Author
To me, the most disconcerting thing about this years extreme weather is, to a person, be it a reasonable intelligent person or a self-identifying Republican, is this: when I say “I think we have crossed the once assumed long-off climate tipping point,” everyone agrees with me.
Just the fact that anyone agrees with me about anything should be a cause for concern.
Note to breathless reporter: multi-billionaires, hundreds of times over, who have billions and billions of dollars to spend on their toys are not:
A ) pioneers
B ) “everyday Americans”
Every day Americans worry about the fact the cost of a loaf of bread has doubled in the past year, and eggs and milk. That their car needs tires and the cost is up 80%. They do not, in fact, worry where to build their new spaceport.
Gus Grissom was my hero as boy. He was the second American in space. He nearly drowned in the Atlantic when the hatch blew on his Mercury capsule in July 1961. Gus’s dad worked double shifts in the factory so Gus could go to Purdue and get a degree in Aeronautical engineering. Gus changed his own oil in his car, would take a swing at you if you pissed him off, and his favorite expression was “fuckin’ A.” He died in the Apollo 1 fire January 1967. Many think, had he lived, Gus would have been the first man to walk on the moon.
Gus was a pioneer. He was an every day American. Gus had, what Tom Wolfe called, “The Right Stuff.”
Please don’t ever compare these rich boys playing with toys to the pioneers of space flight.
My cousin, a few tears younger than me, brought up a very good point today. We are old enough to remember when space races could only be funded by nations, not people.
We live in a nation where “tax the rich,” is offensive to the guy making $15 an hour and wondering why he can’t feed his kids. The same guy who actually believes paying people, like himself, a fair and living wage would bankrupt these putridly weathly men.
We live in a world where there are men with more personal wealth than many nations.
Bezo’s Amazon is nearly, if not already, a trillion dollar company, and they pay almost no taxes—and the idiots who run my town decide he needed $20 million more to build his warehouse here, but that’s just an aside. There have always been imbeciles in office. This Uber-rich stuff is new…
Special note to my friend Tommy who is self-employed, drives a ‘97 F-150, and crawls around on his 62 year old knees installing flooring and thinking he’s a capitalist. Tommy, bro, you ain’t a capitalist. You are what capitalists laugh at while you crawl around on your 62 year olds knees and install the flooring in their mansions.
I remember Rubin Solaro. He was the only guy who ever scared Hector Luis. Nothing scared Luis.
Rubin wanted to kick my ass. Luis had a plan. He’d fought Rubin. Rubin hurt him bad. The plan was simple. Hector Luis would wrap my hands and put gloves on me and have me hit a tree for about half an hour a day. He said Rubin’s body was that hard, like hitting a tree. I would break my hand punching his gut. I had to get used to what it would feel like to hit him. We did this for a week.
The night of what was to be the fight came. Rubin’s girlfriend was with me in my car. We were parked outside the bar. Her saw us, approached my car. I rolled down the window and started to run my mouth. He connected with one shot to my temple. It knocked me clean across the front seats.
I woke up bloody. The girl was gone.
Luis was there. He said, “Lobb, you never told me you was with his girl!”
I said, “You think maybe that’s why he was pissed?”
His eyes were on fire, “You deserve to bleed behind that stupid shit.”
I don’t know until months later Luis answered Rubin’s attack on me with a maple baseball bat.
That war was over.
More were to come.
We thought we’d live forever, Luis and me. Luis didn’t. He’s been gone a long time. I still talk to him. I wish he’d lived to see the violence fade and just be a tired old man trying to piece together the memories to the scars.
One of the boys from back in the day said there is an honor in being an old man covered in scars. I’ve yet to understand the honor.
Tonight I lean on the kitchen sink looking out my window. The sun is setting after a violent mid-summer storm. The temperature has dropped twenty five degrees. The world is rich and green and alive and wet. The sharp last rays of this July day cut through the clouds and make the maples look to be blazing in gold. The hot air seems kinder. Me and Luis we never saw a sunset like that. Maybe it all would have been different if we had.
Luis was the street poet and the scholar. He always knew how to keep the blood inside. Blood was our currency and language. He called me blood and I called him blood, when the mother and father and the church and and the grandma had all abandoned us to the street, all we had left was our blood.
We were both cut up pretty bad from a fight one night. Sitting on some broken blacktop and glass bottles, bleeding, we rubbed our cut forearms together.
“You cut bad, man. I’m cut too. We got to keep that shit on the inside us. We is blood now for real now.”
I can still see that scar through a tattoo on my left arm.
Boys who played with sticks and knives. Blood brothers.
It’s the season again, I suppose; after a year and change away from gatherings of my sweaty fellow Americans, and silent furled flags, I find myself faced with the same old challenge. The questions and facts that have created some uncomfortable noise in my head since pretty Miss Garrison in the first grade sent me to stand in the corner, because I wasn’t quite sure. I got to know that cold, gray, granite block corner all too well. But the questions would not leave me alone. What am I swearing allegiance to?
I was always a less than obedient child, that is not a point of pride or shame, for me. It’s just a fact. I was born that way. My dad never answered questions, he was a pain in the ass, he always said, “Figure it out!” I think he was pretty smart and he sure wasn’t lazy, so I guess he felt it just better to let me ponder all these things that cause such rage and confusion for me, and makes little sense. He left me to draw my own conclusions. I think of him in these moments, “Thanks Dad, this could have been a Hell of a lot easier if you’d just have given me the answers.”
So here I find myself again, unable to raise a hand in salute, or create some implied agency by placing my hand over my heart. I contemplate is my simply standing there, refusing to even mouth the words, because I’m just so tired of being me, not wanting to start another confrontation, is it an act of cowardice, or justified defiance?
My days of needing to cause protest and disruption and chaos have been replaced by a great need to be simply left alone.
Leave me here to silently suffer your patriotism and puffed-out chests and anthems.
I look around the room and wonder if one single person considers the word allegiance at all.
Two hundred and forty years of endless war, and Trail of Tears and the Federal Reserve.
I want to salute the flag of those brave sons-of-bitches who stormed that beach in Normandy and the many who died there. I want to salute the flag of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and Gene Kranz.
But the thought can’t leave me this is also the flag of the Vietnam war and the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about in 1962. It’s the flag of the 50,000 Americans who died in that war for no goddamned reason at all, except that from 1962 to Saigon’s fall in 1973 It pumped a trillion dollars into the veins of the economy—in today’s dollars.
It was also the flag of the men who murdered Emmett Till. It was the flag of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the people they owned. It’s the flag of seventeen million American kids who go to bed hungry every night. It’s the flag of too many who died because they couldn’t afford to get the care they needed, in the richest nation on earth.
It is the flag of the obscenely rich, it’s the flag of a poor who are so destitute their life is a living horror.
It’s as much my flag as your flag.
It was the flag of Mohammed Ali and Ty Cobb, the man Babe Ruth called “A racist bastard,” in 1922. It was the Babe’s flag too. It was Chuck Yeagers flag and Jack Ruby’s flag. It was the flag of the land that murdered of Malcolm X, and the flag of the country that hopefully will send Derek Chauvin away for life.
It is the flag of the only nation on earth to ever unleash the nuclear bomb on another nation.
I’ve got a lot to contemplate before I go swearing allegiance to any nation or any thing.
And, look out, here comes the Forth of July. The patriots will be out in force.
