So the war in Iraq is over. Let the celebration begin!
Never mind the hundreds of thousands of lives lost or ruined, the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, during its seven-year run (almost two of which took place under Obama's watch).
Never mind that the drawdown of troops in Iraq is directly related to, and will be more than offset by, an escalation of combat in the equally unjustifiable and unwinnable war against Afghanistan.
Never mind that these twin wars helped leverage policies of illegal detention and interrogation ("torture" to the layman) that the Obama administration continues to practice.
Never mind that the antiwar movement in this country is dead, killed by its own and the general public's foolhardly faith that Obama would bring us Peace in Our Time.
Never mind any of that. I'm gonna grab me the first civilian gal I can find and plant a big public smooch on her for the cameras.
Showing posts with label iraq war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iraq war. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
King's True Dream
In the week following Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I've made it a habit to introduce my students to a speech of his that practically no one knows about, a speech that's been almost entirely eclipsed by "I Have a Dream." Not that I have a problem with the latter speech, of course. But I feel that the obsessive focus on this speech does a disservice to King's legacy, a legacy that was far more radical than his words at the Lincoln Memorial suggest. "I Have a Dream" is a speech that, these days at least, it's hard to disagree with; who but hardcore racists could object to King's vision of interracial harmony? In that respect, the endless replaying of the "Dream" speech serves a stultifying rather than a galvanizing function in our current historical context; the speech allows us, especially with a black man in the White House, to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, rather than to ask ourselves how far we still have to go.
And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.
And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.
I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.
But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."
And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.
And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.
I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.
But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Thank You For Your Service
I was reading my former colleague Ed Palm’s excellent essay on the return of veterans to college, “The Veterans Are Coming! The Veterans Are Coming!” In the course of discussing the longstanding ambivalence and uncertainty with which vets are treated on college campuses, Palm offers several very sensible suggestions to ease their transition, including: “Treat veterans as you would any other student,” “Do not shy away from any political or social issues appropriate to your class,” and so on. An academic and a veteran of the Vietnam War himself, Palm builds a strong case for best practices in integrating former warriors into the college classroom.
Only one of Palm’s recommendations has stirred any controversy: “Do not thank veterans you don’t know for their service.” Palm’s reasoning is that anonymous thank-yous are not only apt to be taken the wrong way but assume an unmerited familiarity with the individual veteran’s circumstances and beliefs. Several veterans who left comments on the website, however, have argued that they personally appreciated strangers’ thank-yous, and they have recommended this practice as, in the words of one, “good form.”
But is it good form? I’m not talking about the individual veteran or well-wisher’s feelings; I’m talking about the reflex “thank you for your military service” as a social practice. Is this practice productive of social good or not?
To answer this question, we first have to understand the reasons for the practice. As I see it, there are three principal reasons one might wish to thank veterans for their service:
1. They perform work that is vital to our society’s functioning.
2. The work they perform is difficult, demanding, and dangerous.
3. This vital, difficult work embodies certain values—patriotism, selflessness, sacrifice—that most of us claim to approve but that few of us adequately practice in our own lives or acknowledge in the lives of others.
Of these three, the second seems least subject to dispute. Military service is difficult in every conceivable way: physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, ethically. Shouldn’t people be thanked for voluntarily undergoing such difficulties?
Perhaps they should. But if so, then shouldn’t we also thank all the other people who voluntarily perform difficult, demanding, even dangerous jobs? This would include, of course, police officers and firefighters—but it might also include anyone in the penal system (prison guards and so forth), pilots, ships’ captains, bus drivers, airport security agents, field agents in the FBI and CIA, anyone who works with hazardous materials, health care workers who expose themselves to illness, child care workers who do the same, garbage collectors who encounter syringes in plastic bags, high school teachers who break up gang fights in the hallways, college professors whose students walk into the classroom armed with semiautomatic weapons, and, for that matter, those thousands of poor souls who went to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It’s a dangerous world—that’s why we have a military in the first place—and though of course the risks differ by profession, there are millions of workers who put their health, their security, even their lives on the line every day, as a matter of course. Shouldn’t they be thanked for their service?
But perhaps these workers fail the first criterion: that of performing vital service to their country. I’m afraid this isn’t so either. Everyone in the list above—and lots of others I can think of, from orderlies to Peace Corps recruits to soup kitchen servers—perform indispensable social services; that’s how a complex society works. Again, one might dispute which job is more vital to society’s functioning; one might privilege serving in the military over, say, addressing the physical, mental, and emotional afflictions of those in hospice care. But I’d still argue that if we’re going to thank people routinely for their service, we should thank those hospice care workers along with our veterans.
