The day the war started is one I'll never forget. I had moved to Los Angeles the week before, to begin a new job that required relocating hundreds of miles from my former home. For the first few weeks, I stayed with relatives while looking for a new place of my own on weekends. Not wanting to overburden my hosts, I typically worked late, went out for dinner afterwards, swung by some local pub for a drink or two, then quietly retired to my temporary quarters to sleep and begin another day anew.
So on the night of March 19, I found myself in a small public house in the San Fernando Valley's west end. It was a classic old relic of the 1960s called the Candy Canyon, dark and dingy with original red naugahyde and stainless barstools, its paneled walls decked with flag-colored bunting and signs reading "Support Our Troops". The patrons were West Valley blue collar types---dispatchers, delivery drivers, construction hands and truck mechanics, and on the night of the 19th, their attention was riveted on the twin TV screens above the bar. Through the smoky bar haze (yes, you could smoke in this bar, nobody was going to harass you here) flickered static images, shot from the rooftop of a hotel in Baghdad, of a nighttime cityscape lit afire with explosives, rapid-fire rockets, Tomahawk missiles. Each detonation, each flash of light, was greeted with howls of approval and rounds of high-fives, another round of drinks for our boys in Iraq, shooters and beer for a well-deserved ass-kicking. A woman sitting next to me, heavy-set in her forties, asked me what I thought of it. My answer was dishonest, intentionally ambivalent: "Well, it'll be interesting to see what they find (WMDs) over there, but I still can't help wondering if this couldn't have been avoided---"
"What do you mean?" she shot back angrily, pointing at the video. "He started it, now we're gonna finish it. That sonuvabitch should be happy if we only kill ten people for every one of us he killed at the Towers. I got a boy over there right now, in Kuwait, in the Marines. You don't believe in fighting for our freedoms?"
I paid my tab and hurriedly took my leave. If there were any shades of doubt, any worries over the war and the wisdom of waging it, they were not to be found here.
What a shame, I thought, driving home that night: To send your son off to fight, and perhaps to die, for somebody else's lies.
And now, here we are, five years later, still trapped in a world ruled by Up-is-Downism, where we're winning a war which can never be won because we will lose if we ever pull out; where an economy bankrupted by an overabundance of cheap credit and consumer spending is rewarded with lower interest rates and greater incurring of debt; where patriotic dissent is repackaged as devious disloyalty; where former war heroes are labeled as cowards, while draft-dodgers prance victorious atop aircraft carriers; where we're reminded of our freedoms daily, while being told to surrender most of them in the name of security.
A couple of days ago a thoughtful and conscientious young man delivered a speech on race relations in America. It was gracious and nuanced and delicate in its language, filled with ambiguities and offering no easy cures or panaceas. In its breadth of vision and complexity of scope, it could not have stood out in greater relief against the one-dimensional babble that passes for political discourse in our day, the inchoate language of fear and pandering delivered in one-minute video bites and breathless hysterics. It is the kind of language, and the extension of thought, that led a nation blinded with anger and rage into a senseless and wasteful war, and which still attempts to manipulate our emotions, and quash our innate intellectual curiosity, with its toxic vocabulary of fear and cynicism. And while the mood of the country has turned against this war, I am not so certain that our collective psyche has turned with it. Too many of us still seem all too ready to extend the rants of one elderly black preacher to the entire black community as a whole; to perceive opposition to a foreign policy that has proven to have failed as some kind of naiivete and weakness. And I started to ask myself, is America really ready for a leader like Obama? In some ways, his race is the least of his problems, for in his speeches and writings he poses an even more audacious challenge to us: namely, to start thinking and behaving as grown-up adults; to surrender our childish unreason to the colder clutches of intellect; to try, at the very least, to subjugate our most selfish tribal instincts to the forces of reason and the greater national good.
Is America really ready for this, only five short years after our greatest act of collective amnesia? I, for one, am not so sure, but I suppose we must continue to keep hoping, and working, and arguing and demonstrating and organizing for change, for the alternative is the same awful brew of hostility and despair that our leaders and their media vassals have insisted we must continually imbibe if we are to remain ever great as a nation: Powerful, feared, despised the world over.
A few days ago I drove past the Candy Canyon in the Valley. The old dive bar doesn't exist anymore---it's now a Verizon wireless shop.
---Vitelius
