[Peace-discuss] Fighting Words

[Joan Cole]

Personal Voices: Fighting Words

By Neal Pollack, The Stranger
April 16, 2003

Editor's Note: The following story was first published on April 3, during
the war. Since then, the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled the
15th-anniversary celebration of the movie 'Bull Durham' due to antiwar
comments by actor Tim Robbins; and many Pakistani-Americans have had their
credit card accounts cancelled by American Express with no explanation. In
light of these and other examples of war-induced insanity, we feel the story
has continuing relevance.


One night last August, I helped put on a punk rock show in Austin. The bar
was full, mostly because it was the evening of the University of Texas'
football season opener. There were plenty of orange-shirted yahoos mixed
among the misfits. Appropriate to the occasion, I'd decided to wear a punk
rock T-shirt. It read, "Impeach George W. Bush." A guy came up to me. He was
with some friends. They were all pretty drunk.


"Nice shirt," he said.


"You really think so?" I said.


"No," he said. "I think you're an asshole."


He walked past me. So I did what any intelligent person would do after being
insulted by a drunken, belligerent University of Texas football fan. I
squirted him with water. He turned around, ready to kill.


"You just do that?" he said.


"Not me," I said.


I squirted him in the face.


He charged. His friend grabbed him.


"You and me!" said the guy. "Outside! Now!"


"Nah," I said, and turned away.


An hour later, he came back, even more drunk. I was sitting next to my wife,
who was eight months pregnant at the time. He leaned into me.


"I think we should take this into the parking lot," he said.


"Look," I said. "You know you'd kick my ass. So why prove it? And besides,
do you really want my pregnant wife to watch that?"


"Don't hide behind your pregnant wife," mumbled my pregnant wife.


"Fuck you, man!" said the guy. "You shouldn't wear that shirt."


"It's a free country," I said. "I can wear whatever shirt I want."


He thought about this for a moment.


"Okay," he said. "But you shouldn't spill a drink on someone if he says
something to you about it."


"Point taken," I said.


He left. My wife called me an idiot. True enough. Then again, he was an even
bigger idiot. But the real lesson was pretty obvious then, and even more
obvious now. Everyone in America, including me, has been driven completely
insane by this war.


Let's run down a list of incidents that I've heard about in the last month
alone: A French woman in Houston, who's lived in her neighborhood for 20
years, wakes up on a Saturday morning to find graffiti on her garage door
telling her to go back to France. A guy from Seattle arrives in San Diego
and finds a threatening note from airport security because he's packed two
"No Iraq War" signs in his bag. In Austin, the French owner of an antique
shop hears on a radio call-in show that people want to blow up the miniature
Eiffel Tower in front of his store. Radio stations in Kansas City and
Louisiana stage Dixie Chicks bonfires and monster-truck CD stomps. At a
rodeo in Houston, a guy starts a brawl because a kid and his friends don't
want to stand while Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." plays over the
loudspeaker. The guy tells the kid, who's half Mexican and half Italian, to
"go back to Iraq."


Meanwhile, the FBI has warned that the war will lead to an increase in "hate
crimes." Arab Americans were already cowering before the war started. An
18-year-old Lebanese kid in Yorba Linda, California, had his jaw broken on
February 22 by a mob of 20 teenagers who shouted "white power" as they beat
him with baseball bats. A few days later, a Muslim woman in Santa Clara,
California, was attacked in the laundry room of her apartment building. The
FBI also reported that a Muslim father of six was assaulted February 21 in
Irvington, New Jersey, by two men who accused him of being a terrorist.


Of course, we can always dismiss these random acts of dumbness as the work
of lone dipshits or large groups of dipshits. But they're indicative of the
currently insane cultural climate, which is being encouraged and fostered by
the government and certain corners of the media. Fox News taunted antiwar
protesters last week on its large-screen Midtown Manhattan news ticker. The
anti-Dixie Chicks rallies were sponsored by evil radio megalith Clear
Channel, which is owned by a personal friend of George W. Bush. President
Bush himself called the repulsive anti-French backlash "an interesting
phenomena taking place here in America," right before saying that "there
will be a certain sense of discipline" imposed if other countries, such as
Mexico, dare oppose the United States.


Well, Mexicans should consider themselves duly disciplined. Even as the FBI
warns about an increase in hate crimes, backhandedly endorsed by the
president of the United States, the FBI does things like detain 80 people
the week before the Super Bowl as "security risks," half of them Mexican.
Congress takes the time to rename French fries "freedom fries." The
Department of Homeland Security announces, as part of "Operation Liberty
Shield," that asylum seekers from 33 countries will be detained indefinitely
during wartime. I'm sorry. The last time I checked, we were only at war with
one country.


Is it any surprise, given our government's appalling behavior toward
foreigners both diplomatically and domestically, given the hypocritical and
bellicose rhetoric that poisons our minds every day, that dumb guys in
Houston are getting all jingoistic about a swarthy kid disrespecting a bad
country song at a rodeo, that ordinary French people are the target of
scorn, or even that antiwar protesters are hurling rocks at rush-hour
commuter trains in Oakland?


Welcome to insanity. The insanity of war. When President Bush referred to
the Americans as a "peaceful people" in his 48-hour-showdown speech, I had
to wonder: What "people" was he talking about?


So I was in a packed bar at the South by Southwest festival in Austin a
couple of weeks ago. There were lots of bands playing, everyone was blitzed.
An old friend from Chicago came through the door. I was really glad to see
him. He looked at me with scorn.


"SHUT UP!" he said.


Uh-oh. He was referring to a piece I'd published in The Stranger where I'd
equally slagged right-wing pundits and left-wing poets as pompous assholes
who didn't know what they were talking about. That article had upset some
people, but none so much as this guy.


"That article was lame!" he shouted. "I like Noam Chomsky! I like Michael
Moore!"


"That's fine for you," I said. "How's it going?"


But he wouldn't relent, and the shouting match got personal. Within a few
minutes, I was shoving him. Beer was spilled. My bottle hit him in the chin.
A bouncer grabbed me. I recall screaming something like, "You son of a
bitch! You'll never see me again!" And then I was in the alley.


Well, since then, the guy and I have made nice. But there we were, two
people against the war, having a bar fight about whether or not Michael
Moore is a bad writer. How stupid. How very sad, particularly because
Michael Moore is, inarguably, a bad writer - a bad writer who really knows
how to give a lousy, self-promotional Oscar speech.


This goddamn war looks like it will go on forever, in one form or another.
We're all angry and afraid, and it's coming out in some very strange ways.
In the days since I wrote the first draft of this piece, a guy in Cincinnati
drove his semi onto a sidewalk, stopping just in front of 40 people who were
holding a peace rally. Someone blew up a Muslim family's van in suburban
Chicago. The White House continues to talk about our right to protest even
as protesters are being arrested near the White House. The FBI says it will
continue to investigate hate crimes against Muslims even as it enters the
homes of Muslims, without warrants, to conduct "voluntary" interviews.


And in my tiny corner of the world, I've gotten into two fights in the last
six months, and I previously hadn't been in a fight since 1980, when I was
10 years old.


America has gone insane.


Neal Pollack is the author of "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American
Literature" and "Beneath the Axis of Evil." He writes a weblog called the
the Neal Pollack Maelstrom.


----------------------------------------------------------
Joan Cole
http://www.advancenet.net/~jscole/
If America loves its troops so much, why don't we pay them a living wage?