Nuclear Calamity: A Farmer Bows to His Cows

The older I get the less I can stand to see the insults we heap upon our planet and its animal life. Yes – I do worry about the humans as well, but something compels me more acutely about plants and animals. It is something more, I am certain, than mere sentimentality.  Aging people often stand accused of mawkishness, but I think the truth is exactly the opposite. Life and time tend to wring all the worst aspects of sentimentality from a person, leaving an astonishing acuity of vision and a lack of saccharine attachment. I fear nothing, in many ways. I can look at almost anything. But I find the images and accounts that rattle me most profoundly often concern the earth and its creatures.

For the past three weeks, I have been tracking the stories out of Japan concerning the tsunami and earthquake. The prefecture of Fukushima, with its six nuclear reactors at the Daiichi plant, now all deemed to be in massively unstable condition (yes, even reactors 5 and 6, for you fellow followers of events, are now considered to be far from worry-free), has a fierce hold upon my imagination. 

It is true what many have said: there is something about radiation that is so embedded in our consciousness, post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and now post-Chernobyl, that it can envelope us like a malignant spirit from a dream. Like radiation itself, the mere idea of radiation – invisible, pervasive, capable of altering us at the cellular level until our own bodies become traitors against us – can cover us like netting, altering our perception of the world.

I’m reading as much as I can – a tactic to which I resort at every critical and potentially overwhelming juncture in life. In the event of serious family illness, for example, I scramble my intellect like an Air Force fighter jet to medical texts and web sites, reading peer reviewed journal articles. Much of it doesn’t even stick, or is utterly opaque, but something about the attempt to gather as much information as I can serves to calm me.

Nuclear physics, God knows, is even farther out of my range than oncology or general medicine, but I’ve read many assessments of the situation. To be sure, any reassurance I feel occurs only because I’m distracted by the feeling of learning things – the assessments themselves are, increasingly, dismal. Many professionals who initially attempted to calm laypersons lurking on physics web sites have given up the attempt. Many others have had to admit, especially in recent days, their initial predictions were far too sunny. Fierce pro-nuclear advocates have faded almost entirely from view.

For myself, I never embraced nuclear power, but never worried very much about it, either. It was just there, overseen by branches of physics and engineering, governmental regulatory bodies, and of course commerce. I hoped, I suppose, that enough balancing was occurring between all those interests to keep things in good order. One does not consider a 9.0 earthquake and a 30-foot tsunami as a reasonable standard for the baseline endurance of massive structures – even nuclear facilities, with their capacity for awful consequences when compromised. Who would have thought such a thing could occur? Yet here we are.

Today, the New York Times revealed the contents of a confidential Nuclear Regulatory Commission assessment of the Daiichi plant. It is filled with mention of potential crises looming there. The situation is essentially that so many points of risk exist that each idea for a cure or soothing of one crisis point can actually precipitate another. Any good outcomes depend on six devastated structures holding whatever shape they still have despite the stress of being refilled with tons of water, injected with hydrogen, and hit by ongoing aftershocks. Today, April 6, 2011, six quakes are shown on the www.usgs.gov site near or off the east cost of Honshu, Japan – as high as a magnitude 5.4. Yesterday there were eight. One does not have to be an anti-nuclear zealot to believe that any stability that may be created there is of necessity hanging by a slim thread indeed.

But I spoke of animals and plants here initially, not physics or seismology. Today, I read the story of a cattle farmer from Fukushima prefecture. Hiroaki Hiruta has been returning to feed his cows since the mandatory evacuation of his town. He is guilty about this, telling AFP reporter Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura the following:

“These cows are like family. I owe my life to them. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but I can’t accept this situation.” He goes on to tell a story that strikes at the heart.

“When I enter the shed the cows start mooing,” Huruta says. “At times they sound like cries for help, at others as if they were saying how much they had waited for me. You have to hear them to understand,” he added.

“Before I leave them for the day I tell myself that this may be the last time I see them alive, and I take my cap off and bow. I think the cows understand me. Once, they all fell silent as I bowed. It was very strange.”

Despite all my readings about isotopes, engineering materials that may serve as shields between hydrogen and a myriad of possible combustion scenarios, radiation charts, and more, it is this story of Hiroaki Hiruta that moves me most deeply. He has lost something no nuclear plant engineering schema can account for in its calculus of stress and catastrophe. It is the loss of something so fundamental, ancient, and even mythic I am in awe pondering it. Hiruta is losing his attachment to his land, his piece of earth, and the animals he has sustained there with his family for generations – animals which have in turn sustained him and his family. The interplay between human and animal life on earth is so crucial that its destruction is every bit as much of a calamity as a plume of radiation moving across an ocean. The loss of one, and the advent of the other, is cause enough for great grief without any intrusion at all from sentimentality.

