WordPlay - Language, Culture, Media, and Meaning

"Talk" - A Poem by Yevgeni Yevtushenko

read the poem quoted below in Time or some such when I was 14. I think Yevtushenko was on the cover. The poem isn't very good even in Russian, and the translation is a disaster.

But the concept has stayed with me my whole life. God, what I wouldn't give for a little integrity, not even honesty, just the attempt at honesty, from any of the myriad public personalities, pundits, politicians, etc. But these days image is everything, as the long ago commercial put it, which may be a good mantra for a tennis player but is a lousy motto for a statesman.

At any rate, here is the poem, written in the first years of the Kruschev thaw:

Talk

You're a brave man, they tell me.
I'm not.
Courage has never been my quality.
Only I thought it disproportionate
so to degrade myself as others did.
No foundations trembled. My voice
no more than laughed at pompous falsity;
I did no more than write, never denounced,
I left out nothing I had thought about,
defended who deserved it, put a brand
on the untalented, the ersatz writers
(doing what anyhow had to be done).
And now they press to tell me that I'm brave.
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.

-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Groucho Olberman

The Big Store (1941) is not vintage Marx Brothers stuff. By that time, the lads had been in the MGM stable for six years. The once zany nihilists had become old routiniers. Nevertheless, it contains one classic verbal gag that I have had cause to quote again and again over the years.

Grouch is applying (never mind why) for the position of floorwalker at the Big Store – a sort of Macy's/Gimbels place – to the manager, the perpetually exasperated Douglas Dumbrille. The room is crowded with onlookers. The manager puts a test question to Groucho:

*

Manager: A woman has fainted on the fourth floor. What do you do?

Groucho (after brief pause): What color is. her hair?

Manager (in amazement): What color is her hair? What difference does that make?

Groucho (turning to the onlookers): There you go. A woman has fainted on the fourth floor, and he says [weary sigh] 'what difference does that make?'

*

You wouldn't think a rhetorical trick this transparent would work on any audience. You'd be wrong. It is worked constantly, on audiences of all types, in a variety of forms. The latest and greatest practitioner of this verbal sleight of hand is Keith Olberman of MSNBC. Last fall, Sarah Palin in the midst of her campaign, poked fun at the wastefulness of doing fruit fly research in Paris. France, that could presumably be done just as easily in the United States. The project had been noted as classic pork barrel stuff by a number of tax payer organizations. But that evening, there was Olberman, in his most pontitifical voice and face, so pontifical that it is almost meta-papal, backgrounded by a display of notable projects involving fruit flies, denouncing Palin as an anti-science Luddite. Even though there was no face to face encounter between Grou -er, Olberman – and Sarah Palin, I'll translate it into Marxese.

*

Olberman: So identify some of these pork-barrel boondoggles you're against.

Palin: Well, going to Paris to do ordinary research for one.

Olberman: Name the research.

Palin (amazed): Experimentation with fruit flies, I believe.

Olberman (turning to the MSNBC audience): There you go. I ask her to name wasteful projects and she says [weary sigh] 'experimentation with fruit flies'.

*

It's the same device as Groucho's, but not nearly as funny. Maybe that's because Groucho's is a joke, and Olberman's is a con.

If this was merely a sidenote to the recently concluded campaign, it could be relegated to history with no further ado. But Olberman is still very much with us, and now beating the drums nightly about the treatment of detainees back in 2002-2003. I don't watch these shows, any of them, of any political stripe. The spectacle of the preacher preaching to the converted doesn't do much for me, no matter who the preacher, who the congregation, or what the scripture. But my friends who do watch Olberman are having a tough time extracting hard facts from the discussion. The rather limited CIA interrogations seem to be associated with the much larger number of field interrogations done in Iraq and Afghanistan which is in turn conflated with the prisoner abuse in Abu Gharib, which weren't interrogations at all. The more you watch Olberman, the less you understand and the more indignant you become, which I suspect is not a coincidence.

(I should say something about the substantive issue before ending this. Back in 2001-2003, I was more than a little scandalized by the open discussion and public acceptance of harsh interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists. I was particularly infuriated by Alan Dershowitz's suggestion of a torture warrant, which was appalling. There is no question that we as a society have got to decide how to deal with these issues in future. The shock of 9/11 sent us reeling into areas in which we would rather not be. John McCain's opinion on the subject seems to me the correct one, and decisive.

However, there is also no question in my mind that these practices were fully aired, subject to much public discussion, disclosed to Congress, etc. It is rather despicable hypocrisy in my view to hide under your desk for six years, tacitly endorse the tactics of the day, then emerge with your finger pointed when you feel safe. If Olberman can produce any statement in condemnation or denunciation of the CIA in the 2002-4 time frame, I stand corrected. But as I recall he was making funny noises on Fox Sports Cat the time.)

So there you have the exposure of the Groucho-tactics used rather openly by Keith Olberman. The difference is that Groucho Marx made himself a legend playing comic and inartful con men. Olberman is the real thing, and quite artful. Groucho's act was very funny. Olberman's isn't funny at all.

Superficially Wise (But Actually Foolish) Sayings of Smart People (A Contest)

    A long time ambition of mine, which is being fulfilled in this writing, has been to conduct a competition to identify sayings, aphorisms if you will, that are often quoted, APPARENTLY expressions of great wisdom, that - when they are in depth and critically, reveal themselves to be utter nonsense or worse. The object is to take a hard look at REAL conventional wisdom - principles that most of us actually believe reflect wisdom, as opposed to attitudes and expressions to which we give lip service for the sake of getting along.

    Some tough rules apply here - because this is not an exercise in ridicule. The point is to identify the sayings at which we all nod sagely that don't hold up on second thought. So the rules have to be hard.

