CONSERVATISM AND ITS DEATH

Sam Tannenhaus has a piece on ‘The New Republic’ site: “Conservatism is Dead”, in the February 18, 2009 issue.

I’d mentioned not long ago that there is a movement among formerly ‘liberal’ (and I don’t think it’s an accurate moniker) publications that had since Bush’s or even Reagan’s accession cozied up to the Right: now they’re trying to make nice.

In this instance TNR will demonstrate its bona-fides by declaring ‘conservatism’ dead .

Tannenhaus mentions “the harshly punitive ‘culture wars’ waged against liberal ‘elites’”. I hold not brief for the Right, but how anybody can read the writings of the Second Wave in its heyday, or the extensively (if incoherently) laid out plans of John Rawls for ‘elites’ and their judicial allies to trump constitutional rights … how can anybody read that and not imagine that ‘war’ was implemented, if not declared, by the ‘liberal elites’ (not my term) long before somebody on the Right in the early 1990s actually adopted Bismarck’s ‘culture war’ phrase and tacked it onto what had been underway here for almost a quarter of a century? All those Reagan Democrats started voting for Reagan as early as ’76, and certainly ’80 … so they, at least, realized something was up all the way back then.

Anyhoo, my main purpose here is not to refute this or that in Tannenhaus, whose article offers much food for thought.

He mentions Edmund Burke, whose conservatism was based “not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies”. Two points come to mind.

First, I’m not sure it’s the ‘ideology’ that’s the problem; I think it’s the ‘ideological mindset’ in human beings that will raise up any set of ideas as a conceptual Golden Calf and thence engage in the most regressive and primitive rigidities and immaturity of thought (and action, oy) in order to sustain their Bubble as to that ideology’s omnipotence. Inside every human there is a reptilian and primitive element waiting to be allowed to be given the steering wheel and take itself out on the highway. Inside every society there is a herd waiting to be allowed to shuffle around in a bunch and perhaps stampede.

This is not a proof for the fatuity of a democratic politics, or a genuine conservatism, or a genuine liberalism, but rather a proof for the importance of a democratic politics. If a deliberative citizenry does not support itself as a commonality and its individual members, by its adherence to reasonable, deliberative processes, then it will undermine itself even as it allows its individual members to yield to more primitive processes.

Second, while ‘ideology’ is indeed something to be avoided, that does not mean that human beings, or a polity, especially a democratic polity, can dispense with an overarching and undergirding consensus, a web of (provisionally but purposely ‘privileged’) ‘answers’ to those burning questions at the heart of the human enterprise, which lie beyond the scope of governmental policy or ‘scientific’ proof. Perhaps, in America’s case, built upon the Christian (not in the Fundamentalist but in the classic sense) worldview.

If the citizens as human beings are not grounded in some Beyond, then they will be at the mercy of any ‘government’ and its ‘elites’ (of Left or Right or both). A citizenry cannot function as The People if it is not first grounded in something Beyond the government it is supposed to manage. If citizens are not grounded in an adequately comprehensive Sense of their own nature as human beings, then they cannot with any hope of success function as The People. Hence the de-Godding pursued by the Left for the past umpty years has proven even more lethal than the repellent ‘Godding’ pushed by the god-addled, powers-that-be worshipping Fundamentalist Ascendancy.

Tannenhaus notes acutely that “most of the most sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor”.

I’ve always been suspicious of persons who were once rabidly ‘A’ and then suddenly were rabidly ‘anti-A’ without any pause for serious inward thought. The Nazi judge, Roland Freisler, great proponent of ‘the law at war’ – that concept that he used to justify doing whatever the regime wanted – has always frightened me: he had been a rabid Communist one month and the next was a rabid Nazi, and such a profound and utter change, instantaneous, gave him not pause for thought or doubt at all. People like that, even more than ‘revolutionaries’, seem to me to be possessed of a profound interior moltenness that betokens unboundaried and rabid ‘enthusiasm’ for whatever catches their devotion.

And then of course there are all those first-generation neocons of the 1960s who were 'former' Communists and Leftists who suddenly became avowed right-wingers and 'conservatives', bringing their 'revolutionary' mindset and heartset to the Republican-conservative camp.

Such persons as Tannenhaus describes are also indeed ‘revolutionaries’ – by temperament. They ‘need’ revolutionary activity in order to feel alive; they need to see themselves as ‘being in’ a revolution in order to feel any meaning or purpose; they aren’t reluctant revolutionaries – adults with otherwise successful lives who must for a while put away such things for the sake of a cause. Rather, the ‘temperamental revolutionary’ needs to structure all experience as ‘revolution’ – with him or herself involved in the thick of it – simply in order to maintain a coherent sense of self and of life-purpose.

Too many of this type of folks are not healthy for a democratic politics. And for a democracy to ‘valorize’ and ‘privilege’ this type – under the aegis of Left or of Right – is not going to end well. And for a democracy to de-valorize less arbitrary and ‘excitable’ types as insufficiently ‘sensitive’ or insufficiently ‘patriotic’ is also not going to end well at all.

So you can see where things went seriously awry in the mid-Sixties: both the non-conformist sex-and-luhv googoos of the Flowery counterculture and the fire-eyed ‘revolutionaries’ of the SDS (whose female contingent later split and went into feminism proper), held themselves as far more ‘alive’ than the fuddy-duddies of the ‘50s and before. And they both did not so much refuel a flagging democracy as provide a violent explosive super-burst that made it impossible to steer the thing at all. But that was OK – ‘steering’ was for fogies. It was about this time that America, I would say, ceased to be a ‘serious’ nation. And, really, how can it be said that We have since recovered?

So from the 'Left' you had revolutionary mindset, heartset, praxis, and agenda masquerading as 'liberal' and as 'liberation', and on the Right you had the former Reds of the 1930s with their revolutionary mindset, heartset, praxis, and agenda. What chance did a dem,ocratic politics have once that toxic synergy and feedback-loop got started?

Tannenhaus also notes Burke’s insightful point that “The task of the statesman is to maintain equilibrium between the two principles of conservation and correction”. Alas, the Dems were in no condition to maintain equilibrium, vote-addled as they were in the later Sixties, and by the time they realized just what it meant to be supporting ‘revolution’, it was too late to back out.

Hence, in my vision of things, they took to pandering to the revolutionaries (and their Identities) while enwhoring themselves to the corporate biggies who paid into the PACs and who represented the only chance of keeping up at least the appearances of a functioning economy, especially since the postwar economic hegemony was fading by the early Seventies and nobody knew how to hang onto it or revive it. The Identities were given the Bubble of ‘the dream’, the corporate biggies were allowed to start running economic Bubbles, the citizenry were lulled with the trickle-down effect of these Bubbles, and the whole country was Bubble-icious for a couple of decades. And now at least one of those Bubbles has burst.

Which perhaps might start a trend. It is to be hoped.

“Movement politics” – the earlier euphemism for ‘revolutionary politics’ which was later replaced by Identity Politics – “most clearly defines itself not by what it years to conserve but by what it longs to destroy”. Yes. And this is not the spirit best suited to a democratic politics. Which is why We are seeing and feeling less and less democratic politics, and have been doing so for quite some time. If you get the sense that the trusty old institutions and processes you learned about from American history are no longer ‘working’, well – it’s true. But there’s no mystery about it: We no longer have a working democratic politics and working democratic institutions because ‘revolution’ and ‘movement politics’ became the order of the day decades ago.

