It's Great Being A Guy

My housemate, Nate, and I took the hour-long minute pilgrimage to Hornell last night, the abode of the only decently stocked grocery store for three counties in any direction. We'd been living off rice, canned beans and tomatoes, and pasta for the last week and it had been a good solid month since we last darkened a grocer's door.

Two shopping carts (and approximately forty cans of tomatoes, black beans, black-eyed peas, chili beans) later, with luck, we won't have to do that again for another month. We are men. You pull down the biggest wildebeest in the herd so that you don't have to do it again for a while, even if you lose a few expendable tribesmen in the process. (Leading, inevitably, to the expression, "It pays to be alpha.")

Incidentally, we stopped along side the road to pay our respects to a sleek apparition of beauty, in excellent condition, a 1997 Honda CBR900RR, in the red and black. From the days when sportbikes were still naturally aspirated, the '97 double R is a beautifully smooth, elegant, well designed machine of death. I know this because it was for sale, and the owner asked me if I wanted to take it out for a spin.

I'll summarise: the owner (Sean) said that it will do 90mph in first gear, and 135mph in 3rd, and that he's afraid of losing his CDL license and/or ending up like his friend, a local BOCES teacher. He's got good reason to worry--that machine has a very obscene amount of power for two wheels. It bike has six gears, but I was too terrified to get to third. I never buried the throttle, but I can verify--it does do 90 in first. Without even trying. It's an utterly terrifying sensation--you could let your mind wander and hit three digits in no time. Flat.

That's the thing that I like about my bike...it goes fast (well, not really, when you compare it with a raging testosterone fiend like the 900RR), but you have to work hard get it to really move. When you want play screaming demon in the twisties, you have to really get your head into it, hit the right spot in the teensy-weensy powerband, work your way carefully through the gears, being terrified the whole time because every little wobble in the road translates through a less-than-performance suspension. If you relax, it relaxes with you, and you can enjoy a nice sedate, comfortable, fun ride through the rolling countryside.

There is no "relax" button on the 900RR (the two "R"s designating its purpose: Racing, and more Racing). It just goes and goes and goes and goes and goes, and if you want a little more power, you just twist deeper in to the throttle, and--whammo--you get way more than a little power. In the words of the inimitable Mr. Jacoby: "You don't ever have to leave first gear! It's the easiest bike in the world to ride!"

So, that was fun, and terrifying, at the same time, and I am happy to go back to my not ridiculously insane, ordinary-mortals motorcycle. Except that there's this taste of the incredible disparity between a minuscule wrist-movements and incredible horsepower response lingering wistfully in the back of my head...

Thoughfulness

I've been researching the Iraq war, and the military in general, and it struck me--whether or not the war is an unpleasant reality that we'd like to push to the edges of our consciousness in order to get on with our lives of cheerful consumption and self-importance, the entire adventure (or debacle, or task of nation-building, however you see it) is the expressed will of the American people.

The American political system, as shaped by the American people, is one in which decisions are made based on powerful emotions: emotions of borrowed superiority appropriated through belonging to a particular ideological identity, for instance, or pride in being courageous, tough, and in touch with the harsh realities of a dangerous world full of nuke-toting terrorists bent on the destruction of Western Civilization.

We are, I am convinced, political consumers. We pay people to produce convincing and stylized political rhetoric that seductively courts our desire to feel both impressive and correct, then we loudly parrot that rhetoric. And we, the people of the United States of America, are content with that system, regardless of its negative impact on the rest of the world, or its great untapped potential to improve the lives of all sorts of people, Iraqi and otherwise.

I feel like we're in a science fiction movie, where our creations have turned against us--the institutions of democracy and the free press have become institutions of mass group reaction, the enemies of sustained community deliberation. We react to events and causes as they occur, and then forget them when something new comes makes headlines. We have the political attention span--and memory--of five year olds. And the dialogue to match.

So. There are new machines. I was absolutely fascinated this week to read, for the first time, news in primary sources. I found blogs by American soldiers both for and against (and ambivalent towards) the war; I found blogs by Iraqi citizens, describing how their lives have changed since the downfall of Saddam and the beginning of a civil war. I found frontline documentary films by PBS, and independent reporters who fundraised from their websites.

I came to three conclusions:

One. The men and women of the armed forces are, for the most part, policy-implementers, not policy-makers. Their loyalty is the mission, and the mission is decided by the elected representatives of the people of the United States of the America. If those people think the mission is important, they will pay attention to that mission from the day the President declares a war (or a conflict), they will research it and critique it and be involved in the process with a long-term view in mind. They have a moral responsibility to, as it is their bombs and bullets that changing other peoples' worlds--and I think Americans have failed their duty to the rest of the world. Not feeling the direct impact of their war (unless agony-at-the-pump can be considered of equal distress with suicide-bombing-kills-hundreds-in-a-market-and-nobody-bats-an-eye-because-it's-business-as-usual), the American people haven't been terribly concerned about being informed of the details of the war and nation-building, until the shit really started to hit the fan and we started to not only look bad, but sustain uncomfortable amounts of casualties.

One Point Five. It's very sad to read in various blogs that fundamentalists are gaining social and political power and bullying/threatening people for things like playing soccer, reading books, doffing headscarves in public, and shaving. The saddest moment in my readings was when a Muslim woman described her decision to start wearing the headscarf.

"I realized how common it had become only in mid-July when M., a childhood friend, came to say goodbye before leaving the country...She was getting ready to leave before the sun set, and she picked up the beige headscarf folded neatly by her side. As she told me about one of her neighbors being shot, she opened up the scarf with a flourish, set it on her head like a pro, and pinned it snuggly under her chin with the precision of a seasoned hijab-wearer. All this without a mirror- like she had done it a hundred times over… Which would be fine, except that M. is Christian.

If M. can wear one quietly- so can I." from Baghdad Burning, 05-08-2006.

Two. Iraq, like anyplace, is quite complex. In some areas, American efforts have been more successful than others. It's entirely plausible that while the US Occupation may be successful and valuable in some areas of the country and completely futile in others--that the Iraq war could have both good and bad outcomes, dependent on circumstances and perspective. Of course, it's increasingly bad, but knee-jerk generalizations about the hope/hopelessness of the and idealizations about the use of military force have certainly hurt the war effort. Each voice on the ground, each primary source will have a different interaction with the US invasion. Sometimes the differences are subtle, sometimes they are grand--no system of government is perfect.

Three. But some are better than others, and right now, I'm tempted to say (without much concrete research into conditions under Saddam to back it up) that maybe, by way of generalization, the average Iraqi was better off under Saddam before the war, and even better off before sanctions were first levied. This is the cost of American will, and it is a cost we inflicted on the people of Iraq quite whimsically. We owe it to the Iraqi people to not cave in to sentiment or knee-jerk reaction or emotive self-important ideology politics, but to have well-thought-out reasons for whatever we do with this mess that is Iraq. We have to give them the best possible chance for the stablest, most effective, fairest chance at peace that we can--whether that means staying the course, pulling out, or working hand-in-hand with the various unsavory characters who occupy positions of authority in Iraq at the moment. It's the least we can do, since we, each and every one of us, through our choices, actions, and inaction, put them where they are today.