I first saw the massive spread of twinkling lights that is Los Angeles at night from the San Gabriel Mountains in the early 90s while visiting from Philadelphia. It was stunningly beautiful and made me think of a phone interview that I’d heard on CNN a year earlier at Christmastime during the Gulf War.
The images that were being broadcast during the interview were those of nighttime warfare, the sort that made every television set in America appear as if it was a murky green fish tank full of randomly ejaculated sparks and vague flashes of percussive light almost too dim to see. Saddam Hussein by that time had already lost his air force and had begun to run out of Scud missiles, which, as projectiles, were never any more precise or destructive than far flung empty hot water heaters, and there was little doubt, particularly in countries not being fed the CNN feed, that some brutally excessive and wholly unnecessary slaughter of Iraqi soldiers and civilians was being perpetrated in the desert.
The interviewee was a 10-year-old Israeli girl who was being asked her opinion about how well the U.S. led coalition forces were faring in their bombing campaign, a loaded question to be sure, particularly because a 10-year-old girl would never be trusted to honestly answer the question Did you brush your teeth? without a corroborating fondling of her toothbrush’s bristles to test for wetness, forget about asking her to elaborate on something as outlandishly subjective as a war. Thusly, it was not a question in search of a real answer. Instead, it was an attempt by a news corporation to give its viewers the same thrill at holiday time that radio listeners got to experience in the 1940s while listening to Edward R. Murrow tell them how the doughboys were sacrificing their own innocence and pleasant dispositions and apple-cheeked virginity to the noble barbarity of butchering all the fascist monsters who wanted to devour America’s children, grandchildren, puppies and kittens.
The girl answered the question by saying, “I heard an American pilot who was dropping bombs on Baghdad at night say that it looked beautiful, like a Christmas tree. I don’t think I’ll ever understand Americans.”
Sitting in the dark woods above the L.A. basin a year after that interview, with the scent of pine and damp roots and cold earth permeating my clothes, I wondered what super-sparkly destructiveness I was looking at down below and I questioned the sanity of my elation.
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i also remember us fighter pilots saying it was like the fourth of july.
So true…so well said. You may be the only person who has ever written the words…”super-sparkly destructiveness.” I think that may sum up America in three words better than any books, essays, or poems ever…ever.
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