Peter Dale Scott

II.iv I am writing this poem about the 1965 massacre of Indonesians by Indonesians which in an article ten years later I could not publish except in Nottingham England with a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since himself been murdered no one will say by whom but I will guess seeing as this is precisely poetry the CIA's and now Peking's Cambodian assassins the Khmer Serai In that article I estimated a half-million or more killed in this period it took Noam in a book suppressed by its first publisher to quote Admiral Sudomo of the Indonesian junta more than 500,000 and now Amnesty International many more than one million so much for my balanced prose But none of us experienced that pervasive smell of death those impassable rivers clogged with corpses Robert Lowell is that why even you a pacifist had so little to say about it? Or you gentle reader let us examine carefully the good reasons you and I don't enjoy reading this Like the time in the steep Engadine we saw the silent avalanche fall away from the mountain hair and eyebrows the first to feel the murmurations of the spreading killer wind IV.i Mégève   coming down beside a rainbow into a shower glissade 1000 meters on wet grass laughter at falling safe think   married a Venezuelan and lives near Lausanne tell me now you with homes in the mountains who are at hand and know all things where we hear only rumor of the captains at Bilderberg meetings one has to sound like a John Bircher to talk about between the Rockefellers the Agnellis and the Rothschilds at whose Megeve resort we were lodged in uncomfrtable luxury as delegates to the International Student Service Bilderberg meetings supplying Prince Bernhard with an almost unrivalled network not just for the European Movement financed with German counterpart funds but also for the recruitment of old intelligence contacts as conduits for Lockheed payoffs through the Temperate Zone Research Foundation for Antelope Cobbler the Italian premier which supplimented the CIA's financial support to parties canidates and incumbent leaders of almost every political persuasion and under Sukarno which is why I am telling all this -- not just recalling the swampy fields around the Rockefeller lodge in the Connecticut valley where the Liberty Lobby discovered the Bilderbergers in '67 -- Jakarta payments deflected four months before the coup at legal risks to Lockheed towards the very wealthy General Alamsjah epitome of the military entrepreneur whom a Lockheed memo called the second man the coup made at once funds available to Suharto a Lockheed web extending from Geneva to Jakarta millions to Japanese officials where every move made was approved by Washington the money through Deak back to Shig Katayama in the Cayman Islands the Wildlife Fund the Sultan Castle Bank in the Bahamas Helliwell narcotics CIA the name Richard M. Nixon on the list It was at a Bilderberg meeting that Prince Bernhard was introduced by Baron Edmond de Rothschild to Tibor Rosenbaum of the ICB the International Credit Bank (later exposed by the Baron after the Vesco coup as a source of secret funds for the Mossad Israel's intelligence service and one of the country's primary weapons brokers) and whose colleague Ed Levinson was the power behind the Havana Riviera and the Serv-U Corporation of the Bobby Baker payoffs which began to be exposed in November 1963 -- My book would have asked as the Warren Commission staff working for Allen Dulles was unable to why Levinson's pit-boss McWillie gambler and murderer from the old Binion gang in Dallas and Fort Worth who had a fix with Mr. Big I don't think we'd better go into that phase of it twice brought to Havana most likely as a courier his close friend Jack Ruby A dumb subject The book went into galleys and was photographed for the Pocket Books spring catalogue but never published freeing me to write this poem Do you remember   yes just for an instant the sun warm on our shoulders and beyond the mists rising from the meadow Mont Blanc IV.ii From the Bay Bridge on the way home from the opera you could look down on the searchlights of the Oakland Army Terminal where they loaded the containers of pellet-bombs and napalm into black Japanese ships over which the cranes bent like anxious surgeons in the calm and glassy night People of good will of whom at first there were many were willing to sign petitions or to help in drafting the letter to the Times about how six months they had moved from true to false reports of the North Vietnamese negotiating position that the letter never published and the music changing bonfires to still the streets the first smudges of tear gas the Yellow Submarine (acid in Bir Sur Allen kneeling to pray for Johnson's health) at the rock poetry festival no sensations from my first joint except for the difference between the salt and pepper I felt being shaken on my bare left arm Owsley by parachute at the Human Be-in Mika on Carole's shoulders one mine so they could see the Brave New World worms in