Karl Marlantes

Bill Moyers had an interview on TV this last week with Viet-Nam war veteran Karl Marlantes. Marlantes has written a book entitled What It's Like toGo to War and he and Moyers talked about it, particularly about “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” after the wars in Viet-Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The discussion of the book fascinated me at first and resulted in my going to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to read as much of it as I could. But the interview and book felt distractive after a short while. Everything that was said was very familiar to me from the decade of the 1970's when I taught sociology and social psychology to many returning Viet-Nam soldiers. Even the body language was very familiar to me from those years, even the look around the eyes.

The crucial part of the interview for me was also the crucial part of those 1970's discussions of what it was like to go to war – namely, the truth that if you are going to kill someone, if you are going to kill lots of people, you better have a rock-solid reason for doing so, or it will destroy you and your society and your descendants.

Marlantes gets at it like this:

“'Thou shalt not kill’ is a tenet you just do not violate, and so all your young life, that’s drilled into your head. And then suddenly, you’re 18 or 19 and they’re saying, ‘Go get ‘em and kill for your country.’ And then you come back and it’s like, ‘Well, thou shalt not kill’ again. Believe me, that’s a difficult thing to deal with,” Marlantes tells Bill. “You take a young man and put him in the role of God, where he is asked to take a life — that’s something no 19-year-old is able to handle.”

I feel, with great respect and admiration and appreciation for Marlantes and the veterans whom I know personally, that this statement comes close to the issue, but misses. 'No cigar,' as the expression is.

Firstly, is it really true that “you just do not violate” any of the ten commandments? It happens all the time. In fact, it seems more accurate to me to say that nobody really follows the rules just because they are rules, but because they see some reason for the rules. And further, the actual commandment usually cited by conscientious objectors is not “Thou shall not kill” but rather “Thou shall have no other gods before thee.”

And that brings my second doubt about Marlantes' statement above, which is perhaps related to having no other gods before thee: Is it really true that an 18- or 19-year boy can't handle the decision as to whether or not to kill someone? One of my students, who killed people in Viet-Nam and had lots of trouble about it on returning to the States, told me in answer to my asking this question: “My mother would have killed me if I didn't go,” which had extra force because he came from a strong Italian-America family. This man was very close to me and we talked many hours together about such questions. He also cited John Wayne a couple times and wanting to be a hero like John Wayne.

I, of course, do not know the answer to this question as to whether or not an 18-year-old boy in such circumstances can make the decision. My tilt is toward believing that he can. He can handle aircraft in the jungle, handle search and destroy infantry missions and all kinds of difficult situations in combat in a strange land, operate very complicated weaponry, survive in almost impossible circumstances. He might then be capable of deciding whether or not to go to war in the first place. Thoreau would have no trouble with the question. Still, I just don't know. 

Another thought that comes to me on reading Marlantes is that working over in your mind the meaning of what you have done after going to wars like those in Viet-Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan takes a whole lot of time and anguish and effort and depth and knowledge and repentance and humility and openness to the possibility that not only you but almost everyone in control of things in society were murderously insane.  That is asking a lot of anyone, not just an 18-year-old.

The Faces of My Loved Ones

The days are just flashing by but feel more precious than ever.

Here's an appropriate quote from Annie Dillard:

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you were going to die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

My own reality in view of death is to think of the faces of my loved ones rather than to say or to write anything. Such faces, such souls. I thank God that I was allowed to know them, and to see them even now in my mind's eyes.

I see that much has been written on the subject, the latest of which I am aware being What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying, by Karen M. Wyatt, a medical doctor who worked in hospices. She structures the book around the “seven last words” of Christ, that is, the seven sentences Christ spoke from the cross. 

The “seven last words” are in fact excellent for the occasion, but the faces, the reality, of my loved ones move me beyond words.

Predator Nation

The Dayton Metro Library has been the most important place in the city for me. The physical building is drab and uninspiring, and the staff make mistakes such as not properly processing returns, and there are many people who go in there just to get out of the cold or the heat or who have no other place to go.

But I get such good books from it, particularly from the new bookshelf, that I hold it holy.

The best book I got from my visit there yesterday was Charles H. Ferguson’s new book, Predator Nation. It’s horrifying and painful to read - a look into the abyss of the current USA “elite.”

But the corruption of the ”elite” is also very much mirrored in the corruption of the public. Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? has become a classic, or at least the common reference, for people who see the poor and dispossessed out there demonstrating in support of tax cuts and deregulation for the very people who have impoverished and dispossessed them.