And while few of the pols on Capitol Hill are ‘revolutionaries’, they are all pols and they have learned – several generations of them now – to ‘pander’ to ‘revolutionary dreams’ (even as they do whatever it takes to protect those corporate biggies who pay into the PACs).

Wanting to ‘destroy’ things is not something that occurs naturally in a democratic politics. It occurs in imperial politics and revolutionary politics … and so again We can see that democracy has been taking torpedoes on both sides for a long time now. And why it was so easy for this country to slide into its lethal frakkery on the Eastern Front: there was no ‘opposition’ because there was no opposition party, let alone anybody among the pols who still operated on ‘principles’, those things pooh-poohed both by chicken-hawk ‘realists’ and by the cadres of the Second Wave and their spawn. Feh.

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s self-assumption of the term “radical conservative” was not helpful. If he meant ‘radical’ in the classical, Latin sense – from the roots or fundamental – then he might have been OK, so long as he didn’t imagine that being so close to the ‘source’ deputized him to break any laws or principles of thought or decency in order to achieve his goals. But in any case, the word ‘radical’ by the mid-Sixties was simply a lazy way of saying ‘revolutionary’, and that was a reality nobody wanted to really face up to.

In that regard, I can’t help thinking of the movers and shakers of Germany there in the early ‘30s, barons and capitalists and business moguls and so forth, all convincing themselves that Hitler wouldn’t be so bad – even if he had been talking about ‘socialism’ and ‘revolution’ – because they could handle him, could manage him; ‘We’, said Franz von Papen, ‘are hiring him’. Yah. That worked so well.

Conservatism, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. pointed out, was originally concerned “for the social and moral costs of unchecked industrial capitalism”. It had a sense that government had a responsibility – one might almost say a God-given responsibility – to care for its people; in England, certainly, this was a characteristic charge assumed from the monarchy by the Parliamentary power as England’s political governance changed, and not a bad one. And as devious and shrewd as they were – Disraeli and Shaftesbury and others – they still held themselves as ‘Christian gentlemen’ and as responsible before God. Nor were those empty words.

We’ve come a long way. And not the good way. Instead, the Beltway. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

“Do the institutions of the state provide the bedrock of civil society?” This was the question the conservatives asked in the mid-Sixties. No doubt, humanity made great strides 10,000 years ago when it had sufficiently mastered the ability to provide food and shelter, and even a little extra; with those essential necessities provided, and the anxieties as to their lack receded into the background, amazing developments began to blossom.

So there is a sense in which the stable maintenance of necessities and the sustaining of both a sufficient stability to assure reliability and a sufficient flexibility to assure change safely, are necessary for the further flourishing of a society.

But those things are not sufficient in and of themselves to generate or nurture that flourishing. Human beings rely on their government, but they can neither be reduced to complete identification with their government or defined by their government.

The danger of the increasingly centralized and involved government is that it will get the idea that it is the source and origin of all its people’s lives. Instead of being their servant it will become their master.

How the Right is going to recapture the sense of responsibility before God for the moral and social welfare of the citizenry while retaining its clubby and cozy connections with the financial elites is as difficult a question as how the Left is going to seek better conditions for the whole citizenry without alienating the Identity bases with which it is now ensnared.

If neither Party is going to be able to solve its problem , then We are going to have to come up with another Party.

While We've still got a country.

DEEP-SIX THE ‘24’ MENTALITY

Jane Mayer has an excellent in-depth piece on the mentality behind the TV show “24” and its creator and driving force, one Joel Surnow (“Whatever It Takes”, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070219fa_fact_mayer). We are all in her debt. She has interviewed this fellow and drawn out the essentials of his ‘position’ and limned clearly his enterprise and what that enterprise sucks along in the vortex of its wake.

It becomes clear that he is presiding over a hugely profitable ‘show’. As with American corporations that found trade with Hitler’s Germany extremely profitable in the 1930s (with their engines, vehicles, communications, oil, raw materials, and production skills they provided him with the ‘blitz’ for his blitzkrieg), Surnow has a hard time conceiving of any serious downside to his enterprise.

Unlike those tough-minded, steel-souled moguls of America’s Industrial Age, however, Surnow needs to ‘feel good’ about what he does. And his efforts to justify himself and his program quickly reveal the level of his delusions and/or his duplicitousness.

It’s not enough that he’s happy that “the military loves our show” and that he’s “sold” the show to the Incumbency – “People in the Administration love the series too … It’s a patriotic show”. Not a whiff of concern as to what it means when you’ve been able to please a clientele the likes of the Incumbency. In today’s tenderly brutal America he has to feel ‘right’ – we might say, although not in the full Fundamentalist sense of ‘getting right with God’ … he’s still a denizen of Hollywood, after all.

How can he show the US government and its agents conducting extralegal and illegal torture week after week? “Isn’t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow, … that even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?” This is the key logical fallacy: that the present Moment is an extreme situation, and therefore extreme measures are called for. It is the ‘military’ approach: the objective is some sort of tangible Victory here and now – anything more ‘abstract’ can be finessed after you’ve won and you write the history.

Those ‘abstractions’ – as we are now seeing clearly – include Integrity, Truth, and Character and the ensuing challenge, the threat, is posed not only to individual military members and each of Us as Citizens, but also to our culture and to this Republic and all that it has come to represent to the hopes of humankind. Collateral losses, perhaps; acceptable. But the military point of view is short-sighted and operates in a selectively-envisioned, Flattened world, not the many-dimensioned vastnesses that are Life and History. The Neocons and the Fundies, like the Revolutionaries of the Identities who paved the way for them, have brought the proverbial knife to the existential gun-fight. And they have dragged the Republic along with them for the ride.

The worst-case scenario reminds us of the old legal dictum that hard cases make bad law. The rare hard case and such resolution as you may achieve in dealing with it … this is not a wise basis for making Law. But basing laws on ‘hard cases’ – which in our media age means vivid and gory cases – has been part of the gameplan of the several Revolutions of the Identities for decades, later to be co-opted by the National Crime State and most recently by the vision of the Neocon-Fundamentalist Imperial State. The turkey of the Left has come home to roost, now bulked-up and fortified by the Right and deployed in the service of “the dark side”, as the Great Vice aptly calls it.

And too, Surnow is sure, “torture works”. Certainly in his series it works just about every time it is deployed (except against our hero). And it is deployed just about every week, several times. He is certain about this, even when – amazingly – the Dean of West Point, a Brigadier General, comes out to LaLa-land with a cohort of experienced interrogation professionals to point out that torture most surely does not work out in the field, out in the real world, and to plead that Surnow stop giving folks such wrong ideas. Surnow is so “certain” about what he ‘knows’ that he cannot afford the time to meet with them, and deputes some underlings to listen politely and maybe scoop up some script points.

You’d think for a poor little Jewish kid whose father was a carpet salesman, and who considers himself a patriotic “conservative”, that an Army general coming all the way from West Point to visit him in his lavish Valley offices would be occasion to go into full red-carpet mode with plenty of photos and a couple of military knick-knacks for the mantel. But no. His hands go over his ears and he pulls the LaLa equivalent of loudly shouting nyah-nyah so he can’t hear what’s being said: he has a conference call with Roger Ailes of Fox News. Oooooh. Oy.

