Report: Wolfowitz @ The New School

Wolfowitz @ The New School

from: The Morning News, 9/22/03
'black + white + read all over'
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/new_york_new_york/ronald_reagen_and_reading_proust.php
by C. Sicha

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see also NYTimes: Wolfowitz Stands Fast Amid the Antiwarriors
By ERIC SCHMITT 9/22/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/international/22WOLF.html
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[…] excerpted

1:26 p.m. Outside the New School Auditorium there is a giant yellow New
Yorker balloon with the words Sponsored by Kate Spade. The wind picks up
and the balloon assaults some people. Interns spend the next 30 minutes
hilariously attempting to deflate it. A passer-by asks Whats going on
here? The cute Young Republican in front of me in line says Wolfowitz. Oh,
says the passer-by, Whats he doing? Spreading evil, I butt in.


1:50 p.m. Totally hot Secret Service guys yes, with the little curly
wires behind their ears, just like X-Files cruise up and down the line,
profiling. Blue blazers, their little oh-so-secret lapel pins, they are
blindingly-sexy. I realize I havent had a free second to jerk off since
this damn fool Festival began.

2:15 p.m. Some gay fella hits on me while Im smoking on line. Its
Wolfowitz, I say. Who? he asks. Deputy Secretary of Defense. Creator of
the Iraq War. Hes doing a cabaret number. The Young Republicans
girlfriend, recently arrived, notes that everyone talks to me. Its my
face, I tell her. People ask me for directions and information all the
time. They are obviously misguided about my essential nature.


2:45 p.m. The line begins to move into the Auditorium. My friend J.
saunters by. Im so excited, I say. Oh me too, he says, patting his
backpack and wiggling his eyebrows. Wha? That was more than a little
alarming. What the fuck?


3:20 p.m. My body is searched, my murse inspected. One chunky middle-aged
guy is refusing to have his cargo shorts checked. You think Im dumb enough
to come in and attack someone?, he yells. We all shrug and nod
affirmatively. He yells, Constitutional rights blah blah blah. We sigh as
one.


3:25 p.m. There are video cameras inside the auditorium. Just as I notice
them, the guy behind me says If this is on C-Span, why did I just wait in
line for two hours?


3:30 p.m. Great. The cargo-shorts-bomb guy is sitting right behind me with
his 8 or 9-year-old kid. Im going to die in here. You can feel anxiety
ricocheting around the oval room. The kid asks, Is Bush here? No, his dad
answers, a guy who works for Bush and who invests money with him is here.
Is Bush bad? asks the kid. His dad answers, Hes one of the worst people on
the planet.


3:37 p.m. God Id love to be in the Secret Service, always being so secret.
Two guys on my left are discussing the radical book Alice in Wonderland
and the World Trade Center Disaster. The four guys on my right are radical
Zionist Wolfowitz fan-boys. We are going down. We are all going down
together.


3:44 p.m. I am still fixing subway ads in my head. Rape is a terrible
thing to keep to yourself, I try. Whenever it rapes you, your litter goes
to the beach. Who wrote that copy, and for how much? Was it finished at 2
a.m., after one-too-many cups of coffee? Was it a pale black-haired girl
in her East Village share, smoking and thinking, this is the one fucking
hour I have set aside every night for my novel, and Im writing fucking PSA
copy? Furthermore, fuck Fannie Mae in the ass. But was she also thinking
fuck Zadie Smith?


3:46 p.m. The New School head of security makes a really scary
announcement about what to do in the event of a fire. I cant really hear
him because everyone is rumbling. Then, a woman leads Wolfowitz and
Goldberg onto the stage. The crowd literally erupts in screams and boos
and applause and I am completely scared shitless. The Zionists on my right
are giving him a standing ovation. The long-haired leftists behind and a
row ahead scream MURDERER! NAZI! MURDERER! I start laughing hysterically
from the stress. Its fucking bedlam and I am completely sure that there
will be an assassination attempt or at the very least An Incident. A young
Asian woman in front of me turns around, relieved that Im laughing too. I
want to hug her.


3:47 p.m. Turn off cell phones and beepers, the New Yorker woman on stage
says and ruckus subsides. She introduces Goldberg who came up through New
York magazine adding credence to my friend E.s claim that every
journalist started either at New York or the New York Observer. Then
Goldberg begins Wolfowitzs bio, pretty much repeating the Vanity Fair
interview I read that morning. There is much cackling from the audience,
then screams of derision, accusations of genocide. Someone calls Wolfowitz
a fascist. Somewhere a woman screams back, Youre the fascist because youre
denying someone else the right to speak. Half the room applauds. Another
woman shouts out, Change your medication!

Wolfowitz sits quietly on stage like a scaly mute cancer.

The head of security, a very stock-sitcom black man, returns and says hell
be removing dissenters. The Secret Service men flank the stage,
half-hidden behind pillars, like Roman sculptures in niches. They are
backlit and spooky. I think Im glad to be here, Wolfowitz says debonairly.
You, sir, are no William F. Buckley, I think to myself.

