[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Surviving the Fourth of July

Thu Jul 10 21:00:39 MDT 2008

by Chris Hedges

www.truthdig.com (July 07 2008)

I survive the degradation that has become America - a land that exalts
itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human
beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land
that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of
aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its
mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism -
because I read books. I have 5,000 of them. They line every wall of my
house. And I do not own a television.

I survive the gradual, and I now fear inevitable, disintegration of our
democracy because great literature and poetry, great philosophy and
theology, the great works of history, remind me that there were other
ages of collapse and despotism. They remind me that through it all men
and women of conscience endured and communicated, at least with each
other, and that it is possible to refuse to participate in the process
of self-annihilation, even if this means we are pushed to the margins of
society. They remind me, as the poet W H Auden wrote, that "ironic
points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages".
And if you tire, as all who can think critically must, of the empty cant
and hypocrisy of John McCain and Barack Obama, of the simplistic and
intellectually deadening epistemology of television and the consumer
age, you can retreat to your library. Books were my salvation during the
wars and conflicts I covered for two decades as a foreign correspondent
in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. They are my
salvation now. The fundamental questions about the meaning, or
meaninglessness, of our existence are laid bare when we sink to the
lowest depths. And it is those depths that Homer, Euripides, William
Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Marcel
Proust, Vasily Grossman, George Orwell, Albert Camus and Flannery
O'Connor understood.

"The practice of art isn't to make a living", Kurt Vonnegut said. "It's
to make your soul grow".

The historian Will Durant calculated that there have been only 29 years
in all of human history during which a war was not under way somewhere.
Rather than being aberrations, war and tyranny expose a side of human
nature that is masked by the often unacknowledged constraints that glue
society together. Our cultivated conventions and little lies of civility
lull us into a refined and idealistic view of ourselves. But look at our
last two decades - two million dead in the war in Afghanistan, 1.5
million dead in the fighting in Sudan, some 800,000 butchered in the
ninety-day slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by soldiers and
militias directed by the Hutu government in Rwanda, a half-million dead
in Angola, a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia, 200,000 dead in
Guatemala, 150,000 dead in Liberia, a quarter of a million dead in
Burundi, 75,000 dead in Algeria, at least 600,000 dead in Iraq and
untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia
and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern
Ireland, Kosovo. Civil war, brutality, ideological intolerance,
conspiracy and murderous repression are the daily fare for all but the
privileged few in the industrialized world.

"The gallows", the gravediggers in "Hamlet" aptly remind us, "is built
stronger than the church".

I have little connection, however, with academics. Most professors of
literature, who read the same books I read, who study the same authors,
are to literature what forensic medicine is to the human body. These
academics seem to spend more time sucking the life out of books than
absorbing the profound truths the authors struggle to communicate.
Perhaps it is because academics, sheltered in their gardens of
privilege, often have hyper-developed intellects and the emotional
maturity of twelve-year-olds. Perhaps it is because they fear the awful
revelations in front of them, truths that, deeply understood, would
demand they fight back. It is easier to eviscerate the form, the style
and the structure with textual analysis and ignore the passionate call
for our common humanity.

"As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have
opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would
not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary", Proust
wrote. "It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of
awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its
place ..."

Although Shakespeare's Jack Falstaff is a coward, a liar and a cheat,
although he embodies all the scourges of human frailty Henry V rejects,
I delight more in Falstaff's address to himself in the Boar's Head
Tavern, where he at least admits to serving to his own hedonism, than I
do in Henry's heroic call to arms before Agincourt. Falstaff personifies
a lust for life and the mockery of heaven and hell, of the crown and all
other instruments of authority. He disdains history, honor and glory.
Falstaff is a much more accurate picture of the common soldier who wants
to save his own hide and finds little in the rhetoric of officers who
urge him into danger. Prince Hal is a hero and defeats Percy while
Falstaff pretends to be a corpse. But Falstaff embodies the basic
desires we all have. He is baser than most. He lacks the essential
comradeship necessary among soldiers, but he clings to life in a way a
soldier under fire can sympathize with. It is to the ale houses and the
taverns, not the court, that these soldiers return when the war is done.
Jack Falstaff's selfish lust for pleasure hurts few, while Henry's
selfish lust for power leaves corpses strewn across muddy battlefields.
And while we have been saturated with the rhetoric of Henry V this past
July 4 holiday we would be better off listening to the truth spoken by
Falstaff.

