The Poet

                   Another golden oldie - a poem written by three poets, completed in 1990.

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            The poet isn’t defined by what he writes.  Some poets never write a single line.  Some people write hundreds of verses and will never really be poets.

            The poet isn’t defined by how he or she lives.  Not every drunk is a poet, and most poets aren’t drunks.  Anyone can adopt a Bohemian lifestyle – it won’t make one a poet any more than it makes one a Bohemian.

            What then defines the poet?  Perhaps this:  how he perceives, feels and expresses all the phenomena and sensations coming around and through him.  And what common thread runs through the diverse lives of poets, through their incongruous personalities?

            Lorca stepping between the guns on the morning of his assassination.…

            Hart Crane diving into a ship’s propeller….

            Rimbaud, racing for life in Africa after shooting his lover, finally coming home to die

of syphilis….

            Camille Claudel, driven mad by love, destroying her own work….

            Siefert handing out his poems mimeographed when the government bans his work….

            Vallejo starving as he writes about the thin blade of loneliness….

            Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore….

            Pascal’s slashed wrists floating in the ruby water of his bathtub….

            Artaud running with the mad….

            Sylvia Plath’s head in the cold hissing oven….

            Chatterton eating rat poison….

            Hemingway blowing his brains into the orange juice….

            Berryman flying off a bridge….

            Burroughs accidentally shooting his wife in a Mexican bar….

            Pound dragged through the streets in a cage….

            Dostoevsky up against the bullet-scarred wall….

            The common thread is a vague indefinable something that animates the poet and sends him or her swimming deep and flying high, til the very words ‘exalted’ and ‘degraded’ no longer have any meaning.  It is a spark, a charge which drives him in the futile attempt to encompass all depth and height with his own being, to learn the questions, discover the answers, find the connections and essence.

            The poet tells truth, using subtle arts:  exaggeration, the misnaming of things, smoky oblique reflections, and those illogical but revealing comparisons.  And all these acts would be considered unethical and dishonest if used in normal discourse.  But for poetry they are the meat and sinew, the crushing muscle, the flashing nerve. 

And why does the poet tell that story, use those clever arts?  Because he or she is a poet, and that is what poets are driven to do.  Because something burns in the most private heart of the poet, something which forces him – often against his will and contradicting all reason – to stretch the skin of his soul… so that tamer creatures might finally know how large they can grow.

                                                                              --  Charles Bukowski, Lee Mallory & Hakim

© 2012 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

The Strength of a Man

In the late 1990s, I reflected at length on the struggle with cancer that I'd had earlier.  Looking back on my entire life, this is what I came up with.

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 On a day like any other – it could have been any day – a minor complaint prompts a question.  An inquiry.  An examination. . . and suddenly nothing is the same.  The things which were big things become small, and all that had been small things disappear.  You feel the curtain falling, you see  clearly the weakness of living, in an instant you recognise the fragile skin of life.  Closing, the eyes truly open – and the turning world continues.

*                      *                      *

There is a moment in life when everything comes to a crashing close, when the silence is so loud that it drowns out the everyday sounds, when each of a man’s fears takes on a very real and terrifying face.  For some, it is the moment of looking into the gun barrel, or the command to charge the bunker, or perhaps saying “I do.”  For me, that moment was sitting in a small

examination room of completely unmemorable color, listening to a doctor in a white coat tell me that I had a tumor the size of West Virginia inside my chest.

            The sweat starts, imperceptibly, and then comes the realisation that it’s in there, and nothing you can do yourself will get it out of you.  But the man has been talking while you’ve been reeling with that data, and now he’s on to numbers:  survival rates, percentages, things which can only be measured in retrospect, long after the deal is done, when you’re either laughing in Aruba or rotting in Pleasant Acres. 

            The person on the table, the patient, faces the man in the white coat – a man the patient has, incidentally, only just met, and who now has the thoroughly egregious duty of informing this stranger that his life has changed, or worse, is over – and stutters out a request for the doctor to repeat himself.  It all has the tone of a very bad dream.

            The wife, of course, cries quietly, seeing more clearly into the future than her patient husband.  In the coming months, with any luck, this man will come to know the nature of this word patient, as a variety of doctors prod and lead and jerk him around in a display of human frailty that will seem remarkably life-like.  But at this moment, he is too stunned to notice her silent tears, and she is too consumed with a single idea:  this man must somehow survive.

*                      *                      *

I was a fairly normal guy, if I had to characterize myself.  I could talk a little about wines and tobaccos, I ran a successful business and went to movies and had most of my beliefs in neat categories.  I enjoyed jazz and classical music, I read voraciously, and I was very like most American men except that I had a predilection for introspection and very little interest in sports.

            I also had a list in my mind of what it takes to be a man.  A man doesn’t cry.  He is always prepared – for anything.  He doesn’t complain and bears his pain quietly. A man protects himself and those around him.  He won’t exploit, depend or rely unnecessarily on his friends, nor will he take them for granted.  In fact, a real man has a bit of the mom in him – he tries to have enough of everything to go around.  As my Uncle Ironhand used to say, “Always carry your own bullets, or you risk carrying one of your enemy’s.”

            Inside, I had the bricks and stones of a thousand walls to keep me safe, stones I had picked up on college campuses in the Sixties, bricks I had carried from the streets where crowds were teargassed and gunned down by police.  I had faced cops with the bravado that only the very tough or very naïve can muster.  I knew myself to be a little of both.

