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America's New Civil War is the latest hot issue to bubble up in the info-stew of the murkan mainstream media. Gasping for air, pontificati -- mostly on the librul left -- bandy about words like divide and gap and violence or divorce. Of course, from an historical perspective -- that is, a perspective longer than the past two years -- it is a lot of stuff and nonsense. No surprise there.
America has always been divided. It's very inception only promised a “more perfect” Union. The nation has never enjoyed that shared cultural rootedness that obtains in countries like France, Germany, Sweden or Russia. That sense nous sommes chez nous that softens and ultimately neutralizes ideological and economic divisions.
This is not to say that these other countries have not experienced searing political conflicts. We would not be guilty of misinforming. But when the political framework has broken apart there yet remained a shared space to return to. Nous sommes Asterix! When America's constitutional container breaks there is nothing left but cultural incoherence.
The Second World War, by its very military-industrial nature, required a great “national effort” as the saying went. When the war was over, the people who ran the country realized that some national sense of Americanism had to be brought about if the country were to live up to its new imperial role, sub nom “leader of the free world.” Simply put, a shared sense of unity required a shared piece of the pie.
It was hardly rocket science. Even stone and bronze age societies understood that it was the God-King's duty to insure that everyone got fed from his royal graineries. Bismarck understood this, Teddy Roosevelt understood this and France, Germany and Sweden had each put in place the basics of the social (aka welfare) state even before the outbreak of war. When the war was over America finally brought up its rear.
However, America being the sort of place that it is, implementation of the welfare state was devolved onto the private sector. In other words, you can't have welfare unless somebody can make some money off of it! And so it was that providing economic security and social well-being was largely left to large corporations counterbalanced by equally large unions. The hard “charity” cases were left to the government.
For all its obvious defects, the system worked. The immediate post war period could well be called the Great Equalization. Jobs, housing, education, and health care were all broadly accessible. America provided something fairly unique in the world: freedom of movement and affordability which in turn gave rise to opportunity which is another way of saying that the future was nothing to fear.
This is not to say that there were no class differences. But these were not so pronounced as to be unbridgeable. In most states public education was as good as private and the very systemization of admissions and hiring (adopted from the military) tended to equalize opportunity.
The 50's and early 60's may have been culturally insipid, even sterile; but, for what it was worth, just about everyone participated in the new (and fun) mass consumer culture. Jack and Dick may have loathed one another, but if they were locked in a room together they would have ended up talking about football.
The Great Equalization excluded certain groups; religious nuts in Appalachia and Negroes just about everywhere. Otherwise, all modular Presbyterians drove to MacDonalds after Sunday services. All things considered, Truman and Eisenhower's fascism-lite was a great achievement which reached its apogee when the torch was passed to a new generation in 1960.
However, the achievement was not just about benefits. It was understood by all that the American Way of Life entailed obligations as well; and chief among these was universal military service. In fact, Saint Jack promised to extend the idea of service by creating the Peace Corps and, following the German model, initiated national fitness programs to make sure that youth were physically capable of serving. “Ask not what your country can do for you ....” was not cribbed from the Libertarian playbook.
If there remained a division in the country, it was between those in the North who felt military service was irksome and those in the South who were all yeehaw to enlist. But no one expected to evade the draft. It was fact of life and a common defining obligation shared by all men. Then came Robert McNamara.
As of 1948, all men 18 or older were eligible for a service commitment of 21 months. In 1951, as the Korean War got underway, the commitment was extended to two years, but exemptions were granted to full time students. A Universal Military Training provision which would have required 12 months military service for all males was never passed. In 1967 the Select Service Act was amended so as to end student deferments after four years of undergraduate study, leaving four years of draft exposure assuming a college graduation at age 22. In 1969, a yearly lottery system was introduced and student deferments were ended. If a man's number did not come up the first year, he was thereafter exempt forever. In 1973, the draft was abolished altogether.
What this brief summary of draft law shows is that the great principle of equal obligation was honoured mostly in the breach. At all relevant times, college students were exempt from the draft. In 1950 only 6.6% of the white population attended college. In 1960 that number had risen to 8.1% and, in 1970, it stood at 11.6% What these percents clearly signified is that the onus of military service fell mostly on the working and lower middle class. It is interesting to note that in 1940, the percent of whites in college stood at 4.9%. What this means is that the so-called great middle class achievement of the 50's only bumped up 1.7% of males into the “college class.” The other side of this same coin is that the majority of middle class men, and under, remained subject to the draft, while a ten percent upper and upper middle class could exempt themselves by affording to go to college. In other words, throughout the supposed socio-economic unity of the 50's and 60's there lay an insidious principle of division.
This divisive poison did not reveal its full effects until the Vietnam War began in earnest in 1965. As troop levels increased from year to year, so too the number of men actually drafted and so too the “importance” to privileged kids of their staying in school. I am convinced that Saint Jack would not have allowed this poison to seep. At least rhetorically (and rhetoric is important), he would have made the war an “all-together” sort of thing. He was an all-together type of guy and would have at least rallied all of us to ask what we could do for our country.
