Medic Remembers Stitching Up Soldiers in Iraq on Gurneys Next to the Terrorists Who Shot Them
It all begins with an idea.
June 26, 2017
He could tell a story about seeing a building blowing up, rescuing survivors, thousands dead, and you’d probably believe it. That sounds like a war story. But Michael Anthony experienced Iraq mostly from the inside of an operating room, spending hours on end helping doctors patch wounds for terrorists and soldiers alike.
“Whenever I think of my favorite stories, I don’t think of courageous stories,” Anthony said in a phone call preparing for the Warrior Writers workshop at UMass Boston today. “I just think of these stories that show the weirdness of people because we're at war. We're doing silly, crazy things.”
Mortars hit, sailing in dangerously from outside the wire, sending him running to bunkers from the gym, from chow, but he never knew exactly who shot at him, or shot anyone himself. Instead he saw the enemy’s insides. As an Operating Room Specialist Anthony saw blood, guts, death up close and doctors trying to hypnotize their Arab patients into becoming double agents for the American war effort.
“I like the ridiculous silly aspect, because it's real people at war, and I like to hear stories of real people doing real silly, stupid things,” he said.
Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Michael Anthony, 31, joined the Army Reserve in 2003, served six years, two on active duty, one year working as a medic in operating rooms in Iraq, 2006-2007. He grew up in a military family, father in the Army, grandfathers served. His four older brothers and one of his two sisters all joined the military, serving in various branches. One of his brothers is now an officer in the Army.
Anthony grew up wanting to do two things, write a book and serve his country. Now he’s done both. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Boston area, and his advice to anyone who wants to write a memoir is just start writing. Go.
"Some people spend too much time aiming," He said. "You gotta fire it out there. You gotta be a person of action, be a person of writing."
Anthony’s first book, Mass Casualties, takes excerpts directly from journals he wrote while deployed. He started writing the book shortly after returning, and Simon and Schuster published it in 2009, the year he left the Army. The book is dark and moody, but in conversation Anthony sometimes sounds nostalgic for the time he served.
“In Iraq I probably laughed my ass off the hardest that I've ever laughed in my life just because of those late nights. You're working three or four days straight, zero sleep, you haven't eaten in like a day and a half, and you're just hanging out with your buddies chain smoking cigarettes, just making fun of each other and laughing,” he said.
“The military is the easiest place to make friends. I've never made friends as easily as I did in the military. It's just natural. It just happens. You're thrown into those situations where you need that companionship to keep your sanity. It's the friendships that help us put up with all the crap that comes along with being in the military, or crappy leaders or anything.”
Mass Casualties is a compelling first hand account of a “god awful” command with the specificity of a single experience. It’s one story, but there are thousands like it. Anthony does not try to tell the story of the whole war, just his part from his perspective. His writing is frank, funny, and not especially reverent.
“There's that whole mythos about everyone who puts on the uniform is just magically transformed into this amazing person, but the fact of the matter is there's a lot of heroes out there, but there's a lot of dirt bags too,” he said.
“Commanders in my unit were just deplorable people, putting people's life on the line just to get awards, and just lying about things.”
During its time in Iraq, Anthony’s unit was the most investigated in the entire country. The Criminal Investigation Command (CID) looked into mail fraud, malfeasance, and gang activity among other things. The investigation got a little ridiculous, and the oddity of the way the bureaucracy went about trying to root out evil from within makes Michael Anthony laugh aloud to this day.
“So over in Iraq we had a Halloween party, and a buddy of mine dressed up as a gangster,” he said. “People dressed up using war paint to put whiskers on their nose, going around as a cat, people going around as a ghost, just a Halloween party on base. My buddy dresses up as a gangster. He's got a do-rag and stuff like that. The CID sees this guy dressed up as a gangster, and they start investigating, thinking he's a gang member hiding within our unit.”
“So the CID starts investigating us, but it was funny because some of the doctors and the anesthesiologists when we had enemy combatants under anesthesia in the hospital, they started to try to hypnotize them to be double agents.”
