Truth, Justice and the
American Way
By Brantley Thompson Elkins
There was an unfortunate dust-up about a month ago at the Aurora
Universe Readers Group, occasioned by word that DC Comics was dropping
Supermans commitment to the American Way, if not to truth and justice.
It does seem silly, in this day and age, to expect a strange visitor from another planet, with powers and abilities far beyond
those of mortal men to adopt or be adopted by one country. But the dustup
wasnt really about that; it was about American Exceptionalism, the idea that
the United States is singularly blessed in liberty and civic virtue and even
has a manifest destiny to lead the world.
American Exceptionalism has taken a beating in recent
decades from revisionist historians, especially since the Vietnam War and the
current war on terror. Cultural critics have embraced an obnoxious sort of
reverse exceptionalism – America not only isnt the best country in the
world, but its the worst: a bastion of racism at home and imperialism abroad,
the country solely responsible for global warming, poverty in the Africa and
every evil on the face of the Earth.
It doesnt help that some of our nations would-be
defenders betray their ignorance of American history. The latest was Republican
presidential contender Michelle Bachmann, who claimed that the founding fathers
worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States,"
and that one of these was John Quincy Adams – just about to turn nine
years old when the country declared its independence and all of 20 during the
Constitutional Convention. It was at the convention that Gouverneur Morris, who
had served in the Continental Congress from New York, ranted against the
Southern states demand that their slaves be counted in the census to determine
representation in the House of Representatives:
Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the
representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are
they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in
[Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves that cover the rice
swamps of South Carolina....The admission of slaves into the representation
when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South
Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred
laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest
connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in
a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the
citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with laudable horror so
nefarious a practice.
Alas, the better known founding fathers – George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – all owned slaves, and
did little or nothing to end slavery. Bachmann has been roundly ridiculed for
making abolitionist activists of them. But what her critics fail to mention is
that Jefferson and other founding fathers were conflicted about slavery. In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence,
Jefferson condemned slavery and the slave trade in no uncertain terms, even if
he was playing fast and loose with the truth by laying them solely at the door
of King George:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's
most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who
never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another
hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this
piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the
Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN
should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing
every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce
[determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and
that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is
now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that
liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he
also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the
lives of another.
That condemnation was deleted from the final draft at the behest of
slaveholding colonies. Yet the fact that it could be presented at all speaks to
something that was noble in the American spirit from the very beginning. In
spite of being a slaveholder, Jefferson knew that slavery was evil. Five years later, in Notes on the State
of Virginia, he addressed the issue again:
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have
removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that
these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but
with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is
just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.
Jefferson, who was poor at business and chronically in debt, never freed
his own slaves while he lived. It is also almost certain that he had an affair
with a slave, Sally Hemmings, and fathered six children by her. And so he was a
hypocrite. But that brings to mind Franois de La Rochefoucaulds famous maxim:
"Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend la vertu" – "Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to
virtue." The hypocrite, while choosing vice, recognizes that virtue is in
fact better, and assumes its protective coloration. When we call a hypocrite
dishonest, we mean that he is dishonest, not about good and evil, but only
about himself. That is reflected even in the wording of the Constitution, which
never mentions slavery but uses euphemisms and circumlocutions.
Stephen Decatur is often quoted as saying, My country, right or wrong.
What he actually said, in a toast in 1816 to Americas recent victory over the
Barbary pirates, was Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may
she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong. Carl Schurz later
came up with a variation, "My country, when right to be
kept right, when wrong to be set
right. What few
realize is, that in ancient times, nobody would have said, My country, right
or wrong, because the very idea that ones country could be wrong was
inconceivable. The founding fathers knew better, even if failure of nerve stood
in the way of their setting right things that should have been set right.
Regardless of whether one believes in God, Jefferson was prescient when
he wrote that justice could not sleep forever. Slavery continued to expand in
our country, thanks in part to the cotton gin, which energized the cotton
industry. But there were still Americans who fought against slavery. They loved
their country, and it was out of that love that they wanted to set it right.
They held meetings, penned manifestoes, petitioned Congress, thundered from the
pulpits, organized the underground railroad and even took violent measures
– notably John Brown. Harriet Beecher Stowes anti-slavery novel Uncle
Toms Cabin electrified the country and
helped set the stage for the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Legend has it that when she visited the White House, Lincoln greeted her with,
"so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great
war."
