Vince Hancock

As blaze after blaze roars through the States, I teach my students English and read poetry. What else can I do from Taiwan? It's been four years since I hung up my reporter duds.

I feel like I've paced around a lot, thinking of past fires.¹ ²³How much can one person do? How much can each person do? One day, all the options seem like they've burned up.⁴ Do we each reach this point individually, or is it a collective moment? How does one respond to distress?⁵

Americans inherited the British stiff upper lip, so we stretch it out and wrap it around our heads. We put on a brave face, no matter how bad things get. We wear resilience on our sleeves and pray that it's flame-retardant.

Artwork excerpted from K. C. Green

For a long time, I thought my old job was part of the solution. I've thought about the unspoken, perhaps fictional, arrangement between journalists and the public. (The former are your proxy, going into your own community on behalf of the latter, looking into situations, evaluating the sticking points, and trying to point out the dead wood. Subscriptions are how those extra eyes and ears are paid for.) Maybe that arrangement was always too passive, albeit familiar. We've been discouraged from doing much more--we've all heard those stifling voices. "It's not a democracy, it's a democratic republic" has been the repeated admonishment, a fatherly way of saying "hands off!"

I have sifted through my small stack of poetry books, looking for answers to crisis. I think of poetry as petrified wood, minerals having flowed into plant cells and hardened there for eternity. I return to a number of these prime, indivisible roots. Are they like flint? What happens if they are struck together? Can their edges be flaked off, to make a greater point? No longer actually wood, they may survive the heat.

I would like to hand these pieces to you. I have arranged them into a kind of conversation, below. Footnotes here will take you there, or just scroll down to look for yourself. There are links to the full texts at the very bottom. I think they're more important than what I have to say.

* * *

In one of the stories my English students read a few weeks ago, Marta and her dog, Nicky, are outside, looking for something to do. Marta sees her mom weeding the garden, and asks if she can help. No, says her mom, because it's hard to tell the flowers from the weeds. Her mom asks her to sweep the sidewalk.

I think Marta's mom made a mistake. Discerning the early differences between desired vegetation and growing threats is an important skill. Has it been passed down from previous generations? Is it being passed down now?

There isn't much time for critical analysis or metaphors in my classroom. Even at the literal level, I'm not even sure that any of my nine-year olds have an interest in plants. Some are interested in computer games and the stores that sell them. Like American kids, many spend weekends getting and spending.⁶

You can't really blame them. Concrete and asphalt dominate much of the landscape here. I nurse the hope that my students have a few ceramic or plastic planters on a balcony at home. They might eventually discover for themselves an archaic belief; you'll have to play a part, unless you want everything run by the unruly elements.

For a long time, the newspapers somewhat corralled the primitive forces. You could lean against the pen and hear them whinny at your leisure. Since many have decided local journalism isn't a utility worth paying for, the beasts run wild once again.⁷ You'll have to decide if this bothers you.^{8 9 10} If it does, you'll have to step in–regularly–to shape your immediate environment.¹¹ (If it doesn't bother you, there are other noble reasons to cultivate your garden.²¹)

The usual tools of citizenship are pretty dull. I'll leave it to others to advocate for the three kinds of political engagement that most people have experienced. Voting is largely interpreted as giving carte blanche to elected officials for two or four years. Jury duty seems to come along at the worst times and often consists of waiting. Direct action usually consists of protests, strikes, civil disobedience, and flouting regulations/black market activity.¹² Unfortunately, these types of engagement usually come at the end of decisions: boosting a known candidate who has an unwavering agenda, prosecution for breaking an existing law, refusal to accept existing law.

By all means, do those things if they excite you, but I don't think they're enough. Mostly, they're too infrequent. What I saw,¹³ while covering state and local politics in California, Michigan, and Kansas, suggests that calm maintenance¹⁴ of one's own system¹⁵ is far more important. It's the active ingredient in that fusty old word, “civics.” Before your eyes glaze over, let me side with you in expressing my disgust with this word. It belongs in the dumpster and I won't use it again.

