CSotD: Now we know, I hope
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Scott Stantis brings Boston into focus, but not in a particularly comforting way.
One of what I guess you could call the "geopolitical-psychological" disadvantages of being a very large country and sharing the continent with only a couple of New World buddies is that we have never been forced to develop much empathy with the rest of the world.
That works all right if you are an isolationist, which is why Australia and New Zealand can seem so idyllic, despite their issues with indigenous people, refugees and … um … well, that's about it, I guess. Internal political squabbles, but everybody's got those, and, if you slide their aboriginal issues into that folder, it makes things look even better.
But we've been sticking our nose into other people's business since the McKinley administration, and yet have always been able to maintain a genteel distance from most of the nastier results. Granted, there was Pearl Harbor, and some unpleasantness in the Aleutians. And the Japanese managed to explode some kind of bomb on a balloon on the West Coast.
For the most part, however, Uncle Sam has been like the rear-echelon British officer in Seigfried Sassoon's poem:
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy, petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. 'Poor young chap,'
I'd say — 'I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.'
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed.
It's all very sad, and we'll lower the flags and put up some statues and then go about our lives, untouched except in the abstract.
Welcome to the new normal. Like it or not, it's a small world and getting more intimate by the moment.
I remember May 1, 1968, when I went into Chicago for a concert but, first, an antiwar march from Grant Park to the Civic Center, which is now known as Daley Plaza to honor the mayor who sent his goons to beat the living crap out of peaceful demonstrators in what was sort of a pre-game scrimmage before that summer's much more memorable Democratic Convention.
The two clearest memories of the day were (1) the good cops, with whom we had been chatting as we walked along, begging us to stay back on the sidewalk while they watched with horror a cluster of their brother officers in the street, turning the faces of a young couple into bloody hamburger, and (2) carloads of young black men driving past as we left the scene, laughing and pointing and shouting, "Now you know! Now you know!"
Well, my fellow Americans, now we all know.
And, just as those guys in the cars had known all their lives what it was like to be harassed, beaten and arrested without cause (and how little it mattered at the moment whether the perpetrators were "typical" cops or rogues), the rest of the world has known for decades what it is like to have a bomb go off because some group, or some wannabe, felt the need to make some incoherent point.
And how little it matters the significance of the group the bomber represents, if any.
In 1973, my then-wife had decided to find a new job and I was still trying to be JD Salinger, so we talked about taking a month or two off and going to Ireland before coming back to settle into whatever was next.
The problem was, I had family on the border, in what was called "bandit country," and they had already experienced one dust-up with militants and some of them were militants themselves and, well, I couldn't go to Ireland and not visit them, but I had a wife and very young son to consider.
So I was at an Irish gathering and ran into a young fellow who was just back from visiting family in Ulster. I explained my dilemma and asked him how dangerous it really was and if I should be concerned.
"Ah, there's no danger a'tall," he assured me, "so long as you know where ye're goin' and get there a-fore dark."
As it happened, we never made the trip anyway, but, throughout the Troubles, while Americans pictured Ireland as one continuous explosion, my Irish friends would point out that you were in greater danger walking around Detroit or New York or Chicago or, really, any major American city, than you were in Belfast or Derry.
Unless you knew where you were going and got there before dark and avoided certain neighborhoods entirely.
It's simply a matter of risk assessment, common sense and recognizing reality.
Which, I would suggest, is not reflected in the "ooh, we're gonna kick your ass!" bluster and bravado currently being put forth by a depressing number of editorial cartoonists and Facebook posters.
You might as well try to wipe out malaria with flyswatters.
The problem isn't mosquitos. The problem is that we used to live on that shining city on the hill, but now our house is right down by the swamp next to everybody else's house.
So now we know. Now we know.
Or, at least, we will once we stop blustering and bragging and trying to kick asses that have eluded us for more than a dozen years, as David Horsey predicted they would, after the bombing of the Cole:
Not only does bluster and bravado and threatening to kick people's asses — foreign or domestic — not do a damn thing to change the new normal, but it also doesn't help when we keep sending fierce, bald, short-of-breath people to Congress who view our current reality with a distant, disconnected harumph of "Poor young chap!" as Jeff Danziger suggests:
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