393. Poem: The Killing of Children

Oh the killing of children there on the Ken Burns screen the children the children the Vietnamese children their clothes still burning it's so awful we're so awful killing the Vietnamese children but then on the screen the Kansas children the boys with the arms of their sisters around them and then their guts out in Vietnam big children big children their guts on the ground this war is so awful this horrible war and a guy asks do you know any war that's not horrible and kills children I mean if you look close and I now a close looker have to say no not the noblest war the noblest crusade not even the Children's Crusade not the Native American's war to protect his native place children get killed so the only way out is not to go to war at all and the guy says so it's nobler to lie down in front of the white man and I say yes you can't stop him anyway and he says what about the Serb snipers killing the children on the playground in Sarajevo can you stop them and I say yes by bombing Serbia not war not war and he says look closer look closer you've collaterally killed Serbian children burned them in their clothing just as burned just as dead so what are you going to do to stop the snipers from killing children what are you going to do huh what are you going to do?

392. The Tin Woodman Lovers

Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

391. Poem: Education

So then this guy comes to the mike and says I know it's hard to avoid electing dumb people when you've got to give the vote to all the people smart or not because sometimes the numbers come up dumb and that's the price you pay for democracy like yellow journalism is the price you pay for a free press and dumb commercials are the price you pay for capitalism and I say shit yes life is a trade-off but then the next guy says but we can trade up the dumb people I mean the under-educated people can have smart teachers and the dumb I mean under-educated students if they pay attention can get smart a big if because they have to want to get smart and they won't want that unless their parents and what they call culture wants them to pay attention and get smart and that shows how big the if is but if we all work on the problem hard we can solve it and not elect such dumb people any more and he got red in the face and needed a glass of water before he said a bunch of other smart things but I can't remember much now except that the guy was thirsty.

390. Poem: Sensitivity in Senior Housing

So these college students come over to the home and put on their program and during the tea and cookies afterward I hear one of them tell the funny about one old guy saying windy isn't it and the other old guy saying no it's Thursday and the third old guy saying me too let's get a beer and Shirley and Doc and Fred are knocking themselves out and laughing with the guy but the other young people are looking at him like he'd just shit on the floor and there's a long silence so everybody in the room can hear Maxwell saying oh I'm so hurt oh we old people oh how hard it is to be told we're not as sharp as everybody else oh where are our loving children to tell us they're as senile as we are that everybody's senile all of us equal in senility and Dave who's got some marbles left said oh christ the meds get an attendant and Sally to shift attention away said aren't these good brownies except they were cookies.

389. Poem: The Forgotten American Multitude

Now it's a big Hollywood producer asking women boom to give him a naked massage and before that it was a dumb future president just grabbing them boom big like a few  years earlier a Navy admiral grabbed junior officers' wives boom in his office and gave them a deep kiss doing the night thing right in the middle of the day like some sailors I knew and it's not just men liking to skip the romance because four of the wives made it worth the admiral's while just the way my Navy buddies' pickups did and I am thinking I down here must be a member of the smart elite or something because I don't do that and the elite I'm a member of has to be the friends men and women around me because they don't do that either don't jump right at the prize but fool around and play around in the daytime some I'm guessing getting so wrapped up in the play that they forget how it's supposed to end until one remembers and then wow can't believe they're doing this wild night thing with this friend they know so well in the daytime and that is what I would like to call normal in America and the other behavior freaky but have a hard time when I see such a large number of my fellow citizens accepting as if it were normal all that dumb freaky behavior.

388. Taste and Belief

In The Atlantic, October, 2017, the latest in do-it-yourself wedding vows: "I promise to be your greatest fan and your toughest adversary, your partner in crime and your consolation in disappointment," says the groom.  The bride replies, "I promise faithfulness, respect, and self-improvement.  I will not only celebrate your triumphs, I will love you all the more for your failures.  And I promise to never wear heels, so you won't look short."  (Esther Perel, "Why People in Happy Marriages Cheat.")

Well, we know that the great events of life, birth and marriage and death, are too much for any human being to handle in words, so we don't call it banality when a grieving young son says in his eulogy that his mother was "real special."  That call is for a teacher marking a composition theme.  It should be the same way, probably, with wedding vows.  Love trumps style.

