Last night as I was going to bed, my wife Lady Liberty said to me that I was looking good for an old man. I reminded her that Uncle Sam is like a Bible figure, and that Methuselah lived 969 years. I reckon that as a sprightly 228 year old, I still got some good years ahead of me. I felt the same looking at the guy I would like to play me in a four year TV mini-series: John Kerry. He’ll have to grow the beard and grow out the hair, but if history is any guide, he won’t have to dye it white when he runs for re-election in 2008.
The 27 year old John F. Kerry testifying to Congress, which C-Span has pieced together from videos and tapes (they switch to still photos of the sessions when all they have is audio — and they edited them together quite nicely), that’s the young America confronting the tyrannical king. Kerry was the kind of guy who threw himself into the war, and lots of historical and otherwise figures have done that. But what makes him American is that he then threw himself into his reaction to the war. And after all the dust settled, John F. Kerry, our Democratic candidate for President, emerged as our country’s most notable (and arguably most famous, along with possibly Ron Kovic) and emblematic Vietnam veteran — the veteran that returned home to speak out against the war.
When he came back and spoke publicly for the first time about the crazy world of “the ‘Nam” as it was known to the men who served there, the insane world of mayhem that Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and before that Deer Hunter and Coming Home portrayed, he was the first. People don’t realize it, but Kerry’s testimony opened the way for that mythology to enter the American psyche. He really has been a hero, twice. Take a look at the testimony he gave in 1971. http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/audio/kerry3_0001.wmv. You will see a devoutly patriotic guy, who clearly has deep convictions and beliefs, try to bring home the truth, and speak that truth to power about things he sees as Un-American. When Jon Voight is talking to that high school in Coming Home, that’s straight John Kerry.
But he was 27, and testifying before congress was about all he could do. So he went to work from there, under the principle that the best inspiration is not only great leaders, but sometimes inept leaders. It is especially American to draw inspiration from seeing that somebody in charge is squandering opportunities. The legacy of our unique revolutionary history is the idea that stupidity is the mother of all political impulse. It makes you want to lead because you can do it better.
Now he’s 60, and in one of the most Biblically inspired events in American history, John Kerry is able to step back into the ghost of his 27-year-old self, and inherit the same kind of war all over again. Kerry can say in the same way, with the same orientation, that this war is a mistake, and that we need to get out of it somehow. Hopefully victoriously, but without illusions about what we’re up against, America will avoid a foreign entanglement of Washingtonian proportions. And if Kerry can inhabit that ghost, as I began to see him do the other night, it could be positively Lincolnesque. I felt the beginnings of a Kerry policy the other night, tinged with nuances of: “With malice toward none; with charity for all…” Last night what I heard from John Kerry was: I want to be your president and I’m already acting like I am him.
Kerry is slowly saying it: “Sorry folks, but this _is_ Vietnam.” Bush’s black and white vision is crumbling as Kerry makes it clear that it is about gray areas if we’re to get out alive. It’s about reaching out to the Muslim world to create non-violent channels of communication. It’s about solving this problem. Of course, that means it’s about stating this problem first, which neither candidate has done in any meaningful way.
When Putin said: “You want me to negotiate with bastards that kill children!” I thought: “Yes, if those same bastards have potential guns to the heads of more children.” We’re in a hostage situation, and we have to agree that the first step is to do whatever it takes to talk those nut cases off the ledge. The mistake we’re making is not realizing that _pushing_ them off the ledge only encourages more people to imitate them and climb to the ledge themselves.
So long as the core of our response to attacks from radical Islam is KILL THEM, and for this of course I fault Kerry almost as much as Bush, we are feeding the core value of murder as an OK way to deal with problems of inequality. But in a world where murder is used as a political weapon this is a value that radical Islam simply has as an advantage. They are closer to the reality of what that means than we are, and if we play it their way, we are doomed to lose. We have to live up to our humanitarian values in our response if we are to win.
So let’s get Bush’s and Putin’s attention! Are you speaking out of pride brothers Vladimir and W? Listen to me, my friends of a greater good. It’s a negative pleasure, your pride, and as you feed it, people die. The world would love a drama as great as the one you envision of a holy standoff between good and evil, where the infidels are vanquished at the point of the mighty Russian (and we could say the same thing for Bush and the American) saber. But while you are waging your mighty battle, many of us will unnecessarily die.