Inching toward heaven

March has been all about poetry, and I’ve sat long hours in the laundromat revisiting essays about Yeats, pondering the last volume Deborah Digges wrote before she jumped off the upper level of the stadium at her University, and posting tiny fragments of the last works of Agha Shahid Ali on my nightly work altars, beside my photos of the Libyan desert and various maps of the exploding Arab universe.

At home I have created a new geography on my kitchen altar of the Empress of the Americas. Two maps of Japan surround and hold the center where I light candles and dedicate the work I will do preparing meals for the family to the suffering that lies beyond the reach of my hands but never beyond the reach of my imagination.

Here at the hospital my favorite patient has grown angry and foul mouthed for the first time in my memory of our nearly thirty years together. Each night between one and two am she rises to ask to speak with me, and we sit together in the darkened dayroom. The tsunami has unleashed something new in her, something more terrible.  It has a power that lies beyond my ability to console her, and it has aroused a fury in her that has been remarkable to witness and horrible to fathom later, when she has returned to her room. She has determined that she is actually a robot, one of three thousand created at a huge medical center that is not in this part of the country. She thinks she is linked to the mainland of China. Operatives trigger her brain and wake her each night with loud alerts that rocket through her ears to her jaw. She is not sure if the sound or the resulting pain wake her. She is sure I am supposed to inform authorities and have these sounds turned off. She begs me to relieve her pain.

Japan has activated my son, too. He calls me here in the middle of the night this week, and last week. Generally I hear from him when I am working in the night here at the hospital every few years. He wonders about the spread of radioactive material and he cannot comfort himself. He has a sensation in the left side of his chest and is terrified. As I speak to him, a call that lasts less than three minutes, three patients are at the windows of the nursing station knocking for me, and the doctor calls with a patient he is sending to me in a few minutes. I have to ring off and call my son after I’ve dealt with all these things. I advise him to take an Ativan and go to his bed. He tries to refuse, saying he will get on top of his fear. I insist. I tell him to get the pill and swallow it while I am still on the phone with him. It is not up for discussion, I tell him. Take it now.

Later that day we sit on the couch and talk about the night. He’s sad and apologetic until I tell him that most of the world is feeling much of what he feels. Moreover, he has the distinct advantage of being pervious to comfort- he can be reassured, he can be urged to action, he can respond. In fact he tells me he slept better than he has in many months. The pill put him down and kept him there for about twelve hours. I ponder the fact that twelve hours is my average sleep for the five days I work my overnights. Then I kiss his cheek and go off to plan dinner.

The terrible truth that many of the people I care for here and away from here are trapped in a place I only visit momentarily never leaves my attention for more than a moment or two. I realize I’ve entered their reality to a degree many of my colleagues would find unnatural and perhaps even unwarranted, unhelpful. I understand that. My refuge lies outdoors, and when unable to be in the air and the light, it lies in the reliable cure of crafted language. “Many a poor poet perseveres and writes his roomful of wretched verse without rising an inch toward heaven,” M.L. Rosenthal wrote nearly fifty years ago about Yeats and the refinement that would divide him from everyone around him throughout the record of verse. If I cannot rise toward heaven in my own words, let me do so in the words of others. I am never going to be too proud for that privilege.

Labor Pains

I know what it might feel like to be Gregor Samsa, waking up in bed as an entirely other life form.  Samsa, in Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, famously awakens one day as a “monstrous insect.” While I am much the same as ever, I have awakened in a different world – an equally jarring sensation. 

Somehow, I now live in a country in which it is allowable to attack working people from the halls of government, turning our very legislative processes into cudgels used to smash apart the rights of those who keep everything in our society running.

In Wisconsin, Senate Republicans in support of foreshortening workers’ rights to bargain collectively trimmed every bit of budgetary business from a bill they had concocted, leaving only the collective bargaining restrictions to be voted on. This was done so the Democrats who left the state to prevent the vote, under legislative rules, were no longer needed for the bill to be taken up.

