Rosie O'Donnell's view has been obscured by the top brass at ABC, and now she will have to find a different vista from which she can divine truth, and dispense her happy bromides. Curiously, a Rosie cohort, Charlie Sheen, is apparently seeing some sort of light at the end of his nose: He admits he might be wrong about the conspiracy-laden 9/11 film, "Loose Change." The good news is that he might have doubts; the bad news is that Rosie, who has also touted the film, has not had such doubts. Change comes slow, no doubt, and change, like wits, can even sometimes come loose.
Stepping into the news to eclipse all this is Cindy Sheehan, the indefatigable anti-war protester who has, apparently, finally tired out. She is heading back to California to reconnect with her remaining children. News has it that she is selling her land (Camp Casey, named for her fallen son) near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.
It is hard not to pity Ms. Sheehan. Her own words (found here in her "resignation letter"), which are very much worth reading, are filled with pain. Perhaps the most telling line is the one about her son, who died -- freely -- while serving the American armed forces in Iraq. Ms. Sheehan writes simply, "I failed my boy and that hurts the most." [emphasis mine]
Ms. Sheehan has admitted something to us all in her resignation letter posted at The Daily Kos. She has admitted that the most painful thing is not the Iraq War or partisan duplicity or partisan betrayal. The most painful thing is not even the death of her son. The most painful thing is that she feels she let him down by buying "into the [American] system."
One can only grieve for Ms. Sheehan, for it seems she has not yet had the chance to really grieve. Her cause, her passion, and her many minions kept her, or so I believe, from truly addressing her deepest sorrows. Today, she is finally returning to California to try to restore relations with her surviving children, to try to regain the things she has lost. But what things are those, one might ask, if not the very things that are most valued in the system known as America?
If I was a friend of Ms. Sheehan's and I received a letter from her like the one she posted at The Daily Kos, I would be concerned that my friend was contemplating suicide. I am not her friend, and yet I am still concerned. For it is clear that she feels she failed. If her greatest pain comes when she considers that her failures led to her son's death, then she is not really blaming America or war or Iraq or Democrats or Republicans or even Casey for his death, she's blaming herself.
That is too much for any mother to bear.
Ms. Sheehan strikes me as exhausted and disoriented. Someone needs to get her home, hide her from the world, and give her lots of silence. She should stay away from TVs and radios and newspapers and the Internet; she should be given lots of love, hot tea, and pampering. She needs a long holiday from the world and, perhaps most importantly, her own persona needs to be exorcized. Her resignation letter proves that she teeters on the edge of sanity. Her words are those of a martyred messiah, a snubbed prophet. She sees things better than the rest of us; she knows more than America. That sort of inflated sense of self is not healthy. It is the very stuff of craziness. It is the sound of exhaustion, of collapse.
May God give her the healing and peace she seeks. Let us all pray.
Peace to you.
©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.
(A related Contratimes essay, "Weapons of Miss Direction", which addresses Ms. Sheehan's quasi-gnosticism, can be found here.)
Showing posts with label Suicide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suicide. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Saturday, December 16, 2006
A Shot To The Heart
I may be mistaken, though it is not really the sort of thing that makes me care much for accuracy anyway. But I believe suicide has come close to my household in each of the past four Decembers. And then there was the accidental suicide two years ago on Thanksgiving.
I have written about last December's suicide in three Contratimes' essays, "When The Phone Rings Late At Night," "In Memoriam," and, "Staggering Still." That story remains a difficult one for me; there has not been even a few hours in which I have not thought of my college friend, M.
Yesterday, I attended the funeral service for a local friend, another man named M. This man was not a close friend; he was just a friend and a good guy, someone I liked, someone who laughed with me when we bumped into each other at the store, or when we discussed our various hikes or experiences in the wild. We had met when I was 14 and he 20, some 31 years ago. We had more than a few things in common that had to do with the outdoors, but there were others: I had been friends with his ex-wife, and friends with some of his friends; his sister is one of my neighbors. And we had gone to the same high school though he, 6 years my senior, graduated with my sister (now deceased) when I was in junior high.
