the boy in this picture...
...is voting for barack obama.
growing up in puerto rico in the early seventies, this child was taught about the united states of america: not the usa of nixon, kissinger, cambodia, and chile, but an idea of equality and democracy - a nation of tolerance, freedom and opportunity.
the wounded and somewhat jaded adult knows damn well that our political system is far from democratic - that it takes money and compromise to become president and that it is quite possible that the next occupant of the oval office will be just another in a long line of party apparatchiks toeing the line of big business, realpolitik and the increasingly shameless pursuit of power for its own sake.
the child understands intuitively that to vote into office a biracial man named "barack hussein obama" - a man who has taken "the audacity of hope" as his slogan, appeals to the better angels of his constituency's reason and honor as opposed to their primal fears, and advocates that we revisit the decisions of the past administration not with a renewed appetite for conflict, but with a commitment to diplomacy and discussion - is to bring closer to reality the idea of the united states with which he grew up.
in case my views on the bush administration or the fate of this country are in question, i am reprinting below the complete text of a two-part blog i posted in 2005 - nothing has changed since...
what constitutes a turning point?
one of the most significant ones in my life came during my freshman year of college.
my two most important friends in at the time were my roommate jon and his friend jonathan. they were “the jons” as it were, and i - being a year behind and significantly less worldly and socially adjusted - made for a good mascot/little brother/whipping boy.
jon was a complicated, mercurial sort - prone to wild fits of inspiration and energy, an audacious firebrand who leapt face first where angels fear to tread. jonathan was a silver-tongued charmer with enough native charisma to power a city.
the day i met jonathan, he was sitting at our dining nook with jon: they were having a chili pepper-eating contest, and chasing down the burn with vodka. somewhere in the form and substance of that particularly masochistic competition is a metaphor for the common ground that formed the axis of their friendship: and the way they lived their lives.
more often than not, i would stumble home from what i thought to have been a downright scandalous late night of movie viewing and hanging out at the campus coffeehouse only to have the jons storm the apartment and order me to pack a suit and tie.
soon - whether i wanted or not - i would be on the road to atlantic city, lying about my age to enter a casino, smoking cigars, drinking brandy from a snifter and looking fabulous.
however - as one might imagine would be the case with such diametrically opposed personalities - they fought on more than one occasion.
and so, one mid-afternoon, as i entered the one-room, L-shaped university apartment i shared with jon and hit the answering machine (something i did frequently, even when i had been in the room all day without hearing a ring) i found a turning point.
there was one message on the machine. from jonathan to jon -
“i don’t like it when we fight like this, please give me a call so we can talk about it.”
so how does eavesdropping on a private message constitute a turning point?
i had little experience with apologies. it wasn’t an activity that seemed natural. most teenage boys simply grunt their way through the inarticulate rituals of their lives without any thought. sensitive and artistic as i may have been as a young man, i was as much a product of the environment as the next guy.
but not jonathan. conciliation was in his bones. not weakness, mind you, but a natural ease with himself that, among other things, made it possible for him to casually extend a declaration of friendship and affection without that crippling, rapid-onset brainlock most men do not overcome until much later in life.
so that answering machine message was a revelation. here was a young man who was everything a man any age would like to be - charming, sophisticated, intelligent, smooth - and at the root of all those qualities was an emotional wisdom that - in what seemed completely counter-intuitive to a naive young mind raised on tv shows and action films - translated into strength of character.
this wasn’t an isolated event. the longer i got to know jonathan, the more stunned i was by his often flagrant displays of decency and humanity. had he not been such a likeable person, one might have accused him of being a show-off.
that’s not to say the man never made mistakes - he had the same capacity for it as the rest of us - but there was seldom a time when jonathan’s willingness and ability to take responsibility for his actions and broker a peace were not greater than any injury he might have caused.
and he was a good and giving friend.
we spent a huge amount of time driving around the country in his decrepit buick riviera. one time during my freshman year, we made a thirty-six hour round-trip trek to my hometown in the thick of a winter snowstorm because i felt homesick and, for some reason, the sum and substance of my mental health depended on my watching a musical at my old high school and atttending the cast party afterward.
as you might expect, all the parties involved did a lot of eventful growing up in the years that followed. we all stayed friends, fell out, made up, and created lives for ourselves.
jonathan cut a particularly impressive trajectory through life. it wasn’t just that by the time he was a junior in college he had been asked by financial giant to spend a semester working (among grown-ups no less!) in anticipation of an eventual permanent position - or that by the time he was thirty-two, he was named managing director of a world-leading venture capital company - a lot of people achieve massive material success at a young age...