In fact, this bill, which critically alters the world of working men and women, was passed 18-1. In a state of about 5.7 million people, 19 participated. Granted, they were 19 elected people, but really?  This is what we’ve come to?  The vote was announced with little time to spare. It took place in a chamber divided just 19-14, Republican to Democrat. The maneuver of cutting all budget items out of the bill, too clever by half, allowed for the vote to be called without a single Democrat’s presence. 

While elections, as some are overly fond of saying these days, indeed have consequences, a Republican junta ginning up an opportunity to change the laws in secret should not be among them.  This is not what representative government was intended to be, and while Democrats may fairly be faulted for vacating the capitol, Republicans should not have carried out their agenda in this manner.

Now, students and workers are infuriated, and protests are more vocal and potentially more disruptive. Republicans are complaining loudly of disorder, but you invite disorder when you as a leader fail to proceed in an orderly and open fashion. 

Republican Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald calls the situation “unsafe.” He’s also claiming Democratic staffers subverted the efforts of law enforcement to keep the building safe for legislators trying to conduct the people’s business. 

“When the Democrat staffers opened the windows for protesters to get in…that’s not how democracy is supposed to work,” he said.  This is an interesting take on “democracy,” indeed.  We may infer from his comment that Fitzgerald views the proper functioning of democracy as using state police forces to seal the Capitol against any public access. This, he feels, must be done so long as the public is roused to indignation by legislative maneuverings which in fact circumvent democracy and the proper legislative processes as envisioned at the founding of his state.  I can just see Glenn Beck at his flip charts now, trying to explain this.

Here in Iowa, we have our own labor pains. The Iowa House is now debating a bill not unlike the Wisconsin bill. We are luckier here – our Senate is controlled by the Democrats.  But its mere debate gives rise to that Gregor Samsa effect – the sense of waking in an alien country, a land in which human rights, collective bargaining rights, the rights of the elderly to be safe in care facilities (another story for another time), the right to inhabit a state that is safe, functions effectively for public, private, and commercial interests, and provides as best it can for all its citizens, is gone. Replacing it are the rights of management to arbitrarily eliminate employees, the rights of everyone to carry any weapon they might ever imagine everywhere they might ever go (except the State Capitol complex and State Fairgrounds), the rights of nursing home owners to escape oversight (also another story for another time), and the rights of the majority to eliminate the marriage rights of a minority.  With rights like these, freedom really does begin to look like just another word for nothin’ left to lose. 

It’s a shame this debate has turned into a foolish, stylized battle to the death between labor and business. It took both a strong labor force and a vibrant business community to position Iowa in such a way that our unemployment in the current climate is 6.1%. We had, last year, an $800M surplus. I’m not saying everything is coming up roses, but the ecosystem of this state requires true leadership to keep it in balance. If leaders promote one set of ‘organisms,’ if you will, over another (business over labor, government over individuals, or vice versa), without ceasing, the ecosystem becomes toxic for those organisms no longer being promoted.  They are starved of oxygen and no longer thrive. You try selling a state with various “dead zones” and see how far you get in attracting new business. It’s that simple. 

Republican legislators out to trim labor’s sails should take note. Iowa’s business tax rate is among the 16 lowest in the nation already – they do not need government handouts.  They need educated, motivated workers who have a rich environment – culturally, economically, and ecologically –  in which to live. Stop stepping on the workers who buy the goods, insurance services and other things Iowa spends so much time and money promoting, and look out for the long-term health of your state from a broader perspective. If you don’t, we will all live to regret it.

Crazy Horse

Why can’t I write this poem?/ I’ve thought of Crazy Horse all winter/ since the night I worked Thanksgiving/out among the mad/after pale sleep and frying chicken batch on batch at home/and popping weightless cranberries in my cobalt pot with oranges and vanilla sugar/the sugar is a secret silly house proud thing/trivial and mere/but no one eats this sauce and gets away/years go by mail comes from someone sighing after it.

What’s wrong?/I love the stories/love the pain I feel/the way my heart folds up/just like a Murphy bed/when someone tells his story.

Lakota-Sioux/the mystery of my long and bitter inattention/all the years of blindness/tone deaf to music still reverberating all along/the dusted hills and skies of my own country.

“Looking back, it all moves slowly under yellow light/ a sad daguerrotype/ Crazy Horse floats backward on the knife and falls in parchment/the man behind the black veil pulls the string/the West falls down in ashes.”

