untethered

Here Sara Silverman steals an old National Lampoon bit for use as a promo (I don’t know if that makes it better or worse) for her show. I refer of course to the classic 1973 “If you don’t buy this magazine we’ll kill this dog” cover. In Silverman’s version, she is wearing a princess costume, petting a small dog; “watch my show or I’ll kill my dog” she says. Perhaps there’s a reference in there, or a statute of limitations on material over thirty years old.

Another classic. (By way of explaining the joke to the kids, Volkswagen used to run ads highlighting the Bug’s buoyancy–they were said to float) This one was written by Anne Beatts, maybe the only woman on the masthead of the pioneering magazine.

What was great about the National Lampoon of the seventies, beside such work as this (which at the time was downright ground-breaking satire), was that it was a sort of underground publication–for WASP men. They were far more “politically incorrect” (before the term was coined) than the most foul-mouthed, falsely “edgy” (a faint tremor up the back of the neck [“douche chill”] at having to write the word) comedian now. Suffer through two hours of Chris Rock pacing the stage sweating and shouting hoarse cliches at you, and then go pick up a copy of the National Lampoon dated in the seventies, and decide for yourself who’s “keeping it real”–and if we are really more frank about all things now than we were thirty years ago.

One reason why a democracy cannot survive empire, and why empires are increasingly short-lived things, is that citizens of conquered and occupied nations, and cultures, half a world away, thereby become people to whom the leadership of the imperial power is answerable, in one way or another:

“The Americans know everything, they can do everything, they can repair the space shuttle without touching it, why do they let these things happen here in Iraq?” said Abu Muhammad, 55, one of the custodians of the bombed Khalani Mosque.

Good question, and one for which the man has the right to an answer. Mr., or Mrs., (future) President, meet one of your constituents. He has a few problems he’d like to bring to your attention.

Owing to the difficulties with America, no progress has been made in developing the oil…If we remain, shall we not be answerable for defending their frontier? How are we to do this if the Turk comes in?
–Winston Churchill, writing to David Lloyd George, September 1922

When we have made Mesopotamia a model state there is not an Arab of Syria and Palestine who wouldn’t want to be part of it.
–British colonial official

More oil, ever more oil.
—Henry G. Berenger, director, Comite General du Petrol, Nov. 21, 1917

The questions of morality and practicality that, if our society was in full command of its faculties, would normally focus our attention in response to the Administration’s recent introduction of plans for the long term occupation of Iraq, despite any legal or sensible justification for same, will be granted a brief airing in the mainstream media, before fading to the sound of the sputtering Rovian political machine assessing the paltry yield of data acquired thereby.

Much energy will be pointlessly wasted debunking the “Korean” and “Japanese” models (as we continue to abuse the historical analogies one after another until the very device of historical analogy is discredited–we really must stop humoring people), as if we aren’t already painfully aware of the unmentionable obviousness: East Asians are not Arabs are not Europeans (and we wouldn’t be entangled in the Middle East if they were).
All of this when we should be stripping away that part experience tells us is always disingenuous with this administration, the characterization, and recognizing the reality it’s designed to mute: previously disavowed plans for the indefinite, large-scale occupation of Iraq.
Well, this is our world.

Perhaps the question of cost could at least be delicately broached:

“Taking both immediate and long-term factors into account, the overall past and future costs until year 2016 to the USA for the war in Iraq have been estimated at $2,267 billion.”

Can we simply ask what we are getting for our money beyond Churchill’s “ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having”?
Obviously our guys still think that something “worth having” can be salvaged of the war; I don’t think it’s a model democracy and even they can’t be foolish enough to think that preserving a “central front” fighting a stateless enemy for ground neither we nor they can hold is worth the cost.

