Notes on Misplacing Tragedy

[Note: Regular readers may find this particular post a bit esoteric and/or opaque. Apologies. My intent was to give words to a number of things for which I'd had little occasion or audience over the last ten or so years, and the audience in question is rather specific. If you find you're not part of it, do feel free to skip it. In the end, dispensing with shorthand and common references would've rendered this a rather boring read. Do feel free to skip it.]



Yes. So many memories. But sad? Really?

No, friends. Sad is that this selfsame NATO installation was used to carry out one of many massacres, while our vice principal was busying himself disabusing me of the notion that any institution exists to do more than perpetuate its own status quo. Sad is that prior to said massacres, and the impending UN sanctions that killed over a million people (half of them children), Iraq had one of the most secular and highly educated populations in the Arab world; certainly one of the most favorable toward women. Those fundamentalists driving payloads of explosives into produce markets? Yeah, they didn't just fall out of the sky. We created them, when we carelessly murdered their mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, wives; when we encouraged them to rise up, realized any democracy they'd establish wouldn't take orders from us, and then stood down while Saddam wiped them out; when we destroyed their health and sanitation infrastructure and banned the import of anything that might rebuild it; when we left their children to die of gang green resulting from paper cuts.

Sad? Sad was sitting at in a church at 15th and V, nine years ago, at Greg Proctor's funeral... And realizing that probably none of the Sig faculty ever apologized for making him their patsy in the infamous "Tennis Court Incident." Sad was being regaled on my morning bus jaunt from Nicolosi by a thirteen year old girl whose father routinely ordered her brother to "slap her till she bleeds" when the hot water happened to run out during her shower. Sad is that said brother took Greg's place overseeing the student council.

Sad is that no one blinked when certain athletes in our midst were quietly bee-lined Stateside when the cops came looking for the drunk americans that had put a Sicilian man in the ER during a night of rock-throwing in Motta; or when "Bum Day" was half the student body showing up with signs reading Will Work for Food. Sad was hearing all the third-party accounts of who sexually manipulated and/or abused who on whatever bus trip was masquerading as piety, charity or school spirit that particular week, and the fact that this was humored and filed under "not a problem" by every responsible party, top to bottom (never mind that said tropes remained more or less water tight).

And perhaps it's just the default american high school experience (Columbine, anyone?), but ... so many memories," as though it's somehow nostalgic? My memories involve watching my peers abuse alcohol like it was going out of style, watching them fail to experience any sort of epiphany or cognitive dissonance at the moment they found their lips around the nozzle of a gas can, retrieving them from the ER after a drunken game of "corners" (don't ask) in Motta, watching them abuse each other in some of the most vicious displays, hearing about the Ex-O's daughter poisoning a teacher's drink, seeing teachers bend the rules to cover for and enable the most thuggish and anti-intellectual of our ranks (diplomas were issued to athletes whose tirades against evolution betrayed a staggering ignorance of even the most rudimentary biology, for instance), and the recurring nightmares my first year Stateside, where I'm riding shotgun with my mother, sobbing, begging her to let me leave.

Let's not shit ourselves, last I gave it a gander (likely some eleven years ago), The Stars & Stripes was reporting that Sig's academic sphere suffered one of the worst behavior and lifestyle crises of the region. Kids setting locker rooms on fire, throwing each other through walls (in computer labs, no less), kleptomania, and youth center on the verge of structural collapse... And let's all not forget that (now legendary) incident in which a former wrestling team captain's ass-flesh was left dangling from the remains of a shattered glass pane. Anyone paying attention knew something was very, very wrong. And I'd go so far as to say that any of my peers who doesn't recall half their waking hours being swallowed up with their peers (quite rightly) verbalizing their outright misery is just plain lying. We lived for our departure the way many around the District live for Bush's last day in office, and the effort young women around me put into snagging whatever guy made for a flattering photo and envy-worthy story to send to friends Stateside (no matter how degrading, abusive, or just plain unremarkable he was in real life) was nothing short of dizzying. Most of us lived and breathed for a scenario well beyond our reach, and therein sought refuge from our actual conditions.

