Editorial 3.9, October 2001, by Deirdre Helfferich Yellow and Blue in the Homeland On the news recently I heard a surreal little item: those yellow food packages that we had been dropping on Afghanistan were exactly the same color as the unexploded bombs we had also been dropping on Afghanistan. The people there, naturally, were not going to approach them. A peculiar situation, and ironic? Hoo! Sounded just like it came straight out of a Matt Ruff novel. (He’s hilarious, if you haven’t read his books, but be prepared to have your icons slapped in the face with a metaphorical cream pie.) But that’s the way life is: stranger than fiction, and less believable. Oddities abound. Those grocery-store tabloids really don’t have to make stuff up, although I suppose it’s cheaper to do that than investigate some preposterous boo-boo like food relief that looks like explosives. The problem is, in real life, people actually die because of things like this. So those of us who aren’t starving in Afghanistan laugh, because our food doesn’t blow up in our faces when we pick it up. I don’t have to be confronted by the horror of this absurd world. I am relieved, immensely, that I don’t have to live with the irony of being blasted by the same country that tries to help keep me from starving. So I laugh, because it is unreal—to me. The thinkers in the War Department got together and changed the color to blue. Nice color, blue. Has all kinds of pleasant connotations in the West. But guess what? There are some serious symbolic problems with blue in Afghanistan. People don’t want to go near anything blue that falls out of the sky. Interesting, no? What an incredible satire we are perpetrating upon the Afghani people! You may think that avoiding blue is a silly reason to stay away from good solid food, but the symbolic power of colors, objects—and actions—should never be underestimated. The meaning of things is almost always more important to human beings than the fact of things. Facts are often ignored. Let’s take a symbolic gesture here at home: A bizarre change in our government has occurred because of the events of September 11th, although I have yet to hear any news commentator note the eerie (to me) quality of the decision blandly announced by George W. Bush. We now have a new law enforcement arm: the Department of Homeland Security. It’s not so much the idea of coordinating the efforts of the various domestic law enforcement branches (police, FBI, Immigration, etc.), as it is the symbolism in the name that bothers me. It’s the potential perversion of meaning. Homeland security sounds like something benign, but I’m suspicious when the government starts using words that pull heartstrings. There’s an Orwellian aspect to this choice of words that gives me the creeps. Remember that little "police action" we got involved in a few decades back, over in Southeast Asia? That was understatement. Now we are dealing with overstatement: a terrorist act has been described as an act of war. I looked up war in the dictionary, which describes it as being between states or nations. Viet Nam was a guerilla war, something that we’d done to the British back in the 1700s, a matter of tactics and fighting styles, but still a war. What happened in New York was a monstrous terrorist act—but Afghanistan didn’t do it to us. A small group of men did, backed by a well-financed organization hiding out in Afghanistan. The Taliban themselves are not responsible—they’re just protecting the man who is. Curiously, Osama bin Laden is still denying responsibility for the destruction of the World Trade Center. Neither the Taliban nor bin Laden constitute the government of Afghanistan. There isn’t really any government there at all. We’re bombing the heck out of the Taliban, we hope, and propagandizing our own population to beat the band. Perhaps we are redefining war. It would be convenient. It’s a lot easier to remove freedoms when a country is at war—people will accept it in the name of patriotism. Yet patriotism can easily be substituted with nationalism by the unscrupulous or the inflamed, just as religion can be used to convince men to commit violent, murderous suicide. That red, white, and navy blue fashion that’s going around lately can be used against the principles that those colors represent. We’ve declared a symbolic war against terrorists hiding like needles in a haystack, but we’re using dangerous and very real weapons that can hurt innocent people. So be careful: You never know when manna might blow up in your face, gods and governments being what they are.
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