So that leaves us with the final, and least tangible, criterion: the values embodied by military service. I don’t deny that those values exist, at least potentially, in such service; nor do I deny that they are essential social values. (I do, however, deny that one should indiscriminately and under every circumstance attribute those values to military service. As I’ve argued in an earlier post, we’re obligated as moral agents to judge the conflicts in which our military engages, and I would no more thank a veteran for serving in the criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than I would thank someone for breaking into my neighbor’s home.) Yet even if we grant the questionable assumption that patriotism, sacrifice, and selflessness are synonymous with military service, we will be forced to admit that there are many other people, including you and me, who act patriotically, who sacrifice, who give of themselves selflessly day in and day out. What else do taxpayers do? What do parents do? What do ministers do? What do artists, bloggers, environmentalists, antiwar activists do? In short, those who serve in the military—to say nothing of the military itself—have not cornered the market on social value or values. If we believe they have, our own values are dangerously impoverished.
In the end, I hope it is clear, this is neither an argument against veterans nor against thanking them for their service. Rather, it is an argument against the assumption that military service lies in a class by itself and merits a regard entirely out of proportion to the regard owed other members of our society. It is an argument for recognizing value where value lies, and for acknowledging the value one recognizes. So I’d like to conclude by saying, simply, whoever you are, thank you for your service.
Only one of Palm’s recommendations has stirred any controversy: “Do not thank veterans you don’t know for their service.” Palm’s reasoning is that anonymous thank-yous are not only apt to be taken the wrong way but assume an unmerited familiarity with the individual veteran’s circumstances and beliefs. Several veterans who left comments on the website, however, have argued that they personally appreciated strangers’ thank-yous, and they have recommended this practice as, in the words of one, “good form.”
But is it good form? I’m not talking about the individual veteran or well-wisher’s feelings; I’m talking about the reflex “thank you for your military service” as a social practice. Is this practice productive of social good or not?
To answer this question, we first have to understand the reasons for the practice. As I see it, there are three principal reasons one might wish to thank veterans for their service:
1. They perform work that is vital to our society’s functioning.
2. The work they perform is difficult, demanding, and dangerous.
3. This vital, difficult work embodies certain values—patriotism, selflessness, sacrifice—that most of us claim to approve but that few of us adequately practice in our own lives or acknowledge in the lives of others.
Of these three, the second seems least subject to dispute. Military service is difficult in every conceivable way: physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, ethically. Shouldn’t people be thanked for voluntarily undergoing such difficulties?
Perhaps they should. But if so, then shouldn’t we also thank all the other people who voluntarily perform difficult, demanding, even dangerous jobs? This would include, of course, police officers and firefighters—but it might also include anyone in the penal system (prison guards and so forth), pilots, ships’ captains, bus drivers, airport security agents, field agents in the FBI and CIA, anyone who works with hazardous materials, health care workers who expose themselves to illness, child care workers who do the same, garbage collectors who encounter syringes in plastic bags, high school teachers who break up gang fights in the hallways, college professors whose students walk into the classroom armed with semiautomatic weapons, and, for that matter, those thousands of poor souls who went to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It’s a dangerous world—that’s why we have a military in the first place—and though of course the risks differ by profession, there are millions of workers who put their health, their security, even their lives on the line every day, as a matter of course. Shouldn’t they be thanked for their service?
But perhaps these workers fail the first criterion: that of performing vital service to their country. I’m afraid this isn’t so either. Everyone in the list above—and lots of others I can think of, from orderlies to Peace Corps recruits to soup kitchen servers—perform indispensable social services; that’s how a complex society works. Again, one might dispute which job is more vital to society’s functioning; one might privilege serving in the military over, say, addressing the physical, mental, and emotional afflictions of those in hospice care. But I’d still argue that if we’re going to thank people routinely for their service, we should thank those hospice care workers along with our veterans.
So that leaves us with the final, and least tangible, criterion: the values embodied by military service. I don’t deny that those values exist, at least potentially, in such service; nor do I deny that they are essential social values. (I do, however, deny that one should indiscriminately and under every circumstance attribute those values to military service. As I’ve argued in an earlier post, we’re obligated as moral agents to judge the conflicts in which our military engages, and I would no more thank a veteran for serving in the criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than I would thank someone for breaking into my neighbor’s home.) Yet even if we grant the questionable assumption that patriotism, sacrifice, and selflessness are synonymous with military service, we will be forced to admit that there are many other people, including you and me, who act patriotically, who sacrifice, who give of themselves selflessly day in and day out. What else do taxpayers do? What do parents do? What do ministers do? What do artists, bloggers, environmentalists, antiwar activists do? In short, those who serve in the military—to say nothing of the military itself—have not cornered the market on social value or values. If we believe they have, our own values are dangerously impoverished.
In the end, I hope it is clear, this is neither an argument against veterans nor against thanking them for their service. Rather, it is an argument against the assumption that military service lies in a class by itself and merits a regard entirely out of proportion to the regard owed other members of our society. It is an argument for recognizing value where value lies, and for acknowledging the value one recognizes. So I’d like to conclude by saying, simply, whoever you are, thank you for your service.
Monday, October 12, 2009
War and Peace Prize
Well, I told you it wouldn't take long for Obama's misguided war policies to return to this column. I told you it wouldn't take long for him to do something.
