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.
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.
posted by NiK @ 4:26 PM
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