TheHellmouths
Marshall
Looking back on it, we all seemed very young at the onset of the second Iraq war. During the lead up to it — which I like to think of as the Republican re-election campaign — I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Maybe, as some dark appeasing part of me seemed to insist, some puerile pining for respectable pragmatism, this was a necessary action to remove a dangerous dictator. Comparisons were made with Hitler, and moreover, how the world stood by during the persecution of the Jews. Certainly Hussein persecuted the Kurds and Shiite Muslims. Certainly Hussein had attacked Israel in the first Gulf war in order to provoke a response that would draw in other Arab nations against the allies. But at the same time I was disgusted with the American government’s populist approach to the proposed action, characterizing legitimate ethical concerns with a pre-emptive strike against an already broken and scrutinized nation, reservations regarding the human toll both here and abroad, as well as any serious inquiry into the actual effectiveness of such a course in the war against terrorism as unpatriotic and traitorous in the most truly McCarthyesque fashion. Maybe I was just afraid of being wrong about something, being proven wrong by history like that father in the old WWI enlistment poster who is asked by his daughter what he was doing during the great war. Perhaps I was a comfortable moralist passing judgement on “Americanism” as a philosophy of the masses that was beneath my intellectual pretensions. Maybe I had my pride wounded by campus leftists and saw myself as some kind of messenger of a divinely inspired rationale for peace that was more accessible to the people where such Ivory Towered intellectuals had failed. Maybe I was an ingrate to my own freedoms and the sacrifices of my forebears. Maybe I felt impotent by my diagnoses of mental illness and felt compelled to oppose a war I could never fight in rather than support a war I wouldn’t, had the case been so that I could. My self-honesty knows no bounds, as does my capacity for self-delusion. When I heard there was a march protesting the invasion on it’s eve, I went, not because I felt strongly about it, but because I had no idea at all.
We blockaded a few gas stations. One of the campus radicals proposed screaming at the cars that tried to get through until I pointed out that this was the same tactic used by anti-abortionists in front of clinics. Somebody else gave me a number for a lawyer in case I was thrown in jail, an idea that held no heroic appeal to me. How would I get my medication? As I said the morning of 9/11 when my psychiatrist gave me the paperwork to sign to renew the drug study I was on, “The whole world’s going insane. The least I can do is stay sane.”
Somebody else passing by told me there was a vigil starting downtown, so I walked up and hung out with everyone in the square. The crowd was refreshingly free of those campus leftists with whom I’d experienced such animosity in the past over PC fascism and censorship. It was a temperate night, and we were optimistic about an early spring and talk of keeping it going for as long as the war lasted. We had a few ramshackle shelters set up, and the tone was set early on as a forum for discussion, which was preferable to chanting slogans in my mind. It turned out I wasn’t alone in my uncertainty. What became immediately clear was that whether people were for or against the war, they all had the same feeling of not being heard in respect to their opinions on it. I’ve always had to be original, and often antagonistic to the very causes I espoused, so I walked around with a sign that said, “I like apples”, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but by morning, after enduring my first night of drunken rage and sober indignation, at times equal in intensity the delusions I had experienced during my psychotic episode, I settled on the poignant query, “Doesn’t it seem like some people just don’t appreciate peace?” I was later to staple to the other side another piece of cardboard which read, “War is just one sack of shit after another.”
That first night, a stabbing took place among some of the street kids hanging out nearby, and we were blamed for it among the conservative media, as well as some of the leftists who coldly watched from a distance. I remember glowering during one of our meetings at one of the latter’s representatives when he outlined how this could be so, without having been present. Some conservative members of city council responded to complaints that we were an eye-sore by mounting demonstrative appeals to our safety and well-being. Winter returned with a vengeance. Somebody showed with some tools and reinforced and expanded the shelters so they looked like a tree-house’s basement. We held a meeting with concerned citizens in which we told police and one of the toadies of conservative council from parks and rec that we were staying and that was that, in keeping with a brief statement written by one of the other participants as mine was too long-winded. We started a schedule for which many people signed up and few showed, leaving the responsibility to the same handful of near-frostbitten observants. Local businesses donated food and coffee, and we ended up with so much that we started serving it buffet style to some of the street people. One of the backers of the development across the street tried to pay us to leave. I realized in dealing with drunks every night that I still had a lot of baggage to sort through relating to my alcoholic father. I also took a special dislike to one of the teenagers who enjoyed goading me from the midst of what was later to be established as an encroaching mental illness.
