Every Sunday morning my wife and daughter go to church, and I retreat to my office in the back of our house. Usually I write something, often a contemplative entry for my home blog (www.nodepression.net), and most mornings I dig out an album's worth of classic gospel music to play in the background.
This essay began writing itself -- this time -- as I stood in the rows of greasy beans within my father-in-law's garden, training the vines and squishing Japanese beetles. They make a satisfying crack when you get your thumbnail fixed in the right spot.
There was a time when I did not kill bugs, not willingly. There was a time when I would carefully nudge a spider onto the nearest piece of paper and carry it gently outside, setting it free. (Sometimes this curried favor with girls.) There has never been a time, not as far back as I can remember, when I believed in violence. In doing violence. In being a part of it.
This will be discursive, and of little interest, I fear. But I shall try, for this is the story of my life and I continue to rewrite it each time I sit at this computer.
It is a strange thing to have been shaped by the possibility that my big brother would be sent to war. I was ten in 1969, and we spent the summer in Portugal, because that is where my father was doing research. Because my brother, at fifteen, was of fighting age (and there was a war on in Angola, and widows on the streets everywhere in black), he and my father were required one day to present themselves to the office of the Salazar's secret police. It was in a dark cement building in an eerily quiet business district, where little offered itself to entertain my mother and me as we waited. And waited. I bought a whalebone letter opener, and did not understand what took so long, could not guess what might happen to my brother, and to my father.
Nothing happened, of course. We were Americans.
I saw man walk on the moon in Portuguese, which I did not understand. (This makes it easier to subscribe to the conspiracy theories that it did not happen, though I do not.)
When we came back to Seattle my brother went back to high school, and to many entertainments of which I shall not speak, save to note that he had a very understanding Boy Scout troop. Among his claims to fame is the belief that his high school principal turned him into the FBI on a list of the school's top ten radicals. This is not something which can be verified, but his hair grew long and I know that he went to demonstrations, and I am acutely aware that he monitored his lottery number in the draft carefully. As it happened, we were drawing down in Viet Nam when his turn came, and he drew a high number.
That summer he worked as a rifle range instructor at a Boy Scout camp, and afterwards he began accumulating firearms, as a collector. At one point he owned several hundred.
But along that road he taught me the word "pacifist," and it fit me.
On the schoolyard some boys liked to fight. I think there were rules about such things, unspoken things that these boys somehow knew but which I could not understand. I did not fight. I developed the strategy -- all on my own, I hasten to add -- of throwing something which must have looked like an epileptic fit every time the bullies came my way. This made it difficult to hit me, attracted the attention of the playground monitor, and utterly devalued their attempts to gain status by beating me up. (I was once stuffed in a garbage can in junior high school, but that had more to do with my rebounding technique!)
I did not understand these things. I knew -- I still know -- that if I were actually pushed to fight, I would not follow the rules. That I would go for the groin and the neck and the eyes, that if I were pushed so far that I had to fight I would...I would try to kill, I think. I paused typing those words. They seem wrong. Maybe I would threaten to kill. Maybe I would do anything to defend myself, and the knowing of that scared me into doing nothing.
The question remained: What do you do if your lottery number comes up? We had been in Viet Nam my whole conscious life, and I had no idea that it might someday end. This is something that, as a ten and twelve and fourteen and twenty-four-year-old person, even today at forty-nine, something I spend time thinking about regularly. Which is, perhaps, not healthy, especially as there's no chance they'd take me now. But one wishes not to be a coward, eh?
What do you do? A few years back I read a splendid essay -- in Granta, I think, from an early Viet Nam war protester who went to prison rather than serve, who believed the prisons would fill with ethical people like him, and came to find that he had been played for a fool by his fellow activists. But Muhammad Ali went to prison. There was that.
At the time that was the choice I had worked out. I would go to prison. I would not leave for Canada, though it was but three hours to the north. And I would not serve.
Later, when I went to see Platoon with a friend who had served in Viet Nam, who asked that I come with him, I came to fear that my objection to the war had to do with fear, that I could not have carried those packs and weapons and survived. And I came to think that, perhaps, the more honorable solution would have been to seek service as a medic. But, then, what does one do in a firefight when guns are needed?
