Terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds

In the early eighties, on a flight to Washington, DC, out of Salt Lake City, probably, the man sitting next to me was signing letters with a blue ball point pen. He looked tired, and some of the letters were a little worse for having been carried around in a briefcase. "Wyoming's Only Congressman," the letterhead said. The man sitting next to me would have been Dick Cheney, later Secretary of Defense and now Vice President of the United States. My sense of who was important and who was not placed no emphasis on United States Congressmen, particularly not from states so poorly populated that they merited fewer Representatives than Senators. He was busy, and I was tired.

Needless to say, whether I had spoken to the man or not, I wish in retrospect that I had studied him more closely. The man on my right seemed ordinary--middle-aged, overweight, and in every way unremarkable--not the sort of man to be the linchpin of a foreign policy juggernaut seemingly hell-bent on military action as the first option.

Last Saturday, Vice President Cheney addressed the graduating cadets at West Point. Rummy, the man with the swagger, no longer swaggers around as the Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz is long gone from the Pentagon and probably soon gone from the public stage, and there are rumors in Washington that the Vice President might be preparing to maneuver around his nominal boss, the President of the United States, on matters of war policy, should it come to it. Still, there is no hint in Dick Cheney's manner or rhetoric to indicate that he is aware that his position these days is First Officer on the Titanic.

What have we learned since September 11, 2001? We've learned that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and gave no quarter to Al Qaeda in Iraq. We've learned that Hussein, whom we hunted down and turned over to a kangaroo court, might conceivably have been the least of plausible evils for governing Iraq. Nothing better is on offer at the moment, anyway. We've learned the the US military, and the Army in particular, was ill-prepared for the occupation of Iraq. We should have learned that we have probably created a worse haven for terrorists in Iraq than Afghanistan ever was.

If Vice President Cheney is troubled or humbled in any way by any of those lessons, he gave no sign of it in his speech to the graduating class at West Point. Instead, he gave an angry reprise of what he's been saying all along, in stunningly blunt language

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away. These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it. They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society. The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend.

No country understands, talks about, exploits, or expresses cynicism about public relations, advertising or propaganda as intensely as does the United States. The United States pioneered the modern use of these techniques, which are important to the commercial and political life of the nation. It is difficult to imagine anyone graduating from a decent college without having been sensitized at some point to propaganda well enough to recognize it when it is used so blatantly.

To take Cheney's rhetoric seriously enough to express dismay at its blatant manipulation is to be taken in by it. In any case, an audience that is being told what it wants to hear is not being manipulated. It is being stroked. The only serious question would be: Where is the audience that Cheney is stroking? Right in front of him is one plausible answer. All those years in the classroom, thinking critically, surely at some point being taught about propaganda, only to set it aside without notice to be fed rabid nonsense by the Vice President of the United States. Heady stuff. More likely, though, the rhetoric is aimed at the "conservative base," even though any sense of there being anything conservative about it is long gone.

The terrorists know what they want and they will stop at nothing to get it. By force and intimidation, they seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives in total obedience to their ideology. Their ultimate goal is to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization.

There is only one credible empire in the world, and Dick Cheney is currently the Vice President of it. And who made Iraq the central front anyway? If there is any chance of the agenda attributed to the terrorists succeeding, then we should under no circumstances be talking about pulling out of Iraq until it is completely pacified, which means we should be in Iraq indefinitely. Cheney knows there is no support on the home front for such a commitment

During the cold war, we talked about "The Big Lie." Actually, Communism was a big lie, but we had some pretty big whoppers of our own to tell, including the claim that only our Communist adversary would engage in mass deception by techniques as obvious as repeating the same thing over and over again with great conviction.

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

And who said that? Why Hermann Göring, of course. Who else? It's taken from Gustave Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary. I'm comparing Dick Cheney to Hermann Göring? I'm gonna play dumb. I dunno. The people don't want war. Cheney is insisting on the necessity of war by telling us that we are in great danger.

Sixty percent of Americans either want the troops pulled out now or a timetable set for pulling the troops out. Another 10 percent aren't sure what they want to do. That just leaves 3 in 10 Americans sure that we should stay in Iraq indefinitely, and yet, that's what Dick Cheney claims is necessary to our national security.

