The Fires of Orc

What a weary time those years were –

to have the desire and the need to live

but not the ability.

Charles Bukowski

Ioverheard some sailors talking in town yesterday.”

I’m sure he did. The Landlord pays more attention to rumors and speculation than to the day’s work.

“They say they saw an airplane off the coast, an hour south of here.”

An hour south of here is Old Mexico. I’ve heard the rumors. Some say there’s a functioning government in Baja. If there is, it hasn’t come to us in the shadow of Old San Diego. New Pacifica arose within sight of towering, jagged hulks still marking a city center that hummed in my day with the business of life and pursuit of the moment. I still venture out from time to time to look at the ruined skyline and remember those long-ago days. No sane person, particularly not one as infirmed as I have become, would ever venture into the city today. Old San Diego is a killing zone where men half-dead on the outside and all dead on the inside pick at yesterday’s carcasses and prey on the occasional missionary whose faith surpasses his own good sense.

But there it still stands, Old San Diego, its bones at least. The past is the past, but it never goes away.

“Well,” say I, “if there’s an airplane off the coast, there must be a pilot who can fly it. Maybe it’s a new army. Maybe the Aztlán Confederation has its eyes on us.”

The Landlord shuffles papers, composing his thoughts. “I’m trying to be serious, Old Timer. I don’t need to be insulted.”

Perhaps I went too far.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you,” I assure him, though that was precisely my intent. Who’d have thought he would notice?

“Anyway,” he asks, “do you really think there’s an airplane?”

I tell him I don’t know, hoping it will suffice. It clearly will not. So we talk.

“Honestly,” I assure him, “I don’t think there’s an Aztlán Confederation.”

“But what about those riders who came through here last year with their flags saying a new land waits in the south? There were at least a dozen of them. Remember?”

I do remember. I just don’t care.

“What about them? People say lots of things. Even if dozens of people say something stupid, it’s still a stupid thing.”

They were new world bandits, the riders. Their kind abounds in the Outlands. They hunker down in shells of the old world like Old San Diego where they manufacture their crude drugs, hone their crude weapons and weave their crude tales to lure the gullible, like The Landlord, into misbegotten pilgrimages that end in murder and pilfer.

“If those men promised anything,” I tell him, “it was a lie. They’re thieves and scavengers.”

“But they had flags!” he protests.

“What they had was some old cloth. I’ve got a Bible. That doesn’t make me the Pope and this place sure isn’t the Vatican.”

There once were two nations that met in the strip of sea and land beyond Old San Diego. There are now no countries, no flags, and no reason to fight for the former or salute the latter. If only he knew.

But how could he know? No one can since the fires.

We were younger then and more naïve. In that time the space between Americans still allowed the cultivation of old fantasies. We sustained the principles of a simpler age. We believed that work was correlated with reward, that merit underscored achievement and that opportunity could narrow the gap between the many and the few.

In those days no one yet foresaw the fires just over the near horizon. Through the lens of long memory I see now how predictable it should have been to all of us. Everything had to happen as it did, when it did, where it did and with logical consequences, but no one at the time heard death’s advancing step. We might have heard, but we weren’t listening.

America was then a big country full of big people and it was still so young. Just fifty years ago America dreamed as did its first invaders centuries earlier. We had no rank or royalty to mark our station. We thought ourselves free to be who we could become, not just what we were born into. We did not know who were gentlemen and who weren’t and it scarcely mattered. The most vulgar of us could buy a position at the top with fifteen minutes’ wealth.

Today we are all much older.

Those Americans had big hearts to fit their big land, but their hearts were those of overgrown children, bursting with adolescent urges, ungoverned by self-reflection. That America, my America, was a place where a childlike laughter echoed and beckoned the solitary traveler to join the crowd. It was always a good land, America, and its people good people. Good, but oblivious, and they knew not yet who they really were.

My Americans lacked the introspection of adults. They still saw themselves as they wished they had been. As a people, my Americans spent most of their brief history trying to become some imagined ideal, without pausing to look at what they became instead along the way. What they became, as any seer from a mystic perch might have presaged, were soft people born of soft times – decadent, soft people.

My America grew soft through fate and circumstance, and there were, in my day, ogres – great pigmen, fat upon the land, whose run knew no bounds and whom no hedge enclosed. They fanned out across the globe in gluttonous droves, feasting from bottomless troughs. They gorged themselves on what the innocent earth gave freely and on the living souls of men, taken for a pittance. They hoarded unto themselves all they could snatch from air and sea and earth and they accreted unto their stores the treasuries of the day. Theirs was the order of the time. The ogres in their thousands herded men in their millions and the multitudes loped after them giddily, content to breathe their vapors, dance to their grunts and marvel at the waste left heaped and steaming in the swath of their passing.

Americans, my Americans, were too soft in those days to ask what right a few ogres had to take so much from so many. Instead they asked how each of the rest of us might get just a bit more than the next one in line. There were wars and rumors of wars, and gods and ghosts in whose name to fight them. There were great gilded causeways linking the wealth of nations across the waters. There were those who worked and the ogres who rooted out the fat, sweet produce of that work. There were haves and have-nots and a man was not his own master. He existed for his overseers to extract the toll of surplus with the ogre’s whip.

And nobody really saw it for what it was. Americans as a group were all too content with two weeks of vacation, a Chevy in the garage and a rifle in the closet. It was absurd. It was America.

I have lived long enough that I don’t expect to be understood in the present when I speak of the past. Unchecked acquisitiveness was America’s chief virtue, its icon a busty redhead, its tabernacle a tacky glass pyramid with a halogen cap. It was, in a word, insane. Yet, as a man once observed, insanity in individuals is something rare, while in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the norm.