THE UNDERSIDE OF LIBERTY

For July 4^th, writer Kurt Andersen wrote an Op-Ed  for The New York Times.

He had recently been at the Woodstock Writers Festival and the question had been put to him: “Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts … but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?”

His answer: what has happened “is all of a piece”: “extreme individualism has been triumphant … selfishness won”.

He has part of good a point, and one that fits in with my own view of the history of this past half-century or so.

Because – yes – there has always been a “tension” in “the American idea”: “between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal”. And in the 1960s this – he says – led to a supernova explosion of “self-love” (which, he also notes, Thomas Jefferson had derided as “the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others”).

There has indeed always been a “tension”, but it has been a dynamic and tensive tension (if I may): the interaction of the two poles (radical individualism, the demands of the common-weal) actually energized the vitality at the core of the lived American experience.

In fact, in the best-case scenario, you would work hard to develop yourself as an individual precisely in order to not only secure your own life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also to contribute thereby to the general common-weal of everybody else, who were also doing that same thing.

The two energies were harnessed together, like horses to a wagon. They were to be competently handled by the individual holding the reins, and this project would form the common Project of all Americans, each and every one.

Jefferson’s “self-love” – in the bad sense – would work out to something like this: you simply focused on your own pursuit of happiness and (parasitically) let the rest of the country and your fellow citizens eat your dust. Sort of like a quarterback: your only interest is to get the ball you are carrying down to the goalpost and everybody else on the field is irrelevant at best or a potential obstruction at worst. Your only ‘duty’ is to the ball and to your getting the ball to the goalpost (where you can happily spike it and do your favorite little dance, just to remind everybody you did what they didn’t or couldn’t). It is – I imagine – a very self-gratifying little exercise. A restorative little diversion, if practiced occasionally.

Whether you can build or sustain a society, a culture, a polity, and a country by making that your life’s primary objective is another Question altogether. But then again, there’s such a thing as ‘thinking too much’, especially in football American-style.

Andersen notes some historical examples of this and that era in American history when “Americans have gone overboard indulging our propensities to self-gratification”, such as the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Given the Abundance (to use historian David M. Potter’s term from the 1950s) with which the country was naturally endowed, there was more than enough to go around, and everybody could just get to it – making a life for themselves and their families while simultaneously contributing to the common-wealth. With so much Abundance, getting-ahead wasn’t a zero-sum game.

Human nature being what it is and always has been, there was always a ‘moral hazard’ to the whole proposition: you could get so carried away with getting more material Abundance for yourself that you lost sight of anything else. And that would not only morally and materially weaken the common-weal for everybody else, but it would also turn you into a troll – not to put too fine a point on it – although a very nicely-accoutered troll. And you might turn your kids into trolls in the process, or your game-plan might induce others around you to start ‘taking a walk on the troll-side’ themselves. And you can see where that dynamic might go if it really got rolling.

After periods of such intensive and general selfish self-indulgence, an “economic crisis” or “reassertions of moral disapproval” would somehow work out a restoration of “a rough equilibrium between individualism and the civic good”.

So the consequences of an economic crisis or reassertion of moral-disapproval were able to work as a corrective when things got out of whack.

But coming up to more recent American history Andersen starts to sail into troubled waters.

The “two decades after World War II” were notable for a couple of things – and he doesn’t quite touch on all of them. The generations that as young or middle-aged adults had fought – in the military or on the homefront – in that Good War were also the generations who had experienced the deprivations of the Great Depression that extended from 1929 well into the 1930s.

In 1945 the country emerged as the Primary Victor of that War since it had not only spear-headed the winning side with its industrial might and military prowess (although the Red Army had proven itself a kind of frightening peer in that regard), but by 1945 all of America’s peer-competitors for industrial and economic productivity had pretty much been wracked by the War, while the U.S. productivity base had remained untouched by bombing or invasion or combat waged on its own national territory.  The country’s natural Abundance and the natural productiveness of its citizens were reinforced and amplified by the wrack and ruin of all of its peer-competition.

And that verrry comfy economic reality lasted until 1965 or – at the latest – 1970.

The Boomers, alas, spent infancy and childhood thinking that this was the normal state of affairs, now and forever.

Andersen doesn’t mention that.

He does mention that to the Boomers their parents seemed kinda worn-out, conformist, and sort of over-invested in just leading predictable and boringly peaceful lives. That those parents had pretty much had a too-eventful youth between 1929 and 1945 didn’t occur to their kids; that they had seen in the wartime wrack and ruin of Europe’s and Asia’s societies and in America’s own shocking experiences with the Depression and the Dust Bowl so much human destruction that they treasured ‘order’ and ‘stability’ and ‘peace’ … that didn’t occur to the Boomers either.

Like Dustin Hoffman’s eponymous ‘graduate’ in 1968, they only saw that ‘going into “plastics”’ wasn’t going to get you all the happiness that could be had: rather, get the girl, walk out on everything else, hop a bus, figure to score that night, ride out for more exciting pastures, and cut before any larger and longer examination of the consequences could be examined. Hollywood!

Or maybe like an “Easy Rider”, hop on your hog and blow through the boring and backward towns, making sure your very presence reminded all those troglodytes that they lived in caves and you had crawled out and really knew the score.*

And in “Bonnie and Clyde” it didn’t even make any difference whether you obeyed the law. You were just so ‘freeeee’ and ‘liberated’ by robbing banks (of other folks’ hard-earned cash) and living large. The law and ‘society’ were just things meant to oppress you and get in your way. Precisely a kid’s view of it all.

Of course, the kids wouldn’t have long remained mired in such natural (for a kid) misconceptions if their parents had been doing their job. But something had happened to the parents of the immediate postwar period: they really didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore and didn’t want to be too ‘authoritarian’ and bothersome (look, after all, where that had gotten the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians). ** And perhaps Rousseau was right: if you just leave them alone the kids will ‘naturally’ be good and ‘society’ will only screw them up.

After all, 1914-1945 had been a thirty-years or so that pretty much demonstrated to even the most unreflective observer that even the most extensively-developed civilization could screw itself up and deprive or kill dozens of millions in the process. Maybe we should just ‘let it be’ and trust the kids. Maybe that would be better. Maybe that would work. Yah.

Meanwhile, there was money to be made at all levels: the Little Guy could unionize and get a steady decent job and raise his family (think of ‘Archie Bunker’ – and who wouldn’t kill now for a steady job that paid decently, even if you had to carry a lunch-box to work every day?). And the bigger fish could take advantage of the country’s planetary pre-eminence in industry and finance.

Money could insulate you (and yours) from another Depression’s ravages. And nobody but the whacko far right-wingers imagined the government could start to look like those bossy monstrosities that Hitler and Stalin had put together.

But in all of that, as Andersen notes, there was still a balance: if beatniks and hippies were distasteful  weirdos, so too were European-type superwealthy permanent aristocrats whose families and fortunes simply engorged to the point where they might as well have been Dukes and Countesses and all that, living on their estates far away from the troubles and toils of ordinary folk.

As he provocatively juxtaposes it: “Greed as well as homosexuality was a love that dared not speak its name”.

And he continues: “But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment”.

That’s a good start. But only a start. In the first place, the counterculture was only one of two prongs of the Boomer revelation. The summer-of-love Flower Children – just looking for a boozy, bong-y, permanent summer afternoon on a California beach – were the laid-back siblings of the gimlet-eyed ‘revolutionaries’ of an increasingly large number of revolutionary agendas, seeking – complexly – to achieve individual fulfillment or empowerment by massing ‘victims’ together into Identities and groups whose advocates and agitprop organizers could hit the streets and head to the Beltway.

And that is the key element that Andersen doesn’t mention: it was the Beltway, spearheaded by the Dems and later joined in bipartisan bonhomie by the Republicans, that fueled the fires that birthed the Left’s new Leviatha while melting the bars of ancient Right-leaning Leviathan’s cage.

This wasn’t just some vague cultural synergy. This was a calculated political strategy conceived and hatched for their own purposes at the highest levels of government, there in the Beltway.

The deal – as I have often said – was that the Left’s organized Advocacies would be pandered-to in exchange for the votes of their Identity-group’s ‘demographic’ while the Right’s unsleeping ‘moneyed interests’ would once again be allowed to run free, like they were in (what would now be known as) the First Gilded Age.

Government (thus taxpayer) monies would be showered upon the Left’s agendas and groups while government legislative and regulatory authority would be engorged to enable those Big Outrage and Liberation agendas and impose them on society and culture, while government legislative and regulatory authority would be precisely weakened in order to allow Big Money to play its eternal Game.

But then – who knew? – the rest of the world recovered from World War II or started to develop along American and capitalist lines. Suddenly the country had competitors again.

