There is a lot of e-mailing in the New Age crowd, my New Agey sister tells me, about how this is a conflict between the dark forces of both societies, the capitalists (referred to in most of the e-mails as “the world management team”) and the Islamists, who are themselves both the puppets of larger, superhuman, cosmic dark forces that are orchestrating the destruction of the world. That there is definitely a dark side to our society there can be no doubt, but you don’t have to posit any mystical dark forces to explain why it exists. Ignorance accounts for most it.  In Arizona, soon after the attack,  some of the local boys gunned down a Sikh, an Indian from the Punjab, because he was wearing a turban and was the closest person they could find to an Arab. The governor of Louisiana made a declaration that he took a lot of flak and quickly apologized for: “we’re going to pull over everybody who is wearing a diaper on his head.” In Warrensburg, an hour south of where I live, a Getty station owned by a Pakistani (who are already being called “Pakis,” like the “Japs” of WWII) is pelted with eggs. The owner puts up dozens of American flags, and the egging stops.

   A week after the attack, there’s a lively gathering  on the porch of the restaurant/bar in our little hamlet. Meat is sizzling on a gas grill,  the local boys are all there, beer is flowing freely. It’s an end of the golf season celebration, I find out later. I swing by and ask a carpenter who has done work on my house, hey, what’s this all about, and he say, in his cups, “We’re going to kill some sand niggers. Want to join us? ” 

   Sand niggers. I haven’t heard this revolting term in nine years, not since the Gulf War, when the same regulars at the same watering place were hepped up about “nuking the sand niggers.” This term really gets under my skin, because my wife is African, and it’s an ethnic slur that’s built on an ethnic slur. It has twice the potency of your average slur.

   I call the guy from whom I recall first hearing the term, back at the time of the Gulf War. He is a college-educated guy from an old WASP family, and he told me a joke about “sand niggers” from the local boys. He thought the term was hilariously funny at the time. I remember him saying, after I told him that the most disgusting term I’ve ever heard, “Come on. You have to admit it’s funny.” But now he doesn’t recall the joke or ever having told it to me. “I would never tell a joke like that,” he says. So he has grown, and is in denial about who he was then. 
I realize that this could be another case of the useful, forgetting type of loss. We must forget our previous selves before we can grow out of them. Denial greases the skin-shedding process.

  My friend tells me that he heard the term long before the Gulf War. He recalls a Jewish stockbroker on Wall Street applying it to the rich Arab oil sheiks who had America by the balls during the oil crisis of 1973. How interesting. So the attack on the tower could have a karmic, what-goes-around-comes-around aspect. “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.”

   Anthony Sapienza, the aforementioned editor of The Spook who is a New Yorker through and through, tells me sand nigger is a street term that has been around since the seventies. There were “white niggas” in the South, and “sand niggas,” who included Syrians, Egyptians, Algerians, Indians, whoever was in the hood who wasn’t white or black. So apparently the term was picked up by Wall Street, and also by the rural rednecks. Anything society that could come up with such a term is sick, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe we should be looking within ourselves for the explanation of what happened. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We have our own Bin Laden’s, our Timothy McVeighs on the right and our Ted Kaczynski’s on the left, our Columbines and police stompers of Rodney and sodomizers of Abner Louima. Every culture does. There is a Bin Laden in each of us. Most of us are able to keep him bottled, but if you push the right buttons, he will come out. (Having seen Bin Laden's videotaped statement from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan on October 7th, I'm no longer so sure about this now.  Bin Laden seems to be a uniquely creepy, completely cold-blooded individual, someone more on the order of Jimmy Jones or Charles Manson than John Brown or Che.)

   I refuse to be provoked by the carpenter’s invitation to “kill some sand niggers.” Instead I mumble something about having to get to the grocery store before it closes and drive back up the hill and split some very twisted and gnarly wood for an hour or so, until I can’t lift my splitting maul any more. I call my cousin, who lives in Long Island and could see the smoke engulfing lower Manhattan from Glen Cove beach. She has never heard the term and is appalled, but reminds me, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it what all Americans are like. Not every German is Hitler.” 

   She’s right, of course. At an anti-war protest rally in Cambridge, a young woman who had just started at Harvard as a freshman is photographed by the New York Times holding a placard that says AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND. Gandhi’s dictum.  A lot of Americans and people all over the world—too many for the “world management team” —don’t want to see another Bagdad. But the Bush administration is going to be more sensitive to public opinion than the other side. 

   So I want to end this, and to kick off the Dispatches, on a hopeful, positive note. Hope (although to the Buddhists it is one of the major causes of suffering) is absolutely essential if we are going save what is left of the planet’s biological and cultural diversity. (My friend Bill McKibben, who followed The End of Nature with a book called Hope, Human and Wild, was several years ahead of me in realizing this.) Without the hope that things can still be turned around, what is the point of living?  What other reason can we give to our children so that they aren’t completely demoralized? 

   For the answer to such questions, I always take to the woods. Yesterday, the 23rd, day twelve of the post-attack era, I went roaming in the woods behind our house with my three little boys, looking for mushrooms, newts, salamanders, and whatever else might be out there.. Zachary, the six-year-old, said, “Look, Dad, a happy face.” He had picked up a birch leaf on the forest floor that had some holes eaten into it by insects. It is the same face that Zach’s teachers in Montreal put on his artwork and writing exercises. You will see what he was talking about. This is undoubtedly an accidental and perhaps, as Jung would say, synchronicitous convergence of nature and art, rather than art imitating nature or the other way around. 

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