CAN THE UNSOUND BE HEARD?

Truthout carries an AP article by Glenn Johnson. “Obama Says US Strategy in Iraq Is Unsound” (http://www.truthout.org/article/obama-says-us-strategy-iraq-is-unsound).

The article – and Obama – quotes George C. Marshall, author of the famous Plan (who at the time was attacked as un-American and maybe ‘pinko’ by a number of braying folk, many of whom had not seen combat in the late war nor proven themselves fitted for bearing great responsibility and fulfilling great and unforgiving tasks, but who had found national politics congenial enough for their purposes).

“The whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment”. Wellllllllllll, that rules out a lot of folks who’ve joined us only in the past 40 years. Indeed, it also rules out far too many of the Greatest Generation still around who seem only to recall the sodas and the shooting, or at least that’s all the media pick up on.

“Judgment” … ? Oh, I would never presume to judge anybody. Oh that would be judgmental, and we’re Vatican 2 Catholics, you know. You can’t judge … Jesus or Buddha – one of them anyway – said it’s bad. Judging is divisive; we are uniters, not dividers. Sigh. It seems like nobody gets judged anymore. Except sex-offenders. And nobody judges anybody else. Except if those anybodies are sex-offenders. And it all makes sense. (We don’t want to be around when the historians of the future – if our own mis-mal-and-non-feasances don’t lead to a new Dark Ages somewhat before then – start trying to make sense of these times.)

It’s a wonder any child born in this country since 1969 has survived, being taught from the get-go not to ‘judge’, s/he would have kept putting that pudgy little paw on the hot stove until the little nervous system went into shock.

But judging is precisely what grown-ups have to do.

And – the even harder part – in a grown-up way.

We have to inform ourselves, decide, and take all the action appropriate to our role. We study and learn from others, we think and deliberate with others, and all of us make our thoughts known to our representatives.

So, holy hambones, folks! If enough of Us were doing the job, who’d have a lot of time for boredom, emptiness, and all the demonics that rush in to occupy vacuous lives … ?

Yes, I know, ‘vacuous’ is a judgment … but I applied it in the abstract, in general, conceptually, and not for the purposes of disrespecting or hating-on anyone. Was that not clear? I’m sorry, but I won’t apologize.

Obama raises a second question: “Imagine for a moment what we could have done in those days, and months, and years after 9/11.” Yes.

But I imagine what We could have done in those days, and months, and years after 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead, Hahvahd sent over a shiny prize gelding that merely provided a hoofs-on-the-ground example of how persons of high social status in a capitalist system can turn a buck for themselves no matter how wide and deep and broad the moral urgency and history-laden significance of their task. Future, hell, son – get into futures plural!

Strange, how once the Soviets were gone, the Americans were – like the wizard of Oz – revealed to have no solid grasp at all on the priceless gift of Liberty, nor on Truth or Justice or – surely – Love and Charity, nor – increasingly – even on their own affairs or their own government. Hence the monstrous thing now lumbers drunkenly through the world-park, loose from its handlers, causing great carnage, still a noisy and burly thing, trumpeting and stamping, fuelling itself without thought for limits – it will not be oppressed by limits nor contained by boundaries … once that was the great genius of its youth.

We are its handlers. What have We to say for Ourselves. Inquiring minds want to know. Angry hearts. Saddened souls. All are wondering … where is The People?

JUDGMENT BY NUREMBERG

It occurs to me that one way We can get beyond the miasm of quotidian ‘reality’ and see what has actually happened in the country is to go back to the film “Judgment at Nuremberg”. I had seen it on PBS recently (for the umpteenth time in my life) and I’ve been trying to come to grips with “what it is” about the film that tugs insistently.

Yes, the phenomenon of Fascism offers much food for thought – and not simply (any longer) as an historical exercise. Yes, the psychology of crowds and mobs and ‘masses’ offers much food for thought – and not simply (any longer) as an historical exercise. Yes, the awefullness that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other offers much food for thought – and not simply (any longer) as an historical exercise. Back then in 1961 it seemed as if the world, and most surely this country, had emerged from the blood-dark tunnel of such primitivism, and that – Soviet rocketry notwithstanding – the world and We had entered some palpable sunlit upland of species-maturity.

