A column by George Will reminded me that the American talent for courageous individualism and overwhelming violence showed early on in our ethnic cleansing of the Pokanoket Indians in 1675-76, leading to our hostile and dominant relationship with America's first natives (or, as we got used to calling them, "savages"). This led me to reread Thomas Hardy's poem "Channel Firing," written during World War I, which looks back with resignation at England's previous "great" battles.
The great novelist was a poet at heart and turned to poetry exclusively toward the end of his life. In these difficult days, when the morning paper pushes me to dump brandy in my coffee, his poems remind me that days have always been difficult, government usually obtuse, and religion often bloodthirsty. Even Hitler's Christian soldiers had "Gott mit uns" ("God with us") inscribed on their belt buckles.
In "Channel Firing," set in an English country churchyard, Hardy can hear the cannons booming across the English Channel. This is the fourth stanza:
All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.
Hardy recognized the particularity of suffering and the inevitability of cruelty on both sides when a war gets going. Evil is the misuse or perversion of power, and war diminishes us all, his poems say, in one way or another. A corollary of his observation is that the primary responsibility, for both the suffering and the brutality, belongs at the top, with those who start wars in the first place. The foot soldiers, whether at Verdun, My Lai or Haditha, get accused and sometimes convicted, but the real blame lies elsewhere and above. During any conflict, executives and congressmen stay home and cash in; they emerge from wars richer and fatter. (Mitt Romney claims his five sons are "supporting the war" by helping him get elected). During the Iraq war in particular, luxury housing has been booming, and CEO salaries have surged more robustly than those of our troops. The soldiers come from the farms, the small towns, the ghettos; undereducated, underemployed and broken, when they cash in, it's not financially.
Although the Bush administration is making the figures hard to get, Army and civilian doctors are reporting a high percentage of soldiers returning from Iraq who suffer from various psychological disorders; in contrast, the triumvirate of Bush, Cheney and (for a few more days) Rove don't seem to suffer an ounce of self-doubt: The more things break down, the more enthusiastic they become, like the Monty Python Crucifixion skit in which the three victims twitch their toes in unison and sing "Let's all look on the bright side."
I think of "Channel Firing" when our president looks soulfully at the cameras and parrots his lines about the current "surge" being "successful" and "absolutely necessary." After all that has come out since the war began, from Republican and independent sources as well as Democratic, can anyone still believe this? Allow me to sell you the Skyway Bridge.
The government hides the particularity of the war's cost in three major ways: by withholding information, by spinning what information we get and by flat-out lying. This is true from top to bottom and from small things to large. They lied about Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Daniel Pearl, and they lied about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Haditha; and they lied about torture, the ugly practice of "rendition," and about how the war began and how it's going, how much it will cost and who'll pay for it (remember, they fired their economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey for suggesting it might cost $200 billion — now outside estimates are in the trillions).
They lie about our "success" in Afghanistan, and they lie about Iran and Saudi Arabia; they lie about al-Qaida and "insurgents," and about civilian deaths and military deaths. They lied about Iraqi troop readiness and about the time needed for a "surge" to succeed, and they lie about Iraqi democracy and what it will look like if they ever get it. They lie for the sheer joy of lying because they're good at it, and it feels good, too, like a posh mud bath at a desert spa. Listening to the words spouting from Washington, I'm reminded of Hilaire Belloc's "Matilda," which begins "Matilda told such Dreadful Lies/ It made one Gasp and Stretch one's eyes." Ben Bradlee is right: We hear so many lies these days, we're becoming immune to them.
Cheney in particular complains that the press only reports the negative things. If his house were going up in flames, he'd ignore the fire and point out that the garage is fine. A dust squall of falsehoods whirls around this disaster like a desert simoom, and it will be decades before it clears. Our rose-colored pronouncements about Iraq's "democratic" progress, historical and farcical at once, sound more and more like Saddam Hussein's propaganda during the early part of the war or like the late General Westmoreland's cheery chirpings in Vietnam as we daily upped the body count while capturing the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese still standing.
In Hardy's poem, the dead in the church cemetery are wondering if the world will "ever saner be." He writes in the penultimate stanza:
And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbor Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."
Well, I'm with Parson Thirdly. Where's that brandy?
Peter Meinke's collection of stories, Unheard Music, was recently published by Jefferson Press; his latest collection of poems is The Contracted World.
This article appears in Aug 22-28, 2007.