The only difference this time is, he actually did nothing.
But the Nobel Committee, apparently believing that doing nothing is better than nothing, did do something: they awarded him a big fat peace prize.
In interviews after the announcement of the award, Obama confessed to being "surprised" at the committee's decision. And frankly, I'm not surprised he was.
Because when it comes to promoting peace, Obama has not only not done anything, he's done a lot less than nothing.
Let's review. Despite campaign promises, he has maintained the war in Iraq, with no end in sight. (After we pull out, he tells us, tens of thousands of "non-combat troops," not to mention various bases, embassies, contractors, private security forces, and advisors, will remain. So really, we're there for good.) And in keeping with campaign promises, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan, with, let's face it, no end in sight. (If these wars have proved anything, it's that in the modern era, wars are much easier to prolong than to end.) So Obama's signal contribution to peace has been to wage--and no less vigorously than his predecessor--war.
The wars he has waged have achieved none of the objectives on which they were founded. They have not destroyed the Taliban or al Qaida, captured Osama bin Laden, rid the world of WMD, brought democracy to the Middle East, staved off terrorist threats, liberated Muslim women, or any of the rest of it. What they have done is kill thousands of US soldiers and possibly hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, wreck several nations' economies and environments, unleash ancient ethnic rivalries, stoke anti-US sentiment worldwide, spawn new terrorist networks and recruits, install unstable governments, enrich defense contractors, embolden aggressor nations, and generally make the world much less peaceful than it was before they began.
Not exactly what you'd expect of the Nobel Prize winner. But hey, I guess it's something.
The only difference this time is, he actually did nothing.
But the Nobel Committee, apparently believing that doing nothing is better than nothing, did do something: they awarded him a big fat peace prize.
In interviews after the announcement of the award, Obama confessed to being "surprised" at the committee's decision. And frankly, I'm not surprised he was.
Because when it comes to promoting peace, Obama has not only not done anything, he's done a lot less than nothing.
Let's review. Despite campaign promises, he has maintained the war in Iraq, with no end in sight. (After we pull out, he tells us, tens of thousands of "non-combat troops," not to mention various bases, embassies, contractors, private security forces, and advisors, will remain. So really, we're there for good.) And in keeping with campaign promises, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan, with, let's face it, no end in sight. (If these wars have proved anything, it's that in the modern era, wars are much easier to prolong than to end.) So Obama's signal contribution to peace has been to wage--and no less vigorously than his predecessor--war.
The wars he has waged have achieved none of the objectives on which they were founded. They have not destroyed the Taliban or al Qaida, captured Osama bin Laden, rid the world of WMD, brought democracy to the Middle East, staved off terrorist threats, liberated Muslim women, or any of the rest of it. What they have done is kill thousands of US soldiers and possibly hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, wreck several nations' economies and environments, unleash ancient ethnic rivalries, stoke anti-US sentiment worldwide, spawn new terrorist networks and recruits, install unstable governments, enrich defense contractors, embolden aggressor nations, and generally make the world much less peaceful than it was before they began.
Not exactly what you'd expect of the Nobel Prize winner. But hey, I guess it's something.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Why I Don't Support the Troops
This will be the last of my antiwar essays (at least for a while, at least until the current administration gives me another excuse to post something. Shouldn't take long). I originally published this essay in the newspaper of the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh's hub of peace and social justice activism. It also gave me an opportunity to cite Thoreau, which is something I do every chance I get!
Incendiary title notwithstanding, I think the logic of the piece is fundamentally sound. An anarchist acquaintance pointed out to me, however, that despite my conscious refusal to support the troops, I support them and the wars they're fighting every day with my tax dollars. More proof, as Bruce Springsteen reminds us, that it's hard to be a saint in the city.
"Why I Don't Support the Troops"
Headnote: I was dismayed when my daughter told me her class had been assigned to write letters of support to the troops in Iraq. In a meeting with the principal, I protested that children should not be forced to take a moral position they were unqualified to take—that to “support” people fighting a war is not, as he held, morally neutral. I got nowhere with him. But I did put down the following thoughts, which, by coincidence, were composed on Tax Day, April 15.
Imagine a friend of yours has done something you believe to be terribly wrong—say, killing an innocent person. What would your reaction be?
Imagine a friend of yours has done something you believe to be terribly wrong—say, killing an innocent person. What would your reaction be?
It is probable you would continue to love your friend. It is possible you would not wish him or her harm (though you would likely hope he or she received some form of punishment). It is feasible you would try to prevent him or her from committing another such action. It is not, however, conceivable that you would support the person in committing this action.
Imagine further that this friend continued to commit such acts. You might still love the person. You might pray for his or her soul if you are religious, or hope for his or her reformation if you are not. But you would not under any circumstances support this person in the continuance of actions you believed to be terribly wrong.