So much so that in 1971 Nixon had to abrogate the Bretton Woods agreements of 1946 and float the Dollar. The vaunted U.S. currency was now no longer based on the amount of gold in the national vaults but would ‘float’ in the aether of international financial calculations. The economy began to wobble instantly.

But precisely at that same time, rejected 49 states to 1 in the 1972 presidential elections, the Dems desperately welded themselves to their newly-hatched client-Identities and went for ‘revolution’ from above, engineered and administered by deceptively happy-face New-Order elites and the pols who eagerly and happily loved them.

While simultaneously the Big Money elites now went international with an increasingly avaricious avidity that was only intensified by Reagan’s seemingly happy-face but restorative Presidency (when Gordon Gekko’s cinematic ‘greed is good’ became the official morality of the Right, as ‘revolutionary morality’ – which is not really morality at all – became the official stance of the Left).

There was no balance and no proportion now: genuine revolutionaries have no truck with ‘balance’ and ‘moderation’ on principle, and wealth has never accepted limits on its own engorgement.

The fundamental American ‘moral hazards’ – frakkulently and whackulently – intensified precisely as ‘morality’ was kicked to the curb both by the Left (morality is simply a code for sustaining the oppressive status-quo) and by the Right (there’s nothing immoral about making as much money as you can).

With ‘morality’ deconstructed, there was no balancing element to Shape or Boundary either ‘liberation’ or ‘wealth-creation’.

“Do your own thing”, says Andersen, “is not so different from “every man for himself”. True enough.

Although he neglects the revolutionary morality of Identity-group ‘liberation’ as it mutated here: there is no morality because morality ‘oppresses’ and it is only in the service of the revolution (whichever one you choose to benefit-from) that anything can be judged morality; revolutionary success is by definition the only ‘morality’ and is by definition ‘moral’. Case closed. If you ‘just don’t get it’, then get out of the way and shut-up or you really will ‘get it’.

The entirety of the foregoing brought to you by your government. And spun as (marvelously) simultaneously both ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ and also ‘traditional’ and ‘red-blooded’. Something for everybody! Although – weirdly and ominously – the common-weal somehow got kicked to the curb even as ‘everybody’ got something.

But as the world itself became America’s productive (and lately financial) competitor, the government had to resort to more and more tricks to keep up the flow of cash and the illusion that the Golden Eggs were still flowing: diversifying, out-sourcing, off-shoring, juggling the government fiscal and employment figures, re-jiggering the definitions, juggling the books, and then finally, Bubbles – as shiny and glossy as everybody who knew how to work the levers of power could make them. And now the government is simply printing the money and figuring that as the financial Hegemon it can keep doing that as long as the special ink and paper hold out. You might as well have printed up tons of special paper to sop up the water and started stuffing it ‘optimistically’ into the holes in Titanic.

Nor, as he notes, was there any longer any “social opprobrium” to provide speed-bumps to slow down the lemming-rush from Left and Right, nor watertight doors to stop the increasing flow of water leaking into the Great Ship.*** The same deconstructing of social opprobrium that lubricated ‘unwed motherhood’ and ‘gay sex’ and half a thousand other fresh, rich and transgressive bits of progress and liberation also deconstructed any sense of ‘decency’ in the amassing of personal wealth.

Nor am I here primarily disagreeing with the content of this and that ‘liberation’ and ‘transgressive progress’. Rather, for both Left and Right, I am pointing out primarily that nobody stopped to think through the larger systemic Consequences.

Whether you A) agreed or disagreed with the Content of this or that ‘liberation’ or ‘reform’ – from Left or Right – was only one part of the deliberative analytical task and the challenge that demanded to be faced.

There was also B) the Question as to how such changes would be introduced. What sort of government would it take to achieve all this? This was the Question of Method. To what extent could any Constitutionally-grounded American government achieve all this and still remain Constitutionally grounded? And to what extent would have to mutate into something else altogether (Leviatha and Leviathan)?

And there is then also C) the Question of Consequences: regardless of whether this proposed change is ‘good’, is it workable at a cost (financial, ‘moral’ – in the sense of the Framing Vision) that the country, the culture, the society can bear? That can be borne without the entire fabric of society and culture becoming so frayed or pressured that it unravels sufficiently i) as to be unreliable as a matrix of living and conducting a decent human life and/or ii) mutates into some other type and shape of thing altogether?

Costs and Consequences: not simply economically, but in the larger and more Classical sense of ‘the Human Economy’ of values and prudential judgments and decisions, made by all of those whose lives will be impacted.

Or, as one militarily-informed participant in the run-up to the Iraq War put it: nobody wanted to ask the essential strategic Question: And what then? Once you have ‘won’, what happens next? And how do you respond to it?

So: given, as Andersen related at the outset of his piece, that the social and cultural revolution(s) of the 1960s had been “mostly won” … what then? And really, if their Costs and Consequences had not really been appreciated, have they really been won?  Which, of course, has been the abiding Great Question about the Iraq War and the seemingly endless string of military mis-adventures that it has spawned.

If you ‘win’ what you set out to win, and yet wreck yourself in the process, to what extent – really – can you be said to have won anything at all? Hitler – to use that realm of reference only because of its general familiarity – ‘won’ in Poland in 1939 … and yet he wound up – quite beyond his intentions – with World War 2 on his hands. The Japanese ‘won’ at Pearl Harbor … and yet they wound up – quite beyond their expectations – with the War in the Pacific on their hands, the strategic initiative of which by June of 1942, a mere six months later, they lost spectacularly and permanently at Midway.

Thus what Andersen calls the “Me Half-century”.

Except that the individual ‘me’ was organized into ‘Identity-advocacies’ (Left) and ‘interests’ (Right) and thus amplified the lethal Consequences astronomically.

And here We are, in the Year of Grace Two Thousand and Twelve and of the Independence of the United States the Two Hundred and Thirty Sixth … and counting. Literally.

Nor can it be asserted that the ‘culture wars’ of the 1960s can’t be held responsible for the economic perversions of the 1970s and 1980s and subsequently. It was precisely the American culture that provided the matrix and Ground of the Boundaries that would Shape and Contain America’s morally-ambiguous energies.

And when those Grounds and Boundaries were culturally kicked-to-the-curb, then all bets were off as to where the now unguided American energies might go.

And the government’s energies ditto.

So here We are.

And what then?

And what now?

NOTES

*In that 1969 movie, it didn’t hurt that Fonda and Hopper blew through the Jim Crow South, where folks were not only set in their ways – which in itself isn’t such a bad thing – but were set in the ways of Jim Crow. From a scripting point of view, a neat loading of the deck.  

**It’s interesting to look at – say – Lewis Stone’s Judge Hardy shrewdly but wisely fathering the bumptious Andy Hardy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jim Backus’s almost pathetically helpless fathering of James Dean in 1955’s “Rebel Without A Cause”, and Donald Sutherland’s Knowledge-and-Service society architect father in 1979’s “Ordinary People”.

***Thus, I would say, it’s really nothing but a distraction whether one is ‘optimistic’ or not: arguing whether the glass is half-empty or half-full is irrelevant when the glass itself was filled with a poisonous concoction that you have already half-consumed. Or, to use another image: arguing whether the ship is half-empty or half-full is irrelevant when in either case you have now taken on so much water that your critical reserve-buoyancy is negated.

ADDENDUM

I just finished watching an installment of Ken Burns’s superb video history The Civil War; the episode that deals with the events of 1864. There was a photograph of Lincoln, described in Walt Whitman’s words as craggy-faced, serious, his homeliness somehow elevated by the depth and power of his personality. So very much, I thought, a strikingly impressive example of human beings in the full flush of their adulthood, forged in no matter how hot the fires of life and events.

And it struck me: would Lincoln have ever become what he became, had he been required to play to the kids’ mentality?

But isn’t that precisely what has happened to American politics in the past forty or fifty years?

The world and era of the Civil War was an adult world and an adult era: kids had to learn quickly and as best they could what Life and History required of them, and make the best of it. And they acquitted themselves with a stunning sobriety and determination and achievement.

One might wonder, in the twilight, what Obama might have become had he himself not been under the pressures of that type of politics his Party did so much to promote forty Biblical years ago; or had he himself, perhaps, not been heated – but only to a softness – by the mushy flash-pan evanescence of a youthy politics of the quick Impulse and of the easy Intention.   

One might wonder how long – without genuine human adulthood – the country might longer last.

MILITARY SUICIDES

The number of military suicide is continues to grow.

Trying to address is it is going to be verrrry difficult. The complexities are not only deep but certain to be politically uncomfortable for one or another ‘viewpoint’ or interest group.

