Patriot Day

 

As it must every year, September eleventh has arrived once more. 

Cue the inevitable scab-picking that occurs on each 9/11 anniversary.  Even at this remove, it is difficult to believe it actually happened.  Watching the live coverage that Tuesday morning I clearly remember the abrupt sickening feeling when I watched the second plane strike the South Tower, turning what at first looked like a bizarre accident into a chilling blow to our presumed safety and security.  

I don’t think it does much good, though, to commemorate the day as MSNBC did for several years after when it rebroadcast the news coverage of that morning in real time.  The National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, and the History Channel have repeatedly run 9/11 documentaries in the last few days in their own annual ritual.      

At some juncture, we must take a sober, detached view of the event.  After twenty years, we owe ourselves that much.  This is particularly true to me when I consider that a significant number of my students nowadays were born after the fact.  For them this catastrophe is a terrible, but abstract historical event.  Gen Z views 9/11 with the same emotional detachment my generation has toward Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination.  These events were terrible, but not in a way they can access emotionally. 

True to form, we made heroes of a few.  Twenty years later, the victims the public holds in its collective memory are the participants in the Flight 93 passenger rebellion.  While we mourn the Pentagon victims and the first responders who perished at the World Trade Center, we mostly mourn them as a faceless mass absent individual personae.  (If you doubt this, I challenge anyone who wasn’t a family member, friend, or coworker of any of these people to identify any one of them by name off the top of their head.)  The unresolved deaths of Sneha Anne Philip, who may or may not have been at the WTC when the towers fell, and Henryk Siwiak, who was the only murder victim in New York City unconnected to that day’s attacks, hold some public interest but they are outliers. 

Tellingly, we almost never acknowledge the deaths of the workers—receptionists, security guards, cleaners, maintenance personnel, food service workers, among others—whose very lives seem almost to have been beside the point for the public.  This is because in the warped calculus of American values, the lives of ordinary workers count for less than those of a few businessmen. 

Consider the Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died while their boss was out of office to enroll his daughter in kindergarten…and consider how many CF employees would liked to have been with their own children that Tuesday morning.  The boss was appropriately contrite to the media, of course, but that does little to mitigate his privilege-borne guilt.  And it is the privilege divide which bounds the narrative of that day. 

I think in particular of the so-called “Falling Man” caught in the famous photo taken by Richard Drew outside the North Tower as people trapped on the upper floors jumped to their deaths rather than be incinerated.  Drew tried for years to identify the man, to no avail.  Drew surmised that Falling Man was probably a cook or kitchen helper as he was wearing a white shirt and checked pants.  Aside from this detail, there were scant clues to Falling Man’s identity. 

Unlike Falling Man, many of the executives who died lived charmed and fulfilling lives, save for their final hour or so.  By contrast, the Falling Man was someone they would have ignored: a person of color, very possibly an immigrant, working at a low-wage service job the main purpose of which was to ensure their own convenience.  Even if he had been positively identified at the time of his death, it’s unlikely that Falling Man’s wife would have been invited by President Bush as a special guest at the 2002 State of the Union address. The Falling Man was deemed expendable twice over—first by his capitalist masters, and then by the militants who took his life.  He is an anonymous cipher in the larger narrative.  

Mass disasters point up societal values.  Much like the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians who have died since 2001, the fates of 9/11’s working class victims simply aren’t relevant.  They are the losers of the neoliberal world order, fated by their informed personal and cultural inferiority to live in service to the wealthy and their managerial underlings.  If they die, well, there’ll be more to take their place.  New York, Kirkuk, or Kandahar…it’s all the same story.  

We have been told that the attacks brought out the best in us.  Perhaps so.  It also brought out the worst.  The immediate aftermath of the attacks set the stage for an assault on freedoms in the name of freedom.  There were the ham-fisted official measures such as the PATRIOT Act to be sure, and the horrors of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and “extraordinary rendition.”  But many signs were more subtle, because they were socially imposed.  It’s natural to seek solidarity in a time of crisis, but in the autumn of 2001 wore on some of it was clearly forced.  Whether it was bank tellers fired for refusing to wear an American lapel pin or the harassment of Muslim schoolchildren, the reactionary response to the attacks produced a chilling effect.  