The techniques employed by Dick Cheney at West Point are probably as old as war. Our enemy is amoral, uncivilized, inhuman, and implacable. What enemy isn't? This enemy is so bad that we are justified in abridging the Constitution and the Geneva Convention in dealing with them. That's new.

The Republicans got it handed to them in the last Congressional election, in no small part because of dissatisfaction with the handling of the war in Iraq. If the Republican party is looking for a graceful way to wiggle out of the trap that the Bush administration set for it in Iraq, Dick Cheney is giving no signals.

Fundraising is down at the national level for the Republicans and up for the Democrats. Money isn't everything in politics, but it sure is important. At this point, Dick Cheney may not even care what the cadets thought of his speech, which was almost insulting. It was the big money donors he was talking to, and he was telling them what they wanted to hear.

There have been few Vice Presidents (and, actually, none that I can think of) that can deliver product the way that Dick Cheney did at West Point. Vice Presidents need not be as cautious as Presidents, and Dick Cheney was loaded for bear. For those who thought a comparison to Hermann Göring unfair, I would have to agree with you. Despite having serious health problems, Dick Cheney is the more functional leader.

The speaker at West Point isn't all that different from the man sitting next to me signing letters. He was just doing his job, and a good job of it he did, too. Fire-breathing speeches, after all, are just a continuation of fundraising letters by another means.

Should we be worried, though? It is, I really believe, about motivating the party faithful and nothing else. At least I hope so. Dick Cheney can't have nearly the reputation outside the US that he has here. Dick Cheney can safely throw red meat to check writers while the Department of State tries out the diplomacy option with Iran. I wonder how many of those cadets will die in Iraq?

Taking an elm tree by the arm

On a warm and sunny Friday afternoon in Concord, Massachusetts, May 10, 1862, at 3 pm, with the smell of spring in the air and violets in the church lawn, Henry Thoreau was remembered and eulogized at the church in which he had declined membership more than twenty years before. Thoreau, aged 44, had died peacefully on May 6, after several months' confinement at his parents' home. Sam Staples, formerly Thoreau's jailer in the incident that led to the writing of Civil Disobedience, said of the dying Thoreau, “Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace.”

The world around the dying Thoreau was anything but peaceful. On April 6, 1862, a month to the day before Thoreau died, Confederate troops surprised a Union encampment in a dawn attack at Shiloh, Tennessee. By the time the battle ended on the next day, there were thirteen thousand Union casualties and ten thousand Confederate casualties, making Shiloh the bloodiest battle in American history up to that time. It was nearly a catastrophic defeat for the Union Army under the leadership of Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant, who kept his command only because Abraham Lincoln resisted pressure to relieve him.

Thoreau had bravely spoken with admiration of John Brown soon after Brown was hanged, but Thoreau's reputation as a pacifist and his outspoken contempt for anything that resembled industry cannot have made him a figure to be admired in the face of the bloody and increasingly disconcerting reality of civil war. Thoreau had died of tuberculosis, a disease that, at the time, was popularly thought to be the result of solitary sexual incontinence, and it was bruited about, both then and later, that, in effect, the author of Walden and Civil Disobedience had masturbated himself into the grave. Thoreau's fame, of course, was barely in its infancy.

Unitarian divines, one of whom had been the very first actually to pay for a copy of Walden, traveled from places as diverse as Boston and Worcester to attend the funeral. Children were let out of school, perhaps so the the pews would be full. The service was conducted by the resident divine, The Rev. Mr. Grindall Reynolds, and Thoreau's mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the eulogy, which became famous in its own right.

Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had been published at Boston by the Atlantic Monthly on the first of February of that year. It was a time for men of action, not for idlers and dreamers. Even Jesus had signed up. Thus, it might be inferred that Mr. Emerson had given himself a tough assignment that afternoon in May. He was to eulogize a masturbater and idler, a prickly dreamer with contempt for the very things that made the Union strong enough to lift the Lord's terrible swift sword, a man who threw away a Harvard education, apparently to accomplish essentially nothing.

Whatever else Emerson may have thought of Thoreau, he had the man's measure in a way that perhaps no one else did. “The country knows not yet,” Emerson said near the end of his eulogy, "or in the least part, how great a son it has lost." One imagines that not even Emerson could see, just as no one else could see, what a lasting and important contribution to American literature and thought Thoreau had made.