    1. No quotes from identified idiots or villains, e.g., bring your tired old game from Adolph Hitler or Mikail Bakunin into the key, and it'll be slapped back in your face. Rejection city, baby. Quotes from respected sources only - the more respectable, the better.

    2. No predictions. For one thing, predictions that have been proven disastrously wrong have no value as hard intellectual currency these days. We all know ther's no such thing as an unsinkable ship. For another, even the best and brightest go wrong in fortune telling. It's too easy.

    3. No obviously stupid sayings Hiqh quality counterfeit wisdom is the name of the game, stuff that can pass as coin of the realm unless it is bitten really, REALLY, hard.

    The contest is open to anyone with a candidate. (Sorry, there are no prizes.) But obviously I have some candidates of my own. I'll lead off with one of them to get the ball rolling in the right (I hope) direction. My first choice -

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana

    Something of a surprise? I'd be surprised if it were not. This aphorism (or innumerable variants thereof) of Santayana's is endlessly re-quoted, always with approval. It seems to state a principle of elemental, axiomatic wisdom. But in my (actually rather humble, in this instance) opinion there is some really dubious stuff here, relative to the notion of history as science and history itself.

    As to the first, the premise that history repeats itself in any meaningful sense is extremely suspect. The more I learn about some historical event, the more I am struck by the accidental aspects of it, particularly the importance of personality. Discuss the macro-economic factors behind the American Revolution till the cows come home - the importance of the personalities of the Founding Fathers, particularly Washington, are critical to the shape of the contours of the event. As time moves on, the contours become everything.

    How can the larger signficance of the Civil War be separated from the personalities of Lincoln, Grant, and Robert E. Lee? What happens if a man wi the courage and wisdom of Joshua Chamberlain is not at the end of the line at Liltle Round Top at Gettysburg? In the same way, the Russian Revolution cannot possibly take the form it does absent the personality of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin?

    If events of this magnitude devolve endlessly into details, and ever more profound detail, in what meaningful sense can patterns be deduced from them? I know that the thought causes Hegelian and Marxist scholars to weep buckets, but I don't believe there is any pattern at all to historical movements. The study of history is of supreme value, but as the best and most useful study of human nature, nothing more.

    Which leads to the second point. Even if the past did have lessons for the present, how could they possibly be applied? Let me wax lyrical and borrow a metaphor from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine - the characters in their Pulitzer Prize winning show 'Sundays in the Park with George'. I do believe that our perception of contemporary events can be deemed 'pointillist'. We are ourselves figures on the canvas, both participating in and observing the events of our time. We perceive huge arrays of data points, but too sprawling and unwieldy to be interpreted with any precision (unless we want to bring in our value judgments and decide that some are more important than others.) No one can distinguish for certain between a fad, a trend, or an irrelevant incident. It is a certain distance develops between the canvas and the observer, that these points form themselves into shapes, patterns, colors - and even then, undercut by the effect of random detail, as noted above.

    So even if solid lessons could be developed from history, deciding how and to what they apply is impossible - a matter of sheer hit and miss intuition. So what wisdom is there, really, in Santayana's aphorism? Not much.

    So this famous quote turns out to be a non-starter. As far as the science of history, there is no area of human study in which God - and the Devil - dwell more completely in the details - so completely that it makes any pretense of 'science' an illusion. (I'd apologize to all those Marxists and Hegelians, but they deserve all the misery they get.)

    In the sense in which Santayana uses the term 'history'. not only does history not repeat itself. It doesn't even happen the first time.

[This post first appeared on The American Thinker, in slightly different form, on February 28th.]

Beyond Religion: Spirituality in the New Millennium

    Someone who posts (as I did) an appreciation of a movie like 'Henry Poole', grounded in a fairly conventional Catholic background, runs the risk of being mistaken as conventionally religious or even a religious fundamentalist. But I'm not at all. What I do have is an appreciation for faith in all its infinite variety. It seems to me that faith in this day and age has become infinitely more difficult, an infinitely more courageous undertaking, than skepticism.

    All religious experience develops from central phenomenon - the collision of beings finite in time and space, blobs of mud whose fleeting consciousness is numbered from the moment it comes to exist, with infinity. Kant expressed the concept in language of marvelous economical clarity. He said there were two things that made him marvel - the starry skies above [i.e., external infinity, space without limit, time without limit, a number line that never ends) and the moral law within [i.e., internal infinity, the sense of imperishable self, independent of particular identity.] I wrote my own version of this, not nearly as elegant, and will now be so ingratious and egotistical as to quote myself (from the novel Thursday's Child, written under the name Josephine Wurtenbaugh)     

        “Just what are these fundamental mysteries?” she said.
    He shrugged, and spoke now without any hesitation: “What you'd think. What
human beings are, why they are. Why intelligence is. Time – always changing, but
always now. Self distinct from identity – somehow you know you'd still be you, even
if you were someone else. You know some things are right, and some are wrong; it
doesn't matter whether they're useful to you or not, and you know that, but you don't
know why. Dreams about the measureless when everything you experience is
measurable – infinity arising out of finitude. Quantity and quality, wholes and sums,
that they correlate randomly, we talked about that. That such things can be, black
holes in rationality itself, mirrors of the ones in the sky.”

    This sense, of an infinitely at once immediately present and beyond reach, permeates the whole of human experience. It is the raw material of all spiritual experience. Conventional religions attempt to map that sense raw sense onto a set of symbols that can be shared by a community or culture. If they are effective - that is, appeal at both conscious and subliminal level to that sense of the infinite - they become universal. This in essence describes the origin of all the major religions. To state the obvious, a set of symbols that potent are obviously subject to being misused for political purposes, hijacked politically, misused by priests, emperors, commissars - power seekers of all description. Occasionally, someone writes a book braying about this transparent reality, and ignoring (often deliberately) the reason why they became powerful in the first place.

