Satire loads up on rich targets
Review: Ben Fountain. Billy
Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. New York : Ecco, 2012.
Isbn 9780060885595 0060885599
Michael Sedano
It’s about time someone came up with a good satire of the Bush Iraq war years, something Ben Fountain accomplishes in his Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. It's a grand satire that should lead readers to ask what is the value of a soldier's life? Why are our troops not yet home?
Billy Lynn is an east Texas boy, one of those rangy cowboy
types with a keen mind and a Texas public school education. In other words,
Billy’s not dumb, he’s just been raised that way. Trouble is, a keen mind keeps
Billy looking at context and searching for something that looks normal to him.
Here he is at nineteen years old touring the nation to strike
up enthusiasm for Bush’s Iraq war. Mired in a sea of people slapping his back
or teary-eyed to meet the hero, people treat him like an object. The big shots
who come on to Billy’s heroism—“you’re the one with the medal”—don’t give a
moco for Billy but they’re proud that it was one of their own, a Texas boy, on teevee,
fighting off an attack, Billy the guy with a soldier dying in his lap. Such
heroism, sacrifice, killing, makes them proud that nina leven is getting some payback and pose for a picture on my
iPhone.
The welter of stilted conversations, ritual greetings, and
gushing admiration boils down in Billy’s experience to the question Fountain
puts in his mind. “Why do you do this for us?” Billy, stunned in realizing this
owner’s suite hell is normal to these people, is shaken to the core with no answer.
To his infant nephew he sends a message: if
I’m not around you tell him, I said don’t ever join the Army.
Billy’s Sergeant Dime has the best lines in the story. Dime
is a scion of the 1% who’s chosen a decent man’s life as a grunt. His life lets
Dime stand toe-to-toe with rich guys and even Norm himself. Dime does the
thinking Bravo follows orders. Billy
doesn’t have the words so it’s Dime's role to provide a rant when it’s called
for, as when a pig of an oil man imagines how hard a combat soldier’s life
treats him.
“That’s not it at all!
We like violence, we like going lethal! I mean, isn’t that what you’re paying
us for? . . . . I love every one of
these mutts like a brother, I bet I love them more than their mommas even, but
I’ll tell you frankly, and they know how I feel so I can say this right in
front of them, but just for the record, this is the most murdering bunch of
psychopaths you’ll ever see. I don’t know how they were before the Army got
them, but you give them a weapons system and a couple of Ripped Fuels and
they’ll blast the hell out of anything that moves. Isn’t that right, Bravo? . .
. . So if your family’s oil company
wants to frack the living shit out of the Barnett Shale, that’s fine, sir,
that’s absolutely your prerogative, but don’t be doing it on our account.
You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir,
and we’ll keep on killing.” (66)
Fountain sets his plot in motion around a movie deal. Here’s
another side to Billy’s fundamental questions about this war, what is a soldier
worth?
A producer has latched on to the Bravos, but he cannot close
a deal. For the soldiers, there’s no money up front, but once a star and studio
climb aboard, the producer has the men thinking they are worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars each. For working class men, the sum has value as mere
fantasy, like hooking up with a Dallas cheerleader.
Each of the men of Bravo squad, except for SGT Dime, escaped
a crappy life by picking up the recruiter’s inkpen. As excited at the prospect
of movie money as getting a lapdance from Beyoncé, the Bravos occupy whatever moment
is at hand. They depend on their Sergeant, and Billy, to see the deal through.
Fatalistic, they’ll take whatever someone’s willing to pay.
That’s a good choice for Fountain. The author doesn’t have
to develop those characters beyond a gesture or a feel-good experience. When
the tour is over, Fountain and the Army are sending them back to Iraq, where
such questions--why and is it worth it--are absurd.
The title comes from the end of the novel. After a grotesque
freak show in Norm’s suite, the Bravos descend to another hell, the march into
a halftime spectacular where their duty calls on them to serve as mannequins in
uniform to Destiny’s Child.
Chaos ensues and the Bravos have to fight their way out of
this support the troops hell. Now Fountain
plays his stroke of pure cruelty to the hilt. The Bravos survive another ambush
in the parking lot then load into the white Hummer headed directly to the airport
and the return flight to Iraq.
Billy Lynn’s Long
Halftime Walk delivers the same flavor irony Charlie Trujillo flavors his Dogs From Illusion about Vietnam
Veterans. Trujillo’s infantrymen return home to their old jobs picking melons
and being cheated by their boss. Fountain really twists the pinch here, putting
the Bravos through this crap then sending them back into it with the best offer
for their lives. In a delicious scene, Billy watches Dime unmask super-patriot Norm.
