House of Eratosthenes

I’ve never been a frequent sufferer of what we commonly call “nightmares”; the few that I’ve had over the years, have lately given way to something else. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m becoming an old man. Things that distress me in sleep, are sufficiently based on real problems, that they continue to bother me while I’m lying there waiting to get up and start my day. My subconsciousness might invent a fictitious and frightening scenario, and rather than snapping awake to realize it’s not true…I snap awake to discover it isn’t true yet. And so I lie there and fret about it, until I realize the best I can do is to wait for an opportunity to present itself to mitigate the problem, hoping such an opportunity will arise since it assuredly has not yet. What do we call these. Morning-mares?

Always, the future is involved. Wednesday morning I had a bruiser. Again, I was a sad old man who had stumbled on through the decades, watching his ominous foreboding about the world proven correct again and again and again, while people around him listened to his other dark prophecies less and less and less. I was broken, quiet, and empty shell of the man I am today, resolved to keep my opinion to myself until such time as it was solicited…and of course it never was. I was visiting my son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. The situation was happy, in all the ways that matter to most. We all had our health. My son’s business was doing very well. And I had luxuries most old men crave, but about which most only dream; my son continued the gratitude that he has today, that I taught him the priceless lesson of differentiating between a fact and an opinion, and that this practice is the mother’s milk of any thinking man’s ability to know anything worth knowing. He had used this abstract concept to gain material success in the world, no easy feat, and for this I was exceptionally proud.

But if he was thankful for the ability to do this, the rest of the world was not, and I was frequently bothered by residual questions about whether I’d injured his capacity to conform. The world had changed. The problems we have today, had all metastasized into real conundrums, far worse. The United States had left Iraq. “Civil war” did not endure there, after all; terrorists moved in, and who could blame them? Good heavens, what utterly stupid and ineffectual terrorists it would have taken to allow such opportunity to pass. And so the government of Iraq was left in charge for just a small stretch of time, and crumbled when it failed to meet the challenge. The world took no notice of that, it simply blamed George Bush and moved on. Who expected anything different?

It wasn’t any kind of country at all, it was just one huge terrorist “building.” Of course, nobody gave a thought to doing anything with it, as far as military operations, weapons inspections, or anything of the like. It was just a place terrorists went, and we left them alone, resigned to wait for the next attack and tough it out. And so, with training camps and weapons labs on every yard of earth from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, Syria to Iran, September 11 attacks became routine. We stopped coming up with names for them after Number Twenty or so. They were only numbers. We were watching the news about Number Thirty-Eight…once again, everybody we knew, was spared. Again, we were lucky.

Ah…the news. Fact, and opinion. Did I mention the patriarchal concerns I had about how my son failed to fit into the world, as he differentiated between fact and opinion? I should elaborate. News was a different thing in my vision. Today, news does not differentiate even though it seems to understand it ought to. It editorializes under labels like “Analysis” so the editorials can be tossed in where everyone knows they don’t belong. Nouns are joined by verbs in such a way that the observation sounds factual, but only cosmetically so. Challenges loom. Dangers await. That’s now. In my vision, the blending problem is gone…because the facts are gone. News is pure opinion. Nobody takes the time to notice this; if they pay attention to the “news” at all, they show how “informed” they are by repeating things that sound exactly like it. As a broken old man, fortunate enough to have the gratitude of my progeny for all my tedious lectures about fact and opinion, I resolved to dispense only what people wanted. My opinions were secret until someone specifically requested they not be. I was thankful. I had the gratitude of my heirs, for having taught them things. Occasionally, they would ask me about history…asking for facts. That makes two precious gifts to an old man. Opinions I would keep to myself. Opinions they would get from the news.

And so the news droned on about Number Thirty-Eight. Nothing about death tolls or what kind of weapon was used or how the attack was carried out. In fact, the news was nothing but a warning about things we might learn somewhere else. The news didn’t even tell us there was a Number Thirty-Eight; it simply portended that we were going to be told about it, perhaps, and we should disregard anything we hear about this, that, or some other thing. As far as what happened, very little information was forthcoming. We were learning nothing. This was typical.

