by Neil Gordon
Dozens of these residents are running improvised barbecue stops of every possible variety, some as small as charcoal-burning backyard affairs, some huge smokers towed by a pickup. They’re doing brisk business, too, and Isabel Montgomery, girl reporter, noting this authenticating detail into her iPhone, asks herself why. Is it that running the gauntlet of the black barbecue vendors between the parking lot and the demonstration itself excited, for the protesters, so much liberal guilt that they feel obliged to abandon their radical vegetarianism and sink their teeth into red meat soaked in barbecue sauce and then burnt to a crisp? Or is it because militating has whetted their carnivorous appetite to such a high degree that they can’t stop themselves? This was, she felt, unclear but a huge number of people are stopping to eat. And indeed—perhaps it was that second laced cigarette she’d smoked before she left her car—it smells pretty good, too.
Of course, the whole thing is preceded by a Muscogee County Police roadblock and the twelve tell-tale cameras of a PVI array, and this time, Izzy realizes, she is not going to be able to walk around it. She hesitates, then suddenly she doesn’t care, and so she goes on and through the array, feeling computers around the world whirr into life so quickly that by the time she walks past the last camera she knows—knows for a fact—that a Homeland Security officer sitting in front of a computer in Quantico has already ID’d her.
She tells herself that she doesn’t give a fuck.
But somewhere under the fact that she doesn’t give a fuck, some other thing is apparently happening to her also, and if she doesn’t put it into her iPhone, she still notes it, with professional exactitude, as relevant as, at least, to the voice in which she will write this piece, or would write the piece, if she writes the piece, which she won’t. No doubt it is because her emotions are exacerbated by her exhaustion—and Izzy actually does have emotions, despite what her father liked to say—but that same sudden rise of tears that had come over her when she saw the busload of college students from New York disembarking suddenly returns, this time in force, as she passes the PVI cameras and sees a group of sixty-something men and women in tie-dyed T-shirts gathered round a microphone and singing, a couple playing guitars, a couple more with tambourines, and what they are singing is:
It’s always the old to lead us to the war
It’s always the young to fall
Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all
A song she hasn’t heard since her father, then called Jim Grant, sang it to her during their hikes in the Catskills, years and years ago, with her mother, before she disappeared, and Jim Grant disappeared, and this guy called Jason Sinai appeared and told her that somewhere, in this thick substance called history, her entire childhood had been a lie.
Shocked, Isabel stops and listens, and only when she realizes that actual tears are coming to her eyes does she think to turn away.
And all this, all this is just the beginning of the quarter-mile gauntlet of solid protest that she has to walk before she even gets to the stage set up at the gates of Fort Benning, and who in hell knows what she is going to encounter on her way there?
And yet none of this is what she really is noticing as she begins to walk again, the lyrics in her ears—now look at what they’ve done/with their soldiers and their guns—but what she’s really thinking is that one day, long after her father is gone, she will have children, too, and who the fuck is going to teach them this stupid song?
3.
Okay, so now the gauntlet to be run is the solid quarter-mile of hippy-dippy bullshit: the booths set up along the side of the road, a tag sale of outmoded idealism no one wants. One after the other after the other: Buffalo State Students for Peace, PeaceWork, Oberlin Peace Activists League, Grandmothers for Peace International, Veterans For Peace Chapter 56, Indigenous Support Network, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Students for Social Change, International Campaign to Free Lori, American Friends Service Committee, Student Coalition for Action, Council for Peace and Justice, Stop the Madness, Rise Up! Community Collective, Amnesty International, Green Party, Coalition for Global Concern.
Nor is that the complete inventory: after all, Roy Bourgeois, the steadfast organizer of this protest, who lives full-time outside the gates of Fort Benning, is not only a Veteran against the War—a genuine redneck navy boy from Vietnam—he is also a Liberation theologist and an ordained Catholic priest. There is present, thus, a panoply of Christian activists: JustFaith at Church of the Transfiguration, Catholic Workers League, Jesuits, Marymount, Incarnate Word Sisters, Shepherd Progressive Action Committee.
Whether outright hippy-dippy or hippy-dippy and religious freak too, all these folk are displaying their wares, just like the local barbecue vendors, only these wares are either books, or T-shirts, or bumper stickers, or petitions. There are radical feminists, black activists, pacifists, vegetarians, sandal-wearers.
Someone bumps her; she turns to see it is a woman in a Peruvian poncho who doubtless thinks Izzy is what she would call a “narc” because she’s looking at Izzy with every appearance of contempt.
As Isabel pushes forward through the crowd, she’s feeling rather on the Peruvian woman’s side on that one too.
4.
Notes on the central offices of SOA Watch:
Low lying, desperately ugly set of apartment houses, just outside the gates of Fort Benning, can only be meant for the base’s civilian custodial staff. SOA Watch is in building 2B. Outside 2C: Maytag dishwasher, rusted clear through at the base, plastic tricycle, bedsprings. Family sitting at 2D like white trash from central casting, wife-beater on father, morbidly obese mother, two kids in diapers. In lawn chairs, barbecue going and a case of Bud, the King of Beers, the trailer trash evidently enjoying the show. Inside 2B, hand lettered signs on cardboard point to Infirmary (left), Legal Aid (straight), and Press (right).
Isabel is greeted by a young woman who checks off her name on a clipboard—if this is a list of visiting journalists, it is laughably short—and leads her out of the pressroom into a bedroom with a sleeping bag on a mattress, a plastic table, and two very plain white plastic lawn chairs or rather, lawn chairs that were once white. The interviews, apparently, are taking place here. She surveys the room with no happy feeling. The closet, where hangs a single unironed shirt, stands open and on the table the contents of a toilet bag are spilled. Izzy gingerly lifts the less foul of the two chairs and carries it to the window. Sitting, she can see, over the sparse lawn, to the crowds of protesters gathered in front of the soundstage. At the microphone a man speaks in Spanish, with a heavily accented translator echoing.
And today is a special day because yesterday we gained a very great victory in the courts: the Minister of El Salvador was declared guilty of torture.
Listening, she takes out her laptop and puts it on the little table. The screen opens to her face in the camera window; she hits “record” and says to it: “A speech that oscillates between fantasy and trivia.” Then she hits pause and redirects the camera outward—this is how she will record her interview, though probably she will not tell her interviewees that she is capturing image too.
There is a knock at the door, Josh Cohn no doubt, but before she answers she shoves the fouler of the two chairs closer so he will be framed in the camera.
5.
Josh sits and Isabel pretends to be looking at her computer to write. Instead she zooms the camera and then squints at his face. He is older than her by a few years. He has a pleasant face, exposed by a heightening hairline and then concealed by a hermit’s black beard that grows freely up his cheeks and down his rather long neck. To a certain extent, therefore, he resembles Little Lincoln, and for a second Isabel grows confused, trying to remember if she fired him or not. But only to an extent. His blue eyes are sharp and they wander while he thinks: when he directs them at her, it is only for seconds before they are off again. He does not, she notes, at any point look at her breasts or her legs. She zooms out on the
camera to inventory his plaid shirt, buttoned high, showing black hair up on his chest, long sleeves buttoned at his wrists and grey T-shirt. It occurs to her that this, during the height of the protest, must be battle dress. Whether literally or metaphorically. He is, after all, a warrior, of sorts.
But it is time for her explain whom she is writing for and what she wants, and that, for Isabel, means figuring it out to the point of being able to articulate it—something she has been loath to do. She watches out the dirty window for a moment, the soundstage, the Latino speaker, and tries to think. She tries to tell herself that this stuff is easy, isn’t it? It is work, after all, and as such, a well of factitious creativity into which she has been dipping with reliable result for years.
But of course that’s not it at all.
There is in fact nothing factitious about what she is doing. Not anymore.
She just doesn’t know that yet.
So she turns back, shifts in her seat, crosses her legs, and lies.
“So look. What I’m after is a sense of what it means to be an activist nearly forty years and a decade after 9/11. I don’t need to quote for you the statistics about progressivism in the United States, the number of Americans in jail under Patriot IV, or the number of un-incarcerated Americans carrying Homeland Security prohibitions, or any of that. You know—you must know—they’re running PVI outside. You must know that every soul here is only avoiding incarceration at the government’s pleasure.”
He acknowledges this with a short nod but without, insofar as concerns his eyes, letting out whether he knew about it or not. He’s guarded, in fact, in general, which first makes Isabel wonder if he hasn’t had some training in media relations, then second makes her realize that he is treating her as hostile press, and finally, makes her feel unaccountably bad. This, too, sets off little alarm bells behind the part of her mind with which she is still talking.
“So let’s start with the question of how you got into this work.”
The first part of his answer is clear. He’s been a full-time activist since graduation from Oberlin in ’02; he is in his early thirties and now a key organizer of the SOA protest; he is the child of people with ’60s roots: a physician; mother who worked for the Berkeley Tribe and then was “part of the community in New York who were doing above ground work for people who were underground.”
That is any interviewer’s opening, and Isabel takes it. “Exactly. Most people your age find nothing but discouragement in the example of your mother’s generation.”
Having considered this with his darting eyes, he disagrees.
“More people that I know have opted out in response to the draconian law changes and the law-enforcement changes since September 11, 2001.” His eyes turn upward. “I think that that was a more discouraging and crushing thing to people than the history”—of Vietnam.
More crushing than Vietnam? Isabel pauses to think about this. Two million Vietnamese died during the war. But Josh is still talking. As an example, he describes his arrest, in ’03, for committing “an action” at the protest, that is, crossing the line into Fort Benning military base proper, the culminating act of civil disobedience that ends the protest each year. He served the full six months for what most countries would see as an act of political principle worth a bench appearance and fine.
He is, it occurs to Isabel as she watches his eyes, a little thyroidy.
With a little interior note to return to this shocking statement that the Patriot Act has mobilized more young people than Vietnam—and the consequences such ahistoricism has for her article—she asks him how many people he expects at the protest. He says about the same as the year before, fifteen thousand. Is the protest growing? He answers forthrightly that it had come up three thousand in the past ten years, but “twenty to forty percent there each year are there for the first time.”
