Caught that baton

The New Neo Posted on by

Norm Geras tossed me the “10 things I’ve never done before” baton, and so I’ll catch. Norm has sometimes told me I should break down and write shorter posts (he knows I do have a very slight tendency to go on and on), so maybe this was his effort to help me out. Before Nov. 2004, the first entry in the following list probably would have been “voted for a Republican.” But no more.

10 Things I’ve Never Done

–bought a new car
–painted my toenails
–been fired, or fired anyone
–had my horoscope done
—eaten anything bigger than my head
–lied about my age
–worn a T-shirt that said anything
–kissed a man with a beard
–seen any of the “Godfather” movies
–owned a cat, or wanted to

And now it’s my turn to pass it on. So here goes–and you’d better make it funnier than I did. That shouldn’t be too hard!: TmjUtah, Dennis the Peasant, and Dr. Sanity.

Taking the cake

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While we’re on a Van Der Leun roll, see this (otherwise, the following may not make a whole lot of sense).

Gerard, I envy you. Not only did my mother not bake the Holy Cookies, she didn’t even bake. But I can still identify with the Quest. My brother and I easily found my mother’s hiding places for sweets–in her case, candy. She was nowhere near as creative as your mother at stowing the stuff away.

But in our house the real prize was cake. My parents entertained a lot, and they liked to have impromptu gatherings–a few good friends coming over for the four c’s of cards, cake, coffee, and conversation–lively talk and laughter that made it hard for me to do my homework as the sounds drifted up the stairs and straight into my room. I was usually allowed to come down and join them for at least little while (and a little cake).

The cake came in a variety of classic flavors–chocolate, lemon, coconut–always with thick frosting. It was purchased by my mother in quantity at a special bakery in Brooklyn and brought home in stacks of boxes, each box tied with string and then several tied together in a great pyramid-like structure. There were typically three stacks, for a total of fifteen cakes at a time, enough for a couple of months of guests, and stored in a large freezer that sat in our basement next to the washing machine (the dryer didn’t come till many years later).

There they sat, frozen but nevertheless burning large holes of desire in our brains. Until one evening when our parents were out and, maddened by greed, we decided we just had to eat one of the cakes. Like most thieves, we knew we needed to be quick about our work (who could predict the hour of their return?), and so we couldn’t take the time to defrost it. But we found, much to our astonishment, that frozen cake is really good. Really, really, really good.

After that, we had our m.o. down. Over the course of a couple of weeks, we would eat just a few of each batch, disposing of the boxy evidence by ripping it up and taking it to the outside garbage cans. My mother, I’m sad (or happy) to report, was none the wiser. She didn’t seem to keep count. When she noticed the stack in the freezer had dwindled, she just figured it was time to go back to the bakery to replenish it.

As for cooking, I ended up teaching myself, since my mother–although she had many other wonderful qualities–was not going to be any sort of guide in the kitchen, except for what not to do. And, having gone the Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie route (and sorry, Gerard, but Crisco is heresy in my book), I am here to report that the right way, the only way, to eat them is warm from the oven, with the chips still slightly soft and oozy, and the cookies retaining a slight give, crunchy on the outside but tender on the inside.

Psychological history of WWII

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I recently came across this essay by Lee Sandlin, entitled “Losing the War.” It was recommended to me by the inimitable Gerard Van Der Leun, who is certainly no slouch in the essay department himself.

Sandlin’s article is well-written and insightful, and is somewhat of a psychological history of WWII, describing the reactions of those on the home front and those at the actual front. It is very lengthy–War and Peace without the “peace”—but well worth the read.

Sandlin does a phenomenal job of writing about a war we tend to think of as familiar, describing it in ways that are quite new. He shows us the war as experienced by those alive at the time, rather than the version that’s been wrapped up into neat history for those of us who came later.

For those who live it, war usually is utter chaos, and WWII was certainly no exception, as Sandlin makes clear. Ever since I first heard about that war when I was a young child, I’ve had one overriding personal thought about it, which is that I am extremely happy I was not alive during it. I simply don’t think I could have endured the fear and the uncertainty, not to mention hearing about the scale of the carnage in real time. I have often marveled at the courage of those who lived through it without knowing the outcome in advance; it was awful enough to learn about it ex post facto.

Sandlin’s article is nothing if not a demonstration of Churchill’s warning:

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

The only point of contention I can find with the article is that Sandlin calls the idea that Japan was unlikely to have surrendered prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs “preposterous”–and then he proceeds to give a fairly good argument as to why Japan was probably nowhere near surrendering at that point. His description of Midway will make your hair stand on end, and he adds new points of extreme creepiness to the familiar portrait we have of Hitler.

Illuminating and highly recommended.

The power (and the staying power) of the myth of desecration

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Ever since I heard about the violent reaction to the Newsweek Koran story, a little bell has been going off in the back of my head. One of those things that says, “This is familiar. This reminds me of something. What could it be?” You know how it is; you think and you think, but nothing specific comes up, just this general feeling.

This morning, though, it finally came to me, in that state of half-consciousness between sleep and wakening. The blood libel. The host desecration. Of course.

For those of you unfamiliar with the myth of the blood libel and the host desecration, please go here. These are two ancient and false accusations that seem utterly preposterous today, but were believed at the time by many Christians, and have caused widespread violence against Jews–for centuries, and in many parts of the world.

