“I think I can understand that feeling about a mother’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So the job of motherhood is the one for which all others exist…”
As I was busy posting about the anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination, I forgot to note two other events which November 22nd, 1963 also marks — the death of Clive Staples Lewis and the eleventh birthday of my mother, a reader of this blog.
“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…
Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.
He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.
He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”
“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…
Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…
As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:
The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.
The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”
About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.
I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.
Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.
“Tragedy without reason? But was there anything in the universe without reason? The question echoed: ‘Why, God?’ For an agnostic the murder of John Kennedy seemed one more expression of the ultimate fortuity of things. But for those who believed in a universe infused by the Almighty with pattern and purpose—as the Kennedys did—Dallas brought on a philosophical as well as an emotional crisis. Robert Kennedy in particular had to come to terms with his brother’s death before he could truly resume his own existence.
In these dark weeks and months, on solitary walks across wintry fields, in long reverie at his desk in the Department of Justice, in the late afternoon before the fire in Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown drawing room, in his reading—now more intense than ever before, as if each next page might contain the essential clue—he was struggling with that fundamental perplexity: whether there was, after all, any sense to the universe. His faith had taught him there was. His experience now raised the searching and terrible doubt. If it were a universe of pattern, what divine purpose had the murder of a beloved brother served? An old Irish ballad haunted him.
Sheep without a shepherd;
When the snow shuts out the sky—
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?
He scrawled on a yellow sheet:
The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.
and
All things are to be examined & called into question—
There are no limits set to thought.”
“The question arose whether the coffin should be open or closed. The casket arrived at the White House early in the morning of the twenty-third. After a brief service in the East Room, ‘I (Robert) asked everybody to leave and I asked them to open it… When I saw it, I’d made my mind up. I didn’t want it open.’…
He spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom. Charles Spalding went with him and said, ‘There’s a sleeping pill around somewhere.’ Spalding found a pill. Robert Kennedy said, ‘God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well.’ He was still controlled. Spalding closed the door. ‘Then I just heard him break down…. I heard him sob and say, “Why, God?”’
He lay fitfully for an hour or two. Soon it was daylight. He walked down the hall and came in on Jacqueline, sitting on her bed in a dressing gown, talking to the children. Young John Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his father. His older sister, Caroline, said that Daddy was too big for his coffin…
Robert Kennedy sent a letter to each of his children and told his sisters to do likewise. He wrote his son Joe:
On the day of the burial
of your Godfather
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Nov. 24, 1963
Dear Joe,
You are the oldest of all the male grandchildren. You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill.
Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.
Love to you
Daddy
He appeared, I noted the day after Dallas, ‘composed, withdrawn and resolute.’ Ben Bradlee the same day saw him ‘clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken.’ Discipline and duty summoned him to the occasion. Within he was demolished. ‘It was much harder for him than anybody,’ said LeMoyne Billings, his friend of so many years. He had put ‘his brother’s career absolutely first; and not anything about his own career whatsoever. And I think that the shock of losing what he’d built everything around … aside from losing the loved figure … was just absolutely [devastating]—he didn’t know where he was…. Everything was just pulled out from under him.’ They had been years of fulfillment, but of derivative fulfillment: fulfillment not of himself but of a brother and a family. Now in a crazed flash all was wiped out. ‘Why, God?’
Robert Kennedy was a desperately wounded man. ‘I just had the feeling,’ said John Seigenthaler, ‘that it was physically painful, almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack. I mean it was pain and it showed itself as being pain…. It was very obvious to me, almost when he got up to walk that it hurt to get up to walk.’ Everything he did was done through a ‘haze of pain.’ ‘He was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,’ said Pierre Salinger. ‘He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself.’ Douglas Dillon offered him his house in Hobe Sound, Florida, where Robert and Ethel went with a few friends at the end of the month. They played touch football —‘really vicious games,’ Salinger recalled. ‘… It seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down.’
Sardonic withdrawal seemed to distance the anguish. Seigenthaler went out to Hickory Hill after the funeral. ‘Obviously in pain, [Robert] opened the door and said something like this, “Come on in, somebody shot my brother, and we’re watching his funeral on television.” When Helen Keyes arrived from Boston to help with his mail, ‘I didn’t want to see him; I just figured I’d dissolve; and I walked in and he said, “Come in.” I said, “All right.” And he said to me, “Been to any good funerals lately?” Oh, I almost died, and yet once he said that it was out in the open, and, you know, we just picked up and went on from there.’ Senator Herbert Lehman of New York died early in December. Robert Kennedy, in New York for the services, said to his Milton friend Mary Bailey Gimbel, ‘I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.’
