"Alone is an unfortunate predicament. Lone is an aesthetic choice."
I've always been a loner, or so my mother tells me. Wait, scratch that. I know that's true. I was there. During summer camp softball games (2PM every day; they called it "Watermelon League" because the team that won the championship got--get this--a watermelon), I would hide in the barn and read. Eventually, they tracked me down--I was reading Stephen King's "Cujo" at the time. For the rest of that summer, that was my nickname. This may have been because the Camp Counselor mind--always quick to appreciate subtle irony--found amusement in naming a bookwormy kid after a demon-possessed rabid Saint Bernard.
Ah, Breezy Point.
Looking back on it now, my mother may have sent me to camp for reasons that went beyond simple fear for my life and the integrity of the house were I to be left to my own devices during the summer months while she was at work. Camps are full of other kids, after all, different kids than those in the neighborhood and the school. It was, perhaps, an attempt to widen my social horizons. And I did, a little. I had a couple of friends, there. Jay, who I remember primarily because he was into Star Trek and because he ran into someone trying to field a softball and bit through his tongue a bit ("like a squashed tomato," remarked ont of the Counselors); and another kid whose first name I've forgotten but whose last name was Cohen, which is appropriate because he was the first Jewish person I ever knew. I remember Vincent because of his startling resemblance to the yet-to-be-puffy Adam Ant and because of his brother, whose nickname was Igor. There was Samantha...I liked her a whole lot more than she liked me, and I remember her primarily for that and for the white bikini top she wore once without the liners in it.
So, I suppose, social expansion of a sort did happen, there. The summer I hid from the camp car that came to pick me up in the morning, which required my mom to come home from work and find me in my bedroom closet, was the last summer I went to Breezy Point. I wanted to stay home in the summers, by myself, and do whatever it was that I was doing at that stage of my life.
There were other attempts: Boy Scouts (yes, I was a Boy Scout; Life rank, if you must know), a Big Brother, D&D games with fellow Scouts. But...I was always apart, in some way. For Dungeons & Dragons I created a new character class: Interior Decorator, whose weapon of choice was a flail composed of fabric sample books on short lengths of chain. My Big Brother's fellow students at Princeton, where he studied Law, found me to be a strange and nervous boy...entirely appropriate, I think, because I was, and am.
I don't know whether it's due to ephemeral psychology or the hardwired structure of my neuronal soup kitchen, but I find Other People, in both the specific and the abstract, are a source of never-ending tension. These days, it's a fascinating combination of the two: the specific involves the high reaches of corporate bureaucracy to which I have recently made myself known; the abstract involves the collective human stupidity I see in wretched abundance every single time I glance at online news or get stuck on CNN for a few moments while my dying cable remote stalls out.
It's probably already been remarked on by someone much deader and wiser than I: individually, humans are capable of great intelligence and nobility; collectively, we're often nit-ridden monkeys throwing feces and masturbating in trees.
What would Saddam Hussein have been without his Tikrit cohorts, his sycophants, and his tongue-hacking, daughter-raping goon squads? Just another mustache. What would the machete-wielding Hutus have been without all their machete-wielding Hutu neighbors and the encouragement of government-sponsored radio broadcasts? Mass barbarity requires a mass of perpetrators before there can be a mass of victims, all reinforcing each others' behavior and, somehow, flipping on its head the moral code that's been in development for as long as we've had writing.
Similarly, it took a group of our soldiers, acting together and supporting each other, to do whatever it is, exactly, that they did to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Gharib. (I say "whatever" because although I've seen some photos, the only thing I'm certain of is that I've seen some photos. Right now there's no clear context, no real attribution, and no reliable interpretation; as such, these images don't represent knowledge. They are a phenomenon of media.)
Before I get any e-mails: my point is not to compare the savagery of the Hussein goons and the Rwandan genocide with the misconduct of our own soldiers, whatever it turns out to be.
The point is that our soldiers, and whoever else up the chain of command was involved, displayed unmitigated stupidity. That's the defining characteristic of Humans In Groups.
It doesn't matter that a pile of naked Iraqi men being mocked by a woman barely registers on the "Evil" scale when compared with routine tongue amputations, the live dissection of hands, and the melting of ears with hot iron.
What matters is that while our individual soldiers have many chances to demonstrate their quality to individual Iraqis, collectively they had one chance--one chance--to avoid screwing up royally on the propaganda front. War being war, there will always be a certain amount of fodder for anti-American propaganda: civilian casualties, targeted Mosques/armories, etc. Those who swallow that sort of story whole wouldn't be reached by anything decent that we did, anyway.
But a group of our soldiers, acting together, decided that although it was a good idea to subject the prisoners in their charge to all sorts of indignities, it was an even better idea to take hundreds of photographs of the deeds.
Then--to publicly demonstrate that as a nation, Americans value integrity, commitment, and responsibility--Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade and was in charge of administering Abu Gharib, whined to the BBC that she is a "convenient scapegoat," and pointed the finger at her successor. "Yeah, but look what he said!"
Brilliant.
How much better would this have sounded: "Although the interrogations were conducted under the authority of a separate military intelligence unit, they took place in a facility that was under my command, and it was my duty to be aware of what occurred there." That's what it means to be in command of something other than your own career.
So, in one glorious incident, a group of American humans has handed our enemies a fantastic propaganda victory, with ample documentation, and one of our Generals demonstrated to the world that you can rise within the ranks of the American Army while lacking the sense needed to avoid being a weasel in public.
Thanks a bunch, folks.
That sort of thing just makes me nuts, and I think it always has. After I was born, I slept for three days straight. I'm not kidding--they couldn't wake me up for 72 hours. I think I knew, even then. I was born by Caesarean. They cut me out, lifted me up, and I took one wet look around then screamed "PEEEEEOPLE!!!" and passed out.
So, my strategy, apparently, has been to minimize exposure, except for a few individuals here and there. Fortunately, there's the Internet, so such a strategy doesn't automatically result in shack-dwelling and the mailing of intricately handmade bombs to select members of the intelligentsia. (For more on this, see my paper "Internet-redirected Antisocial Tendencies" in the Fall/Winter '97 issue of Bearded Misfit Quarterly.)
It does, however, result in an acute observance of the trivial. For example: a 10" licensed rubber ball with a picture of Spiderman's head or Shrek's head or the Cat in the Hat on it costs as much as a 15" non-licensed rubber ball made of standard marbled rubber. That means that, per ball, Spiderman's face is worth the 392 square inches of rubber that you don't get with a licensed ball. You pay an extra .64 cents per square inch to get Your Favorite Character on a ball to bounce around.
And that's why I put that picture there.