Please read the entire link to learn about it. But here’s a short summary:

In 1144 CE, an unfounded rumor began in eastern England, that Jews had kidnapped a Christian child, tied him to a cross, stabbed his head to simulate Jesus’ crown of thorns, killed him, drained his body completely of blood, and mixed the blood into matzos (unleavened bread) at time of Passover. The rumor arose from a former Jew, Theobald, who had become a Christian monk…
The host is a wafer used during the Roman Catholic mass…the church teaches that it is converted into the actual body of Jesus Christ, just as the wine becomes Jesus’ actual blood. These elements of the mass are then eaten by the believers….A variation of the blood libel myth developed in Europe early in the 11th century. Instead of accusing the Jews of killing an innocent child, they were accused of desecrating the host. Sometimes they were accused stabbing pins into the host, or of stepping on it. Other times, they were accused of stabbing the host with a knife until Jesus’ blood leaked out. Sometimes, they were accused of nailing the host, in a symbolic replay of the crucifixion.

The elements are very similar, particularly in the host desecration myth. In each case, we have believers in the sanctity of the object itself (for medieval Catholics, the host; for present day Moslem fundamentalists, the Koran), and a belief that another group showed lack of respect for the sanctity of said object and violated it in a terrible way. In the case of the blood libel, we also have allegations of an actual murder of an innocent for purposes of ritual desecration.

As in the present situation, we have a fundamentalist group deeply enraged that another group is said to have desecrated its most holy object. Just as many medieval Christians believed the blood libel and the host desecration to be just cause for killing Jews, so some Moslems of today think the penalty for the current charges should be death. In the case of the former, the Church tried to do damage control and say the rumor was a lie, just as Newsweek is attempting to do today. (Unlike Newsweek, though, the Church was not itself responsible for originally spreading the libel). And, as is true today, it is very difficult to clear the record once these things are in the public domain. In fact, it is amazing that, in an age of fairly primitive communications in terms of technology, these myths still had the power to get so far, to have such staying power, and to cause so much damage.

Of course, Christianity has changed a lot since those days. The blood libel and host desecration myths no longer have any traction for Christians, and haven’t for a long while. But the world of Moslem fundamentalism is still very susceptible to this type of thinking.

One very big difference, though–at least so far–is that the scope of the damage in the present case has been relatively small compared to its historical precedent. I sincerely hope it stays that way.

ADDENDUM: I wanted to add once again that I do not think this rumor was promulgated by Newsweek with any appreciation of its meaning in the Moslem world, or the severity of the possible consequences. Whether Newsweek ought to have foreseen these things is a question discussed here, including the comments section.

The lethal narcissism of the press

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I found the following comment by blogging psychoanalyst Shrinkwrapped on this post by Roger Simon about the Newsweek Koran-flushing fiasco. I was so taken with what Shrinkwrapped wrote that I reproduce it here in full:

I have written before about the special narcissism of the MSM (and the academic elites). They write as if their words are the most important products in the universe, but they also write as if their words have no impact. We are supposed to look with awe and adulation at the brilliance and facility of their manipulation of words; the meaning of their words is actually secondary to the use of the words as a vehicle to evoke our admiration.

In the case of Newsweek, they pass off an explosive story, based on anonymous sourcing, as if it is no big deal, just a small note, not worth much investigation; they have handed the enemy another bullet to use against us in a war that is as much about information as it is about guns. The MSM, with its “sophisticated” relationship to information, has no real clue what they are doing.

I am in agreement with Shrinkwrapped; I do not think Newsweek did this with full awareness of the consequences. With malice towards Bush, his policies, and the military, yes; and probably with an awareness that it would impact negatively on them. But with a greater understanding of the larger and more widespread consequences of their acts? At this point there is, unfortunately, not much evidence for that sort of depth of thinking or breadth of vision among the powers that be at Newsweek.

The press plays Truth or Consequences–or neither

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Austin Bay has some excellent commentary on the story of the Newsweek article alleging that a Koran was flushed down a Guantanamo toilet. The report has sparked outrage and deaths in Afghanistan, and may cause more before this is through.

The questions raised by this story are deep ones. What is the responsibility of the media for the unforeseen consequences of their reporting? And what duty do they have to try to foresee the possible consequences of publicaton? If foreseen, what duty do they have to suppress a story to avoid such consequences? And how certain do they have to be of the story’s veracity to publish these–or any–allegations?

In a sense, this Koran-flushing story is of the easiest type to judge, because it turns out that the allegations contained therein were almost certainly untrue, the story itself was relatively trivial and unimportant (there was no overriding “need to know”), and it was based on sketchy and anonymous sources. But what if the story had been true, or important, or well-sourced, or some combination of all three? The task of deciding how to factor in the question of consequences then becomes more difficult.

If we go back in time, we find that, during FDR’s Presidency, reporters didn’t even publish their own certain knowledge of how physically limited he was. They were so wary of the consequences of the story, so protective of both the President and the public, that they voluntarily censored themselves. The same is true for the early rumors concerning JFK’s kinky extra-curricular sex life. Reporters of the time apparently suppressed the story for protective purposes–and also, perhaps, because JFK was well-liked by the press corps. Of course, in those pre-Sullivan vs. NY Times days, the penalties for getting it wrong were a good deal greater.

Now things are quite different, to say the least. They have been for some time. And, as Austin Bay rightly points out, the consequences in this age of cybercommunication are no longer local, they are worldwide and nearly instantaneous. The world has become like a room filled with propane or pure oxygen–a small spark is all that’s needed for ignition.

