Ben Fountain
Soldiers on the Fault Line: War, Rhetoric, and Reality
The Seventh Annual David L. Jannetta Distinguished Lecture in War, Literature & the Arts September 10, 2013 / U.S. Air Force Academy
The reason I’m here is because I wrote a novel called Billy Lynn’s Long
Halftime Walk that was published last year. It’s a war novel, and specifically,
it’s about our wars of the past twelve years in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I
suppose it’s kind of a strange war novel in that it takes place entirely at a Dallas
Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving Day, at the old Texas Stadium, where
the Cowboys used to play before Jerry Jones moved them down the road to his new
stadium.
Some of you have been forced to read Billy Lynn for class, and for that I apologize,
but for those of you who haven’t, just to give you a rough idea, it’s about football,
cheerleaders, sex, death, war, capitalism, the transmigration of souls, brothers and
sisters, parents and children, the movie industry, Destiny’s Child, and the general
insanity of American life in the early years of the 21st century. The impulse for
this book started building in me around 2003, 2004, when I began to realize that
I didn’t understand my country-this place where I was born and grew up and had
spent my whole life, I didn’t have a clue as to why it was the way it was. Mainly this
sense coalesced around the war in Iraq. By 2004, it was apparent that we’d begun this war under false pretenses, on the basis of Weapons of Mass Destruction that
didn’t exist, and that the best intelligence had shown all along didn’t exist. We
invaded a country about which we knew virtually nothing, with no coherent plan
for occupation, or for implementing our stated goal of establishing democracy, or
for our eventual withdrawal.
By the time I’m talking about, 2004, dozens and sometimes scores of American
soldiers were losing their lives every month, fighting this war. The best evidence
indicated that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the course of the invasion and subsequent insurgency. Our country was running up a mind-
boggling debt that’s going to be with us for generations. We were also in the midstof producing a cohort of some 40,000 wounded veterans, whose injuries, both
physical and psychological, will continue to have consequences for themselves, their
families, and our society long after Saddam Hussein is just a blip on our national
memory. By any objective measure, the war in Iraq was a disaster, and even worse,
a disaster we’d brought on ourselves, yet it continued to be sold to the American
people as a just and virtuous and necessary war, a war we could win, that in fact we
were winning even as the insurgency grew stronger and more aggressive.
How could a ridiculously low-tech arsenal of suicide vests, car bombs, and IEDs
defeat the most powerful military on earth?
This was our government’s position, and we accepted it. We swallowed it hook,
line, and sinker, and the proof was George W. Bush’s re-election as president-some
would say his first actual election-in November of 2004.
Cadets, we’ve seen this movie before, and not that long ago. That was the movie
known as Vietnam, and it’s recent enough history that its lessons should have been
fresh in our minds. Not just the disaster of the war itself, but all of the rhetoric
and dissembling that went into justifying the decision to go to war, and then the
nearly decades-long parade of whitewashed assessments as to the progress we were
making, the victory that would soon be ours.
Vietnam; then Afghanistan and Iraq; and now, perhaps, Syria?
This would be a good time to remember the words of the late I.F. Stone, one of
the finest investigative journalists in America during the middle years of the 20th
century: “All governments lie, and nothing they say should be believed.”
There’s no question that al Qaeda was and continues to be a sworn blood-enemy
of the United States. It attacked us by land in 1993, with its first bombing of the
World Trade Center. It attacked by land again in 1998, with the bombings of our
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It attacked us by sea in 2000, with the bombing
of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. And then, of course, by air in the attacks of September
11, 2001. I hope even the most confirmed pacifist would recognize
the need to respond with decisive force to this kind of sustained attack. But our
entirely sane instinct for self-preservation was transformed by our government
into something quite different and strange. To put it bluntly-because of 9-11, we
invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, and whose regime in fact
was a bitter enemy of al Qaeda.
Why? How did this happen? How did we let it happen, and why did we endorse
the war by re-electing the President in 2004? Are we stupid? As Norman Mailer
once said, “Stupidity is the American disease,” but I would argue it’s not that simple.
