Click-Clack-Paddy-Whack Meets Jack Kerouac on the Mer-O-Wac
The scene: In the imagination, but with combat boots on the soil, clearly, lugging the laptap across the land. Just out of lunch after getting my Chinese fortune cookie from this downtown rough spot in Lowell, Massachusetts, too dumb to realize I was doing the historic Jack Kerouac tour in some crude way, since he was born and raised in this half-priced-on-everything, that is, everything turned into a pawn-shop-of-a-New England industrial town. And I certainly don’t remember or have the cookie fortune now. Then when I stumbled upon a commemorative site, a classic red-brick river-walk territory of the National Park Service, or at least this part of town near the Merrimack River seemed to be, I stumbled upon the Jack Kerouac Mational Monument, or perhaps it was just a shrine, who knows? It all seemed very official. Paid for. Looks a lot like Stonehenge. With big horizonal cement slabs in half circles, trees growing old and wise. Worthy of the full respect of everyone. It was the year 2000. Bush had just been elected.
I’d gotten there how? By train out of Boston, I guess. I pulled a folded pouch of black, white, quite stained cloth from my backpack. I set it on a cement bench with various notebooks of poems, a backpack carting the PC, a compass, business cards, collected media, small piles of books for sale, a carved wooden “eagle” and, gotta have it, the Mythville logo, which is the image of a steer skull and the words Mythville.org, my brainchild just coming to being. An adaptation from a Georgia O’Keefe motif (traced it from a drawing myself … a red, white, black deathly image … when a friend saw it he said, “How unfortunate.”) But at that time, for myself, it said it all. Or so I thought. Really, the logo was just a “A premonition of anthrax,” I can now chuckle to myself, in the Mythville of my mind, on how that logo was devised nine months before September 11, 2001, but only a few weeks, if that long, after December 13, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all Floridian dimpled chads null and void. That’s the kind of humor you find now. The ironic kind. With saturnine subtext. Oh well, satire never plays fair. All we really knew back then, the witches of Essex and myself, was there was going to be some serious hell to pay. “Some serious action,” this bizarre historian landlord in Ipswich would say, a year later, after the World Trade Center Towers were taken down. And the logo, the dot org, a network of one? What a gag! A serious non-prophet action, yes it is, yes it was.
Oh yeah, the scene, again: the Jack Kerouac shrine in Lowell, Massachusetts. Right by the river. Betwixt the satanic red-brick mills. The site is chosen now, for examination, because just eight years or so ago, as I write this, sometime after the so-called “election” of George W. Bush Jr. as national executioner, and just prior to the dawn of the new century, that is, January 1, 2001, I had accidentally found this place. Or, since there’s no such thing as an accident, it had found me. There I was, in a Chinese food restaurant in downtown Lowell, after coming out of the “T” station (Yes, I can see it, hear it now, the Dr. Sax sound echoing in the Lowell railway terminal, right along with the “On the Road” mementoes … and me regularly lugging it all over to the city center because, hey, it was something Kerouac would do. To see a woman. A witch ... to have her … should have saw it coming …. I didn’t really have that thought, however, until I opened up my fortune cookie and realized, like I say: I was “On the Road” to Mythville, on the way to the so-called Blakean “Palace of Wisdom.”
Yes, yes, certainly, it was a road of excess ... I just loved to wander all over New England, by car, train or, at best, by foot, to let the thickety mysteries of the Hub, for this transplanted Arizonan, find me.
So then, from downtown Lowell, I just got up, and started walking toward the Mer O Wac bridge, toward the home of this earth woman, a graphic designer and co-conspirator who had agreed to create a logo for the self-publishing effort ... the mission ... she had long flaxen hair, long flaxen body, as well … could it be an accident? Finding that place. Along the way, wham! A moment of complete synchronicity. I walk right up to the Kerouac shrine. Ker O Wac by the Mer O Wac. Never even knew there was such a thing. A veritable stonehenge for the New Journalism.
So now, the coffee is ready. Time for the imaginary press conference. The pouch, a pirate flag unfolded and draped over my shoulders, like a cape. An act of bizarre eccentricity worthy of a Lord Byron or Robert Bly. There are imaginary snickers all around, and I stand (the performance artist) on the cement benches there, part of the circuitous shrine, with big stone slabs circling me, each with bits of Kerouac’s writings, his poetry … imaginating a bunch of nobody listeners around me, listening to me, nobody, signifying nothing. I light up a cig, an Indian bidi, blowing out the smoke for effect. To make it worse, I stand on the center stool of the Kerouac shrine, and my voice begins to boom as the sound waves bounce around within this literary circle, standing on this sorcerer’s stump: "Click, clack, paddywhack, I just met Jack Kerou-oooooouuu-wack! Right along the Mer-O-Wack, the mighty Merrickmack," and so on, with nobody around to listen in, nobody to say, “shut up” … or, “I knew Jack Kerouac, and you ain’t no Jack, Jack.” Those not in audience, the members of the nobody press, would’ve just whispered sour nothings and giggled, but with the acoustics, if they really had been there, could hear the other: “What a piece of work! Standing on the shoulders of this giant, Kerouac! Indeed!”

