Remembering Ambassador Stevens

My favorite composition teacher in college exhorted us to 1) know whose story you are telling, and 2) to get out of the way of the story.

One of the many reasons I have not talked about Chris was exactly that: I don’t know if the story should be mine or his when you write a remembrance; it has to be both I suppose, and I find it difficult if not distasteful to insert myself into a news story.

Christopher of Arabia

Now that the benghazi! Benghazi! BENGHAZI!!1! news dump from last Friday has determined  no evidence of malfeasance on the part of the US Government (again), and Sen. Rand Paul’s (and others’) conspiracy theory that Ambassador Stevens and the CIA were selling weapons to Syria has been debunked (again), I feel that we need to remember the person and not the tragedy.

When writing and laughing about Wingnuttia’s benghazi! Benghazi! BENGHAZI!!1! freakout, I’ve sometimes mentioned that I knew the late ambassador Chris Stevens.

We went to high school together and travelled in the same circles. His probable best friend, Austin Tichenor, was one of my amigos (Hi Austin!) and so often Chris and I ended up at the same place at the same time. And in a small town’s public school that had less than 500 students total, the same place and time happened often. I guess it would be fair to say we were tertiary friends; we had some classes together (mostly music) and I remember that we played tennis in PE at least once.

You need to know this: Chris was a nice guy. I don’t remember him ever saying anything bad about anyone, even about me and my admittedly terrible tennis game.

Chris had that look that I will always associate with the late ’70s and early ’80s, he was a clean-scrubbed all-American boy who makes you think of Ivory soap. Today we would call him preppy, but this was in the days before that was a term. But mostly when I think about Chris, I see a scrawny, beanpole-type kid wearing a horizontally striped rugby shirt, his mop of blond hair hanging low on his forehead.

So much of my memory of Chris is of a pleasant fellow who was always sort of around; he was a background player in my world, not a featured player. So my memories of Chris tend to be vague, that is, until something definitive happened.

I recall for the Christmas concert, Mr. Harvey (the music teacher) had coached us that when singing Gloria in excelsis Deo (Latin for “Glory to God in the highest”), that excelsis was pronounced egg-shell-sees. Chris had some sort of solo (I think), and as he sang the dreaded word, his voice cracked, and he belted out a falsetto EGG-SHELL-SEES!

Chris’ face burned cherry red and with his blond hair he looked like a dessert topping come to life. He very gracefully took a bow and remained composed as hilarity ensued. That’s the kind of kid who becomes an important ambassador in a difficult region of the world.

I’m a sentimental man, more so as I age. My childhood and adolescence memories are probably not to be trusted, but I’ll be damned if I will let the right-wing media rip away my memory of a nice kid to make him some sort of boogieman useful for bringing down a sitting president, and to torpedo a potential candidate in 2016. I sincerely believe that Chris was not a political animal, and that he would not want his memory tied up with the Republicans’ Benghazi witch hunts and fishing expeditions to gain cheap political points.

Chris’s death was not an abstraction, as the right -wing media would have us think. He is not shorthand for an incompetent government. Chris was a real person with hopes and dreams and fears, and whose voice cracked, and we need to remember that. He was just like all of us.

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