Bubble boy

Every day this week, on my way home from work, I've seen a hawk perched on the same streetlamp along Mopac. His back is always to me as I drive southbound and his head is always turned to the west--something of a noble pose. Actually, he seems disaffected. Which, I suppose, is the natural countenance of a hunter. I hope he becomes part of my work-day routine.

My daily guilty pleasure at work lately has been feeding my fresh and raw addiction to the New York Times. Either the office gets it for free or some generous word monkey (I'm a copyeditor, for those who didn't know) brings it in every morning, but regardless, I've gotten to the point where I will buy a Times from Speedway Market on those days I skip work.

What got me hooked was not its high-quality reporting but the sheer variety of things to read--world news to Cannes gossip to features on the World Series of poker. Today the front page was a little drab, so I flipped open the back page and started reading the editorial section. Lots of good, depressing stuff there. There was an editorial about the retarded tax cut Congress is getting ready to pass--$318 billion bones doled out while deficits doom our egg-shell economy, and of course it benefits mostly the rich. Another guy pointed out the absurdity of the attention paid to non-issues like the Dixie-Chick boycott in light of the (to paraphrase John Stewart) shit-on-my-chest deal that Halliburton's getting. Lastly, there was subtle reminder that I probably shouldn't have too much faith in anything in print, considering that the FCC is about to legalize media monopolization.

Granted, the editorial page is usually a forum for such doomsday political prophesies, but it all still made my shoulders sag as I walked back to my sequestered little office. A couple hours later, I was in my golden rolling bubble, heading home, and I got to thinking about liberal exasperation. For some reason the Republicans have been able to become the bullies of politics and the American public seems to love them for it. Every press conference with Rumsfeld is a good microcosm of the nature of the current political debate. He stands up on the podium with that nearly exasperated expression that resembles a grin, like maybe inside his head he's getting a kick out of what he'd say to these idiot reporters if it wasn't on the record. Whenever anyone calls him on anything (say the looting of the Iraqi museum), he just sneers, gives come curt answer ("Stuff happens."), and moves on unscathed. Of course we've all seen how if a liberal leader says anything vaguely anti-administration it's twisted to seem anti-troop (or whatever it's currently patriotic to be pro), and then the spineless liberal leader--the political equivalent of that kid who gets beat up and still wants to be friends with the bully--issues some public apology or tries to reinterpret whatever he said. So while these editorialists wile away their ink with their dour predictions, which they probably write with a smile because it's more fun to criticize than to construct, the course of things never actually changes.

And we're all just as guilty of inactivity. Activism, we tell ourselves, is pointless. That mindset allows us to go to our jobs and make our living and eat what we want and spend our energy trying to get laid instead of maybe improving, even if just by the slightest bit, the world around us. Okay, I'm obviously a little charged up, but it's because I just read in Harper's some emails by Rachel Corrie, the activist who was crushed by a bulldozer trying to prevent the destruction of Palestinian refugees' homes. When I saw the report, back in March, I thought, "Wow, that was some hippie." Jesus. I feel like a total asshole now. The girl's emails showed her to be intelligent, kind, well intentioned, compassionate, and passionate. The situation she described altered my entire perception of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I had always thought disdainfully of the Palestinian cause because of their terroristic tactics. Now, I knew that very, very few Palestinians employed or endorsed these attacks, but it was still hard to support giving concessions to people who negotiated by blowing up innocents. Apparently Corrie's mother felt the same. But in a letter to her mother, Corrie writes:

I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a forty-minute drive a twelve-hour or impossible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed--the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large homes of people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it may be official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here--recently. And then the bulldozers come and take out people's vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you think of anything. I can't.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people--do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed--just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labor of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would.

Isn't that what we've been doing since 9/11? Haven't we struck back with (sometimes-)sanctioned violence, in the most effective ways available to us, at those who attempted to demolish our lives? I can't stand to see the murder of civilians, whether in a Tel Aviv shopping mall or a Baghdad neighborhood, and I obviously don't want to imply that our wars have been carried out with only the intent to kill innocents, as the terrorists have done. But we need to be honest with ourselves. We can detach ourselves from the reality of the cruelness of life in times of war. From across the sea, we can shake our heads, as we should, at those who think that strapping a bomb and vest full of nails to their chest will solve anything. But because our bombs are bigger, stronger, and more devastating, because the pilot can unstrap the bomb from the guts of his plane, we get to call those innocents "collateral damage." I'm not saying that the United States is a terrorist nation, but I think we have to own up to the reality of what it's like over there. I feel guilty for driving along, thinking pundit thoughts, in my insular little car, criticizing the government for it's bullyish tactics and doing nothing about it because, hell, why would I? I'm eatin' well.

I think this has become the trademark of the Repbulican party lately--bubble vision. Morality, economics, global politics, the realities of war, all are viewed from a distance, within the confines of dogma. A president running a war from his heavily protected office. A fighter pilot flying in a tiny glass dome against the sky's massive ceiling. A bomb dropped, falling, out of our hands. And the opposition over here, sitting in their plush offices when so much of the Democratic public just wants a leader with some balls to stand up, would rather pretend what's happening in our country and abroad is not so bad.