Willowing Skywardly by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

Table of Contents

Willowing Skywardly: Stories and Essays ................................. ii

Books Published by the Author................................................. iii

Peter McMillan .......................................................................... iv

Copyright .................................................................................. v

Dedication ................................................................................ vi

Table of Contents .................................................................... vii

Introduction ............................................................................... 1

PART ONE — Fiction ............................................................... 2

C-Shift Change (May 2021) ...................................................... 3

The Leper Colony (May 2021) .................................................. 6

The Witness (June 2021) ....................................................... 10

The High School Dropout (June 2021) ................................... 13

Silverback (June 2021) ........................................................... 17

When Mao Came to Town (August 2021) .............................. 19

Yaniel's Quest (August 2021) ................................................. 22

Tuesdays' Delivery (August 2021) .......................................... 26

The Eyes Behind the Curtains (September 2021) .................. 32

Meanwhile (September 2021)................................................. 38

Prosaic Endings (September 2021) ........................................ 42

PART TWO — Non-Fiction (2020-2021) ................................ 45

The Room Where It Happened (July 2020) ............................ 46

The American Threat to the World (July 2020) ....................... 49

The Time of the Magicians (August 2020) .............................. 56

Is America Capable of Seeing 2020? (September 2020) ....... 61

Franny and Zooey (November 2020) ...................................... 64

What the Dickens Was He Up To? (April 2021)...................... 69

Peter McMillan vii

France's Agent Orange Case (May 2021) ............................... 74

Why does the past keep coming up ... (June 2021) ................ 83

On Wounded Knee: Comparing Bury My Heart at Wounded

Knee and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (August 2021) .... 86

We Won't Get Fooled Again (September 2021) ...................... 96

Beatdown on Wellesley (September 2021) ........................... 100

The Progress of Knowledge and Material Conditions in

Asimov's Foundation Novels (December 2021) .................... 103

PART TWO — Non-Fiction (1995-2008) ............................... 111

Global Trends in Public Education: Market-Oriented Education

Reform (August 1995) ........................................................... 112

After Truth and Falsehood (October 1996) ........................... 127

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (March 2002) ............................ 143

Resurrecting Rosa (May 2004) ............................................. 147

Missionary, Mercenary, Migrant (July 2005) ......................... 152

On Pope Benedict XVI's Truth and Tolerance (October 2005)

.............................................................................................. 154

This Democracy 'Not for Export' (April 2006) ........................ 158

Why Don't People Like Bush? (April 2006) ........................... 160

Don't Let the Political Cartoons Fool You: These Guys May Be

Too Smart For Watergate (April 2006) .................................. 161

O Canada ... Where Art Thou Going? (June 2006) ............... 163

On Regicide (June 2006) ...................................................... 165

On Feudal Loyalty (July 2006) .............................................. 167

Retreating from Iraq? (November 2006) ............................... 171

The Arctic Maquiladora (December 2006) ............................ 175

On Tyrannicide … by due process? (January 2007) ............. 179

H. and the Castle (June 2007) .............................................. 183

The Project (July 2007) ......................................................... 186

viii Willowing Skywardly

Eichmann in Phnom Penh (November 2007) ....................... 190

The War Flower (November 2007) ....................................... 193

Long Live the Queen (December 2007) ............................... 195

Language Catching up with Thought (July 2008) ................. 197

 

Peter McMillan ix

Introduction

Part One features short fiction written since Anthology of Hardly 20/20 Flash! Fiction and Missing Stories: An Anthology of Hardly 20/20 Flash! Fiction.

Part Two Non-Fiction includes two sections: the first comprises book reviews and essays from 2020 and 2021 and the second in-cludes two papers from the 1990s and several essays and op-ed articles overlooked or otherwise omitted during compilation of the Collected Essays on Political Economy and Wartime Civil Liberties.

The fictional and the real are combined in this collection intention-ally, partly because the collection would be too small with just one or the other but also to suggest the permeability of boundaries be-tween perspectives.

 

Peter McMillan

Toronto

January 2022

 

Peter McMillan 1 PART ONE — Fiction

 

2 Willowing Skywardly C-Shift Change (May 2021)

The lunchroom is overstuffed with blue shirts (baby blue button-up style with the company logo on the pocket) and T-shirts (mostly faded dark blue) on bodies of all ages, colours, and genders. The former are one step closer to the 'B' shift, the afternoon shift. The latter are probationary meaning that they have 90 nights before they have to find another job.

Groups sit on the beige plastic chairs set around small square ta-bles, also plastic, designed for four but able to accommodate eight ... with the corners. Some tables are anxiously subdued, others comfortably boisterous There's no music in here, just the hum of the Coke and sandwich vending machines and the whooshing sound of the HVAC system, which are mostly drowned out by hu-man voices. That will change in about 15 minutes and for the next 8 hours, give or take.

In the middle of the room sits Ram, the old guy, Grandpa, who could have started living off old-age benefits years ago. He wears a clean white T-shirt to work every day, even though he should have earned a blue shirt by now, but his probationary period has been extended multiple times. He takes it as its given, doesn't complain but doesn't kowtow. He limps as he walks. His round but muscular midsection doesn't help his mobility. His brown work-scarred fore-arms covered in white hair are as thick and powerful as any in the plant. Asked how he stays so healthy, he answers matter-of-factly, "Very, very good doctors. Son and daughter, and four grandchil-dren." No one takes him literally, but that's what he means.

On one side of Ram is the temp, the 20-something from the dying steel town 40 minutes away. He comes from a family of United Em-pire Loyalists. He's fond of saying that though nobody knows, or cares, what he's talking about—1776 and 1812 being unfamiliar

Peter McMillan 3 markers for most of his co-workers. And on the other side of Ram, is Mai, Vietnamese but from Japan. She often puts in her earbuds and listens to English pronunciation lessons during lunch break. Once that fact was discovered, it spread and has produced no end of jokes and laughter from the male voices in the lunchroom. Mac takes the fourth side of the table. He's a bookish, stand-offish sort, and during breaks he chain-smokes a foul-smelling unbranded cigarette that creates a comfortable space in the 'smokers' pen.'

On the corners of the table are three. The fourth is empty. Between Mac and Ram is Osman, a fastidious Blue Shirt with carefully pressed navy blue pants from Mark's Work Wearhouse and the company blue shirt, always a long-sleeved style that stays buttoned at the wrists throughout the night. Oleg, another Blue Shirt on the 'C' shift, is on the opposite corner from Osman. He only talks about computers, though once he mentioned he'd been in the wars (which ones, nobody knows). He spends his breaks on his mobile re-searching refurbished servers for the database farm he maintains in his one-bedroom apartment. What he stores on these databases he never says. "Somebody's gonna lose their job," snaps Kathleen, the night supervisor, pointing to the empty chair as she works her way through the room brushing up against her preferred who respond admiringly. Edsel, on the third corner seat, wearing a T-shirt, like Ram (though not white) and Mac and David John (the UEL) mutter something after Kathleen passes. Mac nods. Though not as old as Ram, Edsel moves about like someone who is as old as Ram. His breath, bloodshot eyes, and splotchy-reddish-gray face give away what he had for breakfast, the meal daytimers call dinner. He's quiet but his eyes and manner betray an intense dislike of authority. He used to work construction year round in the north but quit after the accident. A steel beam had slipped and fallen six stories onto the supervisor's trailer during lunch break.

 

4 Willowing Skywardly All around the lunchroom, there is a sudden silence as if some sound had commanded, interrupting conversations, breaking off interior monologues and stopping the anxious drumming of fingers. There had been no sound, but what follows is the scooching and clattering of chairs being pushed up to the tables. All stand watch-ing the second hand of the large round clock posted above the lunchroom entrance make its last sweep. At 12, the bell rings, and out goes the night shift and in comes the afternoon shift. The Blue Shirts pass through the lunchroom to the showers. The few day-by-day temps rush out the door to catch the last bus. Soon afterwards, the Blue Shirts trickle out and amble to their cars or pickups. The fragrance of freshly-lit joints wafts through the parking lot of long shadows. Rival rock 'n' roll legends struggle to be heard over the revving engines. Once the stereos and high-torque motors are out of earshot, the great machines in the neighbouring factories lull the industrial park to sleep with their rhythmic white noise, only twice, at 2:30 and 4:45, pierced by the engineer's whistle and then the pro-tracted clickety-clack of a locomotive and its train of empty, rattling boxcars.

 

Peter McMillan 5 The Leper Colony (May 2021)

November 1985. Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas.

Seven never-to-be officers of the USAF are waiting to be processed out and back to civilian life. Four hadn't checked out. People who knew them had said something innocently or otherwise, and these guys no longer measured up. Another had medical issues, and one just wanted out. One wasn't talking.

The first step in the process was to remove them from the general population. Fear of contamination—against regulations to mix as the propagation of values and beliefs must conform to military codes of thought and conduct. The lepers were sequestered in a separate administrative building restricted from access to base fa-cilities except the mess hall. Three times daily, they were escorted by a staff sergeant, unarmed and not exactly custodial but then not one to shoot the breeze with either. The decommissioned recruits were allowed in the mess only after everyone else had been served and had left. The mess hall—large enough to accommodate sev-eral hundred men—was empty but the colony cluster sat together around the same table, as if accepting the reality that they were bound together by a mark that designated them untouchable. Their voices echoed in the vast hall.

Except for meal times, the seven stayed in their barracks, a small square room with freshly painted pale blue walls ... about the size of a motel room fitted with four bunk beds and a one-person wash-room with a shower. No personal electronic gadgets were permitted, but then the times antedated the electronic communica-tion revolution that made these devices as common as the wallet. The only phone was a public phone in the hallway, and there was no TV or radio. Stationery (blank paper for the Xerox machine) and BIC pens were allotted to the group to divide as they chose.

6 Willowing Skywardly Massachusetts was a tall, blond-headed guy with patrician man-ners. He'd got caught lying about his marijuana use, but he was very cavalier about it all. Idaho was a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who wanted to fly Phantom jets before he worked with one of the big military contractors, but that wasn't going to happen with that DUI in British Columbia nobody was supposed to have known about. Alabama was the only guy—yes, they were all guys and yes, again, they were all white guys—who had initiated the separation on his own, not that he was proud of the fact given that he had nothing to go back to except a Walmart job. Nevertheless, with some self-satisfaction he maintained he was better off than if he were continuing his employment with a government that com-mits war crimes, referring to Nicaraugua, Vietnam, and Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki before that. His was no great loss; his AFQT score of 74—acceptable but far below the scores reported by anyone else in the colony. Massachusetts and Idaho were in the 99th percentile. Missouri, the one with the heart murmur, was the only one who was profoundly disappointed. He had dreamed of a 20-year stint in the Air Force, then early retirement houseboating on the Mississippi River and writing about river people for the rest of his life. He'd already been published in a couple of Midwestern lit-erary journals, though his biggest achievement thus far was a personal note that accompanied the rejection of one of his submis-sions to The New Yorker. Utah, one of those who hadn't checked out (he was vague on the particulars), was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, periodically offering his unsolicited commentary on Phaedrus' odyssey. North Carolina was reading the Bible and mumbling to himself from the top bunk farthest from the door. The last guy just lay there, not moving, not sleeping, just there. All that was known about him was that he spoke Russian and German fluently. At least, that's what Massachusetts said. Alabama confirmed the Russian, which he also spoke, sort of, albeit with a drawling Dixie accent.

 

Peter McMillan 7 All were expected to be shipped home by Thanksgiving, but no one was particularly keen about being back with the family during the holidays under these conditions. For Massachusetts, this had been a lark. He talked Oxford or Cambridge. By his own account, he should've been nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship. He was a classicalist and though he'd never imagined himself being on or even near a motorcycle, he found himself mildly entertained by his discussions with Utah about the Zen references to Plato and Aris-totle. As for the Air Force, he didn't need the government salary and pension plan, and his family had never approved of his decision to become a soldier anyway. Idaho, looking over in Alabama's direc-tion, boasted of the offers he'd declined with venture capital-financed high tech firms in the Bay Area, but his enthusiasm seemed hollow, especially during his long periods of silent medita-tion. Missouri, just inside the upper age limit for Officer Candidate School, had three daughters, two in grade school and one pre-schooler, and he wasn't anticipating a successful homecoming after telling his wife that he would start writing full-time now, not later. Alabama had just got married and appeared to be leading the run-ning in becoming the goat (as in laughingstock) in both families. Utah had just returned from a motorcycle road trip from Milford, a mile-high desert town in southwestern Utah, to the tropics of Nicaraugua, where his passport denied him passage through on his journey to Patagonia—his youthful wanderlust effectively checked by geopolitics. The Bible guy was going straight to a New Age seminary in southern California. That came out during an out-of-the-blue fusillade of angry remarks he launched at the Zen guy who he labeled a cultist and a false prophet. And the Russian-speaking guy never said ... at least not in English.

Seven young men. All in their twenties. All intelligent ... nearly all, very intelligent. All unfit to defend the United States against the Evil Empire. All lepers for three weeks in November 1985. All unaware that the United States, in their lifetimes, would rewrite the history of

8 Willowing Skywardly the Cold War and would find a new enemy in Asia to replace the Soviet/Russian nemesis of the post-World War II era.

Seven young men who were given reasons to find the United States unfit to defend, but did they? Did they come to see the United States as the leper in the community of nations? Did they, in their civilian lives, ever entertain doubts about the integrity of Amer-ica's projection of military power? Or had it been just a career path that didn't work out?

Alabama may have found some personal vindication, but had he really or was he refusing to see himself as just another mercenary? Was there any hypocrisy in condemning a warlord while at the same time seeking economic advantage from him? And was that any different from what he found so offensive in America's behav-iour in the community of nations? And, by the way, what of Walmart?

 

Peter McMillan 9 The Witness (June 2021)

The baby is crying nonstop, and the mother strokes its head keep-ing attentive eyes on the two visitors. The coffee table tattooed with cigarette burns and streaked with a household cleaner whose fumes mix unpleasantly with the stale air is set up with a Mr. Coffee decanter and two plates with thin wedges of store-bought pecan pie. The older visitor, a corpulent and round figure, sips his coffee with a slight sucking sound as the younger one, bookish and in-tense, earnestly lays out the plan of salvation to the young mother.

"Jesus loves you, and he loves that little baby of yours, too. Won't you think about asking Jesus to be your Lord and Saviour? He's at the door of your heart, knocking. Won't you let him in?"

"But I'm not a bad person, and this ... my little boy is innocent. He ain't committed no sins."

The baby continues crying, red-faced and eyes tightly closed.

"But God saves us through His grace not through our good works. We have to come to Him and accept Him into our hearts, and when you do that you want to let the whole world know you've decided to follow Jesus. And that's why you want to be baptized. Have you been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?"

Beads of perspiration gather on the forehead of the young visitor as he speaks with passion.

"Uh, no. I grew in the country and we didn't have no church nearby nor no car to take us into town."

"You never went to church?"

 

10 Willowing Skywardly "No sir."

The older visitor loosens his clip-on tie and wipes his brow with the back of his hand. He reaches down to dust off his black dress shoes but gives up with a grunt.

"Did your parents ever pray or talk to you about God."

"My mama used to say God's name a lot, but my daddy was on the road mostly. He drove trucks cross country."

The elder visitor raises the pie to his lips and in two bites it's disap-peared.

"Well, this is your chance to give your baby a better life. We can even baptize—uh, sprinkle for now—your baby to prove that it's a child of God."

"Mister, I'm sorry but my little Billy here is real hungry, and I got to feed him. Can you just leave one of them little books behind? I promise I'll look at it.

The baby flails away with its chubby limbs trying to free itself.

"Well ... of course ... and share it with your, uh, husband and neighbours."

"We keep to ourselves mostly, me and Roger, but I'll read it."

The mother whispers to the baby and rubs its belly gently.

"And don't forget: life is short and the Rapture is coming near. You don't want to be left behind, do you?"

 

Peter McMillan 11 "No, sir ... but Billy here ... he needs to eat. Roger gets so mad when Billy cries."

The older visitor rises and puts the second empty dessert plate back on the table, while the younger one concludes a brief prayer.

"... in Jesus' name. Amen. You come see us now. Everybody's wel-come to join our congregation. We don't discriminate. We're all God's children."

"Good day, ma'am," said the older visitor, as he steps sideways out the door.

The mother, still holding the baby in her arms, nods and reaches for the doorknob to close the door.

The younger visitor trips on the bottom step but catches himself be-fore losing his balance.

The trailer park is in full sun, and it's hot and the air is still. The door handles on the Lincoln are scorching to the touch.

"Turn on the A/C, Hank. It's hotter than hell," said the older man.

Inside the trailer all is quiet.

 

12 Willowing Skywardly The High School Dropout (June 2021)

He'd been a football star in high school—well, that's somewhat overstated. He was quarterback on the JV team. He was good ... and he was white. The coaches were happy with the prospect, but then one day, the kid quit the football team.

That didn't go over well ... not with the coaches, not with the school officials, and not with the townsfolk for whom Friday night football was one of the few exciting things that happened in town.

A concerted effort had been made to re-recruit the kid, but he wouldn't budge. His older brother said he'd wasted all his time grooming the kid brother to be the star he wasn't able to be as a defensive lineman. His uncle—the former mayor of the town—was persuaded (easily) to draw on his family connection to represent the boosters who wanted the kid on the roster for next season. None of this worked to change the stubborn mind of the kid who offered no explanation that anyone thought was credible.

It came down to the school. The head coach of the football team—a figure who could have been a double for Sergeant. Carter in the ru-ral hit TV show, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.—cut to the chase, telling the recalcitrant re-recruit that if he quit football, he'd be setting a prece-dent for the rest of his life. He'd be a quitter. That's it. He had to choose ... between rejoining the football team or consigning himself to a life of turning away from every challenge he encountered in the future. That didn't work either.

For the next three years the kid lived in a closed world, out of touch with the mainstream. He was a loner. The last memory anyone had of him was the speech he gave a graduation. Nothing special. Rou-tine humbug about a new generation, confident and hopeful, as it accepted the charge of taking on the responsibilities of adulthood.

Peter McMillan 13 After that, he disappeared, and only bits of information were circu-lated around and then only when people reminisced out of the en-enduring boredom of small town life.

At high school reunions, where much of the dead past gets relived for a couple of hours, reports were shared about all those who were not attending. At the most recent get together, three-quarters of the White graduating class attended.

"Where's the class president?"

"He's too busy with his law practice. Doesn't like to mix with the hoi polloi."

"How about the guy that all the girls went wild over."

"Died in accident. He flew his crop duster into the power lines. Did-n't pull up quick enough."

"How about that guy who quit football and went on to be the class valedictorian?"

"Don't really know. All I know is that the coach is still pissed after all these years."

"Wonder if he ever amounted to anything?

"In school, he had a reputation for being a quitter—on account of the football thing—so I'd guess, probably not."

"Someone said he'd left the U.S. after quitting the military and a couple of jobs in Washington."

