'Daddy, What is a Drone?' - A Bedtime Story

How do you explain to your child that their country targets little children just like them?

(LAVERNE, CA) - The question jolted him out of his lethargy as he suddenly sat upright in the soft chair he had slumped into when she came for “her time with Daddy.” It had the ring of a catechism question; “What is God, Daddy?” How does one answer that without a torrent of other questions cascading from this innocent mouth one after another? His first impulse was to ignore it; his second, to discombobulate the response with obfuscation, to deflect the question with words she could not understand; his third, to respond directly to her question, to speak the truth knowing that she would not comprehend the intricacies of the policies that legalize the use of drones.

He remembered the story of Hawthorne’s good Dr. Grim who had to address a similar question when Little Ned asked him, “Whence came I here and why?” Indeed, the good doctor answered honestly, truthfully, bluntly, and, dare we say it, wisely.

“Daddy, what is a Drone?” she asked again, noticing his sudden reaction and his hesitancy.

“Darling, I think your mother called; yes, I’m certain. Please go to her and we’ll talk about this later.”

He sagged back into the chair as she left the room conscious that he was no Doctor Grim though the power of Doctor. Grim’s cynical answer to Ned held an unexplainable fascination for him as it sprung to mind when his daughter asked her question. Perhaps Hawthorne had responded for his character because he had grappled with the consequences of the world that surrounded him as he tried desperately to bring closure to this last novel that eluded a meaningful ending.

He sat there musing, recalling that Hawthorne had gone ‘to see the war,” to attempt to understand what it was and why, so he travelled by buggy to Washington “to see the war.” And he saw it, upfront and personal: brother slaughtering brother, the ideals of this new, innocent nation built on such mighty principles of equality for all, of laws that protect all, where the corruption of Europe and thousands of years of wars and devastation, of barbarism and savagery could not taint this new Eden where each could achieve as he or she desired, as he, Hawthorne had determined was the meaningful end of his last novel, The Marble Faun. Hawthorne realized that the world around him had gone mad: the Confederates fought to protect a medieval system of privilege and slavery while the north had capitulated to survival of the fittest and cut throat Capitalism. The evils of Europe had come home to roost.

Daddy sat there ruminating on Dr. Grimshawe’s “kingdom of shadows” and the “dust, mud, clay” and the hell that is the life we live, “to toil and moil and hope and fear” and, above all, and, oh, how pitiful and absolute the truth of it, “to hate in bitter earnest.” Strange how the world has not changed since the Civil War; we simply move the war elsewhere, manufacture schisms, fracture governments, supplant elected officials with western puppets, support dictators with weapons of mass destruction to carry out our will, buy off the representatives of the people, and create laws that erase individual rights while proclaiming we do God’s will.

How then to tell a daughter this truth when in fact she will in time know that he is the one who decides who will live and who will die, which children will be scattered over the landscape as they scramble for the detritus of human waste in the dumps that litter the hills and valleys in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Palestine, which mothers and daughters and sons may be the accidents of the Tuesday night gathering of enlightened men when they decide to do what drones do in the silence and darkness and mystery of the kingdom of shadows that hovers above all the living and the dead. How explain the unexplainable when she asks the next question:” Daddy, who tells the computer when to fire a missile?” “Daddy, why don’t these people get arrested and charged with their crimes?” “Daddy, why don’t you use the courts and the laws of the country?” “Daddy, who is God? Are you God, Daddy? Who made you God, Daddy?”

As he listened in silence to the unuttered words of his daughter, he gave utterance to Dr. Grimshawe’s response to Little Ned:

William A. Cook is Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California where he served for 13 years as Vice President for Academic Affairs before assuming his faculty position in 2001. Prior to coming to California, he served as a Dean of Faculty, Chair of Department of English and faculty member at institutions large and small, public and private in four eastern states. He is an activist and a writer for numerous Internet publications including Counterpunch, Salem-News.com, Pacific Free Press in British Columbia, Dissident Voice and Information Clearing House, serving as senior editor for MWC News out of Canada, and contributing editor at the Palestine Chronicle, the Atlantic Free Press in the Netherlands, and the World Prout Assembly, his polemics against the Bush administration and the atrocities caused by Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert in Israel, now our 51st state, have been spread around the Internet world and translated into French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Italian. Cook also serves on the Board of the People’s Media Project, interviews on radio and TV in South Africa, Canada, Iran and the United States and contributed for five years yearly predictions to the Hong Kong Economic News. This volume follows his Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied: The Rape of Palestine and continues his scourge against the hypocrisy, deceit, and destructive policies that have characterized American mid-east policy and its destructive alliance with the Zionist forces that have turned Israel into an apartheid state determined to destroy the Palestinian people.

In addition to his polemics, he writes plays (The Unreasoning Mask, co-authored with his wife, D’Arcy, and The Agony of Colin Powell), satires (see “Advancing the Civilized State: Inch by Bloody Inch” in The Rape), and poetry (Psalms for the 21st Century). His most recent fictional work creates a morality tale based upon real life figures that haunt our lives, The Chronicles of Nefaria He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or www.drwilliamacook.com..

The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction is a collection of voices from around the world that establishes in both theoretical and graphic terms the slow, methodical genocide taking place in Palestine beginning in the 1940s, as revealed in the Introduction. From Dr. Francis A. Boyle’s detailed legal case against the state of Israel, to Uri Avnery’s “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” to Richard Falk’s “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” to Ilan Pappe’s “Genocide in Gaza,” these voices decry in startling, vivid, and forceful language the calculated atrocities taking place, the inhumane conditions inflicted on the people, and the silence that exists despite the crimes, nothing short of state-sponsored genocide against the Palestinians.