But the most ingenious excuse ever made for St. Bernard is to be found in his life by Geoffroi de Clairvaux, where he pertinaciously insists that the Crusade was not unfortunate. St. Bernard, he says, had prophesied a happy result, and that result could not be considered other than happy which had peopled heaven with so glorious an army of martyrs.
—Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The justice and wisdom of a war cannot be questioned once that war is entered into for in so doing we demoralize and dishonor those we’ve tasked with its execution. New information revealing the original casus belli as fraudulent or mistaken cannot be allowed to affect the war’s continuing prosecution. The war must not be revealed as a mistake or a fraud, and it should not be publicly asserted that the war is failing, much less hopeless, because to do this undermines the effort by demoralizing its soldiers. Once a war has been engaged, its purpose becomes the celebration of its warriors; all else fades toward irrelevance.

This is the essence of the endlessly repeated “support the troops” admonition. Its circular logic, its crass appeal to emotionalism, its bullying of dissent by the suggestion of disloyalty, all combine with its practical effect of suppressing debate to reveal a dishonesty and irrationality that will lead us to ruin. Again.

“Support the troops”, with its seductive appeal to the romance of martial heroism and the debate constricting rhetorical genuflection it requires, by its tendency to force public opinion in one direction, is a death spiral. It is the nuclear option of debate, the napalming of one’s own position, the burning of the village in order to save it. It would not be deployed if not for the hopeless logical and factual position of those who use it. Aside from an unsophisticated public whose understandable love of country is being manipulated, war supporters who pull the rip-cord of “support the troops” are a desperate and cowardly lot, ironically beating a retreat by a path that seeks to put those very same troops between them and harm’s way. Wars of necessity do not require such desperate measures.

In the modern era, people do not propose entering into a war in order to honor those who fight it (at least not openly); but they can always be counted on to insist on continuing a war, no matter how pointless, unjust, or hopeless it is revealed to be, for this very reason.

If you haven’t come to this conclusion already, allow me the heresy: the troops, their morale, and their “support” have no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether or not a war should be entered into, continued or ended (other than as a practical matter of capability, such as our current demoralized and overextended forces lending urgency to the need for bringing them home). No number of acts of heroism and sacrifice, no matter how pure, noble, or inspiring, no number of worthy young men bravely answering the nation’s call, can make a war any more just, sensible, or necessary; this does not become less true once a war has begun. The noblest bravery is as readily employed on behalf of a lie as in the defense of innocence.

“Support the troops” has become a straightjacket we willingly put ourselves into. If more plainly stated for what it is, for the sentiment it truly represents, it would be stated thusly: once entered into a war must be won for the sake of winning, regardless of all else.
This is natural; and as with most things “natural”, it isn’t sensible thereby. In fact, its primal nature makes it all the more perilous. Our instinctual reverence for heroism in war is profoundly human. It is humanity’s most dangerous intoxicant, necessitated by our violent prehistory and naturally produced like adrenaline, dulling our sense of order, justice, and morality (which, as mere social constructs, late-comers with no pedigree, work against it at a distinct disadvantage).
It should never be a purpose of war, in theory or practice, to “support the troops”, but this is precisely what this cheap debating trick effects; the support of soldiers at war is a matter of course, the least expected of the political leadership whatever the reason for their deployment (and notably, many who use this device turn apologist when actual instances of insufficient material support of soldiers impugn the governing class; to say nothing of the heinous crime of sending the young to war unnecessarily in the first place). The public, the media, even opposition politicians, are not bound by any requirement to give their support to a military endeavor with which they disagree; military action enjoys no special privilege as sacrosanct because young men are put in harm’s way. Of course, for this reason it should require justification before skeptics all the more. The perverse effect of “support the troops” has been to sacrifice, quite literally, those troops to their glorification.

Indeed, the very deployment of these troops, is the real issue, obscured as it is: is the war just, but above all is it necessary? The profligate use of human life to advance aggressive and adventurous foreign policy goals, not out of necessity but from ambition, is the ultimate betrayal of “the troops.”

But the obfuscation of reality through the arousal of emotion is the real point. To those it is used against, “support the troops” has taken on a talismanic power to sow doubt, provoke conflicting emotions, and cow into submission; it seizes the mind, stops inquiry and reason in their tracks, as all must genuflect before “the troops”, who begin to exist as a mythical representation of the actual troops being maimed and killed every day.

