The Coda: September 11, 2006

I’ll admit, with some sense of near-surprise, that I was not upset to leave. My ticket had been set for September 18, one week later, but I was somehow able to find one day on which I could fly home without having to pay a penalty. How bizarre.

And after the day of rocket attacks in Haifa, the conversion proceedings in Jordan, the incident in Bethlehem, the cover-up in Ramallah, the awkward nest in East Jerusalem, and the protracted dissonance in the refugee camp, I figured that it would be no greater tempt of fate (at this point) to fly back to New York on September 11th.

Hassan and I split ways because his flight left three days before mine, I had two surprisingly calm nights back in Jaffa and then without the characteristic emotional fanfare, I got on the plane and left. My plans to stay another week, to visit Egypt, to report on the schools opening again in the North, to sway heavily back into Israeli culture and the old political refrain…well…I just got on the plane and left.

I can’t find a way to say that it’s different without it seeming sour. This visit being my seventh lap around the country, the ideas and how I felt there are what did change the most of any previous time. It’s not like a marathon of political exploration or a trip to subconsciously scout out real estate anymore. But it’s also not like a seventh lap around Jericho. It’s something I haven’t quite been able to place into words after about a month back in the States.

I didn’t sleep much on the flight, the inflight movie was a satire of pop culture and politics called American Dreamz. In American Dreamz, Mandy Moore feigns love for her ex-boyfriend (who goes to fight in Iraq after she dumps him and comes back after accidentally shooting himself) in order to win the fan support in a fictitious televised talent show based strictly on American Idol.

Her main competition in the show is the nephew of a Middle Eastern terrorist; the terrorist plots to have his nephew advance to the final round of the show in order to blow himself up and kill the President of the United States (who is a guest judge on the panel because of his low approval ratings). What a perfect homecoming. I watched it all three times.

My night doesn’t end in New York, instead I stay across the river in New Jersey while my subletter finishes out his month’s stay. From the quiet of suburbia, I play catch outside with my surrogate family dog and watch the news helicopters circle the “Tribute in Light” shining blue into the sky from Ground Zero.

This trance, the kind that keeps someone awake and completely engrossed in lousy movies over a twelve-hour flight, intensifies. In my surrogate kitchen, I sit down to dinner and the first Western television programming of my nascent return, George Bush’s speech on the five-year anniversary of 9/11.

a totalitarian ideology, a perverted vision of Islam, hates freedom, rejects tolerance, despises all dissent…

This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.

Had I inevitably heard this speech in my own kitchen, in my own apartment in downtown Manhattan, having not spent the previous five weeks where I did, I imagine myself feeling impressed by the speech. Its symbolic and powerful attributes, its technical achievements, syntactical balance…blah…it would have moved me. I would have called a politically-minded friend in DC or California to impersonate some of its rhetorical milestones.

Leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty…resume rightful place in a world of peace and prosperity.

Possibly from the jetlag and possibly not, I react to the speech much differently. I was still moved. But I was not quite “emboldened” by that characteristic sense of (cornball) patriotism (the kind that someone who isn’t quite making a sacrifice is infused with) which would be the standard.

After all the news and speeches and soapboxes and posturing and ideas and conventions and the hatred and the mistrust, the long bouts of hours in vans or buses and meals and streets spent with the “them” delegate of “us and them,” I found that Bush’s sentences (or Michael Gerson’s rather) sound almost the same as they do out of the mouths of the Arab contingents that Bush describes. It’s just that the “us” and the “them” are simply switched.

I know that feels trite, but never has the difference mattered more to me than it did, after weeks of hearing about how America, Israel, the West are evil, they want to bring death and suffering into Arab homes, they are the madmen who already have the nukes, they want to enslave people…I am actually shocked by how quickly I return to hear the opposite...they are literally the same sentences with subjects and pronouns reversed.

This feeling makes the idea of lasting peace seem so ridiculous now, the lines of the thinking and the blame, how they are similar and polar at the same time. It feels like the world could be three small steps from ending and three (not quite so) small steps from reconciling entirely.

And that’s how all of this has changed for me; while most of my beliefs on paper are still the same and will likely remain that way, it’s the envelope containing them that has changed shape. Does it mean that I've changed inherently? Probably? Marginally? And does it ultimately matter? I'm guessing not. At least, that’s how I feel on September 11th.