Lost America Anthology

“Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.”
—Evel Knievel

Searching for lost America, homesick, I crash land in a “like new” trading card of great Evel riding a wicked wheelie in front of an energetic crowd, and this reminded me of popping my own wheelies on my bicycle riding down Delay Street, showing off for anyone in the neighborhood. But it was on TV when Evel appeared, on primetime special events, when he tried a badass stunt—and, tragically, often failed … (these too well-advertised feats, these hyped ‘70s reality shows were authentic, any patriotic kid could tell) … to jump some colossal obstacle, clearly risking his life, his livelihood, and his limbs—anticipating glory better than displayed in most Saturday morning cartoons. I felt like placing my right hand over my heart, like I did in class, a must, pledging loyalty forever to the red, white, and blue. This was my Uncle Sam on that runway, representing all the fans, We, the People, home of the brave, and all that was important about America, a spectacle for all to eyewitness, to gawk at the talent, the courage, of our good leader, Evel.

Small, with only one vote to my name, a mere poet, and a patriotic citizen of great greying America, the land once called the “mother of exiles,” I am singed in the fires of Old Glory, her oily cloth metaphorically ablaze in toxic fumes. “The Soviet Union has to assume the worst,” said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), “since in fact we are the only nation who has demonstrated a willingness to drop a nuclear weapon.” And these ominous words of our now former president remind me of the even more ominous musings, albeit frightening words, of the scientist Albert Einstein, who said: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Nonetheless, I consumed the poetry of Walt and Allen and Adrienne, rocked and jammed like Jimi and Dizzy, twanged and crooned along with Hank, Elvis, and Frank, looked and felt like a megalomaniacal Jackson drip, loved (but not often enough) … and now: what to say, if anything, or what to add, from a poet, one who didn’t lead the masses like a duplicitous politician, a suit, a peacock of speeches, no art-official opinions from me to crash our once united dreams.

Told to get “under the desk” if Russians of old dropped a great nuclear bomb, so I told my therapist that “that only worked for folks in the 1950s.” She always laughs at my bomb jokes, but said—even now, war torn—some cold-hearted thing about cutting me off of my Klonopin, as I panicked, took a pill. Luckily, my appointment with her was by phone, so she didn’t notice my indulgence. She had told me often about side effects, seizures, memory loss in my eighties. So I worry more. Not a balm. I told her that I was afraid. She said, “The Bomb is not your fault, Dana. You are not alone.”

Harry S. Truman, diary entry, July 25, 1945: “Even if the Japs [sic] are savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo].” Here is the physician Helen Caldicott describing the event: “Many people simply vaporized because our bodies are made up of mostly water, and when exposed to the heat of the sun, we just turn into gas. That’s what happened to people in Hiroshima—they left their shadows behind on the pavement.”

“FIGHTING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR VIRGINITY,” a classic graffiti favoring Total Nuclear Disarmament is spot on.

But, before the fall of American democracy, I am left to wonder will any warmth from a poem or essay by the likes of marginalized me or even the sonneteer Emma Lazarus—her famous poem affixed to the gigantic statue of rusty Lady Liberty—resurrect us? “The New Colossus,” welcoming, welcoming all the tired, the poor, and wretched immigrants, welcoming them to their new home in trusty America via the New York harbor. Here is the inscription on the Statue of Liberty (1883):

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Will we focus our bold vision on making America good again? Or will the bomb heat of the sublime nuclear sun be lit across the lost colossus of bald eagles, burning our land?—a territory still ennobled by We, the People.

In fact, the poet Walt Whitman in his masterpiece Leaves of Grass (1855) said that our American greatness and importance is manifested “always most in the common people … the air they have as persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors … the terrible significance of their elections—the President taking off his hat to them not they to him….” Exalting our status as citizens, and our robust guarantee of civil rights often in my own writing, I wanted to become a great American poet in the class of Captain Walt, forever remembered, though I am still insignificant next to him, but still dreaming big. Although, as French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 in his prescient book Democracy in America, the tragic flaw of our society is status oriented, greed oriented, saying that “an ambitious man [sic] may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion that experience quickly corrects … That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances.”