It is bizarre, that for the first time in fifty years of writing poetry, my inability to finish the poem I started to write about Crazy H back in November. Where did the winter go? What did I do with it? I tended my small fires and fretted myself about the pain of everyone everywhere. I went online and discovered that I could click and drag every single country in the Middle East and North Africa to its place but could only do the same for half of the United States.  I pondered what the hell that meant about me. I made plans to erect a silk tent outside after the snows melt. I made lists as I do every year planning to organize the household. I did about 15% of everything on all the lists, which represents about a 5% reduction over a single year, in the world of lists. I allowed myself to stop running for a month after I had a whomping upper respiratory infection and a descent back into my positional vertigo during the Christmas season.

I made a record number of small altars, some of which were never noticed by anyone in the house but myself. I became briefly but fiercely focused on the safety of my head nurse, who was coming to term with her first child with a lying in date that matched Kim’s birthday and who was being threatened by one of my five hundred pound patients. Yes, one of several, really. Often my life is more like a Fellini film than it is not like a Fellini film.

I watched movies. I found the last frames of Children of Men Arthurian and could not find anyone else to reflect that idea. Somehow the memory of that boat in the mist evoked the last shadows of Camelot for me. It was this winter that I discovered I am thought old and realized I have no intention of permitting this culture to erase me from myself. Still, I am aware that boats in fog and flying birds are beginning to affect me in ways that can only mean I am pushing off in myself in a new way, a way that surely means I am beginning to receive death. But in the meantime I contemplate new ways of being during most of my waking moments. For this is what we are meant to do with our time, in return for the remarkable gift of existence. As life grows more fragile and the realization of what is terrible becomes more vivid and present, the sense of the gift grows ever more acute and precious and impossible to resist. I shall end by loving everything without reservation, that much is very clear.

I Wish I Had A River

Sunday morning, and it was Kim’s birthday. We’d had coffee and the Cointreau cake I only make once a year, for her. We were listening to a compendium of Joni Mitchell hits and I was trying to make Kim guess the album as the songs rolled out. Joni was singing: “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re putting up trees…” and I turned to Kim, to quiz her again. She was crying. She was also wearing that look she has when she is mourning her mother, who passed several years before we met.

I want her to have the same permission she has always given me to feel anything and be able to talk about it without fear of being diminished. Still, her tears evoke sadness in me and a deep wish to bring comfort. Because I spend my life listening to expressions of impossible pain I have learned not to believe I necessarily have anything greater to offer than my ability to hold tight and be present. That is a difficult trick to learn and it was especially tough for me, with my persistent lean toward provisional maternal behaviors of all kinds levelled at nearly everyone around me.

I let myself prattle a little bit about how good a songwriter Joni is, how much she can make you feel about your own life and the things lost and found. This made me feel conflicting things- a bit better, but also a tad prim and removed. Child to a raging alcoholic mother, I tend to jam up tight when someone I love is roiling in something I am watching from a distance.

Imagination is my first retreat from myself and everyone else, and it always was. One of my best friends, the man who made the Joni CD for Kim, told us just last night what a waste of time sleep and food were. I was amused. Sleep and food figure prominently in my real life and in the life I imagine too. I asked Tom what the hell else there was anyway. Music, he said. That’s my real life, he added. I was charmed that this reticent man had never said this to me before, after knowing him for almost twenty-eight years.

Although Kim had a mother who adored her and was the glue of the tribe, and I had a mother who neither loved me nor cared for me and was the undoing of hers, we share a kind of semi-conscious way of relating to ourselves and our experience through our memories of these women. They come upon us unawares sometimes, dissolving some of our attachments to memory, remaking others. As I write this it is Valentine’s Day, a day I do not believe belongs to lovers, a day that is for me not cynical or to be blamed on those who sell us jewels or candy or cards. I like to pour my affection around on Valentine’s Day, and before midnight had already sent some candy to my favorite pharmacy tech here at the hospital. I sent it in a pneumatic tube, up the floors between us. This young man who received it provides me with such generous assistance for my patients that the wait for a new medication might be less than five minutes and has never been more than ten. I brag about him all the time to the people I serve. He makes me stronger for them. And so, I love him.

I am ready to love anyone who makes me stronger for anyone I am ready to love. And that is the truth of the story of the river I’m navigating. I am that vast unwinding and cloud riven water, and I want to inhabit that metaphor in as many ways as possible, while I live.

You Say You Want a Revolution…

Before me, scrolling past, flow first-person accounts of the moments before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak speaks to the nation, supposedly to take his leave.  After 17 days of unrest in the streets showing Egyptians eager for change and a more responsive government, it is said he will resign tonight. (It is also said he has pre-recorded his farewell address, and that he has left for the UAE or other parts more cheerily disposed towards him.)