There is a moment in "Henry IV, Part I", when Falstaff leads his motley
band of followers to the place where the army has assembled. Lined up
behind him are cripples and beggars, all in rags, because those with
influence and money, like George W Bush, evade military service. Prince
Hal looks askance at the pathetic collection before him, but Falstaff
says, "Tut, tut, good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder.
They'll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men."

I have seen the pits in the torpid heat in El Salvador, the arid valleys
in northern Iraq and the forested slopes in Bosnia. Falstaff is right.
Despite the promises never to forget the sacrifices of the dead, of
those crippled and maimed by war, the loss and suffering eventually
become superfluous. The pain is relegated to the pages of dusty books,
the corridors of poorly funded VA hospitals, and sustained by grieving
families who still visit the headstone of a man or woman who died too
young. This will be the fate of our dead and wounded from Iraq and
Afghanistan. It is the fate of all those who go to war. We honor them
only in the abstract. The causes that drove the nation to war, and for
which they gave their lives, are soon forgotten, replaced by new ones
that are equally absurd.

Stratis Myrivilis in his novel Life in the Tomb (2004) makes this point:

"A few years from now, I told him", Myrvilis wrote nearly a century ago,
"perhaps others would be killing each other for anti-nationalist ideals.
Then they would laugh at our own killings just as we had laughed at
those of the Byzantines. These others would indulge in mutual slaughter
with the same enthusiasm, though their ideals were new. Warfare under
the entirely fresh banners would be just as disgraceful as always. They
might even rip out each other's guts then with religious zeal, claiming
that they were ‘fighting to end all fighting'. But they too would be
followed by still others who would laugh at them with the same gusto."

Patriotic duty and the disease of nationalism lure us to deny our common
humanity. Yet to pursue, in the broadest sense, what is human, what is
moral, in the midst of conflict or under the heel of the totalitarian
state is often a form of self-destruction. And while Shakespeare, Proust
and Conrad meditate on success, they honor the nobility of failure,
knowing that there is more to how a life is lived than what it achieves.
Lear and Richard II gain knowledge only as they are pushed down the
ladder, as they are stripped of power and the illusions which power
makes possible.

Late one night, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, I picked
up "Macbeth". It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from
a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death
squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats
slit.

I had read the play before as a student. Now it took on a new, electric
force. A thirst for power at the cost of human life was no longer an
abstraction. It had become part of my own experience.

I came upon Lady Macduff's speech, made when the murderers, sent by
Macbeth, arrive to kill her and her small children. "Whither should I
fly?" she asks.

I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

Those words seized me like Furies and cried out for the dead I had seen
lined up that day in a dusty market square, and the dead I would see
later: the 3,000 children killed in Sarajevo, the dead in unmarked mass
graves in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, El Salvador, the dead
who are my own, who carried notebooks, cameras and a vanquished idealism
into war and never returned. Of course resistance is usually folly, of
course power exercised with ruthlessness will win, of course force
easily snuffs out gentleness, compassion and decency. In the end, all we
can cling to is each other.

Thucydides, knowing that Athens was doomed in the war with Sparta,
consoled himself with the belief that his city's artistic and
intellectual achievements would in the coming centuries overshadow raw
Spartan militarism. Beauty and knowledge could, ultimately, triumph over
power. But we may not live to see such a triumph. And on this weekend of
collective exaltation I did not attend fireworks or hang a flag outside
my house. I did not participate in rituals designed to hide from
ourselves who we have become. I read the "Eclogues" by Virgil.  These
poems were written during Rome's brutal civil war. They consoled me in
their wisdom and despair. Virgil understood that the words of a poet
were no match for war. He understood that the chant of the crowd urges
nearly all to collective madness, and yet he wrote with the hope that
there were some among his readers who might continue, even when faced
with defeat, to sing his hymns of compassion.

... sed carmina tantum
nostra valent, Lycida, tela inter Martia, quantum
Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas.

... but songs of ours
Avail among the War-God's weapons, Lycidas,
As much as Chaonian doves, they say, when the
eagle comes.

_____

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080707_surviving_the_fourth_of_july/

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/