There has been a lot of good, insightful writing lately on the use of language in politics, and on the metaphors that shape our national discourse. And there has been steadily-increasing discomfort with the militaristic tone of that discourse.
As I think about it, I can come to only one conclusion: this militarism is a corruption of the noble and laudable impulse to honor those who serve in combat. And this corruption is being deliberately promoted by many in the Bush Administration and the Republican Party. George Lakoff would say that we're being forced to see things through the "strict-father" lens.
So I'm forced to ask myself: can freedom march?
"Freedom is on the march. The world is changing because of our deep belief in freedom." -- President George W. Bush
Freedom cannot march. Freedom is the road less taken. Marching is the wide road trampled into dust. Marching is the subjugation of the will; it is ugly and authoritative. It agrees with the German philosopher Hegel that "the State is the ultimate end which has the highest right against the individual, whose highest duty is to be a member of the State."
It is the campaign slogan of an ugly administration that appeals to our demons and our fears. It is the antithesis of free thinking. It honors unity above diversity. It honors loyalty over reason. It honors obedience above all else. It allows no dissent.
The martial character cannot prevail in a whole people but by the diminution of all other virtues. -- Samuel Johnson
I was going to write that President Bush doesn't understand the forces he has unleashed with his hate-filled, jingoistic campaign. But I don't think that's true. I think he does understand. I think he wants, to paraphrase Orwell, a Republican party of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans.
Maybe he thinks that unity will bring "victory", and whether victory means to him winning his War on Terror or electoral success for the Republican Party, who can tell. Perhaps he feels that they are one and the same. Certainly, this is what his subordinates believe. When the complete and utter Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that "to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," this is what he meant. To question part of the Republican Party's law enforcement agenda is to support terrorists. To object to provisions of the PATRIOT Act is to be a scaremonger. Unity über alles. Freedom is on the march.
I overstate my case. But this is a symptom of an ugly cancer that is eating the soul of the Republican Party. This nexus of jingoism, militarism, American triumphalism and a reactionary conservative political agenda is a dangerous thing. It will win elections in the short-term, but it is empty and hollow and divisive. A house divided against itself cannot stand. America needs a Republican Party that cares more for the nation than it cares for itself.
In one of his most moving passages, Tolkien writes that "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend". When President Bush delivers speech after speech in front of massed troops, when he again and again uses military fly-bys on the campaign trail, when he dresses up as a pilot and gives a major national address from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, I begin to think that he loves the arrow and the sword as things worth honoring in their own right. At best, he wants to bask in military glory in a base appeal for electoral votes.
n spite of their fetish for all things military, none of the neo-cons in the Bush Administration ever served in combat. This means nothing. Neither did Lincoln or Roosevelt. But it is easier, I think, for those of us who have never seen a war to be more cavalier about starting one.
When Henry V launched his war against the Dauphin, he did not argue that France belonged to an axis of evil. He did not pretend that freedom was on the march. His question to himself was: "May I with right conscience make this claim?" And Henry's speeches, which are written by Shakespeare and therefore about as good as that sort of thing can be, are received indifferently by the commoners. "That's more than we know," responds a soldier to the assertion that the King's war is just. Another points out that:
If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?
Our war on Iraq is not a war of self-defense. It is not a war of last resort. It is not an attempt to fend off an imminent attack. Our war on Iraq is an instrument of policy, gunboat diplomacy writ large. The way to stop Islamic terrorism is to make it impotent, to deny them access to deadly weapons. Therefore, we're going to get rid of governments that are hostile to us and able to build those weapons. We'll bring Jeffersonian democracy to those countries at the barrel of a gun, freedom will march across the Middle East, and everyone will live happily ever after. Because Saddam Hussein is both weak and unpopular, we'll start with him.
This is their theory. It works well when one is playing Civilization II or a game of Risk. It works less well in the real world, in which countries are composed of millions of different people, all working for different reasons towards different ends. It works less well when proposed by a President who is incapable of communicating with anyone who doesn't already agree with him. It works less well when real people with real families and real dreams and hopes are being killed for their own good. It works less well when you kill and torture the people whose freedom you claim to fight for. But this is their idea.
Most of us reject this idea, of course. And so it was sold to us by deceit. Stolen uranium, spy rings tracking down aluminum tubes, drone planes that could drop weaponized anthrax on Cleveland. British Intelligence reports that chemical and biological weapons can be deployed in 45 minutes. None of it was true. The dishonesty involved in presenting this cherry-picked evidence to the American people is astonishing. Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities, indeed. Colin Powell reportedly threw the compiled dossier into the air and said, "I'm not reading this bullshit". But he did read it, and the war came.
We're in Iraq now, for better or for worse. The incompetence of the last two years has drastically narrowed our options for the future. The sooner this war is ended, the better for everyone involved, American and Iraqi alike. Saddam Hussein is in jail, which is the one unarguable achievement of our occupation. But Iraq is not ours to manage forever. If it is to be a successful country, it must be the Iraqis who make it so. If the Iraqis do not want Fallujah controlled by rebels, it must be the Iraqis who remove them. If the Iraqis want parliamentary democracy, it must be the Iraqis who hold their own elections. If we are going to continue to police Iraq, we need to be clear about what we are trying to accomplish, and why we are trying to accomplish it. We owe it to ourselves, and to the soldiers we have sent over there, to fight a just war, and if we cannot do that, we owe it to ourselves and them to stop an unjust one.
If these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.