The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I wonder how long it took this truckdriver to figure out what to say in his phone call to his employers.
I’ve been fond, for a couple of years, of the metaphor of a “tire fire” for something that’s going incredibly poorly. This driver, though, gets to use that phrase literally. That’s a bad day, folks.
I wrote this not long after the awful events of 9-11-01, and I repost it every year on that date, marking the time as one of America’s worst days makes its inevitable transition from Memory into History.
There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.
I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.
When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.
This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.
“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”
“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.
“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”
“She will be with you soon enough.”
“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.
“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”
The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.
“Where will you take us?” someone asks.
“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.
One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.
We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.
“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.
“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”
“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”
From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.
“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.
“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”
A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.
“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.
“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.
“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”
I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.
Almost.
Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.
“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.
“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”
The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.
“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.
But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.
I know these things.
I am the Ferryman of the Dead.
Finis.
Sports columnist Jason Whitlock is often an interesting commentator on race issues, particularly as they relate to sports. Here’s an excerpt from his column today:
The people at the top of the rap music food chain should not be afforded such easy forgiveness. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know the dishonesty and the illogic that fuels the popular sentiment within commercial rap music industry that states the embrace of the N-word is harmless because young people have redefined it and erased its dehumanizing power.
This popular mantra is every bit as intellectually dishonest as the mantra that slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, lynching and discrimination are issues that no longer affect modern American society.
Jay-Z and the other denigration rappers and comedians love to say they’ve taken the N-word from bigots and transformed it into a word of affection and respect. It’s a lie.
The N-word was given to/slapped on black people in America 300 years ago to justify our mistreatment. It was given to define us as less than human so that mentally slave owners would have no trouble treating us as animals.
You don’t change something built to destroy you into something that uplifts you. It’s the equivalent of thinking the slop/food fed to slaves can be transformed into raw fruits and vegetables. As bad as our diet is today (and it’s a direct descendant of what we were forced to eat 300 years ago), actually what we’re trying to do with the N-word is much worse.
The N-word is human feces. It’s not meant for consumption. Jay-Z and his defenders can sauté human waste in butter and garlic for a month and it’s still gonna taste like $**t and lead to poor health.
As long as we keep cooking and serving up the N-word to each other, we’re going to remain mentally comfortable hunting and executing each other like animals and throwing on baseball caps supporting the killers.
Regardless of the user, the N-word is still doing the exact job it was intended to do in the 1700s. Hell, it’s doing a better job.
I honestly can’t claim enough familiarity with race issues to know how I feel about this. On the one hand, the attempted taking-over of the N-word and its concurrent attempted transformation into a tool of irony is a fascinating cultural development. On the other, I’m not sure it’s a good thing.
In fact, as a white male, I’m not sure I even can ever gain sufficient familiarity with race issues to have a genuine feeling about this, other than a vague sense that something is deeply wrong, that racism is still alive and well, albeit mostly bubbling beneath the surface. Trouble with that is, lots of things do even more damage when they’re bubbling beneath the surface, because that allows us to get complacent and think, oftentimes, that it’s not there at all.
We expect our legal system to produce moral consequences, and yet, so often it does not. It’s probably the case that a codified legal system can’t be expected to always produce moral consequences, precisely because what’s moral cannot be so precisely codified. But this does not excuse a lack of efforts to try to make it better, and it certainly does not lessen the pain that arises when the moral and the legal so spectacularly fail to intersect.
(A repost of what I’ve run on July 4 the last couple of years)
Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”
But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.
…
See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.
Signed,
All the guys presentPS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You’re a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
(Hey! Uncle George is in there!)
I’m trying to wrap my head around this story. A convicted murderer is about to go free in Indiana. The case has never been in doubt; this isn’t a case of innocence-by-DNA. The woman confessed to the crime, and there has never been any challenge to her conviction. The sentence, however, was: the woman was sentenced to death. But she was only 16 at the time.
Murderers are…well, they’re murderers, and I struggle with my notion of how best to deal with them. I honestly do believe in rehabilitation and maybe even redemption, and this woman has served 27 years in prison. Is she rehabilitated? I guess that’s not really for me to say. It’s a tough question. But the idea of sentencing someone to die for a crime — and this one, involving a butcher knife and more than 30 stab wounds, is pretty heinous — before they’re old enough to have even most of the privileges our society reserves for ‘adults’ seems extreme.
And then I read further in the article and I learn that until 1988, you could be sentenced to death in Indiana as young as ten years old.
Many years ago, I believed in the death penalty. It seemed pretty clear to me: murderers should be executed. Eye for an eye, and all that. But I changed my mind when Ted Bundy was executed.
If you were to draw up a list of every murderer in the history of the human species, and rank them in order of who most deserved the death penalty, I think there’s a pretty good chance that Ted Bundy would wind up in the top ten. He is among the very worst things our species has ever produced. But I’ve never forgotten the news footage of his execution, during which a raucous and celebratory crowd was gathered outside the prison, brandishing hand-painted signs that said things like “Barbecue Ted” and “Fry Bundy Fry”. Those images were like a bucket of cold water, thrown upon me. The state was killing a human being, and there were folks outside the place where it was happening. And they were having a tailgate party.
I haven’t had much confidence in the moral underpinnings of the death penalty since then.
In my lifetime, at least one state maintained the legal authority to execute ten-year-old children. The mind reels.
My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we’re getting good retirement benefits now that we’re old. Pretty nice. But now we’re turning around and telling today’s 20-somethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago.
But at least today’s kids don’t have to worry about being drafted. That’s something, I suppose.
Look, just what kind of country do we want to be, anyway? This stuff didn’t happen out of the blue, and it’s not an unforeseen consequence that nobody could have known might happen. This is the fruit of our choices.
So again: what kind of country do we want to be?
