Waiting for War in the Sunshine: A Curious Quiet

Are they shooting yet?

This may seem a bit of irreverence, but it is not. As I write, California is grinding through another Monday and no one--at least, no one around here--knows whether we will wake up in the morning to see the images of war on television. Or whether “The Pause for Peace” will still be on. So it’s hard to know what to do, or what to write, while we wait.

At first I thought I would go out to the beach. It seemed a California thing to do. A new Santa Ana had blown in over the weekend, and the beach would be very pleasant. I could sit in the sand and study the curls on the waves. Calculate, maybe, how far I would have to row beyond those waves to get to the place where the war was waiting. The beach would be winter-empty, a good place to think, and very quiet.

Too quiet, maybe. Somehow, when you’re waiting for war, quiet is not so good. Much better to be closer to the sound of human voices. To keep the TV close, and turned on. So no beach. Instead I wandered around, doing my waiting in the midst of crowds.

And all over Los Angeles, the city looked the same. The freeways were humming like always; nobody was staying home. In Westwood you couldn’t find a parking place. Everywhere, everything seemed the same.

But this was deceptive, I suspect. In the lives of most of us, nothing comparable to this period of waiting-for-war has ever happened. We’ve seen wars, small ones mostly, or wars that sneaked up on us, like Vietnam.

For my generation, in fact, that was the way wars were supposed to happen. They were insidious affairs that had no real beginning and maybe not even a real ending. These were the only kind of wars that were permitted because a “real” war was unthinkable.

And a “real” war, we understood all too well, would not involve a waiting period. We grew up thinking that waiting periods were obsolete, relics of the early 20th Century. As was the whole business of massed armies staring at each other across a no-man’s land.

In our age, the real wars were supposed to be instantaneous. Missiles would loop over the North Pole without warning and whole cities would disappear in a puff. That’s how war would happen.

That’s why we had SAC bombers in the air at all times. Why we had the DEW line built in northern Canada. War came in a matter of seconds.

So, in a sense, we are not ready to wait for war. We don’t know what to do with our waiting. And somehow, waiting in California seems strangest of all.

Maybe it’s because of the Santa Ana that blew away the clouds and left us with 80-degree weather in mid-January. How can you have a war when the surf’s up?

Or maybe it’s because California, even in the waning years of the 20th Century, still seems removed from the heart of the country. Wars are made on the East Coast by people who dress for dinner and wear wool coats in the winter.

And we sit out here on the Pacific Slope, in all our balminess, and listen to these other people argue over war. We see it from a distance of 3,000 miles, from a sense of remove. Over the decades California has acquired the wealth and acquired the population and in the future we will have more and more of both. But we do not run the country. They do.

You could sense this in the congressional debates. California’s representatives seemed to have only a marginal role, as if they realized this was not their time.

Perhaps this marginality was the result of California’s absent senators, one sick and one too new to have an impact. But I don’t think so.

I think it was more a case of our representatives knowing their place. California does not figure heavily into issues of war or peace. The heart of the country does that.

We do have a role, of course. A spectral one. We make the machines that fight the wars. We make the radars and the avionics and the lasers that guide the missiles. And we make the missiles and the beautiful, lethal planes that carry the missiles to war.

We’ve done this for generations. Rosie the Riveter was a Californian and she didn’t march into those plants with a tool belt around her waist to rivet sewing machines.

Someday, maybe, we’ll outlive this role and become part of the heart of the country. But not this time. Not this war.

In the meantime, we wait for the news. Out here, on the far side of the continent, where the sun will shine come war or peace, we wait.