As I develop this website, I intend to remain faithful to something that William Hazlitt, one of the great English essayists of the 19th century, said over a hundred and fifty years ago. “So I have loitered my life away,” he wrote, “reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.” I would hope that, as you move through the Honors Program of Fulbright College, you find a way to loiter your own life away, reading, thinking, and writing. From time to time, I’ll post a brief essay that reminds you of your allegiance to the trilogy, to read, to think, to write . . . to loiter in that best Hazlittian sense of the term. The faculty of Fulbright College continually asks you to write for them; now, I’ll write for you. If you feel so inclined, respond with your own words, however brief, however lengthy, and maybe we’ll compile an online forum of responses. Why not? It’s the least, or no, it’s the most that we can do.
How I Watched the Iraqi War on TV
5 November, 2004
View other essays by Sidney Burris
For one thing, I bought a recording of Thomas Tallis’s music. An English composer who lived during the 16 th-century (a century nearly as violent as our own), Tallis would have been in his early forties in 1547 when Edward, Henry VIII’s nine-year-old son, took over the throne. Protestantism became the country’s official religion, and English the authorized language of religious composition. Catholicism and Latin were out. If you’d built a career on composing for the Catholic service, and if you wanted to keep on working, you had to go with English, adapting the new language to the new Anglican liturgy. But Mary Tudor ascended six years later in 1553 and reinstated both the old faith and the Latin mass. Then you had to switch back to Latin and the more traditional forms. Elizabeth arrived next, of course, in 1558, and under her reign, the Book of Common Prayer finally set the tones and cadences that English church music would follow for centuries to come, but it’s also true that Elizabeth encouraged Latin compositions for certain occasions. You could, if you were so inclined, swing both ways. Still, some composers couldn’t deal with the back-and-forth changes and, like John Taverner, to name one, they often sought other employment. Some fled to the continent. But not Tallis. He stayed put, and kept on working at his craft, taking in stride the political and religious upheavals of his turbulent century. I like that about him. He’s often referred to as the “father of English cathedral music.” To me, he’s just the hardest working composer in sixteenth-century English church music.
I listened to the CD and watched CNN on mute, as the war in Iraq rolled across the screen. It made for a weird overlay effect—a religious soundtrack laid down over stark images of carnage, like something from The Godfather. The stateside anchors, attractive and scrubbed, pulled long hours, well beyond their normal shifts, as the correspondents in the field, the “embeds” as they’re bizarrely called, apparently didn’t sleep at all. A British guy who was finally expelled from Baghdad was one of CNN’s major sources, and he remained unruffled, even though he looked from time to time to be in the midst of a heavy siege of some sort. I won’t forget the day that British troops uncovered evidence of atrocities, “past atrocities,” they were called, in one of the smaller towns lying somewhere south of Baghdad—plastic bags full of fractured human bones, skulls with their teeth yanked out, that kind of thing. They also found a brick wall, heavily pitted by bullets of some sort. Probably an execution site, the headline speculated. Many of the skulls had what appeared to be bullet holes in them. Oddly, I remember that on the day the American death toll climbed to 62 hostile deaths, 13 non-hostile deaths, I was getting a little tired of Tallis, but felt obligated to listen to him. It had something to do with collateral commitment: the soldiers fought the war day-in, day-out, and I listened to Tallis. I don’t know. But I do know that last year, in Los Angeles alone, there were 321 hostile deaths. The first track of the CD, “Lamentations,” is the only one I really know because by the time the second one began I was already absorbed in the war. At any rate, the first track begins, “How lonely sitteth the city, that once was full of people.”
Baath party officials left Baghdad with suitcases full of money. They didn’t want to die, and if they stayed, they’d probably be “eliminated,” as the military said. I wondered if all Baath party members were evil; I wondered what sorts of evil had been visited on them. I wondered what they left behind in their homes. Books? Beds? Carpets? Loved ones? The booklet that came with the CD has the names of the choir listed on the back page. I read through them--Elisabeth, Ruth, Andrea, Claire, Suzanne, Elisabeth, Amelia, Alan, Mark, Paul, Neal, Hugh, Thomas, Paul, Boyd, Kari--and found myself wondering about them. Children? Surely some of these fine voices took time out to become parents. Had they buried their own parents yet? Some probably had. Was there a cancer survivor among them? Had one of them been told that he had growing within him that which might kill him? Maybe. What about divorce? Had one of them been told after years of slipping into the same bed every night that on the next night she’d sleep alone? Probably. And what was that first night alone really like for her? For him? Did they feel that the world they once knew had come to an end? And when confronted with that feeling, that feeling of finality, what did they do? Did each admit that things would never be the same, and then turn over, and sleep? Or toss and turn, and worry about the children?
And yet as I listened to the CD, I heard none of this, I heard none of the clamoring, the daily ruckus of human sorrow. Tallis had composed his music as Protestants and Catholics were being martyred, as homes were being left fatherless, motherless, childless. Through it all, he found his stability in the methods and traditions that had been handed down to him; day in and day out, confronted with the extraordinary violence of his era, he plied his craft. There’s no record of what he thought of his government or his church. Surely, he had his opinions, but his work, as I began to see it, was his response, his only credible opinion, when his own world must have seemed at times on the edge of disintegration. Over 400 years later, in California, these singers had done a similar thing when they made this recording: they had gathered together and sung, leaving behind, for the moment, their own sadnesses and joys, and they had participated in a song of lamentation that took its shape from a very old liturgy. Their song, their work, for the moment, was their integrity. I listened to them as I watched strangers in Iraq dying at the hands of my countrymen. I listened to the singers very closely. If war is one of our greatest human failures, even at times an unavoidable failure, then song is one of our greatest triumphs. Even at times, I’m happy to say, an unavoidable triumph.
Nowadays, it’s difficult to know what to do or how to think when our country goes to war, which we’ve been doing with some degree of regularity over the course of our comparatively brief history. We’re encouraged to have opinions, to inform ourselves about the issues, but we suspect that the essential information on which our leaders base their decisions is denied to us for reasons of national security. Still, in what amounts to an act of supreme condescension, we’re polled; we’re asked what we think about issues that we know little about. Give us the relevant information, I believe, and we’ll perform the relevant analysis and form the relevant opinion. “There is no body of theory,” Noam Chomsky has written, “or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.” That certainly seems one way to think about the problem—demand the information, educate yourself, form the reasoned opinion, let your leaders know of your feelings, and then leave it in the hands of our duly elected officials. And if it turns out that you spend your lifetime laboriously pursuing the relevant information, crying foul when it’s unavailable, and opening the channels so that others may have easier access to the facts, then clearly you’ve led a good life.
How I watched the Iraqi War on TV (continued)