Stowes reputation has suffered over the past century, her novel having
been condemned as condescending towards blacks. But she has her defenders, most
recently David S. Reynolds in a June 13 op-ed for The New York Times, who argues that Uncle Tom was anything but an Uncle Tom; rather a
man of courage and dignity who is killed because he refuses to betray two
runaway slaves. Lincolns own reputation, thanks to revisionist historians, has
also suffered; he is widely believed to have insisted to the end that blacks
and whites could never live together here in freedom and equality, and that the
only solution was transportation back to Africa. Yet in his last speech, made
outside the White House, April 11, 1865, after the surrender of General Lee,
his thinking had changed:
Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of
Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful
political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government,
adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally
to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective
franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify
the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery
throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed
to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state--committed to the very
things, and nearly all the things the nation wants--and they ask the nations
recognition and it's assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we
reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We
in effect say to the white men "You are worthless, or worse--we will
neither help you, nor be helped by you." To the blacks we say "This
cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash
from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered
contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how." If this
course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to
bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far,
been unable to perceive it.
For the first time in a public setting, Lincoln expressed his support
for black suffrage. That incensed a down-on-his-luck actor, John Wilkes Booth,
a member of the audience, who vowed, "That is the last speech he will
make." A white supremacist and Confederate activist, he made good on his
threat three days later. Then followed radical Reconstruction, which was
supposed to bring the South into line and assure a better future for blacks but
may have only exacerbated racism – and left the former slaves and their
descendants waiting more than a century for that vague and undefined when,
where and how.
There are die-hard Southerners to this day who assert that their
forefathers were fighting for the principle of states rights rather than the
preservation of slavery. Mitchel Olszak, in a column published in the Richmond
Register April 10, 2010, took one of them
to task:
And then we have Virginias governor, Bob McDonnell, who issued a
proclamation declaring April as Confederate History Month. The document was a
largely innocuous attempt to promote state tourism, but somehow left out any
mention of the elephant in the room — slavery.
When challenged on that point, McDonnell first attempted to dismiss
objections by claiming that slavery wasnt a key issue in the state. Rather,
the governor said, I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for
Virginia.
Not surprisingly, that comment put McDonnell even deeper into the
ideological muck, and he was obliged to both apologize and revise his
proclamation to make note of the evils of slavery.
So how would a Virginia governor, in this day and age, even attempt
to suggest slavery wasnt a key aspect of the Civil War and his states
involvement in it?
The answer has to do with a game thats been played for generations:
Those who seek to rationalize secession claim the Civil War was a matter of
states rights, and the effort by Southerners to resist the dictates of
Washington.
But the central right in question was slave ownership. The Southern
elite feared the growing political opposition to slavery and the economic
consequences of abolition.
Peter Sicher ticked off some of the details in the April 22, 2010 Johns
Hopkins Newsletter:
Those ideas," he said, "were fundamentally wrong . . . Our
new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are
laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal
to the white man; that slavery – subordination of the superior race is
his natural and normal condition."
Some incorrectly believe that middle-south states like Virginia that
seceded after the attack on Fort Sumter did so more to resist invasion than to
protect slavery.
Most Virginians had hoped to preserve both slavery and the Union by
convincing the North to agree to new protections for slavery.
Virginia Governor John Letcher, a truly reluctant secessionist, told
the North that secession could be avoided if they agreed to (among other
actions) remove their laws that attempted to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act,
to protect slavery in the territories, to allow masters to pass unmolested with
their slaves through free states, to refrain from interfering with the
interstate slave trade, and to ban the central government from appointing
antislavery officials to southern posts.
Yet there are also those on the Left who wont let the past rest,
arguing that the U.S. owes reparations to the descendants of slaves because
enslaved blacks had supposedly built the entire foundation of our countrys
economy. Even Margaret Mitchell, apologist for the South and what used to be
called the Southern Way of Life (segregation) wasnt that stupid. Early on in Gone
with the Wind, she has Rhett Butler rub his
fellow Southerners noses in the truth:
I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of
immigrants whod be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars,
the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all
the things we havent got. Why all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance.