This country has done far too many fine and brilliant things to ascribe the disaster
of Iraq to plain stupidity. I would approach it from a different direction and argue
that our culture is stupid, and while that doesn’t necessarily make us stupid in the literal sense, it does make us numb. By “culture” I’m talking about the 24-7 force-
feed of movies, music, television, Internet, youtubes, youporns, cell phones, iPods,iPads, sports of all kinds at all hours, right-wing news, left-wing news, celebrity
news, texts, tweets, emails, and all the rest of it, and that’s even before we get into
the numbing effects of the huge array of pharmaceuticals available to us, legal or
otherwise.
Cadets, I think this avalanche of electronica, entertainment, and media needs a
name, so let me suggest that we call it the Fantasy Industrial Complex.
When you boil it down, it’s pretty clear that the Fantasy Industrial Complex is
mostly someone trying to sell us something-a product, a political agenda, a lifestyle,
an alleged means to a more beautiful version of ourselves. Or what may be even
worse, it’s selling us, our vital statistics in terms of purchasing power and preference,
so that we can be targeted by marketers with ever more finely calibrated accuracy.
Thanks to the Fantasy Industrial Complex, I think there’s a strong argument to
be made that we often don’t know what’s real anymore. To a significant extent, our
lives take place in the realm of fantasy, triviality, and materialism, and our senses
and mental capacity become numbed as a result.
Well, what’s wrong with being numb; with being comfortably numb, as the
song says. What’s wrong with being the functional equivalent of fat and happy,
of cruising along in the prolonged adolescence that seems to be the ideal human
condition as rendered by the Fantasy Industry? Nothing, maybe, until reality comes
along and slaps us in the face: the death of someone close to us, say, or serious illness,
or extreme emotional suffering-trouble in our marriage, trouble with children,
failed relationships, failure or frustration in our work, or a collective trauma such
as we experienced on 9-11, 2001. In other words, the hard stuff of life as it’s actually lived.
It’s not a question of if we’re going to get hit with a crisis, but when, and the
question then is whether we have the emotional and intellectual tools for dealing
with it capably enough that we have a chance of coming through more or less intact.
We’ve all heard the saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” In my
opinion, that has to be one of the most inane statements ever made about human
experience. It’s possible for people to be shattered beyond repair, and countries, too.
We survive, but we’re broken. We limp along in a reduced state. It happens all the
time.
9-11 was a crisis of the first order, both individually and collectively. It inflicted
on us a harsh and complex reality, harsh enough that for a brief a window of time
America was shocked out of its numbness. There were the beginnings of a serious
discussion about our history, our role in the world, and who we are as a country.
What kind of country we want to be. All this by way of trying to comprehend the
violence that was brought down on us in the attacks of 9-11.
Was it something in us?
Was it something in them?
And by the way, who were they, the “them” that attacked us? Every American
with a pulse knew about Osama bin Laden, but what about the rest of them, the
thousands of young men and presumably women who swore jihad against the
United States?
A few days after 9-11, I saw an SUV near my home in Dallas with the words
“Nuke Them All” soaped in huge letters along the side windows. I think we can all
understand and sympathize with that kind of raw outrage, but the “them” in that
equation, that’s the hard part. Determining exactly who they are and what they
want, what motivates them. “Know your enemy” Sun Tzu says over and over in The
Art of War. “If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in
peril.”
I think Susan Sontag made a lot of sense when she counseled in the week after
9-11 that “a few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand how we
got to this point.” For starters, we could have looked into the recent history of the
Middle East for some answers, and for clues as to a viable way of going forward. I’m
not talking about assigning blame, or embarking on an agenda of running down
the United States of America. Rather, I’m talking about trying to determine the
facts of the situation-what happened, and who acted, and why. Not the fantasy
version, the numbed-out and dumbed-down version, but the true version, or as
close to the truth as clear thinking and seeing can get us.
You, cadets, don’t have the luxury of living out the perpetual adolescence of the
numb and the dumb. At a relatively young age, much younger than most of your
fellow Americans, you’ve made the most profound kind of commitment. It’s most
definitely not a game, the work you’re about. It’s about as far from “virtual” as one
could imagine, and it runs you up against the most basic existential questions we
human beings face.
