Cold War, Hot War, This War, That War

In 1969, President Richard Nixon sat in front of the American people and gave us his exit strategy from Southeast Asia. "Johnson's war" is what he called the Vietnam conflict. He had been in office less than a year, and opposition to the war was a national issue, to say the least. The war, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and violent police reaction to protests during the Democratic Convention in Chicago the previous year spurred an entire generation to march on campuses and streets all over the country. Three Days of Peace & Music had just happened in Woodstock, NY where more than one hundred thousand people and the top musical acts of the day railed against Nixon and the war. Nixon called those folks "the vocal minority," and that November evening in 1969 he asked "the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" for his support.

He talked about how we got into the war, from President Eisenhower, to Kennedy to Johnson's escalation "to prevent a Communist takeover."

I heard that speech again recently, and it sounded disquietingly familiar. He said he had a plan that would bring our troops home, "a plan which would end the war and serve the peace." Nixon had first floated his idea in a visit to Guam earlier that year, and now, on television, the American people heard the details of what was already being called the "Nixon Doctrine". There was also another name for Nixon's new policy when applied to Vietnam - "Vietnamization."

In his own words, Nixon's new primary objective in Vietnam was "to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume full responsibility for the security in South Vietnam."

"Through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization," he said, "we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule … as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom."

In June 2005, George W. Bush stood in front of an oddly silent group of soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C. and explained to an increasingly discontented American public his way of getting American troops home from Iraq. Cindy Sheehan was starting to get some press, and there was a growing sentiment of distrust of W and an administration drunk on its own hubris.

He reiterated what has already been called the "Bush Doctirne" - "…as freedom takes root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty as well." Then we'll all feel safer. "Our strategy to defend ourselves and spread freedom is working," he says.

He talked about why we went to war, invoking September 11, terrorism and "murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent."

In that speech, Bush said this: "The best way to complete the mission is to help Iraqis build a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself. We are building up Iraqi Security Forces as quickly as possible, so they can assume the lead in defeating the terrorists and insurgents. A major part of our mission is to train them so they can do the fighting and our troops can come home."

For those who say we cannot compare the war in Iraq with the war in Vietnam, these statements seem to confirm the desire of our administration to complete the Vietnamization of Iraq. Are they thinking we'll get it right this time, that "Iraqization" will work? Nixon thought his Vietnamization plan would get our troops home sooner.

Nixon in 1969: "As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater."
Bush in 2005: "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

Nixon said Vietnamization would work because the South Vietnamese were getting stronger.

Nixon in1969: "The South Vietnamese have continued to gain in strength."
Bush in 2005: "We have made gains in both the number and quality of those [Iraqi Security] forces."

Nixon said Vietnamization was the new way for America to assume the responsibility of spreading freedom.

Nixon in 1969: "The wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership."
Bush in 2005: "We know that this great ideal of human freedom is entrusted to us in a special way - and that the ideal of liberty is worth defending."

And finally, both insisted Vietnamization was the key to peace for future generations.

Bush in 2005: "We are…laying the foundation of peace for our children and grandchildren."
And Mr. Nixon: "I want it to end in a way which will increase the chance that [the soldiers'] younger brothers and their sons will not have to fight in some future Vietnam some place in the world."

America Ex Nihilo: America out of Nothing

The Old Testament speaks of the unmanifested universe as a void, an unbounded sea of emptiness, swirling with an as yet undefined chaos, in the moments before Biblical creation. More like Arthur Clarke’s Jovian monolith than the blank-slated p’u of Taoism, both the Taoist blankness and the Biblical void are nonetheless similar in this respect: both principals refer to the being of nothingness before the creation of something begins.

In my understanding of the Taoist principal, the blank slate is the goal, the place you want to go so you can have a no-place from which to begin, kind of like showing up at a train station and not being nonplussed when you find yourself boarding a plane. In that way, all action stands independently, the result of commitment to and focus on that action.

Biblical Creation, on the other hand, is about an (arguably) logical progression from nothing to one thing that begets two things that beget four things, and on and on, right on through today to Judgement Day and Armageddon.

In America, at least, this Judeo-Christian belief lends hope and faith in tomorrow, that something new will happen, which will cause something else new to happen. Most of us believe that what we do has consequences, that we could take action and cause something wonderful and extraordinary to happen in the next moment that may not have been possible before.

Yet hiding from our perception of growth and replenishment is a singular truth - that regardless of how we live or are guided in our earthly lives, the indisputable destiny is the same: from the moment we are born, we are moving to decay and death, and so to a physical nothingness. So too the Earth, having been brought into existence, cannot be exempt from suffering its own decline and eventual destruction. It has been dying since “Let there be light,” for something cannot die until it first lives; it cannot be lost until it is had.

