This does not equal that, almost always

When I read this blog post, I was reminded (again) of something that happened in my youth. It was well after Joe McCarthy’s heyday, but still, it seems apropos.

When I was a freshman in college and Richard Nixon was President, I took a sociology course which sought to address some of the harsh political events and divisive opinions which were tearing the country apart. (The term ended with the killings at Kent State and – less remembered, perhaps – at Jackson State.) Over the term, a number of guest speakers offered their understanding of what was really going on locally and nationally in what seemed to me at the time to be a poisonous political climate.

One guest to the class was a local police official who told us the communists had infiltrated civil rights and anti-war groups to turn them against America. A fellow classmate – an upperclassman who was less inclined than I to grant that persons in position of authority were informed – asked the speaker “What is a communist?” I protested that everyone knew the answer, but he insisted that the official tell us over my objections. And lo, it turned out the man was ignorant: “They’re not like us; they don’t believe in freedom like we do; they’re…” His explanation petered out embarrassingly. He had no idea what he was talking about. He was almost totally innocent of the subject. And yet he had earlier produced a political thesis with the utmost confidence, a thesis which depended mightily on the presence of communists to justify both itself and his world.

While there were and are plenty of reasonable responses to the excesses of the anti-war movement of the late 60s and early 70s, lazily blaming them on a communist boogieman was patently stupid. It only served to shut down any reasoned examination of the opposition's motives.

This is of a piece with the “Obama is a Muslim” meme we live with today. Muslim is the new brand to freak out about here in America. Muslim is the new communist. What a Muslim is will not be pinned down in the current political discourse. It has become an unfalsifiable predicate. This is because being a Muslim is simply being other than me and mine. It's those other guys, who are not on my team. Islam exists for some only as a negative idea, the negation of their tribe which is engaged in some sort of Manichean struggle for “victory,” whatever that term may mean.

In this way, lazy thinking leads to violence.

Fog and death

Robert McNamara is dead. I hated him once. While he was Secretary of Defense, 16,000 American servicemen and women died in a terrible, purposeless war. Another 42,000 Americans would die before it was all over. Somebody knows how many Vietnamese people died in that war, but I don't.

John Kennedy called him the smartest man he ever met. A master of systems analysis, McNamara crunched numbers both from the Pentagon's organization and from the bloody data he got from Southeast Asia to figure the smartest solutions to problems posed by both. I'm reminded of the finance systems modelers whose far-too-smart "products" precipitated the current recession. Apparently he came to agree with this assessment:

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” Mr. McNamara concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

If you haven't seen the documentary The Fog of War, see it soon. Here's an excerpt:

Geezer test

Essay portion:


Generation WE: The Movement Begins... from Generation We on Vimeo.



Compare and contrast.(25 points)

Extra credit:



We had our chance. What did we make of it? (10 points)

I have a history of these things

My opposition to the Bush/Cheney debacle in Iraq has an older sibling. This is something I just scanned. Lately it's been on our refrigerator.


The war then was in Vietnam, and I was somewhat less mature than I believe myself to be today.

Personalizing the losses

I just saw this at BAGnews. There's a link to the Rocky Mountain News story about his family and the damage his death in this idiotic war has done to them.

The howling animal joy that possessed me when my daughter entered the world 24 years ago is something he will never know. I guess that's why I experienced a very personal grief for a young man I didn't know. He was just a little older than my daughter.

Students of History

In the spring of 2003, I was teaching a 2-D design class in Dallas. The noise from the Bush war machine was at its highest as the administration worked us and itself up to the level of madness necessary for a preemptive attack on Saddam’s Iraq. A few days before the first air strikes on Baghdad, one of my students asked me for permission to miss class so she could participate in an anti-war rally that evening. I have a strict attendance policy in my studio classes, but I also missed a lot of classes myself in the spring of 1970 (unbelievably naïve!) walking door to door asking for signatures on a petition to end the war in Vietnam.

Sure, kid, rally and demonstrate against this stupid idea.

Next week she was back in class, defeated. The war was on. She’d raised her voice in earnest and she’d had no effect. None. I’ve lost many political contests, but it was her first. I tried to console her, but my words sounded empty even to me. Somehow “you let them know what you think” doesn’t really work in the face of smart bombs and cruise missiles.

The previous fall, a student in my painting class told me he was leaving college at the end of the term. He planned to enlist in the army.

“Why? “

“It just seems like the right thing to do at this time in my life.”

It was an honorable decision, one that he’d arrived at reasonably. He would do his duty. His country needed him, and we answered the call like thousands before him. I never saw him again. I hope he’s alright. He was a good painter.

Last night, I saw part of a documentary about a young man horribly wounded in this idiotic war, and the sense of responsibility overwhelmed me. How could I have let this thing happen? How could any of us have let this thing happen? Was it inconvenient to stop the idiocy? Was it somehow a threat to our careers or our comfort? We have shirked our duty as Americans, and our debts to patriotic, idealistic young Americans like those students are beyond repayment.