“When we had these insurgents under anesthesia we'd be like, ‘You love America. You love America. You want to kill all of these other terrorists.’ We're trying to hypnotize these insurgents to be double agents while they're under this intense anesthesia. Once they found out that the unit was under investigation they stopped trying to hypnotize patients because paranoia runs high when you're trying to run these secret hypnosis operations.”
Anthony said he likes war stories that shows the real side of war, the real side of people. While in Iraq he worked on two bases, first in Mosul and then in Al Asad, in the middle of nowhere. In his book, Anthony describes treating enemy combatants next to wounded soldiers and the hospital where he worked in Mosul treated locals as well.
“I remember one time this guy gave me a kiss on the cheek because we helped save his son or daughter's life, or something like that. You know how in Iraqi culture they're a little bit more hands on and kissing, so that was kind of weird. He just comes up to me and my buddy and gives us a kiss on the cheek.”
“I turned 21 when I was over there, and I was just this green Joe who had this naive outlook on life, and once I went to war I did not come home as naive or green as I went there. So I definitely came home a little bit harder on the inside, rough around the edges.”
When he got back from Iraq tail end of 07, Anthony had about $50 grand in his pocket. He spent it a lot of it on pick up classes, and going out to drink and meet women. His new book, Civilianized, published by Pulp last December, describes how he came back and reintegrated into civilian life after a year away at war.
“I was a big nerd in high school, and I thought that when I came back if I could just learn how to talk to girls or get laid, that's what would bring me out of my funk. That's what would make me not be depressed and want to kill myself so I started taking all of these dating classes.”
“I think a lot of us had some struggles coming home. Out of my unit so far we've already lost three guys to suicide and there's a bunch of other guys that I know that have had problems with drugs and alcohol and stuff like that.”
“Oversees, in medical, we see a lot of different sides of the war, so we did see a lot of death, we almost died ourselves a lot of times, and those crappy leaders, it just wears away at your soul just seeing people fighting for a bit of colored ribbon or willing to lie or put your brothers in arms in harm's way just so they can look good and get promotions, so I think those combine to wear out your soul for a lot of us in my unit.”
“I didn't come back in the best shape either, just like a bunch of us. I was still taking Vicodin and Ambien, which I was prescribed in Iraq just to sleep and deal with some pain. I kept on doing those when I came home, and was drinking a lot, and smoking like a pack and a half a day. I was just in that really bad head space. That's what my second book is about. It's about coming back from Iraq and dealing with that transition back home.”
In both of his books, Anthony offers anecdotes that expose the honorable and mundane reasons the reasons people join the military, for family, for money, for security. He left the Army because he got what he needed, some money for college, some experience, and he didn't love war or the work he did in support.
"My job was easy enough," he said. "All I did was assist doctors during surgery, so it was an intense job. But a medical job is one of those jobs you gotta really love to do. I didn't love it."
So after his deployment, he moved on to college, and got an MFA from Lesley University. Military experience, like any experience, will change you. These days Anthony says his worldview changes month to month based on what he's seen, heard, read.
"Anything in life can affect you," he said. "If you're not constantly changing, you're a fool.”
Talking that Old Mannishness
It all begins with an idea.
The most disturbing thing Granddad told me, Grammy would not lie to SS Natzis about hiding Jews in his basement. He said it as a compliment. My grandparents held that Kantian/Christian ideal to never ever lie, an authoritarian, fear based dictum.
The way he put it, “Your grandmother really straightened me out.” He did not frame it as “the categorical imperative,” or to do unto others. Instead he explained his (die rather than lie) reasoning with this anecdote:
“I hit my sister. I was about five years old, and she told our mom. She asked me, ‘Did you hit her.’ And I lied. I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘I believe Tommy because Tommy never lies.’ After that I never lied again, because I felt so bad.”
Guilt so profoundly pricked his conscience (he claimed) that he never lied again. Still he’d often lie for a joke. He’d recite famous poems, smirk and say he wrote them: “My Way” as sung with loathing by Frank Sinatra, or “Tyger” of illustrated story book fame, or “If,” Kipling’s better known companion to “The White Man’s Burden,” and on more serious notes he’d repeat certain ancient myths and fables as facts.
