if but only they in Ohio knew

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 17:46

…Just another beautiful day here in Villette la Morte…
The weather has me thinking of spiraea bushes in bloom in Ohio which I think occurs in latter May. When I think of spiraea blooms with their popcorn like blooms on boughs of what also looks like late snow. I think of tall grass, trees with big trunks and huge canopies, wooden houses, porches, rocking chairs and porch swings.
Peeling grey painted porch floor boards where a cigarette pack and a Zippo brand lighter lay abandoned next to a pair of coffee cups (not mugs). Proper cups which sit filled full cooling sweetened with cream and sugar – unintentional café au lait but they didn’t know that then there in the North. That coffee cup resting in its place on a saucer on the porch floor boards along with an elegant and very tarnished silver spoon lying nearby… I remember these familiars to my grandmother and great aunt Ethyl - Ethyl as thin as her sister was fat - whose liver spotted brown hands covered with a transparent skin through which I could see veins and tendons similar to the artwork on the cracked and delicate porcelain coffee wear. Siamese Cats - twins of a sort – named Buttons and Bow's - I don't remember them as two separate cats because they looked alike and were never near each other. Buttons died early so I didn't notice. Buttons and Bow's being in my kid brain one cat who later we called Ms Bow's - a cat called buttons seemed appropriate - cats eye reminding me of buttons blue green tigers eye buttons. I made no association between buttons and bows being sewing items. Bows was like a name that only meant that cat Bows. It didn't refer in my mind to shoe laces or ribbons. Miz Bouwz I suppose was enough. Looking back at my geriatric women hero's from my childhood and seeing that matronly domestic associations for cat names now seems simple minded and pitiful in a way. So I don't choose to remember my dead hero's in that more honest light. I instead think of mystical cat button eyes and the feminist Miz Bouwz with a name without sentimentalist femininity. Miz Bouwz liked to hunt and kill mice for sport and for the sadistic desire to watch her prey suffer for amusement before being disregarded. This is the fierce association I have of the dead women from my Appalachian Irish origin East Ohio Clan.

All of what I remember and miss about Ohio is missed by Ohio herself from beneath the tarmac and stripped mall foundations of concrete and capitalist conspiracies of legislated and legalized greed.

You can never leave anywhere in North America because it all gets paved over while you are gone.

You just must accept the Beast of Capitalism and its familiar of the Concrete Conspiracy and find what’s left which is only a memory of someone else’s forgotten memory anyway. No place is real anymore.

Less and less I suppose of anything is.

When I remember the media circuiting through our collective propagated electronic thoughts the idea that Bin Laden had masterminded, like a board game, the misplaced and misused events of what we know as Nine-Eleven – when Bin Laden was shown saying in sphinx like cat like elegance or having said with subtitles that American will become a shadow of what it once was. Well, the thing is Bin Laden couldn’t have helped to reduce America to a shadow of itself because America already was a shadow of what it once was. America had reduced itself to a shadow of what it once was. That sad fact is what many cannot bear to admit so better blame been hidin’ too long bin Laden.

Don’t believe me? Then look to the buildings of your county seat if you even know you had one or the state of your state’s statehouse. Look to the streets and avenues of your home place. Only ask yourself where has your once grand High and Main streets gone: Out in the rural squalor to be a tarmac retail snake pit experience.

Every obsessively patriotic American should be required to spend a weeks holiday in downtown old town Detroit City for a reality check. So goes Detroit so goes the Nation.

It took the media sacred events of Nine-Eleven to help American’s just to begin to wake up to the fact that somewhere in the latter half of the twentieth century America became a shadow of what it once was – and worse what it once stood for. Thank the trans-national Military Industrial Complex made up of crooked politicians and even greedier corporate exec’s. Bin Laden just opportunistically took advantage of what already was which we all failed to see since Korea and Viet Nam through to not just one big family trip to Iraq but an ongoing and unending ghastly sequel. And now those events past and present have become a memory of a memory and the original event has been misplaced and forgotten - an event that has become a shadow of what it once was. Like New Orleans has become yet another shadow of what it once was. Like Ohio has been for too long a memory of someone else’s forgotten by old age dementia memory.

Read Jean Baudrilliard if you can of Simulation and Simulacra, incomprehensible at first but much less dangerous to the public than that other French philosopher by the name of Sartre. One Ohio virtue is those two writers don’t get read much there.

Ohio and the present day Ohioans no longer remember what they once were. Hard working, well or at least adequately educated and extremely generous folk who longed for a better life who could fiercely speak out if not all out fight in defiance of any form of legislated cruelty…

What Ohioan remembers their past life as determined and dignified guardians of the only form of Public transportation Ohio has ever known – known as the Underground Railroad? The Ohioans and their Old Ohio history was as colorful as the land of the Ohio Territories (the rowdy old, old west that became east of the commercialized old west we collectively remember as a Warner Brother’s cartoon) - that a slave owning President Jefferson wrote of – like love letters to a southern colored mistress livestock property whom he might have lusted for and nurtured and fucked with consent – and like the forgotten wax recording Empress of the Blue’s Bessie Smith so eloquently tied to remind us – that ain’t nobodies business but their own if they do or if you do. I prefer this image of a memory’s memory for Ohio. A politically incorrect black mammy or interracial colored girl with fair curves under beautiful café au lait skin and passionate mysteries modestly concealed, just barely beneath all that Ohio humidity. Fierce defiance with a thinly veiled tribal aboriginal pagan woodland and prairie people’s past civilization lost magic and ritual for surviving the extreme four season’s weather shifts and temperature disparities.

