Rogouski: A Review of “Let Me Stand Alone — The Journals of Rachel Corrie”

By Stanley W. Rogouski

Rachel Corrie isn’t a household name. But most of us know the basics of her story, that she was an American college student from a progressive upper-middle-class family in liberal Olympia, Washington, that she was an activist with the radical International Solidarity Movement in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, and that she was killed by a weaponized Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer a few days shy of her 24th birthday while protesting the IDF’s demolition of Palestinian houses on the land they were confiscating in order to build the “security wall” along the border with Egypt. The exact circumstances of Rachel Corrie’s death are highly disputed, and are almost certainly going to remain so. But it turned out that Rachel Corrie could speak for herself, even after she died.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, when Israel went from being a strategic asset to being a strategic liability, its supporters in the United States have based their appeal for American funding on the idea of “shared values.” Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. It has a free press, an extensive system of higher education, and a large, well-developed middle-class. Recently, especially after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Israel has also become the darling of the American right. Israelis often appear to be exaggerated versions of ourselves, hardy 19th Century pioneers bringing civilization to a savage wasteland, unabashed defenders of western culture in an age of political correctness.

That Israel and the United States share the same values is beyond question. That American values might not be beneficial for the rest of the world, that taking a Hebrew speaking version of New Jersey, plunking it down in the middle of the Arab world, and then defending it with tanks, F-16s, checkpoints, barbed wire and targeted assassinations might just be a very bad idea is not something many Americans are willing to discuss honestly. The appeal to “shared values” is often an appeal to shared bigotry. Israel’s American supporters have learned to play on American chauvinism, fear of “the other,” and the tendency of Americans not to travel or learn foreign languages like a violin. Go to the Internet to see it at its worse. A gruesome photo of a dead Palestinian child in the Gaza Strip is likely to elicit an almost identical reaction on the American and Israeli right.

Nits make lice.

Rachel Corrie isn’t a household name. But most of us know the basics of her story, that she was an American college student from a progressive upper-middle-class family in liberal Olympia, Washington, that she was an activist with the radical International Solidarity Movement in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, and that she was killed by a weaponized Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer a few days shy of her 24th birthday while protesting the IDF’s demolition of Palestinian houses on the land they were confiscating in order to build the “security wall” along the border with Egypt. The exact circumstances of Rachel Corrie’s death are highly disputed, and are almost certainly going to remain so.

But it turned out that Rachel Corrie could speak for herself, even after she died. Her correspondence with her parents from Rafah were published almost immediately in the British newspaper The Guardian, and turned into at play by the British actor Alan Rickman. It became a huge hit in London and came close to being banned outright in the United States. An inexperienced 23 year old college student, it turned out, could write a lot more vividly about the Israeli Palestinian conflict than most professional American journalists could write about the war in Iraq. Part of the cackling glee with which the right greeted Rachel Corrie’s violent death was also relief. As we’ve seen in the last few years, with the jailing of Sami el Haj and Bilal Hussein, the bizarre campaigns against Scott Beauchamp at the New Republic and against the AP, the American right wants to make sure that no unembedded reporting makes it out of the Middle East.

A few months ago, when I got an e-mail from Amazon.com suggesting that I “might be interested” in buying a book (I shudder sometimes to think that Homeland Security is probably looking at my Amazon.com purchase list.) called “Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie,” I pre-ordered it without thinking I’d ever read it. I was surprised therefore, when I noticed that the blurbs on the dust jacket had been written not by the usual suspects, not by Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, or Medea Benjamin, but by Adrienne Rich, an obscure radical feminist poet I had studied in college, and by Mario Varga Llosa, the conservative Latin American novelist. It was also a substantial looking book, 300 tightly space pages with a brief introduction and a few footnotes. While not exactly polished or accomplished prose, it had substance. This was not a posthumous vanity book but a detailed and honest record of the development of the radical consciousness, of a privileged young American woman trying to molt off her white skin privilege and become fully human.

