Regime Change Edition
That Time The Gang Rid the World of Evildoers. James McBey, Francisco de Holanda, re-reading Matilda, the truth about tides. Again Miłosz.
Twenty years ago I was, along with the rest of the nation, watching the war begin on a television screen. In the manner befitting an American. Bombs bursting blurry and bright live on CNN, the breathless anchors enamored by this long-awaited action. Shocked and awed—aroused was more like it—by the projection of unaccountable power, of pure and righteous will. The rest of us, too, thrilled by a vicarious sense of danger and import, which in my case mingled with helplessness and dread.
Not that I knew anything about what it was to dread. Not that I or my family or my lovely brick downtown in my small Midwestern town would ever know the whistle of a shower of missiles from the heavens or the footfall of sectarian death squads on our streets. Others would, yes. Others would go to war, would die, kill, be maimed or poisoned or taught to torture. Always others, in our place, their performance observed and analyzed from afar and manipulated for our own various ends.
What does it matter to be right when there are no consequences for being wrong? When being right is essentially an accident, indistinguishable from a coin flip? For I fed on the energy of the war hysteria as much as any hawk. It gave me, a gangly teenager, my first fullness of identity, my own badge of counter-righteousness. For all of us it was a mirror, and who of us were not revealed to be a little grotesque?
I didn’t know much about Iraq but I knew my cause was righteous. I had become, as today’s apparatchiks would say, radicalized. I had spent the year devoting myself ever more fervently to the antiwar movement, that sprawling, scruffy menagerie of Communists, anti-globalization activists, war mothers, artists, students, history professors, and reactivated hippies.
For a lonely and isolated rural kid, it was an alluring and cosmopolitan milieu. Yes, one shot through with delusion and grandiosity, petty factionalism, feverish conspiracy theorizing. But one also marked by idealism, willingness to patiently endure the derision of neighbors, and a touching faith in the promise of grassroots democracy. A left that still tried to wield its vestigial anti-militarism and class solidarity, even if clumsily. One wrong about a thousand things, but on this one big thing, absolutely right. Even in spite of themselves, even without knowing why.
With some notable exceptions, we were total naifs. This, I have come to believe, was our saving grace. Why did me and my pinko friends accurately perceive steaming bullshit where the best and brightest could only be dazzled by the emperor’s clothes? Not because of intelligence or expertise but something like the opposite: because of our outsider status, our aloofness from the groupthink and careerism of the commanding heights of society, and even our reflexively anti-social contrarianism and deliberate obtuseness. Where others indulged the satisfaction of allowing themselves to be persuaded, we were committed to the pleasures of refusing ourselves to be.
Not that there were many authentic attempts at persuasion going on. What I remember most of all was the sense of pure inertia—that everything was decided, that nothing could stop it, and that the public “debate” was an insulting charade. Which was all true. The most mildly skeptical observer would notice the following about the justifications for war:
a) that they were all over the place, constantly shifting, and riddled with contradictions, meaning that
b) someone or many someones were most likely lying about some or all of them, which implied that
c) the remaining honest supporters in positions of power were either gullible or intimidated and thus probably unable to make hard-headed assessments about other aspects, such as the glaring fact that
d) even assuming no one was lying, the utopian and messianic visions of remaking the entire world, paired with the assurances that it would all be fast and easy and cheap, were clearly delusional and as such would not end well.
All this was capped off by e) the performative sense of urgency and the railroading of any skeptics as traitors or fifth columnists, which carried precisely the same shabby, desperate, hectoring tone as an early morning infomercial flogging a defective product on a fabricated deadline. Except with the added dimension of seeking to manipulate a nation’s collective trauma, confusion, and grief.
I would like to reiterate that—as I marched and canvassed and wrote op-eds—I had no idea what I was talking about. Even the brief narrative I have just given is surely drenched with post facto rationalization for perennial teenage impulses to stake out a peer group, rebel against elders, and finagle into college parties. The adults who condescended to me, accused me of cowardice, threatened to expel me—one can’t say they were totally wrong. Mostly they were wrong for the right reasons.
The past is inaccurate. Whoever lives long enough knows how much what he has seen with his own eyes becomes overgrown with rumor, legend, a magnifying or belittling hearsay. “It was not like that at all!”—he would like to exclaim, but will not, for they would have seen only his moving lips without hearing his voice.
—Miłosz, ‘The Past’
We all had our reasons. I’m sure there were those who dissented out of a sophisticated understanding of Iraq’s tribal politics or a careful cost-benefit assessment of the risks of creating a regional power vacuum, but I was not among them. I was a committed pacifist, and rested in the comforting simplicity of knowing all war to be wrong by definition. But I don’t regret it, just as I don’t regret the quixotic but deeply-felt impulse that led me to claim conscientious objector status on my draft card that year. Pacifism may not be 100 percent right but it’s more right than most of the alternatives. (Especially the alternatives on offer in the early 2000s, which included publicly justifying the torture of children.)
