God Damn The Naughts
Jules Crittenden
http://www.julescrittenden.com/2009/12/31/god-damn-the-naughts/We watched the sun drop on the last day of the 1990s and the Second Millennium; myself, a Boston Herald photog and assorted others, looking west from among the old Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives. A choir of Carmelite nuns emerged by the gates of Gethsemane to sing sweetly at the sunset, which was silhouetting Muslims walking atop the Temple Mount, toward the domed mosque of Al Aqsa, from which we could hear the mezzuin calling them in. It was like the past was being put to bed, even as everything continued on in this ancient place one more day at a time.
There was nothing doing in Jerusalem that night, the rabbis having nixed that, so the Herald photog and I hightailed it for Bethlehem, where the Palestinian Authority was putting on a big show.
(Bet-lay-chhem. You learn how to pronounce it like the locals do. Sounds better that way. Not so sappy, not so “Little town of …” )
About 20,000 Palestinians and a handful of tourists were working their way into Manger Square. We went up on the roof of the municipal building, opposite the Church of the Nativity and the big lit-up concert stage in front of it, for a great view of events unfolding. Moments before the clock hit 2000, according to plan, the Palestinian Authority cops in blue camouflage began opening crates to release 2,000 doves, as a symbol of peace. But doves sleep at night and were disinclined to cooperate. The cops had anticipated this, and were shining mini-floodlights on them.
No results. The cops started shaking the crates and banged on them a bit. The doves adopted that startled, concerned, head-bobbing pigeon look, but still weren’t leaving. So the exasperated cops just started grabbing birds by the handful and throwing them out over the square, to fly around symbolically like they were supposed to.
At this point there was nothing for the doves to do but start gamely circling, higher and higher, trying to get a bearing on home, wherever that was. And that’s when the clock struck midnight, the millennial odometer tripped over, and the fireworks extravaganza began. Right about at dove level, which was right in front of our faces up on the municipal building’s roof.
This created a situation, forcing the doves to dodge and dart among the brilliant, multi-colored blasts. It looked like a fearsome air battle out there. Looking over the parapet, I noticed some Arab kids in the crowd below tracking doves with bottle rockets. Then all at once, the way flocking birds do things, the doves decided they had had enough. They oriented in on the rooftop where their crates were and began diving in, pelting newscasters, assorted members of the international press corps, plus a lot of Palestinian VIPs, amid explosions of feathers.
It was a magnificent chaos, but it was time to file, so we made our way down six packed flights of stairs out into the square where, the show over, 20,000 Palestinians all decided to go home at once through a few narrow Biblical alleyways. We were immediately taken off our feet and swept along by the crowd. I lost sight of Garo, the Herald photog, an Armenian quickly indistinguishable in the Arab crowd.
“This is a very bad situation,” I shouted to Andre, a Russian photog pal who was being carried along about 10 feet away, his blond shock of hair sticking up like a beacon.
“It is important not to panic!” advised Andre. He had survived a bad crowd scene when AC/DC played Moscow, plus horrific beatings as a Red Army conscript, and knew what he was talking about.
It’s always good advice in dire circumstances, as the Naughts would remind us again and again, and I minded it that night. Shortly afterward, miraculously maybe, but through no effort of our own, the crowd spat us out like watermelon seeds into a centuries-old alley, all three of us within a few minutes next to each other. We tumbled down the hill, found our car and got the heck out of Bethlehem. Bet-lay-chhem.
The Holy Land is in the business of producing omens, and the inability of Palestinian cops to coordinate with another species on peace symbolism wasn’t the only portent it offered up at the end of the last millennium. A few days earlier, the Herald photog and I had raced down from the Golan where we had been doing a mood piece on the anticipated Israeli-Syrian peace talks. We made Tel Megiddo at sunset, and the watchman liked our press cards enough to let us in.
Up on the ancient mound of Armageddon, we could see Nazareth to the east, Mount Tabor, and the pass down to the Mediterranean. We were surrounded by, in fact atop the scene of many ancient and terrible battles. It wasn’t for nothing John of Patmos in his cave settled on Armageddon as the place where the world would end. It had been doing that on a regular basis there for centuries.
