Henry Kissinger
When one listens to the analyses and encomiums about the late war criminal Henry Kissinger, what is missing is a sense of the people whose lives were directly impacted by him. He never had to deal with any human consequences and could exist in a sort of geo-political ether where he could mug for the cameras while wielding a very big stick. Famously scornful of those who dared to criticize him, Kissinger could give a person pause about the official phrase—“National Security Advisor.” What was this security that demanded the overthrow of elected governments and the pursuit of undeclared wars? Was the nation so full of terrible insecurity that it needed such advisors? Certainly, American security has cast a very wide net that has been an integral part of being a nuclear superpower. From Grenada to Vietnam—to choose two locales at random—any situation may endanger American security, both as regards its sanctimonious freedom and its “interests,” which is to say the needs of various corporate kingdoms. Kissinger relished this breadth. The world was a canvas upon which he could help to inscribe whatever necessary “actions” needed to be taken. For many who were caught in such “actions,” there was no way out.
He had for most of his ride, a vengeful paranoiac as his sidekick. Kissinger believed he knew how to play anyone but it wasn’t that hard because Kissinger, for all his shrewd strutting, was cut from very crude cloth himself. An irony of his career is that he fit so well into the role of advisor, a role he could have fulfilled with other vengeful twentieth century paranoiacs. No use naming names because it is impossible for any right-thinking person to think of Kissinger in such company. Yet when one totals up the deaths he had a hand in, you have to give the man credit: he could stand up to any world-scale murderer. Though, again, of course, he personally killed no one and slept, as he pointed out over and over, the sleep of the just. Advisors never have to take the rap and whatever they do can be spun to the largely suppliant press corps.
I’m reprinting below a poem of mine from my book Impenitent Notes. The poem is based on a story someone told me about a folk singer in Chile. To my mind, one of literature’s tasks is to hold up these stories in the face of the mix of contempt and self-congratulation that “athletes of power” (in Zbigniew Herbert’s phrase) routinely exhibit. For them it’s all in a day’s work. Someone such as Kissinger would never encounter my poem in a million years. Yet the poem exists. Poets and writers must be stubborn people. They know how slight their means are and they know they cannot undo a whit of the suffering that nations cause under the banners of various murderous expediencies. Nevertheless, they write. Here is the poem:
Bob Dylan (Chile, 1973)
Footfalls their sound
Deliberate and indifferent.
A metal door.
A smell like burnt hair.
A table and two chairs.
We know who you are.
We know you go around
And you play the songs of this gringo,
Bob Dylan.
A soldier making a face
Like eating something rotten.
We wonder why you do that.
We wonder why you insult your country.
Your country is your mother.
Don’t you love your mother?
As if searching for an answer
The lieutenant looked at a wall carefully.
You are fortunate.
We have a guitar here and we want you to play.
We will be your audience, Mister Mother Hater.
Some people say that soldiers are stupid, cruel people
But they are wrong. We are aficionados.
His fingers were wood his voice a dark whisper.
They stared with dead smiles on their faces.
For as long as he could he made the song go on
As if it were a train that could take him away.
A sergeant came over and grabbed the guitar,
Held it by its neck and smashed it to the floor.
There is the wind’s answer, señor.
There are your words, señor.
The good Americans are helping us.
Your name was given to us by another musician.
We have our own instruments.
A stick came toward his privates.
He felt the blue scream of electricity.
When he woke he was lying in a field.
The air was cold.
It was night.
Was he still a person?
His teeth chattered like impatient dice.
His eyes felt severed from their sockets.
In his mind he saw the American girl
Who had been his lover that year in the States.
She made love when she wanted,
She ate when she wanted,
She said what she wanted.
They had heard Dylan sing.
It was startling so much poetry in his anger.
He tried to rise but his legs were sand,
He curled up as best he could
And started to cry like a lost child,
A child who feels he never will see home again,
Who is full of the worst woe.
He thought of her and tried to imagine the tongue
Of love in his mouth. Such a sweet snake.
In his gut a pain like a turning blade.
He wished to throw up.
In his mind he saw a man walking down
A quiet street toward a woman’s house.
It was dusk there was a light fragrant wind.
He sang a song that could not be unlearned.
Ohh.
The added context only makes the poem even more powerful.
Poets dare to say the unspeakable truths. They show us the parts of us we refuse to see. Monsters are real and walk among us, with disinformation campaigns painting them as heroes. My heart breaks for humanity.