On Tuesday, M.'s elderly mother died at a nearby nursing home. She had been a loving and lovely woman, mother, grandmother. She had cared for her five children in some of life's most difficult circumstances. And she was adored by all. But her death struck her one son particularly hard: by the end of the day M. would also be dead, his body found in his mother's empty house a couple of miles from where his mom had died, mere hours separating their times of death.
Last year, I grieved a man who died in Colorado. The year before I grieved for Timmy, an old schoolmate, whose alcoholism the two of us often battled together, with me praying for him with all due fervor. He even spent Christmas week seeking sobriety in my house one year, with me and my family making room for him, trying to deny him his love of big bottles of rum. And the year before Timmy died, I grieved my cousin Tom, who hung himself in a bathtub in some Florida apartment while visiting friends. Tom had recently come to New Hampshire to rekindle relations with my mother; the two were thrilled to renew acquaintances after too many years of sorrows and great distance; my mother giddy that someone on her side of the family would want to get close in her waning years. Little did she know how cruelly Tom's heart was tormented. And then there was little, sweet Roland, a learning disabled boy and my nephew's best friend, who accidently drank himself to death during Thanksgiving week two (or was it three?) years ago.
But yesterday's sorrow was not really mine. M. and I were just close enough to like each other, to share those kinds of moments when you wonder aloud why you aren't closer friends. But the tragedy of his death will reach deep, very deep, into the hearts of those he left behind: siblings, nephews, nieces, childhood pals. I cannot know their grief; I cannot really carry it. I can only know my own sorrow at not being able to help those who so carefully conceal their need for help. I can only know my own anger and sorrow in the wake of deaths that have struck closer to my heart than M.'s did yesterday, or today, or even tomorrow. I can only know the emptiness I feel, hiking in the same great woods M. hiked, wandering about in silence, outside in the cold distance, hearing a single report to the heart.
In the autumn of 1978, during the first half of my senior year in high school, I would sit next to a quiet boy named Russell Holt. We were in Contemporary Issues together; he was bright as a star, a stand-out cross-country runner, a kid with long and somewhat greasy hair; he was gentle as a lamb. How could I have ever known that one particular morning would be our last together in our seats in Room 115B? How could I know that he would put a shotgun in his mouth when he got off the late bus that day, having just finished cross-country practice with Mr. Ladue? How could I know that every vestige of memory of me - and all his more popular classmates - would be splashed all over the walls of his family's kitchen wall?
Russell Holt's death shook me to the core, and it all called me toward Christ. My conversion began with a desire to be open to all the horrors and sorrows of the human heart; I did not want to be blind to whatever it was I hadn't seen in Russell Holt as his leg jiggled alongside mine in Contemporary Issues. I wanted to see, to be present: I wanted to believe that there was hope, redemption, joy, and a peace that could heal. That could comfort and console. And I wanted, in accepting Christianity, to embrace a love that could see beyond the end of my own self-absorption; I wanted to notice the forgotten, the forsaken, the overlooked; I wanted Russell Holt to know that I cared, that I was glad that he was alive.
Now, nearly 30 years later, I know that I still can't see even beyond the end of my nose. In fact, it is getting harder to see at all. How I wish this were not so! How my heart breaks over all the noise I've allowed to drown out so many calls for help -- even the one call for help -- I may have heard had I just quieted my mind and my soul. And yet (!), I know how fearful it can be to hear such cries, to be open to the scream: griefs and sorrows can overwhelm us, can reveal to us our weaknesses, often weakening our ability to keep the flame of our good intent burning at all. We often flee such sorrows because we believe they will indeed consume us; will indeed suck the life and marrow out of our own being, leaving us too weak to live our own dreams or to love our own sons and daughters. My heart wants to be bold but not too bold; I want to hear, but not too much: I want to fight fires, but only the safe fires; I want to climb mountains, but only the lower ones; I want to sow love, but only when it is lovely.
