Hellhounds of the Wareham Woods, and Other Monsters and Ghosts

     Tonight I went over to Wareham Center to do my laundry at the laundromat by the CVS on South Main Street. So, I'm doing my laundry, and the lady who is running the place, she's very quiet, with a kind of wan, pale, snow-blenched quality, as though whatever fires of human warmth that kindled inside those eyes had to make a great effort, through layers of snow and ice, to get its mere candlelight out to a wintry world -- "Guess she's been in Starkfield too many winters."
      I put in my laundry. A divorced father and his teenage son are playing video games on -- their phones? I don't even know anymore -- while a surly and unhappy looking young man, with long reddish-brown hair, wearing a black pea-coat waited on the other side of the place. It is in a little strip mall, and with the kind of sad soviet glow of the fluorescent lights, and the big storefront windows looking out into the black of the February night, it was a sere and lonesome place -- mournful, most mournful.
      As I go in and out to the car through the hour I am there, I see an older man, a homeless man with the sad downturned mien of someone who, though living amongst humans, is completely forgotten by them: the infinitely sad slumped shoulders of someone who sees themselves as defeated. He wears a dirty, very dirty, white parka, and occasionally stands near to the window where my stuff is, though never so close to the skater-goth human warmth of the teenagers hanging around inside and outside the adjacent Dunkin' Donuts. He has a bunch of stuff, and a kind of tarp lined with a down blanket that he's turned into a sleeping bag. He is, of course, outside the Packie, that reliable institution of Massachusetts strip malls.
      I'm going in and out of my car, and for a little while I'm afraid of the guy as he smokes a cigarette in a possibly menacing way on my path between the laundromat and the car. But as I am in my car, preparing to make a cell phone call,  I see him huddled over on the cold concrete of the sidewalk outside the Packie, and something in my heart breaks a little and I get out of the car. I better get this guy somethin' to eat.
        "Excuse me, sir -- do you want something to eat?
        "Huh?"
         It's not a Sir, it's a Ma'am!
        "Have you eaten? You want a granola bar or something? I'll run into CVS --"
        "N'aaah, I had a peanut butter cup to settle down somethin' I drank earlier....."
        "Oh, ma'am, please let me go get you a granola bar and you know, a cup of, a cup of -- a bottle of water."
        A beat.
        "Don't worry ma'am, I'll be right out."
        I go into the CVS, where I have the same nice blonde clerk of near my age as I had twenty minutes before, when we had a nice flirt. They are closing up, and I go towards the back where the food is. I find some oats and honey granola. I say the hell with it, a whole box of granola bars is only $3.69, so I grab that and a big bottle of water for a buck something, buy them, and go over and give them to my fellow citizen as she lays huddled against the harrowing winds of the New England winter night.
         "Now, Ma'am, you should try to find some place warm to sleep if you can," I say. "It's pretty dangerous out here, you know, in this cold weather. You could even talk to the Cops, you know....."
         "Yeah, well sometimes I sleep up, they send me up, they take me up to that church, you know, behind the Tobey [ed. - the local hospital], you know, you take a left and then a right and then a left -- and, is it a left?"
        "Right," I say, but as an affirmation rather than a correction. She amends herself anyway.
        "Yeah, right, the San Simeon Brothers Church...."
        "Which church, Ma'am?"
        She says something that is somewhere between "Sattinian" "San Simeon" "Sanninnian"; perhaps, in light of what she says in a moment, she means Satanic. Given the appellation "Brothers" I assume it is Catholic.
        Now she pulls back her parka hood, and then her sweatshirt hoodie, and whereas her brown weathered face made her age hard to tell, now I see her hair, white and unkempt and tousled, and realize that she is probably just a couple of years older than my own mother.
         "Is that an okay place to sleep, that church?"
         "No, I don't sleep there anymore. That's a feeding grounds. There's some creature some horrible thing it comes up out of the ground and comes in at night through the window to eat you --"
         "A creature?"
         "Yeah, it comes up out of the ground and through the window and if you want to live you gotta' get outta' thaye'h, it's a feeding spot --"
         "It eats people?"
          "Yeah, you know, you never feel right up there, thai'ah's always kin'ah like'a presence or sumpthin', and these three guys were there and I hear 'em talkin' sayin' to wake each othuh' 'r'up at Three so they can attack me so I get up at Two and leave and that's when I seen it, gettin' ready, gettin' ready to come and eat everybody -- and the next day my friend she says ta' me: you wuh right about that church, it is evil."
          "Is it like a ghost, ma'am?"
          "No! No! It's like an evil sortah animal! A creature! It's got grey fuhwr a white belly and glowing red eyes. And it ain't a coyoat because I seen the way it eats and it eats just the soft spots of the deeah the way the koi dogs do, because they is trained by humans, the koi dogs, and they eat the soft spots but they don't eat no fuhwr, and the coyoats they eat it all, you know, everything, even little bits of fuhwr --"
         "Scavengers," I say.
         " -- But this ain't like a coyoat neithuh, 'r'it eats just the soft spots AND the fuhwr, and it goes into that church at night and it eats the people who ah' sleepin' thaiyuh. It's feedin' time."
         "Wow," I say. I am beginning to try to extricate myself.
          "And that church has a lot of hawrrible things happening up thaiyuh, sick, evil things, they'll attack you, the pervert gangs goin' after childrun, it's Disgusting! and all kinds of horrible bad things thaiyuh --"
         "Yahp."
         "And the weeahd sick shit and the Cops, the Cops! They say to me 'You should take yaw grandchildrun up thaiyah', and I say-" no she grows suddenly and increasingly enraged -- "What the fuck, what the fuck you say to me, I bring my grandkids thaiyah, you fuckin' -- I'll send the Scots Guard after ya ya' fuckin --"
        "Ma'am, I got to go back to my laundry. Try to stay warm, okay?"
        She mutters lowly and profanely.
        "And have some of those granola bars."
        She continues her private tirade, the outward manifestation of her inward suffering, of her terror and rage, of the Furies that taunt her from beyond the bourn of reason.

