THE BOX CALLED WAR

Deconstructing one of the most beloved poems of our times

I'm not sure what came over me in my fifteenth year, but I shuffled out of my pot-smoky lair of teenage angst and bought a John Denver album. Yes, this was an odd thing for me to do, even perverse or freakish. Perhaps there was a pandering "Rolling Stone" review -- I got a shitload of bad albums that way. Or maybe I thought it was by Bob Denver of Gilligan's Isle -- I've always admired Bob, his show's magnificent cast and its memorable theme song ( a three hour tour ). No, that doesn't ring true. Look, I don't really know the reasons. Let's just chalk it up to raging pubescent hormones, psychotropic drugs at too early an age, too many Herman Hesse books, a compromised decision-making capacity and a general absence of free will.

I don't remember much about the record itself - don't want to remember - except that it included an epic poem, which I presumed was composed by the country warbler himself. (It didn't conjure up Wallace Stevens.) Mr. Denver's feverish plea for sanity in a world gone kill-happy was provocatively titled, "The Box Called War," and even after all these soupy, dispiriting and despoiled years, I recall that the poem took the controversial position that women and children didn't open the aforementioned container of violence. This morbid ode wounded me deeply as a vulnerable pubescent, and it occurs to me now that I might enjoy hearing Bill Shatner perform his version of it, perhaps in the hip-hop style.

At the very first listening - Good Christ! What abomination have I brought into my home? - I knew what must be done. Without Dad's knowledge (Pop had a weird thing about his tools), I took his soldering iron to the vinyl, a surgical procedure I had performed only once before, on an early Fleetwood Mac with its own querulous sonnet about ... bare trees. (This surfaced in a recent and very ugly repressed-memory hypnosis session.) But the operation on the Mac album was intended only to create a smooth channel for the phonographic needle to glide safely and seamlessly across the unhappy track to the next puerile song. Unfortunately, despite the skill of a young Dr. Barnard or DeBakey, the patient died due to unforeseen and unavoidable complications.

However, in the case of Mr. Denver's compilation, it was never intended for the album to survive the operation. And it did not, except in my deepest consciousness where it has festered like a rusted nail between the toes.

You're going to say that perhaps I just don't like poetry. That is not true and, indeed, the mere thought of you saying so makes me want to cut your nose, kittycat, like Polanski did Jake's in Chinatown. In fact, I consider myself a sophisticated connoisseur of the bard's art, and as a high school sophomore penned my own poignant collection, "Crickets in the Cat Box." I yet recall one haunting refrain from that precocious anthology ... "But I have seen diamonds."

There was also a subtle simile featuring a battered peony struggling feebly towards the crepuscular light amidst the grimy, limb-strewn abattoir.

But let's get right down to it. First of all, what kind of a putz would package war in a box? What? Like a box for carrying your guinea pig to the vet? Or a box of Cheerios, with the special offers and food pyramid on back? (Jeez, I've spent hundreds of hours pondering the mysteries of the food pyramid while spooning up my toasted O's. So many servings of this, so many of that, the sparkly bits of salt and fat twinkling at the apex. It has become a touchstone of my existence, a handy reference at every meal, a special gift at first dates.)

"They float!" I always thought that would make a great ad campaign for Cheerios.

Speaking of cereal box special offers, when I was little more than a toddler, I sent away my painstakingly collected purse stealings (Mom made it so easy, it was as if she wanted me to rifle her purse) to purchase a tool - a piece of advanced technology as it were - which promised that when easily screwed into the rind of the sweet Florida orange would yield a veritable fountain of delectable, thirst-quenching, nutritious juice. Twist it in, then simply pour the rich, pulpy nectar right into your mouth, chug chug.

You've already guessed what followed: a small, innocent, if somewhat large-headed child spends 27 weeks racing to the mailbox day after day - only to be baffled, crushed and irremediably wounded when that dreamed-of delivery finally arrived. Not one drop of ambrosia dripped from the screw-in, rind-protruding tube. For hours, I held it over my heavy, outsized cranium, mouth gaping like a carp out of water, tongue hopelessly probing the juice-less tube - until my tiny aching arms finally gave out. Then I lay on the floor, curled up like a cashew, sucking, until my lungs hurt, the dry plastic teat of all my illusions.