Derrick Jensen, the radical American environmentalist, begins his book “A Language Older than Words” with the following observation. “Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I’m not sure that’s right.”

The progressive upper-middle-class that Rachel Corrie grew up with in the Seattle area exists on the conservative end of Derrick Jensen’s spectrum. Fully aware of the fact that they’re part of a commercial civilization that is rapidly destroying the beautiful world that surrounds them, the Pacific Northwestern bourgeoisie makes compromises. They build their houses along the shore of Lake Washington, but are careful to recycle. They use electricity generated by dams that are almost guaranteed to lead to the extinction of the Columbia River Salmon. They fill their tanks with 3 dollar a gallon gasoline and then drive to the mountains where they’re careful to maintain the illusion that they’re not interfering with nature. Corrie’s earliest memories involve being initiated into the cult of ecotopia and yet not quite free enough to enjoy it.

“Brigid and I just yearned to feed our granola bars to the squirrels,” she says describing a family camping trip. “We wanted to feed those ground squirrels the way I want to smoke a cigarette after nine cups of coffee. But my mama was there, and my mama had read the signs about why we don’t feed the wild animals…I could go on and list a myriad of instances in which my mamma prevented me from making a hat out of moss in the Hoh or from ripping anemones out of tide pools at Kalaoch. But the general theme of all of them is this intense care and respect my momma had for every little section of soil our feet made contact with. And this trust, that the national park gods who made those “Don’t feed the squirrels” signs were benevolently watching over everything, meticulously protecting every sprig of sorrel and gently pointing us up the designated paths.”

Early in high-school, she finds herself headed down the “designated path” towards a life as an upper-middle-class soccer mom. “I didn’t have to explain myself for my first four trimesters of high school,” she says. “I got straight A’s, enthusiastically attended pep assemblies, at lunch with the same group of all-American-high-achieving girls each day, and did my homework every night before going to bed. I went to every football game. I volunteered at the Olympia Crisis Clinic so that I could nonjudgementally help kids who weren’t quite as all-American and high-achieving as I was.” But she still has a rebellious streak. She and her friend Brigid like to play “shipwrecked princess” down by the river, and, at one point, she decides she doesn’t want to be a princess, so she picks up a dying fish lying alongside the water and swallows it raw. A year later, she’s chosen to be an exchange student in Russia, and, faster than you can say Alyosha Karamazov, she’s alienated from the American way of life for good.

“I was in Top Foods in early April,” she describes a few years later, “when I was beginning my contract on the artist in the community. I was walking through the meat section and all I could think about was this article I’d read about the infrastructure in Moscow. The city is heated by boiling water flowing through underground pipes. Because of the economic depression in Russia, the pipes can’t be repaired. So the pipe burst and sections of soil become saturated with boiling water. People, little children, walking along the sidewalk in Moscow fall through into sinkholes and die in boiling water. I was crying in Top Foods, surrounded by every variety of dead cow you could ever want, caring around this image of boiling death.”

Back in Olympia, her innocence is gone. She’s no longer the perky blond cheer leader destined to grow up into a liberal suburban mother making sure her kids don’t feed the squirrels granola but otherwise leading a life of privileged hypocrisy. He grades slip. She starts hanging out with “kids who pierce more than their ears.” She thinks only about leaving the United States, the world of the OJ trial, Slimfast commercials, supermodels and “grotesque gigantic homes” and going back to Russia, which in spite of its desperate poverty has an authenticity, a poetry that Clinton’s America lacks.

Former menacing Communist empire full of gorgeous people, coal dust on the snow, bland rectangular apartment buildings that looked beautiful in the sunset, sweet, smiling girls who shrugged their shoulders and tossed empty vodka bottles off of balconies, people who supposedly waited in breadlines squeezing my wrists and heaping extra servings of caviar and mashed potatoes onto my plate.

