Yesterday I was going to post a cute bit about the weather, which has been fairly freakish for non-tornadic values of freakish. The news from Egypt pretty much put paid to that, for the moment. The ruminations that follow are not particularly profound or original; they are notes to myself, and you need not choose to overhear them if you have had a surfeit of such things already.
Life does go on. If one is grown up, or has moments of being so, one knows that one day one will be the person without whom it is going on. One knows too, at least intermittently, the truth that anything that can happen can happen to you. (People who wish to point out querulously that their chromosomal makeup or subsequent physical alterations make it impossible for them to die in childbirth, or that chronological considerations prevent them from discovering oxygen or a new species of jellyfish, will kindly hush for the moment.) I've known this for a long time; every once in a while I sit down and look it in its rueful face and learn the fact all over again.
The unsettling thing about the past five years has been the degree to which sitting down, in my privilege and insulation, and looking at the alarming face of that fact, has become unnecessary. I realized while thinking of the people killed in Egypt, the tourists walking about because it was so hot, the workers having their coffee, people sleeping and people talking and people working, that the reason this ritual is no longer necessary is that I feel consigned, by the entire apparatus of the people in power in this country, to the other side, to the side to whom such disasters just naturally happen. The Bush Administration is exceedingly good at declaring anybody who annoys them at all, anybody who is an example counter to their beliefs, anybody they don't want to think about, to be Not One Of Us. I don't personally annoy them; there is no real sense in which they know that I exist. But they have already consigned people like me to the pits of hell. They haven't come along to toss me in yet, but I have no confidence at all that, should they decide in their freakish, for extremely tornadic values thereof, paranoia and self-justification that it's time, they will do it. I'm not even talking about my political opinions or my contributions to organizations like the ACLU, which this administration is investigating with finite resources that they might as well have used up in making paper dolls and then burning them. I'm just talking about being a woman and not defining that fact in the mingy miserable cramped-up second-class way that they do.
It's always hard to tell whether Bush is saying what he seems to be saying or is just demonstrating general linguistic ineptitude. But he talked about the bombs in London as if the deaths they caused were not significant except to bolster his idiot assertions about how well his plans are working; those deaths were there, not here, so all was well. I don't know what he has said about Egypt, if anything, but I assume it's more of the same. It seems to me that, as far as he's concerned, a huge swathe of people here are, to all intents and purposes, really there. Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are there, and everybody mistakenly or cravenly swept up in Iraq and put into Abu Ghraib or Guantanomo Bay is doubly there, there squared, twice removed from anyplace that matters. Gay people are there, and non-Christians, by another mingy miserable cramped-up definition of Christian. Most urban populations are there, but especially the population of New York City. Scientists who tell the truth are there; so are poor people and non-white people and anybody who has ever been injured by a doctor or a corporation. Schoolchildren are there, and people struggling along on the minimum wage, and women grappling with unwanted pregnancy, and people without health insurance. So, weirdly enough, are the actual troops actually fighting his idiot war. His idea of them is here, an idea that includes physical invulnerability and a kind of iron robotic tendency to go on as if they were life. It must be that, because as soon as anybody is injured or killed or even indignant, that person is consigned to there and is no longer worthy of actual support, though words are still offered. You can't armor a vehicle with words, even if you used the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, but that's what there is.
This is why I write fiction, and not opinion pieces or essays.
Those people in Egypt are still dead.
P.
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