Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Cassandra goes to a party
Erstwhile guest-blogger Cassandra went to a party the other night with her husband, a Marine:
It was a fairly small gathering - no more than forty people - and consequently everyone knew my husband had recently returned from Baghdad. It would not be unfair to say we were very likely the only adults there who continue to support the administration. For me, it wasn't all that different from hundreds of similar encounters I've had over the past year. It gets old, being asked what my husband thinks of the war; of our prospects for success?
It's not, actually, that I don't understand the question. Certainly it's a natural one under the circumstances. What bothers me so much is that, though I try not to inject my own opinions into my response (which necessarily makes it more dispassionate and less positive an assessment than my own would have been) there is always that slight turning away; that tell-tale tightening of the mouth when what they hear doesn't confirm their pre-existing biases.
What they want to hear, you see, is that everything is a hopeless mess over there and that we're losing. And it frustrates people enormously to have someone who was actually in Iraq for an entire year contradict the narrative.
What to do, what to do? But soon you can see The Narrative kick back in: "those people" are just administration shills. They are just going to parrot the party line so we can safely discount whatever they say in favor of the authentic, unbiased voice of some paid Iraqi stringer with unknown sectarian loyalties, supervised by a professional journalist whose strict neutrality can be trusted, since he isn't on the scene and he strongly disapproves of the war.
There's an inherent check here. Though one can't trust anyone in the military to put aside their personal feelings and tell the truth, professional journalists and anonymous Iraqi stringers living in a war zone absolutely can be trusted to do the same thing. Got that?
My husband had ducked outside midway through the evening to have a cigar with my youngest son, and I found myself dodging the familiar litany of sympathy.
"How long was he over there?"
"Just a year."
"That must have been awful for you."
"Actually, it's really not that bad, though of course I'm quite pleased to have him home again."
[tightening of the lips]
Oops. I forget to play the role again.
There is much more.
2 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Tue Apr 01, 09:03:00 AM:
By 
, at
Tue Apr 01, 01:03:00 PM:
Glad to see you're still kicking in the sphere, Cassandra.