            I had fought a war a long time ago:  a war that divided a nation, a war that made one generation dig in its heels on social issues, inculcated another generation with a lasting distrust of elected leaders and sent a third – the youngest – into the apathy that passes for hipness.  But I had taken at least one side and had held it for the entirety of my adult life.  I owned the strength of conviction.  It was mine and I would not lose it.

            In my younger years, I had fought with fists and with sticks and with knives.  I had faced opponents and won – or lost.  I had placed myself at the very edge of rightness and wrongness – out where matters are settled like men and, as in the sports pages, the outcome is never in doubt because the man standing won the contest and the man on the ground lost.  I knew I was strong and, win or lose, I could fight if I had to.

            And, sitting in that room whose color I cannot name, it became clear that what I had to do now was fight – fight the cancer, fight to stay alive, so all this philosophy became suddenly quite relevant.  It wasn’t just a collection of testosterone sentiments, not the macho notions of manhood derided by the women in our lives over “lunch with the girls” or discussed fervently by “the boys” in the locker-room after racquetball.  Like the adrenaline surge that dictates to mammals when and how to keep breathing, philosophy transmuted into the very real stuff of life itself.  Of course, I was to also learn some distinctly different lessons in the months to come.

*                      *                      *

One of the many delightful ironies of my life is that, at forty-five, I was stricken by a young-people’s disease.  The predominant window for Hodgkin’s lymphoma is 18 to 24 years of age.  I felt, of course, quite lucky to find that I did not have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a nasty and messy killer which takes thousands of lives per year with impunity.  Hodgkin’s, on the other hand, is neat, clean and imminently curable – the doctors repeatedly puzzled me by calling it the “good” cancer.

            The tumor was pressing on both my heart and my lungs, causing me to have poor circulation and extreme shortness of breath.  Again, the ironies:  as an educated man, I could not help but recognise that the tumor struck at the center of our collective notion of courage (courage comes  from the Latin for  “heart”).  Moreover, the tumor attacked my lungs, where I breathe (spirit comes from the Latin for “breath”).  How often in life do we hear these words matched up with our notion of manhood:   “That fighter’s got a lot of heart;”  “He has the spirit to win this one.”  With these two areas so compromised, how was I to defend myself against this threat to my life?

            And the effects of cancer weren’t merely philosophical.  I was physically weak, I couldn’t work for more than a few minutes at a time, and could not sleep.  I had lost twenty pounds to land at a feeble 160 and was tired all the time.  The tumor was consuming almost everything I ate, leaving the rest of my body to starve.  My life had turned around, and I wasn’t liking the direction it took.

            In another doctor’s office, the silent language of marriage carried a single look between my wife and me:  I would undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments.  A believer in naturopathic medicine for most of my adult life, I now abandoned all interest in healing “the healthy way.”   Like many before me, I put aside distrust of Western medicine in my desperation.  I would find doctors considered to be the best in their fields and learn to trust Western methods. My private realisation in that moment was that I would bite the bullet, even if it meant biting the damn thing in half.

            So it all started out relatively badly and devolved from there.  My wife drove me to the infusion center for chemotherapy every two weeks, because the treatment wiped me out too much to walk, much less to drive. Working from graphs which told the maximum I could take without dying, brisk professionals put poisons into my veins as I watched – and waited – for the effects. At the infusion center, they gave me palliative drugs for nausea and other side effects, but I hated taking them.  I quickly reduced my intake of these additives to a minimum, resigned to pull in my ears and bear the physical discomfort.

            My wife took me to weekly meetings of a “survivors’ group,” while she attended a “caretakers’ group.”  We both learned new things about the realities of chronic and catastrophic disease in America at the dawn of the new century – and about the politics of disease.  I learned that I was not alone – but I wasn’t exactly part of a group either:  no one could do this for me.  Though I had always done so willingly, now I must carry my own bullets, even while my strength dwindled.

*                      *                      *

Your first stab at patient logic tells you to try to deal with catastrophic sickness the way you have always dealt with the routine cold or flu – either one of two ways.  You’ll try laying up and sleeping until you are bloody tired of being in bed and have to go back to work, well or not.  Or, you’ll refuse to acknowledge that you’re sick and continue to work, fighting through it until you fall over from weakness and exhaustion. 

            As you would eventually learn, neither tactic works in the case of real debilitating disease.  It is a hard thing to wake each day into the sickness again, without relief, to see yourself in the mirror more debilitated and feeble each time – the constant reminder of failing health, to know that you are not what you were, that in fact you are so much less than you were, that you are constricting, shrinking each day in your movement, in your strength, in your already-severely-limited abilities.  And added to that are the difficulties of relentless treatment.  If the sickness is pernicious, the treatment itself is vicious.

            You must make all those minor and major adjustments, you must acquiesce and compromise, you must accept that your life probably will never be as it was.  You can accept it with grace or you can fight it.  But this is the real deal, pal:  you can’t stay the same.

            And of course, that’s what life is all about, at the end of the day.  Forget the illusion of a continuing arc of achievement until we die in the lap of luxury.  For most of us, that will never happen – our present success won’t help at the end.  The smaller office, the less-luxury car, downsizing, painful joints, the ex-wife, the hated retirement, estranged kids, move to a furnished room, calendar filled with medical appointments, assisted living, the catheter or colostomy:   a series of minor adjustments, compromises, large and small acquiescences, rationalizations.  We can only hope that we won’t find ourselves on the downward slope of the hill without ever having enjoyed the summit.  We will age until we become too weak to feed and care for ourselves, and we’ll hang on until one day we just . . . die.

