The Time Remaining

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201 31 Gilchrist remembers that Tabry once told him that Washington was a battleground. For years Gilchrist had just considered the capital as something like a field of play, a place where power was concentrated and where power made certain things happen, a chessboard with chessboard margins or rules. The chess players were transient, but the game was permanent. Now, back for three weeks from his trip to Israel and the West Bank, he seems to feel that he is alienated from his Washington environment, that the city now has a certain falsity about it, an impermanence that is totally removed from what he has just experienced in a country whose image in the United States does not in most ways correspond with how it revealed itself to him when and while he was there. Assured by Dr. Voss that Raya was progressing well, Gilchrist concentrated on writing a series of columns about his trip, and column after column bespoke a discrepancy between Israel as most Americans had become inured to perceiving it and the country that emerged from Gilchrist ’s prose—one where class distinctions often followed bloodlines, where political rights in the full sense were reserved for citizens who were Jewish, where arrests were arbitrary and where habeas corpus and trial by jury were not guaranteed for the indigenous population, where prisoners were absolutely at the mercy of their captors, where government was the very instrument that encouraged and often fomented divisiveness in the population, where private property could be confiscated or appropriated by the government for military use or development by settlers, where border settlements could be expanded across borders as “part of the natural evolution of thickening the country’s security belt.” On this pretext Gilchrist wrote in one of his columns that the “United States could create a belt of settlements on Canadian or Mexican soil on the pretext that such 202 | The Time Remaining settlements were essential to the defense of Texas, Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and California.” As Gilchrist knew they would, his columns provoked a deluge of mail, e-mail, and recorded messages, some supportive but the majority virulently opposed. After reading one overflow of letters and e-mails, Gilchrist could not help but notice how almost all of those that were written in opposition contained many of the same phrases, as if a model letter had been used by the respondents so that their letters varied only incidentally but were otherwise clones of the original. “Look, Dodge,” said his editor after the second week of columns had ended and after he had surveyed the increasing poundage of opposition mail, some of which had originated from the offices of senators and other congressmen. “You know what I think of freedom of expression and all that goes with it. I admire your guts for what you are doing, and I’ll stand behind you all the way . . .” “I’m getting ready for the next word, which I suspect will be but.” “Let me go back to what I told you before. You’ve become Johnny One-Note. You’ve got to diversify, pick other issues. William Safire does. Raspberry and Carl Rowan do. Even Von Hoffman does. Why can’t you?” “Because this one sticks like a tennis ball in my throat. I can’t swallow it, and I can’t cough it up. All I can do is write about it. Besides, it’s the one issue that intrudes on the whole concept of citizenship for me. And for you too. For everybody. Can’t you see that? I can criticize the president. I can criticize France, which is our oldest historical ally. I can criticize Jesus Christ, and no one accuses me of being a bigot. But as soon as I criticize Israeli policies, all at once the US Post Office and the Internet have more mail and e-mail than they know what to do with.” “Well,” said the editor, “I frankly don’t like it. I can’t do anything about it, and I wouldn’t do anything that smacks of censorship even if I could. You know my record when it comes to that. Besides, you’re like a senior professor around here. You have tenure. You’re untouchable. But I don’t like the atmosphere it creates. It’s a hassle that I don’t need. I just think that other rights can be championed besides...