Yesterday Eugene's
diary introduced me to a
truly fabulous essay: "War is the Health of the State" by Randolph Bourne. Please read the whole thing sometime if you haven't already.
It's a lonely Saturday night and I just want to make some comments on it because reading it was so effing rad.
Let's start with a quotation to whet your appetite:
A public opinion which, almost without protest, accepts as just, adequate, beautiful, deserved, and in fitting harmony with ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, a sentence of twenty years in prison for mere utterances, no matter what they may be, shows itself to be suffering from a kind of social derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis, that deserves analysis and comprehension.
Bill Bennett prophesied 90 years in advance.
One thing Bourne spends a lot of time on is distinguishing the State--that mystical entity that binds us all together during wartime--from the country. We're talking about neoconservatives again now that Israel is bombing Lebanon to pieces with full US support, and one thing we should appreciate about the neoconservatives is that they believe in America as a state. In Bourne's words, the state is simply the organization of society as "a herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized". Organizing humanity, especially a great and diverse slew of humanity such as we have in the US, into a herd is no small task. So we have corporations, the media, the military, and sometimes even the churches--all of them hierarchical organizaitons--along with our leaders in Washington, goading us constantly to get with the program. The president becomes a father figure whom we must obey, instead of a fellow citizen we can hold accountable. Authoritarianism is the name of the game. In short, becoming members of The State, we cease to be citizens. We forfeit the right and the power of being the primary political agents in society.
At many times in our history (perhaps not that many) we have just been a country--a decentralized assemblage of peoples and cultures and various interests--without having to be a state at all. Canada provides an interesting example of a nation that really isn't a state in the relevant sense. Canada prides itself one being a country of immigrants from all different places who can sit down and have a rational conversation about how to live together. Many more people in Canada think and act like citizens than in the US.
Of course, nothing could be more antithetical to the state than the vision of the Founders. Before 1776, we were members of a state called the British Empire. In the name of patriotism, allegiance to their country, the founders and that whole generation struggled to create a new kind of political community. One consisting of citizens who have rights and dignity as the primary agents of political action through their representatives in the government. This is really what our struggle against the Liebermans and the Halliburtons and the Addingtons today is all about.
There is a strain of pessimism in Bourne's essay, which may just be wisdom. He observes that declarations of war are made by the governing few in a democracy just as in a dictatorship. He would not have been surprised at the pathetic behavior of Congress in October 2002, since the same thing happened in 1916 (and 1898).
There is a bitter choice to be made by the reflective citizen. On the one hand, as soon as we see the state for what it really is, a fiction served up by authoritarian scoundrels bent on dominating the world, we instinctively retreat into our individuality as human beings, and cling to our self-respect as sentient creatures:
the State represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
On the other hand, we also want to remain citizens, and this makes us want to stay in the political arena and fight. But this requires us to recognize certain realities of public life that our intellect cannot really approve:
We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men's heart beat high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation.
A certain degree of patriotism and respect for the ridiculous wars we have fought over the centuries is required of us. The Democratic Party, for example, has never been and never will be a party of sane pacificism. It will have to kiss the flag, and in doing so it will have to kiss the ass of every military contractor that provides jobs for the people who elect our congressmen, the rings of the foreign policy establishment, and the graves of the soldiers who have died in wars however absurd waged by previous administrations. I don't know where we go from here as a political party, but in the face of the truly criminal and destructive doctrine of "let's make as much war in the Middle East as possible", as an individual citizen I tend to err on the side of sceptism and refusal. No more absurd warmongering please.
Don't forget to read Bourne sometime.