Of course, the Standard Operating Procedure that has evolved here in the past few decades is to simply pick the most politically advantageous position, cherry-pick only the factoids that will support it and make it look reasonable, and then enforce Political Correctness to prevent further discussion of the possibly large and essential elements that were left out in order to achieve what passes for ‘consensus’ and policy now.

This has been a plague throughout Our civic life for decades now, and its consequences – those evil turkeys of Truth – are coming home to roost.

But the military setting promises a particularly acute forum: there are things the military has to deal with – warfighting and its consequences – that cannot be spun or repressed or wished or theorized away.

A Thanksgiving Day newspaper article skims the surfaces, but to the practiced eye of a reader who is willing to borrow the skills of the old Soviet readers of news, the awful outlines start to loom up with a little more clarity than most folks – and certainly ‘interests’ – would probably like to see.

The key difficulty is this: how do you as the military show more sympathy for “mentally fragile” and “emotionally frail” soldiers without undermining the entire military valorization of the ‘soldierly qualities’.

In this regard you might consult the most recent Star Trek movie for a rather concise Vulcan assessment of the matter: the young Commander Spock is indicting the cocky cadet James T. Kirk for undermining a key Starfleet Academy command-problem scenario. The objective of the scenario-test, Spock reminds everybody, is to confront a potential commanding officer with a literally hopeless situation, in which there are no good outcomes, in order to test and develop the cadet’s ability to simultaneously confront hoplelessness and probable death squarely, while simultaneously maintaining his self-control and emotional discipline and determination in order to maintain command of himself and his crew so that the mission, however it is to end, will be carried out – for better or for worse – with discipline.

Discipline among a crew and an officer corps, it is clearly implied, depends on self-discipline – and every crewmember has to have some ability in that regard, and the officers and the commanding officer most of all.

This is true of military affairs – at least where the rubber meets the road in combat, if not in the bureaucratic and organizational ‘office’ world of the rear-echelon and higher-echelon (Pentagon and Beltway most of all) sub-worlds of the military world.

You can see right off the bat that the military has a problem, given the way American society and culture has been heading these past decades. A ‘consumerist’ culture has always been a dangerous rival to the military ethos: giving yourself what you want right now is hell-and-gone from self-denial, postponement of gratification, sacrifice of self (not just through death but in a host of smaller self-denials) for a larger purpose and responsibility, and all the other similar requirements for soldiering. (Which, by the by, are many of the classical indicators of what used to be called ‘maturity’ and even ‘character’ before those concepts, starting in the later Sixties, were taken off the road and put up on blocks.)

Mussolini saw the Americans as “a mongrel nation”, and more to the point both Hitler and the Japanese saw Americans as ‘soft’ because of their many comparative ‘luxuries’. In the event, let’s not be fooled, the Japanese and German soldiery (and the Russian, Our allies at the time) proved formidably self-disciplined and capable of sustaining and undergoing monstrous terrors and deprivations. Americans were able to rise to the occasion, but their national industrial and technological capacities were available to close the gap in soldierly qualities.

I mean no disrespect to the Greatest Generation, but pound for pound their Japanese and German opponents were at an advantage: they had been raised from childhood by militarist governments who formed them precisely for their military roles. And I’m not suggesting that this country should embrace a militarist government in order to make sure that its kids are the world’s most formidable individual soldiers.

Still, the blessings of consumerist capitalism do exact a price.

And in the past few decades, the country has trended strongly toward a more self-indulgent or self-sensitive approach to child-raising. And as aforementioned, ‘maturity’ and ‘character’ have been pretty much retired for all practical purposes. Certain strands of feminisim and victimism and even Identity Politics have contributed largely to this, and not by accident but rather by design: their objectives from the get-go have been to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘devalorize’ so-called ‘macho and male characteristics’ in favor of a ‘sensitivity’ and an acute and brassy awareness of one’s preferences, desires, hurts, feelings, preferences and dislikes that cannot but undermine a whole lot of stuff vital not only to a certain maturity but also to the very quality of the youth upon whom the military must rely. (So you can see why bringing in recruits from other cultures and nationalities has been increasing – as in the later Roman Empire.)

And the valorizing of ‘youth’ since the Sixties has contributed as well: the young are not automatically born with access to their highest and most mature potentials and must be shepherded carefully in those formative but vitally deficient years before the most complex and uniquely human parts of the brain reach their full biological development.

And the addled effort to ‘feminize’ the military – demanded as a political expedient by the Beltway – have proven a multiple-warhead danger to the entire military ethos and the capacity to make the rubber meet the road and keep it there when combat is required.

In the first place, the military ethos has been assaulted with gleeful and arrogant zeal by feministicals who are happy to claim that “it’s not your father’s or your grandfather’s (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force – fill in the blank) anymore”.

Worse, that the types of officers required for those ‘old’ wars aren’t required any longer. Although, of course, the ship, plane or combat gadgetry has not yet been invented that will not require officers of competence and deep maturity – and troops will always need leadership (including non-commissioned officers). So the idea of a non-combat military is a political pipedream; and imposing it upon the military has been something not so very far in effect from outright insanity if not treachery.

Worse, the concomitant stratagem of greasing the skids for all this by claiming that the military is primarily an ‘employment opportunity’ (or ‘right’) has had monstrously corrosive effects on the military’s and the public’s sense of just what the frak it is all about and what it’s there for.

The military is not just another corporate employment opportunity like IBM or General Motors (used to be). It is – even more than the local domestic emergency services like fire and police – an organization that must be ready on short-notice to draw upon deep skills of self-discipline (individually and organizationally) in order to sustain the most demanding combat missions. And in Fourth-Generation Warfare (a Fifth seems to be in the offing) the combat challenges are even more stressing and frakulous than in the bad old days of WW2 and Korea, or even Vietnam (and upon all those dead be peace).

Nor has it helped that the national leadership – from both Right and Left – has gotten Us involved in the most incorrigible and refractory ‘wars’, and ones that promise – for lack of any clear enemy and the lack of any overall strategic objectives – to last for years, decades, and possibly generations. Generations of Fourth and Fifth Generation Warfare are going to demand a whole lotta maturity and self-discipline from the troops and their officers ‘in theater’ (and from the products of the Service Academies, and from the ROTC programs and from American society itself).

And these national developments (emphasis on the ‘de-‘) have affected psychology and clinical practice as well. I have written about ‘stress’ and ‘stress in the military setting’, here most recently. Mainstream psychology has had a difficult enough time with ‘stress’ in the civilian setting, but in the military setting the problem assumes exponentially more difficult proportions.


You might for a moment wonder if all this interconnection of seemingly unrelated trends can really have burned together in the national woodland to create such a specific and frakulous wildfire. I recall Rory Stewart, for a while a UK Foreign Service honcho in the Southwest Asia theater, mentioning in a 2006 book* that he could only marvel at “the pomposity of his American bosses, who in the safety of their secure headquarters plan to create ‘a multi-ethnic, decentralized state, based on human rights, a just constitution, a vibrant civil society, and the rule of law’ as if they were constructing a new shopping mall rather than dealing with a 5,000 year-old civilization”.** Funny, funny, funny that the Pentagon has started to try the same type of ‘culture wars’ that have so profoundly corroded the American domestic scene for decades. But hardly a coincidence.

In order to maintain a certain group-sense and group-support of the soldierly qualities, especially among hordes of youth, there is an unavoidable ‘valorization’ of emotional as well as physical strength (also something devalorized by the feministicals) and of the ability to ‘suck it up’ and keep focused not on your fears, pains, and problems, but rather on the mission. (Though I am not here implicitly approving the frakkery of the missions that have been assigned to the troops by the Beltway of late.)

As any high-school athletic coach could (or until recently could) tell you, it’s pretty much a given that the kids – trying to keep themselves on their best ‘edge’ – aren’t going to have much patience with those who are having trouble keeping it together on the field. This may sound ‘insensitive’ but I don’t intend it that way; if your first reaction on reading it is one of distaste or disapproval, I suggest that such a first-impression is an indicator of just how things have changed in the country in the past few decades.

So now We are seeing a military – for decades trying to de-macho itself in response to intense political pressure and the general trend of American society – desperately trying to keep its troops on their best edge in order to sustain at least some respectable level of combat competence and capability while trying to ‘valorize’ or at least not be insensitive to those who cannot – for whatever reason – handle the intense pressures.

This is a problem of the most awful complexity, and there can be no easy solutions. If you make it ‘easy’ on those who can’t handle the pressure, you run the risk of undermining those who are making every effort to try to hold themselves together and keep things going. On the other hand, you can’t simply submit the ‘emotionally fragile’ to ongoing opprobrium and fail to provide some level of services. On another hand, you can tie up an awful lot of resources trying to adequately provide such services. (Military medicine’s costly re-jiggering to provide the politically requisite amount of medical, let alone psychological, services to female troops is a story that has not yet received adequate notice.)

