Holte's corner

Two Visions

I come from a "heartland" background. My father was in the Navy as a surface warfare officer and my Grand-father flew PBY "flying boats" until he disapeared off the Catalina Islands somewhere in 1938. My other Grandfather served in World War I and I have had ancestors or relatives serving in every war fought by this country on it's approximate 20 year max cycle. Until 1972 I assumed I was going to join the military and do at least a four year stint in the service and maybe do even more than that. But something evil happened between 1968 and 1972 that affected me deeply and that evil was what happened to my country during those years. I hit cognitive dissonance over that evil. The Watergate and Pentagon Papers scandals were the breaking point for me.

Part of me split in two. The rational part of me set aside my "heartland" faith in God, Jesus and Country and started looking for rational answers. I went from Republican and "Born Again style" Christian to an agnostic and then a Buddhist. I watched the civilian authorities drive a military crazy with insane micromanagement -- and a military authority that all the while it complained wasn't any more competant to fight that war than it's civilian masters. There is no way to fight an insane war sanely -- and if the US was on the side of human self expression and human rights it felt that it needed to forget that inconvenience for the duration.

Thus the Vietnam war was turned into a lesson on how not to deal with a war of national liberation or "communists." Catch 22 was the catchword. We were burning villages to save them. Giving candy to kids one moment and blowing them to smithereens a few minutes later. Our men were ordered to not shoot at people until they were fired on -- or ordered to fire at anything that moved. We sent draftees to fight while the professional soldiers were able to avoid Vietnam unless they volunteered for it and the reserves were a joke. We had a military who were to a man convinced they knew how to "win" the war -- and each of their plans turned out to be not much better than the stupidity with which the war was actually begun. Invading Cambodia, widening the war by attacking the NV capital, using Nukes. All were demonstrations that might have had tactical utility but would not have won that "war" -- which by the way wasn't even a war it was a "police action."

As someone who grew up reading about war, playing war games, shooting toy guns, hearing smart people talk about the subject and breathing "systems analysis" it was hell to see a country fight a war the way we fought Vietnam. All sides could speak their complaints and have a point. The left could honestly say that the only winners were the investors in arms and weaponry -- though the war represented a boom and bust cycle for them and really didn't do them that much economic good unless they knew when to cut their losses. The right could honestly say that the Civilian authorities hamstrung the military. The patriotic could honestly say that the anti-war crowd acted anti-American and violent. But none of them really were articulating what the "war" was. The warriors were happy to be busy fighting somebody and happy to have an excuse to fight their enemies at home. But a clear definition of what the "enemy" was or what the goal of all this fighting was excaped them. Hence the confusion which I also felt like the good bird I was.

The faithful part of me had my faith shaken to the quick by liars and the lies they told being exposed. Of course they told lies. They had no idea what the truth was. They had abstracts, but no clear idea of what those abstracts meant. Freedom, Democracy, Justice; all are things worth dying for. But how does one impose it on another country? To invade and attack a people means denying freedom, democracy and justice to the people being attacked. Such wars cannot be won by force. At the best such wars can be used to hold back the violence of others, but the real war is in the arena of ideas and in that war both sides of the debate had real points to be made. The Vietnam war and it's internal debates were American. We had a choice of chosing the wisdom of the collective -- democracy or the wisdom of the hierarchy -- autocracy. We chose democracy -- barely. Some wanted to kill democracy at home in the name of saving it. They failed. Nixon was taken down by cheap burglars working for his paranoid re-election campaign. The lies of the Pentagon were exposed by a former analyst there.

But I was a casualty of that battle. Not literally. I just was confused as hell. I guess having this hit at the impressionable ages of 13-17 had a lot to do with how I reacted. I eventually recovered my patriotism but my birth myths would never be the same. I still believe in them, but I'm no longer so naive as to trust that their priests are telling me the truth about what they are doing at every moment. Vietnam taught me skepticism but not cynicism -- Because for all the faults and errors the human beings who fought that war included a lot of exemplary individuals and efforts. The scum-bags sometimes got away with murder but the system survived them. Robert Macnamara, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and foolish children like Jane Fonda, all paid a price for their mistakes and moments of bad intentions. I thought the country learned from Vietnam. I thought democracy was saved.

But it didn't. Some in the professional military and "on the right" have developed new myths and have twisted the story into their own heroic underground narrative in which the 'baddies' are the leaders of the "liberal" part of the country-- the champions of justice, freedom democracy who opposed their efforts to impose justice, freedom and democracy on the battle-field. In those myths the US was betrayed by the Press and the Anti-War movement -- not Johnson and MacNamara, Nixon and Ho Chi Ming. They were unable to win because they were hampered by rule of law, a foolish Congress and belief in Human rights from "getting the Job Done."

For some of these people the Cold war was won by the CIA/Intelligence forces ignoring rule of law and using secrecy as a cover for "getting the Job Done" and ignoring Congress. For them the US is a country with a crises in it's culture and the culture needs to be rescued from the "social leftists" who would impose atheism or new wave religions, Homosexuality and perversion. Gone is the whistful feeling of the folk who used to say "I fought this war so those foolish young people could express their first amendment rights and burn that flag if that is what bothered them. That flag to me symbolizes freedom and that freedom includes the right to burn it." No we'll get a constitutional amendment banning flag burnings and it will probably win a 2/3 vote easily when it comes up. Because this reaction to change has been building up an anger that is getting unstopable.

And this anger is what has to be stopped. A certain friend talks about "meta waves" but the anger that comes out of his mouth is far more powerful than any positive feelings he claims. And I'm afraid that eventually an ambitious politician is going to use that anger as an excuse to cross the "rubicon" of obeying the Constitution eventually. They fear a "living constitution" and so I'm afraid they are going to try to kill it to save it -- and thus only break it and kill it. I pray we can avoid the kind of insecurity and internal strife that destroyed the Roman Republic. But the forces at work in our republic are the same ones that destroyed that Republic. The enemy of democracy is internal strife and internal strife comes when the consensus between rich and poor, powerful and their supporters is broken. And that happens when some get wealthy and others don't. The oligarchs who destroyed Rome blamed "bread and circuses" but it was their own actions that brought that end about. They failed to appreciate the middle class yeoman (plebian) farmers who had built Rome, and they were only too happy to turn them into surfs and slaves in their own country while bringing in Greek and other Slaves to take their place in the marketplace. This led to a class of people whose only employment was in the hierarchy of war. There was no other way to redistribute wealth. I'm afraid we might be heading that way now. And it led to authoritarianism and that in turn led to the death of democratic thinking. Democracy cannot survive the death of the ability to question or to think independently.

The alternative vision is one that was envisioned by people like Roosevelt and others, where progress can lift all boats. It's one where can do attitude can solve problems like our running out of oil or unemployment and health care issues with progressive solutions and where society is seen as a place where progress floats all boats and there is no need to intentionally leave people stranded at low tide or drowning when the tide comes back in. I chose the second vision. The vision of what America can and should be is something I hold onto with faith. And my vision of religion as something that should inform reality not distort it makes an alternative to this dark, authoritarian and deeply self-delusive vision that I've been chronicaling on this blog lately.

There are two visions at war with one another. I pray that the better vision wins. Otherwise how can people see?

Chris

Posted by cholte at April 8, 2005 09:48 PM