Back in my liberal days, when Republicans were busy trying to impeach and remove Clinton from office (for crimes I thought were both stupid and wrong, but which didn’t seem to me to rise to the level of impeachable offenses) I was very upset by the release of the Starr report. I had what seemed at the time (even to me) to be a very strange worry about it. I was concerned about its effect on the fundamentalist Moslem world. It occurred to me that such a puritanical group might experience a sort of wild rage on reading it, a feeling that America and the West were hopelessly corrupt and sexualized–that only a Sodom and Gomorrah-esque country would be publishing this sort of material about its own President–and you know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah.

I have no idea whether the Starr report factored into the 9/11 attacks in any way. I am not familiar with any references to it; it’s certainly possible (perhaps even likely) that it did not. But, whether or not it had such an effect, the idea was already implanted in my mind that the media needs to at least consider the effects of the stories they publish.

Every journalist and every editor has a myriad of small decisions to make for each event: whether this is a story that needs to be covered, and, if so, in what detail; which sources are reliable and which not; which pieces of information should be included and which excluded. Long ago, the press used to factor into their decision-making process assumptions about the effect of such stories–on the war effort and on the American public, for example (the effect on the world wasn’t such a big deal at the time, because of the immense gulf involved). But since the late 60s, when the press rose to its present position as government and military antagonist, the idea of the press as exalted mouthpiece of truth became reified. Now the position of the press seems to be Consequences? Who cares? Our only fidelity is to truth. And this “truth” has, unfortunately, come to be defined more and more as whatever any Deep (or Shallow) Throat might happen to say it is, as long as the story is scandalous enough to draw readers.

The result? Coverage of stories with no thought for consequences–and, increasingly, with a callous and reckless disregard for truth, also. A winning combination, is it not?

If any good comes out of this Newsweek fiasco and tragedy, perhaps it will be a re-evaluation of the duty of the press to be conscientious and cautious regarding both truth and consequences

On the cuteness of ladybugs

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Ladybugs? Yes, ladybugs.

I found one yesterday on my bathroom floor and immediately thought, “Oh, how cute!” But that thought was immediately followed by a second one: what’s so cute about a ladybug? Is there any other insect we generally think of as cute, and would tolerate in our homes?

It’s commonly known that ladybugs are helpful to have in the garden, eating all sorts of tiny pests. I know, of course, that earthworms are some kind of wonderful, too. But they are far from cute, and if I found one on my bathroom floor I would, quite simply, freak.

No, ladybugs really are cute. Rounded, red, and spotted, they look like toys (and have been the inspiration for some). They radiate that sense of puppyhood or youngness that humans seem to respond to with a smile.

It’s mostly the shape and the color. Here’s a nice potpourri of ladybug images to peruse. I think only a heart of stone would fail to agree: cute, cute, and more cute (with the sole exception of the very first image on the page, which in close-up appears to be some sort of fanciful artist’s rendering).

There’s a limit, of course, to even my ladybug tolerance. Every now and then a whole bunch of them enter the house. I would certainly be willing, at the very least, to escort them out–if it weren’t for the fact that by the time I ordinarily see them they are already deceased, so my task is limited to clearing out the bodies. But they are cute bodies.

It’s not about beauty, either. In fact, one of the peskier pests, the Japanese beetle, is a rather lovely creature, looked at somewhat objectively. The jewel-like iridescence of its wings, shining in the sun, is something I often admire–right before I plunk the owner of said wings into a jar of alcohol.

So, I am not an insect lover, I must confess. My guess is that most people would agree that insects are not particularly appealing. But some insects are, and it turns out the ladybug is not the only one.

According to this chart, all but eight states have adopted state insects. Who knew? I always thought that, in Maine and New Hampshire, if there were a designated state insect it would be a close tie between the mosquito and the black fly (sometimes also known as the state birds). But no. Maine prefers the honeybee (not one of my personal favorites, but an extremely popular state insect, with eighteen states choosing it) and New Hampshire–well, New Hampshire is one of six states proudly and sensibly backing Ms. Cuteness herself, the ladybug. Many states (twenty-four in all) cop out by choosing a butterfly, which I know is actually an insect but hardly seems like one to me.

It seems as though, to achieve most-favored-insect status, there needs to be a combination of beneficial (or at least benign) activity and either cuteness or beauty. Butterflies may be free, but they are certainly not cute; they are beautiful. Japanese beetles may be beautiful, but they are harmful to the garden. Earthworms may be beneficial, but to my way of thinking are just not cute (though the Lowly Worm might be considered an exception).

And then there’s my current nemesis, the truly vile lily beetle. It came north in droves last year, forcing gardeners in the area to destroy their beautiful lilies, or watch them be destroyed almost overnight by this voracious plague. But here the lily beetles are (that is, pictures of them). No, they’re not fat and round like the ladybug, and they lack the dalmatian-like spots, but they are somewhat cute and somewhat ladybuggish, if esthetics were the only criterion.

But it most decidedly is not. I have declared war against them, although, so far, I lack weapons in the fight, unless I want to poison myself and possibly everything around me (it’s a relic of my liberalness; I’m reluctant to use pesticides for mere ornamentals). This guy’s advice, which is to go out two or three times a day and pick them off your lilies, is simply not going to happen (blogging is labor-intensive enough!)

