Tuesday, Sept. 18, 42 A.D.
Shooting The Rapids While Time Stands Still
An oxymoronic title for a wildly contradictory time.
Events seem to be unfolding faster than I can track them, and yet the mind's clock seems permanently frozen at the moment it first saw the towers collapse on TV....
Tons of debris continues to be hauled away - 4000 dump trucks so far, according to the news tonight - and yet the rubble never seems to diminish....
We seem to be hurtling headlong towards war without ever quite getting there, just like those particles and imaginary spaceships I've read about which can approach the speed of light but never quite reach it. Even as they accelerate, time slows for those on the spaceship....
I no sooner ended my last entry in hopes of finally pinning my thoughts to the page when second thoughts rushed in like a hidden undertow to remind me that things really aren't quite as bleak and one-note as that entry might have made it seem. The fact is that while we DID seem to enter the pages of On The Beach at the grocery, we also discovered a happy crowd at the pet store we visited later, and then primordial solace in a long walk in the woods. The fact is that while I've been most struck by the flags and the war-mongering, I've also heard reports of peace demonstrators in Oregon and a University of Toledo forum of professors leaning 7-1 against retaliation. The fact is that even while in a boat on a rampaging river rapidly moving towards the falls, one doesn't feel merely a single, omnidirectional sense of motion but bobbing and swirls and listings which, however minor they might be in the grand scheme of things, serve to confuse and distract and give reality a contradictory richness and texture which few disaster movies ever seem to do.
Today seems to be an odd mix of Phony War and apocalypse, patriotic celebration and seething anger. You remember the original Phony War - that time of suspended animation between Hitler's September 1939 conquest of Poland and whatever people expected to come next. France and England had declared war when the Germans first struck east, but it didn't seem to mean anything. No bombs fell in the west, no invasions were launched - it was the calm before the blitzkrieg which would crush Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France and others come the new year. People grew impatient, even giddy as the gore-free months dragged by. What - a world war without combat? It seemed too good to be true.
Alas, it was.
My mind has wandered back to what I've read of that time a lot the last few days - especially as I watched David Letterman last night. His first show since the attacks was somber, of course, and never more so than when Dan Rather broke down and cried - twice. What struck me most, however, was Letterman's sharpest questions to him: "Why haven't we struck back yet? WHY? What are we waiting for?!" As love of God and flag percolated up through the show from the roiling, subterranean Zeitgeist of these feverish times, Dan could only assure David we would - massively, and soon. And hurray for us, Dan basically declared - if we only have the balls to do it right for once.
Such impatience and self-righteousness, so reminiscent of the start of the Great Wars of the past, saddened me in the way only bad things being mistaken for good ones by masses of people can.
A recent USA Today poll reports that a majority of Americans favor war "even if it means 1000 American military casualties." I involuntarily had to laugh. It was like hearing people say they're in favor of jumping off a cliff even if it means they'll lose a full foot in altitude. People have no idea - or at least no more of one than those Washingtonians who went out to watch the First Battle of Bull Run as if it was a sports contest which would settle all the conflicts between North and South in time for everyone to get home in time for dinner and a nap....
Rumsfeld and Rather both tell me that Osama bin Laden's organization is active in between 50 and 60 countries. Afghanistan is only one - and no one has conquered Afghanistan since Alexander the Great over 2000 years ago. The British tried while at the height of their power in the 19th century and couldn't do it. The USSR gave it its best shot for 10 years and lost. Now Russia can't even subdue the Islamic fundamentalists of tiny Chechnya despite years and years of trying....
While Bush and Company pressure the Pakistani dictatorship to assist it in its planned attacks on Afghanistan, pro-Osama Pakistanis already are taking to the streets in protest and just might have the power to topple their government much as the Iranians sent the Shah running 22 years ago. Pakistan alone is a country of 140 million people. It has perhaps 30 nuclear bombs. That's country #2. Just between 48 and 58 more to go, boys and girls, before we can claim victory and kiss each other in whatever may remain of Times Square....
In the face of such facts the increasingly passionate flag-waving and renditions of "God Bless America" seem increasingly hollow and sad to me. And even though in some ways we seem to have entered a future so different from the past the mind wants to label it science fiction, it also seems to be like the replaying of a very old, very scratchy record, with the needle inevitably making its way towards some of the most discordant sounds ever heard by the ears of humanity....
So what if it's actually a CD rather than a 78 platter that I'm hearing? What good are technological advances so long as the horrid siren song of war remains forever the same?
(©Now by DJ Birtcher without commercial interruption)