Wisdom

by digby

The incomparable Meteor Blades has a post up over a Kos that will make you cry. Here is just a small piece:

Three thousand dead Americans from the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force and the National Guard will soon be in the count. Dead, in many cases, as we have seen, because of the incompetent know-it-allness of an Administration still swarming with chickenhawks. But dead, fundamentally, because of lies. Killed, like McMahon and Judge, heroically trying to save the lives of others. Or killed like my friend, Manny, just for being in the wrong place when the shrapnel came tumbling out of the night.

Whether shattered by an IED at some crossroads in al-Anbar province, Xed out by a sniper round to the throat deep inside Baghdad or crushed in a Humvee rollover in Mosul makes no difference. Heroic or not, no difference. They are dead for lies. Futilely dead. Dead because war criminals sent them abroad fraudulently in the name of liberation, security and prevention.

Dead because of people who waved the bloody shirt of Nine-Eleven in one hand, Old Glory in the other, and simultaneously managed to shred our Constitution and decades of international law. People whose closest brush with battle was reading the Cliff’s Notes version of Sun Tzu, which they promptly forgot. People who, if this were a just world, would soon be making journeys in shackles to The Hague.

In 1967 I lived in Bangkok Thailand, my Dad being a member of the military industrial complex that was part and parcel of the Vietnam enterprise just as Halliburton is today in Iraq. I was just a kid. We welcomed young soldiers into our home, friends of friends’ families or long distance relatives who had a few days of R&R in Bangkok. My mother would make home cooked meals and encourage them to hang out with the family for some all-American comfort. As you can imagine, most of them had much more exotic pastimes in mind, so they rarely took her up on it. I never saw any of them again, but thought of them often because they were interesting creatures to me, sitting at the dinner table sometimes talking animatedly about the war or home, but often somnambulent as if they were in another world.

Years later, my Dad and I were talking and he told me that of the half dozen who came to visit us, four of them had been killed. They were all my brother’s age — the draft dodging globetrotter who refused to go, and who my father had almost disowned over the issue one Thanksgiving. On this occasion, I asked my Dad whether he still thought it was wrong for his son not to have “fulfilled his obligation” and he simply said, “no.”

I think one of the things that truly distinguishes this god-forsaken war is the utter lack of seriousness and gravitas among those who insisted that we do it. My father fought in WWII and Korea and spent time as a civilian in Vietnam as the war was raging. He was the epitome of the WWII generation of hawks who believed that America was a righteous defender of freedom and that we were obligated to help the world fight back the totalitarians. He had basically spent his life in that pursuit and he couldn’t imagine his government being so perfidious or incompetent as to sacrifice Americans for anything that wasn’t a good cause. His gradual disillusionment during Vietnam and after was an uncomfortable thing to see; the cognitive dissonance and the emotional discord never really resolved themselves. He remained an unreconstructed rightwinger, but his worldview shrank from its earlier big-picture pride to a series of petty complaints about his fellow Americans.

The people who supported this war, on the other hand, had the benefit of hindsight that the WWII generation didn’t have when they committed the folly of Vietnam. They, at least, could be excused for thinking that the US could single handedly change the world. But it was only 30 years ago that American military might was tested in the post atomic world and every single pitfall of idealistic global adventure was experienced and later examined in great detail. These flagwaving, wingnut cheerleaders did not base their faux patriotism on any real knowledge of war or an investment of their own youths in a difficult but successful military victory. They based it on movies and television versions of WWII, in which gritty, American heroes won the war and then appeared later on awards shows and made speeches about the greatest generation while they accepted their Oscars.

Perhaps this shallowness is best illustrated by an exchange I saw on MSNBC on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week between two middle aged men who sound like something out of a ladies magazine circa 1962:

BARNICLE: Well, you know, Tim, it—it—it is sad to hear you say that, because—and this is not a shameless plug for your book, “Wisdom of Our Fathers,” but, reading the book, there is a lot of wisdom in it, because it is the wisdom given to us by the men and—and the women, actually, of the World War II generation.

Today is December 7. It is the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. On the morning of December 8 — you have heard the stories—I have heard the stories—long lines of people standing outside recruiting offices joined together as a nation to fight a war on two fronts.

Today, 65 years later, we have this commission report. What is your sense, not only of what—what—what the concept of history is in the Congress of the United States, but the sense of bipartisanship, the spirit that provided us strength through World War II? Can it ever exist again in this type of a culture?

RUSSERT: I see so much of this through the eyes of my dad, Big Russ, Mike.

He told me about Pearl Harbor, what he watched, what he witnessed, what he felt, what he experienced that day. And he was one of those young boys in that line in that recruiting office, and then went down with his B-24 Liberator, and spent six months in a military hospital.

But he told me, first and foremost, about the sacrifice, about Rosie the Riveter, and Jimmy Doolittle, and women giving up nylons, and people giving up condiments on their dinner table, because they had to help feed and support the soldiers.

This is what Barnicle and Russert call wisdom — Thomas Kincaide kitch in which sacrifice is not having any nylons or condiments on the dinner table. I think they are fairly typical of the ruling class in this country who really believed that this could be their WWII. There would be no messy counter culture this time, no rebellion, no complaints. Their biggest disappointment isn’t that it’s become a bloody meatgrinder and a foreign policy disaster. It’s that people aren’t coming together to sing “Hut Sut Ralston On The Rillaragh” and painting lines down the back of their legs so people would think they are wearing seamed stockings. It just seems like that was such good fun. The more than 60 million dead were a small price to pay for such togetherness. And maybe, when the new war is over, everyone will get oscars instead of medals.

This is why tens of thousands of people are dying in Iraq. In that sense Vietnam, for all its mistakes, was a far more noble undertaking.

For an excellent, in depth look at this phenomenon, check out Chris Hayes’ piece in In These Times called “The Good War On Terror.”

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