10:19 p.m. - 2007-03-19
Four Less Years
It's strange how, in a way, I owe much of the happiness of the past few years of my life to the war.
Consider this: I have just returned to Texas to work for my father, doing two things I once swore I would never, ever do after I'd left to go away to college. I have graduated to find that I have no skills that make me worth hiring, particularly in the piss-poor job market of the time. I go to work, have a reasonable time with my office mates, but mostly spend my weekends driving to San Antonio to hang out with old friends from high school. In the meantime, the president of the United States is in the process of declaring war on Iraq. I know that every word out of his mouth is a lie, or, at best, a falsehood that he believes is true. I know that it will mean the death of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqis. I know that it is unstoppable, with that same knowledge with which I knew he would be elected three years earlier, and reelected a year later.
But I listen to "Scarlet's Walk" in my car, not just the album but the title track itself, and I listen to the lines "'What do you plan to do with all your freedom?' the new sheriff said, quite proud of his badge. We'll weave them through every rocket's red glare, and huddled masses, you just lift your lamp. I will follow her on a path, Scarlet's walk through the violets." I nearly cry when I listen, because I am not on the path, I am just sitting at my desk, not even raising my voice. I go home one day and I hear the report of the first civilian casualty: a taxi driver in Baghdad, stopping to call his family on the way home. There will be tens of thousands more. I go online and I find out about the next anti-war protest meeting.
I go to the meeting, which is taking place above an Indian restaurant, definitely a good sign. There are flowers on the floor that make me think there may have been a wedding ceremony up there recently, but what do I know, I just watched Monsoon Wedding a few times. I sit down in a cirle with everyone else. There are people of various ages, mostly white, if I recall correctly, although the meeting is being lead by an African American woman named Patrice. We go around and talk about why we're there and what we think we can do. I mention that I have a background in experimental theatre and performance art, and for the first time since graduating college a room full of people sees that as a good thing. I wind up working on publicity, and planning a "Festival of Art and Resistance" for after the rally. I don't know what it is in the moment, and I don't know what it is now. But after the meeting, a man named Lyndon and a woman named Beth come up to me and ask me if I would be interested in directing a show as a fundraiser for their organization, The Rhizome Collective.
And within a month I am making puppets (poorly) at the Rhizome Collective. I am meeting the people who live there. In only a few more weeks I am meeting the people who want to be in the show. I am rediscovering who I am, and making the friends that I will spend the next year with, the friends that I have been spending the past few weeks with. Some of the best friends of my life. They give me back my belief in myself as a theatre artist, they give me opportunities to create art with a political and social message, and they even manage to put together the best birthday weekend for me of my entire life when I turn 25. Hell, besides all that I even get to meet Tori Amos, asking her to announce my peace rally from the stage. She didn't, but she did grab my hands after her first encore, causing me to faint. She still had "Spark" on her hands!
It was only today, though, that I thought about another part of that story. Usually, when I tell the whole I-met-Tori-Amos story, I focus on, well, meeting Tori Amos, because it's a pretty big deal to meet your favorite rock singer. But I was also handing out peace rally flyers in line to all the Toriphiles, assuming that most of them would be against the war. It was a fair assumption, considering the themes of Tori's latest album, but there were policemen there as well. One of them took a flyer and asked what it was about. I told him. I think I was very careful about phrasing things, using a line like, "We disagree with the foreign policy and believe in alternative methods" but before I could finish he ripped up the paper and glared at me. Fucking glared.
I has been almost four years since that guy glared at me, because it has been four years since the war began. That's a college education. That's an entire presidency. That's an Olympiad. Four goddamn years.
I was thinking about how strange it was that, in a way, I owed my happiness to the war. This thing that was so horrible had brought me into a world that I loved. It's such a horrible thought. I like to think that if God herself came down and said to me, "I tell you hear and now as the one being for whom every utterance is a felicitous performative, if you are willing to give this world up, if you are willing to lose all your friends, to have them hate you, to never again stand in front of a cast, to never again be on a stage, to be exiled from this place of joy, if you are willing to sacrifice all that, I will end this war" I would do it. I like to think I wouldn't even hesitate.
