The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen Page A

as it buzzed and buzzed at her. She listened to the speakers, some of whom were inspiring and some of whom ranted about the environment and racial inequality and every other conceivable grievance of the Left, totally irrelevant to the war except within the tangent-happy interrelatedness of the orators’ minds. People were bringing whatever of themselves they could into the cause. The cause was enormous, sprawling; it contained multitudes. It was as ugly and yearning and flawed as human nature, and at times she felt embarrassed to be a part of it. But at least she was a part of something. As her outraged cell phone continued to buzz as if it had its own violent opinion, she stood there, sublimating herself to this unnamed thing, this unified hope or harmonic rage, and tried to stop thinking about those GTK files.
     
    A few nights later she found herself at a meeting of antiwar activists. According to one of the pamphlets at the march, the activist group was hosting a meeting to “channel this weekend’s energy toward concrete and comprehensive goals.” Tasha was down with concrete goals. Part of her trouble since Marshall had died was the lack of goals, the lack of energy, the plain not knowing what to do with herself.
    The name of the group was Peace Now and Forever. That sounded rather utopian to Tasha, but maybe she was wrong to disparage those with lofty aspirations. So many people settled for the easy win these days, you had to tip your hat to those aiming higher, even if you knew they would miss.
    The meeting was held at a small, damp Sunday-school room at the Baptist Holiness Church in Shaw. Yellow Rorschach stains from water damage decorated the ceiling, and the windowless white walls were adorned with religious drawings from the local child artists: the sun rising on the empty cave Christ had fled, multiplied fishes and loaves heaped on picnic tables, Saint George decapitating a dragon with one mighty stroke.
    The different speakers told the audience about opportunities to volunteer for this letter-writing project or that PR campaign, to sit in on and possibly interfere with congressional hearings on the war, to screen documentaries at local apartments, to organize teach-ins and “spread the truth about the administration’s global goals.” Then a couple of “visiting economics professors” (likely unemployed) gave a long, meandering lecture about “world capitalism’s master plan for the subjugated people of the Middle East.” Tasha tried not to fall asleep as she sat there listening to old white men discuss how the free marketeers had deliberately seeded chaos in Baghdad, just like they did in New Orleans after Katrina and in South Asia after the tsunami; even supposedly random events like meteorological disasters were ascribed to a nefarious cabal’s master plan. If the making of legislation and sausage were two things you just did not want to witness, Tasha thought, the same seemed to be true of world peace. This was some seriously tedious shit.
    After the fortunately not endless (it only seemed that way) lecture, the two profs sat down. Then, to Tasha’s surprise, she found herself looking at one of her college boyfriends.
    The new speaker was T.J., a veritable supernova from her freshman winter and spring. They’d lasted nearly a semester, hooking up during a snowstorm in February and breaking up on a lily-speckled quad in May. He’d transferred that summer, and she’d never heard from him again. Now here he was, taking the stage like he owned it, telling the audience about his own related group. They were conducting an anti-recruitment project, in which activists would visit high schools and “hit kids with the truth about being a soldier,” the things that military recruiters would never tell them. For every recruiter who tempted teens with stories of honor and dignity and getting a good education, T.J. explained, an activist needed to tell America’s impressionable youth about the