The Weekly Screed (#556)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
by David Benjamin

TOKYO — Fatuous American journalism doesn’t die; it just fades to
black, and then pops up a week later in The Japan Times, Tokyo’s
leading English-language daily. A classic example caught my eye while
I was here last week. It originated in the venerable Washington Post.
Tastefully, Japan Times editors had deleted the byline. But, thanks to
Google, I found out that this jewel of analysis was authored by one
Greg Jaffe.

It begins with an epitaph:

“This,” intones Jaffe, “is the American era of endless war.”

Jaffe’s grim thesis is that the attacks of 11 September 2001 ushered
in a novel epoch in human affairs that henceforward precludes the
possibility — or even the mention — of peace anywhere on earth. The
villains who are forcing innocent Americans like us, at gunpoint, to
wander this vale of never-ending tears are the well-concealed and
widely dispersed extremist groups all over the globe who use al Qaeda
as their model. They’re heavily armed, technologically sophisticated,
politically insane, highly mobile and eager to die for the cause. And
we ain’t gonna lick ‘em!

But we’re going to spend a lot on the effort. Jaffe’s story leans hard
on Pentagon sources, who rather gleefully forecast a worldwide “period
of persistent conflict” that will require the Joint Chiefs to squeeze
every U.S. taxpayer dollar ‘til the eagle grins.

The Post’s doomsday diagnosis dovetails beautifully with the “clash of
civilizations” theories of Samuel Huntington, the historical darling
of the neoconservative set — guys like Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul
Wolfowitz, etc.

(Oh my God! Is it 2003 again?)

The Post’s anecdotal clincher for America’s inevitable devolution into
the lawless wastelands of “Mad Max” is the construction in Kentucky of
the “Warrior Transition Battalion” complex, a medical facility that
will treat the mental and physical disabilities of U.S. troops who’ve
been deployed, re-deployed and deployed again, for more than a decade,
in the neocon quagmires of the Middle East.

A point that just barely eludes Jaffe is that a $31-million
post-trauma hospital is necessitated partly by the reality that
soldiers who were once mortally wounded in battle now are being saved
by better, faster battlefield medicine. Rather than a defeat for
Gracie Lou Freebush and “world peace,” maybe the Post could have
characterized the Kentucky facility as a victory for Hawkeye Pierce
and the MASH 4077th.

Jaffe offers further (anecdotal) evidence of America’s descent into
Counterinsurgency Hell by citing the popularity of a depressing video
game, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” in which nobody wins. You just
kill imaginary people for the fun of it — certainly a unique premise
in the video-game market.

Nowhere in this piece does the Post’s correspondent mention the
possibly relevant fact that, since 11 September 2001, the Pentagon
budget has more than doubled. Through the presidencies of Ronald
Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the military-industrial
complex’s annual allowance hovered stubbornly around $300 billion.
But, as George W. Bush loved to say, 9/11 changed everything. The
outlay for fiscal 2012 is currently projected at $671 billion, which
would be a lot if you were merely fighting, say, World War II. But, in
an “era of endless war,” it’s barely a tinkle in the ocean. Indeed,
the Pentagon is crying poverty and roaring for more.

“No one,” quoth the Pentagon, “should harbor the illusion that the
developed world can win this conflict in the near future.”

(Hundred Years’ War, eat your heart out.)

As I was reading the Post’s mildly panicky call to duty, it just
struck me, offhand, that — beyond the Pentagon’s boundless greed and
its corollary need to spread worldwide gloom and martial paranoia — a
possible implication of this analysis is that author Greg Jaffe is
either a) a Pentagon lapdog, or b) born yesterday.

(But the Post used to be neither. Where the hell is Katharine Graham
when you really need a tough broad who’s been around the block a few
times?)

Let’s reminisce. Some of us born previous to yesterday can recall (or
look up) another “era of endless war,” beginning roughly with the
Spanish Civil War in 1936, continuing through Hitler’s anschluss of
Austria in ’38, and on to Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima and all that,
leading to 50 years of the Cold War, which included a bloodsoaked
stalemate in Korea, twenty years of slaughter, waste, delusion and
heartsickness in Vietnam — plus all that minor horror in places like
Iran, Nicaragua, South Africa, El Salvador, Hungary, Biafra, Angola,
Laos, East Germany, Argentina, Israel, Somalia, Burma, Kurdistan,
Kashmir, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Franco’s Spain, the Haiti of Papa
Doc and Baby Doc, Trujillo’s Dominica, Pinochet’s Chile, Qaddafi’s
Libya… and Kent State, for God’s sake! The Texas Schoolbook
Depository. The UW math building in Madison and the Alfred P. Murrah
Building in Oklahoma City. Charlie Manson! In the words of Les
Nessman, “Oh, the humanity!”

Those of us not born yesterday have survived the bloodiest century in
human history. Every child born between, at least, 1945 and 1970, grew
up convinced that he or she was destined never to grow up, because
nuclear holocaust was as close as Cuba. Tom Lehrer deftly captured a
sense of those times in a song of mock cheerfulness that we could all
whistle past the radioactive graveyard: “We’ll All Go Together When We
Go.”

Adulthood surprised the hell out of a lot of us — which might explain
our behavior in the years around 1969.

In his glimpse of a future for humanity that’s gonna be even darker
than the ghastly 20th century, the post’s young Jaffe instructs us to
curb whatever enthusiasm we have left. If we don’t want to get our
little hearts broken, we should erase the word “peace” from our
lexicon. “One lesson from today’s war,” he writes, “seems to be that
Americans will have to learn to live with a certain amount of
insecurity and fear.”

Well, yeah, sonny.

Been there. Done that.