In my lifetime, the topic of c**** has been a way to complain about the failure of other (especially younger) people, without actually talking about the subject, explaining it, or demonstrating it. Instead, it's presented as a virtuous, but vague and therefore optional exercise—maybe something once taught in the schools.

Today, this six-letter term now only functions like an Edgar Allan Poe story. When you peek inside, out of curiosity, you get a psychological beating, and for far too long. Maybe you've heard rumors of loved ones, having stepped into cafeterias, assembly halls, and conference rooms, later stumbling out, gasping for air. Perhaps they've managed to snap a photo of a child or grandchild, clutching a Good Deed certificate. Remember Aunt Sally's bragging, about when, in a crisis, she managed to stomp in, say her piece, and stomp out? As for your cousin, well, I still blame that consultant from the big city, who wouldn't shut up. Let us bow our heads for Roger, he that lost his mind during a Public Listening Session.

That's what the term has come to suggest, but those nightmares need to be reined in. Local government meetings aren't usually that bad. Dump the old term, then, and its accompanying bugaboos. Is there a better term? There must be something that other disciplines can lend. Choose an older word, from the ancient Greeks, who had some ideas about participation, including taking turns and facing questions.¹⁶ Or borrow from the scientific laboratory; observation, theories, and conclusions all play a role. Forestry management may also lend words; controlled-burns and invasive species inhabit this realm. For now, I'm going to call it weeding.

* * *

It's nearly impossible to weed a state, let alone a nation. Riding lawnmowers are inefficient to drive up and down the highways, and the gas mileage is even worse if you try to haul one around on a trailer. They are also imprecise machines.

The better technique is to start exactly where you are¹⁷ and use a little trowel or garden fork. I spent one summer pulling up garlic mustard. You want to get the roots. Bagging it up is the best way, some say, to eliminate it. Some with experience say you can compost it. Or cook and eat it. In your own garden or neighborhood, you have much more leverage. You also have options if you need to retreat. If it starts to get too hot, your place isn't far away and you can rest—or you know where the nearest shady bench is. Best of all, there is cause and effect, right in front of you. You can see a spot you've cleared. Since you live there, you'll notice if more work is needed.¹⁸ Satisfaction is possible in the short-term, and it will help in ten years, too.

You're going to have to go to the most local meeting you can find (neighborhood, school district, parks district, township, village, county board) and make it a routine.¹⁹ Seriously: decide which meeting to attend based on your interests and the distance from your house or job, so getting there is not in itself an obstacle. This will be a new habit. Start by making it as easy for yourself as possible. (You'll probably have to cut back on TV shows and movies.)

Your job is to listen and observe, at first. These people are your specimens.

Eventually, your senses will be honed.²⁰ You'll understand the acronyms. Then, when you detect a rough edge or debris, you can engage, even on the smallest matters:

-calculations that don't up, if you're good at math

-ideas that are incomplete, if you read a lot

-a lack of drawings or plans, if you're an engineer

-not enough consideration for the poor/speakers of other languages/the disabled/the unrepresented, if you think of others

-rushing a process or bullying, if you have sensitive emotions

When you raise a small issue politely–after the meeting–as you would with a favorite uncle or grandmother, you're looking for a reciprocal response (respect, sincere interest, follow-up, diligence).

When the most basic request, at a small-potatoes level, goes unanswered, you have found the weed that won't grow into anything better. You're not seeking perfection, just responsibility. Your questions can bring out information, prick their consciences, or simply reveal sincerity. When you find the snotty person, or the one who ignores you, or laughs you off, now you know who is likely unfit for basic political office, and who should also be denied the political trellis. You can give them a second chance, if you think they were just having a bad day. Otherwise, you may have seen their true temperament.

This is where your personal or local leverage will mean something. Weed them out, before their fellow members elect them as chair of the board, or secretary, or liaison to another board. If they can't or won't respond properly to your basic, repeated questions—whatever those might be—you can then publicly wonder out loud why.

