Rob and I drove up to Independence, Oregon for breakfast. There’s a breakfast place there called Andy’s, which has become a fixture since I left fourteen years ago. After the initial hush that fell over the place when we walked in—we’re clearly not from there—conversation picked up again, and we ordered giant plates of pancakes, omelets, and hashbrowns.
Formal portraits of two young Marines regarded us from the wall behind the cash register, and the patrons—farmers, laborers and businessmen—all had the war on their minds. Most days, I disagree with their politics, based on different starting assumptions, but I grew up with these people, literally, and I don’t mind hearing what they have to say. Mindlessly following the “right” view is incredibly boring, no matter which team you think you’re on. After years in the lock-step political environment of San Francisco, it’s refreshing to be in a place where people with ideological differences have to live together and cooperate.
When I was growing up, and the conservatism of rural Oregon got to be too much, we always knew we could go to Corvallis. It’s the kind of town that can supports multiple left wing breakfast establishments. The one with the best prices attempts to make up in gleeful anti-Bush superficialities what it lacks in food service competence. Because I was in no mood for poor service and gratuitous lefty propaganda, we headed for Independence, where people’s opinion on the war has more to do with the fact that they know people who are it.
I found myself on the edge of tears all through breakfast, not because the pancakes were tasteless fat pillows, but because of the conversation of the two men across the way.
The older guy was telling the younger about the misadventures of a mutual acquaintance, “Ditto”, in Iraq. His voice held palpable disdain for the insurgents, for perceived sympathizers at home, for the publication of images depicting attacks on US soldiers, their deaths and their funerals. He was angry, too, at the incompetence of the military, at journalists who might not tip soldiers off to planned attacks, at the death and dismemberment of people his friend cared about. And he was full of dismay watching “Ditto” is trying to live with himself after something that went wrong in Iraq.
Even third-hand, it’s awful to hear: faced with the terror of a an ambush; or a bomb ripping through your vehicle; you’re under attack, your friends are dying and “they”—the bad guys, the people whose country you invaded—are out there trying to obliterate your life and turn you into blackened meat.
This is why my pancake breakfast was devastating. Because this is happening, and it’s brutal and tragic, and exactly how things are right now in some part of the world, in my name. I could never judge someone for their rage at this reality. But I don’t think that formless anger shaping itself into a revenge agenda is going to help anything.
The younger guy said how much he wanted to be a mercenary—although he preferred the term “contractor”—and to hunt down deportable aliens for the Department of Homeland Security.
Isn’t that a telling transition? From fear, despair and shock directly to anger, to revenge, and institutionalized self-defense, by whatever means necessary.
And the cycle goes round and round. Wanting to live undisturbed in our own country. Objecting to our people being slaughtered; objecting to the humiliation of their bodies; turning in anger on some halfway-relevant target. Humans under threat become self-righteous and certain, and therefore dangerous. Hurting and being hurt, not seeing ourselves or anyone very clearly.
It never ceases to amaze me that we deport foreigners who slip up or have bad luck, and have no standards at all for our native-born citizens. I’ve had so many friends—deserving, intelligent people who offer this country so much—who’ve endured immigration headaches, nightmares and disasters, just to be here. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that many of my fellow citizens cook drugs and shoplift and beat up bicyclists—but nobody would dream of asking them to leave. How interesting it would be, to find mercen–sorry, “contractors”– at your door to discuss your library fines?
If you’re an immigrant, you may know this feeling. Like the fellow at our next stop, Monmouth’s fabulous bagel bakery. This shop is one of the few in the country that hand-roll their bagels. The Moroccan-born owner was an engineering student who fell in love with a local girl, and parlayed bagel-making skills learned in New Jersey into a livelihood for them and three little kids.
This fellow didn’t have any library fines; he was just Moroccan. So a couple years ago, Federal agents came by his house for a chat one evening. What exactly was he doing, living as a pillar of the community and purveyor of authentic hand-rolled bagels? In fear and anger, the previously apolitical man went that night to a meeting of the Polk County Democrats.
He was behind the counter today, and that bit of outdated gossip was on my mind as we chatted about bagels and where to buy them. He’s an incredibly sweet, community-minded, principled person. That someone called the feds on him does not make me feel safe, not at all.
But I am safe. And incredibly fortunate to have the few worries I do. Everything about this life I’m living: good home cooking; car and ready supply of gas; warmth and electricity; opinions and intellection; liberal tendencies; the means and motivation to meditate—all comes about as the result of my life circumstances. And it will all, one day, pass away.
A great many, perhaps all, of the aspects of life that are enjoyable or infuriating have come about in dependence on my life as an American. I can’t separately imagine the life of a me who hasn’t lived in this country. It’s far too complicated to unravel, but I know that it would be foolish to think my comforts and conceits have nothing to do with US foreign policy. It is unthinkable that my life circumstances, my very existence, have not been bought with war, genocide, torture, corruption and bloodshed—and with courage, sacrifice, insight, principle and generosity.
It’s hard to accept the irony that the bounty my life is a product of a historical events I would probably have opposed. Should we hunt down the Indians? Rape our way through Mexico? Drop a bomb that obliterates hundreds of thousands of civilians in an instant? Debate after the fact is academic at best, inflammatory at worst. But we are here, and the world is the way it is because of what came before.
So we do our best with the situation at hand. I have plenty of opinions, but I’m not sure they matter one bit; how could I possibly evaluate the alternative to what IS? And given the way things are, what can I do now, within these circumstances?
I don’t know how to get out of Iraq. Things are getting worse there, quickly. Killing makes killing easier. And hearing about killing makes it easier to hear about more. Unfortunately.
Oregon’s Governor Kulongowski has made a personal pledge to attend the funeral of every Oregon resident killed while serving in Iraq. To partisans on both sides, acknowledging the human cost of war is treated as a radical stance. But Kulongowski is not particularly anti-war.
What he does say—and few will— is that burden of this war is disproportionately borne by a specific sector of society. They come from rural areas and blue-collar families, from farming and logging and building-it-yourself backgrounds. For generations, these folks have been a reliable source of patriotism, dedication—and popular support for the Republican party. I wonder how much more they can give, and how much longer everyone else can pretend the war is a distant political abstraction, not a reality as intimate as clothes, as thoughts, a parallel history weaving its way into—and becoming—this life.
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