Like a Limestone Cowboy

By Chris Chrappa

"The dead are covered with lime" says Joker in Kubrick's Full Metal

Jacket. "The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive."

In these postmodern times it is often difficult to tell the true from

the false, the image from the substance, the living from the dead. Some of

us would like to think there are no such things to tell, that reality is at

best a creative fiction spattered with the loam of transcendent categories

plaguing the whole of thought. There's truth in that, I think. But I also

think Kubrick touched on something essential, cut straight to the heart of

the matter, let us know the score like ESPN, except this time the game is

up. He's given away the show. We are, indeed, covered with lime.

Let us look for a moment at this strange fruit--lime--let us look with

open eyes and rigor. At any rate, without rigor mortis.

The way we ordinarily see lime is precisely as we've said: a fruit.

It's in your margarita, it's next to your tequila chicken, it's sour and

acidic. I have a feeling the majority of us think the dead are covered in

limefruit. This is where things get fuzzy.

You see, the Hebrew word rendered lime cropped up in the good old book

so many years ago, in Isaiah 33:12 and Amos 2:1 where it meant something

like "boiling, effervescing," and referred both to a chemical process and

King Edom's bones being burned, respectively. The same word appears in

Deuteronomy 27: 2-4 and is rendered as "plaster." Shakespeare wrote about

it as a cement, informing us "Who gave his blood to lime the stones

together." Tennyson also used the magic word, as did Wordsworth, except

they used it as "entangling" and "smearing" (as in birdlime).

After so much limey-ness one begins to get a bit of reflux. We have the

fruit, which we eat; we have a smearing with a viscous substance, which we

use to catch birds and such; we have an attribute, namely, being entangled

or intwined. I would say that about runs the gamut, and the dead seem to be

anything but "covered" with our precious green mystery. Birds are about to

killed, stones are stuck together by its process, eyes are bewitched with

romantic visions of Tintern Abbey, King's bones are burned until they turn

into it. But where are the corpses who know one thing? Who are covered in

it, lying in a ditch massacred? Let us dig further.

It turns out that lime is also a very precious and very precise chemical

formally dubbed Calcium Oxide (CaO). It is a white crystalline solid with a

meager melting point of 2572 degrees (celsius!). The chemical is

manufactured by heating up limestone, sea shells, coral, chalk--substances

which are mainly CaCO3, or calcium carbonate. You heat these babies up to

about 550 degrees celsius and the carbon dioxide takes off running, leaving

us with the highly caustic pure bred mammoth, CaO.

What's so special about this, you ask? Well, well...take a closer look.

In the first place, this is one of the oldest chemical transformations

systematically produced by man. The use of it actually predates human

history (how we KNOW that, I haven't the foggiest). In any case almost all

the old languages have a word for chemical lime: Latin "calx" (calcium);

Old English "lim" (lime, obviously). Not only is limestone, from which the

chemical issues, superabundant in the Earth's crust, but it is also so

incredibly useful (the dead are covered in it) that we produce upwards of 22

million metric tons of it per year. In the U.S.

Uses: When mixed with water and sand, we get mortar, which holds our

bricks, blocks, and Shakespearean stones together. We also get other

familiar sticky friends like lime plaster and portland cement from it.

Next, we see that heating silica sand with lime and sodium carbonate gives

us a free-form, transparent, decentered and colorless mass (not differance

all you Derrideans): otherwise known as glass. Lime also is used as slag

to take the silicates out of iron and aluminum, a key ingrediant in making

polymers, a reducder of sulfur dioxide pollution, a remover of phosphates in

sewage, and of course, a killer of nasty shit in our drinking water. We

also find it essential for making plastics, paper, sugar, and generating

that bastion of collective theatrical memory--the proverbial Limelight. For

all those not in the know, before electricity struck we'd heat up lime in a

big old torch, probably giving Shakespeare his stage lighting. Look who's

in the limelight now!

In short, every damn thing we can imagine is covered or has been covered

in lime. Roads, parking lots, buildings, the glass in your mirrors and

windows, gold, uranium, steel, paper, sugar, platinum.

For every wonderful fun fact there's an even more distressing side fact.

You see, we figure that since it does all this other great stuff, why not

disinfect the dead as well, so the dead don't kill us too? Traditionally in

epidemics it has been urged that the people disinfect the corpses with lime;

but in point of fact, this is well nigh useless. A superstition, a

"mytheme" as Levi-Strauss would say, or one of those nonsense words like

Mana that don't mean anything but donate to a community an entire system of

sense and meaning. Strangely enough, the dead, if they are carrying

pathogens, are as unaffected by the lime as the pathogens are, and the

chemical causes much more harm to those applying it. Sometimes it's applied

just to take away the dreadful stench, but judging from the look on Joker's

face when he made his inglorious statement about the dead---something ELSE

was rotten in that fine state.

The question is: how could dead people KNOW that it's better to be alive?

We sense the answer, as if by magic: they're covered, with lime. One gets

the queasiest of feelings when watching Joker stand above those

powdered-white corpses, listening to him, witnessing the second of his three

serious moments in the film: the first of which we see Gomer Pyle blow his

brains out after shooting his drill seargent, the third of which we see

Joker blow a wounded woman sniper's brains out ("fuckin' hardcore, man").

In a sense the war itself is covered with lime--the crumbling buildings

everywhere, the industrial squalor of an outsourced Asian "jewel," the

metallurgic crank of tanks and helicopters making death knells with the

clamor of machine guns. Even the title itself is laden: full METAL jacket.

Bullets have full metal jackets, as do soldier-machines, and machines are

covered with lime. Perhaps not unlike what Reich called "character armor."

One character, Animal Mother, wears a helmet that says "I am become death."

Joker wears a helmet that says "Born to Kill" and a peace-sign on his

jacket. Think about it. Twenty-two million tons, one country; we have our

commercial industry, we have our commodities, we have our security blankets,

jackets, lime. If we're not living in it, we're driving on it; if we're not

driving on it, we're working in it; if we're not working in it, we're on

lunch break eating it with our tequila chicken and adorning our alcoholic

beverages with it. It is our territory and our full body, at least a grand

segment of it.

We also think on it. We think might balances right. We think

Christina Aguilera is more worthy of our money than the homeless people

getting locked up for not having money to pay for a hostel every night. We

think we should feel guilty or ashamed for this, as well, if we are aware of

it. We resent ourselves, the more learned we get, or else we inflate

ourselves like Zeppelins and zip off to the next disaster (i.e., Vietnam,

soon to be somewhere in the middle east). We become to partisan to the

seemingly Universal principles mixed in the foundations, bricks, mortar of

our banks, our offices, our dormitories, covering our dead. We become

jokers who know what the dead know.

And how do we know that?

Guess.

----The Limestone Cowboy.