When Rachel Corrie graduates from high school, instead of going to an Ivy League like her “high heels and khaki overachieving corporate sister,” and after worrying that she would end up at the University of Washington with ‘two or three ex boyfriends from high school,” she winds up going to college in her home town, to Evergreen State College, a school where “you can go if you’re not a valedictorian.” But, while going to a state college in your hometown is often a blow to the ego for the typical upper-middle-class American teenager, she thrives at Evergreen. There’s an almost endless array of opportunities for a “progressive education” and she seems determined to take advantage of all of them, an apprenticeship in forestry in Mount Rainier National Park, a trip to Belize to study at the “Institute for Village Studies,” a program devoted to studying the “artist in the community.”

Like most radical children of liberal parents, she finds that it takes real effort to find a way to rebel. You have to keep pushing boundaries. The rebellious instinct in a young African American male means prison. But for a white woman from progressive Washington State, she concludes, it just means another kind of privilege. She angrily turns down her parents offer to buy her a car. She writes long, irritated diatribes about the commercialization of the national park system. She has a stormy relationship with a morose beekeeper (who’s allergic to bees) that finally ends when a violent car crash almost kills them both. She gives up taking money from her parents to put herself through school working the graveyard shift as a mental health consoler for the Behavioral Health Resources Center of Western Washington.

But all the while, she’s still making an effort to teach herself how to write. “Write three pages a day” one entry reads. “Defy negative stereotypes of artists by addressing these opportunities for improvement and using my creativity to develop more stable habits and routines.” The passages describing how she navigated the bus system at odd hours while going to and from her job caring for addicts, the mentally ill, the underprivileged, how she became “acquainted with the night,” in the words of Robert Frost, have a clarity and originality that the rest of the journal entries lack. The young woman who became famous for dying in a strange, far off place has a strikingly poetic ability to summon up the landscape of suburban America.

“Graveyard shift out the window looking west: When everybody goes to sleep and I have some time between Data Tracking forms and mopping, I get to peer out at the town and discover more secrets… Tonight you would never know that there are salmon still running underneath all that. Big droopy sarcophagi state buildings. The Ramada. Tonight this town has cast aside its oyster-bed roots. Olympia is a whole new woman on Saturday night after midnight. She’s a sparkly lady, decked out in streams of blinking traffic signals. She’s wearing a full-body jumpsuit. Sequins from here to the Black Hills. Cubic zirconium along what by day is State Street, and emerald earrings gleaming out of the neighborhoods of the west side. I work near the fire station so I know whenever there’s an emergency. I can also watch the siren lights downtown. But tonight Olympia has tossed off her civic duties and siren lights aren’t the signals of emergencies. They are costume jewelry.”

Up until this point, Corrie is relatively apolitical. There’s no mention at all of the WTO riots in Seattle, even though she was 20 years old at the time, and she lived only 30 miles down I-5. The impeachment of Bill Clinton gets only a passing mention and only because she’s “sick of hearing about his tawdry sex life.” There’s no outrage about the stolen election in 2000. She describes an angry confrontation between a Nader supporter and a Democrat but never bothers to tell us who she voted for herself, or even if she voted at all. But as far so many of us who were violently wrenched out of our apolitical stupor when the Bush administration revealed its not so crypto fascist nature after the worst terrorist attack in American history, 9/11 changed everything.

After 9/11, she sounds a bit like an intern at Media Matters. Just about every important political figure is mentioned, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft, Jose Padilla. She angrily denounces the Patriot Act, military tribunals, heaps abuse on the New York Times and Thomas Friedman. She fantasizes about what it would be like if everybody on TV suddenly started yelling Howard Beale style “Fuck the Patriot Act. Fuck John Ashcroft.” She writes detailed lists of people in the corporate media she wants to fact check. She starts getting involved in local anti-war groups. Her writing gets wordy and loses its poetry.

But it doesn’t matter. It’s time to stop writing. Liberal politics are another way of keeping the system in place. Holding up signs at intersections, parading in dove costumes, writing letters to congress, and holding marches in Washington are not going to stop the invasion of Iraq. Neither will a few extraordinary individuals. Only when the vast majority of the American people not only oppose the war but reject the material basis of their privileged existence will we see any real change. Corrie no longer wants to write. She wants to act, and do so in a radical and direct way.