*                      *                      *

As I watched people disappear from my survivors’ group, I began to feel like Barabbas, delivered from mine enemies – but at what cost?  Some other cancer patient filled the statistical spot that  might  have  been  meant  for  me  under  the title:  “Annual  Deaths  from  Cancer.”    The analogy of Barabbas haunted me – the thief chosen by his people to be free, the committor of seemingly “small” crimes, yet whose sins are greater than those of he whom was punished.  The shrink at the infusion center had asked me whether I thought that cancer was a punishment (it turned out that, given the Judeo-Christian ethic, many people do).  I looked at him as though he had asked me whether winning at the track were the Reward to the Faithful, and said, “Of course not – it’s just the luck of the draw.”

            But my insomniac mind spun with these ideas, having little else to think about but my failing health and my business, which had faltered as a result of my absences.  There was no religious significance attached to the idea of Barabbas and redemption, hardly any moral to be learned and little philosophy – only the irony of  one man’s trial being greater than another’s, and that being the guy with the light end of the load seemed sometimes hard to take.

            Of course, the light end of this particular load was still heavy indeed.  I would live on, bearing the complications and having opportunities to change aspects of my life, trying to become happy at last.  Is that how Barabbas reacted?  Did he walk down that long hill in the light rain amid sunny patches, renouncing his thieving ways and resolving to live a truly happy life for a change, after a long-deserved vacation over in Hebron?

*                      *                      *

Interesting phenomena began to occur when the chemo really started to stack up in my body.  The nature of most chemotherapies is that they are progressive and cumulative – the further down the line you go with them, the more they remain in your body and therefore the more they’ll affect you.  I was getting my ass kicked with some true sincerity from the third through the eighth day – five or six full days of rat poison flowing through my system, twisting every human response into something quite unpleasant and scary, most accurately described as having a corpse shoved into your skin along with you.

            I watched the slow progression, as the man who lived in the mirror lost his thick head of hair, then his beard.  And then one day his mustache fell off.  His features became harder and more severe, and I was reminded of a description of an old cavalry officer by George MacDonald Fraser:  “He was a tough old file with a flinty gaze.”  And that was who looked back at me from the mirror – a tough old file, one I couldn’t recognise.

            So here I was, in the middle of my fifth cycle (having received chemo nine times) and the effects were just pounding me into the ground.  I’m told that it’s something like a woman’s period . . . and so much more.  I don't know if the effect can be blamed on hormones, but the wash of emotions I experienced was frankly stunning.  Profound feelings of hopelessness, despair, fear, weakness, dependence, cowardice – all the things which my life had supposedly girded me against – would overwhelm me at odd moments and set me spinning to a snappy little dance number played by Death’s soloist himself.

            There were times that I could hear Ironhand’s voice floating through the long tunnel from my childhood, repeating a joke he liked:  “I tell you:  first I was afraid I would die.  Then I was afraid I wouldn’t!”   I’d find myself longing for death as a way out of the pain, then I’d chide myself for such silly thoughts.  There was logic lost there – I was, after all, undergoing this pain to avoid death.  But the mind does funny things.  On certain days, in certain hours, it all just seemed too big to cope with.  I was reduced to the outlook of a little boy – a scared and vulnerable little boy, stripped of the years of training in becoming a man, in hardening himself to the difficulties of life.  I was a little boy who felt no shame in crying.

            And in those moments, somehow, I learned what strength is – not what we believe it to be, or what big-screen heroes show us, or what we want it to be or need it to be – what it is.  Strength is forever allied with faith:  the faith that we can get through, if we can just hang on.  The child can believe, and persevere, perhaps because he has not had all that training in becoming a man.

            And then the realizations start to come.  A clarity takes over which peels away all the happy horseshit and the clichéd beliefs we spoon-feed ourselves every day.  A man can look at the bare face of life and learn his lesson, without fanfare – and, if he’s lucky, without regret.

            To really accept being the essence of a man relates back to several archetypes, one of them the failing father, the man looked down upon by the son for not being as good as the son has become.  But how could he be?  How could the father – over and over throughout time – consistently be better than the son?  First, nobody would like the effects of that.  Objections would be raised.  And more important, it defies evolution.  Each generation must improve, if a species is to survive.   Sons must become more – and better – than fathers.

            And we can’t forget the partner and the mentor, both archetypes with very necessary social functions.  There is more to mating than the act of procreation.  The joining of two lives involves a variety of small relationships stacked into a larger, more penetrant and encompassing relationship with the same person – the partner.  And the mentor is a friend and teacher, one who guides the younger person into and through the confusing labyrinth of social and natural relationships.  These facets of adulthood – and, by extension, of manhood – are secondary to the relationship with self, but they are crucial for an individual’s healthy functioning.

            There is also the laudable trait of just being there, a solid post in the community to lend a hand when needed, or perhaps to merely be a witness – the good neighbor, another often-overlooked archetype.  The truth is that we don’t need as many heroes as we need men who will admire them.  And why do we admire heroes?  Because we’re ordinary.  As special as each of us might be, compared to heroes we are only ordinary.  So be it.  The descent into ordinariness is another facet of strength.

            The true strength is this:  We go through our lives, learning our lessons and taking our knocks, often never realising that this is all there is.  No redemption, no third act, no flashing moment of enlightenment:  just more of the same.  Just our own ordinariness, the diminishing strength, our incipient weakness, until we fade or fall away.

