Peace Kills (10 page)

OCTOBER 21, 2001

Six weeks into the War on Terrorism, contemporary war seemed to exhibit the vulgarity that Oscar Wilde said would be needed to make warfare unpopular. That is to say, the opening offensive of this war was directed at ‘the quotidian, the workaday, the commonplace, the vulgar—ordinary people working at their daily jobs in office buildings. And common people, not self-exalted jihad warriors, were showing the bravery and making the sacrifices in Afghanistan as well as the United States. Then, in a more Wildean sense of the world “vulgar,” there came the anthrax contamination. A cowflop of a weapon elicited all sorts of bull in response. On October 20 the
Los Angeles Times
devoted 465 column inches to a disease that had sickened fewer people than the corporation that makes the antibiotic by which the disease is cured. Only a few months before, Bayer had withdrawn the anticholesterol drug Baycol after it had been linked to fifty-two deaths.

Fortunately, my family doctor, William Hughes, has expertise in the most virulent aspect of anthrax—publicity. Dr. Hughes is married to ABC White House correspondent Ann Compton. He suggested that I get a ciprofloxacin prescription, lest anyone think I was too low in the journalism hierarchy to receive threatening mail. And indeed there were threats in my mail, but only the usual ones from Visa, American Express, and the landlord.

One of the first anthrax attacks was made against the company that owns
The National Enquirer
. The company's name is displayed in large letters on its suburban Florida offices:
AMERICAN MEDIA
. Supposing that the anthrax contamination is really the work of terrorists, al Qaeda may be less
sophisticated than we feared. “Ah,” thought the bin Laden operatives, “
here
is where the American media have their place of headquarters.” On the other hand, considering the role of supermarket tabloids in America's life of the mind, al Qaeda may be more sophisticated than we thought.

Anyway, the media were enormously reassuring, simultaneously telling the public that members of the public won't contract anthrax while giving nonstop coverage to the members of the public who did, will, or might. Then Tom Ridge, the head of the Office of Homeland Security, came on the air, reminding us how much “Homeland Security” sounds like a failed savings-and-loan. Didn't Grandma lose $15,000 in a CD when Homeland Security went under? The media also recounted the complete list of symptoms for all three types of anthrax infection—symptoms that correspond to those of the common cold, the flu, a hangover, acne, and eating the church-picnic potato salad.

According to CNN on October 19, being infected with the intestinal form of anthrax results in “nausea, lack of appetite, and fever.” And—if boiling rage counts as fever—so did being on a commercial flight. I had flown on ten during the five weeks after September 11, owing to an author tour for a badly timed collection of light humorous essays. (Not that I'm complaining about being knocked off the medium-well-seller list by people who spent five minutes with Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in 1976. Especially not after hearing publishing-world scuttlebutt about a certain Manhattan novelist famous for tales of fashion models and drug excess, whose reaction on September 11, it's said, was to exclaim how glad he was that he didn't have a book out. Discriminating readers are
always
glad when he doesn't have a book out.)

Airport security would soon be turned over to the government so that a federal agency could do the same fine job of protecting the nation in the future that the CIA and the FBI did in early September. Meanwhile, “heightened security precautions” were allowing airlines to perfect their technique of treating passengers like convicted felons and providing all the transportation amenities usually accorded to smuggled cockatoos.

At the Los Angeles airport I watched as an elderly, arthritic man was forced to remove his buckle shoes and send them through the carry-on baggage X ray. In Ontario, California, a friend was meeting me at the airport. Of course he couldn't wait at curbside. He had to circle through the arrivals lane while slugs (slugs with valid photo IDs!) delivered my checked bags. On the forth go-round a policeman stepped into the road and told my friend that if he drove by one more time he'd be arrested.

What caused the giant python lines at airport security checkpoints remained a mystery. An acquaintance, a plastic surgeon who specializes in cranial reconstruction, was returning from a conference on head injuries shortly after September 11. His hand luggage contained three human skulls. These passed unnoticed through the X-ray screening.