For those who invoke the slogan, it circulates as a sort of cure-all snake oil, dispelling doubt, routing feelings of impotence, instilling the illusion of virtue. It has drug-like properties, giving rise to a euphoria and sense of well-being; above all, it cures doubt and inhibits introspection.

It is the “conservative” equivalent of the common “liberal” valuation of sentiment above reason–and reality. It becomes more important to feel the right way about something, and the more deeply felt the better. Correctly assessing reality, the consequences or fairness of one’s actions, the preservation of order and law, all are tawdry practical concerns that pale next to the purity of emotion and conviction. One is expected to be on the right side of sentiment, not perception. This is natural, and belies an innate human logic adapted to primitive society, borne of the need to gauge the character and loyalties of an individual; a predictive assessment of his dependability. This makes it no less disastrous when applied to modern society and war.

It’s time to become conscientious objectors refusing the call of “support the troops.” No one, after all, is “against the troops” (and if they are, somehow, I should like to hear their argument all the same). The sentiment is a content-less redundancy, obscuring more than revealing. It’s time for a discharge. Call it a reduction in forces. These words have lost all meaning, one more casualty of our new culture of war. They have been left on the front lines of a meaningless war, sacrificed for the goals of the corrupt and cowardly, just like their real world counteparts.

Here’s one more heresy for you: our greater obligation is to the truth, not the troops. They, and the rest of us, will be just fine if we can only honor this.
Memorial Day, 2007.

Funny the things you find out there.
I came across this on the blog of a man I served with, way back then. Ben Hanson, Canadian immigrant, naturalized U.S. citizen, veteran, patriot, and still, apparently, with a camera permanently affixed to his shooting eye. For some reason Ben deleted the comment I left on the post. I was kidding, Ben. I hope this doesn’t have to do with my status as a wild-eyed peacenik.

This photo was taken in the mid-eighties, during the annual massive “Team Spirit” joint exercise with U.S. and South Korean troops in Pohang, South Korea. Pohang at the time was a giant steel mill and port garrisoned by a military base, with attendant town attached.
Pohang is in the southeast of the peninsula, on the Korean Strait that separates Korea and Japan; in the winter it is cold and bleak, with only a few bare trees (however, my travels were severely limited, from base to bath to brothel and back, mostly), buffeted by harsh winds. The air quality in Pohang was poor; Koreans bicycled about wearing dust masks. The people are as tough as the environment, but unfailingly polite. Long tents were set up in the street where the Koreans would stop in to drink their version of sake. The street market was a gruesome spectacle in its own right. Fights were common. This is where I saw a gang of prostitutes beating a man senseless on the street. All the best stories, however, are best left for another venue.

We set up a tent city in a Godforsaken corner of the military base there, where the ground is thick and sticky mud when it rains, and unforgiving hard-packed dirt continually feeding a fine dust into the bracing winter wind the rest of the time. No running water or heat, long hours punctuated by twelve hour stretches of “Cinderella liberty”, meaning one had to be back on base by midnight. We would catch a shuttle into town, get a hot bath, and join the sea of camouflage assailing the city. The smell of kimchi, fermented cabbage, was everywhere. Seasonal industries selling tourist souvenirs, such as the gaudy mink blankets called futons, alcohol, and comfort, sprang up to capture the restless G.I. wages.

The Koreans had been chafing at the presence of American troops for a while by then. The president at the time, Chun Doo-hwan, was effectively a dictator who seized power in a coup in 1979; when we were there opposition street demonstrations were going on in Seoul, always riotous. There was a sense that the country was on the verge of radical change; a student movement was beginning to assert itself. Chun wouldn’t last much longer, ousted in ’88 (and eventually pardoned for the Gwangju massacre of street demonstrators in 1980).

A friend, Mark Lazicki (a laconic upstate New Yorker), and I were collared on the street by a group of female Korean students who bought us lunch and grilled us about life in the states. They despised Chun, who they referred to as “the Pig”, with a sort of cautious sense of indulgence. About this time Ferdinand Marcos’ reign in the Philippines was nearing its end as well (the last time I was there plain-clothes military and police were loitering about on corners with M-16s; rumors of disappearances were rife). These were the first postwar changes in the Far East that have yet to run their course, and only will when we finally give the place back.