It wasnt slaves who built those factories and foundries and shipyards
and mines. They were the product of free enterprise and free labor. Slavery
only turned the South into an economic backwater. That wasnt the fault of the
blacks, of course, and the die-hard whites who worked to rob them of the fruits
of emancipation through terrorism (the Ku Klux Klan and an epidemic of
lynchings) and segregation continued to retard their regions economic
development. But blacks who moved north to work in the construction trades
found obstacles there, according to Henry C. Alford, president of the National
Black Chamber of Commerce:
Due to the Jim Crow laws of the South, there were many Black southern
craftsmen who would travel to perform their skills. Many would go to places like New York, Philadelphia,
Detroit, etc. and would out compete local white contractors who could not
perform as well as they did and could not settle for their affordable pricing.
It was because of this, that construction unions in the North were formed to
block out Black crews from coming into communities and providing a better
service for a cheaper price. Soon
after the unions were formed they set in motion the Davis-Bacon Act (named for
two New York congressmen). This
act set up arbitrary labor wage scales so that Black craftsmen could no longer
under price their white counter parts.
They all had to pay a certain price, prevailing wage, at a minimum and
competition became no more. With the price competition out of the way, the
whites moved in through political favor and blatant racism. This would be
followed with Project Labor Agreements which meant some projects would be
declared Union Only. With the construction unions discriminating against
Blacks, PLAs would also mean Whites Only.
Liberals er, progressives, like conservatives, like to have all their
ducks in a row. Youd never guess that northern progressives or radicals as
well as Southern conservatives were racists. Jack London, known today mostly
for adventure stories like The Call of the Wild, was a socialist zealot whose The Iron Heel forecast a socialist revolution and fascist
counter-revolution, but also a racist zealot, whose The Unparalleled Invasion
dreamed of the extermination of the Chinese people through germ warfare.
Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist who promoted progresssive legislation like
the Federal Reserve Act and conceived the League of Nations, also imposed
segregation on the nations capital and in federal agencies as president. It
would be going too far to condemn the labor movement or progressives wholesale.
Their motives were often righteous, but a sense of righteousness can blind those carried away by it.
Few today remember the Spanish-American war, still less the suppression
of the Philippine rebellion followed. That suppression was pursued by President
Theodore Roosevelt, who was a progressive in domestic policy (The Pure Food and
Drug Act) and won the Nobel peace prize for his role in settling the
Russo-Japanese war. No doubt he really believed he was bringing the blessings
of civilization to the Philippine people – this was about the time
Rudyard Kipling was waxing poetic about the White Mans Burden. In 1906,
General Leonard Wood massacred six hundred Moro men, women and children who
were trapped in the crater of an extinct volcano. They were considered
hostiles because they objected to the occupation of their homeland and the
denial of their liberties. On March 10, Roosevelt congratulated General Wood
and his men for a brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld
the honor of the American flag. Here is how Mark Twain reacted two days later:
His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he
said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred
helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them
in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the
heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms – and would not have been a
brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried
soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of
bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the
honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously
for eight years in the Philippines – that is to say, they had dishonored
it.
Who was the true American patriot in this sorry episode, Roosevelt or
Twain? Beyond that, the Moro massacre and its aftermath offer a stern lesson in
how thin the line can be between patriotism and jingoism. There is also a thin
line between moral outrage and fanaticism. The fervor behind the Prohibition
movement, for example, was very much like that behind the Abolition movement.
But Prohibition was not only a denial rather than an affirmation of human
liberty, but unleashed a plague of organized crime that troubles us to this
day. The War on Booze lasted barely 15 years, but we still have the War on
Drugs, which has cost us billions and billions of dollars – and filled
our prisons with people who have done nothing worse than smoke pot. Rival drug
cartels shoot it out indiscriminately in the streets of Mexico, and then
conservatives wonder why so many Mexicans seek refuge here. Former President
Jimmy Carter acknowledged the ugly truth in an Op Ed piece for the New York
Times June 16:
Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in
other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations.
At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated
in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743
people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any
other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people
are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of
all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing
and three strikes youre out laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions
to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of
prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people
incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since
1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of
millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities),
but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his states
budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11
percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.
As Carter said, perhaps the budget crisis will accomplish what common
sense and a regard for human dignity have failed to, and put an end to this
travesty of justice. And yet, on balance, the past century has been a century
of progress for America. We have been through two world wars and a number of
smaller wars. They have been brutal wars, and yet no president would dare issue
an official letter of commendation to the perpetrators of My Lai or Abu Ghraib.
