Terror in Pakistan: us against them, them against us, fade out

My grandmother, who’s from Pittsburgh, was very afraid that I’d turn out not American enough, so she taught me the Pledge of Allegiance and the “Star-Spangled Banner,” asking me to recite them every summer we visited, until I was eight, by when I knew them by heart. In my teenage years, it was Jesus Christ we fought over, and whether “my guy” – this would be Prophet Muhammad – had performed any raising-the-dead type miracles because “her guy” was really cool like that. In my twenties, with first one, then the other Iraq war, when my grandparents put that star spangled banner up outside their Florida mobile home, and pasted “Support Our Troops!” onto their American-made car, Grandma and I had established a fragile peace. This we have kept ever since.

But the rocket’s red glare can still choke me up a bit, I’m abashed to admit, if it catches me unawares. “One nation, under God” still rings in my ears like a clarion call, albeit from far away, to really be one nation and to really be under God.

I have the entire American TV show “The West Wing” on DVD because I’m a fan of good writing acted well and Aaron Sorkin is a minor writing god. And while those corny moments of the entire cast declaring “I serve at the pleasure of the President” (a nice phrase in itself) make me gag, scenes where coffins come off of aeroplanes wrapped in the US flag and everyone’s grave, or Amazing Grace is playing on bagpipes and some old lady gets handed the flag after her son has been buried in Arlington Cemetary – those scenes make me cry.

So I’m going to attribute to this American training of mine the desire I felt suddenly, driving home from work in Lahore today, to stop near two policemen getting on a motorbike and say, “It must be really hard for you that two police training centres and the Federal Investigation Agency’s building were attacked by suicide bombers and gunmen today. You must be worried and scared, but I want to tell you that I appreciate the job you’re doing.”

I didn’t do this. I drove past instead, because it would be asinine to tell policemen they’re doing a good job or create this moment in which we imagine we’re both on the same side against some unified “them” that are out to get “us.” To imagine that if I were in a car with a guy one evening down a dark, tree-lined street, these same policemen wouldn’t harass me and try to extort money, leering and making obscene jokes.

A bombing does this – creates a false sense of unity – because we imagine that a building in one part of the city attacked is all of us attacked. It does this also because the people doing the bombing feel similarly: an attack on the security forces of the city is an attack on the city is an attack on the government that is waging war in part of the country against these same terrorists, supposedly. War mongering works because it’s harder to get people to talk to each other than to get people to huddle together and feel like they’ve spoken. Like they’ve shared.

There are moments that people do share, of course. Anna Akhmatova writes in “Instead of a Preface” in “Requiem” that

in the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad…[A woman] started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I said: “I can.”

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

This time is not like that time. But sometimes all of us wonder if that’s what’s coming, and so we huddle together and find a flag to wave. You would not believe the number of Facebook groups that are devoted to the greatness of Pakistan, the unity of Pakistan, Pakistani military zindabad (long live). You would not believe that, once the Swat operation began in earnest earlier this year, that masses of the liberal elite, perennially anti-military in a haphazard sort of way, began shouting “Support our Troops” even as they ran relief campaigns for internal refugees.

As if anyone was ever protected by the over-simplification of complex truths. The truths that violence begets violence but revenge is human, and what begins as self-defense becomes mass murder really quickly, that wars are not declared on paper anymore, but are waged nevertheless, and that no one can say for sure if it’s just that we’re fond of killing. We live in a world order that insists you be a part of complex matrix designed to pit you against the other, and we have no idea how to get out of it.

I can sing “Pak Sarzameen” just as well as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I can put my hand on my heart. I can bow my head at the end of my anthem. But what does it matter? Your country will ask not what it can do for you, because it’s not about people anymore. It’s about some abstraction. But we continue to ask what we can do for our countries, because we happen to know that countries are just a whole lot of people and we think, somehow, someday, that’s what the flag will mean.

Dr. Martin Luther King said once (or so I heard on “The West Wing”):

“Violence begets violence; hate begets hate; and toughness begets toughness. It is all a descending spiral and the end is destruction – for everybody.”