At Revelatur we primarily base our reporting and forecasting on facts and analytics. In our two and a half years of publishing we’ve accurately predicted the course the Republican Party would take, the likely Democratic responses, and the outcomes. We haven’t missed a call yet.
Sarah Kendzior recently endorsed our newsletter, which is important recognition of the value of our work. We’re proud of our contribution but remain concerned that we are still losing the battle for the soul of America.
Towards doing anything to help the cause, today’s piece differs from our usual fact-based reporting. Instead, we offer you a very personal, soul-baring piece from an older American Warrior reflecting on Memorial Day.
First let me lay down a marker. I am an American through and through and unabashed. The kind that tears up at the national anthem and feels instantly happier whenever I see the U.S. flag flying.
But I’m not a reflexive patriot. I read dozens of books on American history as a child and young man, from which I drew a broad understanding of our national strengths and weaknesses, our aspirations, and failings.
As a college student, I majored in International Relations, then spent six years overseas in the military working with NATO Forces – from which I gained terrific insights into the differences in our government from other democracies, and a good understanding of how others perceived us.
Through these experiences I developed a more nuanced and sober understanding of what it meant to be an American – and they admittedly changed my viewpoint from uncritical and fawning to the more balanced perspective of a practitioner of governance.
But things have gone drastically wrong in our country. There is a real war being fought for the future of the country – with real guns, real propaganda, clearly defined combatants, battle lines – everything that constitutes combat and qualifies a particular conflict as a war. Categorically, it is a Civil War. If a Civil War is being fought within a democracy, the nation is no longer a democracy. It may transition back to a struggling democracy, it may become an autocracy, but it cannot be mistaken for a functioning democracy because it is just this categorization that is disarming the left so effectively.
Where did things start to go wrong? Well, from my personal perspective, things started to change palpably during the Vietnam War.
The most ashamed I had ever been of the country was the result of seeing the video of the helicopters being pushed off the Midway during the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War – because it indicated defeat and marked Vietnam as the first war we ever lost.
At the time, l was also disturbed by the famous picture depicting a victim of a South Vietnamese napalm attack -- Kim Phuc Phan Thi – but I found myself rationalizing it as collateral damage. With maturity and military training, I now realize that both events were the result of bad decisions on the part of our government, abetted by my rationalization. It takes two to tango in the corruption of ideals and at that time I was nothing if not a good dancer.
Like many Americans at the time, I thought the Vietnam War was wrong, but that we should try to win it anyway. Nixon felt the exact opposite – in fact, almost all of his instincts were wrong – from the perspective of the health of the nation. But he was playing a different game, and it worked for him – he was reelected in a landslide despite clearly being a slimeball with zero integrity. I thought he was a temporary aberration. We made fun of him on “All in the Family, “Maude,” Laugh-In” and countless other TV shows, but he had the last laugh. The right took note of his victory, strategy, and tactics, developed a long-term strategy to exploit America’s societal fissures – and the rest is history.
The two near-simultaneous events of the seizure of our diplomats in Teheran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 hit me hard, and, combined with my family’s national service history, compelled me to join the military when I graduated from college. I just couldn’t see letting those type of things stand, not if I could do something about it.
You know, America may never have been great, but as a nation it was always trying to be. Certainty, it did used to be great to be an American. I served proudly for six years overseas and always felt great about defending Europe from the Soviets. We won the two wars I fought – the Cold War and the War on Terror. I am proud to bursting of my contribution and look back on those days as the best of my life.
But while I thought I was doing all I could for the country, I was also unwittingly permitting a cancer (Nixon’s Sarcoma?) to grow in the U.S., almost undetected. Politicians of both parties – of course the Republicans being the most egregious and odious offenders – were subtly manipulating those of who believed in selfless service to support empire building abroad and oligarchy at home. While we were proudly representing the empire, the oligarchs and big money made sure that we were no longer actually being represented by our politicians. “Representative Democracy” in the U.S. has ceased to be either – and again I helped let this happen.
Then came Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neoliberal capture of all the critical mechanisms and institutions of the nation; then the Tea Party, Fox News, Donald Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. These people and movements are not just wrongheaded – they are loathsome, they are the antithesis of my concept of what it means to be an American. They dishonor my service as well as the sacrifices of the millions of American who have served the ideals of this nation. Yet all have escaped justice and accountability — and it is our collective failure to seek and obtain justice for these law-breakers that most marks the dissolution of democracy in my mind.
Where am I now? It has come to the point where I hate seeing the flag displayed – especially on vehicles, I detest being honored at large events simply because I served, and I am enraged by the continual denigration of the concept of being an American by violence-loving, life-hating, joyless, soulless, cowardly cretins who have evidently been inhabiting the same country as I have.
This realization is gut-wrenching and depressing, even more so because it is so unexpected based on what I knew and believed about the country when I was young. My myths have all come shattering to the ground because many of them never held much truth – and that I can accept – but those that did hold truth and meaning have been deliberately subverted by big money in search of “total” money — and this is unacceptable.
The reason I don’t appreciate being honored for my service is that the gesture is meaningless. We honor each other’s service through mutual service, and the very worst thing Nixon did was to eliminate conscription. I don’t care what analyses indicate on this issue – I know that the nation is the poorer without the galvanizing mechanism that was “the draft.” We’ve engaged in one misadventure after another over the past fifty years– and lost most of the wars during that time – because we don’t have the quality of servicemen and servicewomen that is only available through conscription.
The security debacle that is National Guardsman Jack Teixeira is only the visible tip of the iceberg of the problem the military faces maintaining a fighting force constituted primarily of young, poor, southern, white men who barely graduate from what passes for high school these days. Coupled with the stranglehold that Evangelical Christianity has on the Officer Corps, we are very close to the institutional collapse of our once proud military – or at least its total capture by White Christian Nationalism.
Can we establish a rally point from which to fight back effectively, or is the giant fascist toilet bound to pull us down?
Well, I seem to have uncovered very little new wisdom that hadn’t been handed down to me by people or books. But the one piece I am sure I completely own is that one cannot feel completely fulfilled or to have led a meaningful life without at least one intense period of participation with others in a meaningful cause that is greater than oneself. I have been fortunate to have spent 20 years in such endeavors.
The point is that collective action works – both to get the things done for which the collectives are formed, but also to enable us to self-actualize. If you think that just living a good, honorable life at home and work is enough – think again. That’s what everybody else is doing and thinking – and it’s not working.
If you haven’t joined a collective action organization yet, please do so. If you’ve joined but don’t do much with it, please do more.
Please advocate with your representatives for a new, mandatory National Service to help glue the country back together. Then bug the hell out of them about everything else too!
Don’t know if this will work. Sitting around doing nothing during a war is un-American though, and I can’t abide that.