Wolfowitz has said no more before the first person shouting Murderer! is
removed.

After a little bit of banter with Goldberg, Wolfie says Im glad that the
Iraqis are free so that they can speak the way we do, and that sets off
two more screaming people. They get led off to wherever. I am so tense I
may never crap again.

Goldberg begins again: Youre considered the intellectual architect of the
war on Iraq, he says, and then a man in the audience charges the stage
shouting, Bush should be tried for treason, you fucking Nazi! The Young
Zionist in the yarmulke next to me hides his head in his hands.

Wolfowitz takes up the Nazi theme. This is what the Nazis did, he says,
referring to shouting down dissenters. We all look at each other in
puzzlement. Uh, no its not, not in the slightest.

Throughout the chaos, Wolfowitz stays on tone and hits his talking points.
His reported lifelong goal is to prevent nuclear war and conventional war.
He thinks America should not be impatient with the democratization of
Iraq. He refers to 9/11 as a wakeup call no fewer than three separate
times. He claims he did not support an actual military incursion into Iraq
until after September 11th, 2001. Of terrorists, he says, punishment after
the fact is not enough.

Goldberg is a suave interviewer. Are you a Neo-Con? he asks with just a
hint of ironic insinuation.

Wolfowitz: I dont like labels. Often, he says, Neo-Con is code for
nefarious Zionist conspiracy. Wait, thats supposed to be code? Wolfowitz
decides that he is a Democratic Realist, settling off a vast wave of
bitter cackles from the audience. Then he crosses the line:

Kennedy would support Bush in this war, he says, to a collective gasp.

I cant stop laughing. Im not made for this kind of pressure.

Goldberg keeps at him. On the question of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq,
Wolfowitz profoundly says its a murky world. And later: oil is a canard.
And then: human rights nightmare. And support moderate Muslims. And
brilliant military plan and overwhelming majority of Iraqis and liberated.
And its all so very similar to Eastern Europe. Contradicting himself a bit
he concedes that Iraq, well, its not a free environment yet for people to
tell us what they know.

A woman gets booted for screaming, What about Palestine! Go ahead, drag me
out, Im ready to go! The Bush-hating mans son is literally snoring behind
me, his sweet little face nuzzled up to his fathers arm. Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal! screams a young man near the back, quickly forced to exit stage
left. We look around puzzled at the relevance of this as Wolfowitz rejects
Goldbergs loaded phrase occupation of Iraq.

Unbelievably, a Q&A session begins. A kindly-voiced young man begins a
sensible question, which segues into, Whos going to resign first, you or
Cheney? People applaud loudly. Sadly, the guy continues with Because
Lyndon Larouche and the wave of mocking laughter drowns him out.

And what happens, Goldberg asks a bit later, when Arab countries become
democratic and then elect Islamists? There is silence for the first time
in the auditorium. Wolfowitz has briefly choked, and the crowd turns on
him completely. Screamers get hustled up the aisles. My acquaintance J.
stands up in his seat with a cardboard sign, which is evidently the thing
in his backpack that he was indicating outside. It says On Stage! Not On
Trial on one side and, on the other, Like Goebbels and Lord Haw Haw. A
mass of photographers coalesce behind him, their lenses stretching out to
shoot J.s back and his sign in foreground, and in the landscape beyond,
Wolfowitz coiled malefically on the stage, now ready for his escort back
to the secret bunkers of Washington. The perfect still has finally been
composed, ready for the news package of Monday mornings Times.


5:02 p.m. We shuffle out to daylight. A lone leftist bangs too loudly on a
bucket in front of a Free Palestine banner. Someone blows a whistle
endlessly. We are all glad to be alive. The nice girl who had sat in front
of me turns out to be a poli-sci student at Columbia. I smoke cigarette
after cigarette and a little clump of us gather. We laugh with sincere
relief and make small talk.

This afternoon was one of the scariest experiences of my life, and not
just for the unpredictability of the crowd. There was this: while art is a
luxury we are almost physiologically compelled to indulge, what place does
it have in a world with such awfulness? Wyclef and his fun if slogan-based
critiques of global politics made me feel good, for a while. Edwidge had
said: Learn whats being done around the world in your name. Well, of
course, but then what? Leave? And what use are the gentle politics of a ZZ
Packer, or the comic art of a Dave Eggers? Worst of all Grace Paley,
longtime combative pacifist, her lifes work peace and justice, and our
world letting her age without any satisfaction. Why write at all, because
who can hold his artistic practice up to the skilled mastery of a
Wolfowitz?

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid, wrote Thomas
Bernhard, but he also wrote, We can only exist by taking our minds off the
fact that we exist. It may be necessary to be such escapists occasionally,
but to live and write in that fear and detachment is not; that is to
ignore the billion angry benday dots in the morning papers, each buzzing
people die and die.


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