I've spent the last ten days immersed in the culture of the most wonderful country on the planet. If you're a person like me, unsure of an afterlife, not really buying the whole idea of heaven, take a couple of weeks and travel to Italy, it is paradise on earth, you don't have to wait until you die, they let you in as long as you have a passport. It is a place of amazing wealth, where history is preserved with the utmost care. The design of the cities and villages fit into the landscape so well, you have to imagine that it was sculpted by the masters. Everything you see and taste and smell, the musical quality of the language, all of it reminds you that you've been invited to spend a lifetime in heaven. It is a humbling experience.
I've spent the last 12 hours or so in a tiny seat in economy class, pressurized to the level of extreme discomfort, but they tell me it's not easy to get to heaven, and it is even more difficult to come back. I've been out of the loop so to speak, in Tuscany it was difficult to find an English language newspaper, I heard snatches of news, the indictment of Tom Delay was great, and at my hotel in Florence, we asked the bartender to break out the bottle of Lemoncello, and high fived each other. The news of the White Sox beating Boston was a bit surreal, did that really happen? Did my South Side guys actually do something right? I heard about Harriet Miers, the corporate lawyer who has never even served on a bench anywhere getting nominated to the highest court in the country, but I guess that experience is not really needed for these government jobs, shit maybe I can even apply for a judgeship. I spent most of my time eating and checking out the beauty of Italy, and it was everywhere, the hills, the food, the architecture, the women, and even the men.
Today at the Florence airport I found the international version of the NY Times. As I left Italian airspace, I found an op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman. It was titled "A Question for Saddam and Bush". It was the perfect thing to read leaving paradise, and returning to the land of the Stupid. Here is the question Friedman asks of Saddam.
"What were you thinking? If you had no weapons of mass destruction, why did you keep acting as though you did?"
Now I was sitting in my economy class seat trying to keep the circulation in my legs flowing, but still, I seemed to remember that Saddam pretty much said that he didn't have any WMD. There was this whole ten thousand page document devoted to just that; they didn't have any. It was Colin Powell who sat in front of the UN with George Tenet behind him who created the fiction of hidden mobile labs and fake intelligence. Am I remembering that wrong? Surely a distinguished journalist like Friedman who doesn't even have to pay to get into the NY Times archives can just look it up. Did it all really happen, did our President and Secretary of State tell a bunch of flimsy lies that any investigative journalist could have disproved in a week to get us stuck in this no-win war?
And are award winning journalists really trying to blame Saddam for our stupidity because he acted like he had weapons?
Dorothy, we're not in Florence anymore.
It's tough to come back down to earth when you've been to a place where things like culture and art matter more than developement. It's tough to come back from a place that has no strip malls, a place where things are still made by hand, cities that have structures that have survived tens of centuries, a land where art was born, a country that has survived imperialism and defeat and learned the lessons of history. But it's easy to hope that when we are done with our imperial ambitions and have known utter defeat like ever other imperial power in history, that we will finally know what's important.
