Volunteer!

Quite possibly the most morally obtuse op-ed I've ever read, and that includes every word ever to belch from the mind of Great Murky Krauthammer. How many false assumptions, tenuous connections, and leaps of logic can one man stuff into a single column? A lot!

Yet I am proud my son volunteered, and of his two tours in Afghanistan and his mission in Iraq. And he is glad he served his country. I wish all Americans had a gut connection to the troops so they would know that people like my son don't kill civilians and that they anguish over the vicissitudes of war. And I also wish more people read books like "Naples '44" to give them some sense of perspective when terrible things do happen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Judging by Lewis's diary -- and many other accounts -- the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II was often badly led and worse-behaved, and was certainly less merciful than our present-day soldiers and their leaders. We haven't carpet-bombed Baghdad or nuked Fallujah to spare the lives of our troops. Yet most Americans are glad we forced Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means.

Except that people like Frank Schaeffer's son do kill civilians, and mere anguish over the "vicissitudes" of war in the minds of the occupying missionaries of democracy does precisely nothing to mitigate against that fact. People like Frank Schaeffer's son do kill civilians. They did it in Haditha. They did it in My Lai. The did it in the instances from WWII that Schaeffer himself cites in opening his piece.

People like Frank Schaeffer's son are the killers and torturers in every war. Many of them escape that fate, but some don't. War makes them monsters. The Marines who massacred women and children at Haditha weren't murderers who slipped their way into the military in order to facilitate their murderousness; they were made murderers.

I'm tired of false equivalences between WWII and Iraq. I'm tired of notions of relative brutality--ah, but we firebombed Dresden, and thus do our adventures in Iraq pale in comparative brutality. Pap. Hogwash. Bullshit. We didn't enter WWII to "[force] Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means." It's revisionism of the absolute worst kind; it's the conscious rewriting of history so as to make the debacle and error in which his son willingly participates into the equivalent of a titanic struggle against expansionist, aggressive, industrialist, imperial nations. It's asinine, crass, undignified, revolting.

Men like Frank Schaeffer's son rounded up civilians and executed them in Haditha. And Frank Schaeffer wants context! Would he demand such if his own family were rounded up and shot at close range? Would he demand "the media" abandon its "glib hubris" and report that greater crimes had been committed eleswhere under more or less exigent circumstances?

Is that to be our new moral metric? That if something worse has happened, then no evil has occured?

He concludes:

It's time for the critics of our military to also earn a little moral authority by volunteering themselves or encouraging their children to do so. Anything less is nothing more than arm's-length moralizing.

For the life of me, I can't understand how volunteering to prosecute wars of aggression gives one greater moral authority to question them, any more than I can understand how volunteering to drive the getaway car gives one greater moral authority with which to condemn armed robbery, any more than I can understand how cooking books for your company gives you keener ethical insights into the wrongness of fraud.

Certain Events, Certain Occurences

[Fiorello and Driftwood go over the first clause of their contract]
Otis B. Driftwood: Now pay particular attention to this first clause because it's most important. It says the, uh..."The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part." How do you like that? That's pretty neat, eh?
Fiorello: No, that's no good.
Otis B. Driftwood: What's the matter with it?
Fiorello: I dunno. Let's hear it again.
Otis B. Driftwood: It says the, uh..."The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part."
Fiorello: That sounds a little better this time.
Otis B. Driftwood: Well, it grows on you. Would you like to hear it once more?
Fiorello: Er... just the first part.
Otis B. Driftwood: What do you mean? The... the party of the first part?
Fiorello: No, the first part of the party of the first part.
Otis B. Driftwood: All right. It says the, uh, "The first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract..." look, why should we quarrel about a thing like this? We'll take it right out, eh?

From A Day at the Races

Via Atrios, I see that we went to war because we had to go to war, and we must have had to go to war because we went to war, and we must have had to go to war because we went to war because we had to go to war.

Atrios asks, "Do these 'journalists' even live in reality?"

The expression, I believe, is, "Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Traditional journalists, even the very best of them, even the Sy Hershes of the world, are engaged in a narrative art. Their capacity to present disjuntion is limited; their ability to appreciate the following idea is practically nonexistent: "I'm beginning to wonder if a life even has a shape."

That's Joan Didion's narrator from The Last Thing He Wanted, one of the best, most important, and most neglected works of fiction in the last fifty years. The Last Thing He Wanted covers "certain events" that "occured" in the US and Latin America and the Carribean, "certain events" that "occured" to "certain persons" engaged in "certain activities" with a variety of "purposes."

It's important because it asks if it even makes sense to make sense of things.

