Summer and smoke
As Canada’s ashes turn the sky yellow, and New York City glimmers dimly in the haze, and we chew the dull bone of climate change, I see the black smoke from the burning tanks in Ukraine.
A reminder: As we insist freedom is best served by the dead bodies of schoolchildren, and the firecracker poppoppoppop of gunshots at a Chicago birthday party, the Ukrainians are living our proudest dreams of refusing to surrender.
Yeah. John Wayne-ski won’t give up the Alamo-ski. Meanwhile, we fight off an Arabic invasion of professional golf and battle fiercely to push the illegal immigrants back from the sacred soil of America’s salad fields.
I’ve written before that Ukrainians embarrass Americans because they are doing what we say we’d do, but we don’t, not as long as there is any fentanyl left in the baggie, not as long as we have one life left in the “Emperors of Fligl” video game.
They fight, we roar. They battle, we brag. We weepingly remember the heroes of D-Day as though they were us, which they are not. At best, they were our fathers. More commonly, they were our grandfathers. They “stormed ashore” at Normandy, we write, because even the worst newspaper writer knows to use “stormed ashore” in a D-Day story. I’ve used it myself. It makes the editor think you’re a writer.
It’s history by abbreviation. World War II is “stormed ashore.” The Korean War doesn’t exist. Vietnam is “they were never welcomed home.” World War I is gone. The Civil War is when “white people died to free Black people because white people are always doing useful things for Black people.” The Revolutionary War was “our first big struggle to keep our guns when big government tried to take them away.”
Dr. Seuss could have made it rhyme, but by God, he couldn’t have made the messages any simpler. Seuss died just about the time his writing became the standard for driving a message home.
They got no time for rhymeskis in Ukraine, not unless you wanna rhyme “doom-ski” with “boom-ski.” They’re down to blood on blood and bone on bone, and the bright edge of the knife, dead babies and grannies with burnt, blackened skin.
We ought to love the Ukrainians. They are the American belief in standing on your hind legs and fighting ‘em off with a Bowie knife and plain guts.
Instead, the charitable collections go slow, the public outrage is dimmer than the lights of New York seen through yellow haze, and we quaver that the money we spend on Ukraine “should go to our homeless veterans.”
And that is the great yell against every dollar spent on things we don’t like. You can buy a bazooka for every cop on a suburban police force, and no one says a word. Try to buy menstrual supplies for a 12-year-old poor girl in Oklahoma, and boom-ski, “Why isn’t that money being spent on homeless veterans.”
And so, we storm the beaches of Tulsa from our recliners.
Not long ago, I watched about two dozen men in desert camouflage clothes (much of it acquired secondhand) as they drew themselves up in battle formation and prepared to storm ashore onto a drag queen reading at the local public library.
Unlike our grandfathers at Normandy, the boys in the secondhand camouflage failed. The drag queen’s defenses held, and she giggled her way through a book about a rainbow-colored dinosaur who just wanted to be himself even though he wasn’t like the other dinosaurs. The invasion force took off in their pickup trucks, neither sad nor wise.
“Drag queen-ski?” says the gay Ukrainian soldier as he waits for the next attack. “Maybe after the war.”
Dion’s latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called “Devil’s Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America.” It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.