This chilling effect was reinforced by popular culture.  Numerous TV shows, particularly if they were set in New York City, referenced the attacks.  This was understandable, but white working class culture dialed the sentimentality up to eleven.  From Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” to the renewed popularity of that godawful Lee Greenwood song, to the bombastic tributes to the troops at sporting events, the years immediately following 9/11 inspired either a sense of inspirational unity or one of disorienting alienation. My own initial shock rapidly gave way to the latter.    

As the last Americans left Afghanistan, I could only wonder at the futility of it all.  Afghanistan, Iraq, the War on Terror, what was it all for?  What do we say to the thousands of Gold Star parents?  How do we ameliorate the rise in racism and xenophobia that has persisted into the present?  The answers are elusive for us all.  Unfortunately, it appears 9/11 may become still another tragedy whose lessons will go unheeded.

 

© 2021 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

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

Home of the Brave

I almost missed this story.  I only found out about it from a New York magazine piece linked on Longform.

There was a mass panic at New York’s JFK airport last week which led to stampedes in Terminal 8.  It appears to have been instigated by waiting passengers cheering Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold medal win in the 100-meter dash.  Their applause echoed in the terminal, which sounded like gunfire to people further down. 

When a woman reportedly shouted that she saw a gun, passengers began running for their lives.  In their panic some dropped objects such as their phones; the resulting clatters sounded like more gunfire.  One group ran out a door and onto the tarmac outside.  Another hid in an unused jet bridge.  TSA workers at one inspection line fled their posts.  Misinformation and panic were undoubtedly amplified by flurries of texts and tweets.

It took several hours for Port Authority police to restore order and for normal operations in Terminal 8 to resume.  Other terminals had been evacuated, adding to the confusion.  And yet, hours after the incident happened, news outlets had moved on to other stories, which is why I learned of it via Longform.

It’s a sign of the times.  Elements of story were all too familiar.  When a terrified woman in a hijab, separated from her family by the unreasoning herd fleeing for safety, cried out in fear and reached out her arms to her child it caused one gaggle of passengers to erupt in a renewed paroxysm of panic.  Because everybody knows all Muslims are terrorists, all of them.  I'm a bit surprised that the Second Amendment crowd didn't take to the airwaves afterwards claiming the stampede was still another reason we need an armed public (even though anyone with the merest shred of sanity would see it as still another reason why an armed public would be a terrible idea).  Considering that the incident took place in NYC, I'm even more surprised that Donald Trump didn't tweet or soundbite about how we have to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States.

I can only imagine what would have happened if the panic had occurred in Texas, let’s say, rather than cosmopolitan, multicultural New York City.  The mom in the hijab might well have been set upon by the crowd, perhaps thinking themselves the earthbound equivalent of the heroic passengers of Flight 93.  Incidents like these make me want to barricade myself in my house with a month’s supply of essentials not to venture out unless absolutely necessary.  Not from fear of Middle Eastern terrorists, but from fear of my own people whenever I venture out in public.

We are a greedy, superstitious, and paranoid lot sorely lacking in self-awareness.  Once I was asked by a Canadian acquaintance to describe my compatriots in a single word, completing the sentence “An American is ___________.”  With scarcely a thought I replied, “Oblivious.”  And in few areas are my people more oblivious than in their understanding of the world.

Nearly fifteen years since 9/11 and the declaration of a Global War on Terror, after two disastrous incursions into the Muslim world with a third in progress, we live perpetually on edge.  Despite this we still believe that despite our hostility toward whole faiths and entire peoples we will someday succeed in making ourselves absolutely safe.  This is a false hope.  Even if we prevail against Islamist terrorism, we will still experience acts of terror by perpetrators with different motives.  Terrorism is a political tactic, and it is as old as politics itself. 

So why do we still cling to the delusion we can one day be safe for good?