~

Where am I now, or that is, where do we go? Nowhere, so much, because at the end of it all, it exists in each and everyone’s mind. The Road, that is. Think of it like the impossible endless search for the Holy Grail, negotiating the storehouse of each person’s personal mythology, where all of their angels and demons live. It’s the shining city of light. A place the imagination (and therefore the soul) can go into infinite directions. Just on the edge of touch, but certainly not your mind. For some people, it’s a whole barnyard of beings and deities, gods and their avatars. To meet the Ethereans, perhaps, at first. To ask for their guidance … all quite within the literary tradition of summoning the muses … yes, yes ….
There’s a code for this quest. Comes in handy. Comes in studying the land, the symmetries of it all, the way the old Freemasons even lined up the old North Shore lodges, leaving clues in the aging stone bridges crossing the river in Haverhill, Lowell, North Andover … Ah yes, code is law ... just follow the sun east to west, note the charted streets, the compass-like points of civilization. The passwords are being all handed out now, then, to all of the nobodies there. Indeed it is. Just like the Da Vinci code, too, but in this case it’s a real story of that search? Some of it perhaps. But it’s all a lost doggy story, too, really. Of a borderline perp trying to find his own little lost doggy. Yes, yes … explains the pain … the loss, the endless searching .... You do need to be able to work your machine to get to my machine and then download either an e-book or print-on-demand book, or fuck’n’hell, just read my mind. It’s all tipping over now … pouring out.
So the code is the computer, the ghost between the digits one and zero, and all of these digitized geeks, who like to read about wizards, the enviro digeratis, the online sorcerers, all of those not in the audience … except, perhaps, as, well, kind of personal pathway: The road to superinformation. Like Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.”

~

The road could’ve begun, a ticket for a tricked up mule born then bought on the Smolak Farm in Andover, actually, when I had a long discussion about rabbits. Actually, books with “Sully,” as in author William Sullivan, who wrote numerous short, somewhat quirky, oddly sinister children’s books. It was the fall of 2000. Election day was looming. It was a beautiful day. Picking apples, wandering through the trees, picking a pumpkin with my little girl. Talking of wolves and rabbits. Then I met “Sully” and saw what he was trying to do, and is still doing, writing fairy tales about rabbits and a whole barnyard of his own characters. I was the senior editor for Access Internet Magazine, with its 11 million readers, weekly, another kind of content farm, and I suddenly realized the connection between the mythological constructs of William Blake and the hierarchical order of the online, and therefore, real world. And more than that, what it might mean for a self-publisher of numerous, smaller, shorter, more digestible reads. In other words, making e-books, William Blake-style. Some dumb idea, huh?
But, actually, the experiment in experiential literature all started,
also, with a pirate flag. That is really the crux of the whole thing. That was my first logo. The Jolly Roger.
What kind of Peter Pan fantasies are we talking about here? Now? No, that’s right … I remember ... That medium was the message. The pirate flag was the crux of the whole thing, the Skull & Crossbones vibe back then. A kind of upgrade from the X-files journey of the 1990s … the pirate flag … the crux … the whole thing. Oh well, maybe I really should backtrack? Provide even more back story before the Bush era even begins? When moving through a lot of the ephemeral stuff quickly, we are well advised to keep the mind still and the eyes sharp. The truth will fly right past you.
Okay, so there’s the election. I voted for Nader. Who knew? Then, this long period of a couple of weeks, then a month, then six weeks of nobody knowing who the hell is in charge anymore, right?
Then came a solar storm … A solar storm hit New England. I looked it up. Nobody believed me, except for a lady in a gas station pay counter near the freeway in Andover. A lake of fire in the sky, over Lawrence. I thought the whole place was ablaze with lightning. Yes, yes, that was the first day of forty days of fire that I can count, forty days of rain …

