LUDIC LOG

Today's entry won't be entertaining or funny or insightful. It will be maudlin and confused and defensive and scattered. It will reflect the enervating conflict of mind that the events inspiring it have held me in for the last year. Anyone seeking an escape from the bloody muddle of this grim commemoration will be forgiven for skipping this one.

I have too much I want to say, too little space in which to say it, and too small a faith in my ability to choose and arrange the proper words. I offer no remorse for this, though; what happened on the 11th of September, 2001, when a handful of men consumed by religious fervor took thousands of people's lives, is a subject worthy of a dozen books and a million thoughts, not a single page on a single day. Like most important topics, it is infused to its very core with a daunting, damning complexity that I do not even pretend to address. So, I offer nothing but a few scattershot thoughts, and I'm not sorry.

It is a sad typicality that the thousands who died a year ago have long since ceased to be individuals save to those who knew them. They are abstractions, symbols, and pretexts; they are heroes, they are victims, they are object lessons. We cannot seem to resist the urge to transform human beings into conceptual currency, from the "martyrdom operations" of Islamic terror to the "human capital" of American business.

Can we ever know them, these silent dead, the way we know our wives, our mothers, our sons and brothers? Not unless that's what they were. Our capacity to mourn them is necessarily limited. And that's what makes the geographic and metaphoric distance of alien dead all the more serviceable to those whose response to a pile of corpses is to make a bigger pile of corpses.

There is only one way I know to react to needless death: to remember it, and to realize that there was nothing unique about it. This is where I stand: we have been presented with mindless death. We must not respond with mindless death. Anyone we know could have been in the towers; anyone they know could have been on that rock. Amongst them there are men who scream war, and set the lives of innocents as the price of victory; Americans use a different language but are preaching the same sermon. We cannot sleep, thinking that another attack may come, and none of us regardless of our personal attitude towards this incomprehensible struggle feels safe from sudden death; in faraway lands in rough beds watched by strange gods, their sleep is equally fitful. An airplane turned missile does not discriminate; a bomb is not interested in justice.

Still there are those who hold nothing but scorn for sympathy towards an enemy's death,. There are those who say there is moral rectitude in playing mathematical games with blameless lives. There are always voices shouting out that the answer to terror must be the indiscriminate flinging of fists in a crowded room. The world, clearly, is not yet become too small for fanaticism.

It seems difficult for those who claim knowledge of the proper response to accept the notion that the desire to see a vast crime punished can coexist with the desire to avoid perpetrating an equally vast crime. It cannot be admitted that reminders of the genocide of American Indians, the systematic oppression of African-Americans, the repulsive legacy of American foreign policy, are not offered as the instinctive hatred of a self-abnegating fifth column, but as a desperate reminder of how horribly, awfully, murderously wrong we have been in the past, in the hopes that we do not do something equally horrible, awful and murderous in the future.

Already I have gone on for far too long, saying nothing at great length, no more sure of where I stand, what I believe, what I think should be done than I was at the top of the page, or, more to the point, than I was one year ago today. I am still entangled in sharp wires of doubt, of skepticism, of uncertainty and ambiguity. I am not paralyzed; I'm tearing myself up trying to dig my way out. But I lack the plain, blunt certainty of so many.

This bothers me; not because I dread my own lack of resolve, but because I fear the assurance of those who are certain. I am worried that many in my country -- perhaps even my friends, my family -- regard me as a mere hate-based nonentity who lacks the perspective to appreciate the preeminence of American dead over other any considerations. It does not seem disrespectful of those who died to note that the American government lies a lot. They lied to the slaves. They lied to the Indians. They lied to the Filipinos, the Cubans, the Japanese. They lied about Tuskegee and Russia and Watergate and Spain and communism. They're still lying about taxation and drugs and missile defense. They lied about Iraq, they lied about the Taliban, they lied about Pakistan, and they lied about al-Q'aeda. The racist fantasy being concocted about Saddam Hussein's responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing is one of the most egregious and offensive lies that this country has ever cranked out, an almost unthinkable insult to those who died there. Is it that impossible, then, that a state of skepticism about who's responsible for the death of innocents and who must, therefore, be punished, springs not from a rabid anti-Americanism, a guilty self-doubt, or an effeminate lack of will, but from a simple knowledge of history, and a fervid desire to not be on the side of someone -- anyone -- bringing death and fear?

These tangled wires of ambiguity, doubt, confusion and uncertainty, they weigh me down. I don't like them. They don't make me happy or proud or confident in my judgment. They make me frustrated, angry and sad. But they don't bother me nearly as much as the terrifying confidence of those who are completely sure of what we must do. I need doubt; I need to be confused, to be lost. The people trying to show me the right way are leading me to a destination I want to avoid.

So, is this all there is? Yes. In the end, that's all there is. Millions of words, none of them telling truth that could be called absolute, because there is no such truth, not that we can all agree upon. And so we are left with the exact same thing we had this time last year: thousands dead, and a terrible sadness.