            And that’s what being a man is about.  That’s where a man’s true strength – his real beauty – is found.  To be able to keep pushing forward, knowing that there are no more accolades, no more big kills, no awards or golden moments, no endless summers.  To accept that and to stay focused on just reaching the goal when all the glory is behind you, to keep showing up, suited up, long after you haven’t got a double-play left in you – that’s the strength of a man.

            Maudlin?  Certainly not.  Delusional?  Maybe.  Foolish?  Probably.  But nothing flies for long without coming to ground.  We’re all going to be there, coming to ground, and each one of us must sooner or later face that certainty.  To glide gently in with grace and élan makes a much better story than to crash and burn, a million biker tattoos notwithstanding.

© 2012 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

Sailor Back from the Phillipines, Seeks Work:

Part 2:  Local Man Still Hopes to Bring his Family Home

Carter ‘Hop’ Cowan sits in a coffeeshop in Berkeley, taking a scant few minutes off from his day-long search for work and still wishing that he could have brought his family back to the States when he arrived a few days ago.  But the sea captain’s course back to his homeland was in some ways a rougher ride than crossing the Pacific Ocean from Cebu, Philippines, where he lived for years with his wife and 14 year-old son.

“I’ve come this far, really struggling to get back to the States so I can work and send money home for them – and now the work really starts.  I feel better though, since I’ve managed to overcome all the obstacles to get here, so I’m hopeful that I can do what’s needed to manage our lives here,” Carter says, looking very determined as he jots down ideas and possible leads for work.



Vivian & Carter in happier times

Carter is a tough and salty old hand, who spent many years in shipboard living, crossing the oceans, and bearing the crucial responsibilities of a ship’s captain (providing for and taking care of crews, passengers and vessels at sea).  And it seems that the pain of not being able to care for his family far outweighs the pain he still feels from wounds sustained when a boom slammed into his neck and head during a mid-Pacific storm that sunk the Empress, a yacht he was captaining.  He rubs his neck and groans, then turns quickly back to his list of prospects.

But his eyes soften when he speaks about Vivian, his 49 year-old wife who currently suffers the devastating effects of late-stage cancer.  “I hated leaving Vivian there, but it seemed the only way to get her family involved.  And my life wasn’t safe if I couldn’t pay our bills.  Some old injuries really kept me from some of the jobs I used to do, and I couldn’t keep a work visa in Australia.  It was humiliating to leave like that, but as soon as I can send money back, I’ll begin to feel better about the whole situation.” 

Broke from the medical bills, Carter faced a practically non-existent job market in the Philippines during the world-wide crash of 2008-2009.  Watching his wife suffer became too much for him, and friends worked overtime to get him back stateside by a lengthy campaign with the US State Department and the US Embassy in Manila. 

Impoverished by medical bills, Carter couldn’t even leave the Philippines til someone helped out with the money to fly 355 miles from Cebu to Manila, where the US State Department indicated that it might lend him the money for a ticket home.  His circumstances deteriorating daily, Carter was able to get several American friends to push through for him.  “Now I’m here in the Bay Area, and I’m aiming to find a job – and I don’t care that it’s a declining market.  There’s a job for me and I’m going to find it!”

Asked about his earlier claim that he’d “find a way to sail us back to the US if [his] boat were seaworthy,” Carter shows that tough and salty side.  “I’d never abandon a boat that could safely sail.  And taking a sick person across the ocean isn’t optimum – but I’ll tell you, I was desperate enough to try anything.  Yes.  Yes, I would have set out with nothing but water and plain rice, if we had enough medicine to make the trip.  I know the Pacific well enough.  But it’s a different course now – now I have to earn and send, earn and send.  I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it now.”

While it seems a long way off, Carter still is determined to get his wife here, along with their son Hopkins, who is a top middle-school student.  “Hopkins has seen what a catastrophe medical bills can be, and he’s studying hard to build himself a career that will allow him to care for the family he hopes to have one day.  So perhaps this whole incident has had a good effect somehow.”

Unable to raise enough money to help bring the family back, Carter’s friends turned to the US State Department and even contacted the Red Cross on his behalf.   They recently found some money held by the state of Virginia in Carter’s name, but that’s only a few hundred dollarsthat may take months to recover.  

Carter’s years at sea are evident under a gunmetal Berkeley sky – strength, tenacity and indomitability.  Determined to get his wife to the States for treatment of the cancer threatening her life, he’s tired but unwilling to give up for the day. 

“Got to get back to it,” he says, and heads out into the wind to walk to the marina to look for a job, any job – leaving an observer to wonder whether Carter still has the strength to keep going at his quest.

Readers can send advice, encouragement, or prayers to:  Captainswife44@hotmail.com.

Donations may be sent via PayPal to:  Captainswife44@hotmail.com.  

To read Part 1, go to March 13th.

#                      30                    #

David Hakim is an internationally-published journalist and award-winning author who has run several newspapers – and recently received a commendation for his short story That Man in the London Aesthetica Competition.  He can be reached at 415.378.6170 or dhakim@earthlink.net

Baby Boomers vs ‘The Greatest Generation’

Not long ago, a national magazine published an article called ‘The Worst Generation,’ contrasting the Baby-boomer generation of Americans (born between the end of World War II and the early 60’s) with ‘The Greatest Generation’ (those who fought in World War II).  The article set out to cast ‘Boomers’ into the shadow formed by their parents, attempting to show the quality of the latter group and the inferiority of the former.  I read that article with interest – possibly self-interest, having had the random luck of being born between the two arbitrary year markers set out to start a description of a huge segment of the population. 