Old men (one saying goes) are repositories of bad ideas. I feel myself entering a new stage in life, and I feel old. I’m not. I still have a good 60 years of kicking to do, if I’m as lucky as Granddad. But I see one of my childhood friends posted a “crusty old veteran” meme on social media. He’s 30ish, like me, rounding the bend, probably sees retirement (from the Marines) through his sights.
Wow, I kind of regret not sticking in the Navy. Ten years ago I could have gone to shore duty, done college at Florida State, maybe even made it into BUD/S. My youthful exuberance, the alcoholism, the idealism, the fractious outrage over how it cost a million dollars a day to send our battle group cruising to chuck bombs at foreigners. Now I’m jaded. I just want to learn to fly a helicopter, shoot guns for fun, and buy a house where my kids can grow up.
I suddenly enjoy cliche. I think irony´s lazy. It’s a way of saying nonsense without taking responsibility for all the time you wasted being clever and not offering any solutions. It’s selfish. If you take Dan Carlin’s martian perspective on human history, we’re all gooey aliens, fighting to share the resources we have now, working (sometimes killing each other out of hubris or neglect) to make more cool stuff.
Everyone could live comfortably, if we cared enough. But the variables are too disparate, and I’m pretty sure that AI is a false hope. It’s easy to forget how bound we are by time and space. If everyone had nothing to do, if all our needs were met by digital slaves, we’d still want to do something. Besides there's so much work to do everywhere. I don't need to look past my kitchen to find good work to do.
Stressed by chaos and uncertainty, it’s easy to just look longingly toward death, and maybe selfishly hope that everyone goes together. My friend’s father posts hopeful incantations for the apocalypse in his Facebook feed, public prayers for Jesus to return soon. You’d think instead he’d want his grandchildren to enjoy a full and prosperous life. If this mortal coil continues even past consciousness, why does predicting the end matter so much? I remember his good humor outside of church, his obsession with saving the unborn and perplexing propensity to sometimes suggest that death and slavery might be justice. God moves in mysterious ways, etc. Yet, it’s hard to know what to call it.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare describes life in seven ages: (1) the ¨mewling and puking¨ infant; (2) the ¨creeping¨ schoolboy; (3) the ¨sighing” lover; (4) the ¨jealous¨ soldier; (5) the ¨severe¨ justice; (6) the ¨shrunk shrank¨ Pantaloon; (7) ¨sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything” Second Childishness. I think I’m moving from lover to soldier, or maybe visa versa.
I’m trying to get back into the service, the National Guard specifically. I love America, and I have more to give. It’s not looking good. I won’t lie. I smoked weed. There’s video somewhere. For this, and because I tend to run my mouth, someone will probably soon find me unfit for further civil service. I know a few fine folks who felt the sharp edge of the razor, got their civil service ambitions cut short, found solace in opiates instead of success. I’m currently subjecting myself to some scrutiny and embarrassment, but (hey!) I’m living.
Granddad had a good story about getting rejected from WW2, 4-F, for a heart murmur. He says he almost killed a recruit at prom for making fun of him. Here’s the audio:
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So Granddad said he would not lie to authorities because lies make him uncomfortable. Well, I don’t think that’s moral. I’m not knocking him for it, but if he’d lived in Germany he’d have been a Natzi, or at least complicit. So, life is complicated, and spreading freedom, welfare and happiness is not so easy.
Some folks, standing up on the moral high ground, see me as complicit in the death of 100,000+ Iraqis. I guess I am. I mean, I not only voted to extend the war in Iraq by voting for Bush in 2004, I provided material aid 2007-08.
Whatever you believe, we need to learn to treat each other better. Our current ethics cause serious injury right now on earth. It doesn’t really matter if you think you’ll live forever. Life is more than a flash in a pan. It’s this moment. It’s consciousness, and this might just be all we get.
