The Protest: Scene from my Accursed Novel

When Clark walked into the house, he heard yelling come from the living room. He set his backpack down by the door and ran in to see what was wrong. Maureen was sitting on the floor stuffing envelopes and screaming at the television.

"You fucking lying bastard! How can you sit there and say that shit?!"

"Mo?"

Maureen looked up at Clark. "Oh, Hi. Can you believe these guys?"

Clark leaned over and kissed Maureen on the top of the head. "I thought you were being raped or something."

"You're so melodramatic sometimes."

"I'm melodramatic? You're having a premature stroke watching Crossfire and I'm melodramatic? Mo, maybe you shouldn't watch so many of these things. This can't be healthy, even at your age."

"At my age? What should I be watching at my age? Bozo's Cartoon Circus?"

"I'm just saying, that you don't have to watch every news show just because it's there."

Maureen looked at Clark blankly, as if he were speaking Swahili. "That's what they want, Clark."

"There is such a thing as too much information."

"Sure. I can pretend it's not there and sit around watching sit-coms or docudramas and wait for them to show up at my door and drag me off for thought crimes. Or better still, they could find me so innocuous that they would ignore me completely because my brain is so addled and placated . . . "

"That's not going to happen."

"Tell it to a campesina or a Bosnian Moslem."

Maureen to continued to stuff and label envelopes without missing a beat. "I'm just saying," Clark continued, "that one day without being in a snit might actually be good for you. You push yourself so hard sometimes." Clark sat down on the sofa behind maureen and began rubbing her shoulders as she sat on the floor, back to the sofa, with a pile of flyers, a roll of printed mailing labels, and a sheet of stampls on the coffee table in front of her. She leaned her head back against his legs and sighed. Clark leaned forward and kissed her. "Tyranny will still be there tomorrow for you to battle."

Maureen snapped forward and began folding flyers again. "Don't patronize me, Clark. Just because you and your friends got tired and sold out . . . "

"Don't start on this again. If what I do is so shitty, why do you put up with me? Not everyone can throw themselves in front of traffic or chain themselves to the Armenian Embassy."

No. Some of us have to prop up capitalism while me make the pretense we're bringing it to its knees by writing positions papers and textbooks and putting on red face and doing our little Marxist minstrel show for the department heads."

Clark stood up and snatched a paper from Maureen's stack. "And how is this dead tree pulp going to bring fascism to its knees? Political assassinations through paper cuts?" Clark balled up the flyer and through it across the room. "I really want to know, Mo. WHY DO YOU STAY WITH ME? I'm so clearly inadequate. Am I your practice? If you can improve me, you can improve the world? Or is it just that you can't hang onto your rich Mommy and Daddy forever while you live in your fake poverty, so I'm the least onerous way for you to get a hot meal and a roof over your head and get fucked every once in a while?"

"Fuck you."

"Is that it? Does it make your clit hard when I recite Das Kapital? Or is it just the sexy way I draw out Hegel's dialectic?"

"Maybe I just wanted an A in poli sci."

Clark kicked the table away from Maureen. Stamps and papers went flying and the stapler landed with a thud inside the upended table.

"Why do you do this? You know we never dated while you were in my class. Why do you have to be such a bitch when you're mad?" Maureen cringed against the couch with her hands in front of her face as Clark stood over her screaming. "Why are you crying?"
Clarked stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. Maureen could hear the deadbolt turn and Clark was slamming things down on his dresser. She started when she heard something smash against the wall overhead.

Maureen sobbed loudly, gasping for breath, as she got up and set the coffee table upright. Her hands shook while she gathered up the flyers and supplies. She fished around in the couch for the remote control and turned the channel over to a cartoon. Mechanically, she folded, stapled, stamped and labelled a few more flyers before finally giving up. She crawled onto the sofa and lay down, cradling a pillow in front of her. She stared blankly at the television, sobbing quietly.

