If you are her mother, or lover, or friend, please forgive me. A death of someone you care about, especially if they are young, especially if it was violent, is painful, concrete, and much too eternal to misuse as a symbol, or to make a political point.
But I am not Nicole duFresne's mother, nor lover, nor friend, and in all likelihood, neither are you, so when I read the story of her death it clarified for me how our government managed to fail so spectacularly in Iraq.
At 3:15 AM a cold January night, Nicole, a 28 year-old aspiring actress left a bar on Allen Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan The Lower East Side, not that long ago a poor and dangerous neighborhood, had gentrified and is crowded with fashionable bars where 20 somethings can continue their collegiate experience in slightly more sophisticated surroundings.
Gentrification, however, does not immediately displace all the poor previous residents. Some make money from it, some are resentful, some both. That evening, a group of teenagers, armed with a .357 Magnum, decided to turn a profit from the influx of affluent partiers. Earlier in the evening, they had stolen a $900 coat. As Nicole, her fiancée Jeffrey Sparks, and two friends left Max Fish, the teenagers tried their luck again.
They approached the quartet, pointed the gun and demanded money. Have you ever had a gun pointed at your head? Your reaction might not be what you would expect: you are not scared, surprisingly, but the world does become very clear. Your primary goal is to do nothing to alarm the armed man before you. At those moments, you realize your money, even your dignity, are much cheaper than your life.
This does not seem to have been Jeffrey Sparks' response. Instead of calmly and slowly reaching into his pocket and handing over his cash, he pushed the armed teenager aside and kept walking. The teenager acted as one might expect. He struck Sparks on the left side of his face with the butt of the .357. As Sparks told the New York Times the next day, this minor act of violence impelled the other robber to apologize. He stepped forward and explained, "It doesn't have to be like this, we just need some money."
One could not ask for a clearer message. Sparks, who said at first he did not know the gang had a gun, now clearly understood they were armed and they were prepared to use their weapon. And what did he do? He said to Nicole "Come on let's go," and turned and walked away. Nicole, perhaps encouraged by her boyfriend's bravado, said the line no one should ever say. "What are you going to do, shoot us?" The 19 year old with a gun, confused and insulted by this turn of events, took her suggestion more seriously than she intended, and pulled the trigger, plowing a bullet into her chest. She fell back onto the pavement. She died in her reckless boyfriend's arms.
The teenager who shot Nicole, along with the rest of his gang, has been caught, convicted, and jailed, as he should be. The man who pulled the trigger, more than anyone else, is to blame for Nicole's unnecessary death. But I cannot help but wonder what was going on in Jeffrey Sparks' mind when he disregarded an obvious threat. I suspect that Nicole, on the own, would have handed over her cash and lived but for some reason Jeffrey Sparks thought he was invulnerable, that these pissant thieves could not hurt him. He was wrong.
The men that got us into this war, like Jeffrey Sparks, overestimated our power and underestimated the danger. Jeffrey Sparks, a privileged child of the upper middle class, hoping to sell a TV show to the Food Network, was indeed more powerful than these unemployed teenagers. In the long run, over the course of his life, he will earn more money, live better, probably even have more fun. On a profound level, he knew he was stronger than these brown teenagers. But power, as he and the neo conservatives forgot, is localized. You can have as platinum card in your pocket or an Abrams tank down the block but if you are alone in a room with a man with a sharp knife, his 5-inch blade will trump your nuclear bomb.
Hubris killed Nicole. Her sense of invulnerability doomed her, as did her lack of understanding of the world. The same can be said of the men that plotted this war. They thought it would be easy. They did not consider the possible reactions of the Iraqis to our imperial gestures. Unfortunately, the neocon policy intellectuals do not seem to be paying the price: we are, the reputation of the United States is, as are the unhappy people of Iraq.