Go Down In Infamy

Public Diplomacy was canceled; or our corner of it, at least. Two and a half years after joining this happy little unit as a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate, the order came down on Friday that the Arabic magazine and its various Web sites were canceled. I am a little relieved, to say the least, filled with the same feeling as when I was a kid on the first day of summer vacation.

On the Waterfront on Saturday night, in the middle of a kind of impromptu Propaganda Is Dead celebration, C. turns to me and says, ‘You realize that you’re now a platinum card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.’ C. is a young conservative himself, so the tone wasn’t accusatory.

‘I vote Democratic, dork,’ I think I told him. And it’s true; every time I mentioned to someone new what I did for a living, I found myself inserting a phrase immediately afterwards backing up some sort of liberal credentials – ‘But I worked for Kerry last summer,’ ‘But I’m ambivalent about my role’ – out of a vague sense of guilt. As if I was saying, I am not part of what you see on the television every night. I am not part of this tsunami of shit consuming everything around us. I am not one of those pale fascist vampires stalking around the lobby of the Willard Hotel.

So it’s over for us. But never fear; State is busy on its next project to bring peace, love and understanding to the Arab World, a project that will doubtlessly make jihadists from Cairo to Baghdad throw down their weapons and join hands with their new American brothers and sisters for a rousing chorus of ‘Kumbaya’: a translation into Arabic of the Bronte classic ‘Jane Eyre.’ Your tax dollars at work, making sure that the female version of David Copperfield is greeted with the rousing silence of total indifference.

Meanwhile, my good buddy and former roommate writes from the center of Iraq:

“During today it peaked at 112, 170 in our body armor. We're all constantly dirty; there is a perpetual film of gray dead skin all over our bodies, exacerbated by the rawness of hard wind... This whole affair is best summed up by a soldier's experience in the portable shitters. It’s an oven in those things during sunup, but your nose is numb to the odor of rot. You shit like you shit everywhere else whether in comfort or nausea. You get your crusty ass out, grab a hot bottle of water, curse the army... But ya know what? I have Doritos baby, nothing like a bag of crunchy salty fat shit to humor the weather...”

On the afternoon of September 12, 2001, we sat on the ratty blue-and-grey couch we pulled from the dumpster in a Chicago alley to watch on our other roommate’s television as firemen picked through the rubble of what had once been the tallest building in the world. I don’t think either one of us knew what we wanted to do with our lives, exactly. But we were both filled with the surety that, come what may, whoever had propagated destruction on such scale against the United States would be annihilated like a roach hit with a pile-driver.

Jeepers, did we ever underestimate the incompetence of our elected officials. That faint whirring sound you heard when CENTCOM failed to drop a couple thousand Marines into Tora Bora to wipe out that last pocket of disgruntled Saudi engineers and homicidal goat herders was General Patton and every other red-meat commander this country ever had spinning in their graves over our total ineptitude. And the problem metastasized. We invaded the wrong country. We poured metaphorical fuel on the fire. And part of our solution was to send me into the Heartland with a digital recorder, a couple of Steno pads, a few Outkast CDs for those hundreds of road miles, in order to export what Americans were really like.

But we failed to understand the most fundamental thing: our audience didn’t give a solitary shit. It’s hard to care about pro wrestling or Ashley Judd or movie reviews when your own local news channels are filled with IEDs and screaming babies and infidel tanks crashing through the center of Baghdad. It wasn’t even a case of analyzing the demographics or psychographics; the goblins in State were more interested in slapping Laura Bush’s face on whatever they could in order to curry points with people in the Executive Branch. Now that it's over, I can say full-on that I was part of the problem, not the solution.

Warning: I Bite When Startled

It’s been a long time since I’ve written last, due to life rocketing along with all the speed and stability of an X-1 rocket controlled by someone with brain damage and palsy. ‘Pilgrimage’ is finished and sent to HKD’s agent/manager out in LA. I’ve been writing an average of three articles a week and two daily news stories for Propaganda Today, plus WebMD stuff, the book stuff, the other screenplay stuff, the stretching-myself-too-thin stuff. Kate emails me Snoop Dogg songs in which he sings, ‘You’re doing too much’ as the chorus. The personal life is the usual roller coaster. It’s enough to set anyone to drink, which is exactly what H. and I ended up doing the other night, in Bar Pilar around the corner from my apartment.

There was an impressive stack of OnTap magazines on the windowsill beside us, and H. took one and started flipping through it while I was at the bar ordering drinks. She starts giggling as I walk back with pints in hand, and then tilts the page to reveal a small headshot of me looking like the sort of psychopathic Russian hitman who could set someone on fire while whistling Happy Birthday, next to the 20-point title ‘The Cheapskate.’ My restaurant mini-column: I hadn’t been aware of Monica’s choice for the title. I definitely hadn’t been aware of the photo, which was snapped in a record-breaking 10 seconds before both me and the photographer had to scamper back across two Metro stops to our respective offices. I nearly die on the spot.

‘I think it’s cute,’ H. says.

‘That title, and that photo, I’ll be surprised if women just don’t preemptively pepper-spray me every time I head down the street.’ I take a sip of whatever hipster-friendly import the bartender suggested I try, and put my head in my hands.

‘It’s cute in a very Stalinist sort of way,’ she says. ‘By the way, what’s with the umpire shirt? Seriously, I every time I look at you, I get this strange urge to walk into the nearest Foot Locker.’

I am wearing a blue-stripped shirt with dense lines. I think it looks distinctive.

‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘What else is new?’

I almost died on Tuesday. Or at least I thought so, for a moment. My boss had set his toast on fire in our office kitchenette and, after people started to bitch and complain about the smell and the smoke, ran around spraying the air with a bottle of pine air freshener. My eyes started to water; I retched, coughed, fell to my knees. Within two seconds I was doing my best impersonation of taking the Auschwitz spa treatment. On the upside, my annual performance review was right afterwards, and I think my whole surviving-a-chemical-attack thing bought me sympathy points on the proverbial carpet. I want the title bump, the salary bump, if I can’t escape from here posthaste.

I am going through, to paraphrase Thoreau, the life of quiet desperation, trying not to go to the grave with the song still in me. Some people deal with it by drinking copious amounts of beer; others buy the 200-gross “My Daddy Didn’t Love Me” condom box and head down to the local yuppie-hole for humiliating bathroom sex; others commit some sort of A-for-Effort suicide involving string, just for the attention. I go running. I head out while the sun’s still rising and power past the other gasping joggers, down through the Monuments and across the bridge into Virginia. You’re doing too much. I come home and write – I churn through the book that might not work, the next script that might never be bought, the articles that either pay 10 cents a word or else end up translated into Arabic and used as jihadist toilet paper in some Baghdadi crossfire hurricane. I practice my Chinese along with the podcasts on my iPod, yelling Homeric-scale profanities at imaginary Shanghai cab drivers and Beijing businessman. You’re doing too much. I eat takeout tofu and my blood sings with caffeine and alcohol. In the shower in the early morning, the alternating hot and cool of steam and water and air from the open window, I feel the most fundamental need for the house in the hills, the thatched hut on the island, the boat heading for the ends of the earth.