To My Family, Friends and Fellow Americans:

Happy New Year. I hope each of you are well during these turbulent times. To anybody who reads this, I hope you are happy, healthy and whole in this new year and decade.

In my first Dispatch in 2020, I would like to talk about Iran and about partisanship in America. I do not often post on Facebook, and I rarely write or speak about politics in public. Though war, the devastating effects of war, and the violent sides of American history and American psyche are subjects I’ve long strived to explore in my fiction, I am only now beginning to take them up in nonfiction and examine them in letters to friends and plumb them in literary essays, like this one.

Because the new war that may be beginning in the Middle East affects me and affects us all, and because like many Americans I’ve been struggling to understand what is happening in our country and across the world today and reflecting on current events deeply, wrestling with them in my mind and heart, I’d like to take this moment to meditate together and to add my voice to the conversation.

A Brief Note Before We Begin

For ease of reading, this letter will be divided into several parts, and each part will be posted separately as an individual dispatch. If you prefer to read the essay in its serialized form, you may do so by following the links below. In the serialized dispatches, there are also additional pictures and photograph galleries. If, however, you prefer to read the entire essay together, as one long letter, in a single post, you may do so here or under the “Essays” tab above.

Part I: The Info War Blues
Part II: Breaking Through the Blues
Part III: A Bipartisan American Rebuke
Part IV: The Forever War on Iran
Part V: In A Murderous Time

Thank you for reading, for listening and visiting the Land West of Long Mountain. Let’s begin.

–Part I–

The Info War Blues

WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

1984, by George Orwell.

From what I can see at the start of 2020, it seems we are in the midst of a fierce information war in America. Each day, this info war intensifies in its fervor, grows in its ferocity and balloons in its fury, even as rockets now begin to fly and bombs to fall for real—in the physical world—and the silent long-winged shadows of drones darken our winter days and bring the gravity of war home to all.

Violence is imminent, we’re told—violence is always imminent in America—fear rules our dim muted mornings, anger reigns over our hungry days, bluster fumes up swift as a snow squall and fills our cold gray afternoons, whitening out the world and blotting out the sunlight, dimming the gunmetal light of the brief day as it blows and brays, and all sides are morally bound they say to save face, seek retribution and pursue vengeance like a sinking star to the utmost ends of the earth, even if revenge leaves all the world wasted and all its life maimed, blind, impoverished, homeless, orphaned or dead. At the dawn of a new decade, many feel as if the long, dark night is finally closing in and the world as we know it is ending.

We talk of tit-for-tats and proportionality in our just, lawful and measured response. We speak of terrorists, necessary evils and the lesser of two evils. We talk of truth, liberty, dignity and justice for all, and we swear solemn oaths in the name of the people, before man and in the presence of God. Finally, they promise that when the beautiful clouds of battle cease broiling and the exquisite ashes of war smolder no more and the necessary noise of democracy-building, humanitarian-militarism and freedom-in-the-making finally abates and falls silent that the Free World will be a safer, better, brighter, more liberal and democratic place for us all.

Sound and Fury
& the Irate Rhetoric of Strawmen

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour, 
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

“The Hollow Men,” by TS Eliot.

The beauty of bombs bursting, the splendor of rockets in white-hot flight, the bedazzling brilliance of battle and the great glory of war ring out from America, singing like the shot heard round the world and bringing peace to all the earth and building rainbows over every nation under the sun.

But these lofty words, so long overused by pundits and politicians who have never set foot within ten-thousand-miles of a war or worn a pair of boots in their pampered and privileged lives, who have never dressed a wound on a battlefield or marched into the brickkiln of combat to pull a buddy out of the furnace, ring hollow as chaff whipped up in the bitter winter wind of dusk and resonate with all the resounding heart of a strawman.

In our 24/7 news cycle, in this furious fight and strident theater of the absurd, in this crazed and chaotic media landscape in which we forever find ourselves living, it’s hard to find a still and quiet place to stand, and it’s tough to find clear and common ground.

In the Info War raging relentlessly and perpetually around us at the seeming speed of light, where slogans reign supreme and group-think rules, one thing for sure is clear at the launch of this new year: in the media’s war to win our hearts and minds, there’s no time and no room for meditation.

Life in the Age of Social Media Warfare

I refrain from posting on Facebook not because like each of us I don’t desire to share things that are meaningful to me and to connect with friends and others, like-minded and unlike-minded alike. I refrain from posting because even a few minutes of scrolling through my news-feed shows me how much tension and conflict there is in our country, even among my family and friends, and how bitterly divided we stand as a nation.

Anger, division, resentment, conflict, infighting, embittered and embattled dialogue, potshots, and the slinging of slurs and personal insults are hard to watch and upsetting to witness, especially among friends and family you love and a country you care for and call home, even when you’re abroad. Some may argue that this is simply the chaotic chorus of democracy and the rabbleous theater of free speech playing out on the great stage of America. Maybe.