Those ‘hard cases’ however, are indeed justified – we are to understand. As one of Surnow’s staffers (who “has a law degree”) assures Mayer, the “Doctrine of Necessity” (whatever that may be) “says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm”. But “24” breaks the law regularly and frequently, weekly, and makes it seem like a good idea – indeed, like the only good idea.

There is also the thorny fact that the U.N. Convention Against Torture – ratified by the Senate in 1994 and thus possessing the force of Federal law – clearly specifies that “no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever … may be invoked as a justification of torture.” So 9-11 hasn’t “changed everything”? Sharply, that Convention accounts for all the excuses governments and tyrants have given for torture along the long bloody corridor of Time: war, the threat of war, impending political instability “or any other public emergency” … not much room left for justified torture in there; certainly the post-9-11 situation is covered. The ‘emergency’ of “exceptional circumstances” has undone Republics of far greater duration and experience than ours – Rome’s had been going on for a couple-three centuries, through all manner of profound military disasters, before Julius Caesar discovered an emergency that required his more efficient intervention and in effect invaded his own country, with doughty legions whose troops were loyal to him personally. And he – natch – was ‘doing it for Rome’.

But that type of talk is for a “law-school review article”, as one character puts down another who raises a moral and legal objection to some impending act of torture. It’s amazing how these law-and-order types are so quick to dispense with law: we recall Nixon and Agnew and Mitchell and a host of Reagan-era honchos. But of course, the neocons are not into law-and-order: they are making the case for dispensing with the law in the face of the “Emergency”, an emergency which bids fair to last for decades.

And curiously, we have to smile when we recall that many law-school review articles reflect a very cavalier approach to ‘law’ and have for decades: in the service of ‘sensitivity’ and one or another Revolution’s idea of ‘justice’, saws and axes have been taken to Law in order to “reform” it in the service of whatever the particular agenda desires.

Mayer gives us a fascinating bit of history about this ‘ticking time bomb’ justification of torture, the plot device that impels “24” along like an armored (if not actually ‘runaway’) freight train. This ‘ticking time bomb’ was developed to soothe the sensibilities of French Liberals who had to find some way to make their peace with the torture increasingly necessitated by the unsuccessful struggle against the Algerian Revolt. The French Right had no such problems: the Algerians were an inferior people and France could do what France had to do. But the Liberals’ conscience would need more substantive fodder to appease it: and thus the ‘emergency’ of the ‘ticking time bomb’. Ah well, then, the End does indeed justify the Means.

And the minute it’s over, whenever that eventually might be, why France and her troops will snap right back into being upright, virtuous, decent, and civilized. Yah. No chance that the sustained embrace of the Dark Side will do to a nation, a culture, a people and its troops what the sustained winds of the desert mountains do to bristlecone pine. Nah.

But then, weirdly, the show’s staff assures us that “it’s only TV”. “I think”, intones one LaLa honcho, “that people can differentiate between a television show and reality”. Stop it. Stop it right now. You mean the Incumbency only watches it for its “entertainment value”? You mean Bush doesn’t get up after watching an episode and feel good about what he’s been doing? Hell, even Nixon asked to see “Patton” screened before he invaded Cambodia (or did I dream it?)

Can these guys be honest and serious? Haven’t they seen “Oprah”? Reality TV? Local TV news? For decades Theory and its worshippers have insisted that there is no Truth (see, for example, “Libby No Baddy” on this site). All manner of dubious laws have been passed on that assumption. Generations of college students have been taught that – many of whom are now chronologically adults. And our present young – who by definition are not fully equipped to handle ‘reality’ – are also distracted by the omnipresent, insistent allure of games that are far more ‘interesting’ than actual daily life (and … self). And these LaLa’s think that it’s easy for folks nowadays to distinguish between Fantasy and Reality? Especially among that rich target demographic of 8-to-40?

And yet they try to defend their swag and their status by saying that the show is only “wish fulfillment” for “a fantasy of the American people”. Well, there isn’t as much maturity going around among said people, and most surely not in the cloud-cuckoo-land that is Washington City and the Federal Triangle. Even Rush Limbaugh, staring down his nose (or as many noses as he might see on a bad day) scoffs that “It’s just a television show. Get a grip.” So realistic, all of a sudden, these neocons and their chickenhawk, boffo pundits. Yet they once embraced the realism that they could cakewalk and slam-dunk and that they would be greeted as liberators. Such realism.

And this is after they admit that the show “plays off real anxieties of the American people”. Yes, it does. And very shrewdly. And it’s making a fortune … playing on those anxieties. Whether Americans need their anxieties played off of (sorry) or whether Americans need to face up to actuality (let’s put ‘reality’ up on blocks for a while) is a very good question. Our maturity’s skills – thus our Citizen skills and our People-ing skills – have been under sustained if masked assault by the National Security State, the consumerism amplified by corporate-level and electronic mass advertising, the Kennedy/Boomer infatuation with ‘youth’, the stampeding urgencies of the assorted Revolutions of the Identities, the National Crime State, Fundamentalist emotionalism, and Neocon Imperialistic adventure – for half a century. We need to get back into the maturity-zone, and quickly.

Jack Bauer is “a patriot”. And are we all then to prove our ‘patriotism’ by torturing? Or can we do it on the cheap, by proxy, by approving Jack’s lascivious torturing and the torturing carried on by all the other upstanding civil servants who follow the Unitary Leader-in-Chief? Achieving an identity on the cheap has been one of the awefull temptations to human beings, individually and collectively throughout History.

They insist that they are “conservatives”. Yet what sort of ‘conservative’? They have a disregard for Law; they consider the Constitutional ethos inefficient for the waging of semi-permanent war and they insist we must embark on a course of semi-permanent war; they have embraced the feminist and Fundamentalist rejection of Enlightenment reason and operate instead on the quick-burning fuel of passion; they seek to wield the hugely-swollen government authority as a weapon against the enemies of their choice, foreign and domestic; they have effected a pathetic withering of public Virtue and Character into the frenzied frothing over matters of sex; and in all things, a pervasive and sustained disregard for maturity and Truth. What sort of ‘conservative’ is this?

True ‘professionals’ (another candidate for being put up on blocks), the LaLa’s pooh-pooh the reasoned and urgently pressed remonstrances of the authentic military and interrogation professionals that their weekly offerings are conveying – with mind-paralyzing seductiveness – a hugely inaccurate impression of torture’s effectiveness in the acquisition of usable information. Similar to their ‘conservative’ compatriots in Executive service, the LaLa’s have no patience with any information that does not fit into their agenda (rather similar to certain types of mentally-challenged children).

And also similar to their Executive compatriots, they consider the information to be not- useful for their purposes. To the LaLa’s, careful and rational interrogation is as inconvenient as due process is to the Executive. It is not telegenic; it does not titillate as does the sight of (shrewdly unshown) torture and the visceral (vividly shown) physical consequences; rational interrogation is as quaint – we might say – as the Geneva Conventions and the clanky, inefficient, now unpatriotic insistence on Constitutional requirements.

