Enemies

When I was a kid, the Cold War loomed over our heads so menacingly that one night, as I slept the sleep of the young, a lightning storm rolled in over Miami as they so often do; it announced its presence with a flash of light and an instantaneous clap of sharp thunder, and I was instantly awake, and instantly thinking this: it’s The Bomb! That was all it took, in those fraught times: the flash of light seen through my eyelids, the pistol-shot thunder heard through my dreams, made me think not of the storms that we see constantly in Florida, but of the nuclear death we had never seen but always feared. After my heart had stopped racing, as I lay back down and tried to find sleep, I first thought that it was just wrong that a kid had to wake up in the middle of the night terrified of nuclear bombs; and then I thought that there was something even more wrong with what we were being told about everything. If “the Russians” were the ones who were going to send over The Bomb, then the Russians must be our enemies. But how could our enemy, these Russians, be something other than—-well, people. Because it was never said explicitly, but clearly it was what “they” (our leaders) wanted us to believe: that our Soviet opponents were something Other, our mortal enemies, who lived only for our destruction, and that we were locked in a struggle for our lives and our souls.

But for whatever reason—-and I don’t believe it’s just that I was surrounded by hippies because this was a thought I kept very close, very private, and never discussed with anyone—-I didn’t ever believe what “they” were telling me. It just couldn’t be possible: surely there was some kid in Russia who also awoke in the night thinking that the lightning was a nuclear bomb going off, lobbed into the Motherland by those heartless American bastards. Long before critics chastised Sting for writing something so naïve and idealistic as “We share the same biology / Regardless of ideology / What might save us, me and you / Is that the Russians love their children too,” I was thinking exactly the same thing. And I don’t think it’s naïve, and I don’t think it’s idealistic, I think it’s the simplest, sanest truth there is.

There is no enemy. Not then, not now.

In high school we were required—-the State of Florida actually required all high school Seniors, as recently as 1983—-to take a class called “Americanism Versus Communism.” No, really, this is true. It was taught by a red-blooded zealot named Malafronte, who was fond of throwing erasers at students who didn’t toe the party line fast enough. Me, I was a good little student (plus I was on closed-circuit TV every morning, delivering the morning announcements, so as a sorta-kinda member of the third estate I was treated well), I kept my mouth shut and just got through the class. The one time I was required to actively participate in the nonsense was when it came time to do a book report and say, in my own words, something of what I thought about the subject. I chose Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich because (A) it was easy to take a stand against the Soviet gulags, and (B) it was a really short book that I could read in a night. This report got me high marks, and I sailed through the rest of the class. But I never for a second believed the malarkey that Dr. Malafronte flung around as casually as his erasers.

Eventually I started to realize: if the Soviet people are just people like we are, and not really our enemies, then the real problem has to be a leadership problem. And not just the Russians’ leadership but ours too, for so actively promulgating the notion that the Soviet people were our enemies. Why would they do such a thing? As Gore Vidal tells us over and over, it’s about power. If you can define an enemy, then you can lead us against that enemy and we will have no choice but to follow—-and to keep you in power through the whole empty struggle that must ensue.

And then, look what happened: the Soviets got new leadership. Not us, them; our so-called enemies. Mikhail Gorbachev dared to bring a new kind of thinking to the table, and all of a sudden the Russians weren’t so scary anymore. Now we can argue all day about why that happened, about whether Reagan’s arms race so bankrupted the Soviet state that they had no choice, economically, but to take another path, but in the end it doesn’t matter: a true-blue ideologue would have never admitted to such a defeat. (Can you imagine George Bush ever admitting that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake?) Gorbachev was faced with a choice and he made the one that was actually good for his people and our people both. To me at least, it was perfectly plain: leadership had been the problem, and now maybe there was a chance to get things right.

During that very period, in September 1990, I traveled to Leningrad with a theatre troupe, performing a Chekhov play, and was lucky enough to avoid the hotels and Intourist, and to stay with our hosts in their homes for two weeks, living their lives, drinking vodka and eating blini and talking about the changes of glasnost. I knew then, knew directly so that I never needed to question it again, that the Russian people are wonderful people, and that they had never been our enemies.

Eventually I realized that even with Gorbachev in power, change was never going to come as fast I hoped. The world does change, but it changes in something like geologic time: over hundreds, thousands, millions of years. In the eyeblink that is a human life, real change is no more noticeable than the extra millimeter carved out of the Grand Canyon over the last however many years.

I should think that by now it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this. The Muslim people are not our enemies, and never were. Yeah, there are some bad men holed up in caves, suckling their weapons and their hate, but their real aim is to become the new leaders of their part of the world; and they’re trying to do it by defining an enemy (us) and then leading their people against that awful enemy. And our response to this? We play right into it. We kill a few of our enemy at the cost of some “collateral damage” (i.e., civilians), and the people of the Arab world sit up and say “Wait a moment, these Americans are killing us.” The bad men in their caves snicker and plot some more.

We have a leadership problem. And it’s not just those chickenhawk ideologues currently stalking our halls of power, it’s also the supposedly peace-loving Democrats who don’t dare even peep the idea that maybe our enemy isn’t really our enemy; it’s also the independents who claim to be above it all while allowing “it all” to keep happening; it’s those people who don’t vote because they say voting is a waste of time when all their non-participation really accomplishes is to allow the ideologues to keep voting for the other ideologues and thus control the destiny of our nation. It’s our fault, for allowing ourselves to have these kinds of leaders.

Let me say it bluntly: there is no difference between Osama bin Laden, a conservative religious zealot seeking power, and George W. Bush, a conservative religious zealot maintaining power, except that Bush has a higher body count.

Someone has to step forward and seek a new path. And I think a good way to begin goes something like this: a new American leader, a new Gorbachev if you will, stands up and speaks directly to the Arab people, to Muslims across the world. He says, "Clearly there is a problem. You believe we are your enemy, but we’re not. Our people and yours are People of the Book, we believe in the same God and seek only peace in our lands and prosperity for our families. But we have reached a point where your people don’t believe any of this; your people have become so afraid of us that they are willing to strap bombs around their chests and die. Because of us. Well I’m here today to say to you that we are not your enemies, and that we are sorry you ever thought we were; and I’m here today to ask, What can we do to make your lives better?"

Because that is what an enlightened foreign policy should be about. Make better the lives of people in Iraq and Palestine, make better the lives of people in Rwanda and Columbia and everywhere, and we will in turn make our own lives better. Then there won’t be so many people willing to hijack planes and fly them into our prominent buildings; then there will only be the men of hate, huddling in their caves and wondering why no one is paying attention to them anymore.

We have to do this because someone has to, and it might as well be us. More to the point: if we are the great, enlightened nation we claim to be, then it must be us. But it doesn’t seem likely. On September 11, 2001, the bad men in caves scored an undeniable victory; but since that day we have only ourselves to blame for what has followed. We allowed ourselves to sink into fear and paranoia, and have only succeeded in making the entire world worse off. It has to stop, and we’re the ones who need to stop it.

It will happen, someday. I’m enough of an idealist to believe, to really believe, that someday someone will step up and do what must be done. But I’m also enough of a realist to know that these sorts of changes will occur in geologic time, and that you and I are likelier to see Mount Everest erode to a foothill than to see such an enlightened peace spread across the land.

Oh, and by the way: the business of America is not business. The business of America is Americans. But that's a subject for another day.