Drag

In the first season of Mad Men, protagonist Don Draper crashes at the apartment of a would-be girlfriend’s bunch of beatnik associates.  Needless to say, they don’t hit it off.  When asked how he sleeps at night, ad executive Draper replies, “on a bed of money.” 

Nevertheless, they agree on one thing.  They eventually fall asleep after smoking a large quantity of pot.  In the morning, they awaken to a police raid in progress at a neighbor’s apartment. 

Draper, needing to report to work, straightens his tie and tugs on his suit coat to pull out the wrinkles.  As he opens the front door, one of the beatniks anxiously objects, “You can’t go out there!”

Don pauses a beat and says, “No, you can’t,“ and walks out, nodding at the policemen in the hallway as he goes.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago as I boarded a plane for a brief vacation in Mexico.  Walking down the jetway, I passed by a Customs and Border Protection agent.  Suffice it to say, he was playing the part.  Body armor, M-4 carbine slung across his chest, etc.  Briefly looking over at him, he gave me a slight nod.  Reflexively, I nodded back.

A fleeting exchange to be sure, but telling all the same.  Like Don Draper, and unlike many other people, I can pass.  I’m an average-looking middle-aged white male who presents conventionally.  In a sense, I’m above suspicion.  I’m just grateful no one can detain me for my thoughts.  Yet.

At least the CBP agents were clearly identifiable. The news of late tells of law enforcement officials unidentifiable by agency or uniform rounding up migrants and student activists.  Are they or aren’t they actual cops? 

The second coming of Donald Trump has provoked a resurgence in militaristic cosplay.  I first noticed the trend the first time around during the lockdown phases of the pandemic.  We were shown the spectacle of white men donning tactical gear and brandishing weapons at urban civil rights protests and setting up unauthorized roadblocks in rural locales asserting authority they did not possess.  The January 6^th insurrection appeared to be the climax of this nonsense which would simmer down with the absence of Trump and his minions from Washington.

Wishful thinking.  Shortly after the election, I was at the airport waiting at the baggage carousel when I noticed a young man milling amongst us.  He was white, with a beard of course.  Otherwise dressed in civilian attire, he was sporting a tactical vest.  He walked slowly, with a serious expression, thumbs hooked at the top of his vest.  I had no idea who the hell he was or why he was there aside from being an arriving passenger, and I asked myself if anyone else was even noticing this.  No one seemed to.  It is common enough lately that such sights scarcely raise an eyebrow.

Much as they had during Trump 1.0, the real authorities have gotten in the act.  News and phone footage showing what seemed to be ICE agents abducting individuals in public are disturbingly frequent.  The agents are generally clad in black or in casual wear, their faces obscured with balaclavas or masks, and they are not displaying badges or other markings identifying which agency they represent.  Homeland Security officials defend the practice as protecting law enforcement personnel from being doxed.   

Maybe, but probably not.  The intended effect is performative intimidation made more ominous by ambiguity.  It also looks cool, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem is the poster girl for posturing as substitute for public safety.  We see her in tactical gear joining Border Patrol agents on a raid.  We watch her posing in front of a packed cell of deportees at El Salvador’s supermax CECOT, sporting a $50,000 Rolex no less.  She parries a question from U.S. Senator Alex Padilla at a press conference on the wholly unnecessary federal intervention in the civil unrest in Los Angeles by siccing the Secret Service on him.

The optics are lost on her.  Appearing before a congressional committee recently, Rep. Bennie Thompson greeted her by thanking her for her time amidst her busy schedule “of photo ops and costume changes.”  Noem scarcely batted an eyelash.   

As to be expected, bad actors are getting in on the act.  You, too, can buy ICE merch online.  Young white males have taken to stationing themselves in Home Depot parking lots wearing ICE jackets to scare off day laborers looking for jobs.  Even more troubling are reports of midnight “raids” on immigrant households by people claiming to be government agents.  In one instance, a family was told to hand over their phones and any cash in their possession.  Contacting ICE and Homeland Security offices afterward, the agencies denied knowledge.

The Trump administration’s methods of ensuring law and order have encouraged vigilantism and enabled common criminals to prey upon vulnerable people.  You could reason that this is an intended consequence.  In the first category, we have a small group of MAGA diehards who believe Trump possesses extralegal authority and that anything they do on his behalf is justified.  (I call this the deputization defense; several J6 rioters believed Trump had “deputized” them to stop certification of the 2020 election results.)  In the second category are opportunistic crooks and garden variety assholes exploiting people who can’t go to the police.

Authoritarians are drawn to military and police regalia.  Perhaps even more so when the individual never served in the military or law enforcement.  (Consider Trump’s fixation on parades.)  At a certain point, fantasy and reality blur.  At a certain point, the biggest Walter Mitty losers can delude themselves into believing they’re the good guys simply by cultivating a look. Provoked by the violent rhetoric emanating from Trump and his allies or internalizing a belief that white men with guns are sheepdogs protecting home and hearth, and you have a recipe for tragedy. 

Policing in a stable democracy must operate in the open.  Law enforcement should be clearly identifiable to the public they serve.  If you’re acting legally, there is no reason to hide who you are.  Otherwise, you erode public trust.  When legitimate law enforcement is indistinguishable from the LARPers you don’t believe your eyes anymore. 

Perhaps this moment will stimulate reform.  We can set guidelines for law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels relating to how they present themselves to the public they serve.  Place limitations on the sale and possession of certain items such as body armor and certain kinds of lethal and non-lethal weapons (though this probably wouldn’t pass constitutional muster in some cases).  Introduce stronger sanctions against impersonating law enforcement and military personnel.  Any of these would be a good start.