~

Look it up yourself, a freak solar storm hit New England, the whole earth, really, from that point, sometime between the election and December 13, 2000. Apparently, it was the end of a 13-year cycle of unusual solar activity. My theory is that it sent vibrations turbulatin’ on into the very core of the earth. I was certainly feeling them: After the Supreme Court had ruled to decide the election, I just broke loose. I wanted nothing to do with this country, or, any other. It was as if a bolt of lightning had briefly lit up every one of our institutions and revealed, for just one brief flash of X-ray, every one of our major institutions as faulty, frail and hopelessly corrupt. For me, looking at it from the dark, wintery, London-esque Mordor of Boston, one big, giant, monstrous … well … one big complete bogus ... Mythville. Not that there was much of an audience for this kind of publishing, expression, through the blogs and so on … a specialized audience, indeed. Audience? At that point, I was just one guy with a blogger … A voice crying out in the wilderness …. Yeah sure, that’s what we all believe, but like the ancient Google myth, it’s really just endless pourings of pitchers of water into a crack in the earth, an attempt to cool off the planet, or heat it up, who knows? … So, as my world was coming apart, and I was determined to tap out of the system, especially creatively, in pursuit of this self-publishing, self-expressive dream, I decided I needed to network with like-minded people.
So, what I did was …. And really, trust me, I’m not this person anymore … I took the pirate flag, which I intended to give to my future-ex-father in law for Christmas, and I hung it out to flap in the breezes on the front porch, right out there to challenge the American flags, innocuous sailing flags, and so on … for whatever reason, people in New England alll have flag mounts on their porches. I wanted to signify to anyone who might get the code: Panic! Panic! It’s time to take action. It’s time to be a pirate.
But action came from unexpected quarters: My wife threatened divorce , then followed through with those threats. My in-laws, Sicilian mob-style, tried to get me kicked out of our place there in North Andover. They called the cops. Stirred up the neighbors. Threatened to send thugs over to kick me out. Took the family car, a kind of wedding gift, away, leaving me wheeless. Once, when I had left the home, they snuck into the basement and pulled out all of the fuses, leaving the place completely dark. I guess they figured I would never be able to get the old place back up and running. In fact, I’m pretty damned good with matters electric. They called the landlord and said I was burning candles in the house and leaving wax all over the place, like some kind of creepy Vincent Price.
O sure, there were candles … Yes, but I only burned them at dusk, as a ritual before more writing and blogging and so on. I was in mourning: Look, I'm not saying I wasn’t getting a pretty weird ... approaching the borderline … yes, well past, already, by the time I … I was just expressing the anxiety and turbulance I was feeling all around me. For God's sake. It was the year 2000!
Since both misery and mystery love company, some pretty cool people got curious about what I was up to, and started to come over to the house. I’m sure this sudden new type of gathering in the neighborhood only served to stir things up even more. By this time, the North Andover police really wanted my ass in a sling. One cop, a long-timer macho kid, who lived as a townie all his life, came over, and asked me, after I smarted off about “search and seizure” and some such lunacy, he asked me if I was a lawyer. I said “Yes, I went to Harvard law school.” It was true. What I didn’t say was it was only for one day to attend an Internet-related conference on MP3s and Napster. Anyway, I was obviously going head-to-head with the Gillette crate-packing mentality around there.
That’s when I really started to meet the witches of Essex county, too. They would come over, hang out. I would play loud music and try to describe what, exactly, was going wrong with me, trying to gert off medication I had been prescribed for my ADD … and they’d get to play the healers …. People from a salon in North Andover. In fact we had designers, Webmasters, entrepeneurs, like-minded folk came over, too … but there was a strong New Age vibe …. This Reiki therapy trainee came over and practiced on us, for myself, something of a hallucinatory experience. Was it Mesmer or was it Memorex, who cares? It was a real salon, Parisian style, and I was that cat Cagliostro. Or, at least one of them: the millenial metrosexual man. It only lasted for a short while, though, a few weeks at the most ... it was short-lived because I had decided to get out of there. The Sicilians around the corner, my former New England family fully militarized against me, were getting to be too much …
The whole plan was to end up in Telluride, Colorado, writing my tales from my heart-home, anyway. So with so many problems for me in the neighborhood, my pending divorce, and all of the lousy bitterness and stupidity that entailed, I decided to leave, going back to my friends in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. From there, at about 9,500 feet in altitude, I launched the first incarnation of my brainchild, my Frankenstein, my personal obsession, this text, my message to you, dear reader … and Bush had just been elected … the dot-com bust just a few months away …
Then, I lived in Telluride for a year, then came back to New England, living in Ipswich this time, in order to clear up legal stuff related to the divorce. But right as I moved back, this time to Ipswich, September 11 changed everything. I was living in Concord, Massachusetts, home of the first “shot heard ‘round the world” on the day of the attack. All I can most clearly recall is the complete silence of the skies to the east, over Boston, where the hijackings and subsequent attacks had begun.
I moved to Haverhill because it was cheaper, times getting tough, setting up a small metamedia bookstore right there on the street. And, of course, I always put my pirate flag out on the window to attract like-minded people and ward away the foul spirits, too. Artists. Writers. Programmers. Scammers. Lunatics wandering that unwalled insane asylum called Haverhill. Perfect town for people with Peter Pan fantasies in their heads. Lot of Captain Hooks floating around up and down the main old downtown quad, home of Arichies’ Comix, Viet Nam war vets, most likely … up and down the street drinking beer and me bashing away on my laptop in the Irish bar downstairs. I loved that place. A writer’s place, that bar, for this message to you, dear reader.
Please keep on, see … I almost starved. Trying to sell e-books and print-on-demand poetry is not, exactly, the stuff of commerce, you’ll no doubt find. You can only go so far with a pirate flag in your shop window, as well. But the public doesn't give a fuck about even the shadows flickering on the wall anymore. So until they do, it’s to thine own self be true, with time still to hope everybody else eventually realizes the only actual political boundary, that of Gaia, is both rock, living and atmospheric in nature and moving, through space, on the moment at perilous speeds ... the road going onward … the little doggies as lost as ever … and the weather spinning madly about … heated by the undulating currents beneath the overheated earth …

