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TechnoratiLet's do this one backwards. Sometimes you can make better sense of a situation by going in the back door and poking through the rooms in the ell while the committee is hearing the reading of the last meeting's minutes in the parlor. There are standard procedures, forms, methods for the personal essay, and I don't come before you to object to most of them, but neither do I mind violating any conventions, however useful or satisfying they may be most days.
Shall we state a thesis, then support it with an array of examples, case studies, statistics? Is it more satisfying to roll out the evidence, perhaps increasing the size of the explosion or the quantity of money or blood in each new scene until even the most skeptical reader shall be with us when we get to Thus: or So, or Q.E.D.? Either will work, and hybrid organizations are possible too.
But whether the general or the specific comes first or last, I find most essays, including most of my own, proceed by one route or another toward a positive end. Even the terrible cataloguings of all that is unraveling politically, environmentally or socially usually wrap up with at least a paragraph that offers hope. Time is short, but together we can make a difference. Much has been lost, but with knowledge gained we can build a better future. They're teaching the Bible in Oklahoma but all across New England good liberal Unitarian couples are raising open-minded children. It's darkest before dawn. If we all get out and vote for Democrats we can take back America.
Who wants to read an essay of despair? We'll find out. I'm going to write one. Today we shall start on the sunny side and then go against traffic to stand in the chill shadows and ask ourselves if hope has any purpose beyond small town names or popular book titles.
I don't watch much television. But don't send me any anti-TV literature. I don't blame the Vast Wasteland for the ignorance of the populace, the shallowness of our culture or the rise of consumerism. And you know, radio, even the beloved Public Radio, can be as lame as television, but without, of course, pictures. Any technology can convey crap. (Readers not disposed toward the conclusions I draw will even now be muttering that this paper may be an example of such a medium.) Among those shows which I will arrange my time to accommodate is Bill Moyers' Journal. I'm getting so I have a hard time watching Charlie Rose. He bloviates all over his guests, often answering his own rambling questions; he makes certain we know how many celebrities he knows; and he keeps giving war criminal Henry Kissinger a forum.
Bill Moyers seeks out men and women whose stories, whose experience, whose points of view take us to places and positions and conclusions we would not have discovered on our own. He engages thoughtful persons in humane discourse. That such people and ideas exist, that for an hour any of us may live in their company, is a delight and a wonder. But the hour does end.
Last Friday night Bill interviewed Phil Donahue, former daytime TV talk show host, now turned filmmaker. Together with co-producer and cinematographer Ellen Spiro he has created Body Of War, the story of Tomas Young who joined the Army after 9/11 to fight in Afghanistan, but was sent to Iraq instead. Horribly wounded, now paralyzed and with continuing medical issues, his story is the one that goes untold, unknown, except by those who live it and their families.
The four thousandth American soldier was killed in Iraq this week. That made the news for a day for two. We don't know and don't much care how many mercenaries ("contractors") have died. Guesses at the number of Iraqis we've killed deliberately or accidentally or inspired others to kill range from several hundred thousand to a million or more. Most of us can't point to Iraq on a globe; we keep our distance from the citizens of that country we "liberated" by believing them glad for the "democracy" we gave them or, in the case of the burned and obliterated, pronouncing them "terrorists" and "haters of America." So be it.
But can we care even for our own? Four thousand is a heap of dead people. But for a war that has continued for over five years, that has cost, by the most careful accounting, at least three trillion dollars, that's not many corpses. Massive technological superiority and improved battlefield medicine have made death less likely. But the devastating wounds our boys and girls now survive are one of the hidden stories of this war built on deception.
You can make the small effort of Googling up Bill Moyers' Journal. There you'll find everything I could tell you about his show, this movie, if I were granted even more space here than I already subvert. Please do it. Do it particularly if you retain any affection for our adventure in Iraq, because if you support the war you ought to support it knowing what it is and what it does, rather than because of what you think it is or want it to be.
