Not for the first time, I was finding it hard to believe this was the woman I’d married — a corporate litigator, let’s not forget, radicalized only in the service of her client and with not the smallest bone to pick about money and its doings.
“You want Jake to grow up with an American perspective? Is that it? You want him to not be able to point to Britain on a map? You want him to believe that Saddam Hussein sent those planes into the Towers?”
Specks of snow, small and dark as flies, swarmed before me. I said, “Of course he wouldn’t grow up in ignorance. We wouldn’t allow it.”
She said, “Bush wants to attack Iraq as part of a right-wing plan to destroy international law and order as we know it and replace it with the global rule of American force. Tell me which part of that sentence is wrong, and why.”
As usual, she was too quick for me. I said, “I don’t want to get into an argument about this. You’re pinning views on me that I don’t have.”
Rachel seemed to laugh. “See? It’s pointless having this discussion. It’s like playing tennis with someone who insists on playing gin rummy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re constantly flailing around and changing the subject and making emotive statements. It’s the classic conservative tactic. Instead of answering the point, you sabotage the discussion.”
“Fine,” I said. “Repeat the point. And stop calling me a conservative.”
“You are a conservative,” Rachel said. “What’s so sad is you don’t even know it.”
“If your point is that the U.S. should not attack Iraq,” I managed, “I’m not going to disagree with that. But if your point is…” I trailed off, at a substantive loss. I was distracted, too — by a memory of Rachel and me flying to Hong Kong for our honeymoon, and how in the dimmed cabin I looked out of my window and saw lights, in small glimmering webs, on the placeless darkness miles below. I pointed them out to Rachel. I wanted to say something about these creaturely cosmical glows, which made me feel, I wanted to say, as if we had been removed by translation into another world. Rachel leaned across me and looked down to the earth. “It’s Iraq,” she said.
She said, “I’m saying the U.S. has no moral or legal authority to wage this war. The fact that Saddam is horrible and should be shot dead today is not the issue. The bad character of the enemy does not make the war good. Think politically, for once. Stalin was a monster. He killed millions of people. Millions. Does that mean we should have supported Hitler in his invasion of Russia? We should have stood shoulder to shoulder with Hitler because he was proposing to rid the world of a mass murderer?”
I should have concurred. I knew better than to argue with Rachel about such things. But I was ashamed and wanted to redeem myself. “You’re saying Bush is like Hitler,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m not comparing Bush to Hitler!” Rachel almost pleaded. “Hitler is just an extreme example. You use extreme examples to test a proposition. It’s called reasoning. That’s how you reason. You make a proposition and you follow it to its logical conclusion. Hans, you’re supposed to be the great rationalist.”
As I’ve said, I never laid claim to this trait. I merely saw myself as cautious about my pronouncements. The idea that I was a rationalist was one Rachel had nurtured — albeit, I must admit, with my complicity. Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
“This isn’t reasoning,” I said. “This is just aggression.”
“Aggression? Hans, can’t you understand? Can’t you see this isn’t about personal relations? Politeness, niceness, you, me — it’s all irrelevant. This is about a life-and-death struggle for the future of the world. Our personal feelings don’t come into the picture. There are forces out there. The United States is now the strongest military power in the world. It can and will do anything it wants. It has to be stopped. Your feelings and my feelings”—she was sobbing now—“are not on the agenda.”
Once again I stared out of my window. The snowfall had come to an end. A cold toga draped the city.
“It’s been snowing here,” I said. “Jake could build a snowman on Twenty-third Street.”
Rachel sniffled. “Well, I’m not moving him over there so he can build a snowman. By that logic we should all head for the North Pole. What’s left of it.”
I laughed, but I knew Rachel well enough to take seriously everything she had said. However, I had no idea how to respond effectively. The difficulty was not merely that I couldn’t think of an alternative to the program of traveling to London once or twice a month. No, my difficulty was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love.
Naturally, I reproached myself. I should have not allowed this transatlantic standoff, which had now lasted for more than a year, to persist. I should have moved to London in defiance of my wife’s firm but indistinctly explained preference for separateness. More particularly, I should have seen Rachel’s telephonic outburst coming, not least because the imminent invasion of Iraq had stimulated an impressive and impassioned opinion in practically everybody I knew. For those under the age of forty-five it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment — or, if they hadn’t, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer’s arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out. I could take a guess at the oil production capacity of an American-occupied Iraq and in fact was pressed at work about this issue daily, and stupidly. (“What are you saying, two and a half million barrels or three million? Which one is it?”) But I found myself unable to contribute to conversations about the value of international law or the feasibility of producing a dirty bomb or the constitutional rights of imprisoned enemies or the efficacy of duct tape as a window sealant or the merits of vaccinating the American masses against smallpox or the complexity of weaponizing deadly bacteria or the menace of the neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration, or indeed any of the debates, each apparently vital, that raged everywhere — raged, because the debaters speedily grew heated and angry and contemptuous. In this ever-shifting, all-enveloping discussion, my orientation was poor. I could not tell where I stood. If pressed to state my position, I would confess the truth: that I had not succeeded in arriving at a position. I lacked necessary powers of perception and certainty and, above all, foresight. The future retained the impenetrable character I had always attributed to it. Would American security be improved or worsened by taking over Iraq? I did not know, because I had no information about the future purposes and capacities of terrorists or, for that matter, American administrations; and even if I were to have such information, I could still not hope to know how things would turn out. Did I know if the death and pain caused by a war in Iraq would or would not exceed the miseries that might likely flow from leaving Saddam Hussein in power? No. Could I say whether the right to autonomy of the Iraqi people — a problematic national entity, by all accounts — would be enhanced or diminished by an American regime change? I could not. Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little interest. I didn’t really care.