September 11, 2002
It's September 11th, 2002.
If either of my kids had been killed in last year's terrorist attacks, I'd want revenge.
I even understand people who advocate torture to hunt down and punish those responsible for this abomination. If my own child were kidnapped, and a non-cooperative informant could be forced to reveal her whereabouts through torture, I would dismember that person joint by joint, starting with fingers, toes and incremental bits of genitalia.
Those are my feelings.
Given the heinousness of last year's attack on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, I'm certain many others feel as I do.
Still, there is a difference between private passion and political discipline. For the sake of civilization, I would hope the State would restrain me, or, if I succumbed to acts of passion that the State would punish me, taking into account extenuating circumstances.
As materialism becomes the de facto religion of America, we have learned to compartmentalize our religious beliefs so they don't intrude on our feelings. Although most of us never spank our children, holding to the self-evident belief that "violence begets violence," we are determined to "kick ass" when it comes to "them damn darkies over there."
We claim to be in hot pursuit of "the guilty parties" but repeatedly kill wedding guests, market goers, factory workers and subsistence farmers. We're very sorry for the "collateral damage," and continue to inflict it. To what end? On September 10th, 2002, NBC reported that al Qaeda forces were moving back into Afghanistan.
It's illuminating to examine our former allies. Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein have been on the American payroll. Osama bin Laden learned his evil art at the knee of American trainers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt characterized Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza as a "son of a bitch, but at least he's our son of a bitch." (The only country ever condemned by the World Court for terrorism was the United States for coordinating the Contra War whose purpose was to ovethrow the democratically-elected Sandinista government.)
We swear that this time, we will choose a fit replacement for the Taliban, a fit replacement for the Sandinistas, a fit replacement for Saddam Hussein and a fit replacement for Yasser Arafat. We swear we've learned our lesson. We will not err again. We promise. Cross our fingers. Cross our hearts. Henceforth, we will only deal in high-handed currency.
Fork my tongue.
It may seem I oppose America. Rather, it is my intention to prevent the commission of irrevocable mistakes and potentially apocalyptic errors.
Of course I may be wrong. Gandhi himself wasn't sure what he would do if confronted with Hitlerian violence. He did however believe that the soul force of "satyagraha" was real and that it depended on pacifism. Through a coordinated movement of non-violence, this half-naked little man, walking the Indian sub-continent, spinning wheel in hand, overturned the most expansive empire the world has ever known.
Given my uncertainty, it is particularly ominous that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft are absolutely certain God is on their side.
It is at least cautionary that human beings never felt more certain God was on their side than when Mohammed Atta and crew crashed the Twin Towers.
Lately, I've been pondering the "divinely ordained" self-certainty of warring parties, including our own Civil War in which more citizens died than the cumulative toll of all other American conflicts.
Do we believe the Confederate South was animated by a deliberate desire to perpetrate evil, to sustain the abomination of slavery because a whole people had sold its soul to the devil? Or have we settled into a more measured belief that the Civil War was a conflict of values, a tragic inevitability between different peoples from different cultures, fighting for their beliefs, chief among them that they were standard bearers of their God?
What happens when the immediate horror of war settles down in the hallowed halls of history? At the heart of this transition from "feeling to fact" is the development of perspective, the lack of which Thomas Aquinas identified as the constant source of sin.
An example...
Forty five years ago, my Uncle Walt died suddenly. He left Aunt Virginia impoverished, the single mother of eight year old Beverly. At the time, nothing was as horrifying as her unexpected bereavement.
Five years ago, I was talking with Virginia about Walt's death. "We'd gone to Aunt Lil's for dinner that evening," she began. "As always, Lil topped it off with her heavily-larded lemon meringue pie. We went to bed late. In the middle of the night Walt woke up saying he felt terrible. I said 'That's not much help Walt. What, exactly, does it feel like?' And Walt said, 'To tell you the truth Virginia, it feels like I just ate Aunt Lil's lemon meringue pie.' No sooner did I fetch the Pepto Bismol than Walt was lying there dead."
There was a pause.
Then, Virginia collapsed in the most uproarious laughter I've ever heard. Between shudders of hilarity, she gasped "You know, I never thought about it before, but I think Walt was right. Aunt Lil's lemon meringue pie killed him." She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
Time heals wounds. The violence of vengeance keeps them open. We no longer spank our children because we know it does little good, and often causes demonstrable harm. Consider how we stretch our mouths wide when pestered by canker sores at the corner of our lips. That's the impulse behind retaliation. We've got a sore, and we're gonna meddle 'til we damn well make it worse.
Retaliation. The very etymology of the word has a sorry -- though strikingly straightforward -- derivation. It comes from the Hebrew "Talion" the name of the Law that demands "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
The Semitic religions -- along with their Christian offspring - are enduringly fond of the Talion and the retaliation it demands, the human sacrifice.
Or consider the banalization of the Lord's Prayer. By lexical sleight of hand, we re-phrase Y'eshua's universal call to forgiveness, reducing it to the language of misdemeanor. Catholics pray "forgive us our trespasses." Protestants pray "Forgive us our debts."
"Trespass" and "debt" were the least crimes Christ had in mind. Already he sensed execution "in the air," and easily foresaw the subsequent slaughter of his disciples.
Gandhi said: "Only Christians fail to recognize Christ as a pacifist."
Why?
Thank God for that scene in the Temple where Jesus drives out the money-changers. What better justification for the Crusades, two World Wars, the fire-storming of Dresden and the nuclear nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For that matter, what better justification for the Holocaust...