Phil Donahue: "My inspiration for this film was the naked child running from the napalm. Remember that Vietnam picture? I mean, terrified, this little girl is totally naked... See the pain. Don't sanitize the war. If you're gonna send young men and women to fight for this nation, tell the truth. That's one of the biggest reasons for the First Amendment, and we haven't been. And so I thought 'I will tell the story,' the real story of the harm in harm's way."
And this is the high point of my work today. I can imagine, as you will after watching or reading what you find at Moyers' website, that we will find our way out of the wretched combination of self-absorption and self-pity and self-aggrandizement that let us be so easily manipulated into becoming the world's foremost aggressor nation. The President is a liar, it is true. But we stand in line to buy the lies. And Congress writes the check. The Democratic Congress as surely as its Republican predecessor has given every nickel ever demanded, with far too few questions asked or meaningful objections made.
But books and movies and messages from the liberal pulpits and editorials and op-ed essays could make a difference, couldn't they? We can see our mistakes, change our course? Here now begin the short descent from Bill Moyers' vision to Cooper's reality. Sorry.
I don't know how the subject came up. We had been talking about many things, agreeing mostly, or laughing over our differences about those subjects that don't matter. Then my friend said, "It pisses me off when people get all agitated because we firebombed Dresden in World War Two." (I guess we had landed on Iraq during our chat, probably by way of considering our mutual lack of affection for any of the three current major-party presidential contenders.)
I think I said how ashamed I was that my own country killed civilians and tortured its prisoners and lied to its citizens. "It's war!" my friend objected, his exasperation with me and those like me obvious. "That's what war is: people get killed." And who can argue with that?
And with that I did understand, at last, something I had not previously grasped. All the talk about staying the course and finishing the job and not quitting and America never losing and killing more so that those already dead will not have been killed in vain-all this is predicated upon the unstated, accepted I think as faith or as almost natural law, precondition that war is a useful and necessary tool with its own particular operating instructions.
You plug in the cord or battery and you squeeze the switch. The tool shuts off when the hole is made, the cut completed, the victory won. There will be blood. Hold hard to whatever fantasy you like from your youth in a more promising time. What if they gave a war and nobody came? Trust me-they'll come. War is entertaining to some, glorious to many. The kids we kill are "Heroes", they "made the sacrifice so we can all be free."
Warren Zevon had a song in another time about a more personal subject, but equally sad and perhaps equally bereft of hope as our present situation. "I can saw a woman in two," he sang, "but you won't want to look in the box when I'm through."
So we say we want to win, and that little girl will just have to keep running down that dusty road with the napalm eating away her skin. Cities will burn and villages must be set on fire, and a family will be herded into a corner of its home and interrogated and maybe shot and sometimes raped and occasionally tortured by your son or mine. And we'll elect either a man who bombed villages in Vietnam and who advocates staying in Iraq fighting for another decade or a century; or we'll choose a woman who believed or says she believed the transparent Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld propaganda, or we'll try a fellow who some say once made a great speech against the war but who votes to pay for it and who says he wants a bigger Army, a hotter effort in Afghanistan and maybe an incursion into Pakistan.
And worst of it all, my friend who argues so heatedly in favor of war has his own children, indistinguishable from Iraqi or German or Vietnamese or Cambodian children or any of the other children we've burned and bombed to death, and I know he would be ruined by their loss or harm. But he tells me those Iraqi parents will just have to live with their dead kids-it's war.
Some stand on bridges and hold up signs. A few get arrested for throwing blood at Condoleeza Rice. I turn my typewriter toward this dark corner every month or two, though some readers tell me they've had enough of this subject, have heard enough of it from me, are tired of war essays, if not yet tired of war itself. We all labor in vain. We are most of us too many years and miles removed from what war is and does to be able to feel its heat and recoil from it.
Readers accustomed to my style will be at least pleased to know that the movie has a soundtrack, Body Of War: Songs That Inspired An Iraq War Veteran. Beyond that I cannot tell you much on the subject to suggest we will not in some months' time be briefly considering our five thousandth dead soldier.