But what is most painful today, watching that film, is to realize that the America and the Americans portrayed in it no longer exist. It’s not only that - as they say in LaLaLand – you can’t make a movie like that anymore. It’s that We haven’t got a country like that anymore, and We may not even be able to en-office the types of public adults portrayed by Tracy and Widmark … and what does that say about Us?

It’s the seriousness with which they execute their duties, and – consequently – with which they conduct their lives and the seriousness which seems a constituent part of their very selves. That seriousness is gone now, certainly in public life but increasingly – I think – among the citizenry itself. That ‘gravitas’ I’d like to say, except that I’m afraid it would be too easily co-opted by somebody who’s figured out – with the help of PR consultants – how to ‘do’ gravitas for the cameras and the sound-bites.

Does it take a World War and a Holocaust to muster that seriousness? Isn’t the daily task of conducting one’s adult life enough to muster that seriousness? Isn’t the daily task of confronting the pains and powers of this world enough to muster that seriousness?

How did We get here? How did We come to this? The Boomers have to take some of the blame: they were only youths when the film came out, and somehow its message was effectively eclipsed by the Kennedy Camelot: you could be ‘serious’ and yet ‘young’ (Kennedy’s ploy to neutralize the glaring discrepancy between his own age and inexperience compared to Nixon and the outgoing Eisenhower). To be ‘young’ – and to imagine the mid-40s as ‘young’! – enchanted, intoxicated everyone from 15 to 50. That youth is not an age renowned for its ‘seriousness’, that youth as an age might not be able to really ‘platform’ seriousness … that possibility was eclipsed in the enthusiasm. By the time it became a possibility that required consideration Political Correctness had set in and such consideration would be labeled ‘ageist’.

Within a few years after that, Kennedy’s version of ‘youth’ – which still drew heat and light from the accomplished adulthood of Eisenhower – had slipped from public consciousness. The ‘youth’ of the Summer of Love (1967) was ‘groovy’ and ‘authentic’ when not making hay in the summer grasses in a pleasant pot-induced haze. The ‘youth’ of the Spring of ’68 were rioting not only against the war but against ‘authority’ and ‘the Man’, taking over university campuses for great causes, for small causes, and finally for laughs.

‘Seriousness’ got in the way of everything. So maybe it had to be an excuse too – an excuse to ruin a good time, to obstruct a Good Cause, to get in the way of all the Fun and the Good Work. It was a bummer; it was a downer. Never trust anybody over 30 – they ‘lose it’ and start to get in the way. And then those who were dragged beyond that magic boundary of ‘30’ made every effort to neutralize any possible effects; university faculty, ministers, even (since 18 year-olds could now vote) politicians.

By the time the Revolutions of the Identities got rolling in the early ‘70s, the erosion of ‘seriousness’ as a desirable characteristic and skill among the citizenry had already been set in motion. The reactivity and passionateness of youth was far more useful to a ‘revolutionary’ agenda than any ‘seriousness’; when ‘seriousness’ was on the field inconvenient questions might be asked. The revolutions needed doers, not thinkers – and certainly did not need questioners and tire-kickers. After all, it was in the ‘old’ days – when people were ‘serious’ – that the outrages of ‘oppression’ by whites, by the ‘patriarchy’, by ‘straights’, by (fill in the blank) had been held rigidly in place. And since any Southern preacher or politician or ‘grown up’ could give you half-a-dozen ‘reasons’ why segregation was good, well then ‘reason’ had to be a bad thing, right?