    It is my own view that we live in a pre-religious age. I think all the conventional religions of pre-history began dying150 years ago. Arnold writes of 'an outworn creed', Nietzsche more dramatically proclaims that God is dead. But God is not dead. The sense of infinity that bedevils (sic) all human activity is as alive as it ever was. All that has happened is that the iconography (sorry) with which we used to describe it is no longer effective. A new set of symbols awaits birth. The Great Beast slouches towards Bethlehem again. Such is my belief, anyway.

    Attached for download is a short story I wrote, a variety of what might be called 'preternatural fiction' - science that does not exist just yet. I call it 'The Old Soul' for reasons that will be immediately  apparent to anyone familiar with contemporary speculation about reincarnation. It is an interesting (at least to me) speculation about a natural explanation for the phenomenon of deja vu and visions of other lives. Click on the marked link in this paragraph to download.

    The blog for Thursday's Child is also linked in the right column, if you liked the snippet I quoted.

   

Obama and JFK: or, Running on the Bloody Flag

    (1) I turned 14 the summer JFK was nominated for President. I remember the excitement well. Whatever the shortcomings his biographers have enlarged upon since, he had a flair and a genuine charm.  The  nomination was still slightly contested as I recall, and my devout Catholic family watched in genuine suspense until he was confirmed as nominee. Even the choice of vice-president was discussed and dramatic. It was a much more innocent time.

    JFK was the junior Senator from Massachusetts. He was the first minority President, it is useful to recall. There was a huge buzz in the Catholic population as a result, and he got a disproportionate amount of Catholic votes. Critics assailed him as all style and no substance, a pretty boy riding a wave of celebrity and glitz to the White House. His political connections were dubious, being related to the Boston political machine of Curley and 'Honey' Fitgerald, from whence he derived his middle name.

    Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

    (2) I call myself a Populist, and I mean it. That to me means not merely accepting as a general rule the the superiority of broad public judgments over narrow elites, but also the basic good will and good faith of individual persons. I am waiting for someone in public life to draw attention to the fact that there has been no major shift in public policy or policy direction in the last four years. The Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress, the Presidential rating slips to an all time low, the main stream media finds a new scandal weekly - and nothing of substance changes.

    I have a friend who is a True Believer. He is frustrated beyond all endurance. The candidates he supported won, running on the platform in which he believes. He gets dunning letters from the Party, which are articulate with the resentment he shares, and he sends them money. Nothing happens. . He expected the US to be withdrawn from Iraq about 60 days after the last Congress to be seated, the Patriot Act to be repealed, communications companies to be sued, etc., etc. He is convinced a combination of slimy cowardliness and sinister Republican machinations - perhaps even on of those Taylor Caldwell master conspiracies - has combined to prevent the necessary changes

    "Has it occurred to you," I asked him, "that maybe the problem is that what you believe is nonsense? That when the men and women you vote for get to Congress and actually sink their hands into the nitty-gritty of what's going on in the world, that they come around to enacting (and reenacting) these laws?  And these appeals to your sense of outrage because they know damn well it is misplaced, but they want your votes and money?"

    This thought shocked him, and he rejected it immediately. He prefers conspiracy theories. We remain friends, though.

    (3) For forty years after the Civil War, Republican politicians ran on what came to be known as 'the bloody flag', the Republican investiture in the Civil War. Real issues were secondary. The thought has occurred to me that Democratic politicians having been doing that, at least in the last three elections - running on a platform of 60's rhetoric that is as long outdated as the Civil War was a century ago, but that their constituency, mired in arrogance and self-righteousness, continues to gobble up like trained seals. Baby Boomers (of which I am on the leading edge) are not famous for rigorous self-criticism.

    (4) Obama's style, like JFK's, and later Ronald Reagan, does not preclude considerable shrewdness and practicality. To me, the last eight years have put a footprint on the times that is so huge and heavy that the policy choices of the next Presidency are going to be foreordained. There are (1) the continued challenge of Islamic fundamentalism, that Bush met with great determination, (2) the need for energy independence (the present administration has done something but not enough), and (3) maintaining economic stability with the pressure the Baby Boom demographics are going to put on social services (nothing). 

     I trust Obama to deal with all these issues sensibly. Not to mince words, I think he is running on that 60's version of the bloody flag. I believe he will adopt sensible and prudent policies - as noted, the tenor of the times is going to limit alternatives, far more than the Clinton Administration in the 90's. What I am also hoping is that Obama's style can make the solutions palatable and even popular to his following. The United States and the world have real problems - it is no solution to them to conclude that It Is All Bush's Fault, which is pretty much the level of thought (or reflex reaction) to which the Left has sunk to.

     It would be wonderful to have a President who is truly popular both in this country and abroad.

Cultural Transformation

    One of the posters I respect most on the small discussion board I normally frequent, made the interesting point that, while victory is possible in a military conflict, cultural transformation is not. With all due respect, the point does not reflect recent history. For the discussion as to whether a culture can be transformed was a matter of huge world-wide deabte not so long ago.

    You might remember both cultures. One of them wore spiky helmets, goose stepped through Europe, and started two World Wars within three decades. The other invented ritual disembowelment as a form of suicide, preferred the most hideous death to the most honorable surrender, and for the first four decades of the last cerntury attributed divinity to a mortal man. If anyone had suggested in 1935 that either of these relentlessly authoritarian, militaristic cultures would be transformed into functional democracces within two decades, the Paul Krugmans of the day (Walter Lippman) would have laughed them to scorn.  Yet between 1945 and 1955, that is exactly what happened. It happened despite the existence of the Cold War, and the relentless slander of Soviet propaganda that sounded as loudly as an off-key brass band in those years.

