Extreme Makeover: Iraq edition

I was watching home improvement shows on TV, waiting for the HBO special about injured veterans. In one, a crew of 30-somethings renovated a lazy man’s kitchen while his wife was ensconced in a Vegas spa, awaiting the transformation.

This was not one of those feel-good shows about the Louisiana family that is just now recovering from two-year-old Katrina. These people are living in another kind of fog—a consumer fog. They have accumulated a houseful of low-cost building materials at various sales. Now, they live in the clutter of their unrealized projects.

When the TV crew comes in to save them (why?) their true colors begin to show. The wife escapes scrutiny by taking off for the spa. The husband proceeds to torture the genial crew with his often unreasonable demands and utter lack of productivity. He’s a natural middle manager.

By the end, the wife has had the better transformation (we secretly hope she goes home with the crew boss) and the haggard workers barely manage a smile for the cameras. The laggard husband has a better kitchen, a less-cluttered home and a beautiful wife to enjoy. What have we learned? If you wait long enough, someone less well off than you will save you from yourself, as long as America is willing to watch.

There is a perception of virtue, I decide, that compels us to watch. See how good we Americans are to each other?

On another network, a big-budget home show renovated the house of a 9/11 worker, an ex-Marine who helped pull survivors from the wreckage of the Twin Towers. The man is a strapping fellow with a large, handsome family dependent on him. No one would begrudge him a transfigured home, built to safety codes, with room for the extended family he provides for.

But it is not the Constitutional right of any American, not even an ex-Marine, to inhabit such a home. Only ones who capture the attention of a network scout can hope for such salvation. And, oh, the jingoistic fervor that ABC foments! With a contingent of active-duty U.S. Marines sent to welcome the residents to their re-visioned home, and a whole neighborhood of people cheering them on, I felt like I was watching a Pentagon propaganda film.

Then, I turned the channel to see the “less well-off” servicemen and women who have left arms and legs and whole chunks of their brains in the streets of Iraq, being interviewed by James Gandolfini, America’s teddy-bear mob boss.

These folks were not offered new homes or cars or bathroom suites to let America view their raw stumps and scars. About all they could hope for was the same access to health care that all veterans enjoy, the newest high-tech prosthetic devices and a hug from the ex-Sopranos star. They were not there to trash the military or rant about Walter Reed’s sanitary conditions. Not one of them regretted their service. All of them wanted a normal life with a family. No one mentioned a new kitchen as high on their list of priorities.

I write this dismal diatribe on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attack on America that resulted in the deaths of thousands of American citizens. It is the first year that the weather on this day has not mirrored the day of the attack. Today, a light rain drizzles as jack-hammers punctuate the steady thrum of the city. It seems the whole city is in the throes of renovation, always. “It’ll be a nice place,” someone once said, “if they ever get it finished.”

Yesterday, I was putting a first coat of paint on my bathroom in the country, while listening to General Petraeus report to Congress on the Iraq war. “No one could have imagined the situation we find ourselves in today in Iraq,” said the General. But I imagined it. I imagined the whole world going to hell, General. That is just what I imagined as I marched in the streets of New York City and Washington, DC the year before we sent troops to Iraq. Now that we have renovated the world, we’re going to have to live in it.