ARMS

We know how tedious the work of the United States Supreme Court can be, to the point that we mostly ignore it--at least until the importance of the great ideological battles waged there rise once again to a level that warrants widespread media coverage.  Nevertheless, in my wonkiness, I find what happens there and the history of the place fascinating. I have always been one to appreciate things like tradition, precedent, arcane rules and lofty symbols. The books I have enjoyed most about the court are by Jeffrey Toobin and I read quickly this week his latest, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. Toobin has long covered the Supreme Court and his books, for all their detailed study of the history of constitutional law, are fast-paced accounts of the drudging matters of parsing through the complex legalese that shapes the cases that come before the court. He sorts through it all to show clearly the real drama and significance of the decisions handed down and in the way he goes about his work is able to offer glimpses behind the scenes of the inner workings of the branch of our government that we probably know the least about.

Among the things that struck me about this latest book was its in-depth discussion of the Second Amendment. The massacre at the elementary school in Connecticut had not yet occurred when Toobin's book was published, but the chapters related to debates surrounding the interpretation of the amendment are suddenly and particularly poignant. The two full chapters that Toobin devotes to the evolution of the court's interpretation of the Second Amendment should be required reading for anyone currently weighing in on the subject. This portion of the book frames Toobin's larger discussion of the changing shape of the Supreme Court and the ascendancy of originalism in the last two decades, marked, of course, by the tenures of Justices Scalia and Thomas. On this topic Toobin's premises are clear and he repeatedly illustrates the inadequacy of that sort of reading of our Constitution. In particular, the selective way the idea of originalism has been used to advance an ideological agenda, thus, with a level of irony that pales next to all others in my opinion, rewriting decades of constitutional interpretation and Supreme Court precedent, is the clearest refutation Toobin provides. (I am certainly no expert, but for me it comes down to this: If the founders had not expected the Constitution to be the kind of framework for governing ourselves that is both adaptable and flexible in the face of history, why did they write in very clear instructions for changing it?) The way the Second Amendment has been completely co-opted by the National Rifle Association in the last three decades in order to unapologetically support its absolutist viewpoint is a microcosm of the larger issues Toobin's book covers. 

Before I go further, let me say this right away. I own guns. There are multiple guns in my home as I write. The guns I own happen to be under lock and key and only I know the location of that key. Most of the time, I forget that they are even there, as I guess the rest of our family also does. I have never purchased a gun. I likely never will. Every gun I own was given to me by my father. I grew up hunting with him and shooting guns with him. He taught me from an early age how extraordinarily dangerous guns are and was adamantly clear about the serious business of handling one. I do confess, especially in my younger years, that I did not particularly relish hunting with my dad, but I did it. Mostly for him. I also will say, though, that as I got older I came very much to appreciate the time outdoors with him, watching woods come to life on many cold and clear and frosty mornings, noticing things about the world that I would not have seen or known about if he had not taken me hunting with him. I rarely killed anything, but had an appreciation for the sport of it when I did. That was another thing my father was always insistent about, the significance of taking the life of an animal and the respect and care with which it should be done.

All that said, in no way do I believe that the Second Amendment can be interpreted in a way that gives citizens the right to complete and unfettered access to any and all kinds of guns. I want, especially, to make this particular point. You do not need a thirty or fifty round magazine to hunt or to even protect yourself and your family--both of which I strongly believe you have the undeniable right to do. You do not need a firearm that can be fired hundreds of times in a matter of seconds. You do not need these things in the same way that you do not need missiles, bazookas, grenades or tanks. And risking arrogance, I also wish to say that if you truly believe you need your own personal arsenal to protect yourself from some tyrannical takeover of our democracy by the government, then I am not convinced that you are mentally or emotionally fit enough to own any type of firearm. In the unlikely event that such a scenario ever did arise, then good luck with your collection of semi-automatic rifles and handguns against the mighty force that is the United States military.

This is the question I have: if it is perfectly and unquestionably reasonable to, in the interest of the safety of every one of us, regulate the ownership and operation of things like vehicles or the purchase and consumption of prescription drugs, alcohol, and tobacco or what can be carried with you onto an airplane, why is it so unreasonable to regulate the purchase of something as lethal as a gun? If you have to take a class and pass a test and reach a certain age in order to drive a car, why then is it so far-fetched to say that you have to pass a background check to purchase a gun? If we do not question the perfectly reasonable assumptions behind why you cannot personally own your own missiles or other large-scale weapons of war, how then is it unreasonable to say, no, there is no reason for you to own something that exists for the sole purpose of killing a whole lot of people very quickly? Are not some things just simple, common sense?

I do not believe that having common sense regulations when it comes to gun ownership means that before long someone will be coming after your guns or my guns. You have every right to feel my viewpoint on that is naive. But, of course, I also have every right to find naive the idea that in order to be safe we must live in a society that resembles the fabled Old West, all of us--from teachers to clergy--openly brandishing our sidearms in every public and private space so that we may somehow deter a madman bent upon orchestrating a bloodbath or even a common criminal who wants to steal our television. We can--and must--do better than that.