Impassioned dialogue inspires me immensely, demagogic rabble-rousing does not. Great drama is a delight to behold, and a Greek chorus, even when tinged with the cacophonic, is pure music to the ears and sublimity to the soul. But is the drama of democracy and the cacophony of free speech really what we’re watching and hearing in our country today, or is something else playing out on the national stage?

The Great Deranged Drama
of American Democracy
(Act I)

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

Captain Ahab, from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.

And who/what, we might ask, is offstage, behind the scenes, presiding in the shadowed wings, both to stage-left and stage-right, pulling the puppet strings and making the mad marionettes move and the ventriloquial mannequins sing and dance, even as the Machiavellian muppets scream, and the sideshow freaks from the theme-park circus and the infuriated geeks from the carnival down the street pantomime an altogether different play of their own against the backdrop of a gargantuan American flag streaming in the breeze, blowing its banners of black oil and dripping blood to the crimson wind, high above some desiccated western prairie or Middle Eastern desert, some terrible and alien, moon-like wasteland, the flaming, gold-fringed flag embossed with a colossal cross and superimposed with a fierce-beaked and fiery-eyed bald eagle, wings unfurled, talons splayed, as the majestic and monstrous bird of prey descends like a supersonic drone upon its pixelated quarry, moving in lightning-like for the cold-blooded kill?

All the while, on the dark side of the moon, behind the raven-veiled curtain, the bombs, bombs, bombs fall, fall, fall on Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, O woeful Gaza!, eliciting not a sound of sympathy from the shills and not an iota of pity from the shrilling chorus, and the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen rage on, in between well-heeled and well-needed commercial breaks for the Great Upcoming 2020 Election and the Super Bowl. The long, slow, steady, cold and calculated killing of Gaza may break your heart, as it rends mine, but empathy is a virtue and an emotion apparently in short supply in the USA. Humanity, like freedom, equality, prosperity and justice, is reserved for some, not for all, in America.

So let the bombs fall, fall, fall and the rockets rain, rain, rain down on Gaza, Gaza, Gaza and let the children of Palestine walk barefoot and bleeding into the shrieking and screaming metallic nets of the mad-barking machine guns, let the explosive-bullets blaze and the eagle-eyed snipers reign, let the broken bodies of the children of Gaza mount, mount, mount, no matter, we’ll be all right here in the USA, we’ll be just fine and dandy, living life, enjoying liberty and pursuing happiness, we’ll be merry as the sun is bright, so long as the Super Bowl is a good game, the day warm and bright, no rain, so long as blissful ignorance never breaks, and so long as we never think about the unpleasant fact that Jesus of Nazareth was also once a barefoot, olive-eyed and brown-skinned, hopscotching kid, laughing and playing in sunshine and shade in Palestine, whittling wood in the cool arbor of a fig tree and dreaming up azure angels afire and pearly doves a-fluttering in his heavenly head, the irate archangels wheeling white-hot swords of terrible wonder above the gold-crowned and bald-faced kingly heads of the world, and the ivory doves and alabaster birds shearing the firmament asunder as they shower shining rainbows of peace and justice down across the earth—we’ll be all right here in the USA, we’ll be just fine and dandy, so long as ignorance remains blissful and we never think about these inconvenient facts or the fact that the bombs and bullets raining down on Gaza, even now, say: “Proudly Made in the USA.”

The Great Demented Drama
of American Democracy
(Act II)

“The Devil does his best work on television.”

Bridget Chiao Clerkin, Writer & Author.

Meanwhile, on a parallel stage to this absurdist play, the Moderate Rebels and the Academy-Award-winning White Helmets cry out by day for no-fly-zones and aerial-bombardment and humane intervention from the West, cry out in the name of God and humanity, even as by night they raise high the onyx-and-alabaster flag of ISIS and march soot-booted with Al-Nusra in their terrible, black-turbaned and obsidian-hooded, jihadi robes, bought by Mossad and paid for by the CIA and designed by Saudi Wahhabis in Riyadh, through the ruined towns and razed cities, from Aleppo to Idlib, Raqqa to Douma and Mosul, going from house-to-house, cutting the throats of the victimized, beheading the brutalized, enslaving the impoverished, torturing the innocent and terrorizing all humanity, while plotting their next sarin attack against the populace, which, they’ve already been assured by their backers, bankers, funders and friends in London, Tel Aviv and Washington, and by the OPCW, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, Fox News and CNN, will be blamed unequivocally on the evil dictator in the high white ivory castle, forever petting his black cat and chanting aloud demonic verses from the Koran, that unholy book of the Devil and that ungodly gospel of Satan—the hated and the hateful dictator and despot forever murdering his own people and striving his most sadistically to preserve his totalitarian regime at all costs and to usher in the messianic end-of-days and to welcome the Anti-Christ to earth.

And if this delirious drama wasn’t already mad enough for you, lo, behold!