Friends did their best. John Bartlow Martin, retiring as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, went to say goodbye. ‘How his face had aged in the years I’d known him.’ Martin attempted a few words of comfort. ‘With that odd tentative half-smile, so well known to his friends, so little to others, he murmured…‘Well, three years is better than nothing.’ Peter Maas arrived from New York on the first day the Attorney General went out publicly—to a Christmas party arranged by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star for an orphanage.
The moment he walked in the room, all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence…. Bob stepped into the middle of the room and just then a little black boy—I don’t suppose he was more than six or seven years old—suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s deadl Your brother’s dead!’ … The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away…. The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”
It’s the “remember all the things that Jack started” in Robert’s letter to young Joe that gets me. Started: like the title Robert Dallek’s great book, an unfinished life.
“What does it mean to have integrity? It means many things, of course, but one criterion is to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty—but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives.
To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us. The temptation to do this is often born of an understanding that others will disapprove of our behavior. Often, there are good reasons why they would.
Pick up any newspaper and look at the problems people create for themselves by lying—problems that seem to require more lies to mitigate. It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another. Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener—these are men whose names now conjure images of the most public self-destruction. Of course, their transgressions weren’t merely a matter of lying. But deception was what prepared the ground for their humiliation. One can get divorced without having to issue a public apology. It is even possible to live a frank and utterly unconventional life of sexual promiscuity, or exhibitionism, without paying the penalties these men paid. Many lives are almost scandal-proof. Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.”
I highly recommend you pick-up or download a copy of this thought-provoking essay; for the amount of effort it demands, it’s one of the most stirring and rewarding reads I’ve encountered in the past year. Put simply, it will confront you with a worthy challenge: you should prefer to be awkward or even rude rather than dishonest.
If you don’t want to get your own copy of Lying, you can check back here for more, as I’ll be posting a few more excerpts over the next several days.
As found on the quotes page: “The further you run from your sins, the more exhausted you are when they catch up to you.”
Charlie Rose: In traveling last week through Hungary and Eastern Europe, what did you discover about anti-Semitism today?
Yair Lapid: That it exists. Listen, in Hungary, there’s Jobbik, which is an Anti-Semitic party – the party that has tried to push a bill mandating a countdown, a limit to how many Jews there are in Hungary. This is in 2013. They have 11% of the seats in the Hungarian parliament.
Yet when you live in America, you don’t feel it too much; especially in New York, which is still the largest Jewish city in the world. But when you are [in Europe] you feel it.
While I was there, I took my son to visit a weird place. I took my son to visit a public lavatory. Why?
Because in February 1945, my father was this thirteen-year-old kid in the Budapest ghetto, and he was living in a basement the size of this stage with 400 other people.
And by February, the Russians were approaching Budapest. So the Nazis along with the Hungarian Fascists started to take the Jews in death convoys to the Danube River. There they ordered the Jews to dig holes in the ice, and then they would shoot them into the Danube. And the Danube was red.
One early morning, they gathered the people from my father’s block. It was a death convoy of about 600 people, and they began to march them towards the Danube. At a certain point along the way, a Russian plane flew low over this convoy, causing turmoil – shouting and screaming. And my grandma was there – my grandfather was already dead in Mauthausen concentration camp – but my grandma was there, and she pushed my father into this little public lavatory and said, ‘You have to pee now.’…
And he did ‘cause he was a good kid, and she closed the door behind them.
And from this convoy of 600 people, 598 were dead under the ice of the Danube River by sundown.
But my father and my grandmother were standing, by themselves, in the middle of the street, next to this little public lavatory, and they were freed – they could go anywhere. The whole world was open to them. Here in America, the Midwest: there were thousands of miles that no one had settled. Or Australia from Melbourne to Perth, which you can fly over, and for five hours you won’t see a single soul.
Soon Paris was liberated and London was free, and yet my father – a thirteen-year-old Jewish kid – had no place to go to.
And many years later, he and I went to Budapest together, and we were walking down the street, when suddenly he stopped and he began to cry. I didn’t understand, because the street was empty and there was only a public lavatory. And he said, ‘This is it. This is where I was reborn. This is where you were born.
And this is the place I realized that I would survive and soon need a place to go.’
And this is why we need the state of Israel. Because we always need a place to go.
__________
From Charlie Rose’s October 7th interview with Israeli Minister of Finance Yair Lapid at New York’s famed 92nd St. Y.
In the above photograph: Lapid posing in his home office in Tel Aviv following an Associated Press interview.
Lapid is a fascinating political figure who, in his recent foray into government, stands as a model for what kind of leader a functioning democracy should attract. After a successful career as a writer and television personality, Lapid felt compelled to “put his money where his mouth was” and found his own political party, Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). This decidedly moderate party, which stands between the left-wing Israeli labor party on the one hand, and Netanyahu’s center-right Likud andNaftali Bennett’s conservative Jewish Home on the other, won 19 seats in the Knesset in the last election and is now the second-largest party (behind Likud) in the Israeli parliament.