      In my opinion, there were two reasons for this. Military victory was not one of them - plenty of nations have triumphed militarily and adminstered the vanquished people in such a way that it reinforced all of their cultural idosyncracies. Although it is not the Fourth of July, I am going to rhapsodize a bit. I think the first reason is that all of that Declaration of Independence stuff this nation was found upon actually does apply in real life. The vast majority of flesh and blood human beings could care less about the Holy See of Rome, the Caliphate, the worker's paradise, or the Master Race. What matters to them is whether they can live their lives in decent security and advance their own interests in a basic manner - pursue happiness, in a phrase. They gravitate naturally towards instituitions that make that possible. The US occupation in Germany and Japan made the creation of that institutions - i.e., in Joyce's phrase, waking up from the nightmare of history - possible.

    The second reason is that the American military is fully accultured. That is, American soldiers do not behave imperially, because this is not in fact an imperial society. It has no racial center. It has no territorial imperatives. It is resented by every power elite in the world because the social infrastructure is not based (in theory) on elites. That resentment is rationalized in endless sophistry, but the resentment is always has that base.

     It was not until 1949 that some French historian noted that both the major Hegelian movements (Communism and Naziism) were at base the same authoritarian, anti-populist movement, and both deserved the label 'fascist'. Another fact once common knowledge  that has been forgotten is how dangerous in practice these movements actually are. The core Nazi and Bolshevik cadres were small, and numerically overwhelmed. But they were ruthless and unsocialized (wives and children, at least as major influences and motives, are conspicuous in their absence) and prevailed. The weight of numbers does not equate to political force when force of arms is involved.

    The 'cultural transformation' of Iraq is to my way of thinking no less achievable then Germany and Japan. All it means is the creation of institutions that actually reflect popular will. The notion that the Iraqi people are condemned to endless civil war and sectarian battle is at base a crude racial slander.. The elements obstructing the formation of such institution are fascists - not revolutionaries, or freedom fighters, but the same sort of violent elitists as the ones Europeans became familiar with at such wearisome length in the last century.

A 9-11 Story, with a Nod at Columbine

    There must be a zillion 9-11 stories. Here's mine, not so much an account of the event as an explanation why the event is meaningful to me.

    My younger daughter is neurologically disabled. She is not at all mentally retarded. In fact, she is almost unnaturally alert and involved in her environment. But due to what appears to have been a prenatal injury (not her mother's fault), the processing is off in her brain. The result is an array of autistic-like behaviors that collectively disable her. Her speech is literally childish, her gait is the off-balance duck walk of a one time toe walker, and she has the obsessiveness and eye for irrelevant detail of the true autistic. All this results in profound disability. After a few years of frustration, she ended up in the class of the 'educably retarded', in which environment she is quite comfortable.

    But she is not dumb, quite bright, in fact. (Beneath her mangled syntax and garbled pronunciation, her active vocabulary is actually age normal, maybe above.) The upshot of all this is the paradox, that while  she is comfortable with the special ed routine, she is also very easily bored by it. Back in 1998, when she was 10, the boredom began to show itself in some acting out behavior that was not a good omen for the future. Her mother (from whom I am divorced) and I thought it would be a good idea to have her spend a month each year in an environment as different and as far from home as possible. There are all sorts of special camps for special kids. We wanted one at a fair distance from anything familiar. We are Californian. I found one in the Catskills, upstate New York, with a month long term, beginning in late July, ending in late August. It was expensive, but not pricey. The references were excellent. In February of 1998, we enrolled her in the camp. She went that following July.

    It became summer routine. Between 1998 and 2004 (when she became too old), her mother would take her to the camp. A month later, towards the end of August, I'd come to New York, enjoy Manhattan for a few days, then drive upstate and pick my daughter up. Then it would be back to Manhattan for another day or two of sight-seeing, then home to  the San Francisco Bay Area. A routine developed.  After we returned from camp, we'd check into a Times Square hotel, visit Virgin Records, roam Times Square, and see an appropriate musical. Then next day, some morning event, lunch at the Top of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center, and something in the afternoon.  Monday  or Tuesday, the flight home, always the 8:00 a.m flight out of Newark to San Francisco. Newark is a much better access point to lower Manhattan than either of the NYC airports.

    2001 was no different. We showed up at the Top of the World on day two after the camp pick up. I was touched that the waiter remembered us. It wasn't that we were expected, but my daughter is a very memorable personality and this was the fourth year in a row we had appeared in late August. The human memory is capable of phenomenal feats of detail. The lunch was lovely, and my wonderful little girl enjoyed the awesome vista, as she always does. The next day we flew out of Newark back home to the Bay Area.

    I could dress this up and say that this was one day, or two, before 9/11. But it wasn't. It was two weeks to the day before that event. Two weeks later, our flight would be the one hijacked and crashed into to the Pentagon. I don't know what happened to our waiter with the good memory that day. My hope is that he had not yet arrived for work.

     Not the closest brush with fate, but close enough. The mental image I have, of me sitting with my perpetual little girl, doing my best to comfort her, answering her machine gun questions -  she talks a mile a minute when she is excited or nervous, and she sure as hell would have been scared out of her wits - while four maniacs who know nothing of her vitality, her innocence, her intensity, the lives she has touched, her immense value, prepare to murder her for no good reason whatsoever, except their own lust for self-glorification - makes me dizzy with fury and relief, seven years later, as I write this. This (obviously) is history that never happened. Yet the event touched close enough to make the scenario as vivid as the reality itself. Perhaps you have to know my daughter.

    'For no good reason' - that to me is the point. I have been in criminal law for 35 years, a prosecutor for the last 18. Without doubt, my world view has been shaped by my career. For better or worse, I see the world through that lens. In practice, that means a tendency to analyze actions and behavior in terms of stark, immediate motivation. Forget all your meaning of-life beliefs, what does what you did gain you?  More money? Impress the girl? Self gratification of some other type? Spare me the subtleties, the next ten years, and the life to come, what do you get NOW??

