Poem for two doomed poets

On Philip Levine's birthday, a sad poem about two doomed poets from the Poetry Foundation web site. It's beautiful, really. I'll let Levine say the rest. Go to "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."

This isn’t the first time that National Guard units have been sent to the border

1916 cartoon by Clifford K. Berryman, via National Archive Berryman collection. Not sure if the Uncle Sam of 2018 can jump the massive wall that soon will be built at the border. 

Guys in white pajamas shot at my grandfather. That’s the way he told it, anyway. Or maybe it’s just the way I remember his stories. For a few months in 1916-17, Grandpa and his troop of Iowa National Guardsmen faced Pancho Villa’s irregulars across the Rio Grande. He told us that the white-clad Mexican fighters couldn’t shoot straight but Iowans in their spiffy regulation uniforms weren’t much better. They didn’t know it yet, but they were practicing for the big show in France. The U.S. entered the war about a month after Grandpa and his unit returned to Iowa.

Trump isn’t the first commander-in-chief to send National Guard units to the U.S./Mexican border. It’s different this time because Trump is in a snit about not getting enough funding from Congress for his stupid border wall. During the campaign, Trump promised rabid rally crowds that he would build a wall and by gum, he will get his wall, or else your husband or cousin or daughter from the Iowa National Guard will spend the next year trying to snag the caravans of Mexicans that Trump imagines are invading the U.S.

Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa did invade the U.S. in 1916. His seasoned troops invaded Columbus, New Mexico, and killed 18. Villa lost almost 100 men due to the shiny new machine guns employed by U.S. troops. Villa fled back across the border, leaving Americans in a panic. Pershing’s troops, aided by the first airplanes used by the U.S. in combat, pursued Villa through northern Mexico. They killed a few of his lieutenants but never snagged Villa.

Trooper Raymond Arthur Shay, Iowa National Guard, Iowa City. He and his farm-boy cohorts knew how to ride and care for their horses. They spent most of that southwestern winter dismounted, swatting flies, and taking pot shots at insurgents. Prior to this border expedition, the farthest Grandpa had been from home was basic training at Camp Dodge outside Des Moines. He was a farm boy, oldest of nine kids. Now here he was, hunkered down on the banks of The Big Muddy and the big fool told him to push on – or at least to keep firing at the tiny men in pajamas he could barely see. Their horses weren’t much good either, as this guerilla war was unsuited to cavalry charges. Horses did come in handy for the U.S. Army patrols sent into enemy territory to find Villa. As far as I know, Grandpa never made it across the border.

Four years before, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, commander of this Mexican Punitive Expedition had wrapped up another war like this. In 1911-13, he waged what most considered a successful campaign against the Muslim Moros in the Philippines. In Pershing’s view, the Moros were pajama-clad insurgents worth fighting. But not these poor, undisciplined Mexicans. Pershing grew increasingly frustrated. His hands were tied by Congress. Politicians -- always coming to the border on their junkets. Reporters in tow asking stupid questions. There was no winning under these circumstances. This refrain would be echoed decades later by other U.S. generals in other wars. You know, Vietnam.

At the end of January 1917, Pershing abandoned the border foray. The following winter, Grandpa, now a newly minted second lieutenant, found himself in France eyeballing German trenches across a bombed-out moonscape. World War I trench warfare, with its machine guns and barbed wire, rendered obsolete any “Charge of the Light Brigade” operations. Still, the Iowans had shipped over with their horses as cavalry looked fine on parade days. One spring morning, a resurgent General Pershing staged an inspection and picked the unit’s best mount to ride. It belonged to Lieutenant Shay. That was the high point of the war for him, his favorite story, and ours.

Other stories weren’t quite as romantic. Dismounted, in the trenches, poison gas washing over doughboys as they struggled to don their gas masks. Never enough time. Enough of the gas seeped into Grandpa’s lungs to cause some harm, but not enough to get him sent home before the Armistice.

Grandpa’s gas mask and helmet rest in a box in my basement. Photos, too, of him and his troopers in France. Photos of Grandma – his wife -- and her nursing school graduating class. I think about them and their war when I drive down Cheyenne’s Pershing Avenue, as I do almost every day. Cheyenne, a military town, became the adopted home for the globetrotting General Pershing. He married Helen Frances Warren, the daughter of Wyoming’s first U.S. Senator, and served at Fort D.A. Russell, now F.E. Warren AFB. Their home is now a living museum, preserved for future generations. The base itself is a national historic site, home to war trophies from the Philippines and the old airfield where World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker cracked up his biplane and almost died. It also was the training site for Spaatz’s Flying Circus and the U.S. Army’s airmail service -- Charles Lindbergh was one of its first pilots.

The Pershing family experienced its share of tragedy. If you take a stroll through Cheyenne’s historic Lakeview Cemetery, you will come across a large grave marker for Frances E. Warren and her three daughters, ages 3, 7 and 8. In 1914, Gen. Pershing left his wife and four children at the Presidio in San Francisco to take over command of a brigade at Fort Bliss, Texas. Things were heating up at the border and the general was there to plan for the inevitable. In August of 1915, Pershing received a telegram that his wife and daughters died of smoke inhalation at a Presidio fire. Only his 6-year-old son survived.

