We are deep in the middle of the part of life Hollywood leaves out of every movie: the long in-between. This is the time when we grieve for the immediate past and fret for the near future. At best, this period might be shown in a movie as a calendar, with the pages tearing away swiftly, as if blown by the wind.
Movies are often about unhappy events – war, natural disaster, calamity. The audience is insulated from the unhappiness of these events by the tide of adrenaline which carries us forward and by the floor of the editing room, which saves us from having to live through the long in-between.
The events of the past few months have been cinematic and we’ve been swept along on a current of emotion; we’ve seen enough treachery, drama and heroism to keep a movie studio busy for a decade. Now, most Americans just want this movie to be over, we want to step out of the theater and back into our lives again.
If we could get what we wanted for Christmas, that’s what it would be – we’d all go on a year-end, gift-buying bender that would boost the economy and pull us out of recession. We’d wake up on New Year’s Day to a minor military mopping-up exercise in Afghanistan, with the leaders of the Al Qaeda terror network dead or sitting in a cell, bound over for trial at The Hague, a trial we can blissfully ignore, as we’ve ignored terrorist trials in the past.
America would like nothing better than to stop thinking about anthrax and devote more attention to Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, the National Football League and the 2002 Winter Olympics. It is not to be. This is the long in-between, not the long goodbye. There is more to come.
Overseas, the hard part of the war is just beginning. We’ve all been surprised at how quickly and with how little bloodshed the Northern Alliance has taken over so much of Afghanistan. We’ve learned wars are won by quartermasters in that country, and the side with the better boots, rations and wages soon finds itself with most of the soldiers on its side. Graft seems to be the prevailing military strategy. Instead of special forces, we could as well have sent a couple dozen ward heelers from Boston.
Those are the Afghans. The Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis who volunteered for Jihad are a different story, as we saw in the prison riot. The same kinds of fighters are moving into the cave-riddled mountains to the north and east of Kandahar. This is where things will get tough and the war we keep talking about will suddenly seem very real. President Bush and members of his administration have been rattling their sabers toward Iraq lately and talking tough about Phase Two of the war on terrorism, but Phase One is far from over.
Neither is Phase One over on the home front. We keep hoping the anthrax assault is over, but still more victims keep dying and every death is more puzzling than the ones which have gone before.
Much of the evidence in the anthrax cases points to a homegrown psychopath, rather than a foreign fanatic and let’s hope that’s the case, because a disturbed local person will likely only have the wherewithal for anthrax and won’t go branching out into smallpox.
The worst scenario to contemplate, however, is that Osama bin Laden’s foul friends have not yet finished and something on the magnitude of September 11th is still lurking out there. The bombers tried the World Trade Center in 1993. They failed, learned from their mistakes and came back to the same target.
In late 1999, the Customs Service detected a bomb coming across the Canadian border, supposedly headed for Los Angeles for New Year’s Eve. This might be a good year for Angelenos to ring out the old in Vegas or Mexico.
The Long In-Between
We are deep in the middle of the part of life Hollywood leaves out of every movie: the long in-between. This is the time when we grieve for the immediate past and fret for the near future. At best, this period might be shown in a movie as a calendar, with the pages tearing away swiftly, as if blown by the wind.
Movies are often about unhappy events – war, natural disaster, calamity. The audience is insulated from the unhappiness of these events by the tide of adrenaline which carries us forward and by the floor of the editing room, which saves us from having to live through the long in-between.
The events of the past few months have been cinematic and we’ve been swept along on a current of emotion; we’ve seen enough treachery, drama and heroism to keep a movie studio busy for a decade. Now, most Americans just want this movie to be over, we want to step out of the theater and back into our lives again.
If we could get what we wanted for Christmas, that’s what it would be – we’d all go on a year-end, gift-buying bender that would boost the economy and pull us out of recession. We’d wake up on New Year’s Day to a minor military mopping-up exercise in Afghanistan, with the leaders of the Al Qaeda terror network dead or sitting in a cell, bound over for trial at The Hague, a trial we can blissfully ignore, as we’ve ignored terrorist trials in the past.
America would like nothing better than to stop thinking about anthrax and devote more attention to Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, the National Football League and the 2002 Winter Olympics. It is not to be. This is the long in-between, not the long goodbye. There is more to come.
Overseas, the hard part of the war is just beginning. We’ve all been surprised at how quickly and with how little bloodshed the Northern Alliance has taken over so much of Afghanistan. We’ve learned wars are won by quartermasters in that country, and the side with the better boots, rations and wages soon finds itself with most of the soldiers on its side. Graft seems to be the prevailing military strategy. Instead of special forces, we could as well have sent a couple dozen ward heelers from Boston.
Those are the Afghans. The Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis who volunteered for Jihad are a different story, as we saw in the prison riot. The same kinds of fighters are moving into the cave-riddled mountains to the north and east of Kandahar. This is where things will get tough and the war we keep talking about will suddenly seem very real. President Bush and members of his administration have been rattling their sabers toward Iraq lately and talking tough about Phase Two of the war on terrorism, but Phase One is far from over.
Neither is Phase One over on the home front. We keep hoping the anthrax assault is over, but still more victims keep dying and every death is more puzzling than the ones which have gone before.
Much of the evidence in the anthrax cases points to a homegrown psychopath, rather than a foreign fanatic and let’s hope that’s the case, because a disturbed local person will likely only have the wherewithal for anthrax and won’t go branching out into smallpox.
The worst scenario to contemplate, however, is that Osama bin Laden’s foul friends have not yet finished and something on the magnitude of September 11th is still lurking out there. The bombers tried the World Trade Center in 1993. They failed, learned from their mistakes and came back to the same target.
In late 1999, the Customs Service detected a bomb coming across the Canadian border, supposedly headed for Los Angeles for New Year’s Eve. This might be a good year for Angelenos to ring out the old in Vegas or Mexico.