Eventually, they will give up, if they know more questions from more people—and mounting criticism—are in their future. Good. They will avoid you at the grocery store they share with you. They will decide it's just not worth it—and it won't be. Sometimes this strategy can work in a few months. Other times, it may take a few years.²¹

To torture this metaphor just a bit further, you can customize the degree of weeding based on your location. Which growing zone are you in? What is the pH of your soil? Do the weeds you find grow back quickly, or will the sun bake any new seedlings to a crisp? Your own values will guide you in how severely you trim.

* * *

Similar weeds may grow elsewhere in the country and some people will insist on a specific remedy. This usually comes in the form of TV commentary, which will probably have nothing to do with what you see and your own response. The talking heads try to talk to everyone at once; they can only spew Roundup pesticide, but that's poisoning, not weeding. Even the gardening programs on public television are too broad. They are irrelevant to anything you can affect. In other words, ignore general statements about political parties, trends, or any sentence that begins with They.

If you, however, kindly dissuade specific neighbors from continuing to the upper levels, it will count for something. Today's zoning board secretary is next decade's state senator. Attempting this at higher levels of office usually fails; there's not really any leverage to work with, outside the confines of your neighborhood, township, or county. The weeding has to be done early.

On the other hand, you may notice the newcomer or even the student who needs some encouragement. Consider helping these seedlings. Along with weeding, there are other skills like composting, irrigation, and landscaping. Can you offer any of that? Reinforcement and propagation is how the good traits become part of the system. Every day, another couple of teenagers wake up with a glimmer of self-knowledge about speaking, confidence, or intellect. The current and future generations need support.²² Can you lend your expertise and guidance to them, gently? Should they run for office? Could you run for office? Would it make sense to meet with them weekly, to mull over what your extended neighborhood needs? What can your own ecosystem tolerate? You'll have to be the judge.

Diplomacy

You'll have to approach this with patience and the bearing of a good friend. These people are your neighbors, after all. A large percentage of local leaders is probably attempting to do this work on your behalf. Be respectful and show a sense of humor. Embarrassing them and grandstanding at public meetings isn't the point (the troglodytes are already attending and hurling their own feces). Your mission is to suss them out and act as a gatekeeper.

Meeting times

In some places, local meetings have been timed to fit the schedules of 9-to-5 government staff and agency personnel. If you want to attend, because the work by the committee or board speaks to you, say so. Go to one, if you can, and speak up afterwards about the difficulty of the meeting time. Accessibility is itself an important criterion for evaluating your public servants.

I think this is how we reintroduce—in a purely local way²³—some of those values that we subscribe to and champion for individuals, but can't quite promote on a national scale. Many have been trained in the habit of denying good things to any group of people numbering more than ten. I don't know why, but we deny them to others and to ourselves. Is this baked into the Puritan credo that later American principles were formed around? I wonder. Bob will give anyone the shirt off his back, but he sneers at the word "charity." Kim believes in her local hospital and even helps at its fundraisers, but laughs ruefully at "welfare." We pay into a system designed to be used, but we hesitate to claim anything called “entitlements.” Various elected officials have twisted perfectly-good words into a peculiar set of American profanity. If we can convince ourselves that 20 people deserve the benefits of collective effort and planning, maybe we can swallow the idea of 50 or 100 people having better lives because their own neighbors anticipated or responded to their needs. If words about basic human requirements can be restored to their original meaning through local c*****, maybe there's hope for the forbidden word itself.

* * *

In Other Words: a Conversation in Others' Words

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¹this country might have

been a pion

eer land. once.

and it still is.

check out

the falling

gun/shells on our blk/tomorrows

²Washakie 1804-1900

A Wise Ruler

Always Loyal

to the Government

and to his

White Brothers

³You would not know

that the souls of old Texans

are in jeopardy in a way not common

to other men, my singular friend.