Perhaps most instructively, I remember the six months I got to skip my first class Mondays, to see a therapist after confessing to my mother that I'd begun to believe there might be a God, and that he had carried out every facet of his plan with painstaking precision and success... Except for one: He'd put me in a world in which all indicators suggested I was to aspire to the examples of the thuggish intellectual/ethical/spiritual bankruptcy and self-interest of my peers, or the mediocrity, resignation, and (in the worst cases) downright cowardice of the adults around me... All of this being the world He had planned; a world with which I felt fundamentally incompatible, with every inch of me that breathed... A world with which I had accepted I would never be reconciled.

She suspected I might've been suicidal, and she might not have been wrong. Sig provided me with such an unappealing (read: repugnant) sense of what adulthood and the world in general had to offer me, I'd come to accept that I probably wouldn't live beyond my early twenties. I don't say that for dramatic effect, I genuinely believed that. I'd not grown so cynical as to call it a day just then, but I was not confident that whatever cursory run I gave adulthood would be so compelling as to to prevent me from taking my leave of it shortly thereafter. And (as any who've known me for any recent period of my life can likely attest) the years since have seen me flatly refuse to hand over any quantity of my dignity, time, or energy in a gamble on my "future;" I'd given five years to one transparent lie after another, under conditions in which I had no choice. Even if longterm stability were at stake, I would never again cede my present to the idea that it would somehow pay off later. And the last twelve years have seen these legs carry me as far from what Sig offered as was physically, spiritually, and ethically possible.

The day I turned my books in and walked out, halfway through my junior year... It wasn't out of an apathy toward the life of the mind. It was the first day I'd seen my biology teacher in months, sure. But had anyone wanted to, I wouldn't have been hard to find. I was holed up in the library, reading. The school library, no less. And (quite shamefully, though perhaps desperately) much of what I was reading found its way out of the library with me. I walked out that day after being diagnosed with severe stress headaches. The closer we hurdled toward being released from that space, it seemed, the more adults around us became our cheerleaders. And for what? What exactly had we learned or become? It scared the shit out of me that anyone was satisfied with it, much less championing it. And it foreshadowed the precarious and (indeed) catastrophic mediocrity that awaited me. I left because my body could no longer take that.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I was sitting on a couch in the home of a staffer at the US Embassy in Vienna, with a friend who'd grown up in East Germany and spent five weeks of his nineteenth year incommunicado, after being imprisoned for attempting the climb the Berlin Wall. Those in my company were appalled by the story coming out of Iraq. Fully nothing about it shocked me. Nothing. It was a logical and intuitive elaboration of the very racist arrogance that served as the foundation of life in Sig; a world in which we unquestioningly celebrated, rationalized, and believed any and all in which we saw oursevles, no matter how vacuous, violent, malicious, or transparently false. A world in which we ignored, dismissed, or suppressed all in which we did not. A world in which such patterns were afforded official sanction (indeed, encouragement). And not a day passes in which I'm not absolutely terrified by the casual and indifferent gaze cast upon such worlds, much less the manner in which hindsight might leave one with a nostalgia for them.

Worse still, after all those years suffering that shit hole right next to all of you, hearing and sharing your pain (perhaps in different ways), watching you cope (often in equally disturbing ways)... I've -- in all seriousness -- mourned the fact that so many of you have opted to duck right back into that community. Not for your own sake, mind you. The world is not a cake walk, and I don't discount that material stability and lack of contingency provided by life in the military community. But I mourn that you would be so willing to possibly subject your children to what we endured. I mourn that you've forgotten what that looked and felt like.

Ultimately, whatever paths we've chosen upon getting out from under that experience (certainly, many of you have not found your way back to the military)... Seeing all the emails back and forth waxing nostalgic about Sig, and our time there, and what a shame it was to see the structure that rendered much of our experience invisible demolished...

I guess I just worry that it's a reflection of what we've failed to do with our lives, since. If something so miserable, something that often drove us to the brink of irreparable self-destruction, something that stole so much of the challenge and promise and unknown of what those years should've held for us... If that's worthy of romance, if its physical representation is worthy of mourning in contrast to what's found its way into our lives since... It perhaps marks a point of reflection.

And in that reflection, I sincerely hope that every last one of you is happier than you've ever been.