Missive the Fifteenth
Imagined Attacks by Russians,DATELINE: Tuesday, September 5, 2000, at 1900 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
My friend L. writes from London, England:
"Bill and I shared one class as freshmen at the University in the fall semester, 1965. We were green as gourds, ill-at-ease unsophisticated peckerwoods.
"Both of us were failing Western Civilization. Three hours of 'F' can suck a grade point down. If you got below a two-point, or C, you were subject to the draft. Uncle Sam had this dirty little war going on, so making bad grades in college took on a whole new meaning. Would you believe me if I said, life or death?
"Bill and I were on the cusp; that is, we were students who, if we did well enough on the final, could pass Western Civ. -- or, alternatively, fail. 'You pays your money and you takes your chances' the college prof laughed.
"I passed and Bill had tears in his eyes. We both lasted one more semester. We both ended up in the military. Bill was shot dead in May of 1967 in Vietnam. I live. C'est la vie."
A Psychic Vortex Is Ripped Open.
L.'s memory of Bill, I think, was jolted into the now by his reflections on a homicide
and the synaptic pipes it opened into the Old Days.
The murder eight days ago of Professor John Locke, master of Comparative Literature, in his office at the same University that L. and I attended, also opened a psychic vortex here at Cricket Song.
I can close my eyes and see it, the tumultuous swirling hole of a thing. It descends into regions of a dead hell I'd rather not revisit. It occupies a place it shouldn't be allowed to occupy. It casts an alien image on my perception of the collegiate atmosphere, especially that of the English Department where I studied for so many years. I'm not overly romantic, but the image I project should be sylvan and pacific, not a flickering horror show ringing with echoes of gunshots and stained with spilled blood.
"Get over it," the Cold Eye said. "You weren't there. You aren't family. He wasn't your friend. Get over it."
Other friends of Cricket Song were jolted into contemplation. J. G., a high school teacher in South Babylon, whose daughter Millie attended her first University class on the day of John's murder, wrote:
A Mother Reports on the Emergency Drill.
"Eb's missive about J. Locke helped me make a little more connection with such a sad event.
Thank goodness, Millie called her dad's office right away,
so when I was abruptly told about it during my prep period at school and rushed to the phone,
I had information that she was OK.
"She was unsettled by it, but not 'disturbed' too much. She spoke about D. F.'s experience in reference to it while she was home this weekend. [EDITOR'S NOTE: A few years ago D. F. was stabbed repeatedly in her classroom at the high school. Her assailant was one of her students. She hovered on the edge of death. Bravely, she returned to teaching after her recovery.]
"You may have seen that D.'s attacker was up for parole recently and she had to testify, backed by a crowd of teachers and family members. His parole was denied.
"At the high school the next day after the murder of John, we had a scheduled emergency drill. My students (seniors who know it all) were mocking it, and I pointed out that initially the people in the university classrooms and offices where the shooting took place must have been terrified by the confusion, if nothing else -- that we should take advantage of a few moments to simply get our minds in order if such a horrific event landed on us.
"That quieted them down and all went well. In our drill we lock our classroom doors, turn off lights, get quiet; certain teachers are on hall duty and there's a plan for directing students inadvertently caught in halls to the nearest collecting places, like the library. There's a plan for emergency health responses in the building, communications with parents, media, etc.
"Hope we don't need any of it, of course."
The Changing Character of Imagined Horrors.
In my school days, emergency drills were oriented toward response to imagined nuclear attacks by the Russian air force.
I think today's drills, necessitated by wholly unpredictable acts of evil from peers,
surpass in intensity and probability the projected horrors of surprise A-bomb attacks.
Back then, a nuclear strike destroyed us all. Today, men and boys with pistols and rifles are either insanely selective, according to private hatreds, or they become mad instigators of the random nature of destruction. The chance end-point of a bullet's flight personalizes the horror. Who knows if the next target might be you?
If the Russians came to nuke us in the early Nineteen Sixties, we were all up-the-creek together; our nationalism and the faceless nature of a shared enemy from far away provided some solace and solidarity to members of the group.
Nowadays the scattered nature of it all leads to an uneasy precariousness at school: community-less neighborhoods surround the campus, the fractured hopes of unity through diversity dissipate any sense of group identity, and a rampant materialist individualism prevents the intervention of shared spiritual values that might counteract the outbreak of violence. Something like that. I'm as lost about what should be done as any of you.
Another mother, also a teacher, wrote to Cricket Song:
"I'm still disturbed in an indefinable way about the implications of such an act, not only in a societal sense, but in a personal sense, too. My son (a freshman at the University) seemed mostly unaffected by it, which is also disturbing because I see it as our children's acceptance of violence as a common occurrence.
"Well, we move on." Most of us. A few die trying.
WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE SIXTEENTH in your mailbox sometime 'round midnight on Friday, September 8, 2000. If you don't want any of my missives, let me know. I'll remove you from the subscription list immediately upon demand. On the other hand, if you want to add a friend or associate to the list, please forward their name and email address to ebenezer@corndancer.com
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