a wet night in wellington

SONY DSC

I look up and see
a storm of a thousand falling lights;
swirling droplets of white ember,
silver beads.

Evening air flickers with rain,
cast under the ink,
passing through the black
naked branches of a tree;
pearl outlines the leaves,
deeper green than the shaded seas
an inlet a mile deep.

The madman without shoes;
rocks upon his folded knees,
sat in the ashes of the cigarettes
he collects
and smokes,
mutters
“The madman without direction;
rocks about the dampened streets,
mind the puddles.”

Television skies,
roaming channel greys
felt on cheeks like pins;
ice dabbing not the ears,
the eyes.

Breath-like smoke,
huddled girls looking for a jacket.

Left Bank to Opera House Lane
then home;
rows of punked-up concrete,
metal grails,
brickwork bracing downcast waters
to wash us all away.

My toes are wet.

by

Cuba Street

SONY DSC
SONY DSC

A bar called Highwater
Is where the sea once fell ashore
In unseen, endless bends of foam.
The Ivy: a queer reminder of
How green flora vanished into moss.

A homeless man is kicked out of it;
The bar, that is.
Tossed again into gutters of beer and smoke,
Muttering “**** the Council”
And kicking a can himself.

A well-dressed man shakes his head,
The silk tie hanging around his neck
In choking disapproval.
But he will say the same
Three words at his three o’clock appointment.

A busker plays a song for coins;
The silent beggar plays far sweeter
Music in his mind.
His debt is eternal.

A ripped poster for a gig
(at which the couple holding hands will break
each others’ hearts)
Is torn up further in the wind.

“A Ghost In Spite of Himself”
Opens at eleven – tickets cost the world.

A black Saturn overhead tonight,
One star alone is shining:
Its name is WISE-1049;
It’s six light years away,
So don’t forget to see it burning.

A young man enters Hotel Bristol.
He’s old enough to buy and beer and gamble
Just the sort of man he’ll be
In six more flaming candles.

Continuous manmade sleep is sought
And on this avenue believed.

by

AMERICA ON DRUGS

Mexican soldier guards marijuana bonfire

(i) A Mexican soldier stands guard as marijuana is incinerated behind him in the border city of Tijuana, 20 October 2010. Tijuana is a major drug smuggling route into the United States, making it one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Its homicide rate is nearly seventy times higher than that just across the border in San Diego (1).

DECLARATION

Nixon and Elvis

(ii) Elvis Presley meets President Nixon at the White House, 21 December 1970.

Elvis Presley’s photograph with President Nixon during a visit to the White House on December 21, 1970, became a powerful cultural endorsement for Nixon’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. Speaking of drugs as “anti-American”, Elvis told Nixon he blamed drug abuse on communist brainwashing and the Beatles. Saying he was “accepted by the hippies”, he pledged to support the President’s anti-drug agenda and asked for a Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) badge for his collection. He got one (2).

Six months later in June 1971, the term itself—‘war on drugs’—was being popularised by the American press following Nixon’s own pledge to wage a “‘national offensive’ against drug abuse” (3). The Controlled Substances Act (1970) had gone into effect in May and gave Nixon the renewed ability to declare such an offensive, while the means to carry it out came in July 1973, with the establishment of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The 1970s, however, do not actually mark the beginning of America’s drug war. Rather, they are part of a pattern of escalation, one which continued in the 1980s when Pablo Escobar expanded the Colombian cocaine market, making him the richest criminal in history and ensuring that billion dollar drug cartels would remain in his place ever since (4). President Trump’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border to stop illegal immigration and drug imports is a contemporary example of this escalation.

This pattern also appears in statistics: in the last twenty years, DEA funding has doubled and fatal overdoses from illicit substances have quadrupled (5). These overdoses are on top of the thousands of other victims resulting from direct or indirect contact with the black market, both domestically and internationally. If only counting from Nixon’s speech in 1971, the war on drugs is still America’s longest and deadliest conflict; approaching half a century and millions of victims.

In reality, it is much longer and much deadlier.

Focusing on federal government legislation, this blog will provide historical context for understanding why this conflict has taken this devastating trajectory, charting development over time, and explaining why one battlefield in particular—marijuana—is so hotly contested today. The federal government did not start this war, but it has left an indelible impact on how it continues to be fought.

OPIUM & COCAINE

Opium Wars

(iii) British East India Company iron steamship Nemesis destroying Chinese war junks, Anson’s Bay, 7 January 1841. Painting by Edward Duncan, 1843.

Human drug use is older than human civilisation and societies around the world have had long and varied relationships with it (6). However, when British warships forced China into repealing its 1729 prohibition of opium, first in 1839 and again in 1856, modern drug use became forever entwined with economics, race, globalisation, and violence (7). The California Gold Rush of 1847 to 1855 then saw approximately 25,000 Chinese immigrants arriving in the United States, some inevitably bringing their opium habits with them (8).

In 1804, Friedrich Sertürner synthesised morphine from opium, naming it after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams (9). Charles Wright first synthesised diamorphine in 1874, but it was not until 1897, when Bayer pharmaceutical company employee, Heinrich Dreser, independently synthesised the drug that it became commercially available under its brand name, heroin (10).

Historian Johnathan Lewy discusses how usage of these opiates in America grew significantly after conventional wars. In 1898, victory in the Spanish- American War made the Philippine opium trade an American problem, while the First and Second World Wars, followed by Korea and Vietnam, saw rises in the numbers of morphine and heroin addicts (11). Lewy theorises that white America’s relationship with opiates may have its roots in the invention of the hypodermic needle and its use to administer morphine during the Civil War (12). In the wake of all of these factors, San Francisco became an early drug war frontline by outlawing opium dens in 1875 (13).

Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the cocaine alkaloid in 1856 and by 1886 John Pemberton’s popular recipe for Coca-Cola was among many commercially available products containing the drug (14). This was because, nationally, no laws prohibited anything. Howsoever it had formed, by 1900, America’s relationship with drugs was manifest in the booming patent medicine industry; opium, morphine, heroin, and cocaine were all legally available to anyone who wanted them (15).

Focusing on Chicago at the turn of the century, historian Joseph Spillane writes that “The rise of ‘recreational’ usage of cocaine and opiates at the end of the nineteenth century, especially among socially and economically marginal groups, created a sense of public crisis” (16). Spillane claims the foundations for this panic were “both real and imagined” (17). Chicago’s authorities reacted, as had San Francisco’s in 1875, driving the drug trade underground where it began “bearing most of the characteristic features of the contemporary illicit drug trade” (18).

Historian Michael M Cohen, meanwhile, alleges that “the root of the drug- prohibition movement in the United States is race” (19). He claims that San Francisco’s 1875 clampdown on opium dens came “lest some white woman should fall into the hands of the yellow peril” (20). He also points to the myth of “negro cocaine fiends”, which claimed cocaine made black men superhumanly sex-crazed and violent, as driving the anti-cocaine movements of the Jim Crow South (21). Cohen also suggests that Mexican labourers migrating into California and Texas during the economic hardships of the Great Depression were the basis for the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (22). He then concludes:

When it came time for the United States to declare its first war on drugs during the Progressive era, the South’s racial politics fused with broad national anxieties about race and immigration to shape dramatically not only U.S. public policy but also the nation’s moral judgments about drugs as well (23).

This last point on morality is what Spillane writes about, citing plenty of primary sources, like as municipal investigations and reports, and engaging them in a complex dialogue with each other. Cohen relies more heavily on secondary sources, however, both historians identify crucial pieces of a complex puzzle: moral panicking and racism. Their given timeframes of investigation are 1890 to 1940, with a thirty-year overlap of 1900 to 1930.

In Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial, Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas devote their fourth chapter to a similar time period, titling it ‘The Punitive Paradigm: The Early Struggles, 1900–1930’ (24). This coincides with the prohibition of alcohol in 1920 and its repeal in 1933 and adds legitimacy to scrutinising the federal government’s actions in this era (25).