At 4:10, Clark came downstairs and looked at Maureen, who had falled asleep curled around the throw pillow. He touched her gently on the arm and she jumped up, startled and scared. Clark sat down beside her, putting his arm on her shoulder.

Maureen snuggled against his torso, trying to go back to sleep. Clark lifted her to her feet. "Let's go to bed. You'll be more comfortable there. I'll help you with your mailing in the morning."

"What time is it?"

"After four. C'mon." He led her upstairs to their room, leaving the lights and television on.


In his small apartment, Clark woke up in the middle of the night, briefly disoriented. He lay on his side in the dark, trying to orient himself, to remember where he was. Once he finally remembered, and realizing he now needed to go to the bathroom, he rolled over in bed, fully awake now. He saw a very small man, no more than 3 1/2 feet tall, the same size as the divider between his kitchen and dining room. The little man had a wrinkly face. He was hunched over, wearing a dirty little trench coat. His face looked like a caricature, like a drawing of Jimmy Durante, with the big nose and big eyes. He put up a stubby, swollen wrinkled hand and waved at Clark, then before Clark’s eyes, disintegrated, decrystallized. Clark immediately jumped out of bed and began sorting socks and underwear. It was 5 a.m. Within 10 minutes, he was dressed and out the door, headed for the fluorescent lights of an all-night laundromat.

The next day, Maureen loaded up a few signs and began to drive around town, collecting her friends. The five of them had planned to drive to the nuclear power plant outside of town. No big deal, just issue a few manifestos, stand across the street with some signs, show that not everybody wanted to go inside the plant for a sanitized "tour" promoting nuclear power. As an older plant, this one could potentially have some real problems, and Maureen and her friends wanted to open the debate--a debate that had seemed absent in this community.

Not too far from her hometown, maybe 150 miles or so, the power company had put up a nuclear plant, promising the residents that the lake, built to cool the plant, would provide recreational opportunities. There were images right out of the Simpons of people boating, fishing and swimming right next to the twin towers of the plant. The thought of swimming in a lake that was created for and fed into by a nuclear power plant made Maureen's skin crawl. Not surprisingly, once the plant was open, the residents were unable to use the lake, due to the proliferation of unsafe microorganisms in the overheated water.

All over the country, unsophisticated small towns had been talked into nuclear plants. This one was on the river. Maureen loved living in river towns, and in fact, had vowed never to live anywhere that didn't have a significant lake or river. And she couldn't stand the thought that this plant was pouring unsafe substances into her river, just like all of the other manufacturers that dotted the shores.
Maureen had sent out a press release a few days before indicating that the local "Greens" chapter would make an appearance at the plant. In reality, the Greens chapter thus far amounted to her issuing position statements and having her friends stuff envelopes. That she had a full carload of people gathered for this event was a major coup, she felt.

Once gathered, the local Greens chapter as now configured, decked out in jeans and tie-dye, knee to knee with their signs and posters in their laps, cranked up the radio and sped off along two-lane highways out to the plant. As they got there, they saw both sides of the road full of police cars--county sherrifs, local cops, state patrol. There were more police cars than there were people in her car. At the same time, she saw no media vans or reporters and this was, primarily, a photo opp. It wasn't like they had any plans at all to shut down the plant or anything. Maureen felt at once terrified and proud of her public relations abilities.

"Shit. Look at all the cops. They must have been expecting a lot of people. Maybe I overdid it with the royal 'we'." Maureen slowed down, but did not stop. One of the police cars, perhaps noticing the proliferation of bumper stickers such as "US out of North America" and "Lobotomies For Republicans--It's the Law" began to follow them in a slow-speed OJ Simpson type pursuit.

"What should we do? I wasn't prepared for this. I just thought we'd come out, read a statement, nobody would notice us, like usual, and then we'd go have pizza."
Everyone in the car murmured "I don't knows" and "what do you think." After a few miles, the police car turned around and headed back, confident no doubt that he had defended the power plant from left-wing nuclear terrorists.

