2001-09-15 - 7:49 p.m.
I saw this painting at the art museum today. It�s by Frederick Frieseke, an American Impressionist of the early 20th century. The title of it is "Peace," and it was painted in France. In 1914. As I�ve said before, I don�t know squat about art, but I found it very moving nonetheless. This JPEG doesn�t really do it justice.
A friend of mine took issue yesterday with my statement about how the attack on the World Trade Center is an attack on civilization. He said it smacks of the same kind of white liberal paternalism that treats Third World peoples and blacks in the U.S. like children who can�t take care of themselves. I see his point, but I think he missed mine. I thought the Oklahoma City bombing was an attack on civilization, too. Both Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden were/are wastes of good oxygen.
I look at a painting in an art gallery and I see civilization. I look at the skyline of New York and I see civilization. I look at the U.S. Constitution, and all the rights we�ve added to it--and all the other countries in the world who�ve committed themselves to at least try to treat their citizens like human beings and not bomb the shit out of their neighbors--and I see civilization. I think we all know by now that there are people out there who--for whatever fucked-up motive they�ve cooked up in their heads--see these same things and want to destroy them. I don�t want to share the same planet with those people.
That�s what I meant.
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I needed to get out of my apartment and away from CNN, so I spent the afternoon at Balboa Park, doing civilized things--listening to music, looking at art, watching people, soaking up sunshine.
The park was three-quarters empty--unusual for a Saturday--but everyone seemed happy and peaceful. The individual stasis bubbles we wrap around ourselves when we go out in public had, for the most part, popped. People looked each other in the eye and smiled and said hello--not with the typical SoCal have-a-nice-day surface friendliness, but something warmer, more genuine, more ... defiant. At the Organ Pavilion a blues band was playing. People were slow-dancing. One poor woman got into a tug-of-war with her Dalmatian, who wanted to chase pigeons (the woman lost). There was a wedding going on at the Japanese Garden, which annoyed me a little, because that�s one of my favorite places to go when I want to sit and think. Along the Prado a man in a kilt strolled back and forth playing the bagpipes. ...
And whenever a plane flew overhead (every couple of minutes--Balboa Park is right under the approach path for Lindbergh Field) everyone stopped for a second and glanced up at the sky.
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Returning to England after the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell (one of my personal heros) wrote:
"It is difficult ... especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don�t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth�s surface. Down here it was the still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."
***
You�d think San Diego wouldn�t be this jittery, being 3,000 miles from New York and all. Until you remind yourself that there are two Navy bases and two Marine facilities within the city limits. There are more dot-com geeks here than jarheads nowadays, but old cultural habits die hard. The fact that three of the terrorists who plowed that plane into the Pentagon apparently lived here for over a year hasn�t helped matters. Allegedly, two of them even conned the head of San Diego�s Islamic Center into letting them live with him with the story that they were Saudi students learning English. As if the Muslim community needed even more bad PR.
Like all decent people, I�m disgusted by all these idiotic assaults on Arab-Americans the last few days--but I�m also getting just a little irritated by folks on the left who seem way too eager to use these incidents as proof that We�re No Better Than They Are. Bullshit. Your moral scales need to be recalibrated, badly. On one side we�ve got a well-organized group of people who spent several years and God-only-knows how much money (backed by at least one and possibly two or three governments) to plan an attack which killed at least 5,000 people from all over the world and destroyed two of America�s most recognizable national landmarks. On the other side we have a random bunch of testosterone-damaged cretins getting their rocks off by breaking windows at the local mosque or spitting on the poor guy who pumps their gas--and being condemned loudly for it by every talking head from the President on down. Our homegrown stupidity doesn�t even come close to balancing out their evil.
Frankly, considering how badly we acted in this respect during both World Wars, we�re doing pretty damn well this time. We aren�t calling Afghan hounds "Liberty puppies" and no elected official I know of has even suggested that we intern or expel anyone of Arab descent--in fact, they�ve been bending over backwards to emphasize that we mustn�t lash out at Arabs as a people.
So yes, let�s lock up the yahoos and throw away the key. But don�t even try to tell me that their actions rob the rest of us of the moral high ground, here.
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Off to a birthday party tonight. Hope everyone�s managing to relax and enjoy life this weekend. Me, I need a backrub in the worst way.
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