Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (23 page)

“I hope he backs down,” says the baker.

“Who?” says the woman. “Saddam Hussein or George Bush?”

“Either one,” the baker says.

Bagels were more expensive yesterday, and war broke out. Real life was peculiar, with an edge of sadness and of slow motion, and a sense of New Year’s Eve gone nuclear: only one shopping day till Armageddon. “Now it is our job to shift without too much awkwardness …” Bob Costas said Saturday on
NBC Sports
, segueing from reports of the Gulf War to a football postmortem. That is what it is like. Dinner and war. Homework and war. The mundane and the horrible.

There’s a moment in one of the
Godfather
movies when a capo is being executed for disloyalty. “It was business,” he says of his traitorous behavior.

This is personal.

It’s personal for Saddam Hussein. This war is a career move. His psyche has been dissected like a biology-class frog, but it seems to me that he suffers from a lethal dose of egomania, that craziness that affects anyone audacious enough to lead a nation. The secretary general of the United Nations came to call, hoping to avert the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, and when he left Saddam Hussein delivered this non sequitur: “He met the American president four times before coming to us.”

This brings to mind the moment in Woody Allen’s
Bananas
when the new dictator of a Central American country belittles the danish Mr. Allen has brought him. “He brings cake for a group of people,” complains one of the dictator’s aides, “he doesn’t even bring an assortment.” Saddam Hussein’s comment might be humorous in its egocentricity if it were not so ominous, such a clear indication of how he has intertwined this conflict with those two little words, Big Man.

For George Bush this is personal, too. I don’t think the wimp factor is the only thing at work here. But I think that the sled of public positioning always stands at the top of a slippery slope, and when it begins to move, it is difficult to stop it or slow it down, even when half the electorate are yelling, “Wait a minute!” Sanctions needed more time to work, more time than the sled allowed. But that, alas, is yesterday’s story.

This is personal. Most people agree that Saddam Hussein is pond scum and that he can’t be permitted to take Kuwait as though it were the lunch money of the littlest kid in class. But then they ask themselves this question: Would I sacrifice my child for this?

And the answer is no.

I only hope that we will continue, when this is done, to take these issues personally. We should take personally the fact that we habitually give aid to the kind of men we can easily and accurately describe as monsters.

We should take personally the fact that few politicians have had
the guts or the vision to shape a coherent energy policy that would lessen our dependence on foreign oil. And we should take personal responsibility for the fact that we have not had the will to conserve or change.

We should take personally the idea that if there is to be a new world order, it must include a new answer to the question: Why us? It is time for our messiah complex to get a good overhaul. We can no longer afford economically, psychologically, or politically to be the policeman of the world, even if we are the first one called when someone needs a cop.

That will be then. This is now. Time has stopped. So do our hearts, each time a clinch on
One Life to Live
is punctuated by the words “We interrupt this program to bring you a special report.…” In Des Moines, a teenager demonstrating against the war said he did not want a big black wall in Washington with his name on it. In the desert, a soldier wrote to his wife saying that he would understand if she remarried. It came to me that no matter how swift the conflict, we will someday soon be reading about the design for the memorial to its dead.

“When do they decide to call it World War III?” a friend asked the other day.

I don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know today. I only know that everyone seems sad and afraid, that the loss and mourning began even before the fighting. We are taking this very personally indeed.

THE BACK FENCE
January 20, 1991

If anyone had looked inside the meeting room, they would have seen a peculiar sight. More than a hundred people had paid to hear a lecture, but the speaker had stepped aside because of certain circumstances and instead the audience was staring at a kind of Frankenstein monster, a figure with a brown podium for a body and a small television for a head. Suddenly the head had a face, the face of George Bush, telling the nation it had gone to war.

We had always expected it to be the television war, and that is what it has been. Tom and Dan and Peter and the pleasant generic newsreaders of Cable News Network stared into our eyes day after day, night after night. No one could bear to turn them off.

But it is not the television war we expected. There has been precious little war to see in these first few days: magnificent planes, the occasional soldier, a few minutes of footage of what looked like a fireworks display shot in bad light. And the talking
heads: this has been a great windfall for retired generals. Once we learned that war had actually begun and Israel had been hit, there was little to discover except that Peter Jennings looks fresh as a daisy on a few hours’ sleep.

It was not because of the press of news that we seemed incapable of turning the TV off. The television had become a kind of modern communal meeting place from which to absorb history aborning. It was America’s back fence, the one place in this time of dislocation where we were all connected, all having the same sensation at the same time, even if the sensation was shame at thinking that a correspondent in a gas mask looked like a mutant bug.

The television war, they called Vietnam, and it was because it taught us what it really looked like, what happens before the clutch of soldiers hoists the flag to the top of the hill. It made real all the ugly stuff, the brutality and the blood. Red is the color of war. Mr. Jennings recalled the other day that General Westmoreland once complained in those days that the television camera saw such a narrow view. But it was wide enough.