This is the reason I don’t support the troops in Iraq. They are performing actions I believe to be terribly wrong: invading a sovereign nation, destroying its lands and appropriating its resources, killing and wounding its people for reasons I do not accept as legitimate or lawful. To support them under these circumstances is tantamount to condoning actions I cannot condone.
Some might object that I am misinterpreting the term “support.” They might say that to support the troops simply means to wish them well, to pray for them, to hope for their safety. It is possible, they might argue, to support people even when one condemns their actions.
I do not accept this definition. Let us assume I do “support” the troops in the sense of wishing them well. The fact remains that they are engaged in a conflict in which, to secure their own safety, they may have to inflict harm upon others. More generally, to wish them well under these circumstances is to suggest that I do not condemn what they are doing. It is comparable to saying I wish a murderer well while he commits murder. Though I do not wish such a person harm, I do not wish him well either. I wish only that he will stop committing such acts.
It might be objected, then, that the troops in Iraq are unable to cease committing these acts, or to leave the place where the commission of such acts is likely to occur. It might be argued that whatever the troops think of their actions or of the broader circumstances that placed them in Iraq, they are committed by the terms of their service to continue performing the actions their superiors require of them.
I do not accept this argument either. There are alternatives to performing actions one finds morally wrong. It is possible for soldiers to refuse direct orders, to desert their post, to apply for Conscientious Objector status. None of these alternatives is easy; most will result in dire consequences, including prison time and all the problems a criminal record brings. But this does not mean soldiers cannot pursue such alternatives. It simply means they must weigh the consequences of doing so against the consequences of not doing so. In the case of a soldier who disagrees with what he or she is asked to do in Iraq yet continues to do it, we must assume that this soldier has chosen to suffer the moral consequences of his or her actions rather than the material consequences of refusing them. None of us would wish to be faced with such a choice. But that does not make it any less a choice.
In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), Henry David Thoreau describes facing such a choice. He was required to pay a poll tax, a tax he knew funded the Mexican War. Thoreau believed the war to be terribly wrong—an invasion of a sovereign nation in order to commandeer its land and resources, as well as to extend the practice of plantation slavery. Thoreau refused to pay the tax. He went to jail. He said, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.” In terms even more pertinent to the present situation, he continues:
A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed. . . . They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small moveable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?
Thoreau concludes by urging individuals to refuse wrong actions and fight for what they know is right. “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
With these thoughts in mind, what do I hope for the United States troops bogged down in the hellhole of criminality and injustice, torture and torment that is the Iraq War? I hope for their immediate return home, where they will be freed from the prospect of taking further lives or of having their own lives taken. Failing that, I hope for them to refuse to commit the acts they are being pressured to commit. If they adopt this position, if they transform their lives into a counter friction to stop the machine of war, I will support them. Until that time, I will continue to oppose—not support—the troops.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Domestic Terror
This one came from 2006. It should be self-explanatory (and maybe even a bit too didactic), but I've always been interested in how fantasy films participate in cultural discourses, especially discourses having to do with aliens and outsiders. My 2005 book Framing Monsters, discussed in this interview, lays out my interests and arguments at greater length than this short essay, titled "Domestic Terror," can.
"Domestic Terror"
A colleague told me she absolutely hated Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
“It insulted my intelligence,” she said. “To have the son return unscathed at the end was completely unbelievable. And what about the time Tom Cruise and his daughter were dropped from the underside of the tripod and walked away without a scratch? They’d have been crushed flat, squashed, exploded into a million pieces.”
Taken as a statement of fact, I couldn’t disagree. War of the Worlds insulted my intelligence too. In fact, excepting the six-year-olds in the audience, I think it’s safe to say it insulted everyone’s. But taken as a judgment of the film, I felt she was missing the point. Movies—at least, summer blockbuster alien-invasion movies directed by Steven Spielberg—aren’t about nourishing the intellect. They’re about fulfilling desire. And in this respect, War of the Worlds couldn’t have been better.
War of the Worlds fulfills the perennial American desire for the preservation of the family at all costs, against all obstacles. We in America like to believe that no matter what, no matter how many shootings, explosions, downed buildings, foreign wars, nuclear holocausts, somehow, miraculously, the family will survive. Not someone else’s family, of course—our family. And it’s because Spielberg knows how to tell stories that tap this quintessentially American desire that he’s been responsible for most of the top-grossing films of the past two decades. It’s not that he’s the only American filmmaker to tell this story; most mainstream American films tell it in one way or another. It’s just that he’s so damn good at it.
Maybe this is because it’s the only story Spielberg knows how to tell. He told it in E. T. He told it in Hook. He told it in Jurassic Park (parts I and II). He told it in Schindler’s List. It’s the story of a family, invariably father-headed, that manages to survive the worst possible threat the world has ever known—indeed, that comes into existence through the tumult of fighting off that threat. In Jurassic Park the threat was rampaging dinosaurs, and the father was former kid-hating curmudgeon Alan Grant. In Schindler’s List the threat was marauding Nazis, and the father was former out-for-himself rapscallion Oskar Schindler. And now, in War of the Worlds, the threat is gigantic death-dealing tripods steered by alien imperialists, and the father is former all-around asshole Ray Ferrier.