They pulled over and turned the car off. Maureen turned around to talk to her backseat activists. "Ok, let's do this. We go back, and if we see any media, we get out and talk to them. Otherwise, we just keep going."

So the white Maverick turned back and rode back and forth in front of the plant a few times but they were unable to identify any photo opportunities. They headed back into town and stopped off at a diner for debriefing and chocolate shakes. The headline in the next day's paper read "Greens Turn Yellow."

Chapter 11 of my accursed novel

CHAPTER: CLARK


With spring came the bombing of Kosovo. Clark found himself in the odd position of supporting a US military action. He could not find a single point of self-interest for the United States. There was no oil. The country was devestated from war. There might be economic gains in the future during the country's rebuilding, and yet we were bombing the Serbs--a group of white European background, who appeared to be emerging as the victors, the group that multinational corporations would someday want to court to locate manufacturing plants and sell soft drinks to the country.
For at least five years, if not more, the world had watched pictures of tremendous brutality. Stories of the rape camps, were moslem and croatian women were used as sexual objects. He had read articles and stories where the Serbian army had taught the rank and file to talk about their "enemies" as not human. And they seemed to believe it. Milosevic had been convicted of war crimes and atrocities several times. For the past twenty years, every skirmish was justified by painting our targets as purely evil. Saddam is just like Hitler. Noriega is oppressing his people and shipping drugs to the US. And yet, here was the closest justifiable comparison to Hitler --a leader with no regard for the human suffering of his opponents; a force that used phrases like "ethnic cleansing" to justify genocide--and yet no one was willing to stand up to him. For once, Clark felt shocked at the level of dissent against the bombing.

Yet Clark was not able to feel good about adding to an already devastated country. The picture on the front page of the newspaper looked more like painting, eerie greys and blacks, with a colorful dash of orange at the epicenter. As he watched the wall-to-wall coverage on cable tv, he thought maybe twenty-four hour news was a bad thing, commodifying what was a very serious situation. "The Bombing in Kosovo: Day 2". It came complete with quizzes about where the Mig fighters were being dispatched from and "the answer after this."

Clark decided to take a walk by the federal building and see if there was anyone there he knew. Or, more accurately, anyone there Maureen knew, as he suspected students were much more apt to be there than any of his colleagues. Arrests looked bad at tenure hearings. As he walked by a group of protestors, he heard someone shouting about how they were Serbian and they were worried about their families. Funny, in all this time, he hadn't heard anything about a large pocket of Serbian refugees living in the area. He walked up and began trying to talk to one of the protestors. He tried to calm himself down first. Feeling the blood rush to his face, he knew that it would do no good to be confrontational.

"So, if you're Serbian, how do you feel about what your people have been doing over there until now?"

"Not my family. It's not my fault what the army has done. It's not fair to kill innocent people like this."

"But, what about the innocent Moslems or Croats, or . . . Albanians."

"It is our country now. We need to have our own country. They can go back to their own countries."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"How dare you."

"No, I'm quite serious. If your country is so wonderful, go and defend it. You know, as an American, all I've done most of my life is apologize for my country and try to get them to stop doing what they were doing. Don't support the Shah of Iran, lift sanctions against Cuba, don't bomb Iraq. Blah blah blah. What have you been doing to prevent this bombing from being necessary?"


"Fuck you."


"I'm just saying, I've never seen you out here before to protest atrocities against the moslems, against people you probably grew up with. If your homeland is so right, why are you here looking for political asylum and not over there, defending your family and fighting for your cause."


A young blond woman came over, placard in hand, and starting shouting at Clark.
"It's a free country. We can stand here and protest whatever we want. What are you, some kind of a right-wing asshole? You think everyone should just go back where they came from so we can bomb them?"


"Look, little girl, before yesterday, did you even know where Kosovo was? Can you even pronounce Milosevic? Do you know a Serb from a Croat?"