PURE FOOD AND DRUGS ACT OF 1906

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle cover(iv) Cover of the first edition of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 landmark work, ‘The Jungle’.

The federal government’s first effort to legislate drug use was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It came about after the collective work of various people and institutions, including the American Pharmaceutical Association, investigative journalist Upton Sinclair, and many others working within the nation’s rapidly urbanising landscape. Published in 1906, Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the unhygienic conditions in which many migrants were forced to work in the meatpacking industry, highlighting the need for urgent national regulations of consumable products (26).

Targeting the food and patent medicine industries, the law’s stated purpose was “preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein” (27). Among other repercussions, the law “required that all narcotic ingredients, as well as cannabis, be listed on the labels of any patent medicines shipped in interstate commerce” (28). The legislation also led to the creation of the Bureau of Chemistry, renamed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1930.

Importantly, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 did not criminalise the issue of drugs. It merely regulated their use as a health issue.

Mrs Winslows Soothing Syrup

(v) Before in 1906, Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for babies did not have to mention that it contained morphine and alcohol.

HARRISON NARCOTICS TAX ACT OF 1914

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was successful at regulating the food industry and reining in the patent medicine industry; for example, Coca-Cola no longer included cocaine (29). However, the law did not address the underlying issue of morality that Spillane suggests underscored the anti-drug movements at this time. In other words, drug users were still not criminals.

As mentioned, America’s acquisition of the Philippines and its opium trade in 1898 perpetuated the “internationalization of the problem” (30). Then, The Hague’s International Conference on Opium in 1911 ended without a consensus on the need for international drug laws, but it did “open the door to domestic narcotics legislation” in the United States (31).

San Francisco opium bonfire 1914(vi) Opium, morphine, and heroin about to be burned in front of San Francisco City Hall, still under reconstruction following the 1906 earthquake, February 1914.

Having attended the 1911 conference, Dr Hamilton Wright—“the father of American narcotics laws”—led calls for a federal bill “that would eliminate all non-medical use of narcotics” (32).

The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 is described by historian Erich Goode as “the single most important piece of drug legislation ever enacted in the United States” (33). It was sponsored by New York Democrat, Representative Francis Harrison, who cited an “enormous increase in the importation of and consumption of opium in the United States” (34). With cooperation from major pharmaceutical associations and with no organised resistance from drug users, Harrison’s act became law (35). Only Southern Democrats, worried of federal government infringement of states’ rights, voiced any opposition (36).

The law stipulated three requirements for anyone trading in “opium or coca leaves, their salts, [and] derivatives” (37). First, traders had to register with the federal government (38). Second, records had to be kept of all transactions (39). Third, taxes had to be paid (40). Technically speaking, the law’s language did not criminalise drug sellers or users, but punishments for noncompliance on behalf of retailers made the trade “more troublesome than profitable” (41).

The law also required unregistered buyers (drug users) to obtain prescriptions for their drugs, which could be issued by physicians in “good faith” (42). Almost immediately, a Pittsburgh physician’s arrest for prescribing drugs to an addict led to the Supreme Court ruling that the language of “good- faith” was “so far vague” and ruled in favour of the physician (43). Even so, between 1914 and 1938, nearly 30,000 medical professionals were arrested and nearly 3,000 served sentences (44). This pressure saw the medical profession withdrawing from the dispensing of narcotics and addicts were forced to turn to the black market.

By its very nature, drug addiction was thus implicitly unlawful, and by the 1920s, drug users had been transformed from patients into criminals.

MARIHUANA TAX ACT OF 1937

The First World War, the failed prohibition of alcohol, and the Great Depression were transformative events on an unprecedented scale. The economic, social, political, and technological landscapes were dramatically altered and influenced how the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 came about. The effects of this law are still being reckoned with today.

In June 1930, the agencies tasked with implementing the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 were merged into the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Journalist Johann Hari claims that the newly-appointed FBN Director, Harry J Anslinger, sought to prevent his agency from fading into irrelevancy as support for the prohibition of alcohol began to wane (45). However, newspaper articles linking marijuana to violent crime date back to at least 1919, with New Orleans police making their first arrests for possession of “a Mexican smoking weed better known as ‘Mary Warner’” in June 1923 (46).

Evidently, however, unlike opiates and cocaine, marijuana was not as widely known by the American public. Mirroring opium’s early entanglement with race and economics, marijuana’s use in America is generally attributed to Mexican migrant farm workers in the states along the border (47). During the Great Depression, these Mexican labourers began seeking employment in places like California, Texas, and Louisiana (48). It was in New Orleans that marijuana began being introduced into the African American community, where it entered jazz musician circles, black and white, who in turn introduced it to intellectuals and criminals alike (49).

In November 1926, Dr W A Evans sought to reassure the public of their growing concerns of this new “Mexican drug” (50). He wrote that it is “mistaken” to suppose “the drug is habit forming, or that it renders its victim a public menace”. Of its effects, he wrote that one “laughs inordinately; he is annoyingly ostentatious to the opposite sex; jazz works him into a frenzy of joy; he is quite imbecile in his words and actions yet he is not dangerous” (51).

That same month, the use of marijuana by American soldiers stationed in the Panama Canal Zone was the subject of an extensive investigation. The investigation concluded that “The influence of the drug when used for smoking is uncertain and appears to have been greatly exaggerated. The reports seem to have little basis in fact, and there is no medical evidence that it causes insanity” (52).

However, towards the end of the 1920s, with Mexican immigration increasing, these early reports were drowned out as a mutually beneficial relationship between newspaper mogul, William Randolph Hearst, and Anslinger began to form (53). The FBN fed increasingly salacious stories of marijuana-induced rapes, murders, suicides, and insanity to Hearst, helping boost newspaper sales while also helping the FBN to ferment the public opinion needed for a federal ban (54).

Full page articles were published describing marijuana as “evil”, “insidious”, and “a false god” (55). It was also called “Green Goddess” and “loco weed” (56). Spillane’s moral panics and Cohen’s racism is evident: “The drug is particularly popular with Latin Americans … its use is rapidly spreading to include all classes” (57). Testifying before the Wickersham Commission in 1931, New Orleans Police Captain Richmond Hobson said marijuana “motivates the most atrocious acts” (58).

That marijuana inspired criminal behaviour was a common theme, one article stating that “When smoked in cigaret [sic] form, marijuana has an effect similar to that of cocaine … It undermines both body and mind, one of its most vicious effects being the development of criminal traits” (59). Anslinger himself appeared in numerous newspapers, explaining how marijuana’s late arrival meant it was not covered by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, and since only California, Texas, and Louisiana had prohibited the plant, a federal ban was needed (60).

Even after the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was enacted, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover wrote articles like ‘War on the Sex Criminal!’—an early use of the terminology ‘war on…’—where he blamed marijuana for “torture, rape, mutilation, and murder”. Noting “The sex fiend may strike anywhere, at any time”, Hoover praises Anslinger’s work towards the “eradication of a drug which violently affects the sex impulses” (61).

Scholarly work added to this literature condemning marijuana. Publishing ‘Marihuana as a Developer of Criminals’ in 1931, Eugene Stanley writes how marijuana causes “a rapid flow of ideas of a sexual nature” before detailing a Persian ritual of sexual domination of “young men whom the Shiek [sic] desired to subjugate”. He also tells how the word ‘assassin’ derives from the Arabic name of a Persian military unit given hashish (marijuana) and called “Hashishan” (62). Testifying before Congress in 1937, Anslinger repeated this story (63).

This mixture of exoticism, eroticism, racism, and fear can be seen in Louis Gasnier’s Reefer Madness propaganda film. Released in 1936, it claimed to depict the dangers of marijuana. What it really depicts is the result of the media and federal government’s overzealous reaction to marijuana. The title is now synonymous with this era of fear and disinformation.