Sure, in the wake of the violence, Americans took advantage of the chaos to lay oil pipe and take a cut off the Iraqi crude. But I don’t think that was our military purpose. Somebody’s gotta get that oil. It keeps the lights going so we don’t get raped by fools and charlatans in the night. The fallout was just the market talking. Right?
What’s a Veteran and Who Wants to Talk About War?
It all begins with an idea.
My first brush with the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences came about five years ago. Riding my bike home from UMass Boston one summer evening, my friend Juan caught up with me at a red light. He’d just left a writing workshop targeting Veterans, and he said I should check it out. Probably not, I thought, but nodded. “Dope.” He’d rarely talked to me about his time in the Marines. And sitting together then on our bikes, waiting for the light to change was no time for war stories. So we bullshitted briefly, and parted ways.
I really did not want to hang out with Veterans: a) working on fighter jets for free college, connecting wires, huffing paint, screwing things up, those youthful years of training, long watches and easy days do not make me worthy of attention or a “veteran” of anything other than our grand socialist experiment in American militarism; b) I didn’t want to think about collateral damage or the morality of warfare; and c) I knew that if I looked back at my brief time in the U.S. Navy I might want to join up again, maybe take that long circuitous route to become a helicopter pilot or Aircrew like I dreamed after watching Black Hawk Down as a teenager. I joined the Navy for the experience more than anything, and that branch delivered.
War literature, no matter how malingering, jaded or emotional (I think) works to recruit new bodies to the experience. And that human capital, that interest, that energy fuels the causes of terror. War seems to me to be like sex. It’s hot. In theory, it’s awesome. In moments it’s exhilarating. But most of the time is spent on foreplay and there's long repetitive stretches of passion and humping. You might do weird or vile things to add excitement. At the end you might feel free (or lucky) or frustrated, later maybe a few memories creep back and fuck with your emotions, and the connection between you and whoever you fucked never really goes away. Looking back now I realize I barely got a taste. Did I quit out of cowardice? Why didn’t I try for some distinction?
American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines often get categorized as victims, shitbags or heroes. I don’t fill any of those boxes. I did a decent job, and made some fun out of it. I got an education. I got experience. The stories that pop in my mind from my deployment on the Truman in the Persian Gulf for Operation Iraqi Freedom (07-08) are far too odd or unpatriotic to be cool. I have a few sea stories, no war stories.
Thinking about all those chafed nipples, ringing ears, drunken nights and dirty jobs makes me feel irrational. I mean, amid all of the sweat and excitement a lot of people died. Some Petty Officer told me one day on cruise that it cost about $1 million a day to keep our battle group supplied, active and shooting off armed sorties over Iraq. I thought about the three years I spent training, looked at all of the hard work, the sweat, the toil, the passion around me, thought about how much tax money would be spent on my three years of shore duty if I took it, and decided I got enough. I sacrificed formative years gazing at Mars and hailing Old Glory. I trained for three years to spend nine months cramped in a steel box in the oily slosh between Saudi Arabia and Iran, providing material aid in a vast and ancient struggle to control the Euphrates river basin. I traded youth for a few very expensive stories. So instead of transferring into the Army, or going to solder circuits in Florida, or standing watches in Washington D.C. I left to learn how to write.
Working as a security guard in Boston recently I sat at a desk all night with a Marine reservist who recited this fantasy (lately in vogue online) of turning the Middle East into a sheet of glass. To be clear, that means detonating nuclear bombs to eliminate an entire population of humanity in response to gas attacks etc. in Syria, or the violent propaganda of the Islamic State, or the potential threat of Iran to an increasingly militant Israel. The word for this is genocide.
Frightened of the odd and cinematic potential of a set of suicidal bimbos achieving nuclear fission on a motorboat near the shoreline of San Diego (or in the Boston Harbor or wherever) some vocal warriors advocate extermination. This particular Marine waxed poetic on several subtler strategies for sanitizing human potential from the opposite side of the globe. I can imagine a similar (deplorable) conversation between two security guys working at some flashy complex in Tehran or Jerusalem.
