View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Two weeks later the Haitian government announced election results from this region, with UN blessing: government wins 62 percent of the vote, opposition parties 38 percent. I watched all the ballots burn before anyone had counted them; they were still bound in boxes. I wrote a memo to UNHQ detailing the fraud. They answered that because my memo was transmitted without the signature of my boss, it was not an official communication, so therefore headquarters could not officially respond to my memo. [...]
November 1995, Port au Prince
I'm just now starting to realise how much this book affected the way I see the world. My MUN resolution (at THIMUN Singapore?) on accountability within the UN was almost entirely based on what I learned from this book, and it provided the basis of my focus on institutional/structural issues (which I feel leads nicely into understanding capitalism)
One day someone at UNHQ will commission an official report about this disaster, replete with mea culpas and lessons learned. But for me there's only one lesson and it's staring right at me every day as I eat lunch: If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs. I learned that the day we were evacuated from Haiti.
Srebrenica, July 1996
I set out to save lives and have ended up collecting the dead. Somewhere along the line, I lost sight of treating people and became obsessed with my own grandiose ideals of service. But there is no redemption in this. I've worked myself into the ground only to end up doing the very thing my parents begged me to avoid. I've ended up serving myself.
All that is left now is to hold on for that day, sometime after the first snowfall, when my deputy will radio me from the grave with the news that our backhoe has finally hit undisturbed earth at the bottom and the last of the dead are back above ground. When I receive that message, I'll drive out into the stubble of the cornfields, stand alone on the edge, and stare down into that gaping hole one last time. Then I'll get go of this millstone of belief and ideals that's breaking my neck, watch it tumble down and sink slowly into the mud at the bottom. I've had it with our humanitarian hubris. Let the dead bury the dead.
Afterward I'll give the final order of my brief but eventful forensic career, this time to the engineer. Bulldoze in this hole and bury my youthful illusions. Then I'll crack open a beer and drink a toast. Farewell death, you son of a bitch. Here's to the rest of my life.
Srebrenica, July 1996
We actually set out to save the world. That is what was insane — not ten-year-old warlords with bad breath and voodoo fetishes in Liberia, not Matt's assassin, not the boss in Somalia who set us up for an ambush in exchange for a fifteen percent kickback on the judges' salaries, not the Hutu militias who butchered a minority who had repressed them or the Tutsi survivors who executed the suspects — but me, for thinking I could enter a war and personally restore order.
So that's the easy answer: forswear idealism; resign myself to a sad maturity; put away the things of youth; be thankful I survived and move on. But that's horseshit too, a craven capitulation. I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naïve and romantic and idealistic — the part of yourself you treasure most — to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? If everyone resigns themselves to cynicism, isn't that exactly how vulnerable millions end up dead?
When the Cold Was ended, the power of freedom, democracy and hope weren't abstract concepts; they were palpable in the Iraqi desert, across the Berlin Wall, in Tiananmen Square, atop Yeltsin's tank. That hope crescendoed for us in Cambodia. So we piled into Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia — missionaries, mercenaries, and madmen with no understanding of the history, politics, or culture but with Land Cruisers, military-issue radios, malaria pills, and the sure knowledge that we were on the right side of history.
What a feeling. Andrew wanted to bind the wounds of innocent war victims, hoping to find grace. Heidi embraced the freedom-born-of-emergency determined to liberate herself and, in the process, as many women as she could touch. I planned to harness the power of an ascendant America to personally undo the Holocaust. Don't laugh. We were young. We weren't the first, and won't be the last, to venture forth overseas with grand ideas.
Then eighteen Rangers fell in Somalia and suddenly history started moving in the wrong direction. Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia were all in flames, burning the remains of our innocence. One million civilians we promised to protect died on our watch. There are many competing versions of this story — U.S., UN, NATO, EU. But we were there and capital letters always lie and our version has no meaning if no one renders it.
So I make the conscious choice to believe again: we did not misspend our youth. At least we can bear witness. I did save lives and I did earn my way into Dr. Andrew's club. The act of rendering is therefore mine. l won the right, I am the owner of that privilege.
There is a plaque in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum In Jerusalem, which reads, 'The Jewish people will never forget the righteous among the nations who endangered their lives in order to save Jews from the Nazi murderers and their collaborators. In their praiseworthy deeds they saved the honor of mankind.' I have a copy of these words over my desk and I look at them every day on my way out. Who saved the honor of mankind in Rwanda? Or Bosnia? Or, God help us, Liberia? But I have another quote from the exit of Yed Vashem over my desk, which reads, 'Son of man, keep not silent, forget not deeds of tyranny, cry out at the disaster of a people, recount it unto your children and they unto theirs from generation to generation.'
I don't know who saved the honor of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that an ancestral memory of tyranny commands me to keep not silent.
