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Every writer I know who’s worth a damn spends way more time “losing” than “winning”—if success means typing a polished page that lands in print as is. Scriveners tend to arrive at good work through revision. Look at Yeats’s chopped-up fixes in facsimile form, or Ezra Pound’s swashbuckling edits of Eliot’s Waste Land. Without radical overhaul, those works might have sunk like stones.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
and Johnny Rivers, who had recorded “Positively 4th Street.” Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down—the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it.
What happened next illustrated how much American society and values had changed. Seven months after 2,800 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Adm. Chester Nimitz sailed west to Midway Island, where his carrier destroyed the Japanese fleet and changed the course of the war. Now imagine if Nimitz, when he reached the International Dateline, had decided to turn back, thereby granting the Japanese a sanctuary in the Western Pacific. Such a decision would have been preposterous. Sixty years later, nearly three thousand Americans were murdered in New York City. A few months later, the American military was poised to destroy Osama bin Laden’s force. The al Qaeda Arabs were running for their lives in sneakers, unprepared for the harsh winter, while the local Pashtun tribes were in deathly fear of the enraged juggernaut in pursuit. Fearful of America’s wrath, the Pakistani army was scrambling to distance itself from the Islamist fighters. But when al Qaeda crossed the Durand Line—a scratch on a map ignored by all the local tribes—into Pakistan, the U.S. military, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. president, and the U.S. press stopped as if shocked by an electric current. There was never a serious policy discussion about pursuing and destroying the enemy. By halting on a ridge in the middle of nowhere, we legitimized Pakistan as a sanctuary. Encouraged by our fastidiousness, the Pakistani army regained its confidence and issued dire warnings that the border was inviolate to American ground attack. At the same time, the Pashtun border tribes, due to intimidation, Islamic solidarity, and blood ties, acceded to Taliban rule. Since 2001, Pakistan has played both sides, sheltering Taliban and terrorists while permitting American strikes by unmanned aircraft and accepting American aid. Obsessed with India, the Pakistani army deployed most of its forces along its eastern border and supported terrorist groups in Kashmir. A popular saying was “Every country has an army; in Pakistan, the army has a country.” Inside the army, though, officers were wary of each other’s loyalties. Having encouraged Islamism in the 1980s to divide civilian political parties, the generals weren’t certain which fellow officers rendered loyalty to Islamic parties above loyalty to the army. U.S. aid subsidized the ruling elite in Islamabad. Since 2001, the United States has given Pakistan over $15 billion.2 With only 2 percent of the 170 million people paying income tax, the national budget is sustained by sales taxes that levy the same burden on street sweepers as on members of Parliament whose incomes reportedly average $900,000 a year.3 The goal of U.S. aid was to persuade Pakistan to take seriously the threat from the Islamists it protected, including al Qaeda. But the Pakistani army had proved both unable and unwilling to control the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, along the Afghan border. It remained a sanctuary, sheltering over 150 insurgent camps.
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