Real men nowadays, perhaps capable of eating quiche, do not quibble over the “niceties” of due process when there’s manly work to be done. To an audience of boys looking to prove their manhood and fathers who have little enough opportunity to demonstrate virility in these softened times, to an audience of citizens who are becoming – it has to be said – increasingly jaded and ‘hooked on’ the quick-burning if ephemeral stimulation of vividly portrayed passion and violence … to such audience, the repeated and vivid presentation of torture as successful and as without lasting consequence to the torturer is hugely toxic.

Can it be any wonder that consequences did not enter into the minds of any of the Executive’s audiences when the assorted gambits that constitute the Iraq misadventure were announced? Surely it is no surprise that consequences did not enter into the minds of the Executive or of the Executive himself. For among certain circles with access to powers and power greater than the world has ever seen, the cocksureness that is indicative of a dangerous immaturity has been erected into a virtue and a badge of honor as unmistakable as the varsity letter on a football jacket. Or a cheerleader’s jacket . If they give letters for that.

That power and those powers are exercised on Our authority.

And we are indebted to Mayer for unearthing another morsel: Clarence Thomas and his wife dine with Surnow, Limbaugh is there. Sausages and the social calendars of Supreme Court Justices: perhaps it’s better not to see what they’re made of. In consequence, a talkshop is planned at which the boss of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff (he too is doing a heckuvva job) brays that “24” “reflects real life”. Does it really? If so, it reflects the hall-of-mirrors Misch between cause and effect, fiction and actuality, fantasy and … well, what is not fantastic in a world where ‘reality’ can be created by whomever has the best-deployed ‘spin’? Where there is no Truth, what phantasmagoria can not be put forward as reality? When there is no Reason or ability to reason what phantasmagoria cannot be mistaken for reality? For Truth?

Lastly, Surnow plays the disturbing gambit that “conservatives are the new oppressed class” nowadays. This queasy gambit would never have been possible if the assorted Revolutions, abetted by the well-rewarded self-interested media, had not spent decades stifling public discussion and – unintentionally or otherwise – corroding and corrupting the public ability to deliberate matters of the gravest and largest importance to all. Having raised up the ‘victim’ as the undoubtable demander of our attention and our indulgence, the Revolutions thus created a potent fiction that has become all too real. And now that mythic ‘Victim’ has been co-opted by the Right (which as it is presently constituted is no ‘conservatism’ but in a perverse mirror image of the Left is rather a revolution – or several flavors of revolution - itself). The ‘Victim’ is now the front for the National Crime State.

And the National Crime State is now fueling the National Imperial/Fundamentalist State. We have a synergy here, as they say in LaLa Land. We have several massive fires now burning toward each other, and they’re close enough to start the thermal currents that induce a firestorm. “24” is only television. This Republic has to be more to us than that. Or it will be history.

CHICKEN HAWKS

The world never spent much time in 1946, listening to the assorted Nazi bigwigs still around explain how things happened the way they did. The Nazi project was so reprehensible that nobody was interested in spending any more time on them once the war was over. Assorted generals and field-marshals wrote memoirs, and later Albert Speer – the brilliant young architect who wound up running Nazi war production – did a bravura turn as the brilliant but too-trusting subordinate who had served his 20 years in Spandau and was now on the lecture-and-book circuit.

The January “Vanity Fair” has an illuminating article by David Rose entitled “Neo Culpa”. (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/01/neocons200701). The author goes around interviewing assorted major players among the neocon war-urgers. The overall impression is that they are not only looking to avoid some American version of Spandau, but are actually looking to keep up their creds for the policy-making and talking-head circuit.

None of them have demonstrated the truly impressive skill that Speer deployed in actual hands-on management of crucial affairs in the service of the nation. They ‘think’, mostly at self-serving think-tanks but occasionally on the faculty of ‘reputable’ institutions of higher thinking and learning.

Their pleadings are various. It was a good plan but the Bush Administration really screwed it up, beyond any reasonable thinker’s ability to imagine such a colossal “Schweinerei” (as the Germans might say). Ach ja. The Leader was an incompetent monomaniac who presided over a rigged planning-process staffed by fawning toadies and too-clever-by-half apparatchiks who thought they could handle him. Who knew? Who could imagine that such things could have gone on in our modern and enlightened world? Surely we wouldn’t blame the thinkers. And they’re sorry now.

Well, no, they’re not. To say they were sorry would be to make Nixon’s mistake of admitting one had screwed up. And look where that got him. No, mistakes were made, and good thoughts were pigged-up by lesser beings elsewhere on the food-chain. Would we care to engage a lecture on the topic? The fees, alas, must reflect the tremendous stresses and strains of maturely sitting by and watching one’s visions trampled by kine and swine, lower down or even “at the center”.

Apparently these honchos were simultaneously movers-and-shakers and yet not so close to “the center” that they could reasonably be held accountable. In the British series “World At War”, made in the early ‘70s, Speer cannot – even after 20 years’ imprisonment for his sins – shake his pride of place: “Everyone else had to go through Bormann to see Hitler. Except me. I had the right of direct access to Hitler.” Ach, such power. Look upon me, ye mighty, and despair.

Things have gone terribly wrong, but was one expected to be “delphic”? Can one be held accountable because one is not a god?

And were we not seeking merely to use our power as a force for good in the world? Didn’t we at least try? That’s more than the wussies with their morality and ethics and international laws would do. Don’t we get credit for trying? Is it our fault that such a noble and beneficial plan was poorly executed? And after all, you may take our word for it that at the outset the war was “a doable do”; they love to strut the man-stuff, these neocons.

We wasted “thousands of hours” before the war, confides one Player, “searching for middle-ground which most of the time will not exist”. The logical gap between relating what actually happened and then suddenly shifting to the ungrounded assertion begs for further ‘unpacking’, as they say. But this is not to blame the interviewer: these characters didn’t allow themselves to be interviewed in order to humbly do their bit in shedding light on the Truth; they are all trying to ‘position’ themselves to survive the wreck of Iraq. Eating regularly in Georgetown can get expensive real quick if you aren’t on a number of dinner-party guest lists or ‘cleared’ for the White House Mess (again, the irony …).

After all, given the moral and manhood failures of the U.N. and everybody else, it was only “American armed might” (if they do say so themselves) that was left able to ensure “a world at peace, a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies”. That their efforts have been effected through war and the violation of laws international and national, they do not appear to notice. That their programme has resulted in a ‘freeing’ of the Iraqis “to find their own destinies” comparable to the ‘liberation’ of the Cherokee to do likewise on the Trail of Tears can be attributed to the brutal fog of war, which not even the most competent and realistic planners can totally disperse. Now people … people can be dispersed, and divided, and hung and drawn and quartered, but realistically, the fog of war and events is just one of those things. It happens. Anybody who really knows what the score is knows that.

But while “a huge strategic defeat” is almost inevitable, not to worry. “The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch we can still pull ourselves together.” That’s encouraging, if it’s as true as is going to be necessary. We’ve taken some serious hits in the ‘capability’ department since the end of the ‘60s and even since the (remember it?) fall of the Soviet Union. Theory has flattened our world, the government is happily presiding over a nation of victims, adequate jobs for those who seek them are in short supply, and for lack of anything better Congress has been channeling its predecessor of the Gilded Age and the last Weimar Reichstag. But perhaps a war with Iran will give us all the opportunity to stick-it-out and find ourselves.

