It’s holiday-time and I’ve been pondering the true meaning of Christmas songs like “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” which I sometimes think was a really noble effort to raise money for starving people in Ethiopia; the video still moves me despite the outfits and haircuts. At other times, I think “there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas” is the most ethnocentric line ever written. First, there will be snow in parts of Africa and second, snow isn’t what Christmas is about: it’s what it’s about to us.
Then there’s the #MeToo questioning of the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” because it can conjure yucky Bill Cosby associations: “Say, what’s in this drink?” I personally find the song the perfect encapsulation of life as a twenty-something urbanite on a December Saturday night, cold outside, warm inside, a little buzz on, twinkling lights, and a beautiful date. It is what it is. But the song itself has been overplayed and way over-covered. The Nora Jones/Willie Nelson version was the jumping the shark moment for me, and that was ten years ago.
But the Christmas song that still gives me chills and a sense of sparkling wonder is John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Lennon's voice, those suspended opening chords, the Ono-led sing-along: what a magical, mysterious song. But the lyrics are even more relevant today, as our country wages roughly seven wars that almost no one talks about, than they were during Vietnam-weary 1971. Many of our children don’t realize that our country is actually at war, so successfully have we compartmentalized our society so the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. The kids sing along to “A very merry Christmas, and a happy new year,” but not to “War is over, if you want it.”
I hate to admit it, but I’m beginning to think the ending of the draft 46 years ago was a huge mistake because it meant that not all Americans would have skin in the game when it came to our military deployments. The draft was a huge check on politicians to not overcommit our troops. Instead, today you have a fighting force largely comprised of the American poor, who don’t have strong representation in Washington. When our country is at war, we should all know people fighting on our behalf. We should all feel the sting of shared sacrifice. Instead, our current wars are background music to most Americans, if they even hear it at all.
The squeaky (and not in the sense of “clean”) election of George W. Bush was catastrophic. Although he seems like a great guy if you know him personally or want to host a paint night party, oh my god, he presided over a disaster: going to war in Afghanistan because this quasi-country harbored Al-Qaeda, going to war with Iraq for fabricated weapons of mass destruction, under-reacting at home with his buddy “Brownie,” the FEMA chief, when hurricane Katrina hit, and leaving our economy in tatters for a real president to reassemble at the end of his term. But it all started with 9-11 and the Bush/Cheney doctrine of countering a racket of radical extremist terrorists with a full-on military campaign. It made no sense then and almost 18 years later (hey, this war itself is almost of legal age: soon, it could go to war!), it remains incomprehensible to me. Elect someone as pliable as Bush, Jr., and you get a spineless government that passes a “Patriot Act” to limit the privacy of normal citizens and a legal system that condones torture and all sorts of extralegal shenanigans. What the freaking 9-11 attackers started, our own government aided and abetted: the undermining of the principles of American democracy.
Drone attacks and boots on the ground don’t work because you can’t kill an idea. Radical Islam includes the notion that liberal Western hegemony is the enemy. The best response is to engage in a dialogue of ideas and to show how our system of government/economics/religious tolerance at least strives for fairness. We also ought to recognize where the projection of American force around the planet threatens local populations. We ain’t perfect. In fact, our system is pretty flawed, but it sure as hell is better for women and does allow opportunities for many. And a central tenet of our system is that it is malleable “towards a more perfect union.” Practice makes better, as we say in 5th grade.
The exact wrong response to terrorist attacks is retaliatory violence. Gandhi is said to have said, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Show instead that we are a nation of dispassionate laws. Meet violence with rigorous thought. But we showed would-be terrorists exactly what they wanted and expected: a behemoth military, reprehensible treatment of prisoners, and collateral damage during air and drone attacks. The “nation of infidels” was acting like one.
I try to imagine the emotions of an Iraqi parent who has lost a child in an American drone strike. Through tears: “There was an explosion. My child was killed. It was the Americans, but they were trying to root out ISIS, so it’s okay. Collateral damage is to be expected, and Allah is good.” Really? Imagine the shoe on the other foot. When would you be able to forgive a faceless country that brought a horror like this on your family and friends? And now this accident becomes a recruitment tool, an incentive, for others to hate us. While we tell ourselves we are rooting out terrorists, we plant seeds in the just vacated soil.
So where are we fighting today? Go on the Department of Defense website and see if you can figure it out. I couldn’t. But with a little digging elsewhere, you can get reporting on a government report from last March that explained that our military is actively involved in seven campaigns, all included in the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (which means these deployments could be ordered without congressional approval). All of them relate to Al-Qaeda-linked militants: we are in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. Our president recently tweeted that we are unilaterally leaving Syria. We’ll see what exactly that means. Upon hearing this proclamation, the first to rush the door was not a soldier in Damascus; no, it was the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. The restrained frustration in his resignation letter was to me a profound act of patriotism. The thrust of his letter was that our many strategic partnerships around the world (like NATO) keep us secure as a nation. He could no longer stomach the present president’s disrespect of our allies and deference to our rivals. But I’m getting off topic.
In the early 1970s, everyone knew which war Lennon and Ono were singing about. People saw Vietnam on the evening news and knew that some eighteen-year-old in their household or the one down the street could be summoned to that war. When you sang along to “Happy Xmas (War is Over)", or even played it, it was a peaceful declaration of opposition. Today, war seems like an abstraction, and for many of us, the military itself is like a drone that we send out to do our dirty work. It’s not right.
I’m all for turning off the spigots to today’s wars and reimagining the inevitable conflicts that we face and will face as a nation in the world. One way is to educate ourselves about what exactly the Department of Defense is doing on our behalf. I discovered the free New York Times “At War” newsletter as I thought about this blog. It’s pretty amazing: an impartial and useful digest to help make sense of what the heck’s going on militarily from week to week. If anyone besides my wife reads this, feel free to share other resources for keeping our wars straight. It’s so hard to keep this top-of-mind after 18 years, but I think we owe it to a whole lot of people — our children, our soldiers, and the civilians abroad who are trying to survive and even thrive, just like us.
New Year’s has now passed, but let's sing together anyway to "hope it's a good one, without any fear.”
Good night, Honey.
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