| Monday, February 17, 2003 |
18:02 - Catching Up
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Hoo-boy. It's been a long weekend, and I've really been out of the loop.
I had a friend visiting from Canada, and we spent the last three days on a whirlwind tour of the Bay Area-- taking in all the points of interest that I could think of, both traditional touristy things like the Golden Gate Bridge and North Beach and the Castro, and cool spots of more personal significance like Summit Rock and Quimby Road and Kearney Street (up by Coit Tower) and Skyline Boulevard and my new house. We ended up discovering some cool out-of-the-way secrets that I hadn't actually known about before, and the weather cooperated and everything.
Little did I know that while we were laughing with friends in restaurants and hiking trails, San Francisco's lights below us hid a fresh wave of anti-war protests. It's really getting ugly out there, and I'm starting to feel less and less like I know what I'm doing and where the world is going. Having just watched Big Trouble in Little China and Akira for the first time this weekend as well didn't really help matters; now I'm haunted by nocturnal visions of San Francisco vanishing under a blinding white dome, slowly expanding outward from some central nexus as civil unrest changes the color of the streets worldwide faster and more sharply than has ever happened in the past. Writing on this page for the past year, I've been the proverbial frog in the saucepan, oblivious to the rising temperature and unwilling to shake off the miasma of dulled perspective that prevents me from realizing that I'm about to be boiled alive.
Right after the towers were hit, people on the news were saying over and over again that this changes everything. Few people could say much that added to that sentiment, but we knew, somehow-- instincively, viscerally-- that this changes everything. We had every reason to believe that the world would be forever altered from top to bottom, that either all of humanity would unite in brotherhood, or we would be plunged into protracted war and suffering. There wasn't much middle ground that we could see. We fully expected more attacks. We jumped at every news report. I woke up every morning with my hand twitching on the Refresh button on CNN.com.
But those follow-up attacks never came, and we started to realize that somehow, confusingly, not much had really actually changed. The towers weren't there anymore. Three thousand people were dead. But where was the changed world? Afghanistan came and went as a news item, and soon the only concrete evidence of 9/11 was the ongoing discourse over whether new and old movies should have the World Trade Center in their panoramas of the Manhattan skyline anymore.
I think, however, that 9/11 bit deep-- deeper than we've come to think it did. It's like a childhood injury that comes back to haunt you in the form of a bad back. It's like a seemingly small mechanical failure under the hood, a popped screw or a leaking coolant hose, that manifests itself in its full significance only when you decide to exercise that faulty part.
We're now going to war, and so there's a requisite peace movement. There's nothing inherently new or unusual about this. But what is new is the deafening stridency of the protests-- the naked anti-Americanism, the shameless support of our declared enemies, the open distrust and fear of our own government and the belief in a nebulous concept called "peace" that everybody seems to believe is there for the taking, if only we allow ourselves to grow up-- and that in spite of the largest, most audacious, most viscerally compelling demonstration that we've ever in living memory seen of the fact that peace does not happen by itself. This world was well on the way to being more peaceful than it's ever been, true-- but we've had it brought home to us, forcefully, that mistaking complacency for peace encourages people to become our enemies and attack us. And these protesters seem unwilling to let themselves see that their good intentions ignore plain, bare facts-- that we're entering a new historical period of war, world-altering war, that has been thrust upon us; that 9/11 was not an aberration that can be quickly forgotten and forgiven; that a cancer has grown on the Earth, and if not excised it will only grow worse and eat us all.
Peace protests before 9/11 were points of passing interest. They were never unpatriotic; they were expressions of popular dissent, always a requirement in a free society. But 9/11 tweaked something deep down in our collective soul; it threw something off the rails, it loosened a few screws. And now that we're revving up the anti-war engine again, it's rattling and banging in a way that it never used to back when it was under warranty. It's making those kinds of noises that signal an imminent meltdown, the kind that costs us three months' pay, particularly if we keep on belting on down the highway without paying attention to the smoke pouring out the tailpipe.