As a practical matter, being numb and dumb simply isn’t an option for soldiers in
combat, not if they plan on surviving. I would venture that any numbed-out soldier
operating in a combat zone isn’t long for this world.
The reality of the military has to be about as far from the world of the Fantasy
Industrial Complex as we can get, so it’s surely one of the great paradoxes of our
time that the Fantasy Industry has so thoroughly co-opted the military for its own
purposes. We saw the process beginning in the days immediately following 9-11. As
huge and awful as the attacks of 9-11 were, the Fantasy Industrial Complex showed
itself to be bigger, stronger, more enduring. The difficult and complicated reality
behind those attacks was quickly reduced to a simple-minded, easily digestible
narrative of us versus them, good versus evil, Christians versus infidels.
One clue to the unsettling complexity of the real situation might have been
found in the nationalities of the hijackers, the mysterious “them” that I was talking
about a few moments ago. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from our staunch
ally Saudi Arabia. One of the leaders of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was from
that other staunch American ally, Egypt. Not a single hijacker was Iraqi or Afghan.
Not a single hijacker came from what would soon become known as the infamous
“Axis of Evil.” A few determined pulls on those loose threads might have gone a
long way toward unraveling the fantasy narrative, but rather than engaging in a
clear-eyed study of the situation, we got instead the vast machine of the Fantasy
Industrial Complex, whose full might was brought to bear in promoting this
dangerously simplified narrative known as the War on Terror.
Our government embarked on a concerted advertising campaign to build support
for war, and specifically, for an invasion of Iraq. It’s an old story now. For those who
care to read the history, the components of that relentless ad campaign are right out
there to see: the fear-mongering in the form of WMDs; the grand neoconservative
project of implanting democracy in the Middle East, and remaking the entire
region in our own image; and the goal of restoring American prestige by replacing
images of the burning Twin Towers with those of American forces triumphing
over Arab enemies. The campaign was persuasive enough that Congress and public
opinion quickly fell into line. We invaded Iraq in March of 2003, and by May 1st we were presented with the mother of all commercials, President Bush in a flight
suit on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, telling us against the backdrop
of the “Mission Accomplished” banner that major combat operations in Iraq had
come to a successful conclusion.
At this point, I think it’s worth examining an interview with the man who
conceived and stage-managed President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment
on the Abraham Lincoln. That man was none other than Karl Rove, otherwise
known as “Bush’s Brain,” who sat down for an interview with the journalist Ron
Suskind that was subsequently published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine
in October, 2004. Rove explained in remarkably frank terms the Administration’s
approach to power: Those in the, quote, “reality-based community [journalists,
historians, old-fashioned policy wonks] . . . believe that solutions emerge from [the]
judicious study of discernible reality . . . But that’s not the way the world really
works anymore. [The United States is] an empire now, and when we act we create
our own reality.”
In Rove’s view, it doesn’t matter what the reality of a situation is when you can
remake it at will. “The judicious study of discernible reality”-in other words, the past five hundred years of Renaissance empiricism and Enlightenment principles-
go straight out the window, because we’re an empire now, and the world is whatever we want it to be.
But as we’ve seen, reality, discernible or not, is stronger than any of us. As the
reality of Iraq showed itself to be less than malleable to the Rovian concept of power
and empire, we saw the Fantasy Industrial Complex go into overdrive. Some of
the pronouncements and slogans that resulted were famous for a while, platitudes
and political swagger such as “Freedom is on the march,” “Bring it on,” and “We’re
kicking ass.” Words that had nothing to do with reality, words whose purpose was
to distort, to sell an agenda, to numb the audience-or to put it another way, the
language of advertising.
The American soldier was one of the most effective props in the Fantasy Industry’s
marketing arsenal. Support the Troops became the phrase we heard constantly, and
not just the government, but the entire private-sector Fantasy Industry got in on
it. War, and specifically, Supporting the Troops, became a great branding device.