WAR

It is not often that we are gifted in modern fiction with an opening paragraph like this one:

"The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Ninevah and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

This is from Kevin Powers' first and newly published novel, The Yellow Birds. It is a small book as size and length go, but it takes neither of those to build good--no, make that excellent--writing. Powers' book is decidedly of another era, I think, and I cannot help but be reminded of my old friend Ernest Hemingway as I read the prose here. The language is sparse but cutting, elegant but understated, and I have read no other work about our latest wars that speak with the power that this one does. I cannot quite put my finger on it. There is something intangible in his language and at the same time it is altogether ancient and timeless and real. The novel is moving in a way that makes you think on things you would not otherwise.

We are at war and have been for a long time. We forget this. That is understandable, but perhaps not forgivable. War, too, is ancient and timeless and real and more, of course. Perhaps the very nature of the subject lends itself to the strength of Powers' narrative, but I think it is more a product of the artist here. We who have never been to a war cannot understand all that it does to the people who do go, people who we mostly know of, but who are more and more apart from us, left to do our fighting and killing while we daily reap the benefits. Our wars do not engage the full conscience of our citizenry any longer. And that is one reason why a book of this magnitude is important and necessary.

I think a lot, though, about what war asks of those who come back from it and that is really what this book is about. The most striking part of The Yellow Birds is a masterfully constructed pages-long sentence that gets to the core of one of the primary questions in this novel. How do you go away to a war to spend months and years in a confined theater of violence and destruction, thinking hourly of death, how to bring death to others and to keep it from yourself, only to come back home from that to try and live an ordinary life where bills must be paid and children raised and the lawn mowed?

" . . . because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever . . ." 

I rarely say it as directly to my own readers, but I really do hope you will read this book. Because I truly believe that one day soon people will be required to read it in the same way that so many have been required to read The Things They Carried or All Quiet on the Western Front. It will stun you and make you flinch, but you will recognize immediately its quality and the human truths from our own wars that it so perfectly conveys.

SOCIAL

Thank goodness for the new world of social media. How did we get by for so long without knowing that every issue boils down to viewpoints of a singular dimension? It seems more and more that opinions can be summed up in a status update of a few words or, more likely, in a picture or story from afar that is shared and spread and in which everything is taken completely out of context or born of an unyielding hatred. From behind our screens, big and small, we can so easily direct blame and deny the humanity of others and spread vitriol and say, without a doubt, this and only this is who I am. Should not our thoughts and opinions have more value to us than that? Can we ever again take time to think through a thing, to mull a little bit, to consider and converse and ask good questions, to see perspectives of which we were not aware?

These thoughts have been troubling me for some time, especially as the most recent election wrapped up and more so in the wake of the school shootings in Connecticut, each a situation in which claims to a side were so easily staked and others so readily dismissed. Many times I have been hampered in my ability to post here because my mind is turning over such things, unsure of what it is I want to say or if even I should be saying anything at all. I do not mean to imply that I do not feel strongly about certain issues and problems we face as a gathering of human beings. I absolutely do, though I more often than not keep them to myself. It is a weakness, I confess. And, certainly I have my own penchant sometimes for bumper sticker sorts of philosophies. Do we not mostly prefer things delivered neatly in small and uncomplicated packages, around which we can more easily wrap our minds? But, when I see what we can unleash upon one another with hastily typed words, I cannot help but wonder if we are not capable of a more civil and thoughtful discourse. Should not such a thing be among the highest ideals of a self-governing people?

These same thoughts have been further ground down in my mind of late as I finished my first book of this new year, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. If there is one thing I believe Kingsolver does better than any other writer I have read, it is the way she frames the insurmountable complexities of an issue within a compelling, believable story about people and places and things we can all easily imagine. Her novels lay out for us a pathway through a dialogue and show us that the water can be awfully muddy when it comes to most things. Through characters we recognize and with whom we can identify, she allows us to ask questions that maybe we had not thought of before and she gives us room, especially, to listen.

This her latest novel is a story of a rural community confronting a phenomenon of nature unseen before in its midst and that is at once both inordinately beautiful and a marker of something altogether wrong in the world. Its occurrence draws outsiders and opinions of every kind. Kingsolver's book is dead solid in its presentation of the many and subtle layers that thread themselves through the dichotomies that exist between the rural and the urban. But, what it really comes down to and what she reminds me of over and over again is that nearly everything we confront as a society must eventually be viewed through the lens of class. We have a difficult time talking about it in direct terms, but class shapes more than anything else, I believe, our way of seeing the world.

There are a lot of strongly felt opinions about the central question in this book, and we see many of them everyday written and voiced in terms far too uncomplicated for a problem of such enormity. But, like good fiction should, Kingsolver's novel asks us to work a little harder to see into the mass of tangled answers, to at least arrive at our own conclusions with empathy and understanding and a bit of sweat on our brow, perhaps, from thinking them through. We may not always be able to find the answers, but we can at least acknowledge the shared humanity between ourselves and other people while we are at it.