Lapid, who maintains close ties with his counterparts on both sides of the ideological spectrum, steered Yesh Atid to partner in the governing coalition. He was then nominated to be the Israeli Minister of Finance, and just last week the Israeli government posted an “enormous budget surplus”.
Lapid’s meteoric rise and sustained popularity among the Israeli people may seem anomalous to us in the United States, where so often public figures (especially those from the entertainment industry) make ill-advised forays into politics, only to look plastic, inept, or overwhelmed when under the hot lights and mics of the media. Yet as you can see illustrated handsomely below, Lapid projects a suave authenticity and acuity that are both rare, reassuring, and compelling.
“Jack’s greatest success in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be ‘a lady’s man’…
Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction… ‘I can’t help it,’ he declared with evident self-pleasure [in a letter to an adolescent friend] . ‘It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.’…
Jack’s easy conquests compounded the feeling that, like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class, he was entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly, even gratefully, from the object of his immediate affection. Furthermore, there did not have to be a conflict between private fun and public good. David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a 1939 biography of Queen Victoria’s prime minister, depicted young British aristocrats performing heroic feats in the service of queen and country while privately practicing unrestrained sexual indulgence with no regard for the conventional standards of monogamous marriages or premarital courting. Jack would later say that it was one of his two favorite books.
One woman reporter remembered that Jack ‘didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.’ After Harvard, when he spent a term in the fall of 1940 at Stanford (where, unlike at Harvard, men and women attended classes together), he wrote Lem Billings: ‘Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.’
But restraint was usually not the order of the day. He had so many women, he could not remember their names; ‘Hello, kid,’ was his absentminded way of greeting a current amour. Stories are legion — no doubt, some the invention of imagination, but others most probably true — of his self-indulgent sexual escapades. ‘We have only fifteen minutes,’ he told a beautiful co-ed invited to his hotel room during a campaign stop in 1960. ‘I wish we had time for some foreplay,’ he told another beauty he dated in the 1950s… At a society party in New York he asked the artist William Walton how many women in the gathering of socialites he had slept with. When Walton gave him ‘a true count,’ Jack said, ‘Wow, I envy you.’ Walton replied: ‘Look, I was here earlier than you were.’ And Jack responded, ‘I’m going to catch up.'”
“For someone who prided himself on his independence — whose sense of self rested partly on questioning authority, on making up his own mind about public issues and private standards — taking on his elder brother’s identity was not Jack Kennedy’s idea of coming into his own. Indeed, if a political career were strictly a case of satisfying his father’s ambitions and honoring his brother’s memory by fulfilling his life plan, it is more than doubtful that he would have taken on the assignment. To be sure, he felt, as he wrote Lem Billings, ‘terribly exposed and vulnerable’ after his brother’s death. Joe’s passing burdened him with an ‘unnamed responsibility’ to his whole family — to its desire to expand upon the public distinction established by Joe Sr. and to fulfill Joe Jr.’s intention to reach for the highest office.
Nor was his father completely confident that Jack was well suited for the job. As Joe said later, his eldest son [Joe Jr.] ‘used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it. He was altogether different from Jack — more dynamic, more sociable and easy going. Jack in those days back there when he was getting out of college was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.’ Mark Dalton, a politician close to the Kennedys in 1945, remembered Jack as far from a natural. He did not seem ‘to be built for politics in the sense of being the easygoing affable person. He was extremely drawn and thin… He was always shy. He drove himself into this… It must have been a tremendous effort of will.’ Nor was he comfortable with public speaking, impressing one of his navy friends as unpolished: ‘He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on stage.’…
Despite his father’s help — or perhaps because of it — Jack continued to have great doubts about whether he was making the right decision. He could not shake the feeling that he was essentially a stand-in for Joe Jr. When he spoke with Look magazine, which published an article about his campaign, he said that he was only doing ‘the job Joe would have done.’ Privately he told friends, ‘I’m just filling Joe’s shoes. If he were alive, I’d never be in this.’ He later told a reporter, ‘If Joe had lived, I probably would have gone to law school in 1946.’ He disliked the inevitable comparisons between him and his brother, in which he seemed all too likely to come off second-best, but it seemed impossible to shake them.
Jack also felt temperamentally unsuited to an old-fashioned Boston-style campaign. False camaraderie was alien to his nature. He was a charmer but not an easygoing, affable character like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who loved mingling with people. Drinking in bars with strangers with whom he swapped stories and jokes was not a part of JFK’s disposition. ‘As far as backslapping with the politicians,’ he said, ‘I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.'”