What we may not be able to fix is a cultural toxicity that long predated Trump and MAGA.  They are a symptom or the latest permutation of that ugliness.  The only road to improvement is through individual hearts and minds.  And that is a task fit for Sisyphus.

 

 

© 2025 The Unassuming Scholar

Vanity

Tomorrow’s the big celebration.

President Trump is finally getting the parade he’s been after for years.  On his birthday, no less.

There will be several thousand soldiers marching through the national capital.  There will be Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and self-propelled howitzers rolling down the streets, and a swarm of helicopters in the city’s skies.

But wait, there’s more.  There will be fireworks, musical performances, and appearances by astronauts and NFL players.  In other words, the parade looks as if it will be the sort of cheesy corporate spectacle[1] that has characterized any number of “patriotic” celebrations of the last twenty years or so.

I don’t plan to watch.  I dislike these kinds of overblown displays as a general rule, and the fact that the administration has misappropriated the United States Army’s 250^th anniversary to serve the Narcissist-in-Chief’s unbounded vanity is a bitter pill.

But, you’re probably thinking, the president is making a heartfelt gesture celebrating soldiers past and present.  How could anyone object to that?

Well, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be awfully pleasant for the soldiers marching past the reviewing stand.  According to the Army’s public affairs office, the soldiers will sleep on folding cots in vacant federal buildings.  Rather than providing them with at least two hot meals a day, something easily achieved with mobile kitchen trailers, the soldiers will enjoy two MREs and one catered hot meal daily during their stay.  (Each will also receive partial per diem which will undoubtedly go far given the cost of takeout and fast-food meals these days.) Some news sources report that personal hygiene opportunities are being rationed, with field showers operating on rigid schedules.

Now that’s what I call military leadership, screwing the troops you profess to care about.

What’s most concerning are the optics.  There’s the frequently voiced objection that such displays are worthy of Russia, China, and North Korea.  That’s bad enough, because it’s true.  The mindboggling cost of the parade, not to mention the street damage which will inevitably result from numerous tracked vehicles passing over them, provokes wonder at the administration’s priorities.

However, the widespread perception across the political spectrum that this event was planned solely as Trump’s “birthday parade” is what I find most galling.   On the right, Saturday’s quick-time lollapalooza will be yet more justification for the MAGA revolution.  For the left, the association with Trump serves as further proof of our military’s supposed evilness.

Neither camp appreciates the planning and logistics involved.  It’s been known for a very long time that the Army’s sestercentennial was coming up, and you don’t just throw together a large-scale public display at the last minute.  In other words, there would most likely have been a public commemoration even if Kamala Harris had won the election.  With less bombast, perhaps, but a military parade nonetheless.  The emerging details of the logistical clusterfuck housing and feeding 6,600 people suggest the original plans had been more modest before blowing up at the last minute.

Context dismissed, the Big Parade will be always remembered as Trump’s celebration of Trump.  Before the media hype conflated the Army’s 250^th anniversary commemoration with the president’s autocratic fantasy of one-upping Putin, Xi, and Kim, I had privately looked upon the milestone with quiet satisfaction.  It was a satisfaction borne from the longevity of an institution which had played a part in shaping me as a person.  It was satisfaction that I had played a part in its story.  A trivial, momentary part, but I had been there for it all the same.

I don’t feel that now.  It’s as if something special of mine has been sullied.  I am also concerned by the MAGA influence on the military.  President Trump’s address to troops at Fort Liberty Bragg this week reflects this.  The speech was the usual word salad complaining about political correctness and how Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, and Karen Bass ruined America.  The soldiers’ laughter, cheering, and boos were disturbing.  Subsequent reports said these soldiers were prescreened volunteers attending what was for all purposes a political rally.  While it’s reassuring that the audience were self-selected MAGA-heads who are not (we hope) representative of all Fort Bragg’s soldiers, an important norm is eroding.

That norm is the traditionally apolitical military.  Servicemembers are expected to keep their political opinions to themselves while on duty or any other occasion they are in uniform.  That custom is fading into the past.  The unprofessional conduct of the soldiers at the president’s speech, gratifying as it may have been to Trump, is a bad sign.

The public is noticing, and their conclusions do not augur well for the military’s reputation and its societal role.  You cannot turn the military into a political instrument in a democracy and have it remain a democracy.  This is what is at stake.  The question now is whether there is any turning back.

 

© 2025 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] The Army reports that “more than 20” confirmed sponsors are (partially) funding the festivities.

Spectator Sport

It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time.  I’m not sure which night it was—March 19^th or 20^th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.

I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003.  I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces.  The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on.  The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.

The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety.  I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it.  The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome.  The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.

And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold.  One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off.  Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.

The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program.  I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

Part of me wanted to believe that last part.  But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq.  I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences.  Seems quaint looking back.

I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution.  The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it.  Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support.  Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.

The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years.  We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal.  It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on. 

But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention.  Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.  Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones.  Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.

There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders.  The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency).  The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever.  Iraq ranks low on many human development indices.  (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)

The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students.  There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes.  Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time.  Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.).  Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

The Rally Effect Wags the Dog

“The sonuvabitch got what he deserved.”

I sipped my drink and grunted, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

We were sitting in the bar at a local restaurant, watching the TV news.  The place is a little out of the way, and even in the midst of ski season it was devoid of customers except for me and the other guy as we waited for the kitchen to open.

