I saw the flyer on a telephone pole the week after the election:
RuntheIronmanAgainstBush.com.
I was on my way to Symphony Hall to hear Robert Thurman make Buddhist jokes about anger with a friend I'd met canvassing in Reno.
And although I've never enjoyed running a mile in my life, I thought: "Ironman, cool" and filed it away. In a year in which I had a single priority, to elect a new president, I made it to November 2 only by putting everything else aside, including my own reservations about talking to strangers and standing in traffic waving signs and ringing doorbells in mobile home parks.
I did so for my own selfish reasons: on November 3rd, I wanted to be able to go back to enjoying my life, no longer reading four newspapers and watching "Charlie Rose" at midnight and worrying about the Supreme Court and who we were torturing. I wanted to have no regrets. But most of all, I wanted to not be where we are today, having to figure out how to dig our way out of this. Planning for 2008, when I'm not sure how we're going to get through 2005.
Rage has sustained me for the past two months. I'm not an angry person; You might not know if I were furious.
I might not know either. But plugged into my iPod at the gym, I punch and kick and run like hell. I play the Fugees' version of "Killing Me Softly" and "Don't Fear the Reaper" over and over, and after a few miles, find oblivion.
I lost my appetite for a while, but eventually my natural hedonism kicked back in. I've stopped reading the New York Times, barely taking them out of the blue bags to recycle. Rowing at the gym, with Xbox ads for games killing North Koreans or mud wrestling buxom 3D "women" on one TV and Maury Povich on another, I fantasize about assassinations.
But if I sound dangerous, I don't want to sit under a tree and meditate this away! At least furious I feel alive. Powerless, a member of an officially despised minority, but full of conviction. Unlike our so-called party leaders in Washington, quoting from Matthew and inviting pro-lifers to lead the DNC, I am determined to go down fighting.
"Our goal surely is to conquer anger, but not destroy the fire it has misappropriated...We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative ends."
--Robert Thurman
*
So after struggling to integrate the themes and events of 2004, the tsunami hit, a brutal reminder of how the world can change in an instant. Remembering the week after Christmas that Keith and I spent in Phuket and Phi Phi, in places that no longer exist, feels self-indulgent. We are puny in the face of disaster. For some people this is proof of god; for me, just the opposite.
It's hard to see my heroic efforts to defeat George Bush or even Bush himself as anything but irrelevant. Nature accomplished in one mighty swoop what the rest of us going door to door in Nevada and Ohio could not.
There's now a missing persons branch on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree. Last week, this branch was the province of a few relatives with estranged children who had not phoned home. Today it's overwhelmed with links to hospitals and charities and remembrances of bungalows where we once celebrated New Year's over banana pancakes. There is something very wrong when the Thai government has to cancel its Happy Festival.
Or the Washington Times finds it necessary to manufacture faux outrage at UN accusations of stinginess that were never actually made.
A few people are picking fights online in the wake of the tsunami about who could have given more money or if the news only reports Westerners or favors coverage of Thailand when Indonesia and Sri Lanka bore the brunt of the deaths. Now that I've discovered what an effective tool rage can be, I think it's idiotic, in the middle of a tragedy to waste your anger. If it takes having a personal connection to a dive instructor to make you notice the destruction of the Maldives, so be it.
There is a brief opening after a disaster, when the Tamil Tigers and the rebels in Aceh put aside their differences with the governments and military. But who is brave enough to walk through it? Do we really need to believe we're on the verge of apocalypse before we can consider peace?
"Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity."
--Vaclav Havel
**
Look, we just lost an election because no one in this country likes to hear bad news. Not even when it's their jobs that are lost. They don't want to know about civilian casualties in Fallujah, which is now as leveled as Colombo. We may not be able to change their minds but we have a responsibility to find a way to make them care.
I wasn't interested in election fraud in Ukraine until I saw the photos of people in Kiev, bundled against the snow in orange hats and scarves, taking to the streets. What would it take for Americans to get off our sofas and protest unfair elections? They'd have to cancel the Super Bowl, or all our credit cards.
So after two months of avoiding the news, is it any wonder my favorite movie right now is House of Flying Daggers, in which a beautiful revolutionary seeks to overthrow the evil government while various gorgeous men battle alongside her, in painted landscapes worthy of Vogue spreads, with costumes to match?
I'm a realist. I never claimed to be able to persuade anyone of anything. We should have known we were in trouble when I was more optimistic than Candidate Kerry. But if there's anything I learned, in a year of campaigning like my life depended on it, it's that we have an unlimited ability to connect to each other, to reach beyond the known. (Some days I think it's a conspiracy that the dollar is so low against the euro, to keep us from visiting friends in Barcelona and Zurich, or making new ones in Paris and Athens.)
My triumphs this year should be just as applicable in my new future as a dissident and assassin: talking family members and friends of friends into getting on planes and traveling across state lines to ensure safe elections, getting computers donated, handing out buttons on airport shuttles, and trying in vain to defend Kerry's non-position on Iraq at Power to the Peaceful in Golden Gate Park.
In mid-November, I got an e-mail from an 11-year-old who was writing a paper on turnout and found my essay in the Christian Science Monitor. Why, she asked, do adults say one thing and do another?
I meet a guy at a bar on Christmas Eve. He's sitting alone, nursing a bottle of wine. What are your new year's resolutions? I ask. Not to fall in love again, he says, smiling. I give him a hard time. This is not a time to sit things out. Okay, not to fall in love for at least the first month.
It's a new year. I wish I were more hopeful, more resolute. In the mean time, I'm training. Might as well have a nice ass if you're gonna kick some.
Yesterday, driving north to find Highway 1 closed to a mudslide below Big Sur, we detoured over winding Nacimiento Road,
with its exquisite moss-covered trees and red fallen leaves and lush rolling hills and eventually, a rainbow over the Central Valley. Could my little universe seem any more serene? It was the perfect place for rebels (reform democrats perhaps, in dashing costumes) to train to overthrow this administration. Unfortunately it's already used by the military.
We're running the Ironman here. It may take us 26 years and thousands more miles to undo the damage of BushCo and replace them with leaders who stand for something. We can't wait four years. We have a war to stop, a decimated tax base. Chief Justice Scalia? It's going to take all the sweat and dollars and ideals we can raise. Are we tough enough? Time will tell.
Keep the flame burning.
"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up."
--Susan Sontag (1933-2004)