“I think a lot in this world depends right now on the middle class in the United States,” she writes, “people who, while not directly manipulating the present system for their own profit, are still benefiting from it, are certainly sheltered by it, and, at this point, are still able to avoid the most dire consequences of it. Things could go pretty well if all the soccer moms in the country suddenly decided they were not going to buy from, vote for, or otherwise support anybody who dumps waste in the water or exploits moms in other places or their children.”

The conservative supporters of Israel who circulate the photo of Rachel Corrie ripping up a crude drawing of an American flag that it somehow discredits her, those people who cackle with glee at the idea of burning children in Fallujah with white phosphorous and yet shriek in horror at the idea of burning a piece of clothe made by slave labor in Communist China, miss the point. But they don’t miss the point quite as much as the liberal who expects anti-war protests to be conducted in a clean well-mannered way. Rachel Corrie is a radical and unashamedly so. No finger wagging designed to intimidate a liberal would have had much of an effect on her, and, after having read through her diaries, it’s pretty obvious she would have probably found the reaction the photo of her “burning the flag” hilarious.

There’s a reason Corrie ripped up a paper American flag in the Gaza Strip and not a paper Israeli flag. The Israeli repression in the Gaza Strip is not a quirk of history confined to one small country because it’s propped up by a powerful lobbying group in Congress. On the contrary, Israeli apartheid is simply the most distilled, most concentrated, the purest form of American imperialism. The reason no liberal can possibly accept or even mention Rachel Corrie’s act in Gaza and why every conservative is obsessed with dehumanizing her and annihilating her memory is because what led her to take Mario Savio’s plea to heart and quite literally throw herself into the gears of the machine involves a radical rejection of everything America stands for. It’s a rejection of the “shared values” between the United States and Israel.

Indeed, the more Rachel Corrie studies local history, the closer she seems to get to the Gaza Strip.

“Map as narrative. Historical Map as tall tale. Map as propaganda,” she writes after a trip to see an IWW memorial in Centralia Washington. “Downtown there is a map that shows how Olympia is built on a bowl of Jell-O and is all infill and how native people called that valley Valley of the Bear. It says “You are here,” with an arrow pointing to Swantown Marina. It has images of what was going on at Swantown Marina a hundred years ago. Two hundred years ago. People who were here. It makes it look like this has been some sort of natural progression instead of a bloody holocaust. Instead of theft. It doesn’t say “You are here because some people thought they were God’s chosen people and forced some other people off the land they had lived on since the beginning of time so that they could dump shit in the estuary and build a radio station where the oysters used to be.”

The victory of European Christian civilization against tribalism, the genocide against the Indians in the United States has been so complete that white Americans no longer know how to relate to the land they successfully stole. “As human beings, we’re all a bunch of addicts,” she says. “Addicted to cars, sex, video games, coffee, electricity, Styrofoam, the Internet, sausages, attention, cigarettes, Chap Stick, opera, crack, tourism, paper, chainsaws.” And even in Mount Rainier National Park where she works for the forestry service, it’s impossible to get away from it. There’s something wrong with nature, something apocalyptic that seems to bubble up from the blood soaked land, from the history of American genocide.

“Have you ever noticed that there’s something seriously not right about the animals around here? For instance. They’re not animals at all. They’re overfed little muggers addicted to processed foods and sunflower seeds. They couldn’t survive in the wild. Luckily they don’t live in the wild. They live in the national park where dysfunctional, attention-starved humans trade corn nuts for their attention in an attempt to befriend something other than the computer. The other day a stellar jay came up to me with a syringe and yelled, ‘this is AIDs blood, bitch! Give me some Tostitos before I infect your ass.”

