Letter to the New York Times:

August 4, 2001

To the Editor:

Re: “To Butt In or Not in Human Rights: The Gap Narrows,” by Richard Bernstein (Arts & Ideas, Aug.4).

The article outlining Henry Kissinger’s attitudes towards international human rights mentions the Augusto Pinochet case and Kissinger’s own vulnerability to future prosecution by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Chile and Cambodia. Yet, strangely, it omits the fact that this past May Kissinger fled Paris to avoid a summons from French Judge Roger Le Loire and is currently wanted for questioning by judges in Chile and Argentina. The questions all relate to Kissinger’s role in Operation Condor, a network through which the secret police of seven Latin American countries collaborated to torture and “disappear” political prisoners. Cristopher Hitchens, in a recent column in The Nation (“The Fugitive,” June 25), points out that the Times and other American papers ignored these international events even as they appeared on the front page of foreign papers like Le Monde. I now, like him, begin to wonder what motive is behind the glaring absence of any mention of Kissinger’s attempts to dodge justice.

In his new book, Kissinger casts doubt on the Pinochet case and the International Criminal Court, quoting John Quincy Adams, who said that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Yet, in the early seventies, he marshaled US security forces here and abroad to undermine Chile’s democratically elected government and identify Pinochet opponents, who were then often murdered. His double standard serves his own interests well. We must wonder if Kissinger’s human rights stance is motivated by a newfound sense of restraint in international affairs, or because he hopes to avoid, as Pinochet has, answering to the high cost in civilian lives of his actions in service to his ideology.

Adam Rosenblatt
Austin, TX
adam.rosenblatt@aya.yale.edu

posted by Adam at 5:37 PM [edit]

I remember the new green notebook you kept all your songs in. Instead of putting a distortion pedal on your guitar, you'd just dip the notebook in water and watch as the ink softened.

When the weather conquers you, come inside and I'll either cool off or heat up whatever it was that burned.

By crushing the cans we allow them to fit into a smaller space.

The lightning bugs don't come around here but the screaming shirtless daybreaks do.

One lie plus one lie makes only one lie.

The lightning bugs don't come around here but a choking sense of flowers does.

I remember the green notebook like a sign someone's taped to my back. I don't know what it says yet, but I know it's there and that I'm about to get a kick in the ass. So in a way the meaning is perfectly clear.

One lie plus another really great lie makes a hell of a story.

If your fingers are cold but your ears are hot you're either guilty of inconsistency, or of listening too hard and not touching enough.

I remember you on days you'd write in notebooks. We were so convinced it mattered. I hope we still are.

When the weather conquers you, don't become a heap on my doorstep. I've left the door unlocked.

Wherever you go, go boldly. And return even more so, because it's the returning that's hard.

When the ink softens in your notebook it becomes lies. What a price to pay for beauty.

Oh look, all the teenagers are living what we did, and maybe better. Let them go out in the snow, too lazy for jackets, and freeze their asses off. They'll warm up later, when they're our age, and their perceptions have already started to dull.

By crushing the seasons we allow them to fit into a smaller space.

In the days before the notebook, all it took for you to soften your words was to dribble them moist offf your tongue, like spittle. With the new technology came ease and efficiency, but also a little bit of winter.

I'm not angry about any of this, and I hope you aren't. Because I still think it all matters.

The first kiss is the most famous, but I think people enjoy the second more. Panic interferes with memory, leaving the first kiss blank while the second, well, you know the second.

I have sent an invitation to the lightning bugs and I have written you this note. If the fireflies carry lies, perhaps they can convince you to come inside. Let's leave the teenagers to panic. I have noticed that my parents are particularly attuned to changes in light. I am trying to become more so myself, to learn what beauty is when you already know what portion of the world is yours. To soften my words slowly, like clay in my hand, and leave a few molecules of skin upon them.

For us to joke about tomorrow, when the weather clears.
posted by Adam at 12:42 PM [edit]

I'll never know which one I resemble the best

A rock'n'roll movie with a classical soundtrack. Perhaps it is time to ease up. Perhaps
the imaginary kingdoms can be left for a little while, like pool floats, to drift. Mom says
I have become heavy. The less important I become in this city the more prominent are my
kings and princes, the more vast the empire of the blank page. It is time to ease up. It is
summer, and there are pool floats.

The closing of doors softly in clean apartments to not wake up the people who are
asleep, who have showered, who eat pleasantly. The restaurants and babies,
holding Will by the fishtank. Gold dust. Half an hour in the car alone.
Brushing your teeth softly so as not to wake what's inside. Who's inside.
Buses on the East Coast, which always arrive to someplace gray and someone lovely.
A rock'n'roll soundtrack. One hundred blueberries. Sawmills. Not pointing things out
as you drive by, because the passenger is still asleep. At Dunkin' Donuts
they always put too much sugar in the coffee. In this city they put in just
the right amount, which of course is bitter and unappetizing. No radio.

Ease up, young king. Go out into the world, blindly, as you did in your drawings.
Your castles were beautiful: now leave them. And thank them as you leave.
They threw miracles, hard, into your future. Which is now. Which is waiting.
Gold dust. Tooth brush. New people in passenger seats, not as beautiful as the old,
but willing to try. Or to try something new. In this city which is not yours.
In this castle of sneezes. On a couch, in the world, ready to hope. Almost.
posted by Adam at 12:29 AM [edit]

In that kingdom we once spoke of, the prince has fallen in love. It is the smooth love of fairy tales, where the beloved is cherished for her golden hair or distant eyes, not for the way you watch movies, not for how you wake from naps. The prince in all his fervor rides out to the kingdom of his beloved, where the people harvest water for electricity and depend on the sky. The beloved will not leave her kingdom, for the rains would leave with her, following all her steps with a drizzle of grief. The words are going soft. The words are falling asleep.