 

14 Willowing Skywardly "Maybe. Some people think that he really wasn't that smart after all and that he just knew how to game the system."

"Well, that happened in the graduating class two years behind ours."

"Didn't seem to affect him long term. He's been promoted to VP at the bank. Fastest promotion to that level ever, I hear."

"What about that girl who adopted a couple of Chinese kids?"

"She's an eccentric ... always has been. She says she's a Democ-rat. That's all I need to know."

"She's real smart—made doctor."

"Really, where's her office?"

"Not a medical doctor. She has a Ph.D."

"Oh."

The music starts up again and couples form and move to the dance floor.

_________

In the same small farming town a few months later the high school journalism class was given an assignment to conduct original jour-nalistic research dealing with something from the town's past. Students were advised to ensure that sources were cited, attribu-tions properly made, and great care taken to avoid defamation of any real people. The school worked out an arrangement so that the electronic archives of the local newspaper and statewide dailies

Peter McMillan 15 were made available as well as town records—marriages, births, divorces, deaths, property purchases, and voter registration.

Judy Grier-Thomas chose to research valedictorians from her par-ents' high school years in town. Upon learning that all valedictorian's from the 1990s were current town residents or had been until their decease—with one exception—she decided to find out what had happened to that one person—a boy.

No local records could be found later than the boy's graduation from high school. However, based on an exhaustive search on so-cial media, she felt she had made a possible match. A male by the same last name and similar first name, and around the same age, whose social media posts mentioned specific people and events from the town's past. In addition, this man was an American living in Canada and that matched what her parents could tell her. He had not been well known to either of them, but they were able to confirm some of the gossip that had circulated shortly after high school— that he had quit a Peace Corps' assignment to Micronesia, had left the OCS program at Lackland, had walked away from a job with an economics think tank in D.C, and had emigrated to Canada.

According to her social media sources, this man from her parents' days in high school, appeared to have shown up to be living some-where along the north shore of Lake Ontario where he taught ESL courses.

Realizing, after much inner turmoil, that releasing this as an authen-tic account of a real person—even for a high school course—would be irresponsible, she chose a less ambiguous story for her journal-ism paper. Years later, in a MFA creative writing program, she rewrote the story as fiction. It appeared in her first published book, a collection of short stories about her small hometown.

 

16 Willowing Skywardly Silverback (June 2021)

A distinguished-looking man with silver hair and silver rim specta-cles sits in the middle of an out-of-the-way bench beneath the early morning watery green summer canopy as baby strollers, joggers, and university students criss-cross the park, some in a hurry, some not, many carrying on cell phone conversations. Beside the man is a handsome brown leather attaché case and a lidless banker's box with ' th ' 18 SW black magic-markered on the side. No one speaks to him. And he reciprocates.

Not attired for the season, he wears a navy blue business suit with long sleeves and cufflinks, and the tie knot has not been loosened a bit. Everyone else—men and women, young and old—wears what little they must for the near tropical heat, their flesh protected during the long, bitter winter months now out in full view. The man pays no attention, his eyes locked in place, looking past everyone and everything in his field of vision.

At noon, some of the office workers from nearby stroll through the park and fill up the benches, chatting non-stop except to dip into a yogurt cup or salad bowl. Students are splayed out in the plush green grass their backpacks, textbooks, and phones scattered about their bare feet, talking loudly and competitively about the class just finished. Each group is self-contained. No one sits over beside the silver-haired man with the silver-rimmed glasses. And from him, there are no sounds and or signs of his needing to be somewhere else. Like a statue but not quite like the others. Sur-rounded by metal barricades, they stand uniformly black, though one still has a few smeared streaks of red.

Traffic never slows until well after office hours, and the enclave of this elliptical park in the middle of the city is like an island cut off by a steady stream of vehicles, which keeps the glass and steel and

Peter McMillan 17 concrete at a distance. At the northern tip, the South African obe-lisk, a memory of a long ago and faraway war, landmarks the pedestrian crossings that connect the eastern and western cam-puses. On long summer days, the lighting is good for 16 hours a day, though crossing can be treacherous even in broad daylight.

By the end of the sun's day, the man has not moved. Has not spo-ken. Has not changed his focal point. A couple of the two-times-a-day joggers notice this, but dismiss it without a second thought. Mil-lions of people in this city, and not all of them quite right. That's normal. And parks ... parks are magnets for those. This one ... just another statue really.

 

18 Willowing Skywardly When Mao Came to Town (August 2021)

My mother-in-law told me that after the war Mao came to town. No one quite knew why. Rügen never had been a population centre, even when Charlemagne came to visit. So, where were the cheer-ing crowds to come from?

In the mid-20th century Rügen had been returned to an earlier time. In the 12th century, The chalk-white cliffs of Rügen had been the site of Jaromarsburg, from where the Rani, a Slavic people con-trolled much of the eastern Baltic coast—their boats equally suited for commerce or war. The Christian Vikings, King Valdemar and Bishop Absalon of the Kingdom of Denmark, put an end to that. They burned the fortress and the temple to the pagan deity, Svan-tovit, to the ground. Now, nearly 800 years later, Germany was in ruins, and Rügen had returned to rule from the east, part of the new Slavic empire that spread westward after the Great Patriotic War under the terms of the post-war settlement between empires.

Through its new Slavic rulers, Rügen was now connected in inter-national solidarity and brotherhood to the other side of the world. And so, the great leader from the new Chinese republic paid a visit. But why Rügen?

In Rügen, farms and fishing villages; no industrial base. So, again we ask, "Why would Mao have wanted to come to Rügen?" Could've been that the new empire in China had to accelerate its political and economic development and needed compelling stories of success from elsewhere and there weren't (m)any such places in the revolutionary world to be found at the time. Mao's new Commu-nist government had to rapidly build an industrial economy from a fragmented rural agricultural economy. Could've been that China needed to unify an enormous and historically change-resistant population unaccustomed to the modern ideas of Marx and Ford,

Peter McMillan 19 and Mao wanted to see what ideological discipline would look like in the hinterland. Could've simply been that he needed good press back home.

Whatever the reasons, Chairman Mao and his wife came to Rügen, and Rügen welcomed them in the spirit of revolutionary friendliness and brotherhood. It was the children from the school mostly who came to the parade. They were let out early to line the parade route—two blocks of the village centre. Little blond boys and little blond girls in pigtails held miniature red flags—two in each hand— as they waited for the great leader from the far east.

They were late. Hours passed and no great leader arrived. Some of the children tried to slip away, but they were immediately caught by their teachers, reprimanded, and pushed or pulled back into posi-tion.

Fritzchen—there was always a Fritzchen—was down the road look-ing out for the motorcade, and suddenly he started running towards the other children waving both arms in the air, his cheeks as red as the flags in his hands, screeching "ZIL und ZIS" until hoarseness silenced him. Two limousines—one for the Chairman and one of Madame Mao and no one could tell which was which, as neither was tall enough to be seen in full profile. Two were necessary, be-cause the Chinese didn't trust the bulletproof glass in these Russian-built vehicles.

All the children stood up straight and began to wave their flags ex-citedly—on cue as their teachers checked to make sure that all was in harmony. A small sea of agitated red from one end of town to the other was parted to give passage to the great leader. The teachers, duly satisfied, then turned to focus intently on the occupants of the approaching entourage.

 

20 Willowing Skywardly The two black limousines, one of which carried the great leader, were moving with pace but then slowed as one might to allow farm animals to cross the road. The drive past ended just before the second block and the cars sped off into the distance, leaving clouds of dust in their wake.

As soon as the teachers gave the signal, the children scattered and ran off home not pausing to enjoy the moment. There were those at home who waited for them.

My mother-in-law said that on the way home all she could think about was how she would explain her lateness to Mutti.

 

Peter McMillan 21 Yaniel's Quest (August 2021)

Yaniel, a former colleague at Computer Associates—in the days before CA was caught manipulating stock prices—happened to be in Toronto last year, so we met for coffee in Yorkville. Mövenpick, where we'd often had Kaffee und Kuchen after work, had long back moved to the financial district and recently during the COVID-19 pandemic had gone bankrupt, so we had to find a last-minute alter-native. It was silly that we said "meet you for Kaffee und Kuchen." Neither of us was German. The closest connection was Giselle, his girlfriend at the time, a young international student at the U of T from Switzerland.

After CA, we went our separate ways but kept in touch. He ended up with a cybersecurity firm in Albuquerque (his roots were in the American Southwest), while I bounced around here and there in English Canada and picked up writing gigs from time to time. The last I heard from him was that he was trying to get Spanish citizen-ship. He had mentioned it in passing, but I didn't follow up at the time—I was preoccupied with my own affairs, more than usual—but now I was looking forward to hearing more. Was he planning to move to Europe, I wondered.

_____

As it turned out, he was on business in the 'East,' but it had nothing to do with Spain. Nevertheless, I had generated my own curiosity and made a point of getting him to tell me what was going on with Spain and citizenship. At the time, I happened to be at loose ends about where to go and what to do next and thought that his experi-ence might give me some ideas. He was little hesitant until he heard how eager I was—rather how desperate I was.

 

22 Willowing Skywardly Several years earlier, he'd heard about an offer from the Spanish government to grant citizenship to descendants of victims of the Spanish Inquisition. That came out of right field, and he had to have seen that in my expression. I certainly felt it. Then he proceeded to explain something of his family ancestry. His family had been Catholic for centuries going back to Spain—pro forma, he said. There was a family 'secret,' rarely spoken of. It had to do with a 'mass conversion' long ago. How far back and why he hadn't known until recently. As oral history, it had seemed too remote and vague to be either useful or threatening. But now, he had two kids—a boy of 8 and a girl of 6—and family had become important to him in more than just the obvious ways, especially with the waves of cul-tural awareness that periodically swept across North America, different waves affecting different groups in different ways. For Yaniel, it was a heightened need, almost a compulsion to discover his roots.

I was a product of the melting pot and knew not where I was from, but it really didn't matter. Could be that I don't feel obligated to own a past—good or bad—that I didn't create. And that could be be-cause I'm white (privileged) and American (individualistic). I didn't say any of this to Yaniel, but I was having some difficulty under-standing why and how he could see this so differently.

He tried to explain, and I tried to understand, that his present family situation had revealed to him that his identity was part of a contin-uum running through his family from the past to the future. I'd never thought of Yaniel as being an underdog. He was far too competitive and successful in his competitiveness for that, I thought. Yet, now here he was telling me that he was searching the past for an un-known wrong—committed against his family continuum—that needed to be righted. It would be trite to say that the history of our race demonstrates that we're a mix of the good and the bad and equally unenlightening to add that some are more wicked and dan-

Peter McMillan 23 gerous to others around them. I kept those thoughts to myself as well.

His transition therefrom sent my head reeling. He said that it was important for his kids to know themselves as part of a group—that family continuum thing again—so that they could hold themselves to a higher standard. That struck me as elitist in the extreme, but I listened to hear where he'd take this. For Yaniel, it was more than status—more than upper middle class lifestyle and values—but I couldn't help visualizing failure, whether in a moral or material sense, as something that would be highly disruptive to this family continuum. That, to me, was not just elitism; it was predestined elit-ism. Here again, I held my counsel and let him continue.

It was here that he related the findings of his genealogical research. Now, I've read enough Nietzsche to know the dangers of genealo-gies, so I wasn't too surprised with what I heard next.

He knew that he was Spanish, not just Spanish-speaking, that he was Native American as well, and that the two hadn't co-existed in harmony throughout their common history. What he hadn't known was that some of his ancestors had participated in the New Spain's military subjugation of indigenous peoples. He also hadn't known that his ancestors who had been given an ultimatum—leave or convert—were not Sephardic (Iberian) Jews. From the records he consulted, it appeared that there had been a Moorish ancestor who had been punished—though not burnt in an auto-da-fé—by the Spanish Inquisition and who had elected to convert and remain in Spain. A descendant of his later came to New Spain seeking wealth and power. He succeeded, and subsequent generations of soldiers, government officials, landowners, and priests participated in the re-pressive colonization of the indigenous people. Not all took part— there was Chiricahua blood in his veins, albeit a very low blood quantum.

24 Willowing Skywardly By this point, it didn't even matter to Yaniel that Spain's 2015 act of restitution for the families of victims of the Spanish Inquisition did not apply to all victims ... including him as he had discovered. He never filed his papers. He never got that far, having realized he (Quijote) had been chasing an illusion. His wife, an anthropologist who consulted with Legal Aid on Indian land-use issues, was not displeased, and in her words, "Now, we can get back to OUR lives."

There was a long pause after he finished. It was awkward. We weren't as sympatico as we'd once been. My mind went blank.

Finally, I said, "How'd the kids take it?"

"Didn't skip a beat," he answered.

 

Peter McMillan 25 Tuesdays' Delivery (August 2021)

Tuesday morning, long before dawn, any year in the late '70s, Sam's truck zooms along U.S. Highway 27 en route to the IGA at Sawyer's Plaza on the south side of this small, Southwest Georgia town—a poor farming town in the middle of peanut country. Sam's been driving this route for more than five years—switched from cross-country hauling to short-distance routes in the lower Chatta-hoochee River Valley between Alaga and Eufala after his twin boys were born. Always quiet these days in these little towns, except when they have some crazy homicide, but that's usually either a family matter or a random killing in one of the Mom and Pop stores at some crossroads way out of town. Like the Mansfield murders in '75. He once got detained at one of those stops on Georgia High-way 39 just north of Fort Gaines and was questioned by the state police. Lost three hours waiting to give his statement. He's avoided those little pit stops along the way ever since.

It's 4:45 a.m. and he's early. As he backs his 18-wheeler up to the back door of the IGA, he sees the three figures he meets every week, same time, same place. They're all wearing their dingy white grocery aprons. Two cigarettes glowing brighter with each inhale are Tommy and Waymon sucking in the last milligrams of nicotine before the workout begins. Sam's always in a hurry, and he unloads a truck faster than three men can offload it, so it is a workout. The third figure doesn't smoke but he paces back and forth in front of the store. Kid's got a lot of nervous energy. Sam doesn't care for that kind. Too green and don't know how the world works yet. Still got some dream that doesn't end every Tuesday morning at 5:00 a.m. The others, himself too, over 40 wear their years like chains. In this part of the country, if you're a working man, your life can be read from your face—the wrinkles, the ridges, the folds, scars, moles, skin tags, the tough, sunburnt flesh. Two packs a day, out in the sun, in a place where God no longer sends rain, carrying gro-

26 Willowing Skywardly ceries for little old ladies day in and day out takes its toll and leaves its traces.

Sam unlatches the back doors of the trailer and swings them wide and out of the way. There's a wall of cardboard boxes—976 boxes today according to the manifest that Sam passes to Tommy— uniformly brown boxes of all sizes, shapes, and brands with few crevices to get a foothold or handhold if you're short and need to reach to the top. It would be impossible for, say Tommy, to unload this truck, but Sam, who's a great black bear of a man and as grumpy as one just awakened from deep sleep stands flatfooted and easily slides the boxes at the top of the trailer and works down from there. Blue, yellow, and white Charmin toilet tissue, multiple cases of Le Sueur green peas in the silver cans (must be a 3/$1 sale this week), cans of Campbell soup, tins of sardines, boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix, bottles of Aunt Jemima syrup, boxes filled with of ketchup bottles, jars of mustard, relish, and pickles, pack-ages of Oreos and chocolate chip cookies, bales of 5-pound bags of flour and sugar, boxes of Tide, Cheer, and Gain. And every week something damaged. On a bad day, it's syrup or sugar. On a really bad day it's both or it's a big glass jug of apple cider vinegar break-ing to pieces on the concrete floor and mixing in with a busted bag of Martha White flour. On a good day, it's a package of Chips Ahoy! cookies—perfect with a cup of coffee afterwards.

And once in the store, each and every one of those 976 boxes had to be opened—sliced open at the top with a box cutter leaving sharp edges and sometimes broken blades exposed to rip through the skin of the fingers and palms. Then every item inside the box had to be price stamped. This was long before small town America got bar code readers installed at every checkout, so all product had to be individually priced and whenever there were price changes— and these propagated through the supply chain frequently in the inflationary '70s—new prices had to be stamped on every can, bot-

Peter McMillan 27 tle, box, package, bag affected by the price markups. To keep costs down the same three guys who stocked the shelves also bagged the groceries (in thick paper bags not plastic bags) when it was busy, carried them out to the customers' cars, and ran the registers when the cashiers were overwhelmed, which was always between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. when the IGA deli served the only fast food in town at the time. They were constantly shifted between the aisles and the checkout and when at the checkout, they were in and out the front doors every 2-3 minutes, and between summer and winter the temperature differential could reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Tommy, a.k.a. the Red Baron—nicknamed that by one of the mi-grant bag boys that worked out front for short stints on account of his red hair and last name—was the store manager in all but title, for that rested with old Mr. Bob who seemed destined to live for-ever. Tommy'd probably never get a chance to manage the store and deep down he must've known it but he never let on. Tommy was the guy in charge, and even Sam deferred, and Sam wasn't the kind to show deference to just anybody. Tommy respected that and never pushed his luck. He wasn't a large man—stature-wise— not particularly muscular or fit, but he outworked everyone and did it for 70-plus hours a week (the store was only open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday - Saturday), week in and week out to support his family. His wife was an RN at the county hospital and they had two preschool boys, one with Down's Syndrome, and a mother-in-law (Tommy's) living in their home and minding the boys while the par-ents worked.

Waymon was a man with a thousand stories—a different one for every day of the week. Sundays no one worked, so there was no story. Even the Lord had one day off he liked to say. He'd been a bartender, a barber, a talent scout, a car salesman, and even a re-vival preacher in his early days. He'd talked about being a sniper in

28 Willowing Skywardly Vietnam. He didn't have any pictures to show—said it brought back too many bad memories—but there was no doubting his accuracy with a gun. Back when the store was having a rat problem, Mr. Bob asked him to stay in the store overnight for several nights and take care of THAT problem. No one said RAT when Mr. Bob was around.

The rats were in the walls, so after the store closed, Waymon squeezed himself in the narrow lane between the freezer and re-frigeration units and the exterior cinder block wall and lit up the alley with a flashlight. He did take care of the problem and had the proof—19 rat carcasses. All headshots with a .22 caliber rifle. Col-lected a hefty bonus check from Mr. Bob and spent it all in one weekend in Dothan. He was a ladies' man—of the country and western variety—had been divorced three times and wasn't looking for a fourth. Sounded like a Texas accent, but he never said one way or the other—just said he was from "well west of here." People in town were usually hesitant to ask a lot questions of newcomers. If someone moved here from out of town, you didn't really want to know why, or put another you were afraid of what you might find out. There had been cases. Waymon was always dressed in all black cowboy clothes from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head—not cowboy work clothes, more like Saturday night cowboy clothes, and he was normally full of wit—tending to the blasphe-mous and vulgar when in the company of men—but this early in the morning, just like every Tuesday morning past, after two days off, his eyes were bloodshot and sunken in shadow. He was best left alone until he'd worked his way back to something approaching so-briety, which for him was never complete. Mr. Bob liked him though. No one understood why.

