MISSOURI ON MY MIND

Missouri = Misery.

Have we come to the point where there will have to be "underground railroads" from Missouri and other states with draconian anti-abortion laws to states where abortion is still legal? A psychiatrist friend of ours says there will soon be drugs readily available through the Internet to women for safe stay-at-home abortions? His implication: no laws will be able to stop abortion; so stop worrying. "Excuse me, folks, but Amazon delivered my miscarriage kit and I'm getting up early tomorrow to induce one." 

The widespread availability of safe abortion-inducing drugs is no consolation because it allows doctors to skirt the legal, moral and social issues connected with abortion. If 1,000 prosecutors could send a letter to the Attorney General saying Donald Trump is guilty of impeachable crimes, certainly as many doctors can send a letter to the AG says abortion is a basic right. My doctor friend is, as far as I am concerned, defending illicit means to achieve what should be permissible ends. Drugs allow doctors to avert, rather than face and solve, a millennial predicament. 

Don't get me wrong. Drugs are an answer, but only after abortion is not only decriminalized--but de-stigmatized. Fetal heart beats, stowaway souls at conception--all of this is junk science; natal creationism, if you will. I've been studying scripture, trying to find where God, through one of his many messengers, forbade abortion--and I'm coming up as empty-handed as scripture-combers are empty-headed. 

I'm writing because I fear the steady, nearly unstoppable march of religious fascism. The Evangelicals don't just march to deafening drum beats; they march to imaginary heartbeats. Clarence Thomas even frames abortion as part of a monstrous eugenics crusade to kill undesirables like, you guessed it, black people in the embryo-stage. Crazy science borrowed from the heyday of genocidal eugenics back in the 1930s. 

ARE ABORTION BANS A FORM OF EMINENT DOMAIN? As it see them, anti-abortion laws are an attempt to claim eminent domain over women's wombs. States can forbid a woman from ownership of her uterus once it is "occupied" with an embryo--even if its presence is involuntary or unwanted. Note that recent laws forbid abortion even in cases of rape or incest. How ironic that a rapist can ben sent to jail but his victim is sentenced to an even worse punishment: full-term pregnancy. Indeed, a Michigan rapist was recently granted joint custody of his child. If pregnancy is a circumstance for there are no exceptions to permit abortion, this makes pregnancy a form of servitude. It is as unjust as any other form of enslavement. 

Okay, maybe I'm a libertine or a hedonist. But I think choice is a sacred right--at least, within a certain period of time when a woman can know and act on her own informed behalf and non-coerced will about her condition. That means at least a trimester--and, if left up to me, a helluva lot more time. Moreover, I think an abortion should be as easily chosen and scheduled as a colonoscopy. 

PREGNANCY AS PUNISHMENT FOR PLEASURE. Now you might argue that pregnancy is often an outcome of careless activity. Hence, there must be responsibility for this reckless behavior. The consequence of this activity--no matter if non-consensual or accidental--must be made inescapable. I would think any sane person would disagree with--indeed, repudiate--this punitive moralism. Sex is very often unplanned--a kind of spontaneous combustion of two libidos. Should a woman have to pay for an outcome of pregnancy? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Just as we have cooling-off, and change-of-mind, laws for major purchases, women should have laws that give there the right to second--and often first (when unexpected)--thoughts about pregnancy. It's that simple--and practical.

Perhaps, if we had better sex education and easier, affordable access to contraception, this whole issue would be moot. But behind the growing anti-abortion crusade is a looming crusade against contraception. What or who is to stop pro-life fanatics from introducing laws to ban contraception and criminalize vasectomies? Already health plans offered by companies whose owners are "religious" can deny employees contraception coverage with their health plans based on "belief." "My religion says all life is sacred and, therefore, you can't terminate a pregnancy." 

But, wait, things are getting worse as the pro-lifers arm themselves with a new specious legalism. Recently, a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that religious pharmacists or religion-owned pharmacy chains have a First Amendment right of "religious free speech" (an oxymoron if ever there was one) to deny customer requests for contraceptives. As bad, businesses and corporations are allowed to offer health care that restricts distribution of contraceptions. It is amazing how the Extreme Right has turned the First Amendment inside out and upside down. Just remember this: the fetal remains portion of an Indiana law was upheld by a 7-2 SCOTUS majority. Liberals joined conservatives to vote for this requirement to give full burial rights to fetuses. The same number upheld the right of "religious" people to deny their services to gays and others who practice prohibited acts and live ungodly life styles. "If I knew you were coming, I still wouldn't have baked you a cake."

BACK TO BASICS. As I see it, abortion should be a routine medical procedure, like an appendectomy, and, as such, be performed as widely and safely as any other medical procedure--and not just in isolated clinics but hospitals: public and private. For me, the whole debate over abortion has forgotten or ignored that sex is as much, if not more, for recreation than reproduction. Just ask any sex doll or porn-atronic Internet partner. Pregnancy is often an unplanned consequence of a vital, necessary and, at its best, profound pleasure. And it strikes me as an undue burden on any woman to force her to see pregnancy as a great moral dilemma. 

