Paradise demeaned
By Peter Meinke
Published January 30, 2005
Every few years I resolve to read Paradise Lost and, sinner that I am, never finish it.
For one thing, Milton's sonorous sentences kick me off into thinking long thoughts, making me wish he had written haiku instead. (Sing Heavenly Muse / of men and gods compressed in / Readers' Digest Books - well, maybe not.)
This time, I couldn't even get past the opening lines: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe . . ..
I thought at once: That's it - the follow-up that no one wants to follow.
In the Bible, all hell breaks loose after Eve bites the apple. Actually, the Bible and Milton (1608-1674) both say "fruit," though most of the stories we know identify the fruit as an apple. The reason may be that the Latin word for evil is malum, and the Latin word for apple is also malum, making me think that a bad apple could be a malum malum.
You can see why I never finish anything.
Anyway, in the Bible, the knowledge of good and evil, sexual shame, eviction from the Garden of Eden and the painful history of our world follow in inexorable order because Eve decides to bite the malum: If she hadn't bitten, those things wouldn't have happened.
President Bush's decision to attack Iraq - like Eve's, a moral choice - has led to all the chaos that followed, and still follows, spreading like an oil slick over more and more lives, with no end in sight.
America's a pragmatic country: Okay, he's done it; too bad, but we're over there, so let's get on with it.
America's also a patriotic country: Our soldiers are committed, rightly or wrongly, and their bravery deserves our support.
And America's a religious country: God has chosen George Bush and America to bring freedom and democracy to the infidel.
These are tough beliefs to argue with, though as an obscure poet has written, How can we wonder why the world's in flames / when every faith implies an infidel / and every heaven sends someone straight to hell?
Still, as in Paradise Lost, we can observe that one thing leads directly to another; there's something called Responsibility, a trait in short supply these days (in those days, too: Adam blamed Eve, and Eve in turn blamed the Serpent, but God - unlike our electorate - wasn't fooled and booted them all out).
The dead in Iraq would not be dead: Their lived lives would be washing in waves around their friends and neighbors and colleagues, in America as well as Iraq. Abu Ghraib and the other abuses - imagine what must happen off-camera! - would not have happened, the anti-American hatred spurred by these atrocities would not be surging. The beheading of kidnapped civilians in Iraq also wouldn't have occurred, nor the anti-Arab emotion that has grown here because of them: "Look at those monsters!" we cry. "They deserve everything we do to them!"
This war is demeaning both societies, and it has completely wrecked Iraq's. First, Hussein brutalized Iraqis in the name of State Security; now the "Coalition Forces" brutalize them in the name of . . . democracy? How many Sunnis are left to vote?
Even in her tragic death, the saintlike Margaret Hassan remains instructive. She loved Iraq and the Iraqi people, and she said, months before she was abducted and murdered, "There's a breakdown of almost everything. This city (Baghdad) was a very safe city. There was stealing, but not acts of violence against people."
In the name of freedom, Bush has brought carnage, and we, to bend a phrase from John le Carre's latest book, are the "proverbial innocent bystanders."
Elections or not, getting out can only be costly and painful. Right now, we should be spending the hundreds of billions we're pouring into the destruction and (dubious) rebuilding of Iraq to support our own poor and uninsured, pursue bin Laden, prevent Afghanistan from becoming a narco-country and help ease the suffering caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami.
We also need to bring our old allies back in and ask for their advice and their help.
Adam and Eve, in their equally unsolvable predicament, reached out for each other (presumably consisting of 100 percent of those available). At the end of Paradise Lost, as they head toward their uncertain future, they stop weeping: The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.
The operative word there is "choose."
Peter Meinke's poems about the two St. Petersburgs have been translated by Ilia Foniakov, along with some other of Meinke's poems, and are being published in Russia in a bilingual book called Maples and Orange Trees.