Then, there was the kid—high school age—whose mother had got-ten him the job. Saving for college he said. For what, he hadn't decided yet. Reserved at first and too eager to excel, but reliable ...

Peter McMillan 29 for a teenager. He'd been nicknamed Stan (short for Stakhanov) by one of the migrants who passed through town and stuck around for a few weeks or several months on their way to somewhere else. His name—King Roberts. Nobody understood King most of the time, and he liked it that way. He was a baby-faced, pear-shaped man in his late thirties—not the picture of a mystery man—who'd spent time in the Navy and was on his way back up North from Pensacola. There'd been lots of these. They weren't the usual mi-grants. These guys were all white and they didn't work in the fields. They were just as likely to be passing through in the winter as the summer. Anyway, the kid was often ragged—he was book-smart but life-stupid—and he was duly resented for two reasons. One, he was still young, and two, he had options in his future. For Tommy and Waymon and King and others like King who are too numerous to detail here, those forks in the road ahead had mostly dwindled to next to nothing, yet a fresh start stared them in the face when the kid was around. And though the kid's parents weren't hifalutin—just ordinary teachers in the public (integrated) schools—he wasn't one of them. To them, he was a privileged kid doing a man's job. Tough luck that he wasn't rural patrician.

Every week this happened from the hot, sizzling days of late July to the frigid (for the Deep South) days of January. The truck came and unloaded its cargo, filling the stockroom from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, and day by day, hour by hour, the piles of boxes grew smaller and smaller as the empty shelves were re-stocked. This was the way it had always been and would always be for the rest of their lives ... except maybe for the kid it would be different. That was the way it looked in the too dark and too quiet early hours of those ever recurring Tuesdays. But by Thursday afternoon, Tommy was already back in the aisles chatting with the regular customers as he surveyed the inventory and ticked off the next order for the Tuesday morning delivery. In the next aisle over, the zip of a box

 

30 Willowing Skywardly cutter and the clickety-clack of a price stamper struggled to keep up.

 

Peter McMillan 31 The Eyes Behind the Curtains (September 2021)

Through the sheers of the picture window of a dark, old-fashioned southern living room, two eyes peer out into the sunny day beyond rusty fence and the old evergreen oaks in the unkempt front yard. Spanish moss dripping from the trees sways in the soft summer breeze adding to the obstructions that hide the identities of passersby. And just as what's happening outside can't be clearly seen, the view from the sunny sidewalk can't penetrate the dark-ness behind the opaque glass.

The lights inside are never on in the daytime, and this old two-storey house—closed off to the upper floor and attic on account of her living alone and not needing the space to use or keep clean and having problems ascending and descending the long stair-case—looks the part of the town haunted house, though she thinks that's just ridiculous, childish imagination.

The faces on the sidewalk all look alike, pretty much. She has to go by color and figure and even then she can't be sure what she sees. None of the boys out front right now—there are three young white boys tossing a football across the street to one another as they head downtown past the Catholic Church—are tall enough to be teenagers, and it's hard to judge hair color because their heads are practically empty—on top, that is. Crew cuts—all the white men and boys have them.

_____

Those boys look familiar. Must be the clothes—I seem to recognize that faded and oversized orange t-shirt on one of them, a hand-me-down for sure, and the long jeans shorts frayed at the knees of the other. Four white little legs and suntanned arms. The one on the other side of the street is taller and wearin' long pants and a long-sleeve shirt buttoned up at the collar. That's most uncommon dress

32 Willowing Skywardly for a young boy durin' summer holidays. May be that he's the new preacher's son—one of 'em anyway. I hear he's got enough chil-dren to fill the front row in church every Sunday morning and every Sunday night. And if that is the preacher's boy, then the other two may be his next door neighbors, the Andrews boys. They're about the right ages.

The Andrews boys are pointin' at my house now. Probably tellin' tales about this decrepit, haunted mansion. Nobody's ever been murdered here—least as far as I know. My daughter died here of consumption, but no one else that I recollect. My husband, he never came back from the war (the first one). But kids, especially boys, they always need mystery and frightenin' stories, and this old house and property must look like the kind of place where people in horror movies get killed. Boys seem particularly fascinated with the gruesome and the ghoulish. I hear they even trade in their made-up versions of the car accidents on Highway 45 north of town where older teenagers are said to race their cars and play chicken. Of course, this comes third-hand from the young fella who delivers my groceries, and he's a first-rate embellisher himself.

Bein' situated next to the church's graveyard adds to the aura of the house as do the dark pine woods behind the house and church which extend south all the way to the Negro high school at the edge of town—the one that Rosa Lott had built after the war—the second one.

All that talk about desegregation in the South—I just can't imagine that's gonna end well. The say the First Baptist Church condemned the government's new law on public accommodations. Wonder if the new preacher is gonna stir up the pot. Suppose when I see black faces walkin' past my window on the way to school, I'll know that the wind has takin' to blowin' in a different direction.

 

Peter McMillan 33 Course, white folks don't like the idea of mixed up classrooms— black and white just don't mix well, they say— and then there's that talk about busin' children to a faraway school—probably that Negro high school—when they're used to walkin' to school. Don't see how the government's gonna force folks to do what they don't want to do. From what I hear, most of 'em on the other side of the tracks don't disagree. "If it ain't broke, don't mess with it, 'cause you only gonna make it worse." I'm inclined to believe most Negroes stay on the other side of the tracks by choice, though some say it's unwrit-ten law. I can see their point. Might be a little of both.

That railroad that separates our town right down the vertical used to be somethin' positive for our town. Passenger trains brought vaca-tionin' money in from the Midwest, mostly Chicago, which was the end of the line up North. There were seven hotels in town at one time. My momma worked in one of those fancy hotels where rich folks from up North came to take their treatments. We've got these mineral springs they say are like the health spas and resorts in Europe where people spend lots of money to sit around and get well. And the climate here is attractive if you're from up North. And bein' at a higher altitude than most towns near the coast, we get cooler summers.

We lived pretty well back then. When I wasn't helpin' my momma, I used to go to the train depot and wait for the trains from Mobile and Chicago. All those well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. Some of the ladies from Chicago, and gentlemen too, looked mighty disap-pointed on arrivin' as if they'd reached the edge of civilization. It hurt a little bit when I thought about it, but then someone else would come along, bend down, and ask me questions ... questions that I could answer with broad authority because I knew this town better than most adults. Once a lady asked me if I wanted to retrieve one of her luggage cases from the sleepin' compartment. She arranged with the porter to let me board the train. I was flabbergasted by the

34 Willowing Skywardly richness and polish of everything ... so clean and fresh and so complete with everything you could possibly need to live on a train—or anywhere for that matter—includin' a dinin' car with white tablecloths, silverware, and two kinds of glasses for each place set-tin. When I returned with the case, the kind lady asked if I could direct her to the best hotel in town, and so I accompanied her to the one where my mother worked. I'd never been in any of the others. Never had reason to.

You'd never know it to look around our town now. No more wealthy visitors with sophisticated manners and tastes. Just a poor small town where most are just tryin' to get by. It ain't a ghost town, but it's a ghost of its former self. And like any small town, I guess, there's always a few well-to-do families who own most of what's worth ownin,' but they're in a different society from the rest of us. We're the hoi polloi, my 3rd grade teacher used to tell us. I reckoned then as I do now that it's meant to keep us apart, sorta like the rail-road separates the coloreds and whites.

Our town suffered back durin' the Great Depression and the war years, and the town pretty much shrank and closed in on itself until we struck oil—purely by accident. That was the '50s, and it opened up a whole new industry which has since slowed to a trickle. It's only natural. There's gotta be limit to how much oil you can suck out of the ground. Not everyone got a share of the oil money though. Most of the land sittin' on top of the oil was already spoken for. So, there wasn't a lot of people gettin' rich, just a few people gettin' a whole lot richer.

Seems we get a boom every third generation or so, which peters out after several years and then we settle back into lean times again. Our Main Street next to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad grows a limited crop of businesses and most are like annuals, passin' with the season. But there's some perennials—the drug store, Rosen's

Peter McMillan 35 haberdashery, the Green Emporium (a junk store with cheap stuff from Japan), the barber shop, and the police station and the jail. The businesses that come and go are mostly Mobile folks who have big plans to sell the latest and the best to their backwoods cousins.

To this day, I'm not sure how I got lucky enough to live in this old house. It never was a fancy house, but it's a sturdy one and it's kept a roof over my head most of my life. My parents never could have afforded it—actually, I never knew my father, so it was just my mother and me. She rented it from the family who owned the hotel where she worked. They kept the rent very low on account of likin' or feelin' sorry for her. By the time the resort boom had collapsed, the house and hotel were worth practically nothin,' so the family sold up everything 'cept the house, which they let her have rent-free. My momma corresponded with 'em for years, and then when she passed, I kept in touch with the oldest daughter until my letters started comin' back marked 'undeliverable.' I figure they must be so rich they don't worry about this old, dilapidated house in a town of only 1,052 people way down in the Deep South.

But then there's Eric. How could I forget Eric? Unremarkable in many ways, he can be easy to overlook, but he's the only child who ever came to my door and that set him apart. The first occasion was Halloween ... many years ago. I do remember that he was very polite. But we couldn't really talk much since he couldn't hear me and I couldn't understand his speech. You see, Eric is a bit slow-witted and deaf-mute as well, but he can sign. I couldn't the first time I met him, but I've learned to sign pretty good since then, and now we communicate as much as we need to. He does odd jobs around the house for me, and we sometimes keep each other com-pany just, sittin' and lookin' out the front window Not certain he understands, but I told him once that when I die, he can come live

 

36 Willowing Skywardly in the house. He looked a little surprised, then sad. Maybe he un-derstood.

 

Peter McMillan 37 Meanwhile (September 2021)

It's 8:05 a.m., EDT and the writer is paused at the keyboard, fingers at the ready, waiting for that spark to ignite the creative process.

Elsewhere ...

A scruffy, curly-headed teenager scrambles out of a dirty sleeping bag under the Gardiner Expressway. Some have already packed up and left to search the city. The sun is up but not much of its light reaches the ground beneath the elevated highway. His shopping cart is empty, but that's because he's learned to keep his stuff in the bottom of his sleeping bag. There's only a half-bottle of water left and part of a candy bar saved from last night. He stuffs the sleeping bag in the cart, untethers the cart from his waist and heads off to Chinatown though he's probably too late. According to the calendar he updates in a pocket-sized Gideon Bible, it's gar-bage collection day and the trucks run early in that part of the city. The Snickers bar is melted and gooey but tastes real good. Doesn't stop his belly from rumbling though. Reluctantly, he takes a couple of sips of water. And he pays the price. Though the water is warm, it triggers a sharp pain from the cavity he's been picking at with his tongue.

"Tiff, dear. I've got one of my migraines today, and I won't be good company this morning. Have a nice brunch, and be a good girl. Don't say mean things about me. I'll phone later today. Bye." Cell phone switches to camera, she stands sideways in front of the full-length mirror in the walk-in. Absolutely flat. No trace of baby yet. Scanning her profile in the mirror, she smiles and feels a momen-tary shiver of anticipations as she imagines who she should call. "Another mouse in the pool? No, I want something special today. Oh, of course. The baby's room has to be done, and that interior designer—Ramón—he seemed very interested ... and eager. And I

38 Willowing Skywardly loved his Chilean accent. Could take a few days to get things just right, but Bob will be so pleased when he gets back next week and finds the room all ready for baby."

Judy pulls the twins by their sleeves to get them out the door so she can drop them off at school before her shift starts. Their mother is still asleep in the back room, and probably won't be up until noon. "Those boys been misbehavin' ever since Momma had that spell and's been no time to do that article for tonight's class. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get a seat on the El and can finally take down some notes on my phone." This will be her first real test meeting an impossible writing deadline. "There are no rubber deadlines in the news busi-ness, folks," her journalism professor had said on the first day of class, adding that "This isn't the civil service." One good thing about COVID—night classes are all taught online.

A young Honduran girl holds her teddy bear close. One of the lady visitors gave her Espe yesterday. She was a nice lady. And she also brought a beautiful pink dress. Her parents would come soon, the lady said. The little girl sits on the edge of her bed, wearing her new pink dress and can't remember the last time one of the other girls' parents came to take them home. They say this is Georgia. "Qué?" She doesn't know where that is. From the window in the cafeteria all she sees are green pine trees, red dirt, blue sky, and the tall, silver chain-link fence. She wishes she were back home. She doesn't like this Dream that everybody at home had talked so much about. She just wants to wake up even if it means being hun-gry again.

A tax accountant waits nervously in the van as the driver hands the papers to the officer in the guardhouse. This wasn't the place his lawyer said he'd be going. This was a maximum security facility, not at all what he had been expecting. Minimum-security, campus-like environment—that wasn't this. "Hey officer! There's gotta be a mis-

Peter McMillan 39 take. I'm here for tax evasion—a white-collar crime. Besides my lawyer screwed up. It's not tax evasion—what I did—it's tax avoid-ance. Perfectly legal and by the book. Everybody does it." "Shut the f___ up back there!" was all he got back. "But you can't do this! You can't put me in here with murderers and rapists and ... freaks!"

"Pipe down, Mac. If you're lucky you'll get transferred out in a cou-ple of weeks. Paperwork, you know." The other guard tittered.

In the cool, dusky air, the forest stands as if arrested in its march across the rolling hills towards the sea. Aboveground tree roots, like so many splayed thick legs, keep the tall hemlocks vertical gripping where they can into the uneven lava rock floor. Aokigahara Jukai— it is quiet and peaceful just as Bao had read. This well-known forest in the shadow of the famous mountain—a good place to rest. That's why he had come. A choked scream snaps him out of his thoughts. Off in the distance he hears a struggle, the sounds muffled by the dense carpet of moss that fill in between the tree roots. With noth-ing at hand but a loosely coiled rope incompletely braided at one end, Bao leaps up and charges downhill, yelling "Hello" as he trips, stumbles, and catapults over the tangle of roots and vines. The voice, no longer obstructed, guides him in where he finds her wrapped in a long, black skirt crying and retching in between shrieks.

The large private room is full of people. It's against all hospital regu-lations especially in the middle of a pandemic. But who's going to say or do anything about it? Because he's Daddy, Grandfather, Mr. Wells Fargo, Hank, Henry, president, chairman of the board, and patron of the very institution where he lies dying. Masks are op-tional, too, except for hospital staff. Anyway, the old man's in an oxygen tent and it's just a matter of hours, the doctors say. Every-one's eyes are fixed on the other old man—the gentleman seated beside the bed—white-haired and bespectacled, his liver-spotted hands resting on the brushed nappa leather briefcase on his lap—

40 Willowing Skywardly the face of a Patek Philippe gold pocket watch partially visible. Waiting.

Meanwhile, it's 8:19 a.m. EDT, and the coffee is cold, the fingers a bit stiff, but the mind races on in fits and starts, finding no place to settle and nothing to tell.

 

Peter McMillan 41 Prosaic Endings (September 2021)

The TV hasn't worked since nobody can recollect, but few can still hear well and those that can often have trouble with their vision or their vertigo or something, so the TV isn't really missed. The chairs are comfortable ... enough, and that's all that matters at this point. Some place to rest in between sleeping and eating.

The thickset man in the overalls was a farmer—small scale, 250 acres or so. He prefers things the way they were. Has no time for the 'innernet' or portable phones. Periodically interrupts conversa-tions with folksy wisdom that only he apparently can hear. Once though, he told a visiting preacher that he believed in God—he couldn't really remember why other than that it seemed to be the best thing going. The preacher grimaced in disdain.

The tall, thin fellow with a closely trimmed mustache and beard and rimless, little, round eyeglasses is nearly always in the company of a thick book bearing an unfamiliar, sometimes unpronounceable, title. The books are no worse for wear and could have been bought yesterday or kept on a tidy bookshelf, its spine a clearly visible trib-ute to its owner's intellectual décor. But for talking, he's mostly 'a conversation facilitator'—at least that's what he calls the trivial an-notations and corrections he makes whenever he's invited to join a group. He's not one for lengthy rhetorical flourishes. Rumor has it that he dropped out of college at 20.

The Senator—no one knows for sure what office he actually held or if in fact it was a public office. Actually, his manner is somewhat like that of the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman of years long gone, but curiously he is gregarious in a group but rarely seen in the company of just one other person. He can gab with any and every-body as long as there's an audience of three or more. And he has a gift—verbal dexterity that enables him to say one thing and then the

42 Willowing Skywardly complete opposite within the span of 30 seconds without arousing the interest of his listeners.

Everyone has heard of her 17 grandchildren and has heard most of their names spoken day after day. She prides herself on knowing all their names, and every year she sends money envelopes in all their names by the relative appointed for the Christmas visit. She's told so many stories so many times that folks look startled when one of the stories doesn't sound quite right. "I thought he was a doctor," someone would pipe up and say, as if paying some atten-tion to the old woman's storytelling, although when interjected often enough in the same conversation, it sounded as if the old woman had a full-fledged medical clinic in the family.

They called her 'Frau Director'—not to her face of course for she could command a penetrating stare when necessary. She doesn't look like she'd ever been more than a manager, maybe even just a supervisor. All the same to them. The Director wasn't particularly well-liked, just endured. She appeared to spend her time planning and strategizing how she could assign some task—anything really, it didn't matter what—to someone, but to her misfortune, once she hit on an idea, it was well nigh impossible to scare up a willing par-ticipant since she no longer wielded employment authority. Without a worker, she would have been lonely, but from years and years of experience she knew that she could always count on someone she could schmooze with. And so, she became the only person that the Senator would invite to a tête-à-tête. They made an amusing pair. But when it came time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, all conversa-tions paused, and the legs and walkers were brought into play to make the short-distance but time-consuming journey to the cafete-ria. Within minutes all were in line eagerly but respectfully anticipating the taste of what they could smell—on days when there was a cooked meal—and from meal to meal and day to day, the order pretty much remained the same. Little conversation took

Peter McMillan 43 place at these times until the sounds of the cutlery on the plates were finally silenced.

Appetites sated, more or less, weariness came on rather suddenly, and before anyone could fall asleep at the table, all the residents were hustled back to their rooms for the nap that capped off every meal. The schedule to some may have appeared harsh and inflexi-ble, but that's not how the residents saw it. For them, the regimented day gave them a solid structure for every day of the week and every week of the year, one that helped them to believe that there was a tomorrow that would invariably follow today. Occa-sionally, that belief was sternly challenged by someone's passing, but even death couldn't cheat them out of the internalized routine that assured them of a future up to the very end.

