Sunday, Sept. 16, 42 A.D.
Fever, Fatigue, And Fatalism
Thoughts and feelings continue to mob my head. By the time I have found the right words to attach to them, many more thoughts and feelings in desperate need of my dwindling supply of articulation have lined up just outside my consciousness. It's as if a Great Depression has suddenly hit in the wake of another Great Crash, and I'm running the only soup kitchen for thoughts and feelings in town....
The situation inside my consciousness is even worse. It seems as if my mind is suddenly full of unruly, wolf-raised children, each loudly demanding my full attention RIGHT NOW even as the pots boil over on my back burners and all the toilets of my world overflow....
Friday was the worst so far. It was on Friday that fever seems to have set in.
War fever.
Suddenly an increasing number of the online diaries written by normally sweet people were expressing a thirst for blood. Suddenly a new generation of Americans seemed all too anxious to leap head-first into the meat grinder of global armed conflict. Suddenly yet another president was launching yet another crusade to "eliminate evil" while frothing crowds urged him on....
I ventured out into the world for the first time in a week to find it had become a very different place. Flags flew from cars - sometimes from both windows. Flags flew from houses. Although perhaps only one in 20 homes actually sported a flag, this still represented a quantum leap from what was the case before. If current trends continue, it seems as if each one will be flying 20,000 flags by January, 2003. If only such a cottony cocoon of patriotism were capable of keeping us safe from errant jetliners, Ryder trucks, or people willing to wrap themselves in dynamite....
We got gas at a station where a uniformed member of the Ohio National Guard was filling up his jeep. We went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant where two elderly couples at the next table loudly discussed events until one man in the group even more loudly insisted they talk about something else for awhile. We rather guiltily went out for ice cream later and found red, white, and blue streamers hanging from all the ceiling fans, and all the employees wearing ribbons. It seemed impossible to get away from events, even for a moment, even if you tried....
The simple sound of a police helicopter flying overhead later in the evening tickled my startle reflex, proving once again that context is everything - and that everything is now being perceived by my mind in a new, horrible context. It's a context which is not merely changing the way I perceive the present, and my expectations of the future, but perhaps worst of all, in some ways, it is changing the past (which exists only as a sub-basement of our present brains, when you get right down to it) as well. Suddenly the Clinton years look like a golden age we were too bovine-like to appreciate. Suddenly I cannot look at the large, color photo of lower Manhattan which is sitting in my garage waiting to be hung without my eyes focusing on those towers front and center and my feeling a profound sadness which I never used to feel and will almost certainly never entirely escape. How odd that the actions of a few crazed men so far away can forever change the way I react to a simple photograph. How terribly it resonates with the way the assassination forever changed the way I perceived photos of JFK, turning each glimpse of that famous face into a macabre game of "Is that the piece of his head which ended up on the pavement of Dallas?" despite my best efforts to resist. Disreputable parts of my mind insist on playing similar games now with photos of those towers, making me want to upset the game board and storm away home. If only the board could be upset and tossed clean out of my mind; if only we weren't already home and under an open-ended house arrest....
I have not flown the flag myself. I never have. I doubt that I ever will. Does this make me less of an American than those who do? I don't think so. While others turn to the symbols of our country in times of crisis, I prefer to turn to the words and ideals of the Jeffersons and Madisons who give those symbols their meaning.
And while others choose to cheer the words of our commander-in-chief of the moment, I prefer to embrace and rededicate myself to these deathless words of Thomas Paine:
"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
Although shouting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" may bring comfort and hope to many, to me this chant seems terribly unsophisticated - even mindlessly tribal - compared to these words of Paine....
One of the many important things to remember here, I think, is that Tuesday's attack wasn't merely an attack on America. It was an attack on Western civilization and its highest ideals. Reacting to it primarily as Americans therefore seems to miss the point. And it risks making the situation even worse. We cannot combat extreme nationalism or sectarianism by embracing nationalism or sectarianism ourselves. We need to transcend them by embracing transnational ideals and goals, by remembering and celebrating our common humanity (NOT our common nationality), and by formulating a response big enough to whole-heartedly include all good and decent peoples everywhere and not merely those living in the latest country to be attacked by a violent, pre-modern mindset.
Alas, even as my mind was struggling to put together these thoughts and feelings, it was blindsided by new, even more disturbing information:
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have taken to the airwaves to blame Tuesday's events on the ACLU, feminists, gays, pro-abortionists, and those who believe (as did Jefferson and Madison) in a strict separation of church and state. Seems these people have all pissed off God and caused Him to withdraw His protection from America. And it seems that such high profile preachers as Franklin Graham were concurring with this view by urging America to repent and turn back to God before things got even worse.
Suddenly it seemed as if the country was on the verge of responding to 21st century events by diving right back into the 16th century. Suddenly it seemed as if the greatest danger facing us wasn't Osama bin Laden or the extreme nationalism and naivete which led to World War I but the mindless fears and superstitions which had inspired the horrendous witch hunts of pre-Enlightenment days....