          I come back into the laundromat. I ask the woman there, with her layers of winter, about the old woman outside.
          "Is she gonna' be okay? She's liable to freeze to death on a night like this."
          "Oh," she says with resignation, with a kind of frustrated exhaustion, a sigh of a sentence, "she's been there forever."
           "Well, I'm new 'round here, coming down from Kingston."
            "I'm not from around here either."
            "Oh -- where are you from?"
            "Vermont," she says, with all the famed laconicism of the Green Mountain State.
            "Oh, whereabouts?"
             She hesitates for a half an instant.
              "Whereabouts in Vermont?" I gently press, as if to let her know -- it's okay. I know and like Vermont. You can tell me.
              "Near Canada," she says quietly and without emotion.
              "The Northeast Kingdom?"
              "Close."
               I mention the names of a few northern Vermont hamlets. At one of them the dim candle behind her winter eyes jumps up, flickers.
              "Yes, I'm on the other side of Jay Peak from them."
               So this is it, I realize: she is from Zenobia Frome's country. Long months of dimly lit afternoons, staring from frosted windows at the weak pale sunlight, the bleeding heartbreaking winter sunsets.... Guess she's been in Enosburg too many winters.

                The moon is high and bright overhead. I have bid Mrs. Enosburg goodnight. I am the last one leaving the laundromat; it's ten past nine or so. I was going to make a call from the parking lot, calling my own Mum; but where I am parked, the Touched Woman, pursued by her Furies, she can see me in my car, and there is something in the way she grimly and wordlessly stares in my general direction and at nothing in particular that is spooky, unnerving. There's always something spooky and a little chilling talking with people who are far gone in madness; they exist in our world, our common world of sensorily-derived empirical reality; but they also inhabit a second world, a world of ghosts and monsters, of demonic canines springing up through the Earth from Hell to devour the unwary sleepers in a cursed and evil Church....
           But who knows, and who can say? The rationalist in me says that her brain chemistry is off, her sensory perceptions are off and she's thus misinterpreting reality, that there's almost dispositive evidence that there is not a Hellhound on the trail of St. Patrick's Church (Via google I discover this is the eglise she means). But what if this is what Jurgen Habermas has called "a flattening empiricism"? What if, as Prince Hamlet warned four centuries ago, "there are more things in the world than are dreamed of in all your philosophy....?" Though I am a Theist myself, it has ever seemed to that the agnostic's position is far more logically tenable than the athiest's; for how can we be certain of a negative any more than of a positive? Wasn't Hume onto something when he said that the only thing we can be certain of is our profound uncertainty? What particularly lofty purchase have I, that I might denounce out of hand ghosts and monsters and demon-dogs?
            It seems to me that I have none. And perhaps the Touched Woman has a special purchase of her own, along with other madwomen and schizophrenics. Perhaps she is keyed into a world above, beyond, outside, the world of observable Nature. Is it too much to suggest that she experiences in a kind of waking Dreamtime, the spiritual reality of our own "rational" world? For it occurred to me when I looked up which church she meant, that St. Patrick's, being a Catholic church, no doubt was the scene of some wicked, infamous, and horrible crimes of sexual violence and sadism in the years it has stood; and maybe that's what the Touched Woman was keyed into, in a way deeper, more profound, and more profoundly terrifying than anything imaginable by the Atlantic Monthly/TED Talks-business class wankers whom martyrs call the world. Perhaps the demonic creature, with its hungry devouring bloodthirsty maw, its glowing red eyes (each time I write of the creature I get chills; that is not nothing. But "Eight Days a Week" and the Sign of the Cross will dispel all wickedness!): maybe it is the evil that was done against children that has inhered in a place, and only the Touched Woman, and other touched people, can see it. Perhaps these Hellhounds of the Wareham Woods, visible only to the Touched, represent spiritual realities not directly sensible to us 'rational' people. In this, the Touched and Strolling Poor must be subject to a deeply frightening misfortune -- for if it was hard enough for Martin Luther himself to fight furies and demons, how much more difficult must it be for a person with not even a hundredth of his resources, in a society that ignores them, that has made them into modern-day lepers and American Untouchables?
           We owe our Touched People better than we give them, as a society. We need to do something different, because the current situation is intolerable. For while screaming unholy Furies do chase this poor woman through the New England night, it will be just and avenging Furies which do scourge our society as a whole -- so wealthy, so powerful, so morally stunted -- should we, who can do something for the Touched Woman, choose instead to do nothing.
          