But there is a ray of hope. In the same article, the author writes that there are plans to introduce the French parasite of the Lily Beetle sometime next year. So, help is on the way, and from France, of all places! The only problem is that, as it tuns out, this article was written in 1998. Ah well, c’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

I’m just a cog in the old blog slog

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Blogging’s harder than it looks, writes history professor and author David Greenberg in today’s NY Times piece entitled “Blogging, as in slogging.”

Well, I could have told him that, if he’d ever asked me. I found that out when I started doing it myself.

Before I started blogging, I had no absolutely idea what it entailed. I certainly haven’t mastered the genre, and I’m still in awe of those who have. What you see on a blog is merely the tip of the iceberg. As Greenberg says, with only slight exaggeration:

Creating your own idiosyncratic set of villains to skewer and theories to promote – while keeping readers interested – requires as much talent as sculpting a magazine feature or a taut op-ed piece…By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less…To succeed in blogging you need to understand it’s a craft, with its own tricks of the trade. You need a thick skin. And you must put your life on hold to feed an electronic black hole.

But blogging is also, as Greenberg fails to say, a labor of love for most of us, one that can offer great rewards–although, except for a rarefied few bloggers inhabiting the upper reaches of the ecosystem, certainly not financial ones.

Greenberg’s blogging experience–the one on which this NY Times piece was based–was a guest stint for Daniel Drezner. Perhaps that’s the key to why his experience was so disillusioning. He was asked to do it. For him, blogging wasn’t a labor of love, nor was it a medium to which he was especially drawn. It was just a gig he got, almost by accident. But it’s like one of those movies in which a kid and a parent magically exchange bodies–the experience of walking a few miles in someone else’s shoes leads to a far greater appreciation of the work involved in the hike.

The blog of the Ancient Mariner

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Whenever I finish writing a section of the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, I’m amazed at how much I have to say, and how long it takes me to say it. My guess is that there are at least eight more posts coming up in the series, maybe even more.

I’m always gratified and surprised that so many people actually have the patience to hear me out. And I’m especially and deeply touched by those who take the trouble to thank me (particularly any Vietnam vets, or Vietnamese-Americans), or those who identify with what I write, or those who were too young to remember but are nevertheless still interested. I’m flattered by those who suggest this could actually be a book (although sometimes I feel like it already is a book).

And I sort of chuckle at those who say–“well, but what about this, what about that, why haven’t you talked about x, y, and z?” I want to say, “Hey, man, are you some sort of glutton for punishment? Isn’t this long enough?” Actually, if I ever do write a book, I imagine I’ll get around to answering some of the excellent questions raised by many readers.

To those who ask me, “Why haven’t you talked about how it affects you now?”, or some version of that question, I counsel patience. I’m going chronologically here–I’ll get to it, but slowly. All in good time. Each essay gives the state of mind of myself and others during a certain era–I will add on certain new discoveries about old events later.

Every response and every reader is appreciated. The real reason I began blogging, I believe, was to write this series. But I don’t think I ever would have done so if some of the people whom I originally most wanted to hear my story–certain friends and family members–had not made it clear they did not want to hear from me about this at all. Some of those close to me have also made it clear, despite the fact that we continue to have good relations, that they will never read this blog. Is it lack of interest, fear that their own point of view might be challenged, or fear that, if exposed to my turncoat ways, they might have to cut off the relationship? Whatever it is, it is a source of sorrow for me.

But in a way, it doesn’t really matter. Because, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, it seems I am compelled to tell my tale. The Mariner faces a situation more dramatic than mine, and he meets his listeners face-to-face. But I can identify, nevertheless:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns :
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land ;
I have strange power of speech ;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach.

I studied that poem in junior high school. It wasn’t one of my favorites, although the cadences appealed to me, and some of the stanzas, too, particularly these famous ones:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The poem contained a mystery–many mysteries, actually. Was the Mariner under a spell? What did the Albatross represent? And why, oh why oh why, did he shoot it? I seem to recall tackling the job of writing an essay on the latter question, poring over the poem to find the answer, only to discover–it couldn’t be found there. I was a bit annoyed at that, because I guess even then I was interested in human motivation, and I couldn’t understand why Coleridge was mum on this all-important point.

Well, I still don’t know why the Mariner shot the Albatross. But I no longer think the poem is the lesser for its failure to tell us. In fact, I think the mystery is part of its appeal.

Perhaps the Ancient Mariner doesn’t even know himself why he did what he did. But he knows something happened that was wrong, and he was part of it; and that now he must tell the tale. In the end, it’s a story of redemption and healing; that much I know, too. Healing, not just for the Mariner:

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale ;
And then it left me free.

…but for his listener, too:

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn :
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

Breathing a sigh of relief

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, as you may have noticed, I have finally posted Part 4C in the “Mind is a difficult thing to change” series.

The experience was somewhat like a boa constricter swallowing a large elephant–at least, what I imagine that experience would be, never having had it. I made a ton of notes–the idea part was relatively easy and even exciting–but trying to organize and then write it, that was something else again.

Big sigh of relief on my part. Hope the result gives much food for thought. And now, I’m outta here for a few hours!!

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 4C (Vietnam–change and betrayal)

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(NOTE: Links to previous posts in the series can be found on the right sidebar, under “A mind is a difficult thing to change.”)

When I try to think of the psychological/political effects of Vietnam, two things come to mind (and I could write them in huge dark capital letters, rather than just italicize them): change is the first, and betrayal is the second.