By totally annihilating the Indians, Americans have made it impossible to recover from their sick, addictive way of relating to the land. “A junkie I know told me,” she says, that throughout his drug-abusing career he believed that there was a part of him that was still pure — that had remained untouched by his addiction —that he could come back to and draw strength from when he decided to be clean. Funny thing was, when jail and multiple overdoses finally forced him into rehab, he got clean and realized there was no such place in him, no untouched place.”

In the United States as a whole, the untouched place is also gone.

Someday this country’s going to get tired of getting high on all the extrinsic values of nature and we’re going to want to go clean and sustainable as a whole. And as we start hopping on the mass transit and tearing down the dams, we’re going to look for some untouched place within this junkie country to draw inspiration from. We’re going to look towards the national parks that Roosevelt assured as would be waiting — and we’re going to see a whole hell of a lot of overfed ground squirrels, deer, and gray jays (probably also foxes and bears) running down sawed hazardous tree trunks and flattened social trails and paths, staring right back at us, and waiting for corn nuts. No untouched place.”

And the reason is a successfully managed genocide.

Reading Log Towns, she writes. I found the name of the Squiaitl of Eld Inlet — the Stehchas of Budd Inlet — I’m quite sure I have never heard the name Sqiaitl before. I know about Squaxin Island and Nisqually. I went to a relatively progressive elementary school and we had speakers from the tribes and ate traditional food and built Popsicle-stick longhouses. But I grew up in Eld Inlet. Literally in it, in the creek, in the mud, amongst the Salmon. Did I hear that name at any point? Squiaitl. I need to know whose creek that is. You know. We don’t have that.

In 1969, Moshe Dayan addressed the Israel Institute of Technology. “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages,” he says. “You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

But the difference is that unlike in the United States, the natives in Palestine have not yet allowed themselves to be annihilated. Indeed, the level of demonization in the western press directed against the Palestinians is also a testament to their stubborn refusal to go away, their sheer tenacity at hanging onto their cultural identity and their religion.

For the right wing American male, this is a terrifying threat to his potency and masculinity. The myth of the savage, wild Indian is reborn in the Middle East, and the most terrifying image of all, a white woman who “goes native,” is reborn along with it. Crazy Horse has converted to Islam, put on a kaffiyeh, and resurrected himself from the dead to fight once again against western imperialism. Call out the right wing bloggers and the Wall Street Journal editorialists. Better yet, call out Ethan Edwards from “The Searchers” and resurrect him as John Wayne. “Western civilization” is under attack.

But what Rachel Corrie finds in Rafah are not romantic revolutionaries, but peaceful, ordinary people who have been devastated by a mass industrial attack against their very existence. Like the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest who are all but guaranteed to become extinct by the network of dams preventing the rivers from flowing down to the sea, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are watching their ecosystem being systematically dismantled by the power of a military superpower funded by Washington and covered up by the American press. Water is being stolen. Movement is restricted, and a gigantic “security wall,” a dam for people not rivers or fish, is being built on property seized from people who have committed no crime other than to exist in a space that the empire wants for itself. And yet, even though she’s the very face of the oppressor, people are still kind to her. Contrary to what the media says in the United States, Palestinians aren’t inferior to Americans. They’re better than Americans. She’s found her “untouched space” in the resilience of the poor, the oppressed, and the racially and culturally demonized.

Who do you think these families are that I tell you about, who won’t take any money from us even though they are very, very poor – who say to us, “We are not a hotel. We help you because we think maybe you will go and tell people in your country that you lived with Muslims. We think they will know that we are good people. We are quiet people. We just want peace. Do you think I’m hanging out with Hamas fighters? These people are being shot at every day — that, on top of the complete strangulation I described above — and they continue to go about their business as best they can in sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn’t that basically the epitome of non-violent resistence – doing what you need to do even though you are shot at?

By staying in the Gaza Strip even though she could have left at any time, Rachel Corrie chooses to reject the values shared by Israelis and Americans and to accept the fate of their victims. But she also speaks from the grave in the purest of American accents.