I was glued to my TV, like so many Americans, for the first of several presidential debates. Adding even more nervousness to a week of financial bailouts and growing conflict with Pakistan, the debate in “Ol Miss” had a lot of tension riding on it. The media was unable to agree on a victor and both candidates were obviously too uncertain about financial developments to give whole-hearted support to the Wall St. Bailout.
As an Obama fan my perspective may color things in his favor: on the economy and domestic issues I believe he trounced McCain. Obama continuously laid out specific plans regarding taxation, social services, health care and energy reform. McCain seemed to return fire with abstractions on character, repeatedly alluding to pork and barrel spending from Washington politicians. Senator McCain refused to give a detail oriented response to Obama’s attacks on the McCain health care plan, like so often in the debate he just kept smiling in resentment and changing the subject.
While I felt the first segment of the debate was a success worthy of celebration on the part of Senator Obama, the foreign policy segment seemed to present no clear victor. If anything the distortions of the argument all came from McCain’s repeated sidetracking into his extensive knowledge of U.S. military history. If Obama is pushing the issue of unfinished business in Afghanistan, McCain would like to tell a little story from back in the Nixon administration days, or invoke Reagan, or Roosevelt. While it is true that we use the lessons of history to avoid repeating mistakes, McCain seems to use it to avoid answering questions on his own mistakes involving the genesis of the disaster in Iraq.
Obama retained his image as a true patriot when he responded to McCain’s assertion that a withdrawal would be a waste of our soldier’s efforts and losses. Obama contended that no U.S. soldier ever dies in vain. This, and perhaps Pakistan, is where I split with Barack Obama, whom I otherwise regard as a hero.
I come from a generation that gets a pretty good backwards glance at all the things war can be. Both the misguided Korean and Vietnam campaigns were fought in my parents time. I have been fortunate enough to share thanksgiving dinner at the VFW with my grandfather while he reflected on both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Likewise, we live in a time with some of the most unedited and frank depictions of war in film and writing. Books like Johnny Got His Gun, the Red Badge of Courage and films like The Deerhunter and Apocalypse Now depict the chaos and trauma that is war, while abandoning the mythologizing heroics.
I have enough faith in these fictional representations to never put myself in a foxhole, or have to comb a desert or jungle looking for the enemy. As a generation, I believe we know too much of human psychology and existential dilemmas to believe any patriotic mandates automatically. As an individual, I know I am full of dreams, fears, talents, shortcomings and many contradictions. I realize that both my fellow citizens and fellow humans share that one inalienable fact: we are all individuals. Any association we have with a greater group is a willful product of choice in the most brutally Sartresque sense.
Recently the flag has taken on new meaning to me. Obama’s acceptance speech rekindled the idea that the flag represents ‘our America’. Not theirs. Once again I can regard it as a symbol of reason and freedom, untainted by the rhetorical pimping the right-wing has used it for in the past eight years. In this way the flag, and our country can mean a lot of things. Those meanings change.
I also have the benefit of history to show me that countries, like people, at some point expire.
So, as a complex individual I can associate with a country I recognize as changing and impermanent. I can be heartened by the flag’s symbolic elasticity more than it’s essentiality. The moment a citizen accepts a mandate to engage in combat with a foreign enemy, they accept the fallacy that the terms on which they are enlisted are elemental, pure and informed by the essence of a single unified country with a unanimous interest in one cause. That citizen will be forced to see another human being not as a wealth of idiosyncrasies and personality, but merely as a monomaniacal enemy. Any of these war-time illusions are simply that. Countries and people are not simple enough to be so fixed.
It is true, many military efforts have served a greater pragmatic purpose. Perhaps on great occasion the violence of the just is a lesser sin than the crimes of the unjust, but war as it is mythologized is a different matter. Men are not easily motivated to do great violence by simple pragmatism. They require mythology. To find oneself killing and dying in a chaos of fire and blood, surround by three dimensional personalities that have assigned both themselves and their enemies a divisive and fallacious two dimensionality, is to engage in the theater of the absurd in the most exaggerated and grotesque way possible.
This does not automatically make their efforts or their deaths worthless. But, based on how fabricated the mythological complex that motivated it is; it is meaningless. For this reason every soldier dies in vain.