But McNamara, was a nuts and bolts kinda guy, for whom the country was a machine made of component parts. Machine America required engineers and doctors, ergo student deferments. While it also required mechanics and assembly line workers, these were more fungible. Worse yet, McNamara felt that the draft could be used to give the “disadvantaged” --- i.e., minorities and the poor -- the “training they needed” for life after wounding and death. He thus lowered the standards for draftees in order to catch more fish. McNamara's Morons they were called.
It is somewhat of a simplification to state that college kids were exempted from the draft whereas non-college kids were not. The military has a plethora of enlistment programs, most notably R.O.T.C.; and, as stated, there was still a draft liability after four years of college. Nevertheless, what it all boiled down to is that those in the upper end socio-economic strata could either avoid the draft altogether or delay-enlist as officers or flyboys, whereas those at the lower end of the spectrum got to be grunts. Whereas Kennedy might have created a contrary illusion, McNamara all but reveled in the division.
If you were 18-20 in 1966, you understood the matter very clearly. You could either stay in college or get drafted. If college didn't work out, you purchased a pyscho-medical deferment or simply ran away to Sweden or Canada.
Had the Vietnam War been a righteous war, the matter would have been simple enough: either you were a studious coward or you were not. But Vietnam was not a righteous war. Fully on the contrary, it was illegal, stupidly conceived and even more stupidly waged. If ever there were a war worth not participating in Vietnam was it.
This fact provided a certain moral cover for those who simply did not want to get drafted or have their lives “interrupted” as the complaint went. Of course, who in their right mind would want to get drafted into a war waged by incompetents like Westmoreland, from whose face stupidity all but oozed? Who would want to go get shot up in a war which the government assured us over and over and over again we were winning and that victory was just around the next rice paddy. Quite frankly, no one in their right mind.
But while this stance might have been politically or morally correct in the abstract, it covered a more troubling psychological issue: how could any man be sure that all his moral protestations were not simply cowardice disguised? He could not. Never. A conflict of interest undermined all protestations howsoever valid they may have been in the abstract. Those who went, not wanting to go, were on firmer ground.
It is probably fair to say that most men who think of enlisting do so out of universal desire to self-prove and be accepted as a man among men. In form or another this emulation of our fathers has obtained in all societies. The initial trials weathered, success brings individual confidence and social camaraderie.
But there is another, converse motivation as well, illustrated by a Boomer I knew who dropped out of school in order to enlist as a conscientious objector in a war he completely opposed. When I asked why he had done it, he answered very simply that he began 1965 with the conviction that II-S student deferments shouldn't exist during wartime. In other words, it was not right that some men of his generation should be marched off to war and others not. My friend accepted himself into the ranks of men in order to share their hardships.
These two motivations, neither of which is better than the other, flesh out what it means to be a fellow citizen, a social animal. Both motivations entail effort and endurance. Although each approaches the center from different sides both meet up in a sense of social solidarity born of sharing obligations within a common fate.
The sharing of obligations is more than “social construct;” it is embedded in our bio-psychic construct. Several years back, animal behaviorists at Emory University conducted an experiment with capuchin monkeys, in which the monkeys were had to do some sort of work, at the end of which they each got paid a cucumber. One day, with no lead up or explanation, at the end of the work-day, the scientists only paid cucumbers to half the crew. The monkeys went nuts. All of them were quite upset and even the capuchins that had been paid refused to work. The male instinct to join in to shoulder and to share, to equalize up and to equalize with is no different.
Everyone has his own story unique to his own circumstances, but what the Boomer Generation faced as a whole was a very simple choice: are we, Americans, in this together, or not? Do I, as a young healthy male, say “Not, I” as I watch another man, of my kind and age, being marched off to war? And if so, what does that say to all my protestations about brotherhood and country, and, of course, “doing the right thing” ?
The phrase My Country Right or Wrong, embraces an awful ambiguity. By those who protested the war it meant: my country whether it does right or wrong which of course embraced the supposed rightness of doing wrong. But to those who submitted to the draft it meant: right or wrong, my country. In other words, we don't have that thing we call country unless -- for better and for worse -- we all stand together among ourselves as one of a country.
This latter interpretation is nothing to be taken lightly. It means that one is willing to get one's self shot up for nothing good, for nothing noble except that of living the ideal of solidarity with one's fellow countrymen. I enlist, because my brother enlists and I cannot let him go alone.
Thus viewed, it can be seen that McNamara struck a terrible, divisive wedge into the feeble fabric of the American Gemeinschaft. And, the more privileged half of the Boomer Generation was more than happy to strike the wedge in even deeper. “Hell no! We won't go!” The depth of their moral commitment was cynically put to the test by Richard Nixon. Protests against the war fizzled into insignificance once the heat of the draft was removed.
