heading west on I80 on the GWB
Today is an important anniversary for me personally, in addition to the shared anniversary of the attacks on this date five years ago. Three years ago I finally abandoned my quest to revive my career in NYC and headed out across the George Washington Bridge and into Bushland, into the heart of darkness.
The mood in the city had been subdued as the second anniversary arrived. To my surprise, as we drove west, that began to change. When we left New Jersey and entered Pennsylvania, the tone on the increasingly terrible radio got scarier. I’d known intellectually how many people had bought into the Bush Administration’s lies, but experiencing the strident jingoism, the aggression … that was something else all together. I remember seeing a sign advocating the nuking of someplace A-rab hanging off of a highway overpass. Especially jarring was the sick conflation of aggrieved victimhood, the hallmark-like maudlin invocations of the dead with strident militarism.
I had gotten so used to the way people gave each other space in the city. I’d gotten used to hearing the chorus of different languages, of the panopoly of colors, both in skin and in dress. I knew that I’d made the right decision, a strategic retreat to find a fresh start in a new city where my sisters had settled, but I was getting a quick reminder of the things I’d run away from when I’d moved away from the midwest. Those things, the myopia and the strident “patriotism” and the racism, fear and prejudice were on display, only amplified. I could find all of them in New York, of course, but there was always someone else to balance it out. NYC was America as social experiment writ large, a place where everyday life was a process of finding compromises to get along with others. The very things which Bushland was rejecting wholesale.
There has been plenty written the last few days about what happened that day five years ago. There has been plenty written about what it means. There has been plenty of ink and hot air spilled out justifying the screaming beast that we’ve become striding across the world, spreading death and destruction. The mass grave has been used repeatedly to support our current authoritarian regime, and too many of the people out here have cheered them on. That destruction reminded too many of us of all of the various apocalypses we’d seen on our screens before, and so many of the denizens of Bushland want to be extras when the heroes save the day.
It makes me want to scream when I think of the spirit of possibility that filled the streets of the city that I love that has been squandered, that has been co-opted by base and fanatical reactionaries. While my move west has been personally a good one, my newfound opportunities are bittersweet as I look at the country I live in now.
Two days after we drove the rental van across the GWB, new bad news came over the radio. I stopped on a station somewhere in Ohio when I heard the great Johnny Cash playing on some country station. One of my favorites, one of the BEST things about the great American middle, that voice comforted me as continued on, only to have the DJ announce at the end of the song that Cash had died that morning. So much had passed away that was good about this country, and now this great man who’d been so open to new people, new music, new possibilities was gone too. A voice that had sung out so strongly against an earlier criminal war, against the base inequities in this country had gone silent. So many voices had gone silent, either out of fear for their jobs, fear of reprisal, fear of losing their cozy sinecures in Washington … and now his voice had been stilled as well.
Three years ago today I crossed a border, but at least now I can see that it isn’t just Fox News spreading fear and Rovian manipulations. So much of what has been ugly and frightfully bubbling under the national veneer is now out in the harsh light. I had ended up heading to that biggest of big cities (in spirit if not population) to try to escape the darkness at America’s heart, but there is no escape. Out here in Bushland far too many are willingly cooperating in the destruction of the great potential that this land has.
Heading west and into the heart of darkness … it is that memory that intrudes on my mind today, adding a layer of sadness of the already great sorrow of that clear September morning, half a decade ago. More than nearly three thousand people died on that day … decency and the rule of law followed them to the grave.
Out here in Bushland, darkness rules … and grows.