Anslinger’s law imposed a so-called ‘nuisance’ tax of one dollar on marijuana sales. Anyone found with marijuana without proof of paying this tax could be fined or imprisoned. In 1969, after marijuana’s upsurge in popularity during the 1960s brought it to the fore, the Supreme Court ruled the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 unconstitutional. Controversial psychologist, Timothy Leary, had claimed that showing proof of this tax’s payment forced him to incriminate himself, violating his rights under the Fifth Amendment (64). This led to the Controlled Substances Act (1970), which remains in force to this day.

The hysteria of the reefer madness era was still being felt, and in the heightened political climate of the 1960s, marijuana was classed as a Schedule I narcotic, meaning it has “high abuse potential, no medical use, and severe safety concerns” at a federal level (65).

Reefer Madness movie poster(vii) Theatrical release poster for ‘Reefer Madness’, 1 January 1936.

CONCLUSION

Considering marijuana’s strictest possible classification at a federal level, as the map below indicates, the government is not enforcing this law.

(viii) The legal status of marijuana by state as of 18 May 2019 (66).

Legal status of marijuana by state

Ten states have now legalised marijuana for full commercial use, a reversal of the gradual state-by-state prohibition seen in the 1930s before the federal ban came into force. In a twist of irony, the nation’s capital, the very city trying to impose a nationwide prohibition, has legalised the drug. This blog has shown why this particular battlefront has come about; by the federal government’s reaction to public fears, moral and racial, “both real and imagined” (67).

President Carter tried to deescalate the war, saying “We can, and should, continue to discourage the use of marijuana, but this can be done without defining the smoker as a criminal” (68). His proposal went nowhere and with President Reagan, alongside his wife Nancy’s anti-drugs campaign of ‘Just Say No’, and with President Bush also, “the drug war escalated as never before” (69). President Clinton, who claimed to have once smoked marijuana but without inhaling it, later said “[President Bush] hasn’t fought a real war on crime and drugs; I will” (70).

Fatal drug overdoses from illicit substances have increased fourfold since Clinton’s hardline rhetoric with 70,237 Americans dying in 2017 (71). Over half a million Americans die each year from tobacco and alcohol (72). Deaths from marijuana are difficult to calculate partly because marijuana is often used concurrently with other drugs (73). Of those 70,237 deaths in 2017, however, none were attributed to marijuana alone. This is not to say that marijuana is without risks, particularly concerning the mental health of habitual users, especially so in teenage users (74). Yet with two-thirds of Americans supporting legalisation and 41.9% claiming to have used marijuana at least once, including President Obama, the Schedule I classification is appearing increasingly unsustainable (75).

For some, the first African American president also being the first to openly admit to marijuana use likely further conflated the issue of race and drugs. For others, it likely reaffirmed their beliefs of the relatively benign nature of the drug. The history of racism, however, is evidenced in today’s incarceration rates; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) stating that “African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites” (76).

Obama smoking(ix) President Obama photographed smoking marijuana while attending Occidental College in Los Angeles, 1980, circa Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign.

This blog has shown why finding the line for marijuana between the laissez-faire approach of the late nineteenth century and the increasingly severe approach adopted by the federal government during the twentieth century is being so fiercely contested today. But will the outcome of the battle of marijuana help bring about a conclusion to the war on drugs? As this blog has shown, the scope of factors that contributed to the war is nothing if not extraordinarily vast and complex. Critics of America’s drug war often point to Portugal, which decriminalised all drugs in 2001, as an alternative model of how central governments can deescalate the seemingly endless trend the war has developed. Studying a decade of data, criminologists Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens conclude:

Decriminalization of illicit drug use and possession does not appear to lead automatically to an increase in drug-related harms. Nor does it eliminate all drug-related problems. But it may offer a model for other nations that wish to provide less punitive, more integrated and effective responses to drug use (77).

One thing is certain: the war is far from over.

 

 

NOTES

1. Kate Linthicum, ‘Meth and murder: A new kind of drug war has made Tijuana one of the deadliest cities on Earth’, Los Angeles Times, 30 January 2019; http://www.latimes.com; accessed 20 May 2019.

2. ‘Memorandum for the President, Re: Meeting with Elvis Presley, 21 December 1970’, Nixon Presidential Materials, National Archives.

3. ‘War On Drugs Gets White House Priority’, New York Amsterdam News, 5 June 1971, p. A1.

4. ‘The Richest Man In the World’, Forbes, 5 October 1987, p. 153.

5. Drug Enforcement Administration, ‘Staffing and Budget’, US Department of Justice; http://www.dea.gov/staffing-and-budget; accessed 18 May 2019. ‘Figure 1. National Drug Overdose Deaths’, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics, December 2018; http://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/ trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates; accessed 18 May 2019.

6. Erich Goode, Drugs in American Society, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), p. 269.

7. Ibid., p. 42.

8. John Faragher, Mari Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan Armitage, Out of Many, Vol 1, 6th ed. (United States: Pearson, 2008), p. 411.

9. Rudolf Schmitz, ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner and the Discovery of Morphine’, Pharmacy in History, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1985, p. 63.

10. Doug Latimer and Jeff Goldberg, ‘Heroin Boys’, BOMB, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1982, p. 24.

11. Jonathan Lewy, ‘The Army Disease: Drug Addiction and the Civil War’, War in History, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2014, pp. 118–119.

12. Ibid., p. 102.

13. Michael M Cohen, ‘Jim Crow’s Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition’, Southern Cultures, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall 2006, p. 56.

14. Goode, p. 35.

15. Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (United States: University of California Press, 1996) p. 61.

16. Joseph Spillane, ‘The Making of an Underground Market: Drug Selling in Chicago, 1900-1940’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 32, No. 1, Autumn 1998, p. 28.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Cohen, p. 56.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 57.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 77.

24. Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, and Andreas, p. 61.

25. U.S. Const. amend. XVIII (repealed 1933).

26. Thomas Napierkowski, ‘Reviewed Work: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair’, Polish American Studies, Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 92–93.

27. Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, § 1.

28. Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, and Andreas, p. 63.

29. Goode, p. 35.

30. Toby Seddon, A History of Drugs: Drugs and Freedom in the Liberal Age (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 68.

31. Goode, p. 43.

32. David F Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 31. Goode, p. 43.

33. Goode, p. 43.

34. Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, and Andreas, p. 67.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, § 1.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., § 2.

40. Ibid., § 1.

41. Goode, p. 43.

42. Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, § 8.

43. United States v. Jin Fuey Moy, 241 U.S. 394 (1916).

44. Goode, p. 45.

45. Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 10.

46. Kent Hunter, ‘Some Mexican Slayings That Were Hushed Up: Murderers of U.S. Men Go Free; Washington Notified’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 Sep 1919, p. 10. ‘Police Raid Sellers Of Mexican ‘Smokes’’, Washington Post, 17 June 1923, p. 2.

47. Goode, p. 47.

48. Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, and Andreas, p. 80.

49. Goode, pp. 47–48.

50. ‘Sale of Marijuana to Miami School Students Is Barred’, Atlanta Constitution, 20 May 1928, p. 2.

51. W A Evans, ‘Hashish As Public Menace’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 November 1926, p. 10.

52. ‘Marijuana Smoking Is Reported Safe’, New York Times, 21 November 1926, p. E3.

53. Alexander Chasin, Assassin of Youth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 174.

54. ‘Attacker of Girl Is Doomed to Hang’, Washington Post, 23 November 1935, p. 2. ‘Woman Raped On South Side; 2D In Two Days’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 July 1936, p. 3. ‘Ft. Clayton Insane Called Numerous’, New York Times, 26 September 1935, p. 26. ‘Use of Marijuana Spreading in West’, New York Times, 16 September 1934, p. E6. Chasin, p. 174.

55. Nell Clarke, ‘More ‘Mary Jane’ Laugh Addicts’, Washington Post, 2 September 1928, p. SM6.

56. ‘Narcotics Commissioner Urges Drastic Action Against Hashish’, Christian Science Monitor, 2 October 1931, p. 4.