We, here in the States, have an insurmountable inability to understand the humiliation felt by a people hosting foreign troops on their soil. It’s no use insisting that we’re needed, or that they should be appreciative. Imagine foreign troops in your town. They look different, speak another language (and disdain yours), are young, large, rambunctious, horny, sometimes resentful of you and your home. Often the best real estate is taken up by bases, sometimes operating loud aircraft at all hours; the area surrounding these become dominated by red-light districts, bars, and merchants servicing the needs of the foreign troops.
Large parts of town are unsafe, particularly for young women, who aren’t distinguished from prostitutes. Small crimes of public disturbance are common: fighting, vandalism, drunkenness; occasionally more serious crimes occur, such as rape and murder. The military authorities often deny your police the right to prosecute these crimes. The many, or even majority, of the troops who carry themselves with respect and dignity (which is after all the least to be expected and no cause for congratulation) cannot negate the adverse effects of the minority (but not necessarily few) who dishonor themselves and their hosts.

But on a personal note, on this Memorial Day, this is one veteran who would like to thank the American taxpayer, for subsidizing his post-adolescent maturation. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.

The vast military superstructure that we’ve created is unsustainable; eventually we will have to surrender it, no matter how loud and melodramatic the wailing of the military fetishists of the Victor Davis Hanson variety. I believe this to be necessary for our salvation. But much will be lost along with it.
Among the military/industrial complex’s incidental benefits are its status as one of the greatest sources of job creation in history. The military services specifically have provided generations of young people with little education and few prospects with a job, or career, that is secure and comprehensive in its provision for medical benefits and retirement; placing them with relative efficiency via the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery.

The military also serves as a second system of education, a great vocational alternative to college (where so many go to squander four years and a considerable sum of their parents’ and/or public money), training thousands in a vast array of technical and logistical disciplines as well as a general theory of management, while inculcating them in a culture of organizational discipline and pride rare outside of the professions. The naturally occurring prevalence of minorities creates the sort of racial diversity, and even racial accord, that elites unsuccessfully seek to engineer elsewhere through resented, damaging and degrading affirmative action programs; all without resorting to discrimination. Of course, as Bush grinds away at the fitness of current forces and frightens away new recruits with his seat-of-the-pants foreign policy, these fragile gains will be sacrificed to lowered standards and deteriorated morale.

Among the many absurdities in the common perception of the military, the most obscene may be the oft-leveled charge that the military serves as a sort of raw deal for minorities who are channeled into it by a cruelly discriminatory society that then uses them as cannon fodder. Even now, in wartime, the mortality rate for G.I.s is remarkably low considering the nature of the profession; in most military occupations even in war (and during peacetime in all of them) it is likely safer for a young black man to be in the military than on the worst urban streets.

The military in the post-Vietnam era has served as a pressure release employing and providing for countless minorities. This goes far beyond mere employment in the military, setting up veterans in improved entries into post-military work; this was brought home for me after the service when I went to work in the aerospace industry, where military veterans preponderate, in the last great manufacturing industry left to America. Just another case of Sharpton, Jackson, et al, having their cliche-riddled heads up their collective ass, belying their lack of not just common sense but any real concern for the welfare of those they claim to represent.

Something to remember when people propose a draft as a means of squaring things. Even more absurd is the notion that it will force discretion into our war policy. If we need a draft to compel us to act sensibly in our foreign policy, we are already lost.

President Bush is not handing a war off to the next president. He is handing him, or her, what will likely become the most humiliating defeat this nation has ever known. The first President Bush famously declared the “Vietnam syndrome” dead after the first Gulf War. If he became the nation’s hubris, his hapless son now becomes the nation’s unwitting nemesis. Unlike Vietnam, where the dominoes did not fall (do they ever, really?) and the specter of Soviet domination of Indochina proved an unwarranted panic, the defeat in Iraq holds the promise of untold consequences for real, that is non-ideological, American interests.