Unlike many of my fellow ‘Boomers,’ I was raised by my grandparents, and so came to a fuller perspective on life, a perspective which might even be said is akin to that of the ‘Greatest Generation.’  Along with that perspective, there came some reasoning power, some thought-strength which alerts me when the entire thesis of an argument is flawed.

Comparisons of groups of people are ticklish affairs.  Even studies of large groups of disparate types of people can be hazardous to your thinking.  False premises abound for the unwary.  The first is that any group might be homogenous.  Boomers, whose birth-range covers 18 years, can’t possibly represent a single generation in education, cultural and social perspective, general emotional maturity, intent, or knowledge.  It is also an absurdity to assume that any subgroup of Boomers (grouped by other demographic factors than age) would be alike in many areas, because the rapidly-changing dynamics of the times preclude that one group of people can have the same outlook and focus as a group born so long previous.

Another false premise is that any segment of Boomers, grouped by a closer age-range, could represent a homogeneous group.  I went to school with Young Republicans, while I was a radical who opposed the Vietnam War on moral grounds.  But I didn’t hide in the Ivy Tower – I came from a Navy family and would have gladly served my country in a legitimate war that wasn’t a sham, both politically and morally.  In fact, it angered me that my military career was curtailed by our country’s egregious foreign policies, which only deteriorated as time went on until we find ourselves (under-equipped) in Iraq with no ‘exit strategy.’ 

Not every Boomer dropped acid, spurned lipstick, or burned a draft card wrapped in a bra.  To assume otherwise is the logical fault of painting an entire group with the same brush.  I grew up with echoes of World War II ringing in my ears, shooting capguns at ‘japs’ and ‘nazis’ before I even knew the meaning of those words (having learned a not-so-subtle racism from the much-lauded ‘Greatest Generation’).  A kid born in 1960 was an altogether different creature from my friends and myself, and the gap would become more pronounced as time went on.  That kid, or one born in 1964, would always know JFK as some kind of hero on a big coin, and was just three years old during the Summer of Love, never even contemplating actually having sex until the Sixties were long over.

The cultural drift many decry is the result of many things:  the growth of corporations, the spread of patents (both dating from the late Renaissance), the threat of annihilation, the experimentation with the economy – not to mention advertising, the true locust-cloud of our time.  It is actually thought itself which has changed:  attitudes toward life and other humans, and the manner in which each person faces the life bestowed.  As time has compressed, the number of things in the world has increased, and our institutions and ethics have had an effortful and unsuccessful time keeping up with those changes. 

A twenty-year generational grouping was probably perfect up back when time – and events – moved at a more leisurely pace. But with the coming of the 20^th century, things changed.  Long is the list the events which sped those changes:  telegraph, telephone, electric lighting, indoor plumbing, medical and other technical advances like airplanes, war-tanks and automobiles.   Perhaps it was fair to call a ten-year grouping a ‘generation’ in the Roaring Twenties, but it cannot be to do so now.  And to call an 18-year grouping a ‘generation’ is silly beyond belief. 

I also wonder why people continue to insist on unfavorably comparing the ‘Boomers’ with ‘The Greatest Generation’ – and vice-versa.  Is it some sort of age-old father/son competition?  Persons who do so are buying into a profound conceptual folly, taking potshots at a crowd which must include at least some of their heroes as well. 

Actually, ‘potshots at a crowd’ is almost the perfect metaphor for the entire Boomer situation – and for any argument that idealises one generation at the expense of another.  That afternoon at Kent State was the mirror held up to our times:  one group of kids (Boomers) shooting into another group of unarmed kids (Boomers).  Who put those guns in the kids’ hands?  Who trained them to shoot and to follow orders?  Who gave the fatal orders?  It is unlikely that Boomers could have done any but the last item, and improbable that they did even that.  Those green young National Guardsmen were schooled and molded by members of the ‘Greatest Generation.’ 

And the mirror doesn’t lie:  everything my ‘generation’ learned, we learned from our fathers.  We learned, we absorbed, we synthesized and extended.  Yet Boomers have been described as self-centered and self-aggrandising.  Self-centered?  The Fifties was a self-centered bath of personal comforts, prepared by those celebrating their survival of the ‘Great Depression’ and the War.  Self-aggrandising?  Isn’t aggrandisement of self the subtle heart of the incipient racism and classism of previous generations (extending back, in America’s case, to ‘the founding fathers’)? 

Each generation takes what it can take from the pool and gives what it will give – right, wrong or indifferent.  It isn’t so much about ‘us and them’ as about ‘all of us and these changing exigencies of our lives.’  There are good and bad elements in every ‘generation,’ and I hope that we do not teach purblindness to the generations with whose future thought processes we have been trusted.  It is the responsibility and duty of our teachers to teach openly and fairly, withholding personal bias in favor of seeking all the facts, to guide young minds to think for themselves – rather than accept the party line or the rantings of embittered politicos who happen to be their professors.  Only by keeping our universities free, by not trying to control content, can we hope to have future generations which will be better than we are, more able to cope with changes, more suited to the future which they will inherit.