My mind once again struggles to comprehend how men like Falwell and Robertson ever got on TV in the first place, let alone managed to attract masses of followers and become advisers to presidents. I struggle to understand how people like Jimmy the Greek have been forced off the air for making ignorant comments about blacks while Falwell and Robertson have thrived for decades by making far more ignorant, hateful, and dangerous comments about a broad range of others. As terrible as the events of Tuesday were, they didn't inspire half as much fear in me as the words of these Americans later in the week. Now, suddenly - and for a variety of reasons - I find myself far more afraid of what Americans might do at home and abroad than I am afraid of any terrorists....
And yet another part of my brain finds it all so terribly, terribly predictable.
I've read "The Guns of August," after all, and "The Best and the Brightest." I know how even great nations can stupidly stumble into the most horrid of wars. I've read "The Red Badge of Courage," "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Born on the Fourth of July" and know how quickly war fever can sweep up the individuals of an entire country and send them on a frenzied stampede over the edge of the cliff into the abyss. I remember how events like the Reichstag fire can be twisted and used as an excuse to eliminate all your political enemies and civil liberties if you're scoundrel enough to do so. I remember the newspaper accounts at the time of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and how outraged most Americans were when anyone even gently suggested that incinerating tens of thousands of civilians might be a morally questionable act. In their minds the fact that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor justified any response, no matter how horrible, no matter how much innocent blood was spilled in the process, no matter how disproportionate it may seem to moral philosophers or historians. I have read too many detailed accounts of how the American military has spent decades cold-bloodedly preparing to incinerate hundreds of millions of faceless strangers - even perhaps extinguish all life on this planet - if "the situation requires it" for me to ever be truly surprised by the atrocious things "good" Americans are capable of doing.
And yet I've hoped against hope and lived my life as if it was possible to forget all these things.
Friday crushed that hope in a way Tuesday hadn't come close. First I was reminded that the mindless passions and frightfully underdeveloped morality of some of my countrymen resemble those of small, suddenly orphaned children; then I had my nose rubbed in the fact that the religious madness which inspires fanatics like Osama bin Laden is a mirror image of that which exists in the minds and followers of some of America's own great Christian leaders....
How odd that so many urged a moment of silence upon us that day when what seems to be needed is an unending scream of protest against the deepening insanity. How terribly depressing that Bush declared Friday a day of prayer when what's needed are lives dedicated to the education and serious reflection which alone can help us ascend to the wisdom we so desperate need....
Outraged and shaken as rarely before by these events and perceptions, I didn't get to bed until about 4 in the morning. Saturday - yesterday - was consequently a day of profound fatigue. For the country as a whole, it seems, as well as for me. TV news coverage finally was scaled back. Friends who had raced to share the shock of this week's events were now taking pains not to refer to them in any way. It seems we all needed a break, from Dan Rather on down, and so once again our pre-programmed human psychology seems to have finally trumped whatever objective truth and reality might require.
Four days of shock, followed by a blackout of the psyche brought on by the fact that all our emotional fuses have finally blown. Is it a coincidence that one documentary about the Kennedy assassination was entitled Four Days In November? Are generations born since 1963 experiencing the traumatic events of this week in more or less the same way because this is the way we humans are wired, and similar wiring responds similarly under similar strains?
Whatever the reason, however close the parallel between now and then, the fact is that today the fatigue seems to have continued - as far as I can tell, anyway. A trip to the grocery revealed an apparently normal scene - until I got to the check-outs. That's when this slow Sherlock Holmes finally noticed the dog which wasn't barking, that's when it finally occurred to me - as it occurred to Earl Holliman in the very first Twilight Zone episode, "Where Is Everybody?" - that there were no flies around the trash cans. It was a revelatory moment derived from a profound absence - from my all of a sudden becoming aware that the distant throbbing of the engines was no longer vibrating my stateroom aboard the Titanic.
Nobody was chatting up the check-out people. Nobody was even making eye contact. Not even the employees were interacting. We were all in our own little worlds of sadness exactly as if we were all about to go to a funeral.
I don't believe I've ever experienced anything quite like it before. The sign I saw on a motel marquee tonight - "Mr. Bush Time To Kick Ass" - is the sort of thing that I remember well from the Iranian hostage crisis, when bumper stickers of Mickey Mouse giving Iran the finger were common. This profound silence and sadness in a bustling public place - this was something new.
And yet....
It resonated with... something. Something almost completely forgotten. Some trace memory buried deep inside me beneath the accumulated rubble of 42 years.
And then I knew.
The grocery had been full of the same hopeless lassitude as On The Beach.
It was as if I'd suddenly been transported to that Australia of Nevil Shute's imagination where people wanly waited for the radioactive fall-out from a distant, incomprehensible World War III to complete its inevitable drift south and kill them....
(©Now by DJ Birtcher even though this entry might seem as pointless as a message tapped out on a telegraph key by a precariously balanced Coke bottle gently moving in a breeze coming in through a shattered window)