So infatuated were the adults of the day, so eager to ‘get with it’, so – how American! – ignorant of the prior experiences of other countries, that nobody considered the effect of gunning the societal engine on the hot fuels of enthusiasm, idealism, unthinking and unhesitating action, while simultaneously reducing the ‘control elements’ of reflection, critical and skeptical thought, and substantive deliberation. Racing along far too fast to penetrate deeply, the ‘youthful’ spirit was incapable of serious ‘farming’, of the arduous and methodical and slow process of plowing deep, orderly furrows and planting the seeds. That the Nazis themselves had had more youthful Party members than older, that many of the Nazi leaders – Himmler himself, for one – had come to the Party still in their 20s or hardly beyond them, were facts that in the 1970s did not find purchase in the temper of the times.

The ‘seriousness’ of the characters in “Judgment At Nuremberg” cannot be found today. Even in Our present circumstances – where We not only face formidable economic and societal and international challenges but are now saddled with a pre-emptive war that is failing to accomplish anything except bloodshed and the incitement of wide hostility against Us – even so, no comfort can be drawn from the realization that at least ‘serious’ adults are in leadership positions. That ‘gravitas’ is gone – from out schools, from our churches, from our politics, and from our government. And perhaps from our culture.

Contrary to the current thrust of American society and culture, I’d propose a variation of Mark Twain’s comments about his religious affiliations once he’d arrived in Dodge City: it was no place for a child … and I did not remain one very long.

Nor do I for a moment suggest that ‘growing up’ in my proposed scenario means coming to a Rambo-like ‘conversion’ moment of decision and go grab a mess of hi-tech weapons and ammo, find a really cool ride, and go blow the crap out of something big. Nor do I propose the appearance of seriousness such as Eastwood gave us in the character of Will Munny, as much of an improvement as that excellent characterization was. Lone gunmen and revolutionaries – dressed in the trends of this or that decade – have done enough these past fifty years, and it’s going to take Us a hell of a long time to recover. If We have that kind of time.

Our youth-obsession, given such a boost in the later 1950s and 1960s, swept away the respect for – and eventually the capacity for – the type of ‘gravitas’ that shaped all of the great civilizations and societies and cultures. And having played first as tragedy, it plays now as farce in a society where parents with more resources than medieval barons had at their disposal spend their time and treasure trying to cram Einstein into their infants, while treacherous and blood-soaked public guardians claim they must not be held accountable for their crimes because they are ‘doing it for the children’.

Can it do a child any good to have a nodding acquaintance with Einsteinian thought if there is no effective model of genuine adulthood to which s/he can aspire? Upon which s/he can trellis a Self?

Was it Bakunin who gloried in the revolutionary first phase, ‘creative destruction’? Yet that is the easiest phase, that destruction-in-hopes-of-creation. But either one assumes that by destroying what is ‘there’, then an already-existing, previously hidden, fully formed ‘creation’ is freed to come forward or else one assumes that once the work of destruction is completed then somebody is going to have to do a heck of lot of ‘creation’, and quickly. And in fact, if you haven’t already got a clear plan of ‘creation’ ready for deployment before you begin the destruction, then you’re probably not going to get a chance to put creation together in the chaos that will follow the destruction.

It would be childish to ‘destroy’ with no working and workable plan to ‘create’. We see that now in the bleeding ferocious monstrosity that Iraq has become. But what We are seeing, and what is now ‘old’ enough to turn toward us with furious rage, is itself a reflection and a product of Our own childishness, a childishness that has – ala Orwell – been taken for ‘maturity’ and for ‘seriousness’ these several decades past.

It is time to put away the things of a child. It is time to walk steadily and maturely, as in the day. And if there is any armor to be put on, let us recall that it must be the armor of Light, of a maturity formed by thought and by reason, and informed by spirit (and – what the hey? – Spirit).

Too many – and many of them stained with blood and deceit – are now saying that they never thought it would come to this. But Tracy’s final judgment rings like a church-bell: it came to ‘this’ the first time We abandoned genuine maturity. That bell now tolls for many who have died because of Our immaturity. And it tolls for Us. Hear it.

