Suddenly Preoccupied with War

Over the summer and into early fall this year, I have read two books on war and law as well as a novel about the lawlessness of Haiti. I have reflections on all of them; novels and dystopia are the province of Codex and Hypertext, however. Then, just within days, I watched all of Ken Burns's The Vietnam War and endured the ignorant statements of President Trump about North Korea in our current crisis of nuclear threat. After the racism of his comments about a destroyed Puerto Rico following hurricanes and collapse that he will not address (and for which he blames them!) finishing today with the horror of a mass shooting with automatic weaponry in Las Vegas, everything seems like war.
This phrase echoes the first of the two books I reflect upon here:
Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (Penguin, 2017).

How DID everything become war? Rosa, whom I know slightly as a librarian working with the Graduate Programs at Georgetown and who was chair of a committee I attended, has a good answer for this:

We don’t trust Congress, and the budgets of civilian foreign policy agencies have taken a beating, along with their capabilities. Faced with problems, we send in the troops—who else can we send? Unlike any other part of the government, the U.S. military can be relied on to go where it’s told and do what it’s asked—or die trying. As a result, Americans increasingly treat the military as an all-purpose tool for fixing anything that happens to be broken.

Haass, who is more the foreign policy wonk and less the lawyer in comparing his book with Rosa Brooks's work, concludes by suggesting that we need sovereign responsibility and acceptance of obligations and not just rights and self-determination. That is all well and good, but the United States has been struggling with being responsible for everyone and everything, and even with our military, we cannot do it. We cannot rescue the "failed states" that Rosa Brooks points out were never really states. Civil wars have erupted in response to various experiences of conquest and colonialism over the history of the world. This is certainly the case of Vietnam.

Rosa Brooks approaches world disorder differently and less abstractly than Haass; after reviewing issues in international law around piracy, drones, and the Responsibility to Protect, she looks at something interesting- the warrior identity that has been set off from daily life even in earlier pre-industrial tribal societies. And  we are still tribal- that is our central truth in my view-and in fact she is understated about that aspect. But she raises a fascinating point about war paint and ritual- we used to enter "war time" deliberately, not just drift into it.

Drift is exactly what Ken Burns shows happened in Vietnam. We just kept on pointlessly overlooking a people who needed help and mixed real blood with an abstracted  strategy that our competitors in global domination exploited. An ideology, a Communist and authoritarian reality drawn down from Kant's noumenal world and made phenomenal, became the enemy. And it was real, no question about it, when manifested in a liberation movement that was ignored and not assisted by the U.S. for fear of offending the French. (Odd that we should care so much for a country that was not strong in resisting fascism, but which did help us out in our revolution). In any case, the manifestation that took root when next the north turned to China and Russia was brutal indeed, and we could not stop the unlimited energy, local knowledge, and the support against us of two ambitious powers, each alone not our equal. But together...they encircled us with mayhem.

In the end, we did not learn and the Republican party in particular keeps scratching the itch of war, as it did twice in Iraq even after our defeat. Far from needing a weaker government, we need more democracy coupled with the rule of law, ruling over hyper-capitalism and restraining it in favor of the vulnerable. Rosa echoes what I've talked about with other often- an ideal of national service. I'll close with her recommendation:

War, for all its horrors, has long been one of the best and only means of harnessing collective human talent and energy to serve the group as a whole, and the military has long been the institution we use to bring talent together. If the military is becoming everything, why not use this as an opportunity to engage everyone—to include millions more Americans in the project of makingon the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security. the nation stronger, and the world a little less cruel? ...Imagine a revamped public sector premised on the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security.  Reimagining the military and combining it with a broad program of universal national service would be complicated and, in the short run, expensive—but in the long run, how else can we harness the creativity, energy, and talent we will need, in this uncertain and dangerous world?

Amen to this, and if we can overcome greed and egotism to achieve it, it would be the birth of an engaged social justice, much like the School of Youth for Social Service that Thich Nhat Hahn founded in 1966 in the midst of war-torn Vietnam. Thoughtfulness and compassionate action are as great a challenge as the excitement of war might seem to provide and profoundly more conducive to human flourishing.

At War with Ourselves -The Sympathizer

I am old enough that the Vietnam war was intellectually defining for me, yet privileged enough that it did not touch my life and my family even to the extent that it did many Americans. My brother was older and because of the after-effects of an earlier tragic car accident, not fit to serve. But he likely could have been deferred or excused in some other way.