But that's not true, in a way. If I counted all the days in the past four years that I have spent fighting the war, in one way or another, I probably wouldn't even break the triple digits. Hell, I'd be lucky if I got an even dozen. Sure, I've been to protests. Sure, I've voted. Sure, I've created art that stands against the ideals of this administration. But there are plenty of days when all I've done is lived my life as my own, or even someone else's. I've done my work, and gotten paid. I've gone out with friends. I've fallen for guys who were no good for me (well, one) and even gotten in a good fuck or two. I've cried a lot about my own life. In four years, I have done almost nothing to oppose this war. I've bitched about it to no end, but it has almost always been with someone who agrees with me.
I've come to realize that agreement is one of the most dangerous phenomenons out there. Yeah, it needs to happen in order for anything to be accomplished, but in too large doses it prevents one from being able to see the other side of things, to know the pitfalls of a choice. I was talking about this today with The Notorious MOM. It happens in any organization, she says. The yes-men have a way of isolating the dissenter until the dissenter has no power; look at Colin Powell. She said if you were going to be the person who challenges a given agenda, you had to be really well prepared. Which sucks, because the people in power and their yes-men do not have to be well-prepaed; look at the war.
I am tremendously lucky. There is no one whom I know very well or who I am very close to who is currently fighting in Iraq. Of my friends who have been there, all have come back safe, although an acquaintance from high school had his face lacerated. For all that I've bitched about my life for the past two years, I should have been down on my knees giving thanks. I have killed no one, and seen no one die before their time. I have not see children in pieces. I have not seen my friends shattered by bullets. I do not wake up screaming about anything more serious than a paper, or whether I my actors have their lines memorized.
Sundance, in honor of this day, aired two documentaries on the war and its effects, although it did this after an episode of Ladette to Lady, which, I am sorry to say, was the reason I was watching in the first place (this reality show is classist, sexist hogwash about a group of young British women prone to wild drinking being sent to a finishing school that is something out of a bad lesbian film from the 60s, and I am addicted to it). The first was about veterans coming home from Iraq with post traumatic stress. It is a horrifying film to watch, not because of the effect the war has had on these men, but because of the callous indifference on the part of our government, a government that waited 147 days to even ORDER armor for their soldiers, a government that gives soldiers a questionnaire about whether they feel violent or suicidal that says they can't go home if they say Yes, a government that is trying to treat PTSD in the desert, a government that hires psychiatrists who say, when a soldier talks about his feelings of guilt for having been responsible for the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, "I'm sorry, I can't treat conscientious objectors."
The government's current party line is that if soldiers are coming back from Iraw with psychological problems, it is because they had those psychological problems to begin with. My response to that is twofold. First, if they had psychological problems, then why are you sending them to war? Why aren't you screening for this? Second, and much more significantly, you are wrong. You are just plain wrong, and I will tell you why. Here's why: killing innocent people, or causing their deaths either by action or omission, or beating and torturing people, or seeing their bodies and homes ripped apart, or being stared at with hatred by the mothers of children that are now dead, or seeing your friends killed because the government wasn't willing to shell out money to buy the best body armor, or any body armor at all, is going to devastate the psyche of any sane, normal, rational person who knows that violence on this scale is insane, abnormal, and irrational but who is nevertheless asked to do so by people whom they have been trained to obey and respect. It is those people who AREN'T bothered by this that I am worried about. Any human person delivering a survey should say, "Do you feel guilty about having caused the deaths of innocent people? No? Then for God's sake, come with me because we need to talk about this!"
Do not think, for a second, that I am judging these soldiers. Killing innocent people is the inevitable result of war and the main argument against it. Every soldier since Ur has either caused or seen the death of innocent people at the hands of his or her own side. I do not feel that the soldiers deserve the pain that they suffer, physically and mentally. I simply say that their suffering is part and parcel of their humanity, and that the government's claim that this trauma is the result of a pre-existing psychological condition and thus neither a reason to end this war nor a reason for the government to offer treatment to its veterans is so vile and inhumane that I really can't even make fun of it.
