Smoking guns at Sylvia Beach.
We’re at the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast. Yeah, if you’re ever here, you’re going to want to stay here; it’s cool. It’s great. Go read up on it if you like. That’s not what’s important here.
Up on the third floor, in the library, among all the other magazines and books lying about, was an old Time magazine with Colin Powell on the cover. “Where have you gone, Colin Powell?” it says, on the cover. “The Secretary of State isn’t the foreign policy general everyone thought he’d be. What’s holding him back?” Up in the corner: “Colleges of the year.” And you flip through this magazine, and it’s weird: it’s from another world. They’re talking about Aaliyah’s plane crash and Laura Bush’s book club and China’s pandas; they’re worried about that JC Penney ad where the mom tugs down her daughter’s midriff-baring jeans; and yes, they’re talking about whether Israel has the right to assassinate leaders of the Palestinian Intifadeh and the misrepresentations behind Bush’s hypocritical stem cell policy, but they’re also talking about that 14-year-old ringer who pitched in the Little League; they’re talking about Ritalin ads and the Queen of Sheba and Jonathan Franzen and South American 20th century abstractionists and Band of Brothers and how to stop pop-up ads.
What they aren’t talking about is Iraq. What they aren’t talking about is Afghanistan. What they aren’t talking about is the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What they aren’t talking about is terrorism.
The date on the cover is September 10, 2001.
Oh, but wait: they do mention Iraq. In the profile on Colin Powell, when Johanna McGeary is talking about how Powell got “‘blown off course’ by Bush’s basic principle of anything-but-Clinton,” just before they hare off into how Powell’s sensible plan for North Korea was scuttled by a Bush Administration petulant over the plan’s Clintonianness, above a Rogue’s Gallery of neocons, the “group of true believers in missile defense” who help keep Powell stuck in a box—Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle, with his house in Provence; Paul Wolfowitz; John Bolton; Lewis “Scooter” Libby—there’s a bit on how the relatively new Administration is dealing with Iraq. Allow me to quote at some little length:
When the Secretary jumped out front on Iraq, pushing to “toughen” crumbling UN sanctions against old nemesis Saddam Hussein by making them “smarter,” conservatives scoffed that meant weaker. But Powell persuaded the President—because, say aides and rivals alike, he’s very effective when he “marshalls his facts.” The Administration—and Powell—was embarrassed later, when Russia rebuffed the plan.
And as soon as Wolfowitz, a zealous advocate of “regime change” in Baghdad—backing dissidents to overthrow Saddam—settled into his office, he told European parliamentarians that Powell was not the last word on sanctions or Iraq policy. Enthusiasm is building inside the Administration to take down Saddam once and for all. Powell too would love to see Saddam unhorsed, says an official at State. “But you need a serious plan that’s doable. The question is how many lives and resources you have to risk.” Powell’s unwillingness to fight any less-than-total war is legendary, and the particulars of launching a covert insurgency among the feuding Iraqi opposition factions would give any general pause. The proposition is still “hypothetical,” he told Time. But plenty of others on the Bush team are gung-ho.
So right now I feel a little sick and I’m going to close this file and put it away and open it later when I have a hook-up and can drum up some links to flesh this out. But right now I don’t even feel angry, and I’m not even surprised. The day before the towers fell, and terrorism became job one and missile defense took a back burner, and it’s clear as day we’re going to be making more of Iraq before the next election. Nothing changed the day after this magazine came out, for all that it’s from another world. We just got an excuse. We got our motivation. We got a backstory we could mumble to ourselves before we got into character.
And it’s not like this is something I suddenly learned or anything, and I hardly imagine it’s news to you. They’ve been gunning for Iraq since the late ’90s, after all. Why else do you think Rumsfeld scribbled “Judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not” while the Pentagon still smoldered?
It’s just that it’s still startling to see it all laid out so neatly and cleanly: a story so blatantly in violation of what’s supposed to be true in the pages of a popular news magazine, where just about anyone could stumble over it. Except it’s from another world: one just over two years old, and already just about lost over the event horizon of the memory hole. —It’s fitting, I suppose, that the lies we continue to tell ourselves are this naked and this easily pierced, this easily ripped away. (These lies are shredded every day, after all. The mediascape is littered with so many smoking guns that we can’t make them out for the smog.) —What we’ve done and what we’re still doing is so awful, so misguided, so monumentally stupid, that the arrancy of the nonsense we choose to believe is a sign of the lengths to which we’ll go to avoid seeing the truth.
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Sylvia Beach Hotel is neat. I stopped by there about ten years ago -- I'd like to stay there some day.
I heard that place was built on an old pelican graveyard. I hope your sleep wasn't interupped by any pelican poltergeists.
When I went to bed on Sept. 10, 2001, I was stewing because Ed McCaffrey, my star wide receiver, broke his leg in the Monday night game.
Little did I know that would be insignificant the next day.
Amy and I will try to make it to Sylvia Beach in January; we planned to go last year on New Year's Day, but I was laid up with the flu the entire last week of the year into the first two days of the new year.