Where did all Ohio’s green go? Now only found on chemically enhanced suburban lawns upon which chemically enhanced suburban youth ignore. Where have the rolling hills gone? Where did the wetlands go – and the migratory birds that depended upon them? Why did all of that same ecosphere the Ohioans depend upon have to be traded to become accessory building parts for meaningless wars in other places on a different side of the planet?

For wars that were fought
For lies to conceal
The profits we made
By our corporate zeal
To employ the voters back home
Who for the price of their laborers’ careers
Many would have to send their son’s as a sacrifice for
Just to feed the rest of the family

This is how the Ohioans stopped being known as Defiant malcontents.
And this is how the Ohioans became Complicit and thus assimilated to what became in truth the economics of Northern Aggression Inc.

There is not one single war in the history of this planet between men that was ever finished or that ever stopped burning in the hearts of men. Every war in some form or another is still burning somewhere on some part of this planet – thriving on blood – like an Anne Rice virtue-less Vampyre.

The Ohio in the history books is made of up of strong men and women with backbone who had they known their very jobs would have cost them their sons those old Ohioans would have chucked their jobs and their homes to keep their sons out of Viet nam or Iraq.

Ohio has always been a hotbed, a loathsome sore spot for the powers that be. Defiant Ohio could start that fearful spark of a revolution of the grass roots sort that might reshuffle the corporate war hawking military industrial complex… Those incorporated Northerly Aggressors that might sell the products of war for unfortunate places to buy if Ohio would just realize the planet is at present a much more peaceful place than all Ohio will ever willingly admit. No one in Iraq or Afghanistan or Cambodia or North Korea wanted what they got from the American’s and neither did the American’s but nobody in Washington asked the Ohioans – because the Ohioans were too busy finding the trappings of discount shopping in the retail snake pits of this present shadow of what America once was - before Bin Laden that enigmatic Arab pop star shot across the media’s sky and showed us what we Americans couldn’t see before us in our very own back yards.

We have only ourselves to blame for the America that is a shadow of what it once was for our grand parents and great grandparents and all the men from all those wars who died so that we could what? Shop and sit in traffic and set up house in cheap plastic housing?

If we could show todays average Ohioan in their present material lifestyle to any of the real hero’s of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, The Great War, The Sequel and its ever the moreso hallowed and sacred Holocaust – if we could show to the service men and women who died in those places – what they died for as seen today in any corner in Sleepy Ohio – methinks they would have burned their drafts cars in dignified defiance and run south or north across those arbitrary and insane invisible boundaries that fence off the Majesty of North America into shameless, shameless greed.

If our Ancestors buried under the surfaces of North America could come back and judged us
What would they say?
About what we have done
To what we were given
And what we took
From a people we didn’t even recognize
As our own humanity

I fear if the dead came back like old Ezekiel’s bones are gonna rise again – them bones, them bones, gonna rise again. If they do – I’m running as far as I can from America because they’ll be carrying the weapons of war we produced to kill for profit to judge us with for our misuse of the land we stole to discard as a resource commodity to exploit.

What will the dead say about the grand old buildings they left which we discarded for the plastification and synthetic oil product based lifestyles we built? The dead beneath the soil of North America will ask where the prairies went, where the forests went, where the cut and filled hills and valley’s went. Where rivers and streams now damned for electricity and water went. Where the quiet went – where the night sky and the stars went… Where the firefly’s, crickets and June bugs of Ohio went – not to mention the bee’s much less the swans…

Sometimes North America is too big to grasp – and that is what Ohio is for. It is an example of where we were and where we have gone. Sadly it is a polluted misused sodomized without consent, old and forgotten state with trapped souls inside whose only sense of freedom is the trap of the consequences of commodity making negative freedom as a mass control tactic.

Imagine a Ohio that not many remember – not even the Ohio or prairie and woodlands and wetlands that its indigenous tribal civilizations dead remember and long for. That Ohio I long for but can hardly even imagine. Start to imagine the Ohio from before the great automotive age.

Remember wooden or brick houses set along lonely dirt roads. The Ohio sun screened by the natural protection of green leaves. Remember Ohio woodlands in autumn colors. Picture that wooden porch concealed modestly behind Spiraea bushes with a view on one side of tall prairie grass and on the other woodland and wetland contentment. Remember the trees from the virgin forest of North America harvested to make clap boards that would still shelter defiant, loud mouthed, generous, good hearted, contrary, people with barely concealed colorful lives. Lives not confined beneath the hills and valleys with ancestors of more ancient and hospitable hosts who knew how to keep the land free from the likes of us from this present an appalling futurama drama.

Who remembers Ohio this way – sadly too few – if but only they in Ohio knew.