The television hasn’t had a view for these last few days; in truth, television has acted like radio, with still photographs of faces superimposed on maps. But action was not all we were looking for. Sitting in front of the television was the closest we could come to compartmentalizing the sea change. The most enduring memory of my childhood is of a time much like this one, those long November days of watching the Kennedy murder, the mourning and the burial, in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites I have ever known. Before this, that was the most continuous television I had ever watched. Like this, it did not provide much news. It gave you a feeling of America sitting in a circle.

What Americans have seen these last few days is what they had hoped and prayed for: war without tears. The descriptions of how this missile was picking off that one sounded like a grand video game of the sky. Fighting raged for three days, and the closest we came to seeing casualties was a crumpled van on a Tel Aviv street.

Everyone hoped that was because things were going well, whatever that means. Or perhaps it is because no one really knows exactly how things are going. Reporters are far away from the front, reporting from hotel rooms with sealed windows or basements where they crouch for safety’s sake. The Department of Defense is taking pool reporters where it wants them to go, which is nowhere much.

So for now, we are eased into the unspeakable, confronting the concept of combat well before we confront its realities, an incremental process that can only benefit those who believe this is a noble endeavor. We see map war, diagram war, computer war. The closest anyone got to something else was CNN, which has given new meaning to the term “intelligence network.” For half a day it had three reporters in a Baghdad hotel room describing bombs bursting in air. But the Iraqis cut off their communications, perhaps because Dick Cheney said at a televised briefing that he was getting information from their dispatches. A television war, indeed. The Iraqis watch the Secretary of Defense on television reporting that he is monitoring the front by watching television.

A new age has begun. Our children will date themselves by the grade they were in when the United States fought Iraq. And as soon as we get accustomed to that, we will need more than retired generals. What we have seen in these first few days is a kind of primitive ritual made modern. When things are very scary, we are afraid to be alone in the dark. There have been people and light in our living rooms. Don’t confuse that with war or news. Both are yet to come.

THE DOMESTIC FRONT
January 31, 1991

There are many ways to watch America in action, but one of the most colorful is to stroll the public spaces of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, that squat, ever-busy gateway to the world on wheels. You can learn something about the State of the Union by the state of this place. And it has precious little to do with cuts in the capital-gains tax.

The irony of the terminal is that the building has never looked better, with neon wall sculptures and bright lighting. It’s the people that are the problem. The scamsters, who do a booming business in selling telephone calling card numbers for ten dollars a shot. The runaways, their eyes as old as the stories they can tell about serial parents, prepubescent incest, and foster homes. The broken men, with years of booze running red in the veins of their faces. “Excuse me, sweetheart,” some of them say as you edge past, proving that chivalry is not dead, it’s just drunk.

And all around them move the commuters, angry at being
panhandled, tired of walking over prone bodies to get to the greener, cleaner places where they live.

America is a little like this now. In some ways it has never looked better, with its flags flying and the yellow ribbons tied around its trees. It’s the inside that’s rotting away, the domestic disintegration that war has given us all an excuse to forget.

On television, reports said that children in Israel were sleeping in hotels, homeless because of the war. Children in New York slept in hotels for years because they were homeless.

On television they showed bombed buildings that were shells amid fields of rubble. I’ve seen those broken buildings and rubble fields in forgotten neighborhoods all over New York.

The same country that has rallied round pushing Iraq out of Kuwait has given up on parts of itself. Infant mortality. Teenage pregnancy. Drugs. Dropouts. Bank failures. Home foreclosures. We walk around the bad stuff on our way to somewhere else and mutter under our breath: “Own fault, own fault.”

Fault is not the point. A capable, no-nonsense woman named Janis Beitzer runs the little world of the bus terminal, and it would be perfectly understandable if she said her job was to put people on buses and all the rest is someone else’s problem. But that would be shortsighted, like missing the opportunity to rally people united behind a war abroad around an equally horrible war at home. Rerouting traffic patterns to discourage loitering, opening a drop-in center for the homeless, hiring social service workers—she’s had to deal with issues no one running a bus terminal ever had to consider before.

“We didn’t really have a choice,” Ms. Beitzer says.

Neither do we. America often has a one-track mind, and the track in the last month has led straight to the Persian Gulf. The president knew where the ovations lay in his State of the Union address, a kind of boilerplate noble-cause speech that could have been delivered by any American president engaged in battle abroad. When he praised the men and women fighting in the Gulf, a great roar went up from his audience.

But the domestic initiatives in his speech were sketchy, perfunctory, and shockingly beside the point. At a time when many Americans still believe this war is inextricably linked to our reliance on foreign oil, he kissed off energy conservation with one vague sentence. Elimination of PACs and a cut in capital-gains taxes don’t seem like pressing issues for a country with thousands of people sleeping in the streets and thousands of mothers giving birth to addicted babies.