Not so the energetic and skillful writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. His novel is deeply plotted through the perspective of the divided self, a hero/anti-hero, American/refugee, apparent supporter of the corrupt and autocratic South Vietnamese regime to which the U.S. clung as anti-communist, but a double agent as well for a communist regime that shared all the ruthlessness necessary to be conventionally revolutionary.

The comic satire of the book, especially around the racism of Hollywood and its hypocrisy about a war that for us was a "cause" but that for a whole people was utter destruction- well, it's brilliant.
The unnamed narrator, the General, the Auteur, are all like masked archetypes yet all too real.

The center of the book spiral down into the fateful duality of loyalty/betrayal, friend and enemy together going back to the ravaged country, and so the torture of "re-education" resonates deeply and cuts away the arrogance and cynicism that the narrator has used to escape from his own idealism and refusal to feel the sadness of loss. The narrator finds he had to continue to kill, not only in the U.S. to keep his cover and pretend to fight communism, but also to protect a friend. His confession- this book- is thus in the end about human rights and the right to be human, a right that neither capitalist nor communist flavors of authoritarianism can tolerate. The ability to kill and to suffer: this is what the narrator's divided self is left with. At the end he understands, too late perhaps, the value of life and knows at last why he must say "we will live."

Among the many literary echoes and allusions included by this English professor, what I found most frequently coming into mind was Herman Melville's The Confidence Man.  This neglected work, overshadowed by the writer's famous Moby -Dick and Billy Budd,  is about the divided America that the narrator of The Sympathizer embodies. The spook-narrator of the latter is very different from the American con-artist or huckster in that he emerges in tragedy and has few choices about how to confront a ruthless materialism. We are now living in another age of the "con," and governed by fraud. Our destruction of Vietnam ended up as a weird "con" as well- raising up hopes and patriotism even while going down in humiliating defeat.

What we arrive at in The Sympathizer is a recognition of the sanctity of living free, and here is where I find there is an outcome Nguyen alludes to but could not develop: healing. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn has begun a spiritual and environmental movement that tries to be a powerful voice for such healing and wholeness and an antidote to racism (he was a peace colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr.), destruction, political hypocrisy, and torture: simple compassion. Viet Thanh Nguyen showed the need for this healing in his talk at Georgetown when he described the experience of his parents having to give up their store in L.A. to eminent domain- this outrage coming after surviving burnt villages and a horrific escape. Nguyen choked up at the podium, nearly crying publicly at the thought that his parents had to suffer more even after they achieved some peace and success.

Simple compassion. Even democracies don't cherish it. We have to hope that this can change. It was good to hear that Viet Thanh Nguyen now has a little boy. 

Newspeak, Agitprop, and Fake News: 1984 in the Age of Trump

In coming back to Orwell's 1984 after reading it in high school and noting a lifetime of references that have put it at the center of our literary culture ("Orwellian",) I am most struck by two things: the real beauty of so much of Orwell's writing and the deep darkness of the book. I am almost ashamed of having taken the work for granted, relegated it to a staple of what high school students read and discuss, and also of having found it much less interesting than I do now. I believe I can account for the change. Two things are different now: Many of us feel we are experiencing aspects of the threat Orwell portrays, and in addition, I think I am appreciating more acutely the degree to which this novel is about the nature of language and its connection to human dignity and flourishing. Now I get it: there is a deep and important relationship between words and deeds (as Chaucer observed in describing moral integrity in General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: "the word must be cousin to the deed" ). There can be a path from text to torture.

Orwell feared Stalinism and yet fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He apparently came to regret this and after his sequence of careers- as an Imperial Civil Servant, teacher and writer. He became anti-Communist but against bureaucracy and managerial conformity as well. His seeming "all purpose" dystopia may be part of why his novel appeals to the planners of high school curricula. However, his ideas were more complicated than "balanced." He did specifically have Stalinism most in mind and was in fact worried about Ingsoc as centralizing and using efficiency in a way that would cause loss of basic freedoms.

Fortunately, in 2013 The Daily Beast published a piece that presents the text of a 1944 letter Orwell wrote explaining quite openly why he wrote 1984. He says

       Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler,Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.