The sky was afire, blood red and terrible overhead. It looked great, very apocalyptic. But Garo needed someone to shoot amid the ancient wreckage of 16 cities, and I needed someone to quote. I caught a flash of black in the corner of my eye, a caped figure bounding across the old fallen stones at some distance.
“Look, it’s the Angel of Death,” I said. “Let’s go get him.”
By the time we ran him down in among some rocks, he had taken the form of a long-haired, heavily tattooed, Bible-quoting car park attendant from Albuquerque. I asked if he was here waiting for the End Times, for the Great Final Battle between Good and Evil. He gave me a look like I didn’t get it, and said, “That’s been going on for some time. It’s going on all around us. You just can’t see it.”
Garo and I gave each other a look. It was a time of relative contentment, prosperity, no trouble on the horizon. In the much-fought-over Holy Land, it looked like peace was possible between Israelis, the Palestinians and even the Syrians. Religious violence seemed to have expired in Ireland. Even the millennial terrorist attacks that scared off the expected mass pilgrimage had failed to materialize. It was all a lark. Trouble, violence, slaughter all things of the past. We were having a good time. But our tattooed friend up on the ancient tel at Armageddon was right. The battle was raging.
God damn the Naughts.
My mother, who enjoyed writing ”2000″ on letters and checks, died in September of that year. I would miss her, her calming influence and advice, as this decade unfolded. She had lived a full life and went quick, for which I’m grateful, and I’m glad she didn’t have to see what followed. She had seen enough in her own century. I’ll tell you, though, I felt her presence more than once when it counted.
That was my family’s unsettling loss. Shortly followed things we all shared.
The USS Cole bombing in Aden in October of 2000 was trouble pounding at our door. And on Sept. 11, 2001, it burst in, all the trouble that had been raging around us, that most of us had failed to notice. My memory is of the planes emptying out of the sky, one by one, each of them having a menacing quality as they flew through the same airspace over Boston through which two of the hijacked plans had departed a couple of hours earlier that morning. On the TV monitors at work, we watched the Twin Towers fall. A Boston Herald photo editor informed me that a colleague’s father was in there. The 2,973 innocent victims were the first of the many dead we would come to know in this decade.
God damn the Naughts.
For some of us, it would be a lost loved one or neighbor, or someone that someone else knew and loved. For others, it would be the faces of those they had seen killed before their eyes. For a few, it would be the faces of those they had themselves been compelled to kill. I know men intimately who I have never met. Because I saw them die. I never expected that.
Some of us would send sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers off to war, and not always get them back. If they did come back, they were not the same people who had left, changed inside if not maimed outside. We would know those people or perhaps even find ourselves one of them, coming back forever changed, innocence and peace of mind taken way, in a world that would be peopled with the dead. We were supposed to have advanced beyond all that by now, to have become superior to misery, but we learned that is an unreasonable expectation in this world. Instead, like others I know, I learned something else unexpected. I was not only capable of remaining calm and functioning in combat, I enjoyed being there. I was capable of ruthlessness.
God damn the Naughts. It was a perverse decade, in which that thing so many responsible people had agreed was the right thing to do, the removal of a dangerous, mass-murdering dictator, was strangely rendered not just unnecessary but an evil act, by an unexpected twist of fate. The accusations of lies were themselves lies, all of it built on a tyrant’s framework of lies, that together became an unquenchable fire that just burned hotter. It was as revolting as the stench of death, the way they tried to make it meaningless and wrong. Except that death is honest.
That war dragged on and became a wretchedly divisive thing. Not only in the way it divided our nation. It cost people friendships. I saw some, friendships decades old, walk away. I walked away from others. It was an embittering experience. The thing that it became deepened political cynicism beyond what many of us might have imagined, as accusations of scheming met with accusations of political betrayal, cowardice, and opportunism, even as both sides claimed to represent the best interests of our nation, our soldiers and the world. It caused people to reconsider and switch their allegiances.
