When you re-establish contact with someone who was important to you, it is like stepping for a moment into a beautiful memory and reliving the good times that you thought were frozen in the past as artifacts. It was this feeling that washed over me like sunshine when an old friend who I never thought I would talk to again called me last week and said, “Hey asshole, I looked you up online and see that you are doing comedy bullshit now. You’re a f***ing fraud and a loser; you’re name is a joke around here. You’re worthless and I hope I see you again so I can tell you that to your ugly traitor face. F**k you.” I responded that we should get lunch sometime and that it was lovely hearing from him.
I volunteered at a bookstore for about two years. People often express confusion as to why I would volunteer at a bookstore, so I then tell them that it was a non-profit, essentially Communist, bookstore. To a lot of people, the difference between “working in a bookstore” and “volunteering at a Communist bookstore” is like the difference between working at Blockbuster and moonlighting at Leather Pete’s Bondage Films and Snuff-O-Rama. I have a lot of stories about the store, but that is for a different column; this column is about my old friend who made that phone call, “Anton Kucharski1.”
In the Venn Diagram of life, Anton and I overlapped in several circles, some seedier than others, as can be expected from a diagram that looks conspicuously breast-like. The overlapping point, the cleavage, of these circles was often the bookstore – a hub of less-than-effectual aging fringe class warriors and young passionate upstarts who wore their hearts on their sleeves and Che on their chest.
I’ve more or less removed myself from the aforementioned circles, a decision which Anton seems not entirely pleased with. Little is more dangerous than abandoning concern for people in favor of rigid ideology, than losing oneself and reality in dubious abstractions and unquestioned dogma. And Anton is definitely lost.
Now is not the time to get lost; the reality is far too dire. The reality is a war in Iraq that, contrary to the propaganda machine’s drivel, has not “turned the corner.” There is no “light at the end of the tunnel,” in fact; there is little electricity or infrastructure at all. America is getting lonely, having lost its Spanish, Danish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Norwegian, Filipino, Thai, Ukrainian, and Polish friends in Iraq. Italy should follow suit in the near future, with Berlusconi’s resignation and the anger over the Pentagon report absolving the U.S. of any guilt in the attack on journalist Giuliana Sgrena’s convoy that killed an Italian intelligence official.
The reality is that this war has cost us well over $300 billion, a number which will continue to skyrocket as more money is being requested from Congress. But that’s a small price to pay for the blooming democracy and sovereignty in Iraq, right? Ask those who have to go through checkpoints and roadblocks everyday, who have grown accustomed to routine raids and American imposed curfews. Better yet, ask the elected member of the National Assembly who was recently stopped at a checkpoint by a U.S. soldier who, in the words of the Iraqi, “began to utter some words in English which I did not understand. When I took out my MP badge and showed it to him, he threw it in my face, opened the car door and pulled me out. When I told the translator with the soldier that I was a member of the national assembly, he answered, ‘To hell with you and the national assembly.’” The man was then beaten. This sort of thing doesn’t happen when Ted Kennedy drives to work in the morning.
The reality is that things are not getting better and that people like Anton are too far gone to even ask the right questions. The right questions are the ones for which there are no answers, as Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern is aware when he asks, if things in Iraq are improving, “ why are we not decreasing the number of U.S. forces there? Why is the insurgency showing no signs of waning? Why are we being told that in a few months the administration will again ask Congress for billions of dollars more to fight the war? Why, according to the World Food Programme, is hunger among the Iraqi people getting worse?”
The most thoughtful questions and arguments do not come from the ideologues; they certainly don’t come from Anton and his ilk. They come from those who subscribe only to a dogma of empathy and humanity, who see injustice through a personal lens that has not been shaped by countless tracts, abstract theories, and raging egos. It is pivotal that those who decry the crimes of this country respond to what is happening at the present. Once they forsake the present and lose sight of the reality; we are all lost.
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