Death and Myth Making

My eighty-seven year old father says, with astonishment and wonder, “Nineteen years old and I was responsible for the maintenance of a fighter plane.”

He continues to have a boyish and militaristic obsession with weapons, technology, the application of science to the art of killing and maiming human beings.

And I think:  soldiers and cannon-fodder are always, have always been young men---who did not know what the hell they were doing.

The recurrent myth-making of USA films and television shows fills my father’s head.

I don’t mind his memories, but sometimes, his memories seem to be artificial constructions---built out of what he read and what he imagined more than what he had experienced first hand.

My own myth-making starts with the letter I received as a twenty-year old telling me that I could go to graduate school, but that there would be no job at the end.

Of course, the letter was more careful, more scholarly and objective than that!

But it didn’t matter.  My hopes were dashed.  And I have lived with desperation and fear in my heart ever since.

I am sure the authors of the letter meant no harm.  They did not, after, all decide where the resources of a society would be spent.

They never chose that more money would be spent on bombs than on books, or that the books that were published would be mostly trash.

But the letter was a kind of death sentence.

And I have been dying slowly ever since.