Damnatio Memoriae

I grew up with the country, as all of us must. Every new war is different, this time; every war is not. I found myself among my peers, in the year the towers fell: a child in a nation of children, blindly lashing out. But I remained too much a child to recognize that words were for the wielding. I thought the laws of nations were writ in blood at Nuremberg; I thought their consecration there was above our power to detract. I thought the interdict against murder was meant to mean something to us.

And so I never caught the bloodthirst, though I must have been exposed. I claim no special moral status here - not yet. I was simply caught at the wrong stage of true belief - values still fusing to the bone, the lattice-logicwork which bore them there still present and still strong. They had me standing and reciting by then, each day begun beneath the loudspeaker and the flag. But the words were all still wet with reference, and “freedom” still seemed to me a finger, pointed at the moon. I could hear the battlecry of freedom in the roar of Saturn V, bridging here to there. I would like to say I could not hear it, when the bombs first fell on Baghdad. I would like to say I could not hear it in the thunder of the guns. But it would be more honest to admit that I saw and I heard nothing. I don’t remember anything about the war as it began.

Children live in fragments. Only just before and just ahead, the vague confusion when all the airports changed and the firm conviction that Kerry had to win. But Kerry lost. The war went on. I know now that these two facts are unrelated. I did not know it then. The war had become too large a thing for little men to stop. But I knew and know and always will be certain - George Bush set the war in motion. George Bush destroyed Iraq.

I did not hear much of guns at all, nor much at all of fighting. The news spoke in soundbites; adults spoke in code. “Shock and Awe” and “surgical strikes”; “counterinsurgency” and “asymmetric war”. “Extraordinary rendition” of “enemy combatants” to “detention centers”, where their “interrogations” could be “enhanced”. An “operational pause” in the “nation-building” efforts of our “boots on the ground”. But even then I was not stupid. I knew what boots were for.

I will not degrade that point with “human interest”; I will not bring our victims’ bloodied bodies back to us and find a silver lining in their loss. It does not matter what I thought or felt, what I think or feel today. Enough about our anger, our trauma, our shame. Enough about how we were played for fools by midwits; enough about how actually they were secretly quite bright. I have seen their shiny pedigrees, and I have seen the backrooms where the unter-ober-deans polish them to shine. Enough outrage about how they lied, how our minds crumpled beneath the sheer gravitating thusness of some powder in a tube.

Enough about complexity, and enough about tradeoffs. Enough about what you’ll understand one day, when you’re all grown up. Yes, I know, “but AIDS, but Africa, but PEPFAR”. Bush brought lifesaving medicine to millions - so did Mao. Do not attempt to claim seven figures worth of broken bodies still lies in loose and loamy nuance far above the deep law’s face; do not even try to say the bedrock starts at eight. What complexities remain here mark the world raw; invoke them, and all things are in play.

But right now the topic is Iraq. The only meaning here is this: in excess of a million lives were lost. George Bush stole them. George Bush murdered them. Not alone, of course: a thousand others helped. They, too, are murderers and worse. They, too, have a fitting precedent to escape.

Though “escape” is perhaps too generous. They went nowhere; Buenos Aires did not receive its saecular psychosis booster shot. They sat still and ripened for the cuffing; when the last of them dies free and easy, history will not brand us one last time with its scarlet mark. It will brand us stupid children who never saw a truth too horrible to simply be forgot.

Dubya “shares our values” now. Cheney’s face goes unpelted long enough to get full sentences across. Sentences that start with things like “I will be voting for”. The shouting dies down long enough for him to hear new “honors” gifted back. Condi, fully fused with Stanford, is the newest face of the The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, while John Yoo stalks between the trees at Berkeley, spewing lectures on a little thing he likes to call the law. Paul Bremer is a ski instructor, apparently, and does a little painting on the side. Bush paints too, of course: his “inner Rembrandt” shits out mockeries of the world that he marred. And Bob Mueller, you may remember, has been made a minor god.

But I am not a child anymore, and I remember those years raw. I have grown up; my country has not. Now it’s my turn to speak sideways through the slits between stock phrases; now it’s my turn to pick which sweet nothingness pads my promises. And I offer assurances of this: they are not men, these days, these things which govern us. But neither are they laws. They are flesh and steel soaked through with efflux from some oozing ancient dark - but then so too was the unhung SS-Sturmbannfuhrer who promised us the stars.