The segment we were watching dealt with the targeted killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.   Soleimani, as you undoubtedly know by now, was the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.  In recent years, he has been a key player in Iran’s support of Syrian strongman Bashir al-Assad and a leader of Shiite militias in the war against Islamic State in Iraq. 

President Trump’s justification for ordering the killing was that Soleimani posed a threat to American lives.  The unrest in Baghdad in past weeks, which included an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, is simply the latest symptom of the power vacuum created by the 2003 invasion and should have been little surprise to anyone.  Similarly, Iran has actively meddled in regional politics as far back as its support of Hezbollah in the 1980s Lebanese Civil War. 

In short, business as usual.  Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon exist at the intersection of a number of religious and ethnic groups making national unity impossible absent a one-party state with a strongman at its apex.  And yet the United States and other Western powers assume they can maintain order and security while fostering Western-style democracy.  In Iraq’s case, the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 practically ensured its Shiite-majority government would become a client of Iran.

Soleimani and the Iranian leadership doubtlessly welcomed the deepening of anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.  Iran has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in the past and Soleimani’s high-profile presence in Iraq was not encouraging, his role in defeating ISIS notwithstanding.  However, I’m inclined to take Mr. Trump’s assertion with a grain of salt.

This isn’t the first time a U.S. president facing an impeachment trial has leveraged a foreign policy crisis.  Bill Clinton was one lucky so-and-so as 1998 drew to a close.  Saddam Hussein had threatened to expel U.N. weapons inspectors, triggering U.S.-led airstrikes.  The Kosovo War for independence was well under way.  And, over the summer, al-Qaeda made its international debut by detonating car bombs outside our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. 

You don’t want to change commanders in chief in the midst of a perceived national security crisis.  This is arguably one of the reasons the Senate merely censured Clinton.  (I think, too, that the Republicans would have preferred not to have gone into the 2000 election facing an incumbent President Gore.  But that’s just one of my crank theories.)  It didn’t hurt that Clinton’s approval numbers actually went up before the trial.  I haven’t seen this week’s polls, but the White House is surely counting on the rally effect to further cement Trump’s apparent acquittal whenever the Senate decides to hold the trial.

The timing of Clinton’s sudden emergence as a quasi-war leader didn’t go unnoticed by a skeptical media.  The resemblance to the recently released Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog was uncanny and was frequently invoked as the impeachment trial drew nigh. 

For those of you who have never seen a movie made before the turn of the century, the plot goes like this: An unpopular president facing defeat at the polls cooks up a hoax war with Albania on the advice of his spin doctors.  Hilarity ensues.

Wag the Dog was just okay as a comedy, but the film’s conceit wasn’t lost on the chattering classes.  Even journalists sympathetic to Clinton invoked its title when discussing how foreign policy had suddenly become so important to an administration more concerned with domestic issues.

The killing of General Soleimani was handled in the maladroit, hamfisted fashion typical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.  It’s so all over the map it doesn’t know which direction it’s going if it ever did.  But I think that makes scant difference to the base.  Something went bang, and a brown-skinned Muslim was dead.

Which was probably what my bar companion meant with his remark.  I guess I could have provoked an argument by pointing out the nuances of Middle Eastern politics, or that if Soleimani had committed war crimes he should have been afforded due process and put on trial.  But why spoil the prospect of a good meal?  I sipped again at my drink and perused the menu.  The news moved on to another story.  Out of sight, out of mind…for now.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

The Good Fight

There are only a handful of surviving Second World War veterans.  This week’s D-Day commemorations here and abroad remind us, as with those of recent years, that their time with us is short.

Being the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, the spotlight shone especially bright.  President Trump stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the celebration in Portsmouth, as actors read from the letters and diaries of those who served and jet fighters performed fly-bys in between rousing song and dance numbers.  Theresa May and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron each spoke, as did Trump himself.  The Queen gave the closing remarks, praising the resilience of the war generation.

Her Majesty is well aware of the thin strand the living vets represent, linking us in the present with the deeds of the past.  She is herself a Second World War veteran in a manner of speaking, having served in the British army at home during the war’s last year or two (though she returned to Buckingham Palace each evening).  This year’s commemoration will likely be the last to be celebrated on such a large scale.

Here in America, we subscribe to the same mythos surrounding that war.  It was a good fight, we were unquestionably the good guys, and the enemy, particularly the Germans, were evil.  It has been so even before the guns fell silent.  When I was a kid, the WW2 vets were fixtures in the community who shared their stories with elementary school classes and served as community and business leaders.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, as the veterans began passing away in noticeable numbers, popular culture became particularly laudatory in its treatment of them.  Even as films and literature treated our other recent wars, particularly Vietnam, as morally ambiguous at best, the black and white view of the Second World War persisted.  Five decades after it ended, mythology became hagiography.  Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was lauded by the talking heads as one last call to service even as they seemed to assume that Bill Clinton, derided by conservatives as a Vietnam draft dodger, would easily win a second term.  The ever-bombastic Tom Brokaw, who himself somehow missed out on his own generation’s war, dubbed those who lived through the war years as the Greatest Generation.

It was at the movies and on cable TV where the mythologizing reached its apotheosis and shaped the narrative in the everyday discourse into the present day.  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are of course the main culprits.  Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers were both technical tours de force and powerful storytelling.  The verisimilitude of the first film in capturing the horrors of combat is striking on first viewing and it still hits hard every time thereafter.  Nevertheless, both works and the volume of derivate films and TV shows following in their wake, engage in cheerleading for an American exceptionalism that we as a nation can’t seem to let go of.

