Personal Voices: Fighting Words

Editor's Note: The following story was first published on April 3, during the war. Since then, the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled the 15th-anniversary celebration of the movie 'Bull Durham' due to antiwar comments by actor Tim Robbins; and many Pakistani-Americans have had their credit card accounts cancelled by American Express with no explanation. In light of these and other examples of war-induced insanity, we feel the story has continuing relevance.

One night last August, I helped put on a punk rock show in Austin. The bar was full, mostly because it was the evening of the University of Texas' football season opener. There were plenty of orange-shirted yahoos mixed among the misfits. Appropriate to the occasion, I'd decided to wear a punk rock T-shirt. It read, "Impeach George W. Bush." A guy came up to me. He was with some friends. They were all pretty drunk.

"Nice shirt," he said.

"You really think so?" I said.

"No," he said. "I think you're an asshole."

He walked past me. So I did what any intelligent person would do after being insulted by a drunken, belligerent University of Texas football fan. I squirted him with water. He turned around, ready to kill.

"You just do that?" he said.

"Not me," I said.

I squirted him in the face.

He charged. His friend grabbed him.

"You and me!" said the guy. "Outside! Now!"

"Nah," I said, and turned away.

An hour later, he came back, even more drunk. I was sitting next to my wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time. He leaned into me.

"I think we should take this into the parking lot," he said.

"Look," I said. "You know you'd kick my ass. So why prove it? And besides, do you really want my pregnant wife to watch that?"

"Don't hide behind your pregnant wife," mumbled my pregnant wife.

"Fuck you, man!" said the guy. "You shouldn't wear that shirt."

"It's a free country," I said. "I can wear whatever shirt I want."

He thought about this for a moment.

"Okay," he said. "But you shouldn't spill a drink on someone if he says something to you about it."

"Point taken," I said.

He left. My wife called me an idiot. True enough. Then again, he was an even bigger idiot. But the real lesson was pretty obvious then, and even more obvious now. Everyone in America, including me, has been driven completely insane by this war.

Let's run down a list of incidents that I've heard about in the last month alone: A French woman in Houston, who's lived in her neighborhood for 20 years, wakes up on a Saturday morning to find graffiti on her garage door telling her to go back to France. A guy from Seattle arrives in San Diego and finds a threatening note from airport security because he's packed two "No Iraq War" signs in his bag. In Austin, the French owner of an antique shop hears on a radio call-in show that people want to blow up the miniature Eiffel Tower in front of his store. Radio stations in Kansas City and Louisiana stage Dixie Chicks bonfires and monster-truck CD stomps. At a rodeo in Houston, a guy starts a brawl because a kid and his friends don't want to stand while Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." plays over the loudspeaker. The guy tells the kid, who's half Mexican and half Italian, to "go back to Iraq."

Meanwhile, the FBI has warned that the war will lead to an increase in "hate crimes." Arab Americans were already cowering before the war started. An 18-year-old Lebanese kid in Yorba Linda, California, had his jaw broken on February 22 by a mob of 20 teenagers who shouted "white power" as they beat him with baseball bats. A few days later, a Muslim woman in Santa Clara, California, was attacked in the laundry room of her apartment building. The FBI also reported that a Muslim father of six was assaulted February 21 in Irvington, New Jersey, by two men who accused him of being a terrorist.