 

44 Willowing Skywardly PART TWO — Non-Fiction (2020-2021)

 

Peter McMillan 45 The Room Where It Happened (July 2020)

Bolton's memoir covers his stint in the Trump Administration as Na-tional Security Advisor from April 2018 - September 2019. In the book, he recounts the discussion and determination of national se-curity policy in nearly all the contemporaneous hotspots, devoting as much as a chapter to each of the following: Syria, North Korea, Iran, Turkey, China and Ukraine. In all of these spheres, Bolton is not sparing in his critique of how Trump makes decisions, vacillates and denies responsibility, all the while seeming to serve his own interests even at the expense of the national interest, yet Bolton seems charitable in his regard for Trump, as if the childlike behav-iour of a solipsistic narcissist must be tolerated and shown deference on account of the 'Office of the President.'

While guiding the reader through the multidimensional labyrinths of international relations, Bolton is true to form with his hawkish views of how and why America must project its economic and military might around the world. The hubris and duplicity of Bolton's real-politik foreign policy (political, economic and military) is actually not so foreign to Americans, even House Democrats. What's good for America is necessarily 'right.' For example, with respect to Ukraine, 'we can fork around in your elections, but you'd better not fork around in ours.' And then where Chinese economic policy is con-cerned, 'it simply isn't fair for the Chinese government to finance and employ Chinese corporations as if they are extensions of the state, because in America, we believe in competitive markets and laissez-faire economic policy, and state aid is not playing by the rules.' To his credit, Bolton pulls the veil back to reveal the forces that usually drive American foreign policy. However, dismayed, he demonstrates how Trump tosses realpolitik and national interests out the window, instead pursuing foreign policy outcomes that align with his personal objectives. Nevertheless, Bolton does not go so far as to propose 'regime change' in America as it might have

46 Willowing Skywardly played out had the Senate convicted Trump of one or both of the articles of impeachment.

In the Epilogue, Bolton readily dispenses with the impeachment in-quiry and trial, blaming the impeachment-obsessed Democrats in the House for committing impeachment malpractice (a stronger charge than merely saying the Democrats were incompetent in managing the inquiry process) and sabotaging their own impeach-ment plans. Furthermore, he charges that their motivations were as just as self-serving, politically expedient and flawed as were those they alleged governed Trump's decision making. To paraphrase Bolton, if the ends don't justify the means for Trump, then neither do they justify the means for the House Democrats.

Bolton considers that the first article of impeachment (abuse of power) was not compellingly demonstrated, because the House chose to telescope the impeachment inquiry both in duration and in scope. According to Bolton, the impeachment process should not have accommodated the presidential election campaign, and the investigation should have gone beyond Ukraine, possibly including the Turkish bank, Halkbank, and the Chinese telecommunications companies, ZTE and Huawei and the national security implications of Trump's policy making vis-à-vis these companies and their host countries. On the second article of impeachment (obstruction of Congress), Bolton was unequivocal in declaring it to be 'frivolous,' since the House chose not to litigate for its subpoena enforcement authority.

Seemingly regardless of the outcome of the impeachment process, Bolton maintains that the November presidential election is the most appropriate and meaningful venue for rendering a verdict on Trump. These takes on the impeachment process correspond closely to those expressed by Republican senators when they briefed the country after acquitting Trump.

Peter McMillan 47 In concluding his remarks on the impeachment process, Bolton states his curious belief that if re-elected, Trump will advance poli-cies much more acceptable to Democrats as he, presumably, will be able to ignore his base and be 'presidential' for the history books. Now, Bolton only surveyed national security matters—his mandate—leaving domestic policy to others, so that's another 'out' for Bolton in making a final judgment on Trump's legitimacy.

In summary, Bolton's book is not a coup de grâce to Trump's presi-dency—it certainly can't be thought of as the straw that broke the camel—and it's far from the betrayal that Trump asserts. Trump comes out looking petulant and weak but not impeachable, and it's unlikely that Bolton's testimony would have changed the Senate vote. Bolton's view, as if projecting the assessment of some future historian, seems to be that Trump is unquestionably a bad presi-dent but not a catastrophic threat to the republic.

It is interesting that Bolton's ultimate decision to resign was trig-gered by a personal affront not a policy dispute or a conflict over defending America's national interests, such disputes and conflicts as he encountered multiple times during his 18-month tenure, often precipitating a strong inclination to resign abruptly. Trump ques-tioned Bolton's loyalty and Bolton quit. That's it.

 

48 Willowing Skywardly The American Threat to the World (July 2020)

Right now, in the last third of July 2020, the most dangerous virus in the world is not COVID-19 with nearly 15 million confirmed cases and more than 600,000 confirmed deaths. No, the most dangerous virus in today's world is Trumpery—glitter-covered worthless non-sense and lies. It has infected approximately half the voting population in America. Trumpery is the essence of the present U.S. Government that continues to exert a disproportionate and negative influence on the rest of the world. Since very little good has come from the Trump Administration, very little can be expected in the future. Trumpery is the virus that the rest of the world shouldn't have to suffer. It must be contained within its borders and cured there.

We Americans ‘may’ have the opportunity to decide in a legitimate election whether to return the President to the White House, but if we refuse to re-elect him, there looms the possibility that he will continue as President anyway, probably under a substantially-modified constitutional regime. We Americans have the right of self-determination and sovereignty—historically denied to lesser nations (especially in the Western Hemisphere) and currently being denied to some of our fellow Americans in concerted efforts to suppress the vote through campaigns of voter disinformation and efforts to discredit mail-in voting in the time of the COVID-19 global pan-demic where America leads the world in cases and deaths. Come November, we Americans will have another chance to choose what kind of country we want. However, as mentioned, do not expect the President to concede even if he loses the election, the increasing likelihood of which may oblige him to act pre-emptively: to either postpone or cancel the election.

The rest of the world will have to live with the consequences if the President is fraudulently re-elected, illegally cancels the election, or

Peter McMillan 49 refuses to comply with an unfavourable election result, and quite likely not just for four more years. (Expect a hereditary—not neces-sarily a bloodline—transfer of power upon the President's death).

The global consequences are often lost on many Americans as our perspective has historically been short-sighted, parochial and self-serving, not unlike that of other peoples whose governments have ruled large parts of the world. Perhaps a difference is the zealous self-righteousness and moral tyranny that the U.S. Government projects mendaciously among its citizens and residents and throughout the world, which non-Americans, and many of us Americans as well, recognize as out-and-out hypocrisy, deception and perversion of the ideals of charity, freedom and choice, which have been twisted and corrupted by our government's interpreta-tions of a secular state, elected government and competitive markets.

The significance of America's 'actually adhered to values' as op-posed to its liturgically-recited ideals is linked to the reality that America is still without question the dominant nation in the world. It has the world's largest and most powerful economy and military, which can project its advantage unilaterally and anti-competitively vis-à-vis other nations or other blocs of nations. It has a massive government infrastructure that is relatively well coordinated within its borders and across the globe. The vastness of the American bu-reaucratic state is intermingled with the nominally 'private' corporate world ('free enterprise' being an American oxymoron), which thrives on public grants, tax incentives, and market protections and devel-ops public policy in between elections, leveraging its industrial and commercial wealth, connections and expertise.

Theoretically, the legitimacy of the U.S. Government's power de-rives from its charter to protect life, liberty and property (pursuit of happiness,’ really?) not of everyone in America (that was never the

50 Willowing Skywardly intention if we are honest about American history, and since the public murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Depart-ment we are, for a time, being more forthright in our self-assessment) and certainly not of the rest of the world's inhabitants, who represent merely a theological burden. Fundamentally though, America's power is coercive and therefore grounded in its authority, i.e., its ability to muster brute force to compel submission. Never-theless, inside the borders, the military has traditionally been kept out of domestic affairs (though periodically ordered in to enforce federal desegregation law or invited in by State governors to keep the peace, e.g., after Rodney King's violent beating by the Los An-geles Police Department and the subsequent acquittal of the officers involved), but the world and even some of us Americans are realizing that the perpetuated myth of American goodwill will be mass-marketed as perfectly compatible with the continued slipping-off of the constraints of liberal (limited) government and the ena-bling of the idiosyncratic governance of its President, who has been able to dominate the administrative machinery of government, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Board, much of the armed services, the federal police—from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and perhaps the State Department (CIA)—and State governments. This has been accomplished by a coup that too few Americans have acknowl-edged—some naively regarding these rollbacks as temporary and reversible and attributable to an anomalous president.

As the underlying power of the U.S. government rests with law en-forcement and the military, with restraints removed, the policing of America will be facilitated by the dumb, sycophantic or non-confrontational pliancy of our American electorate who persist in the belief that America is the just leader of and shining light for the world—those ends justifying dubious means. Many in the American police and military establishments have no doubt been rehearsing the Nuremburg defense and are ready and willing to follow what-

Peter McMillan 51 ever orders the commander-in-chief gives. Then, there are the se-cret police that the world has seen in Portland, Oregon and the multitude of militias that stand waiting in the wings to be called into service by the President. That's all part of 'the [perverted] American way.' "We don't want a king—but we'll take a dictator—we do crave a leader to worship" as has been proven for all the world and his-tory to see. Whatever the President wants done will be supported, or at least not opposed, by a frighteningly large number of Ameri-cans, and it will be enforced through the might and technological sophistication of the post-Eisenhower military-industrial complex, sometimes overtly as in Lafayette Square and cities across Amer-ica, and sometimes covertly as in Portland, quelling the protests (one day perhaps giving no quarter) but raising the spectre of a po-lice state wherein we may have our own desaparacidos (disappeared).

The U.S. Government has extraordinary political, economic and military influence around the world, and to the extent that a unified authoritarian nation remains entrenched in Washington, D.C., the world has good reason to be prepared to prevent the contagion of its illiberal and anti-humanitarian policies. Actually, the first question is what can the U.S. Government do to the world by means of exer-cising its unequalled global power? The answer: pretty much what it wants. The next question is what will the U.S. Government do to the world, i.e., will it lead the world and treat other nations with charity and fairness? The answer: don't bet on it.

American exceptionalism is a global problem, but American excep-tionalism under the direction of a President, who may be variously described as an incorrigible mobster or child-brained, should frighten the daylights out of the world (and America), much more so than did the Cuban Missile Crisis in those long October days in 1962. Don't think that the President is inclined towards the calculus of proportionality and don't believe that the voice of reason and

52 Willowing Skywardly wisdom will always have the ear of the President in a crisis. This President is capable of setting the world on fire to feed his vanity . . . and that includes America from Wall Street to Highway 101 and all the Main Streets in between.

While we Americans ‘may’ be able to decide for ourselves in No-vember, what can other nations do? How can they protect themselves against the ever-aggrandizing American autocracy, which to some just means ‘a whole lot more of the same as what we've been getting.’ As we Americans may not be able (or willing) to deal with our own rogue president, nations around the world must have a contingency plan to protect themselves against this unchained monster.

This would be no modern version of the 19th century Concert of Europe. This time it must be a concert of the world—a global con-cert—committed to countervail the authoritarian, anti-charitable, anti-democratic and anticompetitive bulldozing of what exists solely for the purpose of developing a beautiful, brand-new, perfect world neighbourhood for the American elite and their hangers-on. Such a concerted global effort would not simply be a coalition of nation-states but a global consensus, uniting the sovereign and represen-tative functions of the nation-state with the transnational missions of beneficent non-state actors to promote a multilateral, progressive agenda for the world instead of the retrograde, self-serving agenda of American exceptionalism and its asymmetric political economy embodied in the Washington Consensus.

But, this global concert cannot be led, directed, or controlled by any existing or nascent autocracies or blocs thereof. What would be the point of exchanging one autocracy for another?

Alas, who will sponsor such a new world order? The Concert of Europe, the League of Nations, the United Nations? What would be

Peter McMillan 53 the next evolutionary step? Does the UN Security Council have the remedy? No, it does not, as each of the five permanent members (three of whom are themselves arguably present-day hegemonic threats to the world), possesses the ultimate secret weapon—the veto of multilateral cooperation. So, what is to be done (And not à la Lenin)?

As a first step, the containment of monolithic world powers must be addressed, and the U.S. Government provides the immediate prob-lem for which a solution must be found. Separation of powers, checks and balances . . . the world has listened to this ad nauseum. Forget the scraps of paper once called the U.S. Constitution. It's time for the rest of the world to step up and condemn American ex-ceptionalism and dissuade other hegemons waiting in the wings. This is no time for the piously silent. The world must speak out.

The leadership of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea will enjoy the ironic turn of events and will easily be persuaded to join in. Let them, but for humanity's sake, remember that one or more of these countries would fill a power vacuum with alacrity and themselves emerge as a greater threat than America now is.

America must come around. We Americans must get rid of our dic-tator. America must join the rest of the world, and it must assume a leading role but not ‘the’ leading role. America's role must fit in the context of global power-sharing among nations who would eschew the dictatorship models of the Trump Administration or the govern-ments of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Is there a utopia on the horizon? No. So, does the world stand idly by waiting for the barbarians? No. Whatever can be devised will likely fail at some point. However, it's better to acknowledge our fal-libility, and like Neurath's sailors out at sea, never cease making repairs to our unseaworthy vessel to stay afloat. And so, Americans

54 Willowing Skywardly and the world's nations must do the best we can, respectively, to improve governance. We Americans must check the dictatorship in our midst, and the international community must check American exceptionalism. It's the best we can do for now.

It is to be hoped that by calling out and challenging the excessive abuses (criminal and unconstitutional) of the President, we Ameri-cans will rally and defeat him at the ballot box and force him to accept the verdict of America's citizenry. The world can help by call-ing out and challenging these abuses. It is unnecessary and undesirable for the world to intervene in the same way the U.S. Government has attempted and often achieved regime change dur-ing its storied history of American foreign policy. The means to the end are still important. Besides, there are millions of American pa-triots protesting in the streets, speaking through the media, in public spaces and among their friends, families, and neighbours—calling for universal basic human rights in America—and they must not be the innocent victims either of the President or the international community.

First published in Arts and Opinion, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2020.

 

Peter McMillan 55 The Time of the Magicians (August 2020)

In The Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger writes a collec-tive biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin covering the Weimar Republic years from 1919-1929.

The Wittgenstein presented is from the Tractatus; Cassirer is the neo-Kantian, establishment academician and Weimar republican; Heidegger is from Being and Time; and Benjamin is the literary and cultural critic of 'Goethe's Elective Affinities' and the Arcades Pro-ject. Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Benjamin challenged the philosophical establishment of the day—Wittgenstein all but retired from the world, Cassirer continued in the neo-Kantian tradition, while Heidegger and Benjamin attempted to lay the groundwork for a new philosophy. Despite his withdrawal, Wittgenstein's influence spread to the Vienna Circle in Europe and Analytic Philosophy in the English-speaking world. Heidegger's work helped lay the foun-dation for 20th century Continental Philosophy—the archrival of Analytic Philosophy—and Benjamin's work contributed to the early years of the Frankfurt School and its critical theory approach (draw-ing from historical materialism) and inclination towards social change.

Of particular interest is Eilenberger's inclusion of portions of the 1929 Davos Debate between Cassirer and Heidegger. This debate is reminiscent of Settembrini and Naphta's contesting for Hans Cas-torp's soul at a sanatorium retreat in Davos, Switzerland in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (1924). In Mann's novel, Settembrini repre-sents the Italian-Mediterranean Enlightenment, Naphta the authoritarian side of the Jewish-Jesuit-Marxist tradition. Eilenberger writes that "indeed Cassirer and Heidegger mirror with almost un-canny precision the ideological struggle between Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta." In the non-fiction Davos Debate,

56 Willowing Skywardly Cassirer defends while Heidegger challenges what was then the Enlightenment-based Kantian idealism—both vying for the 'soul' of '20s German philosophy. Heidegger would, therefore, be situated in the counter-Enlightenment, along with Nietzsche.

The book is a somewhat difficult read owing to the complexity of the philosophies and this reviewer's limited prior familiarity with Cas-sirer and Benjamin. Nevertheless, the most significant takeaway from this exposition is how '20s German philosophical thought was conditioned by the world (its historical context) and by the person-alities and their relationships (its biographical context). Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Benjamin introduced new philosophi-cal approaches (either an end of the old ways or the beginning of new ways of doing philosophy), while Cassirer seemed to be a bridge between past and present philosophies. The times, 1919-1929, were themselves conditioned by the revolutions in physical theory—general relativity and quantum theory—and by the devas-tation to modernity brought about by World War I as well as by the freedom and confusion that ensued when nations were liberated from collapsed empires.

Wittgenstein's ladder—the Tractatus which elevates us to see the limits of our linguistic competence regarding the metaphysical and then ceases to be useful—and his assertion regarding the mean-inglessness of metaphysical statements suggests that for him it was necessary to end the delusion of architecting grand philosophi-cal structures, e.g., Kant and Hegel's castles. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's 'inexpressible' is comparable to Kant's limitations on human understanding and the immanent method of Wittgenstein's critique of philosophical language is not dissimilar from Hegel's im-manence of Reason.

Heidegger's Being constitutes the ultimate metaphysical reduction. Being replaces the subject—Descartes' cogito ergo sum—as fun-

Peter McMillan 57 damental, since for Heidegger existence must precede recognition of existence hence recognition of self and other. What is given is reducible beyond self and world. Existence is the prerequisite for any further classification of 'reality' as well as for any knowledge of it. As with Wittgenstein, according to Heidegger our knowledge and language of 'reality' proceeds immanently—from within—there be-ing no external reference, e.g., forms, archetypes, noumena, ways of knowing, etc.

Heidegger's Being is genealogically related to the ancient Greek philosophy of Parmenides, two-and-a-half millennia ago whose concept of the 'One/Whole' is delimited, or made finite, by Nothing-ness. For both, Being is dimensional in terms of time and space, however neither dimension is an infinite 'container' for intervals of time and regions of space. For Heidegger neither time nor space exist prior to Being, which itself is the extent of space and time. The opposite of Being, Nothingness, has no existence and therefore has no extent in either time or place. In other words, for Par-menides and Heidegger, there is no eternity and there is no infinite space. Parmenides predates Christianity, but the conclusion that there is no eternity or infinite space undermines the traditional Christian theology of an eternal, omnipresent deity. Not only does Heidegger's Being threaten the foundations of his early Catholic upbringing, but he also sets out to undermine the preserve set apart for metaphysics by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. For Heidegger unlike Kant, there is no a priori way or means of appre-hension that lies outside Being.

Heidegger's method of discovering Being and the awareness of Be-ing is essentially revelation (immanent unfolding), akin to Descartes' introspection on one side of Western philosophy and Hegel's immanence of Spirit's self-knowledge on the other. Be-cause of the metaphysical nature of the concepts of Being and Dasein, they cannot be deduced by means of logic. Furthermore,

58 Willowing Skywardly logic is not apart from nor does it condition either our existence or our awareness of our existence. Existence, like the Parmenidean One/Whole, precedes logic and all other ways of knowing.