The Second World War continues to resonate because so few of our conflicts have been so morally clear cut.  Only the Civil War, on the Union side at least, possesses the same clarity of purpose in the popular mind.  The others have been mainly exercises in imperialist expansion, large and small.  The Indian Wars aren’t discussed much anymore, even though the genocide of indigenous peoples made America as we know it possible.  Even less is said of our guerrilla war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century.  The Banana Wars involved the subjugation of Latin American states for the benefit of U.S. corporations.

Our military ventures after 1945 are no less problematic.  One could make a case in favor of our intervention in Korea, given the odiousness of the North Korean regime and the fact that Harry Truman shrewdly used the United Nations as a fig leaf for our unilateral butting-in.  By comparison, we sacrificed nearly 60,000 American lives in Vietnam—not to mention the lives of countless Vietnamese—over a pretext so slim that an exchange of diplomatic notes normally serves to settle such disputes as that which led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

After a brief funk in the late 1970s, we resumed flexing our muscles and making self-serving justifications for it.  The invasion of Grenada, the smallest country in the Western Hemisphere, was justified because the Cubans gave material support to a popular revolution.  The invasion of Panama wasn’t a violation of another country’s sovereignty, it was sort of a law enforcement action to catch a drug kingpin.  But the real turning point was just around the corner.

The 1991 Gulf War brought us into the present era of militarism.  A war fought to make the world safe for Exxon was packaged partly as a media event and partly as a case for ramped up interventionism cloaked as the liberation of oppressed peoples.  (Liberation of the oppressed—just like in the Second World War!)  We are now at the point where more than 70 countries host U.S. military bases.  The public has been culturally intimidated into supporting our ventures abroad, and attempts to debate the matter in the mainstream are a non-starter as a consequence.   

In a college history class, we were assigned to read Empire as a Way of Life by William Appleman Williams.  This was circa 1984, and revisionist historian Williams was somewhat passé even then and he is mostly forgotten today.  That’s too bad.  Empire as a Way of Life is a plainly worded account of America’s imperial adventures as the prominent, recurring theme in American history.  Williams made a moral argument for rejecting imperialism and embracing a renewed role for the United States as an ethical member of the family of nations.

Williams the man was a singular character.  A military brat, an Annapolis graduate, and a Second World War veteran, he left the Navy to pursue an academic career.  (The circumstances leading to this have been described variously as an early retirement for service-related injuries or for those inflicted upon him while participating in a civil rights march in the Deep South.)  By the 1960s, Williams was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in a history department featuring such luminaries as George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg.  Williams was a high-profile participant in the intellectual controversies of the era, opposing the Vietnam War while locking horns on occasion with the campus New Left.

Williams’ career stalled a bit the following decade as the discourse surrounding American history and foreign policy shifted and morphed and his work was nudged to the margins.  He migrated westward and concluded his career at Oregon State University.  Distrustful of large institutions, he continued to argue for a return to decentralized government which mirrored his critiques of U.S. foreign policy.  Williams retired in 1980 and died ten years later.

When the Iraq War was at its height, Williams’ writings enjoyed a minor renaissance thanks to academics like Andrew Bacevich but remain fairly obscure.  However, Williams’ ideas retain a certain authority applicable to our present predicament.  We must face the truth that few fights are truly good fights and address the questions of war and peace in language detached from nationalistic sentimentality.  When this discussion takes place at last, may the spirit of Dr. Williams moderate.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar 

Lessons Unlearned

John Walker Lindh is a free man, sort of.

You remember John Walker Lindh?  The so-called American Taliban.  The California native turned Islamic militant captured in Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11.  Yes, him.  He was let out of federal prison this week on supervised release 17 years into a 20-year sentence for numerous charges to which he pled guilty in 2002.

Like everyone else, I hadn’t thought of Lindh for a very long time.  Once he went to prison, the legal case against him was settled and so there was no reason for the media to pursue his story further.

John Walker Lindh’s moment in the spotlight was brief and confusing.  His name was initially reported to be simply “John Walker.”  We learned he was the son of Marin County navel-gazers whose religious seeking led him to fall into the rabbit hole of Islamic fundamentalism.  He had waged war on America, and a courageous CIA officer had lost his life as a consequence. 

Counternarratives fail to thrive in times of crisis.  There were fragments from which John Walker Lindh’s account could be elided.  There was the disturbing image of a naked Lindh blindfolded and duct-taped to a litter.  It was reported at the time that he had been held incommunicado aboard a U.S. Navy vessel for several weeks.  He was questioned by the FBI without benefit of counsel.  Little to none of that registered with the public at the time, however.

It did not register with me, either.  There is a whole new generation coming up who did not witness the September 11^th attacks.  For them, they will be as meaningful as Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination were for me as a child; important certainly, but events carrying no emotional freight.  But personally, the shock of that Tuesday morning reverberates almost two decades later.

The fall of 2001 was a surreal time.  There was the horror of large-scale terrorism visited upon us, live on TV.  The biggest news story over the summer had been the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy and the revelation of her affair with congressman Gary Condit, which somehow made our collective complacency even more astounding.   Weeks dragged on, the destruction of the Twin Towers replayed endlessly on cable news.

Then, in early October, I logged on to the internet (on a dial-up connection, naturally) and learned we had begun bombing Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan.  Finally!  Something was being done.   We’d get bin Laden and his murderous crew and our thirst for justice would be slaked at last.  Within weeks, NATO forces routed the Taliban.