One reason is the emergence of security theater since the September 11^th attacks.  Aside from the Boston Marathon bombings there haven’t been any major incidents involving a non-firearm mass casualty device in the U.S. since 2001.   Notwithstanding this we’re constantly on edge.  It was understandably worse in the first years following 9/11.  Eight weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, an American Airlines flight departing JFK crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff.  While the cause was later found to be rudder failure brought on by an overreaction by the pilot to wake turbulence, media speculation immediately centered on terrorism.  (It didn’t help that a Palestinian militant group claimed credit for the crash immediately afterward.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks took place around the same time.  Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to the offices of two U.S. Senators and several news outlets killing five people and sickening 17 others.  (It would be nearly a decade before it became known that a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible and that his motives were personal.)   Throughout the fall of ’01 and into the following year the media ran stories of people trying to obtain military gas masks and creating so-called “safe rooms” in their homes.  At one point I read an article on this topic in which the quoted expert’s sole credential was that she had been a producer of the 1995 film Outbreak, which portrayed a fictional epidemic caused by a military bioweapon.   

It was in this atmosphere that Congress and the Bush administration created that bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster known as the Department of Homeland Security.  A mishmash of formerly independent executive branch agencies and agencies formerly belonging to other cabinet departments, DHS is a model of bureaucratic inertia.  (One need only consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina to recognize this.)  It is also a font of questionable policies, particularly in the arena of air travel.

Remember the color codes?  You know, the ones depicting the terrorist threat levels.  It was called the Homeland Security Advisory System.  There were five levels, running from Low Risk (green) all the way to Severe (red).  We were only at red once for a few weeks in 2006, and it only applied to incoming flights from the UK.  The level reached High (orange) several times between 2002 and 2004 though never again on a general basis after that.  (There were a few partial oranges after that.)  The default state, as the advisory at the airport’s entrance would inform travelers most days prior to the demise of the advisory system in 2011, was Elevated (yellow).  Never during the system’s existence was the country ever at Guarded (blue) or Low Risk status.

I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what any of these states actually meant.  In fact, that’s why the system was eventually abandoned.  It was just a meaningless way to reassure an anxious public.  Fox News Channel, which practically held itself out as an arm of the government during the War on Terror’s first years, was the color system’s most assertive proponent, ostentatiously displaying the day’s threat level at the bottom of the screen just above the crawl and near the FNC hologram superimposed over the American flag in the lower right corner.  (My antipathy toward Fox hardened into its present state in those days.) 

The climate of fear simmers in the background of our lives, stoked by a cynical desire for ratings on the part of major news outlets, only to boil over suddenly into mindless fright.  That is what I find intriguing about the American character.  We love to beat our chests, hold our index fingers aloft and proclaim, “We’re Number One,” and moronically chant “USA! USA!”  (This last was a fixture on The Jerry Springer Show, often chanted by the studio audience whenever the menagerie of cretins guesting on the program that day would suddenly erupt into violence.)   Yet when danger approaches we scatter blindly and helplessly.

It doesn't help that Americans seem to suffer, individually and collectively, from the Dunning-Kruger effect.  It's especially strong in conservatives.  Registering Republican apparently makes one an automatic expert on national security even when the person is an insurance salesman or dentist who never served with the armed forces or been part of an intelligence agency.  Believing we are in the loop, that we are active participants in this epic struggle against the terrorists and other boogeymen who lurk in the shadows reinforces our sense of control.  Again, this is particularly the case with xenophobic conservatives who already have strong authoritarian tendencies.  

In some respects the tenor of the War on Terror’s beginnings remains.  “Security moms” are a quotidian feature of American life in 2016 in the way “cocooning” at home with the family and driving them around in an SUV to ensure their safety were in the early 2000s.  We idolize Navy SEALS the way we did first responders a decade ago.  We still tear up and sing along with Lee Greenwood.  And still we are as skittish as a kindergartner on her first day of school.

Just watch the news coverage of the JFK incident if you don’t believe me.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Chilling Effects

The Soldier Formerly Known as Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for his role in the WikiLeaks scandal.  Meanwhile, Julian Assange remains at bay in the Ecuadoran embassy in London and Edward Snowden has found temporary refuge in Russia.

The years since 9/11 have not been good for government transparency.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with public acquiescence in any official measures purported to fight terrorism, have emboldened American officialdom to act with a secretive heavy-handedness unseen since the dark hours of the Cold War.  Manning should thank her lucky stars she wasn’t convicted of the charge of aiding the enemy.  Judging from the comments seen on various news sites, Manning would have been put up against a wall and shot if the court of public opinion had had jurisdiction. 