Doubtless all sorts of civil rights must be sacrificed temporarily in times of crisis. But there is no ACLU for comfort and convenience. A generation hence we'll be living in a world of metal detectors in nudist colonies.

Traveling around the country did, however, allow me to see how different regions of America were coping with current events. On October 9 a local TV anchorman in Washington, D.C., called Islam (using an adjective perhaps left behind by the sudden journalistic shift away from celebrity
obsession) “the second most popular religion on earth.” It has an amazing Q factor, too, that Islam.

At about the same time, aided by the Internet, there was a cheerful realization nationwide that “Taliban” scans perfectly in “The Banana Boat Song”:

Come Mr. Taliban, rid me of Osama
.

Air Force come and it flatten me home
.

Cruise missile
,

Tomahawk
,

Half-ton bomb
.

Air Force come and it flatten me home
.

On October 16, in Austin, Texas, local TV reported that the Austin fire department had responded to a call from a household concerning a “suspicious package.” The sole suspicious thing about the package was that it had been mailed from New York City.

On October 19 a chipper announcer for KFWB radio, in southern California, said, “Anthrax news certainly has Orange County people talking …” Later that day, at a lunch in Simi Valley, I was sitting next to someone from the Ventura County district attorney's office. He said anthrax alarms were coming in at a rate of one every three minutes, and that the only practical decontamination response would be to have people get naked and be hosed down. That evening, on the set of a public-television book show, T. C. Boyle talked about how he had a certain admiration for acts of “ecotage,” but in his fiction he tried to show both sides of the story. He managed never to mention September 11.

I can remember when powdery white substances of sinister origin were doing a lot more damage to America than anthrax had done so far. Circa 1980 America's elite was
suffering “nasaltage.” It emptied bank accounts, wrecked marriages, ruined thousands of careers, and brought the nation to its knees (with a soda straw over a glass coffee table). But Attorney General John Ashcroft was very firm in stating that anthrax threats are no laughing matter. Pranks and jests concerning anthrax would be treated as serious criminal actions. Thus various larval jokes with “You've got mail” punch lines had to be allowed to die before maturation. And the heavy-metal band Anthrax was said to be considering changing its name—presumably to Chicken Pox.

Were we as a nation forgetting what our international critics have been saying about us for years? Aren't we supposed to be a big, terrifying country, a Godzilla of capitalism wrecking the globe? Since when did Godzilla flip out because he might have brushed against something in the mail room while he was devouring Trenton, New Jersey? Since when did Godzilla turn (devastating) tail and scamper to Mexico to buy Cipro over the counter? I trusted this was a momentary lapse. And I hoped that Osama bin Laden was discovering, amid smart bombs and Delta Forces in Afghanistan, that America isn't scared, America is
scary
. The members of al Qaeda had gotten dressed up in their holy-warrior costumes and gone trick-or-treating at the wrong house.

NOVEMBER 26, 2001

Lo! The intrepid Afghan Taliban fighter of warrior lineage ancient. He who had vanquished countless foes, unassailable in his mountain redoubts, imbued with fanatical resolve, possessed by suicidal courage—and who was now running around Mazar-e-Sharif getting his beard shaved,
playing Uzbecki pop music on his boom box, and using Mrs. Afghan Warrior's burka for a bedspread in the guest room, soon to be rented to foreign aid workers.

The fighting in Afghanistan was so brief that CNN Headline News had to delete three bars from its “Target: Terror” score to keep the theme music from outlasting the hostilities. The Soviet Union fought the Afghans for ten years and gave up in ignominious defeat in 1989. What were the Soviets using for weapons—cafeteria buns and rolled-up locker room towels? The United States dropped a lot of cafeteria buns—or emergency food aid that is very like cafeteria buns—on Taliban-controlled areas. Exposure to American school-lunch fare may have been the deciding factor in the radical Muslim demoralization. A country that can make something that dreadful from mere flour, yeast, and water is a country not to be defied.