As we would find to our chagrin, the Taliban would prove quite resilient.  But as November came to a close, just after we had solemnly observed the first Thanksgiving of the War on Terror, the Taliban’s resolve in the face of what we thought was certain defeat became very clear.

The Northern Alliance and U.S. special operations forces had secured the surrender of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan.  A number of prisoners were temporarily held in a fortress at Qala-i-Jangi, just outside Mazar-i-Sharif.  Seeking information on al-Qaeda activity, CIA officers Mike Spann and Dawson Tyson questioned a number of them.

One prisoner said there was an English-speaking man among them.  Facing certain questioning, Lindh was advised by his comrades to claim he was Irish rather than American.  When he was brought to Spann, however, it was readily clear Lindh was from the good ol’ U.S. of A.  News footage of the interrogation showed a visibly irate Spann haranguing his haggard and dazed prisoner.  At one point Tyson, seeking to further intimidate Lindh, turned to Spann and said they should just leave him to his fate, to rot in an Afghan prison.  Some time thereafter, Lindh was presumably returned to the prisoner population.

Later that night, a pre-planned uprising erupted at Qala-i-Jangi.  The prisoners overcame and expelled their Northern Alliance captors at the start of what would become a weeklong siege of the prison.  John Walker Lindh was among the prisoners, but his true role is open to question.  Lindh, understandably wanting to minimize his culpability, claimed he took refuge in a basement after being shot in the leg.  The U.S. government said he was an active participant. 

Lindh would have been in a world of hurt in any case once he fell into U.S. custody.  The mere fact he had joined the jihadists was damaging.  But there was an aggravating factor: Mike Spann had been killed in the early hours of the uprising, the first American to die in the War in Afghanistan. 

Mr. Spann was interred with honors at Arlington.  Mr. Lindh faced the consequences of Mr. Spann’s death, among other things.

The charges against John Walker Lindh were sobering, ten counts altogether.  Most were paired conspiracy and commission counts (e.g., Conspiracy to supply services to the Taliban / Supplying services to the Taliban).  Lindh was unquestionably guilty of nearly all, and so he pled in federal court so as to avoid a harsher sentence.  A little more than year after his capture in Afghanistan, Lindh entered federal prison and faded from public memory.

It would be helpful if Lindh would be permitted to tell his story.  It’s doubtful we will hear it anytime soon.  The Justice Department says that the federal Son of Sam law precludes him from giving his side, at least for pay.  He might need it; from what the media have reported the restrictions on Lindh for the next three years would make it difficult to obtain paying work.  But there is one discrepancy between Lindh’s claims and one of the charges which has me puzzled.  Perhaps the most serious charge Lindh faced in 2002 was conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens.  Lindh, through his family, denies he ever wanted to fight or kill Americans.   

It’s possible Lindh was an innocent abroad.  In his search for Islamic community, he was led into the Taliban’s arms.  It is unlikely he or anyone else in the Taliban rank and file had any advance knowledge of 9/11 though he almost certainly had to have known of the Taliban’s links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.  But after the attacks, desertion or avoiding an armed confrontation with American forces became a dim prospect.

This begs the question why.  What would lead an American youth from an affluent background down such a path in the first place?  Regrettably, few of us are interested in knowing.  Empathy is not a virtue in our society.  Individuals who are square pegs get scant understanding from those who fit neatly into round holes.  

Then again, disaffection with the American way is nothing new.  During the Vietnam conflict, the New Left journal Ramparts once published a cover proclaiming, “Alienation is When Your Country is at War, and You Want the Other Side to Win.”  Our culture uncritically embraces American exceptionalism which in turn blinds us to the suffering our foreign policies bring to millions around the world.  For the small number of people at home who pay attention, however, such suffering affects them acutely.  An even smaller subset of them conclude that the only way to end the suffering is resistance.

Was John Walker Lindh one of these resisters?  Some of his statements seem to support this theory.  Is he still motivated by such sentiments?  Reports from prison, if true, would cast doubt on his reformation.  Lindh is said to sympathize with Islamic State.  He cannot obtain a passport or leave the country during his supervised release, though he acquired Irish citizenship through descent during his imprisonment and could settle in Ireland once the restrictions on him are lifted.  From there, his travels would be less visible to U.S. authorities and would arguably be even less so should he renounce his U.S. citizenship.

Then again, maybe Lindh’s idealism has waned sufficiently for him to retreat into obscurity.  Let’s hope that’s the case.  But until we address the conditions that produce young people like John Walker Lindh, we will see more of them.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

After the Guns Fell Silent

The First World War ended a hundred years ago today.

November 11^th is commemorated each year in our country as Veterans Day.  Most of us treat it as just another welcome day off from work or school.  In spite of our cultural fetishization of veterans and the military, however, the origins of the holiday don’t receive much scrutiny.

In Europe, the legacy of the Great War looms large.  I visited London in the summer of 2014 during the commemoration of the war’s centenary and you couldn’t avoid it.  At home, it received sparse notice from a historically oblivious public.

The war and its aftermath have irrevocably changed the course of events in ways which reverberate into the present.  It doesn’t seem to matter much to us, though.  The President traveled all the way to France for the commemoration yet declined to attend a wreath-laying at the Aisne-Marne cemetery at the last minute due to rain.  He also decided not to attend the scheduled Peace Forum summit.  The optics of this in Europe and elsewhere will be undoubtedly negative.