And on another hand, given the type of frakkery inherent in Fourth Generation War you are going to have emotional and psychological problems with even your most dedicated troops. And all of this is exponentially intensified if the troops generally start to get the idea that they have been committed to another Vietnam, or something close enough to it.

The neat but criminally witless Fundamentalist solution – if you just believe God works through the US government and ‘the powers that be’ then your ‘faith’ is all the ‘help’ you need – is probably starting to lose steam with the departure of Bush the Egregious, but after 25 years of Fundamentalist Ascendancy in the military (since 1987 and Reagan’s second administration at least) there’s still a lot of that going around.

So you see the problems.

And this is even before the parents, relatives, and advocates of military suicides and the “emotionally fragile” military members speak their piece.

To try to make a gesture such as giving “equal honors for survivors of military suicides” in military funerals is going to create as many morale problems among the troops as it ‘solves’ among the parents, families, and friends of the deceased. There is difficulty enough with the development (in the Canadian fashion) of special medals for those who ‘thought’ or ‘felt’ they were under attack by the enemy and suffered physical or emotional or mental ‘wounds’ as a result.

Should the President send a letter of condolence to the immediate survivors of military suicides as is done for those killed in action? Again, what effect will it have on the military members still trying to keep themselves going? And what effect will it have on the expectations of potential recruits whom the military will need to sign up? It is already heavily influenced by recruits who signed up in the sure and certain knowledge that military service was merely an ‘employment opportunity’ and a ‘right’ not much more complicated than deserving a drivers license – and then they got deployed … into a Fourth Generation War.

How do you maintain the vital and indispensable appreciation for self-discipline and a certain emotional toughness and resilience, while also demonstrating from the highest levels on down that ‘frailty’ is ‘OK’?

This is a turkey from Hell, come home to roost from the early days of the military’s truckling to the feministical demands that it re-make itself into a feministical-friendly employment-opportunity organization while officially and formally maintaining its insistence that such ‘changes’ would not, and do not, and could not adversely affect morale and operational competence.

As with credit-cards, it was all a great time … until the bill came due.

And so it has.

NOTES

*Stewart, Rory. “Occupational Hazards”: Picador, 2006.

**For that matter, I recall a Buddhist leader, Shunryu Suzuki, commenting decades ago on the 1960s-1970s fad of setting up an American Buddhism; he opined that trying to transplant Buddhism “is like holding a plant to a rock and waiting for it to take root”.

ADDENDUM

Having said all that, let me broach a topic that’s even less PC. Again, I’m not insensitive here, but when you’re looking at stuff that has to be looked at clearly even though it’s not PC, you’re going to have to ruffle the feathers too quickly smoothed by PC proprieties.

In all of this military stress stuff, there’s the ‘moral hazard’ element as well.

You have seen the phrase ‘moral hazard’ before: it means a policy’s effect (intended or unintended) of creating what used to be called a ‘temptation’ to game the system.

You’ve seen it applied in reference to the subprime mortgage crisis. The high-living financial ‘wizards’ (more like cheap conjurers) were unregulated and that non-regulation created a moral hazard for them. And it appears they fell right into that temptation.

The poor or impecunious, offered unbelievable deals with seemingly limitless credit for mortgages, also rode right into the valley of the Little Bighorn.

In all matters of the ‘stress’ diagnosis, there is also a moral hazard. Since the diagnosis is kind of fuzzy, it’s not hard to claim stress and there’s no real way that your claim can be verified by an observer or evaluator. It’s built into the whole ‘stress’ diagnosis: you claim a) to be under pressure and b) as a result of such-and-such an experience.

Now it’s possible that your reported ‘stress’ is purely ‘emotional’ and its ‘pain’ ditto – in which case there’s no way for an independent observer – one trained but still ‘outside of’ you – can examine that for validity. Yes, perhaps your ‘stress’ is causing some clearly verifiable medical or psychological problems; high-blood pressure or some such. But ‘nightmares’ can’t be independently confirmed, nor can ‘behaviors’ that – alas, given human nature – can be mimicked or staged.

But on top of that, (b) is verrrry hard to establish: so that even if an evaluator can decide that Yes, you ‘have stress’, s/he can almost never conclusively connect (a) to (b), can almost never conclusively say that your ‘stress’ is a result of such-and-such an ‘experience’.

That’s been the trouble with all ‘stress’ and PTSD diagnosis, even in the civilian sector: establishing the link between (a) and (b).

And then on top of that, ‘stress’ has been expanded from its original context of PTSD resulting from (mostly) Vietnam-War-experience to ‘stress’ and ‘trauma’ caused by various gender and sex issues and – at this point – by just about anything at all.

Now, even worse, how can you 'cure' such 'stress'? Because 'victimism' (a noxious brew comprised of the quiet political alliance of radical feminism and law-and-order Rightism), forbids suggesting that an individual is somehow responsible for his/her well-being or self-managment or self-improvement - to say such a thing would be 'blaming the victim'. So what options are left to you as a care-provider? Drugs, cash payments, government health care that promises to burn eternally because the 'therapy' can never reach the 'source' of the problem? Such a deal.

And it’s been like this now for at least two decades.

Now imagine this problem as it manifests in the current military situation. Generations of youngsters (and not so young), raised to be acutely alert to any unpleasant stimulus that may ‘stress’ them, are now put not only into military life (which in its day-to-day Stateside form has become sort of average-corporate employment with a dress code) but put into combat, and Fourth Generation War combat at that, and on top of it all, a losing war (or two).

Now military life and one’s military ‘commitment’ and ‘responsibility’ become not only an unpleasant stimulus, but potentially very dangerous as well.

There is – is there not? – a rather significant possibility that less-than-robust troops will be tempted to declare themselves ‘stressed’.

Thus commanders are once again over a terrible barrel: to respond to all ‘stress’ reports as if they were unquestionably valid is going to quickly have two dangerous results: i) significant fractions of troops (perhaps increasing fractions) are now unavailable for operations and ii) troops trying to keep up their responsibilities see how easy it is to get out of them.

This is NOT to imply that all ‘stress’ issues are ‘fake’. But there is precious little way to officially and conclusively distinguish the ‘genuine’ cases from the – ummmm – ‘moral hazard’ cases.

Add that the predominant default position in the country for the past few decades has been to ‘believe the pain’, and the military commander is put into an almost impossible position.

And like so many of combat’s consequences, these are problems that cannot simply be ‘spun’ or ‘re-visualized’ away. It’s no longer a matter of ‘reframing’ a ‘text’ or merely ‘changing an attitude’; these are real, intractable, demanding problems that require real solutions (not the Beltway’s preferred mode of action these past few decades, alas).

NOT SO MUCH

In light of what I said in my last Post, I’d like to try to get to the nub of it all. I came across a chapter in Clive James’s “Cultural Amnesia”. Although it’s about a European intellectual of the interwar era, Egon Friedell, James manages to wrap a marvelous contextual penumbra around it, much of it having to do with Nazism and Soviet Communism, two monstrosities which bethumped the Austrian Friedell in his lifetime. The page-references are to the W.W. Norton paperback edition of 2007.

Even in the time of Khrushchev there was a movement to bring back the Stalin-era ‘scientist’ Lysenko. Lysenko had tried to force biology into conformity with Communist principles. This, as James rightly asserts, raised Party doctrine and Political Correctness to the level of a ‘religion’ and raised the imposition of that Correctness on genuine science to the level of a “superstition”. Truth and accuracy were tossed overboard in the quest for ‘political’ and doctrinal purity.

The possibility of Lysenko’s comeback engendered dismay in many scientists (though in Stalin’s Russia, most of them had learned to keep their mouths shut, and to ‘go along to get along’).

Except for the amazing Andrei Sakharov, who managed to love his homeland as a true patriot and remain committed to truth and speak up for truth when Political Correctness was threatening any non-conformity to the Party line with professional oblivion, imprisonment, and death – and you don’t run into that type of courage very often in life, not even here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sakharov wasn’t the first or the last intellectual to face the risk of losing his tenure and his union card as an academic; but he acquitted himself better than most.

Sakharov stood up to Khrushchev and persuaded that earthy but lifelong Communist Party ‘macher’ to put the kaibosh on the plan.

But even though Sakharov was successful in this particular case, James puts his finger on the darkness: “The dreadful truth was that the superstitions had reached so deep into the fabric of the Soviet polity that nothing except a complete collapse could get them out.” (p.247)

I’m wondering whether that’s the deep rot that infects the American polity now, after four decades of the Political Correctness of the radical Left (there was nothing ‘liberal’ about it) and since about 1980 the equally toxic reaction to that Correctness developed and deployed by the radical Right of the Fundamentalists and the neocons.

