Lawrence Weschler

Anyway, my Serbian journalist friend continued, recalling those eerie days in the late 1980s, she’d kept herself almost studiously oblivious to the swelling surge of nationalist hysteria sweeping over her fellow countrymen in the Serbian capital — the swelling rallies, the thronged marches, the midnight masses of lusty, near-Messianic patriotism.

“It was all so stupid, so beneath contempt,” she said, “this transparent gambit of Milosevic’s to cast himself as some kind of savior of the Serbs, when of course he’d never been the slightest kind of nationalist before. The response he managed to evoke was mystifying, to be sure, but really, it was just too stupid to spend time thinking about. Surely it was going to pass, and in the meantime I felt justified in ignoring it.”

She paused. “Then, one night,” she recalled, “I was watching the evening news, and they had footage out of Zagreb, the Croatian capital — a huge nationalist rally there, a shouting throng chanting these blood-curdling Croatian nationalist slogans — and I remember thinking, all at once, ‘Oh my God, we’re driving them crazy!‘ And suddenly I saw it all clearly, how it wasn’t just going to pass. From one moment to the next that evening, I saw all the horrors that were going to come: war with Croatia, followed by war in Bosnia, followed by war for Kosovo, until finally it would all end, most ghastly and gruesome of all, in a civil war among the Serbs themselves. And so far, alas, we’re right on schedule.”

A few weeks later, while traveling in Bosnia, I happened to be reading an account of flocking behavior in birds, specifically about a computer scientist who used to gaze out over the cemetery grounds outside his office at a group of blackbirds that tended to congregate there. He’d been struck by the way the group seemed to consist, say, of 100 individuals, each with its own little brain, but then of a 101st presence as well, which was the flock as a whole. The flock seemed to have a mind of its own, one that almost seemed to control the brains of all its members. How did they all know to rise and swoop and veer like that, as if as one?

This fellow decided to try to model flocking behavior on his computer, that is to establish, say, 100 points on a screen, each one animated by a simple algorithm or set of rules (but simple rules: so easy that even a bird brain could grasp them, such that if all 100 such points began moving about in relation to one another in keeping with those rules, as a group they’d end up replicating the elegant, consistent and seemingly auto-volitional patterns of a flock. And, indeed, he succeeded in doing so. He boiled it all down to three easy injunctions — I forget the particulars (something along the lines of “If another point comes within distance x to your right, turn left,” and so forth) — and the resultant screen spectacle was indeed uncannily flock-like.

This in turn set me to thinking about whether the bloody surges of Balkan (and other) nationalism might not be similarly framed, and after a while, I did manage to get things down to a simple three-step progression, to wit: A) Fear (of the other) trumps hope; B) it apes hate, which in turn; C) provokes more fear (in this case in the other, who now launches into his own A-B-C progression). I subsequently tried that formulation out on that Belgrade friend of mine, and she managed to distill things even further, citing an ancient Persian proverb: “Fear those who fear you.”

The point of all this is that the same mass psychology that animated the descent toward war in the Balkans in the late 1980s continued to predominate all through the 1990s, even after the hostilities themselves had seemingly petered out: Corrupt gangland-style leaders on all sides were able to intone how if you think you had cause to fear/hate the other before this war, just think of all the cause you have now. At which point, axiomatically, the life-and-death necessity of falling behind those same leaders was meant to become self-evident.

And up until this year, it had continued to do so. But in what may be the single most heartening development in the region so far in the brief new millennium, voters in parliamentary elections in Croatia last January upended that psychology, decisively turning out the corrupt, inept and blood-curdlingly nationalistic HDZ (Croation Democratic Committee) party of the late demagogue Franjo Tudjman that had ruled the country since its inception. (Maybe the fear/hope polarities were at last in the process of reversing, such that hope, for instance, for a greater Croatia was finally getting trumped by fear of being left utterly behind in the wider region’s slow reintegration into greater Europe.)

