INCHOATE THOUGHTS
Hi,
Hi,
Lots of us use T-shirts to show our interests, advertise our
allegiances, or recall past experiences. Standing in line to board one of the
vessels during the Tall Ships event in Boston Harbor, I found myself not far
behind a middle-aged guy who seemed really keen to identify with the U.S.
Marines. I have a great deal of respect for the U.S. Marine Corps, and had I
served with it I may well have been tempted to make the fact known with a car
window sticker, pennant, or pin. This guy was wearing khaki shorts, a service
belt, and a desert camouflage cap on his close-cropped head. He was clearly
striving to identify. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. His T-shirt,
though, crossed a line. Around a caricature of a grimacing bulldog wearing a
military bucket hat were the words: “UNITED STATES MARINES UNLEASHED”
(presumably alluding to the grotesque bulldog), and “SINKING OUR TEETH INTO THE
MIDDLE EAST.”
The creator of this sentiment has every right to express it on
such a garment, and the wearer has every right to express himself by putting it
on his back. It seems to me, though, to exemplify much that is seriously wrong
with the attitudes of at least some—too many—of my fellow Americans towards the
rest of the world. In fact, the sight of it made me feel sick, angry, and
ashamed. Small wonder we are hated around the world.
Offensive braggadocio has been a characteristic of
self-justifying, fearful, fighting people throughout human history, but the
rest of us don’t have to let it go wholly unchallenged. This sentiment seems to
convey more than personal swagger. In widespread popular mythology, the USA is
a reluctant combatant, invariably drawn into war against its communal instincts
and wishes. We find this articulated by, among others, the prominent British
military historian John Keegan who, in Warpaths:
Travels of a Military Historian (1995)—published in the USA as Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America,
(1996)—suggests that war has always been “repugnant to the people of the United
States,” and that Americans have always viewed war as a “task,” as “work,” but
“not their favoured form of work,” having always engaged in it reluctantly. But
do bulldogs bite more in sorrow than in anger?
Robert Kagan, in Dangerous
Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006) argues the exact opposite of Keegan’s
thesis. The USA was conceived in warfare, expanded by means of warfare that
today would be termed genocidal, and seized huge tracts of the continent—Texas,
the South-West, California, Puerto Rico—through unremitting, aggressive
violence towards other colonizing polities. Now the violent reach of the USA is
global—as the invasion of Iraq demonstrated— with little to hold her in check.
The overweening confidence that such power and its exercise
prompts, expressed in contempt for others and for their ways of living, has
compromised our moral standing and diminished our influence throughout the
world. We would do well to heed the strictures of John Quincy Adams when as U.S.
Secretary of State he addressed the U.S. House of Representatives on the 4th
July, 1821. He warned against imposing American values elsewhere in the world rather
than supporting their voluntary adoption. In such cases “the fundamental maxims
of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force...” We have already
taken that road, a road that leads to contempt for the rule of law, arbitrary
imprisonment, and torture, to say nothing of the deaths of many thousands in
the Middle East (into which we have sunk our teeth), and elsewhere. It’s time
to stop biting—and wearing disgusting T-shirts.
Ever,
Ivan
Ever,