On Violence
Here's another pome also from the manuscript for Dante's Internal Combustion Engine, circa 2005. One reason for reconsideration is our current national debate on guns, and also, considering Hannah Arendt's essay "On Violence," the question of origins of violence: is it bureaucracy and the faceless "rule by Nobody" (as she would have it)? Or is is more personal, in which powerful actors exercise tyranny? Arendt said that the latter, the more identifiable they are, should tend against violence (and towards power), because one could appeal directly, attempt to redress wrongs, and if necessary, rebel.
In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
—Hannah Arendt, "On Violence"
As I wonder how she could disassociate the horrors of the holocaust from the personalities of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and others, I also wonder what she would say now: the people seem beyond redress; the power of not just the oligarchs but the elected (like Hitler) so great they simply do not care. Violence is entrenched not in pogroms but systematic repression so great the effect is the same; this time on a global rather than continental scale.
This week, in a survey on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the New York Times found that the event itself is fading from memory. For instance: forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was.
What I glimpsed from the cab: this is the way things work, whether it's categorized as power or violence, and whether it's politically or personally motivated. Them that's got, shall get; them that's not, shall lose. It goes all the way back to the garden, and shall continue, lest we forget, lest we stop bearing witness.
CAIN AND ABEL
After their reckless questions about
Where can you find drugs and hookers?
and So can you really buy crack on 5th and Blanchard?
and just as thoughtlessly
Do you ever drive anyone you know?
Dood! What if you went to pick up someone
and it was your girlfriend going home from cheating on you?
What if you balled someone in your own cab
did you ever do that?
After that, they try to connect with some friends
on their cell phone
and as we get near frat row
the one with the big mouth says
So you been making pretty good money tonight?
Dood! What if I told you I had a gun pointing at you
through this seat?
His friend, the quiet one, shrinks back from my rear view mirror
he is alarmed as I,
but says nothing, as he always must
and I imagine these two, like brothers,
one profligate, one dutiful,
one aggressive, one silent,
one stalker, one stalked
two coils of an armature
negative and positive, powering their own motor
bound to each other until they burn out.
I cannot see the one directly behind me
but I can hear the shit creeping through his intestines
up his esophagus through his teeth
and too clearly to explain to them
I can also see their futures
which are gathering force and speed,
spinning away from any ground
and while I am their driver I am sitting completely still.
On my axis I pivot and look at him
and think of all the possible things I can say
but which he will not hear.
What I croak out is:
"The fare is eight-eighty."
Geez man, I was just messing with you.
Then he throws down a $20 bill
and says to his friend, c'mon, let's go
not waiting for change.
The friend looks at me like he's apologizing
but he isn't, he's asking for help
and he slouches out, following his shadow-boxing
sibling up to campus, up to the towers on the hill.