This brings to mind a short poem “U.S. 1946 King’s X” by Robert Frost that I was exposed to in high school:

Having invented a new Holocaust,
And been the first with it to win a war,
How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed,
King’s X—no fairs to use it any more!

Democracy is in trouble. That is widely agreed upon. Just how it is in trouble, and from whom it is in trouble, is not agreed upon. In the recent past, democracy was largely believed in—as an ultimate political good—by every American. If your candidate lost in an election, the winner would be legitimately wished the best—for the sake of the country. In fact, democracy was so revered by Americans that the winner was often thought to be the best person to win because a democratic process chose him or her. This “reverence for democracy” was true all my lifetime … until now.

“Any excuse will serve a tyrant,” said Aesop.

Take, for example, the deadly 33rd president: “We have spent $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history, and won,” said Harry S. Truman in a press statement only sixteen hours after the first atomic bomb was dropped. Is there no escaping human arrogance and human evil?

So, rather than exploring why this troubling ideological change concerning democracy has occurred, or how democracy might be recovered—that is, a renewed faith in our democracy and, especially, a basic trust in our fellow citizens and a respect for immigrants—I will argue that it cannot be recovered. Let’s just admit it. As philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau pronounced, making his vote clear, “Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men [sic].”

The age of democracy is likely coming to an end (or it has already ended). The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, in his book America: The Farewell Tour, puts it bluntly: “Xenophobia has become rampant as a desperate and bitter underclass searches for scapegoats. America’s social fabric is unraveling …” Rousseau once again, denying democracy any real hope by definition, in his celebrated work The Social Contract (1782), plainly says: “In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and it never will.” But I do not suggest that strong men should rule, either. No one person should have the ability to push the button that ends civilization. “In the nuclear age, by the time a threat has become unambiguous it may be too late to resist it,” said statesmen Henry Kissinger.

In 1992, the James Cameron movie Terminator 2 was released. It depicted A.I. gone terribly wrong. But that doesn’t have to be the case with actual A.I. in the 21st century. In fact, maybe our main political problem, the disenchanted collapse of united democratic values, can be overcome by a new kind of leadership, by an A.I. benevolent dictator, a wise machine programed to be a saint, a flawlessly ethical computer (depending, I stress, on its programing) in control of politics—no more lost elections, no more distrusted votes, no more damned ignorant votes. “It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine,” says Gary Marcus, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. And I would add to that—justice.

“Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” said the acclaimed war strategist and politician Winston Churchill. But this is new. Outrageous, yes. But it is a different, much more rational take on our astonishing future with A.I. than the naïve fear of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, “I’ll be back …”

Walt’s photo, part of my search for lost America, arrived today in my mailbox, early, and I was disappointed at first, because the date he had written under his signature (which was clearly visible in the Amazon ad) was cropped, and 1879 suddenly became now, for the glossy b/w looked modern, as if Walt Whitman (not Disney) was just another ambitious Broadway actor, and this 8 x 10 (very well lit) just another headshot for directors, future fans. Not just a poet, but Walt Whitman seems to be a wannabe star clamoring for Hollywood, and I would say a character actor, though, and not a leading man; his grey, frowzy beard suggesting that he would make a superb Santa Claus, and his hat, to the modern gaze, looking just like a forest ranger’s, snazzy, on duty, and ready to help. His keen left eye drooping, his right provocatively moist, with a hint of a tear.

So, I wonder about his writing, his gargantuan thoughts, his keen examination of his beloved America, his forte operatic insights; and if his great line (I am large; I contain multitudes) is true, somehow great Captain Walt is looking dead at me—alive, just another American citizen—and I temporarily feel more at home, for I am a poet, too, Private Dana, down in the literary trenches.

Dana Stamps II
first published in Wayne Literary Review