Back for the Final Sprint

When we catch our breath, I’ll go into detail on how great the South of France was, but then again, most peo­ple already know that it’s a beau­ti­ful, ele­gant and epi­curean delight, so I won’t go sprin­kling this blog with any more clichés. Besides, pic­tures are def­i­nitely worth a thou­sand words in this case, so if I get about 50 of them up on Flickr then I think our vaca­tion will be bet­ter shown.

The fact that it was so easy to for­get our immi­nent depar­ture from Cam­bridge made Saturday’s reen­try all the more of a shock (not to men­tion the 95°F heat and the cab had no famous Amer­i­can Air Con­di­tion­ing!). So we’ve thrown our­selves into pack­ing once more. It feels as if it will never get done, and always be in a state of near chaos.

I’m still a bit jet lagged, get­ting up before dawn and near exhaus­tion at this hour (9:30 PM), and I’m a night per­son! So, I’ll make this entry a bit short.

I think I should acknowl­edge the new set of right-wing blog­gers who have dis­cov­ered me. Appar­ently I’m just a man with­out a coun­try, because even Cam­bridge, MA is too Amer­i­can for me. I had no idea that ‘left­ists’ (which I guess, is what I am) had appro­pri­ated the term ‘lib­eral’, and that 9/11 taught us that the left had destroyed the coun­try. There’s more, but just read the com­ments on the pre­vi­ous entry to get the rest of it.

OK, with­out get­ting too much into a debate, the way I see, it, 9/11 was indeed a tragedy. It was an awful, hor­ri­ble, hate­ful thing and the peo­ple behind it are the worst excuses for human beings the planet has pro­duced for a long time. But the big­ger tragedy is that the US pop­u­lace got so scared, so screwed up, that they were will­ing to fol­low any­one who said that they had The Answer and would Make Them Pay for What They Did. The Repub­li­can lead­ers who claimed they knew what to do, in black and white, con­fi­dent and heroic lan­guage then took advan­tage of that vul­ner­a­bil­ity and gulli­bil­ity to drag the coun­try into war with Iraq, which had noth­ing to do with the attack (yes, that’s a fact and we all know it now — only the truly deluded dis­pute it) . So it’s a tragedy, but not the kind of tragedy of 9/11. It’s some­thing more far­ci­cal, show­ing how eas­ily an une­d­u­cated and irra­tional pop­u­la­tion is per­suaded. It’s a tragedy that the coun­try I grew up in just doesn’t exist any more, not because of 9/11, but because of what the shock of those falling tow­ers allowed peo­ple to get away with.

Final thought: I’m think­ing about how to explain that I really do feel as if I’m being forced out of this coun­try. If I stay and fight, I fear even­tu­ally that I’ll end up in jail or worse. I’m not con­tem­plat­ing any­thing ille­gal, but these days peo­ple are really get­ting spir­ited away in the night, the way it used to be in the old Soviet Union. It’s mostly just peo­ple who have some con­nec­tion to the Mid­dle East, like that poor soul who at one point worked for an Islamic char­ity that it was revealed had fun­neled funds to the terrorists.

Let me put it this way. It’s not as if I went off my rocker and became an under­ground activist. But I feel like a pas­sen­ger in the sub­way car, sit­ting still on the tracks, but the train going by the oppo­site direc­tion is mov­ing with so much force and dom­i­nat­ing the win­dows, so I feel as if I’m drift­ing for­ward (we’ve all felt some­thing like this opti­cal illu­sion at some point in time). So I feel the coun­try lurch fur­ther and fur­ther to the right, and hence, I also feel that my place within it is less and less clear. If being Amer­i­can means being ultra-religious, intol­er­ant, arro­gant and waste­ful, then I guess I don’t want to be one of those. Call me crazy.