What if it is our collective violence that murders our children and teaches them to murder?
As Americans come to grips with Sandy Hook through various
political and social debates about firearms and violence, we seem to have
engaged every related subject except the one that might well be the biggest
elephant in the room: continuous war and its effect on our culture.
After all, we have been at
war in Afghanistan since 2001.
This has not been the longest war in U.S. history; the
Vietnam War deserves
that honor, featuring as it did a decade of covert war making that preceded the
significant troop deployments, which began in 1961 and lasted through 1975. Still,
by other measures, and before the war in Afghanistan finally concludes, it may
very likely turn out to be the longest sustained firefight to this point in
American history and, combined with the second war against Iraq, which ran
concurrently, the most expensive military action ever.
Yes, the cost and morality of these wars has been argued in
detail, but their cultural impact has been examined only rarely. Gun control
advocates tell us that two separate instances of American exceptionalism, gun
ownership and murder rate, are linked. This seems a very defensible position, and
a decent argument for more restrictions on gun ownership, but perhaps a more
distinct instance of American uniqueness would be our history of aggressive
military action and continuous war.
There may be other examples in history of warlike nations, but
none whose wars, troop deployments and police actions have also received
regular, sometimes hour-by-hour, media coverage.
Arguably, with the exception of a couple of years in the 1930s, when even feeding troops was a budgetary challenge,
the U.S.military has been continuously deployed for aggressive action for more than a century. But Google “cultural impact of war” and you will find very little
discussion of how war, war making, and preparation for war might predispose
individuals in a society so occupied to engage in violence themselves.
Yet, we have been warned in a variety of ways to beware of
continuous war. George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four
is the story of a society where language, politics and social life have been
entirely debased by the theatrical propagandizing of war and what appears to be
victimless virtual war.
And plenty of other books come to mind about actual war,
both fiction and non-fiction, that have helped to clarify the ways in which war
traumatizes the people who fight it, the people who are victimized by it, the
people who survive it, the people who report it, the people who prepare for it,
the people who witness it up close or at a distance, and the people who arrange
for others to fight it.
All Quiet on the
Western Front,
Catch 22,
Slaughterhouse Five,
The Things They Carried and lots more
are included in a more
extensive list of anti-war literature that can be found
on Wikipedia.
But the range of writing investigating the traumatic effects
of continuous war on countries and cultures is much narrower. Still, an essay
written by
Simone Weil,
The Iliad or The
Poem of Force, written as Europe plunged into World War II, is helpful.
“Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It
comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim. And from this
springs the idea of a destiny before which executioner and victim stand equally
innocent, before which conquered and conqueror are brothers in the same
distress,” she wrote.
“A moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to
escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which
is as rare as dignity in weakness,” she continued. “Moreover, moderation itself
is not without its perils, since prestige, from which force derives at least three
quarters of its strength, rests principally on that marvelous indifference that
the strong feel toward the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects
the very people who are the objects of it.”
Weil is a difficult and demanding writer, asking the reader to
follow chains of reasoning that are both complicated and precise. In her essay,
Weil largely confines analysis of The
Iliad to assessments of the effect of war on combatants, but any reasonable
extension of her ideas suggests that some of the changes in feeling and
behavior that war causes for warriors ripple through the society from which
they come and to which they return as survivors of war.
American fighters returning home may suffer deeply from the
traumas of war and of reintegration and inadequacy of services and
opportunities at home, but we also celebrate them as heroes at football
half-time shows and at patriotic celebrations and at political rallies and
state of the union speeches. They have used force, to the extreme, in pursuit of
policy goals and military objectives; they possess the “prestige” to which Weil
refers.
By and large, the most celebrated athletes in our culture,
like home run hitters and middle linebackers share a similar prestige based on
the havoc they create. Football coaches are celebrated in the same manner as
generals, at least until we realize that prestige is a garment that falls off
as easily as it goes on, as has been the case with, say, a David Petraeus or a
Joe Paterno. The same celebrity is conferred on high school jocks and,
sometimes, neighborhood bullies, who often only lose prestige when they suffer
defeat. Certainly many of us have memories of the indifference of the powerful
towards the weak, memories from childhood, perhaps, or outside the experience of military service.
But imagine in a country where war making has been the rule,
never the exception, for more than a century; consider the number of heroes and
ghosts of heroes and suffering veterans who live amongst us. Ten million?
Twenty million? How many children growing up with no fathers or, increasingly,
no mothers? How many lost or damaged lovers? How many neighborhoods shared with
one or a half-dozen disabled or severely traumatized veterans? How many of the
millions of homeless on our streets are returned veterans or their brothers or
their sons? And through our families and our communities and our emergency
personnel and our treatment professionals we share the trauma.
Who wants to say that
Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter,
was not a child of our many traumas, even of our wars?
Sometimes, especially for warriors, war is almost a
delightful game, Weil tells us. “But with the majority of the combatants this
state of mind does not persist. Soon there comes a day when fear, or defeat, or
the death of beloved comrades touch the warrior’s spirit, and it crumbles in
the hand of necessity. At that moment war is no more a game or a dream…And this
reality, which he perceives, is hard, much too hard to be borne, for it enfolds
death.”
Of course, the death of which Weil speaks can be consciously
ignored, it can be fought off, it can be sublimated. But eventually death is
all around and present, perhaps with varied and sometimes subtle effects on
those who must confront it, embrace it, or pretend it is
not there. Ultimately it is not there only for those who kill, or watch their comrades die. It is there for all of us, for those who attend military
funerals, or comfort the survivors, or see them at a distance.
Nothing changes that reality, even for those who do not live
near military bases or do not see the homeless vets around us. Advanced
technologies do not change it; they only raise the price and, in many cases,
increase the profits some of us make from war. Drone strikes don’t change it;
do not wash President Obama’s hands of the blood of victims, innocent or
otherwise. After all, violence makes even the victors equal with the victims,
Weil tells us. And, as today’s
Washington Post tells us, “
More U.S. troops lost to suicide than combat in 2012.”
Ultimately, we may wish to exclude ourselves from Weil’s
sweeping conclusions about warriors, but we do not live beyond the sweep of official
violence and death. Our taxes pay for war and for our country’s war making
capacity, and we pledge ourselves to our country and sing its anthems.
We know that “in war, truth is the first casualty.” Nevertheless,
we most often tolerate the lies about weapons of mass destruction or Kuwaiti
babies dumped from incubators. And, we even pray to protect our warriors at the
expense of those on the other side. As Mark Twain put it more bluntly in
The War Prayer,
“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go
forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth
from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God,
help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover
their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to
drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in
pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us
to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us
to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in
the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the
sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with
travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…”
This
was an American prayer long before Sandy Hook and still is. It is not our video
games that are the first cause of our violence towards others and ourselves.
More likely, it is our wars.