Some of us will take the dismantling of the empire any way we can get it, but it would be nice to go out on our own terms. This is probably not possible; no one will be elected president, and few will be elected to Congress, by espousing, or so much as harboring, a truly non-interventionist foreign policy. A nation can choose to acquire an empire but it cannot choose to relinquish one. Perhaps that isn’t accurate; perhaps it’s that empires are acquired, as the man said, “in a fit of absent-mindedness”, and lost the same way. The question is, once inevitability reveals itself, will we have the wisdom to manage our return home, preserving domestic liberty, or will we give in to further militarization, spending ourselves flailing away at an increasingly hostile and resentful world, and inflicting upon ourselves the further erosion of the republic that comes with it?

The usual suspects probably already have worked up enough material for a whole wave of “Iraq wasn’t a military defeat” books. They tar their opponents with the “stab in the back” libel straight out of inter-war Germany already; as the hysterics provoked by Ron Paul’s assertion that our actions abroad affect terrorism recently displayed. Curious, how “conservatives” now employ that most tawdry of liberal conceits, reacting in mock (or worse, actual) outrage, sputtering that considering the consequences of our actions constitutes “blaming the victim.”

President Bush promised no surrender ceremony on the deck of a destroyer,* and Lord knows he’s kept his word on that one, but a familiar scene he may still manage to deliver, is the ignominious last helicopter out of Saigon. It’s only a matter now of how dramatic will be the fall from control to chaos. But perhaps this is what it will look like:

In recent weeks, the Green Zone has suffered near-daily barrages of mortars and rockets, some from predominantly Shiite neighborhoods to the east. The attacks have threatened the zone’s status as the safest place in Iraq. Many officials working in the enclave have begun wearing body armor outside their offices.

You’ll no doubt be relieved to know that Tony Blair’s defeat lap around the Green Zone was unaffected.

*Though he certainly tried to fabricate one, with the now infamous prancing about the deck of an aircraft carrier in military uniform with strategically-placed sock.
The disastrous audacity of the ever-expanding “global war on terror” as willed into being by the Administration: there will be no clear end (we’ll tell you when it’s over) marked by ceremony, but there will be simulacra of such, the celebration of victory without the end of conflict, to rouse the mass in support of more conflict. For no other purpose than to strengthen the Party’s hold on power, consolidating the political gains of its fictional victory, while arousing the public’s appetite for more conquest.
This administration has managed to manipulate mass perception like no other, overlaying a fictional struggle atop a horrendous reality. All wars have their accompanying propaganda, but the gap between perception and reality has grown so wide, and the consequences looming are so large, that it threatens to swallow us whole.

This “no clear end” to the “global” war on terror is a grotesquery that we somehow allow to survive the light of day: war, everywhere and without end. Combine with this the use of the “authorization to use force” in place of real legislative authority, as Congress grants the president monarchical powers, surrendering responsibility to avoid responsibility, and you have enshrined in principle an absolute presidential power that was definitively rejected by the founders. Congressmen are afraid to oppose wars riding waves of popular sentiment, and afraid to bear responsibility for their failure; the “authorization to use force” exists only for that reason. Cowardice ceding power may prove to be the fatal flaw of a republic with a strong executive.

The “war” is not waged as such, that is, legally, observing long established civilizing custom, and with the restraint we’ve shown in past conflicts. The captured are not prisoners of war, even though we insist we are engaged in war, because the war is against “terror”; neither are they mere criminals, however. They are what we, more precisely what Bush and Cheney, say they are. The closest thing the world has seen to an all-powerful nation, we have created Limbo on Earth.

Public opinion can be counted on to show little sympathy for the rights of terrorist suspects, but the war in Iraq and the pointless nation building in Afghanistan burden us with thousands of prisoners that have nothing to do with terrorism.
The worst disgrace of the Bush years concerning the torture and abuse of prisoners would have no relationship at all to the prosecution of terrorists; Abu Ghraib was a desperate attempt to collect intelligence to halt the insurgency in Iraq (an insurgency that wasn’t acknowledged). The methods justified by the threat and irrationality of terrorism are being used against many who have merely taken up arms to oppose the occupation of their country.
Imagine: war, universal, undeclared, unlimited, without end.

Well, how did I get here?