Cojones

I am back to my blog, back to my regimen, but not necessarily back on topic.

Benazhir Bhutto died violently today while running for office in Pakistan. To my knowledge she is the only person I knew in college who has been assassinated.

I've run for political office 3 times in my life. Well, 3 times since I graduated from high school. I retired from politics in 1990 with a lifetime record of 2 and 1, not good enough to get me into the Hall of Fame with Jim Rice in today's voting.

I ran for school board in Newbury, Vt. in 1982. The election occurred at Town Meeting and I won 82 to 38. The big story in the Valley News the next day was that it was the first time an outsider had ever been elected to anything in Newbury. I actually made a speech about zero-based budgeting, which was sort of a wedge issue because some of the land-rich, cash-poor dairy farmers may have understood me to be saying I would zero out the school budget.

Six years later I had moved back to my native Boston and I ran for state senate against my district state senator, who happened to be president of that body and widely considered the most powerful man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I had come out of a background of progressive, lefty community organizing and I owned a very pleasant if unprofitable bookstore in Dorchester. I raised and spent about $60,000, which seemed like a lot to me, until I compared it with the sum that William L. Bulger had in his campaign account. I was heartily endorsed by every sort of progressive group from NOW to the Rainbow Coalition to several Democratic ward committees and the Greater Boston Gay and Lesbian Political Task Force, or GBGLPTF, as it is more poetically known.

All that summer, when I ran into acquaintances around the town, they would make remarks about the size and scale of the cojones I must possess to run against Billy Bulger. I suspect that many of them also remarked to each other, when out of earshot, that I must be, at best, delusional. Stories circulated around the town about Bulger being a powerful and unforgiving adversary, and other stories always loomed not very far in the background about one of his brothers.

I never had any trouble with the man, or any members of his family, aside from the fact that he whipped my backside decisively in the Democratic primary. I took solace that I defeated him in 31 out of 60 precincts, but the voters in Southie and Savin Hill had a little more passion about exercising their franchise than the genteel folk of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay.

I had never met Bill Bulger, but we had a long and friendly conversation on the phone the next day, and eventually made it a point to get together for breakfast from time to time. He has continued to reach out to me with care and generosity over the years, and I have come to know him as a man of powerful intelligence, imagination and inquisitiveness. These are characteristics that I prize among my friends, and I am proud to consider him a friend.

In the past several years, Bill has been helpful to me in ways that I never expected would be important in my life. Perhaps he was able to anticipate my needs because of difficulties his own family members have experienced or anticipated; I am not certain. On Christmas morning he found himself reading a novel of mine, and emailed me about it in a way that, perhaps still a tad delusional, I found encouraging.

Cojones, I think, are over-rated, except as a symbol that Hemingway used in (I hope, generously perhaps) self-parody in To Have and Have Not, Islands in the Stream, The Sun Also Rises and The Garden of Eden.

Whatever attributes they symbolized for Hemingway and for my acquaintances back in 1988, those attributes have been required only in small measure in my own life, and I am grateful for that. I am also grateful that, while my personal courage may have limits, I have the inquisitiveness, openness and good luck to have found friends even where I have least expected to find them, as when I mounted my possibly quixotic campaign against Bill Bulger.

As proof of my belief that cojones are a poorly chosen anatomical symbol for personal courage, I submit for your consideration my former schoolmate, Bennie Bhutto. She was 16 when I met her, when she first came to school in Cambridge: tiny, fragile, precocious, and friendly.

Whatever flaws she may have had, and quite regardless of her politics, her courage shines. As I listened to the radio news the day she re-entered Pakistan this fall, I said to myself, "She will be dead within a few weeks."

Of course she knew that too. And I cannot imagine being able to summon the power she brought to her mission in spite of such knowledge.

Thursday Soundtrack

U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday



My great grandmother Reid landed in Georgia and married a full-blooded Cherokee with all his possessions on his back after she came here from Ireland in 1900, give or take. That's near all I know about her, except that her daughter (my grandmother Addie) dipped snuff and that her surname and her religion suggests she hailed from Ulster.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
--from William Butler Yeats' "Easter 1916"

26+6=1.

Today a woman who lived a few doors down from me in college died in Pakistan. Her name was Benazhir Bhutto. I used to see her carrying her books in the library all the time. The other Cliffies called her Bennie. She did not die of old age.