Deep.
I don't think this is a right-wing nation. I don't think the public in general is in favor of most of the policies and priorities of the Bush Administration. I think that, if the other side fights a little harder and a little smarter, there may be a chance to reverse what have been some significant losses over the past few years.
That's what I like, hope. And he's got a new book out, too.
Herbert's book is entitled,
Promises Betrayed: Waking Up From the American Dream. (I know, it seems as if I'm asking you to support another blog/website, but it's better than going to Amazon. If anything, try your local independent bookstore instead, but buy it.) It's a kind of greatest hits of his
NYT columns, but then it's a bit more. It's a meditation about how far we've strayed from enacting and living the American Dream, "a dream of opportunity and fairness and justice."
As a example, Buzzflash asked Herbert about the difference between World War II, which is often evoked these days as propaganda in support of the Iraq War II, and where Dubya is equated with the wartime, patrician FDR and 9/11 is Pearl Harbor revisited. However, there is a severe disconnect going on with the events of over sixty years ago, and now. Unfortunately, some of America hasn't yet woken up to the filmy suggestion of unity masking the strong dose of reality. We can't go back; each war is different, and this is not Fortress America, 2005.
BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about one word which we often struggle with at BuzzFlash in trying to understand the pickle we're in in the United States now politically -- and that word is "community." If you look back at World War II, we had a sense of community as a nation.
Bob Herbert: Very much so.
BuzzFlash: It was a war of the people. We felt as one nation, fighting a common enemy. Americans of all different backgrounds were thrown together in the military, although the armed forces were still segregated until Korea. Now we have a war in Iraq about which there's really no sense of community involvement. There's approval or disapproval ratings, but it's hardly on the radar of everyone's daily life here. It's almost like the U.S. is running a business overseas or something.
Bob Herbert: I think that's an extremely important point because it's the opposite to the idea of a sense of community. If you talk to ordinary citizens about this, to people who are doing well financially and who are pretty well educated, say, to kids on college campuses who are looking ahead to a career, they might have a feeling pro or con about the war. But if you ask them if they would ever consider joining the service and fighting in that war, the answer is invariably no. If you ask parents who are reasonably well off whether they would allow their children to go and fight in Iraq, the answer is absolutely no. That's one of the reasons the military is having trouble meeting its recruitment goals. Parents are saying, hey, my kid might go to Iraq and get killed in this thing. No, we're not going to encourage the kid to sign up for the military.
A lot of the young people who are off fighting in Iraq, some doing two or three tours over there, are people who joined the service or maybe the reserves or the National Guard to get an education, to get a little bit of extra income - that sort of thing. They did not join up with the idea that they would actually have to go off to the Middle East and fight in a war like this. So you lose the sense of community. You have a split between the people who are actually doing the hard work of fighting the war, and then the people back home for whom, as you point out, the war is just a peripheral issue at best.
BuzzFlash: One of the things that certainly gets our goat is the young Republicans on campuses who tend to be rather militant and radical, and will disrupt people who are anti-war, yet do not seem to be volunteering to serve in Iraq.
Bob Herbert: They're not volunteering to serve in Iraq, and neither did many of our public officials who promoted this war. They had an opportunity to fight for their country in Vietnam. They didn't do that either. And it sort of gets my goat. I'm a veteran. I got drafted during the big build-up to the war in Vietnam. Luckily, I did not get sent to Vietnam. I went to Korea. But I lost a lot of friends in that war. I saw the split, then, between the people who were drafted or enlisted and had to fight the war, and the people who were able to get deferments. I had friends on both sides of that divide.
War is something that is not just dangerous wherever you're fighting and dangerous for the troops involved. War is something that wounds the spirit of the country here at home, and creates splits that take an awful long time to heal. We saw that in Vietnam and I'm afraid we're going to see that again in Iraq.
Hell, we are seeing that again in Iraq. I saw something on NBC News last night: a visit by Vietnam vets to American soldiers in Iraq. The vets felt heartened that the soldiers had more of a sense that they were carrying out a mission on a day-to-day basis that was coming up with personal dividends and met goals. I felt uneasy with this picture, because it was just the kind of window dressing more than 30 years ago that made better, more dedicated newsmen cut through the bullshit and tell us the truth. Right on schedule, like with Vietnam, came yet another report that illustrates the divides--between perceptions vs. reality, between two different wars, two different "patrician" presidents, and between well-to-do and poor--that Herbert speaks of:
After years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is seriously limited today in its ability to fight in other major conflicts.
That's the sobering assessment from the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, who told Congress on Tuesday that the United States would ultimately win another war, but it would take longer and put U.S. forces at greater risk, because the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have strained resources.
When the draft does come, it will be one major nail in Bush's--and his henchmen's--coffin.
Herbert's book will also return to those issues that Herbert highlighted and made noteworthy in his column:
- the relentless focus on "the entertainment society";
- the fight of the African American citizenry in Tulia, TX against being railroaded for drug crimes they never committed on the tainted word of one white sheriff, and illegal arrests rising across the country;
- assaults on the right to protest
Looks like a great read, and encouragement to keep up the fight and the faith.