The Culture War

So, as I said in my first post, sometimes I'll write about things not directly related to current events. This is one of those times. I'm not claiming to be expounding the great truths in the proceeding paragraphs. Just putting some thoughts onto this convenient, digital paper.

I just got finished reading an excellent book by the great historian Barbara Tuchman called The March of Folly. The general theme of it is that one of the great constants in human life is folly, the making of decisions contrary to one's self-interest despite evidence showing the foolishness of those decisions. Examples of folly in government are rife throughout mythology and history: the Trojans and their acceptance of the fatal Horse; the Renaissance popes and their willful ignorance of the coming Reformation; the British and their ham-fisted response to the restless American colonies; the American government and the grave it dug for itself in Vietnam. In the end, she prescribes no solution for this deep-seated tendency in human behavior, except to be prepared for its inevitable occurrence.

It was a minor, well-known point made in the final section on Vietnam that got my gears turning: the draft was biased against the less-privileged. Tuchman wrote, "Everyone who could took advantage of the draft extension allowed during the pursuit of higher education, while the less advantaged classes entered uniform. The inequitable draft, first sin of the Vietnam war on the home front, and intended to reduce cause for disaffection in the social sector, dug a cleavage in American society in addition to the cleavage in opinion."

Tuchman wrote those words in 1983. While she was referring to a row plowed at the end of the 1960s, I think that like a stretch of land that has borne the same rows of tobacco for season upon season, the furrows lasted in American society long after the breaking of the soil ceased. The rich continued their education, and enjoyed a survival rate that one might expect from the treacherous halls of the ivory tower. The poor got to go see how their odds were in a war zone. Some of the poor got to come back intact, and they were (in some cases literally) spit upon. Needless to say, some degree of bitterness ensued.

Twenty to thirty years later, the resentment had not yet abated, and had joined forces with a litany of other angers (anger at the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, anger at the widening income gap, anger at the North for Reconstruction) to become fodder for the Republican party to exploit with a false, cynical populism ginned up against the effete, free-trading, welfare-stating, South-hating, Volvo-driving, latte-sipping hippy liberal Democrats. John Kerry, a legitimate war hero (among many), is shown windsurfing and is bashed by other Vietnam Veterans who question everything he did in the war. Max Cleland, a triple amputee and Bronze and Silver Star recipient, gets defeated by a Republican who got an educational deferment from the war based on the idea that Cleland's identity as a Democrat means he must be unpatriotic and soft on terrorists. The Republicans' ability to keep the trenches of resentment clear of obstacles (like, say, common sense) is still impressive, and our politics remain bitterly divisive.

As these thoughts were occurring to me (in a much less organized manner, if that's imaginable), my mind strayed to the great national efforts that preceded Vietnam, in Korea and of course, World War Two. What was different then? Well, many returning veterans from Korea found that as the years past, they quickly integrated back into society and their struggle became known as the "forgotten war." But it was also a smaller war, less present in the mind and on the television screens of the public than Vietnam.

The Second World War, on the other hand, was an enormous undertaking of our society, unlike anything that came before it or has come since. Virtually everybody served, at home or abroad. Joseph Kennedy and Prescott Bush sent their sons off to war, and so did the nameless butchers and bakers on the other side of the tracks. Every man risked his life as much as the other, and the bombs and bullets did their jobs without prejudice. The broadest possible slice of (male) American society saw the world, and those that came home did so with a different outlook on foreign and domestic affairs. What resulted was a politics of consensus, a meadow unbroken until Ms. Tuchman's plows of folly arrived to unearth the political climate we all know and loathe.

So there you have it, a sort of mental open thread that will undoubtedly reprise itself as I keep writing this thing. You might disagree with me now, and I might disagree with myself later. But I hope it's at least been thought-provoking.