This is a very helpful statement, even if only a snapshot of his conscious reasons for writing as he did. He goes on to mention the attempted rewriting of history by Hitler to say the Jews started the war, and so on. Why this is now so very disturbing is obvious. Despite Orwell's own distrust of many around him who seemed less worried about socialism, and with the irony of his own use of a pseudonym (being born Eris Arthur Blair), he perfectly isolates the most chilling and persistent abuses of state power: 1) perversion of the meaning of words in the context of proclaiming that an obvious falsehood is true, and 2) endless war. The wars further nationalism and a reason for unity and distract from questioning Big Brother's version of events. Sadly, we are right now seeing how this is possible; Orwell had to have Winston Smith burn up news accounts. With the internet, there is no need. The pixels just come and go, might be erased or not but it is all very confusing isn't it? Who is to say one thing is more true than another?

If we do not resist what is happening here under Donald Trump and Steven Bannon, and if we do not see the admiration for dictator oligarchs like Putin for what it is, we run a risk that many commentators believe is unique in our history. Our own government certainly has misled us many times and maintained secrets. However, if this was done to achieve ends that leaders knew or suspected might be democratically rejected, it remains within a universe of discourse and human dignity that we know. It arises from some sense of shame and realization that some norms and rules are being broken. Vietnam and even the pretext of the second Iraq war can fit into this model.

Not so our current situation. Some "Anglo-American millionaires," to quote Orwell again as above, are seeing that Newspeak serves very well to undermine human decency. Ban enemies and name them and see if a terror attack or a war starts. That will be a useful distraction. Lie boldly and simply say that a former President personally "wiretapped" you, the videos showing you saying what war you supported or that you said many things and then the opposite- all of it can be accepted by those who are just so confused, aren't they? Don't all politicians lie?

Orwell writes beautifully. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make the thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one work, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." It is not just that "war = peace" but that it does not matter to those who are not curious.

     Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

I think Orwell means here that when  true loyalty has been destroyed, the body can be treated as an object by the State- no one will come to save, or rescue you. And this will be not only out of fear, but also out of having forgotten who you are. "When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness."

We cannot let this happen to a leading democracy, and certainly not to human culture, but since thanks to Orwell and Trump we know it CAN happen, we have to make sure that we do not let a nationalist, white supremacist, ignorant, lying, misogynist, con artist, the savior of  "I alone can fix it," become our destroyer. We have to use the Constitution's rule of law and our democratic institutions to put a legitimate stop to what is going on right now.

Hillbilly Elegy and the Dust Bowl Days: Live and Don't Learn

After finishing a reading of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, but before beginning to write these reflections on it, I got into one of my documentary-watching moods and ran across Ken Burns's The Dust Bowl. I am one of the legion of Ken Burns fans, but this one came out at a time when I could not get involved and so on a recent (coincidentally very windy) evening I decided to take it in. However, I wonder if unconsciously I was drawn to it now, not only because of the Trump supporter conundrum, but also because of reflections on my roots.

Both of my parents grew up in Oklahoma near the panhandle (but not in the exact "no man's land" of the documentary but instead to the east and slightly south of it near Woodward).  They did tell me about the Dust Bowl, but as both came from educated, professional families, they were affected more by the Depression in general and were spared the horrors of the worst of the ecological disaster. Then I recalled what my father told me of his family's earlier generations in Appalachia as broadly conceived- northern Alabama. Somehow, farmers became teachers, then pastors, then doctors. And then there was my time in summer camp in Tennessee when I got to know a true hillbilly family slightly when I volunteered to help with the grooming of horses for the day's classes. There were lots of children, little food, and all their savings spent on a one big family event without caution or planning. It all added to my big WHY about what happened to my family that did not to others, what happened to the post-war boom that I have been lucky enough to have lived through, and what is happening now that is causing me not just to disagree with those on the other side of the aisle- in my case I am toward the left and they are toward the right- but to fear for the rejection of our core political assumptions that I thought were shared at the most basic level.

I enjoyed Vance's book even as I experienced astonishment at his emergence from a truly brutal childhood of real dysfunction in his immediate family. However, he communicates very well the role his grandparents played as his real, psychological parents. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine from a rural background. The chaos, lack of connection to literate or any form of what one calls "higher" western culture, violence and collapse of ambition felt harrowing. Vance himself is a study in the interplay of nature and nurture: his raw native and genetic intelligence miraculously won out over his ghastly but all-too-common circumstances. In Tennessee folks described this way were not farmers but miners, hired hands, or available for odd jobs. But even back a few decades, I observed as a privileged teenager that a fierce, admirable honesty existed alongside a strange lack of defined skills, like carpentry, metalwork...as if the old village of the nineteenth-century was populated with people who had sudden amnesia for how to do things. Into this void has come the end of much manual labor, old injuries, opioids, addition and collapse. Learning new skills is not really an option.