Those of Us who can’t keep up on this glorious March or Griff, or doubt the wisdom of it … well, we obviously aren’t worthy of our birthright. And perhaps God will arrive at the last minute and Rapture all the good ones and toast everybody else. So what’s the diff? Why do your homework if the world will end before final exams? That thought had been proposed by more than one enterprising school-child the night JFK announced the blockade of Cuba; the tests went on after sunrise nonetheless.

Photographs accompany the article. In the practice of journalistic photography these days, the portrayed is allowed to control the mise-en-scene. They have all been shot in sober black-and-white, much after the style of Karsh, the great portrait photographer of World War Two, whose camera captured Churchill and … whoever. Well-coiffed, expensively suited, perhaps chin in hand pensively “pondering the imponderables of war” (in Shelby Foote’s acute description of General Halleck).

Except for one Mr. Professor Doctor Cohen, who stands sideways to the camera, head turned to look sharply at you over a raised nose and chin, eyebrow raised as if alert to the exigencies of those imponderables, hair just a tad mussed, one hand decisively flat on his lap, the other arm half-stretched forward with the hand half-curled in tensive thoughtfulness; he seems to be going for either Lincoln or Grant, but he’s careful not to let you see his arm resting on the classic Civil War-era half-column prop, so it looks like he might have just had a stroke.

A woman, an ‘expert’ at one of those think-tanks, in unadorned simple black, was apparently trying to go for decisive arms-folded, but instead looks like she’s hugging herself, whether out of habit or fear of still-pending consequences, it is not clear.

Another is bearded, looking either thoughtfully or shiftily off to his left, perhaps eyeing the arrival of those same consequences; the expertly trimmed beard makes it look like a simple change of collar and type of tie would make him one of the Kaiser’s advisers, or one of Franz Joseph’s – and considering the sorta Central European dynastic froth out of which the neocon agenda of empire stems, that’s not so off the mark.

Our accounts have not been managed well. And our managers appear far less impressive than the troops who remain obedient to their word. We should do something about that.

WARRIORS OR WARR-ERS?

Bill Moyers gave a speech to the cadets at West Point recently (http://www.thruthout.org/docs_2006/120706S.shtml.) It’s always a good thing to try to expand the consciousness of those who will someday run the military machine that we have built. Especially since it and they are going to have to function in a world where America no longer so widely commands the huge postwar respect for military power that we have been accustomed to since the end of the Good War. “The American Century” was a short one, lasting just about sixty years; the country outlasted Soviet Communism by a decade, and then yielded to the temptation to set itself up as a ‘hyperpower. And yet again, within the lifetime of a single generation, one of our “quick little wars” has morphed into a debacle. Only this time, with consequences even worse than Vietnam.

Moyers quotes Rupert Murdoch, the media Marshal who deployed the forces of Fox in support of this violent misadventure. Murdoch has taken his cue from the bosses of the Bush administration, who took their cue – in reverse – from the Nixon administration: don’t even think of going down the I-was-wrong road because it’s not so much a slippery slope as it is a leap into the abyss; a leap from authority and public respect into opprobrium and potential criminal prosecution. And We the People dare not forget: we now face a looming simulacrum of the problem caused by many functionaries in and out of uniform (although they almost all affected a uniform of one sort or another) in Germany around late 1944: the bosses had to keep up the fighting, even though there was no possible hope of any level of success, because for them personally there was no other alternative except arrest, prosecution, and … nothing pleasant. And so American 18-year-olds had to shoot German 13-year-olds in firefights in frozen mud.

Murdoch, even now, essays an aura of successful command, cocky and in-your-face in a that inimitable adolescent way that we too often nowadays mistake for genuine and successful command (it’s been a long time since we could contemplate the real McCoy). For $20-dollar-a-barrel oil the whole thing was worth the try, quotha. Our military losses, in the big picture, were “minute”. He’s a big-picture kinda guy, like so many of the movers and shakers there in Washington City. But unlike an Eisenhower or a Roosevelt (either of them), our current crop of big-pic honchos literally got their big picture from big pictures, from Cinemascope and Technicolor extravaganzas which unrolled before them in the cool, popcorn-crunchy precincts of local movie theaters. Grand, glorious adventures, easily supplied with all the bounty of a refreshment stand and all the convenience of a parking lot for the chrome-cruiser when the two-hour operation was successfully accomplished. Murdoch, famously, even sought to bring that level of fantasy to the hallowed precincts of journalism and television news, and he has been as successful as any Goth or Vandal.

Three thousand American deaths, in his big picture, are a bargain. And as far as the deaths of ‘others’, he doesn’t even essay the professional modesty that Robert Lewis Taylor noticed in the gunmen of the Wild West. Asked respectfully how many men he had killed, one of these efficient vultures would cough modestly and say “Twenty-five” or whatever the current number might be, and then conclude, de rigeur, with a modest “not including Mexicans and Indians, of course”. The dozens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of ‘other’ deaths – Iraqi children, women, and elderly – are, in the big picture, not worth taking into account. Progress – especially when Divinely authorized – does not stoop to such trivial computations. But even if a Registry is kept, in some Other Place, no doubt our big picture guys presume that the Recorders thus employed are also big picture types. That they are more correct than they could ever imagine, that the Recorders of that Registry serve a Picture far Bigger than anything the elites of modern day Washington City can, or dare to, imagine … that illumination is only just beginning to dawn on some of them. How will they spin the Wrath to come? However will they avoid It? The Bible they carted around, waving it or caressing it, will take on a life of its own – such has been the experience of History in the West. And it is equally clear that rumors of History’s end have been greatly exaggerated.

It is heartening to hear Mr. Moyers encourage the future officers to fight for freedom. He raises, however, the even more excellent point that our Founders were fighting for ‘our’ freedom (yes, however ‘our’ is defined) rather than Freedom in the abstract and around the world. We would through our own struggle gift the rest of the world’s peoples with a model and a good example, but we would not be the agent of anybody else’s freedom. And not simply because you couldn’t keep the world under your thumb with sailing ships, muzzle-loaders, horse-transport and quill pens. Rather, there was the profound and very much adult wisdom that there are far far too many variables, and the plain orneriness of human nature in the individual and in groups, and just too much of ‘the friction of things’ and – as ever – the ‘lacrimae rerum’ … wayyyy too much of all that for any one nation to be trying to play God.

Of course, this was before the development of the profoundly whacko Fundamentalistic hubris that America and her ‘saved’ (that baptized ‘vanguard elite’ that would be so familiar to one Vladimir Ulyanov) are Deputized with God’s authority. To which was then added the utterly adolescent fatuity of mistaking B-2s and aircraft carrier task forces for the omniscient, omnipotent and omni-competent power of God. Not even the Marine Corps makes that mistake (except on one or two days a year). No, we are clothed neither with God’s authority nor His power nor His wisdom. And as far as His responsibilities, we have enough on our hands simply struggling toward Lincoln’s vision: “to achieve a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations”. To which, with awefull sadness, we must now include the clauses just prior to that: “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and for his orphan”.