Nothing doesn’t always beget something. Sometimes, nothing begets nothing. But something always eventually becomes nothing. We are all, always, headed to nothingness.

America has been dying for 229 years, ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self evident…” because although there would be no United States without the established British colonies, this country would not have been possible unless the Founding Fathers were willing to accept a nation without King George’s rule.

They had to imagine an entity unruled in order to come up with a new country. “These truths,” wrote Jefferson. New truths. Our truths. Not George’s. That’s all great, but here’s the catch – now that we have a nation in which everyone is entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” we have a country where the precious can be lost.

Perhaps Jefferson was empowered to write those words because we have evolved into a culture where we are willing to risk the most precious, even though we know that eventually it too will be gone. Perhaps he knew, even as his quill scratched the words on the page, that even in the best of nations his brand of populist idealism would eventually die.

But at the time, to Jefferson and our Founding Fathers, the “truths” were the light of creation. What are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but plants, animals and man, Eden and the joys of the feast, the pleasures of dreaming, the freedom to think and to act? All these were given to us to become a spectacular nation, and from the moment of their giving, our nation has been growing… and dying.

September 11, 2001 was a day that called to us to come from nothing. For “W” it was a day that gave him his special purpose. It is said that is the moment George W. Bush became president, and perhaps he took those infamous “My Pet Goat” moments to steel himself to perform his duties as he saw them.

As Brent Scowcroft was quoted as saying recently, “For the president… there was something unique, if not divine, about a catastrophe like 9/11 happening when he was president. That somehow that was meant to be, and his mission was to deal with the war on terrorism.”

So it is not surprising that when he woke from his “Pet Goat” reverie that morning, he saw the carrot of moral righteousness dangling in front of him and could not resist the temptation to bite it. From that day, through last year’s election and today, he will not let go, led by it like a fish on a line.

Moral righteousness is a sword too heavy for the hand of the humble, and too easily wielded by the hand of the indignant. Had Bush taken those moments in the kindergarten classroom and said to himself, “I have been humbled. America has been humbled,” perhaps he would have seen that “protecting and defending the Constitution” could be accomplished better by guaranteeing our freedom with the law, rather than curtailing it.

Moses fasted for forty days before receiving the Law on Sinai. Jesus humbly gave his spirit to God. Bush did not re-create himself, though, forgetting what it took to be “born-again”. His first reaction was sadly and unabashedly predictable. He let the temptations of leadership mislead him (supported in no small part by a Lucifer in the Justice Department and a lemming-like Congress).

He attacked both those who had done us harm and us. He took our power and replaced it with his own, and we did nothing. Except for a few Americans whose stories were buried by a press that was as cowardly as those who spoke out were brave, we failed. We failed to confront. We failed to protest. We failed as a nation to vote what the latest polls, at least, acknowledge as truth – we were all lied to.

We allowed Bush to continue, hoping with uncertainty that he would eventually see he must humble himself. We know he wants to, so why won’t he? When he was addicted to drugs, he humbled himself and was “born-again.”

Now, new demons control him. His heart has been hardened, and unless we are able to part the sea of lies, deceptions and secrecy with open, honest and fair words and actions, coming not from wounded hearts but from hearts of bottomless joy, we will all drown with him.

Cooperation and Consensus

I drove past a sign yesterday outside a middle school in my suburban Atlanta neighborhood. “The Word For This Week,” it informed me, is “COOPERATION.” Good word. Important word. I saw myself at twelve putting pencil to paper, scratching out what for me would have certainly been boilerplate drivel that I had written so much of in the first seven or eight years of my formally-delivered-casually-received education. The titles would be simple, like What Honesty Means to Me or Why Friends are Important. I wrote those early essays as if I were Dudley Do-right with a pen: self-righteous and saccharinely virtuous. Strictly Sally, Dick and Jane stuff.

I figured there would be similar titles written this week by the kids at the local middle school. There’s little Brandon, tongue hugging his upper lip, as he comes up with his not-too-original What Cooperation Means to Me. He’s twelve, an idealist, with all so perfect notions of what cooperation is and why it’s important. Maybe he’s going to talk about cooperation in his scout troop or his football team. Kid stuff.

Like Brandon, I was ready to deliver an upbeat message about cooperation, from the adult perspective of course, which meant it was not going to be kid stuff. Right here in the open notebook by my left elbow I have a couple of paragraphs about consensus and cooperation and community. Pffft! It’s crap! Total naivete.