...and many of them do it by being total bastards.
not jonathan. he rarely lost his temper or gave in to depression, despair or aggression - even in the face of the painful growth everyone endures as they transition into adulthood.
in addition to his meteoric professional career, jonathan sucked the marrow out of life and made the most of every moment - he met and married a wonderful woman every bit his equal, had two beautiful children, fronted an affable cover band that played clubs in his hometown, painted (quite a feat for someone color-blind), and hosted amazing parties full of friendship and warmth - most of which would end with his picking up a guitar and leading the last of the guests in song.
and unlike most of the people who pick up a guitar in a party (let’s face it, there’s a reason the funniest part of “animal house” involves john belushi smashing someone’s guitar at a party), he came across as an unassuming host breaking out yet another diversion.
the song i remember him most frequently playing was pink floyd’s “wish you were here.”
i remember jonathan as a prince of the city. the kind of guy who could stride into peter luger’s steakhouse and receive hugs from the grumpy, inscrutable, pot-bellied old-timers who wait tables in that venerable new york establishment. being jonathan’s friend was like taking a ride in a duesenberg with the rat pack - only instead of nelson riddle, you would hear james taylor playing on the radio...
...and as i write these lines, i ask myself: why is it so important for the living to canonize the dead?
i can’t shake the feeling that we do it because it elevates us. surely, if angels and heroes saw fit to seek out our company, then there must be something angelic and heroic about ourselves to make us worthy.
i should be so mercenary. it would make the loss that much more bearable.
on the last week of august, 2001, jonathan phoned me. we had not seen each other in about six months, and hadn’t talked in three or four. even the best friendships suffer such lapses - jonathan had a globe-trotting, world-leading job and two children, and i had been steadily working in television and was a producer on a series - but when the line connected, we were back in college -
“javi! baby! we’re brothers!”
jonathan had a strange penchant for mixing rat pack lingo with his favorite sean connery line from “highlander.”
we talked for a good thirty minutes. jonathan had bought a porsche after years of commuting to the city by train and felt the need to let me know - in a very sheepish tone of voice, before anyone else told me - so i could make all the requisite “early-onset mid-life crisis” jokes with a minimum of obstruction.
Jonathan also gave me his office number yet again (i have a bad habit of never keeping anyone’s number for too long), which i wrote on a sticky-note and posted it on my document stand. we then made plans for a trip to las vegas with jon and a few other friends from college, and agreed to talk again in september to finalize the deetails of the trip.
jonathan was murdered on september 11.
i won’t get into the details of where i was when i heard about the attacks or the like. the world is awash with such stories.
like everybody else, i spent the day on the phone and in front of the television. by the time night fell in los angeles, i was so worn that i popped a dvd of “koyaanisqatsi” into the player and let is repeat for the rest of the night. i craved abstraction after an entire day of watching the american media straining to put a narrative thrust on the incomprehensible.
not once did it occur to me that my friend - whom i had been reminded less than two weeks before worked in the hundred-and-fifth floor of the world trade center - was involved.
why?
maybe i had forgotten jonathan’s specific place of work. it’s not unusual for me. i can quote verbatim from a toy commercial i saw when i was two, but, as of this writing, i’ve left my car keys in my office and had to walk back from the parking strucutre to get them for seven days straight.
more importantly, the very idea of jonathan dying was beyond the scope of my comprehension.
seriously. i don’t clutch my head in disbelief at the unthinkable, even though i can’t understand it - the world can be a cruel place, and while i do my best to be an optimist, the human capacity for destruction seldom catches me by surprise...
