no thank yous

I went to a play tonight called ReEntry, based on interviews with US Marines returning from Iraq.  The play was decent, quite compelling at points, if politically safe.*  The audience talkback afterward was infuriating.

There is a section in the play where soldiers talk about how they feel when random people come up and thank them for their service.  It's actually a pretty interesting part of the play.  But for some reason the discussion got on this track where people were talking about saying thank you to soldiers and how words weren't enough to express their gratitude.

Out of nowhere, I started to get viscerally angry.  I mean really, deeply furious, in that way that makes you afraid to speak up because you're not sure what will come out.  I was trying really hard to form a coherent thought so I could raise my hand, but the talkback was short, and before I could get my shit together, it was over.  Then I was just more angry at myself for being unable to articulate what was pissing me off.

The play, honestly, was good.  But the perspective in the discussion was so limited.  I am all for the voices of US soldiers getting heard--I'm writing a screenplay about one--but let's be honest.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not natural disasters that US soldiers happen to have survived.  They are military occupations, and the soldiers who carry them out are occupiers.  They are also brutal counterinsurgency campaigns--the type of war that virtually guarantees torture, military terror, and the slaughter of lots and lots of civilians.  That doesn't mean we can't sympathize with US soldiers and try to understand their experiences.  Nor does it mean we should let the war criminals who call themselves our government off the hook--they are ultimately responsible.  But the least--the very least--we owe to anyone who's suffered because of these wars is to face the truth about what they are.  They are massive crimes, organized by our government, but carried out on the ground by thousands of working class men and women, who are made into perpetrators in a war they have no interest in and then abandoned to deal with the consequences by a government who doesn't give a shit about them.

I understand why, if you participated in one of these wars, this position might be a hard one to adopt.  It's not easy to admit you risked your life, and possibly killed people, for a swindle, a crime, a lie.  It is much, much easier not to question, and the US government relies on that.  It's much easier to be proud, to say you were defending your country or even just your comrades-in-arms, to believe you did your job and conducted yourself honorably, than to face the truth that there is no honorable way to conduct yourself while forcing your government's will on other people at gunpoint.

And what about those other people--the Iraqis, in this case, who were completely absent from the discussion that followed?  I know the play was about US soldiers, but the discussion could have been about anything.  And yet to hear these people talk, the Iraqis didn't even exist.  The war was all about us Americans--our experiences, our suffering, our trauma.  By the end of the discussion I was fairly disgusted.  No, alienated.  Alienated is the right word.  Because I realized how differently I see war from most Americans.

I now know a substantial number of people who've lived--and continue to live--through wars and military occupations as civilians.  I've traveled to places that are occupied and places that have been recently bombed.  I've had a few brushes with occupying soldiers myself.  And even those small, temporary experiences have profoundly altered the way I look at war.  I know enough people on the other side of the guns--some who've lived their whole lives there--that I can't not see that part of the picture.  And, on the whole, I find it much easier to identify with those people than with the ones doing the occupying.

In talking to a US soldier, I might say "I'm glad you survived."  Or "I hope you didn't see or do too many things that will damage you for the rest of your life."  Or even "I'm sorry that I and the antiwar movement I'm part of have not yet been able to stop our government from sending you over there to kill people who never did anything to either of us."  But I'd never, ever say "thank you" to someone for occupying someone else's country.

And, while I generally defend Americans as victims of the unfortunate circumstance of living in a superpower, moments like this talkbalk sometimes fill me with despair, because my worldview has been shaped by direct experience that I know not everyone can have, and at times the gap between my view of the world and that of those around me seems like a chasm.  I've dedicated a substantial portion of my life to bridging that gap using both art and activism, but at times it just feels unbridgable.  (Those are the times I dream about moving out of the US, despite the fact that that feels like giving up.)

Watching ReEntry, I couldn't help thinking of the brilliant play Aftermath, also based on interviews, but this time with Iraqi refugees who had lived through the war as civilians.  I remembered their anger--so intense, boiling off the stage, that it made some people in the theater uncomfortable.  As it should.  Americans get off the hook far too easily when it comes to reckoning with the unsanitized reality of war and the grief and anger of its victims.  I would love to see these two productions staged back-to-back.  I wonder what the talkbacks would be like after that.

On a side note: The play was underwritten by Northrop Grumman--that's right--a weapons manufacturer that makes, among other things, the B-2 bomber, F-35 fighter jet, and a variety of drones, missiles, and other killing machines.  They had a full-page ad "saluting the troops" on the back of the program and were mentioned in the opening announcements.  I know funding theater ain't easy, but this seems deeply unethical to me on the part of the theater, the playwrights and anyone else involved in making the decision.

*Side note #2: ReEntry is a perfect example of how trying "not to have a political agenda" is a political decision in itself, usually in favor of the status quo.  Talking about how we all support and honor the troops--and agreeing to be sponsored by a weapons company--are not neutral, apolitical positions.  As I've argued before, you can't make an apolitical piece of art/media about war, so why delude yourself into trying?  Take a stand and be honest about it.

every american should watch this video

On April 5, the whistleblower site Wikileaks released this video showing US soldiers in an Apache helicopter opening fire unprovoked on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad in 2007. While the initial report on the incident claimed US troops were responding to small arms fire from resistance fighters, the video shows a very different story. Among the twelve dead were a Reuters photographer and driver, which is perhaps the only reason the story did not slip into obscurity in the anonymous mass grave that is the US occupation of Iraq.

Every American should watch this video. Because this is not an isolated incident, but an everyday occurrence in Iraq under US occupation. Because we are so frequently shielded from the reality of war and occupation. Because we're paying for this. Because these soldiers, who have learned to kill so easily, have already come home, along with tens of thousands of others.

You know, I was going to write some commentary about the many ways in which this video is profoundly disturbing, and I still might in a separate post. But I think Glenn Greenwald, Dahr Jamail, and Democracy Now! have already said it better than I ever could.