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War at a Distance Revisited12/08/2006 22:23:32Several months ago I posted a theological article called War at a Distance. I have recently revised it in philosophical form, as a refutation. It has the same title. Fortunately since then there has been a slight raising of consciousness among our leaders about the urgent need to stop the violence. But only a slight one. The closest I got to all this was on September 11, 2001, when there was a crash at the Pentagon, which, though officially on District of Columbia land, is actually enclosed by Arlington County, where I grew up and where I was. We watched the rest on television in what would have been English class. That night, my friends and I met to play a giant melancholy game of tag in the field around our school. We went there for comfort. After a while a policeman came, but instead of asking us to leave as usual, we exchanged quiet gestures in deference to what had happened, and then he left. For my generation the attacks were the beginning of time, announcing the start of what God has to say to us and the expectations of our response. After that everything has been at a distance. I haven't been to Iraq or Afghanistan, and only occasionally do I meet people who have. Life here goes according to its own logic. My city looks mostly like it always did, continuing on its steady progress with new buildings and more wireless hotspots. Time refuses to stand still or to be abruptly changed. Do you remember the first nights of bombing? In 1991 I was just a kid, waiting with my mother by our tiny T.V. to see if the bombs would really fall. In March, 2003, I was an adult on my own for the first time. The flashing images of Baghdad came through in green night-vision, fixed on strange features of the cityscape like water towers and mosques. The intention seemed to be to convince those of us watching that the bombing might as well be on Mars, it was so far away. The war at a distance as such is an innovation of our time. Never before in history have images and stories of killing so surround us, making us aware at least in a general sense what is going on. At the same time, people are becoming increasingly sensitive to the interconnectedness of geopolitics and the world economy through words like "globalization." We know that the oil fueling our cars and heating our homes is connected, in one way or another, with the far-away conflicts. What comes of them determines the fate of the world we share in, yet from Sudan to Iraq and southern Lebanon, ongoing bloodshed hardly seems to figure in the normal lives of so many of us. As human beings, of course, there is only so much we can do. It would only be worse for us all to run abroad as fighters or peacemakers. We have to survive, support our families, and work to make our neighborhoods safer. And every day the onslaught of the headlines continues. This distance exposes everyone to the paradox that the families of soldiers at war have always felt: living in the picture of normalcy, we sense that everything depends on something too far away to see or touch. Now we look to them as examples. Like never before war families lead the rest of us in supporting the troops, as they say, as well as opposing the wars. We are discovering that the war at a distance, qualified by its subtle closeness, is a situation we are in, one that we have been be recognizing, experiencing, examining, and finally, inhabiting. Lately I have started remembering things I had forgotten about so quickly, like the mysterious anthrax scare that struck in the last months of 2001 and the capture of John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, an American not much older than me fighting in Afghanistan. The years of fighting that followed had made me forget President's dramatic and premature "mission accomplished" speech from the deck of an aircraft carrier in 2003. Now these things feel so far in the past. I put together a timeline of the last five years and am amazed that so much had happened while my life went on casually. Distance is one theory, nearness is another, presence is another. The purpose of naming the war at a distance is to refute it. And to that end there are a thousand proofs, to be found everywhere in modern existence. From the fuel that great countries consume to the histories we forget. While making up bedtime stories, assembling the wreckage made upon words into a tale ready for telling, alienation will best be undone. So will rigorous proofs let people begin the great research project into our times, scouring every corner of life for complicity while crying distance like an alibi. If there is any language left from the wreckage of terror, freedom, security, victory, and airplanes, let it be gathered for our refutations before being asked to make bedtime stories. The theory of distance is perpetuating wars because it claims that some are safe from them when actually we are culpable. Of the images of torture from Abu Ghraib prison, Susan Sontag wrote, "The photographs are us." Every day the newspapers show martyrs in an aspect of Christ, revealing so starkly the complicity of human nature. Images stand before us and the captions say to the crowd descriptively and prescriptively, "Look, human beings." (Some of the prisoners were pictured with their arms extended.) Recognizing them dissolves the divide between normalcy and war, placing even those of us at a distance in the common condition. We have to see in the daily motions of our lives the way we are actors in the same political and spiritual play that are bringing such suffering about. War is play, disgustingly enough, and a person has only to find a role. The stage refutes the distance because we are all seen at once upon it. At the end of this frustrating bout of refutations, a theory standing beside a blackened building and a concrete fence, Heidegger's jumbles of words sound about right. Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance. What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on the radio, can remain far from us. What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near to us. Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness. If he were writing in English, he would have noticed the closeness between "abolition" and "ablution," which means to ritually wash before prayer. An ablution should be anything but frantic. It should be efficacious. Water to wash the sand off our ankles and also to prepare us for the presence of God. Before he went to visit wounded soldiers from the fields of the Civil War, Walt Whitman would spend four to five hours preparing himself, resting and bathing, finding his best spirits. He saw that with the soldiers "it was in the simple matter of personal presence, and emanating ordinary cheer and magnetism, that I succeeded and help'd more than … anything else." This kind of presence is a better answer to the far away. "Nearing is the presencing of nearness," continues Heidegger. We who are not now in so much danger, held off at an apparent distance, can at least, like Whitman, bring forward the best in ourselves in preparation for the world to come when the war is over and in affection for the present. These wars have to be brought to an end now because our children are entering their lives (and our soldiers are losing them) with innocent blood on their hands and terror in their ears. The distance from them we have theorized must be refuted.
re:War at a Distance Revisited - 12/11/2006 22:03:01
re:War at a Distance Revisited - 1/03/2007 10:56:40
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