In the Name of the Son
See, it’s the war/money/oil connection; the city’s Million Worker March Committee is running a catchall event, to point out how the war is making life generally miserable, with a motley crew of protesters who seem to be chanting and speaking only to each other, the already converted.
This is what it has come to for Michael, his platform dying. But he has to keep trying, to keep his public stance alive any way he can. Partly, it’s how he connects to his lost son. From the 10-year-old who built a three-story tower in the backyard, wiring it so he could listen to Led Zeppelin on WMMR, to giving Michael a call from high up in a tower he was repairing near Washington, just to tell him: I can see the sand along the coast. I can see the sweet blue ocean. A view of the world. Developing Prometheus Towers, his own quarter-million-dollar business (Prometheus stole fire, or knowledge, from Mount Olympus to give to man), a grand vision of helping to wire the world. Even if that vision spun out of control.
It’s easy, after the fact, to see how naïve Nick was. His country offered to fly him out of Iraq. In fact, during his release interview last April, after he’d been detained for those 13 days by Iraqi police, an American military observer who was present challenged him: “Do you understand, Nick, that if you continue traveling here alone you’re going to be killed?”
“You don’t understand these people,” Nick told him. “I understand them.”
And so off he went, alone, thinking, Michael knows, that he was as safe as he would have been walking the streets of West Chester. To be so trusting was a mistake of youth and passion that even Michael isn’t sure he would have changed, if he could have: “Because the Nick I loved is the man that would go. You can’t change one thing. You change one thing, you change the whole.”
Live your vision — careful, earthbound Michael was never so bold. But that’s the demand he makes of himself, now. That they saw this war so differently, father and son, is beside the point. Michael has to be true to himself. So he will keep on saying his piece, no matter what we think of him, and even — the city rushing by on this dreary Friday night — when we’re not listening: “George Bush has declared war, not on the Taliban, al Qaeda or Iraq, but on all poor people and working people throughout the world, including in the United States.”
His story no longer news, the vehicle for getting it out has been reduced from Good Morning, America to a ragtag demonstration in downtown Philadelphia. No matter: A chanting man with a vision of peace, wearing a sandwich board, Michael Berg will keep right on attacking the sins of his country.