And also, we must first fight to re-establish our own freedom here at home. Our own freedom has been eroding steadily, if not completely by intention, or at least not with evil intention. But erode it has. Americans have always been notorious for their inability to understand what’s going on in other parts of the world; now we don’t seem to have a serious grasp of what consequences have been sown by our own policies here at home. Nor can we – in a golden sunset or sunrise miasm – indulge in the Reagan era’s brassy, mushy sanctification of the military. They may be a standing army, but they’re our standing army. Robert Kaplan was tickled pink with himself when a young major at the Army Command and General Staff College confided (see elsewhere on this site) that then – in 1996 – they were training for the day when they would have to “go domestic”. And while we owe our young combat troops huge debts of support and respect, we cannot forget that more than a few would, if ordered to fire on American citizens, do it. These are the profound complexities of putting youngsters to war, and it is our responsibility – as The People who send them – to manage matters so that such an awful dilemma is not placed before them.

Mr. Moyers holds up the shining examples of Grant and Sherman. They were certainly competent, and creatively so, at their trade. But we also have to remember that they were not organization men nor ‘team players’ nor insiders. At war’s outset Grant was contemptuously written off by Maclellan and Halleck as a drunk and a has-been – and while he was no has-been, he was on more than nodding terms with the bottle; Sherman was considered insane – he had said in the patriotic Spring of 1861 that it would take several hundred thousand men and several years to secure the Mississippi Valley. What saved these two and their skills for the Union was the fact that they got on with their work as best they could and – having won this or that battle – attracted the attention of Lincoln, the supreme realist, who recognized actual competence and honest-to-god success when he saw it. No fancy uniforms, no clanking ceremonial swords; just victory after victory, achieved through shrewd and deft maneuver or – when unavoidable – bulldog tenacity. No Grant or Sherman could survive professionally today. Even Schwarzkopf’s achievement has to be seen in light of the fact that his opponent simply sat there in front of him, utterly inactive, for the months and months it took to actually transport the American armies and fleets to the scene and get into well-supplied position. Grant and Sherman faced a far more able foe. And neither of them were warriors; they were commanders of armies – not at all the same thing. The preening, picky, passion-wracked peacocks of Greek mythology, capable of a certain ballsy grandness in the face of death, but rarely able to muster a sustainable seriousness about Things … can we afford them in a Republic?

And Moyers touches upon, but understandably does not here develop, the fearsome question for all those who would shape events: can Violence in a Good cause ever yield a purely or even mostly Good consequence? Can Evil bring about Good? Or is any result of Evil itself irretrievably Evil itself? The famous American pragmatism has never resolved this; indeed, the famous American pragmatism pragmatically avoided it altogether, settling for a narrower focus on the arena of this dimension, putting off the possible dynamics of any other Dimension for another day – Sunday, perhaps. Yet the mysterious stormy heart of Things beats on, as the famous American pragmatism and its assorted offspring race about aimlessly on the hot hard surface of events like indigestible, un-nutritious globules of fat on a hot skillet.

He mentions – again without developing – the early fears of a standing army. The conundrum of how to enlist – let alone draft – free and Constitutionally endowed citizens into the confinements of military life remains with us to this day, though in the ‘all-volunteer’ era it is most clearly to be perceived in the military justice system, a dangerous and deceitful hybrid that for two centuries has attempted to convince citizens that it is indeed perfectly possible for American ingenuity to meet the implacable requirements of command while adequately protecting Constitutional rights in – so aptly characterized – ‘criminal’ trials.

And he mentions – gamely – the many less than sterling wars which graduates of West Point have had to wage in order to fulfill their oaths: the Mexican War (opposed by both the young Grant and the young Lincoln, among many others), an out-and-out land grab; the Civil War – almost unmentionable since the Southrons and their world-view took control of the military and the Executive and (until recently) Congress; the wars to exterminate the Indian tribes (and their warriors); the early imperial war to grab decrepit Spain’s possessions and secure a globe-circling coaling ability for the Navy; the Philippine insurrection, waged ferociously and ably by Filipinos who had believed that America was actually going to liberate them (as so often with the Indians, the thing was finally won by pragmatic dishonor: the militarily unbeatable Aguinaldo was eventually invited in to discuss matters under a flag of truce, and … well, what did he matter? We won.); the Great War; the banana republic incursions that so disgusted Marine general Smedley Butler, who saw himself as simply a “goon for the United Fruit Company”; the Good War; the Cold War; Vietnam … Vietnam so short a time ago, its veterans (not to include the current supreme high grand-poobah of the American Legion) still an active generation. And then there are the ‘secret’ wars.

But he notes solidly that a military “can’t be expected morally to be much better than the people who send it into action”. To which I would only add: can’t be expected to be morally much better than The People that sends it into action. And how can The People function at a level high enough to qualify as ‘moral’ when cohort upon cohort of its young have been taught that Morality and Virtue don’t exist, except as patriarchal illusions meant to justify ‘oppression’? Or is the very denial of the Moral immoral itself? We had sure as hell better hope that Heaven doesn’t subscribe to ‘zero tolerance’.

And now the Israelis have declared assassination for state purposes to be legitimate. A fine example we’ve set. Cheney – as Sith as any Republic might hope never to encounter – declared that in order to do Good we would have to embrace “the Dark Side”. How we as The People respond to that alluring proposition will – in the words of an adult who once occupied the White House put it – “mark us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation”. So many of our young seem to feel that the only way to establish one’s cred as a Man is to embrace the Dark side since not only are ‘the good’ pretty wussy, but there isn’t any Good anyhow. But there’s always Evil. It abides. Such faith; such a faith. And if we could scoop up all the gang members or whatever ethnic origin and send them all off to the Eastern Front, what then? Would we have done good? Well, we might win. And huge chunks of humanity will be waiting for us in the tall grass. And – their existence has never been disproven – there are always those Recorders, keeping an offender Registry that will last longer than any databases within our poor power to maintain or enlarge. If this generation has a rendezvous with Destiny, we might give some thought during this holiday season as to just what that Destiny might be. And what we intend to do about.

He urges them not to mistake “flattery and adulation” for genuine support. Can we – can We The People – pull the nose up? Can we correct our “attitude” so that this aircraft isn’t trying to move forward while pointing inexorably down? Not if we are capable – as the once-sturdy Brits now are – of believing that the little flame lit near Princess Di’s accident scene can credibly be named the Torch of Liberty. Have we lost all sense of what ‘Liberty’ really means? What it consists of? What it demands?

He thanks them for not becoming a ‘praetorian guard’. But there is a generation of majors from the mid-1990s – now senior officers – who were taught and prepared to “go domestic”. They are among us, in uniform. Or back in civilian life, hidden in ‘street clothes’, maybe now in law enforcement or prosecutors’ offices. Or for all we know in Congress.

He concludes by urging the West Pointers ever to “speak the truth as you see it”. Well, given that our politics have become surreal precisely because The People are being seduced away from any ‘truth’ except that which the government creates, and since this has been going on for decades, and since Truth itself is held to be nothing more than a personal belief, on a par with believing in leprechauns as long as you keep it to yourself … you see the problem we face nowadays.

But if there is a Truth, and if there is a Universe that balances things, and if such Truth has Keepers, then our falling away from Truth will trigger an awefull Recoil, far more shocking and awe-ing than any force we can still manage to project out into this groaning world.

