Let's Disconnect These Cables, Overturn These Tables
by Christopher Cooper
There are many things about which I know very little.
Possibly I have not been proactive or forceful in conveying this over the course of my last few hundred columns. That's the nature of these exercises; you pay your fifty cents expecting insight, not confession. Readers (editors hope) wish to learn something, or at least to be exposed to a different way of looking at something they are familiar with. And, too, it's my nature; I'd rather be thought knowledgable than ignorant. So I haven't admitted that, despite their widespread popularity as the livestock of the moment, I'm still uncertain as to the differences between llamas and alpacas (please, no mail). And daytime TV? Nothing but uninformed opinion. Is “The Price Is Right” still popular?
So it goes. And mostly I earn my column inches by bending the same light that shines on the normal people through the oddly ground lenses of my own experience, displaying my refracted opinions as a kind of alternate scene from what they teach your kids in school.
A man apologized to me last weekend for not serving me quickly when I visited his workplace. I'd seen him engaged with a couple of other customers and I am far beyond the years of my life when waiting a few minutes for a blue collar employee to put down his welding torch or climb off the tractor would annoy me. (Rotting for forty-five minutes in a doctor's waiting room with a sick kid after the damned M.D.'s receptionist specified the hour and minute of service is an issue we'll perhaps explore another time.)
“I am not aggrieved by your sloth,” I said. “I saw you bullshitting with those guys and figured you needed to complete your presentation.” “We were solving the problems of the world,” he said. “So far we've worked our way up to the Alna line.” “Stay out of there!” I advised. “We'll do fine as long as we're ignored.”
But I've been thinking about our few minutes together. It developed that he was a regular consumer of my unconventional, unlovely, undercompensated essays. Further, he found common cause with me on several issues. This has not been the usual experience for me in life—I rather expect to find my opinions and advice greeted with skepticism or laughter or revulsion.
But there is a clean, crisp breeze beginning to stir the stagnant, foetid air in our post-9/11, perpetual-war, love-the-rich, eat-the-innocent, pass-the-astrology-charts-please culture. They're resurrecting Darwin in Dover Pennsylvania. Congressmen and cabinet members come under indictment daily. One can stand on any street corner today and say “Bush is an idiot; Iraq was a mistake; Dick Cheney eats babies for breakfast!” and incur no argument. The times, however belatedly and slowly, may be ever so slightly a-changing. I am emboldened to say it as I see it. I wish to advise the generals.
Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha knows much more about war than I do, he having fought and been wounded in Vietnam while I lay about the bars and libraries in Albany, accumulating the spotty education that has enabled me to hang drywall, excavate shallow trenches in soft ground, and write rambling essays of uncertain point and delayed termination. Three weeks ago he made a speech in the House of Representatives in which he forcefully recommended our complete withdrawal from Iraq.
The warmongering outfit of draft dodgers and deserters currently abusing our nation jumped all over Representative Murtha, and he said he appreciated the criticism from Dick Cheney of the five deferments. You know the arguments: Saddam was bad. Terrorists hate America. They hate freedom. If we don't fight 'em there, we'll have to fight 'em in Iowa and Arkansas. It'll be WMDs from Bangor to Boise, and Old Glory stomped into the mud by Mad Muslims. Praise God, Drill for oil, Cut taxes, Vote Republican (or at least cast your vote for a Democrat at a machine maintained by a Republican technician.)
Well, what did you expect? Murtha is a Democrat. A peacenik, a coward. Ah, but this isn't 1968. Murtha is no Eugene McCarthy. Today's Democrats are a sorry lot of enablers, willing to vote for anything previously established as popular, terrified of being called liberals, but not apparently mostly bothered by being seen as whores or fools. Just keep the pork flowing to the home district.
So up steps Jack Murtha and he says he talks to gene rals and shot-up soldiers and he goes to Iraq and pokes around and the fighting men tell him this is a bad business. In the Pentagon and on the battlefield senior military officers tell Murtha they don't think America is winning either the war or the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. The longer we're there, they say, the more resentment we cause, the more recruits we send to the bomb factories. They tell their friend the old war hero this, he says, then they go to the official briefings and they stand beside Rummy or behind W and they keep their creases straight and their eyes straight ahead and their thoughts to themselves.
