By Matthew Duersten
Being caught up in the (inter)national euphoria over Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the most powerful brutha on earth was an easy thing to do – like falling backwards into crystalline-cool waters after years of bitter exile in the hot-throated desert. But let me pause during this massive tectonic shift that has occurred in our country to remember those we lost. Specifically, a close friend of mine who, one might say, was driven insane by the policies of our current President of the United States, George Walker Bush.
No, this isn’t (a) a joke; (b) a pretty story, or (c) uncommon.
I playfully call her “Buffy” for her blonde pixie-ish resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar, her lounge-meets-goth fashion statements and love of slashing, depressive postpunk music (mixed in with a little Lucinda Williams). We met when she hired me for a shitty job in some anonymous office building in the shadow of the RAND Corporation, a massive military think tank in Santa Monica. Buffy and I bonded editing legal textbooks alongside a wizened ex-dancer now consigned to doing paste-up art. One day, this woman whirled slowly on her swivel chair and told us an exquisitely creepy tale of when she worked for RAND in the early 70s. She was invited by her co-workers to an informal "gathering" in an apartment in the San Fernando Valley. When she showed up that night, she was confronted with a roomful of what appeared to be crosslegged law students frantically but meticulously arranging large piles of documents in geometric patterns on the shag rugs as if caught up in some last-minute sprint to halt a death-penalty conviction. As the dancer told it, this was her introduction to Daniel Ellsberg's purloined Pentagon Papers, stolen from RAND’s offices that very week and leaked to a shocked nation that very month, bloodying the government’s crème-colored assessments of the Vietnam War and leading President Nixon to send a posse of inept black-ops to burglarize the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Buffy and I listened to this with rapt open mouths even as we debated its truthfulness. The dancer was of the batty spinster variety—she seemed to spot evil plots in her soup. Then, ironically, Buffy herself went to work for RAND around the same time George W. Bush prevailed in Florida. “The stolen election” itself was a messy, noxious affair that piqued even the most cautious of Left-leaning conspiracy theorists – but with Buff it was different. Her animosity towards #43 was a laserlike and logical bandwith.
It was also relentless. She sent out obsessive watchdog e-mails titled “The Bush Rant” with increasing bulk and regularity. Buffy’s husband of ten years, whom I will call Angel, began noticing she would arise predawn and spend more than three hours every morning fervently catching up on the exploits of W. and monitoring all of the Bush Watch websites like a boho Ashley Banfield. Angel, a quiet meditative surfer-type, would let her take center stage when she spoke of “secret” oil pipelines through Afghanistan and innocently detained civilians in Guantánamo Bay. Angel held equal animus with All Things Conservative but preferred indirect sort of critiques, such as recalling the peculiar sight of Neil Young in concert kvetching about the conservative media giant Clear Channel while a large “Sponsored by Clear Channel” hung above his head over the stage.
Angel seemed to sink deeper down into the couch as Buffy’s monologues became increasingly strident. But thanks to her, I was already aware of 90% of the content that would wind up in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11—particularly the Bush/Bin Laden family relationship through that weird Parallax View-ish consortium called the Carlyle Group and that the Saudis own about 7% of the United States. That a disastrous and immoral war in Iraq was zigzagging rudderless and leaderless while our Commander-in-Chief teed off and chopped wood like a retired CEO seemed obvious to everyone. But with Buffy, it was what she DIDN’T know that started to get on her like a friendly fat rapist. “Who knows how many people they’re detaining that we don’t know about?” she would ask us. She took it all personally. To her, the stomping on civil liberties and the vinegary callousness displayed by the Bush Administration towards the families of G.I.s killed in Iraq was so blatant, so undraped with nuance, and so splendiferously brittle and bullish in its message: Yeah, we're going to take y'all to war, what are you gonna do about it? You want some o’ this? The very fact that this taunt could be applied equally to both the American people as well as the Iraqi people seemed to indicate to her that it was open season on the powerless, everywhere.