In all these stories, an inconceivable, a seemingly insurmountable, and—importantly—an alien threat conjures the family into existence. So you and your daughter get dropped from a height that would crumple steel? So your son walks into a wall of fire that engulfs the horizon? Don’t worry. At the end, father and son will embrace. Our family is impregnable.
War of the Worlds brims with imagery suggesting the family’s peril, suggesting, in fact, that the family won’t make it. You might have noticed the repeated image of panes of glass pierced by a perfect circle: once when Cruise throws a ball through his own front window, once when a refugee claws through the windshield of Cruise’s stolen car, once when Cruise, hiding in a basement bunker, witnesses his daughter standing like a prepubescent Ann Darrow before a looming tripod. In these shots—the first of which occurs before the aliens attack, as Cruise tries to one-up his son by whipping a hardball at him in a curdled game of father-son catch—the shattered glass signifies the fragility of the family “circle”: an invisible protective shield that is frighteningly easy to break, glass, like the family, should not survive the onslaught of baseballs, much less of alien monsters. But it does. Indeed, the ultimate fantasy of a film like War of the Worlds is not just that the family survives, but that while an errant throw by an inattentive dad can puncture the shield, the alien menace, the very power that should shatter the family for good, whips the father into shape and coaxes the family into being.
I don’t disdain the power of this fantasy. We are family creatures; we need families. And a certain truth underlies the claim that families find themselves in extremity. Though catastrophe—financial, mortal, or otherwise—can destroy families, it can also bind them closer. Typically, of course, families are threatened not by alien forces but by forces inflicted either by themselves (alcoholism, abuse, infidelity) or by their own society (low pay, lack of health insurance, mercury-laden water). And typically, families survive, if they do, not by plumbing some previously unglimpsed reserve of inner fortitude but by appealing to external agencies: the police, the social welfare system, legal and legislative allies. Still, the primal power of this fantasy can be productive of good: it makes us want to preserve our families, or at least to see them preserved, and a desire that strong can help people through some pretty rough times.
Yet to the degree that this fantasy is capable of producing great good, it is also capable of producing great harm. For when we convince ourselves that because families come together through the agency of external threats there must be an external threat to secure our families, we enter a realm of dangerous, even deadly, paranoia and denial. When we believe that, we’re liable to do anything. Buy guard dogs. Buy guns. Bomb Iraq.
The obvious way to read Spielberg’s film—at least, the one in all the reviews—is to call it a 9/11 nightmare; and the screenplay, obligingly, provides such a reading when Cruise’s daughter, a convincingly panicked Dakota Fanning, screams, “Is it the terrorists?” just as the tripods attack. But I think a more profitable way to view the film is to place it within America’s foundational posture of defensive denial, a denial so powerful it enabled the young nation to view its prehistory not as the greatest act of invasion the world had ever known but as the providential triumph of a besieged outpost of civilization against the heathen hordes. That denial still runs so deep that only now—three years, tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars after we sauntered into war with Iraq—are we beginning to witness a murmur of collective discomfort (it is still too polite to call it “protest”) against our delusive national conviction that we could preserve our own family by slaughtering someone else’s. And however that hallucinatory denial may be ebbing a bit in our public discourse, it remains regnant in our collective psyche.
So we forbid photographs of dead Iraqi children and dead American soldiers. So we drive SUVs with magnetic September 11 stickers, memorializing 9/11 by enriching the nation that birthed and bred the hijackers and their mastermind. So we sit by as the President of the United States hides out in his Crawford bungalow, unwilling (I mean us as well as him) to confront a grieving mother. So we watch War of the Worlds. Don’t worry, we tell ourselves. The wall of fire, the fall from the heights are only movie tricks. Our family will survive.
And I suppose it will. But it will also suffer, and punish, and kill, and no Tom Cruise will appear to save it.
"Domestic Terror"
A colleague told me she absolutely hated Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
“It insulted my intelligence,” she said. “To have the son return unscathed at the end was completely unbelievable. And what about the time Tom Cruise and his daughter were dropped from the underside of the tripod and walked away without a scratch? They’d have been crushed flat, squashed, exploded into a million pieces.”
Taken as a statement of fact, I couldn’t disagree. War of the Worlds insulted my intelligence too. In fact, excepting the six-year-olds in the audience, I think it’s safe to say it insulted everyone’s. But taken as a judgment of the film, I felt she was missing the point. Movies—at least, summer blockbuster alien-invasion movies directed by Steven Spielberg—aren’t about nourishing the intellect. They’re about fulfilling desire. And in this respect, War of the Worlds couldn’t have been better.
