This amazing invention lately seems so cut off, so arrogant, we did not even know we could still be hurt. (Allan Gurganus)
The New York Times Magazine has a web-only edition today that is full of brief and moving pieces. Gurganus’s piece, drawing connections between the U.S. today and the South then is perhaps the best and most carefully thought-out.
It is folly to speak of going to war, or being at war, or to suggest that by force of arms and embargoes or cajolery and bullying, we can put down terrorism as an earlier generation put down fascism.
Meanwhile, the Star’s Dalton Camp negotiates deftly between horrified sadness and overzealous, misplaced rhetoric.
I have felt disengaged and adrift from my native country often (many times well before I moved to Canada), but nothing ever like this. The other times were like what happened to Jews in Germany in the 1930s, experiencing internal exile, unsure of how to mediate between the force of reality and the fragility of psychology. Sooner or later, reality wins out. Guiltily, I realize that I’m somehow grateful for reality, after years of being distracted by the fall of the Web and gay celebrities and all the rest. But I still can’t get my friend’s dead brother out of my mind, I can’t stomach lies about “democracy” and “war” and all the rest.
I have been thinking over national differences, as well as those on the smaller scales, and how I feel about them lately. There is very little flag-waving in Canada; the maple leaf flies over government buildings and a few cultural institutions like the Royal Ontario Museum, but, aside from July 1, ordinary people don’t wave it. A reporter on CBC from New York said, “Americans are upset, and when they’re upset, they buy a lot of flags”. There’s also just one national song, while La Exigente has been shocked at the number of songs about itself that the U.S. sings; the lyrics to many of them float back to me in fragments.
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we are now witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies.
