What's a Panama?

Ruminations on the past, the things we are taught as children, and war with Iran

Note: The way this Substack works is that each public essay, like this one, has a follow-up for paid subscribers for spicier-than-prime-time screaming. The follow-up to the last essay on ICE malfeasance was delayed by a brutal bout with the flu, several blizzards, a strike, and a major depressive episode. Plus the fact that insane clown policy keeps happening and every WTF is out of date as soon as its posted.

The next essay will be a follow-up to both that piece and this one.

Please consider subscribing to support my work here and on the printed page.

I remember it so clearly.

One of those childhood memories that gets etched in glass, permanent lasered onto the inside of your skull, sometimes for good reason, sometimes just a moment that stands out among other moments, a redheaded memory in the long fog.

It was early winter and I was in fifth grade. I caught the school bus before 7 am, as everyone in our neighborhood did. Everything was wet and sunny and pale, slick and blindingly bright. Outside the bus smelled like pine trees, mucky leaves, and ozone. Inside smelled like cheap lip gloss, hairspray, permanent markers, and sour socks. I unshouldered my backpack and slid into the second cracked vinyl seat next to my only friend, a blonde girl with big glasses named Leigh. The door made that signature hydraulic-piston-creaking-hinge noise combination as the driver shoved the lever closed and the engine started complaining about the hills again.

I was quiet for a minute. Stared out through the hoarfrost of hearts and initials and misspelled swear words scratched into the bus window behind Leigh’s frizzy head. I was quiet because I didn’t know what to say. I felt like everyone must know. That’s why the boys in the back row were so rowdy, the older girls in the middle were whispering, that’s why the driver seemed so tired and sad. They must all be feeling what I was feeling. Angry and afraid and sad and confused. They must all not know what to say, either.

But I had to say something to someone or one of my organs was gonna just pop. One of little ones you could stand to lose, hopefully. Maybe not pop. Maybe ooze. Like one of those old crappy snake-bomb firecrackers that sludged out coil after coil of horrible black rope but never made any noise.

“Leigh,” I whispered. “We just invaded Panama.”

She turned to look at me with those huge pink-translucent rimmed glasses taking over her whole face. I even remember the sunlight glinting on the little gold cross she wore. Leigh’s parents were super religious and ran a Bible camp out of their backyard every summer. I was dying to go, not because I was so hot for God, really, but mainly because I wanted to spend the summer at Leigh’s house.

“What’s a panama?” Leigh said.

And that’s it, that’s the moment that crystallized so perfectly that I remember it in total detail thirty-five years later. What I remember isn’t that the US invaded Panama in December of 1989, though I do remember that.

What I remember is that none of the other kids knew or cared what the hell I was talking about.

I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I’d been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.

Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we’re ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.

And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.

Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.

Even if they give the operation a neat little nickname. (For Panama, it was “Operation Just Cause,” and let’s take a moment to give that one a big wow.) Even if the leader of that other country is a horrible person who does all kinds of illegal stuff and kills his own people kind of a lot and nobody likes him, not even, or maybe especially, his own people. Even if everybody plays a bunch of word games about how it’s not really preemptive or an actual invasion, just a sparkling strategic operation.

Invading other countries is wrong. Kidnapping or killing the leaders of other nations is wrong. How could my country do that? Was my home bad? Was I bad, too? Weren’t there rules about war? We had a whole color-coded system just to go to the bathroom at my school. Wasn’t there a system for this? Aren’t you not supposed to be able to just do war because you felt like it? Were all the grown-ups who taught me to be proud of my nation and work for its future lying or did they not know?

What’s a Panama?

I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who geneuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn’t have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.

I was just little girl on her way to school.

Like a lot of little girls in Iran. Only that day in 1989, I got to come home from school. That day in 2026, those other little girls didn’t.

And I’m sure they believed a lot of pretty, simplified, half-formed things that weren’t true, too. I’m sure they believed there were rules, like I did.

All these years later, another century, another winter, another war. And I still don’t know what to say. Now I know that in fact my country does do this, pretty frequently. It had done many times before I was ten and did many more times afterward.

They did, once, feel they needed to lie about it, to dress it up so it looks like something anyone would want. And I also know that it is a profoundly dark sign that they no longer bother with the effort.

I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don’t think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don’t know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can’t figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it’s still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.

And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won’t stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It’s all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.

And though I frequently forget, I do know that no matter how upset I am, no matter how axiomatic it seems to me that everyone around me must know what’s going on and be just as horrified by it, just as desperate to fix it, for the most part, everyone’s just stuck on the same shitty bus, barely chugging up over the hill, cracked seats and vandalized windows and a muffler from the depths of hell, not thinking about anything but their own worries and needs, all headed toward the same destination, not because they want to go there, but because that’s where the machine is heading and the doors are locked, for our safety, of course.

I’m one of the grown-ups now. And I didn’t tell my second grader about Iran. Just like Leigh’s parents didn’t tell her about Panama, if they knew. I’ve participated in the generational lies of this place. Because I still don’t know what to say. It’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong, even the people doing it. But they’re going to keep doing it, not because there is a goal to be achieved, but because they want to, and they like it, and, at a very distant third, they might think it will give them more power and allow them to keep what they have. But that part isn’t really that important. It isn’t the reason, any more than God was the reason I wanted to go to Bible camp that summer. The people driving the bus just want to feel the way they feel when they push a button in a comfortable room and other people they don’t know or like die. They want to feel that way forever.

How do you explain that? To children? To grown-ups? What’s a Panama?

Maybe I don’t even know anymore.

I hope for a better outcome than I expect. I hope there are answers on the other side of this. I hope to find a little optimism at the bottom of this very deep box.

But I’ve spent thirty-five years staring out that long-vanished bus window repeating a non-sensical question in my mind. Staring out at the same moment happening over and over again even though it’s not supposed to happen at all, at America catching fire, hissing and sputtering as endless coil after endless coil of hideous black smoking dead rope spools out onto the cement in silence while claiming to be something of value, something to enjoy, claiming to be a firework.