To support the war, Norm’s willing to make a $30 million dollar movie and pay
each Bravo $5500.
This is plain mean, Mr. Fountain, but a stiletto of a point.
$5500 is less than half the value of a GI’s life insurance policy. Every
soldier has that insurance number engraved in active memory. This is how much I’m worth. A living Bravo
is worth half what a dead Bravo’s worth. Oh say can you see it now?
One mark of capable satire is its ability to lead readers to
ponder what makes authors and characters passionately angry? Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not
a war story about heroes and duty. These guys are soldiers so we know they will
follow orders.
Fountain wants to inquire into the reader’s duty.
What is it, in us, as United States Americans that we allow
people like Bush, and Norm and his friends in the owner’s suite, to send out
boys like Billy and Mango to kill and die in our name? When people say “I support
the troops,” this is what that looks like in dollars and real world common
sense, fifty-five hundred dollars for you, millions for me.
So why do we ask them to do it, soldiers?
Much as I enjoy the novel, Fountain leaves me with an equivocal
enthusiasm for the deserter ploy, and the constant distraction built into "Billy" as an allusion to
Billy Pilgrim, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse
Five. Il miglior fabbro.
Fountain sets up a red herring using as support Billy’s
asshole father, abused mother, children, and a sister’s plea that Billy desert.
Had the author carried through this bit of cheap agon, it would have been the
worst case of character assassination since the upcoming presidential election
against Obama. There is never a question that Billy or any Bravo would desert,
but it sends up a smokescreen for readers who don’t see that not
happening. Billy is not going to desert, the Bravos are not going to quit.
It’s up to the nation’s Rubens to support the troops by
voting the Norm tipas tipos out of power and bring the troops home. Ruben’s the chicano food worker who
invites Mango and Billy to share a joint on a private stadium overlook. The two
soldiers and the vato pass the number, offering a singular measure of Ruben’s
admiration for the troops. Here, Fountain’s
storytelling skills rise toward the sublime. When Ruben explodes outraged learning
Billy and Mango are headed back to Iraq, the scene brings tears to a reader,
realizing this is what “support the troops” looks like, helpless outrage.
The hallmark of satire is irony. And that’s irony.
Eraldo Lucero. Echoes
of a Distant Past. Screaming Eagles. Vietnam War Memoirs, 1969-70. Pena
Blanca NM: Eraldo Lucero, 2012.
Isbn 9781466360396
Michael Sedano
Back in 1969, a month after the Army sent me to live atop a
Korean mountaintop missile site, the Army sent Eraldo Lucero to Vietnam.
There,
the Eleven Bravo—Army code for a grunt—from New Mexico would earn the Combat
Infantryman Badge and other medals during a year humping hills and jungles,
eventually finishing his tour on a pair of remote mountaintops in the final
major battle of the Vietnam war.
Lucero’s memoir provides a fit counterpart to a reading of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
Where
violence and warfare come with a literary glitz, the writer struggles not to
glorify war, killing, and the death of friends. Fountain doesn’t make it, his story, and not having been a soldier, constrains his fingers, leading to a glorious accounting of the attack and rescue caught by Fox teevee news cameras and making Billy and the Bravos heroes.
In recent US war literature, Chicana
and Chicano writers are among the most effective, including Vietnam Veterans
Charlie Trujillo, Dogs From Illusion;
Alfredo Vea, Gods Go Begging; Daniel
Cano Shifting Loyalties.
Echoes of a Distant
Past reads like Lucero and you sitting down and telling each other’s
stories. This is mine, he says, and tells it. The writer Lucero doesn’t inject
his memories with glitz or hyperbole.
Lucero’s pages lead a reader chronologically from in-country orientation to his first hostile fire, then from trail to ambush, battle to battle, night attacks and the occasional pendejada. He speaks in quiet, matter-of-fact declaratives. This is what happened to me.
Lucero’s pages lead a reader chronologically from in-country orientation to his first hostile fire, then from trail to ambush, battle to battle, night attacks and the occasional pendejada. He speaks in quiet, matter-of-fact declaratives. This is what happened to me.
