Photo credit: The tree, Howie Lisnoff
Howie, you must be out of your tree!
Does that mean for being a leftist, or maybe even being the last new leftist? No, because there are many new leftists who are still hanging on, maybe by a single thread these days, but still hanging on in the face of the utter disaster around us. And the disaster of the US political system mounts each day. Inequality has festered for decades and we are seeing its effects come home.
This story is about the felling of a tree. Not about the expense of its loss, but about the long view or sweep of history that this tree has witnessed. Joyce Kilmer may have been impressed, or perhaps the transcendentalists.
The tree, a conifer, a pine, has been in decline since my wife and I moved into our house in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. We have a house up on a hill surrounded by a mostly coniferous forest. If readers want to get a sense of the area, then Arlo Guthrie’s “Massachusetts” sort of captures its essence, with some serious and major caveats. The qualifier has been a clique of dyed-in-the-wool provincials, who hang onto local power and ancient hatreds. Some of those people are common bullies and antisemites! The tree is over 100 years old, so it's seen lots and let’s get to that now. Besides the sweep of history, it's seen so much of my personal life and history of the times in which I live that it's a kind of environmental journal, or the journal of environmentalists.
The tree, we have another great conifer nearby that has a name, The King, given to it by the house’s former owner, but this tree had none. That former owner did almost no upkeep of an old house, built in the late 1960s, and we’re paying the price. We knew the tree was in decline because it has been losing branches and needles since we moved here about 14 years ago. This growing season has been the worst for the tree with a hefty section of this massive tree seeing many of its needles go from green to brown prematurely, so it was on its last leg.
The tree began its life as a pine cone decades before I was born. It may have pushed itself out of the rocky soil around the time of World War I and the Red Scare. The “war to end all wars,” similar in origin in Eastern Europe as the Ukraine War today, was a power contest. Germany, France, Russia, Great Britain, the US, and Austria were some of the places in the push to solidify empires as Russia emerged from that epoch as a revolutionary force that scared the shit out of the others. It was mostly about economics and the projection of power by nation-states. It’s still the same story. The loss of civil liberties was more targeted in the US then, as it is diverse now, but imperialism and empire were still the choice of sending workers and ordinary people to the trenches to slug it out, get wounded, and die for the rulers. Air wars and the massive loss of civilian life, like in today’s Gaza Strip and formerly in scores of other places, weren’t affected by the newly emerging air wars, and warfare was a hell of a less technologically based. Drone warfare is a kind of air war and even more impersonal than its predecessor. This species has known for centuries, no millennia, that certain classes of people needed to be protected during war, and that became well known a generation later in World War II. But the history of the protection of noncombatants in war goes back several millennia.
The tree saw me playing cowboys and Indians [sic] in the fields around my home in central Rhode Island. Being politically correct was unknown to us, and we took to the ballfields after the wait for a new pair of PF Flyers during the long winters of the Northeast. I learned the work ethic during my seven-days-a-week job carrying the only major newspaper in Rhode Island. Sometime in the middle of the 1960s, I learned about writing for a public when my mother went to the Providence Journal’s annual letter writers’ dinner. What could be better than writing about issues like war and peace and having a dinner to celebrate with other writers, editors, and journalists?
The Vietnam War and college defined my life in ways that echo down to today, as the outer rings of the pine grew. It was in school that I became acquainted with the Vietnam War through ROTC and the best friend I made in my junior year who has long since vanished from my life. The vanishing of friends, still almost impossible to tolerate, is like the loss of this great tree in some ways. They echo through the corridors of my mind and are always present; sometimes a nagging lost reality. The military, I, and Vietnam were like a strange mix of oil and water. I became stridently anti-war, have veteran’s status, but not in that war, and became anti-war for the decades that followed.
The many battles as a protester have followed from the fight for amnesty for war resisters; the movement against Reagan’s low-intensity warfare in Central America; the Nuclear Freeze Movement, a bust; George H.W. Bush’s successful eradication of the Vietnam Syndrome; which the military claims I have, in the first Gulf War; and all of the endless wars that followed from Afghanistan through Iraq, and up to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Wars raged elsewhere in Syria, Somalia, Lebanon, Libya, and beyond, but do not include the secret wars which the US and others fight. With about 750 military bases, the US is the leader. The debacle of the guns v. butter equation has been lost to the dictates of empire, militarism, and inequality.
The single most obscene, earthshaking issue for me has been the genocide committed by Israel. It flies in the face of everything that I value and attacks the very heart of my beliefs in the secular Judaism that I came to love and has now been lost. Trees don’t recoil at the loss of humanity or the loss of those we have loved, but this great pine has stood witness, and I mourn its loss.