If Emerson knew and acknowledged Thoreau's greatness, he nevertheless seems largely to have missed the point of the man. He described Thoreau as he would have been known locally and as he is still known by some today: as an amateur and unsystematic naturalist and ambler about the countryside. In fact, Thoreau corresponded and collaborated with Louis Agassiz, a Harvard naturalist who was the first to propose a past ice age, but Emerson either didn't know about that collaboration or didn't take it seriously.

Thoreau's prose is far more satisfactory to the modern ear than Emerson's, but Emerson had no praise for Thoreau as a writer. In fact, he bluntly criticized one of Thoreau's habits in writing and was critical of Thoreau's poetry. Thoreau's poetry, to be sure, is now of interest only because Thoreau wrote it.

“It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him,” Emerson said by way of praise, but he also said

It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. "I love Henry," said one of his friends, "but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree."

“We live amid surfaces, Emerson had said in his essay, “Experience,” “and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” Thoreau was not good at skating on surfaces and he emphatically did not wish to be. Thoreau wrote in Walden

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.

The United States, born as a nation out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, was already a confection of shams and appearances, at least to Thoreau, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Emerson, on the other hand, was a startling apologist for the ethics of commerce. “For there is no crime to the intellect,” Emerson wrote in “Experience,” anticipating Nietzsche,

"It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal?

“Weak emotions?” Thoreau was a truth-teller, and the world did not welcome truth-tellers if telling the truth interfered with commerce, which it almost always did. Thoreau had written in Walden

I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly- that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

Thoreau's countrymen were scrambling all over one another in pursuit of wealth. Emerson cut a deal for publication of the eulogy he had just delivered while still on the steps of the church. Well might Emerson have been critical of Thoreau, for surely Thoreau had been critical of him

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

Thoreau's eulogist was an assiduous student of form, and he faulted Thoreau for not playing along, but Thoreau's stubborn “No” is the reason we still read him today. No to slavery, no to wage slavery, no to conformity, no to taxes to support war, no to unnecessary encumbrances, no to the endless oppressions that made a mockery of the freedom of America, including the oppression of agreeing to lies as a condition for acceptance in the community.

One tries to imagine how the townsmen of Concord would have taken the reverence with which Thoreau is read today. Even more, one tries to imagine how they would react to his being seen as the first fruit of that place and time. Not well, probably.

And how would the world react to a Thoreau in the flesh today? Hardly better. Emerson makes it clear that Thoreau's uncompromising nature made him disagreeable as company—“That terrible Thoreau,” as he was characterized in Concord.

Thoreau is commonly thought of as being a misanthrope, but he was not. He welcomed company at Walden Pond. One gathers that he encouraged the company of children, another reason why school might have been let out for his funeral. He may well have been an insufferable prig even to those who tried hard to warm up to him, but then, probably so were the prophets of Hebrew Scripture. What Thoreau wanted, as did the prophets, was not to cast off his fellow man, but to lead him to a better way, even in the absence of having been asked to lead.

Emerson ended his eulogy in an elegiac tone worthy of his reputation as a speaker and writer:

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called "Life-Everlasting," a Gnaphalium like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens,) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweisse, which signifies Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance.

As beautiful as is Emerson's prose, it largely misses the point of Thoreau's career. Thoreau had no trouble harvesting Edelweisse—noble purity—for himself. He wrote to interest others in the same quest. In his own lifetime, he was largely a failure at that enterprise, hardly more than a curiosity, a passing odd note. In the long view, of course, even Thoreau might have been pleased with the harvest of his labors. If not, he should have been.

The American Civil War darkened Emerson's view of the world—crushed him spiritually, almost. Emerson continued to write, but his best work was behind him. Not only that, but Emerson's reputation waned even as the world started to take notice of Thoreau. Emerson made an important contribution to American letters in his own right, but, without Emerson, we might not even know of Thoreau, and it is bringing Thoreau to our attention that Emerson made his greatest contribution.

Thoreau's life was, after all, a life well lived. Emerson could not see that, so he could not say it, and his eulogy of Thoreau stands as a monument to myopia. There never has been a time, one thinks, when true prophets have been well-received. Certainly Thoreau was not. Thoreau's studied indifference to the barely-concealed contempt with which he was treated in the community had to have been an enormous act of will.