A large part of me is still sucking that teat.

All creation cries out: what kind of soulless ogre would do this to a smiling baby, who had, at least theoretically, heretofore regarded the cosmos with trusting, clapping, awe-struck wonder?

Thank you, we now return to our respectful exegesis of Mr. Denver's album, "Box of Flatulence."

Why not a bag, thermos or tube of war? Huh, answer me that, if you can. I know what you're going to say, you transparent Quisling apologist: Pandora's Box! Ha Ha! Hoisted on your own petard! (My second wife did this to me once - I think the pretext was, "Honey-bunny, can you help me with the curtains?" Then she brought out a cattle prod to discuss Charlene and Darlene, my one and only twin-sandwich experience. I guess she found the polaroids.) Why have you been hoisted on your petard? Because Pandora's "box" was really a "jar!" A classic example of sloppy Greek-to-Latin transcription work in the ancient world. Read your Britannica, ass-face!

I apologize, dearest reader. That was inappropriate and my publisher says I should not have called you "ass-face."

Now to the crux, this dangerous nonsense about women not opening the Rubbermaid tub of brutish conflict. If you're a motherless, sister-less gay man, you might be excused for thinking thus - if you were also a spittle-drooling halfwit of saint-like proportions. But anyone who has lived with a woman longer than an enthralling drug-addled weekend knows that the female of the species has honed war to a fine-edged art. The wiles of Mata Hari. Elephant traps with Punjabi sticks! Bouncing Betties! Interrogation techniques outlawed by international law! It's self-preservation: women live surrounded by grunting, biologically-whipsawed weasels, may the Lord have mercy on our sad, raddled souls.

The ladies took a crowbar to the box called war a long time ago.

Who do you think Pandora was, anyhow? Tootsie?

Furthermore, the witless deification of children makes me extremely peevish. What feeble, granny-toadying, Hallmark-ish pimpery! Yes, mmm mmm, the little, dirty-bottomed angels drop from above like heaven's ambergris. I, for one, try to remember as little of my childhood as possible, doggedly replacing loathsome reality with light-hearted scenes from early Macauley Culkin and Molly Ringwald movies. Outside the company Christmas party, there is no more dangerous and repulsive place on earth than the Every-Town Lord-of-the-Flies Middle School: gang warfare, stink bombs, sexual humiliation, extortion, scalp burn, pink belly and lynch mobs of eager, baby-fatted faces chanting "Fight fight! Kill kill!" I wouldn’t dare enter a school restroom without significant numbers of burly supporters...which unfortunately, I never had. All I had were my fellow pacifist intellectuals: Mssrs. Hoyglet, Funk and Fudd -- and they avoided the toilets as well.

Childhood is one long war zone! I approached each school day like a brain-fried Vietnam grunt fearfully eyeballing another malodorous tunnel hole in the muck. Please don't make me go in there, Lieutenant! ("Yankee dog, you die!") I'd rather just drop a grenade - "fire in the hole!" - scuttle back to my dark room, bolt the door, suck the hookah and watch the ceiling fan slowly turn to Airplane's "White Rabbit."

Doesn't that make good sense to you?

For the most part, that's still how I feel about life. And yet...I have seen diamonds.* Man! That's powerful. Most writers would give their eyeteeth to come up with a line like that. If Mr. Denver had had one-tenth my talent, I might have given his album a favorable review. As it is, I really have no other choice than to shitcan it.

* Footnote: For those of you who have been hurriedly skimming the piece, hoping for an explicit sex description, this evocative line - depicting fragile hope amidst overwhelming despair - comes from the reviewer's own pen. Yes, really. Now, please proceed to the next piece for some hot XXX action.

Correction: I am begrudgingly obliged to thank reader, R. Doe, for researching, and then rubbing in my face, the facts that the correct title of the piece in question is not “The Box Called War” but indeed simply “The Box,” which was written not by Mr. Denver but instead by the great English poet, Lascelles Abercrombie (1881 – 1938). Ms. Doe proceeded to point out, rather gratuitously in my opinion, that Mr. Denver was born in Roswell, New Mexico - the implication being, I assume, that he was an alien.

By Henry E. Panky