Love and War
I want to be a sign painter
I need to be utterly profane
I need to address the possibility
that I may not be as talented as I always thought I was
I need to wander for weeks in a state of unemployed humility
and pretend I am a tourist
and forget what it’s like to answer the phone
and forget my recurrent dreams of stepping on grubs
the way they crunch and ooze and curl up spasmodically...
--“Notes upon quitting a secretarial job at Bank of America”
SLJ, circa 1994
The winter was brutal.
Long and dark and full of blizzards and terror alerts. Terror alerts!
Aaaagh! Everybody, remain in a state of panic! A dirty bomb could
hit Manhattan at any moment, and you’ve got fifteen minutes to get on the
thruway going north or else you have to stay in your basement for a hundred
thousand years! Keep your bug-out bag packed! Stock up on water
and cat food! No, scratch that, after a week or two you’ll be eating
the cats! Be very afraid, worry without ceasing, and maybe you’ve got
a chance of survival!
Well, yes, and then there was the war. Lord. We
attended an all-night party for the closing of the Right Bank Bar, lots of
singing and dancing and drinking and weeping, and presiding over the proceedings
was a large TV giving us up-to-the-minute video of the bombing of the cradle
of civilization. “Tank falls into the Euphrates river, two Marines drowned,”
back from whence they came. We stayed till after 3, when they started
giving away the booze. The owner, Carey, sold out, packed up and went
somewhere far, far away, where he no longer owns a bar with a splendid view
of where the twin towers used to be. Carey used to be a firefighter;
he was a member of the team that mostly went down with the towers.
He doesn’t mention it much anymore.
in fact I’m really a dull sort of person
I think in epileptic reruns
I can’t imagine life without the wealthy
and my sexual fantasies are bland
Just to be clear, this is not going to be another op-ed piece bashing on
Shrub. I don’t actually know what I think about George W. He strikes
me as earnest, well-meaning, and a bit simple-minded, but that’s just the
impression I get from watching his face on TV with the sound turned down.
For some reason, listening to politicians makes me queasy. I get most
of my political information from reading in-depth profiles in The
New Yorker, which convince me of nothing except that people are complicated,
situations are murky, and nobody is always right.
I did, however, get unreasonably annoyed with the number of Internet “peace
petitions” that started cluttering up my mailbox as we got closer to D-Day.
This got me into trouble when a friend of mine, travelling with a band of
nouveau gypsies across South America, forwarded an anti-war Internet petition
to me, intended for the U.N. This was back in the days when I was only
receiving one anti-war Internet petition every few weeks, rather than two
or three a day. I followed my then-usual policy by thanking her for
the petition, but pointing out that Internet petitions are politically useless,
because the signatures are unverifiable, and the forwarding address is usually
blocked by the time the petition has been in circulation for a few hours.
A more effective use of one’s energy is to write or phone one’s Congressman,
vote, or volunteer for Amnesty International, all of which take more time
and effort than forwarding Internet petitions to everyone in one’s address
book. I also added a few choice words about the U.N.’s track record
in preventing senseless violence in, say, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Congo etc.,
perhaps allowing a tone of sarcastic frustration to seep through.
Unfortunately, I happened to hit the “reply all” button, and my friend took
my public diatribe rather badly. She accused me of being a smartass,
of bothering her friends who didn’t even know me, and said that maybe Internet
petitions were ineffective, but they were better than doing nothing.
I apologized, she calmed down, and I quietly deleted most subsequent Internet
petitions, keeping my smartass mouth shut.
This got me thinking about the problem of righteousness, something that
not only right-wing fundamentalists are guilty of, in this pre-apocalyptic
world. I realized that what galled me about all of these peace petitions
was that the senders seemed less concerned with promoting actual peace than
in coming out “for peace,” that is, in not being personally blamed for war.
It bothered me that my fellow countrymen seemed relatively unconcerned about
senseless violence in Iraq, or Rwanda, Bosnia, the Congo, Chile, Argentina,
East Timor, etc., as long as our government doesn’t directly perpetrate said
violence, or take any risks in trying to stop it. In trying to formulate
any type of informed position on the state of world affairs, I felt like a
second-grade teacher trying to maintain order in the lunchroom. “Who
stepped on Edie’s sandwich?” “Not me! Not me!” “Who
set that bomb off?” “Not me! Not meeee!”
Really, it doesn’t matter who set the bomb off; the bomb went off, or not,
and we all get to deal with the consequences. Righteousness is of the
ego. Righteousness perpetuates war. Enough with righteousness,
already. Let's all agree to be wrong, and love one another anyway.
perhaps this is the ultimate mystery
perhaps this is what’s endured
when I reach my uninterrupted time and place
I will perceive deeply the boringness of self
I will not be even moderately insane
and so I will be a sign painter
and spend an hour on every P
curling myself around it with the concentration of Eve
During the winter I really didn’t care about war and politics and economic
depression all that much, because I fell in love. My car got a flat
tire, my friend Jill took me to visit the guy who fixes things, and the rest
was history. My new boyfriend can fix just about anything that’s broken,
as long as it is an inanimate object; fixing animate beings is my job.
We spent every long dark night talking and talking about love and loss and
poverty, and cabbages and kings, and every rare sunny day biking across the
bridges and through the snowdrifts, for bagels and hummus at the Lotus Cafe,
and down Canal street for gloves and cheap electronic parts.
During the spring I spent my days and nights renovating and restoring my
boyfriend’s empty storefront, turning it into a Healing Arts center, since
nobody except my boyfriend would hire me. I got really good with a caulking
gun. Caulking is cool. It got so that the entire world started looking
like a bunch of holes to fill in, surfaces to smooth out, to integrate, to
make One. The process was meditative and deeply satisfying, despite
the fact that I was basically gluing together a building that was only held
up by the paint. It was also nice to do some work with a concrete,
physical, obvious result, as opposed to sending more résumés
off into the Hot Jobs void, or petitions off to the U.N. Security Council.
The entire neighborhood got involved with the painting of the storefront;
I got called a "troublemaker" by a little old lady who took exception to my
colors, pale yellow with burgundy trim. She changed her mind after I
took off the blue tape, though.
What is Peace, anyway? Peace is not just the absence of war.
Perhaps it’s the absence of fear.
and there will be no more grubs or phones
or people who talk about the mystical regions
in tones of fatuous sentimentality
I will be free to be stunted and ignored
with considerably less discomfort
and the world will be an incomprehensible place
until I’ve labelled it
and gone about my humble secretarial way
© 2003 by Stephanie Lee Jackson
Photo: "Gallery Window," taken at Healing Arts on July 4,
2003, by R.A. Friedman.
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