War of the Worlds fulfills the perennial American desire for the preservation of the family at all costs, against all obstacles. We in America like to believe that no matter what, no matter how many shootings, explosions, downed buildings, foreign wars, nuclear holocausts, somehow, miraculously, the family will survive. Not someone else’s family, of course—our family. And it’s because Spielberg knows how to tell stories that tap this quintessentially American desire that he’s been responsible for most of the top-grossing films of the past two decades. It’s not that he’s the only American filmmaker to tell this story; most mainstream American films tell it in one way or another. It’s just that he’s so damn good at it.
Maybe this is because it’s the only story Spielberg knows how to tell. He told it in E. T. He told it in Hook. He told it in Jurassic Park (parts I and II). He told it in Schindler’s List. It’s the story of a family, invariably father-headed, that manages to survive the worst possible threat the world has ever known—indeed, that comes into existence through the tumult of fighting off that threat. In Jurassic Park the threat was rampaging dinosaurs, and the father was former kid-hating curmudgeon Alan Grant. In Schindler’s List the threat was marauding Nazis, and the father was former out-for-himself rapscallion Oskar Schindler. And now, in War of the Worlds, the threat is gigantic death-dealing tripods steered by alien imperialists, and the father is former all-around asshole Ray Ferrier.
In all these stories, an inconceivable, a seemingly insurmountable, and—importantly—an alien threat conjures the family into existence. So you and your daughter get dropped from a height that would crumple steel? So your son walks into a wall of fire that engulfs the horizon? Don’t worry. At the end, father and son will embrace. Our family is impregnable.
War of the Worlds brims with imagery suggesting the family’s peril, suggesting, in fact, that the family won’t make it. You might have noticed the repeated image of panes of glass pierced by a perfect circle: once when Cruise throws a ball through his own front window, once when a refugee claws through the windshield of Cruise’s stolen car, once when Cruise, hiding in a basement bunker, witnesses his daughter standing like a prepubescent Ann Darrow before a looming tripod. In these shots—the first of which occurs before the aliens attack, as Cruise tries to one-up his son by whipping a hardball at him in a curdled game of father-son catch—the shattered glass signifies the fragility of the family “circle”: an invisible protective shield that is frighteningly easy to break, glass, like the family, should not survive the onslaught of baseballs, much less of alien monsters. But it does. Indeed, the ultimate fantasy of a film like War of the Worlds is not just that the family survives, but that while an errant throw by an inattentive dad can puncture the shield, the alien menace, the very power that should shatter the family for good, whips the father into shape and coaxes the family into being.
I don’t disdain the power of this fantasy. We are family creatures; we need families. And a certain truth underlies the claim that families find themselves in extremity. Though catastrophe—financial, mortal, or otherwise—can destroy families, it can also bind them closer. Typically, of course, families are threatened not by alien forces but by forces inflicted either by themselves (alcoholism, abuse, infidelity) or by their own society (low pay, lack of health insurance, mercury-laden water). And typically, families survive, if they do, not by plumbing some previously unglimpsed reserve of inner fortitude but by appealing to external agencies: the police, the social welfare system, legal and legislative allies. Still, the primal power of this fantasy can be productive of good: it makes us want to preserve our families, or at least to see them preserved, and a desire that strong can help people through some pretty rough times.
Yet to the degree that this fantasy is capable of producing great good, it is also capable of producing great harm. For when we convince ourselves that because families come together through the agency of external threats there must be an external threat to secure our families, we enter a realm of dangerous, even deadly, paranoia and denial. When we believe that, we’re liable to do anything. Buy guard dogs. Buy guns. Bomb Iraq.
The obvious way to read Spielberg’s film—at least, the one in all the reviews—is to call it a 9/11 nightmare; and the screenplay, obligingly, provides such a reading when Cruise’s daughter, a convincingly panicked Dakota Fanning, screams, “Is it the terrorists?” just as the tripods attack. But I think a more profitable way to view the film is to place it within America’s foundational posture of defensive denial, a denial so powerful it enabled the young nation to view its prehistory not as the greatest act of invasion the world had ever known but as the providential triumph of a besieged outpost of civilization against the heathen hordes. That denial still runs so deep that only now—three years, tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars after we sauntered into war with Iraq—are we beginning to witness a murmur of collective discomfort (it is still too polite to call it “protest”) against our delusive national conviction that we could preserve our own family by slaughtering someone else’s. And however that hallucinatory denial may be ebbing a bit in our public discourse, it remains regnant in our collective psyche.
So we forbid photographs of dead Iraqi children and dead American soldiers. So we drive SUVs with magnetic September 11 stickers, memorializing 9/11 by enriching the nation that birthed and bred the hijackers and their mastermind. So we sit by as the President of the United States hides out in his Crawford bungalow, unwilling (I mean us as well as him) to confront a grieving mother. So we watch War of the Worlds. Don’t worry, we tell ourselves. The wall of fire, the fall from the heights are only movie tricks. Our family will survive.
And I suppose it will. But it will also suffer, and punish, and kill, and no Tom Cruise will appear to save it.
