Viggo Mortensen talking:
I’ve always been curious. I like to know what’s going on, you know? I mean, I drove my mom crazy probably as a kid by saying, “Why?” And then she would explain it. I’d go, “But why?” You know, then, “What does that mean?”
I was born in New York City and raised all over. My parents moved around a lot, in South America and Scandinavia, where my dad’s from.
Pope Francis blessed a chapel that I had donated and had built on the grounds of San Lorenzo, the same soccer/football team that he has supported all his life. So we have that in common, and he came and blessed that place. It’s a place that was built, and when we inaugurated it, where I said, you know, “This is a place for all—for atheists, for Jews, for Muslims, even people from other soccer teams that aren’t San Lorenzo.” I thought that was fantastic, what he said. And he’s done many things, you know, but he’s going against the current within the church. And it’s amazing, what he’s been saying and many of the things that he’s been doing.
You know, I wish I could say the same thing about Barack Obama in his first and second terms, you know, everything he promised, the changes he promised. It’s not enough to say, “Well, the Republicans stymied me all the way,” which is true. There are choices he made, from the people he appointed—you know, criminals from Wall Street right to start with after the 2008 collapse of the economy—and especially foreign policy. You talked about drones. I mean, I could go on and on, and I won’t.
You know, you talked about something about being engaged. There are many ways of being engaged. One is to talk about politics.
we can talk about politics and talk about facts. Sometimes—as I said, this book, Twilight of Empire, has not only essays and reports from that moment in 2003, but there are also poems by different people. And I have a poem in here.
I’ll take the liberty of reading it, because sometimes you can say things with a poem in a different way. And this is written in 2003 right at the point of the invasion, or just before it; in February of 2003, it was written. And it takes place in Iraq, or what used to be Babylon, you know, that part of the world that’s traversed by the rivers, you know, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Anyway, it’s called “Back to Babylon.”
Accept and forget difference or desire that separates and leaves us longing or repelled. Why briefly return to play in broken places, to mock the ground, to collect infant shards, coins, fossils, or the familiar empty canisters and casings that glint from poisoned roots in the blackened dust? We make bad ghosts, and are last to know or believe we too will fade, just as our acrid smoke and those strange flakes of skin and strands of hair will, into largely undocumented extinction. Lie down, lie down; sleep is the best thing for being awake. Do as we’ve always been told and done, no backward glances or second thoughts, leaving sad markers buried in the sand. Sleep now, dream of children with their heads still on, of grandmothers unburdening clotheslines at twilight, of full kettles slow-ticking over twig embers. Ignore boneless, nameless victims that venture out on bitter gravel to claim remains while we rest.
Pay at the window for re-heated, prejudiced incantations. Take them home and enjoy with wide-screen, half-digested, replayed previews of solemn national celebration. Then sleep, by all means; we’ll need all the energy we can muster for compiling this generation’s abridged anthology of official war stories, highlights of heedless slaughter, to burnish our long and proud imperial tradition. At some point, by virtue of accidentally seeing and listening, we may find ourselves participating in our own rendering. Few of our prey will be left alive enough to water the sun with their modest, time-rubbed repetitions, to rephrase their particular, unifying laws. Our version of events has already made its money back in foreign distribution and pre-sales; all victory deadlines must be met.
It can get so quiet, with or without the dead watching our constant deployments. From our tilted promontory we may see one last woman scuffle away across cracked parchment of dry wash beneath us, muttering to herself—or is she singing at us?—as she rounds the sheared granite face and disappears into a grove of spindly, trembling tamarisk shadows lining the main road. We’ll soon hear little other than our breathing, as shale cools and bats rise to feed, taking over from sated swallows. Night anywhere is home, darkness a cue for turning inward, quiet an invitation to review our expensive successes before morning extraction from the twin rivers of our common cradle.
I think each person has to make their own decisions. You know, each person has to answer the question, “O say can you see?” O say do you want to see? I would say, don’t take no for an answer in terms of career, whether it’s an actor or writer. Someone who wants to be a director, someone who wants to be a journalist, like yourselves, don’t take no for an answer for something you really want to do. Just stick to it. Stick around. You learn a lot by listening to others, by paying attention, by making a conscious effort to see. I understand, as I said before, that people a lot of times don’t want to know, certainly don’t want to speak about what they’ve seen, because it’s unpleasant. It can be depressing when you start to dig around and find out things.
And there is that fear that you speak of. You know, am I going to lose the job? Is my movie not going to be seen by many people? Are people going to hate me? I mean, those things do happen. You know, people are blacklisted. One of the most important activists of the 20th century in the United States was Paul Robeson. And he was someone who spoke truth to power in the way Howard Zinn does and Anthony Arnove and all these people in Twilight of Empire and all these ordinary Americans throughout the history of the United States in Voices of a People’s History of the United States do. Paul Robeson, because when he would go overseas and perform, spoke about U.S. foreign policy and about, you know, the tyrannical aspect of U.S. foreign policy, so the next time he came home, they had his passport taken away. He was not allowed to travel. And he talked about being a member of the U.S. resistance movement, in the same sense that, you know, there were some in France who were part of the resistance movement against the Nazis. When he equated the two things, people were scandalized.
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Viggo Mortensen
Academy Award-nominated actor and editor of Perceval Press.
— source democracynow.org