Lest we try to remember ...
Here's what I think about organized religion: Right after 9/11, you'll wishfully forget, there were the anthrax attacks, and, after that, a rash of copycat hoax mailings. One day, while I was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, I went to an interview for a journalism job in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it just so happened on that day that the whole staff had been freaked out by one of these copycat mailings.
So, as an ever helpful soul, I told them about a theory I had based on my own wacked out mind at the time. If you could take your mail, put it at the bottom of a box, then cover it up with dirty laundry, especially dirty socks, then leave it there for a while, you could neutralize the anthrax with your own defending fungus microbes. Then, you could read your mail without worries.
Well, as you can imagine, I didn't get the job. But as far as the anthrax went, it never got me. And I felt a lot better.
That, in a shoebox, is my metaphor for organized religion. A bunch of dirty laundry, put in a box and hidden for a while, to make everyone feel better. And so they do. Who am I to argue?

~

What has happened to artistic expression since Sept. 11 as it’s transmitted through
any kind of media (or anyone claiming to be a medium), from the political satire of
"The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" to the mega-bombastic sequel to the classic post-apocalyptic thriller in any theater near you. To the episodes of “Survivor.” To every creative impulse that every tried to be a light in the darkness; to all those media images that are flowing through us now: How do we respond? How do we deal creatively with our own struggle to find the appropriate voice? How do we know the right thing to say, when we see death, so much death? He do we contend with what David Byrne of the Talking Heads once anticipated in “Life During Wartime”:

“Ain’t got no speakers
Ain’t got no headphones,
Ain’t got no music to play.”

After many knee-jerk reactions to Sept. 11, including a slew of benefit performances
by rock stars and actors, there was a shaky sense of assurance. After an alleged victory over the Taliban, followed by their resurgence, Americans crawled out of the foxholes and flooded back into the malls, then the floods and economic crisis of late 2008 flooded right back out. Nevertheless, Sunday’s gladiatorial epic, otherwise known as the NFL, stormed right on through from Super Bowl to Super Bowl. Like a country immune to war, then, not so immune. A country dotted like a push pin map of the Stars and Stripes remains as a menacing reminder of who we have become ... and then the election of 2008 ... as if every now and then the electorate feels guilty for its leadership and responds.
For several years, anything that strays from a patriotic vision was likely to be, with the force of a fully diligent flight crew, wrestled to the ground and whisked away: A terrible beauty was born. But where does it stand now?

~

Seth Butler, out of a concern for air pollution on North Shore of Massachusetts
and a need to burn film for a photo essay for a class at Montserrat College, loaded a
roll of film and fired.
He pointed his weapon, a truth-telling device, at the churned and weathered brown
spires of the Salem Power Plant. Since photos never lie, or, at least, a picture beats a thousand words, he figured in some small way the images might flesh out of the mystery and wonder of the place. He thought the suspected poisons made possible on a daily basis by the plant might be explicated by his pictorial essay, and through this kind of truth we might all be saved from this inconvenience, or, at least, that we might all enjoy some breathtaking pictures of the alleged poisoning taking place.
In fact, such satanic mills have been fodder for artists since William Blake. In fact,
power plants and factories will always be great targets for interesting photos. Especially now. Technological wonders perched on American shores will always make great targets. For artists. And for terrorists.
Which, for Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, became part of the problem.
After Sept. 11, as a he snapped on the lens and took in the fall New England air, he
looked at the monumental smokestacks, trying to see what the relationship was between
himself, the lens and the world at war----not so much the brother-against-brother battle, but man-against-nature war.
“I was just struggling with how to deal with it,” he says.