Back in this essay, I mentioned that therapists consider there are three basic aspects of change: cognition (thought), emotion (feeling), and behavior (action). During the Vietnam era, changes occurred primarily in the cognitive dimension, while the resultant sense of betrayal was mainly an emotional response. Action played a smaller part in the mechanism of change for the country as a whole–although obviously, for those who actually fought the war, it played a much larger part.

All three aspects of change worked in concert with and affected each other. Many people are still heavily under the sway of changes that occurred and perceptions that formed during and after the Vietnam War. So the Vietnam War continues to affect us greatly even today, and wounds and rifts that were caused then have deepened and reopened during the Iraq war and its aftermath.

Change

The Vietnam era represented a watershed of sorts. The resultant changes in attitudes towards the government, the military, the press, and even America’s destiny in the world were so great that, for many people, they amounted to a virtual reversal of previous beliefs.

Prior to the Vietnam War (and for the first few years of that war) the press, for the most part, had been on the same page as the government and strongly supportive of the military. World War II had been a terrible war, and attacks by the allies on civilian populations and the decision to drop atomic weapons had come in for some criticism. But that war had had a moral clarity, nevertheless. The press wrote about it in a way that indicated they considered the US as representing the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. Postwar revelations (such as descriptions of concentration camps) served only to increase that conviction.

It was only the most far-out of fringe groups that thought otherwise, and they were relatively easy to discount. The “narrative”–to coin a post-modern phrase–on which we (and our parents and grandparents) had been raised was a consistent one: America might have made a small mistake here and there, but our leaders were strong and decent, our fighting men moral and courageous, and we fought for justice and truth.

Somewhere along the line in the Vietnam era that narrative changed. In Part 4A I tried to describe the process by which that happened in a span of years so short as to be dizzying–the way we became disillusioned and confused about our goals and our methods, and even our morality. I’ll just touch on it briefly again here: the military kept saying victory would come soon, but the war dragged on; many of the South Vietnamese leaders we supported seemed corrupt; we read in the Pentagon Papers that the government and military had kept some things secret from us; reports came back that the powers that be had never been committed to fighting an all-out war to win; My Lai, and other allegations made by some returning vets (or people who claimed to be returning vets) made us wonder whether our military was committing atrocities on a regular basis; Kent State made us wonder whether we students had also been targeted as enemies; and Watergate made us lose faith in the morality of the President.

What was the mechanism of delivery for all of this news of change? It was the news itself–in particular, television and print journalism. Vietnam was the first war to be beamed instantaneously into our living rooms via the relatively new medium of TV. This fact has been repeated often enough that it has become a cliche, but I think we still don’t appreciate what a huge effect TV had on perceptions of war. Before television, people at home had been much more protected from the reality of conflict, and could idealize it, romanticize it, and distance themselves more effectively from it. Newsreels shown weekly in a movie theater, with grandiloquent narration and footage of far-off blasts, were a totally different thing from what we now saw every evening on TV.

War is not pretty, it is brutal; it involves doing things that most of us don’t like to think about and usually don’t have to watch. The young in particular tend to be softhearted and vulnerable to the sight of human suffering, not hardened by life experiences (unless, of course, they’ve been subject to great violence early in life, which the vast majority of us fortunately had not been). That kind of empathy is a good thing, by the way, not a bad one. But those reactions, which are primarily emotional in nature and go very deep, can short-circuit cognitions about why a particular war is happening, and why it might be “the lesser of two evils,” despite the horror. So the first change was in feelings about conflict: a more widespread horror of, and sensitivity to, war itself. It came from the fact that we were seeing the war every evening on TV, which was a first in US history–and, in fact, a first in human experience.

Another change was in the type of war being fought. Each war that is waged has tactical differences from previous wars–that is why the old adage that generals make the error of preparing to fight the previous war rather than the current one is so apropos. I am not a military expert, and some of you reading this no doubt know a great deal more about the subject than I (and you no doubt will correct me where I’m wrong!). But it is my impression that Vietnam represented a fairly dramatic break strategically from previous wars, offering new and different conundrums and challenges which were part of the reason the war was widely perceived as unwinnable. It seems fairly clear that a war such as WWII, with conventional armies facing each other and fighting large-scale battles over territory, had become outdated in Vietnam, which (especially in earlier years, when the Vietcong were numerous) was basically a guerilla war that even contained some elements of terrorism. There was also indisputably a lack of commitment, for political reasons, to the full effort that would have been necessary to win it. In addition, there was the insistence that much of the war be directed from Washington by civilians (such as McNamara), an idea that led to many misjudgments. These were all innovations, as far as I know.

Still another change was in the way propaganda was used by the enemy. The North Vietnamese were unusually astute and knowledgeable about the psychological and sociological vulnerabilities of the US. By the late 60s, the enemy was well aware that the US press and public were wearying of the war, and that if they could exploit this fact they could prevail. Propaganda tactics had traditionally been used on one’s own people, or on the opponent’s military (Tokyo Rose, for example). Vietnam was the first war (at least as far as I know) in which propaganda tactics were also used relentlessly and effectively to influence the press of the opposite side in order to undermine the esprit of its people. The US was attempting to fight a war of attrition in terms of bodies (we kill so many of you that you run out of willing fighters), whereas North Vietnam was attempting to fight a war of attrition in terms of time (we drag the war on for so long that you run out of the will to fight). In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese won this particular war of attrition. As North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, Ho Chi Minh’s aide, said to French war historian Bernard Fall in 1962: “Americans do not like long, inconclusive wars – and this is going to be a long, inconclusive war. Thus we are sure to win in the end.”

