Unlike most columnists, Hal Crowther doesn’t tailor his opinions to fit an established body of thought. He isn’t out to prop up either party’s platform. More ornery and sagacious than most of his journalist peers, Crowther hunts for truth like a forty-niner panning for gold. Sometimes he finds a small nugget; sometimes a big chunk.
His commentaries appear in the Independent, a weekly newspaper in Durham, North Carolina, and are syndicated in two dozen other weeklies. The essay reprinted here was written in the wake of the Gulf War and is included in Crowther’s new collection, Unarmed but Dangerous. It appears here by permission of Longstreet Press. © 1995 by Hal Crowther.
In his introduction to the piece, Crowther writes: “Everything depends on what we teach the children. If we could teach them to figure out the connections for themselves — the fundamental logical connections described here by Lewis Mumford and W. H. Ferry — I think they could save what’s left of the world.”
— Andrew Snee
Our children are grown and grandchildren are a mercifully distant prospect, so my only contact with elementary education is the lower-school playground that borders on the running track where I make my daily sacrifice to the angry god of obesity. The kids are a pleasant diversion from ragged breathing, and I pick up occasional pointers on gear, slang, and pop culture in preadolescent America.
But the other day they scared me. Three or four of us, regulars, were pounding out the quarter-miles in our usual reverie when we were startled by a distinctly martial drumbeat. And down the hill to the edge of the track, led by a girl with a drum, came two dozen elementary students in parade formation, carrying sticks and toy rifles on their shoulders. They split into two companies and proceeded to reenact some historical battle, perhaps Lexington or Bunker Hill. It was a battle from the age of muzzleloaders and massed formations firing at point-blank range — the age of patriotic suicide.
A teacher, a woman, was directing the company that seemed to represent the British: “Now kneel . . . aim . . . fire . . . withdraw . . . reload.” The battle lines were ten feet apart. It was chillingly authentic. Of course the kids were loving it. And of course I thought, The only way this exercise might teach them anything is if one day someone substituted real guns and bullets for their sticks and toys.
Even then, the survivors — at least the males — would probably forget the lesson before they graduated from high school. But teachers should know better. I remember something H. G. Wells wrote, before the great wars that killed more than one hundred million soldiers and civilians: “The crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilization is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistresses in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.”
During the Vietnam War I asked one of the wise men of the peace movement, a kind of renegade Jesuit, if there was any force on earth that could end our love affair with war. “Only education,” he replied. “There has to come a time when they beat the drum and no one marches.”
I don’t think he realized that the drumbeat begins so early, or that fifth-grade teachers are training themselves as sergeants major. Logic, memory, history, and catastrophe have no perceptible influence on the fatal glamour of civilization’s most loathsome perversion. The winter of the Gulf War was the darkest season I’ve ever suffered as a citizen of the United States. The motivation and the propaganda were so transparent, the outcome so depressing, the celebrations so pathetic, and the public response so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that I was left with no alibi that any foreigner would accept. So this is my country. I wasn’t surprised, in this election year, to hear that their votes against the invasion of Kuwait would be a serious liability for many candidates.
But I was naive enough, still, to twist and groan when the patriots attacked Governor William Clinton, a presidential candidate — and a Desert Storm supporter — for avoiding service in Vietnam. Vietnam? It’s been years since I’ve read anything but the most halfhearted and perfunctory apologies for that tragic fiasco, a textbook failure of tainted foreign policy by any yardstick you devise. If there was ever an instance when an issue split this nation in two and one side was totally vindicated, beyond any further debate, it was the instance of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh won the war and Eugene McCarthy won the argument; thank you, friends, and good night.
Beyond a certain turning point in public awareness — a turning point that arrived too late for thousands already in uniform, or already dead or maimed — nearly every young man with access to accurate information (Bill Clinton, a college graduate and Rhodes Scholar, presumably had prime access) tried to get out of serving in Vietnam. And all of us, those who failed to get out of it and those who succeeded, should stand together now to declare that there was no honor to be had fighting that war and no dishonor in refusing to fight. This would be a major milestone in the march of civilization — at least one bad war buried without fanfare in a pauper’s grave.
But that’s never how it works. The male protagonist in Norman Rush’s novel Mating delivers a tirade against his own sex:
You know men are happy in the army because when they get out they do nothing to keep younger men from joining up, and in fact they themselves join the American Legion to keep their memories of war and killing as fresh as possible and have circle jerks where they call anybody who’s for peace commies, and a deep calm drenches the male soul when it feels the persona it inhabits being firmly screwed into a socket in some iron hierarchy or other, best of all a hierarchy legitimately about killing.
