September 12, 2006

I wore my FDNY T-shirt yesterday to the US embassy’s Sept. 11 memorial service. It was underneath my button-down shirt and sport jacket (it was damp and a little chilly yesterday). But it was there.

The ceremony we attended was mercifully brief – no more than a half hour – and featured a speech by the ambassador as well as a statement from the president, followed by a tree planting. Bec managed to get close to the ambassador during the photo of all the guests watching the tree planting. At the last moment, I felt goofy so I bailed and watched with the embassy staff.

I knew that the president and his staff had sent around a directive ordering American diplomats around the world to emphasize that the United States is a country at war, and that we’re not going to stop that war until it’s done, blah, blah, blah. But how many times do we need to say that? Frankly I’m tired of it. It almost sounds like the president and his bunch like the state of affairs. Maybe it makes them feel manlier. Maybe he’s scared. But as one of my friends said, they’ve already said that 5,000 times. Do they have to say it again?

I also knew that the ambassador here wanted nothing to do with that stuff. Being in Cameroon helps, because it matters a lot less what he says. The ambassadors in strategic countries, like Indonesia or Nigeria or Russia, I’m sure don’t have the leeway that the ambassador to Cameroon has.

But he didn’t go for the war. In fact, I don’t think the word war appeared in his speech at all. He talked about the fear that has engulfed the world, and how that needs to end. I think that’s a message the U.S. would be much better off sending than we’re coming to kill people and we’re scared.

When the ambassador read the president’s statement, you could almost see him sighing a little.

………

Speaking of all that, how come when the president officially announced that there were secret prisons holding terror suspects, nobody said, “Hey. Wait a minute. What’s the big idea?” First of all, he said we didn’t have those. In fact, he and his cronies said that people who did say we had them were conspiracy theorists and other nasty things. And nobody said, “Hey. You lied again.”

And even worse, nobody said anything like, “Hey. That’s something the Argentine military junta did during the dirty war. We shouldn’t be like that.” Or that secret detention in a foreign prison was in some way un-American. Or that if we’re going to go out and have secret prisons and fly people on secret planes and torture people, what’s the point of defending our values and way of life. That fight’s already been lost.

Instead, people bickered over whether people standing trial should be allowed to have access to the evidence against them.

Now, I’m in Cameroon, so I may have missed all those things that I wanted to hear. But I don’t think I did.

Does this mean that I don’t think there are threats to the United States and the West? Ask Rebecca, who has to listen to me stupidly accuse her of that very wrong idea. No, it just seems that if you’re fighting a “battle of ideas,” you shouldn’t abandon them at the first hint of danger.

………..

Meanwhile, back in Cameroon – I played my first game of soccer this past weekend. I was on a team full of middle-aged Italian guys and a few others who have played soccer every day for their entire lives. My friend Tad, who seems to be a part of all my Cameroon athletic stories, was on a team of primarily 15-year-old boys.

I hadn’t played soccer probably since I was about 14, and my lack of skill showed. I had Zinadine Zidane’s thuggish instincts, without his graceful skill. It got to the point where everyone was saying, “Hey, you kicked it” whenever I played a ball. At least they didn’t do to me what they did to Tad. He got stuck in goal.

I figured out that my biggest problem in soccer is that I’m used to playing stupid North American games where when someone came near my goal, they had to go down. Since I couldn’t do anything else, the Italians put me on defense. Scott Stevens used to say that a good hitter could see a body check developing before it happened. He’d see a guy skating with his head down, into open space or towards the goal. Then he’d see the exact path to take to nail the guy just right.

Well, I was Scott Stevens for an afternoon. Except that I always remembered to pull up at the last minute, which meant the little buggers usually got a shot off.

There was one occasion where a little guy did go down. He was running with his head down and I just moved into position to stop him. I even stopped moving so that I wouldn’t run into him. But he kept coming and the next thing I knew, this little guy who came up to my shoulder and was probably 13 or 14, was on the ground. I helped him up and dusted him off. “Why am I such a jerk,” I thought.

But then I noticed that it was the same little guy who had put his elbow into my solar plexus earlier in the game. You know, one of those punks who keeps his elbows up at all times to create space, or injuries. I hated those guys in lacrosse; I hated those guys in roller hockey; and I hated those guys in soccer. So I felt a lot less bad about sending him to the turf. His elbows stayed down for the rest of the day.

But this begs the question, which is something many people have wondered on many occasions: Why am I such a jerk?