...but no way jonathan could be rubbed out. absolutely not.
surely he was out there in his brand-new porsche, flying through the freeways on some ill-advised road trip, blaring a sinatra song with a big smile on his face.
jonathan was larger than life - there was no way i could fathom him being soiled by so terrible a display of the ugly side of the human soul.
and so i went through 9/11 experiencing many of the same emotions everybody did but not once thinking about jonathan. the next day i went to my office, sat at my desk, and saw his office number scrawled on a sticky note on my document stand.
and it was an alfred hitchcock-vertigo-dolly-counterzoom moment. i was no longer a spectator, the tragedy had just shown up at my door.
stupidly, i dialed jonathan’s office number. i’ve always been that big a dolt. how someone as cool as jonathan ever chose to befriend me is beyond my understanding.
then i called his home. his father answered the phone. and i knew. why else would jonathan’s father be at his house at noon on a weekday?
six days later i flew to new york for jonathan’s funeral. over five hundred people attended. one of them sat next to me after the eulogies were said, and wearily mentioned he had thirty other funerals to attend that day.
i flew back to los angeles as soon as humanly possible.
in spite of it being jonathan’s base of operations, i have never liked new york city, and even before 9/11 i was always immune to its cosmopolitan charms. i never could shake my dread of that particular metropolis - and believe me, coming from someone who suffers los angeles’s many drawbacks because it is a geographical career necessity, that is a hell of an indictment.
on the night before jonathan's funeral, i had dinner at the home of a mutual friend across the river from the world trade center. the ashes, dust and smoke still hung in the air, backlit by the city, forming a nimbus that loomed over everything like a ghost - a massive funeral pyre.
i have only been back to new york once since then and refused to visit ground zero. i found it morbid - no, ghoulish - that anybody would want to “visit” ground zero - and stranger still was the bizarre sense of envy i often got from people who had no personal connection to the tragedy.
i want to feign shock and claim that i don’t understand the psychology behind that kind of thinking - but, as a professional producer of televised narrative, i would be disingenuous. i understand it all to well.
9/11 was a televised spectacular - and a lot of people would have killed to have a story to tell - to have a part of the great tragic and heroic american narrative woven by the television networks with all of their mythmaking prowess.
i do not want to imagine what a nightmare the next few months must have been for jonathan’s family. his wife was widowed, his two children - his daughter still a babe in arms - were orphaned, and his parents had to bury a son - and in spite of everyone’s effort to move on, almost a year went by before Jonathan’s remains were found and identified.
on my end... i grieve to this day.
that doesn’t mean i haven’t come to terms with the blunt-force brutality that led to jonathan’s death. life goes on in spite of the awful truth that this beautiful man simply does not exist anymore - we are forced to continue whether we like it or not - and at the very least i have the memory and example of how jonathan lived his life to ameliorate the pain of how that life was ended.
but there is something else that gnaws at me.
jonathan left a legacy - everyone who knew him was deeply affected by the joy with which he lived. he taught me one of the most valuable life lessons i have ever learned. his work on this planet may not have been done, but no doubt he earned his way into heaven.
which demands that i continually ask myself the question that is at the root of my current malaise: how are we, as americans, going to be remembered after september 11?
because i don’t see us as a nation earning our way into heaven any time soon.
to those of you whom i told i did not like to use my live journal as a bully pulpit, my apologies. i have made no secret of the fact that i have been working under a cloud these past few weeks and i want to get this out. so bear with me.
the thing i can’t shake is a looming dread over the path our country has taken - a pervasive sense of depression and rage that is visited upon me with every foreign policy announcement and every news report of the motion of the american war machine.
before you roll your eyes and say “oh dear lord, here’s another overeducated, overfed, overpaid, privileged hollywood liberal lecturing us about the evil ways of our republican government”...