God damn the Naughts. It forced me to take sides. I never wanted to do that, and generally, like most, had successfully avoided doing so. My profession had made the idea of it anathema, though when it happened, I finally was ready to admit that had in large part been a lie.
It became so many things I never expected. It was a decade that demonstrated what a bitter thing winning could be. Remember how, despite the opposition party’s best political efforts to abandon a war effort and abandon a nation to deadly chaos, our political and military leadership found a way to prevail there? Most people have forgotten. The more than 4,300 Americans dead in Iraq don’t need to have died in vain, though the commonly accepted narrative will be that they did. They did something good there, for that nation whose future was always written in blood, for a region that was stabilized and shown that democracy is possible. Things are possible that couldn’t have been imagined before. But the only satisfaction from all of that is of the sort that can barely be spat out in words … You see, we’ve done it. You tried to stop us … Make no mistake. Thumbs up or thumbs down, here or there, we all own a piece of it. So many fought so hard, and would not be denied. It had to be done and now it has been.
God damn the Naughts.
It was odd, how people turned to the kind of naivete that got us into all of that in the first place. Maybe they expected a cheap kind of messianic deliverance. That’s not so odd. In dire times, people have always wanted the easy out. I remember as well the unexpected feeling of relief when they had their way. They wanted it, let them have it, as one friend said. That feeling wouldn’t last long.
We were now facing an economic collapse, the sudden onset of which stunned both our political and financial leaders, yet another obvious threat out in plain sight that no one had quite noticed, and each side immediately blamed on the other. After years of war and deepening political divisions, hundreds of thousands of us faced the prospect of losing homes and jobs. Another fundamental fear we were supposed to have transcended decades ago had resurfaced, and it isn’t clear yet that it is ready to subside. As it happens, it was just the latest of a series of blows to my own profession, the newspaper business, which would in this decade be laid low by this marvelous tool of the devil, the Internet. It revived popular literacy and caused an explosion of information, and threatened to destroy all of the fundamental infrastructure of both. It gave the people a voice, new avenues of power, and new means of exacting accountability. And showed just how base, vile and petty people could be.
God damn the Naughts.
A great moment in our nation’s history, the election of the first black president, was mired in vile accusations of racism that were debunked not least by the facts of repeated elections, but still opposition to his political proposals were dismissed as bigotry. Ironically, one of the most straightforward tutors in modern race relations ultimately was not the president himself, but a white cop who was wrongly denounced, and bore it with grace.
Damn the Naughts. In its closing months, as if to add insult to injury, this damned decade showed, finally, how a charismatic young president’s utter lack of accomplishment, his disparagement of past sacrifice and achievement .. and worse, vain lip service to it … and even destructive behavior toward our allies can be heralded as great deeds in themselves, bestowed the world’s highest honor. It has been a bizarre display. But there is at least the hope, as the decade closes and the anti-war president has committed himself to some kind of victory in Afghanistan, that he might grow in office and the sacrifices and hard-fought gains might not be thrown away. I’m always willing to be optimistic. And I know well enough that combat is a leveler, its hard choices carrying rewards of terrible gut wisdom fast received, that I’m always willing to consider that our president is capable of rising to his times.
Damn the Naughts. More astonishing than any spectacle of fireworks and doves in Bethlehem on Millennium’s Eve. I wouldn’t have believed any of it if someone had told it to me then. Like the battle raging in the sky over Armageddon as described by that tattooed car-park attendant, it was something fantastical, but really only something happening all around us all along, unseen and awaiting revelation. Occasionally I’ve thought about what life might have been like if none of it happened. It is not fully imagineable, a life in which I might have been able to stay as I was, willing to think the best of people, unaware of the terrible choices that bring out the best and worst in people, in which that old world continued on as it was. Not fully imagineable or even in so many ways desireable, for all this upheaval and violence.
Damn the Naughts. Thank God that decade’s gone. I’d like to live a different way now. I know, that isn’t how it happens. This is our world now.