57. ‘Use of Marijuana Spreading in West’, New York Times, 16 September 1934, p. E6.

58. ‘Use of New Narcotic Reported Spreading’, Washington Post, 5 March 1931, p. 1.

59. ‘The Threat of Marijuana’, Atlanta Constitution, 25 August 1934, p. 4.

60. ‘Government Will Ask States To Ban Growing of Marijuana’, New York Times, 6 September 1931, p. 37.

61. J Edgar Hoover, ‘War on the Sex Criminal!’, Los Angeles Times, 26 September 1937, p. K2.

62. Eugene Stanley, ‘Marihuana as a Developer of Criminals’, The American Journal of Police Science, Vol. 2, No. 3, May – June 1931, pp. 254–256.

63. US Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Hearing on Taxation of Marihuana, 75th Cong., 1st sess., April 27–30, May 4, 1937.

64. Leary v. United States, 395 U.S. 6 (1969).

65. Controlled Substances Act (1970), § 812 (b) (1) (A–C).

66. ‘State Policy’, Marijuana Policy Project; http://www.mpp.org/states; accessed 18 May 2019.

67. Spillane, p. 28.

68. ‘Drug Law Revision’, Congressional Quarterly Almanac 32, 1977, p. 41E.

69. Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, and Andreas, p. 110.

70. William J Bennett and John P Walters, ‘Suddenly Losing the War Against Drugs’, Washington Times, 7 February 1995, p. 2.

71. ‘Figure 1. National Drug Overdose Deaths’, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics, December 2018; http://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/ trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates; accessed 18 May 2019.

72. ‘Smoking and Tobacco Use: Diseases and Death’, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics; accessed 19 May 2019. ‘Alcohol Facts and Statistics: Alcohol-Related Deaths’, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health; accessed 19 May 2019.

73. Stephen Sidney, Jerome E Beck, Irene S Tekawa, Charles P Queensbury, and Gary Friedman, ‘Marijuana Use and Mortality, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 87, No. 4, April 1997, pp. 588–589.

74. Adam R Winstock, Chris Ford, and John Witton, ‘Assessment and management of cannabis use disorders in primary care’, BMJ: British Medical Journal, Vol. 340, No. 7750, 10 April 2010, p. 801.

75. Justin McCarthy, ‘Two in Three Americans Now Support Legalizing Marijuana’, 22 October 2018, Gallup; http://www.gallup.com/poll/243908; accessed 20 May 2019. ‘National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 2011’, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; http://www.samhsa.gov/data; accessed 19 May 2019. David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Making of the Man (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), p. 293.

76. ‘Criminal Justice Fact Sheet’, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet; accessed 19 May 2019.

77. Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens, ‘What Can We Learn From The Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs?’, The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 50, No. 6, 1 November 2010, p. 1018.

IMAGES

i. ‘Soldier guards the incineration of marijuana in Tijuana’, 20 October 2010, Associated Press; http://www.businessinsider.com; accessed 20 May 2019.

ii. ‘Richard M Nixon Meeting with Elvis Presley, 12/21/1970’, Roll 5364, Ref. No. 194703, Nixon Presidential Library, National Archives.

iii. ‘The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis, commanded by Lieutenant W. H. Hall, with boats from the Sulphur, Calliope, Larne and Starling, destroying the Chinese war junks in Anson’s Bay, on 7 January 1841’, by Edward Duncan, 30 May 1843, Ref. No. JEAWJD, NMUIM/Alamy Stock Photo.

iv. ‘Cover of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, first edition’, The Jungle Publishing Co., 1906.

v. ‘Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup’, Ref. No. DTEFTG, 503 collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

vi. ‘Opium about to be burned in San Francisco’, February 1914, Underwood Archives/Getty Images.

vii. ‘Theatrical poster for Reefer Madness’, 1 January 1936, Ref. No. J152335505, Hulton Archive/Stringer, Moviepix.

viii. Created using MapChart with data sourced from ‘State Policy’, Marijuana Policy Project; http://www.mpp.org/states; accessed 18 May 2019.

ix. ‘Barack Obama posing for a portrait session while he was a student in 1980’, Lisa Jack, Ref. No. 16429831, Contour RA.

by

the

woman

at

the

edge

of

the

abyss

Of all the pictures taken on that day… 

to one particular my thoughts remain:

At first glance, she is so easily missed,

Some woman at the edge of the abyss.

The mad circus of September’s horror;

The raining people and flames, heroics,

This falling cultural              apocalypse,

A woman at the          edge of the abyss.

Having survived        the un-survivable,

Coming then          to the indescribable:

Is at the gate of blackened smoky mist,

There woman at the edge of the abyss.

A haunting image of her standing there:

Known only as a woman from her hair,

Breathes the life into all my loneliness,

Poor woman at the edge of the abyss.

& the Devil’s crooked-smouldering teeth,

& with the New York City streets beneath,

How in the world did it all come to this?!

When woman at the edge of the abyss.

She is so small next to all that carnage;

Evil’s will to destroy: finely harnessed.

In the steel and burning broken wings,

Our woman at the edge of the abyss.

Yet sizes speak unto something greater:

OF HUMANITY’S CREATIVE NATURE.

Maybe she was given this final glimpse?

Doomed woman at the edge of the abyss.

But she should miss all the coming grief;

Crusader-blinded eyes of terror’s deeds,

Comes paranoid century politics…

My woman at the edge of the abyss.

For of the vortex of that darkened hole,

Will soon suck in some many million souls;

Collapsing Empire went collapsing in…

…Liberty at the edge of the abyss…

Septermber 11, North Tower impactSeptermber 11, North Tower impact close up, Edna Cintron

by

Printed in the United States of Aotearoa

NZUS Flag.png

“We are entering a new world; one in which everything is alive and in motion. If we are to find our way, we must learn to map water and fire, wind and mist”, (233) says Hōne Heke at the end of Dylan Horrocks’ graphic novel, Hicksville. Heke is speaking to James Cook and a representation of Charles Heaphy, and while it is possible that Heke and Heaphy crossed paths, Cook could never have met either of them. So why does Horrocks place them together in a curious subplot to his book, a post-modern ‘comic-within-a-comic’, depicting them as lost in a landscape that keeps changing? The answer could be that these three characters can be easily read as emblematic representations of the different threads that came together to create the fabric of New Zealand society today; the indigenous, the explorer, the settler. “But how does one map when there are no fixed points of reference?” (234) asks Heaphy’s character; and indeed, how do we, as New Zealanders, map our culture when it is constantly evolving? Ought New Zealand novelists be committed to this task?

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that “the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium” (3). Two and half thousand years earlier, Plato also combined the work of the poet and the painter in Republic; “He is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth” (Cai 12). In Metaphysics, Aristotle seemed to reject his teacher’s implication that creative writers impart too much emotion into their works for them to ever be considered objective representations of reality, though he did concede that “The difference between the historian and the poet is … one relates actual events, the other the kinds of things that might occur” (Cai 13). In a book published this year, History Is a Contemporary Literature, Ivan Jablonka writes that “History is not a fiction, sociology is not a novel, anthropology is not exoticism” (2). He then, albeit somewhat arbitrarily, lists the kinds of literature that can “produce knowledge about the real world, past and present” as being “travel logs, memoirs, auto-biographies, correspondences, testimonies, diaries, life stories, and news reports” (2). Presumptuousness aside, novels are noticeably not present. As truly powerful and important as literary fictional forms undoubtedly are (Aldama 235), it would appear the consensus across the ages is that they are limited in their ability to be true depictions of reality. Even so, can they still tell us something of culture? And, if so, the question remains; should this be their aim?

In his book, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, John Storey quotes Pierre Macherrey’s A Theory of Literary Production, in a defence of literary fiction as a means to glean insight into culture; “It is in a text’s ‘unconscious’ that its relationship to the … historical conditions of its existence is revealed”. The ‘unconscious’ being referred to here is generated in the narrative discourse; the ‘truth promised’ versus the ‘truth revealed’ by the act of reading, within such experience lies the ‘unconscious’ – and the delivery of a repressed, ‘historical truth’ (Storey 46).