Manning’s real crime, as with those of Assange and Snowden, was that she embarrassed the powers that be.  It’s that simple; the emperor does not like to be told he’s naked when he’s convinced himself he’s clad in the finest robes.  Footage of U.S. helicopters lobbing Hellfire missiles into residential neighborhoods undermines the claim we’re fighting for freedom from terror.  The government’s aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers, past and present, notorious and obscure, has created a chilling effect on dissent.

A crucial point no one excoriating Manning, Snowden, and Assange can substantiate is whether any U.S. or coalition military personnel were directly harmed as a result of the WikiLeaks revelations.  The combat videos have undermined the military's image, to be sure.  The many thousands of diplomatic cables address mainly mundane affairs, with the occasional embarrassing observation or admission.  But the true threat is to the classification regime itself.  Official secrecy creates its own incentive to hide even innocuous information from the citizenry, not to mention the ability to cover up possible war crimes.  Secrecy permits us to go about our lives blithely unaware of the brutal deeds routinely carried out in our name.  It lets us believe our hands are clean.

Manning seems to elicit a rage in people which Assange, Snowden, and the myriad other players in the WikiLeaks drama do not seem to inspire.  The reader comments I’ve seen on Yahoo!, Reuters, AP, et al., leavened as they are with the sadly inevitable homophobic slurs and prison rape jokes, leads me to conclude that the real animus springs more from the transgressiveness of Manning’s persona than his misdeeds.  The underlying logic runs like this: No wonder she’s a traitor to her country, she’s a traitor to the masculine military ethos, to the very ideal of masculinity.  It calls to mind the “Commies and queers” witch hunts of the McCarthy era, when homosexuality was considered both figuratively and literally subversive.

This single aspect of the Manning case reveals an ugly truth of American culture.  We are a society of playground bullies.  The strong pick on and exploit the weak.  Manning is the kid whose lunch money was stolen, whose ass was lashed by snapping towels in the high school locker room, who has gone throughout her life forced to submerge her very identity under the crushing weight of heteronormativity.  A lifetime of having to choke down one’s rage every day takes its toll.  It is exceedingly difficult to feel loyalty to an order which denies you your basic humanity.

No matter—It won’t be long before Chelsea Manning fades from public memory.  Our collective amnesia will permit us to preserve our belief in our national virtue.  It will be easy to forget because America is populated with consumers rather than citizens.  We readily, perhaps too eagerly conflate abstractions such as “freedom” and “democracy” with material placebos.  Forced feedings at Guantanamo?  Unarmed villagers massacred?  No worries; the people in charge know what is right and it’s not up to us to question them.  Besides, we’ve got the latest SUV in the garage, the house’s value has gone up over the past year, and the kids each have a brand new iPhone 5.  All is well and right with the world.

God bless America!

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

The T-Word Revisited

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the arrest of Dzhokar Tsarnaev on terror charges, I thought it appropriate to repost an entry from last year:

Under Every Bed

I made a faux pas in class the other night. 

Discussing how news coverage affects perceptions of events, I compared headlines describing a Baghdad bombing attack.  One described the incident as Shiite on Sunni violence.  The other (from Fox News, naturally) merely said that terrorists had killed a number of people.  My point was that the American media tend to throw the T-word around indiscriminately, and that this inhibits our issue knowledge.

After class a group of students came up to me, a couple of them Iraq war veterans.  They took exception to what I had said.   Didn’t I know Iraq was the frontline of the war on terror?  Without waiting for an answer they walked off, muttering bitterly among themselves.

I suppose I should have explained myself better, but I don’t know how I could have.  Things have calmed down considerably from the collective paranoia immediately following 9/11, but I still can smell a whiff of latter day McCarthyism in the air.  One thing that hasn’t changed in our national debate over the war on terror is its proponents’ preference for mutually exclusive, either/or arguments, encapsulated in George W. Bush’s dictum, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”    

Deep down, I’ve always feared that Saul Bellow moment that would get me fired.  I don’t kid myself about where I stand with my students.  To them I’m just another service worker, a Starbucks barista minus espresso machine and tip jar.  That’s why they’re sometimes upset when I tell them things they don’t want to hear.  I’ve made a few genuine gaffes I’ve regretted, but I believe what I teach.  It is my responsibility to ensure my students at least know there are alternatives to the conventional wisdom, even if they choose not to accept them.