Another change for the US was that this was a war that was conceptually difficult to understand and justify. It was fought for a seeming abstraction: the domino theory, as yet unproven. As time went on (and on and on and on), the question arose in people’s minds (with the help of the press) as to whether this might be a mere civil war of local importance only, one we would do well to stay clear of. The Vietnam War was fought as a nasty guerilla war during the years of heaviest US fighting in the mid- to late-60s, with all the problems, questions, and uncertainties that guerilla conflicts usually entail: who is the enemy? what does the populace really want? how can we kill the enemy without killing many innocent people, if the m.o. of the enemy is to hide among them, uniformless? how can we fight on terrain that we are not familiar with, and with which the enemy is extremely familiar? Never had the US been engaged in such a lengthy struggle of this particular type, and the public lacked a context in which to understand it. Lacking that context, which might have been provided by better communication from the government, and better explanation in the press–how could the American people sustain the stomach for it?

Then there was the fact that, despite this lack of conceptual understanding, all of the young men in the country were vulnerable to being called up to serve because of the draft. This particular combination–lack of a strong belief or clear evidence that the war was in our best interests, coupled with the fact that any young man could be drafted to fight it–led to feelings of special frustration and even rage on the part of those who might be called on to make the ultimate sacrifice (John Kerry perfectly expressed this feeling when he asked his famous question about who would want to be the last man to die for a mistake). The war itself was perceived as being so far away as to be almost irrelevant to America, while the danger to the average young man was potentially huge, up close and personal.

This geographic distance, combined with the lack of cognitive clarity about the reasons behind the war, and the powerful emotional valence of susceptibility to the draft, were a new and volatile mix in American history. For many, the combination led almost inevitably to action: antiwar sentiment and demonstrations, many of them pitting the younger generation against the older, whom they felt were callously sacrificing them on the altar of a war whose purpose was murky and whose execution was inept. So another new element (new, at least, in its intensity) was the idea of a generational war that pitted sons against fathers, and vice versa.

The widespread and new idea of the war as a “mistake” was twofold. For example, when Kerry used the word “mistake,” he was speaking not only of the reasons behind the war, he was also speaking of the conduct and strategy of the war itself. Some moderates or conservatives (or even some liberals), who had no problem with the first (they accepted the domino theory, or felt strongly about the need to keep the South Vietnamese from Communist domination) were angry about the second–the limited war strategy, for example. So the idea of “mistakes” in this war came from all sides–left, right, and center, for somewhat different reasons for each group.

Somewhere along the line–and most agree it had certainly happened by the Tet offensive of 1968–press coverage of the war turned extremely negative. As far as I can tell, this was another huge change; to the best of my knowledge, it seems to have been the first time in American history that the press turned on a war en masse while that war was still ongoing. There are many studies of the role of the press during the war (Big Story by Peter Braestrup and The Military and the Media by William V. Kennedy, to mention two), and it is a subject far too vast for me to cover adequately here. But the general thrust of coverage changed after the Tet offensive, not because it was a military defeat for us (it was actually a military victory, particularly over the Vietcong, who after that were never again to be a major player), but because the press perceived it for the most part as both a military and a psychological defeat and presented it as such to the American people.

The reasons underlying this perception of defeat were twofold. Firstly, the press corps was mostly untrained in military matters; and, since the Tet offensive involved attacks on many of the cities in which the journalists resided (many of which had not previously been the scene of much major fighting in the war), the press corps itself felt vulnerable and frightened. Secondly, right before Tet, the Johnson administration had been boldly stating that victory was almost at hand, and therefore the huge scope of the Tet offensive seemed to indicate that this had either been a lie on Johnson’s part, or a colossal error. The new perception was instead that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong seemed willing to go on forever. This led to feelings of betrayal and depression in the press and in the US, and these feelings only grew stronger as time went on, the war dragged on, and events such as the secret bombing of Cambodia, My Lai, and the Pentagon Papers unfolded.

This article from Smithsonian magazine contains a number of specific examples of the sort of thing I’m talking about. Here it describes occurrences just prior to the Tet offensive:

As the Communists prepared their attacks, the White House was setting itself up for a political disaster with a misguided “success offensive,” claiming that victory was in sight. From the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, President Johnson declared that the war would continue “not many more nights.” Most tellingly, Gen. William Westmoreland, the handsome, square-jawed commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, said before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.: “With 1968, a new phase is now starting. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”

To show the magnitude of the change effected by perceptions about and coverage of the Tet offensive, here is another statistic, from an article about Tet, written by Steven Hayward : it is estimated that one-fifth of those who had been hawkish in the US turned against the war between early feb and march of that year.

The Pentagon Papers actually represented another enormous change, a shot across the bow in a new and very significant war, the war between the press and the government. A recent book review of Inside the Pentagon Papers (ed. John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter), written by Anthony Lewis and appearing in the NY Times Review of Books of April 7 2005, quotes professors Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt Jr. of the Columbia Law School as saying, “The New York Times, by publishing the papers…demonstrated that much of the press was no longer willing to be merely an occasionally critical associate devoted to common aims, but intended to become an adversary threatening to discredit not only political dogma but also the motives of the nation’s leaders.” This, I think, says it very well: during this time, the press turned from government associate to government adversary, and questioned not only tactics, theory, and judgment, but even the goodwill and motives of those in charge of decisions.

