War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning
Steve Clemons, guesting at the Dish, finds a milblog the Pentagon missed: Army of Dude. The entry on the Revolution of 1920s Brigades will feed some suspicions you probably already had. But I’m most struck by excerpts from another entry:
This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.
Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck.
The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens.
In his narrative poem, Genesis, Frederick Turner includes the passage:
Those who say war is hell tell only half
the story – the other half is joy.
There’s something to this. The point is, it’s a problem. War is beguiling. Even those of us who have spent years opposing this war, and the next one, are testament to this. We could be writing every day about tax policy or drug laws or health care policy or Lindsay Lohan. We write about war because it’s important, but also because it’s fascinating. Even as we abhor it we are mesmerized.
Comment by Nat —
August 26, 2007 @ 10:35 am
Shit, I hope that kid makes it back to the States in one piece.
Comment by anodyne —
August 26, 2007 @ 11:31 am
The tone of your comments here seems contemplative to me. I’m assuming that this isn’t the first time you’ve considered the apparent paradox of war without giving into anger, frustration or despondency. If you’re still somewhere in the neighborhood of the mental state you were in when you wrote this, perhaps you can elaborate on what you mean by “There’s something to this. The point is, it’s a problem. War is beguiling.â€
What does beguile mean in this context? Why is it a problem? Who is being beguiled? Is there a libertarian view of how to deal with this perceived form of beguilement?
Comment by Donald Johnson —
August 26, 2007 @ 11:38 am
“We could be writing every day about tax policy or drug laws or health care policy or Lindsay Lohan. We write about war because it’s important, but also because it’s fascinating. Even as we abhor it we are mesmerized.”
Yep. One of my arguments against the liberal humanitarian case for the Iraq War was that if human lives were equally valued, we’d get much more lives saved for dollar spent if we did the sort of thing Jimmy Carter does–trying to eliminate obscure (to Westerners) African diseases. The death toll there from preventable disease is millions per year.
Of course, this would lead to arguments between liberals and libertarians about the best way to lower that death toll, but it’d be much better to live in a world where that was the issue endlessly debated on op ed pages and in blogs.
But getting back to your point, yeah, even liberal/lefties find death caused directly by human violence more fascinating than millions of children dying of malaria, AIDs, etc… I’m guessing humans are just wired that way.
Comment by Madeline F —
August 26, 2007 @ 12:52 pm
To the shoeblog! Oh Manolo the Shoeblogger, help us!
Oh, no, he’s writing about the paratrooper boots! Ayyyyy!
Comment by Mona —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
The grievous sins of the Bush 43 Administration and the modern GOP have forced me to divert focus from what was, for all of the 90s, my primary passion: the obscene drug “war.” Both major parties were so awful I had stopped voting, and concentrated on issues advocacy, primarily drug policy reform and equality for gay Americans.
But the neocon take-over of foreign policy, and the Yoo-driven Executive-cum-monarch travesties, have had to rise to the top of my list. Meanwhile, of course, tens of thousands of innocent lives are lost (via death or prison) to a vicious “war” on substances, and the prison-industrial complex remains healthy.
So much evil to combat, so little time.
Comment by yave begnet —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:13 pm
War is just a bunch of man-children running around playing Halo with real guns and real lives. It’s fun, but not particularly meaningful except for the mayhem it causes and the people it enriches. War, in its careful deconstruction of order, is like the Sex Pistols–more nihilistic than meaningful.
From Metric:
Comment by Eric Martin —
August 26, 2007 @ 6:14 pm
There’s something to this. The point is, it’s a problem. War is beguiling. Even those of us who have spent years opposing this war, and the next one, are testament to this. We could be writing every day about tax policy or drug laws or health care policy or Lindsay Lohan. We write about war because it’s important, but also because it’s fascinating. Even as we abhor it we are mesmerized.
Good stuff Jim.
I tried to scratch the surface of this phenomena here and here FWIW.
(shameless blog hussy)
Comment by matthew hogan —
August 26, 2007 @ 7:18 pm
Hell and glory — Stephen Crane got both down in Red Badge of Courage.
Comment by Brian C.B. —
August 26, 2007 @ 7:53 pm
How did Tim O’Brien close “How to Tell a True War Story?” Something like, being approached by a sympathetic old woman after a reading in which he dismisses war stories with any moral uplift as the vilest propaganda and recounts a young man vaporized by a booby trap, thinking to say to her, “You don’t understand, you dumb cooze. What I told wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.”
Comment by paul —
August 26, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
Is it war or is it just the intensity of the experience that makes it so beguiling/fascinating? It certainly rules out intelligent design if killing other people is the most rewarding experience a designer has in mind for us.
It’s been a while since I read Crane but Matthew Hogan may be onto something.
There’s something about facing each day as if it were your last — and there being a non-zero chance of that being true — that gets these young guys amped up. War does so much damage, besides those who end up dead: do any survivors come out unchanged?
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
August 27, 2007 @ 8:11 am
I don’t know if the design is intelligent, but it’s clearly in the design. Another author, with a more technical take on this subject, is Robert L. O’Connell. In Of Arms and Men he argues that it was ever thus, from sticks and clubs to nuclear weapons. It has been a while since I read the book, but it had a powerful effect on my thinking and my feelings about my place in the military-industrial complex.
Comment by Barry —
August 27, 2007 @ 11:41 am
Comment by paul —
August 26, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
“Is it war or is it just the intensity of the experience that makes it so beguiling/fascinating? It certainly rules out intelligent design if killing other people is the most rewarding experience a designer has in mind for us. ”
That assumes an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent intelligent designer.
Comment by paul —
August 27, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
@ Barry: I suppose if we don’t attribute benevolence to the Designer, it makes it more believable that we were created in that image. I don’t hold with that theory, but sometimes facetious remarks are hard to get across in typing
@Mr Obscura: not a very cheering thought, but I don’t think our first hard-wired response is to crack someone over the head to get what we want.