Amid a chorus of voices that expect Veterans to express pride or regret or anger or disillusionment, there’s this curious take on terrorism. Peaceniks say we’re all terrorists (those who studied the dark arts, who joined to fight terrorism after the caller called Americans to Crusade). I prefer “Warrior.” Terror is debilitating because there’s no way to address death directly, no clear response. If we’re going to debate war like we can actually define and establish a functional peace, we need good terms.
What is the difference between terrorism and a surgical strike, collateral damage and casualties? Can humans thrive without state powers (taxing business to keep militaries) that ordain magnates to tap oil and create busy work? What propels us so violently to kill each other in our struggles? Does punishment work? To what end? If we’re looking for stories and ways of boosting our social status, war offers exceptional trials by fire. But what does state sponsored violence actually accomplish?
Venturing into a strange backyard in the summer of 2013 (maybe it was 2014) ducking under a trellis covered with grape leaves, with the sappy smell of wood chips engulfing my mangy beard I found a group of maybe twelve people who called themselves Veterans. Along the edge of the vegetable bounty of a garden, The Old Oak Dojo had just been built, and breaking the earthy stillness Brian Turner prompted the group gathered there to “Write a letter to an enemy.”
I wrote to Tarek Mehanna, a friend of a friend’s brother, a Muslim from Sudbury serving a 17.5 year sentence in prison for Material Aid to Terrorism. He translated several troubling documents from Arabic into English, and circulated them online along with his own rather incendiary opinions on words attributed to the prophet of Islam. The knowledge of his curtailed religious speech disturbed me. Later I sent that letter to him in prison, and struck up some correspondence. We email each other now occasionally.
Mehanna still writes tomes about Jihad and the Devils trying to turn people from One True Faith. His plight, and the idea that our (the U.S.) conflict with Al Qaeda is essentially religious (emphasizing safety over the first amendment) shook my faith to the core. His imprisonment, I felt, undercut the oath I swore to defend the Constitution. I’m not a fan of his apocalyptic ideology, so I wrote back at him as my enemy. In the years that followed, babbling at length into Google Docs and on various defunct blogs, I tried to find my voice and develop some coherent meaning out of chaos and contradictions. His story lingers in mind. Meanwhile, Warrior Writers gave me a forum and purpose to show up and write.
The Joiner Institute secured spaces for Warrior Writers to meet at UMass Boston. We were always a small group, generally about five people. New folks would come through at pretty much every workshop, and share a few words. Year after year I attended sessions during the summer workshops organized by The Joiner Institute, dabbling here and there, mostly hanging out with the Warrior Writers at the Dojo in JP. I never paid to attend workshops at the Joiner Institute, and since I lived off a credit card and some student employment income at the time, I probably wouldn’t have paid to attend. But the workshops were always open to me, and they inspired a lot of writing.
Good things can grow out from that old fashioned partnership between government and business. Lady Liberty (rich liberals) and Uncle Sam sometimes make a sweet couple. This political and financial partnership established institutions like Harvard and public boating on the Charles River, but it can also conspire with the fearful and greedy to organize monstrous displays of menace and skulduggery.
Violence is compelling. It certainly seems effective. Terrorizing our enemies might keep some danger at bay (in the short term), but I think it also makes us dependent on force (encouraging competition between the makers of F35s and X32s for example, instead of inspiring cancer research). Silencing our enemies makes us deaf to the more simple and benign wants and needs that help us flourish. Violence is the blunt weapon for fighting terror. If we only fought fire with fire, we would have no cities. We’d all still be nomadic.
Immediately after connecting with Warrior Writers, encouraged in my moral outrage by Eric Wasaleski, I checked out the protest scene. I followed around Veterans for Peace, made a video of the 4th of July march, read some poetry at their events, wore their merch. As a student at UMass Boston, reporting for the campus newspaper, I covered protests but had never participated. The pageantry of the whole thing seemed a bit overwrought and ridiculous to me. Besides, I was secretly a Republican. I believe in hard work, independence, and personal achievement. I like order and purpose, and protests to me seem chaotic and make me feel uncertain. On Armistice Day 2014, Eric did something that captured my imagination.