...let me make one thing clear. this is not intended as a partisan screed. anybody who reads this journal knows where i stand politically, but - make no mistake - i would be writing these same words were a democrat in the oval office.
this is not about political alignment - it’s about morality and ethics.
after september 11th, the president sought to answer the question “why do they hate us?”
frankly, i don’t know how why he sought to answer this question. nor do i know if many people over the age of ten actually asked themselves the question. the president - who clearly sees himself as a father figure to the country - must see all of us as infants, because that is the way he chose to frame the popular discourse in the time following 9/11.
i have an answer to which i subscribe. “they” hate us for decades of selfish, short-sighted and destructive foreign policy - foisted by republicans and democrats alike - designed to keep us in cheap foreign oil.
don’t believe that one? try this one: they hate us for cozying up to oppressive regimes led by the likes of saddam hussein, mohammed reza pahlevi, augusto pinochet, anastasio somoza, ferdinand marcos, the taliban and the house of saud because - while we advertise ourselves exporters of democracy - some animals are just more equal than others.
don’t like that one? here’s another one: they hate us because they hate freedom.
i like it...
...apparently so do a lot of other people, because “they hate freedom” is the reason our armies are spread so thin and taking casualties around the world as we speak.
“they hate freedom” is the reason we described the so-called axis of evil and rattle our saber for more conflict even though our troops are currently bolting refrigerator doors to the sides of their humvees because the people in charge of defense logistics never imagined that we would engage in so widespread and long-lasting a conflict.
“they hate freedom” is the reason we have taken it upon ourselves go at it alone and disarm the bad guys.
as a professional writer - someone who struggles daily to harness the power of words to make people believe in a reality of my own making - i envy the author of “they hate freedom.”
it is the most elegantly succinct piece of fiction i have ever known. simple to the point of art. easily grasped by anyone who reads it, “they hate freedom” demands no understanding of history or politics to make itself understood. it tells the word that we are on the side of good and anyone who opposes us is in the side of evil. “they hate freedom” - not us - they - and “they” could be anybody who isn’t us.
just keep repeating it to yourself. it feels great. better than any food, drug or medicine i have ever ingested. it is the ultimate justification. a warm blanket of comfort deafening the cries of the world outside.
and if you don’t believe it, maybe you hate freedom too. and what could be sicker - more warped, more demented and inhuman - than hating freedom?
here’s another statement that is also very much in vogue in our popular culture - “what would jesus do?”
i like this statement because i am a christian. i love god and subscribe, without shame or fear or guilt, to the truth of jesus christ as god made flesh - sent to earth to provide a vivid, concrete and lasting example of the values to which we humans should aspire.
that much said, i am not a particularly good christian. i have a lot of difficulty attending mass on a regular basis, and while i pray consistently and try to live according to a christian ideology, i do not know scripture to the extent that i should, and often find myself in willing exile from the episcopal church i attend.
the reasons why are complex - and i won’t try to sell you (as i did myself for a long time) on the idea that “i practice my faith in private,” because i am of the belief that one needs to be in the company of others more spiritually advanced than one’s self in order to truly grow and learn. every athlete needs a coach, the same applies to the spiritual realm.
bottom line: i am writing this with a copy of “the bible for dummies” in one hand, and openly defying jesus’ own admonition against those “who practice their righteousness before others in order to be noticed by them.”
the great thing about jesus christ is that he left very little up for interpretation. turn the other cheek, blessed are the peacemakers and do unto others as you would have them do unto you are statements of adamantine simplicity. could one find shading and nuance? sure, but at their core, these statements are as simple and easily understood as “they hate freedom,” and they have the added benefit of constituting a system of ethics as opposed to a rationalization for any behavior we see fit.
of course, you could ask me why i don’t believe in the death penalty, and i could give you two answers. one of them is the flawed, human one that betrays a dark soul that doesn’t entirely frown on the idea of vengeance - lifetime imprisonment in a life-crushing hellhole where the prisoner is in constant danger of being anally raped is a fate worse than death. the other is infinitely simpler: “which part of ‘thou shall not kill’ didn’t you get?”
the point: i am a hypocrite - which, according to “the bible for dummies” comes from an archaic term for actors in a play - doing it for spectacle instead of for internal reasons of truth-seeking or spiritual growth.
our president, however, is a veteran of one of the most vigorous christian fellowships in our country - the midland community bible study in texas - and he claims jesus christ as the most important and influential person in his life. in so many words - in issues of both foreign and domestic policy - he has made christianity one of the pillars of his agenda and ideological design for his stewardship of the united states.