Then again, Mr. Trump’s opt-out is understandable considering how the people back home view that war and the value they place on peace.  World War I took the lives of 53,000 Americans in combat deaths alone not to mention another 63,000 dead from illness but since it rates only a brief mention in the high school history lessons we slept through, it might as well have never happened.

It is not accurate to say that November 11, 1918 marked the end of the fighting.  That was just on the Western Front.  It dragged on for several more years in various theaters in Europe and the Middle East.  The Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Armenians and British and French and Italians all contended for the forlorn remains of the Ottoman Empire.  Russia was wracked by civil war.  Hungary and Bavaria endured first Red, then White Terror.  The Spartacist Uprising was brutally suppressed; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were among the victims.  Marauding Freikorps threatened the nascent Weimar Republic.

Even at home things were far from calm.  The 1919 Red Scare, unlike most other periods of national hysteria over exaggerated threats, had some justification.  It also provoked the usual disproportionate official and public response.  The Palmer Raids (instigated after attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer’s house was bombed by unknown assailants) were one manifestation.  The mob killing of Wobbly and recently discharged soldier Wesley Everest was another, as were the mass deportations of socialists and anarchists (Emma Goldman being one of them). 

Unsurprisingly, there was an uptick in racial violence as well during 1919’s “Red Summer” in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and Phillips County, Arkansas.  The Red Scare’s repercussions were felt into the next decade, culminating with the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it would raise its head once more in the 1940s.

So, the end of the First World War was more preface than conclusion.  The unnecessarily punitive conditions placed on Germany fueled popular resentment, while the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy led to the rise of fascism there and elsewhere in Europe. Lurking in the background was the specter of nationalism.

Depending on your political proclivities, nationalism is either a fine thing or it’s deplorable.  The President is a self-proclaimed nationalist.  Many Americans are, though they misappropriate the word “patriot” to describe their nationalism instead.  Right or left, we’re partial to anything which makes a social statement while requiring a minimal investment of time and money.  Thus, wearing a flag lapel pin or slapping a yellow ribbon sticker on a car qualifies one as a patriot. 

The nationalism I am describing is the move toward ethnolinguistic identity which began in the Enlightenment’s aftermath and would challenge the authority of those dynasties ruling multiethnic states.  Such ideas do animate white supremacist and alt-right activism in this country, but probably doesn’t register as strongly with the rest of the American electorate.  It remains very strong in parts of Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. 

This fact became manifest after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.  I personally witnessed the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s and am still struck by the scope of destruction to both lives and property they brought.  Those conflicts were something of an anomaly, however.  The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian peoples share a common tongue and racial heritage.  Their national identities are instead rooted in their respective historical religious faiths.  That was enough to plunge them into a war that took roughly 140,000 lives and displaced millions.

That conflict was itself informed by the mass population transfers following the Second World War in Eastern Europe.  A beaten Germany was shrunk to two-thirds of its 1914 territory and split into two mutually hostile states.  Eastern Germans were expelled from their homeland after it was annexed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.  Poles were expelled from their homes in the east after their lands in turn were annexed to the Soviet Union (Poland was actually shifted westward from its 1939 footprint).  Italians were driven from Istria by the Yugoslavs.  The Soviets pushed the Finns out of Karelia.  And so forth.  We can chart the border changes and count the numbers of people involved.  The scale of the human suffering caused cannot be measured.

This is the legacy of the “forgotten” World War.  Few Americans know about it, or care.  This does not negate the profound value of the lesson the twentieth century nightmare can teach us, however.  We ignore it at our peril.

Enjoy your day off, everyone.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Requiem for a Spectre

If you’re under forty, you were raised to fear Middle Easterners and Muslims.  For my generation, the bogeyman was communism.

This week marks the centenary of the October Revolution.  Strangely, the anniversary has attracted little comment in the media which is funny when you consider how large the U.S.-Soviet rivalry loomed over 20^th century history.

The Cold War was, in retrospect, more about national rivalry and global power politics than ideology.  While it’s true that the collectivist ethos of the former socialist states was inherently antagonistic to Americans’ individualistic worldview, the East-West standoff was really about global hegemony on both sides. 

Still, throughout my childhood and youth my teachers and the media played up the threat evil communism posed to our freedoms.  Atrocities such as the Cambodian genocide were offered up as proof of the ruthlessness of communist rule and what might befall us should they succeed in their goal of defeating the United States.

This statement, which seems overly dramatic from today’s perspective, would have been credible to a number of people when I was a kid.  Once, in a high school history class, the teacher asked us what was the goal of the communists.  A student in the back of the room promptly answered in a loud, emphatic voice, “The goal of communism is world conquest!”  No one disputed him.  The teacher appeared pleased.

This was in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was doing his level best to antagonize the Soviet leadership.  Anticommunism had become conflated with “patriotism,” and the popular rhetoric ignored realities on the ground.  The Sino-Soviet split had occurred twenty years earlier.  The recently concluded Vietnam War was more about national sovereignty than communism, a truth recognized by many scholars from its start though clearly not by most Americans and their poliicians.

We have a tenuous relationship with truth that goes back much further than the current debate as to whether we’re living in a “post-truth” era.  Our thinking tends toward either/or, black and white reasoning.  We categorically reject any evidence which contradicts our narrative, however manifest it may be to a less partial observer.  This tendency becomes pernicious when it results in defining ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not.