I found inspiring the way Vance zeroed in on what his grandmother in particular gave him: she cared. She actually thought learning was important and took the time to communicate this. According to J.D. Vance, this was what was so lacking in his friends and the communities in which he grew up. They did have to go where jobs and survival were, but nothing lasted and despair was common.

Then his narrative took an unexpected turn. He began to look back, after detailing how he aced the SAT and similar exams that no one knew enough to tell him were a big deal, excelled in the US Marine Corps, and then exhausted but educated himself at Ohio State, got into Yale Law, went for a visit home, and found....laziness. While I do not agree with some critiques of his attitude, it did surprise me. The subtitle of this book could be -White is the new Black.

And he has gone on to occupy that right wing side of the aisle. He does blame his poor while culture quite a bit even as he expresses a lot of love for his extended family. Being of the Scots-Irish myself, I can say he is lucky that he was not left as much on his own emotionally as I have been, but regardless of social class we all got a big dose of Calvinism that explains why only some of us are still even asking religious questions. I imagine this comes as a surprise to many readers of his book- the lack of interest in church at least in the Midwest area, as opposed to the South.

Finally, is he in fact explaining anything about Trump supporters? In many ways, yes, insofar as some are like the Dust Bowl farmers. Those former tenant farmers were sold huge tracts of land and told to plow it; they had no way to test it without some education in science and critical thinking, and so the land sharks and hucksters of the Oklahoma land rushes swindled them easily. They knew that wheat could not grow there long-term. And Trump also is nothing more than a con artist; it is the hyper-capitalist elites and fanatics like Steve Bannon who are the real dangers. In other ways, no, Hillbilly Elegy really does not tell us about racism and the onrush of technology that will take away jobs no matter what. I was really fascinated that Vance did not talk about African Americans really or immigrants. I learned from some web research that the wonderful woman he found to marry is of South Asian background- India- and at his website are pictures of their Christian-Hindu wedding! I wish he would send them to the white nationalists, although they would probably just blame Yale. And if the climate-change deniers feel superior to the Dust Bowl farmers, well, they are either just as gullible as the farmers or just as crooked as the land dealers. Anyone want to sell a house to a sub-prime borrower?

Only viable schools, the cultivation of empathy, and true open-minded curiosity can save our larger culture, and maybe that is where the new idealists need to be, like the civil rights advocates of years ago. If J.D. Vance can just cultivate a little more empathy he can contribute. He has some of the other two advantages and found out the "elites" are people, too.

That's Not Sun; it's Rain, and That is the Whitest Black Dress I've Ever Seen (alt-reality)

Over at the Yale Environment 360 (E360) Blog, a January 23, 2017 post by Bill McKibben asks just bluntly if it is already too late, and the dystopia of a damaged planet with no means of reversing the reactive systems in place is just something we have to accept with the election of Trump. He repeats the often-stated bad news that predictions from as far back as 1989 were too conservative and it seems now the pace of climate change has accelerated: "Already, only 17 years into the millennium, the planet is profoundly changed: half the ice missing from the polar north, for instance, which in turn is shifting weather patterns around the globe."

In a post-election panel at Georgetown Law, Vicki Arroyo stated something the Yale post acknowledges as well, namely that it has already been so very hard, and the interests so very much entrenched, that for climate lawyers and scientists pushing harder and harder is what they have always done. Would that hard work and the need to convince others were the whole picture. Instead, there is a new horrific world of Steve Bannon and alternative facts to contend with.

I just learned today that on the campaign trail, Trump actually told drought-stricken Californians that there was no drought.   If the autocrat truly can say that black is white and wet is dry as we experience what is actually happening, we could be truly lost. As Christian Schwägerl wrote in October 2016 for his Yale E360 opinion post on "How the Attack on Science Is Becoming a Global Contagion," there are many recent examples, which he lists, of attacks on science and a resort to pure ideology to create a narrative of opposition between environmental concerns and the nationalism that is growing in the U.S. and Europe.

He does not mention the implications of Trump's attempts to convince some voters in California that a conspiracy to save a small fish created an unnecessary drought, and by implication, destroys jobs, etc). The implications are that there is a narrative that many of us need to counter, and it should be done strategically, pointing out that fisherman have jobs, that some jobs will be lost by environmental destruction, and of course the small fish is not the end of the story but a link in a chain.

If at least the children can learn this science, we may have hope. We will have to contend with De Vos and the whole army of ignorant billionaires, but we must do it. I just refuse to believe it is too late, even if I have to accept the science that we have ushered in a new planetary era.