Despite all this change, it’s hard to know whether any of it translated into changes in political affiliation. Did Republicans become Democrats (or vice versa)? I have been unable to find statistics on the matter, but my guess is that there were no major trends in either direction. Congress started out as Democratic at the beginning of the war and continued to be Democratic through the end of it, while the Presidency changed from Democrat to Republican. My sense is that changes in political affiliation were not widespread because the Vietnam War was seen as the product of both sides. The details might have been different–the Democrats presided over the years of escalating troops, and Nixon, a Republican, decreased the number of US troops under the policy of Vietnamization–but both sides were seen as culpable. Both parties were seen as making poor decisions at best, and of purposely dissembling at worst. For many people, this distrust appeared to extend to government and political leaders in general, not to one party in particular.

Betrayal

During the Vietnam War era, strong emotions (fear of the draft, revulsion at the death toll) in combination with cognitions (“we’ve been lied to;” “we’re losing the war,” “this will go on forever,” “the South Vietnamese don’t even want us there,” “you can’t trust the government,” “our servicemen are committing atrocities as a matter of course”), led to one overwhelming feeling: betrayal. Betrayal, in turn, often led to rage, bitterness, pessimism, and cynicism. And these cognitions and feelings were especially powerful in people who were young during that time, because youth and early adulthood are times of great emotional intensity. They don’t call them “the formative years” for nothing–this is when lifelong attitudes begin to be shaped, sometimes as though in cement.

Betrayal is a very strong word, with a great deal of emotional valence. We can only be betrayed by those whom we once trusted; it always involves a loss of innocence, and a feeling of vulnerability. The greater the naivete and trust at the outset, the greater the reversal, and the more intense the sense of betrayal. Betrayal is generally used only to describe extreme cases–traitors, for example, or the discovery that a beloved husband or wife has been having an affair and lying about it.

But I think the word “betrayal” is absolutely appropriate here, and accounts for many of the still-powerful reactions and repercussions from the Vietnam era. Because the pre-existing trust was profound, the reversal, when it came, was exquisitely sharp also. The loss of trust in our government and military had to be dealt with emotionally and cognitively, and people dealt with it in different ways. The vast majority of liberals seem to have taken that trust and re-invested it–this time in the press, who were seen as whistleblowers, the exposers of the government’s lying, cheating ways. That is one way to respond to a loss of faith–by reinvesting in it something else perceived as replacing it (you might say it’s somewhat analogous to starting a new relationship on the rebound). Other people had a more extreme reaction, and decided to withdraw trust from both the government and the press, and to place their trust in nothing and became cynics. Still others (leftists) reacted to the betrayal by supporting whomever and whatever was against the US. Many conservatives, on the other hand, withdrew their trust from the press, previously seen as an ally of sorts, but now perceived as an enemy. They also solidified their anger at liberals and a left seen to have ignominiously betrayed the South Vietnamese people and our nation’s honor.

However, some feelings were more universally shared. Anger at having been lied to by a previously-trusted government, for example, was a feeling shared by many liberals and by some conservatives (I’m exempting leftists, since they started out feeling anger and distrust towards the government–there was no disillusionment there). The feeling of betrayal by the government because of its lack of full commitment to winning the war was shared by some liberals and many conservatives. The feeling that the soldiers responsible for atrocities such as My Lai had betrayed American values and honor was, likewise, fairly universal.

Some feelings were not universal. A very much smaller subset also felt that those soldiers themselves had been betrayed by their superiors and had been given tacit approval for such actions (this, in fact, was the general stance of Kerry towards soldiers guilty of atrocities–he felt it was the commanders and general military policy that bore the responsibility). Many returning Vietnam combat veterans themselves felt deeply betrayed by other returning combat veterans (or men who held themselves out to be such) who alleged (falsely, according to the first group) that atrocities had been commonplace and acceptable in Vietnam. So there was a sort of vet-on-vet sense of betrayal. Many veterans also felt deeply betrayed by leftist activists such as Jane Fonda, and by those citizens at home who had reviled them for having served in Vietnam (I’ll pass over the controversy as to whether returning soldiers were actually spat upon; the point is that they felt disapproval and anger coming from a large portion of the public). A significant number of veterans also felt betrayed by reportage in the press that they felt had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory–for instance, the reporting on Tet. And many South Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans felt that Congress had betrayed them by withdrawing funds from the South Vietnamese military, allowing the North Vietnamese to finally overrun the South after the long, valiant, bloody, and costly struggle.

So, what happens to those who feel betrayed? As I wrote earlier, there are quite a few possibilities: rage, bitterness, pessimism, cynicism. It is human nature to cry, as a result of betrayal, “Never again!” Never again to be deceived. Never again to trust in the person (or institution) that betrayed you. These attitudes, forged in the furnace of such emotions, and at a time of life when emotions are already strong, can become unalterable. If the government is a liar, if the military is a dehumanizing institution inevitably leading to atrocities, if the press is the only trusted truth-teller–well, then, that is the set of beliefs a person has adopted to make sense of what happened, and that set of beliefs can easily be held for a lifetime. That belief system can then be brought to every future situation, applied indiscrimately, and never re-evaluated in the face of new facts about new events (or even in the face of new facts about old events–as we shall see in future essays).

