears have followed me, all of which are too many to recount in this posting alone. However, isn't that the essence of fairy tales? Shouldn't they be wary of strangers and unafraid to report bad people to the nearest policeman (woodsman)? Shouldn't they know life is dangerous, filled with people who are not looking out for their best interest, and if they are going through it lackadaisical, they can find that they've been swindled in a Rumpelstiltskin-like deal?

Isn't it truly dangerous to have an imperfect perception of reality where all we hear and know are happy, G-rated tales? I think it is, because a lack of imagination or ignorance of a darker reality will cause a child to show his chubby finger and not a bare bone, or to climb willingly into the witch's oven.

Anyway, today marks the end of "spider's coming." See, my older daughter shot out of bed from her nap and started screaming, thinking, because her bed was now empty, that the spider finally got me while she slept. As much as she could relate to me through her tears, her dreams of horses and trees that grew chocolate bunnies were interrupted when a giant, hairy spider crawled alongside the walls, up the staircase, broke down the bedroom door, and spun her unsleeping father into a cocoon, taking me back to its lair in order to feed a thousand spider babies. I guess I put up a good fight against this Shelob, at least.

So, I folded my hand. I told her the spider does not exist, never has existed, except in stories. I promised we will stop telling this story to her sister to convince her to sleep. She was relieved. Thus, the spider was dead.

Now, I got to come up with something new. Maybe I should just rock her to sleep with an older song, sing to her: "Go to sleep, little baby / go to sleep little baby / you and me and the devil makes three / don't need no other lovin' baby". But seems a lot of lullabies are sad, too, you know, cribs falling out of trees, bridges falling down, and the like.

So, I reread them the story of The Little Mermaid, whose new feet are not stabbing with excruciating pain, leaving a trail of blood behind, and who, in the end, does not sacrifice herself by throwing herself into the water to dissolve into sea foam, but instead this is The Little Mermaid, who rescues her prince from the clutches of the Sea Witch's spell and sails with her new husband far, far away from her father's utopian kingdom.

Even I don't yet have the heart to tell my children that a lot of stories don't have happy endings.

In Memoriam

My grandfather, whom I met once in my life, passed away on April 13th. My mother received the card today to let her know. It's a lima bean green card, with the words: "Just a note to inform you of the passing of your father." It gave her the date of his death as April 13th, signed by a woman she never knew, a sister of a friend. It's difficult to discern why anyone would choose this color of a card for any occasion.

I don't speak ill of the dead, especially when I only met the guy once during a half-hour layover at O'Hare. He was estranged from my family my whole life. Unable to keep grudges longer than four days, I never understood how that happens to families, but it does. People got their reasons. I'm not getting into his, because it's not my story to tell, and regardless, it's an old story of which I knew only scant details. Scant details are all I know of his life.

He was an Irish man, who did not give many of my family good memories. He left my mother sometime in the early '60's, I believe. (My grandmother remarried to an Air Force pilot, who later became a state trooper and a worker at the GM Janesville plant, two of the more common occupations that my family members who reside in Ohio have. This is the man I've called Grandpa my whole life.) So, I can't say I feel hurt from his passing, but I preferred a different resolution to his story.

I wanted him to meet us at O'Hare, and say to ma, "You know, I really fucked up leaving you all those years ago. I can understand if you never forgive me, but I love you. I always have. I'm sorry." I know, queue the swelling over-the-top Hollywood music. Hugs and kisses. He didn't even have to make an effort to be in our lives again. You know, but just acknowledge that it happened. He made his decisions, for better or worse. For whatever reason, it was something he had to do. I'm a man. I could see his reasons, even if I didn't agree with them.

Instead, I think we just got a Big Mac or something, and Christ, I can't remember what we talked about. It wasn't much. Years after this rushed encounter that I barely recall, my ma receives a green card. And that's the end of the story. No reconciliation. It was not even written in his words. I can't even remember his face.

I can only speak of him in death as I would speak of him in life. Yet, with sincerity, in the old words all of us Irish, failing or unfailing, deserve:

May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind be ever at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
And the rain fall softly on your fields
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

Death is nothing at all.

Accidents Happen

My daughter snuck a purple Hello Kitty bracelet on my left wrist while I was working on a story. She told me that it was very special and will grant me super powers to protect the world. I said, "The entire world?"

"Yes," she said. "All of it."

"Wow. That's a lot of responsibility."

"Yeah, but if you can't, that's okay. It's not your fault. Accidents happen."

"Accidents happen" is her new favorite phrase, though I'm not sure where she got it from. When she marked our couches with pink marker, she said she was sorry and that she didn't mean to miss the paper. But accidents happen, you know? It's a logic I find tough to argue against.

How can you? Maybe there's no reason to find blame anymore, especially when the person who's culpable is beyond reproach, because the very fabric of society could unhinge itself if the truth be known. See Chinatown, or more recently, the Bush administration. How will this affect our notion of revenge tales?

Hamlet's father was murdered by his uncle, who, in turn, married Hamlet's widowed mother. Hamlet could understand a man usurping power through murder, but for his mother to then marry his uncle in a matter of months? Jesus, how dare she? But we know how it ends. Hamlet was bigger than them. He put the past behind him, got drunk with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for the remaining three and a half hours of the play, until he married Ophelia, a woman he may or may not have loved. They then moved to a two-story, coldwater flat in Copenhagen. Tragic.

I know Bush's eight years of service are old wounds. We should put the past behind us, like Prince Hamlet, even though most of the past is still our present. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I prefer to see someone who committed a crime go to jail. When Todd Gillman asked Bush if he was excited about his new home in a posh Dallas neighborhood, Bush responded, "Why do you care?" Oh, that Bush and his humorisms!

Todd should have responded, "Well, thing is, a lot of us expected your new home would be smaller. Oh, and with bars."

So, we had a few protests in the streets. We made a few movies about the man. Wrote a bunch of books about him. Some of us became so outraged that we couldn't even function in society anymore. All of this, however, was after we gave him the benefit of the doubt that he would act in accordance with a few minor cobwebbed-laced documents, like the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. I mean, we didn't say shit when Bush's only accomplishment within his first hundred days was banning snowmobiles in national parks and not going to war with China (which was still a little too close).

Yet, Obama has not even been in office for one hundred days, and there are Republicans mentioning words like "secession", and others talking of violence over the mention of higher taxes. Can we just let the man wade through this shit-storm a little bit before we talk about dissolving the Union or playmaking that the Redcoats are coming?

I know, I know. Bush is in Dallas and is no longer the president. They had their martini shot in Crawford and broke the set. Jolly good show, everyone! We had them fooled, by golly! History books given to our children will have glowing remarks about Bush's wonderful service to our country in a time it needed him most.

Now, all we hear about on the news today are Les Miserables songs, tea parties, and pirates. I was surprised when he brought down our country, in awe when he brought down the entire world's economy, but I'm speechless he knocked us back to the 18th century. Hey, we all make mistakes, right?