Mr. Cooper reports that lately several persons have written him expressing their concern for his emotional well-being, so dark and stark are some of his recent essays. He assures them that he remains a congenial, cheerful soul, poised on this cusp of spring to once again engage vibrant living nature. He does, though, remain a realist and thinks everything will get much worse before anything may begin to get better. Complain or correct him at ckc2@prexar.com
This piece was first published in The Wiscasset Gazette (Wiscasset, Maine)
22 Comments so far
Show AllI have been more than surprised by Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue on quite a few occasions. "Now" on PBS is a great series of current investigative stories; I enjoy that show most Sundays in Atlanta; I only wish is was an hour long instead of 30 minutes. Too bad, there isn't room for such thoughtful and topic oriented talk show in today's broadcast lineup. There was a time when Oprah had periodic shows on issues of the day, but no more - what a waste. I look forward to this documentary now being filmed and wish it's producers well.
And people are appauled at Reverend Wright's comments. Give me a break. If I'm not mistaken, he didn't kill anybody.
Daniel David March 28th, 2008 3:36 pm ....THEY have not convinced me of anything, other than my own conclusion that THEY are corrupt beyond reason. Of course, I'll vote and I'll vote my conscience..as you...but in my wildest dreams I will NEVER...at this point in the process...believe that We the People are electing the president. I'll vote because it is my priviledge that I choose to exercise since it's one of the few THEY have not taken. Is this a shallow effort?...indeed! But, not to vote, unless there is a MASS effort, serves little purpose and likely works to their advantage.
Chris, my friends and I have a game where we consider what we would do if elected president, part of that game includes choosing a new cabinet. In our most recent election we chose Bill Moyer as Secretary of State, Helen Thomas as a presidential advisor (who has more experience?), and you my friend, are to become the official White House Press Secretary, simply because you know exactly how to tell it like it is, dark and gloomy or not. All we really want is someone to tell the truth. Truth is easier to swallow than the garbage we are fed day after day. If some of your readers feel that you are losing it then it follows that we are all losing it right along with you. If there are persons who believe that wars are necessary to control an exploding population then I know for sure that we have lost all sense of reason. When abstinence becomes the mantra for morality we are truly living in a twilight zone far, far removed from reality.
If and when we ever, as a collective body, decide to resort to reason there may be a tiny pin point of light at the end of tunnel. Do we really have to wait two months for your next essay?
Wealth and power breed evil. Very good essay -- facing the reality is the only way to begin to confront it. Only a fool can be optimistic in times like these but a pessimist can still have hope. My hope comes from the knowledge that there are a growing number of us who see through the whole bloody scam and have a better vision. We may not be able to "change the system" but the system has outlived its sustainability and will collapse on itself. As it does, we must be organizing community and a better system that will be there to replace it. As this old order collapses its reality becomes more and more obvious to people who have less room for illusions.
armybrat, you are so right that the fascists didn't lose WW2, the "good war". The US ruling class that supported Hitler when he promised to attack the USSR set up a ratline to get top fascists out of Germany, and never held the Nuremberg trials of the German capitalists who supported Hitler.
But I disagree that there are many of them. If so, why do the same people keep showing up decade after decade? We've got Negroponte going to Pakistan, after he went to Iraq, after he was UN ambassador, after he was ambassador to Honduras. Hey, he's one of the bad guys! Recycled endlessly, in some parody of green values.
And Rumsfield, Cheney, Armitage, the whole gang of gangsters, year after year show up, along with the hitmen like E. Howard Hunt and Oliver North and Jose Luis Posada.
And George Walker Bush, grandson of two men exposed for trading with Hitler's Germany, son of a CIA director, connected with many shadowy plots of murder most foul, placed into the Oval Office to further the aims of the evil.
There aren't that many truly horrible people. Our problem is a system that rewards the evil with wealth and power. Change the system, stop the evil. Production for use, not profit.
Chris, Unlike those who ask you to stop writing about the war, I insist that you continue. Someone has to write about what's happening and it certainly isn't mainstream media! With the 4,000 coffins arriving unseen, and injured vets not photographed with their missing limbs, who will know that there will be, and has been, blood if the Chris Cooper's and the Bill Moyers' of this world don't bring it to our attention?