I’ve alluded before to our propensity to embrace policies wrapped in the flag.  We love freedom, which we define as sharing the same beliefs as everyone else and deferring to authority.  It’s hardly a surprise, then, that we have no problem with practices such as extraordinary rendition, drone killings, and the denial of habeas corpus and due process rights even when the suspects are U.S. citizens.  Because, you see, they’re terrorists, and we will never be safe as long as even one is left.  No real American would question the necessity of fighting them or the means.  Our leaders always know what’s right and it’s not your place to question them.

Many post-9/11 policies have been more symbolic than substantive.  A case in point: Driving to the airport where I live, approaching the passenger terminal there used to be a sign on a light post announcing the current “security advisory” level.  I never fully understood what this was supposed to mean.  Yes, I’d looked up the definitions of the various security advisory levels on the Department of Homeland Security website and understood what they meant in principle.  But really, what did level Yellow, or Red, or Mauve, mean to me or anyone else reading the sign driving by?   The truth is that someone in charge was trying to convince us that they were doing something so we would feel more secure.   

Are we more secure?  Maybe, maybe not.   There hasn’t been an attack on American soil since 2001, and you can make a case that this has been due to increased security measures.  But is this cause or correlation?  Only time will tell.  This is one situation where I actually hope I’m wrong, and that the security obsession has made us safer.  Because we’ve been down this road a couple of times already.

I came of age during the Cold War.  I grew up believing Communism and the Russians and Chinese were bad.  This is because that’s what I learned from my family, my teachers, and from what I saw and heard in the media.  On the whole, though, it was a mild, watered-down anticommunism I was exposed to.  The worst excesses of anti-Red hysteria happened before I was born.  The Smith Act, HUAC, loyalty oaths, blacklisting, and summary firings of so-called security risks were among the excesses of the time, and there is no credible evidence that any of these measures made the country safer.  Decades before that, the Palmer Raids, mass deportations of immigrants, and the Schenck decision after the First World War set the stage for the Cold War national security state whose legacy we live with today. 

I do not dispute that the Soviet Union and “Red” China posed a military threat to the United States in those days.  Nor do I dispute that there are in fact individuals, organizations, and countries that seek to do us real harm today.  What I question is our malleable definition of “terrorism.”  While I accept the general meaning of terrorism as violence meant to create fear in furtherance of political goals, I also know governments are apt to apply the label only to that political violence which works against them. 

Let’s consider some past examples.  South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.  (He remained on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2006.)  Rhodesia’s army used the recruiting slogan, “Terrorism Stops Here!”  The Germans summarily executed captured partisans as terrorists during World War II.  And the military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil imprisoned hundreds of their opponents on terrorism charges in the 1970s.

Let’s consider a few more examples, along with the oft-disparaged cliché, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  The Zionist groups Irgun and Haganah waged a campaign of bombing, kidnapping, and murder against the British authorities and Palestinian Arabs prior to the formation of Israel.  Were they terrorists or freedom fighters?  Anti-Castro exile Luis Posada Carriles and his associates planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner, causing it to crash with no survivors.  Was he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?  The Nicaraguan Contras killed judges, doctors, and labor leaders in their insurgency against the Sandinistas.  Terrorists or…?  You get the idea.

I’m not necessarily arguing moral equivalency here.  But the distinctions can get pretty blurry.  I’ll stipulate once more the definition of terrorism I gave above.  It’s a threat we have faced for several decades from a variety of sources.  The main difference is that since the Berlin Wall came down the Islamic terrorist has supplanted the communist as national bogeyman and all-purpose enemy.  Where we once faced an ideological foe, we now face a poorly differentiated set of religious militants.  Confronted with that fact, it’s a short leap to conflate the relatively small number of militants with hundreds of millions of their coreligionists.  In fact, popular support for the war on terror is largely rooted in anti-Muslim, anti-Middle Eastern bigotry.  Why bother telling Sunnis apart from Shiites, or Arabs from Persians, Turks, Kurds, et al., when you can just hang a single label on them and leave it at that? 

As Americans we have internalized fear and suspicion as our default approach to the rest of the world.  Coupled with our penchant for reductionist thinking, I wonder if it will be our own undoing.   Until we can consider our national security challenges rationally, we will continue to look for monsters under every bed.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar