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December 24, 2003
TT: A new Christmas color
I wanted to write something about the orange alert, but Lileks did it for me:Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny cartoon – or the idea of gradations of concern will strike us a luxury, a contrivance, a flimsy thing that marked the interregnum between the day the war began and the day it flared hot coast to coast. I'm betting on the former. The worst rarely happens. Something just as bad often comes along, but it's not what we foresaw or worried about. Then we learn that a short period of coping can be preferable to a long period of fearing.
It will end, one way or another. But there won't be any signing of papers on carrier decks; nothing that tidy. No Times Square parties. It began as a long slow subterranean process where the murderers gather and bond, and the end will be slow and constant and maddeningly indistinct. Imagine boxing gloves unraveling the strands of a thick wet rope; that's the next ten years. It won't make sense all the time. The narrative will drift. In 2031 the BBC will put out a 22 hour documentary on the War, and our children will think we all lived in an age of constant peril and heroism.
We will have to remind them that peril and heroism was reserved for those volunteered for a full ration of both. Most of us saw the war on TV. If we felt it at all, it was the pang we got when consulted our 401(k) statements. The stores were full of things; meat and sugar for everyone. The vast majority of Americans hardly felt the war at all – and while that may have been a blessing, it didn't feel altogether right. There was something about Orange that said we should do something, and we had no idea what that might be.
Read the whole thing here.
The only thing I want to add is that everybody in my home town appears to be aware of the alert, though not much more than that. I got my hair cut yesterday, and the barber wanted to know what it was like flying out of LaGuardia on Monday. When you live in a small town far from the coasts, or from anything remotely resembling a military target, you know you'll be watching events from afar, not from across the street.
I happened to be visiting my mother on 9/11, and the feeling of dissociation as I saw the horrors unfold on TV was violent. The place where I lived was under attack, yet here I was, sitting in an easy chair in the living room of the house where I grew up, watching the bloodshed as if it were a war movie. Which isn't to say that people here didn't feel it: they really did, and they do now. But they feel it differently, unless they have a son or daughter in uniform. That changes everything.
Posted December 24, 2003 2:10 AM