We saw it in the entertainment industry, in professional sports, and in business
generally. If you wanted to generate positive associations for your product, you
made it clear how much you supported the troops.
The sum effect of all this was to take us farther and farther from the reality of the
war. We were allowed and even encouraged to dwell in the fantasy version of war, the infantile version. No photos of coffins at Dover Air Force Base. No torture, but
rather, “an alternative set of procedures.” Abu Ghraib, that was the work of “a few
bad apples.” Dead Iraqi civilians, the very people we were supposed to be liberating,
were “collateral damage.” The insurgents were a ragtag bunch of “dead-enders,” and
month after month we were assured that the insurgency was “on its last legs.”
The ceaseless refrain of “Support the Troops” made it all so much easier to accept,
as if to analyze the reasons and conduct of the war might imply less than total
support for the young men and women who were doing the fighting.
In the fantasy version, it’s easy to support the troops. What’s the personal cost to
us to say, “I support the troops”? To fly the flag, to thank soldiers when they cross
our paths, to pay for their meals and drinks, to give up our seat in first class. These
are all fine and good as expressions of appreciation, and entirely appropriate. The
troops absolutely deserve our support, and that was one of the many tragedies of
Vietnam, the abuse that so many soldiers endured when they returned home. But
let’s be real about what’s going on here. This is the easy part, the feel-good part,
wearing lapel flag pins, thanking the soldiers and buying them drinks, flying the
flag on Memorial Day. We can congratulate ourselves for being good and virtuous
Americans, for doing our civic duty. We can feel secure in the knowledge that we’re
patriots-in other words, that we love our country.
Okay, but what is love?
In my experience, real love, true love, involves pain, sacrifice, hardship, selflessness.
That’s adult love, when all the fantasies and illusions get burned away, and you’re
left with reality. That’s the kind of love you ultimately discover in marriage, if your
marriage is going to have any chance of lasting more than a couple of years. That
head-over-heels stuff, that hormone rush of infatuation and sexual buzz, that’s
great, but it’s not love. It’s not really love until it hurts.
By the same token, how genuine can our patriotism, our love of country, be when
the cost to us is so trivial?
In some ways, the war has never been more accessible to those of us at home. We
can find it in the news; we can access the most graphic, horrifying images online.
But I think that in a profound sense the war remains an abstraction unless and
until we have skin in the game, a vital personal stake. Maybe it takes love to make
war real. Maybe the reality of war isn’t really driven home unless we ourselves, or
someone who we love very much, becomes directly involved.
In that sense, Vietnam was front and center in the lives of the majority of
Americans. Every family with a draft-age son had a stake in the war. I remember my
older cousins and neighbors, and the friends of my oldest sister, all sweating out the draft lottery every year. We all knew someone who was serving, either a neighbor or
a family member, and we were forced to think about the war in a very real way, to
consider the reasons why it was being fought, and to look long and hard at the costs.
Contrast that with the wars of the past dozen years. Certainly the most striking
difference is the absence of a draft, which means that most of us have been excused
from thinking about the war in personal terms. Not only that, but no sacrifice
was asked of us in other ways. We were told to go shopping, to spend money, to
buy stuff. Not only were taxes not raised in order to fund the war effort, tax rates
were lowered. Contrast that with the top tax rate during World War Two, which
was-brace yourselves-ninety percent. That’s how you pay for a war. That’s how you
share the sacrifice. That’s how you make it real in the life of the country.
In the past dozen years, you never heard the first mention, not a breath, about
rationing. The heyday of the Hummer in Texas was during the first years of the Iraq
war; you couldn’t drive down a street in Dallas without seeing at least one of those
huge, heavy, gleaming vehicles trundling along, loaded up with chrome and steel.
Meanwhile, back at the war, soldiers were driving around in Humvees that lacked
appropriate armor, and the scarcity of effective body armor was a chronic problem
for our soldiers. And as we all know, these days the Veterans Administration is
seriously overwhelmed by the influx of veterans from the past dozen years of war.