    This perspective is likely the point of departure between me and the Demented Left. I don't necessarily believe the reasons stated for a criminal act are the actual motivators for that act.  In my opinion, that is very infrequently the reality. In the case of the 9/11 conspirators, spare me your discussions of the Palestine problem, the 11 Century Caliphate, or obscure suras in the Quran. These are rationalizations, and transparent ones at that. What is really going on is the same narcissistic interest in self-glorification through spectacular acts of public violence and destruction that motivates high-school shooters - the Columbine pair, for example.

    Both crimes involve unsocialized, unfeminized males, who become morbidly fascinated with grandiose  acts of destruction. They do not have some reason to shoot their classmates, and then shoot them on that basis. They decide to shoot their classmates and then find a rationale. They do not fly planes into buildings because they are religious martyrs. They become fascinated with the idea of flying planes into buildings and only latterly become religious martyrs. They are first and last criminals, and by definition unprincipled - despicable, cowardly narcissists.

    There are some implications from this for how these appalling acts are to be approached analytically. There is at present, and will be for some time, an ongoing debate as to whether Islam is a violent or peaceable religion. I am no Islamic scholar, and not about to become one.  But the correct answer seems to me that it is both - as are Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, and the other major faiths. Just as Christianity has enough substance to provide fodder for the mystic St. Theresa of Avila and the ultra-rational Aquinas, for Quaker brethren and Jesuit warrior priests, so does Islam provide enough universality to house both soldier and peacemaker. The religion would not be a major faith if it did not have this degree of universality, a place for every type of personality.  The question, then, is not what the religion offers (everything), but what the actor chooses to find in it. Am Anfang war die Tat, in the beginning was the Deed, Goethe wrote famously in Faust, and so it is with crimes of this type.

    It is the misfortune of the whole Earth at present that the Middle East produces these criminal males in enormous numbers - young men with no viable future in their society, no hope of achieving social status, no possibility of intimacy with young women, for whom the notion of spectacular, violent destruction (with simultaneous suicide) becomes an enthralling possibility of self-realization. I was not sure whether or not the Iraq War was a wise tactic or not - I am still unsure.

    But I am quite sure that the worst move of all would have been to leave those stagnant, morbid societies in the same state they were in at that time, spewing out masses of angry, alienated young males. Change of any kind had to be an improvement over the status quo, and I am glad that it is underway. The crime against my daughter never happened, as vivid as the scenario is to me. But there were others on those planes, comforting frightened children, hoping against hope, at the mercy of monsters. They stood in our place. I am not about to forget them.

Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, or Vietnam Revisited

    Back in 1963, when I was a junior in high school, summer jobs were not so easy to come by - the negative aspect of Baby Boomer demographics. Finally, a friend managed to line me up with a job busing tables at a local Catholic retreat house. I served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, washed dishes, and did my best to keep a low profile. It wasn't much, but the start of my career of gainful employment.

     A strict rule of silence was enforced then on Catholic retreats. The participants, entirely male, did not speak to each other, and particularly at meal time. Instead, they listened to a tapes on a variety of thematic topics. These were not all religious talks, which might surprise some. There was a considerable amount of diversity. There were not all that many, and so I heard the same speech over and over again that summer. One of the most striking, so striking that it has stayed with me these 45 years, was a speech that Dr. Thomas Dooley had given to a group of nuns, reporting on his experiences in Southeast Asia between 1954 and 1960.

    The Kingston Trio had made the name famous back in 1958, with a superb arrangement of an old Civil War song. But the flesh-and-blood Tom Dooley was well known before that. He was the author of three solid books about conditions there, the most well-known being 'Deliver Us From Evil', published in 1956. He'd been dead prematurely dead two years (of cancer) when I did that repetitive listening. So what I was hearing dated back to 1961 at the latest, probably earlier, long before there was any political baggage attached to discussions of Southeast Asia.

     If you did have to listen to a talk over and over, that was a good one to hear - light and entertaining (though the subject was very serious), and leavened with a lot of humor. The subject was the same as the books, Dooley's first-hand impressions of the refugee camps in Haiphong and the repulsive cruelty of the the Stalinist regime from which they fled. I still remember him describing the exact meaning of the title 'Deliver Us from Evil' , which only indirectly referenced the Scriptural passage. The direct reference had to to do with an incident which Dooley had personally witnessed and in which he even participated.

    Three young Vietnamese children had been brought to the border by the police of the North Vietnam. Their vocal cords had been cut (or tongues cut out, I forget which) as punishment for treasonable speech. When Dooley asked the guard how children so young could possibly have committed treason, the guard asked him, Dooley, to recite the Lord's Prayer. When Dooley reached the phrase, 'And deliver us from evil', the guard stopped him.

    "That is the treason", he declared, "for there is no evil in the People's Republic of Vietnam."      

    The Vietnam debacle was the second greatest trauma in the history of the United States. (First is the Civil War, without any serious contender, and we may all hope to God that it remains unrivaled on the list.) It was fought on the wrong terms, by the wrong nation, with the wrong Army, with the the wrong tactics, and explained in the wrong way. It ended, when it finally ended, with a total collapse of interest and will. The precipitate and hasty abandonment was followed by the most monstrous atrocities perpetrated in my lifetime. Domestically, It engendered a cynicism about American power, American objectives, and American values that persists to this day - in fact, that seems to be permanently embedded in Western culture. It was an improvident, unwise, absolutely absurd exercise in mismanagement. It was in every respect but one a complete disaster.       

     The one respect in which it was not a disaster, or should not have been, was the moral perspective. The Vietnam War was colossally unwise. It was never immoral. Anyone who heard Tom Dooley once, let alone all summer long, knew – or should have known - that reality. At base, after all the heat, after all the millions of words, after all the sound and fury, what the war was about was a frightened, even terrified, people resisting the imposition of a relentlessly tyrannical and inhumane regime. The moral judgment should always have been weighed in their favor, and their allies by association. 