This is our generations’ rendezvous with Destiny. Every moment we delay is a treason to everything for which We The People are responsible. Are we rightly shocked by the very thought of clergy sex abuse? Each of us as a Citizen, as a member of The People, has a calling and a commission as critical to the survival of the Republic as any soldier’s. As necessary to the working out of History and – Grace – as any clergyman’s. We live in an Occupied world, a world Occupied by a Sinfulness that casts its fake-bright illusions over nations as well as individuals. “Strenuous liberty” – we must “put on the armor of light and walk becomingly as in the day”. T-h-a-t is the true Long War. Let us so bear ourselves. The temptation to actively ‘collaborate’ is great. Even greater is the temptation to collaborate passively – to simply retire into our personal bubble and figure that someone else will fix it. The buck stops with Us.

Nor from what we have seen of the Democrats in the past month, can we expect that the Democratic Party will make it all better, make it all go away come January. The Democrats are up to their professional and personal necks in the orgy of our Second Gilded Age, and if we think that they’re going to go cold-turkey overnight on the basis of Ideals that for 40 years they’ve been claiming don’t exist for any public purposes, then we are bigger dopes and more ‘French’ than all those folks who let themselves sleep snugly in the long Nazi night, and maybe even turned in a Resistance fighter if the occasion or the need arose.

We are not a warrior people. We are warr-ers in the sense that so much of what we’ve got has been the fruit of war. Well it’s a broken world, and we can only hope that a Just God understands. Or at least that we win. But no. God sleeps with the leprechauns and we’re losing every old which way on the Eastern Front. We can contemplate with great fruit – as the old Catholic spiritual directors used to say – the newsreels of the mobbed service of prayer held at Notre Dame in Paris in that late, late Spring of 1940. Defeat seemed to remind even Parisians and the Third Republic that there was a God. And that’s not such a bad thing, in the long run. Who knows what a resourceful People might do with such a re-awakening?

Arise, or no dawn will be at hand, only another slide into the Long Night. History is still alive. We owe it that much. “Assembly” is being sounded. Not on a cavalry bugle, but a far greater Trumpet. Let us, The People, come forth.

AS IF ON CUE

The previous Post mentioned General Abizaid’s visit to the Kennedy School of Government, wondering – in the process – if there are a few too many main stream media types who seem to enjoy being seen talking to Men in uniform.

The very next day I came across Lawrence F. Kaplan’s “The Troops and Us” in the online “New Republic” (www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?I=20061127&s=diarist112706). I am not one for coincidences, and so I must proceed as if on a mission from … elsewhere (var. Elsewhere).

He opens by establishing his Man creds: having dinner with “a senior Army officer”. Senior in relation to what rank? A Sergeant? A Captain? A Major-General? But we are quickly brought up to speed: this officer “commanded thousands” so, he’s a general officer (unless they are reely reely getting to the bottom of the barrel on the Eastern front). And he’s “too often, lifted their remains into helicopters”. Now that’s a scenario that gives pause: a helicopter is kinda a tactical thing, and generals being out where the tactics fly is kinda … not. Of course, it’s a scenario that let’s you know two things: a) Kaplan is much-man and seriously connected and b) the modern major-general weeps for his troops (alas, “he did for them all with his plan of attack”).

This officer confides to Kaplan that looking at news reports of Iraq nowadays “I don’t even recognize it”. Well: either it’s changed one hell of a lot and this general doesn’t know why or it hasn’t changed and this general or Kaplan or both are not just blowing smoke but laying it down like destroyers. But of course, Kaplan isn’t buying the scampi so that the general can embarrass them both by discussing how things went south. Nor is the general munching the scampi only to wreck his career prospects by dessert. No, Kaplan is here on a mission of mutual benefit: he proves his creds and gets grist for his particular mill, and the general gets to plug his kind as compassionate and reely powerful, and he gets the scampi and free liquor as afore-noted (if Kaplan tried this with a 17 year-old … well, they’re not promoting quite that fast on the Eastern front … yet, anyway).

The author had met this officer in Iraq, and that’s OK, because as Kaplan himself goes on to mention, there are a few too many professional commenters who don’t seem to have ever been in-country over there; not – again as Kaplan rightly observes – that such ignorance stops them from going on, and on and on.

These two – getting back to the preliminary scene-setting – are drinking (but of course; it’s what Men do), in a “grubby” joint where, for all we know, the mustachioed Italian bartender spits to polish the glasses in best 19th-century frontier style. There is a television above the bar (this is reely reely a joint). And, by propitious coincidence, it happens to be Election Day night and the drama is unfolding just over the horizon of the ice cubes. I cannot help but by amazed by the ‘coincidences’ that are presented to readers and viewers these days: one recalls – say – advocates for or against working-mothers who gushingly recount how their tyke delivered a poignant, acute and grammatically complex observation precisely supporting their position, out of the blue one day, which prompted (fill-in-the-blank having to do with this cause, this book, this show, or etc. etc. etc.). In this case, our two revelers muse upon a comment that the election will “doom the U.S. enterprise in Iraq”.

First off, let me say that I think the commenter was inaccurate: s/he should have said the U.S. enterprises in Iraq, since there are so many of them, emitting more than a whiff of the commercial, and their multiplicity, as well as the bald fact of their existence and the awesome incompetence with which they have been pursued, constitute a major factor in the military mess. Nor, could a reasonable person infer, might the military and the commercial be considered merely as sub-facets of the same overall plan, any more than –say – the SS commandeering of freight trains for transporting Ukrainian Jews could be considered merely as a professional collaboration paralleling the Wehrmacht project of trying to win the campaign in Russia.

Kaplan deftly notes that few commenters have actually gone to Iraq and gotten to know the situation. He’s right. And yet he knows he’s right. After all, his tours of the front have enabled him to be sitting here in this dive with some general. There seem to me to be a lot of Kaplans around; they all have more or less the same take on things, and I recall the Robert also prides himself on getting right in there with the … men in uniform. It was the Robert who, in 1996 interviewed young Majors at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth where one of them – perhaps also over brewskis in a local dive – confided cockily that the real manly men in the program were looking forward to the day when “we go domestic”. Kaplan (the Robert) seemed quite pleased to be graced with such a professional confidence, moving right along (the Kaplans are nothing if not crisp and efficient) without ‘unpacking’ that confidence: its content was truly disturbing, even more so in 1996 than a decade later. Deploying the Army domestically? One might have been forgiven for imagining that it would only be against sex-offenders, they being at that time the replacement for the recently-dissolved Soviets in the national demonology. But it appears now that the Army was thinking about Posse Comitatus and Habeas Corpus and the far-too-extensive rights of citizens long before 9-11.

Kaplan (the Lawrence) rightly casts a shadow on another (conservative) journalist’s sniffing that an actual trip to Iraq probably wouldn’t make him much the wiser. Even taken at face value, the comment tugs the jaw downward. You wonder just how many journalists actually know much about things they ‘report’ on these days. Then again, there isn’t much investigative reporting capability left any more. It appears that the new M.O. is to pick an obvious target, put a few scary but suggestive headlines out there, and wait for the ‘tips’ to come in. Or better: the horror-stories. Then you report yourself stenographizing the story and, with more or less lurid inferences, let the lower appetites of the readership/viewership take it from there. Given the number of people these days who seem to operate on the assumption that Feeling is as much of a decent day’s work as Figuring out the true state of affairs … well, you can run a paper, keep a show on the air, and professionally surf that crowd for quite a while.