The heart is a difficult place to find one's hope, one's joy. It is a hard place to find a foothold. Perhaps that is why I am so eager to fill my day with distractions and sundry trivialities: books, bargains, baseball, beer, and the other banalities of the day. I am afraid to really be what I am called to be; I am afraid of what is true about the nature of even my own need: that I cannot avoid the fact that I am a person very much in need of grace, forgiveness, redemption, and a hope that is not some cheap illusion.
The Physician did not come to heal the healthy, but the sick. And He does not heal the wallet, or the ego; He does not heal with accolades and honors, with awards and Christmas bonuses, with publishing deals or tax write-offs or hot babes or hot sex or cold beer in fast cars or Botox or breast implants or a new kitchen or a well-lauded poem or an iconoclastic rock song or a five-star meal or a bigger church or a bulging credit line or a new gun or a better wife. His healing begins with a broken God nailed to a cross.
The next step is for me to let go of the hammer, to let fall the nails.
Peace.
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
I have written about last December's suicide in three Contratimes' essays, "When The Phone Rings Late At Night," "In Memoriam," and, "Staggering Still." That story remains a difficult one for me; there has not been even a few hours in which I have not thought of my college friend, M.
Yesterday, I attended the funeral service for a local friend, another man named M. This man was not a close friend; he was just a friend and a good guy, someone I liked, someone who laughed with me when we bumped into each other at the store, or when we discussed our various hikes or experiences in the wild. We had met when I was 14 and he 20, some 31 years ago. We had more than a few things in common that had to do with the outdoors, but there were others: I had been friends with his ex-wife, and friends with some of his friends; his sister is one of my neighbors. And we had gone to the same high school though he, 6 years my senior, graduated with my sister (now deceased) when I was in junior high.
On Tuesday, M.'s elderly mother died at a nearby nursing home. She had been a loving and lovely woman, mother, grandmother. She had cared for her five children in some of life's most difficult circumstances. And she was adored by all. But her death struck her one son particularly hard: by the end of the day M. would also be dead, his body found in his mother's empty house a couple of miles from where his mom had died, mere hours separating their times of death.
Last year, I grieved a man who died in Colorado. The year before I grieved for Timmy, an old schoolmate, whose alcoholism the two of us often battled together, with me praying for him with all due fervor. He even spent Christmas week seeking sobriety in my house one year, with me and my family making room for him, trying to deny him his love of big bottles of rum. And the year before Timmy died, I grieved my cousin Tom, who hung himself in a bathtub in some Florida apartment while visiting friends. Tom had recently come to New Hampshire to rekindle relations with my mother; the two were thrilled to renew acquaintances after too many years of sorrows and great distance; my mother giddy that someone on her side of the family would want to get close in her waning years. Little did she know how cruelly Tom's heart was tormented. And then there was little, sweet Roland, a learning disabled boy and my nephew's best friend, who accidently drank himself to death during Thanksgiving week two (or was it three?) years ago.
But yesterday's sorrow was not really mine. M. and I were just close enough to like each other, to share those kinds of moments when you wonder aloud why you aren't closer friends. But the tragedy of his death will reach deep, very deep, into the hearts of those he left behind: siblings, nephews, nieces, childhood pals. I cannot know their grief; I cannot really carry it. I can only know my own sorrow at not being able to help those who so carefully conceal their need for help. I can only know my own anger and sorrow in the wake of deaths that have struck closer to my heart than M.'s did yesterday, or today, or even tomorrow. I can only know the emptiness I feel, hiking in the same great woods M. hiked, wandering about in silence, outside in the cold distance, hearing a single report to the heart.