It is often said that "War is Hell" which recalls Hitler's tactical observation that "shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven... The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
Retaliation is the biggest lie of all, and has been perpetrated by the twin spirits of depersonalization and demonization that constantly seek to infect all polities.
Still, the particular corruption of the American political tradition has specific roots in post-War isolation, greed and aggrandizement.
Immediately after World War II, the United States held unique sway among the "developed" nations, most of which were recovering from wreckage. George Kennan, the leading architect of The Cold War, understood our situation clearly and expressed it with icy plainness in Policy Planning Study #23, released to other members of the State Department in February, 1948: 'We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and benefaction.... The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'"
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote 81 brief poems known collectively as the Tao Te Ching. http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/ttc-list.htm Every poem is saturated with irony and paradox. In one verse, Lao Tzu says "If you would not be robbed, do not fill your house with jade."
In an effort to rid myself of residual jade, I've been re-reading "Voluntary Simplicity," a book published in 1981 and revised in 1993. "Voluntary Simplicity" adopts the historical perspective of Arnold Toynbee who concluded that all civilizations -- like all life forms -- partake of an inevitable cycle: birth, childhood, adulthood, senescence and death. "Voluntary Simplicity" creates a similar typology, suggesting that civilizations pass through stages of High Growth, Full Blossoming, Initial Decline and Breakdown, each of these four stages correlated with Eras of Faith, Reason, Cynicism and Despair.
I was particularly struck by the book's description of "Breakdown": "It is an era of despair as all hope that things can return to their former status is exhausted." Immediately I recalled September 11th, and the now common belief that we cannot return to our "former status."
According to the nation's power brokers, we have embarked an endless war on terror. This constant war-footing endows bureaucrats with power to curtail individual rights, thus - so they say - facilitating capture of "a hidden enemy." However, in this world of lurking terror, we can never be sure if "The Enemy" has been destroyed, or is simply hiding, just as we cannot determine if Bin Laden is dead or alive.
By my lights, warfare - whether domestic or political - begins when both parties start to stare at the other's "shadow," focusing on the inevitable darkness rather than the original light. With good reason Neitzsche issued his warning: "When fighting a monster, be careful you don't become one" Entrance to the shadow-lands is through "the other's" shadow. When fighting a battle that is intrinsically endless, war - and rumors of war - become our daily bread. I recall the old Beatles' lyric "You know that what you eat you are..."
Of all the fatuous mottoes emblazoned on American license plates, only New Hampshire's rises from a deep philosophical well. "Live free or die." The war on terrorism corrupts our determination to live free. Instead of confronting death with the boldness of liberty, we authorize "mercenaries" to help us deny death at the expense of liberty. In the process, we create a fool's errand and a coward's mission.
Five years before the Soviet Union collapsed (chiefly from untenable internal forces) NPR interviewed a Russian dissident. Speaking with the unctuous tone that often colors the liberal press, the interviewer asked: "What's it like to live without freedom of Religion?" The Russian didn't miss a beat: "There is always freedom of Religion."
"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."
After sputtering growth within the Jewish community, Christianity finally took root as a slave religion. From this powerless base, Christianity encompassed the world not through resistance but through acceptance --- chiefly the acceptance of martyrdom. Doubting Thomases proclaim the inefficacy of passive resistance, cavalierly dismissing the historical truth that passive resistance is the only approach to human transformation that ever succeeded on such epic scale.
When Jesus said "Resist not evil. Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you," he was, perhaps, voicing the literal truth, regardless the parade of revisionists who would hold him in a gilded cage.
Will Durant, the only English-speaking historian to rival Toynbee in scope and vision, completed his final reflection at age 96. In it, he argues that the greatest human accomplishment - the crowning glory of civilization - is nothing more, nor less, than forgiveness --- that free gift that re-images us as children of a loving God and heirs to a fearless freedom that smiles at the inevitability of death.
As I conclude this reflection, I glance at a copy of Newsweek lying on my desk. In it, Americans are invited to buy the new "Country Coach Intrigue," an RV that lists for $348,000.00. Have we nothing better to do than create tin cans jammed with jade?
In the toss-up between the world's great wisdom traditions and America's servile prostration before The Golden Calf, I'm not only repulsed, but embarrassed by the brute dominance of materialism.
When asked what he thought of western civilization, Gandhi replied: "I think it would be a good idea."
***
Afterthoughts
"We should not march into Baghdad... To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."
"A World Transformed," George Herbert Bush, 1998"Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime." Dick Cheney, 1996
"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright, in response to question in 60 Minutes interview: "A half million children have died [as a result of sanctions against Iraq]...more children than died in Hiroshima. And is the price worth it?"
War is a Racket
Major General Smedley Butler
United States Marine Corps Commandant
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns six percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes, and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem off for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. "During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents." Major General Smedley Butler (former Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps), Common Sense, November 1935
"The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy."
Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General, Carter Administration The President's Real Goal in Iraq by Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Recommended by friend and traveling companion Arthur C., a retired Air Force general who served in WWII and Korea. Like General Norman Schwarzkopf and George H. Bush security advisor Brent Scowcroft - Arthur has been opposed this war. He recommends Bookman's article as "the best description I've come across concerning the Bush Adminstration's goal in Iraq." http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/0902/29bookman.html
"The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims. There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." G.K. Chesterton
"Americans are fucked. They've been bought off. And they come real cheap: a few million dirt bikes, camcorders, microwaves, cordless phones, digital watches, answering machines, jet skis and sneakers with lights in 'em. You say you want a few items back from the Bill of Rights? Just promise the doofuses new gizmos." George Carlin
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." Thomas Jefferson