From Tahrir Square, Egyptians are expressing fear, anxiety, joy, elation, and extraordinary impatience that Mubarak, who is late, is keeping them waiting!  In this moment, hundreds of thousands are there, hoping for something better in the days and months to come. They have been brave, some have died, and now comes the fragile time wherein established entities – military, religious, and governmental – square off and try to come away with the lion’s share of power in the new government as it forms.  It is a dangerous and extremely heady time.

In the background, a gentle percussion sets a rhythm and now a variety of instruments can be heard lifting across the night air, as well. The crowd is jubilant, peaceful. Army leaders have sent SMS texts that the people will not be harmed, but will be supported and protected. All manner of social media have been deployed today, in a complete change of tack, to relay the start of a new era in Egypt. Government television now decries the violence of pro-Mubarak protestors in recent days, calling them “an offense to the entire nation.” 

The question of the day is, what does this all mean? The answers depend almost entirely upon who’s asking and who’s answering.  For the President of the United States, it has been in some ways a deeply damaging period of time. Obama has whiffed every at-bat he’s had on the situation in Egypt. He’s either been utterly oblique to the point of checked-out, or too punchy by half, almost insisting that Mubarak step aside (not something any other nation’s leader, especially ours, should be doing at this moment).

Of course, the U.S. is not in the easiest spot with regard to Egyptians fighting for freedom. We have, after all, used the country as our hub for the rendition of political prisoners – excuse me, I mean terrorists, of course – since 9/11 dimmed our national conscience on such small matters as the torture of human beings. Mubarak was used in this as well, and we knew what stripe of leader we were dealing with in these matters. This leaves Obama hard-pressed to successfully deliver a Reaganesque speech on freedom and America’s heritage of civil and human rights. Egyptians would not be buying any of that. I admit I’m filled with something akin to dread when I ponder what our security agencies may or may not be fomenting on the ground there, but I have to hope nothing disgraceful is in the offing and that Egyptians will be captains of their own destiny over time.

Factors set to affect this include the military’s now openly declared, 24/7 counsel overseeing the safety and security of the nation (read: we in the military will have much to say about events to come and don’t you forget it), and political factions including the Muslim Brotherhood and more progressive and modernist Muslim groups, along with elites.

For now, there is celebration to be enjoyed, and a speech to hear. In the time I’ve written this, no sign of Mubarak. Theories that he has been spirited out of the country seem plausible, as does the thought that his address is a pre-recorded, pre-arranged matter taped yesterday at the Presidential Palace.  For now, the real event remains where the people are, and it is music, and song, chanting and cheering, and a din of conversations ongoing.  

Now – Here’s Hosni.  I’ll break into a liveblog of his speech. 

Uh-oh.  He looks defiant, and he is announcing again that he will not run in the fall elections (significant because it is very old news and may be ominous). Says he has served the country for 60 years in public service. Vows he will “fulfill” his “promises” to protect the constitution and protect the people until September… this does not bode well. Says he will monitor the situation “hour by hour.”  From where?  The UAE?  Is he going to stay?  Incredible!  It is a non-resignation, and I expect Tahrir to blow up in a moment.

Details of amending constitution (this was predicted).  Preparing for free elections.  From Egyptians in Tahrir on their blogs: “This is not good.”  Indeed it is not, and we will know momentarily whether or not Cairo will erupt in response to what is, so far, an intransigent speech focused on his unwillingness to do the bidding of foreign governments. 

He just slipped in – even the translator on MSNBC fumbled over it – an aside that he has delegated presidential powers to VP.  (Suleiman, whose enhanced position now only makes matters worse as he is labeled as a “twin” to Mubarak and unacceptable. Yet another thumb in the eye to the people of Egypt.)

Moments later. The atmosphere in Tahrir is no longer idyllic. It sounds angry. It is a terrible situation, one Mubarak has apparently been allowed to create. There will be awful human repercussions now, I’ve no doubt. The angry crowd is leaving Tahrir Square.  I expect blood in the streets will be Mubarak’s final “gift” to his people.

This speech was cowardice writ large, spoken by a man not man enough to leave with any dignity whatsoever.  He made repeated false claims of his loyalty to the constitution and the people’s freedom.  Worse yet, he did the one thing he knew would cause riots in the streets: he was intransigent and refused to clearly, immediately, step aside.

Indeed, Mubarak may get the end he expressed sooner than he thought when he said he would “not leave Egypt until I am buried in its soil.”  Your mouth to God’s ear, Hosni.

