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Pond Scum: American Simplex
By Steve Finbow
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To begin with, you don't know it's there. Then there is a slight tingling – the prodrome stage – and discoloration of the lip. If you touch it with your tongue, there is a hard lump, small but containing growth. You feel irritable and headaches are common. Inflammation occurs and the lip is tender to the touch and so are, sometimes, the gums. If you look closely, and try not to fog up the mirror with your feverish breath, you can see a number of tiny fluid-filled blisters. After a day or so, these begin to weep – the ulcer stage – and suddenly you're contagious – this is also called the get-away-from-me-with-that-scabby-cornflake-on-your-lip-if-you-think-I'm-kissing-you-with-that-hideous-labial-monstrosity-you've-got-another-thing-coming stage. Then it begins to crust. To scab. It burns. It itches. You worry it with your tongue. It flakes. It begins to heal. It scars. Small white points on the red of your lips like white toadstool warts.
Art by Nicholas Allanach
This is herpes simplex virus type 1 (not to be confused with herpes simplex virus type 2 – or genital herpes). No, this is HSV-1, recurrent herpes labialis, fever blisters – the cold sore. “Herpes” – to creep or crawl. “Herpetology” – the study of reptiles and amphibians. Hold on. Let me check my notes. My handwriting is appalling. I seem to be going off on a tangent. Now I remember. My notes to this week’s column read “cold war” not “cold sore”.
I was amazed to learn, when I read in Thomas Powers’ Intelligence Wars, that America didn’t have a secret service until June 1942, when Roosevelt established The Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Huh? Why not? Were you naïve? Was it ego? I can’t think of a time when Britain didn’t have a secret service. From Christopher Marlowe to Daniel Defoe to Graham Greene – even our writers have flirted with spying.
In The Human Factor, Graham Greene writes, “An enemy had to remain a caricature if he was to be kept at a safe distance; an enemy should never come alive.” America has created an enemy who sits on your sofa, watches your TV, drinks your Buds, eats your corn dogs, and kisses your ma. It was easy during the Cold War – the Russians wore furry hats, had potato and rutabaga visages, swilled home-brewed vodka, the only Russian they spoke was “do svidaniya,” and their female shot-putters wouldn’t have been out of place in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. This time, you have a faceless foe. She could be your manicurist. He could be your pool boy. Whom are you fighting in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In America? How do you spot a terrorist? Suicide bombers are easy – they’re the ones wearing hijabs and the Leonard Cohen T-shirts.
Failure to recognise the enemy as human leads to the creation of a foe deemed already and always inferior. Does America find it so difficult to wage war on al - Qaeda? Yet, the invasion of Iraq ensures the unseen enemy becomes visible. A war that should be fought in camera is fought on camera. You also need your enemy to be recognisable, to be a caricature – VC, gooks, Charlie – in order to fight it. As Elmore Leonard puts it in Cuba Libre, "The war begun and he was in it because he was American and he was here. It seemed to simplify his understanding of his role, knowing he liked the idea of being in a real war. He wouldn’t have to wonder anymore what he was doing here." Or as Powers puts it, America believes "anything can be achieved with a big enough wrench."
In the news this week were images of a bound man encased in a wire cage, staring in terror at us. He is dressed in the uniform of Guantanamo Bay, the orange jumpsuit, once the apparel of Devo, Beastie Boys and, more recently and post-ironically, Bart Simpson. He is Kenneth Bigley. These visions from Iraq, and arguably from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, reinforce a point Christopher Hitchens made in Regime Change that “if everything is terror, then nothing is.” By caricaturing the enemy as fanatics, we cannot know them. By not knowing them, we deny their rights. By denying their rights, we deny them their humanity. We fear them. By fearing them, we discriminate against them.
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an exposition on fear. Roth insists the novel is not concerned with contemporary politics. The America that is in danger of being lost in the novel is a protective America, constitutional and egalitarian. The novel is about being American – it conveys the fear felt by all that that is what you are not. The government in Roth’s book is anti-Semitic. The present U.S. government is anti-American.
Where
did this schizophrenia come from? I don’t mean a Jekyll and Hyde
split personality, I mean the full RD Laing. There is a rupture between
U.S. thought processes (the government/military) and emotions (the American
people). (Britain’s last schizophrenic phase was 1979-1990 during
Margaret Thatcher’s government.) Reality is confused. You hallucinate
enemies. Delusion has replaced apple pie. Paranoia appears in everything
from DeLillo to Disney. You are regressive. You are anti-social. You have
had a complete personality change.
Power is a virus – paranoia is a symptom. I believe the British
are responsible for spreading that virus – it was under pressure
from our government that Roosevelt formed the OSS. You now carry this
virus. The lesions opened by war cause any cosmetic democratic government
to catch a variant strain. You infect your own body. You cause mass irritation.
You may become brain dead through encephalitis, a form of imperial egoism
– the neo-cons are neo-egoist.
Nobody will want to kiss you with that suppurating pustule of a war on your conscience.
Click here to read previous Pond
Scum columns.
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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
© 2004 Me Three