~

If the medium is the message, then the date, Sept. 11, is the portal where we pour all
of our pain, and then, put it on display.
The message is our mantra, our artistic Alamo. Lest we forget, every shark-eyed cub
reporter tooling around the town halls of Salem, Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead
has felt a nearly subconscious duty to post that date, Sept. 11, at least once or twice, like staples into the newsprint, glossy or cheap, of whatever passes for local media.
One reporter, well after the attacks, typed “Sept. 11” in four times within the text of an article that had absolutely nothing to do with the war or terror, real or imaginary.
(Well, actually, even in some tangential way, it was hard to fail to find some way the war against terror might apply to each and every thing we did in a daily lives, from trips to the mall to articles written under intense deadline.)
Plagued by nightmares before a pilgrimage to Ground Zero in New York City, the
writer provided repeated semi-accidental advertising for our national numeral of
mourning, anger and fear, for all of the shell-shocked sensibilities, destructive or
creative, which launched our nation into a heightened state of awareness (whatever that means) on Sept. 11. To write Sept. 11 in copy, in short, became our patriotic duty as muckrackers and documentarians for our times.
For example, so far this article has used the date five times. The date, Sept. 11 (OK,
that’s six) flows like water, like shorthand, or better yet, a link to the streaming media of shock, horror, and yes, nationalistic fervor, our personal bond to (what it believes to be) justice and (unbelievable) vengeance. By expressing oneself in this way, in times of mass hypnotic states of hysteria, war, famine and scary bad TV, we discover the most constructive choice in terms of reacting to the world around us.
I mean, why send a missile when maybe a simple e-mail note or a Hallmark card
would do? “Hey,” we write, “Remember Sept. 11, and get well soon.”

~

As they say, the medium (Or, the media) is the message. So is writing the date, Sept.
11 (seven). On posters, stamps, newspaper supplements, whatever we can get our hands
on.
But what is the most appropriate way to express oneself on the big blank page of life
during a time of national trauma, and yes, tight security? The Urizen archons of control, the warlords and the convergent media paradigms, are all in sync with the Union at War.
What if you are a dissenter? A pacifist? With dark skin? Maybe even a Canadian.
Or worse, an Islamic art dealer who needs to take a plane to Paris?
A Hub taxi driver?
A Quaker who just woke up one day, and, feeling his or her oats, decided they had
something to say?
A photographer on the North Shore of Massachusetts who pointing and firing near
some power plant smokestacks?
Better think twice. First figure out if it’s naughty, or, nice. Think twice before you
click.
But then the reversal came true, especially after the release of "Fahrenheit 911" before the election of 2004. Slowly and surely, as the war became less popular, a whole new sense of media emerged.

~

Seth Butler, age 22, photography student at Montserrat, isn’t an idiot. As a cub
photojournalist he knew that when firing off snapshots of satanic mills in Salem during wartime, it’s best to let the most immediately available authority in on what you are up to.
“I went up to the police officer out front of the plant, gave them three IDs, and
warned them that I was shooting photos for a project,” he says.
Butler thought he’d received permission, at that point, since he was on public
property, to start firing away with his telephoto lens. The guard at the gate said sure, whatever.
“But then this guy pulls up,” a security guard, he says. “I just wanted to do my work.
They told me I had to leave.”

~

The bombardment of the global media, crashing all day, all night upon the New
England shores, lighting up the giant video screens of Times-Square (still standing) and the pubs of London (last time checked), and yes, your living room, became overwhelming.
Our sense of freedom and free expression, in every aspect of our daily lives, from
Paris to Portsmouth, became critically impacted. Especially so for those of us in the
curious position of being at the seacoast front of a new kind of war when the media
buzzword, as in “terror,” is the message, and the enemy could be just about anyone.
“Since Sept. 11, as a photographer,” says Ron DiRito, a teacher at Montserrat whose
specialty is art and media and its context and meaning in society, “I don’t think they
understand what it’s like for us. I think the rest of the country doesn’t have the same kind of …,” he pauses, looking for ways to explain how it feels to be at the front of this new war, then, completing the thought: “ Everybody in New York understands it better than other people in the country. The physical distance changes our perception of something. There is this overwhelming sensibility.
“We have learned to tolerate each other better, but on the other hand, there is that
thing going on, you don’t know who to suspect. This is still relatively trying to be
understood. I don’t think we have processed it culturally and socially.”
But, once it did, America's appetite for violence in the media soared ...

