"Falling Bridges"

Aug. 2, 2007: American News
More black news from Minnesota.A bridge over the Mississippi falls down: nine dead,twenty missing, details unclear...All this arrives in half-understood Icelandic over state radio while I am driving to Akureyri.I imagine cars hurtling over the interstate bridge down into the now-tepid waters of the river.The sky above a humid hundred, cries and shrieks muffled in the saturated air.Bridges are not supposed to fall down in invincible "can-do" America.The Brooklyn Bridge does not fall down.The iron gates of the locks in the Panama Canal have opened and closed every day since 1913.The generators hum below the Hoover Dam to feed the electrical jolt that cools, lights and irrigates the west.The motor in the old Buick purrs after 250,000 miles.We build to last! We are the world's engineers!Suddenly we lose all our steadily stupider wars; the currency evaporates,we're afraid of every moving shadow.The Fed-Ex clerk in Minneapolis has never heard of Iceland.That in Europe? We don't deliver there. Where's Retchivelt?The code book lies on the table in front of him: number 286.But he either can't or won't read it.So goes business -- as Charles Wilson said: the business of America. Three quarters of us believe in a personal god who saves and punishes. Three quarters of us can't find Canada, France, or the Pacific on a map. We believe in one true god, but not in geography. Every day Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan appear in the Reykjavík newspapers: what are they up to now?Tomorrow I suppose it will be pictures of cars dropping off a collapsed bridge;Down into the Father of Waters that divides us, east from west,The waters that begin in Scandinavian, safe, efficient Minnesota and now will carry bodies downstream in the current through 27 locks and dams that mayor may not open and close and open again as they are directed so that the ghosts can make their way toward whatever is left of New Orleans.Oh United States! Walt Whitman thought you might wake up --though he was not sure -- and he wept for you.Your sleep is deeper now than ever before and none of your "information systems" are worth a damn to wake you or to hold up the girders of whatever bridge might carry you through even one more century of history.
Bill Holm
8-02-07
Published with permission of the author