“From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if I’ve been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island,” the statement read. “I no longer feel in harmony with American culture.” This did not come from Buffy’s cursor, but from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist/writer/editor Art Spiegelman. He was speaking to the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera on his bitter resignation from The New Yorker after the magazine nixed his strip “In The Shadow of No Towers,” which concerns the author's memories of September 11 and a poisonous aftermath “in which one feels equally threatened by both Bush and bin Laden.” “Towers” was commissioned by the German newspaper Die Zeit, but here in the USA only one magazine, the Jewish journal The Forward agreed to publish it. (LA Weekly also reprinted portions.) Despite the provocative subject, part of reading the punishing, wounded “Towers” is that you feel you are watching Spiegelman come apart on the page. Spiegelman himself had nervous breakdown when he was still in college at SUNY-Binghamton and the combined roundhouse punches of 9/11 (he and his family live in the last block that wasn't sealed off when the towers collapsed) and it’s ensuing exploitation by the Bush administration as justification for beating the piss out of Iraq was probably not the best thing for a sensitive man’s nerves. After seeing Spiegelman speak at UCLA, Anthony Miller, a writer friend of mine, told me Spiegelman’s slow public meltdown was “symptomatic of the Left’s failure to come up with any viable alternative to what the Right is doing to the country.” “In The Shadow of No Towers,” he concluded, “is a work of great powerlessness.”
Like Spiegelman, Buffy seemed to be attempting in her own life such a similar synthesis of powerlessness, catharsis, activism and art. I did admire her screenplay idea about a low-level employee for a major government think tank who becomes an anti-war protester, is swept up by the Top Cop's security net, dropped into Camp X-Ray and labeled “American Taliban.” Guess you had to be there, but it sounded pretty good in the earnest way she described it. (Honestly, I was sure Ben Affleck would have accepted it without even reading it – which would be par for the course. But still.) Because she knew I occasionally wrote for the Weekly, she dragged me to a satiric revue staged in a basement called "The Patriot Acts," which, like the whole Left's response to the Bush presidency post-9/11, was creaky and half-formed and amateurish.
Buffy’s stridency combined with her finding refuge in artistic expression made me think of how it is the artists and other sensitives who are acutely plugged in to the thrashing ills and corporeal rot of their home country. It wasn’t just isolated to Art Spiegelman. I think of the late monologist Spaulding Gray, who returned to New York from Ireland after being mauled in a car accident on the very day of the 9/11 attacks. Good God, why wouldn’t he decide to take a dive in the Brooklyn River? I think of Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, who saw the massive, expedient claws of neoconservativism closing over the country during the Reagan Years and simply could not take it, committing suicide in 1989. I think of the Haymarket Bombings of 1886 in Chicago, which ended in the grisly public execution of four wrongly accused "anarchists.” (It would have been five if one of them hadn’t managed to blow himself up in his cell by chomping on a dynamite tube in his mouth.) The executions drove writer William Dean Howells into an acute and bottomless despair over his country's unstoppable tide of politically engineered blood lust. His anguished writings during the period reflect a deeply caring soul holding his head in his hands in despair in his study as the grandfather clock ticked maddeningly towards Bethlehem. I think of another Chicagoan, Jeff Tweedy of the American rock band Wilco. A man of often overweaning oversensitivity, Tweedy suffered through terrible migraines as well as stomach and panic attacks during the recording of their lauded 2000 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Tweedy's ills were related both to childhood illness as well as the trauma his own band was undergoing; yet listen to songs like "Ashes of American Flags" ("Tall buildings shake/voices escape/singing sad sad songs" and understand why the man felt compelled to puke his guts out. How could a man who wrote songs like that not be attuned to some dreaded elephant the rest of us can't, or won't, see? Was the man’s artistic antenna absorbing a sort of pre-dread the whole nation would experience ten months later, on September 11, 200? "We made a record about America," Tweedy told Rolling Stone six days after the attacks. "Now it feels like these personal moments are politicized in a way I couldn't have imagined.”
Although she managed to stay creative, Buffy’s Bush Rants grew more alarmed and, yes, alarming, after the launch of Gulf War II. It didn’t help that one of her dearest friends, one our co-workers at the publishing company, died after a decade-long fight with breast cancer; her friend was an equally vocal protester against the invasion of Iraq, and she died the month U.S. Forces crossed the border from Kuwait. Buffy’s daily work at RAND started to become a conduit by which global paranoia and an awful sense of world reckoning was siphoned from the Big Picture and packaged down into bite-size reports. In November 2003, she was assigned a project involving apocalyptic speculations on a possible terrorist attack with nuclear weapons on the city of Los Angeles – the findings of which Buffy would absorb, as her job consisted of putting such findings up on the Internet. This involved trolling terrorist websites. At home, she started to do lots of “ruminating,” which if done in excess can be quite dangerous, because the ruminations become ceaseless until one is turned to stone – or frightened for their very lives. Case in point: Buffy became convinced that terrorists were going to hit L.A. with a “dirty bomb” on November 19, 2003. She woke up Angel in the middle of the night and forced him to drive them both to a remote motel outside of the city for safety. They did this twice: once to go to Santa Maria; the next, Angel, though seriously sleep-deprived, managed to talk her down to Ventura. Buffy began imploring him to build a bomb shelter under their pre-fab house.