It was hard, at any rate, to exaggerate the hopeful implications of that vote. Suffice it to say that in a beneficent obverse of the cascading developments at the beginning of the last decade, Zagreb suddenly seemed on the verge of driving the rest of the region sane, a prospect that has now been further reinforced by developments in Belgrade over the past several weeks (where the same sort of fear/hope polarities reversal may also at last have begun to come into play).

Maybe, maybe. On the other hand, my Belgrade journalist friend’s comments from several years ago continue to haunt me as well, and the question for the coming weeks remains whether that longed-for transition will be possible without one final wrenching civil war among the Serbs themselves.

“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window.  “We saw you.”

“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand.  “National security.  Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”

“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask.  “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge.  I was photographing the rapids.  The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!”

To no avail.  I open my car door and begin to get out — but the third soldier pushes me gently back and then leans into the window, peering amiably. “And besides,” I continue, “there were no signs forbidding such photographs.  Anyway, if it’s such a big deal just give me back the phone and I’ll delete the photos.  You can watch.”

I’m beginning to panic.  As with most of us nowadays, pretty much my entire life is couched inside that bloody little device: contacts, calendars, hotel reservations, all my appointment coordinates for the coming days.

“Ah no,” Soldier Three smiles in a silkily practiced manner.  “You are not to worry.  This is not an affair about you.  This is an affair between Ugandans.  It is your driver who was at fault.  He is a Ugandan, he should have known about our national security and how no one should photograph the bridge.  Let them work it out.”

And indeed, when I turn around Godfrey is no longer behind the steering wheel.  He’s with the other soldiers, remonstrating away.  “Don’t you worry,” repeats my guy indulgently, a broad smile spreading across his face as if we are the best of buddies.  “Give them time.”  And then, as if to pass the time himself, he adds, “So, how do you like our excellent country?”

Minutes go by with Godfrey and his two interlocutors on the other side of the road, locked in fervent colloquy — much hand waving, arm flinging, rifle toying, shouting, cajoling, and then smiling, even guffawing — until finally, 15 minutes and $20 later, Godfrey comes ambling back to the car, climbs into the driver’s seat, and hands me the iPhone.

(Memo to would-be terrorists: If any of you are planning to blow up the Karuma bridge, make sure to budget an extra $20 photography fee during the planning phase.)

Anyway, Godfrey turns the key, revs up the car’s engine, and we resume our climb out of the canyon of the Nile and back onto the flat, red, shrubby plateau.

“Does that kind of thing happen often?” I ask Godfrey, who in much of the rest of his life is a Kampala taxi driver.

“All the time,” he assures me.  Two or three times a week.  He has to figure it into his budget, and it’s a large item.  Just the other day, he adds, he turned down a one-way street in the middle of Kampala and found, a couple hundred yards on, that it was completely flooded.  As he gingerly made his way back to the intersection, a traffic cop was happily standing in wait to give him a hefty fine for driving the wrong way on a one-way street — either that or a 100,000 shilling tip (about $5, which in Kampala might otherwise pay for two good meals) to make the problem go away.

It’s to be expected, Godfrey went on.  The soldiers are conscripts, the traffic cop a lowly underling, and they’re all notoriously underpaid.  Or rather, their superiors carve out a substantial part of their salaries for themselves, leaving these men with hardly enough to live on, let alone maintain a family.  The opportunity to garnish bribes becomes a necessary perk of the job.  The trouble is, he continued, such corruption riddles the entire country, infesting virtually every transaction with the state.

We are silent for a few moments, the scrub brush racing by.  Then Godfrey asks, “Doesn’t this sort of thing happen in America?”

I don’t even hesitate.  Not really, I tell him: not blatantly like that, and not frequently, certainly not all the time.

Only, then I get to thinking, because that answer turns out to be way too glib.  It’s not that the United States lacks corruption, I go on to say — or even pervasive corruption.  It’s just not of the low-level and petty variety like the kind we just went through, not most of the time anyway.  In America, corruption is concentrated at the highest levels of society — and it masquerades, for example, under the name of “campaign finance.”

