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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
War at a Distance9/22/2006 21:19:49The following is an article I wrote but haven't been able to publish, called War at a Distance. 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 must be recognized, experienced, examined, and finally, inhabited. 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. Now is a critical time because people at home are beginning to assemble the first collective narrative of what has happened. Movies about the first attacks have been coming out. We are at the point of deciding how to tell these stories to the next generation and what we want to teach with them. Every moment at a distance is a theological problem. It concerns the state of our souls and the meaning of God's love among us. Lately I go to meetings about the situation in southern Lebanon and the situation in Iraq. I hear people shouting at each other, looking for arguments, waiting in anger with no place to put it. Slowly the wars are killing even us so far away. And I can't help but seem to myself frustratingly indifferent, like the priest who passed a Samaritan lying on the road. "Look, the man!" [Jn 19:5] said Pilate before the crowd, with us among them. One description of the Christian struggle is to be standing in that crowd, knowing that we called for God's execution, thinking somehow still that it was the right thing to do. Faith in Jesus is the practice and revocation of distance, since through him (and by extension the saints) the ineffable can be apprehended: "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." (Jn. 1:18) Christian traditions offer resources to help us see. We can learn from the cycle of the springtime calendar, from mourning the agony of Jesus in Holy Week, to the Resurrection on Easter, and the period of meditation that leads to the call to action at Pentacost. Ritual trains our compassion, insisting on the closeness of God and of each other. It forces the feeling of what needs to be felt and carries us though it toward the possibility of praxis. 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 and the pressing need for a new world founded on faith. (Some of the prisoners were pictured with their arms extended.) Recognizing the image of God in 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 participants in the same political and spiritual forces that are bringing such suffering about. As in Lent, a space should be made for mourning and repentance. Without that it can be too easy to forget that the things we learn about are real. But of course we cannot let ourselves be destroyed also! 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." The answer to Christ's Passion, after recognition and repentance, is the preparation of our hearts, in the expectation of his return. 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 fear in their hearts. The distance we imagine from them must be refuted. This refutation is not philosophical so much as a daily practice, from consuming less oil at home to political action to prayer for the suffering—with the suffering, who are certainly praying too. In the meantime, the example of Whitman is a good one, showing forth the image of what the future might look like. We have to make a better world. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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