An old friend just called because she's going to write a piece for our new local alternative newspaper (the only other choice is a Gannet affiliate,) and she wanted to incorporate something from my blog, which is NOT a blog, really. She is a peace activist, and want to draw on some cockamamie thing I said (we both attended Scott Ritter's talk.) Have been thinking/writing about my youth, which was governed by Vietnam, a war that remains vivid to me, not so much because ofwhat actually happened overseas, events of which I had just the dimmest awareness (I am just now reading Fire in the Lake to learn about the actualities) but rather because of the psychic force the war exerted on our developing hormonal teenage brains. Because we were only dimly aware, death seemed a vapor that engulfed us. It was everywhere, we were doomed, so there was no reason not to (for example) take LSD, what did the long-term effects matter?

Now an opposing idea circulates in the culture (or is it an idea that circulates among those growing old) that our paramount duty is to maintain our health. This program is hard for me to sign on to because 1) America is being run by people whose motives are so incomprehensible and things seem to be going to hell, and 2) I am sick and do not desire a long life. I guess I would like to return to the youthful damn-the-doom way of living, but can't work up the oomph to party anymore.

Here is a poem by Hayden Carruth that seems to fit.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then like a child
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
__________

The poem's being so artless leaves you unprepared for the metaphor that closes and clinches the poem and leaves me breathless because I see that smile. Come to think of it...uh oh...I know whose smile it is. It is Donald Rumsfeld's smile.