While I was at the Detroit Airport heading back to Manila, the "Shock and Awe" attack on Baghdad began. On huge screen TV monitors, bombs and missiles pounded Baghdad while travelers silently looked on. Many Americans were resigned to the war, believing the President’s declaration that Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction had to be destroyed along with Saddam Hussein. With each exploding rocket, Americans were seeing real time destruction and deaths.
In June, I was back and the mood in the country was suspended, with a large majority still giving Bush their support for the war on Iraq. There was, though, an unsettled feeling. Bush’s declaration on May 1st that the war was over didn’t stop American soldiers from being killed every other day. A few editorials in the major newspapers appeared, questioning why it took so long to achieve normality in Baghdad. The United States was castigated by the world community for having failed to provide security for the Iraqi National Museum which was looted and burned. A half-dozen dissenting books by Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn appeared in bookstores.
Across the Atlantic, the English were hounding Prime Minister Blair on where were the wmd’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction). The issue was spilling over into the American press: Yeah, Where Are They? And Saddam too?
In New York, a highly publicized event was an exhibition at the Whitney Museum entitled "Ameri-can Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990- 2003." 47 international artists were invited to interpret America’s cultural and foreign policies throughout the globe.
It was an impressive and divergent array of artistic views in many mediums, much of it humorous, others quite searing, questioning American motives in the past decade. Globalization, consumerism, violence and America’s continued military presence throughout the world were recurrent themes.
Filipino artist Alfredo Esquillo Jr.’s painting entitled "MaMckinley" was hung prominently with its realistic rendering of an elderly American woman dressed in Victorian clothes holding a child. The woman’s face was that of President William Mckinley and the child’s was unmistakeably Filipino. Instead of hands, MaMckinley had eagle claws wrapped around the child. Despite the almost tender scene, the painting echoed the current state of Filipino-American relations.
The last trip I made in October, the national mood had changed considerably with half of the country disagreeing with Bush’s handling of Iraq. No longer fearful of being branded traitors and sniffing election opportunities, leading Demo-cratic Congressmen and Senators were voicing their concerns daily. The press had many more articles and op-eds from every angle questioning the war. For body count watchers, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq almost equalled the number of those who died (113) when Bush announced the end of the war last May. (As of November 5, it had exceeded that number).
The grim war which began in the spring had become a joke in the fall. In a gay clothing store in San Francisco’s Castro Street, the hottest selling t-shirt was that of a dog biting a missile. The message read "My dog ate the weapons of mass destruction".
Last year, in anticipation of the war, fancy Rome clothing boutiques were selling $90 t-shirts with peace signs while bookstores in Venice and Florence had "Peace" rainbow flags on display. Belatedly, the anti-war mood was now present in Man-hattan’s retail stores.
In large and small bookstores, anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-American foreign policy and lampoon books were displayed prominently at the store’s entrance. They’re selling briskly like Al Franken’s Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, about the Bush Administration’s media cover-ups and, well, lies. It’s been number one on the New York Times Bestsellers List for the past seven weeks only to be bumped to number two by another anti-Bush book, Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country?
A chic window display in lower Manhattan decided to forego the Prada and placed a huge poster of a Post-Victorian daughter on her father’s lap asking, "Daddy, why don’t you or any of your friends from Enron have to go to war?" It’s a growing, disquieting fact that a dispro-portionate number of America’s soldiers come from lower income and minority communities. White rich men like Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz have never seen military service. If they did, people ask, would they be as gung-ho about war as they have been so far?
Last October 25, major antiwar demonstrations occurred in Washington DC, San Francisco and other American cities. In San Francisco, about 15,000 came and these were not your radical commie types. Parents with kids in strollers, army veterans, students, gays and lesbians, Christian nuns, budd-hists, vegetarians, the Gap types, the yuppie types, just about every kind of Bay Area type came. The most endearing were the many oldies present who demonstrated against the Vietnam War, against the Pinochet and Marcos dictatorships, against Contra support in Nicaragua, against Bush Sr.’s Persian Gulf War and many other demos in between. One of them sported a peace sign and the words "Back by Popular Demand".
You had to look hard, past the grey hair and wrinkled faces, to find the defiant young hunks and vivacious women who once wore long hair, Indian shirts, smelled of Patchouli, owned only sandals, wept over Neruda’s poems and stuck daisies in the gun barrels of riot policemen. Thirty years ago, they lay down in front of convoys bearing missiles, got teargassed and beaten and shouted, at the top of their lungs, "Bring the Troops Home."
Today they’re in San Francisco’s Civic Center, with a little less hair, faded jeans and t-shirts saying "What Part of Thou Shalt Not Kill Don’t You Understand?" signed "GOD." The oldies–my oldies–on a crisp Indian Summer day, were back, shouting "Bring The Troops Home" once again. The smell of marijuana wafting in the wind causes a smile, recalling hedonist times.
This was the America I fondly remembered while in exile during Martial Law. It was bittersweet to wax nostalgia that day. At my own mid-century, intense memories sweep through me at random moments, ignited by a sight or a song. While in a trendy Kyoto boutique recently, they were playing the Beatles, playing them to be retro-chic. I hummed along, recalling past loves and peace demonstrations way before any of the shoppers around me were born. I started to sing with the Beatles, singing robustly about how "…They may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…" while fingering the merchandise, and getting discreet stares.
This last trip to America rounded out a cycle which started the year with a flourish for war and, at year’s end, with people of goodwill and peace coming out again to protest the course, reviving passe notions and refrains like "Give Peace a Chance". Whatever the outcome, it’s comforting to note idealism still lingering, if not growing, in America.