One night I awoke at home to find it had been snowing and freezing rain all night. I pulled on two our three layers of clothes as usual, headed over to the convenience store and bought six cups of coffee which I didn’t have to pay for when I told the clerk who it was for. I struggled through knee high snow for what seemed like an hour for a walk that would have taken five minutes in the summer, carrying the coffees in an awkwardly large cardboard box only to find only one person was awake, holding his hands over a tiny Coleman heater, sitting next to a box of cold pizza, upon which was in turn sitting four large cold and full cups of coffee. I relieved him, sending him home, and tried to pass the time trying to find merit in Nietzsche and trying not to smoke too many cigarettes. In the morning I did circuits around the fountain in the square, and looked up at the beautiful high altitude clouds in sky, red from the first burgeoning of dawn, and thought that it was cold up there and it’s cold down here and it’s beautiful up there and it can be beautiful down here and maybe it means that I can feel the beauty up there when an SUV pulled around the corner and the driver started spewing profanity at my smiling face until he was out of sight of me and, presumably, I was out of sight of him. I remember his face like it was yesterday. Contorted in hatred, exerting everything that was wrong with his life against a stranger standing in the square on a silent cold Saturday morning. Yes, it was a yesterday face.
I cut off two feet of hair and donated it to Locks of Love, mailed at my expense. It had been five years since my last haircut. I had kept it long as a stubborn refusal to conform my recovery from schizophrenia to the standards of others. That was probably the most enduring thing I did that winter. The vigil lasted eight weeks before it was abandoned. The mini RV that had been donated was hauled out into the middle of the street by hoodlums, and that was the end of it. I had bowed out early citing the memories that hostility awakened in me, and the deep chill I caught that stayed with me all the time, even in a hot bath.
When spring came, so did Romeo Dallaire, former head of UN Peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, to speak at Convocation Hall. A bunch of us attended, and I twisted in my seat like a school boy to talk to him at the end of his lecture, when members of the audience were invited to approach the microphone.
“Mr. Dallaire, a bunch of us held a vigil against the war. We talked to people, analyzed ideas, broke up fights and fed people. Yet, at the same time, people kept coming to us and saying, ‘I agree with what you’re doing, but not how you’re doing it.’ How would you respond to that?”
Dallaire’s haunted eyes widened in mock innocence,
“Where were you doing this? In Baghdad? Or was that just here in town?”
I’ll never forget that look either. Maybe it was a tomorrow face. Maybe it was less a jibe and more an expression of pure hope that we really had hoofed it to Baghdad and put our lives on the line in service to others.
That summer, when the blackout happened, one of the vigil members, a sixteen year-old named Scott Marshall was hit by a car while riding his bike at night. The rumour was that it was an SUV. I ran into some other vigil-keepers on their way to the hospital where he was being treated, and they were planning to sneak into his room to see him. They were all smiles and rosy cheeked, like revolutionaries mounting an insurgency against death itself. He slipped into a coma and never came out.
The funeral was an uncomfortable experience for those of us not given to religious appeals to our eternal souls, though I had as little patience with the atheist who mounted a diatribe against Christianity at the café where we later adjourned. I didn’t actually know Scott that well, but I remember thinking during the service when they talked about his faith in humanity, we were to discern, as much as God — that it would be nice to talk to him about such matters, before realizing I never would. I wrote “Marshall” in a creative spurt while I was waiting for lunch at the drop in centre, an afternoon which also produced “Since When” and a few other sets of lyrics we haven’t composed music for and maybe never will, who knows. It was originally based on a conversation I had with my step-father over the price-gouging that was going on during the blackout. The conversation was very much the way it happens in the song. Fortunately, however, we talk all the time. That was a bit of artistic license I took in acknowledgement of the fact that mine isn’t always the case, and it never would be in the case of Scott and his family now that he was gone. This song is very much about my family, and also their families, my parent’s generation, and the “Gulf” between them and their’s opened by war and the opposition to it, a final refutation of it’s necessity. Two years later, I don’t see any of the people I froze out in the cold with anymore. I’m living with my girlfriend and her son now, and these issues are no longer abstract to me. Last week gas prices went over three figures, and this week in the wake of hurricane Katrina, they’ve gone up again thirty cents a litre. We’re both working our asses off with nothing to show for it. Yet in these circumstances, it would seem that the ideals we froze our asses off for back then are actually more relevant than impractical, when history has shown that hatred and bigotry foments itself in times of economic hardship. The patience I have fostered for others has parlayed itself into a greater patience for myself and my own shortcomings and failings. It takes more strength to love than it does to hate, and the dividends are greater than anything that can be taken by force.
“Marshall” went quickly from inception to arrangement with few bumps. It was the first of the more sensitive, less caustic, writing we started with. I look on it with a great deal of pride. If I never write anything else, at least we wrote that, which does a lot to relieve artistic pressure.
Yours,
K