What I must do now, think here before

On this night, the night of January 12th, I do not turn on the television to watch Barack Obama in his role as comforter-in-chief. “Words carved in marble,” one commentator says, alluding to what the President must do now. I don’t watch. I have already broken my promise to God that I would watch him every time he spoke in a public format. The previous Saturday afternoon, all that long afternoon, he never even crossed my mind.

“She’s dead,” Kim told me right after I had placed my little ceremonial tag on the altar of the Guadalupe. It had Gabby’s initials and a shadow raven in pale red on a field of jade flowers and blue shadows. “She has died, NPR says.” In the car on the way to the gym we’re quiet. We’ve decided to exercise our heavy hearts according to the ongoing plan. I know I will either run well or find I can’t breathe at all.

Minutes later on the treadmill though something else happens. I can feel right in my body that she is not dead at all, and I hiss aloud to the Virgin: “Hold her, hold her,” and it becomes a physical mantra as I run and run and run. I feel her alive and being slowly wrapped and rocked in gold by the Lady of the Americas, as if she were prey of an enormous benevolent spider who will not consume her life but heal it and release her into the bright air. It is a weird gorgeous feeling and from the sheer weight and shame of it I break into tears as I run. Then I see the reports- she is not dead after all. She is not dead after all.  I am emboldened and I whisper to the Virgin again: “Heal her entirely, then.”  I feel almost immobile, though I am in flight. I feel drawn toward some immense lodestone, magnetized. I see it here on the screen before me- she lives.

In the morning of this vivid and terrible day I have already wept before the sun rises. The night before I heard a fragment of an Elgar piece I wanted to hear again, and before Kim is up I put on Youtube and watch Daniel Barenbolm of the Chicago symphony conducting the piece, which is “Nimrod,” a nomer one cannot speak to people of a certain age without a sense of the absurd. Mother of God, I think. Daniel B is like the true leader of the free world. He is majestic, gentle, like a conflation of our dear departed friend Ted and the Infant of Atocha- a duo I have already confused in myself anyway- and Daniel B is rising, prevailing, refining, sublime. He is neither young nor fit nor a marvel of good looks, and yet this music flows through his body. He is literally evoking and pouring it out upon the players and the audience like some dark and flowery honey- it is a miracle of beauty, a complete wonder. This tenderness that makes me feel I know the melody from somewhere much earlier in my life is folk, lullaby and anthem all at once, and it astonishes me.

This is what the Internet has given the world, at least my world, which is absent of grandkids and extended family distractions. I sit and watch this man, this vessel, this male embodiment of the great Tarot card of The Star conducting and transmitting the mystery of this music, watch it radiating out of his face and his arms, and for an instant I imagine I understand everything. It is the morning of little Michael’s surgery too and I sit and weep for his life, for what was taken from him and what will be given, and in this weeping I cry for the world, for my own son who seems to be disappearing somehow, growing thinner and softer and somehow less present even as I seem to burgeon and fester. I cry for it all and I am ministered to by the force of what Aslan the Lion called “the deepest magic.”

Finally I see that I have written this line: The refusal to imagine you are fettered by your suffering.

That is why I work and that I how I live.

The Oath

Today, I nearly began to cry as I took my oath of office.  How odd is this, I thought.  I have held this position for coming up on 12 years, through all kinds of political weather – much of it unexpected, and unexpectedly apt.  I am Iowa’s only openly gay or lesbian recorder, and I have been candid about that aspect of life since my years writing newspaper columns in the 80’s and 90’s here in Iowa City, city of literature, the place where my heart carried me when I left the Western Illinois town in which I was born.  It is my office that issues marriage licenses, you see, and takes in the applications.  And it was in this office, the office of the county recorder, ground zero of the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, where the reverberation of it was immediately felt. 

Having come through protests years earlier in which I had denied licenses to marry requested by over 50 couples, despite my own sense that the Iowa legislature had passed a flatly unconstitutional law in its attempt to reserve marriage for opposite-sex couples only, I was able to fully enjoy the ruling and the ability I had gained to legitimately issue licenses in the spring of 2009.  There was no mayhem, things proceeded in an orderly fashion, and thus Iowa began to grant same-sex couples licenses to marry without in any way rattling the timbers of society. 

