Omnipotent

Transients

Philip and James May 2, 2011

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
Lynda Barry (b. 1956)

***

Days that go off course early have a way of diverting from the intended route a few more degrees every hour
until by nightfall
you find yourself somewhere unrecognizable
no worry
listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go. – (e.e. cummings 1894-1962)

which may account for how I ended up at the
Brick & Bell cafe @7:15am
hoping to re-collect myself at a tiny table off in the
corner of the patio with
my mocha and my journal drawing deep yoga
breaths psyche searching

suddenly surrounded by nine loud
men
noisily pulling tables and chairs to convene their forum
on
how to evade cell phone charges in Europe how much
cabs cost in Rome

and without so much as a
may I
backed into my chair knocking over
my mocha
spilling it onto my jeans my journal and all its eccentricities tucked inside confirming course correction so far futile

enduring outrage at a world as yet
unwilling
to unwind under my direction requires energy

the striking 7 ft rattler that slithered across our
path on a sunny high desert hike without apology for
altering our route
the huge old canopy tree thrusting up the sidewalk creating a perfect skateboard launch until the city
chopped its roots to smooth my walk

the precipitous slope some realtor somehow slipped
by the regs about not building in canyons being
cleared by hand by two Mexican laborers to erect two
multi-million dollar houses in a hurry before
the land makes its return to the ocean
bottom

the Scarlet Tanager who flew into our front
hallway
introducing unscheduled havoc into his
day and ours
the rude seagulls that perch and poop on people’s
precious cars

the pair of gulls performing astonishing acrobatics
one chasing the other that had just
snatched something sumptuous off the beach weaving bobbing swooping low at the exact wrong instant smashing into a surfer’s car headed home after a sublime session converted to grief as the bird flopped

its end on our asphalt

impromptu brushes with our transience
impotent efforts to stay the course
buy friends earn praise counter self-condemnation
seduce us into laboring in vain to eradicate whatever
makes a mockery of our longed-for
omnipotence

Osama bin Laden

There can't be a web site in creation that hasn't waded in on the killing of bin Laden today.

While I am a part of the United States and thus am in awe of the intelligence and courage that finally brought down this man who became our nation's most recent symbol of danger and evil in the world, I don't share either the jubilation of the revelers in front of the White House last week, nor of those who made the pilgrimage to ground zero today.

My reasons are many but chief among them is our love of finding a symbol that will make a complex issue seem simple.

Bin Laden became that symbol for us in in the misnomer of the war on terror which we seem unable – despite President Obama's early efforts – to excise from our conversation.

I am no intelligence expert (and the only one I know is jubilant about this killing) but I'd be willing to bet that Osama bin Laden had long ago ceased to be of great significance in the operations of terrorists who seek to do us harm. In fairness that is partly because we drove him into deep hiding. But it is also because he has never been a central spokesman for Islam.

Whatever martyrdom that may now surround him will be largely of our creation.

And it seems only rational to assume that the assault was not only an assault on the man we have been hunting for a decade, but on the easily wounded pride of Islamic jihadis without significant connection to bin Laden. Which would suggest that this has stirred the hornet's nest anew.

Now, having identified bin Laden as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks almost from the outset (whether he was in fact or not) we were backed into a corner from which we could emerge only by last night's stealth operation.

I have long sided with Vice President Biden who wanted to fight terrorists with intelligence and small bands of special forces. Last night's operation seems to bolster the argument for that. It is no mere irony that the president made a near equation between the death of bin Laden and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians in the wars we have waged since 9/11. The wars seem to have resolved nothing, and in fact to have ramped up the rage of people in those countries higher than before we went to "save" them.

I wish we weren't so dependent on oil from that region that we can't afford to simply let it figure out its own future. I wish we hadn't become the only super power just when we did, tempting us to use the moment to try to cow any serious challenge to our hegemony for at least a generation. I wish that we hadn't become so out-of-balance rich in comparison to the rest of the world, that we became wary of any other country that seemed to challenge us, and created such envy in the less affluent countries.

I can wish a lot of things. But these things are as they are, and they require even a thoughtful president like Barack Obama to do things I'm pretty certain he could never have imagined himself doing before he felt the weight of his office.

On the day he gave the final order to carry out the mission that killed our arch enemy, he then boarded a helicopter to go see the devastation the tornadoes had wreaked in the southern states and to offer solace to those people. He flew back to Washington in time to put on his black tie and attend the White House correspondents' dinner where he did the stand-up comedy routine now required of the president on that occasion. (I thought the jokes – his and the professional comedian's – were pretty lame.)

God save the United States from ourselves.