HOMELESS PARTISANS

Up in Boston there is a statue. Actually it’s a collection of figures, just slightly larger than life-size: five mounted horsemen, armed with swords slung on their hips and each with a lance that rises up behind him. They are riding in a loose double file, the horses at a walk. It is one of the most remarkable statues I have ever seen, and speaks deeply to me. And I think it is a quick diagnostic for any of us, how we react to it.

The riders themselves are thick-booted, but without helmet or headgear – the lack of the helmets suggesting that they are not ‘troops’ and yet the boots reminding us that at times they must laboriously walk on the earth. The swords, thick and heavy, hang down although not on a pure vertical plumb, joining the boots in their message that the matters of this earth are thick and dense, not always on-plumb and heavy to engage. Yet the lances are perfect thin spires that rise up above them, reaching with sharp lightness for the sky, a natural medieval city of spires, an echo of the forests that gave them shelter.

The riders are recognizably human males but without individually distinctive facial features. But – no surprise for the deeply Catholic Polish tradition – each rider’s face has a beard, and of the cropped type often seen in paintings of the Crucifixion; the effect is heightened by each rider’s head bending slightly forward, with the upright ‘tree’ of his lance directly behind. The physical contours of their upper bodies are clear, as if they had no shirts (against the cold night) or very threadbare shirts; the lead rider seems to have old medals pinned to whatever shred covers his chest; the effect is of an undemonstrative vulnerability. They sit their mounts square and straight, but with their shoulders hunched. Counter-intuitively, this imparts strength to them, as if in gathering his arms in toward his torso, each was marshalling his resolve, and the tensile seriousness of the group itself is thus multiplied. But while the heavily-booted legs bond with the torsos of the horses, each individual’s upper trunk rises free of the close-grouped mass, each lance then further elongating its owner, extending him almost as an El Greco saint, straining upwards under the tension of his spiritual dynamism and yearning.

The horses are equally marvelous. Thin-bulked, they give the impression of not having eaten a great deal recently. Their legs are long, which serves to further extend the group on the vertical plane. But the legs are not bent as if the animals were weak; rather, the legs are flexed, tensively and dynamically; they are in the very act of moving at a walk. The necks, however, especially of the lead animal, are stretched out, extending the group on the horizontal plane, pulling it forward into the uncertain future. One of the following animals – bringing up the left rear of the group – is caught perfectly in the midst of one of those inimitably equine gestures: the simultaneous extending of the neck to the left and shaking of the head from side to side, almost palpably accompanied here by a whinny. And its neck, extending obliquely outward further to the left, breaks that plane of the presentation, as if reaching out to the viewer.

Yet too, the animals’ legs are not only thin, but also enlongated; as if the necessarily thick burden of the men and their mission is raised up on thin but very adequate legs. And further, as if those who pursue strenuous, lonely but honorable paths, even though burdened, pursue their duty on a plane above the plain dimension of quotidian earth, of daily life. As if, even while moving along in the common dimension, they are actually existing in a dimension above it – perhaps Above it.

The whole group arises from a single base. It is executed completely in a very darkish, pitted and pocked bronze-like metal. No child-smooth, brightly polished, proudly mawkish encomium here. Rather, the metal’s darkness and texture grittily respects the tremendous and lonely exertions of the committed adult, so often carried out in physical hardship and the darkness of uncertainty, unlit and unsmoothed by any clear promise of success or aid.

Or of support. For these men, this group, is alone. Darkness dwells with them, even in the daylight. They are hunted as well as hunters, and cut off even from their own countrymen, who cannot or will not join them in their hazardous duty, who may well not acknowledge their exertions to be any sort of duty at all, but rather a madness that is also a crime, endangering everyone. And thus burthened they press onward with a quiet will.

They are partisans, modeled by the sculptor (Andrezj Pitynski) on those Polish fighters who fought the Nazis and then the Soviet Communists, in the awful years spanned by Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Iron Curtain. But of course, they are a tribute to all partisans anywhere, whose complicated passions draw them into the tangle of human darknesses amplified through war and the ragings of governments, and yet whose uncomplex ideals draw them upward above the spume and dust of the human fray, reaching spire-like for a heaven that, if it exists, must out of tactical necessity assume the shape of a spear rather than a fully-formed cross. They ride together yet each separate, always in darkness, in a hard and darkling world, on a mission that is never completed, undetained by any welcome, stretched out in a crossroads dimension, a vortex comprised out of the living fiber, the colliding energies, of the Vertical and the Horizontal. And of the Beyond.