Number Thirty-Eight, from what I could gather, seemed to have something to do with what is called “Chicago.”

My grandson was watching the “news,” and paying close attention to the instructions about what he should ignore. Not because he wanted to, but because it was a homework assignment. He was “debating” in school. He was very skilled at this, and we were all very proud of him, but I made a point of not following the action too closely. Nobody analyzed anything in high school debates, or any other debates for that matter; nobody proved or provided evidence for anything, nobody refuted anything, and nobody represented themselves as trying to. Of course, simply noticing that would be expressing an opinion, and so I kept my silence on this. But it was so bad, that participants in high school debates were “scored” on a percentage of how closely their comments resembled the “news.” My grandson was sure to take first place in the last debate, but he took second. The other kid’s comments were found to resemble the news 93% of the time, and my family’s champion was scored at 88% or 90% or something. Clearly, he needed to study up and make sure his opinions were brought in line. That’s right, excellence was defined as…resembling other things. I’ve always had an opinion about that too (Thing I Know #145) — but I kept quiet about it. How could I not? My grandson was winning trophies and was bursting at the seams with pride. No grandfather would put a damper on that.

But this week he had been topped. And so, three generations of us sat around. Watching “news.” About an attack that wasn’t an attack, so far as we knew. You had to kind of read between the lines, but that is the way it was with everything.

And my grandson turned to me and asked me a horrible question. I don’t remember what it was, but somehow in answering it I had let it slip that the Dark Place that had no name, from which terrorists repeatedly prepared their next attack, the place to which nobody went, which nobody understood, the Lord Valdemort of geographic locations — was Iraq. A hush fell over the living room. Nobody was angry with grandpa, but I would almost have been happier if they were. No, they were eager to learn more. I had let the cat out of the bag; I had forgotten that young people didn’t understand this. Oh, they were encouraged to believe President Bush “messed up Iraq” some thirty years before. They were encouraged to believe that the reason we couldn’t do anything about terrorist attacks, was because it was absolutely forbidden and unthinkable to go to the Dark Place. But they didn’t understand that the Dark Place was what Iraq became.

And it opened a huge can of worms. It revealed that the United States once had a military presence there, a little morsel of information that was carefully concealed from young people and more-distracted young adults. Older people like me, had made a practice of speaking as if these were two different regions. It worked, most of the time, because geography was something you just didn’t learn in school and you didn’t expect to learn it. So Iraq went away…from out of somewhere, came the Dark Place. Connecting the two as one mass of land, although this was factually correct, was simply not done because it might lead to more questions. Questions upon which, now two full generations were left without the tools to explore. So what was the point?

The questions flew toward me. What was it like when we were there? Well, of course it was messy, I said. And so we talked about “insurgents” and I.E.D.’s. I told them some 3700 American soldiers lost their lives as Iraq became the Dark Place. And every answer I gave…led to more confusion. As I cleared up the confusion as best I could, I started to find reasons why the confusion took place. For example, that we were pushed out of Iraq in a single afternoon. That was not correct. It took years. Where did we get the idea it took just a few hours? Oh that’s right…the 3700. The place is filled with terrorists and we are forced to leave, if such a thing goes on for any length of time it seems the toll should be higher. Much higher.

You think about it, it makes sense. Thirty-Four, six months previous, hit Atlanta with a loss of some two million; Twenty-Nine struck in Los Angeles a year before that, with a toll more than double. Death expressed in aggregate, no longer packed a wallop for this new generation. How could it? And so they hear about 3700 soldiers dying over an undefined amount of time — the last thing they’d think is that this took five years. Sounds more like five hours.

