Peace and quiet

Finally. Friday's rush-hour blare has dwindled to the chug of a solitary bus idling outside on West 49th Street. But the rain’s been relentless, playing hard and emphatic under the white street light outside my window.

I’ve got the Mississippi Sheiks on in I-Tunes, “Your Good Man Caught the Train and Gone.” Bruised vocals, in perfect sync with a slightly off-kilter guitar. A fired-up fiddle that reads the singer’s mind, darting in and out of the guitar fills like a hopped-up turnstile jumper. Old blues; real blues. Not even a few rock stars play the blues like this anymore. Eric Clapton’s last effort, a tribute to the great Robert Johnson, was a slippy, overproduced disaster. The late Kurt Cobain sure could make the genre his own, as he brilliantly demonstrates on Nirvana’s cover of Ledbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” But singing the blues is a risky business, something you shouldn't try unless you can rip yourself apart in public and still be able to live with yourself in the morning. Not an easy balancing act, that.

It’s been a long, busy week, but it’s also been quiet, mostly. Iowans should know that quiet does exist in New York City. You’d never know it reading the city’s papers. It’s not the kind of quiet that settles on an Iowa cornfield, quiet in the literal sense. That's an impossibility in this great, overbearing metropolis. It's also why any New Yorker will tell you that every so often you have to escape the city and go to places not entirely unlike Iowa to keep it all together (eg, upstate New York). Call it blue town goin’ red—if only for a long weekend.

In Manhattan quiet is experienced internally, and for as long as it lasts the hubbub of big city life goes on but doesn’t intervene. It's a welcome detachment. But then days like Friday roll in—days that rain on a million short tempers—and, well, so much for quiet in the glorious, wormy apple.

The weekend’s a question mark. Arafat’s dead. Do I celebrate? Not according to The Nation, which extols the virtues of Arafat the founder of the Palestinian liberation movement while berating him for the few good-faith concessions he made to Israel and the international community. How can I take seriously an editorial that calls the 2000 Camp David proposal for the creation of a Palestinian state “inadequate and insulting”? I’ll readily admit that Israel’s land grabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip contributed greatly to Arafat’s later recalcitrance at the negotiating table. But clearly the editors at The Nation are not living in the real world when they denounce the label of Arafat the terrorist as “so much propaganda and mythmaking.”

The Nation can keep right on stewing over the failure of realistic minds to grasp its utopian vision for the Palestinians. I’ll follow our president’s lead in asking God to bless Arafat’s flawed soul while hoping the new Palestinian leadership grasps the significance of this moment and the opportunity it presents. And Sunday, weather permitting, maybe I’ll take a drive to a place not entirely unlike Iowa, if only for an afternoon.