Whether the dubious or downright untrue ‘science’ deployed by this or that advocacy, replete with fake numbers and ‘research’ that was with-held from peer review or public deliberation (long before Bush tried to put the workings and writings of the government beyond public review), or the demand by this or that Identity’s Advocates that such and such an agenda be implemented without any serious deliberation , or the intellectually childish and barbaric insistence on responding to inconvenient truth by shouting down the truth-speaker … or all of the foregoing, I wonder if the rot is now burrowed so deeply into American popular culture and into the government in all its Branches that it will take a complete collapse – a ‘crash’ of the hard drive, as it were – to ‘reboot’ Our culture and society and genuinely Constitutional way of going about conducting life as a People and as a nation. *

“Stalin’s capacity to join in the superstition … is the gateway to the larger subject of how an utterly cockeyed metaphysics guaranteed that the Soviet experiment could not possibly succeed even though the men who led it were willing to murder the innocent en masse.” (p.246) In Our case there is no one dictator. But there is a Congress and a Supreme Court that has now gotten used to ‘accepting’ the most culturally and communally wrenching ‘demands’, on the basis of the most implausible and incoherent and highly dubious assertions backed up by the most sketchy (when not downright inaccurate) ‘numbers’ and ‘studies’, which are accepted either with no effort to ascertain their validity or with illogical chains of ‘reasoning’ that a freshman in any 1950s college Intro to Philosophy course could puncture like a cheap balloon.

Which is no doubt why the cadres of any revolution have always gone after the schools and the universities, to prevent the type of critical thinking that could enable a fresh mind and a sturdy heart to blurt out that the emperor had no clothes on. ‘Elites’ do not think for themselves, they just have a better grasp of what they’re supposed to conform to and – in their decadent stages – can applaud politely on cue and know how to choose the right wines.

The metaphysical assertion that there is no metaphysical reality is not one that prompts visions of a bright future, but rather a Flattened and darkly bloody one, if human history is any indication. And despite several memos to the contrary, I’m of the mind that History isn’t yet dead. Not hardly.

Revolution has its place – it’s a monstrous but true sadness in this industrialized world, one that Jefferson took a little too lightly (until he became President himself). But the Framers specifically constructed the American governmental polity so that actual revolution would not be necessary: the Branches and the Houses were like the several engines of a jetliner: if one went a little off, the others could compensate and keep the craft airborne.

But it was precisely the use of ‘war’ imagery (Emergency! Enemies! Hate and kill!), so reminiscent of “War Communism” and the willful trahison of first the Democrats (for their political benefit) and then the Republicans (ditto) that invited the ‘revolutions’ into the heart of this country’s politics. A citizenry that (too trustingly) assumed that the ‘government’ and ‘Congress’ and surely ‘the Democrats’ would provide ‘serious’ supervision in the service of the common weal was instead forced onto a roller coaster ride of cock-eyed metaphysics so egregious that the ‘revolutionaries’ realized that their only chance for pulling it off was to claim that ‘metaphysics’ didn’t exist and therefore couldn’t be used to analyze or criticize their agendas and their demands.

And then the Republicans decided that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander: they put the same scam into the service of the rich and of a repressive governmental intrusion into the private life and civil culture of the nation.

Not that the ‘revolutions’ hadn’t already been doing the same thing, creating the eerie American revenant of fascist and Communist intrusions into the life of the citizenry, the better to control hearts and minds.

But – of course – ‘only in a good cause’ … as if any dedicated Italian Fascist or Nazi or Bolshevik or Maoist ever got up in the morning and said ‘Today let’s frak up the world and everybody in it’. Phooey, they all got up convinced that they were doing ‘the right thing’, a ‘good thing’, and had Heaven’s or History’s – or at least The Leader’s – warrant for whatever bits of the dark side had to be embraced that day, in order to ‘do whatever it takes’ to drag the lumpish world a few steps further into its bright future.

You may need a 'revolution' in a dictatorship. But you don't need it in a functioning democracy. The country and the American people did not deserve what the Dems did to them - inviting 'revolution' in for the Party's own political purposes. Now public discourse is debauched and - can it be a coincidence? - this country has the highest imprisonment rates of any country in the world or in history, and - yoooo hoooo! - almost all of them male, which is to say 'men'.

What did Wilder’s and Lubitsch’s Ninotchka say to her counterparts? “The show trials are a great success, comrades; from now on there will be fewer but better Russians!” Well, from now on there will be poorer Americans … whether they are better off, let alone whether they are ‘better’ , is a question which will be answered in future episodes. So stay tuned, to see if – Mother of God – this is the end of Little Rico.

Meanwhile a government so debauched by its servility to a cockeyed metaphysics, while denying the validity of any decently coherent metaphysics, now has the warrant of both Left and Right to go forth and invade any nation that might be sitting on enough cash to fund the spendthrift spree of the past decades. In ‘civilian life’, on ‘Main Street’, folks like that are called ‘bandits’ and dealt with accordingly. And not just in Hometown, USA, but in any decent human community on the planet. We’re still in a great Western like ‘The Magnificent Seven’, only now – half a century later – Americans are in the Eli Wallach role. Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall’s.

Whether to get oil, to make the world ‘safe for Democracy’, or to make a country safe for this or that cultural agenda … what’s the difference? And should We be surprised if a country chooses to screw itself up rather than become the doormat for international bank-robbery and cultural deconstruction on a ‘world-class’ scale? A woman in a soldier’s uniform holding a male naked on a leash … the equivalent of political gold in Our domestic politics, the radical feminist (and eerily lesbian) damp-dream of a world where ‘men’ are beasts fit only for servitude and degradation … that photo will haunt Our every effort to gain ‘the trust’ of other peoples of the world and keep a seat at their table. What plays to the ‘base’ over here will – the hot ironies! – ensure resistance to the glorious American agenda unto the latest generation and the Latter Day.

James talks about old Nazis after the war, who “could not resist telling television reporters how sad it was to see a new generation of young people who believed in nothing and had no respect for values, because they had never done anything hard and clean … [those old men] remembered their lives as a crusade.”

This observation bespeaks a reality wayyyy too complicated for current American grade-school conceptions of what makes the world go ‘round. It’s William James’s ‘moral equivalent of war’ problem with a vengeance. How to live one’s life unto its fullest and furthest capacities? How to push one’s very self to its most ultimate (and glorious) limits? How to ‘get the most out of’ your life and your own self? How to ‘make a difference’? How to maximize that?

The Nazis and Italian Blackshirts considered themselves far more vitally involved in life than the intellectuals who ‘merely’ read books and trafficked in ‘ideas’. But they also considered themselves far more vitally human and ‘engaged’ than the flappers and the louche generation that staggered out from under the horror of World War One with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, looking for one boozy party after the next and trusting no one who valued sobriety. The Bolsheviks considered themselves more genuinely human and far more authentically ‘Russian’ than the ‘bourgeois’ who had jobs, raised children, and conducted life as decently as might be in this vale of tears.

The fey but intelligent Walter Pater had said that his ideal of full humanity was to “burn with a hard, gem-like flame”, perhaps recoiling from his own inconsistency and lack of an emotional (even spiritual) center. The ‘true’ Brownshirt, Blackshirt, and Bolshevik embraced the ‘hardness’ and the ‘gem-like’ purity.

But it wasn’t enough. Not hardly.

And the ideals of Europe’s old Christendom could have told them that. James quotes Friedell: “Mankind in the Christian era possesses one advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience.” (p.242). You can only access ‘conscience’ by acknowledging that there is a Law – written in your heart but coming from Somewhere Else – that you cannot violate without somehow also violating yourself. It’s that ‘element’ which provides the trellis (capital justified in this case: Trellis) that keeps all your determination and dedication and zeal from bursting forth wildly, crushing truth and integrity and justice and charity and, inevitably, other people’s rights and lives.

Without ‘conscience’ and its ‘Law’ all human energy goes wild, barbarically wild. And that barbarism need not appear unwashed and slavering like a Victorian ink-sketch of Attila the Hun or a pop-eyed histrionic with a funny moustache and hair flopping down over his eye. It can appear dressed rather nice, speaking calmly and confidently from the highest human precincts: ‘Well, we’ll just have to embrace the dark side’.

Nor need it be a Brownshirt screaming about “unlebenswurdiges Leben”; it could be a young female remarking over drinks that she can’t let her life be thrown off by a “discarded bundle of cells” that she one day “discovered” as if by inadvertence inside her body. Ach. A cell here, a cell there … after a while … **

So, James notes, it soon became clear to Friedell in those awful days of the 1930s in Germany that “Christianity was in for a comprehensive rewrite, the main aim being to jettison its moral encumbrances, of which bad conscience was the most burdensome”. (p.242) That should not be unfamiliar to Us.

