Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

This morning I woke up at four a.m. and read the beginning of Medea Benjamin’s book on drone warfare. Benjamin talks about meeting a thirteen-year-old girl who was begging on the road near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2002, a missile hit her house while she was outside carrying a bucket of water; it killed her mother and her two brothers. Her name was Roya. Her father, a vendor of sweets, had survived, but he did not speak. I got up and watched a video of Medea Benjamin telling the story to an audience at a library. She said that Roya’s father had carefully gathered pieces of his wife and his sons from the tree near their house and buried them. Oh, Jesus. Roya. That poor girl. Her poor father. Their lives completely demolished. I was traumatized and angry — angry at General Atomics, the company that makes drones, angry at George W. Bush, angry at Barack Obama for increasing the drone attacks fivefold after he was elected. I paced the kitchen for a while feeling powerless and ineffectual. At least Tim is writing his book.

• • •

I WENT TO PLANET FITNESS and had a long session on the elliptical trainer. By the time I was done, the parking lot was crowded with cars and I couldn’t remember where I’d parked. I walked up and down and then I started singing, “I lost my car in the parking lot, I lost my car in the parking lot.” Was it a song? Yes, in a way it was.

Once I found my car, which was parked way over to the right, I started home. I saw a street sweeper — a big yellow street sweeper with an invisible pilot high up in the cab. It looked like it was driving itself. I love street sweepers, I always have, even more than garbage trucks. I love the way the big rear roller turns inward against the forward movement of the machine, flinging the mess that the front bristles have dug away from the curb up into some inner holding area. “Sweeper” was one of the first words I said, according to my mother’s stories. “Sweeper” and “lung lord.” “Lung lord” was how I said “lawnmower.”

I lit a Ramones cigar, from Honduras — one of the shorter cigars in the grab bag — and I pressed the button on my recorder and sang, “Street sweeper baby, coming down the street. Spinning those bristles and keeping it neat.” That’s definitely a song. When I got home I grabbed my guitar and went up to the barn and clutched out a few chords and matched the chords to the melody, and I was in business, in a primitive sort of way. It was very windy and the barn creaked — I could hear the joists moving and twisting — but I ignored the wind’s white eyeballs. I spent the morning recording snippets of songs, and then I took Smack for a walk in the park near Strawbery Banke, where all the historic houses are. Strawbery Banke, is there a song in Strawbery Banke? No. I looked across the water at the submarine base. What about a song about a burning submarine? “The submarine was burning, going up in smoke.” No. “The sea warriors watched while their submarine burned.” No, definitely not, because Chuck worked on submarines and it would make Nan unhappy if I wrote a song about Chuck’s precious submarine.

Oh, but the guitar sounded good. I couldn’t get over how good a D minor chord sounded on the guitar. Little old D minor. I once played a Mahler symphony with a D minor bassoon solo, big deal — Mahler’s interminable Sixth Symphony. But this guitar D minor was different. By shifting two fingers you can go from a D minor to some other chord with a suspended something-or-other. D minor, then strange chord, then D minor again. So beautiful. “It’s early morning and the rollers are rolling,” I sang. “The rollers are rolling in the early morning.”

Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then those chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration.

• • •

IS IT POSSIBLE to write a song about the beginnings of the CIA? About the fetish of secrecy? I know a little secret about the CIA. I bet you don’t know this. I’m going to tell it to you right now. The true founder of the CIA was a poet, Archibald MacLeish. Well, that’s not quite right. MacLeish was one of the true founders, one of the early recruiters and legitimizers.

When Franklin Roosevelt wanted to set up a bureau of secret intelligence — this was in the summer of 1941—he assigned the job of creating an intelligence agency to two highly placed people. One was William Donovan, a Republican lawyer who’d gone to Pearl Harbor to “inspect the fleet” before it was attacked and gone to London to cook up trouble and help set Europe ablaze. The other was FDR’s poet speechwriter, the man who’d won a Pulitzer Prize for saying, with great self-importance, that a poem must not mean but be: Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish had already helped Wild Bill Donovan with some of his interventionist speeches — they stayed up late in Donovan’s place in New York fashioning what Donovan would say on the radio about how convoys of American destroyers should be protecting British ships — and he was setting up a new propaganda agency called the Office of Facts and Figures, and he was, incidentally, Librarian of Congress. When Roosevelt wanted an Office of Censorship to keep the lid on bad news, he put MacLeish on the board of directors. MacLeish wanted to be in control of all government information. He was fascinated by air power — the physical air power of bombing, and also the ideological air power of propagandistic radio. He wanted us in the war, but he wanted us to fight smart, at high altitude, with careful targeting and big new weapons made in democratic factories — to fight, above all, with the really big weapon, managed truth. Elizabeth Bishop wrote dismissively of MacLeish’s “mellifluous and meaningless” speeches. The Chicago Tribune called him the Bald Bard of Balderdash.

In August 1941, Donovan and MacLeish met on a cool porch and sketched an organizational chart for a secret agency, and afterward MacLeish sent out telegrams to academicians of war planning, including William Langer at Harvard and James Phinney Baxter at Williams: “Colonel Donovan as coordinator of information is setting up a central intelligence service with which the Library of Congress is cooperating,” MacLeish said in the telegrams. The war planners met, and one of MacLeish’s librarians produced a long document titled “Proposal for a CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE for the Federal Government Together with the Relationship of THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Thereto.” It ended up being called the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, and it did many counterproductive secret things during the war, some of which are still classified, and in 1945 Harry Truman formally abolished it and fired Donovan. But Archibald MacLeish carefully watched over the shreds of OSS intelligence that were left, in his new job as assistant secretary of state, and then a few years later Truman realized he needed a spy service after all, in order to do battle with the evil Communist conspiracy as it was manifesting itself in Greece and Italy and Southeast Asia and everywhere else. Truman wanted to overthrow Communist leaders by spreading around bribe money and napalm and ammunition, so he reconstituted the OSS. But now it was called the Central Intelligence Agency, echoing MacLeish’s original name. And some of MacLeish’s young Yale protégés from Skull and Bones, including Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton, eventually became the CIA’s senior paranoid poltergeists. So now you know. Archibald MacLeish was one of the original instigators and organizers of this bloated monstrosity of assassination and violent regime change and unaccountable underhanded ugliness and skullduggery. And drone warfare. Which is why Plato was right: poets should never get involved in politics.