Subsequently, if the press continues to be seen as the truthteller and the government the liar, no number of press releases by the government can ever overrule what the press says about an event. These beliefs have been adopted for a reason–to make sense of a terrible experience, based on the best knowledge available at that time. Part of the “never again” reaction is that it becomes a point of pride to never again let oneself be duped, to never again naively believe. Those who no longer trust in the government are seen as sadder, but infinitely wiser.

But what if, at some time in the future, evidence surfaces that that hard-won knowledge may be wrong? How many people, having lost faith because of a betrayal, and having laboriously reconstructed a new worldview, can revise that worldview again? What if that worldview turns out to have been a house of cards? Who can stand two betrayals–trust having been placed in a rescuer, the press, who is now exposed as having been a liar and a betrayer, also? Who can return to believing that the government–although flawed (there is no returning to the initial state of naive, unquestioning trust)–is now to be trusted more than the press, after all?

For some, one betrayal is enough. They can’t even entertain the possibility of a second, or the idea that they may have come to incorrect conclusions about the first one. To say you’ve been wrong once is one thing; to go through it again (“fooled me twice”) is quite another. And the second time it is even worse, because this time you are older and more experienced, and should have known better.

So, just as some generals continue to fight the previous war, so do some people. Over and over.

Action

So far, I’ve talked mostly about cognition and feelings. But action also had its place in reactions to the Vietnam War. The behavior/action component, for those liberals who were not directly involved in the war itself (and that constitutes most of us), was the demonstration.

Getting together with like-minded people in organizations dedicated to stopping the war tended to reinforce the feeling of the rightness of the cause, in the usual way of groups. Ultimately, the actions of the antiwar liberals (and their far more extreme and far less numerous fellow-travelers, the leftists) had its effect: the withdrawal from Vietnam. And so, young liberals had the heady experience of affecting history at an early age–protests seemed to matter; they worked. Liberals considered this a success, perhaps their finest hour, something to be proud of for the rest of their lives. As I wrote here, the terrible scenes of the American withdrawal, the fall of Saigon, the reeducation camps, the boat people, the killing fields of Cambodia–all these things that came after gave pause to some of us, myself included. But rationalization is a powerful tool, and many of us were able to rationalize that it was not our fault because there had been no alternative, that this outcome was inevitable, and that the only thing that would have occurred had we stayed longer was more American deaths, and more Vietnamese deaths at American hands.

So the investment in believing this particular “narrative” of Vietnam was huge for liberals. As the years went by, decades of beliefs, affiliations, and activities were added to the mix, and the stakes grew even higher. To have disbelieved it all at some later date would have meant facing a profound disillusionment, not just with institutions such as the press and the government, but with the self itself.

The bitterness and polarization of that time had deep roots, as we discovered post-9/11. But that’s another story for another time.

[ADDENDUM: For the next post in the series, Part V, go here.]

Calling a killer a killer

The New Neo Posted on by

Today, as on so many days in the past, the murderers of the Iraqi people set about to blow a bunch of them to bits, and have succeeded. Sixty is today’s number. The killers must be so very proud.

And here is the AP headline on the story. It begins with the word Insurgents.

The definition of the word “insurgents” is as follows: People who are fighting against the government in their own country. So, how is it that the media persists in calling them this? This is not merely a matter of nitpicky semantics, either; words have power and meaning, and the use of this one lends worldwide legitimacy to people who should have absolutely none. There is a perfectly good alternative available, too–“terrorists”–and the consistent refusal to use it is deplorable.

Yes, many of these attacks target police. But many of them target ordinary citizens. There is no question that these killers, whom I refuse to call “insurgents” because it is an insult to language and thought (and true insurgents, wherever they might be), are cold-blooded murderers. There is also very little question that many of them are not in their own country; many are foreigners.

My question is this: has there ever, in modern history (or even in ancient history), been an “insurgency” bent on indiscriminately murdering its own people in droves? I cannot think of one.

The closest historical precedent I can think of (and it is far from a perfect one) is Hitler’s plan to take revenge on the German people as a whole after he knew the war was lost. If he and his Reich were to be destroyed, all Germans should go down with the ship, too. His motive seemed to be an indiscriminate and murderous nihilistic rage at the thwarting of his own desire for power over the people. That seems to be the motive here, too.

If the killers in Iraq had only targeted policemen, it would be bad enough, but at least it would be a strategic move, although a reprehensible one–a move against people who at least work for the government (or are planning to). But a marketplace, as in one of today’s bombings? Or people walking on a street, or going to mosques, as has occurred in past bombings?

Was Timothy McVeigh ever called an “insurgent?” After all, he targeted government workers, didn’t he? How come I don’t recall the AP ever referring to him as such? And he actually fits the bill better than the Iraqi killers do–at least he was not a foreigner. He was targetting government workers in his own country–that is, innocent people who happened to work for the government.

The mass murderers of the Iraqi people (that’s what I choose to call them) seem to be operating out of a desire to kill; a blood-lust, as it were. If the police station isn’t available, a market will do just as well. Their target is only tangentially the government of Iraq; their true target is the people of Iraq, whom they cannot control. And, since Iraq is now a democracy, that makes sense, I guess–the government is the people of Iraq.

After each of these attacks, I feel a white-hot rage. If I–ordinarily a mild-mannered American woman, not knowing any of the victims personally–can feel this way, I can only imagine what the true victims, the Iraqi people, must feel.

One thing I keep hoping they feel, though, is courage. So far they have; and for this, they are the true heroes.