Frighteningly, the ideals of Christianity have been under assault – ferociously – from both Left and Right in this country for decades. From the Left, knowingly, to jettison the moral encumbrances that obstruct ‘liberation’ and some sort of ‘full equality’ that winds up assaulting Life and lives, although only in the service of a revolutionary ‘good’ that must be acknowledged and accepted here and now without delay. From the Right, unknowingly, in the pursuit of a ‘purity’ and ‘zeal’ that seeks to flood human imperfection with an irresistible force of ‘good’ here and now without delay.

“Even if the Nazis had stayed where they belonged, at the fringes of politics instead of at its centre …” (p.242). But of course, that Our problem too. Forty years ago, as desperate as a Weimar government fearful for its own existence, the Democrats invited the most radical and revolutionary elements into the very center of Our democratic polity, and thereby through everything out of balance (not a good thing to do in a large aircraft flying at altitude).

It wasn’t the validity of the agendas and the false numbers and fake studies and the cockeyed metaphysics of no-metaphysics … it wasn’t the strength and validity of all that which ‘justified’ the sudden irruption of all those numerous agendas into the center of Our national life. It was that the Democrats – without actually admitting it – simply threw their entire weight behind what they saw as their political life-preserver, the radical Left (nothing ‘liberal’ about it at all). Which seems as fecklessly self-defeating as the struggling democracy of Weimar making common cause with the radical Right in order to keep itself going, sort of like inviting in the vampire to protect you against the wolf.

And the Political Correctness that then stifled all intelligent deliberation so as to prevent any ‘obstruction’ to the realization of the agendas and demands … you won’t keep a democracy for very long once you’ve taken that route.

We’ve been on that road for forty years. Wandering in that desert. Now according to one Narrative, things should start to look up about now. But then, in the cock-eyed metaphysics of no-metaphysics, The People can expect no help from … Somewhere Else. They will be urged to stick with ‘the revolution’ . The revolution which after all this time (like the Communism from which it drew so much of its method) has now calcified into its own ‘nomenklatura’, its own aristocracy and big-shots, its own string-pullers and puppeteers, all of whom are doing very well, thank you, and – more acutely – really don’t want things to change and don’t want ‘light’ to be shone into darknesses that have been embraced. Why cry over eggs that had to be broken to make the Great Omlette? Why dig up all the bodies? They’re dead so let’s stick to ‘the living’ and not worry about anything else – only the living count. (An eerily modern bit of advice, no?)

But there is a Somewhere Else. And the dead – here and everywhere – cry out to that Realm from the ground. Because in some other Place the dead are still very much alive. And they know.

Conscience can hear those voices. Courage must answer them.

NOTES

*History, of course, is dynamic. This means that once you have gotten yourself into a mess, and when you finally get around to taking measures against your previous area of mistake to get yourself out of the mess, all of History's other 'areas' will have moved on, so that when you finally do get the particular mess somehow resolved, you will not be returning to your original condition since the rest of that original condition will have 'moved on'. So '1999' or '1959' ... they aren't coming back and nobody is going back to them.

**For a stunning discussion by a young woman, having recently undergone the procedure, of how she’s shocked that “even smart, liberal men are freaked out by abortion” when she tells them, over drinks, that she wouldn’t let “the uterine equivalent of minor knee-surgery” or “a discarded bundle of cells” interfere with her life just because she “had been careless with [her] pill intake”, see here. There is something of a Brownshirt callowness to it.

Nor am I consoled by the thought that this is a ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ and therefore rare position among young women.

First of all, there’s no reason to think that it is and some substantial reason to think that it may be rather the norm, especially among the college-educated ‘elites’.

And second, it was not the ‘middle of the road’ aspect of feminism that was embraced into law and policy, laws and policies that are still very much on the books.

In this I am not voicing an anti-feminist concern; this is an anti-Brownshirt concern.

FIRST RECTIFY

Over at ‘The American Prospect’ Ann Friedman is running a play with which We should all be familiar. (“Don’t Call it a Culture War”, here).

Her specific topic is “LGBT rights”. Specifically, she doesn’t think it’s the right way to proceed – letting the issue be ‘labeled’ as (just another) front in the “culture war”. After all, quoting Peter Beinart’s illumination over at ‘The New Republic’, “culture war no longer sells”.

So what We got Us here is a problem in ‘defining’ and – perhaps in essence – marketing (Goebbels got much of his propaganda theory, We recall, from the ground-breaking American marketing whiz, Edward Bernays). The stuff has since gone to college – or to Academia – where it has been washed, waxed and re-badged as ‘defining the narrative’ or ‘defining the frame’. To maintain control of the narrative is a primary objective of all ‘Advocates’. The product itself – the idea, the agenda, the grounds for the idea, its workability, its costs, its consequences, and – increasingly – its performance over time … all these are secondary, if not utterly irrelevant. Packaging is all. Sort of like how Detroit (a large city in the upper Midwest, known in happier times as the seat and capital of the American and the world auto industry) has been conducting its business for a couple-four decades now.

This has been a major milestone on Our road to serious disconnection from substance and reality and, in consequence, from real, life-giving politics in a democracy. It’s all a matter of defining and keeping-up appearances. After a while, it was theorized, people would ‘get it’, or at least ‘get used to it’, and so – now a familiar piece of the national furniture – nobody would think (or dare) to object. The agenda will have established itself as a ‘fact on the ground’ – that’s worked so well for the Israeli ‘realm’ these past sixty years.

Our own thirty or forty-year experience with the thing, on multiple ‘fronts’, has shown the theory to be somewhat insufficient to account for events. But We aren’t supposed to notice that; consequences are ‘oppressive’ insofar as they ‘limit’ or complicate what should be clear as a bell to any correct-thinking citizen. Vietnam and Iraq – wars that destroyed far more than they accomplished, in the recoil as well as in the projectile – come to mind, by perverse coincidence.

As I’ve said before, the solution to that problem involved the upbringing of numerous cadres of children and youth who don’t remember how democratic politics are supposed to work, and who – worse – have been taught not to think and to analyze but merely to hold the ‘correct’ opinions and direct their still molten emotions only at ‘correct’ targets. And it also involved the importation of far too many immigrants who never knew, whose own original political experiences make anything here look ‘good’, and who are simply happy to be ‘here’ and are willing to let it go at that.

Oy.

She proposes to her readers that “we’ll continue to lose until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights [as] a civil-rights issue [italics hers] situated firmly within the context of other civil-rights struggles, not an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy.” She immediately adds, parenthetically, that “(To a lesser degree, the same goes for abortion rights.)”

Well.

She brings out clearly and succinctly the problem that has bethumped Us for lo these many decades since about July 10, 1965. The first-phase of the ‘Negro’ civil-rights movement was significant in two ways. First, there was and had been general national public consensus (the Southrons and the Klan-minded excepted) that “all men are created equal”; the Founders had only grudgingly accepted the continued existence of race-slavery as the price of getting the country Founded at all, Congress had outlawed it in the early 1800s, and then there had been that Civil War thing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s national attention and a long-simmering outrage was focused on effecting the political rights that had been ‘won’ in that Civil War, only to be undermined over the course of the next 90 years.

Ensuring that ‘the Negro’ had full civil rights as had been promised was to bring to fulfillment a long-standing commitment that the country had made, had bled copiously for, and had – with too much moral lassitude – allowed to be undermined by Jim Crow. Just about ‘everybody’ agreed on that.

Second, Martin Luther King’s ‘southern civil rights movement’ (see my immediately previous Post) was a unitive call to all Americans to fulfill a national commitment and in doing so to participate in a restoration, a ‘rebirth’ and ‘rededication’ to what had been the spiritual integrity of the American ideal.

It was a powerful and life-giving national experience.

Indeed, as even Richard Rorty points out in “Achieving Our Country”, the ‘old Left’ of the 1930s and prior appealed to a ‘fraternal’ unity, and the efforts for workers’ rights, as even the Progressive legal struggles for child-labor laws, were unitive (the employers being the only objectors). And King, as noted, appealed to not only a common American-hood but to a spiritual and ideal communion in which all Americans might come together (the Southrons excepting themselves).

This is hell and gone from what has been the standard tone of the post-’65 Revolutions of the Identities. Even where – as Friedman’s article exemplifies – a connection is drawn to ‘civil rights’, it is a tactical ploy, and precisely does not call to any broad and deep American unity, and precisely does not seek to speak-forth its agenda and cause, but rather seeks to clothe them in misleading euphemisms and impose their objectives by ‘spin’ and stampede and end-runs around that American unity which to the Identities does not exist and cannot exist in the first place. This is not a democratic movement in any substantive sense of the word. Some serious rectification is in order here.

