Requiem for an Urge

I’ve seen the scrawls and statements in the men’s rooms of bars scattered across the country and in many farther-flung locales. Globally, both bathrooms and the bathroom walls of the public variety, share the characteristic of satisfying basic human urges. Each bathroom tells a different story. There are the misspelled racist statements common to truck stops. There are the limericks, witty quips, and graffiti tags of college campuses. And then there’s the unnamed desperation lingering behind a phone number, anatomy drawing, and list of services found in a stall at a Ruby Tuesday’s.

The bathroom walls of DC bars, like most other towns, serve as confession booth, humor outlet, networking tool, and many other purposes not worth mentioning here. Where they stand out is in their overtly political flavor. At a pool hall I’ve seen multi-stanza odes to Condoleeza Rice, clearly written by several authors. In Georgetown I once saw a series of salty back-and-forths originating from the statement, “HR 24 SUCKS!” But far and away, my favorite piece of bathroom wisdom was at a dive bar sometime in early 2002. It said simply,

Give Bin Laden to the Rednecks

No single phrase or instruction has ever captured that tempered need for revenge so many of us felt in my hometown during that gloomy, anxious time. Nowhere in our buttoned-down lives could we just howl. Nowhere had I seen such a clearly stated sense of justice and place in the world. There’s a perfect symmetry to handing that atavistic, parochial, violently sanctimonious fanatic over to the local moral equivalent, his crude caricature of an adversary.

I can't speak for elsewhere, but in DC everyone was sure that nothing was that simple. We all were aware that there was no one reason why streets were closing daily for suspicious packages, war machines were sputtering alive, and the politics of fear and blame clouded all of our thinking. We all knew that the national battle cry for frontier justice precluded all the best options, even as we stifled our own cries for the sake of propriety. We all saw that there was no first cause behind the September 11 attacks, no nerve center to eradicate, no one culprit. But Bin Laden felt damn close to all those things. It just felt that way.

Today, few believe that the violent end of that man will usher in a New Jerusalem, as the bible hints. All but the most naïve retain the illusion that we are exempt from blame for our troubles. Not after ten years of war, if we ever were. Only the malicious believe that revenge is an end in itself. But that includes us all, whether we admit it or not.

All of us have urges to satisfy. He’s in the water now, gone for good. It’s time to flush the toilet, wash our hands, and get back to showing our best side to the world.