Friday, Sept. 14, 42 A.D.

Fingering My Exit Wounds
 

What?  It's not over yet?  A good night's sleep has not led to a complete and full recovery?

*Sigh*

I knew it wouldn't, of course, but still...  Despite having gone through this process that's triggered by national tragedy several times before, my mind needs to relearn and re-experience that process all over again, bit by bit, apparently powerless to either speed things up or escape the process altogether.

Part of my brain knew the moment it heard the news on Tuesday that it was merely the start of this long and painful process, just as one in some sense knows the moment bullets are tearing through one's limbs that months of recovery are going to be necessary, at best.  The cognitive brain, however, must take a backseat to more primitive mental processes: The startle reflex, the automatic ducking and covering (which serves us so poorly in this age of modern weaponry), the attempt to make sense of and deal with the immediate pain, the need to reconnect with others (which helps the brain determine just how bad things are and allows it to convince itself that what is happening actually is a part of an external reality and not merely a self-generated nightmare)....

One could almost chart this process.  Perhaps some psychologist somewhere right now is.  Perhaps there are even charts I know nothing about hanging on walls I've never seen, charts which clinically detail the normal mind's reaction to shocking events.  Perhaps these charts owe something to Kuebler-Ross's famous  sketch of how we deal with horrid events like death.  You know the oh-so-pat little drill:  Denial.  Anger.  Bargaining.  Depression.  Acceptance.  The cognitive brain apparently takes great comfort in being able to attach labels to each type of writhing that the feeling brain painfully experiences directly.

In this it seems we are all reporters rushing to the scene of intense suffering.  Unable to think of anything better to do once we get there, we stick a mike in the very center of our agony and stupidly ask "Could you tell me exactly what it is that I'm feeling?"

Where on the arc of normal reaction would I place the dot symbolizing my brain's state today?  Its wounds have stopped bleeding, but the bruises radiating out from them are becoming more and more purple.  The freedom of movement of my thoughts has become painfully restricted.  The mind can no more distract itself from the awful details of Tuesday than someone who has just fallen down a steep flight of stairs can forget their new wheelchair by going to a dance....

Instead, the mind's finger keeps tracing and retracing the ragged edges of its wounds.  It is not compulsion or morbid obsession so much as it is part of an ongoing attempt to rewire the brain, to update its programming and adapt it to the sudden and new realities.  Like an agonizing reinstallation of Windows, it is a process which cannot be avoided or rushed....

And while those parts of the brain variously writhe and chart the writhing and strain to adapt, other parts (oh, we humans have so many - too many?  or not enough?) do other things....

The writer in me, for example, continues to observe and remember, and then struggles to find the right words which will successfully (or at least plausibly) integrate the surreally unexpected now into the 42 years of nows sitting frozen somewhere in the warehouse district of the skull.

As luck would have it, much of those 42 years of nows in my skull consist of words... words gleaned from books... words gleaned from newspapers... words which form stained-glass crystal patterns which I must now look through as I struggle to glimpse Deeper Understanding.  It is important to remember that these crystal patterns are, to an unknown extent, peculiar to me and, as such, hard to distinguish from a subjective dream.  It perhaps goes without saying, however, that remembering this fact can in no way keep me from looking through them, even if I forget their subjective nature in the process.  Better, it seems, to look through stained glass (or even a kaleidoscope) then shut ones eyes and be blind.  Better, it seems, to experience life as a dream than not at all....

War.  I have just watched a C-Span tape showing congressmen on the Capitol grounds yesterday explaining the details of their draft declaration of war.  Whatever the reality of the event may have been, it seems both apocalyptic and quaint from this side of my stained-glass mind.  The US hasn't declared war since the horrid year of 1941.  Even then, Hitler - perhaps the epitome of evil for most Americans even today - officially declared war on us first.  Some historians speculate that had Hitler not done so, FDR might have had a hard time doing the job himself.  After all, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor - not the Luftwaffe.  How do you explain to the unsophisticated America of 1941 that bombs from Tokyo dropping on Hawaii require that your sons be sent off to the Black Forest to engage Germans in hand-to-hand combat?  In any event, America was soon engulfed in world war - the immediate historic precedent to yesterday's draft declaration of war and one which I suspect must chill the heart of even the most hardened videogame warrior.

If we had only had the sense to declare a few minor, unimportant wars between 1941 and now, perhaps things might now seem a bit better than they do....

But of course declarations of war went out of style with zoot suits and the jitterbug.  And nobody who knows anything about the way Congress works ever thought it would be able to organize itself and even vote out of committee a declaration of war in the 20 minutes between the launch of Russian ICBMs and the "need" to respond with ours.  War, it seemed, had simply grown too big and fast for declarations, perhaps not unlike a child outgrowing the need for parents to tell him  how to balance on his (Hell's Angels) bike.  And for a society which was soon regularly telling itself that old and smelly products were actually new and improved, the Orwellian idea of calling war something else entirely in order to make it seem less unpleasant was soon standard operating procedure - and issuing declarations of incursions would have rather gone against the brand new and improved grain, wouldn't it?

How odd to realize all this as I watched C-Span this morning.  How odd to realize that we live in a world where organized violence launched against other nations and states and whole peoples is labeled a police action while declarations of war are reserved for poverty, cancer, drugs, and terrorists.

Terrorists.

I've tried to wrap my mind around this word for almost 30 years now, and each time it slips away in the dense underbrush of semantics.

