Running Around in Circles

Chris Hedges has a provocative new piece up over at Truthdig entitled "Liberals are Useless". In it he argues that, well, liberals are useless:

They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

Yikes! While I disagree with labeling all liberals as "useless" Hedges does make some very good and bold points in his article. There are often some very troubling perceptions that are held by the public when it comes to Democratic candidates for office. President Obama is only the most recent example of a candidate who got a large percentage of liberal support and who has not turned out to be all that he was cracked up to be. I agree with Hedges when he says: "So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are." People bought into the brand that the Democrats tried to sell, even despite the signs that Obama was not the progressive that he was being made out to be. Now, here we find ourselves with the country operating in the same old fashion, escalating war, bailing out Wall Street, and expanding executive state secrets powers beyond what the Bush Administration tried to do.

Liberals and Progressives as a whole need a lot of help in holding Obama's feet to the fire. The anti-war movement has gone dormant and the face of opposition to the current Administration is defined by groups of people who think that Obama is a communist and support politicians like Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin. Talk about an uphill battle.

BlueTexan over at Firedoglake had a different take on Hedges' article:

The notion that voting for Ralph Nader or an even more ridiculous figure like Cynthia McKinney is an effective strategy to move the country in a more progressive direction was thoroughly discredited by the 2000 election.

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Does Hedges really believe the country would look no different today if the Supreme Court hadn’t appointed Bush in 2000? Because I think he’s wrong.

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Just don’t tell me that a vote for Nader in ‘08, which was a vote for Palin, was the way to get a more progressive country.

Let's forget for a moment that Blue Texan skipped over much of what Hedges said in his article. The 2000 election, which Blue Texan claims would have put this country on a different path, was conceded to by the Democrats. Al Gore, who won the popular vote, did not stand up and fight for a fair recount of the votes despite encouragement from some of the more progressive members of his party. The fact that the election was so close was not an indication of how badly Ralph Nader screwed up the Democrat's chances, but an indication of how the Democrats did not resonate strong enough with the people.

Have we learned nothing? While there are minor improvements from what Gore was proposing over Bush and to what Obama was proposing over McCain, we still end up with the same government that is closely aligned with corporate interests, that wages brutal war, and defends the status quo. Blue Texan says that a vote for Nader in '08 was a vote for Palin. Is it really necessary to explain that in a Democracy citizens should vote not for the "least worst" but for the candidate that they feel is the best in the race? This is the same argument that was advanced in 2000 and if progressives are going to continue to line up behind Democrats then this is going to be a steep uphill battle.

Our (lack of) Collective Memory

Columnist Chris Hedges has an interesting piece that is posted over at Truthdig.com today on the topic of how society collectively thinks (or doesn't think) about war. Here is a clip:

War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.

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A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble, heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind. It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to wallow in self-exaltation.

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The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence—the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of death.

These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I think Hedges makes some very interesting points about collective amnesia. The late folk musician Utah Phillips has a quote that always sticks in my mind where he states that the most radical idea in America is a long-term memory. I think that there is a lot of insight in that quote and this article by Hedges speaks to one reason why the collective memory of this country has the ability to not only forget historical lessons, but create mythical memories of more complex events.

The brutality of war is often more understated than it is represented accurately. Take a look at the recent example of the war on Iraq in 2003 to see a prime example of this. Newscasters focus on the "awesome" technological advancements of warfare all while sanitizing images of bloodied children and refusing to air the images of coffins returning back to the United States. While this strategy may be easier on the eyes and conscious of the American public, it does not represent reality.

Just as the news coverage of war often does not take into account essential elements that would paint a more realistic picture, war memorials are guilty of the same. They help to sanitize and perpetuate myths about soldiers and about the very nature conflicts that are far too complicated to capture in an inscription. While war memorials may help us collectively feel better both about the actual conflicts as well as the sacrifice of soldiers, they do not help to portray a realistic account of said conflicts. Myths then are perpetuated and society ends up with a much different recollection of the events than actually happened at the time.