So if we really want to support the troops, how about if we slap a tax on every
vehicle that weighs over a certain amount, or averages less than forty miles a gallon,
and direct that stream of tax revenue to the VA?
Support the troops.
What do you suppose the life expectancy is of a country that’s lost its grip on
reality? Whose national consciousness is based on delusion and fantasy? Whose
dominant mode of expression is the language of advertising and sloganeering?
For you, cadets, this isn’t an academic or theoretical proposition. The course
of your lives, and perhaps even whether you survive your twenties, depends on it.
You’re of a generation that’s come of age in a time of constant war, a time that’s
happened to coincide with the full flowering of the Fantasy Industrial Complex.
You live directly on the fault line between the two, and that strikes me as a
dangerous place to be. There are times when war is necessary, but in circumstances
where the justification is less than clear, when, in fact, there’s serious question as
to the necessity or wisdom of going to war, what then? How are you supposed to
conduct yourself? How do you keep your conscience and your soul and your honor
intact?
Given recent history, the odds are you’re going to find yourselves in that exact
situation. You may be required to lay your life on the line for reasons that you might
very well suspect are the product of fantasy and delusion. I call that not just a crisis,
but a tragedy. That’s how lives are ruined and souls are shattered. We all have some
idea of the kinds of things that are done in wars, the things that are hard to live
with afterwards. Experience shows that it’s hard enough to live with those things
when the war was just. And if it was less than justified, imagine how much harder.
Of course, the obvious answer, the default answer to this dilemma, is that you
follow orders, you do your duty no matter what. As Alfred Lord Tennyson writes
in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Theirs is not to reason why/theirs is but to
fight and die.” It’s a snooze of a line, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Certainly it was
true for British soldiers of the Victorian era, conditioned as they were to hierarchy
and total devotion to the Queen.
But what about for you, young Americans? Your entire lives you’ve been taught
the virtues of democracy and self-determination. The integrity of the individual.
The right and imperative to question authority. It’s not an accident that this is so
ingrained in our culture. It started with the tradition of Protestant dissent that
came over with the Puritans, that wonderful tradition of radical independence and
rebellion against authority. All your life, the best examples have taught you that
democracy requires us to be thinking, questioning, analyzing citizens. That it’s
not simply our right, but our obligation, to hold those in authority responsible for
their actions, which is part and parcel of the notion of democracy-those in power
govern only with the consent of the governed.
So then what happens? You graduate from high school, you go to the Air Force
Academy, and all of a sudden you’re reduced to the status of a serf! Or worse than a
serf-you become a “doolie,” from the Greek doulos, meaning: slave.
To be part of the military in a democracy, I’ve got to believe that requires living with a good deal of internal tension and psychological stress. I have a theory-
probably not a very good theory, but nevertheless-that this tension might explain the American soldier’s genius for profanity. It’s a way of venting, giving expression
to the sheer weirdness of having to balance two ways of being, the democratic and
the authoritarian. I have to wonder if soldiers in authoritarian cultures as good as
our soldiers at cussing. Say, the soldiers of North Korea with their blind obedience
to the supreme leader, can they match our extraordinary eloquence? Maybe soldiers
of all cultures have this genius for profanity, but what I do know for sure is that
Americans have made it into an art form.
In any case, I think that psychological stress is real, and it may never be more
acute than when you’re told to put your life at risk for what you sense may be a
fantasy, a delusion. Alfred Lord Tennyson doesn’t cut it in America, not here, not
in this day and age. “Theirs is not to reason why . . .” No. You’re Americans. It’s in
your nature and your culture to ask why.
My sense is that one of the things the United States military excels at is training
its soldiers to compartmentalize. Focus on the mission, the task at hand. Break
it down into discrete parts and execute each one in turn. That may well get you
through the moment. You might even be able to get through an entire war that way,
but sooner or later, on some level, you’re going to find the why question coming
down on you. Sanity demands it. Human nature demands it, the American nature.
We need our actions, especially actions as fraught as those done in war, to have
meaning and purpose. If I’m going to die, I want my death to mean something.