Standing in Government Center in Boston, he washed the American flag in a steel basin with soap. He had told me about this planned performance. The process felt like scales and scabs being rubbed from my heart. I’m a patriotic person, so if someone even leaves a flag on the ground it bothers me a little. I want to pick it up. I want to place it somewhere secure. But this act, washing the flag felt compassionate. It felt honorable and necessary and renewing.
In the spring of 2015 I jumped at an opportunity to TA for Erin Anderson, who organized a class that created a series of Oral Histories by veterans. There were about ten of us in the class. We interviewed each other, and then Medal of Honor recipients. Presenting our work at an event on campus later that summer I got a little sting from a guy in a trench coat. He looked to me like bat on acid, warlock like. He whispered, “Real warriors don’t tell stories.” That’s some 1950s bullshit, echos from the WW2 spin doctors who draped themselves in the valor of a silent collective. The guy might have been a Vietnam vet. He might have been a professional protester. He might have been a mobster with three hits under his belt, or a newspaper delivery man bitter about low pay and lack of work. For all the praise heaped on “veterans,” it’s worth remembering that Hitler and Stalin also experienced war. It’s worth acknowledging how violence gets infectious.
Inevitably 2016 found me seeking ways back into military life. I knew it would happen, even though I’d decided emphatically in 2011 I was done. At 30 I found my way to boot camp blocked by a little hiccup from my past. In 2012 I ran my mouth at length about my violent ideation to people who listened, seriously jeopardizing my freedom. Several doctors logged some unfortunate phrases in my medical record.
More recently my wife told me that she doesn’t like to hear veterans talking about military life. She said one of her internet friends (who flew a helicopter in Vietnam, and in an odd moment of impulse shot himself to death sometime in January of 2017) would often complain about veterans who talked excessively about their experiences. War stories tend to get political. Listeners project their prejudice on tails of chaos, misery, triumph and defeat. The facts can get lost in torrents of emotion, so often war stories about pride and valor make it hard to understand what went wrong, what went right and why all this happened. Everything in the extreme can sound like bullshit.
The conceit of the military is that only the best rise to the top. In the process of creating a professional fighting force a lot of folks fail, get injured, or otherwise skate along into a mediocre retirement. Maximizing human potential should be the work of government, but rigorous focus on military heroism and conquest seems to me to be a dim way forward.
Doug Stanhope, a Libertarian trying to wrangle a crowd at a comedy club during an incident with Alex Jones in Austin in 2004 (still searchable on YouTube), responded unkindly to a lady asking, “What about the boys in Iraq?” He said he likes war because it clears out some assholes. “Like that peanut-head in Killeen Texas that wanted to hammer my head in, he’s not fighting for your freedom. He’s fighting because he found a way he could go and kill people without getting jail time. He could get a pat on the back.” There are other ways to get college money. There are other ways to get a green card. Military service in America is a choice, so if not victims, OEF Veterans are suspects.
In the midst of the War on Terror, in the gritty atmosphere of a Texas bar, Stanhope’s idea that war abroad could be manageable and fine resonated. “The point is war is good,” he said. “As long as people who kind of want to go and kill other people are going to kill other people who want to kill other people, you’re killing all the right people, and opening up some pretty important parking spaces.”
Of course, you can’t control who dies and who lives in war. Civilians, innocents, semi-innocents, invariably kids get killed. These endeavors in unnatural selection through violence and identity politics (who’s a true Muslim or American, or who’s Black, or who’s a Veteran) seem to gather us into irrelevant clusters of opposition. When we form our opinions based on group identity, we can get into fights over things we don’t even really understand, believe or care about.
Trying to write about warfare, or the consequences of warfare, or anything really about veterans or my own brief experience in the U.S. Navy makes me feel stiff and awkward. Once enlisted I decided I’d rather do anything (flip burgers) than invest my life in what appeared to me to be another misguided attempt to violently cleans the world of riffraff. Now out, I fantasize about going back. The toys the government gave me to play with, damn. It wasn’t all bad.