All four philosophers regard language as a limit to philosophical thought, which is not a particularly astounding discovery or realiza-tion. Wittgenstein goes further by maintaining that we cannot ask or answer questions about metaphysics, as we have no language for it. And Heidegger's neologisms (e.g., Dasein, anxiety, being-in-the-world, being-toward-death, present-at-hand, ready-at-hand) testify to our inability to explain the philosophy of Being without first stretching language to accommodate new ways of thinking. Cas-sirer's case is slightly different as he, "who [likely] spoke and understood more languages fluently" than anyone in the autumn of 1927, turned to developing a philosophy of culture that would en-compass the multiple symbolic forms or languages—science, mathematics, art, and music, as well as new forms emerging, e.g., in quantum physics.

For both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the '20s were more than just a test of their formal philosophies as both radically engaged the world in their personal choices—Wittgenstein with his almost Can-dide-like return to the simplicity of the rustic Austrian mountains and Heidegger with his flirtation with National Socialism in the early '30s. Benjamin's biography resembles the unfinished collage of the 19th century Parisian arcades. In contrast, Cassirer's biography re-flects the stability and continuity that characterized his philosophy.

The effect of these four individuals on 20th century philosophy has been profound, and the historical and biographical circumstances that provided the context for their various approaches and conclu-sions was in turn profoundly influenced by dogma-shattering revolutions in physics and radical breaks from empires leading to an expansion of nationalism and alternative political systems.

Peter McMillan 59 Eilenberger's underlying thesis could be that radical changes in the 'real world' or the physical theories of the 'real world' of 1920s Ger-many became the inevitable and inexorable catalyst for radical changes in the methods and roles of post-Kantian German philoso-phy in the modern world. This image conflicts sharply with that of the scholar/intellectual living and working in an ivory tower. In addi-tion, the biographical and historical context also reveal a turn in philosophy to incorporate not just the world(s) of philosophy but the material and human conditions that determine how these worlds are discovered, understood, and communicated—an all too human enterprise.

 

60 Willowing Skywardly Is America Capable of Seeing 2020? (September 2020)

On September 23rd, there were two more milestones on America's journey backwards and downwards. Trump announced that he would not commit to ensuring a peaceful transition if he loses the election, and a Kentucky grand jury agreed with the State's Attor-ney General and lead prosecutor not to indict any police officers for the murder of Breonna Taylor in her own home.

Did that sink in? A president said that? A prosecutor recommended that?

How is it conceivable that tens of millions of 'God-fearing' Ameri-cans and champions of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cannot see the mockery of every ideal they proclaim?

* * *

In Canada, we still have a few Monarchists who are at least honest about their desire for king/queen worship. In the U.S., the Republi-cans seem to regard themselves as contemporary Cavaliers who want to restore absolute rule from the top, but shy away from mon-archy as if it's a sacrilege.

Republicans—the party of the rich (and their servants) with aristo-cratic pretensions—would ideally like to return to something along the lines of the feudal class system (slavery is taboo at the mo-ment) of Merry old England with the title king/queen replaced by president and Republican Party membership being a preliminary step towards nobility.

The Republicans are traitors to a man/woman and must be called out. Their wealth is built on lies, cheating, stealing, murdering—

 

Peter McMillan 61 making them perfect candidates to create a new American aristoc-racy, BUT they can be stopped.

America has dissidents. Many of them are on the streets and are dismissed as anti-fascists (lumpen America used to oppose fas-cism, too) and looters (but not on the scale of 'white-collar' looters).

Dissidents will never be popular at home. They wouldn't be dissi-dents then, would they? Americans do celebrate dissidents who expose injustices abroad—remember how America courted Solz-henitsyn who incidentally despised American simplemindedness and duplicity just not as much as Soviet terror—but Americans really don't tolerate internal dissent. Think ... just for a moment about how Blacks have sponsored authentic American dissent for centuries, only to be ignored by Whites. Blacks as dissenters on par with the brave anti-Soviet East Europeans—imagine that.

America needs to do more than wake up. It needs a shake-up to be rid of the class and race biases that permeate American society. Voter intimidation and suppression will never lead to 'one person, one vote' or are we back to the Dred Scott thinking that Blacks are non-citizens. And American capitalism is nothing short of govern-ment subsidization of corporations, railed against by 'free traders' when it occurs abroad but hailed as patriotic when it occurs at home. And welfare for the poor is decried as un-American while 'corporate welfare' is thoroughly American, inspiring all that is so wonderful about state-financed 'free enterprise:' low-wage job-creation, increasing asymmetries in income and wealth inequality, innovations in perpetuating growth for its own sake and negative and unmitigated externalities that endanger the environment, hu-man rights and global peace. And then there's institutional Christianity—the state religion that expounds upon its virtues but in no way embodies them—which could very easily be substituted for

 

62 Willowing Skywardly Catholicism in Dostoevsky's chapter on 'The Grand Inquisitor' in The Brothers Karamazov.

America needs a revolution of the spirit ('revolution' by itself arouses primal fear in the middle and upper classes and The Purge is not the catharsis America needs) if it's not going to become God's chosen third-rate tinpot dictatorship. Didn't American foreign policy and its flag-wavers and Bible-thumpers use to glory in over-throwing foreign dictators? Christians living through repression can be admirable, but Christians in power create 'bloody borders' to re-vise Professor Huntington.

America ... leader of the free world ... NO. The world doesn't be-lieve that anymore, if it ever did, and many Americans are seeing through it for the first time. Being 'woke' isn't good enough though.

America, U R Trump ... do you like it? Or do you want to change your ways? If you weren't so wealthy, powerful and lethal, the world could pigeonhole you as another small fascist aberration, like Bela-rus, but you do too much harm to your neighbours and the world in which we live and you have the potential to do so much more harm. Can't you see yet?

 

Peter McMillan 63 Franny and Zooey (November 2020)

Franny and Zooey, published in 1955, is vintage New Yorker fic-tion—fiction set in New York about New Yorkers and often found in the pages of The New Yorker. It's upper middle class literature for the cosmopolitan, the bright, and the beautiful, so it it's no surprise that Franny and Zooey is a tale about an existential crisis in a young woman accustomed to a world within the world where wealth and privilege exceed most readers' experiences. To an outsider, its characters are bizarrely eccentric, and while their circumstances may be familiar, they are so only from a distance and to a limited extent. Given this separateness from a common reality, is it possi-ble that Franny and Zooey contribute in any meaningful way to world literature?

Does the author give us anyone we can identify as deserving our empathy or even our interest? Could it be Franny, a captious 20-year-old, intelligent and attractive, attending a girls-only private col-lege in the Northeast, who escapes back home to get her bearings with respect to what appears to be a profound, if not melodramatic, transition from childhood to the adult world ... unless she is indeed facing a truly adult crisis as her symptoms in the short story could suggest a pregnancy? Or could it be Zooey, her brother, also intel-ligent and handsome, an insolent 25-year old still living with his parents in the family's Manhattan apartment, daily asserting his in-dependence and maturity with his excessive and swaggering indoor cigar-smoking habit and gratuitous overuse of 'god-damn' as an all-purpose adjective, verb, and noun to express his disdain for every-thing 'not him?'

Prodigies, the children of Glass, seven in number, all appeared on a radio quiz show when they were younger where they demon-strated their impressive book knowledge. The libraries in the family home are beyond the financial comprehension of most. As props,

64 Willowing Skywardly they intimate an intellectual preserve where the precocious brood has been reared to demarcate and celebrate their superior knowl-edge and intelligence. That the children are both educated and gifted is repeatedly signified in the extensive name dropping in-tended to persuade the reader that this family and these children are indeed special, if not chosen to engage life through the accu-mulation of worldly wisdom, in print.

Not only are Franny and Zooey exceptionally endowed with mental acuity and the opportunities to develop that faculty, they are beauti-ful, attractive, handsome, and good-looking as the reader is reminded throughout. As mentioned, Franny is enrolled in an elite private college, and nowhere else is there any indication that the family is financially constrained—the surprise being that the two oldest sons were in World War II, although World War I gave rise to a privileged community who told the world all about the horrors of total war and the individual existential crises so engendered, so why wouldn't WWII?

In view of Franny and Zooey's being from a different set, one that most of us will only read about or experience indirectly through me-dia and the arts, does their story have literary value for us, or is it just a curious, maybe envious, peek over at the other side?

On one hand, Franny and Zooey might be useful consolation for parents of bright, beautiful children who gradually and eventually disappoint their parents anguishing over the unfavourable compari-sons with others' kids inasmuch as such parents can look for and hope for a 'soulful awakening,' a deep sensitivity, and an existential 'victory' that somewhat compensates for their progeny's failure to measure up. On that reading, Franny and Zooey would be more than just an ostentatious waste of space.

 

Peter McMillan 65 However, when Fanny curls up in her parents' bed to rest from her existential self-torment, opposite and clashing images come to mind. Where can the smart, good-looking inner city kid go to conva-lesce when the formative existential questions come? ... where the nearest library is a 16-block walk. ... where the indoor ambient temperature varies with the seasons from 60-85ºF. Where can the clever, handsome kid in a rural mobile home park go? ... where the library comes and goes with the Wi-Fi. ... and where the weather indoors very closely approximates the weather outside.

The reader may concede that Franny and Zooey live among wealth but poorly, as the apartment must smell like a cheap motel room since years of incessant tobacco smoking would have thoroughly penetrated the entire living space and its furnishings and not just left its mark on the walls which unsurprisingly needed to be re-painted. Then, too, the contents of the home being so thick throughout the apartment must have been a reminder that the fam-ily's material well-being, though quite comfortable, was far too modest to accommodate the depth and breadth of its aristocratic intellectual pretensions. So, perhaps the author has sufficiently de-tailed the surroundings to reveal possible constraints on the perfect world of Franny and Zooey's home. And then there's the mother imposing herself and her maternal conversation on her 25-year-old son while he is taking a bath. How can that not manifest a bizarre and unhealthy mother-son relationship?

As for Franny, why did she need to come back home? Was she still unfit to live on her on? Was she perpetrating a crisis to come home, because home was there ... always there? While Franny told her dorm roommate that she was doing her a favour by leaving, could Franny really have convinced herself that she was considering an-other's welfare even as she was enduring the solitude of an overwhelming and unrelenting anxiety?

 

66 Willowing Skywardly Is Franny's the human condition or is it the upper middle New Yorker's condition? Is it a human existential crisis or is it just the self-indulgence of the privileged? ... of superior egos enthralled with their consciousness of their existence? No development of Franny's character is discernible from the short story to the novella. Had the author chosen to pursue the narrative of Franny's pregnancy, the Franny character could have been drawn to show the development of a girl into a woman, but the image the reader is left with is of an emotionally immature Franny hiding in the 'nest.'

Zooey, in contrast, is a character allowed to reveal himself in a much more positive light after having been introduced to the reader as a pretentious and self-important but shallow and insecure mama's boy. However, his Buddy-impersonated call and the ensu-ing conversation with Zooey revealed far more depth and sincerity than the reader could otherwise have imagined. Though Zooey doesn't experience a development along the lines of a protagonist in a Bildungsroman, the author does provide the character the op-portunity to reveal himself more fully so that the reader can feel as though something worthwhile did emerge from Franny's over-wrought performance.

Re-engaging the issue of whether New Yorker fiction can be con-sidered great literature on account of the universality of its themes, it's relevant to recall from another genre that Hans Castorp was a privileged 23-year-old, albeit orphaned, character in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, which is beyond doubt, great literature. As an example of the American opposite of New Yorker fiction, the reader might revisit Richard Wright's Native Son—and Bigger Tho-mas, its 20-year-old protagonist—an American literary classic in realism. The universality of Bigger's condition might be more obvi-ous than Hans', but that depends on the reader. It shouldn't be forgotten though that privilege is relative as is the human condition, for there remain billions of human beings who haven't had, don't

Peter McMillan 67 have, and won't have the luxury of comparing or sharing their exis-tential moments, leaving some to wonder whether they have them or are blessedly ignorant.

Salinger's Franny and Zooey might be dismissed as faux protago-nists at first glance, but there is evidence that the author intended to reveal something about what he considered the human condi-tion, however narrowly confined to the Glass microcosm. This 'something' the reader might still need to experience first-hand. Al-ternatively, the innate human faculty of imagination and ability to project might afford an imperfect but perfectly adequate substitute.

 

68 Willowing Skywardly What the Dickens Was He Up To? (April 2021)

In 1842 Charles Dickens made an extended business trip to North America. For Dickens, a littérateur of satire and social reform, the New World promised to expand his stock of grievances as well as his stock among the burgeoning English-speaking world on the west side of the Atlantic. His travels inspired his 1842 American Notes, which in turn influenced the interpolation of his American experience into his 1843 The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuz-zlewit. Neither book was universally well-received in the New World as he appears to have overestimated the number of his friends in America "who, loving their country, can bear the truth when it is told good humouredly, and in a kind spirit."

From the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit to the publication of the postscript, Dickens did not withdraw his harsh criticisms, but he did acknowledge American sensitivities and the injuries felt in response to his satire. In the famous postscript to Martin Chuzzlewit, he only went so far as to observe that the America of 1868 was vastly dif-ferent and improved from 1840s America. The satire still stood, but Dickens located if far from the current reality, as if to suggest to those who might be suggestible that America could no longer be satirized. This was no recanting of Martin Chuzzlewit.

For a writer with Dickens' facility with language and its rhetorical uses and his unequivocal sense of what is just, one would not ex-pect a humble admission of defeat. That would have been out of character.

It could be argued that Dickens' rapprochement was motivated by dramatic changes in the previous quarter century, although that's less believable than that America had evolved somewhat, at least insofar as the result of the Civil War marked the end of slavery some 30 years after it had been abolished throughout the British

Peter McMillan 69 Empire. However, Dickens being attentive to the reality of human conditions irrespective of their contradictions with temporal and spiritual laws could hardly be suspected of harbouring such naive views as that a new era of political equality had suddenly broken out in America. While it is true that Dickens' novels tend towards the simplistic victory of good over evil, it's not so easy to assign that sort of indefatigable optimism to the author. His realism is what car-ries his work, and his trademark end-of-story resolutions seem little more than trifles for the reader who has borne with him for so long.

It has been argued that Dickens' turnabout culminating in an appar-ent surrender in the postscript was a similar play to the audience in order to sway public opinion in his favour in his longstanding copy-right battle with American publishers. It was patently ironic that while Martin Chuzzlewit was a thoroughgoing rebuke of selfishness, particularly regarding wealth, Dickens was perceived to be more intent on securing his pecuniary advantage in the American book market than in advancing issues of social justice for which he had been appreciated by part of the American citizenry. It appeared to many American that Dickens, the author, had been transmogrified into Dickens, the bookseller.

Whether this reading of Dickens is correct, it is preferable to the view the Dickens apologized for his satire having been merciless and unfair to America. In fact, so much of the general analysis is sufficiently accurate in characterizing American shortcomings that persist to this day. Boorish, ignorant, and priggish, the ugly Ameri-cans are swindlers and hypocrites in far larger numbers than might be normal for a given population. Unfortunately, it's not easy for an outsider to point out and recommend correction in manners and at-titude, and as Bevan said at the end of Chapter 16, "If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us to-morrow, he would be hunted down." Bevan continues by adding that "where a native writer has ventured on the most harmless and good-humoured illus-

70 Willowing Skywardly trations of our vices or defects, it has been found necessary to an-nounce, that in a second edition the passage has been expunged, or altered, or explained away, or patched into praise," of which Dickens was undoubtedly reminded when he penned the postscript.

Dickens does not have to be defended here. What is to be de-fended is social criticism and not just of an era. American journalism has been worse, but it still shows a heavy bias to the sensational and the conjectural.

‘Here’s this morning’s New York Sewer!’ cried one. ‘Here’s

this morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York

Family Spy! Here’s the New York Private Listener! Here’s

the New York Peeper! Here’s the New York Plunderer!

Here’s the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here’s the New

York Rowdy Journal!

And the sacrosanct words of the Founders—"all men are created equal," "unalienable Rights," and "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"—have been repudiated in deed throughout American history in the treatment of Black people, an anomalous situation not easily missed ... by non-natives. On arriving in New York, Mark Ta-pley remarked to his gentleman, Martin, about the American perspective on Negro slaves:

they’re so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that

they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with

‘em. They’ve such a passion for Liberty, that they

can’t help taking liberties with her.

In the third decade of the 21st century, human slavery is now illegal in America, but its legacy of violence against "Life, Liberty, and pur-suit of Happiness" and complicit tolerance remain noticeably intact.

 

Peter McMillan 71 Then there was and is America's materialism, selfishness, and status consciousness, reflected in its pretense to aristocracy founded on "intelligence and virtue" as proclaimed by Colonel Diver, Editor of the New York Rowdy Journal. "And of their neces-sary consequence in this republic—dollars, sir."

And to the issue of copyrights—a divisive topic across the Atlantic in the 19th century—the American predilection towards native profits put the young American nation squarely in the pirates' camp—now occupied by China in 21st century trans-Pacific intellectual property disputes.

What is important today about the 150-year-old quarrel across the Atlantic is not which side was right ... which to a nonpartisan might seem much like the sins of the father. What's relevant and worth remembering is that America can profit—in a salutary and non-pecuniary way—from re-reading Dickens' satire. And Americans need not extend their beliefs to recognize the superiority of that au-thor, his countrymen, or their nation. The ideals America espouses are sufficiently well articulated and should be well enough under-stood to place the standard of behaviour and governance above any individual or individual nation's practices. Nevertheless, Ameri-cans' over-reliance on ad hominem argumentation ever places inflexible limits on sound reasoning.

Based on the overwhelming evidence of Dickens' oeuvre, his statement in the 1867 preface to Martin Chuzzlewit can with good reason be accepted on its face, viz.:

As I had never, in writing fiction, had any disposition

to soften what is ridiculous or wrong at home, so I

then hoped that the good-humored people of the

United States would not be generally disposed to

quarrel with me for carrying the same usage abroad.

72 Willowing Skywardly However, human nature is incorrigible in some ways as E. Rush-more Coglan, a sophisticated, widely-traveled man, demonstrated upon resorting to fisticuffs in defense of the honour of his home-town, Mattawamkeag, Maine, in O Henry's 1906 story, 'A Cosmopolite in a Café.' The cosmopolitan Coglan "wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place," said McCarthy, one of the French garçons in the New York café. It wouldn't stretch the imagination too far to consider the possibility of a foreign critic being treated to similar local hospitality in modern America not least if he/she hap-pened to be Black.

 

Peter McMillan 73 France's Agent Orange Case (May 2021)

In 2014, Trân Tô Nga, filed a lawsuit for civil damages in the amount of $360,000 against 26 chemical firms alleging that she was poisoned by Agent Orange[1] manufactured and sold by these companies and used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War between 1962-1971. Of the original defendants, only 14 companies survived to face the trial that finally commenced in January 2021. The two most prominent defendants were Dow Chemical and Bayer AG, the latter implicated through its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto. The inclusion of Bayer is déjà vu as Bayer was part of the giant chemical conglomerate IG Farben, one of Germany's corporate aiders and abettors during the Holocaust.