Evidence to support this idea, that fiction is capable of inadvertently delivering the historical context surrounding its creation, can be found by analysing New Zealand’s own novel history. To start with, New Zealand’s relationship with literature arrived at complications from the earliest possible moments. For hundreds of years, Māori tradition closely guarded knowledge, passing it down orally from carefully selected members of one generation to carefully selected members of the next (Sturm 1). In complete contrast, British tradition recorded knowledge in print, encouraged a general ability to disseminate it, and gauged societal progress by measuring rates of literacy (Sturm 3). Therefore, the story of how the earliest ‘New Zealanders’—whomsoever after Cook’s arrival in 1769 this label applied to—value literature is immediately and inescapably mixed with complex colonial history and revision. Some contend that the more literate Māori became, out of necessity to coexist alongside colonials and by missionaries converting them to Christianity, the greater the distance from their oral traditions they found themselves; a phenomenon described as ‘cultural-colonialism’ (Ballantyne 245). Apparent proof that Māori struggled to find their voice in a colonial medium that had stolen their voice from them, is that it was not until 1972 that a book was published by a Māori author. Indeed, Witi Ihimaera’s short story novel, Pounamu, pounamu, and the Māori Renaissance of the 1970s, arrived more than two centuries after Cook.

However, Ihimaera himself writes in his autobiography, Māori Boy, that despite popular belief, there were early Māori writers (247) and the “unsympathetic climate” (Sturm 23) towards Māori literature is more nuanced than simple racism. Of Pounamu, pounamu, and this nuance, Ihimaera writes that “[Māori] really had to adjust their thinking about it” (44). Some claim that Pākehā inventing the Māori alphabet and writing about Māori—in English —alongside the translation issues with the Treaty of Waitangi and the ongoing focus of print in land disputes, and, as already mentioned, the complications surrounding oral traditions and colonialism in general, all contributed to the “slow … tentative” emergence of Māori in New Zealand novel writing (Sturm 23).

The fact remains, however, that Māori novelists were missing for a long period of time; a period that coincides with the hideous belief that Māori would become extinct and the prohibition of te reo in schools. This gives shape to Pierre Macherrey’s assertions that fiction is “the articulation of silence” and “What is important in the work is what it does not say” (Storey 45). If we view New Zealand-authored novels as a national bibliography, this long silence of the tangata whenua articulates loudly a shameful part of New Zealand’s past, giving new meaning to Allen Curnow’s statement in 1945 that “Strictly speaking, New Zealand doesn’t exist yet” (Curnow, “Dialogue”, 77).

The near-complete absence of New Zealand from Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife can be read in a similar way. Published by a British publisher in 2008, it tells the story of an Englishman recalling the months leading up to his Australian wife’s suicide. The book is mainly set in London and only two, very minor, characters are New Zealanders. Perkins’ national identity is entirely masked, as is her gender. However, by writing of an Australian woman’s troubled ‘overseas experience’ in London, now a staple adventure for many young New Zealanders, Perkins does faintly sketch a portrait of New Zealand, or ‘Australasian’, culture. Themes of isolation, distance, homesickness, national identity, ‘fresh starts’, globalisation, etc., are all indicative of the ‘overseas experience’, yet they also echo elements of our colonial history. “I hate this bloody country!” one of the New Zealanders sobs one day, to which the main character, Ann, comforts her by saying, “I know, I know … I found it hard too when I first came” (Perkins 200). In the 1960 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, Curnow described this anxiety surrounding national identity, cultural substance, belonging, and historical legitimacy that Perkins appears to be evoking: “The best of our verse is marked or moulded everywhere by peculiar pressures—pressures arising from the isolation of the country, its physical character, and its history” (17).

The unusual subplot in Hicksville of Cook (as isolation), Heaphy (as physical character), and Heke (as history) can best be understood with Curnow’s ‘peculiar pressures’ in mind. The character of Emil in Hicksville, who is from a fictitious country called Cornucopia, suggests that there are two types of maps; those which represent place and those which represent time (Horrocks 86). Hicksville itself and Novel About My Wife demonstrate that novels can function in the same fashion, mapping our culture in time and space.

Interestingly, like Cornucopia, the version of New Zealand depicted in Hicksville is also completely fantastical, evolving Curnow’s ideas from 1960: “In making a first really comprehensive anthology of my country’s verse, I have found myself piecing together the record of an adventure, or series of adventures, in search of reality” (17).

It is clear then that New Zealand novelists can and do reflect different aspects of New Zealand’s changing culture in a variety of sophisticated ways, but importantly including via omission. Therefore, suggesting they ought to actively do this is a redundant imperative. If they focus simply on writing good novels, the rest will take care of itself.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of New Zealand’s diverse modern culture is the diversity of the novelists themselves; no longer are they bound by skin or shore. Exploring areas outside map—internal and external, historical and contemporary, imaginary and fantastical—does not mean they are lost, rather they have such a firm idea of where home is that they are not scared to venture over faraway horizons in order “to map water and fire, wind and mist”.

I know this firsthand; I am a New Zealander and my first book happens to have nothing to do with New Zealand. It is being published by an American company (Unsolicited Press) and will be printed in American English. Due for release next year, the inside sleeve will read ‘Printed in the United States of America.’ However, the shadow of my national silence articulates a silhouette; I am free of nationalist thinking because I am from this free-thinking nation.

Works Cited:

  • Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Why the Humanities Matter”. University of Texas Press, 2008.
  • Ballantyne, Tony. “Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past”. University of British Colombia, 2012.
  • Cai, Zong-Qi. “Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism”. University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.
  • Curnow, Allen. “A Dialogue with Ngaio Marsh.” Look Back Harder, 76–82.
  • Curnow, Allen, editor. “The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse”. Penguin, 1960.
  • Horrocks, Dylan. “Hicksville”. Victoria University Press, 2010.
  • Ihimaera, Witi. “Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood”. Vintage, 2014.
  • Jablonka, Ivan, and Nathan J. Bracher. “History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences”. Cornell University Press, 2018.
  • Perkins, Emily. “Novel About My Wife”. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008.
  • Strum, Terry, editor. “The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English.” Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • Wilde, Oscar. “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Penguin Books, 1985.
by

Angelheaded Baxters burning for the ancient heavenly connection…

James K Baxter, Hiruhārama, or Jerusalem, by the Whanganui River, 1971.

“It’s not On the Road. It’s just for me” (19), Jack says in Eli Kent’s The Intricate Art of Actually Caring. But it is On the Road; Kent’s play works hard to emulate this iconic Beat Generation novel, through dialogue and narrative form. Curiously, however, alongside Jack Kerouac and later American countercultural figures like Bob Dylan (38) and The Velvet Underground (40), Kent also implicates his relative, James K Baxter. In doing so, Kent appears to claim Baxter’s work as a New Zealand expression of the Western countercultural movement of the 1960s. Kent’s statement that “Baxter changed this country” (16) can, therefore, best be made sense of by also considering this wider frame of the Beat Generation, who themselves helped change the United States (Morgan 247).

A definition of the Beat Generation is difficult in any way except provisionally:
• mostly born between 1920 and 1940
• mostly published from the 1950s to the 1970s
• influenced by jazz
• marginal to mainstream life
• in the language of ordinary/street people
• valuing the unmediated experience
• intensely spiritual (Zauhar)

Baxter is also hard to accommodate in theoretical terms (Sturm 247) but he immediately shares the first of these traits, coming of age and publishing in the post-WWII era. Born in 1926, the same year as Allen Ginsberg, without whom the Beat Generation would never have existed (Morgan xv), it is through comparing Baxter’s life and work to Ginsberg’s that the other striking traits emerge.

Related image
Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco, 1965.