      But as the 60's lengthened, and Vietnam became more controversial with each passing year, that base insight was lost. There is no question that the tactics and posturing of the Johnson Administration had much to do with this. The War should never have been fought primarily by the American military. The rationale should never have been expressed in the Cold War grandiosity language of the Kennedy inaugural address. Vietnam was a sideshow to the major East-West conflict, if it was a part of it at all. The issues were local, Vietnamese resistance to Vietnamese oppression. But as South Vietnam came to be perceived as an American client state, awareness of the elementary justice of the basic cause - small, but anything but trivial - became obscured by the superheated rhetoric.

    It was the wrong army. It was also the wrong type of army. If it was to be fought by the US, it should have been fought by a professional military, and not sullen and discontented draftees. (Popular armies perform wonderfully well in wars of national survival, or great causes, as Victor Hanson Davis has convincingly pointed out. But the Vietnam War was neither.) The military tactics were the wrong tactics. The war was sold to the public on the wrong basis, duplicitous if not outright fallacious. But none of this accounts for the complete reversal in the moral polarity that occurred in the late 60's and early 70's, in which the Stalinist thug Ho Chi Minh was somehow transformed into the a native Populist, the actually elected South Vietnamese government perceived as a repressive state, and the assistance of the United States as some sort of imperial venture. It does not account for the vehemence, the shrill, shrieking hysteria that became the dominant tone of war opposition. The reasons for that lie elsewhere.

    They have to do with the determination of the New Left and its fellow traveler draft resisters to characterize the opposition as a moral issue, a crusade, a matter of good versus evil. It was not sufficient simply to question the practicality, the wisdom, the sensibility of the military approach to Vietnam. To wax philosophical for a moment, arguments of that type address the means only and leave the end intact. Accepting the justice of the end (resisting the tyranny of North Vietnam) would not do for the war opponents, and particularly not for draft opponents. Success on that limited basis would not lead to an end to the war, but only an alteration in the manner in which it was conducted. Above all, it would not lead to an end to the draft.
   
    Full disclosure must be made here. I did not serve in Vietnam or in fact in the military at any time. When I began college in 1964, I enrolled in ROTC, fully expecting to complete the course and do my service as a ROTC officer. I was not particularly looking forward to it. I am not militaristic. I did think it would be a valuable maturing experience. But fate intervened in 1965, in the form of the first episode of mild rheumatoid arthritis with which I have coped without too much difficulty my entire adult life. Almost the first words out of the mouth of the internist who diagnosed it was, 'at least you won't be going into the Army'.

    So when I opposed the War in those years - and I most certainly did - it was not because I had anything personal at stake. I believed the war was foolish because it was wasteful. I did not buy completely into the New Left dogma, with its endless misquotation of Eisenhower about Ho Chi Minh's likely success in a referendum in 1956. But it was also the case that my memory of Tom Dooley and all he had seen and reported was a long time in the past. 

    But even for a fervent war opponent, the extent to which the war opposition had at base the self-serving interests of the Boomer generation was unsettling. Everyone mouthed the sentiments - moral language is as easy to mimic as any other - but the bottom line for a huge percentage of resisters, maybe the majority, was a resentment of being inconvenienced by two years military service, with kp, field drill, and master sergeants with their own view of the world. Simply insisting the war was badly conducted would not do - it didn't avoid that inconvenient two years. So the war became an impassioned moral cause, a crusade. 'Hell, No, I Won't Go' became a slogan that was chanted with blazing eyes and and an even more blazing self-righteous indignation. The United States Army was recast as an invading army, and the defense of South Vietnam as an imperialist venture, a Western power imposing its will on a Third World people, as so often in the past. America thus became Amerika in those years of mass insanity.

 Insisting that the issue was a moral one, rather than simply a matter of political alternatives, neatly linked draft resistance to war opposition. Obviously, if the war was evil and immoral, to participate in any form was to become complicit in the immorality. That inconvenient two year obligation thus disappeared. Consistency with that transparent rationalization is also the reason why Vietnam soldiers were treated so disgracefully shabbily in those years. To the extent that one acknowledged that the troops in Vietnam were not acting immorally, one had to acknowledge that maybe the righteousness of war opposition was in some doubt. Maybe - perish the thought - some of the protest was motivated by selfishness and moral cowardice. That was not a notion that could even be entertained as a thought at that time, let alone spoken aloud. So the troops were vilified and the motives of the protesters never questioned.

    This transformation of the dialog from a limited political issue to a great, sweeping moral condemnation that was absurdly blithe to the actual facts of Vietnam has had huge repercussions. It was catastrophic for the people of Southeast Asia. Persuaded by all the inflamed rhetoric that the United States was interfering with the popular will of a distant people, Congress not only withdrew troops, but cut off aid to South Vietnam, at a time in 1974 when many military historians believe that nation might have been able to withstand the assault with reasonable support. The successors to Ho Chi Minh, as Stalinist as he was, overran Saigon in 1975 and imposed the same brutality as they had in Hanoi two decades earlier. Deliver us from evil. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took advantage of the power vacuum the West had left behind to perpetrate the most appalling genocide since World War II, maybe in history, in the killing fields. (In 2005, filmmakers trying to make a documentary about the massacre found too few survivors to contribute. 

   In the United States, the war protest gave birth to the Great Sacred Cow of the demented Left - that it had taken to the streets and, by heroic measures, brought an unjust and immoral war to its knees. For many Boomers, participation in the anti-war movement is the most significant moral action of their lives. For many, these are life episodes too precious to rethink critically – and they don't. But the protests didn't stop the war. What it brought to a halt was the draft, which ended in 1971, as did the protests – for it is hard to deny that had been the real point all along. The war went on until 1975. And the events that followed? The repugnant atrocities of Pol Pot and the concrete demonstration that North Vietnam had intended all along a ferociously tyrannical Communist regime? In one of the great acts of collective rationalization in recorded history, the Baby Boomers - my generation - shrug their shoulders. Not our problem. 