Nga, a dual Vietnamese-French citizen, was able to approach the court under France's recently resuscitated law of universal jurisdic-tion, which permits (but does not obligate) French courts to assume jurisdiction over cases beyond the traditional reach of national law provided that the alleged conduct is of an egregious nature that is offensive to humanity and not just to a particular society or nation.

On May 10, 2021, there was again no judgment in the courts of the West for the non-Western victims of America's use of chemical weapons during the Vietnam War. Neither Dow nor Bayer disputed the fact that they were responsible for the production and sale of Agent Orange used by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1960s. Their argument was that there was nothing ille-gal in what they did as they were acting on orders from the sovereign nation of the U.S. The implication being that if culpability is to be established it must be demonstrated to rest with the state, which possesses the sovereign right to wage 'just war' for which there never has been an international arbiter. Bayer AG established its defense based on U.S. Government immunity in a statement claiming that “it has been well-established by courts [in the U.S.] for

74 Willowing Skywardly many years that wartime contractors ... operating at the behest of the U.S. government, are not responsible for the alleged damage claims associated with the government’s use of such product during wartime.”[2] Dow Chemical's defense goes further and even ques-tions the scientific conclusion that Agent Orange has caused the harm alleged by plaintiffs and adds that "historic wartime issues, including the use of Agent Orange, are appropriately a matter of resolution by the governments of the United States and Viet-nam."[3]

Although the American Government did not use nuclear weapons during the war, the bomb tonnage dropped in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia far exceeded what America dropped in the European and Pacific theatres of WWII, evidencing a frustrated superpower intending to bomb a Third World agriculture-based society "back to the Stone Age." And this massive bombardment, on a scale larger than any in human history, didn't just destroy transportation, com-munications, and production infrastructure. It killed civilians as well. This was total war. John Hersey had already told us about the in-human horrors of 'collateral damage' in his 1946 non-fiction book, Hiroshima, but a decade-and-a-half later we had forgotten that we waged war against whole nations not just armies, but women, chil-dren, the elderly, and the disabled. The same American general, Curtis LeMay, who used the "Stone Age" metaphor admitted with the matter-of-factness of extreme hubris that had the U.S. lost World War II in the Pacific, he would undoubtedly been charged with war crimes. But the U.S. didn't lose, and LeMay was back in action in Vietnam, and by the 1968 presidential election was the running mate of George Wallace of the American Independent Party, which garnered nearly 10 million votes or 13.5 percent of the popular vote.

At this point, it's worth conjecturing that Americans will never un-derstand war until it reaches our shores and interior. The

Peter McMillan 75 September 11th suicide airplane attacks traumatized a nation of 300-plus million people, but 9/11 was a battle not a war. The wars that followed had to be moved far away—back to faraway Asia where the enemy lived, in other words, safely away from Wall Street, Main Street, and the industrial parks. We can only speculate on the emotions and responses of Americans if foreigners decided to bomb America back to the Stone Age.[4] One can imagine chil-dren—of all ages—crying out, wailing to God to not abandon his chosen people and to rise up and destroy the enemies of ... the new 'Israelite' nation.[5]

Returning to the French court case, the defendants drew their inspi-ration and legal claims from the U.S. courts, most recently in Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange v. Dow Chemical. In the final judgment in 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals reaffirmed the 2005 U.S. District Court decision, and in 2009, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, which is tantamount to confirming the two lower courts' decisions.

In 2005, the District Court issued a summary judgment and dis-missed the plaintiff's case.

On a motion from the defendants for summary judgment

and dismissal of the case, the Court rejected all claims—

claims ranging from tort liability to genocide, war crimes

and crimes against humanity—advanced by the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit was dismissed for lack of an actionable claim

based on the Court's finding that the defendants were im-

munized by the government contractor defense from any

civil liability under U.S. law and were not susceptible to

prosecution under international law since there was none

that specifically proscribed or criminalized the manufacture

and use of Agent Orange and other chemical herbicides by

the U.S. during the Vietnam War. This result of the Viet-

namese case is not inconsistent with that of the earlier

76 Willowing Skywardly

U.S. cases, since the Vietnam veterans' cases were won in

an out-of-court settlements and not in the courts. In the

U.S., the Agent Orange manufacturers were willing to set-

tle and bring an end to the negative publicity of the Agent

Orange litigation, despite favourable prospects for their

winning the class action lawsuit. Undoubtedly, the Viet-

namese plaintiffs in VAVAO considered their out-of-court

prospects to be advanced by the risk of negative interna-

tional publicity for the chemical companies.[6]

Then, in what amounted to the decisive and closing 2008 judgment, the Court of Appeals concluded that:

The District Court made several rulings that were favorable

to Plaintiffs, but it ultimately determined that Plaintiffs had

failed to allege a violation of international law because

Agent Orange was used to protect United States troops

against ambush and not as a weapon of war against hu-

man populations. The District Court also determined that

Plaintiffs’ domestic tort law claims were barred by the gov-

ernment-contractor defense, which the court previously

had found to bar similar claims brought by United States

veterans against some of the same defendants named as

defendants-appellees in the companion appeal decided

herewith. Accordingly, the court denied Plaintiffs’ claims for

relief under both international and domestic law and

granted Defendants’ motion dismissing the Complaint. Be-

cause we agree with the conclusions reached by the

District Court in this case, we affirm the judgment for the

reasons set forth in this Opinion.[7]

The trial in France had been expected, or hoped, by supporters of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange poisoning to be an historic opportunity for America, if not the government, at least its defense contractors, to be held accountable for crimes of war such as sell-ing toxic, gene-modifying, and lethal chemical agents of mass

Peter McMillan 77 destruction affecting millions of people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cam-bodia. To date the U.S. Government and U.S. courts have consis-consistently protected the chemical industry from lawsuits on the grounds that the defense contractors are implicitly granted immu-nity when acting on behalf of a sovereign nation at war—when that sovereign nation is the U.S.—although under domestic public pres-sure, the U.S. has been compelled to pass legislation—the 1991 Agent Orange Act—to compensate U.S. victims of Agent Orange exposure.

The French court voluntarily waived its right to jurisdiction and ac-cepted the American argument of sovereign immunity and its corollary that agents of the sovereign U.S. were beyond the reach of the French justice system.

The case is not over though. Nga has indicated that she will appeal as this is not simply a case of monetary compensation for her health care costs but a challenge to bring justice to Vietnamese (and all) victims of Agent Orange.[8] Therefore, the legal issue of defense contractor immunity with respect to America's use of Agent Orange as a chemical weapon of war has not necessarily been ir-revocably decided. However, Nga is considered to be the last Vietnamese plaintiff with any chance of indicting the producers and sellers of Agent Orange. It is curious, as Nga's legal team has noted, that the French court allowed the trial to proceed even though the court ultimately concluded that it lacked jurisdiction.

While many of Nga's supporters likely shared the vision of implicat-ing the U.S. Government of war crimes in Vietnam with a verdict of against the chemical manufacturers, there had to have been suspi-cion that political and commercial motives were at play, not to mention that France, itself, has a tarnished legacy in Southeast Asia. Commercial interests in Europe and North America would predictably respond negatively to any suggestion of product liability

78 Willowing Skywardly in general and for making and selling the weapons of war in particu-lar. France's actions in its own colonial wars in Africa and Asia would also draw increased scrutiny if a court trial in France could expose American wrongdoing in Vietnam, and so business and government leaders on both sides of the Atlantic would have little to gain from allowing a trial court to poke the American superpower in the eye. In additional, trans-Atlantic business relations would likely be strained if one trading partner were thought to be encouraging negative publicity against the other trading partner's corporations. It might be construed as an unfriendly act and even an anti-competitive act. Better to allow the lawsuit to fizzle out and fade from public memory.

Notes

[1] Agent Orange is an herbicide and defoliant—the most common of the Rainbow Herbicides that include Pink, Purple, Green, Blue, and White—whose purpose was twofold: to destroy agricultural crops and to remove the tree canopy in the dense jungles of Southeast Asia as part of America's total war on North Vietnam and its South Vietnamese allies, the Viet Cong. Earlier, the British had used Agent Orange during the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 as a weapon against communist guerrillas. The chemical warfare had been introduced to destroy crops (enemy food sources) and defoliate the dense jungles (enemy's protection from aerial bom-bardment).

[2] According to a May 8th Washington Post story, 'French court to decide landmark case against the U.S. makers of Agent Orange,' Bayer issued this statement on May 7th.

[3] The full text of Dow Chemical's position vis-à-vis Agent Orange, reproduced below was downloaded May 12, 2021 from

 

Peter McMillan 79 https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/about/legal/issues/agent-orange.html.

Agent Orange

Description

As part of the United States and allied forces war efforts in the jun-gles of southern Vietnam, the U.S. military developed and used a number of military (tactical) herbicides, one of which was Agent Or-ange. Agent Orange was used to aid U.S. and allied troops by stripping away dense foliage that could conceal enemy combatants.

During the war, Dow, Monsanto and other companies were com-pelled by the U.S. government to produce Agent Orange under the U.S. Defense Production Act of 1950. The government strictly con-trolled the transport, storage, use, and the specifications to which Agent Orange was to be manufactured exclusively for the military.

The U.S. courts have consistently ruled that Dow and the other manufacturers bear no responsibility for the development and use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and have dismissed all legal claims to the contrary. Moreover, decades of study relating to Agent Orange have not established a causal link to any diseases, birth defects or other transgenerational effects. Notably, the exten-sive epidemiological study of veterans who were most exposed to Agent Orange does not show that such exposure causes cancer or other serious illnesses.

Dow's Position

Dow has great respect for the men and women who served in the Vietnam War and the others who were affected by it. The U.S. gov-ernment bears the responsibility for its own military actions, including the development and use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

 

80 Willowing Skywardly Dow also firmly believes that historic wartime issues, including the use of Agent Orange, are appropriately a matter of resolution by the governments of the United States and Vietnam. The U.S. govern-ment has committed resources to address this issue and collaboration between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments con-tinues on a number of fronts.

[4] A more strategic war against America would be non-military. The infrastructure could be severely damaged, rendering the na-tion's electricity supply unpredictable, communications networks unreliable, and transportation options reduced to the local. The im-mediate and perhaps even lasting effects of this kind of widespread disruption would be to turn Americans against the themselves be-fore they could be unified to defend against the enemy and certainly before they could relocate the battlefield outside the conti-nental U.S. No electricity during the hot summer months, traffic tie-ups frustrating commuters and interrupting the nation's supply chain, an end to overseas vacations, an inability to connect to na-tional and global networks for entertainment, work, education, etc. would make Americans stir crazy and inclined to strike out at the nearest person or object in their way. It wouldn't be necessary to kill Americans. Americans would readily and handily do that on their own initiative. The weapons are already in place, 'locked and loaded' as they say in Hollywood war fantasies.

[5] In 1625, in the early years of the Thirty Years' War in Europe, the Dutch legal scholar, Hugo Grotius wrote his classic treatise on international law, On the Law of War and Peace. Although he ar-gues that war is not always to be condemned as there are 'just wars,' he states in the preface:

There are persons who imagine that all laws lose their au-

thority in wartime, but such a theory we should never

accept. Rather we should declare it wrong to begin a war

except for the enforcement of justice, and wrong to con-

Peter McMillan 81

tinue a war already begun, unless it is kept within the

bounds of justice and good faith.

and

Throughout the Christian world I have seen a lawlessness

in warfare that even barbarian races would think shameful.

These two quotes qualify the remark he makes in Chapter II that "If all people were Christians and lived like Christians, there would be no wars," when discussing the prophet Isaiah's prophecy of no more war, and they are relevant in conjunction with the discussion of America's use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War and even in the discussion whether that war was a 'just war' and whether any single nation has the unilateral right to ascertain what is a 'just war' according to some divine law.

[6] 'VAVAO v. Dow Chemical' (March 2005) in Collected Essays on Political Economy and Wartime Civil Liberties, 2002-2008, by Peter McMillan, 2020.

[7] Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin v. Dow Chemical Co., No. 05-1953 (2d Cir. 2008) https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/05-1953/05-1953-cv_opn-2011-03-27.html.

[8] According to a May 11, 2021 Reuters story, 'Franco-Vietnamese Trân Tô Nga continues her fight against Agent Orange,' Nga "re-fused to negotiate a financial arrangement with the companies she filed a complaint against. 'I might be a little rich but the victims would still have to wait (for reparations to be made) I don't know un-til when.'"

 

82 Willowing Skywardly Why does the past keep coming up ... (June 2021)

Like a poorly digested meal or tainted meal?

Many of us grew with the notion that the past was fixed and immu-table. Rather, that the facts about the past were established and incontrovertible. But today—and long before today for many oth-ers—some of us are discovering that the facts have been incompletely and sometimes even falsely passed down and just as often put in an ill-fitting context that has led to flawed conclusions. The past with which many of us had become comfortable is begin-ning to disturb our digestion. We finally acknowledge what we didn't see or didn't want to see then, though the clear evidence school, neighbourhood, and church segregation had been ever present. History had before our very eyes and we weren't paying attention.

Take this line from Ralph Ellison's book, The Invisible Man, pub-lished three score and nine years ago:

All things, it is said, are duly recorded—all things of impor-

tance, that is. But not quite, for actually, it is only the

known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the

recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies

his keepers keep their power by.

This was not a novel discovery. Nietzsche covered this ground in the late 19th century, and he had his predecessors, but we needn't get into that. What's important about Ellison's statement is that he was talking about a contemporary view of Black Americans, igno-rant of its own double standards and duplicity. Ignorant because blind—willfully blind to the myths created and perpetuated to keep an entire people from being recognized and treated like ... people. These were inherited myths—they had a genealogy. If we look past their brilliant speculations, we see that the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant of the

Peter McMillan 83 European Enlightenment—were themselves heirs to the myths, which they thoughtlessly accepted and propagated as a practical reality. Myths about the inferiority—even subhuman status—of Blacks. These myths had deep roots in Western societies—just how far back we don't need to worry with for our purposes—and they fed the preconceptions of the new inhabitants of the Americas and their descendants. 'White is right' has filtered through all layers of White North American society from the poor, dumb redneck to the philanthropic who purchase indulgences with their wealth of of-ten dubious genealogy.

Ellison's invisible man is not just one man, but everyman, make that every Black man, or better still, every Black person. When Ellison says that Blacks are invisible he means that Blacks are regarded as being unworthy of consideration ... not in the present or the future and not in the past. Being invisible in the past means being omitted from history, not unlike removing all traces of existence—sealing historical records and bulldozing cemetery markers as the world has now witnessed in the case of Aboriginal peoples in Canada's reluctantly-disclosed residential schools, where 'cultural genocide' has been affirmed by Canada's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In his 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead draws upon a similar past, the actual history of a notorious youth reform school in Florida, where, as in Canada, ground penetrating radar technol-ogy has made it possible to find the unmarked graves of children whose causes of death remain suspicious. The victims were dis-proportionately Black in the case of the Florida School for Boys and mostly Aboriginal in the church-run residential boarding schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Oral histories have been kept alive for generations and are now being confirmed by previously-secret records and forensic evidence.

 

84 Willowing Skywardly Today voices ring out as they have before, telling the stories that have been hidden, ignored, whitewashed, or forgotten by main-stream history taught in our schools. Periodically, these stories rally broad public support for reforms but over time, the need for new distractions and freedom from collective guilt allow these stories to pass. Will this be another episode of social introspection to be moved offstage when we become bored again?

Maybe so, but so far there have always been those who don't let us forget and don't offer to absolve us of responsibility, however indi-rect. In China—out there or over there—where Westerners like to look to find examples of gross human rights violations, there are those like Liao Yiwu who tell us the stories of Chinese history that the Government and Party don't want their people to know. Stories preserved in an oral tradition that can find ways to defy censorship. Stories about people on the bottom rung who aren't supposed to be there and who are a modern inconvenience for the New China's quest to surpass Western materialism. Stories from the ugly side. Ugly people, miserable conditions, and worthless lives. An abomi-nation to Mao's peasant revolution and detritus to be composted and kept out of sight in the New China. Among the oral histories presented in Liao's Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up are a professional mourner, a human trafficker, a public toilet manager, a leper, a grave robber, a peasant Emperor, a Falun Gong practitioner, a safe cracker, and a migrant worker. The book published in English in 2008 is banned in China.

What reading Liao does for us and what reading Ellison, Whitehead and others does for us in Anglo North America is challenge us to think about just how receptive we are when the dissident voices come from within—not from a Liao in China or a Solzhenitsyn in the USSR—especially when the messages we hear and read make us uncomfortable with the historical accounts we have always as-sumed to be thorough, objective, and truthful.

Peter McMillan 85 On Wounded Knee: Comparing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (August 2021)

This review will compare two heterodox histories of Native Ameri-cans* referred to as 'Indians' by the authors and herein as well. The first is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, now considered a classic, authored by Dee Brown, and published in 1970. The second is The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, by David Treuer, published in 2019. Both accounts attempt to debunk the prevalent American myth of 'how the West was won,' by developing counter-narratives drawn from historical facts.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee presents the history of the West in the U.S. from 1860 to 1890—that is, from just before the Civil War through the Battle of Wounded Knee—and, in the author's words, is intended to

fashion a narrative of the conquest of the American West

as the victims experienced it.... And Americans who have

always looked westward when reading about this period

should read this book facing eastward.

On the other hand, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee "tells the story of what Indians in the United States have been up to in the 128 years that have elapsed since the 1890 massacre." Treuer charac-terizes the Wounded Knee Massacre as "a touchstone of Indian suffering, a benchmark of American brutality, and a symbol of the end of Indian life, the end of the frontier, and the beginning of mod-ern America. Wounded Knee, in other words, stands for an end, and a beginning."

What is clear from both histories is that the U.S. Government—not just a haphazard collection of violent and primitive Americans— attempted to destroy and very nearly did destroy the indigenous 86 Willowing Skywardly peoples in America. It was a multi-generational campaign of the elected government of the U.S., often with the knowledge and tacit complicity of its citizenry, that bears responsibility for the atrocities, tragedies, and hypocrisies that created the transcontinental U.S. And, as both authors note, what culminated in the 1830 Indian Re-moval Act—the forced removal of Native Americans west of the Mississippi River—is essentially what the U.S. Government tried to do in the West, although by different means as west of the Pacific Coast, Native Americans could not be relocated. Treuer does not mince words when he says, "America did not conquer the West through superior technology, nor did it demonstrate the advantages of democracy. America “won” the West by blood, brutality, and ter-ror." And these words are consistent with Brown's history.