Well, I had to re-think and re-think again on the words as they came out of my mouth, because I was trying to repress any opinion. I wished I was boring everybody; I’d be just one more tedious old man, shutting up when nobody listens to him anymore. That would be easy. But my granddaughter and daughter-in-law had gathered around, and I was surrounded in this horseshoe arrangement as I recounted this history nobody heard before. To answer my grandchildrens’ questions, it was difficult to stay neutral, because now I had to explain how wars are lost not tactically, but through lack of political will. And that this lack of political will, while everyone wishes it comes from independent thinking…well, the facts don’t support this. It comes from “news.” But “news” that isn’t really news. And so there I was explaining how Iraq, we had been told decades before on the “news,” was degenerating into a “civil war.” This struck everyone as rather odd. A civil war is all about who’s going to be in charge; if Iraq is the same spot as the Dark Place, then it was a place where, as I was speaking, nobody was “in charge” except terrorists. Civil war? Here we were finding out something dreadful had happened in Chicago. Nobody we knew had been injured…nobody we knew of, quite yet. And this was the thirty-eighth attack. For this generation to learn that we once had control of the Dark Place, and gave it up willingly — well, they were having a lot of trouble grasping this.

And again, who could blame them? And so I had to explain the news…not so much as a bunch of opinion masquerading as fact…but as an interest. They’d already picked up on the leitmotif that when America does something militarily, the effort put in by the “news” is to try to get America to stop doing it. This was puzzling to them. We could have stopped terrorists; terrorists want us to live under Sharia law; the prognosis for a free press under Sharia law, is not terribly good; what’s the interest of the news people, to stop America from stopping the terrorists? Here, my opinion was being directly solicited. The trouble was, I had none to give.

And then, my granddaughter wanted to know when they all began. The thirty-eight. How long has this been going on? What about Number One?

The conversation was going to a place I didn’t want it to go, but I had never held secrets from my grandchildren and wasn’t about to start. The question was direct and she was owed an answer. The moment of the dream that shattered my slumber, and left me lying there thinking through what I had just been dreaming, was an explosive epiphany blossoming from my own remark. As if it came from another person, I heard my own raspy voice grind out, “We would not call it ‘Number One’ for a very long time…” Someone gasped. “We called it the September Eleven attacks, Nine Eleven for short.” Something jumped through my brain, and in a heartbeat it became impossible to go on. I was struck by the ramifications of what I had just said. Thirty-Nine was coming and Forty was coming and Forty-One…what would they be like? Another Fourteen, detonating in the midwest where the population was most spread-out, snuffing out just a few hundred of us? Or, that awful, unforgettable Twenty-Two, still unmentioned in polite company? Something in between? And nobody could do anything about any of it. No one had any vision for it; nobody, anywhere. Control over destiny was thought to be an evil thing, and we were told on a daily basis that it was far more noble to simply await the inevitable, lest “world opinion” be agitated against us again. In the final analysis, the human race became just like a bunch of ants, or something even lower still, waiting to be squished.

My mind churned as I tried to put together the words to explain what Nine One One was all about. From where did the three numbers come. About telephones, about how this was an emergency number and how that all worked…how “9-1-1” stood for a fundamental meaning, now lost forever, something nobody understood. “Something terrible has happened and we gotta do something.” I was trying to figure out how to explain this to a girl who was a stranger to such a thought from infancy, and had ever met anyone who had entertained such a thought. In her time, life, for however long it lasted, was a simple affair. Be happy. Don’t make mistakes. Think the right thoughts. Don’t disagree with people. You may be dead tomorrow, so the point isn’t to try to avoid it, the point is to make sure you’re remembered in a positive way. She was happy, and her friends were all happy; they’d be ostracized if they were caught being something else, since any dreaded challenge to the status quo must arise from evil, wretched dissatisfaction. Happiness and contentment, all around. Ignore what the “news” tells you to ignore. To someone living in a whole world like that, how do you explain what 911 means?

I made a few false starts, interrupted myself, my voice broke. My tired old eyes became thick and wet — and then I woke up.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Memo For File XXXVFriday, December 8th, 2006

Memo For File XXXV
Friday, December 8th, 2006