Aha. Isabel makes a quick note. Here we are at a political movement with a loyalty rate as low as 60 percent and of which as much as 40 percent—nearly half—are brand-spanking new. She considers pointing this out to him, but at the thought it occurs to her that he looks not only slightly like Little L., but exactly like Lincoln himself—a big, bearded, Jewish Lincoln. Lincoln was probably a little thyroidy too. But this guy is the child of Jewish radicals, the whole bit: small-schools New York childhood; then St Ann’s or Dalton or Elizabeth Irwin some other such place, because Mother and Daddy might have been peaceniks but they’re also educated and beneficiaries of a rising economy from Vietnam to Iraq—indeed, she learns later that Daddy’s a doctor and a friend of her Uncle Danny—then Oberlin. Only Josh can’t play by the rules and so he takes the whole thing at its word and decides to serve full-time his convictions. Isabel imagines his parents running after his VW van, shouting, Wait! Wait! We only meant you to believe in this stuff, not act on it. His answer is simple, given that chances are his dad did the same in the early ’70s. Why? You acted on it. But it was different then. But Josh, like her father and his little friends, was taking them at their word, wasn’t he? It was an act of cruelty. And at the thought, Isabel suddenly stops liking Josh. At the thought, she sees him as one of those hardcore, addicted radicals—like her own father—who would rather be right than kind; who are prepared to do harm to others for their beliefs, as if they can only have a sense of self when the self is feeling the suffering of the other. John Brown, Emma Goldman. The first step of identifying them is that they have really hurt someone in some fundamental way in their path toward a sense of authenticity. For a moment, she regards Josh’s image in her computer with something like contempt.
“And what did your parents think of your arrest?”
The answer is not what she expected.
“Really proud of the work that I do and glad that I’m doing this work.”
Oh, Isabel thinks to herself: fuck. So everything she has just so brilliantly analyzed is, in fact, wrong. Josh’s parents, she understands as he talks, are sincere people and happy to have their son live by the integrity of their principles. And Josh himself is not a bad, but a good person.
Then what is, she asks herself, the ontological status of her incorrect character analysis?
In a moment, the word surfaces in her consciousness: projection.
Her sense of contempt, now, directed at herself—she changes the topic.
“You seem to me to have given me such convincing reasons to stay home.”
Josh directs her a quizzical look, and she goes on.
“I mean, your parents gave a lot of their lives to the struggle. Now you, and the struggle is not any further advanced, all these years later.”
Now he understands.
“The faith that I have is in people’s desire to do good and the ability to transform their lives. On a personal level I try to follow a guiding principle of reducing the suffering around me and reducing the suffering I do to the world and that owes a lot to a lot of the work I do here.”
6.
Okay. Be that way. This is what she is thinking, after he goes, standing by the window, waiting for the next one, her contempt for herself momentarily occluded by what she has just heard. Be that fucking way. But don’t expect me not to go to town on you in print. Because that answer? It’s spiritual, and there is nothing that the liberal American press—or what passes for same—hates as much as the spiritual. Maybe because we have to spend so much time toadying to the religious right, that when these soft-hearted spiritual types happen by, we can chop ’em to pieces.
But then Isabel thinks of what he said about his parents, and a different emotion comes to her. They’re proud of the work that I do and glad that I’m doing this work.
Out the window, the crowd at the soundstage, where a show of Mexican puppets is taking place, has grown under the thickening sun. You’re just a huge big disappointment to your folks, aren’t you? Too right-wing for your father and, as for your mother, for all the time she spent in Laurel Canyon rolling around with whatever groupies were rolling around with Crosby,
or Zappa, or whoever the fuck, she still can’t stand it when you bring a girl home and God forbid you should be having a second drink.
Or a third.
Or a fourth.
But her thinking is interrupted now, thank God, by a knocking at the door.
This next one is a different demographic—Christy Pardew, the name kind of gives it away. She’s a pleasant woman in jeans and a long-sleeved black pullover—no bra—a freckled, friendly face under sandy brown hair, a pierced nose, and an unaccented American diction.
Soon Isabel knows where she’s from (Baltimore); how she was radicalized (Catholic Workers); what she is working for (societal transformation).
But this time, Isabel’s problem seems to be different. Now this flat wa-wa is in her mind, a drained throb as the last of the THC is metabolized. And she is suffering from thinking that none of this seems to be telling her anything. It’s unfathomable to Isabel that this smart, powerful woman devoted herself full time to this protest. She cannot see what her interest is, nor her ambition, but worse, Isabel can’t see how this woman has convinced herself that anything is ever going to come of what she’s doing.
When she poses the question, Christy answers simply that she doesn’t think that she “could do this work without having hope that we can really make it happen.”
As gently as she can—not because she wants to be kind, but because she want to elicit an answer rather than make Christy walk out, like Crown Prince Cuntmuscle did, she suggests that that would be a strong argument, for many, not to do this work. Christy answers after some thought that she gets “a lot of hope from the little victories that I hear about happening all over the world. The ways people are creating new models of being and interacting.”
Outside there is more singing, and Isabel realizes that there is an image in her mind of children gathered around the stage.
Smoking that J was a mistake.
