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411: En route to Harvard
Listening to:
I woke up in Boston again.
This always unnerves me. I feel as if significant distance travel requires significant time. It's weird to wake up in DC one day and then be in Boston a few hours later. I feel as if more days should pass in between the cities.
January means the start of school, and therefore the loss of my wife to an institution of higher learning. We piled all her stuff into the car, left a little room for the dogs and her snowboard in the backseat, and started the very same drive that countless parents of 18 year olds are familiar with.
The dogs don't get breakfast when they make this trip. It takes them at least half an hour to stop whining in the backseat, and once that happens it's too easy to psyche yourself into thinking they have to go to the bathroom. After a quick rest stop (where they never actually go because they're wound too tight) you then have to wait another half hour for them to get calm again. Easier to let them miss a meal and sleep through this entire trip.
On the way to Boston we listened to the audio CD of Anne Garrels' "Naked in Baghdad", her account of the recent war in Iraq. Unlike many other journalists, she wasn't "embedded", but parked herself at the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad and worked with cooperative Iraqis to get her stories.
Broadcasting from her hotel with an illegally-kept satellite phone, Garrels repeatedly scooped other news organizations with stories that unearthed details others didn't even bother to try getting. She credits several factors for her success:
Excellent guides: Garrels credits her success in every conflict situation to the assistance of whomever becomes her local guide. She has a good sense for such people, and in Baghdad she meets Amir who is so amazingly resourceful that he can find a case of French bordeuax in a war zone, while other reporters are happy to be eating stale macaroni and cheese.
She's not a tv reporter: It's distinctly easier to get people to open up and talk when you aren't sticking a 20 lb. camera in their face.
She's an older woman: Being a woman allows her access to female enclaves that men can't access. Being older allows her not to have to deal with her gender. She describes a rare interview with an Islamic cleric that wouldn't have been possible had she been younger and possibly, "attractive".
Garrels' pieces aired on NPR, but what I found engaging is that she isn't really the kind of run of the mill anti-war kook that one usually associates with public radio. Nothing offends me more than the blind ra-ra of the anti-Bush, anti-war crowd, and you can find that in spades on NPR. Start using the analytic part of your mind and you'll find yourself offended by zealots of both sides, turned off by both Democratic and Republican rhetoric. This will ruin both Fox and NPR for you, by the way.
A Garrels skewering is like watching a stammering boyfriend with lipstick on his shirt dig his own hole. Throughout the war she highlights the suffering of the Iraqi people, and continues to point out the absence of Saddam Hussein. When it becomes vogue in the States to shout, "self determination for the Iraqis", she simply does man on the street interviews with Iraqis who say 'give us a year and we'll take care of Saddam ourselves'. Yeah, get right on that guys, we'll wait over here.
When the peace movement becomes a sacred cow, she starts interviewing the "human shields" that went to Iraq and find themselves way over their head, being used by the government and their fellow shields deserting them like the Elite Republican Guard fleeing a bunker.
And of course, when it comes to the White House, neither she nor anyone else has to try that hard. Just say "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and that pretty much sums it up.
Garrels doesn't need spin to skewer the hypocritical. What she shows us is that with our own words and deeds, we do that just fine all by ourselves.
And as Garrels wraps up her stay in Iraq, the Marines arrive in Baghdad and we pull up at Sarah's apartment in Boston.
I'm glad someone is finally home.
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