Even now, an omni-theater-sized TV drops, emerging deus-ex-machina-like, from the cavernous dark and yawning dome above, the ribbed rafters of the roof leviathan-like, as if the whole theater lay bellied in the bowels of a great white whale. On the TV screen, nineteen-thousand candidates for the Highest Office in the Land parade, jumping and hopping, striving to leap through the laser screen into your lap. They pamper their pomaded hair and pander to you; they beseech you to give up your bucks, they beg you to to donate to their heroic campaigns your hard-earned dollas, dollas, dollas—they must have your dollars to keep well-oiled and fatly-fed the insatiable machines of their noble campaigns—and they implore you to vote for them. “VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!” they rant, they rave, they cartwheel and caterwaul. “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!”

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, William Shakespeare.

And when you work up the courage to humbly and sincerely raise your hand and ask the nineteen-thousand candidates what they can do for you and your neighborhood, as if synchronized by some unseen Maestro, they clamber and climb over one another, fighting and vying, clawing eyes, pulling hair, berating both the Incumbent and each other, flipping and flopping in the flying mud, praising the Party without apology, while the bipartisan corporate cheerleaders of the brain-dead Republic root and toot them on, hounding them, bedeviling the crazed candidates, before they, the poor distraught presidential hopefuls, spider-webbed-eyed and strung-out, beleaguered and at the ends of their own empathetic ropes, finally fix their suits and straighten their red-and-blue lapel pins and stand on their heads and spit out bright pennies and shiny quarters.

“Oh, we’ll do anything, anything, anything under the running sun,” they answer and declare dutifully. “We’re great patriots and good, red-blooded, God-fearing, flag-waving and freedom-loving Americans. “Whatever you want is our wish, kiddies, but first you must part with your meager bucks, give us your beloved greenbacks, your hard-won and worth-less federal reserve notes—don’t worry, they’re going to a great cause—so stop asking so many questions, don’t think so critically, just sit down and shut up already, trust us and give us your bloody money and your damned VOTE!”

Timeless Truth and Mystery
Within the Allegory of the Cave

“I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human
condition as follows. Imagine an underground chamber, a great cave…”

“The Parable of the Cave,” Book VII, The Republic, Plato.

Who/what, we must ask, is directing the furious drama and conducting the cacophonic chorus, and why do we, the American people, sitting angrily in the audience, dumbstruck at the confounding drama and perplexed by the bizarre spectacle and absurd charade, feel something is so terribly amiss? Why do we feel as if we’re living in the matrix and our liberty is illusory?

And if the drama of American democracy is so wonderful, why do we wonder if we in fact freely bought these tickets and elected to come to this strange show tonight, or if those shackles padlocked around our ankles and bolted to the bedrock floor mean that we’re not willing participates in this ludicrous play after all, but prisoners held hostage in an insane asylum, detainees straight-jacketed and dungeoned in Plato’s cave and primordial matrix, watching the flickering shadows on the wall rant, rage and rave, and commit unspeakable acts of the absurd—cerebral genocide, the wholesale slaughter of the intellect, self-lobotomy and self-immolation, murder of the mind—while we sit hapless and hopeless, malnourished, hungry for truth and starved for rationality, powerless to turn our heads and behold, face-to-face, the puppeteers and marionettists, the prison masters, whom we are sure are there, as surely as our beating hearts and reasoning minds tell us this cannot be reality, that there is a world of light—lithe, celestial and luminous—where intelligent, rational and free beings walk and breathe cold and clear, rarefied air in radiant upper climes—brave, free and fearless as the day we were born—somewhere above and beyond this dank cave and bleak basement in the subterranean bowels of the Grand Imperial Armada Slave Ship of the World that even today, in our so-called free and modern times, at the rose-dappled and blood-drenched dawn of a new decade, still plunges headlong through the barren salt seas and plumbs the black ghostly oceans of the earth, bound for whatever foreign land lies on the horizon and whatever unexploited country awaits beyond the dark haunted waters with a dollar to be had, a nation to be pillaged, a free people to be enslaved and an ungodly profit to be made?

When the Long, Dark Curtain Falls,
Does the Drama Resonate?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when the great deranged drama ends for the day and it’s time for us to get up and go away, until tomorrow, do we leave the theater feeling elevated, enlightened, ennobled and wiser, or do we feel dumbed-down, dejected and depressed, and does the drama resonate in our hearts or leave us disturbed, gutted and hollowed out, distressed, dispirited and sick as a strawman staked in a wind-scoured field on the frontier of the blood meridian at sundown?

When watching or participating in the great drama of American democracy, these are the questions We the People must meditate on and ask ourselves with fearless courage of the heart and ruthless bravery of the mind.

These are some of the critical questions, the existential and exigent mysteries, and perhaps the unspoken truths that America must plumb and reckon with if America ever truly aspires to be great, free, full of grace and worthy of its praise.

-Family-

Breaking Through the Blues:
Part II of An Open Letter
to My Fellow Americans

Continue Reading Here

“Breaking Through the Blues,” Part II of this essay and open letter, has been published. In the next section, we explore waking up, tuning in, paying attention and singing praise, guided by the words of poets and some of the great wisdom teachers of the ages, ancient and modern. To keep reading, please click here.

Thank you for reading and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project. If you’re new to the Long West, you may learn more about the project and the author here.

Happy New Year, my best to all. Hope to see you again in the Land West of Long Mountain.