The most important difference between these two histories is that Brown focuses on the end of Indian history, while Treuer develops the thesis that Wounded Knee was neither the end of Indian history nor just the beginning of a new chapter in American history but the continuation of a history of indigenous peoples' fight to survive after European discovery of the 'New World.' Another important differ-ence is that Treuer places post-Wounded Knee American history in the context of broader American history, e.g., the world wars, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, urbanization, emphasizing the bi-directional influence of Indian life on the world beyond the reservation. Brown, too, presents important external in-fluences, viz. the Civil War, America's vision of a Manifest Destiny, and the continentalization of America by communication and trans-portation technologies, but for Brown, the world outside the Plains acts upon Indians and not so much vice-versa—hence, the pres-ence of a fundamental theme of victimization. A third difference is that while Brown's characters are those of history, viz. the leaders of Indian tribes and leaders of the U.S. Government, especially mili-tary personnel, Treuer's protagonists, particularly in the years after 1890 also include numerous Native Americans who would not nec-

Peter McMillan 87 essarily figure prominently in textbooks. They provide anecdotal material that Treuer uses to tell more about individual Indians than we know about those, for example, who were killed at Wounded Knee, about whose lives we know very little.

What Brown reports in detail is what the U.S. Government did pri-marily to the Plains Indians after it had forced Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole from their lands in the Southeast to Oklahoma—The Trail of Tears, a signature achieve-ment of President Andrew Jackson. The record of U.S. Government policy—economic and military—towards the Indigenous Peoples west of the Mississippi described by Brown amounts to genocide. Even though the collective consciousness of genocide in the 19th century was nowhere close to what it is today, the attempted eradi-cation of indigenous peoples, the theft of their property, and deliberate destruction of their way of life and culture could in no way be squared with the religious and political ideals of the new re-public, much as slavery in America demonstrates that American ideals were often empty of substance. In addition, the panorama of lawless war-making by the U.S. Government, through its elected officials and bureaucrats and by churchmen and civilians alike, re-veal a brutality of warfare—rape, theft, murder, destruction, mistreatment of noncombatants and prisoners as documented in the Sand Creek and Wounded Knee massacres—give the lie to a nation sworn to uphold the rule of God and the rule of law. The tim-ing of the publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee a year after the covered-up story of the My Lai Massacre broke couldn't have been worse for Americans with a conscience, displaying for all the world to see that something was fundamentally wrong with the way the U.S. conducts itself at war.

[T]he drama on the Plains between 1850 and 1890 threw

the question of the young republic into stark relief: Was

America a democratic country that respected the rights of

individuals, or was it just another greedy power in dis-88 Willowing Skywardly

guise? The Plains Wars raised the question because for

the first time Anglo-Indian conflict was staged for all to see.

European settlement also came late enough to connect

with emergent print and photographic journalism: as with

the Vietnam War, the Plains War was there to see in

magazines and newspapers and illustrated weeklies.

Integral to Brown's story is the accumulation and presentation of evidence sufficient to indict America's economic and military policy, as it repeats the iterations of how a civilized nation lied, cheated, stole, and murdered to take over the land. America desired the lands in the West to support its expanding population of European immigrants and their descendants, to create a new economy for the West (farming, ranching, mining), and to construct railroads and communication to connect America from east to west. Then and since, the American the myth of America's Manifest Destiny ex-plained and justified U.S. economic and military policy to each new American generation. Also fundamental to the myth was the belief that Native Americans were uncivilized, savage, and primitive such that they didn't warrant the privilege of living under the rule of law and explained. This part of the myth made it incumbent on America to liberate this barbarian race from its backward ways of life and misguided beliefs. And so, the stain of the Indian Wars was mostly hidden from generations of American students and minimized when mentioned. According to the myth, the Indian side of the story didn't need to be told—the treaties that were broken time and again, the buffalo herds that were wiped out as a source for food, clothing and shelter for the Plains Indians, the women and children who were murdered, the reservations that were starved of life's necessities during the harsh winters of the Plains, and the children who were taken from their families and taught to deny their Indian ancestry and culture. Brown tasks himself with re-balancing the historical re-cord tilted one way for so long by the thousands of accounts of the same period that have facilitated the propagation of this part of America's creation myth.

Peter McMillan 89 America, a self-proclaimed nation of laws, did not recognize, let alone, honour the legal rights of Indians. By maintaining that Indi-ans were savages, Americans arrogated the right to wage war lawlessly and inhumanely. In the early 17th century, the scope and scale of atrocities committed during the Thirty Years War led the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius to observe that "Throughout the Christian world I have seen a lawlessness in warfare that even barbarian races would think shameful." The ever-present reality of war in hu-man society was such that Grotius felt compelled to write about the laws of war, i.e., the laws for making war and the laws for conduct-ing war. Where was civilization and its laws of war when the Indian Wars were fought, when savage massacres provoked savage counter massacres? What truth is there in the words of Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota (Teton Sioux) when he said, ”When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him," somewhat reminiscent of Professor Samuel P. Huntington's (in)famous remark that "Islam has bloody borders."

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer reviews the history of human life in North America dating back thousands of years, incor-porating some of the latest thinking in archaeology and anthropology, which gives credibility to the possibility that the origi-nal migration of peoples from Asia to North America may have pre-dated the familiar Bering land bridge of 10,000 years ago by up-wards of 20,000 years. He moves through the history of the indigenous peoples in what is contemporary continental America, detailing the peoples, where they hadn't been exterminated, in the various parts of the country from Maine to Florida on the Atlantic coast to California and Washington on the Pacific coast and all parts in between. Treuer notes that the Indian remains, even in the Northeast and Southeast, where "total war" had not produced "total extinction." California, however, presents a different story as Indi-ans fought to survive the Spanish, the Mexicans, the U.S. Government, and even the new government of the state of Califor-

90 Willowing Skywardly nia, which at the height of the post-1849 gold rush paid militia to kill Indians. Treuer states that the Indian history of California is "among the most brutal and bloody treatment of any people anywhere on the globe played out in one of the most beautiful landscapes and Indian homelands ever to greet the eye."

And so by the end of 1890 it must have seemed that eve-

rything was over. In four hundred years, Indians had lost

control of 100 percent of the United States and remained

only in small clusters scattered like freckles over the face

of the country. In 1891, the Indians who remained every-

where poked their heads aboveground and surveyed the

desolation of their homelands and asked the question Indi-

ans had been asking since the beginning: What can we do

next to survive?

From this point on, Treuer sets out to answer this question and to explain and support his thesis that Wounded Knee was not the end of the Indian but rather one of countless setbacks endured and overcome by Indians as they fought to survive displacement and annihilation by the emerging dominant society that had migrated from Europe.

Indians fought the government plan after plan, policy after

policy, legislative act after legislative act, and they contin-

ued to fight. And they fought using their own governments,

their own sensibilities, origin stories, legends, language,

and creativity. And they fought to remain Indian just as

much as they fought for and in order to be Americans, but

Americans on their own terms.

Still, Indians remain, and their presence in American society has grown as Indians continue to fight—not on the battlefields—but from within the system—in politics, in the courts, and in peaceful protests—just as Blacks have done since slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago. Treuer refuses to accept Brown's victimi-

Peter McMillan 91 zation thesis and introduces numerous characters to flesh out the abstract picture we have of events like the Wounded Knee Massa-cre where extant historical sources gloss over the anonymity of those involved.

The struggle for Native American rights since Wounded Knee has not been easy. U.S. Government laws continued in force to erase Indian culture. Boarding schools, not unlike Canada's residential schools which they influenced, provided Indians with a Eurocentric education in English at the expense of Indian histories, languages, and religions. The goal was assimilation of Indians into the Ameri-can melting pot. Similarly, the codification of Indian Offenses regarding ceremonial practices was intended to 'civilize the Indian.' Then, regarding the land, the U.S. Government introduced allot-ments to weaken the tribal system and introduce competition among reservation members by parceling out reservation land to members and allowing white settlers to buy reservation land allot-ments.

Then, after World War II, the U.S. Government moved to devolve administrative authority on Indian lands to State governments through the Termination Act and Public Law 280. This devolution of administrative control was a logical extension of a long-term policy to assimilate Indians into the general population so that they would be treated no differently than any other ethnic or racial group. Three decades earlier in 1924, Indians had been guaranteed U.S. citizen-ship, allowing for dual citizenship, thereby protecting Indian tribal status and existing treaty rights. Though Blacks had been granted citizenship as well as equal protection under the laws and due process in the 14th Amendment, Indians had been excluded. As In-dians were now citizens, this actually helped the U.S. Government's case for delegating the administration of Indian affairs to the States. The tribal system was further challenged by demographic changes brought on by industrialization and migration of people to cities to

92 Willowing Skywardly find employment as well as by relocation programs funded by the federal government.

Nevertheless, the tribes survived and the Native American rights movement continued the struggle and was given a boost by the Meriam Report of 1928, which found the federal government's In-dian policy to be an abject failure—in health, education, and economics. But what was won and subsequently enshrined in law was not always so in practice as Blacks had discovered after emancipation. For example, although all Native Americans had the right to vote as U.S. citizens, this right was denied by several states as late as 1962 in the case of Utah.

Then, in 1970, President Nixon determined the Indian termination policy to be a failure and formally ended it. Termination, or devolu-tion, had been a significant threat to tribal sovereignty, and the 1960s marked a shift in the power of the Native American rights movement to command public attention and litigate grievances through the courts. The Native American civil rights movement par-alleled the civil rights movement for Blacks, and the emerging litigation capability of the Native American rights' movement in the 1960s and 1970s began to produce favourable court decisions, such as the 1976 Supreme Court decision that unanimously found that the States do not have the legal authority to regulate Native activities on reservations. Not only did this undo Public Law 280 from the early 1950s, but it also recognized Native sovereignty on the reservation. Most famously, it opened the door for tribal casino gambling. Also, in the 1970s, the Indian Education and Religious Freedom acts were passed bringing the U.S. Government policy of assimilation—e.g., boarding schools and the code of Indian Of-fenses—to an end. Today, Native Americans are at the forefront of the environmental movement as they litigate and protest against land-use violations by corporations in the energy and resource sec-tor. Into the 21st century, Indian culture has resisted assimilation,

Peter McMillan 93 erasure, and post-colonial hegemony, so for Treuer, 1890 was not the end of the Indian. It was perhaps the nadir of Indian history post European contact and settlement, but what followed was a con-tinuation of the Indian's fight to survive.

Brown's work is not so sanguine. In fact, he offers no future for the Indian. At the close of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee are these words from Black Elk of the Oglala Lakota:

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look

back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see

the butchered women and children lying heaped and scat-

tered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw

them with eyes still young. And I can see that something

else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the

blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful

dream … the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There

is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

Bury Me at Wounded Knee is nevertheless valuable and relevant, as it clearly and effectively challenges the conventional account of Indian history, and it is important for Americans to have such non-conforming accounts to compare with the 'official history' so that some awareness can be provoked where before there has been too much ignorance and mendacity and that the history to be written in the future will correspond more closely to America's espoused ide-als.

Treuer's history, which is both more hopeful—almost defiantly so— and more pragmatic, can be regarded as a logical development from the historical base laid in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Both books are needed for a better understanding and appreciation of Indian history. And as Treuer concludes, "To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works." Thus, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a useful genealogy of power—the

94 Willowing Skywardly power of the state and the power of the powerless as Havel might have put it. And this perspective is shared by Brown in his 2000 Preface to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee where he writes, "Name a small nation, one whose people have a history of past in-justices and oppression, and this book will likely be in print there." _____

*At some point in the future a better alternative to the term 'Native American' may be found—one that is more specific than 'Indige-nous Peoples' and at the same time does not make reference to European contact. Following the example of David Treuer, who identifies as Ojibwe, the terms 'Indian,' 'Native American,' 'indige-nous' and 'Native' will be used to refer to the indigenous peoples within the U.S.

 

Peter McMillan 95 We Won't Get Fooled Again (September 2021)

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, by Craig Whitlock, journalist with The Washington Post, was published in 2021, 50 years after The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War. The similarity of the titles is intentional: the au-thor's central thesis is that the U.S. government's duplicitous secrecy during the 20-year war in Afghanistan resembles the se-crecy during the Vietnam War. In other words, in Afghanistan there was a cover-up just as there was in Vietnam. In both cases it was the federal courts, not Congress, who determined that the govern-ment was obligated to release documentation of the real wartime policymaking to the press on behalf of the American public—civilian and military.

In 1971, in a landmark ruling for freedom of the press, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 that the government could not prevent The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. In an epigraph to his current book, Whitlock quotes from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's concurring opinion in New York Times v. U.S.:

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose

deception in government. And paramount among the re-

sponsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part

of the government from deceiving the people and sending

them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign

shot and shell.

While no Supreme Court decision was required in having The Af-ghanistan Papers released for publication, The Washington Post had to file lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act in order to obtain previously withheld information from the Lessons Learned interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghani-stan Reconstruction (SIGAR) between 2014 to 2018. 96 Willowing Skywardly

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the secret history of wartime poli-cymaking had to be secured with the assistance of the federal judicial branch and, oddly enough, without the assistance of Con-gress, although Congress has oversight authority over the nation's war-making policy. Thus, the determination of what information the American public (and that includes those serving in the Armed Forces) had a right to see involved the federal judicial and the ex-ecutive branches but excluded the people's representatives. Ironically, Congress abdicated its constitutionally-based wartime obligations in both wars. The 1973 War Powers Act, ostensibly passed to correct the excesses of the Vietnam War and curb the unilateral authority of the executive branch to wage war, has netted very little in the half-century since Vietnam. Congressional inabil-ity/unwillingness to challenge presidential war powers persists as a marked failure of the constitutional restraints on executive power.

What is particularly dangerous, especially for a democracy, is that the government's wartime secrecy veiled lies, deceptions, and mis-calculations. The general public was deceived; the soldiers were deceived, though the upper echelons of the military were complicit with the executive branch, as Whitlock reports. And the same type of lies, deceptions, and miscalculations were propagated by the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations in Vietnam and by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations in Afghanistan—in other words, America's presidents of both parties have failed to demonstrate loyalty to the truth about war. It is not without reason that the truth is said to be the first casualty in war. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, misinformation, disingenuousness, and outright de-ceit and dishonesty about the progress of the wars required the dynamic redefining of the initial war rationale to justify fighting with more soldiers, more money, and over an longer (TBD) time frame.

 

Peter McMillan 97 Vietnam was always about the geopolitics of the Cold War—with the U.S. on one side and the USSR and China on the other. The war was sold by ignoring or falsely characterizing the Vietnamese nationalist aspirations, which were directed as much—if not more so—against foreign interference—be it Japanese, French, or American—as they were in favour of communist ideology. Yet, in America the war was marketed as the last in Southeast Asia against international communism. In Afghanistan, what started as a war to retaliate against al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., eventually turned to an extraordinary commitment of human and material resources to build a new country modeled on American institutions—a country so desperately poor that in the 1970s before the Soviet Union moved in, the U.S. government created a public service TV ad (with Johnny Hart's BC characters) to recruit Peace Corps workers to go there.

Ultimately, the U.S. lost both wars. About that there should be no doubt. U.S. military and diplomatic personnel were forced to leave both countries. The expulsions were on live TV shown around the world—Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021. Lessons learned? One stands out above all the others and that is that the countries that 'hosted' the wars suffered disproportionately in terms of the number of casualties as well as in total economic costs.

In the Acknowledgements section of The Afghanistan Papers, Whitlock writes:

Emblazoned on a wall in The Washington Post’s news-

room is a quotation—“Journalism is the first rough draft of

history”—from Philip L. Graham, who served as the news-

paper’s publisher from 1946 to 1961. To put it less

succinctly, news reporting is an initial attempt to define and

interpret noteworthy events: a preliminary step in a never-

ending effort to understand and interpret the past.

98 Willowing Skywardly This reminds the reader of the tentative nature of history, especially when the history is too close in time to the present to afford com-pleteness and objectivity.

Nevertheless, the thesis that the U.S. government lied, deceived, and withheld the truth about the Afghanistan War just as it did the Vietnam War holds up pretty well, and if the 2003 Iraq War were considered, a pattern of deliberate deception by the U.S. govern-ment during wartime seems pretty well established. In Iraq, the entire world witnessed the fabrications and manipulations of the U.S. government as it prepared for war. And there, in Iraq, the per-ils and contradictions of a global economic and military superpower acting as a global moral leader continue in what may come to be America's longest war.

That U.S. government deception regarding its war rationale, con-duct, and progress has been documented over generations should be a guarantee that the threat is an ever-present one. Other nations ignore this lesson at their own risk—with respect to their own gov-ernments as well as the U.S. government. __________

'We Won't Get Fooled Again, The Who, 1971

 

Peter McMillan 99 Beatdown on Wellesley (September 2021)

Gray sky, temperature just above freezing. City noises: traffic, si-rens, crowds. Seemed just like any other Monday late in the long winter season. Around Queen's Park it was. To the west, the sprawling university campus; to the south, office buildings, hospi-tals, and consulates; to the north, museums and upscale shops; and to the east, a miscellany of vintage businesses—bars, strip joints, travel agencies, used bookstores, music stores, convenience stores, and so on.

At Queen's Park, the centre of government, it was not just another Monday. For one thing, the Legislature was scheduled to resume sitting after a brief recess.

Hundreds of police—dozens in full riot gear—faced off against thousands of protestors. It was a strike, a labour disruption target-ing the government. All legal though. No traffic on nearby streets, police barricades permitting passage only to police and emergency vehicles. For their part, protestors were delaying—sometimes pre-venting—the people's representatives from entering their offices across the street from the House. This was the 4th Monday of the strike, and pickets continued to slow movement into all government buildings in particular the adjacent square of government high-rise offices.

Twelve storeys up was her office where her research work on edu-cation reform initiatives in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand was on hold ... indefinitely. Fifty yards away on Wellesley, the confrontation simmered. On one side, the picket line, three bod-ies thick on the sidewalk and in the gutter their backs to the legislative office building they were blocking. In their faces, dozens of black uniforms, helmets, visors, kevlar jackets, truncheons, shields, and pepper spray.

100 Willowing Skywardly An escalation. For what seemed like half an hour or more, a steady drumbeat of batons beat against shields drowning out the chatter of the picket line and surrounding sounds from beyond the Park of this city of four million plus returning from lunch.

The assault. Black uniforms broke ranks and the units plunged into the picket line, truncheons waving, beating whatever flesh stood in the way, felling several, creating a wedge that pierced then pried open the picket line. On cue, three police vans zipped around the corner, coming to a screeching stop at the ramp leading down to the rear entrance of the building, and 'debussed' their cargo. Ten to 15 members of the legislature were hustled out of the vehicles and behind a cordon of police that stretched from door to door. Ducking their heads and raising their shoulders, the people's representa-tives, scurried down the ramp.

This was before smart phones but newspaper cameras flashed and TV cameras rolled capturing a part of the action which unfolded in no more than three minutes. From her cautious post, she saw a few bodies fall, but she was too far away and blocked by too many people to see the faces of either the protestors or the police behind the masks. Ambulance sirens replaced the drumbeat. Once the picket line had dispersed and the police had backed away, she ap-proached close enough to witness the blood on the sidewalk, a clump of hair, a few strips of clothing from shirts and blouses, pieces of a watch, bent eyeglass frames, and fractured lenses all trampled by so many feet in retreat.

