This majestic eucalyptus tree (Myrtaceae eucalyptus) catches the setting sunlight in the back corner of my lot here on this heap of sand welded onto the North American continent so many eons ago. The tree sometimes seems as if it has been there since that time; its girth almost twenty feet and it towers above every other living thing in my neighborhood. Eucalyptus are not native to Florida, they evolved on the continent of Australia, and are unique to that island nation. But their beauty, the white woods exposed beneath a pealing rolling bark, the scythe-like leaves, drooping with authority, and the star-patterned flower clusters all attract themselves to the human imagination. We have dispersed it to our living places everywhere. In Southern California, where the eucalyptus finds a climate much like its home climate in Australia, the tree has become something of a nuisance, so loving the warm dry air of the region that it reproduces beyond its wildest dreams and does so with such fervor that other forms of life get pushed aside. Its seeds seem to sprout on every piece of ground they reach and they grow with such speed that one cannot blink an eye lest they become invaded by the plant. We are luckier here in Florida where the trees will do just fine but cannot take root from their own seed in the sandy ground. I do not know yet why, but I do know it is a truth. In our plam hammock on campus, there are four eucalyptus trees planted in the late 1960s who are not even close to the size of this one but who grow flowers every year and seem to drop some seed, but have not succeeded in spawning progeny. The curving scythe-like leaves are reproduced in the curving armlike branches, the tree fills space and shades yard, and sheds bark and leaves and has what can only described as a presence. I would welcome it under any circumstances and worry not one lick about its staus as an exotic, a moniker that sends shivers and tremors through the nerves of some purists I know. To be from elsewhere is a dangerous thing; to be unusual or unlike is akin to criminal behavior. Purity is desired, the true landscape, an ecology untouched by humans, unblemished by the acts of human will. I do not have to play this out very far to expose its shallow roots and wilting leaves. We do not do well to condemn that which lives and only serve to do what death does by doing so. Ideals are forged in the cauldron of imagination, which, when unstudied, comes to badly built conclusions. Know thy metaphors, and rethink thy place.The erstwhile architect of our failed disaster in Iraq and current tenuous head of the World Bank is one whose metaphors have gone all wrong. The diminutive and gargoyle-like demon has through the force of his own ill-conceived will over these past six years led us toward more dead ends and bad situations than the King of England ever even threatened and still the sensibility of the other powers cannot quite push him from his heights. The forces of good are not at play in this nation any longer, if ever. The forces of humanity have retreated while evil men with small minds and only selfish goals feed at the public trough and steal from our best intentions. All the while, those of us who do nothing, who choose our own self interest only serve these powers. We do not live isolated lives, we merely cultivate isolated imaginations. We have been cloistered by technology and decception into our own self-defeating units of non-power, non-will. The traditional family is such a lust word for the powers that be because it forces us into units that cannot hope to contend with such power. We are no longer public or social or collective or guided by our better instincts because our better instincts are denied us in our boxes and refused us by the market, and squelched and laughed at and turned sour by experience. Paul Wolfowitz, under a reasonable government operating according to long-accepted principles of justice, would have been jailed long ago. Our president, too. Crimes are crimes and they should be punished, but we are too much distracted by our own petty lives and the stuff we think we need to fill them with. The violence perpetrated on us is generational now, it numbs us to truth and shields us from even ourselves. Antoni Gramsci called it hegemony, where the social group of capitalists, those who own and control capital in this deceptive system we have been sold, rule over the rest of us with an iron fisted reality that denies us our birthright. Go ye to your dungeons and caves, invest thyselves with nothingness and aspire to the empty status of consumptive beings. Be what you are through what you own, know who you are by what others say of you, lose yourselves in the lie, for the alternative would take more imagination than we have cultivated in this nation of ours. Live the dying lifestyle and do not ask why, you have been well trained. Do not, whatever you do, aspire to live a life as present as the majestic eucaplytus, branching to your true nature, filling out a girth worthy of titans; that would be sneered at by your neighbors and upset the Walmart stockholders. Go ye! The time is ripe for self-defeat.