~

“They watched me leave and get back into my car,” says Seth Butler, spurned
photojournalist after being unable to capture very much of any possible dangers,
through photographic realism, of the alleged poisoning of the sky at the Salem power
plant.
As he moved on into an intersection, at a speed of 15 miles per hour, the legal limit,
a white pickup truck sped in front of Butler’s vehicle and slammed on the brakes. “He
must of have going thirty five when he went by me and stopped,” he says.
“This cop says, ‘Some people want to talk to you.’ ”
Another police car pulled up, and then another. The local arm of the security state
was coming down on Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, like something out of a
Raymond Chandler novel.
“A large black SUV with tinted windows pulled up next. I kept my hands in clear
view,” he said. “I had the film …,” he laughed nervously, visibly shaken, as he spread
photos of American flag imagery upon a table in the media lab basement at Montserrat.
“I was in possession,” he admits, “of concealed film.”

~

For all practical intents, seemingly, the latest CD by Madonna was for several years rendered not so much obscene but most certainly oblique. On the surface level (which really the only level you can really make money in the entertainment business) it’s a commercial question. What were audiences looking for?
Perhaps everyone had seen enough. That was at least the sentiment immediately
after the attacks exploded so cinematically onto the real world’s stage. But things have changed. While it was hard to know what to feel, at first, the natural inclination toward unity, even for writers, artists and performers, who are often malcontents and social renegades, even they seemed to join up and salute to the brave new paradigm: grieve now, kick ass later.
Oh sure, there was that initial sense that pyrotechnic violence on theater and
television screens was a thing of the past. But that was naive, it has been proven.
“A lot of people had the same impression, that it seemed like Hollywood, not the
real thing,” said David Goss, director of fine arts at Gordon College, of the terrorizing video of the Sept. 11 attacks. Prior to the terrible events of that day, and the subsequent season of terror that followed and continues to this day, the main concern for the planners of fall concerts, for example, might be quality, recognition, publicity, recognition, ticket sales, recognition, who might get top billing, and oh yeah, recognition. But now, everything has changed.
“People are feeling uneasy about what they once considered to be so exciting,”
Goss said.
But that's all different now. You can rate films in terms of tonnage of TNT now.

~

My first night in Ipswich was Sept. 18, 2001, and it revealed something … at least in
terms of the ripple effects (tidal wave, actually, in hardy Ipswich sea-shanty talk) of the post-Sept. 11 realization. I was feeling world weary. So much moving from town to town. I just wanted to be an old tree, not a burned out leaf in the crosswind of global or civil war. All the same, on that day, Sept. 18, I was feeling thankful for having found some shelter in the storm.
More out of accident than a sense of patriotism, I wore my blue Ralph Lauren, “Polo
Jeans Company, RL,” baseball cap, which features stripes, but no stars, because Mr.
Lauren is the only star to be allowed on this particular head-based insignia. I was a
human billboard for Ralph Lauren, patriot … even if most people only recognized my
tribal signifier: red, white and blue.
I had a beat up used copy of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man” in my back pocket, as well as a childlike curiosity about this strange town called Ipswich. Down the street I went, toward the town center, a babe in the woods beneath a dusky sky of implied imaginary terror.

~

Was the media really ready to fess up, since Osama-style violence is only the copycat
caricature of three, hmmm, maybe four late ’80s get-the-terrorist films, two of those
starring Bruce Willis, who can walk on the White House lawn, most likely, any day of
the week without an invitation. Are post-Sept. 11 tastes no longer able to stomach the
video violence?
Yeah, right.
You only need to consider the many years conditioning, that is, what’s required to
stomach a totalitarian storm of Christmas-season escapes into Star Wars, hobbits and
pre-teenage detective wizards, Monsters, Inc., The Sopranos and on into the phantasm we go ... The Christmas of 2008 it became another of a long line of films with furies frames of evermore destruction.
In the global mythic village, the plastic monsters and war toys are as real, within the own scale, as anything you can find in the jumbled up world. Just another mask for our national fascination with violence, which is still, quite surely, anything but satiated.
While the purpose of art has not changed, the art of re-purposing myth towards the
designs of the machine are more than ever apparent. But money machines, still, easy to
come by, for some, are less easy for others. Starving artists included. So then, the big money still wins. The purpose of mass entertainment (as opposed to art), taking its Dec. 7 queue from the way the film industry rallied to the cause in the 1940s, now becomes a mouthpiece for that very same machine.
And it’s only beginning: Coming to a theater near you – a lock-step, achy breaky
heart sort of thing, with a plastic Bill Murray doll for the marketing tie-in. It’s a pull-upyour-bootstraps at the boot-camp sorta flick. With real napalm, and, real renegades to storm the unsafe gates of the Republic.