which raises the inevitable question - why is the united states of america behaving in such an unchristian way?
the week after september eleventh i sat alone in a hotel room in new york city following jonathan’s funeral. it was freezing in the room - i always turn the ac on full blast when i stay in a hotel (what can i say? i like cold, dry environments) and i was weighing whether or not to numb the pain of the last week with scotch and spectravision.
that was the night that our president gave the “axis of evil” speech.
it was in the course of that speech that i first felt the hard, darkening dread that fills me to this day. the culmination of my every orwellian nightmare. the moment the united states crossed through the looking glass.
before that day, our president had been a joke to me - a slam-dunk one-termer to be endured with a stiff upper lip... hopefully soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history as a “caretaker” president.
after that day he became a nightmare.
that night, the president took it upon himself to declare his office as judge, jury and executioner by naming other nations as evil and threatening quasi-divine retribution.
now, last i checked, that was god’s job. but let’s humor the guy - he is, after all, the president.
my impression is that taking it upon one’s self to make the judgment call of who is good and evil and mete out punishment implies moral superiority. so where has our moral superiority taken us in the past four years?
to me, 9/11 was the ultimate opportunity for the united states to take the high road - to prove itself the most evolved and sophisticated nation in the world. how might we have accomplished that?
we could have truly declared war on the aggressors, rallied the nations of the world into a cohesive alliance based on the sharing of intelligence and military assets and made the world a truly inhospitable place for terrorists. remember - this was a time when le monde, arguably france’s newspaper of record, printed the statement “we are all americans.”
the world was ready to be led into a historical coalition now that its last remaining superpower had fallen victim to something almost every other nation had already experienced on some scale. together, we could have brought osama bin laden to justice. together we could have sent a strong clear message to the aggressors - that the rest of the world had embraced an evolutionary unity adverse to the use of terror for political ends.
and while i am describing what is clearly a crackpot, bleeding-heart liberal dream, let me make another suggestion...
...we could have taken what recovering alcoholics refer to as “a fearless moral inventory.” we could have evaluated the historical faults of our foreign policy in the middle east and embarked on a new course of diplomatic action based on conciliation and understanding. we could have made a true effort to understand “why do they hate us?” and followed it with an aggressive initiative to win the support of the very same people who are now plotting to murder us.
in short, we could have turned the other cheek on an unprecedented global scale.
for those of you who still think the expression means “let them hit you again and again until you die” here’s some news: it means “shame the aggressor into complicity.”
would it have been difficult? you bet. nigh-impossible and maybe even doomed to failure. it would have been a task whose complexity would have been equal to the space race, the manhattan projact, and the cuban missile crisis rolled into one. worth trying? more than anything else - and, in failure, the result might have still been significantly better than the world in which we find presently ourselves.
i don’t have to tell you how we actually responded. we will be reaping the fruits of it for generations to come in terms of social paranoia, decimation of civil rights, and, most importantly, the loss of our political and economic capital with the rest of the world.
the list of people who “hate freedom” just keeps growing - even though i can’t think - not even for a moment - of what it might just be that makes hating freedom so atttractive.
then again, i may hate freedom myself. why else would i even dare to suggest that our post 9/11 foreign policy and subsequent adventures in iraq have been - to use a highly technical military term - a mongolian clusterfuck?
the bible - our president’s self-proclaimed handbook for personal ethics - says “thou shalt not bear false witness,” and yet we know that the theoretical foundation for our war on iraq was flawed, misrepresented and, ultimately, fraudulent. we know that very high level people in our government were fully aware of the torture and abuses going on in our military prisons and shunted off their responsibility to the lower ranks. we know many things - and they all point out to the kind of outrage that led jesus to kick the moneychangers out of the temple.
jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers” and yet we wage aggressive war on trumped-up charges against an opponent that had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. in doing so, we have helped create an insurgency that will eventually find its way to our homes, schools and places of business and recreation. we have made the world a more dangerous, more hateful, more paranoid place.