It came out later in the Report of the Commission of Inquiry that a city police officer had been beaten by state police truncheons as she attempted to intervene, literally putting herself between the ba-tons of the riot police and the protestors. Otherwise, only among protestors were there injured in the beatdown.

 

Peter McMillan 101 This happened—not on TV, not from a police state 'over there,' and not even from the U.S.—here, in front of her disbelieving eyes 12 floors down from the office window she looked out of every day. Would her colleagues who were still inside understand how jarring these events were with their insulated and urbane lives as manag-ers and policymakers in the civil service?

Likely not. The disturbing images—not as disturbing as when they're 'over there'—would be edited, editorialized, and rendered harmless or else they would be attributed to the dangerous aberra-tions of direct democracy. This would be an inoculation ... herd immunity being society's self-defense.

Beyond the Park, ripples were felt on campus to the west, but not so much in the chic stores to the north, the parlors to the east, or the foreign missions to the south.

They hadn't thought it could happen here. But it did, and some who know history didn't experience the sense of tragedy and betrayal that she did. But then living history is decidedly more impactful than reading it.

 

102 Willowing Skywardly The Progress of Knowledge and Material Conditions in Asimov's Foundation Novels (December 2021)

Is human evolution on a secular path, i.e., is progress inevitable and ever-increasing? If so, is it because our evolution is naturally inclined that way or is it because we have the knowledge and ability to predict the future and intervene as necessary to control the fu-ture? Of course, by 'humans,' we can't mean 'everybody' for then there would be more chaos to project into the future than we have ever had to contemplate. Universal psychosocial freedom would fundamentally change the dynamics in human communities, which have heretofore been more or less accurately characterized in terms of who are the strongest, the fastest, the savviest, the rich-est—for these are not only the ones best fit to survive but also most likely to dominate.

In the Foundation novels,[1] Asimov appears optimistic about the future and about humanity's ability to anticipate and influence it. However, that does not mean the full unfolding of the future can be predicted and changed, rather that only significant states/conditions and trends can be managed. For example, the technology of the future and its impact on society and individuals cannot be predicted in detail, yet according to Asimov's psychohistory in the Foundation novels, periods of peace and civilization and trends towards ad-vancing technologies and stable social systems can be. Hence the assessment that the Galactic Empire was doomed to fall and be replaced by 30,000 years of barbarism unless a psychohistorical plan were to be developed that could shorten the dark ages to a millennium. To put it in a more contemporary perspective, Hari Sel-don, the chief protagonist in the Foundation series, develops a new science—mathematical sociology—which promises knowledge and control on a much larger scale and over a much longer time frame than, say, the reduction of a 10-year depression to a 6-month re-cession.

Peter McMillan 103 From a 21st century perspective with more than half a century's ex-perience of complex mathematical economic models, we can barely imagine the depth and breadth of the futuristic modelling that Asi-mov writes about. Even though our econometric models are sparse compared to what Seldon and the psychohistorians are developing, they rest on an axiomatic base supplemented by a multitude of as-sumptions, many bound together in highly unrealistic ceteris paribus caveats, as does psychohistory. And while our econometric models are most accurate at the level of the nation-state, a fraction of a subset of Asimov's 25-million-world galaxy or even the 800-culture world of Trantor—the prototype for psychohistory—they al-ways allow for the possibility of error due to exogenous shocks. In other words, it's virtually impossible to introduce and quantify a vast realm of possible disturbances that have never been factored in be-fore but could upset the precarious balance of the model's known variables (actors' knowledge and expectations, initial conditions, current trends and historically recorded relationships). With regard to econometric models, we must be tentative because supply and demand shocks can be propagated throughout the system from ex-ogenous variables such as climate, natural disasters, epidemics/pandemics, wars, etc. none of which have ever been fully reducible to accurate forecasts and control. So much more could exogenous shocks disturb the Seldon Plan. Asimov sets the stage for this at the conclusion of Foundation and Earth, when Tre-vize reflects:

Just outside the Galaxy are the Magellanic Clouds, where

no human ship has ever penetrated. Beyond that are other

small galaxies, and not very far away is the giant Andro-

meda Galaxy, larger than our own. Beyond that are

galaxies by the billions.

Hyperspatially, the Galaxy is a point—and so is all the Uni-

verse. We have not visited any other galaxy, and, as far as

we know, no intelligent species from another galaxy has

104 Willowing Skywardly

ever visited us—but that state of affairs may end some-

day.[2]

Asimov posits his own entertaining answer to the question, 'Can the future of a galaxy of 25 million human worlds be predicted using a mathematical model that encapsulates a thorough knowledge of present and historical conditions and trends and law-like relation-ships between and among the physical variables of the world?' And although he can't demonstrate a proof—this is, after all, science fic-tion—he writes as if the future can be known and can be deliberately altered so long as there is but one maestro. In other words, if each of the 25 million worlds had psychohistory, then each world would potentially be able to alter future conditions and trends and no effective psychohistory modelling could be conducted with-out adding immeasurable variable conditions introduced by countless maestros who would likely be following different scripts. Two maestros would be too many, assuming the two acted inde-pendently with perpetual options for conflict and cooperation. Even though Asimov restricts predictions to macro events or tendencies avoiding the unimaginably complex modelling that would be re-quired to ascertain individual 'fates,' there are nevertheless more than enough system variables to be accounted for over expansive regions of space and time to overwhelm macro forecasting. Again, the comparison with macro and microeconomic models should suf-ficiently demonstrate the complexity of accurately forecasting economic conditions and trends for just a single economy in one world over a period no more than a few years.

Curiously, though on reflection reasonably, Asimov also restricts the universe of possible outcomes to the material world, i.e., the technological and sociological. Human nature is assumed constant and incorrigible. Anything otherwise would likely be incomprehensi-ble. Even Gaia, which comes close to an alternative to human nature that we take to be universal and cross-cultural, is the prod-uct of robotic engineering which in turn is the product of human

Peter McMillan 105 engineering raising the question whether any 'life form' can create a higher order or superior 'life form.' The Zeroth Law of Robotics, which according to Daneel in the Foundation novels states, "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm" provides but a hint of a human nature re-engineered. Certainly, an all-encompassing super-organism such as Gaia is radically different from existing human nature, but how well it can be described and understood in all its implications is un-fathomable.

To illustrate, imagine a human community where egos didn't com-pete and where there was no asymmetric distribution of political power (inclusive of social, economic, cultural, religious, etc.) be-tween leaders and followers, i.e., where power was not concentrated, secretive, self-serving and manipulative. While we may on occasion be critical of selfishness and authoritarianism (es-pecially when it's 'over there' or 'back then,' e.g., the dictatorship of the proletariat of Marxist-Leninist communism) taken to extremes, where is the individual who does not experience the world inde-pendently? Don't we always reflect a perspective that is non-identical to any other human perspective? Can we even contem-plate encountering the world as a super-organism like Gaia, where every part is also a whole? This would entail our being able to cre-ate and maintain multiple different perspectives of the same thing at the same point in time. Could I even talk about experiencing a sun-rise from the perspective of me, the ground on which I stand, the air which I breathe, the flowers which I smell, the man who is just start-ing a day's work underground in the mines where he's worked for 40 years, the woman who is trying to nurse the stillborn child, the tram conductor who is punching tickets, the ocean which storms the rocky Japanese coastline and pacific calm on the southern Califor-nia bikini-populated beaches, the snow-covered trees in the high altitudes and the burning forests of the parched lower slopes sur-rounding remote towns.

106 Willowing Skywardly Beyond the issue of the immeasurable complexity of a psychohis-tory model of the Galactic Empire is the matter of the historical unanimity, i.e., is it conceivable from our world of competing views of history that humans could ever arrive a consensus regarding all of human history let alone a unanimous verdict? Without a shared understanding and interpretation of human history, wouldn't such a model be constructed of facts that would be endlessly disputed? And if so, wouldn't there end up being multiple models of the future competing against one another with no mutually agreed upon stan-dard against which to judge them?

Then, too, there is the uncertainly principle which provides an anal-ogy whereby the psychohistorians invariably alter the facts of history by studying them relative to some pre-defined criteria of im-portance. Even with universal assent to the story of history, there remains the problem of history tampering with its subject matter and making it conform to expectations, or criteria of significance, that are incommensurable.

But, Hari,” said Dors, “mathematics is an orderly thing of

human invention. One thing follows from another. There

are definitions and axioms, all of which are known. It is … it

is … all one piece. History is different. It is the unconscious

working out of the deeds and thoughts of quadrillions of

human beings. Historians must pick and choose.”

“Exactly,” said Seldon, “but I must know all of history if I am

to work out the laws of psychohistory.”

“In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psy-

chohistory.” [3]

Before yielding to despair in the face of such an enormous task as modelling a 25-million-world galaxy, it would be worth remembering that the purpose of the Second Foundation— comprised of men-

Peter McMillan 107 talics, i.e., mind readers/shapers—was to influence other minds, or stated less euphemistically, mind control. Psychohistorical predic-tions need not be absolutely comprehensive and accurate in predictive capability. Plausibility might suffice as long as those who author the predictions are able to convincingly articulate and dis-seminate the most highly probable and best of outcomes based on the best available theories and facts.

And it is here, that we introduce some ideas borrowed from the contemporary philosophy of science, e.g., the sociological basis for theory proposal, testing and acceptance. The theories need not be perfect as long as they conform to the larger body of relevant the-ory and account for the latest discovered anomalies. Our 'pictures' of subatomic structures, which we infer from theory and experiment in order make explanations intelligible to a larger community, have changed from particle to quantum descriptions and in another 100 years may change yet again when we have visual representations that better match our mathematical descriptions.

W.V.O. Quine in his famous paper 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' published the same year as Foundation, addresses these functional 'myths' of objects and forces in physics:

 

Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing

with physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse

except for differences in the degree to which they expedite

our dealings with sense experiences....

Total science, mathematical and natural and human, is

similarly but more extremely underdetermined by experi-

ence. The edge of the system must be kept squared with

experience; the rest, with all its elaborate myths or fictions,

has as its objective the simplicity of laws.[4]

108 Willowing Skywardly Nevertheless, despite the ever-refining and correcting of our knowl-edge, we continue to be able to invent and manufacture new and innovative products that improve our material conditions. From simple machines (e.g., the lever, the wheel, the pulley) to faster than light speed travel and terraforming, we continue our upwards progress ... technologically speaking. Social progress, political pro-gress, economic progress ... these have not historically moved along a consistently inclining trend line, and there are no such san-guine forecasts in Asimov's Foundation novels. Thirty thousand years of barbarism reduced to a millennium would indeed be an achievement if psychohistory were confirmed on this point; how-ever, a regression of society for a span of 1,000 years does not speak to an ever-improving evolutionary path. In addition, sociopoli-tical and economic degradation can be accompanied by and even contribute to technological retrogression as Asimov notes in the case of the now-disappeared technology that created Daneel and other robots with mentalic powers.

Asimov concludes that the Promethean fire could go out and we could end up in the dark again—there being no assurance that apart from our own efforts the human condition will forever follow a secular incline technologically, socio-politically or socioeconomi-cally. Presumably, the primary factor that breaks continuity in human progress in any of these areas is what appears to be be-yond our control—our nature. The Foundation novels are not the place for considering whether and to what extent human nature can be revised and re-issued.

Endnotes

[1] In the order of publication: Foundation (1951), Empire and Foundation (1952), Second Foundation (1953), Foundation's Edge (1982), Foundation and Earth (1986), Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993).

Peter McMillan 109 [2] Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Earth, 1986.

[3] Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, 1988.

[4] Excerpted from W.V.O. Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism,' The Philosophical Review, Vol. 60, No. 1. (Jan., 1951).

 

110 Willowing Skywardly PART TWO — Non-Fiction (1995-2008)

 

Peter McMillan 111 Global Trends in Public Education: Market-Oriented Education Re-form (August 1995)

Abstract

One of the most pervasive and radical trends in public education in countries around the world is the implementation of market-oriented education reform. Market-oriented education reform has been in-troduced in order to make the providers of education services more accountable to the consumers of education services. According to the theory behind market-oriented reform, the 'invisible hand' of the market is more efficient than and therefore should replace state bu-reaucracies in the regulation and allocation of education services. Competition among service providers gives the consumer choices where previously the monopoly power of the state limited consumer autonomy. Service providers in a competitive market environment are held accountable by the consumers' freedom to select among rival providers.

The purpose of this presentation is to increase awareness and dis-cussion of market-oriented education. Instances of market-oriented reform throughout the English-speaking world will be described. The four major manifestations of this global movement, each of which will be discussed within the context of different countries, are: decentralization of education administration, e.g. school-based management; privatization of education services; preparation of teacher technicians; and the 'commodification' of students.

Introduction

The unifying theme of this presentation is 'market-oriented' educa-tion. This theme will be shown to be the common thread that runs through the most significant global trends in public education today. It has surfaced in school-based management reform in New Zea-

112 Willowing Skywardly land, the U.S., England, Canada and Australia; it has shown up in the privatization of educational services in Canada, the U.S., Eng-land and New Zealand; it has appeared in the competency-based assessment of teachers in England, the U.S. and Australia; and it has been heard in the education-for-the-sake-of-the-economy rhetoric in Canada and in the U.S.

Before proceeding with this presentation, I wish to point out that the dimensions of 'market-oriented' education reform are far beyond what I can hope to be able to describe in this session. There are two brief points that I would like to make in this regard. First, in ad-dition to the four previously-mentioned instances of 'market-oriented' education reform that I will be talking about today, there are at least four others that deserve mention. These are:

a) year-round schooling, which is beginning to gain sup-

port in the U.S. and in Canada;

b) integration of special needs students into regular

classrooms, which is an emerging policy initiative in

the U.S., in Canada and in Australia;

c) increasing class sizes, which has become a serious

issue in England and in Ontario; and

d) alternative teacher certification schemes, which seem

to have become a permanent route into the teaching

profession in the U.S. and may soon be permanently

incorporated in England and in Canada, as well.

All of these are trends that can be interpreted as 'market-oriented.' Year-round schools maximize use of facilities. Integration of special needs students paves the way for class size expansion, however charitable the explicit intentions of policy-makers may seem. In-

Peter McMillan 113 creasing class sizes mean that fewer teachers are required. And alternative teacher certification schemes expand the supply of po-tential teachers so that in the not too distant future, competition among prospective teachers may be expected to exert downward pressure on teachers' salaries and benefits.

The second point that I want to make is that the four reform trends that I have just listed have also received support from governments in non-English speaking countries. For instance, Japan, South Ko-rea and Sweden have versions of school-based management and school choice. Other examples could no doubt be given, save for the fact that I am unilingual and the preponderance of comparative education research material that is available in North America is written in English and is almost exclusively devoted to education in the English-speaking world.

In the remainder of this presentation, I will describe and give in-stances of school-based management, privatization, competency-based teacher assessment and the education-economy connection. Owing to limited time, I will use one country example for each trend. For school-based management, New Zealand will be my example. For privatization, I will use Ontario. England will be my example for the trend towards competency-based teacher assessment. And On-tario will provide my example of education-for-the-sake-of-the-economy rhetoric. Finally, I will offer some critical thoughts which I hope will persuade you to consider carefully the implications of these global trends in public education.

School-Based Management

School-based management represents a decentralization of educa-tion management through the transfer of administrative authority to schools. The source from which this authority has been transferred is usually the intermediate layer of bureaucracy, that is school

114 Willowing Skywardly boards or their equivalent. In England, they are called Local Educa-tion Authorities and in New Zealand, they were called Education Boards. Australia is the exception. It does not have an intermediate layer of bureaucracy between the schools and the State depart-ments of education. School-based management, in its most extreme form, and not necessarily its most rare form, gives parents control of budgets and staffing. However, even in the most extreme school-based management arrangements, departments and minis-tries of education continue to control the curriculum, teacher training and funding.

School-based management has occurred in New Zealand, Eng-land, Australia, the U.S. and Canada. What school-based management in all of these countries has in common is the goal of making schools more accountable to the parents and communities that they serve. By transferring key administrative responsibilities away from middle-level bureaucracies, schools are thought to be made more responsive to the communities they serve, and parents and communities are considered to be empowered to hold schools accountable for education services through parental influence on school councils. Furthermore, where school-based management is coupled with school choice, parents are said to be truly empow-ered, provided of course that school choice is 'real' and not illusory. If parents do not have any other schools to choose from, then school choice really is an empty slogan. And if communities are ex-pected to match government education grants with contributions coming from local fund-raising drives, as is the case in New Zea-land, then the empowerment of parents is income-relative. In other words, school-based management and school choice become the means by which the middle class is empowered — the upper class already being fully empowered.

Government strategy behind the implementation of school-based management reform appears to be designed to consolidate its

Peter McMillan 115 power over education. Under the guise of introducing greater com-petition among 'retail' education providers, government eliminates the layer of bureaucracy between it and the schools. The govern-ment's regulatory control is augmented by the direct line of communication that is established between the ministry or depart-ment of education and the schools. Furthermore, the ministry or department of education continues to dictate education policy and to determine how education funding is distributed. One is reminded of the trend in corporate re-engineering where middle management gets eliminated in what is referred to as 'de-layering,' enabling ex-ecutive management to have greater control over the 'real work' of their organizations.

New Zealand provides the best example of such a corporate strat-egy. In 1989, New Zealand eliminated its Education Boards, creating a direct line of communication and responsibility between the New Zealand Ministry of Education and schools. Under New Zealand's Education Act of 1989, boards of trustees were created for each school and given authority to hire and dismiss staff, includ-ing the principal, and to manage the school budget. Parents elected from the community constitute a majority on each board, and the school principal is the chair of the board and serves in the capacity of school manager for as long as s/he enjoys the support of the board of trustees.

In exchange for local autonomy, the New Zealand Ministry of Edu-cation holds boards of trustees accountable through a school charter which includes National Education Guidelines as well as specific objectives prepared by the boards of trustees on behalf of their communities. The Ministry of Education continues to regulate the education system through its policy and funding responsibilities. In addition, the Education Review Office performs quality assur-ance audits in schools, ensuring that legislation, charter agreements and education policy are being followed. And the New

116 Willowing Skywardly Zealand Qualifications Authority establishes national education qualifications, calibrates these against international qualifications and administers national examinations to secondary school stu-dents and post-secondary students. The Education Review Office and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority were devolved from the Ministry of Education by 1990, and since then schools and their boards of trustees have been directly answerable to these two agencies for those matters that fall within their jurisdictions.

Privatization

Privatization refers not just to the transfer of public education ser-vices to the private sector but also the transfer of public education services to non-profit agencies. It is the latter form of privatization that I wish to pursue in this part of the presentation. I will describe the transfer of state control of teacher education to autonomous professional teacher standards boards as a variation of privatiza-tion, and then I will use Ontario to show how self-governing teacher agencies can fit into the privatization agenda. Autonomous profes-sional teacher standards boards have been created in 11 U.S. States, in Scotland and in British Columbia, and the prospects are very good for Ontario to have one by 1996.