Ginsberg thought any writer who shared his values was eligible for inclusion within the Beat Generation (Morgan 146) and believed a writer should commit to improving society (Morgan 221). Baxter shared this social and moral sense of responsibility (Sturm 391). Ginsberg went to India from 1961 to 1963, connecting with Eastern spirituality. He helped introduce this into the countercultural movement in the United States as more people looked for meaning in non-Western forms (Morgan 203). Baxter also had a spiritual journey involving India. In 1958, the year he was re-baptized a Catholic, he travelled to India and was deeply moved by the condition of the poor, becoming critical of the effects of Western culture (Weir xxii). His journey continued upon his return to New Zealand, becoming intrinsically woven with Māori community and spiritual life (Sturm 416). It is partly these spiritual connections that allowed both poets to sharply focus their sense of justice upon the dominant mainstream forces surrounding them, leading them both to actively participate in anti-establishment protests and lifestyles.

Their poetry, however, reveals this even further and establishes a close artistic bond between them. This bond validates Kent’s implication that Baxter was a ‘New Zealand Beat poet’. Though Baxter’s Romantic poetry during the 1950s was lavishly praised (Sturm 391), Weir describes it as “inconsistent”, “gravely rhetorical”, and “derivative” (xxi). However, Weir claims Baxter then wrote “prolifically” and with “considerable power” (xxii) in the 1960s. Ginsberg’s landmark Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956, and after the ensuing obscenity trial ruled in his favour in 1957, the floodgates of American publishing were opened and by the 1960s the Beats were a global phenomenon (Zauhar). This is relevant given Baxter’s capacity to absorb the work of other poets and turn it into his own (Sturm 391).

In the 1960s, Baxter noticeably wrote more in free verse. This is not to say that anything in free verse is automatically Beat, nor that the Beats owned free verse, but it is a style which lends itself to less structured poetry. This rejection of traditional poetics for jazz-inspired rhythms, for non-conformity, helped Ginsberg and Baxter express themselves in a number of ways. It aided their considerations of alternative viewpoints, enabling them to more critically peer at the mainstream. This allowed them to more fairly represent the outcasts. Moreover, Baxter’s drift away from traditional poetics allowed him to use ordinary ‘street’ language. In his “At the Grave of a War Hero”, he uses language in jarring contrast to the reverence usually reserved for such places; “Nobody to fuck … Swallowed up in Caesar’s black mad eye … you rot” (Baxter 363-364). This would be seen as highly disrespectful at an Anzac Day service. However, Baxter calls the soldier “mate”, like a fellow soldier might, making it an altogether more human poem than one espousing war cliches. Thus, Baxter treats the soldier with greater respect.

Form aside, the content of Baxter’s 1960s poetry and the bravery he displays it makes this decade of work so powerful, so Beat. In “Pig Island Letters”, he writes of a night-long argument about the “Mythical, theological, political” (Baxter 285). Both he and Ginsberg often blurred the lines between these subjects, blending them into one human experience reflective of the different racial, social, and political changes which defined the 1960s.

Incidentally, they both lent the names of their countries to the titles of poems. “America”, from Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, is a powerful critique of his country, and with the impact the Cold War was having on American society in 1956, lines like “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (39) led to the publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, being tried for obscenity (Morgan 127). While Baxter’s “New Zealand” offers no real comparison to this, “The Maori Jesus” does, both in form and content. “His hands were scrubbed red to get the shit out of the pores” (347) is equally confronting for Pākehā society, not just because of the profanity but the implication that Māori skin has “shit” in it which needs to be “scrubbed” out. Baxter’s critique of Pākehā society continues in “Ballad of Calvary Street”, turning on a seemingly model home, picking it apart, and suggesting something darker is hidden beneath the surface; “Where two old souls go slowly mad” (213).

On madness, Ginsberg paints confronting imagery of a mental institution in “Howl”:

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void … where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha … where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb (25).

In “The Maori Jesus”, Baxter writes in similar, equally confronting language:

While he worked in the Asylum laundry … he told the head doctor, ‘I am the Light in the Void; I am who I am.’ … he was lobotomised; the brain of God was cut in half … God was neither alive nor dead … Mountainous, mile-deep, civilized darkness (347).

Here, Baxter is writing of Māori detachment from their land at the hands of Pākehā. In “America”, Ginsberg similarly writes of the plight of Native Americans; “America why are your libraries full of tears?” (39). These are the “Mythical, theological, political” expressions delivered within the same breaths.

“The Maori Jesus” also invokes Ginsberg and the counterculture’s liberal attitudes towards sex (Morgan 201), speaking of “a call-girl who turned it up for nothing” and “a housewife who had forgotten the Pill” (Baxter 347). Baxter also wrote sexually explicit poems such as “The Hymen”, “A Question of Rape”, and “Daughter”, the latter raising questions of incest (354). Baxter’s unfiltered, hard edge social critique reach a Beat-like peak in 1969 with “Ballad of the Junkies and the Fuzz”, describing various confrontations between Auckland outcasts and the law. His writing is almost unrecognisable as the same Baxter of the 1950s.

In “To a Print of Queen Victoria”, Baxter writes, “I advise rest; the farmhouse we dug you up in has been modernized” (316), advising an exhumed British monarch to rest while using the American spelling of ‘modernise’. In “Obsequy for Dylan Thomas”, from whom Bob Dylan took his name, Baxter writes of American English, “The English Language mourns her spouse … The bedlam jailors have her now” (216). Baxter is aware New Zealand is now under the political and cultural hegemony of a new ‘empire’, helping pave the way for later New Zealand poets, like Bill Manhire and Ian Wedde, to embrace the vitality of the Beats (Sturm 418).

However, perhaps the deepest measure of Baxter as a ‘New Zealand Beat poet’ is in the wake of his legacy. The Beat Generation helped transform America (Morgan xxi) and Baxter, by embracing Māori in his vision of just society (Sturm 417), gave New Zealand a blueprint for social reconstruction between Pākehā and Māori (Weir xxv). This helped prepare the national psyche, at least from the Pākehā perspective, for the Māori Renaissance of the 1970s and beyond. Without this, New Zealand wouldn’t be a country today of which any of us could be proud.

This is perhaps why Kent focusses so much on his connection to Baxter, and through Baxter, his connection to the Beats and the values of the countercultural movement. It represents a national spiritual quest for something larger than New Zealand. Kent attempts to disguise this, “People hold so much fucking reverence for the past, I don’t” (47), but his play is a memorial to the past, to friendship, to culture. His friend’s character, Jack, is more honest; “I am that kid in the Baxter poem … I’ve seen the angel with the sword and I’m ready to overturn the cities” (36-37). He pleads––or howls––for someone to “Give me something to fight for” (37).

New Zealand is still on the road.

Works Cited:

– Baxter, James K. Collected Poems, edited by John Weir. Oxford University Press, 1995.
– Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. City Lights Books, 1956.
– Kent, Eli. The Intricate Art of Actually Caring. The Playground Collective, 2009. PDF file.
– Morgan, Bill. The Typewriter Is Holy. Free Press, 2010.
– Strum, Terry. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature. Oxford University Press, 1991.
– Zauhar, David R. “Beat Poetry.” Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, edited by Eric L. Haralson, Routledge, 1st edition, 2001. credoreference.com. Accessed 03 Sep. 2018.
by 2 Comments

Tsar-Spangled Banner

I recently had a read of the ultra-conservative, autocratic nineteenth-century Russian scholar, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Allegedly, he was the inspiration for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor. As a continuation of Pobedonostsev’s long career supporting the Tsardom, he wrote a work entitled Reflections of a Russian Statesman. Titled somewhat more provocatively is a chapter within this work, The Falsehood of Democracy.