You may know vatos who fought the war in Vietnam, and likely
they don’t do a lot of talking about it. Maybe a friend gets up and quietly leaves
the room when someone starts talking about a book they read about the war. Maybe you have a friend who enjoys Ben Fountain’s fictive Billy but would not be OK with Eraldo
Lucero’s memories of his friend Billy.
Except for those Veterans with good reason to shy away,
reading Echoes of a Distant Past fills-in knowledge that is beginning to disappear from the body politic. Lucero wants this knowledge
to disappear or at least diminish for him. He says he writes to get this stuff out of his system. In
whatever manner expression fulfills an exigency, memoirs like this deserve to be written, as well as have a
place alongside novels and short fiction.
Novels tell stories at a distance, in belletristic dramatic
relief. A memoir like this doesn’t draw characters, it remembers friends,
events, details, like relentless grunt quotidiana of being the first soldier to walk
into a field of fire, losing friends, who was where when the sappers attacked:
At this point, I
remember hearing Roy Larison opening up with his M-60 machine gun. Hank Trickey
was in the same foxhole with Larison, just a little to the left of my foxhole
and assisting him with the machine-gun fire. As soon as they began firing, I
noticed the satchel charges moving away from my position and now exploding on
their position. To this day, I’ve felt that they saved my life that night. . .
. at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. as we came out of our foxholes, the situation within our
perimeter was extremely chaotic. Guys were still yelling for the medics from
all different directions within the perimeter.
Although Echoes of a
Distant Past, as most self-published work, would benefit from detailed
editing, there’s no missing the numbing authenticity of a soldier’s story, such as when an aging Veteran learns the details of a friend’s death.
Lucero and Billy, Billy Lucas, were tight. Billy is assigned
to a new unit, where he is killed. Thirty five years later, Lucero meets a man
who’d been in that unit, and who tells Lucero about that time when “Kentucky” got hit in the
forehead. That’s what it’s like to be a soldier, sometimes. Die without a name.
Billy Lucas, QEPD.
And QEPD the fifty-five names that close the memoir beginning on
page 125. KIA, Killed in Action, with the 2/502nd Infantry Battalion
in Operation Texas Star, including Hills 714 and 882. Many of these men are
¡Presente! in the pages of Echoes of a
Distant Past. Read the names. Qepd.
News & Notes Update: Zócalo Poet Laureate Video
La Bloga shared a trio of fotos
recently of California Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera at his Zócalo
evening. As promised, click here
to navigate to the full video of Herrera’s engaging talk.
 |
| Freedom's flag in the dawn's early light |
A thought-eating bacterium appears to have spread from Arizona to Texas, where education policy makers don't want to challenge a student's fixed beliefs, so they want to ban teaching the kids to think for themselves.
On-Line Floricanto Day Three of Month Seven 2012
It’s the eve of the United States of America’s Independence
Day from England. That’s the revolución that killed a bunch of Europeans and
some locals so thereafter all of us would be equal.
Call that one of history’s bigger ongoing ironies.
Caviling fools and pinheads fill the air with
complaints that freedom is a limited commodity, especially in Arizona. If justice continues to prevail, the whines heard round the world from angry right wingers sounds their last gasp.
La Bloga's On-Line Floricanto on the eve of US Independence Day brings the voices of five poets sounding out loud confident defiant: Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Jorge Alejandro Medina, Joe Navarro, Julie Corrales, Fernando Rodriguez.
La Bloga's On-Line Floricanto on the eve of US Independence Day brings the voices of five poets sounding out loud confident defiant: Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Jorge Alejandro Medina, Joe Navarro, Julie Corrales, Fernando Rodriguez.
“Becoming
Visible” by Odilia Galván Rodríguez
"Mi
color es un crimen" por Jorge Alejandro Medina
“She
Did All the Right Things” by Joe Navarro
“Hasta
la Victoria” by Julie Corrales
"Letter
to Arpaio" by Fernando Rodriguez
Becoming Visible
Odilia Galván Rodríguez
no longer invisible
you wish to banish us
back in time
to our quiet place
stooped in fields
in your gardens
kitchens loud
clattered and steam filled
laundry rooms
quietly nurturing
you and yours like our own
children
lucky if left with family
less so if latchkeyed
lonely and locked in
scared to make a sound
lest neighbors call
authorities
living in fear
of offending
of being visible
time and struggle
changed that game
people learned their rights
to fight for what is just
to come out into the light
c/s
Mi color es un crimen
Jorge Alejandro Medina
Mi color es un crimen
Duermo con el miedo a mi lado
Mientras veo venir el tren
Se olvidan que todos fuimos lodo.