But the whole argument about ‘Boomers vs The Greatest Generation’ is one big exercise in cheap generalities, careless thought and sloppy argument.  No wonder the larger fraction of the American public can’t think clearly, fed as they are on disingenuous pap, propaganda disguised as opinion, outright lies by their ‘leaders.’  Of course, that is what they want, after all.  The media continues to present them with a collection of half-baked sentiments masquerading as thoughts and ideas.  But I shudder to realise that our colleges and universities harbor professors indulging in carelessness, in the shoddy building of thesis and argument, resulting in enormous waste of creative power. 

But there is a third false premise in the pitting of one generation against another, a mistake made in almost every anti-war movie ever produced:  the demonisation of one side.  How can the audience really feel the waste and tragedy of war when that emotion is pushed aside by a stronger visceral reaction, one engendered by a discernible villain to hate?  By casting one ‘generation’ against another, we miss the entire point:  all generations have their noble few, their plodding many, their great and silent apathetic masses.  They all possess within them individuals who are greedy, the guileless, the cynical, and the idealistic. 

We are all of us human, all marked with the same tendencies and needs and wants.  These traits are part of the human psyche.  Victorian women in New York suffered lead poisoning from the white makeup they slathered on themselves in an attempt to ‘stay in fashion.’  Others bound their waists so tightly that they irreparably damaged their viscera.  Can we really believe that every woman of our grandmothers’ (or great-grandmothers’) generation would have spurned breast augmentation or liposuction – had it been safe, inexpensive and available to them?

It is true that recent generations were generally ‘given everything,’ where most previous generations grew up in harsher conditions.  Boomers were presented with opportunities at every turn, and had them thrust on us by the world at large and by our parents, who were admittedly affected by previous privations that could not be ignored.  Some kids were spoiled by their parents, while other parents took the absurd tack of emulating their kids, which often made them look ridiculous indeed.

The simple fact is that Boomers just became much more visible than any previous generation, as the spread of television and the globalisation of our culture thrust us into people’s living rooms every night on sitcoms, on the news, in movies and magazines and newspapers.  As a group, we became the center of attention, and don’t think some of us didn’t deliberately play to it for all it was worth.  But that situation too serves to distort the facts.  It made us seem more important than we actually were, a point readily made if one looks at one item generally taken to be an immanently ‘Boomer’ phenomenon – marijuana.  An overview of the recent history of marijuana reveals immediately that the Boomers as a ‘group’ still haven’t got the political clout to legalise the damn stuff after roughly 40 years of effort.  If the thesis of ‘generational homogeneity’ were even close to true, we’d all be buying ‘Boo’ or ‘Gauge’ or ‘Herb’ or ‘420’ cigarets at the corner store, paying a hefty use tax to the government.  But we’re not – what’s that about?

Like most of American life, it’s probably all about issues, and the truth is that there is no single ‘American public’ viewing (or deciding) the issues.  There are only a collection of ‘publics,’ overlapping, sharing interests in a broader or narrower fashion – but no one group can even begin to embody the contradictions of the ‘American’ mind.  Notions of homogeneity are nonsense – and even dangerous when included in ‘discussions’ in national magazines or on TV.

Some of us were fighting against the Vietnam action long before it threatened us – like ’64 or ’65, when we were still in public schools, not yet shaving, unaware of the true reality of that awful threat.  Without their kids providing a conscience – for whatever reason – most Americans might have shrugged off the atrocities in Southeast Asia as ‘the cost of doing business,’ just as they are today shrugging off the war in Iraq as ‘a necessary part of bringing democracy to the Middle East.’

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll weren’t invented by my ‘generation,’ though many of us often acted like they were.  And there were a lot of fortysomethings crashing – and throwing – parties in the Seventies.  And yes, many Boomers did embrace Reagan’s rapacity; don’t forget that $3 trillion debt – but they don’t represent the entirety of the ‘generation.’  And when we hear George W’s lectures on social responsibility, we have to remember that he personally has never shown fiscal responsibility and seeks to turn the entire country into Republicans through a variety of ‘parlor tricks’.

Of course, large parts of the ‘American public’ [not just Boomers] say about Clinton, “How dare he behave like one of us!”  Americans have a long and cherished history of pulling down their heroes for showing that they are human.  The ‘straight press’ has only sniffed the wind and adjusted course to become the pillory of American society that the tabloid press had once been.  We – all generations of Americans raised puritans in our schools, irrespective of religious affiliation – want our heroes perfect, impeccable, safe.  In other words, dead.  Anyone elevated to hero status has to die or fall, or America just won’t be happy.

Some wag called this new crop of little altruists as being ‘Letterman’s kids,’ ‘ironic but not cynical.’  Boy, does that miss more than one mark. Most of these kids wouldn’t know real irony if it bit them in the ass, and cynicism is endemic, though not the film-noir type with which we are familiar.  It is ironic too that some think of Letterman as some paragon of social attitude, that man described elsewhere as “a 52-year old … stogie sucker…workaholic perfectionist whose scabrous self-loathing and growling hostility are unmatched on network TV.”  Quite a choice for an ‘ironic but not cynical’ role model.  Letterman’s faux-courteous but mocking attitude has infected a lot of young people, especially males, who think that mocking something is the same as understanding it, or improving it.  None of Letterman's humor does anything to point toward improvement – it is puerile, smug and extremely self-satisfied.  He would do well to practice humility, since he does have so much to be humble about, sitting on the sidelines and jeering at others while offering no true perspective, no solutions, no answers.

