Installation view of “José Faus: We Hold These Truths” at the Kansas City Public Library Central Library, featuring 10 new blackout poems using the Declaration of Independence as the starting point. (Kansas City Public Library)
Most of my life I’ve maintained a healthy cache of “Duhs!” in reserve, undeletable. I’m not easily swayed by promises of fortune or gifted entree into the mechanisms of the world, the secret formula that makes one a master of the universe. I take most things with grains of salt, like pure-rock-boulder-size-Himalayan-pink salt. I hear it’s pretty good, although too much of a good thing is bad for you.
Like working. Can’t say we weren’t warned — it’s right there in the language, the promise. Work hard and in the end, you will be rewarded. Implied is some trophy presented by the hands of those who oversee the game, because it is a game. In fact, they make up the rules by which you compete. And riddle me this: Why is there always a grey area where the rules don’t apply to all? There is a greater truth out there — it is not what you know but who you know.
A friend of mine tells a cautionary tale. He was looking to publish a book. He compiles a list of agents to query. He catalogues hundreds of them and dutifully spends a good part of the year writing and sending queries and waiting as he continues working on the manuscript.
Days turn to weeks, weeks to months, and more rejections than Pepe Le Pew. A fellow writer, in town for a reading, asks my friend if he would like to share the stage, read, and talk about writing. In conversation, my friend tells him of his homeless book. The writer offers to read the manuscript — tells my friend that he is a reviewer for a publisher. No guarantees.
You know the ending. The writer knows a friend that knows a press that might just be interested, and the rest is publishing history. I can’t confirm that the effort turned into a glorious success and the author wears the laurel crown of wealth. Nope, he struggles as most creatives do, but he does have a book that deserves to have an audience.
What does that have to do with the many rights under threat in this country’s rapid rush to an oppressive and authoritarian bent? Sometimes I like to start the day thinking clearly of the obstacles to be faced and how even the most certain of verities is dependent on conditions far out of our control. Take this pesky thing about rights.
They are embodied in the foundational document of this country, the Bill of Rights, important enough that prominent revolutionaries like George Mason, Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, threatened to jettison the Constitution rag unless they were recognized. So, in the spirit of equanimity (read expediency) they are enshrined in the holy foundational document. Such a declaration clearly settles all matters of rights inherent in a participatory democracy such as
this republican project.
I don’t mean to offend, and that is why I add republic to any discussion of democracy because some in the camp that should know better, shout “this is not a democracy but a republic.” Well Duh! it’s not like we are confusing underwear with a wash towel. It’s fabric crafted for a different purpose but come an emergency, underwear works as well in staunching an open wound as a wash rag.
So, let’s not quibble about meaning. There is a document with lofty language spelling clearly what the rules of government bequeath as rights to an individual and a collective. Interesting, though, is how in practice it comes back to a variation of the adage, it is not what you know but who you know, not what is promised to all, but who interprets for all.
I’ve had a complicated respect for institutions; that is what happens when one is foreign to the customs and mores of a new country. I believed the things I was told, and I embraced the institutional fantasies, fleetingly believing the leaders of our choosing. Once, I even met and shook the hand of the leader of the free world. There is a picture somewhere of us in the oval office with the right reverend “I am not a crook” Richard Nixon surrounded by us starry-eyed believers.
Honestly, I was too young to understand what was in front of me. I saw a leader who I was told was the most powerful man in the world. I was a boy with not even a hint of hair on my chin in front of a man that was surprisingly tall, and that nose. Years later, I am reminded of that visit when he appeared one last time as President. He looked so little on the screen, waving goodbye from the lawn of the White House as he left Washington to find comfort and redemption in anonymity.
He should have faced prison time. But such are the frailties of the rich and powerful that punishment, suitable and merited for the rest of us, is downgraded by laudatory reminders of how good a person they are, and how they have served their country, and how it is cruel to put them in the same space as hardened criminals. And I’m always left asking, is it so bad to steal a loaf of bread when hungry when the powerful steal blindly from the rest, shouting don’t do the crime unless you’re willing to do the time?” and they set the consequences.
The selective amassment of privilege is corrosive. When it comes to this Republic the damage may run deeper than any mix of Bondo can ever mend. I used to say, as a last resort, that when the safety net began to unravel, the Congress or the courts would step in and in their defined sphere of power do the checks and balances dance. How quickly they became wallflowers. Turns out they are incapable of the fragile lifting required of such a heavy proposition. This is the tale of a chronicle foretold a long time ago.
To govern justly bound to the dictates of those hallowed documents or any nation’s document is the promise. But in truth there has always been a flaw in the practice of governing. The heartbeat of it is a murmuration of grifters, in abeyance to the party, governing by the rule of exceptions.
Everyone is free except for … Everyone has a right to speak except for … Everyone is a citizen except for … Everyone has a right to equal protection while in the borders of this country except for … Everyone is free to worship or not in the manner that most represents their values except for … Everyone born in this country is a citizen except for … etc.
How does a lifeless, soulless, abstraction like a corporation suddenly accrue individual rights more powerful than the rights of breathing humans? How does “No man is above the law,” become “except for the self-proclaimed ‘most powerful dude in the world.’” Really? This is how the lifetime-appointed sages, paragons of blind indifference to coercion, bribery, power, cozy vacations and private charters, interpret the documents?
And now the Duhs! stream out of my cache, more Duhs! than I thought I had to give. Duh! Duh!, and double Duh! Again. And once more for good measure. Duh!
This feels only slightly satisfying, like being laid out on the gurney beneath the bright lamp while the man in the blue hairnet has you counting backwards from a hundred just before you are anesthetized on the operating table. To sleep, perchance to dream of what never was, but could’ve been if not for exceptionalism. Duuuh!
We Hold These Truths is currently on view in Guldner Gallery at Kansas City Public Library, 14 W. 10th St. through May 3.