There is no ambiguity here. I am a witness. I have a voice. I have to write it down.
this passage hit me at a pivotal moment in my self-development as a writer and I can still feel its influence even today
But it’s utterly ridiculous to say that people are vile. If we step outside and pay a brief visit to the nearest supermarket or the nearest café, we’ll find ourselves in a position to see, scattered perhaps among scenes of ugliness and greed, examples of behavior that is thoughtful or kind, moments when someone could easily have been cold or cruel but in fact was not. Perhaps we will see the very same person do something harsh and a moment later something gentle. Everyone knows that this element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there’s something particularly disingenuous about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it’s already over.
One of my daughters teaches in a state college in which the aspirations of most of the students are to become a nurse or a policeman. The first day of class (she teaches history) she usually asks her students to identify their class background. And it turns out there are two answers. Either they’re middle class, or they’re [part of the] underclass. If their father has a job, like as a janitor, they’re middle class. If their father is in jail or transient, then it’s underclass. That’s it. Nobody’s working class. It’s just not a concept that exists. It’s not just here—it’s true in England too. I was in England a couple of months ago at the time of the Cannes Festival, when Michael Moore won, and one of the papers had a long interview with him, and the interviewer was suggesting that Michael Moore wasn’t telling the truth when he said he came from a working-class background. He said he came from a working-class background, but his father had a car and owned a house, so, you know, what’s this crap about coming from a working-class background? Well, his father was an auto worker! I mean, the whole concept of class in any meaningful sense has just been driven out of people’s heads. The fact that there are some people who give the orders and others who follow them—that is gone. And the only question is, How many goods do you have?—as if, if you have goods, you have to be middle class, even if you’re just following orders.
People are trained—and massive efforts go into this—people are trained to perceive their identity and their aspirations and their value as people in terms of the things they amass. Nothing else. And in terms of yourself, not anyone else.… It’s kind of interesting to watch this campaign against Social Security going on, and to see the attitudes. I see it even among students. And the reason certain people hate Social Security so much is not just that if you privatize it, it’s a bonanza for Wall Street. I’m sure that’s part of it, but the main reason for the real visceral hatred of Social Security is that it’s based on a principle that they want to drive out of people’s heads—namely, that you care about somebody else. You know, Social Security is based on the idea that you care whether the disabled widow on the other side of town has enough food to eat. And you’re not supposed to think that. That’s a dangerous sentiment. You’re supposed to just be out for yourself. And I get this from young people now. They say, Look, I don’t see why I should be responsible for her. I’m not responsible for her. I didn’t do anything to her. I mean, if she didn’t invest properly or, you know, something like that, that’s not my business. Why do I have to pay my taxes to keep her alive? And why do I care if the kid down the street can’t go to school? I mean, I didn’t keep him from going to school.
<3
WS: Yes.… I feel like saying that your approach to discussing these things is a bit like the approach of a sculptor—with hammer and chisel you attack the big block of marble, and from a certain point of view, all your gestures could be seen as rather hostile or aggressive as you pursue the somewhat negative activity of cutting down the stone, but in the end something rather glorious is revealed. I think you’re suggesting that to live in illusion, to be a slave to the worldview of your time and place, or to be all your life a follower of orders—these are all in a way different forms of oppression. But I think you’re suggesting that all human beings have the capacity to collaborate in the task of guiding their own lives—and the life of the place where they work, the life of their community, the life of the world. It would be so amazing if people could take that possibility seriously.
Yesterday I walked through a neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings on shabby streets, and I ate lunch in a lousy restaurant. The bread was hard, and the lettuce was rather stiff as well. But to tell you the truth, the experience wasn’t that bad. I could survive some lousiness, some uncomfortableness, some decline. Back on the street, I kept walking for a while and wondered what would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there under the sand, if we decided not to try to dominate the world. We’d have no control over what would happen. We’d let go and fall. How far would we sink? How far? How far? Sure, it’s been great, the life of comfort, good lunches, predictability. But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed—I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.
<3
Well, I didn’t expect to be understood, and I quickly realized that I’d never be able to “make my living” as a writer of plays (assuming as I did, without ever thinking about it, that my “living” obviously had to include at least the minimum of bourgeois amenities—telephones, heating, “good food,” etc.).
Clearly it was an odd position. There was a certain ghostliness, one might very well say, about writing for people who probably wouldn’t be interested. And that sense of a flat landscape stretching out forever was heightened by the fact that, as a writer for the theatre, I was not joining an artistic community committed to any particular struggle or agenda. The cafés of the Impressionists and the bars of the Abstract Expressionists had no equivalents on the streets I traveled. I didn’t live in a world like Renaissance Florence, in which sculptors vied for the honor of putting their particular subtly different vision of a hero or a god in a public square, because as far as I could see there were no types or models toward which I ought to strive, no public squares, and, in a way, no public.
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine’s ballets? Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico’s frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day’s newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
In the corner of the universe where I’d be writing, there’d been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that behaviorists would consider the only possible system for teaching a dog or a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally free.
Well then, what was the outcome? Was the game lost or won? Were the plays worthwhile and valuable, or weren’t they? Regrettably, I may never know. Freedom and self-confidence enabled me to write ambitious plays. I amused myself, and then I died, I suppose, with the results of the experiment still undetermined.