That follow-on phase of the civil-rights movement embraced i) a negative, demanding and divisive agenda (not a little redolent of ‘ressentiment’) and ii) a de-facto revolutionary method of getting those demands met, a method which by definition (‘revolutionary’) eschewed the slow consensus-building of a democratic politics for an immediate and imposed submission to their will and program.

Nor did the demands of that program enjoy any wide grounding in public awareness.

Worse, other ‘movements’ – Second Wave Feminism the primary one – embraced the same revolutionary method, seeking also – as the later phase of the black civil-rights movement – to establish without delay their own demands, most of which did not enjoy broad public acceptance. And especially prominent among those ‘demands’ was the right to ‘abortion on demand’ (as it was first known and as, alas, it is now being plumped these many decades later); and this ‘abortion’ was cast as a ‘civil right’, as if it were ‘merely’ a follow-on to the rectification of black civil political rights around which the King movement had coalesced, black and white together, male and female, Americans all.

As Confucius would have advised, one must first accomplish a ‘rectification of names’: the issues have to be correctly identified before any rational assessment could be made as to what might be reasonably accomplished in regard to them. This is akin to Sun-Tzu’s advice and to general military strategy and command principles that you have to know what you’re facing before you engage in any action (Vietnam and Iraq anyone?).

But ‘rational assessment’ and ‘reasonable accomplishment’ through the processes of a democratic politics were not the route selected by the second-phase black civil-rights movement, nor any of the follow-on movements. Instead, imposed-action-from-above was embraced, with a concomitant democracy-dulling ‘valorization’ of political correctness, foregoing public deliberation and debate, out of a fear of being labeled (labeling, again) ‘insensitive’, ‘racist’, and later ‘genderist’ and just plain stupid enough to not ‘get it’.

Rectifying names was not on the menu; ‘real’ liberals didn’t do it, nor did ‘real’ citizens.

Thus the matters of more-than-political equality, matters of just what the government would guarantee and how much the government could guarantee and how far the government could go in enforcing such guarantees – all huge questions worthy of and in need of great, wide, careful deliberation – were simply ‘imposed’, as Lenin had done, by ‘elites’ who very much did ‘get it’. The choice presented to the citizen was ‘you’d better get-it, or you’re going to get it, and if nothing else just shut-up and mind your own business’. It was clearly not a programme designed to enhance or respect democratic process. And how it came to be the standard operating procedure of ‘liberalism’ in this country is a book crying to be written.

Certainly, the phrase and term ‘reproductive justice’ makes no sense on its face, nor the associated mantra of ‘full equality’. They are obviously ‘names’ in dire need of rectification. But that is precisely what the proponents of those phrases don’t want to happen. After all, that could lead to swamps of ‘moral’ controversy – and that’s not only going to slow the revolutionary achievement down, but it’s – did We not know? – useless to mention ‘morality’ because that’s a private thing and the civil-rights of having one’s ‘reproductive justice’ and ‘reproductive freedom’ is a public thing. Anything less or otherwise is simply ‘oppression’. And a ‘denial of civil-rights’, just like – We are meant to unthinkingly infer – slavery and Jim Crow were a denial of the civil rights of America’s black population.

And the fact that forty-years of imposition has not dulled public doubt? And the fact that decades of this and that ‘plan’ being imposed and still not working even unto the present day? And the fact that there appear some very possible unforeseen consequences that have undermined and deranged the very fundaments of Our democratic politics?

Correct-thinking ‘liberals’ do not allow themselves to be distracted or detained by such matters, it would seem.

And in consequence of the ‘liberals’ having become something else indeed – whether they intended to or not – the Republicans and ‘conservatives’ cobbled together a Frankenstein’s monster of a coalition uniting greed-crazed corporate wealth and God-haunted fundamentalists and Southern-besotted militarist ‘patriots’ . The wealthy were allowed to pull all their old tricks to enrich themselves on the backs of the national peasantry and create an oligarchy; the Fundamentalists saw themselves as subjects of King Jesus for whom a ‘democracy’ was merely a polite and traditional form with no substance; and the militarists saw the citizen’s only true role as being to support the military exploits of the nation. Something for everyone: the wealthy controlled the military-corporate complex, the Fundies could baptize and deputize the military into God’s righteous right-arm; and the militarists would be given benefit of cash and clergy by the other members of the axis.

Now I don’t know what LGBT ‘rights’ are at issue here. I can agree with Richard Rorty – but only for a very short distance – that the past decades have gone some way towards making the country less “sadistic” (his term, not mine); it is incumbent upon a Citizen to respect other Citizens. Whether and to what extent ‘rights’ are involved is a legitimate – and pressing – matter for examination.

But Friedman proposes that the label ‘civil rights’ “is less divisive … the very act of involving the term ‘culture war’ signals that we think something is controversial when, in fact, equal rights should be the furthest thing from it.” What this constitutes is an effort not to rectify the name but to use a deceptive name in its place. Just what “equal rights” means is something that has to be explored.

As best can be gleaned from the abortion movement’s dictionary, “equal rights” means that the government is bound and beholden to cancel out the male ‘advantage’ – imposed, as it were, by evolutionary Nature itself – of not having to be ‘stuck’ with the results of having sex. Now that’s quite a bit to digest; is even the U.S. government in a position to be doing such a thing? Is it even wise? But then on top of that, it turns out very quickly that the means of ensuring such “equality” is by letting the female abort the human life she carries if she so decides – which for quite some time was considered a primitive and uncivilized act in most of the world’s advanced civilizations.

I am not taking a position on the matters here; but I think it can be clearly seen that these matters require a huge lot of thought and deliberation. There are monstrous questions here, not excluding Our regressing as a civilization and a society. A little attention must be paid, surely.

Is the denial of ‘civil rights’ worth the wait? Well, I’m not sure We’re dealing with ‘civil rights’ here – certainly I don’t easily equate a black citizen’s right to vote and to be not-lynched with a female’s nullification of evolution’s plan for sustaining the species. I’m open to learn more, but please don’t try to stampede me and to do it under the false-name strategy that it’s not a stampede but rather a long-delayed redress of civil-rights.

So this is not quite so simply a matter of “fundamental civil-rights” as opposed to “a minor culture-war skirmish”, as Friedman sums up. Although her tone reminds me of Justice Scalia’s recent plaint that folks should just forget ‘Bush v. Gore’ and ‘move on’. Surely Mussolini, Goering, and Al Capone sought to make the same sort of case on their own behalf – and Bush, Cheney and a raft of others may do yet. Although not the captain of the ‘Titanic’, who had the decency to accept responsibility for his stunningly fatal frak-up; he, lest it be forgotten, was a ‘male’ and raised as a ‘Victorian male’ at that – such a fuddy-duddy, whose example – some might bray – need not detain Us here. I would disagree.

And I point out – not irrelevantly – that We have yet to experience the full consequences of the damage done to Our integrity and viability as a moral society by indulging in the falsely-labeled invasive war for WMD, and further by subjecting Our troops for so long to a soul-shredding darkling frakfest reeking of failure if not outright defeat. When those troops come home, as they inevitably will, what profound wounds will they bring into Our midst, unseen even more than clearly observable, which will rightfully demand Our attention even as they present profound challenges to Our traditional sense of Ourselves as a decent and civilized society and culture? Our too-easy and too-quick actions, taken on the basis of hugely un-rectified ‘names’, now promise vast and unseen consequences.

I will do everything in my poor power to respect – as fully as possible – LGBT citizens and female citizens. But I’d like the respect of being allowed to find and evaluate the truth, and deliberate as to what is workable. I do not want to see ‘them’ penned up like cattle and treated like sheep; I would expect in return not to be stampeded like cattle nor treated as a ‘dumb’ sheep.

And We all will see what can be done.

Which, nowadays, is a very pressing question on so many levels of Our common life and weal.

ASSORTED RELATED THINGS

There are a couple of things that have come to me.

I’ve used the ‘ship’ metaphor often, many times ‘Titanic’ and other times just ‘ship’ in general. There’s more to clarify there.

If Our commonwealth is indeed a ‘ship’, what are We the People?

Not ‘passengers’ because passengers rely utterly on the captain and crew and the seaworthiness of the vessel, they have no knowledge of anything having to do with operating a ship or voyaging on the open ocean. And of course, they are completely at the orders of the captain or crewmembers, especially if things get rough.

Not ‘crew’ because the crew is completely at the orders of the captain.

Ships are – famously – not democracies.

So what are We then? I’d say that in the Constitutional vision The People are the ‘owners’. They paid for the ship, and they’re making the voyage aboard the ship. They may not know all there is to know about sailing, and they shouldn’t be up on the bridge day in and day out giving orders or getting in the way, but if there’s a major decision, then the captain is bound to consult them. It’s a bit of a balancing act, but then again the entire marvelous Rube Goldberg contraption of the Constitution is nothing if not a balancing act.