It's things like that that make me pray that there is a Hell, because I know that there will be no justice in this world for the people who took us into this war. How can there be? How can there be justice for the women of Iraq who have buried their sons and daughters, all too often in small caskets as a result of bullets gone astray or casually dropped bombs? How can there be justice for the wife who wakes up to her husband screaming, or who comes home to find that he's destroyed the furniture? Hundreds of thousands of people are living a nightmare. I cannot imagine what would be justice for this administration, except perhaps to be locked in a room and tied to chair, and to be visited every hour on the hour by the relative of someone who has been killed or by someone who has been permanently wounded--mentally or phsyically--by this war. Let these people bring in photographs. Let all this happen in bombed out houses in Iraq, and let them only be let out to areas where there are bodies on the street. If Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and everyone who has made a profit off of this war needs to be sedated every night because they refuse to sleep because that's when the nightmares come, THEN justice might be done. Maybe. As is, they are sleeping soundly.
The other was a documentary/recreation of Guantanamo Bay. I actually couldn't take anymore after a while. I'd already heard enough in the first film, when an American soldier described a man who had been brought in as "Al Qaeda, or Taliban, or something: a bad guy" and who had been hung for so long from his hands that they had to be amputated. It was later discovered that they'd got the wrong man, and he was free to go. How did this man make his living, I wonder, without hands? Well, the American government didn't care, so why should I?
And I don't care, in so many ways. I've spent most of my time in Texas and California. The former's government is too conservative to listen to pleas to reject the war, the latter already progressive enough without my help. I don't call people I know who are Republicans every day with death tolls. I just go about my day, trying to get my reading done, trying to do theatre, trying to get laid. By the way, before I forget, I DID get laid a couple of time recently and will write about it soon.
See there? Even in all this, I think about myself.
I'd be lying if I said I was going to make a vow to start doing more against the war, because I am out of ideas, and all I feel like I can do at this point is to keep saying "Yep, still against it" so that posterity and the international community remember that not all Americans support the war. Actually, I have plenty of ideas, but a lot of them involve me doing things I don't want to do, like running for congress and things like that. Anyway, a congressman's chief of staff once said to me I would serve my country better by doing what I was good at, by being an artist.
How does one make art that confronts this effectively? I come back to Tori Amos on this, because her new album is very explicitly anti-Bush and, much to my surprise, some of her fans are pro-Bush. Some are pissed at her, others don't seem to care. There are still others who just wish she'd keep politics out of art. Here I am one of the people inspired by her political committment. Truth be told, I'm a little bored at this point. It's really, really easy to say "Fuck Bush!" at this point. Public Enemy did it at their concert and everyone cheered. I was, again, bored. Show me something I haven't seen before. Figure out a better way to fight this.
If I could reach for anything artistically, it would be that there are certian means of thinking that have caused this war, and so there are means that can prevent it. Like I said before, I think that agreement is dangerous. I think that challenging opinions and admitting when you are wrong are two things that have become villified in America, and I think this is a huge problem. I think this is something that the Democrats need to deal with. I think that great art can change the way you think. The problem is, though, that this takes a long time.
So in the meantime, I will say that by the most conservative estimates, 392,000 Iraqi civilians have died. More than 3,100 American soldiers have been killed. 23,500 have been wounded, and as many as 300,000 have reported symptoms of PSTD. There are at least 3.8 million Iraqi refugees. We have spent $400 billion dollars on this war that could have repaired New Orleans, made us fully compliant with the Kyoto accords, treated and/or cured many diseases afflicting the entire glove, or become one of the most well-educated nations in history. Instead, we have laid greater waste to a country than the dictator we overthrew, and a recent poll indicates that we are third only after Iran and Israel in terms of nations whose policies are despised around the globe.
This is what happened in the time it took for enough Americans to oppose the war to begin electing leaders that oppose the war.
I'm not going to funny, and I'm not going to provide the glimmer of hope. I'm going to let that sit there. I am not going to deliver a message of hope until I myself get up off my fat ass and start doing something proactive again. Tori has a new album coming out, and she's about to go on tour again. I'd better be back on that path if I'm going to face her again.