But then again, it all depends on what aspect of Iraq one is concerned with. Someone who goes on about the morale of the troops without going in-country deserves no attention (which hardly means s/he won’t get it). Someone who doubts the legal or moral legitimacy of the military validity of the war and its strategy in the first place … there’s no demonstrable imperative to go over and talk to the troops (senior to others or not so). In fact, chumming with the little people (and may they be blessed) might distract that someone.

Loyalty and enthusiasm are wholly secondary virtues: their ‘goodness’ depends on what one is being loyal-to and enthusiastic-about. There are film clips extant of a parade field on a cloudy day, bright-eyed, fresh-scrubbed young men in faultless uniforms and crisp haircuts, concentrating intensely at their task under the barking eyes of senior NCOs. All music to a certain ear, and not wrongly so. But these were young SS bandsmen, perfecting the maneuvers they would exercise at the massive parade in honor of their Fuhrer’s 50th birthday.

So too then, hanging out with the troops in the front isn’t necessarily going to give you a clarity about the larger issues of a given war. In fact, this is precisely why a certain genre of mawkish slipperiness is a perennial at certain types of newspapers or in certain broadcasts: the I-couldn’t-oppose-this-war-because-I-met-little-(fill in the blank)-who’s-trying-to-win-it. Thus, chronological adults – and Citizens - allow their judgment to be swayed by the sentimental goop which some of the troops munch on for a quick pick-me-up. Adults who hang around youngsters and adopt their lifestyle and thoughts … that type of behavior nowadays is on certain police checklists. The French didn’t call it the ‘infanterie’ for nothing; they’re the youngsters. Yes they’re our youngsters, and they’re putting their lives on the line. But since we let them get sent over there in the first place, we aren’t doing them or ourselves any favors by giving up our judgmental capabilities and taking our emotional cue from them.

Troops at the front: just how reliable are their ideas about ‘stuff’? Are they going to tell you just what they figure you want to hear? After all, if they don’t like the war and they tell you that, you might tell their bosses (with whom you trade boozy insights in grubby dives) and they’d catch hell once your well-wiped ass gets back on a plane to the world. Or, if they do put on blinders and refuse to consider the wider implications or complications of said ‘stuff’ just so that they can get through the (increasingly) endless days, then just how valid is such (hugely understandable) ‘thought’ about the said ‘stuff’? But such ‘reporting’ seems to be the Kaplan (the whole of them) schtick.

Are we as The People going to allow our assessment of a war to be determined by the youngsters we send to fight it? It’s an iffy course to pursue in the best of wars, but in this one it’s a betrayal of ourselves as The People; a dereliction of the duty assigned to Us in the Great Scheme of the Republic. We’ve already let the thing get started, and now it’s going south. Now we want to make our initial failures worse by taking our guidance from the youngsters we sent over to live in the deforming furnace of battle? We as adults and as Citizens and as The People owe them so damned much more than that.

This bad stupid misadventure is going south. And it’s threatening, like a sinking liner, to take our troops with it. It’s already taken more than died in the 9-11. It’s taken 4 or 5 times as many again in physically wounded. It’s taken we-don’t-know-how-many in psychologically deformed. And how many will not be emotionally and spiritually deformed for life? This is not the Good War, people. Its own perpetrators now openly call it “the long war” and they apparently figured that it would be so long before they shared that thought with Us. This thing promises to get endless. And it is asymmetrical and it is frequently urban: there are no front-lines, therefore no ‘safe’ rear areas; only – with savage ironies – forts where the cavalry can hole up while ‘the Injuns’ control everything else. Enduring bases. We will all be enduring them for a long time, in consequences of our quick handing of the hot potato of 9-11 to ‘the National Command Authority’. Too quick.

We did this to those kids over there (who can even begin to comprehend what we have done to the Iraqis?). We failed to hold our horses and those horses ran away with the government wagon. Nicely, there is a plot being worked out in this year’s season of “Superman”: young Clark Kent, through his own impatient exploration of his powers and of his true nature and calling, allowed a passel of super-baddies, evildoers even in their own super-worlds, into our world. Now he’s trying to round them up before they kill any more than they already have. And despite the urgings of all his (few) loved ones and confidants that it’s not his fault if he ‘didn’t mean to’, he insists that the mess is his responsibility and continues his lonely and dangerous task of making things right as best he can.

We’ve let loose the dogs of war. We elected that stunning bunch in Washington City, twice. Nor have we allowed ourselves to complain. Here’s a mental exercise: imagine that a race of aliens arrives tomorrow (a less overtly religious variant of a vision that is presently ‘reality’ for a disturbingly large fraction of this population); they go around the galaxy and help worlds by holding them to their stated ideals and laws, and they’ve just dropped by. They neutralize all the weaponry and set up a Court to judge the Iraq war by this-world laws that were/are in effect. How do we explain ourselves? Not how Bush or the generals or the diplomats will spin themselves. How do we as a people, as The People, explain how it was that we allowed what we allowed with so pitiably little dissent? How is it that after the example of 1933 we allowed ourselves to behave so much like … well, Germans. Is it any surprise that our Army has taken to certain of the less-pleasant German attitude and tactics, since its People have assumed the vigorously supine position of the German people of 1933? Is it any surprise, more immediately, that our government is demonstrating some of the same characteristics as that government of 1933? (No, I am not making an equivalence, but I am noting some irrefutable similarities).

You do not easily commit your young to war. You do not do it because any – ANY – journey through the blood-dark valleys of Ares Ferox and Ares Atrox is going to leave a mark on soldiers. It was not just a pious custom that in early Christian times soldiers returning from wars were not permitted to receive Communion until they had gone through a period of cleansing. It was ASSUMED that they were tainted, because nobody – citizens, congregants, clergy – were under any damned illusions as to what war or War does to troops, no matter what side they’re on and no matter how Good their Cause and no matter how unintentional the evils consequent upon their operations.

But we – We – are indeed under such illusions. And it’s killing our troops, and not just the ones who come home in boxes by night (upon whom be peace eternal).

Nor do our veterans and their organizations do any service, seeking to be identified with, even photographed with, the whipmasters of this war. Worse than having ‘gone shopping’, they have ‘gone native’, forsaking the hard-won knowledge of Ares’ pomps and works, condemning another generation of youngsters to his maw, while they themselves seek cheap ‘purpose’ and stature by buttlicking the treachery in Washington City.

Mr. Kaplan is right enough that journalists should know what they’re talking about. His own niche (and it seems to be a family affair) is to go visit the troops and from them take increased devotion to the tasks set them by the government in Washington City, and then to frost that cake with a sentimental, self-indulgent, self-flattering, Man-mawkish, faux bonhomie that can only come from having a well-wiped ass, of which there are, at the front, very very few. And morally speaking, back here ‘at home’, there are even fewer.

We as a People have so much to do in this holiday season. Let’s not let the troops down. Our role as ‘the home front’ is as vital now as it was in the Good War 60 years ago. Not just baking cakes to send them; but doing the hard stern work of Peopling, for we are indeed The People of whom so much was written and from whom so much is expected. If there is any cavalry that’s going to come over the rise in the nick of time for our troops in Iraq, it’s going to have to be Us, our decisions resolutely reached and our will resolutely imposed on our Employees in Washington City. They want a ‘unitary executive’? We’ll give them a unitary People. It’s the American Way.