In the autumn of 1978, during the first half of my senior year in high school, I would sit next to a quiet boy named Russell Holt. We were in Contemporary Issues together; he was bright as a star, a stand-out cross-country runner, a kid with long and somewhat greasy hair; he was gentle as a lamb. How could I have ever known that one particular morning would be our last together in our seats in Room 115B? How could I know that he would put a shotgun in his mouth when he got off the late bus that day, having just finished cross-country practice with Mr. Ladue? How could I know that every vestige of memory of me - and all his more popular classmates - would be splashed all over the walls of his family's kitchen wall?
Russell Holt's death shook me to the core, and it all called me toward Christ. My conversion began with a desire to be open to all the horrors and sorrows of the human heart; I did not want to be blind to whatever it was I hadn't seen in Russell Holt as his leg jiggled alongside mine in Contemporary Issues. I wanted to see, to be present: I wanted to believe that there was hope, redemption, joy, and a peace that could heal. That could comfort and console. And I wanted, in accepting Christianity, to embrace a love that could see beyond the end of my own self-absorption; I wanted to notice the forgotten, the forsaken, the overlooked; I wanted Russell Holt to know that I cared, that I was glad that he was alive.
Now, nearly 30 years later, I know that I still can't see even beyond the end of my nose. In fact, it is getting harder to see at all. How I wish this were not so! How my heart breaks over all the noise I've allowed to drown out so many calls for help -- even the one call for help -- I may have heard had I just quieted my mind and my soul. And yet (!), I know how fearful it can be to hear such cries, to be open to the scream: griefs and sorrows can overwhelm us, can reveal to us our weaknesses, often weakening our ability to keep the flame of our good intent burning at all. We often flee such sorrows because we believe they will indeed consume us; will indeed suck the life and marrow out of our own being, leaving us too weak to live our own dreams or to love our own sons and daughters. My heart wants to be bold but not too bold; I want to hear, but not too much: I want to fight fires, but only the safe fires; I want to climb mountains, but only the lower ones; I want to sow love, but only when it is lovely.
The heart is a difficult place to find one's hope, one's joy. It is a hard place to find a foothold. Perhaps that is why I am so eager to fill my day with distractions and sundry trivialities: books, bargains, baseball, beer, and the other banalities of the day. I am afraid to really be what I am called to be; I am afraid of what is true about the nature of even my own need: that I cannot avoid the fact that I am a person very much in need of grace, forgiveness, redemption, and a hope that is not some cheap illusion.
The Physician did not come to heal the healthy, but the sick. And He does not heal the wallet, or the ego; He does not heal with accolades and honors, with awards and Christmas bonuses, with publishing deals or tax write-offs or hot babes or hot sex or cold beer in fast cars or Botox or breast implants or a new kitchen or a well-lauded poem or an iconoclastic rock song or a five-star meal or a bigger church or a bulging credit line or a new gun or a better wife. His healing begins with a broken God nailed to a cross.
The next step is for me to let go of the hammer, to let fall the nails.
Peace.
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
The Seinfeld Administration
I wonder if readers can guess where I might be going with this essay merely by its title. My guess is that a good number of you can.
The incredible TV show, Seinfeld, was a cornucopia brimming with pop-culture gifts for the tongue: Soup Nazi, shrinkage, regifting, hand, marble rye, Hennigan's, preemptive breakup, low talker, close talker, "quone", the Bro (or manssier), bubble boy, pigman. These delights fall off the tongue, they spill over merry lips; at least they do for those of us who have watched the show (and there are many of us). We get these terms; they make sense of certain things that ordinary words fail to describe. They give us the giggles; they are part of our laughing lexicon. Even the name "Seinfeld" has been incorporated into pop-speech, e.g. "This is a real Seinfeld" (or "Seinfeld moment"). The show shaped pop-culture, and we let it, with delight.