Election campaigns have become so expensive that candidates have to go begging, hat in hand, to anyone who will finance them.  And the billionaires and millionaires and bankers and hedge-fund operators and portfolio managers and CEOs and their lobbyists are, in turn, only too happy to contribute.  They lard the “people’s representatives” with grotesque “contributions” after which those representatives prove only too willing to turn around and carve out billions of dollars in specifically targeted tax breaks and subsidies structured exclusively for them — precious dollars which then can’t be used to fund schools or clinics or playgrounds or to further the public good in any way.

And it’s worse than that: once congressional representatives or their senior staff retire, they almost invariably get much higher paying lobbying jobs working for the very industries over which they had once held sway — a further incentive not to upset those monied interests when still on the public payroll.

So regulations get gutted, calamities ensue, and guess who gets stuck cleaning up the inevitable mess, whether financial, environmental, or of any other sort: yup, the taxpayers.  Tax laws get dictated or often just written by the lobbyists of those same monied interests, with all sorts of sweet loopholes carved out especially for them — not infrequently for them individually — so that, in the end, the richest man in America reports he’s getting off with a lower tax rate than his secretary.

“You’re kidding,” Godfrey interjected.

No: even he’s embarrassed!  Education, meanwhile, is funded according to narrowly local property taxes — and the rich make sure it stays that way.  The result?  Their kids get a far better education than those living in poorer neighborhoods.  When people try to remedy that injustice through affirmative action programs which at least recognize the unfairness of the competition for access to, for example, university slots, the rich protest and get judges to overturn such programs as racist.  They are, however, perfectly happy to take advantage of other programs that assure the acceptance of the children of alumni, no matter their scholarly performance, and no one says boo.  It’s all perfectly legal.

In America, as W.E.B. DuBois noted toward the end of his life, “We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is ‘legal’ we call it high profits.  And the profiteers help decide what is legal.”

In Uganda, corruption often arises out of desperation.  In America, more typically, its wellsprings are greed, pure and simple.  And it’s hard to decide which is the more dismaying, the more disfiguring, the more disgusting.

Or actually, no, it’s not.  It’s not that hard at all.

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The inhaled stogie lends the image a certain sulfurous air, as does word that their followers have now gone and attacked a hospital, of all things, and are holding hundreds of hostages. Is there no bottom to the world’s demented evil?

Of course, this is all so much Orientalist claptrap: feverish white Western fantasies about the metaphysical debauch of endlessly inscrutable colored folk, the convenient Other. In fact, the attack on the hospital itself undercuts such smug and easy projections: They’ve raided the hospital and are holding all those hostages to advance their demands that the Thai army stop shelling their positions and that the doctors there treat their own ragtag wounded. There is no Primordial Evil here, only all-too-human desperation.

But the fantasy of the first allows us to screen out the palpable reality of the second — no need any longer to trouble ourselves over the plight of Karen minorities wedged in a tightening vise between those Burmese and Thai generals. No call to keep paying attention.

And so we don’t (pay attention). Time passes, and then suddenly, last week, here they are again, those wacky Htoo boys, come in out of the cold (or rather the jungle dank). After turning themselves in to Thai border guards alongside a clutch of their followers, they are whisked to a police compound in the nearby town of Suan Phung, where (according to the dispatch by Time’s Robert Horn) they soon find themselves exchanging bewildered stares with the Thai prime minister and several of his top generals. The prime minister “gently stroked the boys’ lice ridden locks. ‘He totally demystified them,’ says Sunai Phasuk of Forum Asia, a human rights group. In Thailand, where people still crawl before royalty, ‘you don’t pat a god on the head.’”

So that, see (another comforting dodge, an obverse reassuring fantasy): They’re just ordinary kids after all. Decked out there in their fresh soccer frocks, straddling nothing more fearsome than everyday puberty, they’re just like the boys next door (though it would be nice if somebody could get that Luther kid to stop smoking).

This too, of course, is all wrong. Thirteen years old, they look like they can’t be more than 7 or 8. And that’s not charming mumbo jumbo, that’s severe extended malnutrition. These aren’t just ordinary kids. They’ve seen things, they’ve lived through hells that the world (which is to say the rest of us, swaddled in our comforting illusions) had no business allowing.

