Review by Martha Quillen
Essays – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Something Needs To Be Said – Essays, Poems and Short Stories about Things That Matter
By Michael L. Bullock
Published in 2006 by Hillside Publishing Limited
ISBN 0-9758911-1-1
THIS COLLECTION by Mike Bullock, the editor of Buena Vista’s Chaffee County Times, quickly convinced me that Bullock missed his true calling. He should have been a preacher. And I mean that in the best possible sense. Although not necessarily religious, the opening entries in Something Needs To Be Said are short sermons (with allegories and parables) about how we should live, and they ooze the sort of old-fashioned, inspirational sentiment which was once common in mainstream American culture.
Bullock’s essays offer the kind of gentle remonstrations that became archetypical for all those good, kind country pastors of stage and screen. You can imagine John Ritter delivering one of Bullock’s short morality lessons to his Little House on the Prairie congregation. Or John Wayne, standing with hat in hand in a 1940s western, delivering similar reflections.
In “Nature’s special child,” Bullock advises:
“When you can’t run, walk.
When you can’t walk, crawl.
When you can’t crawl, face the right direction.
Be like a tree:
firmly rooted in sound principle, but swaying in the force of changing circumstance and happenstance….”
In “It’s up to us,” Bullock muses:
“I got to feeling unimportant — and it made me mad.
I said something nasty to someone, and I didn’t care.
That person became angry at the nasty thing I said and she drove her car recklessly on her way home.
She upset six motorists in the process, and they became angry at drivers in general. They vented their anger in various ways, and snubbed 50 family members, friends and strangers. . . .”
Of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder would have been driving a wagon, but the moral of this story certainly graces chapters in the Little House series. It is, of course, that humans “have a far-reaching impact on the world” and should remember that their actions can make a huge difference.
In “Haven’t we learned that?” Bullock offers a list of maxims, including: “Freedom is obedience to the highest authority.” And, “Truths fall like diamonds to the ground, trampled by the inattentive.” And, “Disillusionment is not a curse but a source of laughter.”
Bullock’s moral tales and homilies seem so familiar I felt as though I had heard most of them before. And yet I couldn’t recall reading anything similar recently — perhaps because many of Bullock’s essays have a curiously old-fashioned sensibility.
TODAY’S MAINSTREAM moral instruction tends to get divided along political lines. On the right, there’s a trend toward patriotic zeal, hellfire and brimstone oratory, Biblical prophecy, and angry denunciations of secular morality. On the left, academic experts offer counseling, spiritual inspiration, and psychobabble. Bullock’s moral messages, on the other hand, are the sort that were once commonplace in movies, sitcoms, and radio shows — in Bonanza, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest — and that still inspire kids’ programming, children’s literature and Disney films.
Such messages are friendly, morally instructive, and religiously non-denominational — thereby addressing the largest possible audience. Or to put it another way, Bullock’s essays impart morally uplifting messages to adults in much the same way that Winnie the Pooh and Arthur the Aardvark remind kids that “It’s nice to be nice.”
Bullock’s short, pleasant sermons on virtue segue nicely into another section of his book, which offers heartwarming personality profiles. The best of these is “The solid-gold junk collector,” a touching memorial to Fred Johnson, a handicapped neighbor Bullock met years ago when he lived in the Ponderosa Mobile Home Park in Boulder.
JOHNSON SPENT HIS DAYS scrounging in Dumpsters for bottles and cans to support his meager lifestyle, and for food to feed his entourage of stray pets. And all the while, Fred Johnson kept an eye out for items he thought his neighbors could use — until one sad day when Bullock and a visitor found Fred moaning and unconscious in his tiny travel trailer.
Predictably enough, Johnson’s neighbors remembered him fondly, especially his flaying feet sticking out of the Ponderosa’s Dumpster, and Bullock concludes: “…Fred served as a reminder to everyone to waste nothing, and to be generous with what we have.”
Due to the recent fusion of religion and politics in the United States, most of us have doubtlessly grappled with how our own notions of right and wrong and good and evil compare to other people’s beliefs. And that is the primary theme of Something Needs To Be Said: The collection reveals Bullock’s penchant for religious, moral, and ethical contemplation. Yet the weakest material in Bullock’s book comes in his essays about religion, cosmology, and metaphysics.
In fact, these pieces made me conclude that Bullock really should have been a minister (even though it’s not entirely clear to me whether he embraces a traditional Protestant or a more secular humanist belief system). Either way, however, Bullock clearly regards the nature of good and evil and what Americans believe in as “Things That Matter.”
And yet Bullock’s religious writing is hazy, imprecise, and difficult to follow. Take for example: “Individual consciousness is a bubble. Expansion of this sphere is evolution, as the organism becomes and perceives a greater share of objective reality. God is the maximum sphere, and is the cumulation and culmination of the individual spheres. God is realized by the growth and merger of the individuals, hence the evolution of God is a process of individual will power: the individual nurtures or impedes God by captivating or destroying his own soul.”
I wasn’t sure what Bullock was trying to say here, or in many of his metaphysical and cosmological passages (and he offered little in the way of elucidation). I suppose that’s probably because expressing personal religious convictions is fairly taboo in journalism, and thus Bullock has become somewhat inhibited. But since Bullock seems to regard this transcendent exploration of religion as a higher calling, I felt he should — as he might say — try, try again.
Something Needs To Be Said offers a tantalizing glimpse into Bullock’s religious viewpoints. But in the end, he shies away from deep introspection, soul-searching and personal revelation. The book left me feeling as if I understood this mild-mannered editor (whom I don’t really know but whose words I’ve often read) a little better. But I was left with many unanswered questions.
I kept wondering if Bullock finds his exhortations for forgiveness, kindness, benevolence, a helping hand, and a giving heart to be at odds with his role as a newspaper editor — a career which strikes me as demanding a cool, candid, social critic who encompasses a rather unlikely (or perhaps wholly impossible) combination of determination, tenacity, audacity, high-mindedness, fairness, and impartiality.
LIKEWISE, I was surprised by Bullock’s poetry about “being in love with her,” which was really all about dating. This section featured poems entitled Michelle; Madeleine; Camille; Melissa; Sue; Frances; Leslie; Stephanie; and many more. But it was noticeably lacking in verses about the trials, tribulations and rewards of long-term relationships (be they marital, filial, or Platonic) even though Bullock is over 50 and dedicates this book to his wife and son.
And, of course, in a volume so thoroughly and clearly about religion and beliefs, one couldn’t help but wonder just what Bullock does believe.
One suspects a pastor charged with ministering to his flock — hearing their religious views, listening to their doubts and fears, and helping them overcome their moral lapses — might be more apt at communicating abstract religious concepts than a newspaper editor. Yet Bullock clearly considers this business of exploring our innermost souls an important calling, and thus this book cries for a sequel.
In Something Needs To Be Said, Michael Bullock has begun a spiritual exploration with pleasant sermons, humorous anecdotes, and heart-warming profiles.
One, however, gets the impression that as spiritual quests go, this is just a beginning, not an end. Perhaps Bullock could call his next spiritual exploration — into more difficult, less familiar territory — Something Still Needs To Be Said.