jesus told the parable of the good samaritan specifically because samaritans were reviled at the time as weirdos with an unpalatable culture and religion. they were the great, frightening unwashed that could just not be trusted. with this parable, jesus made a simple point against racial prejudice... and yet our government persists in pursuing a foreign policy that has done little more than foment hatred and social injustice against muslims here and abroad.
jesus said “blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” but our god-fearing president’s foreign policy bears a greater resemblance to the slightly better-known axiom “don’t mess with texas.”
as far as i can see, our government seems concerned with creating a fertile ground for only one of jesus’s teachings: “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
but let’s say you just aren’t into all of this jesus mumbo-jumbo. hey - i can respect that - let’s go to someone who ought to know what he is talking about...
...robert mcnamara - chief architect of the vietnam war - a war characterized by lyndon johnson (in what should be very familiar language) as a struggle “against tyranny and aggression.”
to this day, mcnamara is reviled by many as a warmonger and demagogue, he is a man whose very name makes most of the baby-boomer liberals in my acquaintance snarl with anger and contempt... but during the interviews that made up errol morris’s film “the fog of war” mcnamara makes the statement that -
“we are the most powerful nation in the world - economically, politically, and militarily - and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. but we are not omniscient. if we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of our proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally.”
some argue that, to this day, the ruthless application of military force has solved more problems worldwide than any other manifestation of diplomacy. it’s probably true.
but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way.
if we have the power to rain destruction on any nation of our choosing, then doesn’t the man most directly responsible for wielding that power owe it to the world - especially when he invokes jesus christ as his lord, savior and role model - to use that power wisely (and if the required wisdom is just not present, to at least try to apply the values taught by jesus christ)?
and let’s face it, jesus christ - being the human manifestation of the almighty - could have blinked and turned us all into hermit crabs. however, to the extent that one can impose values of human morality on an omniscient, infinitely powerful being, he did not - because jesus christ’s mission on earth was not - as many believe - to drug the downtrodden into acceptance of their sad lot in this life with promises of a better world to come - it was to serve warning to the powerful that the existence of their power did not constitute a blank check for cruelty.
jesus christ was a revolutionary who spoke to power the truth that there is an evolutionary way to wield the political and military weapons of man with humility, tolerance and dignity.
i keep hearing that our president’s rival lost the election because he failed to articulate a coherent alternate vision of america.
while i believe that america should be a secular state, i also believe that, since our president used jesus christ to set the table, his adversaries should have been ready to meet him in that arena - ironically, the place where his footing is weakest - and point out the ways, which are legion, in which the president has failed to honor his own stated commitment to the christian ethic. that might have been the beginning of a vision of an america willing to take responsibility for its actions and confront its mistakes with honesty and strength of character.
and frankly, there are worse things - whether you are a religious person or not - than to advocate a foreign policy based on the hard work of coalition-building, conciliation, peace seeking, and tolerance - none of which - by the way - cancel out the necessity or possibility of bringing the aggressors to justice or providing for our own internal security. we should not be above kicking the moneychangers out of the temple on occasion.
our present government is a profoundly hypocritical concern pursuing - in the name of morality and christian values - a destructive, soul-poisoning set of foreign and domestic policy goals that point to an increasingly bleak future.
our government excels at performing the intellectual contortions necessary to interpret a passage from leviticus as an indictment of gay marriage, or pushing a so-called “decency bill” that would punish someone for saying “fuck” on the air with the kind of severity reserved for those who illegally test pesticides on human subjects, but cannot bring itself to bring to translate the simplest of beatitudes delivered by jesus on the mount into a practical modern political reality.
i take our government’s offenses personally - not only because of my religious convictions - but because the friend i lost on 9/11 was one of the greatest conciliators i ever knew. he wasn’t a christian, and i have no idea about his political slant - but he was, to me, an example of a life lived with a surfeit of common human decency.
and although the united states is full of individuals who exhibit nothing but common human decency, our government has turned our country - in the eyes of many who live here and abroad - into a faceless war machine bent on stomping out dissent no matter what the cost.
is this our legacy?
i don’t know. unlike our president, i don’t have a direct line to god.