Sadness overwhelms even these most grandiose of visions, and the only recourse is a balance of global manhunts, not global invasions, on the one hand, with a broader attempt at understanding and reconciliation on the other. When a kidnapper has a knife to your throat, it doesn’t matter what is right. When a driver at the intersection is not going to stop even though you have the right of way, do you let him go, or do you insist on being dead right? This is not about wrong or right. This is about – at least as new nightmares land in our minds – people with guns to our heads. These people are mad. And we join them when we say there’s no other way to deal with them but to try to kill them all.
Because if you go to war in order to kill them, you have to go in there with such firepower that you have to kill lots of innocent people. The innocent who witness and survive these killings hear almost nothing of our reasoning, and would rarely be swayed by it if they did. But they hear a great deal from Mullahs and other leaders that explains it all quite nicely (and even in some cases not so falsely) in terms of imperialism and greed.
There is no more effective way at creating exponentially greater numbers of people who are willing to try to kill us than the current “war on terrorism.” When you kill a terrorist using our current methods you make ten more. What we have to do is defeat the idea. In the phrase from the days of Vietnam, we have to win hearts and minds. The only way to do that is to lead by vision, and reach out to those who find themselves alienated from our society. We have to state somehow that we feel their pain.
In the first debate, Kerry said, of the terrorists, I will hunt them down and I will kill them. And for a few very wonderful moments (and this debate would feature many), George Bush was flabbergasted. He stammered his way into the response, but Kerry claimed the only ground that Bush had. Bush’s great strength is clinging to these classical images of America, but Kerry had managed to appropriate the central one.
Bush did have a couple solid shots that reflected these classical images. One was shedding a few tears and having a few laughs with a mom of one of the dead soldiers. One was given to the feeling that he met with them just so he could say he did for this debate. More typical of his willingness to share the grief of family’s who have lost a child in Iraq (or I what I call A Wreck) is that he never attended one single funeral of over 1,000 US soldiers killed in a war he initiated. The other good punch he got in was when he had 90 seconds to respond a second time about North Korea and he just took a pass, simply saying of his answer: “I already gave it.” Lehrer was taken aback, asking Bush if he was sure he was willing to waste 90 seconds of prime time with 70 million people watching. Bush just said, “Yeah, I told you what I think.” Right there, Bush showed insane confidence, showed the great power of not caring, that he could just waste that time. And he showed us his non-speechifying style, which was a deeply classical American thematic. “Got nothing to say there.” Good for him.
So I tried to put on the George Bush helmet, to see the world the way the people who love him see it. What I saw as I pretended to want him to win was that people appreciate that he’s looking out for their interests. They think he will keep the playing field level for folks like them. He’ll keep out the weirdoes that bleed off resources. If you’re in his club, he’ll go on a raid now and again to get you stuff. He is holding down the fort. He’s not a Eurofag.
And now we will see if he can hold the fort on having a monopoly on delivering on these deliverables. To my view, Kerry pulled the rug out from under him. He came out feisty and tough and delivered a knockout for the ages.So, it’s been awhile since I’ve spoken up, but Uncle Sam wants you again. Only this time it’s not to come join a war; it’s to figure out how to unjoin it.
And no, Uncle Sam is not a flip-flopper. That’s right America. I can be for one war and against another. If our job is to defeat terrorism, and it is, than the only terror we have to defeat is in our minds. We have to join together on this, and mean it. We can change the world if we put our minds to it. It will take tremendous vigilance, just as George Bush says. But the vigilance is to fight it wherever that makes the most sense, and, frankly, defeat it by communicating with it and deflating it and even reaching out to it where _that_ makes the most sense. The point is to win. The value for doing that is to defuse it by any means possible. Winning means being willing to do what it takes to win, even accommodating it out of existence. What we have to win is not living in a world permeated by terror.
Simply stating in a public way that we are going to come together and focus all our energies on defeating it will defeat it. We will beat it by being sustainable, by being fair, by being unworthy of 9/11. When we are willing to say in the same context as the war on terror: look at how we’re exploiting the world, look at our role, then we have begun to dig ourselves out of the denial that’s got us pinned down in this war. I haven’t heard anybody say that, and I don’t expect anybody to. I’m willing to support Kerry even if he never gets there. The geopolitical world view he represents is simply closer to that vision even if not articulated by him.
But Uncle Sam can articulate it. That’s my job! And so I say: WE WILL DEFEAT TERRORISM. Say it with me. Of course the outcome is unclear and we don’t know if we will fail to defeat it, or if we will succeed in defeating it. So why not assume the latter? After all, your old Uncle Sam is an optimist, and I like to win. Americans know the power of a dream, so let’s put our energy into the outcome we want to see.