We have been through the Great Depression, and a series of other crises, and
yet we recovered from them. Women got the vote and, a few generations later,
found a new voice in the womens liberation movement that radically changed
society and their role in it. We can find women in board rooms instead of just
the secretarial pool. Black Americans finally got the right to vote in the
South, and segregation was swept away; today we have a black president –
and even if he has been a disappointment, the fact that he could be elected in
the first place speaks volumes. And would anybody have believed a generation
ago that Oprah Winfrey would be the queen of daytime TV? Ordinary working
people are now part of the middle class, owning homes and sending their kids to
college instead of slaving away as the working poor. Gays, once treated as
criminals, have been liberated, and New York recently became the sixth and largest
state to approve gay marriage. These changes have all come about because there
were Americans who were determined to set things right for their country.
Martin Luther King is the most celebrated example, but there are many others,
sung and unsung. They are the kind of people who are the true defenders of
truth, justice and the American way, and their labors, often at great personal
cost, have shaped an America we can be proud of. Youd think that we have a lot
to celebrate this Fourth of July, and we do.
But youd never guess that from the diatribes of Americas most vocal
critics. In their eyes, things not only havent gotten better, theyve gotten
worse. In fact, worse than ever. It
isnt just because were in another deep recession, either, because the
alienation of critics on the Right and Left alike goes back a lot further. On
the Right, it began as a lunatic fringe thing, with groups like the John Birch
Society convinced that Eisenhower was a Communist and fluoridating water was a
Communist plot. But it later went mainstream with the likes of Jerry Falwell,
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Evil Empire,
they see our country in greater peril than ever from devil-worshipping secular
humanists, gays, Mexican immigrants and especially, after 9/11, Muslims. I've seen Muslim women in head scarves working the checkout lines at Target something they'd never be allowed to do in many if not most Muslim countries. They have to know they're better off here than there. But that sort of insight is lost on those who
see them as so dire a menace that only draconian internal
security laws, unlimited surveillance of the entire U.S. population and
military courts can save the country – although we never needed such
extreme measures against Nazi agents during World War II, Soviet spies during
the Cold War or, for that matter, the Oklahoma City bombers and the perpetrators of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. But the Right can
at least claim that its only responding to current events; for the Left,
nothing in the United States has changed for the better since World War I or
maybe even the Civil War.
In Costa-Gravas movie Betrayal
(1988), for example, typical Midwesterners are depicted as hunting down black
people for sport. Costa-Gravas is Greek, which we are evidently supposed to
think gives him greater insight into the evils of Amerika than any American
could have. But there are Americans who parrot his line. Here, for example, is
science fiction writer John Sladek, also on the American Midwest:
Whats
wrong with the Midwest is not flatness or greyness but people. It was just as
flat when it was a home for the Sioux, a pasture for their buffalo. It did not
become boring until a peculiar breed of genocidal people took over. Their lives
were flat and rectilinear, as the straight and narrow path to the heaven they
believed in. Accordingly they cut the Great Plains into squares, setting
rectilinear boundaries for states, counties, farms and fields.
So
rectilinear boundaries are the essence of a genocidal people? Such boundaries
were never the rule in Europe, and by that logic Germans under the Nazis could
never have become genocidal. For that matter, what does the rectilinear
pattern of streets in New York City say about the possibly genocidal nature of
New Yorkers? Sladeks argument is every bit as specious as those of the 19th
Century racists who invoked phrenology in their cause. An aspiring writer named
Dave Auerbach quotes Sladek approvingly in an essay about another sf writer,
Thomas M. Disch, who, like Sladek, was born in Iowa – and made it clear
in his fiction that if the world needed an enema, theyd have to put the tube
in his native state:
George
Wallace and Adolf Eichmann are two figures who recur in Dischs work, early and
late, and they symbolize the two halves of America that now appear in far
sharper relief than they did at the time Disch started writing: town and city,
one rural, populist, and xenophobic, the other liberal, technocratic, and
heartless. Disch frequently treated them in isolation, but they reinforce one
another, antagonists that form a unified system. Together, they constitute the
American success story, by which Disch means its inhumanity.
An
odd thing here is that Auerbach never mentions Alabama; youd think that
Wallace, too, must have been a Midwesterner. As for Eichmann, Auerbach –
surely unintentionally – reminds us of Ward Churchill, the University of
Colorado professor who famously proclaimed that all the people in the Twin
Towers on 9/11 were Little Eichmanns who got what was coming to them.