I often listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio as I drive across Ohio and Indiana because there is nothing else on the radio even remotely intelligent. Limbaugh has the whole selfishness thing down cold, overlaying unalloyed hate. And Limbaugh is “successful” – a term that should just make you cringe whenever you hear anyone use it, because it invariably refers to some very “squalid” interpretation, to use William James’ expression.

The very fact itself that the content on the radio is so very shallow is no secret to anyone, either. Everybody knows and we know that everybody knows.

I particularly appreciated Ferguson’s appreciation of the academy’s collusion or collaboration. He won an Academy Award in 2011 for Inside Job, his documentary on the financial crisis in which he mentions that collusion. He writes at the beginning of the present chapter 8, “The Ivory Tower:”

Many people who saw Inside Job found that the most surprising, and disturbing, portion of the film was its revelation of widespread conflicts of interest in universities, think tanks, and government regulation. Viewers who watched my interviews with eminent professors were stunned at what came out of their mouths. It was indeed very disturbing, and sometimes I was stunned myself.

There are other books which have the same theme and perhaps deal more fully with the historical and cultural concomitants to the economic realities, but Ferguson's book is just clear and unassailable in what it does.

*       *       *

Crazy Has Places To Hide In

Another verse from by Leonard Cohen has been going through my mind often since my last post on Leonard Cohen. It comes from his Crazy to Love You:

Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than saying goodbye.

Over and over again, it just speaks to so much that I have seen during my seventy years. People going crazy, for example, because they were willing to lie because they didn't want to be “alone,” then forgetting or losing the thread within themselves back to the place where the lie was made.

I think now especially of various people who have “made,” “earned,” absurd amounts of money and allowed themselves to believe they “deserved” all that money, losing the thread within themselves back to the place where the lie was made.

Further, for some reason, I can't help thinking of Elias Cannetti's line in Auto-da-Fe that goes:

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. Whom men would destroy, they first make sane.

Finally, there is a speech Cohen made to the Prince of Asturias that is just so wise and beautiful that I consider it essential for anyone who has joys and tears about the world, for anyone who is not crazy. He says in this speech that he owes all his songs to a young Spanish man who taught him six chords on the guitar and who suicided. Perhaps this touched me so deeply because I myself was once a young man in Montreal seeing what he saw.

Cohen once said in an interview that he did not consider himself “one of the big boys,” meaning that he does not consider himself one of the great poets. Some of his lines, such as “Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than saying goodbye,” seem to me certainly to be on Shakespeare's level. To me, that young man who taught Cohen those six chords was true, deep, great.

The Wind in the Trees

One of my favorite verses in Leonard Cohen's recent album, “Old Ideas,” is in his “Lullaby” and goes as follows:

      Sleep baby sleep

There's a morning to come

The wind in the trees

They're talking in tongues

That reminds me of a line in Isaiah that Old Betty Stocks once sent me just at the right time:

For you shall go out with joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before you, and all the trees shall clap their hands. - Isaiah 55:12

I think that the words surrounding that passage in Isaiah are saying the same things that Cohen is saying, and I am saying, during this hallowed, old-yet-renewed, time of our lives.

*     *     *

Saskatchewan

The thing about Saskatchewan for me is that is there. I've heard the comment that “There's nothing there” and after reading a book like Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House, one could easily get an even worse impression.

But I used to truck into Saskatchewan every chance I got. I'd be out on the rolling grasslands, thinking of the indigenous people and buffalo who used to live there before the white man discovered that they were there, and I felt I was somehow coming home.

I made a point of travelling whenever I could to places like Regina, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, Assiniboia, Lloydminster, Yorkton, North Battleford, Qu'Appelle, Weyburn, Estavan, names that became associated in my mind with thoughts that seemed way beyond a lifetime's span to pursue.

• A boy at a rodeo in Swift Current, dressed up in a buckskin outfit with fringes, handling his horse as if it were his best friend, at one with it.
• The “Most Admired Canadian,” father of Canadian medicare,Tommy Douglas, bringing in doctors from England when local doctors went on strike against the new health care system.
• The history of the Doukhobors coming to the province.
• My grandfather's escape to Saskatoon for a few years when no one knew where he was.
• The beginnings of a tornado, a whirlwind, in a parking lot in Lloydminster, the most astonishing display of raw energy I've ever seen.
• The prairie grasses in the wind late at night, alive with joy and eternal life.

I happened to be listening to a local radio station one morning as I was out there, a program in which local people were phoning in to relate their personal stories about the prairies. One woman related how her father visited her from England and asked her to drive him way out on the prairie and just to leave him there alone for a couple hours. His words to her when she came back to get him were, “There's an ancient wisdom here.”

*      *      *