This is a recurring theme.  In our first century or so, we were not those corrupt, rotten Old World aristocrats.  During the Cold War our alliance with the Soviets against the Axis was forgotten as we proclaimed to the world that we were most certainly nothing like those godless commies.  Today, we are not those Muslims who hate our freedom, but this is a topic for another time.

Back to the dialectic between a free, virtuous America and a totalitarian, evil Soviet Union.  If you were with us, your country was a “democracy” and part of the “Free World.”  If you were not, your country was either enslaved or untrustworthy.  This fiction ignored two things.  First, many of the regimes in the so-called Free World countries were in fact corrupt and repressive.  Secondly, whenever the people of one of these countries dared assert their right to self-determination the U.S. and its allies would step in to stymie the attempt—witness the examples of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, East Timor, and Nicaragua.

All this sidesteps the question of the merits of the Soviet experiment, however.  Putting aside the chaos of the Civil War and the totalitarian excesses of the Stalin years, there were aspects of it which compare favorably with the capitalist West.  Many of the ills of capitalist economies were less manifest, such as fluctuating business cycles and unemployment.  The regime at least made the effort to attend to its people’s essential economic and social needs.  The state ideology encouraged the collective welfare over narrow self-interest. 

That last item probably doomed the system in the end.  The citizens of the Eastern Bloc were less interested in political freedom than in Levi’s and rock music.  During the so-called Era of Stagnation between the mid-1960s and the advent of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s economic planners struggled to meet popular demand for consumer goods.  Appeals to the collective good fell on deaf ears when people stood on line for soap and razor blades.  Some Soviet clients, most notably Hungary, managed to satiate consumer demand.  Others, like Romania, were economically inept and politically crooked.

Watching from afar, the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath did seem breathtaking at the time.  The West was vindicated.  It wasn’t long before the downside became apparent, however.  Ethnic conflict in Russia and other former Soviet republics.  Terrorism.  Economic turmoil.  Organized crime.  Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union did not fall for the reasons we use to congratulate ourselves.  It wasn’t the absence of freedom or because of the Reagan administration’s military build-up.   It was that our comparatively free market was more efficient than their planned economy.  What was portrayed as a clash of ideologies ended on a disappointingly prosaic note.  Then again, it doesn’t matter as we’ve long since moved along to newer, suitably evil enemies.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Outrage, Conservative Virtue Signaling, and The Vet

Fox News traffics in populist outrage.  It is its forte, its stock in trade so to speak.

It’s not hard to see why.  For one thing, it’s great for ratings.  It stokes the need of its core audience to perpetually seethe with resentment.  One of its specialties is bringing to light the opinions of obscure dissenters no one would ever have heard of had Fox not pointed them out as proof positive that good old fashioned American values are in dire peril of extinction.

This week, the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia aired a story about a Drexel University professor who Tweeted that he wanted to vomit after seeing a first-class passenger on his plane gave up his seat for a service member in uniform.  The network picked up the story, which is now on all the major news nets.

The professor, one George Ciccariello-Maher, had drawn right wing ire a few months back for another Tweet calling for the abolition of the white race.  Ciccariello-Maher claimed his remark was sardonic, but the story of the plane incident began by describing him as an “anti-white Drexel professor.” 

The good professor’s nausea stemmed from the botched coalition airstrike on Mosul last week, which is reported to have taken a couple hundred civilian lives while doing nothing to break Islamic State’s hold on the Iraqi city.  Didn’t the other passengers who thanked the man for yielding his seat know that the uniformed soldier was complicit in this tragedy just by being in the military?

The newsreaders displayed the expected level of disgust at Ciccariello-Maher’s words while reporting the story.  The trolls crawled out of the woodwork in force to leave comments condemning Ciccariello-Maher’s message, with the predictable profanity and malice.  One poster wrote ominously of the “enemies within.”

For me, the report dredged up the usual mixed emotions whenever I read about encounters between progressive academia and the rest of society.  You see, I’m that overeducated, godless, lefty professor your conservative, God-fearing parents warned you against.  But I’m also a veteran.  I understand the passenger’s gesture.  I accepted a number of small kindnesses from people while traveling in uniform over the years which helped make the stresses of being far from home bearable.  As a civilian, I’ve anonymously bought a drink or paid a restaurant check for service members from time to time, particularly if one was traveling through an airport alone.

So, I’m not about to knock the guy who gave up his seat.  The soldier could have been traveling for a number of reasons.  Perhaps there was a family emergency such as a sick relative.  Maybe he was rushing home for the birth of a child.  It could be that he was beginning or coming back from midtour leave or returning from a long overseas deployment.  Regardless of the reason, it was a gracious gesture which I’m sure was graciously accepted.

But let’s take a clear-eyed look at that gesture in the context of how the public views the military.  “Thank you for your service” has become the obligatory affirmation during any encounter with a service member or veteran, however trivial.  Just this afternoon, I was on the phone with my insurance company.  This particular insurer is a well-known company whose clientele consists exclusively of current and former military personnel and their immediate families.  The customer service rep was pleasant and was able to assist me with the issue I’d called her about.  The call ended like this:

“Thank you for your membership with -------, Mr. Scholar, and thank you for your service to our country.”

“Um, thanks…thank you for…for your help.”   

I never know how to respond.  I’ve come to see gestures such as thanking veterans and giving up seats on planes for soldiers as a form of conservative virtue signaling, a little like wearing American flag lapel pins or attaching Christian symbols to the backs of cars.  Membership in the U.S. military has become politicized, a phenomenon which would certainly horrify the founders of this country if they ever found out.