Pershing Avenue starts at F.E. Warren AFB and runs straight through town past the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center where the aging Lieutenant Raymond Shay spent some of his last days. The road ends on the east side of town. If you know where to look, you can see Minuteman III missile sites out on the prairie.

     

Combat casualties were minimal in my grandfather’s World War I unit. They were surpassed by deaths from infection and disease, especially from the Spanish flu. Grandpa’s lungs deteriorated from gas attacks. After he returned to the States, he recuperated for months in an Iowa Army hospital. When he took a turn for the worse, the Army transferred him to Army Hospital Number 21 – soon to be renamed Fitzsimons Army Medical Hospital after a hero of the Great War. The dry Denver climate, famous for its healing properties, may have helped his recovery. He really took a turn for the better when he met my grandmother, an Army nurse. He and Florence Green married in 1921, stayed in Denver, raised a family, and lived a good long time.

Now Grandpa and Grandma share a plot at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver.

Wonder what they would make of our boy Trump.

So what else was going on 100 years ago?

Sabino Osuna, "Felicistas in the YMCA," ca. 1910-1914, photograph, courtesy of Sweeney Art Gallery and Special Collections Library, University of California, Riverside. Part of the Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna’s Photographs of the Mexican Revolution, , now at the UNM Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque.

Chloe Courtney is one of the excellent writers and art historians who write for Adobe Airstream: Art, Music and Film from the West. She penned the following review in A2's Nov./Dec. issue. It caught my attention for several reasons. One, the photo is startling, with its group of gunman by the window of a YMCA in Mexico. Second, my wife works for the local Y, and I spent some time imagining a group of revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries using the Y as a gun emplacement against... who, liberals streaming over the border from Colorado? Third, my grandfather, Raymond Shay, was with Pershing on the Mexican border, allegedly there to keep Pancho Villa and his irregulars on the southern side of the demarcation line (more about this in future posts). Finally, it alerted me to an excellent exhibit in the Rocky Mountain region that I may travel to in my retirement. If I can get there before it closes on Jan. 31.

Here's a snippet of the piece entitled "How to View the Mexican Revolution:"

In the photograph “Felicistas in the YMCA,” snipers crouch near a window in a rubble-strewn room and train their weapons on the street below, and yet, the title informs us, this violent scene takes place in a former community center.

The photograph appears in the exhibition Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna’s Photographs of the Mexican Revolution, on view at the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. It defies an otherwise chronological and thematic structure following the revolution and developments in Osuna’s photography. Located at the entrance of the exhibition, the image reveals a curatorial strategy to make the subject of the Mexican Revolution accessible for a US viewership. Some Americans may not recognize the names of revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata, but they know the YMCA, and likely experience the shock of seeing a familiar community center occupied by gunmen.

Mexico at the Hour of Combat shows, for the first time, a group of documentary photographs from UC Riverside Libraries Special Collections and Archives. This collection comprises 427 glass negatives of Sabino Osuna’s documentary photographs of the Mexican Revolution, 56 of which have been selected for inclusion in the exhibition.

The show includes compelling portraits of key figures of the Revolution, as well as powerful documentation of the brutal violence of the war, and images constructed to craft a new Mexican identity. As a whole, the exhibition importantly works to combat the under-representation of Mexican arts in U.S. cultural institutions, and seeks to draw attention to the Mexican Revolution as an important player in our understanding of revolution and resistance today. 

More Arizona craziness: Tucson schools ban books by Chicano and Native-American authors

Can you imagine a school district anywhere banning the writing of Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Shakespeare, Roberto Rodriguez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sandra Cisneros and Henry David Thoreau?

This is what the Unified Tucson School District board did when it ordered the removal of "Rethinking Columbus" and other books from the curriculum. This was in response to the Arizona State Legislature's banning of ethnic studies classes in all public schools.

The Know Nothings in the Arizona Legislature are an international embarrassment. They have the upper hand now, but it won't last forever. The voices of these talented authors will outlast the barking of the bigots. Authors such as Alexie and Silko and Baca and Rodriguez and Cisneros are writers of the West. They write about the struggles that go on every day in Wyoming and Utah and New Mexico and Arizona. Their voices are loud and clear. Too loud and too clear and too popular for close-minded bigots in state legislatures across the West.

Read more here: Tucson schools bans books by Chicano and Native American authors | the narcosphere

P.S.: When the Arizona Legislature was first considering banning ethnic studies classes in May 2010, I penned a modest satire on the subject, "Ethnic Studies 212: The Superiority of the Irish." The post has received thousands of hits in the past 18 months and remains one of the most popular pieces on Hummingbirdminds. Read it at http://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2010/05/ethnic-studies-212-superiority-of-irish.html

One more reason to like Calexico

Wow! Arizona and France and Mexico on stage in London. Hummingbirdminds craves Calexico.