The Weekly Screed (#741)

This country is condemned
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — When I was twelve, the apartment I shared with Mom, my sister and my brother was condemned — officially — by the town’s building inspector. We were in the rear unit above the S&Q Hardware on Superior Avenue, and people weren’t supposed to be living there. Inhospitable though it was, there we were. Nobody ever tried seriously to move us to safer quarters.

Our building got regularly condemned — and routinely reprieved — for good reason. There was no evident insulation in the walls. In winter, our windows — huge single panes — frosted over from top to bottom, on the inside. Our oil-burning stove heated one (of four) rooms indifferently and posed a fire hazard that would have reduced Smoky the Bear to a cowering cub. We hung laundry, played games and housed my pet turtles on a rickety wooden porch screwed precariously to the building’s back wall and held up by several warped four-by-four timbers. The stairs to this teetering deathtrap had steps missing, wobbly handrails and a lot of rusty ten-penny nails that seemed reluctant to stay nailed. On one corner, we kept an oil drum. It had soaked the floor so deep with heating fuel that a stray spark or a smoldering matchstick would have made us — in one spectacular instant — the Monroe County reincarnation of Mrs. O’Leary’s pyromaniac cow.

Once, I naively brought two schoolmates home. They paused in the doorway, round-eyed and traumatic, as though they’d just walked into the middle of a Hitchcock movie. Another friend called our apartment “a walk on the wild side.”

Whenever a condemnation order came down, our landladies, the Kuckuck sisters, would gradually husband just enough resources to do as little as possible to keep the rent flowing. Perhaps a new plank on the porch, one step on the staircase, a strip of flannel on the doorframe against the subzero blast that swept the building like the Red Army. Ironically, the Kuckucks were sweet old gals. They often gave me a cookie when I delivered the rent. They were just tight with a nickel.

Living in a condemned building tends to bring down other forms of contumely. My seventh-grade teacher, Sister Mary Ann, openly disdained me as the dead-end son of a damned mother, lucky to occupy even the crumbling hovel where I shivered in my bed, warmed my clothes on the oil stove in the morning, and did my homework wrapped in a blanket in front of a black-and-white Philco. Her message was that I had no more future than my crummy building.

In a way, Sister Mary Ann was right. The money we paid to rent that dump, and the pittance the Kuckucks spent to fend off the sheriff, might have been better used to subsidize decent lodgings on another street, in another town, or even Minnesota. Mom might have rejected such charity. But the option would have been humane, and it might have made our future lives a little less of a struggle.

Which brings up the subject of Afghanistan. Just as Mom kept us too long above the S&Q Hardware, Uncle Sam has lingered in Kabul and Kandahar way beyond the condemnation date of Afghanistan.

There are, let’s face it, countries that just ought to be condemned, and the people living there offered a better, safer, kinder place to live.

Today, for instance, women are fleeing Kunduz en masse because the Taliban — who occupied the city briefly — are targeting educated women for unspeakable punishments, declaring them troublemakers, traitors and sluts. In the same town, the hospital is gone because the United States (accidentally) blew it to hell with a bomb that was a lot more expensive than the oil drum on our porch.

In recent months, we’ve learned that rich Afghan men consider it part of their “culture” to kidnap small boys and turn them into sex slaves. This is OK because, as it turns out, Afghanistan has no laws against sodomizing children. And then there’s the “honor killing” tradition — fathers murdering daughters who fall in love with the wrong boy. Afghan agriculture consists largely of growing opium poppies to enrich the Taliban and torment the junkie population in America. The Taliban are the latest in a long history of medieval throwbacks who stifle education, enslave women, distort Islam, oppose modernism and feud incestuously among themselves. Afghanistan is a military tarpit that has sucked down the young men of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the bungling, unwelcome troops of the U.S.A.

We shouldn’t be there. Nobody should be there, especially little kids.

For less money than we’re now spending to train and equip thousands of U.S. troops to slog pointlessly around a Third World hellhole, to fly multi-million-dollar airplanes that drop ten-thousand-dollar bombs on hospitals and “terrorist compounds” next to kindergartens, we could afford to offer the refugee women of Kunduz a nice double-wide on the outskirts of Little Rock, or a slab bungalow in Bakersfield, or a first-floor flat in Prague, Lyons, Manchester, Waukesha…

The first step toward sanity is to issue a notarized Condemnation Certificate on Afghanistan — the whole country. Syria, too. And Somalia. Possibly Yemen and Liberia. Definitely North Korea! Invite anyone in those miserable, futureless, heatless, no-elevator tenements who wants to leave. Offer a new home elsewhere. Build them a subdivision on Long Island or just outside Minneapolis — with bike trails and a municipal swimming pool, an ice rink and a Starbucks.

Not everyone would sign up. A lot of people prefer the devil they know. But nobody should have to live forever in a condemned walkup. Mom, for example, eventually got fed up and moved us to an uncondemned fourplex on Simpson Street in Madison. I never really thanked her for saving my life.

I guess if we saved the Afghans from Afghanistan, I wouldn’t mind the Pentagon sticking around there. But, in that case, Uncle Sam would be wise to emulate the Kuckuck sisters. They understood that the best you can do with a rotten structure is the least you can do to keep the building inspector off your back.