Peace isn't the absence of war. Peace is the willingness to accept certain risks in the world landscape, on the understanding that other people won't take advantage of us-- because they're taking on those same risks for the same reason. Peace is a mutual understanding reached by a unanimous community of similarly-minded peoples, with an absence of hatred and resentment, with common goals and an inherent incentive toward cooperation and friendship. Peace isn't something you get if you just lie down and cover your head with your hands while the other kids hurl rocks at it. That's called surrender, not peace. And it's what comes about when your vision of "peace" is simply "not fighting anymore", even if that includes self-defense.
"America isn't under attack", some say. But one has only to look at the desires of our enemies, expressed in so many press statements and propaganda videos and sermons, to realize that the only reason we're not suffering more attacks right now is because they lack the means, not because they aren't really our enemies. They are. They say so every week. And sooner or later, 9/11 will happen again, or something worse. To disagree with that possibility is to ascribe to them immense fecklessness and unwillingness to follow through on their own threats. I don't think that's a tenable logical position. these are human beings we're talking about, but human beings deeply and thoroughly convinced that it's their duty to do whatever is in their power to destroy us. They've already declared war on us, and they're dead serious about it. For us to march for peace under such conditions is to proclaim that we can bend spoons with our minds.
The problem still exists; the threat is still real, because the hatred is still real. The hatred is of what we are, not of what we do; and so short of changing fundamentally what we are, there is no solution to that hatred other than to remove the immediate threat by whatever expedient force is necessary, and then work on defusing whatever cultural and religious schisms divide us from that part of the world that currently wants us dead.
I spent Sunday evening with a couple of friends, watching the sun set over Silicon Valley from Summit Rock, unaware of what human opinion seethed under the lights that came on pinprick by pinprick in the expanse that stretched under us, from Cupertino to Milpitas, from Los Gatos to the northerly city glow silhouetting the San Bruno mountain line. It was awfully peaceful up there, true; but I know that if I had to sit at that vantage point and watch those points of light being snuffed out below me, under a cloud of bioweapon or something worse, the peace I'd achieved by putting myself out of harm's way would have been the most shameful delusion I'd ever bought myself.
They're waving Iraqi flags down there, I told myself. They're chanting that Bush is dumber than Forrest Gump and more evil than Hitler. They're declaring the US to be the biggest threat to world peace that currently exists. I knew these things were happening, but somehow it wasn't until I came down the hill and started reading the weekend's news and blogs that I started to think about how deeply into the nation's heart 9/11 really cut-- and what's more disturbing, just how irrational and vigorous our reflexive reaction to that affront has been. Never before has this world been in such a position: accustomed to so much ease and wealth and power, and confronted with a menace of such raw and primitive fury. We've evolved beyond the ability to deal coherently with it. And while in Vietnam our country's protesters grew their numbers measure by measure, over the course of years, only becoming significant as a political movement some four years after the war began, today we've declared our own country the enemy before we've even taken a decisive proactive step toward cutting out the cancer that has attacked us. We've become astonishingly quick to blame ourselves, to declare even self-defense to be antithetical, to reject outright any shadow of the promulgation of our world philosophy that has been a hallmark of America since the days of the Monroe Doctrine. It's only now that our people have grown so eased and complacent that the ideas of "puppet governments" and "promotion of democracy" and even "right and wrong" all seem like sinister relics of our parents' time.
The current conflict should be so black-and-white, so good-and-evil on its very surface that it seems it should have given the world a consensus unlike any it had ever seen in history. But it would seem from the evidence that when the MTV Generation meets the Dark Ages, there's no context for dialogue. There's just too big a rift. Wry irony, when given a sword and an enemy to smite with it, would rather impale itself with a smirk for the sake of the laugh it will get, than to take the obvious "right" course and swing for the bleachers. We all expect a trick question, and so we can't bring ourselves to come up with a straight answer no matter how high the stakes.
"Interesting times," they call them. It's never intended in a good way.
I worry that the wounds to our own country's confidence in its own system will be every bit as hard to heal, after all this is over with, as the wounds in the Middle East will be.
UPDATE: Dane Petersen says much the same thing, only a lot more succinctly. Plus he goes on to link to the bizarre movies and stuff I've been accumulating over the weekend. It's so good to see that some people still know when wry irony is appropriate (freaky pop-humor memes) and when it's not (waving US flags with swastikas instead of stars).
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