Michael Katakis - A Thousand Shards of Glass: There Is Another America

Traveller: Observations of an American in Exile

Traveller is a collection of letters, journal entries and photographs that combine the immediacy of experience with reflections on the authors own past.

www.theauthorpeople.com/traveller

Excavating Voices: Listening to Photographs of Native Americans

Three authors from diverse backgrounds contribute essays to this volume of photographs of Native Americans from the archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Listen closely as you look at these arresting images.

www.theauthorpeople.com/excavating-voices

Photographs and Words

Michael Katakis has spent his life travelling with a camera and writing a journal. This is the resulting book. For 25 years he collaborated with social anthropologist Kris Hardin in work spanning continents and cultures.

www.theauthorpeople.com/photographs-and-words

A THOUSAND SHARDS OF GLASS

There is Another America

Michael Katakis

First published in North America in 2015 by The Author People

PO Box 159, St Ives, NSW, 2075, Australia

Copyright Michael Katakis 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of The Author People

Author: Katakis, Michael

Title: A Thousand Shards of Glass: There is another America

ISBN: 9781925399073 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781925399073 (eBook)

Design: Melissa Four/S&S Art Department

Cover photo: Gallery Stock and Shutterstock

Printed by Lightning Source

The Author People accepts no responsibility for any inaccuracy or any incorrect or untrue information.

For Kris

Ive kept a lock of your
Hair and some of your dust
As a talisman, protection
From the memories, like a
Sirens songs that deceive and
Rust

You were my True North
My bearings, my home, but
Death, envious of our course
Folded you into his silence
Setting me adrift without she
Who was my map, my love

I bring what you are with me,
To London and Rome, to the
Greek lemon hills you loved and
Into the Ligurian Sea where once,
Amid the Dancing Stars, we bathed

You are everywhere, my silent
Traveling companion

and for
Mrs. Mary Katharine Lewis,
my Charlotte Shaw

CONTENTS

One night, travelling where those who live within illusions should never go, he stared into the darkness and glimpsed a faded flag where shadows gathered, revealing another America. It was a broken place, bred from fear and distrust a thousand shards of glass filled with a people who long ago had given away all that was precious; a people who had been sold a foreign betrayal that finally came from within, and for nothing more than a handful of silver.

These essays, letters and journal entries were written as a farewell to the country Michael loves still, and to the wife he knew as his True North. A powerful and personal polemic, A Thousand Shards of Glass in Michaels appeal to his fellow citizens to change their course; a cautionary tale to those around the world who idealise an America that never was; and, crucially, a glimpse beyond the myth, to a country whose best days could still lie ahead

INTRODUCTION: A THOUSAND SHARDS OF GLASS

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leasd out I die pronouncing it Like to a tenement or pelting farm. England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watry Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds; That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Shakespeare, Richard II, II, i

There is another America and it lies just beneath the surface of myth, adrift on a sea of illusions and imprisoned by implacable ideologies that strangle reason and compassion. We are not in this together.

The real America is a place obsessed with religion but not ethics, with law, not justice. It is neither the democracy nor the capitalist society touted by corporations, politicians and the media, who perform their own kabuki dance of pretend objectivity when in reality theyre another cog in the corporate state, dependent on its largesse. What is most disturbing, however, is the willful indifference and arrogance that has now made many Americans comfortable with injustice, both at home and abroad.

In the United States of Salesmen it matters little what is in ones heart. It is the verbal, animated gestures of patriotism and faith, no matter how insincere, which are the measure of ones Americaness today. Straighten your stars and stripes lapel pin, adjust your tie and, no matter what you see and hear, just remain seated. Forgive me but I prefer to stand and I have never much cared for club pins on my clothing.

Americas capacity for self-delusion is equaled only by its hypocrisy, which for decades has allowed us, without a hint of irony, to lecture other nations on human rights while torturing people in our custody. America has long spoken of democratic values while working tirelessly during the twentieth century and before to thwart democratic movements and elected governments that have not coincided with our national interests, which has often meant nothing more than forcible corporate access to other peoples property. General Smedley Butler, one of Americas most decorated soldiers, who, I assume, was exhausted by the hypocrisy himself, wrote in his 1935 book War is a Racket: I spent 33 years [in the Marines] most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

A great many Americans have never fully understood that the past does not reside in some dead history. It is always being retold, passed between sister and brother, from parent to child, creating new resentments about unaccounted for transgressions. Those histories roll in front of us until we run into them again like an unresolved Freudian dream. Far from being something to be avoided in the future, however, in America this repetition of manufactured and unresolved conflict is for some their bread and butter, or as the gangsters in the movies say just before they shoot their fellow Mafioso, This is nothing personal. Its just business. And business is exactly what it is.

We are not who we think we are or, more accurately, we are not who we sell ourselves as. America is a nationalistic state filled with actor patriots such as the now deified Ronald Reagan who, along with others like George W. Bush and the draft-averse Dick Cheney, represent the so-called modern Republican Party which, by the way, eerily resembles the Mississippi Democratic Party of the 1950s, with all the trimmings such as voter disenfranchisement, shameless bigotry and corruption, and is filled with the type of patriot George Orwell once described as the kind of person who is somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. In such a patriotic country it seems rather odd that less than 1 per cent of the population would serve.