However it was that we achieved victory, achieve it we did, although to what end remains to be seen. One effect of victory (though very temporary) was to make America's elite even more sanguine about armed conflict than they had been during the 1999 air war on Serbia.
SURPRISE: WAR WORKS AFTER ALL
, read the headline on the Week in Review section of
The New York Times
for Sunday, November 18, 2001. That same day
The Boston Globe Magazine
ran a cover story titled “The New Patriots: College students support a country at war—and so do their Vietnam-era parents.” Of course, there was the possibility that the revived fighting spirit among America's elite had nothing to do with Afghanistan but was a collateral result of Harvard's first undefeated football season since 1913. I believe Harvard played Mount Holyoke, Smith, Li'l Dickens Day Care Center, and several Pop Warner League teams, but I didn't check that.

Meanwhile, what next for our nation? Would we do, after the Afghan war, as we did after the Gulf War and just go home, have a recession, and elect some creepy Democratic governor of an obscure state as the next president? Or would we finish the War on Terrorism? The U.S. Department of State publication
Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000
seemed to offer ample opportunities for pursuing the latter goal:

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism. … It provided increasing support to numerous terrorist groups, including the Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ). … Iraq continued to serve as a safe haven and support to a variety of Palestinian rejectionist groups. … Syria continued to provide safehaven and support to several terrorist groups. … Sudan continued to serve as a safehaven for members of al-Qaida, the Lebanese Hizballah. … Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the PIJ, and HAMAS. …

We mustn't forget that this was not a war between Western civilization and the Muslim world.
The Washington Post
certainly hadn't forgotten. The
Post
made absolutely no comment about the real or apparent ethnicity of the person quoted in the following item about anthrax, which ran in the
Post's
November 1, 2001, issue:

“In hindsight, this has been an escalating event,” said Mohammad Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We will continue to see new cases of anthrax disease.”

I was proud of
The Washington Post
and meant to write a complimentary letter to the editor, but I was too busy phoning in my tip to the FBI.

This was not a war between Western civilization and the Muslim world. There was, nonetheless, interesting reading to be done in
Freedom in the World
, a survey of political rights and civil liberties issued annually since 1955 by the nonpartisan organization Freedom House. Among countries whose populations are predominately (60 percent or more) Muslim, only remote Mali and tiny Benin were rated as “Free.” On a scale of 1 (Canada) to 7 (god-awful), no other Muslim country received a score better than 3 in political rights and 4 in civil liberties.

Would we have to fight all those countries? Or could we just give them a hug? A peace vigil was being held each Saturday at noon outside the town offices in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a few miles from the house we own there.

According to the November 15, 2001, edition of the local newspaper, the
Monadnock Ledger
, “One week, when it was rumored that CBS might cover the protestors, 45 people showed up.” By Saturday, November 17, the peace protest had, in effect, turned into a victory protest, and eight people were present. There was one sweet-faced, white-haired old lady, and then another who was so much older that she looked as if she might have been doing this sort of thing since the Hitler-Stalin Pact. There was a middle-aged man with hair that was both very long and gone from the top half of his head, a middle-aged woman upon whose features smugness had made an extensive and permanent settlement, a young man whose devil-may-care sideburns clashed with his go-to-hell golf pants, and a tweedy professor type who spent the whole vigil reading
The Nation
. Plus there was a mom in hand-knits trying to keep an eye on a rapidly fidgeting eight-year-old, and an Asian woman of college age who carried a sign reading
RETALIATE WITH WORLD PEACE
. Considering how world
peace has gone for people in many places since the end of the Cold War, that's a harsh sentiment. After a while, the Asian woman wandered off to window-shop.

Most local New Englanders were ignoring the vigil with the perfect obliviousness to all incongruity that has been a New England hallmark since Henry David Thoreau went off to live a hermit's life at Walden Pond but continued to have his mother do his laundry. Only one fellow, flannel-clad, stopped to argue with the pacifists. “What do you do,” the fellow asked, “when they strike the homeland? What if they roll right in here with tanks?” I was about to think “Good for you” when the fellow went on to say, “But I'll tell you one thing, I've refused to get the anthrax shots they're trying to give everybody.”