Marketing Mayhem

Reading Howard Zinn last night about the numbers of English males who volunteered for duty and were promptly slaughtered during World War I, I was struck by the idea that we tend to repeat the past, but, if there is any consolation, as bad as Viet Nam and Iraq and Afghanistan have been, they have been only pale reflections of what others have suffered through the marketing of the idea of "Patriotism" or the mass indoctrination of what you owe God and Country.

World War I was fought for the flimsiest of reasons--people are still trying to figure out how that one started, who drove it, and who benefited, but clearly, whatever got that one going, it was not to make the world safe, or to make it safe for democracy or for whatever other reasons were given by the English government, the German government or the French or the American governments.

As Slim Charles tells Avon Barksdale in The Wire,  "Don't matter who did what to who now. Fact is, we went to war. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie, But we got to fight. That's what war is, you know."

Slim Charles is a street hood in Baltimore, He hasn't gone to school. He's been schooled on the streets. And, as if in testimony to Paul Simon's line, "When I think back on what I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."  Which is to say, if you are living your life outside the mainstream, your mind is not distorted by all the marketing and indoctrination. 

So it is the little child who can see clearly that the emperor has no clothes. He hasn't been schooled not to see the truth.

Zinn takes us through a month by month slog through WWI with the English general making some idiotic decision to send waves of soldiers across fields as Wellington once did, only to have them mowed down by modern machine guns. So 600,000 are lost in a month. Then another 500,000. Whole armies of Englishmen are mowed down. And on the home front people are told to not think they know as much as the general who is issuing these orders.

Know your place. Don't disrespect your betters.

And here we are listening to secretaries of defense, four star generals talking about "The Mission" in Iraq and "The Mission" in Afghanistan, as if there were a real mission in either place.

What is The Mission?

To deny Al Qaeda a "Safe Haven?"  What idiot would believe you can deny a group of 19 men a safe haven? Groups so small they can live in an apartment in Germany or a hotel room in Florida, and you think you can destroy them by invading a country as big as Texas, where the people don't speak your language and they can hide in mountain caves?

So, if it's a lie, then we fight on that lie.

One of my favorite series is Band of Brothers. If The Wire is a dystopia about dysfunctional institutions, then Band of Brothers is a story about an institution which actually did work, or at least an institution which bumbled into success. Certainly, you see the American army making stupid mistakes--giving parachute troops a bag to carry their equipment which they were supposed to strap to their ankles and jump out of the plane--and popping this on them after two years of training, giving them this untested bag the night before their jump into Normandy. And the bags, containing weapons and ammo simply blew away, leaving troops landing without weapons. And the night jump leaving troops miles from their targets. But, somehow, the officers and men were trained well enough to overcome obstacles and they succeeded.

As is typical of a Stephen Spielberg production, there is a heavy lard of sentimentality which nearly destroys the story.  In the episode titled, "Why we fight," the 101st airborne stumbles onto a concentration camp. This happens just after a scene where one of the soldiers has told his comrade he doesn't fight to win a war, but to simply survive and, at least, to be able to use toilet paper again and to sleep on a bed with real sheets rather than in a foxhole. This same soldier is stunned by what they find in the concentration camp. And the moral of the story, is that's what we were fighting for, to defeat a hugely evil entity--the Third Reich.

The problem is, how can you say the why you are fighting is for something you never knew existed until after you had defeated it.

You took on faith, you believed the marketing that you were fighting on the side of God. But the other side was told and believed they were fighting you because they were on the side of God. (The Germans wore belt buckles, Gott Mitt Uns.)

So it's not why you fought. You can't invent a motivation retrospectively. You fought because you wanted to for other reasons. Because you bought into the idea of heroism, of God and Country or for the adventure, or to escape boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. But you did not fight to free the victims of Nazi Germany who were buried in concentration camps you knew nothing about.

We were hoping to find weapons of mass destruction, mass graves, something in Iraq to justify our crusade, but we did not. So why did we fight there? Because we believed the line Saddam Hussein was evil. He probably was, but no more evil than a dozen other despots. Why him?

We fight on that lie.

As for Osama Bin Laden, well, I'll accept on faith he was a murderous man--or on the possibly tampered evidence of his Internet videos in which he spewed hatred toward America. He may or may not have had much to do with 9/11, but he was apparently a cheerleader, so I'm happy he's dead.

But what lies have we been sold about him?

You have to believe there are haters when you watch the evening news and see the random bombings of trains, subways, markets. There are haters out there for us to hate, hunt down and fight. But, how can we trust the people who say they know who the villains are and how to get at them?

I haven't figure out that part yet.