Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

Revenge of the American Leviathan

141 Revenge of the American Leviathan Our high-tech weapons worked, and . . . [have] changed the face of modern war. —Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, U.S. Army, Pentagon briefing, February 28, 1991 It walks, it talks, it crawls on its belly like a reptile. —Carnival barker’s spiel The bite of conscience . . . is obscene. —Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals D uring the night of January 1, 1991, I had a dream, which I recorded the following morning: I am in a house that I know to be surrounded by soldiers who are very dangerous. I have no idea what they are up to, but have no doubt they will kill me if they find me. There is nowhere to hide. I am lying facedown on a sofa in a small room, trying to be inconspicuous . Suddenly one of the soldiers appears at the door. I have an 142 The Muse in the Machine impression of him, though from where I am it must be impossible for me actually to see him: a man in special services uniform (camou flage gear, a beret, bandoliers, hand grenades on his belt, an automatic weapon at the ready). I am defenseless; I try to pretend I am dead, but he knows I am not. He shoots me through the back of the head. There is terror but no pain. Am I dead? I can’t tell. Somehow I am still conscious, but I am shot through the brain. I must surely either be dead or dying. It seems as if I lie there for a very long time in a strange state of numb and confused detachment while armed men ransack the house and shoot any “enemies” they can find, but I also seem to wake up immediately, in a panic. Though after-the-fact impressions of dreams are always suspect, what I retained on waking was the chilling memory of how inevitable it all seemed, how helpless I was, both before and after being shot, and the “numb and confused detachment” under the spell of which I lay facedown on the sofa, perfectly aware all the while of everything that was going on in the house. I was to reexperience the same emotions soon. I don’t believe that dreams are prophetic—at least not mine—but I am convinced of the sensitivity of the unconscious mind to every nuance of its environment , and on January 1 I was all too consciously aware of what was in the air. Just over two weeks later, on January 16, 1991, at 8:10 p.m., I tore myself away from my television long enough to find a legal pad so that I could write the following: At 6:58 [EST] this evening—exactly at the end of the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour—it was announced that war with Iraq had begun. For the past hour, then, with feelings of overwhelming horror and outrage, I’ve been watching the (not in a good sense) incredible news coverage of the bombing of Iraq. So far, there have been no reports from Kuwait. So far there are no reports of counterattacks by the Iraqis. So far, Israel is not in the war. Wave after wave—it’s reported—of aircraft are attacking Baghdad . Somehow the reports from the CNN reporters—in a hotel at Revenge of the American Leviathan 143 the city center—continue. It would be impossible to orchestrate a better media event. “Clearly I’ve never been there,” one reporter says, “but this feels like being at the center of hell.” There is a complete breakdown of conscience. I stopped writing, feeling the falseness of every word I penned (however “true,” in some sense, the facts I was recording may or may not have been). It was as if I were gesticulating in front of a mirror to reassure myself that I had the capacity to feel a certain way, when in fact what I felt was something quite different. I seemed to be lying again on that sofa in my dream, facedown, numb, confused, and detached: not yet understanding that what I was feeling was the beginning , the instinctive denial phase, of a terrible guilty grief. But the grief I was then beginning to feel—which I also feel as I write now—was of a peculiar kind. Unlike more immediate and personal varieties of grief that most often follow loss, it was...