In the 2nd chapter of the book, there is an anecdote which relates Joe Jr.’s affable swagger during his days at Harvard:
His brother’s success in campus politics also reduced any hopes Jack may have had of making a mark in that area. Under an unstated family rule of primogeniture, the eldest son had first call on a political career. And Joe Jr. left no doubt that this was already his life’s ambition. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, one of Joe’s tutors, remembered him as keenly interested in politics and public affairs and quick to cite his father as the source of his beliefs. “When I become President, I will take you up to the White House with me,” he liked to tell people. Joe’s quick rise to prominence on campus gave resonance to his boasts.
Later, Dallek characterizes the cataclysmic effect that Joe Jr.’s death in World War Two had on his father and younger brother:
Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he explained that he needed to interest himself in something new, or he would go mad, “because all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Joe’s death also confirmed his father’s worst fear that U.S. involvement in the war would cost his family dearly, deepening his antagonism to American involvements abroad for the rest of his life.
His brother’s death also evoked a terrible sense of loss in Jack…
His heroic death left Jack with unresolved feelings toward his brother and father. His competition with Joe had “defined his own identity,” he told Lem Billings. Now there was no elder brother to compete against, and Joe Jr.’s death sealed his superiority “forever in his father’s heart.” “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack said.
Given the upcoming anniversary of his death, I’ll be posting more from and about Jack Kennedy in the next few days.
“You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion of empty perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.”
“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.” – PR
Reader Kevin Barrett recently commented to dispute my last blog post about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying,
A very interesting post, but I disagree with the premise – that wars are the fault of the military.
While it is true that our military-industrial-Congressional complex promotes wars for profit’s sake, it is unfair to lay the entire blame on the military. As Tom Clancy wrote: “Every time a bullet is fired, somebody is making money.”…
The wars continue, not because of the need to protect/root-out the couple of hundred Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (a country the size of Texas), but because there is still money to be made. But this is not the military’s desire… This is the desire of those who don’t have their kids at risk in the military and who have no intention of letting taxes go up so they have to pay for the wars…
The military fails at subduing the general populace because that has never been a job the military does well. Its job is to engage and destroy the enemy (normally an organized military of a nation-state). That our military excels at…
Now, [American civilians] don’t want to pay for the military and we particularly don’t want to pay for the injured (hence, the acquiescence on sequestration for the DOD) and rationing of Veterans benefits (slow down the whole process and we won’t have to pay out so much). But we do like all the parades and halftime shows.
I wish it were as simple as “blame it on the military”, but unfortunately, it is not…
I responded to his critique (and tried to clarify my last post) below:
Baron de Rothschild once remarked, “When there’s blood in the streets, buy property.”
Kevin,
I think you you may have mistaken my point, or maybe I didn’t express it clearly enough. My stance is not “blame the military”; in fact, I suggest the exact opposite. It’d be impertinent and ridiculous for me to say “blame the military.”
What I do blame is a system — which extends from American politics to American culture — which detaches active military personnel from civil society, while also insulating citizens, to a shameful degree, from the real struggles of our men and women in uniform. This works both ways, and civilians and politicians are certainly at fault. The fact is our society does not see enough of our active duty military; and when we do, it is so often in contrived situations (like during halftime of the ballgame), where we are made to feel good ‘n’ patriotic about cheering a single veteran’s safe return home.
But our actual support for the military is abysmal. I don’t exclude myself here. We send soldiers on a string of protracted deployments, from which they eventually return to a VA that is thoroughly backlogged and utterly inefficient. And underlying these operational disgraces is a strategic program that entrenches them (and us) in conflicts that are completely open-ended. There is no victory without objectives, and our objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan are, and have been for a long time, either muddled or unattainable.
My brother-in-law is a West Point grad and Army Ranger who is currently stationed in Fort Carson, Colorado. He was awarded a Purple Heart several months ago after taking grenade shrapnel to the thigh while in Afghanistan. He’s one of the most brave, humble, and honorable guys I know. I’ve sat up long and late with him many times — and Skyped with him while he was deployed — talking about the impossibility of his unit’s task in Afghanistan. He told stories about the corruption of the local and national Afghani governments, the continued collapse of U.S. installations there, and the chaos which is filling the vacuums left by allied withdrawal.
It’s ignoble to charge men and women like him with quixotic missions — missions which we as a people neither seriously engage with nor sacrifice for, except in meaningless, vicarious gestures.
Clapping or crying at a football game doesn’t count. Thanking the uniformed soldier you see in the airport doesn’t count. Posting on a blog (like I just did) doesn’t count. Saying the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t count. Bumper stickers and flag pins don’t count.
What counts is, first, adopting sound policy so American power is used justifiably and effectively in the world; and second, making sure we have the proper care and support waiting for those brave men and women when they return home.
As I see it, we are right now failing on both those fronts.