The prince, cruel in his love, thinks to trick the sky or his beloved. Since the sky sees everything, he chooses her instead. "I have bargained with the sky," he says, "and it has promised me to rain a river into your kingdom, a river so deep it almost leaks onto the underground stars, and almost puts out the fire at the earth's core. Will you come with me now?" She says yes, but she must see the river first. The words start to cough. The words have eaten too fast.

The prince orders the mirror-makers of his kingdom to make mirrors all night long and all day. In their shops they work to exhaustion, and make so many mirrors that they begin to lose themselves. Fergus shouts to Harold to pass him the cloth that is in his own hand. Greta wakes up to find that she is Sarah. Gertrude has never been seen again. The mirrors are taken, in the night, to just outside the beloved's kingdom. They are lain out and joined together, all the way from the horizon line to where you are sitting right now, so far from me. They form a great winding surface that reflects the sky.

"Beloved," says the prince the next day, "Behold the river the sky has made you. Look how still and perfect! Look how the sky made it in his own image!" She is enchanted, and wants to touch the cool surface. "Oh no, you mustn't," says the prince. "It is so deep, and its currents so forceful beneath that glassy surface, that should you even dip your finger, it would pull you in!" The words collect in pools and begin to make electricity.

As the beloved gathers her things and travels with the prince to that kingdom we once spoke of, the sky stares angrily at its own reflection in the prince's river. It beats a desert sun down on itself, and that day everyone in the beloved's kingdom gets sunburnt, and the sky too suffers a headache from its own glare reflected back in the mirror. It tosses lightning down, which just skips like an ice skater losing its balance across the flat surface, and bounces into the village, causing dogs to bark and lovers to shock one another when they touch.

At last the sky does the one thing it can: it stops raining. The people of the beloved's kingdom are without water and without their electric entertainment for weeks. Old people are desperate in their thirst. Children, bereft of their electronic boxes, are learning to read and drawing on napkins. The prince has closed the gates of his castle, however, and no emissary from the drying land is allowed to reach the beloved's ear. The words are so thirsty. The words are suffocating from all this air.

Perhaps it is a loyal bird who, returning from migration and landing to take a swallow of water from this surprising new river, realizes the magnitude of the glass falsity and flies off in search of the beloved, to tell her of her woe. He flies in the open window and straight to the mirror on the beloved's wall, squawking madly. She shoos him, not understanding. He returns later with a mouthful of water and spits on the mirror, flapping repeatedly against the glass. She shoos him again, wondering at how a bird so much like the ones back home got all the way here. He comes back after days of travel with the brownest piece of wheat from her kingdom, drops it in front of her, and goes again to the mirror. She grabs the wheat, shudders, rushes out from her quarters. The mirror in her room, which had begun to treasure her reflection, realizes that it has just lost her and begins to weep. Too far from where it is needed, real water streams out from a mirror.

The gates are closed, the prince gone hunting. The bird brings other birds with him, and they each grab a piece of the fine new cloth on the fine new wedding gown that the beloved now wears. Holding her in the trembling of many yellow feet, they carry her into the air, back to her kingdom, where the sky looks down angrily at her for being so foolish. Her tears of regret fall down on the solid river and sit on the surface like bird's spit. The sky, glad to have her back despite his anger, and softened by her tears, lets a droplet slip from his eye. Then another, and another, until water covers over the fool's river and spills out into the town, washing away the memory of thirst and books. To this day, in that land of plentiful water and electronic entertainment, you can dive to the bottom of the great river beside the town and find, at its very bottom, your own face looking back at you. The words are haunted by their reflection, and they slink home feeling ill at ease.

The prince, when he returns, will find his beloved long gone. His mirror, however, will never show him his own reflection; instead, in a surface that seems more like a river of bulging tears, the mirror guards the beloved's reflection, which shifts and refracts as we all do when we are absent, existing only in the memories of the people who have lost us.
posted by Adam at 12:15 AM [edit]

This skin,

awake from a headlong nap,
wearing last night's lawnchairs
and foodstuffs, is ready for
plunder, mad for mayhem.

The brief hold on self lost in the marketplace.

This blood,

running in colors invisible
and immune, is ready for motion:
the dance as yet unasked,
the curdled milk of the music.

A most impossible, and impractical, way to say "stay."

This rumor,

which the mouth bit off the tree
and cooked in the food
and coughed into the pavement
of the country, the humming country

is a lie, a hope, a little prayer carved into skin,
and then folded back again.
posted by Adam at 5:01 PM [edit]

The High Way

With the new shades of blue I wear, in the pick-up trips, I remember:
detectives were hiding in the grass all around us, and we were alone.
You said something that at the time seemed full of rage, and yet perfectly
complete. Our blanket was spread out awaiting miracles. They never came.
In all my searching I found your lips instead. This too must now wear blue.

On a gear-shift Saturday, with cheeks scraped red by sun, at the gas station,
waiting to urinate, with all the buzzing of nothing natural, in a world so unsharable,
in a state so wide, playing with the claws of traffic, I remember: detectives
were waiting silently in the trees. We were almost alone. I heard a voice
that had put rage to rest. You were speaking. A little kid with stick and twine
was fishing for a miracle. He caught one, pulled it up, and threw it, hard, into his own future.

And in that future he knew you.
posted by Adam at 4:50 PM [edit]