As I've mentioned several times at Contratimes, language is not static; a dictionary is not a law book, it is but a guide. It tells us merely how words are used; it does not insist that words MUST be used certain ways, nor does it prevent new meanings, even new words, from taking form.
How is it then that so many critics of George Bush's language skills don't see their own linguistic foolishness? When Bush "invents" the word "decider"†, how is it that his critics suddenly act as if A) they don't know what he means; B) there is a law that prevents new words from existing in a fluid or dynamic state; C) the new word makes no sense in context; and D) Bush is stupid? When he says that terrorist leaders have sent "suiciders" to terrorize normal folk -- no doubt a word that conflates suicide and bombers into one neat word -- why is that snickered at as dopish? Is it not a perfectly good word even if it is a gaffe? Is it not perfectly descriptive; is it not a good alternate?
Ironically, Bush's gaffes are finding longevity in the marketplace of ideas and the public square because his critics are breathing life into them. Sarcastic commentators use the words every day; bloggers love to describe his penchant for malapropisms, while others have given Bush himself a new name in light of his linguistic liberty ("Bumbleshrub" is one such name given by blogger Just Ain't Right). The irony is simply lost on these critics; and what is also lost on them is that when Bush invents a word (many educators actually encourage children to use inventive spelling when young) his readers and listeners STILL understand what he is saying.
Hey, I am something of a word guy, so surely you would think his tongue-stumbles would bother me. Perhaps they do. But he has coined some very useful words, like "misunderestimated" (which makes perfect sense), "decider" (not really coined, see note below), "suicider" and so on. Why is he not therefore perceived as a creative genius; why is he not seen as the architect of new ideas and concepts? Why is he at least not loved as an entertainer, or as a half-idiot savant seated in high office (like Being There's Chauncy Gardiner)?
You see, this stuff is to political language what Seinfeld was to breakroom badinage: it is the stuff that entertains (and it is stuff that makes us pay attention in a weirdly earnest way). By comparison, the Clinton Administration was a veritable word wasteland, a linguistic Death Valley. What pop phrase pops into your mind from those eight years, those tarpits of tongue? Merely the lone and meager mindbender, the "definition of IS is" foolishness. Bush, on the other hand, will no doubt impact every English dictionary: his malapropisms have life. We all get them.
Speaking of Mr. Clinton, I recall listening to him answer a question posed by NPR's Terry Gross in 2004. His answer was so prolix that even Deep Blue could not have deciphered it. And his reply was without a single mispronounced word. I scratch my head wondering how a man who speaks smoothly yet makes no sense is preferred over a man who brandishes an unruly tongue and yet is understood at every turn. Are Americans really too stupid to get the beauty of "misunderestimated"? Do they have no capacity for the truly incisive "suiciders"?
Only the bushleagured dolts who mock him would tire of his malappropriateness or his diseloquence. Unlike them, I am enlivened knowing that language is not stuck in the leaden lexicons of Bush's critics who abhor linguistic dynamism. They are so many malcontentious verbaphobes. To give them heed would be misattention on our part. But I truly delight in the fact that Bush's critics are the ones who will be responsible for ensuring his blunders last in lexicons in perpetuity.
Peace.
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
†Please note that this word is a legitimate English word, by the way; a fact which should have been mentioned when I first penned this. In haste, I failed to make note that this word appears in literary usage as early as 1593 (according the Oxford English Dictionary). [This addendum added January 12, 2007. See comment at the end of this 2007 post.]
For a related essay, go here.
Technorati tags: Seinfeld, Bush, Language, Malapropisms, Decider, Suiciders
The incredible TV show, Seinfeld, was a cornucopia brimming with pop-culture gifts for the tongue: Soup Nazi, shrinkage, regifting, hand, marble rye, Hennigan's, preemptive breakup, low talker, close talker, "quone", the Bro (or manssier), bubble boy, pigman. These delights fall off the tongue, they spill over merry lips; at least they do for those of us who have watched the show (and there are many of us). We get these terms; they make sense of certain things that ordinary words fail to describe. They give us the giggles; they are part of our laughing lexicon. Even the name "Seinfeld" has been incorporated into pop-speech, e.g. "This is a real Seinfeld" (or "Seinfeld moment"). The show shaped pop-culture, and we let it, with delight.