     But the fact was that Tom Dooley had been telling the plain, unvarnished truth. The Vietnamese people - the real flesh-and-blood kind, that live and die, suffer and hope - not the mythic 'People' of immemorial Leftist cant - began running from Ho Chi Minh in 1955. They kept running for the next two decades, as far south as the land would take them, then into boats and the open sea when the land ran out. The war was a dumb war, unwisely formulated, stupidly communicated, even more stupidly fought. But it was a just cause and a moral undertaking. It was the protest, with its utter contempt for the actual human reality, that was immoral.

    Tom Dooley had it right. I heard him clearly enough back in 1963. But by 1968, I'd stopped listening. So had everybody else.

                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

(This article first appeared on the website American Thinker on February 15th, 2008 under the title 'Boomers and the Vietnam Shrug', at the site linked here.

The History of Two Hard Centuries in One Hundred Easy Words

   A brief history of Western civilization (or anti-civilization) in the last two hundred years.

    The major nations of Europe were never able to assimilate the ideas of liberal British philosophy as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the United States of America. During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries,  cultural arrogance and xenophobia impelled them to inflict appalling, unforgivable horrors on other peoples in the form of colonialism. Before they could actually be made to pay for these crimes, they spent the Twentieth Century battering themselves to pieces in a series of utterly absurd tribal wars. They also created the monstrously cynical Soviet Union, which furthered  its own imperial ambitions by perversely corrupting one liberation movement after another in the ostensible name of the 'People'. Old Europe then handed the whole Godforsaken mess it had created to the aforesaid United States of America. The great irony of our times was thus created. The original anti-colonial nation has to bear the totally slanderous label of colonialist.

    That's actually about one hundred fifty words, but give me a cookie. The point is this. Over the course of the last century, what the  relentless barrage of Soviet propaganda did was create an ambiance, a sense, that the effects of American power are somehow intrinsically negative. The pronouncements were relentless, ruthless, and utterly cynical. It was the Soviet Union (so it said) that upheld the banner of human freedom. The United States backed the forces of reaction for its own despicable national interest.

    Now that happens not to be true. It is in fact an outrageous lie. It should by rights have ended in 1991 and the years immediately thereafter, when the curtain was ripped off and the full extent of the corruption and brutality of the Soviet Union was relentlessly exposed for what it was. All of the Communist mythology was completely debunked. Alger Hiss was indeed a perjurer. The Rosenbergs were in fact spies. All those various liberation movements that postured as popular uprisings were Soviet dominated, and actually fascist.  But the most important insight, the global discovery, was the complete absence of good faith in all of this posturing. Respect for truth behind the Iron Curtain was non-existent.

    Now, what should have happened after these revelations, as a matter of simple intellectual honesty, was a complete rethinking of the entire history of the Cold War - for it is impossible to underestimate how completely pervasive, how universal, the effects of Soviet propaganda actually were during those years. Quite apart from the avowed Marxists and sympathizers, most persons of good will assumed that there was something to Soviet claims, even if exaggerated -  that there was at least a kernel of accuracy - that there were rights and wrongs on both sides. (I myself fall into that category.) But that was not the case. Absolutely nothing - literally nothing - that the Soviets and their sponsored states could be accepted as valid.  Complete bad faith - to use blunter language, whole cloth fabrications, in which nothing is true - is a surprisingly difficult phenomenon for most people to assimilate.

    So  a complete reexamination of recent history was required. But did it happen? No. Rather than thoughtful confessions of error and studies revisions of opinion, what the Demented Left did was subside into a sullen silence. Yeah, the revelations following the Cold War had  - reluctantly - to be accepted. But that did not mean that  - somehow - you know - the influence of the United States  - you know - was negative. Don't ask us how, but somehow. Above all, the baseline, the mother ship, the Great Sacred Cow of the Baby Boom Left - the opposition to Vietnam - remained unaffected. Since it had survived the revelations in the Killing Fields and the Stalinist thuggery of the Vietnamese Republic, that was hardly surprising. But it was disappointing.

    This attitude that the effects of United States power are somehow negative is just that - an attitude, an unattached value judgment, seldom or never reduced to concrete terms. There is a good reason for this. It isn't true. I don't mean to imply that US influence is some sort of panacea, a cure for all that ails ya in a particular society. That's nonsense. The racism, sexism, class-ism, culturism - above all, the xenophobia which is the the universal human disease - which run through the whole sordid history of humankind was hardly going to vanish with Thomas Jefferson's wonderful pronouncements. I also don't mean that force majeure does not produce intimate human tragedy. Military force never gets the real Bad Guys cleanly and elegantly - they're always hiding in a bunker somewhere, with champagne and concubines. The damage is always collateral. Bad Guys hold whole nations hostage.

    But despite these considerations, the plain fact is that in my lifetime, the enormous crimes against humanity have not occurred where the United States is. They occur where it is not - in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Eastern Europe. Where United States influence has been pronounced, human values have always advanced and often thrived. I will make one example stand for all. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, anyone who argued that the authoritarian militarist societies of Japan and Germany - both traditions a thousand years old -  could be reformed into working democracies, would have been considered insane. But it happened, in the most successful nation building in human history.

    These mundane factual observations counted for nothing, in relation to that sullen value judgment. When the Iraq War began, it was interesting to me how all that old Cold War machinery sprang back to life. Like some banal science fiction story in which an unlucky astronaut stumbles into a lost city and triggers its ancient weapons, all the cliches of the 60's were enthusiastically revived. Everything old became new again. There must have been tears of nostalgia in the eyes of some of the old New Lefters.