Arranco esperanza de la esperanza
Todo parece que somos un número
Me quieren castigar por mi raza
Pero si Dios fue primero.
Los míos me acogen con sus brazos
Nada está perdido para la luz encendida
Se parecen a la furia de los osos
Pero no podrán con la caridad espléndida.
El fuego cae y sólo es ruido
Mis entrañas se retuercen
Y pienso en lo que fue el nido
Mis labios callados gritan a los que se enfurecen
Todo será tranquilad y vida
Algún día seguro que respiraré la paz
Será existencia real y a los demás dirigida
Sólo pienso en el amor y en hacer eso capaz.
She Did All the Right Things
by Joe Navarro
She did all the right things...
Studied diligently, worked hard
Academically made great strides
Went throughout school impressing
Her teachers and imbued
Her padres with orgullo
She was the student everyone
Knew would succeed and the
Student every teacher bragged
About in the teachers' lounge
She did everything right...
She tearfully explained this
To the arresting officers who
Cuffed her, dragged her to
The jail, where she awaits
Being severed from the only
Home she's ever known for
As long as she can remember
But now faces the prospect
Of being abandoned in an
Unfamiliar place away from
Family and a lifetime of friends
She did all the right things...
And shined brightly, being a
Brilliant star...all the right things
To make her a productive member
Of this society...which does not
Matter in the court of
Ignorance and prejudice
Joe Navarro
© Copyright 2012
Hasta La Victoria
Julie Corrales
Stories untold, weighty on my shoulders
I live the skeletons of history hid from me
You can lie to my face, but not to my condition
I don’t need banned books to know
of disenfranchisement, of my mother’s forced submission
Knelt over shinning porcelain latrines,
Poetry in all her motions, pride in her calloused hands,
Now you deny me her dignity,
call her struggle towards prosperity, stealing of resource
and land
call me unpatriotic when I raise my closed fist to sky
demanding what she died for,
earth which should have been my birthright
chronicles burned through genocide
stories and tragedies and triumphs you simply deny
I don’t need your admission, the truth burns under my
Bronze skin and deep in my onyx eyes
The raging fire in my brick red heart, exposes your lies
And we will continue to fight
Until cherry pickers, and babysitters,
House cleaners are heroes memorialized
Till our history is taught to our descendants
And our victory written in a red, white, and blue sky.
Letter to Arpaio
Fernando Rodriguez
Hello Mr. Arpaio
From California the people salute you
Chicano style like in a soccer game
Whistles and boos is what you deserve
The man who thinks himself a legal
The man who wants to apprehend illegals
The man who says he is the law
The only sheriff breaking up laws
Hating immigrants in an immigrant country
Enjoying and hailing an American dinner
No idea you have that an immigrant picked it
So proudly you brag and hail at a State
A state free of immigrants you wish to have
A bunch of dumb people follow you behind
Senseless and with no feelings you seem to be
Breaking up families and breaking up dreams
Asking for papers from people around you
Native Americans ask the same from you
Ironies of life the ones we live today
Attacking the dreams,
Same dreams that brought you here
If an American you’re claiming to be
We are more American we were born here
The American continent is where I’m from
I’m sorry Arpaio I don’t expect you to know
Oh one last thing mister don’t call me more names
My mom gave me one and was approved by god.
BIOS
“Becoming
Visible” by Odilia Galván Rodríguez
"Mi
color es un crimen" por Jorge Alejandro Medina
“She
Did All the Right Things” by Joe Navarro
“Hasta
la Victoria” by Julie Corrales
"Letter
to Arpaio" by Fernando Rodriguez
Hi, let me introduce myself, my name is Jorge Alejandro Medina, Francisco X Alarcon, told me about the nomination of my poem to be on The Bloga magazine, let me say little bit more about me, well I have a bachelor in Philosophy from Seminario Diocesano de Tijuana, I used to work as seminarist in some communities from Baja California, now I work in L.A., I would say that I found my passion about writing poems a few years ago, I really enjoy doing it, my inspirations come from watching our reality and how people suffers and struggles every day with it, also, I can write about love, politics and different stuff or themes.
Thanks for like my poems.
Alejandro Medina.
2 comments:
Powerful poems from powerful writers! Thanks for spreading the truth.
I only wish our politicians in Washington as well as California read these poems and La Bloga in general...to really begin understanding what our millions of Latinos/as feel, think, and experience.
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