As for SSW, who is as good an example I've seen recently of the kind of mouthing off that makes Americans so disliked by non-Americans, he is quite wrong to say that there is nothing people can do to make the government listen to logic and reason. Prevent the women and men from joining the military! Prevent the military from going overseas! If parents and friends and lovers and even the folks down the street were to put their bodies between those who've enlisted in the hopes that it might get them a decent job or a decent education afterward, between them and the leaders determined to lead them astray--attention will have to be paid.
You don't want to be brought down by words about the war? Then end the war! That's all it takes.
Chris, I must be in that dark corner your typewriter faces every month or two because all I read here is the truth about our situation in Iraq. I know we have stolen elections here (that's how THEY pick the president every 4 years), I know we've lost our democracy when We The People can't get most of America to impeach/imprison the murderers in the White House, and I certainly have no illusions as to our perceived freedom.
Just as your friends worry about your well-being for writings so dark and stark, mine worry about my well being because the horrors of this invasion with all our war crimes is all I want to talk about with them. I worry about their well being because they don't bring it up!
Thanks Chris keep writing but can you try somthing differtent to war.
We all know war is bad but there is nothing people can do to make the goverment listen to logic and reason. Anyway sure it sucks that parents lose their kids, but the planet is severly overpopulated so every corpse helps prolong the inevidable human extinction.
NPR, 'beloved'? What a ridiculous POV, Chris. I can barely make sense of something that seems like a discussion heard through Alice of Wonderland. If you think that Public Radio as it is on US radios today is 'beloved', then I do worry about your mental health.
wow...2 moving and thoughtful essays in one. thank you chris and armybrat. i have also been toying recently with the unthinkable -- that we indeed lost WWII. Seems plain as day now.
daniel david, you are a stalwart defender of your position, but i fear your premise is flawed. just because obama is a cut above the competition (which isn't saying much, yet i still respect the man, if only for attempting to raise the level of discourse), doesn't mean that our choices are meaningful. we have been served a platter from which all the nutrients have been removed, and to believe that we must be satisfied and still make a choice is a kind of desperation no less dark than mr. cooper's.
willybill,
THEY may have convinced you it's over before it's over. Not me. I am voting Obama because he is my conscience in this one. And I believe he has an excellent chance to win.
Daniel David March 28th, 2008 12:30 pm ..Do you seriously believe that you or any other voter will elect the next president? Vote your conscience, as THEY have already chosen the next president.
What exactly did we 'win' with WWII? All I saw, as a child, was rubble, broken people trying to pick up the pieces of broken lives and broken dreams - and later I found out that fascism was never defeated - it just moved to greener pastures - to the US and Palestine, to fester until it once more took over the world and brought so much death and destruction, instead of the hope and promise of freedom, equality, and prosperity the end of the war was supposed to bring.
What I learned from WWII was that the machinery of war was far too profitable for the fascists to ever abandon - they would rather destroy the world than give up their own 30 pieces. And now, here we stand, on the brink of destruction, boldly building ever bigger armies, ever more terrifying weapons - all to destroy the hopes, dreams, and lives of all of humanity. We lost WWII. The only 'winners' were the fascists - the industrial monstrosities that profit from death and destruction - and now there are so many more people to kill, so many more societies to pillage and loot, and so many more dollars to be made by the fascists who won WWII. Even the military - the people who try to honorably serve their country - have been devastated by this abomination.
Is there any hope when so many cruel psychopaths are loose in the world? Was there ever any hope for mankind? Or will we always choose to follow fascism, rather than seek the higher moral ground that serves all of humanity, instead of trying to destroy it? Not in my lifetime. And probably not in yours - or your children's or even your grandchildren's - not until we face the real enemy: the fascists who lead us into hell with each succeeding generation. And we help them by sacrificing our children, our resources, and our energies - barbarians, one and all, regardless of our claims otherwise.
