The View from Smalltown, USA

The problem is I don’t have a television so I have to visit people. I listen to the radio. Plus, there’s always the phone and e-mails. I had to call a lot of folks. The other prob- lem is that this is Oregon, 2000 miles from the attack.

My friend Mike shrugs and says, “So? If people want to live in New York they need to accept the risks.” Another friend, Dan, who clerks at the farmers’ market, says, “It serves us right. How long can we continue to consume the majority of the Earth’s resources?” A farmer comes by, and Dan stops talking. There’s a sign outside in the parking lot. Dan’s rearranged the plastic letters to read: “Pray for peace.”

A relative calls to say it’s the Jews trying to make Palestine look bad. My sister calls to say it’s the Bush political machine. “Every time we’re in a depression,” she goes, “what gets us out? A war.”
The local mayor comes on the radio every 10 minutes to say no-one has at-
tacked Portland, Oregon, yet.

At the park where I walk my dog, a 55-year-old Vietnam veteran tells a group of young men, “It’s war. Yeah, it’s war all right. And we’re going to go over there and kick some camel-jockey butt.”

All these young men, all registered for the draft, they try to change the sub- ject. The sun is warm. Our dogs play. The veteran talks about all the women he’s slept with. He tells us he’s a plant expert and gets paid $60 an hour to tell people their gar- dens suck. He says the government has already dispatched the military to destroy tar- gets. He says we’ll all have to fight in this one, but it will be a glorious war. He says he sleeps with his four dogs and every morning he has to wipe a layer of shed dog hair off his face.
After an hour he’s the only one left talking, and it’s all war, war, war. Everyone
else has left.

On the radio the conservative presenter Rush Limbaugh says Americans need to forget their differences of race, income, sex, religion. “We just need to be happy with what we have,” he says. We need to unite against our common enemy.

I ask my neighbor, Linda, if she’s worried about going to war and she says, “Wo- men don’t have to fight in wars.” She says, “We don’t have equal rights so why should we support this country?”

My friend Monica says, “I want to go to Mass, but isn’t religion what got us in this mess in the first place?” My mom calls to say, “Well, we could use that federal budget surplus right about now.”
There are a lot more American flags around, but not on the majority of houses.

On television, when I visit friends, we watch the World Trade Center towers crumble again and again. My friend Anuj in New York says, “It wasn’t surreal. It was hyper-real.”