It's fear for the career, you see. You step out of line in this administration and you're looking for a job. So here's where we get to the part I know something about. Pay attention, generals.
First, let me say your fear is justified. You probably wouldn't be dismissed outright, but you'd be demoted or transferred or reassigned or cut out of the loop. You'd become so marginalized and miserable you'd quit, or they'd engineer an incident whereby your paperwork was inadequate or your decisions suspect and you'd be lucky to finish your career dispensing louse lotion and prophylactics to trainees leaving Fort Bragg on a weekend pass.
OK. So what? Ever work for a concrete company? The boss'es nephew leaves out a couple form ties and a wall buckles a few inches and they blame it on you and you're denied unemployment because you were terminated for poor attitude. You lose your job; you get a new one. Maybe it won't have the same benefits or the illusion of job security, but your conscience will ease and your dignity revive.
Is your pension in jeopardy if you speak the truth? I'm sure it would be a great comfort to know you could retire at half pay and shop the PX in your golden years. But you know those boys and girls (or parts thereof) you've sent stateside in the holds of so many cargo planes? (Did their pilots dip their wings to the CIA jets hauling our detainees to Morocco or Uzbekistan for some see-no-evil, hear-no-evil Cheney-approved, Rumsfeld-authorized torture as they passed each other over the dark Atlantic?) Have these honored dead died in vain? You know they have, Congressman Murtha knows they have, I know they have, and pretty much everybody I meet at the dump or the feed store does, even if they didn't think so six months or a year ago.
The time has come today, generals. It's true that any one of you, speaking up, would be pounded down. But they wouldn't torture you or kill you. They wouldn't quite dare, although I dare say Rumsfeld and Cheney would consider it. And you guys must talk among yourselves. You're embarrassed to have a playboy mamma's boy fortunate son as your Commander-In-Chief. You're sickened by the lies, appalled at the commonplace torture. You know better than any of us how many civilians we've burned to death.
So get together on this. Two or three Pentagon big guns (so to speak) acting together, or any pair of field commanders speaking with one voice, could do more good with less effort and at less cost than thousands of editorial writers, essayists, college professors, petitioners, or Quaker peace activists inhabiting windy street corners with candles and earnest literature.
I know it isn't your job. But Congress is inadequate or unwilling or bought off or corrupted or too busy taking bribes or managing their “blind” trusts to personal advantage. And I know it goes against what you've been taught, what you've always believed. But gentlemen, your C-in-C is retarded or insane or (mundane, yes, and sad, no doubt, but true) just garden-variety stupid and lazy. And he's letting Rumsfeld (arrogant and crazy) and Cheney (see baby-eater, above) have their fun (yes, they really do seem to like war, don't they?) at the expense of the men and women you're sending out to die two or three or ten each day.
You've never stood up and stood out. It's not the army way. Chain of command, orders, respect for officers, the code, Semper Fidelis, honoring the uniform, respecting the office, even a good dose of “My country right or wrong”, when you get right down to it. And Saddam was bad. Nobody doubts it. But you've seen the pictures the Pentagon won't release. You know how bad we've become. And you can start to set it right.
Look, it's never easy. I watch citizens struggle to rise at our town meetings to say what they believe when no one else believes it, to try to turn the whole meeting in a better direction by the force of an argument, the strength of an idea, the rightness of their moment in this space, now, today, whatever the scorn or embarrassment or cost. I have seen men put away their tools and leave a job because they could not any longer tolerate the direction this boss was taking this job. I have seen this in February, with jobs scarce and bills to pay.
Two years ago columns such as this brought angry rebuttal letters. Now, with the country waking as if from a drug-induced dream, they elicit mostly notes of agreement and encouragement. Still, I'm ever aware that the next such one may well be the one too many, when editor or publisher or readers dismiss me in favor of some less caustic commentator. And I wouldn't suggest that when I'm fired from this newspaper I'll be forfeiting whatever benefits you feel would be risked by speaking your own truth to that dark corrupted power.
But I do know something about some things, and I'll tell you that nothing (nothing, not any thing you've ever done or will ever do) feels as good as honoring your conscience and putting yourself in the way of whatever harm may await by proclaiming the clear and inescapable truth when circumstance has put you in the position where America's military leaders find themselves trapped today.
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