As became clear during the Reagan administration's escapades in Central America, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.  Menachim Begin was once a terrorist.  George Washington might well have been considered a terrorist had 18th century British royalty only known the word.  This doesn't excuse what happened Tuesday (what could??) but it does suggest that there's a world of difference between declaring war on the Japanese Empire (not fascism) and declaring war on those basically defined as "very bad people."  Might as well declare war on bigots and ignoramuses while we're at it.

And on all their little dogs, too....

*Brief pause while I again gently trace the size and shape of my bruises, and wonder: Is infection setting in?  Is fever?*

The Taliban were quoted as saying something very interesting in yesterday's paper.  Well, *I* thought it was interesting, anyway:  "There is no factory in Afghanistan that is worth the price of a single missile fired at us."  Although a few culprits like Osama bin Laden may be wealthy (thanks in large part to the reserves of oil which Allah in His Infinite Wisdom has seen fit to put under their land), these are generally very poor people we are labeling terrorists.  They certainly have neither the numbers nor the resources of a Germany or Japan.  I'll be very surprised if it turns out those responsible for Tuesday's attacks even have the numbers or resources of a Kalamazoo or Poughkeepsie.  And yet Congress is now set to unleash on them the full fury of a military designed to take on both the USSR and China?  Has such a small group of people ever brought down upon themselves such a hugely disproportionate reaction?  Are American officials contemplating the use of nuclear weapons to get a man on a donkey in a Third World slum?  Is that what this special Theater of the Absurd production we're all stuck in as bit players finally come down to?

But of course it's not really about one man, is it?  Sure, we always need a bogeyman of the hour to focus our hate on, be it Hitler or Khomeini, Castro or Saddam, Qaddafi or Khrushchev, Oswald or Noriega.  Something much much more significant than one man is always going on, of course, and so it is here is  - it's just difficult just yet to know what.  We are, it seems, like those people in 1861 who struggled to learn all they could about the bombardment of Ft. Sumter but nonetheless remained hermetically sealed off by time itself from the horrors to come at Antietam and Gettysburg - or the hope provided by the Emancipation Proclamation.  We can only hope we are not like those people in 1914 who struggled to learn all they could about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and were hermetically sealed off by time from the Battles of the Somme and the Marne, mustard gas, the eventual rise of Nazism from the ashes, and all the rest....

And of course we aren't like those people.  Not exactly, anyway.  One cannot simply ransack the past in search of what seem to be parallel situations and then simple-mindedly apply them to today.  If one could do that, we really wouldn't be hermetically sealed off from future events, would we?  We would know when it's in the not knowing that the scorpion of history has buried its stinger and poison....

Or, as some English chap once put it (even though he didn't know the word "terrorism" anymore than the 18th century royals did):  "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Or maybe not.  Maybe what we're facing here is merely our latest, clearest glimpse yet of an emerging war between the world's haves and have-nots, with the haves (oddly enough) having far more to lose.  Then again, maybe it's merely another chapter in the centuries-old conflict between modern rationalism and medieval superstition, with the medievals smart enough to turn the technological products of modernity against their makers.

Or maybe - just maybe - we're witnessing the mutation of human conflict into something new.  Just as castles gave way to cannons, redcoats gave way to camouflaged bands, trench warfare gave way to tanks, and large standing armies gave way to neutron bombs, perhaps we are witnessing the snarling but easy to shoot German shepherd dogs of war evolve into a kind of AIDs virus which hides within the world's farthest recesses and turns the global immune system against itself.  Perhaps we can never eradicate that virus or develop a vaccine against it; perhaps we can only hope to reduce it to a tolerable, chronic condition while providing symptomatic relief as needed....

Such are my thoughts this day as my mind struggles to fit new facts into understandable patterns.  The newscasters are doing a great job of delivering those facts, but they really suck when it comes to putting those facts into historical, sociological, psychological, or philosophical perspective.  Alas, without such perspectives these facts tend to go straight to the emotions and inflame them.  Or perhaps trigger an allergic reaction - which of course can be much more dangerous than the allergens which triggered it....

In hopes of achieving at least some historical perspective before ending this entry, I duly note the following:

"Jefferson's first major foreign crisis began in 1801.  European commercial powers - and the United States - had long paid Africa's Barbary Coast pirates annual fees to protect their vessels from raids.  When the Pasha of Tripoli demanded that America increase its payments, the United States refused, and the Pasha declared war.  Jefferson ordered the fleet to the Mediterranean.  In 1804, Tripolitans took the American warship Philadelphia, which had run aground, and United States frigates bombarded Tripoli.  His purpose, Jefferson said, was to bludgeon 'the Barbarians of Tripoli to the desire of peace on proper terms by the sufferings of war.'  Later, William Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, marched with a small force from Libya to the Tripolitan town of Derna and seized it.  A treaty favorable to the United States was signed in 1805." - The American Heritage Book of the Presidents, Vol. 2, p. 105.

The Encyclopedia Britannica adds a few more details:  These pirates terrorized seafarers for hundreds of years before Jefferson.  Funds for their ships were routinely provided by unnamed rich men who received 10% of the spoils in return.  In the 1500s, they became "state-supported terrorists" after Khayr ad-Din merged Algeria and Tunisia into one big military state dependent upon piracy for its revenues.  By 1650, more than 30,000 captives were imprisoned in Algiers alone.  Although Jefferson's actions are interesting and notable, it took British and French military action to put a definitive end to all this in 1830....

The stained-glass minds of the authors of the Britannica being much different than my own, the Britannica does not mention what the civilian casualty count might have been.
 
 

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(©Now by DJ Birtcher while sipping his Earl Grey tea with a stiff upper lip
and thinking, "Gee, so THIS is what it's like to meticulously conform to international copyright regulations even as angry tribes and savages rampage through the global village.  How mad....")