As I've mentioned several times at Contratimes, language is not static; a dictionary is not a law book, it is but a guide. It tells us merely how words are used; it does not insist that words MUST be used certain ways, nor does it prevent new meanings, even new words, from taking form.
How is it then that so many critics of George Bush's language skills don't see their own linguistic foolishness? When Bush "invents" the word "decider"†, how is it that his critics suddenly act as if A) they don't know what he means; B) there is a law that prevents new words from existing in a fluid or dynamic state; C) the new word makes no sense in context; and D) Bush is stupid? When he says that terrorist leaders have sent "suiciders" to terrorize normal folk -- no doubt a word that conflates suicide and bombers into one neat word -- why is that snickered at as dopish? Is it not a perfectly good word even if it is a gaffe? Is it not perfectly descriptive; is it not a good alternate?
Ironically, Bush's gaffes are finding longevity in the marketplace of ideas and the public square because his critics are breathing life into them. Sarcastic commentators use the words every day; bloggers love to describe his penchant for malapropisms, while others have given Bush himself a new name in light of his linguistic liberty ("Bumbleshrub" is one such name given by blogger Just Ain't Right). The irony is simply lost on these critics; and what is also lost on them is that when Bush invents a word (many educators actually encourage children to use inventive spelling when young) his readers and listeners STILL understand what he is saying.
Hey, I am something of a word guy, so surely you would think his tongue-stumbles would bother me. Perhaps they do. But he has coined some very useful words, like "misunderestimated" (which makes perfect sense), "decider" (not really coined, see note below), "suicider" and so on. Why is he not therefore perceived as a creative genius; why is he not seen as the architect of new ideas and concepts? Why is he at least not loved as an entertainer, or as a half-idiot savant seated in high office (like Being There's Chauncy Gardiner)?
You see, this stuff is to political language what Seinfeld was to breakroom badinage: it is the stuff that entertains (and it is stuff that makes us pay attention in a weirdly earnest way). By comparison, the Clinton Administration was a veritable word wasteland, a linguistic Death Valley. What pop phrase pops into your mind from those eight years, those tarpits of tongue? Merely the lone and meager mindbender, the "definition of IS is" foolishness. Bush, on the other hand, will no doubt impact every English dictionary: his malapropisms have life. We all get them.
Speaking of Mr. Clinton, I recall listening to him answer a question posed by NPR's Terry Gross in 2004. His answer was so prolix that even Deep Blue could not have deciphered it. And his reply was without a single mispronounced word. I scratch my head wondering how a man who speaks smoothly yet makes no sense is preferred over a man who brandishes an unruly tongue and yet is understood at every turn. Are Americans really too stupid to get the beauty of "misunderestimated"? Do they have no capacity for the truly incisive "suiciders"?
Only the bushleagured dolts who mock him would tire of his malappropriateness or his diseloquence. Unlike them, I am enlivened knowing that language is not stuck in the leaden lexicons of Bush's critics who abhor linguistic dynamism. They are so many malcontentious verbaphobes. To give them heed would be misattention on our part. But I truly delight in the fact that Bush's critics are the ones who will be responsible for ensuring his blunders last in lexicons in perpetuity.
Peace.
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
†Please note that this word is a legitimate English word, by the way; a fact which should have been mentioned when I first penned this. In haste, I failed to make note that this word appears in literary usage as early as 1593 (according the Oxford English Dictionary). [This addendum added January 12, 2007. See comment at the end of this 2007 post.]
For a related essay, go here.
Technorati tags: Seinfeld, Bush, Language, Malapropisms, Decider, Suiciders
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