So why, if all of this was such a swimming success, was I near tears today, taking the oath of office for the fourth time?  It happened when I looked out at my beloved spouse, Jessica, raised my right hand and repeated after the district court judge administering the oath, “I Kim Painter, do solemnly affirm that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Iowa…”

For it was no less than the Constitution of the State of Iowa that our Supreme Court unanimously upheld in the historic Varnum v. Brien ruling, and three of those judges were ousted in a retention vote that never should have gone awry.  Forces external to Iowa entered the state, riled up some people and spent a million dollars to rile up some more, and that, combined with a debacle of undervoting (ballots on which no vote either way was cast on the retention of the justices – some 98,000 votes never voiced), and an amazing number of people who came out and said they “always” vote to unseat judges as a matter of principle, knowing they will almost always be retained, led to their unseating.  Three justices who made history the right way – by standing upon principle of law, and their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Iowa – now gone, swept off in a tide of opinionated bile and bigoted sewage directed at the state’s justly famous constitutional protections of equality.  And there I stood today, still the state’s only openly gay or lesbian recorder, elected in my county by the second-highest vote total of anyone on the ballot at any level of office, swearing to do what they had done so bravely, and at such a price.

I said the words “I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Iowa,” and my voice broke a bit.  I looked at the judge, who seemed to register what I was thinking and grimace in sympathy, and on we went with the rest of the oath.  But I looked at Jessica, there to support her wife in spite of having worked all night as a psychiatric nurse at the University of Iowa and in spite of having battled through a two-day bout of so-called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, and I nearly wept openly.  In an instant my mind traveled from the dear face of the woman with whom I will spend the rest of my life in joy to the forces gathering out there, forces that wish to unseat the remaining four of seven justices who crafted what has been widely hailed as a brilliant ruling in Varnum.   Forces that may indeed wish to take from us the marriage we now have.  And for a minute, it almost was enough to undo me.  But I made it past that patch, and I concluded my oath, and I will spend the next four years faithfully discharging all the duties of my office.  Most especially will I execute my duty to uphold the state’s constitution whenever it is attacked in a mean and foolhardy fashion.  Those who seek to unseat justices on our high court have distorted vision – they view the goal of diminishing the equal protection our constitution affords as strengthening liberty, when in reality they would diminish liberty and freedom to the point of meaninglessness if they succeed in their efforts. 

I don’t like to say it often – in fact, never before have I publicly said it.  But as fate would have it, two ancestors of mine fought in America’s Revolutionary War for Independence.  They were not luminaries, neither Jeffersons nor Hamiltons, but there they were, under names like Painter and Fownes, risking everything to create a nation founded on the concept that no civil privileges or rights may be granted to one group while being denied to any other.  That is the crux of who we are as a people.  It gives us the liberty spoken of so freely these days by those who scarcely seem to deserve it, hacking away as they do at our wisely balanced tripartite system of legislative, judicial, and executive power.  They call themselves federalists when I have no doubt the founding fathers would prefer to exit their own skin rather than embrace this twisted, contemporary version of federalism that seeks to diminish liberty and deny equality. 

Do I tell myself these patriots from another time would have supported same-sex marriage per se?  No.  Nor voting rights for women, nor racial integration, nor interracial marriage.  I have no idea where they might have stood on such issues.  Those developments in our social and cultural life had to be hashed out in the hurly-burly of our raucous public square, the reactionary furnaces of our legislatures, and finally in the chambers of our highest courts, where the constitutionality of laws passed by legislatures is meant to forever be interpreted and tested.  But of those ancestors who fought for America’s freedom I do know this much:  they would never settle for an America in which one of their descendants was denied civilly granted rights and privileges because she was one kind of American, and not another. 

In their spirit, then, I Kim Painter, do solemnly swear, that in every way possible I will attempt to live up to this revolutionary lineage, and also to the historic work of three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who will no longer be donning their robes.  Chief Justice Marsha K. Ternus, justices Michael J. Streit and David L. Baker – names that will endure in history.  Their loss is a great blow to our state, and today was a sad swearing in, but it also presents an opportunity to serve with bravery and strength in the coming days, to be a voice for the real meaning of liberty and constitutional equality.  I hope all of you join me in rising to meet that opportunity.

Velvet Shoes

It is probably fifty years since anyone read the poet Elinor Wylie, and perhaps much longer. Every year when it begins to snow softly, in sufficient amounts that I find myself wanting to walk out in it and look for owls, I think of her poem that speaks of soundlessness and silver fleece, and print it out for someone. Tonight, I’m leaving it for the night nurse who follows me on weekends. An hour ago I was so close to a fit of weeping that I begged my colleague to stop me from it. He let me talk to him about things I like- tonight it was spiders, snakes, and Shakespeare, and I settled down.