~

Just then, it happened: a spontaneous moment of humanity. A grizzled old man
walked toward me. Small towns such as Ipswich, especially those that have made peace
with nature, require us to say hello. It’s the decent thing to do. But a week after Sept. 11 everyone was being decent to one another. A crying of our lot in each and every eye.
But this time my fellow pedestrian and I appeared to be on a collision course. The
man just came right up to me, took my hand and shook it, saying, “God bless you,
brother.”
I was taken aback. Maybe giggled out of a sense of surprise. I figured he saw my
cap and was thanking me for my heroism. Yes, Ipswich is a friendly little place, but
connections like these, random acts of humanity, were taking place all over the country.
For the first time in a long time we noticed each other, realizing we all had something – loss – to share.

~

As Boston political satirist Jimmy Tingle put it, in a post-Sept. 11 performance at
the Wingate Street Micro Theatre in Haverhill, Massachusetss, “everything has
changed.”
As part of the performance, serious even for a satirist in less apocalyptic climes, he
read from a poem he had written in reaction to Sept. 11, “911: Prayer for America.”

There’s a hole in the tip of Manhattan
A hole in the soul of America
A hole in the center of our psyche
A hole in the foundation of our confidence
There’s a hole in the faith of our country
That fills churches in search of our God
There’s a crack in the national mirror
empty chairs around the family table
9
dark houses of our missing neighbors
Vacant desks of our absent workers
On our streets,
There's a wail from the widows with candles
sobs from the orphaned with pictures
the face breaks on the lawyer of the dead women’s husband
flags and flowers for the public servants
There’s a hole in the soul of America
Afraid with the televised pictures
Numb with the morning papers
Grieving for the land they loved
Grieving for the land they lost
Grieving for the innocent victims
Grieving for the broken families
Grieving for the friends still weeping
Grieving for the ones who fight fire
Grieving for the ones who fight crime
Grieving for the volunteers by the thousands
Grieving for the City that never Sleeps
Grieving for the City on a Hill
There’s a hole in the soul of Humanity
And I pray for all of our leaders
Good people and well intentioned
Condemned to retaliation,
Doomed to retribution
Sentenced to seek revenge

~

It happened again in the local café. Strangers meeting eye to eye, recognizing the
shock and the grief and pain. We all had good radar for it, at least until Thanksgiving.
We were awakened out of our complacency, if for just a few weeks, months or years,
10 depending on your sensitivity to such things as alcohol, Duncan Donuts coffee or
intensive psychotherapy.
Times such as these bring out the best, and also the worst. It has always been that
way. In 1916, a small contingent of Irish patriots (today we might call them terrorists), took over a post office and ended up dying in a martyrdom of British bullets and fire.
The poet, W.B. Yeats, reflecting on the shock waves the event created in Irish
society, wrote the following: “All is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.”
America became terrible beauty, then the bloom came off the thorny rose bush ...

~

After his 45-minute roust, Seth Butler, spurned photojournalist, put his Greenpeace
passions aside over the Salem power plant, and started taking photographs of American
flags. But rather than puffing up his frames with a patriotic fervor, his eye seemed to be finding something else. An irony. A horror. A beauty. A terror. And more than anything else, a sense of alienation.
“For the first time in my life, I was feeling like a stranger in my own country,” he
said. “They basically insulted me. They asked me why I wasn’t in Vermont (which is
where his family lives). I was being very open about the whole thing. I was being very
civil about the whole thing.
“I’m trying to deal with an event, a problem, over air quality, carcinogens, a serious
matter. I ended up being shut down. I tried to work from farther away, and ended up
trying to look at it in different contexts.
“But never did I think that I was going to run into the FBI as a college student.
“This was history. I didn’t want to give up. Somebody needs to be working,
recording. It doesn’t stop, and I’m not going to either.”
Of the flag photo project, a follow up to his season of hope, terror, frustration,
whatever, Butler has decided to call the series “Tattered.”
A terrible beauty was born.