Running along the estuaries of the Neponset River recently I found myself at the Vietnam memorial, reading the names of several young people who died in service in that large struggle fifty years ago over concepts too vast and obscene for the tiny clump of fat and nerves between my ears to contain. I wonder if it’s worth memorializing war. Do these names just call more people to the glance over the abyss? Is war how society chastens proud and violent people? Is it so bad to enjoy a good fight?
Trigger Warning: this website includes adult ideas, lewd language, and explosions
It all begins with an idea.
Sex, drugs and death sell units. So materials on this site may include, in the words of Sherman Alexie's Zits, “blood, sweat, tears and cum.”
The oral histories on this site are small parts of several larger projects. Some of these projects are fictions. A lot of this work grows out of intriguing facts. I will do my best to help differentiate between facts and fiction, but part of the point of this site is to show how the truth is rarely clear or comfortable.
Like anyone who speaks for a long period of time, you should be skeptical of my stories. I’m not trying to deceive you, but my perspective can get wack. I am, like anyone, easily deceived. I get enamored by myths, and falsehoods are often easier to absorb than the truth. Approach this website as a work of fiction.
People say fiction is a convenient vacation of the truth. They say everyone is skeptical of rigorous journalism, but almost anyone will believe a full throated lie. For some reason bold lies are difficult to refute. While I’m not trying to lie here, I am free associating and playing around with abstract ideas that cannot exactly always be true.
Frank Zappa says, “Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best!”
Since much of my music is pirated, text and interviews are all I can offer. But, lifting hip hop tradition, I'm not afraid to break a rule or two. I’m mixing in other people’s work here, and gladly give credit when I can. I’d like to get to the point where I can pay myself and my collaborators, but this project has been on a slow simmer for awhile.
Maybe sometimes in my exuberance for spinning an oral history I’ve recorded, I’ll just slide in ten seconds of some odd song unattributed from one of my old hard drives. If you see me not giving people credit for their work or ideas here, please call me out with a comment.
Fiction works by simplifying the truth and condensing time (sometimes years of experience) into a stream of info that takes just hours or minutes to process. Fiction activates our imaginations, and it can stimulate conversation. There's cheap fiction (porn); realist fiction (Tolstoy); high fiction (Gonzo/POV Journalism). There are many kinds of fiction, but the worst and most obnoxious fictions are the ones that people (without reason or argument) emphatically pretend to be true for no other reason than to build up their brand with a hollow following.
Race is just such a fiction. It’s something we’ve developed through marriage, through culture, by favoring certain features over others for brief periods of time. And we take it far too seriously. Our physical traits, our melanin, tracing our roots back through this tribe on that continent, could at some point help each of us maximize our health and potential. Maybe, once we really understand the genome, some enterprising humans will be able to better define justice and cure cancer. But what really matters is what we create, and how we contribute to our society now. Race does not matter. Still it has this outsized effect on how we treat each other.
Last night I relieved an aggrieved white guy early from the concierge desk at a building downtown. His heart was aflutter. He had to get home. He said he got robbed. His neighbor, “a sweet old woman, from the old school.” Called him at work to say that there were some “niggers” in his apartment. He said, “she said the n-word’” and then whispered the word to me in a conspiratorial way (because we’re both white) “You know, niggers.”
At the time his story hit my Snowflake nerve. I should have said, “It's unfortunate she didn't take a video, get some identity on the guys.” I should have asked, “Why did she call you to be racist instead of calling the cops? Any idea why you were a target? Did you post pictures of your gun and address on Instagram like a mark?” But instead of being brave, I melted into the desk chair and just shut up until he left.
I didn't want to offend him. He seemed like the type of precious individual who would do some petty bullshit behind my back to spite me. Maybe he’d call the office to say I came in unshaven or something. Or since I’m on call all the time, he’s the type that would call out at an inopportune time just to prove his relevance, holding this grudge over my minutia. I thought, “I did not get enough sleep to try to change the world tonight.”