I am dubious as to the benefits of any more Iraq War post-mortems. We already got whatever catharsis there was to get. Everyone has moved on. Still, one consequence has been to make me more sympathetic to those who get things right for the wrong reasons. It’s hard to precisely define but maybe you know what I mean. Most of us much prefer to be wrong for the right reasons. That maintains your respectability and doesn’t make anyone important look bad. When you’re wrong for the right reason, you always get to stay in the club.
But I speak too glibly of vindication, of saving graces and I-told-you-so’s. Far be it from me to cast aspersions. Had I been an influential person, I would have done as influential people did—this I know for fact. What does it profit that some people who didn’t matter guessed right about great affairs of state about which they had no real knowledge and over which they had no control? What does it matter that some unshowered jesters on a street corner yelled about the emperor’s wardrobe until they were blue in the face? It certainly didn’t matter to the emperor.
Understanding that governing authority is always deeply ambiguous, that its lies might kill millions with one hand even as it provides the basis for peace and social order with the other—this has long been table stakes for adulthood, a basic rite of passage. The Iraq episode was simply how my generation was given to learn this perennial lesson. If some of us are guilty, as I have often been, of spinning the whole thing into a mythology of betrayal out of proportion to the unceasing drumbeat of sovereign crimes, that is yet another sign of our historical myopia, our dissociation from the deep stream of human experience, and the delusions of uniqueness we labor under.
Nor was anything preordained: a few different bounces of the ball and people like me might well have eaten crow instead. If the CPA had not disbanded the army, crash-privatized the economy, and put clueless twenty-somethings in charge of the financial sector, then there’s a decent chance it all could have held together. I remember the triumphalism of those weeks after the capture of Saddam; that’s where the story would have ended, with the humiliation of the doves and the peaceniks and the entire axis of anti-American scum. The lies about WMD and Al-Qaeda consigned to be just one more official picadillo in a footnote to a Wiki page, only ever dredged up by activist undergraduates in the same breath as Arbenz or Allende or Ollie North, while the grownups roll their eyes.
But too much cynicism, however justified, is a cop-out. That’s another lesson I’ve struggled to learn from those years. Responsibility is real, even if accountability is not. There were those, let us remember, who got it right for the right reasons. There always are a few. That is so no one can say, though many still try, “we didn’t know; no one could have known.” But we could, and did. And will again.
Links.
James McBey, the Rembrandt of Aberdeenshire.
Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda’s mystical visions of the geometry of God.
GPT’d: “This text wears a thin furze of comprehensiveness yet is larded with filler phrases, prose padding, dithering. I suspect that content not a product of a human mind lacks the reinforcing tangle of uneven yet thickening circumlocution to hold it upright. Human synthesis may be spotty, yet it acts as backing; these passages yield and dissolve under even cursory scrutiny.”
Justin E.H. Smith is similarly dismayed by the LLM’s indifference to The Love Boat, inter alia.
I spent a good chunk of last month re-immersed in the worlds of Roald Dahl, with the nieces and nephews starring in a middle school stage performance of James and the Giant Peach. (They killed it; I saw it three times.) I also re-read Matilda, for good measure, a keystone text of my childhood, and experienced many emotions. One was delight at how Dahl captures and speaks to the real inner world of the child, rather than the sanitized version many adults would prefer that children inhabit. Next was grateful nostalgia for how these stories entertained and comforted me long ago. Finally was disgust with the cultural commissars who have taken it upon themselves to vandalize Dahl’s work, helping to cement a precedent (though nothing all that new) that those lacking literary merit of their own may make their mark in letters by holding texts retroactively hostage to the enforcement of ever-shifting linguistic fads. (They also excise some of Sir Quentin Blake’s wonderful illustrations.) This is, ironically, a similar sort of destructive self-importance to that Dahl skewered in his adult villains.
Bertram Goodhue’s Gothic revivalism as demonstrated by Manhattan’s Church of St. Vincent Ferrer: a vertically-stretched symphony of limestone, glass, and carved wood.
Benjamin Crosby surveys the failure of Canada’s mainline churches to speak plainly against the rapid expansion of euthanasia.
How tides really work (!):
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.
—Miłosz, ‘Love’
A blessed Holy Week and joyous Easter to all. May you find some time to catch up on your reading list before they make it illegal.
As ever,
J
Cynics of the world, let us unite. We need to unlearn the bad habits the boomers made fashionable, is my takeaway from a sobering piece by Nathan Heller a few years back: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-there-any-point-to-protesting