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I am always struck by the power of images, especially in juxtaposition. I give you the following fragments of history with no comment:



Ben Shahn WWII Poster
Abu Ghraib Prison Photo

The Geography of Doubt

Tonight I came, filled with doubt, down over the hill and into the valley. But California is a doubtless territory; it was settled by, and has settled into, brazen assurance. The tall slender palm trees and the tall slender cypress trees thrusting into twilights of gold and sapphire and rose are quite certain of themselves. The tall trees and the mansions on spiders legs above Mulholland and the women too young to drive the cars they do, and too rich not to, are all part of the Siren’s song. It’s why I was drawn here, despite the snarl of wolves. If liberty is the possibility of doubt, I might be the only free man in Los Angeles.

I hear the snarling, I think, more readily than others. I doubt the landscape. Vladimir Keilis-Borok who in recent years predicted two quakes with great accuracy, one in Japan and one in San Simeon, has predicted a Los Angeles area quake before September 5 of this year, though no one seems to be listening. But Californians have studiously learned to isolate doubt. We know there is no tectonic stability in our Golden State just as we can not really believe in an everlasting golden adolescence. But an admission against our interest is not doubt. It is blind hope and faith that our faults will not expose themselves while we’re still in the game.

“It’s a hundred and eight degrees at the top of the hour in the Old Pueblo, and here are the Buckinghams with ‘Kind of a Drag.’”

Heat rises, so I was taught. But in Tucson, where I have spent the last few days, the heat presses down. My shoulders become slack, my spine bends, my feet become heavy. It is no wonder that every corner here seems to boast a podiatrist and a chiropractor. I move slower and I begin to realize that the slight and annoying odor that seems to be everywhere is really the smell of my own mucus membranes drying out.

I left Tucson three years ago and I have to admit that the way things change concerns me. I don’t resent change itself, but I am moved to melancholy sometimes by its direction. Case in point: The façade of the El Con Mall. The El Con mall was built in the 1960’s, a study in that sort of desert mid-century modernism that was half Palm Springs and half Brasilia. It replaced the old El Conquistador hotel, a 1920’s Spanish Style behemoth where my mother spent her high school graduation dinner ogling Peter Lawford from across the hotel dining room. The cycle of life continues as the El Con Mall, like the El Conquistador hotel before it, is surpassed by trendier competitors.

Now, tacked onto the modern front entry of the El Con Mall there are a pair of awkward stucco-over-wire Mission-style towers and a Spanish arch. Perhaps someone thinks giving this mall a mission will draw in customers. It is an apt metaphor for an age in which false traditional virtues hide a decaying modernity, a modernity which itself held out the promise of breaking free from ossified traditions.

I’m not sure I would have noticed this kind of discord if it had crept up on me. But coming back to town, I notice such things. When I go to visit my old neighbors I receive another surprise. I remember the couple across the street from me as a model of happiness: friendly, funny, hospitable, smart, sincere, beautiful people, with a child I actually found bearable. Now they’re separated. All around me relationships are burning away like wildfires in the mountains above Tucson, and nothing seems to flame up faster than dried-out love.

The heat pushes down. The air above the desert writhes trying to escape the sun. The rippling atmosphere blurs the vision. Missions, modernity, marriage; they drift incorporeal like a mirage.