She was embarrassed and ashamed at all of the “trouble” she was causing for Angel and her family and everyone else. She became increasingly fragile. She took a short-term disability leave from RAND. Angel would be in his home office and turn his chair to see her standing in the hallway staring at him for hours on end, soundlessly, as if in a trance. She started constantly fidgeting and checking her skin. She wasn’t making sense. She’d replaced words with other words: “Look at that sky” would come out as “Look at that steak” or “Look at that steamroller.” It was as if she had absorbed all the Bush Administration double-speak she had been wading through for the last three years. Her heart was racing, she felt she was going to die. Angel would wake up at 2am and find the paramedics standing on his doorstep, hands on hips; then they’d leave and she’d call them again; then they would refuse to respond, she called the police; the police got fed up and pulled Angel aside and said, “She called 911, she’s your wife, she’s your responsibility.’” Angel shook his head when he related this, as if wincing at the distaste of these cops talking about his vulnerable and troubled wife like she was a poltergeist in need of a good, stiff exorcism.
Buffy rebelled, against the doctors, against Angel, convinced they were trying to poison her or make her part of this medical plot to pacify “activists” with psychopharmacology. She refused to take any medication prescribed to her. On recommendations from her therapist, Angel wound up driving his wife to the Acute Ward at UCLA Hospital. There was only one pay phone on the Ward and she could only talk for ten minutes. The other patients would time her, especially one bellicose lady I will call Cordelia, whom always announced she was getting ready to make a call but never quite did. “I have to go now, they’re yelling at me,” was a typical way of ending conversations with Buffy while she was on the ward. When she was in group therapy, most of her fellow patients were so doped that all they could do is sit and drool; Buffy wound up trying to comfort a young black girl from the ‘hood who had quite simply lost her mind after both her brother and cousin were killed in gang violence.
As it turned out, Buffy’s troubles had very little to do with world events, but were instead rubbed raw by them. “The whole ‘Bush Rant’ thing, the therapists told me, was just a manifestation of the illness,” Angel told me in a sad, deadened waft. This could not be? I thought. She sounded so passionate, her hatred of Bush so meticulously informed and righteous. I found myself thinking: Who are these doctors? What are their credentials? And if I keep asking questions like this will I wind up Buffy’s roommate, fighting with her over the pay phone in the Acute Ward?
Given this, it’s odd that Buffy’s symptoms became calmer when, aided by behavior-cognitive therapy, she finally assented to take her meds, when the President's approval ratings saw some serious rending by three-syllable names that refused to go away: Fallujah, Chalabi, Abu Ghraib, Al Sadr. When I spoke to Buff over the phone, I wanted something that would cheer her up, to give her something to look forward to. Michael Moore had just won the Palm D’Or for Fahrenheit 9/11, and I blurted out that she should take all the time she needed and make herself well again so we could all see it together when she got out (wincing at that last phrase). I want to go with her to this movie but I’m torn between this childish image of little Buffy the Giant Hunter, inspired by Moore’s rabble-rousin’, rising up against her demons and shattering their jaws with a swift and merciless swift-flying kick. Or, the images would piss her off to the point where she would have a relapse, and I would have to hear her quiet peep over the grainy pay phone at the Acute Ward: “Do you think my husband will still love me for all the trouble I’ve caused?”
Which is why I didn’t see Fahrenheit 9/11 when all my other friends did. Because Buffy was not in the right frame of mind. She even told her husband: “I want to prepare you for the possibility that I might die.” Angel was distraught. “I think she might have to go back in,” he confessed, his voice twisting and tightening like a rubber band. He told me one thing he learned from talking to Buffy’s doctors was that mental illness destroys the brain the way a heart attack destroys muscle or a stroke destroys the nervous system: each time Buffy comes back from the NPI there is a little less of her that what originally was. Here's the thing: Buffy had never hurt anyone. Neither of them had deserved this. Imagine Angel's feelings of having to finally, inexorably beginning the process of committing his beloved wife to a psychiatric institution. Imagine that first night alone, sitting in a lone house by the beach whose very walls were a standing reminder of the love that raised them was now a sentence with a perpetual question mark.
So there we are, Mr. Bush. I hold you personally responsible, you bloodless tick, you incompetent, bottom-feeding skink, for my poor friend's mental decline—someone who never had an unkind word to say about anyone and would not hurt a fly and ascribed to a personal philosophies of No Flies To Be Harmed. Oddly, it reminded me of the changes noted by family members and friends every time a soldier returns from active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, only to be relentlessly called out again, and again. Because, you know, eventually they don’t come back.