“Thus I sang of the care of fields, of cattle,
and of trees, while great Caesar thundered
in war by deep Euphrates”
– Virgil, Georgics
Ten years have passed since we thundered into Iraq. G.W.Bush following Cheney and Rumsfield, following a frustrated Oedipal ego, following a hazy idea of Reaganism, of pseudo-Americanism. “Drill Baby Drill” echoes now as a dry hole, empty sounds banging on pipe that would never fill us — and the glory of war — once again repudiates all sense of history, all sense of humanity. We sing our shields into battle shining under Arabic sun, secure in our delusions of democracy — something we never really wanted — just an excuse to rehearse new players in an old plot with familiar lines. If you can’t trust Cheney, who can you trust?
How many dead now? How many? The desert only knows. We pretend the sand subdues all honest patriotism. We marvel with incredulity the vast open spaces that invite us, our technology on parade only to be swallowed in the Sufi winds that even Time fears. How a nation belittles itself when the warrior is praised as god, while cattle and the trees are ignored, the beauty of life along a river as it has always been, is now relagated to sharing space with American Exceptionalism. Cattle chew their cud, roots seek hidden moisture, but the fields burn with the fire of lust — and we know what we hope to forget.
***
What hath New York to do with Baghdad? Oklahoma is in the middle of this geographical kaleidoscope in which we see fragments, but never the whole.
New York cries out with horrible realization and Baghdad wonders, and Oklahoma (and Alaska) chortles the chorus of the opportunistic – let us drill our own oil – for our own good – and we justify that pagan chant by caricaturing some Arabic world we’ve never known.
We went to Baghdad, bolstered by the promise the her oil would pay for our efforts. 2.2 Trillion dollars later, Oklahoma drills at home with the cadence: “be free from foreign oil” – so we drill – and prices have risen steadily. We’ve secured a corporate empire at the expense of our prairies and box canyons, now holes poked all over the state but the average guy in a pickup spends his $4/gallon waving a flag and singing “God Bless Us All” hating “Sand-Niggers” and forgetting the first rule of war — if you’re going to threaten your soul with dishonesty, at least get something material in exchange.
So liberal New York and liberal-hating Oklahoma wonder why the birds sing less often these days, why energy costs triple and why anyone should doubt patriotism.
In Oklahoma we know terror too – Timothy wasn’t Arabic though. He looked like us, and that complicates our sympathy all the more. Bin Laden and McVeigh – two similar rogues – two fellows who knew how to play a system – and we refuse to learn. Refuse to learn. We worship faulty systems and broken promises echo in the hollows we used to know.