Thought and Memory

Men remember. And women even moreso. Damage is done, and the children of corpses do not forget. The arc of recent memory embraces a terrible world, and all the sidereal beauty of it. Baghdad, Belgrade, Kandahar and Kabul - ancient cities, the scenes of a modern crime.

The rape of memory. The abandonment of thought.

You see...

There were harbingers of Triumph gone out into our world. They had dreams of an isolated perfection, an American century. They had a project, and a war. They dreamed, they promoted; somehow, they captured a state at the apogee of opposition to it.

Let's call it, temporarily, the age of the Lesser Vigilance. We were new Americans. We were the new saints of prosperity. The World Bank turned Robin Hood on his head, and we were rolling in the fat of it.

There was Bill Clinton, and he fooled the lot of us. The wingnuts loved him or hated him. An industry emerged around the image of the man - paid to attack him, paid to defend him. We forgot to mistrust the whole enterprise itself, entertained and outraged instead by the spectacle of our own First Among Equals.

So: there was Bonnie Prince Billy, and his dour wife. And then there was George, casting himself about in an embarrasing impression of a Paladin, armed with the mute witness of a sated establishment.

What could go wrong? The world was ours, we were the world.

We lacked vigilance. Zealots plotted, here and abroad - triumphalists, jihadists and crusaders. All of them, of a breed and a type. Totalists. Crazy men sounding the carrion call of universal war - seriously - and we took them at their word that all would be well, and all would be well and all and all would end up just dandy.

We found our Painted Villains, done up in blackface - Milosevic, Saddam, Osama. Bad men, certainly. But bad men on our terms, as foils to our Prince and our Paladin.

Bonnie Prince Billy smacked the Serbs around. Milosevic relented, the partisan gangster prudent and cagey to the end. Paladin George rained fire down on Baghdad, and Saddam sought the hidey hole, a secret libertine done up in chains.

The Strong Men fell. That was always in the script. Well, not Osama. But here we have it: War as Theater. War as legerdemain.

How did we get here?

How did we get to this terrible place?

We're lazy. That's the truth of it. We were faced with an awful choice - Flat Screen TeeVee, or Vigilance.

Are you surprised at the outcome?

Somewhere outside of Belgrade, Thought was abandoned on the side of a Balkan road, an orphan in the dark. Somewhere in Baghdad, Memory clutches at her skirts and begs for a blanket and a single night's rest.

We didn't think this out. War and occupation do not occur in a vacuum. The curtain is up. The theater is empty. And still, we have our war and occupation. And we didn't remember - that time moves, that times change, that the feast and the famine alternate. That our own dead - however heartbreaking and terrible - do not weigh heaviest on the minds of those who survive our response, who have corpses for mothers and fathers.