In August, 2001 I abandoned my old life, largely over my lack of desire to decide in favor of having a child anytime soon, and left the sanity of my Brooklyn home to return to the madness of Manhattan and crash on the couch of my uncle Joey. Overnight I had left my partner and leapt from the portals of the American Dream into the underworld of the Starving Artist. With most of my earthly belongings soon stored in my friend Aaron’s garage in Windsor Terrace, my new life was for me rudely Spartan: cabinetful of Ramen, loose assortment of clothes, some books, Swiss army knife, small flashlight, laptop, AM-FM pocket radio, handheld television with a 2.3″ screen. Despite my freely made choice to destroy my gateway to the middle class in order to be alone, the road I’d chosen was an emotionally hard one to walk.
When a month later 9/11 happened and the looming threat of terrorism settled in, I began to see my self-marginalization and the streamlining of my lifestyle not as setbacks but as survival advantages over many of my beourgeois friends. I had become fully mobile, I had become unfettered by property, I had become an urban Bedouin ready to run at a moment’s notice. And I had trained myself how to run like hell.
One evening a week into our invasion of Iraq Joey came home as usual with the New York Times tucked beneath his arm fresh from a neighborhood newsstand, only this time he frantically pulled a color insert from within its folds as he scurried into the living room at me where I sat writing at my borrowed desk. “See?” he proudly proclaimed. “The New York Times isn’t afraid to show us the images. Everyone else is too scared to do it.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he dropped the insert onto my lap. I picked it up and almost retched. The images on the insert were those from Al Jazeera featuring dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed with US weaponry, the ones we’d all been hearing about but never been allowed to see here in the free world. The freeze-frames depicted in living color the destroyed head of a child, blasted to pieces in a US military attack. The top of her skull was completely gone, the scalp, with hair intact, was torn open and splayed in several directions on the ground like a fleshy crown. The accompanying text read, “3 year old innocent Iraqi girl ‘Liberated’ by George Walker Bush. Basra, Iraq, 3/22/03. US & Brit Soldiers look what you’ve done if you follow orders you are a war criminal.”
This insert was an amateurish, although not necessarily inaccurate, photocopy which had been reproduced onto Avery label paper so that the back could be easily peeled and posted in public, an unspoken exhortation for the recipient to become an active participant in showing the public our tax dollars at work in Iraq. As my visceral revulsion at the images increased, and a growing rage about what this child’s parents, neither of whom had a bloody thing to do with 9/11, must now think of us invaders, I began to imagine public places where I might hang the poster under cover of darkness in order to join anonymously in alerting my fellow New Yorkers to the facts.
However, I found myself too selfish to let the macabre insert out of my possession. Instead I clung to it in mourning, a replay of my reaction to the heart-wrenching images burned permanently into my mind the day I stood on the south side of Washington Square on my way to teach, and saw office workers diving and falling like tossed mannequins from the upper floors of the World Trade Center.
The insert was being placed in newspapers by someone angry over our media’s censorship of unpleasant war footage, either an individual with a lot of free time or perhaps an organized group. But was the insert correct? Was this dead child now haunting my daydreams even real? Was she indeed killed with US-made weapons? I became obsessed with tracking down the distributor of the insert. I wanted proof of the images’ veracity. I wanted to learn that the perpetrator was a prankster, that this atrocity in Basra never really happened, that there is no dead little girl with a burst head. It’s a Photoshop trick. Everything’s going to be okay.
The solution to uncovering the truth about the insert’s claims seemed quick and simple. I would go to Al Jazeera’s website and seek out versions of the same pictures. Perhaps I would even be lucky enough to find a name to go with the shattered little face and help rehumanize it. Unfortunately, US-based pro-murder hackers had attacked the site a few days ahead of me and replaced Al Jazeera’s content with an image of the United States flag. So much for freedom of the press and the democratizing power of the worldwide web.
Momentarily thwarted, I tried contacting two prominent anti-war organizations based in the city to see if either of them had any awareness of a campaign to distribute these images. I never received a response from either organization.
Next I blindly e-mailed the editorial, advertising and customer service departments at the New York Times. Did they know anything about the poster being ensconced in their papers? Had they gotten any complaints? Praise? Could the perpetrator be a disgruntled employee on a delivery truck? I received a call from the Times‘ PR director Toby Usnik. “It’s the first I’m hearing about this instance,” said Usnik, much to my disappointment. He wasn’t nearly as besieged and distraught as I’d hoped. I needed a teammate, a partner in bereavement and the search for truth. I pressed harder. He reiterated, “I’ve also asked a few people around the office and no one’s heard about this.” He offered me his cell number and urged me to call him if I learned anything more.
I finally did what I should have thought to do in the first place. I walked into the newsstand where my uncle had bought the newspaper, slapped the insert onto the counter in front of the elderly cashier Vinod and explained it had come from a newspaper bought at his store. Had he seen others like it? Had he done it himself? Had it come in that way off the Times‘ delivery truck? A little embarrassed, he conceded that every few days a man comes walking by with a stack of these homemade posters, runs into the store and shoves them into the newspapers, then runs out to hit the next store. Bingo.
I asked Vinod to have the man get in touch with me on his next raid and began digging in my wallet for my card which naturally contained my name, e-mail, home phone, and home address. As I offered it he warned me. “This man is crazy. Another customer tried to have a fight with him about the poster and he spat all over the customer’s head.”
A crazy spitter? I thought twice about my quest for truth, quickly retracted my card from Vinod’s hand and instead scribbled down only my first name and cell number on a scrap of paper. “Tell him I don’t want to fight with him. I only want to talk to him about the pictures of the dead child.”
My dark little mystery remained unresolved but one new rallying cry emerged from within me that week: my government is using my money to kill others and I have a right to know about it. I have seen Matthew Brady’s grisly yet revered Civil War photos of our forebears and I have relatives who died fighting at Gettysburg. I have seen disturbing newsreels from World War II in which my relatives also fought. I have seen colorful carnage captured on film in Vietnam. My brother Steve proudly served four years in the armed forces as did my father. I myself photographed bombed out suburbs and booby trapped churches on the Croatian countryside in the 1990s en route to Nikola Tesla’s wartorn birthplace in Smiljan, a trip that inspired my 1999 play Tesla’s Letters.
If I cannot trust my own government and my own press in the 21st century to show me the realities of Iraq’s occupation instead of working actively to keep me within a naive fantasy of precision-guided weapons that never miss their marks, if a group of rabid hackers can also force me to keep blinders on, then to whom can I turn for independent verification of facts but a crazy spitter? If these are my choices then I hope there is an army of crazy spitters out there, and that they are cranking out more inserts of war victims this very minute and slipping them into newspapers all across this great land.
After a week of searching for confirmation that this anonymous kid’s horrific fate was partly my responsibility because I had partly paid for it, I gave up and decided to seek closure for her death in a more personal way. I e-mailed my ex to make sure she and her new husband and their newborn were safe, and to wish them good luck.
Written March 31, 2003.
[Emil Nolde’s The Prophet via wikipedia. Al Jazeera photo via American Genocide.]