I remember there was a lot of talk there in the halls about the League of Nations. “If the U.S. walks out on this court,” the Syrian delegate assured me, his eyes twinkling with grim satisfaction (he was all for it; he couldn’t wait), “it will be like the League of Nations.” Perhaps, I remember thinking at the time, but in that case ought President Clinton be cast in the role of Woodrow Wilson, the League’s strongest advocate, or that of Henry Cabot Lodge, its most ferocious opponent?

Of course, the answer, in retrospect, was both. With regard to the court, Clinton wanted to play both Wilson and Lodge. And not half and half: not a wily Wilson disguising himself as a grimly realistic Lodge, or vice versa. Rather, Whitmanesque, Clinton wanted to contain multitudes. He saw no contradiction in being both Wilson and Lodge, each 100 percent and both simultaneously.

Which is to say that he was approaching the International Criminal Court in much the same way he’d approached just about everything else — gays in the military, national health insurance, campaign finance reform, land mines, Bosnia, global warming — in his presidency.

In this particular instance, both the Pentagon and Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., were adamant in their insistence that the U.S. ought never sign on to any sort of international tribunal that might ever, under any circumstances, claim jurisdiction over any American soldiers or officials. Such justice was fine for the Saddam Husseins or the Pol Pots of the world, American opponents of the treaty argued, but not for us. Hence the court would be fine, so long as the U.S. was able to maintain veto control over its operations, for example, by way of strict Security Council oversight.

But virtually all of the rest of the world’s delegates in Rome protested that justice would hardly be universal if great powers could willy-nilly exempt themselves from its provisions. Furthermore, it was the Security Council’s propensity for tying itself in veto-knots (France covering for Rwanda’s genocidaires, China sheltering the Khmer Rouge, Kissinger-era America backstopping Pinochet and so forth) that so often led to paralysis and the unchecked proliferation of precisely the sorts of horrors this court was being created to address.

The U.S. delegation attempted all sorts of other gambits to effect the same outcome (total immunity for Americans), each more convoluted yet transparent than the one before, but to no avail. In the end the vote in favor of the treaty was overwhelming, with the U.S. stranded in opposition alongside such other holdouts as China, Iraq and Libya.

In the months that followed, considerable pressure was brought to bear on Clinton to stand up to the treaty’s domestic opponents. It was pointed out that in fact all sorts of safeguards had been inserted into the treaty, at U.S. insistence, to forestall frivolous and even not-so-frivolous prosecutions of American nationals. Notably there were the complementarity provisions that decreed that any ICC prosecution could be trumped by a good-faith investigation and, if need be, prosecution, on the part of domestic judicial authorities. (The ICC was being created for precisely those instances where local authorities were proving unable or unwilling to pursue such investigations.)

The Pentagon and the Senate opponents were unswayed, however, and Clinton, for all of his idealistic pronouncements to the contrary, seemed incapable of standing up to them. “The problem here isn’t political,” one longtime observer of the process pointed out to me a few months ago, “but rather biological. Has anyone ever heard of an instance of an invertebrate’s suddenly and spontaneously growing a spine?”

And then suddenly, seemingly spontaneously, at the last possible moment this past weekend (Dec. 31, the last date a country could take advantage of the as-it-were “safe harbor” provisions of the treaty by signing onto without simultaneously ratifying the document), this particular invertebrate did indeed up and sprout a spine.

Alone up there at Camp David (Barak and Arafat had failed to show for their last-minute Legacy-Assuring Summit), pickled perhaps in thoughts regarding the eventual judgments of history (“Wilson? Lodge? Wilson? Lodge?”), Clinton bucked the naysayers and did in fact affix his signature to the Rome Treaty. Albeit, he did so noting that the signature would be meaningless without eventual Senate ratification, and urging the next president to wait a good while (and to continue fighting the good fight against eventual American susceptibility to the treaty’s provisions, now from within the treaty process frameworks) before ever submitting the document to the Senate.