And, contemplating the spirey but so thin lances, one cannot help but be reminded of the charge of the young Polish cavalry against the Panzers and the machine guns and the Stukas. Yet the human will to be free – not equally taken up among individuals of our species – proves itself sparked by the divine when it is welcomed into the heart and reaches out to others of similar stature.

For twenty-three years, this group had ridden its Long Mission on the lawn at the western edge of the venerable Boston Common; hardly an inappropriate spot. Here stern Puritans gathered to drill for their errand into the wilderness, militia formed to join General Washington in Cambridge or man the fortifications on Dorchester Heights, and Union troops paraded en route to the colossal struggles far to the South. Only yards from their site, the new Polish Pope had said Mass in October of 1979. If this group is out of place, it is only because of their stern message. And maybe because they’re Polish.

The group was removed some months ago. The heirs – by Deed and mortgage if not by blood or spirit – of those earlier generations, the current ruling residents of Beacon Hill, to whom the City has granted the trump-right of outrage and preference, finally took an unofficial vote and decided that the piece did not fit in with the “spirit” of the Common. The sculpture was “depressing”. Apparently the nearby Civil War monument, several stories tall, does not depress them. Perhaps because they can’t quite place it, that particular war. Or perhaps because they can only recall that General Sherman had had tea at great-grand-mamaa’s, when he attended the unveiling. Or was it General Washington? That their defecating Lhasa Apsos and cavorting poodles do very much fit in was taken as a given; ditto their white-tent receptions and twittering parties, held on that hallowed ground by City permits vouchsafed only to the utterly proper, the impeccably appropriate, and the irresistibly-connected.

It’s “depressing”. Well, anything more expensive than cheap grace always is, to a certain type. It’s a type that is not in short supply among us today, arguably it’s even in the majority. If there is a ‘grace’ to Citizenship, a genius, a set of skills (or are they gifts?) of mind, heart, and character, then what are the different roles played by the ‘cheap grace’ and the ‘strenuous grace’ folks? Is there a tipping point when the inertia or chaos wrought by ‘cheap grace’ living finally overwhelms the Republic? Or is it pretty much expected that the Republic is bound to have more ‘cheap grace’ types – perhaps many many more – than ‘strenuous grace’ types? The Founders probably had a very specific and narrow range of folks in mind when they declaimed “We, the People”; is it crazy to expect that a wider democracy will be able to platform sufficient Peopling skills? When Lincoln rhapsodized sparely about “the people”, was he describing what he really believed existed or was he only limning an ideal that he hoped enough folks would adopt as their own? Will we recover enough of the skills, in any case, to be able to People this much-expanded Republic? Or will we simply slide into a paralyzed political senility lubricated by near-hysteric distractibility bordering on dementia?

It was not long after the sculpture was removed up in Boston that Ray McGovern, (the former CIA intelligence agent now spearheading others of his peers in an effort to lay open to the light the treachery and perfidy by which this Administration stampeded the country into our current debacle on the Eastern Front) was shushed by a white-tent-full of oh-so-propah pretend-gentry from the Great State of Jawjah. He had arisen at a Q&A presided over somewhere down there along the line of Sherman’s March, and amidst the tinkling and tittering, had asked the now-almost-former Secretary of Defense about fudged intelligence, thus ruining the rhythm of antiphon-and-response, the tone of democratic rapport established between the good (and gated) burghers and their war-master. McGovern’s brazen temerity was considered an egregious breach of form branding him the worst sort of hussy, and the heroic patriots shushed as if one to defend the graces. They had their priorities.