The other door, that killing people was against my religion, has forever been closed to me. I have no religion. I did not come to pacifism as a Quaker (though my brother and his girlfriend dabbled in that faith for a time, hedging his bets, I suppose; or getting over), nor any other of the accepted religions exceptions. My mother was baptized a Catholic, but not raised in the faith (either because her father was not Catholic, or because she was born a week after the stock market crashed in 1929, and I do not know which); my father was raised by a woman who periodically proclaimed the Christian Science faith, but she was not right in so many ways that none of it stuck with him. We were not church-goers. I was sent one summer when the neighbor girl was teaching Sunday school at the Presbyterian church down by the grade school, and that's the only time I've worn a tie in my life. I could not understand whether the Disciples came before or after the cowboys and Indians, nor could I understand why I was expected to give my allowance to this church for the privilege of wearing a tie.
Where, then, am I confused?
Would it make any sense to you if I mentioned that for a number of years I was a significant fan of pro wrestling, that I spent Christmas of 1976 with my older brother at a cage match at the Seattle Center Arena, watching Playboy Buddy Rose and Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka do battle? That I remember hearing the folks behinds us in the cheap seats talking: "They're back in the locker rooms playing cards with each other," which they may well have been, and then, "KILL HIM!" I can go on at some length about the decline of this classic old American form of carnival culture.
Would it make any sense to you if I added that during my undistinguished career playing street ball I was as physical and violent a player as one can be at 5'9" with no particular stature? That I always went through the key with my elbows a little out. That I am highly competitive in any argument, in any setting, unless I consciously over-ride that impulse.
My wife and I courted at club fights in Nashville, at the Music City Mix Factory. Every Wednesday night for a few months we would go to this strange place and watch men fight. One night we saw, for $15, ringside, three former heavyweight champions fight. Not each other, not competitive fights. Four rounds each, workouts, barely. But they were (I cannot remember their names) former heavyweight champions of the world, and they moved beautifully in the ring, even the one -- especially the one -- who was dangerously crazy, and had cried in the ring. I cannot remember his name, and it does not matter.
Today boxing mostly bores me, and I have taken to watching the UFC -- the Ultimate Fighting Championships -- and other forms of mixed martial arts, should they appear on my TV when I am bored. I am fascinated -- this is my excuse, something I believe, but an excuse nevertheless -- by the ability of these highly trained, supremely disciplined men to think strategically while somebody else is hitting them hard or bending their limbs in directions they are not meant to go. As a writer I respect that focus; it is why, for a time, I liked lifting weights.
But I am a pacifist. I do not believe in violence.
In my teens and twenties I spent a lot of time in a mountain cabin with a very rational friend. And in the late evenings with the fire in the stove flickering and the windows open because it was too hot, we would talk about these things. Inevitably he would ask me: What would I do if somebody tried to hurt me? My answer varied, and I cannot recall what I may have said then, but my answer today is this: Any situation I cannot talk my way out of is already resolved, and not in my favor. And then he would ask, What would you do if somebody threatened your wife and child? At the time, I had no intention of marrying, much less fathering. Having now done both, a little late in life, but not too late to enjoy it, I am much more troubled by this question.
It is something I ask myself while killing Japanese beetles.
We live in a small town, in a safe place. It is unlikely I will ever confront this choice. But it is important to this thing that is fundamental to me that I work out the answer, and rework it, and know.
It is important to me when I look at U.S. foreign policy that I understand how my personal pacifism can and should play into those decisions.
What I think is this, today: If somebody came for my wife and child, I would, if necessary, do what violence was necessary to stop them. Only, I hope, what was necessary to make it stop. That, I think, is what U.S foreign policy ought to be.
And there I will leave it.
Should it matter, I wrote this while listening to an advance copy of a new gospel album called Como Now: The Voices of Panola County, MS, a newly recorded a cappella release which is meant to be sold beginning August 19 by the Daptone label.