Nor should the ‘owners’ feel particularly cowed because unlike the captain and his officers and the crew they don’t get to wear snazzy uniforms. Their role is different, but the fact that it doesn’t involve gold braid and colored ribbons and a big hat doesn’t make their role less important – and a mature ‘owner’ will realize that.

Second, ‘fear’ and ‘emergency’ is not the best baseline emotional condition for conducting a vessel at sea. Nor is it the best way to conduct a democracy or a democratic republic – that curious but not bizarre hybrid that the Founders constructed and bequeathed to Us . Yes, the Founders allowed for special powers that would come into play in the declaration of a war – that monstrously weighty and grave decision that should never be entered upon lightly nor without the full comprehension and approval of the Branches and – it is to be hoped – The People.

But ‘war’ is a dynamic monster with a will all its own. Lincoln was saying more than anybody wanted to really comprehend when in his Second Inaugural he observed that “Each side looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding”. For Americans today, dulled by decades of advertising (You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! The amazing slicer and dicer!) Lincoln’s use of that heart-stopping “astounding” may slide beneath the radar.

But We cannot allow it. War is dynamic and its results do indeed “astound”; not ‘amaze’, not ‘wow’, not ‘impress’, but “astound”. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged defines it as “to shock with amazement, astonish greatly, shock with wonder or surprise”. And the adjective ‘astounding’ is defined as “stunningly surprising”. If you’re going to open the gates of a cage the living content of which is capable of ‘overwhelming’, ‘stunning’, shocking’ … well, you want to make sure you’ve thought things through.

Once it’s out, you can never go back. And even if you win, you can never go back. The America of 1865 could never go back to the ‘simpler’ time of 1861, the America of 1919 could never go back to 1914, the American of 1945 could never go back to 1941. And that isn’t simple self-indulgent nostalgia. Veterans in large numbers return, having changed or been changed; there is an awareness – no matter how buried – in the national consciousness that ‘things were done’ – yes, perhaps ‘had to be done’, but ‘done’ nonetheless.

And, ever and always, power of all sorts - financial, bureaucratic, prosecutorial, political, and cultural – has inevitably flowed to Washington, perhaps in waves that will not recede even after a President yields his wartime powers . Which Presidents now rarely seem to do.

Surely, while the Vietnam antiwar movement sought to curb the power of the post-WW2 presidency, the Identities were licking their lips, looking to capture that power for their own ‘liberational’ purposes. The Sixties were indeed troubled waters, deep beneath the surface. That both elements became identified with ‘liberalism’ has done nothing to clarify Our largest national matters, and the Democratic Party has fairly ripped its hull apart trying to navigate in that ominous sea – a process which the Republicans did nothing to prevent.

Third, there is a huge danger in taking the Civil War as a definitive embodiment of American Constitutional process at its best. The Civil War was precisely a failure of Our politics; the elected officials and citizens of those generations were unable to resolve the huge question of slavery in any way that was acceptable to all sides. “And the war came”.

It was in its way a hugely fortunate war for the Union: the elimination of slavery was a cause that later generations –even more than the generations of the War itself – could feel ‘right’ about; and certainly, the cause of ‘the Union’ (the logo of the most recent Presidential debate – “The Union and the Constitution Forever” – dates from those years) was a powerfully worthy one.

But it was also subtly but greatly dangerous. You could get the idea that anytime you were opposed, the situation was just a ‘replay’ of the Civil War situation, and the Army and Navy were to be called out forthwith to trample out some evil vintage, coming with the glory of God and a little tipsy on the grapes of wrath (served to them in paper cups by a Fundamentalist chaplainry itself drunk with the Deputization of God Himself). Oy.

Fourth, ‘fear’ or ‘outrage’ have always been necessary to goad post-Civil War Americans into war. McKinley had to use it to start his war with Spain, slyly focusing American outrage on the Spanish in Cuba while he made his move to occupy the ‘enduring base’ of the Philippines; Wilson had to do it – against a Germany that was trying equally shrewdly to avoid giving him a pretext (they remembered what McKinley had pulled against Spain less than twenty years before) and on behalf of an England and France who were equally aware of what McKinley had pulled and fervently and fondly hoped that Wilson had the same shrewd cojones as his predecessor; FDR may not have expected so bold a tactical stroke as the strike at Pearl Harbor but he was expecting the Japanese to strike somewhere (alas, We should know for sure, but when the statutory 50-years had passed in 1991, the Brits opened all their 1941 files except those for the last three pre-Pearl Harbor months of communications between Churchill and FDR, which – why would they do it, do you think? – they sealed for another fifty years, 2041).

Johnson had to fabricate an excuse for the U.S. involvement in Vietnam with the Tonkin Gulf non-attack of 1964; and then there was 9-11, which was not an attack by an enemy nation at all.

But the American People responded differently to 9-11. They went all-out for war – against … well, whomever, or –rather – whoever. And whatever. It’s hard to say how deeply and widely: the media were pretty consolidated into corporate employees by then so who knows how many Americans disagreed but figured – shades of Germany in ’33 and ’34, that it was best to keep their thoughts to themselves. The Germans called that sort of thing ‘interior exile’ – and nobody in these parts nowadays knows just how many such ‘exiles’ there are, especially now that the option that existed in 1980 – switching to the other Party – really means nothing any longer.

Why? It’s not just because of the twin-towers and so forth. No, I think that there was still a strong sense of war-as-a-last-resort in the country. But a corporate media that had already been battening on a diet of inciting ‘fear’, cooperating eagerly thereby with both the National Security State and the Identities behind the National Nanny State, were simply too far gone down that dark road to suddenly stop and become sober and skeptical, especially in the face of the ‘patriotic’ demands that the government claimed were flowing like a river of wrathful grapes, demanding an assault on the oilfields of Iraq, planned by a President, Vice-President, and Secretary of State who were – didn’t We know that? – former oil corporation executives.

And folks were kind of used to being ‘fearful’ and ‘anxious’ and so much so that ‘stampedes’ didn’t really look like ‘stampedes’ anymore; rather than quickly proving themselves to be moments of irrational emotion and great danger they had come to look like liberating moments of extraordinary ‘outrage’ that - like the Civil War – stamped out this or that designated field of evil grapes. After all, it was a fight for survival – ‘us’ against ‘them’ – where We were (somehow) both ‘victim’ and ‘avenger’ against evil perps.

But American democracy and the Constitution and the Branches were not meant to function optimally in a state of continuous ‘emergency’, in a situation of sustained ‘fight for survival’. ‘Survival’ is an overriding End which might justify any Means whatsoever (this is the conundrum Israel has set for itself by claiming that it is ever under an ‘existential’ threat). And if one drives too long in the gear of End-Justifies-Means, the transmission’s gonna go; the vehicle wasn’t designed to drive in that clunky gear for long periods.

Human beings – soldiers and citizens – cannot for long operate in that ‘gear’ without seriously deranging themselves.

That’s why the Identities’ sustained agitprop seeking to highlight and incite ‘fear’ and ‘outrage’ in Our democracy was hugely dangerous and toxic. And to seek to incite such ‘fear’ and ‘outrage’ against other Americans … well, you can see why no nation in the throes of an extended bout of this sort of thing is going to be entirely well. Perhaps not entirely well ever again.

So here We are now.

With flu season – perhaps even a global pandemic – upon Us, the national immune system that protects ‘maturity’ and ‘common cause’ is hugely compromised after decades of abuse. We may wind up on an ER gurney as a ‘train-wreck’.

Lastly, I can’t help but note that ‘deregulation’ came along only after decades of ‘deconstruction’. I need to give this more thought, but just on first look it seems there’s a connection: having ‘deconstructed’ ‘character’, ‘virtue’, ‘justice’, ‘law’, ‘responsibility’, civic-mindedness and ‘maturity’ (don’t be fooled by the last 25-years’ worth of everybody-is-a-professional), finally the radical elements of ‘liberation’ had punctured and undermined those retaining and restraining walls designed to curb the eternal human weaknesses and vices and Shape the human energies.

And suddenly – can it be coincidence? – there arises a generation of lawyers and bankers and financiers and assorted butter-greasy sharpies that has no character, no virtue, no civic-mindedness, no sense of sin or fear of justice, and – despite huge expense accounts and salaries and perks – no maturity and no real human Shape. And they meet with a generation of politicians equally conformed to this brave new world, and together they all erect the deconstruction of limitation into a Plan, called ‘deregulation’ – which is a classy way of rephrasing the ‘60s mantra about ‘being freeeeeee’ by not trusting anyone over 30 who might ‘know better’ but who –reeely reeely – ‘just don’t get it’.

And here We are.

Don’t pass the popcorn. We might need to store it up for the winter.