America

“What's new?” I asked my father.

He thought for a moment, then said, “The Senate voted down the non-binding war resolution, and Britney Spears shaved her head and got some tattoos.”

“I meant what's new with you,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Nothing much.”

After we hung up, I wondered, what kind of world is it where an 82-year-old man not only knows the situation on the outside of Britney Spears's empty head but would impart it in the same sentence as information about the United States Senate? Then I remembered what kind of world it was: America.

Who could have predicted last November that when the Democrats swept to victory in elected offices from dog-catcher on down, the overwhelming show of revulsion against George W. Bush and his epic folly in Iraq would translate three months later into George W. Bush continuing to do whatever he wants to, including, presumably, starting a war with Iran based once again on transparently contrived evidence of their nuclear capability, or their obstinate Iranian-ness, or whatever his boeuf de jour is.

• • • 

I have always been astonished at the characterization of Iran as an evil empire, a term popularized, though certainly not coined (since he never had an original thought), by Reagan during the ascension of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In my misspent Chicago youth, I was a waitress in an Iranian restaurant where I found my Iranian colleagues to be delightful, surprisingly western, people. A decade later, in 1979, masked marchers passed my Dupont Circle apartment chanting, “Death to America! Death to the Shah!” and while this was pretty creepy, I understood why Iranians were mad at us: a generation before, we had installed the Shah in a CIA-led coup after the elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized the oil industry, which had cut out Anglo-American profits.

In the old days, CIA-led actions against heads of state were called coups. Now, however, we call them wars—a misnomer, since according to the dictionary, war is an “armed conflict.” Our action in Iraq was not really a conflict; we told Saddam to allow the UN inspectors in—he let them in. We told him to get rid of his weapons—he got rid of them.

No, what we did in Iraq was a coup, much like the coup in Iran in 1953, Operation Ajax, in which we removed Mossadegh and installed the Shah, who with the help of the CIA instituted a secret police force, SAVAK, that went around kidnapping and murdering people, much like the death squads of Guatemala and El Salvador, which were evidently also set up by the CIA. -1

For years, in fact, the CIA operated behind the scenes in cloak-and-dagger operations that overthrew elected leaders and trained assassins. They were implicated in coups against Sukarno in Indonesia, Allende in Chile, Lumumba in the Congo, and the pre-Saddam government of Iraq, and they chased Fidel Castro around for years, trying and failing to murder him.

Back then, the CIA (headed for a time, as everyone knows, by George H.W. Bush) had the decency to try to keep its international manipulations secret. Now, however, the same basic drill as all these machinations of the past is being played out in plain sight on an international stage, and no one seems to object, or even notice.

Why? Because as a culture, we are too overwrought over the death of Anna Nicole Smith—which was luridly reported as “Breaking News”—to pay much attention to the thousands of Iraqis who have died pointlessly since George W. Bush insisted on removing Saddam Hussein for reasons known only to himself, reasons that were certainly not the ones he gave out publicly. We do notice the number of deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but rarely do we see news footage of their grieving families, or of the body bags as they are flown to military bases and then home for quiet funerals, or of the many veterans who have lost limbs, or eyes, or brain function. -2

But I'll bet everyone in America, including my father, knows that Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy has been completed and that her body has been embalmed and then locked up for safekeeping, presumably so her multiple lovers won't attempt DNA fraud, something that happens a lot in soap operas but not so much in real life, at least, not until now.

• • • 

After 9/11, in that period of hushed reverence before Saturday Night Live was given permission to be funny again by Rudy Giuliani, America collectively browbeat itself for its obsessions the previous summer with the disappearance of Chandra Levy and a rash of shark attacks. But soon, our infotainment machine had ramped itself back up and was churning out the minute details of the lives of what we call “celebrities,” many of whom have only one name (or sometimes, one name for two people, e.g., Brangelina).

Though this is embarrassing, I might as well admit it: when I heard that Anna Nicole had died, I shed a few tears. I wish I could tell you exactly why, but I am at a loss. I didn't know her personally, I didn't think she had any discernible talents unless you count Flouncing, and I thought she seemed singularly devoid of common sense. However, I had somehow—I don't even know why—watched enough episodes of her reality show on the E! Channel some years ago to feel oddly fond of her; she seemed like a sweet person with a heart, perhaps, to quote Robert Browning, “too soon made glad,” but one with good intentions.

