But not at my house. I don’t think I can honestly use the word depressed to describe what I felt last week, but it was close. Despair, perhaps, or despondent. I apologize for being a party pooper, but when huge crowds start rejoicing in victory over some dark and evil force out there in the world, I get scared. I think that crowds of people united by a common mission – especially when it involves an enemy – are horrifying. It’s at the heart of my aversion to college football, and it’s at the heart of my reaction to almost anything that includes uniforms and weapons.
For the most part I avoided the news for a few days. I heard snippets of lust for the Navy Seals on talk radio, and that was all that was required to switch to the jazz station. By the middle of the week, though, I tuned in, and there was one of the country’s most visible PR executives broadcasting from a prime piece of real estate where two enormous office towers once stood. The president, I learned, had flown to New York to lay a wreath before a tree. He met with a group of firefighters. He hugged a few children whose mothers or fathers – though mostly fathers – had died right there on that plot of American soil. There was a boy who was in kindergarten back in 2001. Some children lost a father that day, Katie Couric explained, but this boy, who is now a teenager, his mother knew the firefighters: He lost several fathers that day. And he’s made a movie about it. Katie Couric spoke with the boy’s kindergarten teacher, who, with tear-glazed eyes, confessed that he felt like he’d failed the boy because he’d had no idea how deeply impacted the child had been.
In many ways PBS was more disappointing. Charlie Rose was away so Brian Williams from NBC filled in for him, which struck me as odd but perfect, and hosted a presidential historian, a writer for the New Yorker magazine and a reporter from Time. The historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, was welcomed not as a scholar but as the proud mother of a U.S. veteran. How will the mission in Pakistan help or hurt the president? Oh, she said, if anyone had any doubt that he’s the man for the job of president, this mission has made it obvious that he is indeed the one. And it will be good for his place in history. Taking military risks, she explained, always helps define a president when history is being drafted. Just look at what it did for Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
Yes, I thought, just look.
But how did she feel, asked Brian Williams, as a mother? Quite proud, she said. Her son, right after graduating from Harvard, signed up to serve the country, and while it scared the hell out of her, he came back a leader. A leader of what or of whom she didn’t say, but a leader all the same.
I suppose the writer from the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, was on to provide us all with a New York perspective, for this is, when all is said and done, a celebration by, for and about New York. Swooping into Pakistan in the dead of night to kill the terrorist is a good thing, the writer explained, because there is a liberal kind of violence, and that’s necessary. That certainly got me thinking: Liberal violence.
On the PBS Newshour the consensus of opinion was that the killing of Osama bin Laden represents a shift from having a president known for nuance and being “too cerebral” to a president who is more decisive. The “professor in chief,” the commentators gloated, is a thing of the past.
My problem with this – the root of my despair, if you will – isn’t necessarily that the country seemed to have seamlessly shifted into pep rally mode last week. It’s the absence of any perspective other than that put forth by those who come across not as journalists and historians but as cheerleaders.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s son came home a leader. Good for him, and good for her, but what about the mothers and fathers whose sons and daughters not only didn’t come home as leaders but didn’t come home at all? How did they respond to our newly decisive president? And in terms of violence of a liberal persuasion, it’s one thing for a New Yorker writer to smugly proclaim the okay-ness of that while sitting in a television studio. But what about people in the neighborhoods in places like Iraq and Afghanistan whose homes and hospitals and schools have been blasted and burned and bulldozed? As they bury their dead children – who are not leaders, and never will be – do they remind themselves that the violence that killed the youngsters was a liberal kind of violence? Or do they wonder if it was more along conservative lines?
The world is connected in ways it never has been before, so I am really curious to know why the spectrum of voices and faces and stories on the television doesn’t include more colors. I know – trust me, I know – that nuance is not in favor these days, but I’d like a little of myself. Does anyone have any questions? Or concerns?
On Sunday, on Mother’s Day of all days, I finally finished A People’s History of the United States, and it was Howard Zinn – not Katie Couric, or Brian Williams or even Jim Leher – who answered my question: I didn’t hear tales taken from other narratives last week because I’m not meant to hear them, and I’m not meant to hear them because acknowledging another point of view would jeopardize the storyline, and in a country whose economy is based on military might fueled by nationalistic fervor, the storyline is important.
And here is how Howard Zinn helped me out of my funk. Just as we were led to believe last week that the country was on the verge of celebratory delirium, so too were we led to believe more than 30 years ago that Ronald Reagan was elected president “by a landslide.” Which, if you look beyond the criminally simplified storyline put forth by Katie Couric’s predecessors, is complete and utter bullshit. Barely half of the voting-age population took part in that election, and of those votes cast barely half voted for Reagan. So that’s 27 percent, and if that constitutes a landslide, we’re on seriously shaky ground. The statistics from 1994 are almost identical: Two years into Clinton’s first term, the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, attained a majority in the U.S. House of representatives, which was branded “a revolution.” After being reminded of these falsehoods, in the chapter titled “The Unreported Resistance,” I felt better. I don’t think the majority of the people in this country went berserk last week because “we got ‘em!” I think what happened was that those who did were fast tracked onto the evening news. Furthermore, I don’t believe that those of us who have serious doubts and the serious questions to go along with them are some sort of strange minority. We’re just off message because we have not yet erased the word “justice” and replaced it with the word “revenge.” So we’re off the air.
As joyful as that realization was, I was sort of ashamed of myself, it being Mother’s Day and all. That’s because my own mother was one of the most cynical, jaded people I’ve ever known. I remember her folding the newspaper and then setting it aside or turning off the television and saying, to no one in particular, “What a bunch of malarkey.” And I allow myself to slip into a bit of decline because of what’s on the network news? Did I learn nothing from her?
