Imagine Walking in Another's Shoes

I'm as pissed off as the next guy about The State of the Nation. And, judging by the political polls, the next guy is pretty ticked. I rail about the war in Iraq and the madness of Prez George. I blog, write letters, debate the issues (or try to). I feel it's my obligation to make my views known so I can live with myself in my rapidly approaching dotage. I remember back in ought-six when Bush and Cheney and all those other neo-con goons told us lies about WMD and Osama and World War III and Islamo-fascists? I was there on the front lines giving them hell. Not exactly the front lines, but deep in the red state of Wyoming, surrounded on all sides by Cheneyites and neocons and Christo-fascists. Republicans to the right of me, Republicans to the left of me, into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred -- that's how many Democrats there were in the entire state, give or take... The tales I'll tell to my nursing home cohorts.

It is about the stories we tell. I'm an engaged citizen, yet also an essayist and fiction writer. Different rules apply to each. My essays -- personal, political, or both -- need to stick to the truth. Not truthiness, but verifiable facts. I can write a diatribe, be doctrinaire, but when I say Bush lied to us about WMDs in Iraq, I can quote chapter and verse to show that's exactly what he did. To keep my bearings and my reputation as as essayist, I have to remember the distinctions between fact and fiction.

In fiction, I have different obligations. To write a diatribe thinly disguised as a short story is to invite disaster. Short stories are about characters. Each of us is a complicated bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions. The writer attempts to breathe life into each of his characters, to make the reader believe in his/her motives and reactions. Good stories do this. The best stories let the reader experience the main character's epiphany as if it were happening to you. The most intriguing stories allow you to empathize with a character that is your polar opposite.

So, if you take those criteria to its logical conclusion... I should be able to relate to a diehard Republican who thinks everything I believe is crap. And I should be able to write a story about such a person. My imagination should be spacious enough to write about people of varying ages, ethnic backgrounds, social classes, religions, etc. While a 55-year-old liberal Irish-American with a wife and two kids and a mortgage interests me, I live that life and have little interest in portraying it in a story. I'm a lot more interested in what life is like for an immigrant trying to make ends meet in Salt Lake City, a 30-something man left home with three kids as his wife goes to war, a young woman alone and bleeding to death from an unplanned pregnancy, or a group of Nisei physicians trying to adjust to new lives in 1951 Denver.

Those are some of the characters in my book of short stories, "The Weight of a Body." I am pleased when readers tell me that, through the stories, I've brought these creations to life. It's gratifying to know I can write about more than my own reality.

I have not yet written about a Muslim suicide bomber. Bruce Springsteen did in his song "Paradise" from "The Rising." Steve Earle wrote about so-called American Taliban John Walker Lindh in "John Walker's Blues" on his CD "Jerusalem." It caused a real firestorm when it was released in 2002. Critics said, "How dare Steve Earle turn this guy into a sympathetic character." But how else can we understand him and his motives? Most of us have been trying to make sense of 9-11 for the past five years. Musicians and poets responded first. The novelists are now making up for lost time. The stories are in the people and it sometimes takes awhile to know what those stories are.

My friend and vagabond poet/musician Ken Waldman has a new book. "As the World Burns: The Sonnets of George W. Bush and Other Poems of the 43rd Presidency" (Ridgeway Press, ISBN 1-56439-129-9, $14) features 41 poems in W's voice, "poems he might have written if he'd somehow chosen to write sonnets." The remaining 23 poems serve as commentary, according to Ken's press release. I've been reading the sonnets and learning and -- dare I say it -- even empathizing with our president. We read about him escaping from his job by putting on the headphones and listening to music, "something loud with twangy blues," by Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson. The presidnet gets stressed out because the media is "amking fun of my so-called 'illogicalness.' I know there's no such word. Instead there's stress, always stress."

As Colorado poet Bob Cooperman says on the book's jacket blurb: "[Ken] has chosen the harder, true road of art: to allow the president to speak his own firmly held and utterly sincere beliefs." Instead of making the president a caricature, Ken has treated him seriously, which is all anybody asks for. That's what fiction writers seek to do when they turn loose their imaginations on people unlike them. What better way to learn about the world?