Have Mercy

This morning I was disgusted with the American people. There was Sarah Palin again, on the front page of the Post's Metro section. There she was on the home page of AOL. There she is on my Time magazine. She's lying to everyone, weathering multiple scandals, and continuing to repeat bogus claims about her position on earmarks, opposition to that famous bridge to nowhere (instead, she spent $70 million on a road that would have led to the bridge but now leads nowhere) and about her family life, among many other things. She is driving me bananas, but more so the American people, especially women. I'm starting to feel like an anti-feminist. I was so insulted when McCain picked her. "Does he think that women are stupid?" I said. "That just because he picks a woman, even those women who supported Hillary will flock to his ticket?" "It will backfire," I said. And now, he's up in the Gallup poll among white women. Maybe I shouldn't complain. Arguably, the "racial loyalty" that supports Barack Obama is akin to that "female loyalty" that leads women to support Palin. The big difference is, Democratic policies, if they can be implemented with the Republican, military-industrial, astronomical deficits we face, will help the majority of blacks. Palin is about as anti-woman as Joe Biden is pro-woman. Rampant political apathy makes me think it cannot be the case that women are simply determined to finally break that glass ceiling, come hell or high water.

Maybe women are stupid. Or maybe this is the latest slant on the "What's Wrong With Kansas" discussion that we've been having for the last 8 years -- why do people continue to vote for what they perceive as Christian family-values types (or, maybe, hunter-patriot, military-hockey mom types) rather than voting with their pocketbooks? I truly hope it isn't that people are so ill-informed, or so swayed by attack ads, that they actually believe that voting for Republicans will improve their financial lot even after the Bush and Reagan administrations proved that what happens on their watch is a "trickle-down to nowhere." But if they are actually informed, then maybe this really is a continuation of the "culture war." Us versus them, self-proclaimed born-again Christian versus --whatever, "average American" versus some kind of "elite", who supposedly all live in the Northeast. Weren't people just saying how tired they were of partisanship, gridlock, useless politicians getting nothing done? And now what? All it takes is a few negative attacks from a snippy governor who sounds like your friend from the PTA and all of a sudden people's mouths are watering for snipes and jabs?

What's the deal with the anti-"elite" rhetoric? Do people long for some kind of American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where intellectuals are rounded up and sent to farm soybeans somewhere in labor camps while paleontology textbooks are destroyed, or rewritten? Do we want to emulate countries who deride their intellectuals? And why is it that only liberals who think and carry on reasoned discourse are "elite," while Bill Kristol and those jokers at the AEI and the Independent Women's Forum are not? Do people really think Bill Bennett and James Dobson don't eat arugula? Someone on the radio yesterday -- gasp, NPR -- said, "If your kid gets accepted into a so-called 'elite' college, aren't you supposed to be proud?" Ahem. How many of us "elite" became that way because we busted our *sses in school to win scholarships and took out loans to pay for it? Lots of us, I'll wager, including Barack Obama. And what's wrong with eloquence, as long as it's backed up by brains? Do people think that Kennedy, FDR or Lincoln were intellectual slouches? It's been studied and proven that Jack Kennedy used bigger words than Barack Obama does now. Why is it that in the 60's people were inspired by that, not envious of it, while nowadays they think about whether the man knows how to bowl? I feel like the electorate tells pollsters they support McCain/Palin and a refrain from Toby Keith's song, "How Do You Like Me Now" starts playing in the background. (Don't get me started on Toby Keith.)

Most infuriating of all -- why is it that we liberal smarty-pants are the "elite," but the scads of CEOs that were trotted out to speak during the daytime, CSPAN-only portion of the Republican convention, are not? Does Carly Fiorina take her kids to hockey? Does Meg Whitman go bowling and eat at Appleby's? Why don't "average Americans" see through this baloney? Perhaps I shouldn't give up yet. Perhaps I should say that I hope that average Americans will see through this baloney, and stop voting for people whose policies will continue to enrich the richer, bankrupt the rest of us with wars based on faulty foreign policy, and leave a scarred and melted planet for our kids with no plan for the future.

Anyway, I was disgusted with the American people this morning. Then I saw the front page of the Post and remembered that it's September 11. I read the articles about memorials in New York, and about victims' families raising the money to fund the Pentagon memorial, which opens to the public tonight. I teared up reading about it, remembering it -- remembering in particular the way we felt in the immediate aftermath, in the few days afterward when you went to work in DC just to show you could, when army vehicles roamed the empty streets and anti-aircraft batteries were suddenly parked along your commuting route, when you went to the subway and actually looked into the eyes of the people around you and saw sympathy and shared sensibility in them. Below is the text of an email I sent to some friends on September 13, 2001. Note the one politician I quote, in the context of my blind anger and thirst for revenge. And may our nation one day be healed, in honor of those who died that day.


When the war began on September 11, and the enormity of what was happening began to sink in, I was situated in my office building just next to the FBI headquarters and 4 blocks from the White House. My mother, in western Pennsylvania, was hysterical, as she tried to reach both me and my brother. Call me a small-town girl, but I was frightened and I wasn't in the slightest
interested in working or even watching t.v. Since the phone wasn't working, I went out the door and went looking for my brother, about 10 blocks away. I didn't find him -- the office was closed and no one had news -- but later in the day we reconnected. He had been stuck in the snarl of traffic after the Pentagon attack. The next worry was fragmentary reports of another crash in
southwestern Pennsylvania. My father works in a defense department installation in Johnstown, where the plane was said to have crashed -- and of course I couldn't get through to him with all my technology either. The most frustrating thing was trying to get through to my mother, because I knew she was so scared and upset, and I wanted to talk to her and reassure her that everything was OK.

Through the generosity of a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, I relayed a message to Mom that everything was fine. Then I set about going home, walking through the empty, quiet streets with no cars and very few people -- only ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks.

Ever since Tuesday morning, I have been itching for revenge. I wish I could pick up a weapon myself and go after whoever did this. In fact, I cheered people like Laurence Eagleburger, Orrin Hatch and Norman Schwartzkopf, who basically suggested there was little need to determine definitively who was responsible -- this was war -- we should simply go and "take out" everyone
we know to be our terroristic enemies. I am all for it. That night, when for a while CNN was reporting explosions in Kabul which everyone assumed might be a U.S. retaliatory strike, I exulted. It wasn't true, but I still wait for the F-16s to fly over Kabul. I feel so angry and outraged -- how DARE someone attack us this way. As stories have come out since of the horrifying search for friends and loved ones, of firefighters breathing asbestos while they pick
up pieces of flesh and deposit them in special garbage bags, of children in schools with a front-row seat of people plunging to their deaths from the tops of collapsing skyscrapers in New York, of cheering Arabs in the streets, of heroes on the Pennsylvania plane who fought to their own deaths to save more lives, of the intent to strike at the very heart of our nation -- the White House and the President -- I am filled with a fury that amounts to actual bloodlust. I want
the full might of the United States to rain down on our enemies with the combined ferocity of the emotions of a nation behind it. Like an angry God.

And then, I pulled out Henri Nouwen's book Bread for the Journey, which contains daily meditations on Scripture. I was a little behind, having ignored it for a few weeks, but I wanted solace yesterday, so I began to read. Below are some of the recent entries, set forth there as if to speak to the very feelings I am having. I will stress that I don't want to accept what I read
here. Instead I agree with John McCain -- May God have mercy on the terrorists, for we will not. But Nouwen also speaks from the Word, so I am trying, with ever so much difficulty, to open my heart just a crack to hear what is written there.

[excerpts omitted]

May you have more success hearing God's Word than I have.
Anne Package