The young woman started to clap and yell, and soon a chant had begun to swell among the crowd, drowning out any further opportunity for discourse. At least, thankfully, this was an anti-war protest, and so most of the crowd advocated nonviolence. At previous rallies, Clark mused, he was up against pro-war demonstraters, who had no problem with violence whatsoever. He shook his head, shoved his hands in his pockets, and wandered off. What a strange thing, to be defending a military intervention. And yet, despite such a shifting of the world, he thought, we still hadn't learned to talk to each other.


Clark had always had a sympathy toward eastern religions. Reincarnation had seemed to make perfect sense to him. After all, how fair can it be that with somewhere between one and 105 years, your entire eternity would be determined. And didn't premature death leave the playing field very unlevel. Sure, if everyone died at birth, everyone could go to heaven. Unless you were Catholic and unbaptized prior to Vatican II, and then you had to go to Limbo. And even though no one ever talked about those old nature vs. nurture debates, science was still trying to prove that everything about our personalities was chemical and determined by DNA and electrical impulses. It seemed just as plausible that your DNA imprint, your personality, was simply your Karma travelling with you. Why do two people, with identical backgrounds, do drastically different things. Why does one child who is abused grow up to become a rapist and a murder while another becomes a social worker? It was simply your Karmic imprint, continuing your personality and temperment from your previous life.


Yet, reincarnation seemed to carry with it a notion of progression. As Clark looked around him, though, he couldn't buy that anymore. He looked at the people on the bus, in the booths at the coffee shop, beating on their kids or talking about some inane bullshit like their car payments or what Elizabeth Taylor wore to the Oscars, or how they spent six hours a day mastering a new video game. He wanted to jump up and yell "You're going to die someday, and what will you have to show for your lives?"


Society at large didn't bear up too much better under the notion of human progression. We were still executing people for crimes, ridiculously schizophrenic over sex--both obsessed with it and shamed and embarrassed by it--and we hadn't found a way to deal with our neighbors on a civilized human level. No, if reincarnation was going to work as any kind of a believable doctrine, we were going to have to let go of the notion of karmic progression. Maybe, instead, one ran around in circles for a long time, like a dog chasing his tail. Each lifetime, there was something new and interesting attached to your tail that you tried to chase--money, sex, power. Only then, only when you had tired completely of everything life had to offer, only then did you actually advance to a higher level. So even though learning might happen between lifetimes, it merely propelled you on to the next thing, not onto a higher level.

Once, as a graduate student, Clark remembered grading a paper in which a student was writing about Siddhartha. He read a sentence that sent him off on a spiritual reverie: "Because Siddhartha still had desires, he would have to be reborn." Of course! Years of gurus had not been able to make eastern religion as accessible to him as this college freshman had--probably inadvertently, grasping for a way to explain a concept very foreign to him. Yes, it was not that you had to transcend your desires, but that you needed to experience them, get them out of your system, before you could get to nirvana.

It's sad to think we'll never exist on this plane, as ourselves again. Death is not only letting go of life. It is letting go of people, of thoughts and words and your soul ordered in a certain way. It's like losing your spiritual DNA, the collection of molecules and biological memory. It's leaving behind people who will forget you, who will be forgotten, and love and friendship and fun and words you thought you'd carved into their hearts, that you meant to write on the sky in indelible ink, that you carved into the trees and onto the sides of mountains like billboards proclaiming that you were here only to see them washed away, eroded for the next generation. The generation that will not mark the day you were here. Or the day you left. Or any of your days in between.

You have to content yourself with a silent legacy, with anonymity in every word you left behind, every thought you shared with every other person. Ancient artisans left no identifying mark on their work. Pick up a vase, or a plate or a ceremonial bowl, and you will never know who made it. Copyright a poem, patent a sheep clone, but nothing leaves my mark on the world. A silent invisible legacy that hoped for something large, something immortal, and left only ephemera.