The Sin Drum Beat
by Lisa Massaciùccoli

“The story is of a child who decides never to grow past his current height of three feet because the world is such a horrible place, and then experiences many adventures that prove to him that he was simultaneously totally right and totally wrong in his belief.” — Darran Anderson’s description of Oskar in The Tin Drum

“I don’t wanna have to learn to count” — Tom Waits

“I will never grow… a fraction of an inch.” — from Peter Pan Soundtrack Lyrics

Coming off of a close reading of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, I find the situation particularly unbearable. THIS American situation.

Good friends asked me the other night whether or not I hated the U.S. My response was that “hate” was a strong word, and then I went into some long, less than ingenuous blah blah, couched in carefully constructed, appropriate-for-the-occassion (I thought) attitudinal stances. Dances around the point.

“Say how you feel,” I was encouraged. “Well…,” replied I, and — given a second chance — I still didn’t address the hate factor. There was a syndrome of sorts at work there.

Watching the local Christmas Parade on tape this morning with my darling Marcel, we caught members of San Jose’s Children’s Musical Theatre — largest of its kind in the nation, they boast — dancing in the street to the tune of the Peter Pan lyrics in “I Won’t Grow Up.” A different set of words than what’s offered up by Tom Waits’ version of that theme in “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.” You can look ‘em both up.

It seemed to me that the very performance of such a tune in the midst of the mindless celebration of Xmas in downtown San Jose was evidence of having committed to growing up firmly within parameters dictated by The Adult World.

Smiles on cue, soul askew, something borrowed, not too blue, etc. Yes, these children, I thought, were very definitely on a theatrical career fast track, bourgeois benefits and fame just around the corner. Little Jack Horners, if you ask me. See http://www.rhymes.org.uk/little_jack_horner.htm.

We might acknowledge the terrible evil and good in each and every child. In each budding adult. In every grown-up. And by doing so, reject the tired old, self-destructive, dichotomy of the Good and the Evil.

As Darran Anderson points out, in reviewing The Tin Drum:

“By rejecting the good/evil system of thought, Oskar maintains his freedom. Likewise, Grass refuses to demonize the Nazis, to dehumanize them into stock villains as they had the Jews. They were not predestined or predetermined to be evil, it was not the devil or some higher or lower force that possessed them. They were people, ordinary educated people (doctors, university graduates, chicken farmers, greengrocers) who brought evil about consciously through their choices. If you accept this, you accept that we also have an immense power in every choice to bring good, and in this there is hope.”

Obviously, hope is not to be found with militaristic/ecocidal America’s latest False Hope.

There’s a certain slant of light
On winter afternoons
That embraces anarchism
And poetic tunes

Internal difference
Where the heartbeats are.

Read all of Darran’s http://www.litkicks.com/GunterGrass/. Or, better yet, read the whole of Gunter’s The Tin Drum. Definitely glance at Emily Dickinson’s poem ( http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/830/ )… which provides a certain slant of light.

The wars are over, if you want it.

(Pause)

You are going to die very soon. And you don’t know what that means.

Only one thing is certain.

Anything you’ve heard about to date, any angle you’ve thought of…

doesn’t dance to its beat.

(Pause)

Now play your drum, trusting your wiggly vibration.