Since Obama called out identity politics last year, I keep hearing the young white men in my life complaining about him. People keep saying that Obama used identity politics all the time. I don’t remember seeing this. He made a few subtle digs, like that Beer Summit he held between a black professor and a white policemen that apparently flopped. He once told the listeners of Univision to “punish” their “enemies” at the polls to achieve their desired goals on immigration reform. For that, people said he abdicated responsibility. But legislation is the job of Congress, not the president. That was a civics lesson.
I never voted for Obama. I do not have very much faith in the human capacity to centrally plan an economy. I lean Libertarian, but I was a registered Republican until about a year ago. I prefer to see production take shape organically, at small scales. Bad actors can be checked at the periphery. Things like slavery, theft and murder need to be contained by the hamfisted power of law and punishment, but I believe most people play by whatever rules they’re given.
The two parties we have in America are functions of American democracy, not ends in themselves. They are supposed to elevate inspiring candidates and rational policies for debate, not generate identity cults.
I don’t know if I will ever vote for a Republican again. I’m a Snowflake, like I’ve said. I can’t abide hot air, and petty shit makes me ghost. Political parties are not like sports teams. They are central pillars for our government. This is not about decorum. It’s not about sexual deviance. It’s not about boorishness. The problem is complete lack of engagement in substance. It’s in hot takes. It’s PWNing media. Republicans cut the capital gains tax, but why? Nobody with a stake in that decision cared enough to explain.
During his presidency Obama referred to speculation subsidized by low capital gains tax, saying “You didn't build that.” That’s true, by the very nature of investing, you don’t build anything you fund. So if speculation causes bubbles, we ought to make conservative, rational investments. Betting on stars might make money fast, but it doesn’t chop wood or build condos.
Pearl clutching drove me out of the Republican party. I probably will not go back. If you’re a pearl clutcher, you will be triggered by many of the posts on this website. If you can’t see past falsehoods to find nuggets of truth, you might be baffled by my apparent lack of empathy.
Like when the skeletal lady with track marks walked into a dumpling shop last night to ask me for $10 while I was waiting for my dinner, too often I avoid engagement. I was reading on my phone, glued to my screen like a normal millennial, not wanting her distraction, aware that people who ask for money at midnight are hungry, but not for food. I wish I had offered to buy her something off the menu, struck up a conversation about where she’s from and what she really needs. Maybe I could have directed her somewhere nice and uplifting. I wish I knew of a place to send her for some food and a bed at midnight. “Today is the day you turn your life around,” I might have said. Instead I ignored her and continued reading my book.
Like when this man with a backpack expected me to unlock the door without asking his name, let him up to his apartment, even though I do not know him, sometimes I don’t bend rules. His FOB was not working, and mad at me he said, “I hope you do this to everyone.” I said, “Oh I do.” But I don’t. His backpack gave me pause. Did I also stop him because of his brown skin? I don’t think so. He does. So it goes.
You will not like everything I write here. I’m trying to keep this blog from becoming explicitly political. As far as politics, I’m registered Independent. That matters to some people. If you’re one of those people, you probably will get triggered by some of the content collected here.
I’m tired of not reacting. Like when I said nothing to a white teenager who I saw harassing a black teenager who was walking from the train (about 100 yards ahead of me) cutting through a little enclave of wealthy residences called Savin Hill toward BC High. This white kid road his bike slowly up on the heels of the black teenager and yelled, “Yo, where you from? Why you walking this way, man? Don’t want to take the main street? You look strong. I like your backpack. Why won’t you look at me? You have nice calves. What? I was trying to compliment you, if you didn’t know. Yeah, get out of here. Go back where you came from.” This preposterous display (of racism?) seemed almost unreal. In fact, I was also cutting through the neighborhood. I guess my whiteness gave me a pass. Or maybe these guys were just playing a crude prank on me, trying to catch attention for whatever reason, or just joking with each other. This website is me reacting to many weird, absurd, un-parsible experiences.