In the decades that ensued, these Boomers, now become the Clinton Class, continued their pursuit of Me, Myself and Mine further perpetuating this country's economic divides and making a shambles of the Great Equalization of the 50's and early 60's. Smoking dope and rutting in the mud at Woodstock gave way to the pursuit of real estate under cover of religiosity or Aquarian spirituality. This was not a change of course, it was a continuation of that course which was implicit in turning one's backs on “those who were unlucky enough to get drafted.” Beneath all the lovey-dovey peace & kumbaya chanting, beneath “growing up at last and getting a job” lay the quiet little sin of turning one's back on one's own generation.
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| An estimated 400,000 attended Woodstock |
In short, today's economic divide is no accident. It flows from a principle of societal division -- of voluntary civic alienation -- which was embraced by the privileged half of the country.
Sadly, the other half of this equation retained none of the higher ground it might have, as they fell into resentment, racism and retaliation that was exploited and engineered by the Republican Party which, we must never forget, is simply the other half of the privileged class.
First came Nixon who cunningly wove together disaffected Southerners resentful of integration with working class whites resentful of having been integrated into the military in a cause which was increasingly disparaged. Those who opposed the war never quite got the effect that protests in the rear have on those “at the front.” There is nothing like a bullet flying in your direction to distill things to the starkest of realities. You are either with me or you are not. There are no midway choices.
Then came Reagan who exploited these resentments further by injecting the working class with a narcotic, flashy, jingoistic militarism while at the same time destroying its unions. The barrage of militaristic and aggressive movies that hit the big screens in the 80's was the military industrial complex's answer to the hippy strobe light n' acid shows of the late 60's. They worked equally well.
Finally, came Clinton who, simply put, finished off the work of destroying the working class as such and then went on to push the lowest rung of all into the dirt of a lumpen sub-proletariat. Where was the New York Slime while all of this was going on? Somewhere in the Berkshires or the Hampton's one supposes.
What Reagan and Clinton in fact accomplished was to translate what was left of the working class into a volunteer/veteran class. Most of the old working class was left to rot away working in service jobs, shopping at Dollar Stores and dulling the pain with Oxycontyn. The luckier sergment got to avail themselves of enlistment opportunities. The military ...now highly technocratized... became the new working man's employer of first resort.
This achievement was itself the worst type of fascism possible. The Old Fascism had quaintly presupposed a universal militarization of society in which everyone classlessly was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. This style of fascism is still seen in places like Israel. America's New Fascism (Not-So-Lite) created a new military working class. Historically speaking, the development makes perfect sense once it is born in mind that the term “military industrial complex” refers to a marriage or partnership between the government and private industry or finance as expressed through military presence and power.
It stands to reason that this complex will create the class it needs. At the same time, this complex will shunt aside and ignore whatever human mass it does not need. This is a repeat of what happened in the later Roman Empire when, as it was said, the democracy of the forum was replaced with the democracy of the legionnaire's camp. At this point, however, the observation of one politician comes appropriately to mind.
“The ditch which separates [the lower middle] class, which is by no means economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual labourer - a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the labourers.”
Thus, no one despises the poor and disadvantaged more than the new military working class which has rescued itself from the sub-proletariate swamp by donning a uniform. At the same time, it continues to loathe the college educated Clinton Class which continues to indulge itself with investments and pieties while engaging in various forms of sneering, naysaying and reproving of others. America is reduced to hierarchies of loathing, disparagement and resentment, each of course appealing to moral certainties au gout.
There is only one way out: a sharing of obligations .... of universal military service, of universal and equally burdensome taxation and uniform distribution of the basic benefits of state provided education, health care, housing, state guaranteed job opportunity and universal single payer pensions.
No democracy can ever exist without raucous and usually stupid factional frictions. But no democracy has ever existed without a broad, stable middle class and only a moderate disparity of wealth. Any other argument -- be it trans-rights, gun-rights, racism.... you name it... is a distraction. A distraction which the upper 10% be they Republicans or Democrats are very happy to indulge it, because it distracts everyone else from the one issue of supreme importance to them: the 401(k) Issue.
Do I really blame all of this on poor Arlo Guthrie? No, of course not. He was just a kid with a guitar. But his album Alice's Restaurant, was symptomatic of the irresponsible me-ism of his generation, and that turning away from a sense of shared national obligation has had the consequences I have described. No one side can escape its fault but, in my opinion, the greater fault lies with that part of the Boomer generation that renounced the drawbacks of being an American while making use of the benefits in pursuit of their own happiness.
A country cannot be founded on equality of rights, because rights are individual and centrifugal. It can only be founded on an equality of obligations because it is these alone which pull all together toward the core. Until Americans of all classes are willing to recongize that fact and to take real concret measures to bring them about, the country will continue to not exist in actual fact. “America” will continue to be simply the cauldron for mutual loathing and hateful slogans.
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