~

During those fall nights and days in Ipswich, I worked the late-night copy desk at
The Salem Evening News. More than anything else, I remember the horrible anxiety I
felt each time the 10 p.m. news came on in the newsroom. It got to the point where I
was afraid to look over my shoulder and at the television. But still, I got all of the
sound. Each night, the local anchorpersons would gleefully report the day’s horrors, the new death count for the Sept. 11 attacks, and, of course, handy health tips for the best way to deal with the anthrax threat.
One night I decided to ask another copy editor, who also lived in Ipswich, about the
“God bless you” guy. He told me a story that I did not expect.
He said the man was a kind of local loony. Somewhere along the line the man, who
had been a boxer but decent civil servant, lost his marbles. Something to do with a
divorce. Figures.
In fact, he had been coming up to people in Ipswich and blessing them for years.
This stunned me. My impression, as first impressions often are, was incorrect. The
“God bless you” guy’s greeting to me was just another day in the life of Ipswich. It had nothing to do at all with the sudden wash of compassion and kindness in American life.
He was always like that.
It was then that I realized this: While everything has indeed since Sept. 11 has
changed, the biggest change of all, the one that I couldn’t detect, was within me.
So, let me just say this: God bless you all, brothers. A terrible beauty, reborn, faded and then became, what?

~

Word on the street got ugly, especially when it comes to baseline of public discourse we reached after the little Town of Telluride raised its pirate flag over the Bush/Cheney impeachment debate.

The street lingo, as it exists online, became particularly ugly, coarse, beyond just polarized. Terms such as "rabid," "vociferous lunatic-extremist fringe group" and "liberal-minded yellow cowards" were thrown at the Telluride Town Council during the summer of 2007 and supporters of the citizen-driven initiative, and that really hurt. Made one want to take up terms like "Bushite," indicating someone with unconditional love for a Texan with millennial zeal in the pursuit of oil-driven global warfare, in order to respond, and honestly, the whole thing could make you feel queasy.
Most thought the town should back off, turn its back on the issue and start waxing up those ol' snowboards again. Everyone should smile and spend a lot more time thinking about improving customer service. That's all. Town Council should change its vote – in fact tear up the "impeach" document, and keep its mouths shut. Forget sending it to a vote of the people, because in this secluded, insulated coven of pinko fringe groupies, we all know how that vote would turn out. We'd only get more nasty treatment, and then they'd all feel more poorly about the war than they already did.
How can anyone, sitting way high up on this mountain perch, ascertain whether the war was bad or good? They seemed to be immune from war up there, too, and a long, long way from the truthiness of our times. Who knew if there were any weapons of mass destruction from way up there. Heck, nobody could even be sure if there was actually any oil in Iraq, either. Local prices for gas indicate there was a shortage, then prices dropped, then went back up, so who knew?
In calling for an impeachment, the town endorsed a long and brutal and quite frankly embarrassing process that, like it did for President Bill Clinton, would simply add an asterisk to the presidential legacy of President Bush, but wouldn't stop the really ambiguous – if yes, unpleasant – things going on out there. At least not right away. In addition, a lot of winter visitors who were at least partially involved preferred to relax from conducting oil-driven global warfare with millennial zeal while they recreated at 10,000 feet. They spent good money for their vampire time, and when a stressful war is going on, finding quality vampire time is worth its weight in Amex gold.
Since Telluride's economy, as it serves the top tier of our society, is often the beneficiary of trickle-down war proceeds obtained with millennial zeal, there was no backing off. Vampire time was sweet (while it lasted).

~

The interesting phenomenon about suicide cults is their leadership, how it reacts to any challenges to their belief system. Due to the blindness induced from being indoors with too much high-octane religious fervor in the room, a demigod millenarian prophet tends to refute all outside input when backed into a corner. Absolutism is the toxin, here, after all. As suicide cults are confronted with more and more contrary information, they become more and more convinced the evil-doing they are railing against exists, and it's the information bringers gathered outside who become bogeymen, or, in this case, "traitors."
This is why the "Bushites," in terms of their lingo, slammed so much bacon from the "traitor" tray during the election. The contrary information became incredibly intense, and so did the counter response. Their reactions became equally intense. At the White House, they were surrounded on all fronts, just like Waco, by Congress, by a whole competing field of Hillarys and Obamas, by a majority of the electorate, by lurking terrorists, by a United Nations worth of nations, too, as well as mad-bloggers, gay bongers and fake news talk-show hosts ...
In the 1960s the radicals all got together and circled the Pentagon by joining hands in order to, supposedly, exorcize the demons within (Hah! Nice try). However, that seemed to be a dangerous move in this case. The Bush Administration, as well as the Bushites, entered into such a strong state of denial, based on the below-the-belt, guttural tone of their "just drink the Kool-aide" arguments,if the White House were circled in that way, the man would press the button, Jim Jones style, just to prove his talking points on the need for global warfare with millennial zeal.