For several days, I pondered. What was Anna Nicole to me? Why did I even know who she was? Why was she famous for being famous? Then, as usual, I had an epiphany: Anna Nicole was the girl in high school whose glaring insecurities caused her to “act out,” which took the form of egregious sluttiness—but in the end, she meant no harm and would lend you her lipstick, or her mohair sweater, or a crumpled dollar bill, if you ran into her in the girl's bathroom and were in need of those things.

• • • 

Years ago, when I worked at the Iranian restaurant, I had a regular customer named Ralph who taught at a college downtown. In between orders of luleh kabab, Ralph gave me an invaluable piece of advice: “High school is bullshit,” he said. “You won't learn anything there, so you need to get the hell out. Go right to college.” Following Ralph's sage advice, I went to a strangely accelerated high school in Chicago's financial district that enabled me to graduate at age 15, take some time off, and go to college at 16. (Ralph, wherever you are, thank you.)

Ralph told me another interesting thing: “High school was designed during the industrial era to train people to spend their days in factories, sitting still, not questioning anything. Its purpose is not education: its purpose is training.”

Now, in our post-industrial age, Ralph's analysis may be dated, but I think it's still pertinent: it appears to me that high school continues to train people, not to work—indeed, it runs counter to that, if my freshmen are any indication—but rather, to be part of a complex social network of groups and subgroups into which one must learn to fit. As any teen will confirm, for the past thirty years, high schools have been societies with substrata as clearly demarcated as those of bees—Preps, Nerds, Goths (not to be confused with the ancient Germanic tribe), Jocks, Punks, Skaters, and so on.

In the giant high school that is America, each of us has a clear role to play. Celebrities are the popular kids, the ones who are Kings and Queens of the Prom. -3 Celebrity athletes are, of course, the Jocks; celebrity musicians are the Punks or the Goths; celebrity idiots like Paris Hilton are the rich kids who are popular because they are rich. Britney Spears is the head cheerleader dissolved in a fit of hubris. Chandra Levy was that intense bookish girl whose tragic end proves that being intense and bookish is bad for you. Monica Lewinsky was the fat girl with a pretty face who slept with the student council president, who then broke up with her. Anna Nicole Smith was the blonde who slept with the entire football team and several of the teachers, all of whom then broke up with her.

George W. Bush is not one of the Jocks himself, but the guy who gets them a keg. Karl Rove is the Nerd who gets to hang out with Bush but pays the price of an embarrassing nickname (Turd Blossom).

At America High, nothing that goes on outside its walls matters, or even exists. Places like Iraq, Iran, even Canada, are not real to us, and the news of what happens there makes no difference to us unless an American, i.e., someone from our school, is somehow involved.

• • • 

In 2006, Time magazine departed from its normal practice of naming an illustrious individual “Person of the Year” and opted instead for the collective: “You.”-4 Sure, Time said, there were individuals whose behavior stood out, people we could “blame,” as they put it obliquely, for “the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006,” such as the war in Iraq and Sony's sad failure to manufacture enough Playstation3s. But according to Time, 2006 was a year of collective endeavors, from Wikipedia to YouTube, that should be marveled at, or at least noted. Strangely, they didn't mention the November election, certainly collective endeavor at its finest, but their overall point is that we, the geeks, the unpopular kids, had somehow for once, for one year, found our voice. The popular kids at Time seem amused by this; the tone of the article is faintly patronizing.

With this one voice, it seems that most of us are in agreement: we want the war in Iraq to end. We are against Bush's plan for escalation, AKA a “surge.” We are tired of the war. We don't like it; it's no fun. We want our old lives back. We want to worry about shark attacks. We want to go back to being innocent and insouciant, the way Anna Nicole was on her reality show, before reality overtook her.

But this does not seem to be happening. Meanwhile, together, we can watch Britney's blonde mane as it grows back, hair by hair by hair.

Footnotes:

1—I'm not even bothering to footnote any of this, since it is common knowledge, but here is more information on the CIA and the Shah: http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html

2—See Anne Hull and Dana Priest, “The Hotel Aftermath: Inside Mologne House, the Survivors of War Wrestle with Military Bureaucracy and Personal Demons,” Washington Post. February 19, 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/18/AR2007021801335.html

3—Nowadays, people seem to leave the “the” out, but I think “Prom” sounds weird without an article. This is because I am old.

4—Lev Grossman, “Time's Person of the Year: You,” Time. December 13, 2006. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

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