It is truly ironic that the corporate models of late 20th-century America and the personal ethic of ‘captains of industry’ were all visited on us by the Harvard MBA Class of 1949.  Gordon Gecko was only the natural extension of a philosophy that has been building for more than 150 years – at least since Vanderbilt sent William Walker and his small army of mercenaries to ‘pacify’ Nicaragua in 1847.

The logical extension of that little escapade in 19^th-century ‘nation building’ – the School of the Americas – was not started by Boomers, any more than were the HUAC hearings, the Tuskegee Experiment or other heinous offerings of previous generations.  But to lay blame on an entire group is wrong – and false.  Invective against anyone not interested ‘in the lasting result of the creative process,’ or against anyone for ‘trampling on the rights of others,’ might be leveled against any at least one segment of any generation at any time in history. 

We’ve heard about the Civil Rights Movement continuing ‘without strong support’ from Boomers on college campuses.  Oh, really?  I was there, and stand witness to the fact that the college crowd was just about the only strong support in numbers that the movement had from ‘white America.’  Without a whole segment of one ‘generation’ behind it, the Movement might have missed the watchful eye of the Gatekeepers in the media [the Greatest Generation and the one previous] – and failed to gain needed political momentum in the white establishment.  

And who gave that generational group the sobriquet ‘hippie’?  Life Magazine.  The previous generation has been defining us since it taught us to walk.  In our schools, the previous generation taught us how to define ourselves – in its own language, not ours.  And this is a crucial point – every generation down through history has fought this battle with its predecessor.  Every generation has looked back and said “No,” only to look forward a few years later and said, “Oh, no.”  Somewhere in a cave is a pictograph that translates “Screw Og, my axe is better,” next to one that says, “Mog is grounded til saber-tooth season.”

For every argument pulled up to bolster a biased argument, there are countless others to support not only the opposing argument, but a true and objective picture of the times and of the sad, colorful, varied, sometimes noble, hopeful people who struggled through them.

Marooned Sailor Can’t Get Back from the Philippines:

Part 1:  Local Man Hopes to Bring his Family Home

 Carter ‘Hop’ Cowan looks across the narrow strait from his rural home on Cebu Island and wishes that he and his family were back in the States.  But the sea captain’s course back to his homeland is not as easy as crossing the sixteen miles over to Pacijan Island from just outside Danoa City, where he lives with his wife and 14 year-old son.

“It’s hard to believe that after so many years of living at sea and fending for myself – and taking care of my crews and passengers at sea – I can’t manage our lives here,” Carter says, his eyes scanning the horizon as if searching for a safe passage out of this situation. 

Carter with his wife and son in happier days

“This situation” involves a 68 year-old seaman (still afflicted by wounds sustained when a boom slammed into his neck and head during a storm that sunk the yacht he was delivering from Japan to California), his 49 year-old wife Vivian (suffering the devastating effects of late-stage cancer), their son Hopkins (a very promising student), Carter’s own boat (left in northern Australia after foundering there), personal financial ruin caused by mounting medical bills, and lack of work for experienced men in the Philippines. 

“I’d find a way to sail us back to the US if my boat were seaworthy.  But here I am.  Old injuries keep me from the jobs I used to do, and I can’t earn passage for three of us back home.”

The irony is that when it went down in the mid-Pacific, the Empress took Carter’s entire collection of Asian art, statues, carvings and antique swords and knives – and that treasure now lays under two miles of water.  “Hell, I know exactly where that boat went down.  I got the coordinates from the transponder, and if I could only get at that boat, there’s a small fortune there just large enough to pay my off wife’s medical bills and put us back on our feet.”

Now impoverished by medical bills, Carter can’t even leave the Philippines, because he doesn’t even have the money to fly the 355 miles from Cebu to Manila, where the US State Department might lend him the money for a ticket home.  And his situation just deteriorates every day.  “Even my neighbors here can be a threat to my safety.  Once they know that there is nothing they can get from you, you’re useless to them.”

Carter, who graduated Thomas Dale High School in Chesterfield Virginia before attending Virginia Commonwealth University in the late 60s, moved to Harrisburg Pennsylvania in the early 70s.  He later returned to Virginia, where he lived in Richmond, Petersburg, Blacksburg, and Arlington, until he followed a girlfriend from Richmond to California’s Marin County in 1978, where he first got involved with the sailing life.  One friend remembers that Carter immediately fell into seagoing as if he were made for it.  And perhaps he was made for the sailor’s life:  after about a year, he shipped out from San Diego on the Taiyo, bound for Tahiti. 

In late 1979, Carter served aboard the Taiyo as an officer on the Sir John Barrow Memorial Expedition, under command of Glen Christian, an English-born direct descendant of Fletcher Christian.  Tracing part of the route of the HMS Bounty, the group did extensive research on Pitcairn Island that was recounted in a later documentary alternately titled Island of The Bounty and Children of The Bounty

Late in 1980 Carter wound up in Ala Wai Harbor in Hawaii, working as chief engineer on the Good Fortune, a 62-foot Garden ketch that had lain untended for several years after a mid-ocean mishap that resulted in the death of a crew member.  “The sail covers were shredded, and the caulking on the deck had shrunk and disintegrated.  The engine needed a lot of work, every bit of teak was pale grey, and the hull leaked.  Our crew gave that boat a brand-new life.”