To make the appraisal fair, one admits that appreciating Thoreau the man must have been no easy task and that a few put themselves mightily to the effort. In delivering his eulogy, Emerson did no more or less than what Thoreau would have wanted. He said what was on his mind. In that sense, the eulogy is a fitting final tribute, well-deserving to be the salute of a master craftsman to a true prophet and genius, a man well ahead of his time.

Suppose our material wants were easily met, which, in Thoreau's case, they were. Then what? Long before the reach of the Industrial Revolution had become clear to most, Thoreau anticipated the ennui that would result from having all essential material wants satisfied for the bulk of men.

We measure out the quiet desperation of our lives now in miles of film or its digital equivalent. What would Thoreau have said about working so that one has the money and the leisure to sit with a companion in a darkened theater to watch patterns of color projected on a screen?

The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can 'see the folks,' and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and 'the blues'; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

Awkward though he may have been in company, or perhaps precisely because he was so awkward in company, Thoreau could accurately take the measure of our interactions with one another. We sit in a movie theater and ignore one another and regard it as time spent in company.

The more desperate our lives become, the more we want to turn to someone like Thoreau. Why is it that we have so much and yet have so little? Thoreau asked that question long before it became urgent. His eulogist Emerson, so much a reflection of the values of his time, would have thought the question silly.

Death untimely

A week ago Monday, a 23-year old French singer, Grégory Lemarchal, died after a two-day illness. The event went unnoticed, apparently, outside the Francophone world, as there were no news articles in English listed by Google news, but it had bousculé at least parts of the Francophone population of Europe. Since the singer was known to suffer from mucoviscidose, or cystic fibrosis, early illness and death could not be regarded as completely unexpected, but his sudden death was manifestly traumatic to many. A syrupy telethon the day before his funeral raised millions of euros to fight mucoviscidose.

Who was Grégory Lemarchal? He won Star Academy 4, the French Equivalent of American Idol, in 2004. With a pretty face, the slight frame of an anorectic, a ready smile, and a barely adequate voice, he received eighty percent of the final vote. One need not be uncharitable to imagine that his illness contributed to his popularity.

He was often credited with having la voix d'un ange. His face surely was angelic, but the vocal acrobatics that he pushed himself to also pushed his voice to the limits of his vocal range and beyond, and no one would have described his voice as rich. He was young, and pretty, and a sentimental favorite because of his courage to attempt such a career with the genes he carried, so the fact that his singing was barely adequate hardly mattered.

Housman, the poet laureate for the untimely death of young men, had it right:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It whithers quicker than the rose.

How long was the treacly story of a sickly, but attractive and courageous young man going to hold up his career? Fortunately, he was unlikely to live long enough to find out, and he didn't. He was eager to please, apparently happy for the attention, and the perfect object for a kind of sexless romantic attraction. He was someone onto whom unmet needs could be projected without risk or cost. He could be loved the way that one might love someone else's pretty child, or a puppy dog, or a stuffed animal.

It's too easy to be cynical. No matter how foreseeable such an eventuality might have been, it catches us up short—we are as teased out of thought as was Keats pondering his Grecian urn. Here one day is this likable, attractive, and sweet young man, and in the space of a week he is in a coffin being carried aloft. He died weeks short of his twenty-fourth birthday, but still he seemed so much a child that John Crowe Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" seem even more appropriate than Housman's eulogy for a young athlete:

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

The young singer produced only one album. He will be hardly a footnote in the history of popular music in France. How much more exploitable material must there be, though: books, television specials, movies. It's the kind of script that Hollywood would have loved in decades past. The story is probably too sweet for anything more than a made-for-television movie—unless someone has the courage to tease out the dark underside of the tale: all those who profited as the pretty young man gasped his last, his adoring public drowning in sentimental tears, blissfully unaware of how difficult it would have been for him to have had any life that in any way resembled the love songs he sang. When he presented two girls at once as his simultaneous girlfriends, no one examined too closely what the underlying reality might have been, or what kind of loneliness he might have endured.

If Grégory's terminal illness lasted only two days, I am happy for him. I hope he didn't suffer to the extent that I am imagining. I hope that those who were close to him never realize that he might have been better off leading a more normal, if short, life. I hope that those who aren't close to him and have taken his career and his death as an opportunity for the outpouring of emotion will find something a little more real and less of a fantasy to attach themselves to.