If I’m going to give up my legs or arms or a chunk of my sanity, it needs to have
served a worthwhile purpose. But to ask young soldiers to sacrifice crucial parts of
themselves for what-delusions and fantasies?
I call that obscene. It’s morally obscene, and as a practical matter it can’t help but
corrupt the life of the country. You can’t ask your youth to sacrifice themselves over
and over for nothing without the country eventually rotting from cynicism and
disillusionment.
What does “literature” have to do with any of this? Does it have anything to do
with you, cadets, living as you are on that fault line between the ultimate reality of
war, and that other reality, the dream reality produced by the Fantasy Industrial
Complex?
Can literature make a country wiser, less prone to engaging in foolish wars?
Could it affect, dare I say it, the political life of the country?
I can’t speak for other writers, but when I wrote Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
I wasn’t thinking that John McCain or Barack Obama would read it someday and
start making policy based on what they found there, or that Dick Cheney would
read it and suddenly realize, Oh my God, I was so wrong! Invading Iraq was a
terrible idea!
Cadets, I’d be out of my fucking mind if I thought that.
So I’ll ask again, what can literature do? Does it do anything, does it have a
social function? Or is it just ornament, decoration, something to entertain us in
our downtime?
First, let’s be clear about what “literature” is. These days, when somebody says
“literature,” a lot of us can’t help thinking of the English teachers who tortured us in high school with grammar fascism and terrible translations of “Beowulf.” Or
maybe we think of something rarified and dainty, something Oprah-ish about
innermost feelings or the power of healing. I find myself clenching up whenever the
word “literature” gets mentioned, because the modern connotations of the word
seem so far removed from life as it’s actually lived. So how about if by “literature”
we mean words that get down to the real stuff of life, the sweat and worry and
blood and guts and sex and pain and pleasure of it, the down-in-the-dirt human
tumble that we’re all going through at one time or another. So when we talk about
“literature,” or “literary” qualities, we’re not talking about fancy turns of phrase
or artifice or prettiness, but rather, meaning in the most profound sense. Writing
that corresponds to the facts, to lived experience, with all its layers of past and
present, motive and drift, conscious and sub-conscious. Writing that takes account
of all the confusion and ambiguity and contingency of life. Writing that’s true to
“discernible reality.”
So maybe that’s the value of writers, of “literary” writers-to preserve and protect
the language. To see things as they truly are, and to find the language that describes
those things as accurately and fully as possible, without sentimentality, or a political
agenda, or a wish to please the reader.
In his book The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound emphasizes that writing has
meaning only to the extent that it corresponds to the thing being described.
He goes on to define literature as “language charged with meaning,” and great
literature, he says, is “language charged with meaning to the utmost degree.” In
other words, the rhetoric matches the reality. Reality is a thing to be apprehended
by clear seeing and clear language, which stands in exact opposition to Karl Rove’s
imperial notion of reality, in which we get to “make” our own reality, and to hell
with the facts, the messy truth of the situation.
A bit later in ABC of Reading Pound describes literature as “news that stays news,”
and as an example he cites Homer’s Odyssey, one of the founding documents of
Western literature, written some 2700 years ago.
Well, in essence, what’s the story of the Odyssey? It’s the story of soldiers trying
to find their way home. They’ve been at war for ten years, and then they spend the
next ten years trying to get home. Writing in the early 1920s, Pound noted that
Homer’s portrayal of Odysseus’s companions seems to indicate they were suffering
from what was called in the Great War, World War I, as shell shock. Of course, now
we know that same affliction as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and it’s very much
with us today. But writing some 2700 years ago, Homer’s vision was so acute, and his language so true to the situation, that he was diagnosing an effect of war that
was every bit as relevant in 3000 B.C. as it is now in 2013. News that stays news.
I read something a while back, a statistic to the effect that one out of every three
homeless people in the United States is a veteran. Well, that’s the story of Odysseus
and his companions, soldiers who are wandering, trying to get home. But these
homeless people among us, these veterans, they’re the ones who didn’t make it all
the way-they are, literally, homeless. So, the next time you’re in Denver or San
Francisco or New York and you see a bunch of homeless folks hanging out on the
sidewalk, think about Odysseus and his boys out there wandering.