Just before I asked Richard to keep me from crying I was getting shouted at by a respiratory therapist who’d come to the unit after I paged her. One of my patients had a malfunctioning CPAP machine we had been unable to silence for some time, and the difficulty had begun on a previous shift. I am polite by nature and more so in the written than the spoken word. So I had sent her this text page, saying that the first page was generated at 2300 and this second was sent at 0400. No blame was assigned, but she arrived on the unit minutes later with all guns blazing and tears in her eyes. She called me “rude” and she did not scream out loud but her volume was sufficient to turn heads and to startle me.

I apologized but this was not enough to calm her. I apologized again and the result was no better. Finally, I dropped my eyes to her badge and spoke to her with her name and asked her why my apology was not heard and what I needed to do to make things better. At that she seemed to shake off her anger. We began to actually speak with one another. I confessed I had intended to imply that it was possible I was told a mistruth about the first page, because sometimes I am told things that have never happened at all, here. People leave, exhausted, and as they exit they want me to think they have taken steps they haven’t. I understand. At last she said she could see I had never intended to offend her. I thanked her for listening to me long enough to see that. She said the same to me. I let her off the locked unit, deactivating the fifteen second delayed alarm system. I told her that her work is important to the hospital and I am personally grateful for it.

But after she left, I felt deflated, punched down, hurt. I wanted to cry. It isn’t just my two weeks of working with a bad head cold and my eternal insomnia and the truth that for the first time ever we are three weeks into December and I have done no shopping whatsoever for the holiday and that this weekend must embrace everything I ought to have done for the last month. It is also this: how can we ever be a peaceful society when it takes this much effort to outrun a simple misunderstanding between workers who have never even met and been annoyed by one another before tonight? How can there be any hope at all? I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked from me.

One hour before all of that, I’d had a break. I ate my nightly cottage cheese and watched a flashmob of singers stun an audience in a food court singing Handel’s Chorus, that marvel of Euro-tribal ecstatic process. “Listen,” I told a co-worker near my side- “this is the part where the first sopranos max out.” I was a first soprano in school and am still thrilled when this part of the work arrives- it is like climbing the steepest staircase with your lungs to reach and hold those highest of notes. It is devastating and lovely and it makes me long for some way to sing this again with a big bunch of other people.

It is the saddest truth of all, how much we do long for goodness. It is the last beautiful thing about being human.

listening carefully

Struggling under the influence of 15 days of an upper respiratory infection that took my voice away for two days last weekend, I fail to obtain a picture of Richard Holbrooke large enough to put on my kitchen altar in any of my usual formats. Just after pulling the roast out of the oven and donning my coat to go and collect Kim I place a tiny stamp sized photo of him right onto the sternum of the Virgin of Guadalupe statue that glowers on her red tin tray. She was carved in Oaxaca and she is dark and seems to glare, especially by candlelight.

How tired I am of the Obama administration is just about how exhausted I am by this horrible cold. “I have loved knowing you,” I hear myself say to my friend on the phone just before we all sit down to one of our rare shared dinners. Kim is scandalized by my allusions to my own death. But I feel close to it, my arms so heavy I can barely lift them. At work I let the suffering of my patients extinguish any concerns I have for myself. I come to work and fling myself at everything, then I go home and can do no more in the mornings than fill the birdbaths and give our medically obese cat her tiny puddle of milk before I fold up for the day.

I am angry tonight that the Obama military industrial complex is saying Holbrooke was joking with his doctors when he said his last words about getting out of the war. I am moved to tell the story of what I overheard thirty years ago, just before I was put to sleep for a surgery. An anaesthesia resident was training an orientee, and I heard him whisper firmly to his charge: “Watch them and listen carefully-patients will reveal their deepest fears to you just before the induction.” Of course that is what Richard was doing! He was speaking his heart. I am ashamed and sickened that the Obama White House tries now to diminish this story, this wonderful story that ought to make us all listen with more of ourselves. Damn these people and their little ways. Damn the fact that once more I will have to vote for them in two years time. Damn the country that can do no better than produce these sorts of leaders, people who let you down in every way and then call you sanctimonious and then leave you to realize that the alternative to them will be far, far worse. Tonight I am sickened beyond anything I can say and beyond comforting myself. A lovely and ferocious man leaves the world and is already being dumbed down for those of us left behind.