I apologize for being absent these past many days. We had company and it was wonderful to play tourist again for a while. After lunching at the Izaac Walton Inn, we drove the full length of Going To The Sun Road, which dissects the lower area of Glacier National Park, from Saint Mary's to Apgar. The sky was hazy with smoke from forest fires in adjacent areas, but not horrible. The scenery was spectacular and that road, a true marvel of engineering, was great fun to drive. But the world, sadly, kept going down its own, chaotic path. Stuff happened.
It's hard to pick a subject to write about, there are so many. Then I remembered my old stand-by. All my life, ever since I can remember, I have fought a war against war. It permeates my thinking. It shows up in about half my poetry. I even assembled an entire set of “war poems” along with a tribute to the soldier-poets of World War One, Charles Sorley's Ghost.
I hate war. I would kill it if I could. All it does is destroy. Not just people: war butchers the land and the life upon it. So it disturbed me greatly that our President, who proclaims to hate war at least as much as I do, re-named the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
You may ask, What's in a name? Inevitability. “Defense” is just what it says, a term that promotes a steadfast preparedness against war. “War” is an invitation. It is aggressive. It is a threat. And it accepts its own inevitability.
It allows this administration to murder eleven human beings aboard a small boat in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, on suspicion that they were smuggling drugs. Maybe they were. We will never know. They weren't stopped and boarded, or given the chance to surrender. They were brutally attacked and killed, and all evidence destroyed, by an act of war.
The rule of law has no meaning in America today.
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