Breathing room

Hi.

I'm sorry to have been away for so long, but I've had to run dark for a while after the war started. I couldn't bring myself to make a running commentary about death and destruction. I couldn't force myself to watch the sci-fi night vision camera-portholes of CNN, BBC and other news outlets, but now, I admit, I'm a bit of a spectator, checking in on the war as if it's a baseball game or the NCAA college basketball tournament. March Madness, indeed.

I'm having a hard time putting into words what I've been thinking for the past few days. It's incredibly difficult to write something about this war when a) you get it through the filter of a spoon-fed media and b) when you aren't there to understand the heat and chaos and anxiety of wandering through someone's country, firing off rounds and pushing your body to the limit to reach and attack some ancient city. It's hard to write from being this far away, safe in my little suburban cocoon where war is just another reality program on TV, shot through fuzzy fractals of videophone cameras and the aforementioned olive-drab soup of night vision. All I can write about is what I see on TV, what I see through fixed camera feeds online, what I read on other blogs. It's not much, it's all incomplete.

Watching coverage of the first full day of the air campaign, including the first waves of "Shock and Awe" against Old Babylon resulting in a mushroom cloud of a very large bomb drift into the desert sky and blankets of white smoke rolling across the city, making an illusionary halo of fire when backlit with sodium street lamps, I understand that there goes my tax dollars...whoosh and boom, into a building. I helped pay for this war, and all the bombs that pound into buildings, into streets, into the fearful hearts of families. Saddam Hussein was supposed to be killed in the first wave, but instead a Jordanian woman is killed. So much for "smart" killing devices, and when the wave of bombs come I'm an accomplice as the ghosts of Dresden inhabit the exotic, desert city full of men, women and children.

I'm told to support the troops now, as they roll forward in a battle that's becoming less of a cakewalk than they expected. Some are killed, some are captured. It's tragic, but only unexpected to the most gung-ho armchair soldier watching cable news for their warnography fix. Should have we expected any less? The Iraqis may not love Saddam, but just who are these people invading our country away, they are thinking. Of course they'll fight back, and they'll fight in the walls of Baghdad. Dresden, meet Stalingrad. And Stalingrad, get ready for your close-up on the fixed cameras stationed in your streets, beaming back real-time images of failed diplomacy and a lust for hegemony.

Support the troops? Maybe. In a way, they have it good. Superior numbers and technology, heavy armor and weapons, antitoxins and the unconditional love of elected officials. Back at home, as I watch the murmurs on Arab Street grow more angry, I think about how long it will take for mere anarchy to be loosed in my local shopping mall, sports stadium or public venue. The soldiers will have all the money and emotional assistance they could desire. As for us on the homefront, our police, fire fighters and rescue teams (the "first responders" to any terrorist attack) are low on funds and readiness. No wonder we were told a month ago to stock up on duct tape and protein bars in case of a terrorist attack; our home team will be busy trying to hold it together to help us.

Yet, as I watched the bombs begin to hit Baghdad on the night my wife and I celebrated our 45 months of marriage, I knew something had definitely changed: We are all enlisted in Bush's little crusade now. We Americans are all soldiers or components, because this war will be brought home to us. Despite the early attempts to spread the spotlight to other members of the "coalition of the willing," George Bush has personalized this whole endeavors, and its inherited after-effects, for years to come. Those troops we're told to support will be busy for a long time, I imagine.

When I get the chance, I try to access BBC's fixed camera which points an unblinking eye onto a small sliver of Baghdad. Last night, I watched a sun rose on the city, turning an ebony sky marked by stars into a lush purple and then an azure rich like water in an oasis pool. It's a bit unseemly to watch this happening, to watch a city wake and die in real-time, to see the bombs I helped pay for blow up pieces of someone's home. But every so often, I see a car or a person moving about, and I pray that car's occupant or that lone soul is safe for another day, that he or she doesn't hear a bomb blast or feel the earth quake through heavy munitions. I see these anonymous players in this drama through the jumpy parade of images my modem can squeeze out and I smile. Life goes on.

I hope they will be safe. It's a common prayer right now, shared by those who want peace, but I say it because I envision Web surfers from Kyoto, Johannesburg, Paris, Manila and all points in between who will use fixed cameras to peer at a besieged America of the future, and they will pray that we come out of the latest terrorist attack with as little dead as possible. It's the best thing one could hope for, after all.