Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
The words of Wilfred Owen, written a week before his death in the Great War.
They are the frame for this column by James Carroll, which bears the same title as this diary. I think it is an important read.
The occasion of Carroll's writing is a speech Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave to the Corps of Cadets at West Point.
“I feel personally responsible for each and every one of you,’’ he solemnly told the cadets, “as if you were my own sons and daughters.’’
Carroll offers this in the context of the cadets gazing at Gates with the absolute trust Isaac had towards his father the Patriarch Abraham.
Carroll further notes that the remarks Gates offered were noteworthy in their blunt honesty:
“Since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right — from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more.’’ Gates was faulting failures to anticipate the true nature of those engagements, but their outcomes arguably establish that all of them were unjustified. Young lives wasted.
What was really remarkable was, as Carroll notes, that Gates did not spare the wars over which he currently presides:
“Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.’’
But then comes the key part of Carroll's remarks, in his own words:
Since Korea, the national security establishment has consistently gotten it wrong. Why should elders be trusted now?
Why should they indeed? Surely we have men and women in theater with the perception of that Englishman of poetic gifts who died in 1918. He could frame the leaders of his day as unwilling to listen to the voice that offered an alternative, who could recognize that awful impact of one of the deadly sins, posed as the Ram of Pride.
Pride - the pride of nations, the pride of national and military leaders, blinded - and dafeaned? - by pride of different kinds, unwilling to listen to other voices than their own thoughts.
It is interesting that in the poem by Owen, he chooses to describe the father not with the name he received Genesis 17, Abraham, when God promised him to make him the father of many nations. Owen chooses to alter the text of Genesis 22, to instead use the original name of the man, Abram, before God has formed a covenant with him. Might it be that Owen sees in the action of sacrifice, in the refusal to hear the voice offering him a different way, that there is - there can be - no covenant with the divine? Is the promise of being a father of many nations, or even of one child, not willfully abandoned by the refusal to listen? Might the parallel for the United States and our leadership not be that we have abandoned whatever it is or was that potential marked us as a different kind of nation?
Gates said that “the tendency of any big bureaucracy is to revert to business as usual at the first opportunity — and for the military that opportunity is, if not peacetime, then the unwinding of sustained combat.’’ The reform-minded secretary meant that as a warning about the unwinding ahead, but there should be no mistake: the real — and unmentioned — business as usual in this particular tradition is protecting the holy ethic that empowers the old to send the young out to die. Hello?
Hello? Is anyone listening? Is anyone at home - in the house of the Lord?
holy ethic - there is nothing holy in sending anyone to their slaughter, and to the task of slaughtering others. We debase language and ourselves with words like collateral damage to cover the atrocities that parallel all of our conflicts.
When Benjamin Britten wrote one of the great masterpieces of the 20th Century, his War Requiem, he added words from Owen to the Latin Text of the requiem mass.
The first appearance is framed, before with "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: - give them eternal rest, Lord - then followed with then "Kyrie Eleison" - (the only Greek words in the Mass) - Lord have mercy. And in between we hear the tenor sing these words from Owen:
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, --
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them at all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
for those who die as cattle . . .
Our generals and political leaders do not send masses of our young and not so young "over the top" into a hail of machine-gun fire, a death worse than that of cattle in the slaughterhouse.
Not so many of ours die physically - our military medicine has improved so much that they survive, with broken and dismembered bodies, far too often with shattered psyches and souls, even if the bodies apparently remain whole.
The Carroll column is, as are many of his, powerful, well-crafted, well worth reading and then pondering.
The reference to Owen moved me to offer this diary. When Britten's masterpiece came out, I was still in school. I learned it, music and words, very quickly. Owen has been a part of my mentality ever since, although at times I suppressed its impact upon me - after all, I did enlist in the Marines in 1965 when I dropped out of Haverford for the first time.
I have not personally seen combat. I have seen its effects upon people I know, from the generation of my parents, to my contemporaries, to some of their children.
We glorify war to make people more willing to undertake the tasks of war.
Perhaps it is because we have not experienced the real horror of war within our boundaries the way other nations have that we remain so committed to the idea of glory in combat.
Carroll warns us that the real "iron triangle" - ravenous Pentagon, conscienceless defense industry, spineless Congres - continues on with its appetites unabated, even as the rest of the nation suffers financially. Even the current wars seem not to teach us, they are yet another voice we are not hearing.
There is then one sentence that cannot be ignored. It is written in the context of the Biblical tale, but in the framing offered by Owen. It is this:
Somebody’s children are ever on the altar.
The knife is raised yet again. The voice tells us that there is a different path. Will we as a nation, as a society, hear that voice, or like the Abram in the poem by Owens, will we be stubborn, only to have the voice of the poet echoing as a horrid epitaph for yet another generation of young people:
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Peace is not merely the absence of armed conflict. It is a mindset. It is a worldview. It is something I have not experienced in this nation in what is now my 65th year. Despite the words Gates offered at West Point, an audience that includes a son of my Best Man, I despair that it will in whatever years may be left to me.
I can only hope that the children who pass through my classroom will help create an America that is better than the one we are leaving them.
Carroll is right on what we need to do. We need to follow his title and save our children from ourselves.
Not just our children. All children. All persons.
To do anything else is obscene. And we would rightly be describe by the voice of a poet as being outside any covenant with God, with good.