On Exceptionalism, Or, Towards an Inclusive New England

   I was recently having a good natured, but spirited, argument with a friend of mine over the Facebookismo. She is part of that large portion of humanity who evidently find Boston and Bostonians insufferable. And so we got into the nitty gritty of a debate over New England, both of us adducing our reasons, with varying degrees of intellectual veneer (n.b. mostly from me), why it -- or rather, Boston, for I did point out that Boston and New England are not one and the same -- is either great or horrible. And we both went back and forth, for a long time, both of us making points, mostly good, a few not as. But it was a good time. She is a smart as a whip, a great arguer, and on the right side of History, and that made it a lot more fun of an experience than it would be were I engaged in my prior habit of fighting vicious moron libertarians and NeoConfederate freaks.
    But it got me to thinking several things:
                                 
                                  I.
   The joy of argument, the thrill of verbal combat: it is a mighty thing, a deeply intoxicating emotion: like kissing or wine, it flushes our very cheeks; and for that reason is to be all the more suspected. I'm trying to go with the actual Epicurus and his moderation in all things here, not the hedonic caricature of Epicurus drawn by decadent Restoration Stuart types. I hate those jackasses. Nor the grim Calvinism of a world-hating Christianity (St. Francis, you're okay!).
                                  II.
      In thinking about the exchange with this person, I began to think more about the idea of Exceptionalism. Frequently we hear this word in connection with the phrase "American Exceptionalism". Now, we frequently get the Right's version of this, the idea, both anti-humanist and at odds with certain scriptural verities ("the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike"), that America represents a force that transcends human history, imbued with a kind of holy immanence, and that Americans are not subject to the same prostration before inscrutable Fortune that is the common lot of the human race. This is the strain that believed we could ride out a fascist world on our own Continent, that believed with Lindbergh in "America First"; it is the same strain today which believes that the immutable laws of physics do not apply to America, and we need not worry about our warming globe.
       Now, there are of course, some New England origins of this exceptionalism, John Winthrop's belief that his new settlement at Shawmut (Boston) would be "as a Citie on a Hill"; but I do think it's notable that before the City on a Hill, in 1630, there was an older, more republican idea, from a smaller, more heterogeneous society: The Mayflower Compact, which affirmed that the Saints and Adventurers in Provincetown Harbor in late autumn, 1620, would "combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic...." And here is a different, and older, New England political genealogy than the rather unctuous self-regard of the City on the Hill: it is a deeply civic and communitarian tradition, one linked to what J.G.A. Pocock has called "the Atlantic republican tradition," which he traces to Machiavelli and other Renaissance Florentine thinkers, who would certainly have been read by the leaders of the group, especially Cambridge graduate William 'Elder' Brewster. It's also important to note that the Saints, or Separatists, don't have the same wildly inflated theological view of themselves as Winthrop and the Puritans. They just want to get away from it all, they're convinced Europe is screwed (and with the Thirty Years War coming and Civil War in Britain and Ireland, you can't say they're entirely incorrect) and it's time to get out. Thus, alongside the arrogant self-regard of the City on a Hill strain in early New England political thought, there exists, at a lower frequency, a deeply civic strain that is seen in operation through the quotidian doings of the Town Meetings, which are, for their time, the most democratic form of government in the Atlantic world (who can vote? Male freeholders, i.e., property owners, who are most males over 21 in the 17th century. This changes to an extent in the 18th century, with increasing tension and landlessness leading to a lack of the franchise until the introduction of universal white male suffrage in the early republican era).