The less-than-stirring tone of Clinton’s statement in signing onto the document put me in mind of the appearance made by Undersecretary of State David Scheffer before Jesse Helms’ Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in July 1998, a few weeks after the conclusion of the Rome Conference, where Scheffer had been the administration’s point man. At the time I remember thinking how the man might have been excused a certain feeling of conceptual whiplash.

For if he’d been being treated, by the end there in Rome, as a sort of pariah or leper, now back in Washington he was being unanimously praised as a kind of returning hero. Positions that had provoked nary a chord of resonance in the conference hall in Rome were almost drowned in a rising chorus of defiant triumphalism on Capitol Hill.

Sens. Helms, Rod Gramm, Joseph Biden and Dianne Feinstein each addressed Scheffer in turn, congratulating him on the fortitude of his resolve and pledging their undying contempt for that monstrosity spawned in Rome. Not one of them focused on Bosnia or Rwanda or Pol Pot or Idi Amin or the Holocaust or Nuremberg. (Sen. Feinstein did wonder about the possible implications for Israel.) They all seemed utterly and almost uniquely transfixed by the treaty’s exposure implications for American troops, vowing to protect them and to fight it.

Across the ensuing hours, it became possible to identify what may have been the true underlying anxiety of the American delegation all along, never broached by any of them back in Rome but veritably palpitating just beneath the surface even there. Helms wasn’t afraid to name it outright. The status of individual peacekeepers in some Mogadishu alleyway had never been the real concern, for all its near-obsessive rhetorical focus. Rather, as Helms picked off the examples defiantly, he was going to be damned if any so-called international court was ever going to be reviewing the legality of the U.S. invasions of Panama or Grenada, or the bombing of Tripoli or Hanoi, and hold any American presidents, defense secretaries or generals to account.

“I’ve been accused by advocates of this court of engaging in ’18th century thinking,’” Chairman Helms said in concluding his statement. “Well, I find that to be a compliment. It was the 18th century that gave us our Constitution and the fundamental protections of our Bill of Rights. I’ll gladly stand with James Madison and the rest of our Founding Fathers over that collection of ne’er-do-wells in Rome any day.”

At some level, of course, Helms was way off the mark in his choice and characterization of antecedents. James Madison, for one thing, was a Federalist — with Hamilton, the principal author of “The Federalist Papers” — and as such had precisely, and with great passion, ranged himself against the nativist states’ righters of his own day and in favor of a substantially wider conception of governance.

But at the same time, it seemed to me that Helms was on to something. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” True, Thomas Jefferson strikingly pitched his Declaration of Independence in an assertion of universal human values, an assertion that, cascading down through the ages, from the Rights of Man (1789) through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), constitutes one of the principal wellsprings of the law feeding into the International Criminal Court.

But at the same time, Jefferson cast those assertions in what was, after all, a declaration of independence, of separateness, of American exceptionalism — stirring, defiant themes that had been very much in evidence there in Rome as well and, one suspects, will continue to frame if not dominate most of the coming debate over the treaty’s ratification.

People have been speaking of George W. as a latter-day liter version of his father, and there is indeed a strong sense of déjà vu in all of this, but the comparison to Bush the elder misses the essential point: This is not so much a case of déjà vu as of repetition compulsion, a bizarre family psychodrama writ large. With George W. (the pervading vacuousness, the deer-in-the-headlights stare, the cavalcade of late-night TV jokes, the burgeoning compilations of tortured syntax and uproarious gaffes, the nervous edgy glances of the surrounding adult handlers, the defiantly clueless Alfred E. Neuman gaze, the utter lack of curiosity regarding the cluefulness of the world), what we are witnessing isn’t so much the return of George the elder as the triumphant apotheosis of Quayle!

Remember how we used to cringe through the better part of Daddy Bush’s term in office, mortified that something might befall him and we’d all get stuck with Quayle? Well, guess what? I’m reminded, in turn, of the joke that was going around in March 1969, about the accident victim who’d spent the entirety of the previous decade in a coma. Coming to, his first frantic query had concerned the health of President Eisenhower. Informed that Ike had in fact died just a few days earlier, the poor fellow wailed, “My God, that means Nixon must be president!”