1 Boring Old Man

I’ve been avoiding watching Ken Burns The War, letting it take up space on our DVR. Tonight, I watched the first installment. I think I figured out why I was avoiding it. When it got to Pearl Harbor, and F.D.R.’s response, rallying the country, all I could think about was what happened after 9/11, and I felt both enraged and ashamed. On 9/11, we rose up in arms. We covered our cars with patriotic stickers. Young men and women joined the army. And we were lead on a wild goose chase so misdirected and so wrong that it has obscured 9/11 itself and where it should have lead us. Whatever the politics were in 1941; whatever the partisan divide in the country limping out of the Depression; whatever was going on in the Halls of Congress; the net vector was directed at the real problem and the result is a proud part of our heritage. What happened 60 years later after 9/11 was the opposite. The vector pointed away from the problem, fueled by an unacknowledged ideology and misguided set of motives that have shamed us all.

I think I’ve avoided The War because it promised to bring something into even greater focus that I already feel much more than I want to feel. I want our dead soldiers to have died for a just cause. I want our live soldiers to look back on their contribution like the people Ken Burns interviews in his documentary. And I wish to have had leaders who rose to the challenge of 9/11 with integrity and wisdom. We’ll never have any of those things. We’ll never have the chance to relive these last seven years, five of which we’ve spent in a superfluous and damaging war. The Ken Burns of the future will never make this kind of documentary about the invasion of Iraq. The best we can hope for is a future series that documents our recovery from a shameful mistake – about how we successfully learned to overcome our encounter with an Administration that betrayed our Constitution and the American people in a time of crisis. Unfortunately, the subject matter of that future documentary is not yet guaranteed.

Rush Limbaugh, who by the way has gone insane [see his web site, which looks like the loonie tabloids with two headed aliens] says, "The Dems hope we lose the war." What he’s saying is, of course, his usual irresponsible distortion of the facts. But his point is based on some concept called "winning." In the war he’s talking about, the Second Gulf War, there is no winning or losing for the U.S. There is only fighting. There is never "winning" in an unjust war. But in this case, there’s a special kind of losing for the U.S. We’ve lost the confidence that we can rally our resources behind our leaders in times of peril and come out on top – the legacy of The War. We rallyed this time, and the Administration used it to take us down a garden path. We shouldn’t have followed them, and most of us now know it. The damage of that lesson will weigh heavily on our future. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have destroyed our confidence in our own government in a way unprecedented in our history, even beyond the Nixon/Watergate debacle. And their duplicity in the lead-up to the war, their renunciation of the Geneva Conventions, their secret prisons, their torture of prisoners, their unwarranted domestic spying, have deeply tarnished our image and self-concept.