The problem with journalism is that it admits no shortcomings in causality. Gaps, yes, which might be filled in by more research, more reporting. But whether you believe that the US went to war to spread democracy, or to eliminated so-called WMDs, or to line the pockets of oil companies, or, in Tom Friedman's memorably barbarous phrasing, just to throw some crappy country against the wall to prove our national martial potency, you still believe in a reason; you still reject the more difficult truth of the matter.

We went to war because we had to go to war. We had to go to war because we did go to war. How could we go to war if we didn't need to go to war? How could we need to go to war without going to war?

Not Worth Protecting

On September 11, 2006, several men flew airplanes into the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon, just outside of Washington, D.C. Approximately three thousand people were killed, the Pentagon was badly damanged, and the World Trade Center towers collapsed, causing billions of dollars worth of physical damage to New York and wreaking as-yet-unspecified environmental degradation. The immediate response of the governing class, which includes both the recognizeable government and the so-called Fourth Estate media--the self-nominated explicators of the rest of the governing class--was to begin cloaking the events of that day in obfuscating euphemism. It's difficult not to be guilty of it. Even calling them the "events of September 11" is engaging in a kind of revision, but it was far worse when, within weeks, the hive mind agreed that going forward the proper general locution would be, simply, "September 11" or "9-11."

There's only one other day in the American calendar similarly named: the Fourth of July.

Meanwhile, as Didion pointed out in her essay, "Fixed Ideas," a whole series of pieties appeared in a newly catholic national dialogue: the "heroes," the "families," the "firefighters." The problem wasn't the specific reference--certain people did act heroically, for instance, and surely the relatives of those killed in the attacks of that day deserve a degree of collective sorrow for seeing their family members die so jarringly and, in a sense, so publicly. The problem was that specific referent became moral concept. It's a common and deeply damaging trend in American thought on justice: "What about the victims? What about their rights?" Justice, which should be as impartial an act as possible, becomes little more than a psychodrama of offense precipitating moral vengeance.

But the new sanctity of all people, places, and things associated with those "events of September 11" wasn't a one-way designation foisted on grieving families by politicians in need of a moral foil; it was also a welcomed to an unfortunate degree by a great many designees, who in the American, CourtTV, Larry-King style accepted with barely-contained eagerness and a false sense of more-in-sorrow-than-anger the moral mantle—an authority rooted inexplicably in proximity to disaster. Their experience of personal tragedy, in this formulation, gave them an innate and unchallengeable platform from which to pass judgment on their society’s actions, post-tragedy. Many were, in other words, willfully and willingly complicit in their own cooptation by a governing class with its own imperatives and narratives.

It was in no small part because of the "familes," the "heroes," the "firefighters," the "first responders," of September 11 that the neologistic Department of Homeland Security was born. Political obsessives enamored of partisan conflict will point instead to the familiar form of political gamesmanship: the Democrats proposed said department; the Republicans rejected it; but, seeing public support, the Republicans stole the idea, perverted it, made it their own. Then it worked or didn’t. It was or wasn’t well managed. It’s function was or wasn’t clear. It’s purpose was or wasn’t defined. All depending on political self-identification.

But the Department of Homeland Security isn’t a matter of policy; it’s a matter of rhetoric. It exists as an organizational chart. It can’t be construed as a rational, actual response to disaster. It makes no sense to think of it that way. The Department of Homeland Security isn’t a policy crafted by one or other ideologically distinct political entities for a practical purpose. It is, instead, the natural outcome of a kind of bureaucratic, institutional imperative recognizable to anyone who’s ever worked for a large organization. Re-name; reshape; re-present. Hasn’t anyone been watching the Enron trials? It’s an off-book account; a shell company; a mechanism for transferring dollars.

And now, there’s trouble in the Homeland. Monies aren’t being rationally disbursed. Stated priorities and actual behaviors don’t match up. Rewards aren’t disbursed coherently.

"Why," asks John Amato at Crooks and Liars, "[does DHS] hate America?"

I’ve asked the question before on this blog, and I’ll ask it again. How do you know it’s broken? How do you know it’s not doing precisely what it was intended to do?

The What of the Taliban?

The deaths of civilians, both in the initial car crash and in the protests that followed, sparked the worst anti-American riots the city has seen since the fall of the Taliban four years ago.

The New York Times

In wars, or "wars," as in politics, or "politics," certain constructions become so prevalent, so ubiquitous, that they persist long after the moment of their accuracy, or "accuracy," has passed.

"The fall of the Taliban," is one of these. It was clear enough at the time, but is now perfectly clear that the Taliban didn't fall so much as they shrugged and walked away.

Now they're marching back.