Not long ago I might have discounted this outburst as emotional exaggeration, in part because I know so many veterans who don’t fit the profile. But the yellow-ribbon war moved me much closer to Bush’s persuasion. Pacifism is a beautiful and also a stubborn flower, once it’s firmly rooted. I was a confirmed pacifist at thirteen — the purest example of untutored innocence viewing the emperor’s new clothes. Later, I compromised and equivocated. I wanted to be open-minded, to respect what appeared to be a consensus, maybe just to get along.
But there are compromises that should never survive the age of reason (conscription succeeds by plucking its victims long before that age arrives). Lewis Mumford embarrassed me. In The Myth of the Machine, his landmark study of technology and human development, Mumford devotes only ten pages to war per se. Ten are all he needs. He traces warfare back to the lovely pre-Christian tradition of human sacrifice — “the only guess that ties all the components of war together and explains in some degree the hold that this institution has kept throughout history.” He explains how “the megamachine,” the mobilized nation-state, evolved in a military form long before modern warfare was invented to perpetuate it.
Mumford shows that war was always symbolic, never practical, and that it was always employed to stifle domestic dissent and tighten the rulers’ grip on their subjects (“popular hatred of the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies”). Though he was writing during the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the calm force of Mumford’s argument is only occasionally interrupted by flashes of anger, as when he calls the Vietnamese “an innocent people, uprooted, terrorized, poisoned, and roasted alive in a futile attempt to make the power fantasies of the American military-industrial-scientific elite ‘credible.’ ”
Once past Mumford, there’s no turning back. Only the most outspoken pacifism suffices, like W. H. Ferry’s epilogue to Conditions of Peace, a collection of essays published shortly after the Gulf War.
“The war system enters our lives through so many doors that its presence, to say nothing of its dominance, is virtually unnoticed,” Ferry writes. “The country is bound together by the system’s omnivorous requirements. Simply put, the war system and the American way of life are one and the same phenomenon.”
“Patriotism,” George Bradford wrote last spring, “is an expression of the defeat of community and the triumph of the state.” (“The state is bodies of armed men,” said Lenin, no pacifist and no maudlin patriot either.)
These strong words are true, or far more true than any arguments that can be thrown up against them. That so many can be induced to deny them so successfully is a marvel, though no mystery. It’s still the human sacrifice that seals the deal.
The best way, maybe the only way, to give a flagrant lie the force of truth is to soak it in innocent blood. No one blames the bereaved for trying to link their agony to great causes and noble ideals. For the average Christian, accepting the utter futility of a son killed by friendly fire in Kuwait is as unthinkable as accepting a callous God who allows all this carnage century after century, and probably without granting any afterlife as compensation.
I only blame them when they vote, again and again, for leaders who will make war again and again, instead of leaders who will make every effort to avoid it. How do we break the Covenant of the Bloody Shirt?
I’m still crazy enough to believe that warlust is more nurture than nature — to blame the parasite warlords, the media, and the schoolmasters instead of some murderous gene we inherited from rogue chimpanzees. It’s still possible that we could end the ancient cycle of human sacrifice by reducing the pool of willing victims. The political upheavals of the past eighteen months have produced a poignant new argument against the blind patriotism of faithful soldiers.
What we are seeing, more clearly than at any time in the past half-century, is the perishability of the nation-state itself. Afghanistan has been called the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Veterans of that war face the irony that their comrades died for a nation, a flag, and a cause that no longer exist. In what had been Yugoslavia, brothers and neighbors could have battled and died under a half dozen different flags within a month.
Scotland, home of most of my ancestors, is thinking of seceding from Great Britain after four hundred years. In Nova Scotia, where I was born, serious people are talking about seceding from Canada and joining the United States. Things change. Things fall apart. The United States is no seamless union. Massachusetts and Mississippi still have little in common besides four Ss apiece. I often wonder if it was worth the blood that was shed to hold them together in 1865.
The same vain, covetous old men, in violation of half the Ten Commandments, will send you to your death for a flag, a creed, a party, or a set of borders that may be historical trivia long before your natural life would have ended. Don’t risk it if you have the slightest doubt. Nations, good and bad, come and go. They’re chimeras compared with your sacred, single life.