A pox on the faux-proprieties that dictate polite applause as war-masters bask confidently and the Republic is drawn closer to that tipping-point experienced by Rome when, through her people mistress of her own house, she was betrayed by those same people to Caesar. The propriety and right-thinking that enables these McMansioned gentry to gate their drives and keep the sinecures that pay their mortgages has not served us well. If there is little good done for the Republic by beer-swilling Fox-fed chest-thumpers waving plastic flags, there is equally little good done by wine-swilling fake aristocrats demonstrating their good manners to the whipmasters of war. As we saw in Germany decades ago, the only difference was whether you wound up in the huge mob, cheering yourself hoarse while sweating profusely, or you got gussied up for the invitation-only post-speech reception, where you could applaud tastefully with your gloved hands and shuffle alertly down the receiving line. Ja, surely there is a great difference between those who shout at the Fuhrer and those who gently gush their names to him with a respectful grace. And to think that your invitation marked you as one who had not only some standing and some cachet but a security-clearance! Very heaven! Ach!

But that is no difference at all, in the larger sense of which Lincoln spoke. A soup rabbit is a soup rabbit, whether it is temporarily parked in an iron cage or a velvet one. And if we are to be a People, if we are to be The People, we need very much not to place our trust in the manners and habits of soup rabbits. We, even more than the now-rescendant Democratic Party, must understand that. (Yes, I did make that word up; I couldn’t bring myself to compliment them with ‘ascendant’ – while I have seen Republicans falling, I haven’t actually seen many Democrats doing the hard work of rising. Show me.)

Knowing that in the eidesis of the sculpture they are Polish partisans, we are brought up short by their weapons: horses, swords, and lances against Blitzkrieg and the Soviet T-34. How pathetically quaint. How hopeless. How unshrewd. How useless. What can they be thinking, these partisans? Is it depressing to realize how quaint Justice has become among us? (Republicans, take note.) Is it depressing to realize how quaint Character, Virtue, Will, Commitment, Self-Mastery, and the Beyond have become among us? How flat our unVertical world has become? How smooth our un-adult world has become? How dangerous our world has become in its government-engorging selective crusade for societal and individual purity? How disenchanted our world has become without a Beyond? (Democrats, take note.)

If there is anything ‘proper’ and ‘appropriate’ for us, it is the willingness to do the work of Peopling. Is it depressing to recall what stern exertions Liberty demands? Then we need to re-educate ourselves as to just what the hell we have inherited here in this Republic. Our economic and cultural elites are depressed by statues that speak of the vigorous darknesses of life; our young troops are depressed (with far more reason) by the stern realities of war – and a failing war to boot. And against this ‘depression’ we are exhorted to ‘go shopping’ while our troops are prescribed sleeping-pills in a war-zone. And at all times to applaud politely as our whipmasters urge us on. Are we lemmings? Are we rabbits? Are we – in the gay argot – bottoms? Whatever we are becoming, if this keeps up we will most certainly be slaves.

The sculpture was, after some time in a storage shed, given a new billet, by the Transportation Authority, outside one of its ultramodern stations: on a concrete overpass, above the newly re-developed cement and asphalt plains of the city’s old fish pier and warehouse district. You have to know where it is. Once you get there, you have to imagine them riding the actual earth (although, rightly, the group has been ‘planted’ in an earth-filled wooden stand).

But they are there. And they are here. Homeless, betrayed by a propriety as treasonable to the human spirit as any violence, they pursue their mission. To such spirit, the whole earth is home. And yet not any particular place on it. In faithfully, resolutely struggling for Justice and Liberty partisans make themselves unacceptable to the appropriate. And as it is for Justice and for Liberty, so also for partisans and the spirit of Resistance: only willing human hearts can create a place for them. But no permanent place. If we wish their company, we will have to join their stern and strenuous mission.

The soil of Boston Common was gracious to The Partisans. The hearts of its current presiders were not. How can a Republic bloom if it is not rooted in the soil of the heart of The People? Not everyone who treads Boston Common is a patriot; not every one whose forebears entertained Washington is truly his heir. But there are some Polish guys …