Reporting the Wars

In his Journals from the 1960's, the novelist John Cheever wrote:

The President, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, says, "Your weapons and your wings are the swords and the shields of our freedom. The names of your planes--Phantom, Intruder, Hawkeye, Vigilante, Skyhawk--they are the watchwords of our liberty."

The President he was quoting was the Democrat Lyndon Johnson. The war was Viet Nam--a little southeast asian country that was supposedly a threat to American liberty. The deck of an aircraft carrier: it seems our political image-makers and propagandists have a fairly limited symbolic vocabulary. But, apparently, it is expansive enough for the limited imaginations of many of their constituents. Cheever continued:

Republicans and Southern Democrats have hamstrung the anti-poverty program. Men and women of Jewish descent are blackballed at the country club. Next to armaments, the nation's largest-selling product is whiskey and drugs. Wall Street capitalists are real, militaristic, and avaracious. You can see them on the station platform any morning, the overt and cheerful sponsors of tyranny all over the world. They raise the bonds for Salazar, Franco, Papa Doc.

It strikes me that our "democracy" differs from the Turkish variety only by degree, not by kind. In Turkey, ever since the revolution, a military junta stands by and permits civilians to run the country unless they (the members of the junta) feel that the civilian-face of the government has moved too close to the religious values of the majority of the population. At that point, they stage a coup and put the "right kind" (read: unelected) civilians in charge.

In the Spring of 1963, President Kennedy announced at American University a new, cooperative vision for U.S. foreign policy. He had already demonstrated the previous year, during the Cuban Missile crisis, a determination to oppose the Pentagon's "bomb-'em-into-the- Stone-Age" method of settling disputes. In so doing, he averted a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. November 22, 1963, Jack Kennedy was shot dead by a "lone gunman" and Lyndon Johnson, he of the flight deck, was Commander-in-Chief.

In the final months of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., had begun to draw connections in his public speeches between racism, capitalism, urban American poverty, and U. S. militarism. As I say, those turned out to be the final months of his life. Another "lone gunman."

A few months after King's murder, Bobby Kennedy, whose anti-war candidacy for the Presidency was gathering real steam was shot dead by a "lone gunman."

Next to armaments, the nation's largest-selling product is whiskey and drugs. Wall Street capitalists are real, militaristic, and avaracious. You can see them on the station platform any morning, the overt and cheerful sponsors of tyranny all over the world. They raise the bonds for Salazar, Franco, Papa Doc.

Cheever, in 1967, writes:

One knows all of this, and the corruption of the war is inestimable...This is madness...

And it's business as usual.

There are, today, so many besetting madnesses. Greed and violence--or their passive acceptance--seem to me to have overtaken the American character. Grasping and striking; the cheerful sponsorship of tyranny all over the world.

The current poster boy of the flight deck stole the election of 2000 and very likely the election of 2004. But he has no worries; no "lone gunman" stalks him in the shadows. He has made sure of that by staying close to the "winning side." Yes, he wins--no matter how the wars turn out--because the "winning side" is the side of the war profiteers. War is profitable Big Business. George W. Bush is the civilian-face of the military-industrial-complex.

Welcome to Turkish democracy--American-style. Of the two versions, ours is less honest.

If only the religious values of the majority of the American population were such that we found ourselves scandalized by our government's militarism--then the Pentagon-junta would be forced to come out of the shadows and play their hand straight. Stage an open coup. As it stands now, they get away every day with murder.

War without end. Amen.