05.12.04 - 2:41 p.m.

When we tell stories, when we tie something up in narrative, we want it to make sense. We tell truths. We come to conclusions. We beg assurance from at least the solidity of our ever-so-slippery words. If you think them, if you say them aloud, even if you write them in some now-lesser form of writing (IMs, for example) they aren't quite real. There's no moment for reflection, or a shorter moment for reflection, no compulsion to solidity or truth, which seems to be the slipperiest concept in my whole repertoire of slippery concepts, post-modernism, post-cultural-deconstruction-feminist-marxism, post-post-post-facso-iptoism, post-graduate-theorish.

I don't trust truths. I don't trust lies. Intellectually, I park myself on the precise middle precipice of almost every issue. Well, I think I'm in the middle of every issue. Others think I'm crazily left-wing, except for the crazy left-wingers, who think I'm a fascist.

The current examples - to which I am building, which is also, I think, ulcerating my consciousness and depressing me, not needlessly, but hopelessly - are the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (or however it is spelled) prison in Baghdad and the videotaped murder of Nick Berg, from Westchester, Pennsylvania.

(And, while I'm on the subject, I'm getting teary-eyed. This is why I started with the idea of narrative as a neat bow. This is a narrative, of sorts. I would like a neat bow, but I don't have one, so I'm half-crying over the whole situation, the one and the other, the war and the dead and the humiliated, and the cacophony that inevitably erupts, the snarling tug-of-war over The Meaning Of It All. I would like to tell a story. I would like it to mean something. I would like it to mean something both now, and next time. I would like to believe in the progress of ideas, the inevitable forward march of humanity, or at least, I would like to believe that the lip service we pay to the mistakes of the past - the Holocaust, Vietnam - is perhaps a bit more than lip service, and that somehow we avoid the repeating the worst of what we have wrought. Somehow.)

Nick Berg. NPR had an interview with Nick Berg's father this morning, who claimed that his son was in Iraq because he simply wished to help people, and that he wasn't making any money there. I believe that, sort of, how could you make money there? He was not a humanitarian volunteer of some sort, but has rather been described as a "small telecommunications business owner," whatever that means. It sounds vaguely sketchy to me, what with the war zone and all, but that wasn't the strange, bizarre, wholly ironic aspect of the story.

Apparently, according to his father, Berg was picked up by Iraqi police sometime in late March, turned over to US forces, and held for thirteen days by US forces without benefit of counsel and without contact with the outside world. During his captivity, Berg's father filed a suit naming Donald Rumsfeld as a defendant for illegally holding Berg. Of course, this is precisely what is happening to Iraqis, this is precisely the same sort of wild-handed abuse of power that creates circumstances in which our soldiers abuse Iraqis imprisoned for little or no reason, at all. In any case, by the time Berg was released in mid-April, the insurgency had progressed and the in-country conditions had changed, and Iraqis were kidnapping Americans, and someone kidnapped him. I read a story earlier this morning in which the DoD denied that Berg was ever in US custody.

So, there's Nick Berg, who was apparently subjected to improper detainment by both the Americans and the Iraqi al-Qaeda insurgents, in some bitterly ironic twist.

There's Nick Berg, and then there is - Lindy, Lindsy? Something-or-other, the 21-year-old from WVa who participated in the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. Narrative, guilt, relatively: it's all part of this story. First, how stomach churning to see such behavior from our own forces, kids with a little power and too little understanding . I hate looking at the pictures. I cringe away from them every time they are on air, every time they pop up on some newsmagazine's front page (or second page, or third page). I don't want to think about them, and I absolutely hate hearing politicians mouth their stupid, second-rate truisms about such raw, clear abuse of power, such degradation. They might say it, but I mean it: we should be above this.

It would be almost as bad to wake up one day and see your son or daughter, brother or sister, on the Early Show, in stills, torturing someone else's son or daughter, and find the media camped outside your house. What do you say? I empathize with the people who want to deflect blame from their children, but at the same time I hate hearing them deflect blame. She was following orders. Wait until the whole story comes out. I have strange fantasies where I learn something similar about a student or friend and manage to craft some eloquent statement condemning the behavior without the person, standing above whatever fray erupts. Those things don't happen in real life.

Now that we've lived with those stories and images for days, for a week, for longer, the narrative (not the real one, whatever it was, with all its split ends, with its fraying, meandering center) is becoming more important than the - what, the facts? My mother says "oh, a 21-year-old girl couldn't dream that up on her own, it's not her fault." The president blames the soldiers, individually, as aberrant expressions of the American philosophy (and true that. Need it be said? Most soldiers aren't torturing Iraqis? Some are?)

They have two separate narratives, and both narratives are now struggling for dominance, while another crawls alongside. Here's my narrative: it includes equal heapings of blame (not shares, mind you. This cannot be shared. It is simply expressed exponentially. They are all to blame for all of it.) for the soldiers who engaged in the humiliation and torture of Iraqis (whether or not they were following orders. Twenty-one year olds do many stupid things, but I believe that they are of sufficient age to know the difference between harmless fun and dehumanizing and degrading torture); for the officers and supervisors who allowed or encouraged such behavior, or who created the atmosphere in which such behavior could happen; for the architects of the current system of military "intelligence" gathering, with all its outsourcing, private contractors, and other overlays that muddy up the chain of command and let that much more noise (especially in the form of completely untrained personnel) into the system; and for the architects of the current policy in Iraq, who did not prepare for war, who prosecuted a VOLUNTARY war without being sufficiently prepared for the aftermath, who hired prison administrators under investigation in the United States for a variety of problems, including the torture, sexual humiliation, and deaths of prisoners, to organize the Iraqi penal system.

In my narrative, both Lindy whatshername and George Bush are equally and wholly responsible for this mess, and only some overt confession of the same and deeply felt apology from the top will begin to - I don't know what. I'm so angry and ashamed and utterly, deeply fucking sad about the whole situation that I cannot begin to formulate that thought. What does it mean? The people who hate us will only hate us more, and the people who were neutral are likely sliding over into that camp. Meanwhile, self-important motormouth apologists refuse to acknowledge precisely how disturbing and destructive the whole situation is. Individual soldiers bear individual guilt and responsibility. The whole system bears wholesale guilt and responsibility. Both are possible in my version of the world. I wish that were true of more stories about this mess.

In five years - what will this all mean then? Will it mean anything? How do things like this happen, and how to they become history? How do they come to mean in history? What story are we going to tell? It's such a complete and utter mess, like some weird 3-D tapestry with too many broken threads fraying in all directions, and I just needed to write this down so I could find my own thread in the horrible cacophony that is erupting.