Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

BEN: “Decapitation.” I remember.

JAY: So just after that, I took a bus here, because there was supposed to be a big march on the White House. There was going to be an even bigger march in New York City, too, but I wanted to be in the place where the crime was being committed. To assign blame, you know? I felt there was nothing else to do. All the reasonable arguments against an attack had already been made, all the op-ed pieces had been written. It didn’t seem to matter. There was bloodlust in the air and there was a thrilled feeling that it was all inevitable. “Let’s see what happens!” So the planes went in, and the missiles went in, and all I had left to do was to come here and shout till my voice stopped working. That’s all I could do.

BEN: Yeah, we—

JAY: And there were all these cops on horseback that came trotting briskly, mounties, all lined up, self-important mounties, with blank faces. We were just a bunch of people with signs who wanted to march to the White House and shout that the president was a war criminal, but the funny thing is that nowadays here you can’t march to the White House, you’re really not allowed anywhere near the White House, they’ve got things blocked off and this maze of barriers around, so all you can do is pretend that you’re marching on the White House when actually the house itself is way way off in the middle distance, and you’re in a little sort of park, with your sign in the air, standing there.

BEN: What did your sign say?

JAY: “Murderers.”

BEN: Ah.

JAY: So then the crowd started to get bigger and we poured out into the street, and then it became kind of interesting because the horse cops were trying to keep three different phalanxes of gathering protesters apart, but we just oozed, man, we were like a huge amoeba of dissent and we poured around the block from one side and then another side and suddenly we were in front of the horse cops and behind them and coming in from the right, and they looked kind of silly there — because what were they blocking?

BEN: Nothing.

JAY: And then the motorcycle cops came, about a hundred of them, with those low-slung panniers. I don’t mind the sunglasses and the engine-revving, it’s part of their act, but some of them drove down the sidewalks at forty miles an hour, freaking people out. The crowd had gotten big by then.

BEN: You were pulling in people.

JAY: Yeah, we were pulling in people, it was a spontaneous surge of humanity, because we were so furious about that bombing. It was so obviously terror bombing — and I didn’t even know about the napalm then. There were government employees marching — I overheard them saying, “Keep your head down so they can’t take a picture.” And there was one guy, oh, he stood up against an equestrian statue, and he was holding a small white sign, right in front of his chest — it said SEE YOU IN THE HAGUE, MR. BUSH.

BEN: Good one.

JAY: I thought, Right on, right on. And I shouted stuff that I never would have believed that I would shout. My voice was destroyed by the end of the day, I was just croaking. “Stop the violence! Stop the hate!”

BEN: That’s called peaceful protest. Julie and I—

JAY: Oh, it was really something, for about an hour in the middle they had us caught, walled off between two streets, with rows of Plexiglas shields and nightsticks and paddy wagons — and I just thought, Man, all we want to say today is, This attack is wrong, so get the shit out of our way, you shitassing bluebeards, so we can just say this. But actually, you know what?

BEN: What?

JAY: They were very restrained, they were. I’ve heard things about Washington cops, but this really wasn’t bad. Their jaw muscles were jumping, some of them were angry, but they held back. And some of them beeped their little motorcycle horns in rhythm when we were chanting.

BEN: Did they really?

JAY: Oh, that made us cheer. And any time somebody flashed a peace sign from a window or a roof we would cheer, I mean it really felt straightforwardly democratic, and there were no bloody incidents, one or two guys got a little testy and they were wrestled down and hauled off, but we were standing there in front of the Plexiglas shields, and, you know? I had nothing really in common with all these people I was marching with — I’m not actually, you know, if you really want to know, pro-choice, for instance. In fact, quite the contrary.

BEN: Hmm.

JAY: This war, Ben? Is an abortion. It’s an abortion performed on a whole country. I mean in some ways I’m actually surprisingly conservative, if you get down to it. But there I was with my fist in the air, I’m sobbing, I’m screaming with these people because we all sensed and we knew, regardless of what we did or didn’t have in common in other ways, we all knew that the war that the United States was waging on that patchwork country was, was — it was ushering a new kind of terribleness into the world. And we knew that we had to do something. So we marched and marched and marched, and we shouted till we couldn’t shout anymore, and then we all went home and we put on our pajamas or our whatevers, and we went to sleep and woke up the next morning, and what? People were still getting their limbs blown off — families were still being killed. I’d given it everything I had. I felt like a lump of depleted uranium.

BEN: Well, you’d walked all day.

JAY: Yeah, oh, and at the end all the cops were lined up in a long long row to keep us from going into a certain park, and as I passed I thanked them, I said, Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, nodding to each one of them, because they had been restrained, and there hadn’t been any violence, and that’s something. That’s really important.

BEN: So you thanked them.

JAY: I did, and the next day, when I woke up, I told myself you’re not going to read blogs all day. Because I’d been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, Talking Points Memo, checking Google News twenty times a day.

BEN: I don’t read blogs so much.

JAY: I said to myself, No more, because where does that get you? You’ve got to detach. It’s happening no matter what you do, no matter how well informed or not informed you are. And I lay there in this big house where I was staying, listening to myself breathe, not moving my head, just blinking. That’s when it happened. There was an old National Geographic map of the solar system on the wall near the bed, and it was just when the sun was coming into the room in a certain way, so that the sun hit one of the pushpins that was holding a corner of it, a lower corner, to the wall, and there was a moment when this yellow pushpin shined out. It was as if at that moment the pushpin was a celestial body. And I thought, The solar system, man, now that’s neutral, it’s eternal, you can’t politicize it, it’s on a different scale or plane, and I found that that was quite a comforting idea. The remoteness of the planets. The fact that the sunlight had come ninety-three million miles down through space and into that window just in order to light up the end of a pushpin — and I was thinking all this in a kind of peaceful way…. Is this working?

BEN: I think so, you could check it again.

[ Click, click. ]

JAY: Good, because — well, anyway, I thought, it doesn’t matter to the solar system what my status is. It doesn’t matter to, say, the Oort cloud whether I’m in jail or dead or alive, and it doesn’t matter whether the president is dead or alive. You see? It’s a matter of complete indifference to the universe at large.

BEN: Uh-oh.

JAY: So anyway, I had a moment of clarity, that’s all. Just a moment of understanding that I was capable of something that I didn’t know that I was capable of. That was all last year. And then he was on the aircraft carrier with that freaky flight suit on, and it was supposedly over, and then there was the Sunni Triangle, and the “insurgents,” you know, death everywhere, and now it’s all ramping up again, there’s a new massing of forces. And I know I’m capable of it.