Chicken Hawks
Now that I've gotten started, I thought I'd treat you to a few of my antiwar essays, which I've written over the now more than six years since the monstrosity that is the Iraq War began. I was moved to revive these old essays (the first of which, "Chicken Hawks," dates to 2005) when I attended an antiwar address delivered by Anthony Arnove, who spoke during the The People's Summit currently being held in Pittsburgh as an alternative to the G-20 Summit arriving next week. Arnove's impassioned address, which pointed out that Obama's policies regarding Iraq and Afghanistan merely pretty up for public consumption those of the Bush administration, convinced me that we need now more than ever to mobilize as many voices as possible, in as many forums as possible, to speak out against the criminal wars being waged in our name.
So here's "Chicken Hawks." It's old news in one sense, but--especially given Obama's refusal to release documents relating to the Abu Ghraib scandals and his continuation of the Bush policies regarding the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists--I believe it's still pertinent.
"Chicken Hawks"
Five years ago I stopped eating meat.
And yes, that includes poultry and fish. Why people don’t consider poultry and fish meat I’ll never know. To make sure I’m covered, I now tell everyone I don’t eat creatures.
People ask me why all the time. Here’s what I tell them.
Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Think about it. Eons ago, when our hominid ancestors were roaming the savannah or the steppes or the rainforest, there was a degree of parity between predator and prey. You could get hurt trying to lay your hands on enough buffalo or puma to satisfy the caloric and mineral dosages our megawatt brains required to evolve. Heck, you could get killed. The scales of power were, if not exactly even, at least not radically out of whack.
But we did evolve. And when we evolved, and no other creature really did, at least not in intelligence and rapacity, the scales of power tipped absolutely and irrevocably. Nowadays, at least in the industrial West, there is no risk whatsoever involved in obtaining meat—none, that is, beyond the occasional fender-bender at your average snarled supermarket parking lot. Our power over the animals we eat is absolute; we hold all the carving knives.
And because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, abuses in the current system were bound to occur.
I was reminded of this truism while watching a news report about the abuse of chickens (meat, remember?) at a slaughterhouse operated by Pilgrim’s Pride, chief supplier of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It seems that a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals infiltrated the plant disguised as a regular line worker, and in secret videotapes recorded an appalling litany of abuse. The tape showed fellow workers stomping chickens on the head. Hurling them against walls. Snapping their necks in two.
All of this, of course, is against company policy, which dictates the humane killing of food animals. Hanging the chickens upside down and slitting their throats, I understand, is the current humane method.
As soon as the story broke, representatives from the plant itself, as well as from KFC and other beneficiaries of the killings, were quick to denounce the atrocities. They assured the public that these were deviations from the norm, that the guilty workers were aberrations, that they would be summarily fired, that safeguards would be instituted to ensure that it never happened again. Most of all, they wanted to assure us that the abuse went no farther than the individuals involved—that the company itself, the CEO at its helm, the stockholders reaping its profits, and the public gobbling its butchered meat were blameless.
But they were wrong.
All of the above parties—company, CEO, and multitudinous beneficiaries, including you and me—were directly accountable for what happened.
This is because when you engineer the circumstances under which power operates without fetters—though not, obviously, without feathers—abuses will occur. When you lord it over the chickens to the extent that we do, when you (we) cook up a contest of Homo sapiens versus Gallus domesticus absolutely devoid of equality of any kind, abuses must occur.
Why? Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And what’s true of people versus chickens is no less true of people versus people.
Consider the nearly contemporaneous scandal in the Abu Ghraib detention facility. Once again, photographic evidence, this time taken by the perpetrators themselves, recorded an appalling litany of abuse. Detainees forced to stand immobile for hours with hoods draping their heads. Led about with dog leashes around their necks. Threatened with genital electrocution.
Once again, as soon as the story broke, the higher-ups issued the customary disclaimers. They said these were deviations from the norm, that the guilty soldiers were aberrations, that they would be summarily court-martialed, that safeguards would be instituted to ensure that the atrocities never happened again. From Donald Rumsfeld to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush, we were assured that the abuses went no farther than the individuals involved—that the military itself, the secretary and president at its helm, the oil companies reaping its profits, and the American citizens cheering its War on Terror were blameless.
And once again, they were dead wrong.
I don’t know whether Rumsfeld or Bush ordered the abuse. They tell us they didn’t. They tell us they knew nothing about it until the papers spilled the beans. Turns out they were, if not lying outright, at least stretching the truth by cleaving to a disingenuous (some would say devious) literalism. It appears now that ambiguities in the definition of who counted as a terrorist and in how such persons were to be treated created an atmosphere in which no one knew exactly where the lines were to be drawn.
Whether such ambiguities were purposeful I can’t say. But if all we care about, and all the press does seem to care about, is trying to prove with which individual the ultimate blame lies, we’re going about it the wrong way. Once again, the issue isn’t who ordered the abuses. The issue is what made the abuses certain to occur.