      But I do let the love of my homeland drive me to digress; and this perhaps is the very point I am making. The 'exceptionalism' of our relationship with anything -- with America, with New England, with the University   of Michigan or the Red Sox -- lies not in the existence of this relationship outside the realm of those exigencies of fate and contingency which are the common lot of human beings at large, but rather in this relationship being one of a deep, profound, and personal kind of love, the love of parent for child and child for parent, of brothers and sisters for one another, a love, perhaps, prior to romantic or sexual love: a deep mammalian love, a kind of love we feel when we regard our dogs and kitties and their beautiful little snouts. And this, then, is why our exceptionalism, predicated upon deep loves, is actually Unexceptionable: for in loving some ones and some places and things more dearly and deeply than life itself, we engage in that habit which we share in commonality with all our fellow human beings (indeed, with the puppies and other mammals as well).
      Thus, while we are all engaged in relationships that are almost ipso facto exceptional, in the sense of totally singular -- there shall be no other mother-child relation than the one between your mother and you -- we see that this kind of exceptionalism is the common lot, and often the common misfortune, of mortal humanity. It is, as President Obama wisely put it: of course he believes that America is exceptional, and the greatest country in the world; but he also knows that Britons believe that about Britain, the French about France, and the Greeks about Greece.
        Why do I say misfortune? It is because, while my attempt at a Left and Love-based understanding of Exceptionalism is all for the well and good, the nasty right-wing version, the version that includes belligerent Nationalism and rapacious Imperialism, the Tea Party and la Mission Civilatrice and Francisco Franco, has bigger battalions and more money. And it is in the habit of appealing to the worst in that exceptional relationship of a priori Love, a willingness to see the extraordinary character of one's own love, and one's fears for the preservation of that love, as a kind of moral blank-check to engage in the most wicked and barbarous disregard for the singular and exceptional loves of our other fellow creatures. Thus, I think it is important, at least in the will-o'-the-wisp world of Internet Publishing, to make a move towards taking those underlying feelings of exceptional love, and moving them towards a politics that, while cleaving to its love of Patria or Motherland, acknowledges that this love is a common feeling of all peoples for their homeplaces, and in no wise entails the normative justification of economic or political or otherwise violence and domination. That while we all (or most of all of us) love our parents, we all also know that our parents, being human beings, are not perfect. And yet we still do love them.

                                                              III.
    Thus it is, that in the course of the conversation with my friend, that I found out that some ignorant piece of trash from the Town of Boston spat on this brilliant woman, with her brilliant sparkling sense of humor, her wisdom and her decency, when she was in Town because of the color of her skin! What a fuckin' asshole that guy was; wish I could get 'ahold a' him. But I got to thinking more. And so, as I thought: if my Father spat on someone because she looked different than him, of course that person wouldn't like him -- and she would be in the right! And my City-Father, Boston, spat on her! So of course she dislikes Boston, and has every right to do so! And it made me think: what do you think, beyond your love for your native places -- what do you think should go into a New England-based politics of what I'll call Inclusive Singularity (rather than Exceptionalism)? A politics that both acknowledges what is singular in a place, but then allows that singular quality to be accessed in an equal fashion by all who seek it, regardless of birthplace, race, class, creed, or any of those other poxy artificial distinctions by which we render humanity alien to itself.
       So what are these principles, these rather creedal than mere accident-of-birth elements of what it ought to mean to be from New England? These will both overlap and be, in some cases, beyond the bourn of traditional Anglo-American legal rights. Let me propose a few of these principles, based on my own understanding of New England history, and my own judgment as to what may be worthy in that history; they are premised first of all in my belief -- my firm and passionate belief -- that the land of any one place is what makes it unique (or rather the land and waters), and that this land is at the heart of any place's singular, original quality:

        I. The Preservation, Regulation, and Maintenance of the Commons -- of Wood, Water, Marshes, Meadows, Swamps, Sky, Fields, Fish, Fowl, and Game of the Several Towns and Cities must form one of the chief ends of Government. These common resources must be available to all citizens regardless of artificial distinctions of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed, in proportion to what the ecosystem may bear.
        II. Where practicable, government shall be by Open Town Meeting, with each legal voter capable of bringing motions, debating them, and voting on them. The Government of the Cities must be made as directly democratic as is practicable, with the Mayor engaged in a kind of Prime Minister's Questions once every Season of the Year from the City Council. Town Meeting Day and Election Day shall be legal holidays, and citzens shall be legally enjoined to vote.
       III. The education of the young and the training of a wise and able citizenry being one of the chief ends of civil government, the establishment of public schools, with education equally available to all, regardless of artificial distinction, must forever be established and enforced.
        IV. Each Town, and in the Cities, each Neighborhood, must establish a Free Public Library for the use of its citizens, equally available to all, regardless of arbitrary distinctions.
        V. Public Order being essential to the Public Liberty, no citizen shall be suffered to carry a gun any more powerful than a hunting rifle or fowling piece outside of the regulated and duly-established militias of the several Towns and Cities, under the command of the Governor as Chief Magistrate of the Civil Power.  
         VI. New England must forever abandon and eschew military adventurism abroad. We shall go to war only if we are attacked.
       VII. This being a wealthy country, the right of all New Englanders, regardless of creed, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other false and invidious distinctions, to a healthy subsistence shall be the duty of the Community and the Civil Power.
       VIII. The Civil Power of the Several New England States shall be responsible for the preservation of those oceanic fisheries beyond the bourn of any one Town or City.
         IX. Corporations are not citizens or legal persons. Legal personhood may attach only to animate, corporeal beings.

   Those are my first nine that I can think of. Let me know if you have some you think ought to be added. And apologies that this essay comes to a rather -- inconclusive? -- conclusion. But it's late-early, and I have some Jimmy Cliff to listen to.

Gun Extremists Aren't The Minutemen

So, there's this blog I often visit by a retired US Army Special Forces Colonel, mainly for the insight he brings to the Greater Middle East, having been an attache' to several Arab militaries. He's sort of in the paleo-conservative camp, meaning there are some things -- the virtues of rural living, the monstrousness of the corporate-military industrial complex, the delight of trout -- he and I can agree on. But there are other things we can't and that make me mad, like the Civil War (he is an old Virginian). More topical is gun control. He posted a rather silly piece of satire from one of his right-wing commenters, premised on the idea that the Battle of Lexington and Concord was Big Government (Gen. Gage) trying to "take the assault weapons away from anti-tax, right-wing, paramilitary extremists."
    There are a lot of things wrong with the piece, but as an historian of 18th century Massachusetts, let me note just a few:
   1. The Patriot/Whigs were left-wing, not right-wing, if we're going to impose this ahistorical framework. The right-wingers are the Tories locked up in Boston.
  2. These were not "paramilitary extremist" nutters in the sense of Ruby Ridge or Waco; they were the established militias of the several towns of the provisional Gov't in Exile of Massachusetts Bay. They were undergirded and sanctioned by the Civil Authority in the several Town Meetings, and the General Court in exile that met in Salem. This is crucial and key: the modern far Right's view that any cadre of bandits with firearms constitute "defenders of liberty" would have been roundly rejected by the intensely communitarian New Englanders of the 18th century countryside.
  3. The idea that gun fetishists and various madmen (they mostly are men, aren't they?) owning stockpiles of weapons designed for industrial warfare, in the midst of a free and democratic society, during peacetime, can in any way be likened to the storage of 18th century war materiel, AT THE BEHEST OF THE LEGITIMATE CIVIL AUTHORITY, during a time of foreign military occupation, is fallacious.

    Thus, the ultimate problem the Far Right has in this analogy of themselves with the Minutemen, is the lack of the crucial element which legitimized the 18th century minutemen: the endorsement of legitimate civil authority representing the popular will (now, you can say that Gen. Gage is the legitimate civil authority, but I'm assuming we all accept the Patriot/Whig argument here; sorry, Tories, John Yoo, et al.). If they want to start Committees of Correspondence and other legitimate civil authorities that will endorse their nuttery, they are free to do so: but only if such civil authorities are democratically formed can they be considered legitimate in today's America. Indeed, they would have to be more democratic than the currently ordained civil authorities, the Towns, States, and Federal Governments. But if one thing is clear about the Gun Extremists, is that they really DON'T want to accept democratic strictures; the idea of a free and open debate on their right to own weapons of mass destruction makes them quite literally frothing mad, as it did Mr. LaPierre on "Meet the Press" in December. Or, more recently, the fascist mutant who decided to carry an assault rifle into a Charlottesville, Va., supermarket, in order to impress on all the mothers and babies there how devoted he was to his strange, trigger-bound political theology. This is not how people in a democracy discuss an issue of public import: this is how maladjusted punk weirdoes do so, with the overt threat of violence.
     But, as old Abe famously said, in a democracy, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
     Then again, I don't think they're big fans of Abe in the first place.