It helps to think positive, but I cannot shut out the inevitability of its absence in a divided America and a dangerous world. That makes it even more important, right? But when a judge’s family is killed by a hate group** in Chicago because they think she’s Jewish (which she is not, which doesn’t matter) and anti-gay marriage laws passed in all the states they were on the ballot last year, it’s hard to get my head around the notion of communities being willing to work together in some kind of cooperation.

The remains of attempts at commonality, too often manifested through fist, stick and sword, rot and turn to dust below our feet, held in place by the gravity of dogma, sadly forgotten through time. Dogma, it seems, not only informs us of who we are, but also blinds us from what we can be. As long as people feel chained to belief systems, how can there be cooperation?

Maybe the problem is that I see cooperation as being the fruit of consensus, where people come together and agree to a common goal. And there it is: a common goal. Two boxers in the ring have a mutual understanding that they will likely beat each other bloody and one of them will win, but their goals are mutually exclusive. They each want to win. There can be no consensus with divergent goals, but there can be consent to cooperate with the process.

Even the two great Western religions –Judaism and Christianity - have a basis for cooperation. As the great twentieth-century scholar, AJ Heschel , said in a collection of essays edited by his daughter Susannah (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1996):

“The purpose of religious communication among human beings of different commitments is mutual enrichment and enhancement of respect and appreciation…
“There is an unfortunate history of Christian-Jewish disputations…which eventually degenerated into enmity…
“We honestly and profoundly disagree in matters of creed and dogma. Indeed, there is a deep chasm between Christians and Jews concerning, e.g., the divinity and messiahship of Jesus. But across the chasm we can extend our hand to one another.
“Religion is a means, not an end... To equate religion and God is idolatry.”

In the same way, it can be said that politics is “a means, not an end,” for just as religion is the personal pathway to God, personal politics is the pathway to what we all want. We can disagree with each other on political and social principals, but ultimately, we have the same goals: good government, fair government, and a better America.

So what are the pathways to some of our common goals? When we go into the voting booth, we cooperate with the process, consent to having our choices counted. For me, the process is not a search for the status quo, the lowest common denominator, but a reach toward the highest common good, the one who I think is likely to embody the possibility of creating the best society. That is my commitment.

Another pathway is right outside your front door. I’d like to think that we all are likely to choose what is best for our children, our neighbors, ourselves. I’d like to think that is a basis for cooperation. That’s why instead of waiting for our government representatives to reach across the proverbial aisle, we can start by reaching across the street. Be active. Create consensus. Maybe next election, your block can vote as a block.

So I guess that’s what cooperation looks like when you’re an adult. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.

** as it turns out, someone not associated with Matt Hale committed this crime, but the point is the same. Hale, btw, got a pretty hefty sentence for threatening the judge.

What's My Voice Worth?

They put it in letters to my representatives, in petitions to government agencies, and in surveys about my government. They include it with your restaurant check, on your Home Depot receipt, and I just got one from the guy who comes out periodically to service my furnace. We may never know who the “they” are, but the “it” is a place, block or card for my personal comments about the service that the interested agencies provide.

There may be some practical use for such feedback in the private sector. If I get a lazy waitron, I want to know that he or she will be given a talking to by the restaurant manager. If I walk through a pile of debris in a Home Depot aisle, I want to make sure someone even clumsier than I doesn’t actually hurt themselves under similar circumstances. And if the guy who comes to check my HVAC is rude (which he isn’t, by the way), I want a course of action.

But what about those petitions, letters and surveys, both online and direct mail, that I get from groups like NARAL, MoveOn.org and the DNC? Many of those have a section that begs to be typed in, like adding your own comments to a form letter to a congressman, or asking you what you think the Democrats did wrong last year that needs improving. I don’t know about you, but it’s harder for me to leave those solicitations for comment blank than it is to ignore the insecurities of a restaurant staff.

So I want to know why I am compelled to comment to someone who doesn’t provide a service with tangible rewards? Why, when I recently received the 2005 Survey from the Democratic National Committee, did I find it important to fill in their “ideas” box? Why? For the same reason I write this column - I want to know my voice will be heard.

But it’s frustrating. It’s so much unlike the private sector because I am held captive by my politics. There may be many entrances to the progressive mansion, but there’s still only one place I can go. It is as if my town only had a Wal-Mart and a K-mart, and I was forced to be loyal to the latter, despite its crappy selection, because I disliked the policies of the former.

So how can we be certain that our comments will yield results? It could easily be very much like the suggestion box at the office. Maybe someone reads it, and if they like it they may implement it; or, like in some offices, the suggestion box is a placebo that’s contents get dumped with the evening trash. I guess we’ll never know, but the great thing is, we get a chance to say them, and maybe, just maybe, someone will listen.