posted on the web on April 13 2003

Country Data

Full Name: United States of America Capital: Washington D.C. Population: 280,562,489 (2002 est.) Location: North America Total area: 9,629,091 sq km Language: English, Spanish Ethnic groups: white 77.1%, black 12.9%, Asian 4.2%, Native 1.8% Religions: Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2% Currency: US Dollar IGO memberships: G-8, NATO, UN, UNSC, WHO, WTO Internet site: Department of State Source: CIA World Factbook

War. The word itself, with its monosyllabic abruptness, its slightly scary looking "W" and its "r" that fades instantly into silence on the lips, is an ominous thing. And the word is everywhere now. It's in our newspapers (the art sections too), flashed recklessly from the ticker tapes at the bottom of televisions, and its violent specter lurks in every conversation, no matter how idle the talk.

Somewhere of course, war is more than a word. Somewhere, war means blood and tons of steel falling freely from the sky. Somewhere, somewhere far away, war means the sounds of gunfire and bullets piercing flesh and men and women and children crying. Somewhere, somewhere else, war means death. But to be honest, I don't know very much. That's just how I imagine it: all I know of war I learned in the movies.

But back to the word, because this war, perhaps more than most, suffers from a surreal disconnect between the word and the deed, the television screen and the three-dimensional reality behind it. I live on the side of the television, thank god, where the word "War" is the reality, where the impact of bombs is gauged from little cameras on the bellies of planes that the Pentagon gives to CNN. My country is at war, and my thoughts, like most peoples, are constantly being directed at some repetitious news source talking of war. But am I at war? Or is this whole tragi-comic episode just like another movie to me?

To be perfectly honest, the whole thing is pretty cinematic. You can almost hear the symbol crash crescendo when the stations return from the necessary commercial breaks. And this latest invention of "tank cams", of grainy live video feeds of diesel cavalry driving serenely through the desert, through a battlefield, is perhaps the latest innovation in the blurring of war and entertainment. Never before have millions of home viewers curled up with popcorn to watch a real war unfold. And if it were not for the bad quality of the image (or is that some new cinema verité style?), I probably wouldn't know it wasn't the very boring movie of the week.

But there are moments when the word "War" and its concomitant news specials escapes the theoretical; brief terrifying seconds when the violent realities puncture through the banal photographs of front page destruction and fetishism over armaments. For example, I saw soldiers carrying automatic weapons in the subway the day after war began. They looked incongruous among the hurried masses, the hands of the citizens clutching not guns but shopping bags and cell phones. I saw a homeless man ask a soldier for change.

I don't know why the soldiers are here and there. They always look a little bored. Perhaps they are symbols of memory for a city with a short attention span, armed reminders that this war began here, in these streets. But regardless of their purpose, the very presence of the soldiers, like the word "war", casts an ominous shadow over the normal busyness of a rush hour subway station. The woman reading the romance novel as she waited for the train glanced upwards at the soldiers with a touch of guilt. She closed her book and put it away. How does one read a novel during wartime? The clichéd young lovers stopped kissing as the soldier walked by. How does one kiss before camouflage? People all over the station stopped and stared, a bit annoyed at this intrusion of the act of war, the reality of guns (how big and serious they look) upon the smallness of the word "war".

So perhaps the answer is yes, war does change life, even when it exists simply as a word. War the word, the imagined idea of mass violence, has a way of drowning out life's subtlety. General, useless fear does the same. But ob la di, ob la da, life goes on. Springtime arrived simultaneous to war here in New York. It was a much-needed thaw, coming after a long and cold winter. It was as if God was making amends, trying to tell us that although he has no control over us and armies (we have free will), he still controls the weather. There's beauty yet. Spring will come. The lilacs coming out of the dead ground will be like rainbows.

Jonah Richard Lehrer is a student at Columbia University, USA.