Gaza as Moral X-Ray. John Trudell. And, Tell Me What You See.

Like all X-rays, it's a self-portrait etched with radiation in black on white.

Gaza is a Moral X-Ray

The dark spot on an X-ray, the unexpected absence of light, is the sign of disease. The darkness of that spot is as deep as the ocean.

Gaza is a moral X-ray of humanity. The radiation of its dying souls passes through the human spirit, revealing any darkness inside.

At the atomic level, the production of X-rays is not a gentle process. It requires intense heat, a dense cloud of electrons, repulsion forces to hold the cloud together, and a way to trap radiation on a two-dimensional surface.

A moral X-ray is a violent process, too. Just look at the news.

It looks like one of those cartoon images where a sudden flash of light reveals the skeleton inside a character’s body. Or like the human silhouettes left on the walls of Hiroshima’s ruins after the explosion vaporized their owners’ bodies.

The X-rays of children are smaller, but no less vivid, than their parents’.

A moral X-ray, like all X-rays, is a self-portrait etched with radiation in black on white.

John Trudell’s Sacrifice

Last Thursday, February 15, 2024, was John Trudell’s 78^th birthday. He wasn’t around to celebrate it because John died at the age of 69, in 2015. His wife Tina and children Ricarda, Sunshine, and Eli weren’t around, either. They died in 1979 with Tina’s mother, in a suspicious fire at the home of Tina’s parents on Nevada’s Duck Valley Indian Reservation.

Roughly twelve hours earlier, John had burned a US flag on the steps of the FBI building in Washington DC. It was not an act of desecration, he said. Rather, the flag had been desecrated by the government’s treatment of Indians and other minorities. As a former serviceman, John knew that the proper way to dispose of a desecrated flag is by burning it.

Despite suspicious circumstances, the FBI refused to investigate whether arson had killed John’s family. He suspected they were involved in setting it. “Fire for fire,” the old saying says.

John first became known as spokesman for the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, then as National Chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM) from 1973 to 1979. Tina, a well-known activist, was pregnant at the time of her death.

John’s emotional devastation gave rise to his next career. “I was looking for help,” he said later. “I was looking to cut any spiritual deal.”

John Trudell’s Words

The deal came in the form of a new career, as a poet, performer, and spoken-word musician who fused the political with the spiritual. The late, legendary Native guitarist Jesse Ed Davis recorded with him. Bob Dylan called his first tape, AKA Grafitti Man, the best recording of the year. (The title’s misspelling is per the original.)

John Trudell recognized the suffering of Palestine in “Rich Man’s War”: “Central America bleeding/Wounds same as Palestine and Harlem/Three Mile Island and El Salvador/Pine Ridge and Belfast.”

“They are going to become more brutal,” he predicted in 1980. “They are going to become more oppressive.” How right he was.

The industrial overclass, he told interviewer Leila Connors, “erases the memory from the human being of being a human being. It's almost like a severing of our connection to any spiritual reality. That’s what makes these other things” – e.g., Gaza – “possible.”

John was radical, but his radicalism was unific, not divisive. “We see the physical genocide that they are attempting to inflict upon our lives,” he said, “and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.”

Some genocides seem to be successful; America’s war on North America’s native peoples, for example. But history hasn’t ended, and the spirit never dies. Justice plays the long game.

Conversations  

History is a conversation between humanity and time. Biography is a conversation between each of us and our own mortality.

I think of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who traveled to the Rafah Crossing with Sen. Jeff Merkley. “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food,” Van Hollen said afterwards. “In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true: That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.”

That was brave of him, given the political climate in this country and in Van Hollen’s party. But he still voted for a bill that shuts off aid to Gaza and sends more than $10 billion in weapons to those war criminals. Merkley voted against it.

I guess I sound preachy. I don’t mean to. Our culture hates preachy people. Nobody wants to be one. Besides, I get it. Van Hollen is fighting to see the world with new eyes and act accordingly. He’s struggling for his own humanity.  I honor his struggle. But it’s not enough.

I’m not sure I’m even talking about Chris Van Hollen, come to think of it. I think I’m talking about myself.

Biography is a conversation between each of us and our own mortality. Sooner or later, the conversation ends. If you haven’t already said what you had to say, with deeds as well as words, then you never will.

Shadow

“A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”

Rudyard Kipling said that to the French author André Maurois, circa 1930 or so, about Germany in collapse. It feels especially relevant now, as echoes of the genocidal American past ripple through present-day words and deeds.

Today’s global violence is almost a caricature of early America’s frontier warfare. We season it with the same empty platitudes about ‘civilizing’ the Other, even as we reload our rifles and head back into the cultivated lands we insist on calling “wilderness.”

I’ve quoted this line before, even though I hate Kipling’s politics. It probably reflected his elitist Anglo-Francophone worldview rather than any deeper insight. But as a general statement of empires in decline, it isn’t half bad.

Don’t take my word for it. Just look around.

Tell me what you see.

The Rorschach (or “inkblot”) test was introduced roughly a century ago. Everybody knows it. People are shown ink blotches – absences of light, dark shapes as deep as the ocean – and are asked, “What do you see?” We’re told there are no right or wrong answers. The test is apparently still used, despite doubts about its validity.

Gaza is not as Rorschach test. If someone sees the picture of a Gazan child killed by an American bomb, it’s not a shadowy ink spot. It’s a child.

People may say they see something else. They may say they see another person’s wrongdoing, or an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence. Those answers are wrong. If someone sees the picture of a child killed by an American bomb, the only correct response is, “That’s a child killed by an American bomb.”

That answer will make you act. Any other answer will haunt you, eventually.

You know how children are; they demand to be seen. If you won’t pay attention to them now, they’ll make sure you do later. These children will follow you. Soon you’ll see them everywhere, in the corner of your eye: ashen silhouettes burned on to every wall, each wall a future ruin. You’ll see them, ghostly and skeletal and small, walking hand in hand like kindergartners on a field trip through a world they never had a chance to know.

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https://www.johntrudell.com

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