Canada

I finished reading"Canada" by Richard Ford last night. I'm not sure what it was about. Maybe it's about trying? The last words in the book are: "We try, as my sister said. We try. All of us. We try." When Lea Ann asks me what I'm doing, only after she hasn't heard from me in awhile, I say "I'm trying to write a poem." She says that I'm either writing a poem or not writing a poem, and she's right. You can't try to write a poem, as I understand the word try, just like you can't try to live your life.  You either write the poem or you don't, you live or don't live. However, if you are drowning you should try to breathe.

On the 10th Anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq (yesterday), I listened to a panel discussion about the subject on NPR. One of the participants was an "embedded" journalist who rode in an Army combat tank and reported on it for ABC News; one was a West Point-trained military man who'd seen combat in Iraq and later became a analyst for a progressive D.C. based think-tank; one was a former State Department officer, involved in policy-making in the Bush Administration. All three said they thought the war was a huge mistake almost from the very beginning.

How weird the notion of an "embedded" journalist seems now! It's not like Hemingway or dos Passos in Spain, reporting on the Spanish Civil War. To be an embedded journalist in the midst of a foreign country your own country has invaded seems like such a dangerously arrogant place to be, like somebody who thinks they're using somebody who's actually using them.

In the midst of finishing Neil Young's book, "Waging Heavy Peace," I become aware that Neil & Richard couldn't express Canadian sensibilities more differently. Richard's an American imposing America upon Canada and Neil's a Canadian,  in his case something close to a Buddhist, not trying to be anything other than a guy who writes songs and likes to restore old cars and is trying to remember as many of the good and bad things that have happened to him in his life as he possibly can.

And what if 100 years from now it becomes clear that Canada is a far greater country than the US? Maybe it wouldn't be that big of a surprise.