And the solution to that conundrum is, of course, laughably simple.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
No matter how you slice it, George W. Bush is a chicken hawk, a man who glibly decreed that fellow human beings, American and Iraqi, would have to confront horrors he’d somehow managed not to face himself.
But that’s not what really matters either.
To the extent that we condone or pardon what happened at Abu Ghraib—not to mention at Pilgrim’s Pride—we’re all chicken hawks.
So here's "Chicken Hawks." It's old news in one sense, but--especially given Obama's refusal to release documents relating to the Abu Ghraib scandals and his continuation of the Bush policies regarding the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists--I believe it's still pertinent.
"Chicken Hawks"
Five years ago I stopped eating meat.
And yes, that includes poultry and fish. Why people don’t consider poultry and fish meat I’ll never know. To make sure I’m covered, I now tell everyone I don’t eat creatures.
People ask me why all the time. Here’s what I tell them.
Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Think about it. Eons ago, when our hominid ancestors were roaming the savannah or the steppes or the rainforest, there was a degree of parity between predator and prey. You could get hurt trying to lay your hands on enough buffalo or puma to satisfy the caloric and mineral dosages our megawatt brains required to evolve. Heck, you could get killed. The scales of power were, if not exactly even, at least not radically out of whack.
But we did evolve. And when we evolved, and no other creature really did, at least not in intelligence and rapacity, the scales of power tipped absolutely and irrevocably. Nowadays, at least in the industrial West, there is no risk whatsoever involved in obtaining meat—none, that is, beyond the occasional fender-bender at your average snarled supermarket parking lot. Our power over the animals we eat is absolute; we hold all the carving knives.
And because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, abuses in the current system were bound to occur.
I was reminded of this truism while watching a news report about the abuse of chickens (meat, remember?) at a slaughterhouse operated by Pilgrim’s Pride, chief supplier of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It seems that a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals infiltrated the plant disguised as a regular line worker, and in secret videotapes recorded an appalling litany of abuse. The tape showed fellow workers stomping chickens on the head. Hurling them against walls. Snapping their necks in two.
All of this, of course, is against company policy, which dictates the humane killing of food animals. Hanging the chickens upside down and slitting their throats, I understand, is the current humane method.
As soon as the story broke, representatives from the plant itself, as well as from KFC and other beneficiaries of the killings, were quick to denounce the atrocities. They assured the public that these were deviations from the norm, that the guilty workers were aberrations, that they would be summarily fired, that safeguards would be instituted to ensure that it never happened again. Most of all, they wanted to assure us that the abuse went no farther than the individuals involved—that the company itself, the CEO at its helm, the stockholders reaping its profits, and the public gobbling its butchered meat were blameless.
But they were wrong.
All of the above parties—company, CEO, and multitudinous beneficiaries, including you and me—were directly accountable for what happened.
This is because when you engineer the circumstances under which power operates without fetters—though not, obviously, without feathers—abuses will occur. When you lord it over the chickens to the extent that we do, when you (we) cook up a contest of Homo sapiens versus Gallus domesticus absolutely devoid of equality of any kind, abuses must occur.
Why? Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And what’s true of people versus chickens is no less true of people versus people.
Consider the nearly contemporaneous scandal in the Abu Ghraib detention facility. Once again, photographic evidence, this time taken by the perpetrators themselves, recorded an appalling litany of abuse. Detainees forced to stand immobile for hours with hoods draping their heads. Led about with dog leashes around their necks. Threatened with genital electrocution.
Once again, as soon as the story broke, the higher-ups issued the customary disclaimers. They said these were deviations from the norm, that the guilty soldiers were aberrations, that they would be summarily court-martialed, that safeguards would be instituted to ensure that the atrocities never happened again. From Donald Rumsfeld to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush, we were assured that the abuses went no farther than the individuals involved—that the military itself, the secretary and president at its helm, the oil companies reaping its profits, and the American citizens cheering its War on Terror were blameless.
And once again, they were dead wrong.
I don’t know whether Rumsfeld or Bush ordered the abuse. They tell us they didn’t. They tell us they knew nothing about it until the papers spilled the beans. Turns out they were, if not lying outright, at least stretching the truth by cleaving to a disingenuous (some would say devious) literalism. It appears now that ambiguities in the definition of who counted as a terrorist and in how such persons were to be treated created an atmosphere in which no one knew exactly where the lines were to be drawn.
Whether such ambiguities were purposeful I can’t say. But if all we care about, and all the press does seem to care about, is trying to prove with which individual the ultimate blame lies, we’re going about it the wrong way. Once again, the issue isn’t who ordered the abuses. The issue is what made the abuses certain to occur.
And the solution to that conundrum is, of course, laughably simple.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
No matter how you slice it, George W. Bush is a chicken hawk, a man who glibly decreed that fellow human beings, American and Iraqi, would have to confront horrors he’d somehow managed not to face himself.
But that’s not what really matters either.
To the extent that we condone or pardon what happened at Abu Ghraib—not to mention at Pilgrim’s Pride—we’re all chicken hawks.
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