Now, while I’m not a supporter of ultra-conservative autocracy, it has to be admitted that Pobedonostsev’s assessments of democracy’s shortcomings are pretty damn… well, accurate. To illustrate this, let’s compare some of his critiques with the most famous democracy of them all, the United States of America…

“In theory, the election favours the intelligent and capable; in reality, it favours the pushing and impudent. It might be thought that education, experience, conscientiousness in work, and wisdom in affairs, would be essential requirements in the candidate; in reality, whether these qualities exist or not, they are in no way needed in the struggle of the election, where the essential qualities are audacity, a combination of impudence and oratory, and even some vulgarity, which invariably acts on the masses; modesty, in union with delicacy of feeling and thought, is worth nothing.”

Related image

“Experience shows that in great assemblies the decision does not belong to reason, but to daring and brilliancy; that the arguments most effective on the mass are not the most symmetrical – the most truly taken from the nature of things, but those expressed in sounding words and phrases, artfully selected, constantly reiterated, and calculated on the instinct of baseness always dominant in the people. The masses are easily drawn by out-bursts of empty declamation, and under such influences often form sudden decisions, which they regret on cold-blooded consideration of the affair.”

Image result for fox news talking points

“What is a Parliamentary party? In theory, it is an alliance of men with common convictions, joining forces for the realisation of their views in legislation and administration. But this description applies only to small parties; the large party, which alone is an effective force in Parliament, is formed under the influence only of personal ambition, and centres itself around one commanding personality.”

Related image

“Any vagabond babbler or unacknowledged genius, any enterprising tradesman, with his own money or with the money of others, may found a newspaper, even a great newspaper. He may attract a host of writers and feuilletonists, ready to deliver judgment on any subject at a moment’s notice; he may hire illiterate reporters to keep him supplied with rumours and scandals. His staff is then complete. From that day he sits in judgment on all the world, on ministers and administrators, on literature and art, on finance and industry. It is true that the new journal becomes a power only when it is sold in the market – that is, when it circulates among the public. For this talent is needed, and the matter published must be attractive and congenial for the readers. Here, we might think, was some guarantee of the moral value of the undertaking – men of talent will not serve a feeble or contemptible editor or publisher; the public will not support a newspaper which is not a faithful echo of public opinion. This guarantee is fictitious. Experience proves that money will attract talent under any conditions, and that talent is ready to write as its paymaster requires … The healthy taste of the public is not to be relied upon. The great mass of readers, idlers for the most part, is ruled less by a few healthy instincts than by a base and despicable hankering for idle amusement; and the support of the people may be secured by any editor who provides for the satisfaction of these hankerings, for the love of scandal, and for intellectual pruriency of the basest kind.”

Image result for trump porn star cnn

“In our age the judgment of others has assumed an organised form, and calls itself Public Opinion. Its organ and representative is the Press. In truth, the importance of the Press is immense, and may be regarded as the most characteristic fact of our time – more characteristic even than our remarkable discoveries and inventions in the realm of technical science. No government, no law, no custom can withstand its destructive activity when, from day to day, through the course of years, the Press repeats and disseminates among the people its condemnations of institutions or of men.”

Image result for fake news twitter

Never been a time like this? I would suggest Donald read a book… but just our luck the one book he’d read would be that of a Russian autocrat!

by

So… what comes next?

1200 – The Mongolian Empire is founded

1210 – The Magna Carta is written

1220 – ‘Trial by ordeal’ is abolished in England!

1230 – The Treaty of York is signed

1240 – The Aztec Empire is founded

1250 – Fibonacci dies. 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584

1260 – The Opus Majus is written

1270 – …the Ninth (and last) Crusade…

1280 – The Thai alphabet is composed

1290 – The Ottoman Empire is founded

1300 – William Wallace dies.

1310 – …the Great Famine of 1315 – 1317…

1320 – Tenochtitlan is founded

1330 – …the Hundred Years’ War begins…

1340 – …BLACK DEATH…

1350 – The Hanseatic League is founded

1360 – Nagarakretagama is written

1370 – Earliest reference to playing cards! A2345678910JQKJOKER

1380 – The Peasants’ Revolt

1390 – The Medici Bank i$ founded

1400 – …T h e R e n a i s s a n c e…

1410 – Perspective is discovered!

1420 – …the Siege of Orleans…

1430 – The printing press is invented!

1440 – The Vatican Library is founded

1450 – The Byzantine Empire collapses.

1460 – The works of Plato are translated into Latin

1470 – Oldest recorded game of chess is played!

1480 – The Vitruvian Man is drawn!

1490 – The Americas are contacted!

1500 – The Statue of David is sculpted!

1510 – …T h e R e f o r m a † i o n…

1520 – First circumnavigation of the globe!

1530 – The Church of England is founded

1540 – …T h e S c i e π t i f i c R e v o l u t i o π…

1550 – First recorded use of the = sign!

1560 – The pencil is invented!

1570 – Imaginary numbers are defined!

1580 – The Spanish Armada

1590 – “Knowledge Is Power”

1600 – …the Gunpowder Plot… (remember?)

1610 – Heliocentricity is proven!

1620 – ♪ The modern violin is invented ♪

1630 – …the trial of Galileo Galilee…

1640 – “Cogito Ergo Sum”

1650 – …T h e E n l i g h t e n m e n t…

1660 – …the Great Fire of London…

1670 – Bacteria are discovered!

1680 – Gravity is discovered!

1690 – …the Salem witch trials…

1700 – The United Kingdom is founded

1710 – The steam engine is invented!

1720 – ♪ The Four Seasons is composed ♪

1730 – The automaton is invented!

1740 – …the War of Austrian Succession…

1750 – Electricity of lightning is discovered!

1760 – …T h e I n d u s t r i a l R e v o l u t i o n…

1770 – The American Revolution

1780 – The hot air balloon is invented!

1790 – The French Revolution

1800 – …the Napoleonic Wars…

1810 – The locomotive is invented!

1820 – The camera is invented!

1830 – The electric motor is invented!

1840 – Communism is developed

1850 – Evolution is discovered!

1860 – …the United States Civil War…

1870 – The telephone is invented!

1880 – The automobile is invented!

1890 – The combustion engine is invented!

1900 – The aeroplane is invented!

1910 – …World War I…

1920 – The television is invented!

1930 – …the Great Depre$$ion…

1940 – …World War II…

1950 – …the Cold War begins…

1960 – The Moon landing!

1970 – The personal computer is invented!

1980 – The Internet is invented!

1990 – The Cold War ends!

2000 – …September 11…

So… what comes next?

by

Operation 8

“Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war.” – Plato

Forgive me if the rest of this account isn’t as eloquent as Plato. I’m not a philosopher. I’m certainly not a hero. Shit, I ain’t even a soldier. Technically, I’m a veteran, but in reality, all I am is a survivor – and a witness. A witness to the weirdest conflict this godforsaken world has ever seen. Historians with better ideas of how to write might refer to this conflict as ‘The Insect War’, or ‘The Infestation’. But to me, and the men I knew who fought in it, it was and always will be known by another name – Operation 8.

SONY DSCOfficially, I’m not a witness. Officially, the events I’m about to write about never even occurred and I never even saw them. Officially, my name is Private Finn Thomas, a photographer in ‘Redback Company’, 29th Infantry Battalion, United States Army.

Unofficially, Redback was just an otherwise nameless detachment of degenerates and no-hopers who saw only one way out of the corporate urban slums of America: joining, fighting, and dying in a cleanup operation in the Mojave Desert in the summer of 2021. This operation that “never happened” was known as Operation 8.

It was, militarily speaking, a successful mission. On a personal level, however, it was a crisis of epic proportions, one in which I don’t suspect I’ll ever overcome. Even so, this account is my first step towards doing just that, and while I suspect I will never come to terms with what happened, perhaps I may succeed somewhat in telling people just what took place out in that desert in that summer. The world deserves to know the truth.

I took many pictures during that summer. I can only show you the ones of which I’ve managed to steal the prints. If they ever catch me, the US Government will likely charge me with treason for making these photos public. I will be tried, found guilty, and if not executed, I’ll be imprisoned for the remainder of my life. This is a risk I’m willing to take. It’s the least I can do for my dead friends.

SONY DSCThis is the only photo I took of my four buddies. I never thought to take a photo of all five of us together. I guess it simply never crossed my mind. In this picture, from left to right, is Miles Monk, Douglas Iverson, Fred ‘Po-boy’ Green (called Po-boy on account of him coming from New Orleans), and Jack Irish. Jack wasn’t really Irish and that wasn’t really his surname, but he was found outside an Irish pub in Boston when he was two years old so the name kind of just stuck to him. He never did find out what happened to his parents.

On June 8th, 2021, a chemical factory right on the state line between California and Nevada, some miles southwest of Las Vegas, had an explosion in their wastage silos. It was later discovered that they were dabbling with certain materials that they really shouldn’t have been. Now – and this is the crazy part, the part nobody would believe if I didn’t have the pictures to prove it – the upshot of these chemicals exploding was that every insect in a two hundred foot radius was suddenly enlarged by a factor of one to eight hundred, depending on their distance to the fallout epicentre.

You don’t believe me? Sounds ridiculous? That’s what we all thought, too. Until, of course, we came face to face with them.

SONY DSCAnts were a constant threat. They could appear out of the ground basically without warning. The only way to know one was coming was to listen carefully to the rumbling sound they made in the dirt. Often, though, they would burst out of nowhere, their pincers gnashing wildly. Their exoskeletons would eventually give way to machine gun fire, and their heads were big enough targets, but if you failed to put them down in time, their razor-shape pincers could cut you in half. That was the fate for poor old Miles Monk. There was nothing we could do to save him.

SONY DSCBees and wasps weren’t too common, but they offered the cleanest, noblest, and most favourable of the deaths. They would simply stab you with their stinger, just like being stabbed by a sword or bayonet. The area around the wound would burn, but it would eventually go numb, and if it was seen to by a medic soon enough, you’d live.

Scorpions were bad. There must have been a few on the outskirts of the factory blast zone because they weren’t enlarged to nearly the same extent as the ants. Even so, their stingers and pincers were sharp and they could move fast. I almost fell into this pit. The identities of these soldiers are unknown.

SONY DSCQuick as they were, though, at least the scorpions couldn’t fly. Flies were the worst of the ‘airbornes’. Unlike the bees and wasps, flies would regurgitate the most foul smelling, vilest, most disgusting, shitty, vomit-like acid all over you. It would burn your skin and then they’d eat it. There was nothing glorious about any of this, but flies presented us with the most degrading death of them all.

Poor Douglas Iverson met his end at the filthy handiwork of a fly. It all happened so fast, I had no way to save him. All I could do was take pictures as his outpost was attacked…

SONY DSC…and his body dissolved into the desert sands.

SONY DSCAll of these ‘critters’ were our enemies and we killed any damn critter that moved. The laws of nature would suggest we were the predators, entering their environment to commit genocide. But if there was anything we learnt out there in that desert, it was that the laws of nature no longer applied.

At least, that’s what we thought for a long time, that the rules of nature had been broken, but as we began to fight our way towards the chemical factory, towards the epicentre of this nightmare, where an outpost had been established, we soon discovered that the rules of nature were very much still at play. We discovered that we weren’t the only ones out in the desert hunting. There was something else hunting the flies, the bees, the wasps, the scorpions, the ants – and the humans.

Something which made our blood run cold.

SONY DSCThe spiders were different to the other critters – they could think. The explosion appeared not to have just made them bigger, it made them smarter. They could form complicated ideas and communicate them to each other. In the ruins of the factory, they’d built a fortress. They used ants to bore tunnels. They could lay traps for us to walk into. They could ambush us.

Remember that photo I showed you of the ant attacking those two men? Well, here is the same incident from another angle a few seconds later.

SONY DSCAs well as being intelligent, they were also fast on the ground and much harder to put down. They could keep low and run with agility at terrifying speed and were able to jump as much as one hundred and fifty feet. On top of this, some were poisonous. Others just pulled you apart. I found this soldier en route to the factory, his head had been pulled clean off.

SONY DSCAnd this fleeing factory worker had survived the explosion, only to have his legs ripped off, from which he bled to death in the desert.

SONY DSCThe route to the factory was also lined with more nameless, melted victims of the flies.

SONY DSCA fly had vomited over these two troops, melting them into each other.

SONY DSCAnd this poor bastard was still standing upright, all his skin melted off.

SONY DSCBut not even the flies would dare enter the factory area. They were afraid of the spiders. If it was up to any of us, we wouldn’t have entered the factory zone either. But this was the Operation 8 objective: “Enter the factory blast zone, destroy all hostiles with extreme prejudice.” The only way I was gonna get out of this mess alive was by entering the ruins of the factory. The same was true for Po-boy and Jack Irish.

It was raining the day we arrived at Operation 8 Headquarters (O8HQ), just a mile out from the factory. June 20th, nearly two weeks after the explosion, and the three of us finally made it through the desert full of critters to the nerve centre of Operation 8. That was when we met a man known only as the Colonel. He was the most senior officer on the ground, the only top brass who had any idea what we were really dealing with. He was the meanest son of a bitch I ever met.

SONY DSCIt was also the first time we saw the kinds of ‘defences’ the spiders had built; we called them “poles”, they were mediaeval-like, pieces of wood they’d whittled down with their teeth into sharp points and stuck in the ground. We lost a lot of good men clearing them.

SONY DSCBut even from the relative security of O8HQ, we weren’t safe from the spiders. They were stealthy and seemingly fearless.

SONY DSCWe stationed lookouts, building watchtowers, or “targets”, out of scrap metal and the poles.

SONY DSCBut the spiders could almost make themselves invisible. By the time you see the spider in this photograph…

SONY DSC…you’re already dead…

SONY DSCHolding this position was futile; we needed to advance. So, it was from these outskirts of the factory that the Colonel decided we would make our main assault on the ruins. You might ask why we didn’t just get the almighty power of the US Air Force to bomb the place back into the stone age. We did. But the spiders had dug in. No matter how much or what kind of bomb was dropped on these bastards, they were going to have to be flushed out one by one.

Our great fear was that we wouldn’t exterminate them all before their eggs hatched. If that happened, if this war spread outside of the desert, all I can say is I wouldn’t have to share these photos with you. You’d have seen it yourself, eventually.

The day of the assault was June 22nd. It wasn’t until the Colonel ordered us to storm the ruins of the factory that I saw he was missing a hand. It had been pulled off by a spider. He was the only man I’d ever heard of coming that close to a spider and living to tell the tale.

SONY DSC

THE BATTLE OF THE FACTORY

The objective was clear: kill everything, burn the place to the ground. In the chaos of the ensuing battle, however, I lost track of Po-boy, Jack Irish, and the Colonel. My efforts on this day remain a frantic, horrified, and confused blur. I didn’t know what was happening, who was winning, or what to do. I simply tried to survive and take the pictures I’d been sent into this mess to take.

SONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCSONY DSCBy nightfall, once it was clear we’d won, we started the painful process of counting our casualties and retrieving the bodies of the fallen, our friends.

When I think about the most harrowing photos I took during Operation 8, a few final come to mind. The first is the Colonel lying dead in the desert.

SONY DSCThe second is the one of Jack Irish, or rather what was left of him, embedded into a wall of rock, still holding his gun.

SONY DSCThen there’s the one of Po-boy, hung up in a web, dangling over the battlefield. He was still alive when the spider that did this to him began to eat him.

SONY DSCBut the photograph that haunts my sleep more than any other is the last one I’ll show you. Before I lost Po-boy, only to later see him after the battle hanging up in “spider silk” and half-eaten, I took a picture of him moments before we were separated. I didn’t see it at the time, I only saw the look of terror in his eyes, but I later realised that the spider that would string him up and slowly eat him is in this picture too.

If only I had seen then what I’m risking everything to show you now…

SONY DSCYou might ask how the US Government ever hoped to keep this all a secret, but a better question might be: how could they ever hope for me to keep it a secret?

by