I could go on, but I wonder what you think. This is an issue worth discussing among ourselves. The hour is late. Sales of erectile dysfunction meds are at stake. 

The real heart of the matter isn't the faint heart-beat of the unborn but the ever-more-faint heart-beat of Disestablishmentarianism--the crucial separation of church and state and freedom FROM religion. The battle over abortion rights is just one in an ongoing war against the First Amendment. Fundamentalist religion is destroying America! 

GARCIA LORCA'S CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

Granada in 1936 was as dangerous as Gangland Chicago a decade earlier. So divided was the city by the Spanish civil war, it hadn't had a mayor in months. Bravely, Manuel Fernandez-Montesinos, the brother-in-law of renowned poet Federico Garcia Lorca, volunteered for the job. A week later, on August 18th, he was assassinated and Lorca was arrested the same day by Franco's goons, along with three other men, all of whom were killed by a firing squad within 24 hours. Although Lorca had Loyalist sympathies and was a known socialist, Franco had him executed for the capital crime (to fervent Catholics like the Generalissimo, that is) of "bestiality," meaning his homosexuality. The martyrdom still haunts Spain and every place where poetry is honored. (By the way, his grave has never been found.)

Recently, I have begun what I call "The Lorca Project," whose purpose is to find all music written as a memorial for the poet after his death. So far, I have found only a three-movement chamber-orchestra homage by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and a violin-and-piano sonata by French composer Frances Poulenc. I'm sure there is more. Desperately sure, I admit, because I cannot imagine a world bereft of numerous outcries over Lorca's murder. Some day soon, I hope to share my findings with you.

Meanwhile, with summer nearly upon us, and seashore vacations in the cards for those of us with credit cards, I give you a poem written while Lorca was in New York City, studying at Columbia University, in 1929-30. If you think Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a summit of surrealist protest poetry, Lorca's "Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude" is a base camp for this peak. Certainly, it will prep you for future climbs with its hallucinatory anger. Sometimes, I think surrealism this savage is as much shelter as catharsis. As Robert Creeley memorably wrote, "To look at it is more than it was." Surrealism was a way of both bearing and baring witness in a reckless throes of molten free association and the ecstatic custody of wild imagery. Lorca was there when the bottom fell out of American life, and New York City (in his case, Spanish Harlem) was one of the most bottomless pits of the time. As you read this, see if you don't hear adumbrations of Kenneth Patchen in the 1940s and the Bob Dylan of the mid-1960s when he was rock and roll's Lorca.

My own Coney Island memory: My dad used to dock his small, beloved Chris Craft (I think that was the brand) at Coney Island and I'd accompany him on fishing trips. I still remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper" with him on a portable radio in the summer of 1967 while the boat was at anchor and we were eating lunch. "What do you hear in this music that makes you love it so much?" he asked in slightly testy bewilderment. I was at a complete loss for words. I thought the Beatles would be something we could have in common. After all, Aaron Copland had proclaimed admiration for it. So had Leonard Bernstein. But he refused to share their enthusiasm. For the good of all concerned, we changed stations. By then, there was as much to divide as unite us. But those dwindling points of agreement are another story. I still remember both of us awed by the sight of Coney Island's Wonder Wheel (built around 1920)--both off shore and on land. It was like a monument to merriment and summer--despite already having read and loved Lorca's "Poet in New York". Returning to the poem after 50 years or so, the opening line made me laugh. I remembered the cliche, "It ain't over until the Fat Lady sings." In this case, it must be modified to: "It ain't begun until the Fat Lady is sung about." Lorca, I plan to spend a lot of this travel-less summer with you. You set the itinerary. You'll be a great sherpa for any trips to the heights (or depths). You know these terrains so well.

Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude (from "Poet in New York")

(Dusk at Coney Island)

The fat lady came first,

tearing out roots and moistening drumsticks.

The fat lady

who turns dying octopuses inside out.

The fat lady, the moon's antagonist

was running through the streets and deserted buildings

and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners

and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts

and summoning the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills

and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.

The graveyards, yes, the graveyards

and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,

the dead, pheasants and apples of another era,

pushing into our throat.

There were murmurings from the jungle of vomit

with the empty women, with hot wax children,

with fermented trees and tireless waiters

who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.

There's no other way, my son, vomit! There's no other way.

It's not the vomit of hussars on the breasts of their whores,

nor the vomit of a cat choking down a frog,

but the dead who scratch with clay hands

on flint gates where clouds and deserts decay.

The fat lady came first

with the crowds from the ships, taverns and parks.

Vomit was delicately shaking its drums

among a few little girls of blood

who were begging the moon for protection.

Who could imagine my sadness?

The look on my face was mine, but now isn't me.

The naked look on my face, trembling in alcohol

and launching incredible ships

through the anemones of the piers.

I protect myself with this look

that flows from the waves where no dawn would go,

I, poet without arms, lost

in the vomiting multitude,

with no effusive horse to shear

the thick moss from my temples.

But the fat lady went first

and the crowds kept looking for the pharmacies

where the bitter tropics could be found.

Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived

did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.

Federico Garcia Lorca, 1930

-Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White