    The Demented Left KNOWS that any exercise of United States power is negative.  It doesn't know why. It can't say why the deposition of a repulsive monster was an exercise in imperialism, or what is immoral about the attempt (apparently succeeding as of the date of this posting) to mediate the conflict of two ancient sects. (The radicals have become reactionary over Iraq - a subject of a later post.) It doesn't have to say why. It just KNOWS. That ancient value judgment, the product of systematic Soviet disinformation and propaganda over four decades, was never revised, never re-evaluated.

     I have to wax philosophical here for a moment. As a matter of elementary logic, pure value judgments are absolutely insignificant. The reason is that they aren't reasoned. There is no progression from predicate fact to conclusion. If you can't say why you are for or against something, and back it up with some meaningful reference to actual factual criteria, then - despite all your moralizing, your passionate intensity - your opinion is no better or different than your preference for rocky road ice cream over butter pecan. That happens to be the situation in which most of the members of the Demented Left find themselves.

    But it doesn't make any difference to them. They don't know why they know, but it doesn't make any difference. They KNOW.

                                                                                        - Genuine Realist

   

'Imposing American-Style Democracy': Iraq, part 2

    Back in 2004-5, I used to post regularly on a UK-based political discussion site named 'Open Democracy'.  (This is the site.) Other than the fact that the site was not particularly open, and anything but democratic, the title was reasonably descriptive. The tenor of the vast majority of the posts was what might be called 'Marxist Triste', i.e, acknowledgment that the Cold War had ended, and - yeah - probably in the right way - but wouldn't it have been nice if . . .? The Iraq War had clearly revived their flagging spirits. To a man and woman, they were convinced that the stated rationales about WMD or regime change was at best secondary, at worst a subterfuge, and that the war was really an exercise in American 'imperialism'.  Resisting the temptation to offer the basic response of an Irish American to British subjects moralizing about empire - 'you oughta know' - I posted back and forth. They were all cynically sure that the various deadlines the US had set for the return of power to the Iraqi people would be postponed or ignored. When they were scrupulously met, one after another, and the cynicism of the comrades remained undented, I lost interest in the site and stopped posting there.

    One striking phrase occurred over and over in the posts. What the United States was doing in its unforgivable empire-building zeal was 'attempting to impose American-style democracy' in Iraq.  The expression  interested me, and particularly the underlined phrases. The connotative sense of the phrase is ominously imperial. 'Impose', of course, means to require someone else do something against their will. The adjectival phrase 'American-style' has a loose relation to the noun phrase 'American life-style'. In the manner of traditional conquerors, the crass Americans insist that the hapless Iraqis adopt their way of life. The crass neocons will not be satisfied until Iraqi girls are walking down the streets of Baghdad in miniskirts, with a pork sausage in one hand and a music video playing on their Ipods. It all sounds as arrogantly smug as Americans are supposed to be, and dreadfully parochial.

    But hold the phone. Let's take the expression apart rationally, before buying into the metaphorical background. The actual phrase is 'American-style democracy''. Just what exactly is 'American-style democracy'? And is there any relevant sense in which such a thing could be imposed? What does the ominous sounding phrase actually mean?

    There is not enough space to analyze 'American-style democracy' in depth, but the Reality Principle produces the salient point instantly. 'American-style democracy' does NOT mean the cloning of American institutions in a foreign culture. Not even the most demented anti-American sloganeers would advance such a contention. In its efforts at nation building, some of which have been more successful than any other in history (Germany, Japan), the United States has never attempted any such thing.

    So what exactly is 'American style democracy' in this context? As noted, too big a topic to do exhaustively. My intuition is that the essence of 'American style democracy' boils down to two central elements - (1) the Jeffersonian notion of egalitarian inalienable right, and (2) the Lincolnian notion of consensual government - in a word, the core of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, combined. The institutions of government vary radically - the Iraqi Constitution adopted in 2005 on Islamic principles is as different from the German as the Japanese is from the United States, etc. But the essence of individual right and consensual government is common to all.

    So this 'American style democracy' that is supposedly the point of imperial ambition - an insistence on consensual government. Perhaps the notion is not so ominous after all. But let us return to the verb - 'impose'. How on earth is it possible to impose consensual government on any people? 'OK, buddy, back into that polling booth . . . slowly'?' The concept is preposterous. It would be as useful to talk about 'imposing liberty', which is a nonsense phrase that no one would use - unless they were deliberately trying to obscure the difference between liberation and conquest. This of course was exactly what was going on.

    I have discussed the phrase 'imposing American style democracy' in some detail because it illustrates perfectly the conundrums the Demented Left faces on this issue. Like it or not - and the Demented Left does not like it one little bit - deposing a dictator of appalling cruelty, attempting to establish a nation based on consent of the governed is a Good Thing To Do. There is no way around it. Such an undertaking is not 'imperial' by any normal definition of the word. (My British friends implicitly agreed with this, by defining 'empire' in terms of breathtaking absurdity, engaging in the Glass Bead Game with unrepentant zeal.) The objections are political and practical - not the moral question, 'should it be done? (of course it should), but the realistic one, can it be done - with the resources available and without undue human cost'?

    But this reduction of the issue to its actual prosaic elements means that judgment on the war and the Bush Administration must be left to the voice of history, which may deem it wise or foolish, as time unfolds the matter - and for those who want to condemn now, and unequivocally, and with the vehemence of zealots, that will never do. For that reason, bland political language is absolutely out of the question. The issues must be formulated in terms that make it suitable for instant denunciation - moral language, in short. Thus, the commendable objective of deposing a madman oppressor is transformed into 'imposing American style democracy', 'empire' becomes redefined to something that Caesar Augusts, Napoleon, or Stalin would never have recognized, street gangs engaging in random mass murder become 'revolutionaries' or 'freedom fighters', etc.

                                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

   

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