I blame our collective guilt over how we initially rejected the Vietnam vets. Prior to the Cold War, we never had a large peacetime military.  Soldiering was a refuge for petty crooks and ne’er-do-wells in times of peace and a noble calling for citizens in times of war.  The Second World War was the apogee of the citizen-as-soldier ethos, and rare was the family without someone in the services.  The inequities of the postwar draft were impossible to ignore, however.  During the Vietnam era, the poor were shipped overseas by the thousands while their middle class contemporaries hid behind student deferments and exaggerated minor ailments.

I’m agnostic concerning tales of returning Vietnam vets being assaulted and spat upon by “hippies” at airports.  Some I’ve known claim vehemently that this happened to them.   On the other hand, I’m familiar with historical investigations which were unable to identify a single substantiated incident. 

America was split down the middle over vets in the years following the withdrawal from Vietnam.  I recall the repatriation of the prisoners of war in 1973.  My small town put up banners in celebration, though none of the returnees were from there.  (“Mommy, what’s a ‘pow’?” I asked in confusion.)  That was my small town in the rural West.  Out in the world beyond its limits, people thought and believed differently.

The prevailing attitude toward the military and veterans in the 1970s was roundly negative.  The mass media have left an indelible record of the time.  It’s common knowledge that the TV show M*A*S*H was really about Vietnam despite being set in Korea.  The antihero protagonists of Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver were Vietnam vets.  In Black Sunday, a disgraced former POW is goaded into attacking the Super Bowl with an explosive laden Goodyear blimp.  The disaster movie Earthquake featured a psycho National Guardsman who tries to rape a woman he’s obsessed with and a cowardly Army colonel who flees a tunnel in panic at the first sign of collapse.  Even movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter which were praised for their compassionate portrayal of men and families damaged by Vietnam contained a hint of superciliousness.  During my first year or two of high school, visiting recruiters were greeted with smirks, smartass remarks, and the occasional taunt.

Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, the zeitgeist turned on its head.  Reagan’s cocksure swagger and anticommunism had something to do with it.  Frustration over the Iran hostage crisis and other foreign policy reverses probably did as well.  For whatever reason the Eighties were the Decade of the Heroic Vietnam Vet in American pop culture.  There was First Blood and its sequel Rambo, of course, not to mention any number of Chuck Norris movies.  Platoon played in theaters to rave reviews.  One or more of the main characters in Magnum P.I., Riptide, Miami Vice, and The A-Team were Vietnam vets.  A Rumor of War, Platoon Leader, and The Things We Carried told the grunts’ story to a mainstream which would have scornfully rejected it a couple of years earlier.  Pop songs such “Goodnight Saigon,” “Still in Saigon,” “Born in the USA,” and “Walking on a Thin Line” extolled the travails of the discharged vet in an uncaring world.

This new awareness not only inspired guilt-ridden feelings about vets, but over the military generally.  The Iran crisis made Americans realize that despite decades of propaganda to the contrary there was a lot of pent up anger over U.S. policies abroad.  It also made them aware that future military actions abroad might be necessary and that the burden of these would fall on the shoulders of recruited volunteers.  Americans love the troops because they don’t have to be the troops.  The specter of the draft lurks in the background, particularly during rough patches such as the Iraq War prior to the 2007 surge.  There’s a kind of desperate cheerleading from the mainstream which I trace back to the 1991 Gulf War.  It’s born of remorse over one’s affluence, comfort, and safety when others are facing danger even though few would ever, ever entertain the thought of volunteering or allowing their sons and daughters to do the same. 

There are other symptoms of our collective embracing of veterans.  The sudden anointing of the-vet-as-hero has had its seamy underside.  Rambo gave credibility to the Vietnam Dolchstoẞ myth of the left behind POW.  Despite the black POW/MIA flags flying from the flagstaffs of numerous public buildings and burly biker types too young to have served wearing “You Are Not Forgotten” vest patches, no evidence has emerged proving Vietnam is still holding American prisoners.  What could they gain?  It defies common sense.  Vietnam has had diplomatic relations with the U.S. for over twenty years and the U.S. is an important trading partner.  Why not come clean up front and avoid future friction? 

Another unfortunate side to our hero worship is the rise of the imposter.  Lots of guys have their war stories with a detail or two exaggerated here and there.  That’s one thing.  Telling everyone you were GI Joe with a kung-fu grip when you were really a cook, claiming you received the Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart when you never heard a shot fired in anger, or accepting veterans benefits when you never served is another matter.   

Why doesn’t anyone call foul on these antics?  Why do they go so long without being caught?  It’s because the public has become intimidated.  Criticizing anyone linked to the military is seen by some people as tantamount to treason.  Hence the uproar over the yielded airplane seat.  The soldier who drew Ciccariello-Maher’s opprobrium in all likelihood had nothing at all to do personally with the tragedy in Mosul.  He is neither villain nor hero.  He’s not responsible for decisions made by the Pentagon or CENTCOM.  He was just a traveler trying to get to where he was going. 

By the same token the hubbub on Fox and elsewhere over the professor’s infelicitous Tweet has a further chilling effect on any legitimate critique of our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Question our policies or tactics, and you’re disloyal and un-American.  I think that this incident is one of countless symptoms of misplaced guilt masquerading as Americanism.  Perhaps if we had done right by Vietnam veterans in the first place we might have avoided this unpleasantness.  But in light of the heavy doses of propaganda ladled out to us by government and media alike over the past century, I am inclined to doubt it.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar