Scott Free: McClellan vs. the Army on the Potomac

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a book and the level of vilification from the Bush White House, neo-cons and other ultra-right wing loyalists has been swift and deafening. The gist of all the criticism from the neo-fascist propaganda mill from Ari Fleischer to the noisemakers at Fox and other ultra-right wing media is, "How dare he!" The amazing thing to me is that the response has been so swift and so rancorous the McClellan must, at long last, be telling the truth.

The criticism I've heard most frequently goes something like if Scott thought that something was wrong, why didn't he step up and say something at the time?

That question is what's known as a "gimme". McClellan saw what happened to Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame when Wilson reported honestly that there was nothing to one of the neo-fascists' rationales for the Iraq invasion. Looking at that and knowing how the Bush loyalists fetishized loyalty he had only two choices. He could resign in protest and probably be relegated to the same outer darkness that the neo-fascists are hustling him toward now or stay on and try to make money and connections that would support him should he eventually find himself in that outer darkness.

In some sense the choice he made is a quintessentially Republican one. He chose to stay on because he, even today, excuses Dubya and because staying was in his self-interest. Self-interest ahead of nation, community and law is the ultimate Republican characteristic. Thus, asking why McClellan stayed is both foolish and self-evident. For hitman, Karl Rove, to pose that question is deliciously ironic and reveals two more essential characteristics of Dubya’s neo-fascist crew and Republicans in general: they know neither shame or irony.

One of the other questions frequently asked is, “Why now?” Why did McClellan put his account of Administration machinations and perfidy out now? That too is obvious. It’s an election year. This year his book is likely to sell better than in any other year. Again, self-interest trumps everything. Still, being a little less cynical, I think that Scott McClellan, like several former denizens of this Administration like Colin Powell and George Tenet before him, knows that this crew of war criminals and civil rights violators is going to be called to account as soon as they are out of the White House and regardless of the raft of pardons that Dubya, like Poppy before him, is going to issue on his way out the door. McClellan is jockeying for position. He’s a relatively little fish. If he suddenly develops or counterfeits a moral compass the coming storm is likely to break lightly on his head.

In 1980 Cyrus Vance who’d differed with Jimmy Carter over the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission allowed the mission to fail and then had the decency to resign once his reservations had proved all too prescient. But Vance was a Democrat a bit less steeped in total self-interest than Republicans. McClellan, like his Republican cronies, talks a good game when it comes to morality, personal responsibility and shared values but doesn’t stand up until it’s too late for the nation and profitable for himself.

To be a true Republican of this time it seems to me that one must have steeped one’s self in Ayn Rand’s pernicious screeds Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The wildly misnamed Objectivism contends that nothing matters but the individual and what that individual deigns to grant to others and society as a whole. Indeed life is characterized by the struggle of the individual against society. In truth it is extreme subjectivism and a close, even incestuous, cousin of fascism. Scott McClellan hasn’t had a change of heart; rather he’s decided that his bread is buttered on a different side. Still, that he’s being more truthful today than he was while he was one of Republican minions is to be celebrated but much in the way that one thanks a match seller for turning in an arsonist he before sets another fire. While we congratulate him for his current honesty we should remember that had he found a spine in 2004 we would have been spared some of the depredations of the last three and a half years of neo-fascist rule.

Words. Words. Words. The Rhetoric: Troops

When I was a boy my mother spoke of "our boys" who'd fought in World War II or were fighting in Korea. When I was in my teens that terminology was still in common usage for the soldiers, sailors and airmen who'd been sent off on the foolish mission to subjugate Vietnam. If they weren't "our boys" they were soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines. They had some identity. Each was, at least a sailor, a Marine, a soldier. And when they came home broken in mind or body or for burial, there was an individual coffin, an individual loss. We saw those coffins. We saw the funerals, heard the buglers and the fired salutes. On television we even saw them fall.

Today we see no coffins. The horrors of war are little in evidence on the television. The buglers are on tape. The salutes go unfired. Even at their home bases the memorial services are collective rather than separate for each individual loss. And those "boys" are now simply wrapped up in the impersonal plural of "troops". I've even heard those who should know better use the plural, collective noun "troop" to refer to a single person.

Proverbially we are what we eat. I would suggest that most people think what they hear and speak as they think. Or don't think more likely.

It is in the interest of those who perpetrated this obscene, unjustified war in Iraq that we not see the consequences of their hubris and blunders. It is also in the interest of these same war criminals that we think of the human beings whose murder they abet of impersonal, faceless troops rather than individual soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines and certainly never consider them as "our boys".

Unfortunately for Dubya and his fellow neo-fascists who have perpetrated the crime that is the Iraq War, too many troops have gone to the Middle Eastern desert for too long. Too many have come home in pieces for the impersonalization to retain its initial force. As the hollowness of their rhetorical ploys has become as apparent as the open graves into which more and more are laid, Dubya's popularity has plummeted. More people than the neo-fascists thought understand that the rhetoric about "cut and run", "stay the course" and "timetables for surrender" really mean, "We don't care that your child or loved one may die or be maimed as long as we can claim to have remained strong. None of our children stand in harms way so we can safely persist in a policy that never made sense in the first place." Then they can hop into their limousines bedecked with a magnetic "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbon without any pangs over the horrid irony.

We know from countless television and movie crime dramas that murderers, particularly the psychopaths, impersonalize their victims. They refuse to name them individually. I would suggest that Dubya and his co-conspirators are murderers and entirely psychopathic but then did we really need to analyze their rhetoric to understand that?.

War and Music

And now for something completely different...

Every war has had its music. Soldiers have taken their popular tunes to war with them as long as there have been popular tunes. The American Southerners who first fired on Fort Sumter in April, 1861 and later forgot that inconvenient fact by labeling our Civil War "the War of Northern Aggression" carried with them minstrel show tunes like Dixie and The Yellow Rose of Texas. The Northerners who fought to put down the rebellion brought with them songs like Lubly Fan (which we know better as Buffalo Gals) and The Year of Jubilo. Indeed, America's national anthem derives from a popular song of 200 years ago. Its tune is that of the English drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven. Francis Scott Key substituted "the land of the free and the home of the brave" for "the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine" and thereby opened every baseball game in history.

Certainly there was martial music. One can't set out to massacre one's fellow men without a good marching song, now can one? But there's yet another sort of music, more in the popular vein, that fairly bleeds of wartime. It is the sentimental song of love and home. Though I may sound casually sarcastic as is my wont, these songs are often achingly beautiful and unquestionably moving when thought of in context.

What brings this to my mind is that as I write I am listening to a mix of news headlined by the senseless deaths in Iraq of more young Americans, sacrificed on the alter of neo-con ideology and Dubya's ego. In between news reports is a jazz program that has drawn heavily on the music of World War II. It strikes me that it is impossible to listen to a song like Sentimental Journey or Moonlight in Vermont without seeing the young men, two of whom were my father and Uncle Eddie, on the fields of Northern Europe or the islands of the Pacific. Nor is it possible to hear them without seeing the families and lovers waiting for their soldiers and sailors to make that sentimental journey home.

Perhaps the most sweetly sad of all Christmas songs is Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas written in 1943-4. Not even White Christmas captures the yearning in every syllable of Hugh Martin's lyric:

Someday soon we all will be together

If the fates allow.

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Martin's original lyrics were far more bitter and cynical, so much so that Judy Garland refused to sing them in Meet Me in St. Louis. The compromise above is still ineffably sad.

Those songs carry on a tradition from Civil War songs like Just Before the Battle, Mother and Aura Lea and include a hit on both sides of the European "Theatre" lines in both World Wars, Lili Marlene.

Vor der Kaserne, Vor dem großen Tor
Stand eine Laterne, Und steht sie noch davor
So woll'n wir uns da wieder seh'n
Bei der Laterne wollen wir steh'n
Wie einst Lili Marleen.
Wie einst Lili Marleen.

Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate
Darling I remember the way you used to wait
'Twas there that you whispered tenderly
That you loved me, You'd always be
My Lili of the lamplight
My own Lili Marlene.

The English lyrics are more like a love song that retains something of both the meaning and spirit while, in German, there is the sadness of hoping in vain caught in that refrain that more exactly translates "As once, Lili Marlene."

Romantic songs continued to appear during the war in Korea but since then we have had unreal, even surreal wars that inspired protests more than songs of longing and derived their music from the hard, urban beats of rock and roll during Vietnam and Hip-Hop and Techno during our 2 more recent oil wars.

Was there an analog for I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time from Vietnam or either Gulf War? I don't think so. I could be missing something though I doubt it.

Certainly there are lovers parted from the men and women now serving in Iraq. Certainly they pine for their lover to come home. Certainly they are in a constant state of fear and worry that the one they love may be in the way of the next explosion on the next roadside. Yet the popular songs expressing their longing and anxiety seem absent. And I wonder why.

I want to offer one possibility. Perhaps those songs are absent because neither in Vietnam nor either Gulf War are we convinced that we actually are at war. Perhaps we view the absence of loved ones as an excessively long vacation in a dangerous land.

I think that for 40 years and more we have expected that those loved ones will come home physically whole rather than dead or maimed. We have had wars in which we have been insulated from the consequences and that insulation obviates the need for the songs of longing for home or for someone's homecoming.

If we do not accept that wars have consequences for us I think that makes it easier for a group of power-mad ideologues to fantasize that they can march into a country as occupiers amid showers of flowers and the cheers of the conquered people. I don't know if I'm correct in this but, should I be, we are in a frightening time indeed. If we have disjointed war from its inevitable consequences we are more likely to go to war more often with dire results for all concerned.

I think we will be better off when we start hearing a contemporary equivalent of I'll Be Seeing You.