By 1982, Carter was back in Midlothian Virginia, where he had spent his childhood.  He spent some time with his parents in Richmond, working in a boatyard and seeing old friends from Midlothian and the Richmond area while waiting for his next billet.  The next year, he went back to sea, heading for the South Pacific.  And for the next 17 years, Carter sailed the world, working in boatyards and refurbishing yachts when he wasn’t delivering yachts for the rich and famous. 

Carter and his wife Vivian were married in 1986, and the next year he captained The Sol on an expedition that that exposed to the world the very destructive muro-ami fishing operation, in which huge industrial pounding devices were used to smash coral reefs in order to drive the fish living there into waiting nets.  (Muro-ami was a scandalous practice that not only resulted in deaths of children used as divers, but also smashed the living coral into small fragments and despoiled huge sections of the life-giving reefs – longlasting and practically total destructive effects that have since been condemned by fishery-management agencies worldwide.)  Carter’s vessel carried the film crews that obtained the footage used by in different reports by Geraldo Rivera, Barbara Walters and 60 minutes reporters in 1987 and helped secure the ban on the destructive technique in the Philippines.



Carter on shipboard 

With the money from the muro-ami expedition, Carter purchased the Matilda in 1988, keeping it in Midlothian’s Tichou shipyard.  He then sailed again for the South Pacific.  During this period he continued his shipboard work, at the same time earning certificates in Celestial Navigation, Maritime Engineering, and Piloting, until getting his Captain’s ticket.  And even then he continued educating himself in the ways of the wind and tides – and in the laws of the sea.

In 1999, he went back to Petersburg Virginia to heal after receiving some serious injuries during a storm that sank the Empress in the mid-Pacific.   Once healed, he returned to the Philippines, hoping to get back to yacht delivery and the life of a sea captain.

And life continued, much as it had before.  Carter and his wife raised their son Hopkins, now an honors student currently enrolled in 7^th grade at North Eastern Cebu School. 

But the fair weather that Carter had enjoyed for so many years on the waves seemed to slip away for Carter.  Work slowed down, circumstances grew leaner, until he would leave to take charge of other people’s boats, while his wife and son lived aboard the Matilda.  But when his wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Carter’s life began to really change – work seemed to slip away with the tide, and the international financial crisis quickly changed the world of deep-water sailing. 

And that was only the beginning.  Medical bills mounted while work disappeared altogether in the bad economy that hit the Philippines like a tidal wave, affecting tens of thousands of workers.  So Carter headed for Australia after hearing a rumor of work there.  At that point, more disaster struck, as his boat was disabled at sea.  Barely able to continue paying rent on the tiny house for his family, Carter limped his beloved Matilda (now disabled) into Elizabeth Bay on the northeast coast of Australia’s Arnhem land, not far from Darwin in the Northern Territory.  The little boat was almost beyond repair – but that didn’t matter, because Carter had no money for any repairs at all and was running out of options.

Stranded, Carter managed to find a job as a mechanic at a pearl farm outside Darwin.  Sending his wages home to his wife, he was able to acquire various Australian visas so that he could continue working.  He abandoned the Matilda, and worked hard in hopes of a sea change for the better.  But that change never came, and Carter’s visa expired, forcing him out of Australia’s better economic atmosphere.  He was quoted in a local Darwin news story, saying that he didn’t mind the long working hours there.   “Immigration had a minor heart attack when I got here but we were able to work it out.  Basically I’ve been here on various working visas.  It’s a worthwhile project, the people I work with are pretty reasonable, and I’d rather work out here where the air is clean and the food is good than to be working in a ship yard in Darwin.”

Friends tell how Carter influenced them throughout his life.  Robert O, who met Carter at Pacific Maritime Academy and sailed with him out of Ala Wai, says, “No matter how big a boat is, it’s still pretty small.  This guy’s always had a generous spirit and a sense of humor – the kind you need to make long hauls across the ocean.”

Longtime friend Debra B says, “He taught me many, many things.  I’d grown up spending time with my dad outdoors, hiking, hunting.  And Carter re-introduced me to my love of the outdoors.  We had a lot of outdoor adventures together.  My half-vegetarian diet is based on all the cooking he taught me to do.”

And it’s a funny thing about sailing folk:  they keep in touch and fall out of touch as the wind and the waves take them away and may or may not bring them back.  You may never want to drink with the ones you want standing beside you on the deck – and vice versa.  And even so, you’d welcome either one of them like a long-lost sibling when they bump into you in some far-off port of call.  But the hard thing is that you can rarely find them when you need them. 

Those few friends he’s been able to contact cannot raise the money needed to help bring the family back, though they’ve contacted the Red Cross and even have found some money coming to Carter from the state of Virginia (the complicated process of even gaining access to the files would take months of work from overseas).  

Still, Carter shows the tenacity and strength he’s learned from years at sea.  He’s determined to get somehow back to sea, get his wife to the States where she can get better treatment for the cancer threatening her life, and teach his son the ways of the sailor.  Then, while watching the way the wind changes the surface of the Strait of Cebu, he says to no one in particular, “Always wanted to make the circumnavigation – I’ve planned it over and over in my mind.  Looks like it may not happen now.”

Readers can send advice, encouragement, or prayers to:  Captainswife44@hotmail.com.

Donations may be sent via PayPal to:  Captainswife44@hotmail.com.  

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David Hakim is an internationally-published journalist and award-winning author who has run several newspapers – and recently received a commendation for his short story That Man in the London Aesthetica Competition.  He can be reached at 415.378.6170 or dhakim@earthlink.net

© 2013 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.