News that stays news.
What about the causes of war, the reasons for going to war-does Homer have
anything to say about that? Let’s look at what triggered the Trojan War. Sexy
Helen, hot Helen, the super model of her day, runs off with Paris back to his
hometown of Troy. When her husband Menelaeus finds out, he goes to his brother
King Agamemnon and says, Come on, let’s get the army together, we have to invade
Troy. Helen ran off with that turd Paris and we need to get her back.
Can you imagine a lamer reason for starting a war?
Agamemnon should have laughed in his brother’s face. Dude, unh unh, no
way, that’s your problem. What you need is either a marriage counselor or a good
divorce lawyer, but there’s no way we’re going to war just because you couldn’t keep
your wife happy.
But of course, that’s not what he said. So the Greeks go to war for ten years to
get Helen back.
Talk about a bullshit war.
Odysseus and his companions spend ten years fighting that war, then ten more
years trying to get home when it’s over. I wonder if Homer is saying something
about bullshit wars, and whether that kind of war is harder for soldiers to come
back from. Wars based on folly, fantasy, vanity; wars of choice as opposed to
necessity. Maybe in the extreme difficulty they have in returning home, soldiers
are manifesting some psychological truth about those kinds of wars that’s deep in
their bones.
The Trojan War.
Vietnam.
Iraq and Afghanistan.
News that stays news.
Okay, so what’s been happening on the home front all these years, these twenty
years that Odysseus has been gone? Well, his wife Penelope’s been getting the hard
sell from a bunch of guys who want to marry her. 108 of them, to be exact. Even
worse, they’ve settled in right there at the house, so there they are 24-7, drinking
Odysseus’s wine, barbecuing his cows and sheep, abusing his servants, trying to
sleep with his wife. Meanwhile, the man of the house is off fighting the war, doing
his patriotic duty.
Homer goes to some pains to describe at least a few of these 108 men, and he
makes it clear that they’re the scions of the leading families of Ithaca. The leading
families of Ithaca. The wealthy, the powerful, the well-connected. Well, why aren’t
they off fighting the war? Or did they get a pass because their families are wealthy,
powerful, well-connected.
Sound familiar?
News that stays news.
Then when long-suffering, tough-as-nails Odysseus finally does make it home,
he’s changed so much that no one recognizes him, not even his wife. He’s a stranger
to them. How often have we heard that the past twelve years from wives and
parents and friends of returning soldiers: He’s a stranger. I feel like I don’t know
him anymore.
News that stays news.
Correction, somebody did recognize Odysseus-his dog. Argus was a puppy
when Odysseus left, and now he’s old and decrepit and can barely get around, but
he recognizes Odysseus when no one else does.
Good old Argus.
So this poem, this very, very long poem that Homer wrote some 2700 years
ago, is it just ornament, decoration? Something to read purely for pleasure and
entertainment? Sure, it can be read taken that way, but suppose we’re faced with
a real crisis in our life. Suppose we’re a young soldier trying to find his or her way
back from the war, and we’re struggling, and it may well be a matter of life and
death. Suppose we’re reading like our life depends on it, not in that numbed-out,
Fantasy Industry frame of mind, but with our full attention. Maybe then it’s not
so much like entertainment, but the best chance we have of understanding our
experience, of gaining a measure of peace in ourselves. A way to restore meaning
when it seems meaning has been lost.
Or, say, we’re a General, or a Senator, or even a President, faced with a geopolitical
crisis that may involve force of arms. If he or she is willing to read with full attention
and thoughtfulness-willing to read as if lives depend on it-maybe they’ll come to a fuller appreciation of risks and consequences, and of the potential for tragedy
that’s inherent in having great power.
Will reading Homer, or any work of literature, prevent unjust wars, unnecessary
wars? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe sometimes yes-and maybe that’s the most we
can hope for. It may well be that the reality connect of Homer, and writers like him,
is the best shot we’re going to get. So I would urge us all to read. To keep reading.
Because we never know enough.
Eugene Bookies 