the rose the party's hostess some new drug in the basement crying like a child CIA personnel helping local chemists set up LCD labs in the Bay Area to monitor events STP Serenity from Dow Chemical and the Edgewood Arsenal like being shot out of a gun men with their Sunday morning rifle range target practice Black Panthers Ku Klux Klan women who shyly hinted at ineffable orgies of acid nakedness Ed Sanders the Fugs investigative poetics Out demons out with no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step two hundred pounds of daisies from Peggy Hitchcock to skybomb the Pentagon Fort Funston Beach the Barb's first nude-in under the fixed gaze of the mounted police dunes of iceplants and callas linnets in the sun and mist (To shoot a policeman is a sacred act) the women in seaweed and surf wading as if to be washed as clean as seals IV.viii Clifford Geertz having just reread your Notes on the Balinese cockfight how you were first accepted by cautious villagers after you all fled from the Javanese constabulary and how slaughter in the cock ring itself after red pepper is stuffed down their beaks and up their anuses joins pride to selfhood selfhood to cocks and cocks to destruction a blood sacrifice offered to the demons to pacify their cannibal hunger depicting how things are among men not literally but almost worse imaginatively what it says is it is of these emotions that society is built and of the combat between terrible witch Rangda her eyes bulging like boils and the endearing monster Barong a clash between the malignant and the ridiculous It is not your belief in men every last one of them are cultural artifacts that I now question or even that the imposition of meaning on life is the major end of human existence that Virgilian flourish in your footnote to Max Weber but your recurring interpretations of the Balinese massacre after what you choose to call the bungled coup and its savage aftermath My complaint is not of your early field project for Ford and the CIA-funded Center at MIT in which you preceded Pauker or your commissioned study on which local elites would best play a role in Rostow's pre-take-off period I will not cast that stone from this front window of the world's largest weapons lab you who know about puputan and Tjalonarang have the right to recall the fact of the massacre through the medium of the cockfight the theatricality of trance but why did you write several hundred thousand people were massacred largely villagers by other villagers though there were some army executions as well when even Shaplen admits the murders in Bali did not start until early December that is until after Colonel Edhie's commandos with unit-names like Dracula had finished in East Java the army began it then handed the job over to the Balinese that is to the special teams set up under Nasution's and Suharto's orders and finally stopped the bloodletting as the smell of burning houses overpowered the customary fragrance of the rich island flora Clifford Geertz sometimes the world is not as mysterious as you and I might wish why can you not write as straightforwardly as Time about the land to which you returned on a junta visa and how can you write about the integrative revolution in a book that is indexed to sixty-one countries Paraguay the Soviet Union but not the United States? IV.ix When some toys from the West where stolen out of the back seat of our Peugeot in Saska Kepa I went without thinking to the Warsaw police A moustached officer wrote down everything I had to say which was very little and then asked me Was the door locked? I said I had no idea probably not and he said Prosze Pana excuse me but it would be good in the future to keep your doors locked Our children are not used to seeing toys from the west and you do not want to encourage them in crime those Sunday walks with Cassie in her blue pram the well-dressed housewives offering in illegal dollars twice what we paid for it I told the officer I was withdrawing my complaint He smiled and began to talk about his life as a policeman how much easier it had been after Stalin had died in those days no one wanted to talk to us even our own children sometimes mistrusting us despite what they learned at school We talked for two hours and I think of him often as I read in the papers of Solidarnosc suppressed how those must be privileged moments one can so transcend history how today he would not dare to have such a conversation nor I have the heart And yet those two hours in that ill-furnished precinct seem somehow more true than the street battles since My own life is easier no longer having to be consul I suspect that on our side officials of U.S. Steel IV.xvii And now East Timor where in 1977 the Indonesian minister admits perhaps 80,000 might have been killed that is to say one person out of eight by his own government's paracommandos these gentle midnight faces the beetles which crowd their eyes From 1975 to 1977 the New York Times index entries for East Timor dropped from six columns to five lines