4/5/2002


Well. That epic series of essays I wrapped up (more or less) in mid-March took ages to cobble together, and as I write this I'm still working on reorganizing it. I'm still reading the news; maybe a little less intensely than before, but making the same rounds. In all honesty it feels like the intensity has dropped because new things are happening a little less frequently, or things of a new sort. Or maybe it's just that what's happened in the last two or three weeks is less new to me because I'd been reading the news before that.

At this point the news is overwhelmingly about Israel and Palestine, which of course is deeply related to the things I've been writing about, but not in any surprising way. There is definitely a lot of terrorism committed by Palestinians; there is more, and more thorough, terrorism being perpetrated by Sharon and the IDF, as much against civilians as anyone. Lately Israel has banned journalists from the region and has been shooting at the press--a sure sign of informed and deliberate wrongdoing nearby.

Public debate on the subject is fairly predictable; some paint the Palestinians as utterly innocent martyrs, and Arafat as a hero (he's no such thing or he would have stayed at the table when Barak was trying to make a deal) while others portray them as a united front of terrorists in a shockingly unexamined way. The Palestinian situation is a complex one, and no one party can speak for all that people. Israel, meanwhile, is defended or reviled by the respective folks you might expect. Its defenders all too often wave the antisemitic label at either the Palestinians or all the Arabs or anyone anywhere who gainsays Israel in any matter at all. Sometimes they go to the furthest extreme, comparing any anti-Israel sentiment to Nazism.

I thought about all that for a while, and finally I decided that one group of people could not simultaneously wage a war of conquest and be (reasonably) regarded as a downtrodden underdog. Israel waged a successful war of conquest in 1967, and has been an occupying army in the disputed area ever since. And that, pure and simple, is what the fighting is about right now. Mind you, the Jewish people have indeed been oppressed, as we all know, and antisemitism is still shockingly rampant in the world. But the nation of Israel is not the Jewish people. It is a nation-state and currently it is on a rampage of human rights abuses.


So the news keeps happening. But at a certain point I have to remind myself that I cannot comment on all of it as it goes by, much as I might like to. Trying to keep abreast of it all at once, over the last few months, took over my life to a surprising extent. Nothing is really news in Palestine; the collapse of the American Constitution is news, and the news isn't reporting it very loudly.

The last batch of writing began as one quick essay and burgeoned to fourteen as stunning developments outpaced my effort to find time to research and discuss them all. It's been a strange and volatile time, and the topics I did write up were sort of inevitable, as more and more reading kept drawing them tightly together into a single, coherent, harrowing story.

I had to leave a lot of less interconnected developments untouched, but I read about a great many things other than the subjects I was seeking. One particular shock hit me when I learned that Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and of some of the most incisive commentary on my country's conduct since September, had been briefly jailed over her opposition to a dam in India. The jail time wasn't shocking, and hearing a snippet of her non-international activism was no surprise either. But at the end of this article came these sentences: "Roy's prize-winning novel, a tale of a twin brother and sister in southern India, became an international best-seller. But she has not written any fiction since, taking up cudgels instead against the dam project." Reading that made my blood run cold.

I've been writing about politics not because I love politics--I think anybody who loves politics qua politics has a screw loose--but because the events have been extraordinary, and because there is a real and imminent danger to everyone buried in the unhinged progress of current events. I think everybody needs to lay down their usual work right now and pay attention to the murderous band in Washington who have dedicated themselves to unwriting the Constitution and to maximizing corporate profits even if it means the destruction of life as we know it in half a dozen ways at once. It's incredible, even saying it sounds like obsessive rhetoric, but honestly I'm just reciting the facts as I have been finding them. The state of affairs is that crazy. It demands attention; I feel compelled to sound the alarm about it.

But I don't want this to be my life. I have plans. Lots of them. I want to settle down and have a family and play guitar and get a dog and be a happy person, and devote my energy above all to writing good fiction. I want nothing to do with campaigns and petitions and shrill rhetoric and protests in the street. I want to be safe without having to stand up and defend even the most basic of rights.

For the time being, I will be safe if only I have the sense to shut up and carry a flag and maybe move out of Manhattan. But that won't last unless something changes. We're making enemies abroad as fast as we can figure out how to; and more pressingly for our own American lifestyles, we've seen most of the Bill of Rights annulled by the "Patriot Act" and the decrees of John Ashcroft. We've seen a presidential election summarily discarded by the Supreme Court, acting outside its jurisdiction by any measure; we've seen the White House lightly declare that not only the activities of Bush and Cheney but even "presidential advisors" are above answering to the call of Congress itself. As easily as this, the old safeguards of the Constitution are running afoul of new ground; they are falling apart around our ears. Stories from The Ivory Coast, from Uganda, from Ecuador, about elections being rigged or denied, people taking to the streets--they seem a little less far away now. It's clear to me, at least, that a dedicated team of saboteurs really can flout the Constitution and our historical state stodginess enough to bring things to such a head at home.

Down the road a few years, if Washington doesn't manage a quick about-face, we will feel the results of this year whenever a big corporation wants to lock down a captive customer base, or wants to legislate a competitor out of existence, or just generally pollute the hell out of everything at the public expense. The overarching organizations that chiefly make it possible for them to do this--the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank--have been subject to ever-increasing public protest, following them around the world as they move their secret meetings from one remote location to another, ringed by armed police, tear gas and razor wire. Now, under the Patriot Act, demonstrators trying to assemble peaceably to protest the rapacious activities of these organizations can be subject to harsher treatment than ever--and already, as we saw here in New York at the World Economic Forum meetings, many will seek to equate "protester" with "terrorist" in the media. It could get very hard to stand up to anything at all that a corporation feels like doing. It's the road toward some ofthe ugliest dystopian societies science fiction has cooked up.

I can't stop talking about it. I can't keep talking about it all the time. I'm feeling a little trapped. I don't want to give up my real writing. I don't want to ignore events of huge and immediate importance.


The Spring Offensive of the Snail

Living someplace else is wrong
in Jerusalem the golden
floating over New England smog,
above paper company forests,
deserted brick textile mills
square brooders on the rotten rivers,
developer-chewed mountains.

Living out of time is wrong.
The future drained us thin as paper.
We were tools scraping.
After the revolution
we would be good, love one another
and bake fruitcakes.
In the meantime eat your ulcer.

Living upside down is wrong,
roots in the air
mouths filled with sand.
Only what might be sang.
I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
The journey is too long
to run, cursing those
who can't keep up.

Give me your hand.
Talk quietly to everyone you meet.
It is going on.
We are moving again
with our houses on our backs.
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.
Pack the Kapital and the vitamin E,
the basil plant for the sill,
Apache tears you
picked up in the desert.

But remember to bury
all old quarrels
behind the garage for compost.
Forgive who insulted you.
Forgive yourself for being wrong.
You will do it again
for nothing living
resembles a straight line,
certainly not this journey
to and fro, zigzagging
you there and me here
making our own road onward
as the snail does.

Yes, for some time we might contemplate
not the tiger, not the eagle or grizzly
but the snail who always remembers
that wherever you find yourself eating
is home, the center
where you must make your love,
and wherever you wake up
is here, the right place to be
where we start again.

Marge Piercy


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