You would not know

of the long plains night

where they carry on

and arrange their genetic duels

with men of other states--

⁵What's going on here? Can no one help them?

Must everyone witness their downfall?

This reduces us all.

Someone must show up at once to save them,

to take everything off their hands right now,

every trace of this life before

this humiliation goes on any longer.

Someone must do something.

I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it:

⁶we lay waste our powers;--

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hears away, a sordid boon!

⁹Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb -

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

¹²And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass,

pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens

¹³I have split the earth and the hard coal

and rocks and the solid bed

of the sea

And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,

And bring back a report

¹⁵A man has to begin over and over – to try to think

and feel only in a very limited field, the house on

the street, the man at the corner drug store.

¹⁷You can know all about what Henry James

really meant, or the art of the fugue, but if

you are not at home in the world under your feet

and before your eyes,

you are actually uncivilized.

¹⁹There is a kind of love called maintenance,

Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn't forget

The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

²¹what matters is that you graft the right slip

onto the right tree (selah)

if the executioners then knock on the door

they come too late

a few ice-ages pass and the youngsters

will then savor your delicious apricots

²³Mind your own yard.

⁴No water in the water fountain

No phone in the phone booth

[…]

He gave me a dollar

A blood-soaked dollar

I cannot get the spot out but

It's okay it still works in the store

⁷A collection of loud tales

Concentrating eternal stupidities,

That in remote ages lived unhaltered,

Roaming through a fenceless world.

⁸[Aldous] Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not,

that it is not necessary to conceal anything

from a public insensible to contradiction

and narcoticized by technological diversions.

¹⁰creating a sequencing of information

so random, so disparate in scale and value,

as to be incoherent, even psychotic.

¹¹I am not interested in preventing Asia from being Asia

and the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall

but Asia and Russia will not fall

the government of America also will fall but how can America fall

I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments

fortunately all the governments will fall

the only ones which won't fall are the good ones

and the good ones don't yet exist

But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems

¹⁴Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still

Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited

Steps that can be taken against danger

Now and in the future, in cool yards,

In quiet small houses in the country,

Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

¹⁶ἔπειτα γονέας εἰ εὖ ποιεῖ,

καὶ τὰ τέλη εἰ τελεῖ,

καὶ τὰς στρατείας εἰ ἐστράτευται.

(Whether he treats his parents well,

and whether he paid the taxes he owes,

and whether he served his military service.)

¹⁸a car had passed over the clay

just where the ant came out busily with its pine needle now

[…]

Time after time it slid back down with its tottering load

and worked its way up again

²⁰it's you, Potentilla Anserina, an old acquaintance

from Tartumaa and Vorumaa farmyards

we can never forget as we cannot also forget

gooseshit I so often stepped in

and that stuck between my toes

²²My young son asks me: Must I learn history?

What is the use, I feel like saying. Learn to stick

Your head in the earth, and maybe you'll still survive.

Yes, learn mathematics, I tell him!

Learn your French, learn your history!

Sources:

1. “Right on: white america,” Sonia Sanchez (PDF download)

2. Tombstone marker for Washakie, Chief of the Eastern Shonone, Ft. Washakie Cemetery, Wind River Indian Reservation, Wyoming. Front, left side, right side, back

3. “Gunslinger, Book 1,” Edward Dorn (PDF download)

4. “Water Fountain,” Tune-Yards

5. “Distress Sale,” Raymond Carver

6. “The World is Too Much With Us,” William Wordsworth

7. "War is Kind," XII 'A Newspaper is a Collection of Half-Injustices,' Stephen Crane

8. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, p. 111, 1985

9. “The End of the World,” Archibald MacLeish

10. Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition, AmusingOurselves to Death, Neil Postman, p. xi, Andrew Postman, 2005

11. "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" Allen Ginsberg

12. "Shine, Perishing Republic," Robinson Jeffers

13. “I am the Poet,” Walt Whitman

14. "The One Thing That Can Save America," John Ashbery