Let's remember that fascists do not sacrifice the lives of their own children - at least not directly - they are parasites that suck the life out of every society. And we eagerly offer our children, our security, and our prosperity to them - maybe hoping that someday we will become 'one of them' - and that's the sickest nightmare I can imagine. No pollution is as dangerous as that of propaganda sown by fascism - militant psychopaths whose deranged minds drive them to destroy all of us in their search for a cure - a cure for their diseased minds. But there are no resources left once they use everything for their endless wars - not even our children, sacrificed on the bloody altar of war.
Chris, title from Susan Tedeschi?
Yes Chris, I know the picture, and also the one of the self-immolated Bhuddist monk. What many may not know, is that our destruction of Viet Nam did not have to happen.
According to Neil Sheehan as he wrote in "A Bright Shining Lie" what the Vietnamese wanted - surprise, surprise - was independence, their severeignty. Ho Chi Min was western educated, a mandarin from the most respected family in Vietnam. He listened to Woodrow Wilson's oratory about expanding freedom and democracy globally and mistakenly believed that the U.S. must be a natural allie in the Vietnamese struggle to unyoke themselves from colonialism.
Ho sent more than a dozen letters to U.S. leaders begging an audience - to FDR and Truman - and as he was ignored over the years by the bastion of the west he turned instead to socialism and to communist help in ridding his land of occupiers.
It was just the good ol' boy network at work again. We weren't going to go against our French allies so soon after the convulsion of WWII. To repeat: the Vietnamese wanted their independence, they were not die-hard socialists bent on the destruction of the west. We killed 3 million people because they wanted to be free.
Yeah, "it's just war." But war represents failure, and when does our collective conscience become so full of our failures that we believe that is all we are capbale of?
Hang in there, Cooper - we need more like you - Life is not Disney
In 1982 the band Asia released a song called "Wildest Dreams". One line referenced "Children trampled under marching feet". As a teen at the time, I remember thinking that line was stupid. I knew some friends that were in the military and some guys in ROTC and none of them would ever trample a little kid. So usually when that song came up I just skipped past it.
Years later, the words are eerie in their prophetic nature. Children ARE trampled under marching feet. Ships sail on oceans of tears. Carols have turned to Laments. Through all this is the man behind the curtain who keeps saying "We've got to WIN! WIN! WIN!".
Mr. Cooper is right to criticize the consequences of war and care about all the children in every nation. But he's wrong in the fourth from last paragraph to try to equate McCain, Clinton and Obama as equally bad choices. If he cannot discern the global statesmanship potential of Obama over the other two, it's because he has his typewriter intentially turned to the dark corner he mentioned. Maybe if he would turn it toward the light of the window he would have better insights to share with his readers.
American voters are going to choose from the choices we have. Brooding from the corner doesn't help us do that. We need to choose wisely, and hearing too much from media umpires so depressed that they can't call a strike from a ball is mostly a distraction.
Thank you Mr. Cooper.
Remember "The War to End All Wars" (1914 -1918)?
A world weary of centuries of European and North American bloodshed and suffering would now be wise and compassionate enough never to commit this sort of carnage again. Remember?
Just one week before the Armistice, Wilfred Owen was killed in the trenches of France, but his poetry still cries to us.
"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*"
(*"It is sweet and meet (fitting) to die for one's country.")
From "Dulce et Decorum Est" 1917
A complete collection of Owens' war poetry can be found at:
http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/warpoems.htm
Read them and weep for our humanity .
Thank you Mr Cooper for your sane courage to confront the delusions of our fear. What puzzles me is the willingness of Americans to court deception. Does it really feel good to deny the disaster that is Bush and company?
Chris Hedges' WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING (2002) should be required reading for all Americans, certainly young folks about to trundle off to maiming and death in Iraq, certainly returning soldiers about to be quickly celebrated and abandoned, certainly anyone who thinks about casting a ballot in November. It is a voice we all need to hear, as we do yours Mr. Cooper, a voice that now seems eerily prophetic given its date of publishing.
Mr. Cooper: I get it.