But still, we can't lose our eye for banality.  And keeping traditional words, the best that the best writers of the past have been able to think up, keeping them in view is our best help.  If we don't fully realize how superficial and juvenile the above performance is — two children showing adults their advancement to serious magazines, and, still, their cuteness — we need to recall the traditional vows.  You all know them but, for old times' sake, I'll ask you to give them another read.  A slow one.  "In the Name of God, I take you [my bride] to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part."  That will bring the other great words to mind, "Cleave only unto her…,"  "…let no man put asunder."

Listen to these adults as a child in a pew and you say, "So this is what lies ahead — possible poverty filled with sickness, with death at the end."  It's like the first time you listen to Hamlet, his problems fading after he parts the curtain on the life ahead, a sea of troubles — "the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes."

People who do things in the name of God do them with a sure view of the dark realities of life; people who do them in their own name may or may not have a view of those realities.  In any case if you speak in the name of God you speak rich and tasteful words; in your own name you speak bare banalities.

But you can't speak "in the name of God" without revealing your credulousness.  That, today, is a mark of superstition.  You have not been enlightened by the Enlightenment.  You are benighted.  So a child in a pew hearing the hard truths of life in rich and tasteful language is growing up in darkness and a child who remains a child reading magazines selling self-improvement is growing up in light.

If you are content to see the big contest going on here as a contest between taste and belief, and you have lived long enough, you can't help wondering how things stand in that contest now.  There was a time, in my circle, when good taste didn't have a chance against belief.  If you didn't believe in the existence of God the most discriminating taste, the most sensitive style, the most comprehensive imagination got you nothing more than a more ornamented car to hell.  Then came a time when I had friends for whom belief in the non-existence of God scored you the same way, zero for taste, style, and imagination.  Nothing made up for an offense against reason.  Reason, we had decided in a dormitory bull session, was the key to enlightenment and civilization.  Doubting God was the mark of reason.

Where do my friends stand now?  Being out of touch with them I'll have to extrapolate from their last known position and personality.  Returning to the bull session I read aloud to them the two sets of vows.   Everybody takes the contemporary couple to be unbelievers.  

Philip, still militantly unbelieving, will swallow the juvenility because nothing, as before, makes up for credulousness.  It's a hard swallow, though, as he senses the improved taste of those around him. To lessen our disapproval he makes a face, showing what a struggle it is. 

Fred, loose at the beginning, is loosy-goosy now.  Neither taste nor theology matter that much.  He's got a lump on his neck he's worried about. 

Time has played a joke on Carl.  He was an easy believer, and in the dormitory was easily laughed out of his belief.   Now he waits to see which way the laughs are going and is stumped.  He sees that he's facing a serious issue, but not clearly.

For Livingston, an esthete into theology, the weight of God kept taste, alas, way down there.  God lost weight but taste did not rise.  He wanted to have them pulling together.  OK, let weightless "God" stand for "order in the universe."  Ah, he's in the ranks behind the heavy thinker who said,  "Without order in the universe there can be no order in daily life."  But does good taste depend on good ordering?  Liv has to look at Rob, who has nothing in order, in life or head, but has unerring taste.

Rob has a grip on one rule: don't look or sound like Looey, the low-class family friend his mother kept making fun of.

Will's girlfriend Margaret, with us now, started High Church and moved higher, taking her family with her.  She reads the made-up vows, points her finger down her throat, leans as if to throw up in a basin at her side, and goes on to more interesting things.  Her economy tells me not to make a big deal out of this.

Clarence, back from France, is the surprise.  He was an intense family fundamentalist and an intense college atheist, with never an opening for taste.  Only his roommate, perhaps, sensed the refinery below, building pressure.  Life with poets in Paris opened the valve.  "No, no," he says, "No, any belief as an alternative to what produced 'partner in crime.'"  Then he overdoes it. "I'll bow down to wooden poles.  I'll make phylacteries.  I'll wear hair shirts.  Anything to avoid 'self-improvement.'"

Korey, out for years and in a long relationship, so wants the serious blessings of society on his hoped-for ceremony that nothing but "till death" and "cleave" and "asunder" will do.  He says he'll start looking for a safe place if he gets called his partner's "greatest fan."

387. Poem: The Tin Woodman Lovers

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see pist 2 see post 392  see post 392 see post 392

      Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

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Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

1. The

Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

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