Churchill later lost his job for having allegedly falsified research papers, he
was also accused of faking Native American ancestry. Years before that, he
published a screed arguing that pacifism was racist.
For the likes of Auerbach and Churchill, all America is like Mississippi
at its worst during the era of segregation. Yet even in Mississippi, you could
find decent white people. I know this because of the oral history testimony of
Henry Peacock of Grenada, who may well owe his life to the woman who ran a
local restaurant where he and other black youth staged a sit-in 1966:
Peacock: We went around to the front. And this lady that owned that
place was named Ms. Tony. I never will forget her. She wasn't no prejudiced
lady. She just was going along with what was going on in [those] days. You
could tell that because she didn't mind serving us. It wasn't her; it was the
guy that owned the service station across the street over there, from her. And
if I'm not making no [mistake], I don't want to call this guy no wrong name,
but I believe that guy was a Worshen[?]. And anyhow, we went in that Chicken
Inn, and we ordered all those hamburgers, and she was there. She went back
there. She said, "You want ten? Sure." You know. We ordered ten hamburgers.
It wasn't but seven or us, but we were going to take some of [the hamburgers]
with us.
Anyhow, this white guy walked up to me, and he say, "What are
you doing in here?"
And we said, "Well, we just come in to buy burgers." You
know.
He said, "Well, didn't you know niggers wasn't allowed in
here?"
And we said, "Yeah, that's why we're in here. We're integrating
the place." You know.
And this guy said--. He takes a gun out of his pocket, and he cocked
it.
Interviewer: What was it?
Peacock: A thirty-eight. I didn't know what it was then, but when I
got back to the church and explained to Leon and told [him] what the gun looked
like, he said that sounded like a thirty-eight because it was a short gun.
And he takes this gun, and he put it up to my nose right there and
say, "You believe I'll blow your brains out?"
And I'm just naive. I'm steady turning away from the man, like, you
know, "This ain't nothing." You know. "Just a water gun."
You know. I mean, that's the way it was. You know. Because you didn't think
about it. You really didn't think about it. And I told him, "Naw."
And he said, "Well, y'all some smart niggers." I think
that's the way he put it.
And Ms. Tony finally told him, say, whatever his name was, "Why
don't you leave, Doc?" I believe that's what she called him. "Why
don't you just leave, and let me go on and serve these people, and get it over
with?" And he did. He left. And we finished up. We went on back to the
church because we had to go back and tell what we experienced.
It is people like Ms. Tony that the likes of Churchill and Auerbach want
to erase from our memories, and yet it is people like her who are the real
bedrock of America – people willing to give up their old ways in favor of
new and better ways. One recent bit of headline news suggests that Americans
are ahead of their supposed betters in Europe in their sense of civic virtue.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as Im sure you all know, was the French head of the
International Monetary Fund, who had to resign after he was accused of
attempting to rape a housekeeper at a New York hotel.
In recent days, the case against Strauss-Kahn has fallen apart, because
it turned out that the maid has serious credibility problems. Only, before
that, a French woman had come forward to accuse him of having tried to rape her in 2002; her mother had pressured her to keep silent about it. Yet Strauss-Kahns
political allies – socialists,
mind you, not right-wing misogynists – defended him from the start.
Chances are now that hell be the toast of the town in the enlightened land
of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. But in America, hed be toast, period just
like John Edwards and Mark Sanford and Arnold Schwarzenegger and other
prominent politicians who have cheated on their wives. Weve come along way
since John F. Kennedy could have affairs without the press getting wise, or
perhaps keeping silent even if it did. But it isnt a matter of renascent
Puritanism; Americans arent against sex theyre against public dishonesty and private betrayal.
All this really does relate to that dust-up at the AURG. But let me back
into it, through the movie Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), an account of Lt. Col. James Doolittles
raid on war industries in the Japanese capital in 1942. The movie was obviously
intended as a morale builder and it was filmed during the height of
anti-Japanese propaganda. Yet there is surprisingly little venom in it. In the
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, Doolittle makes it clear that attacking military
factories will mean civilian casualties, and tells his men that if any of them
have a problem with that, they can drop out of the mission without any penalty.
That seems astounding for a wartime movie, and even more astounding given the
fact that Trumbo was a hard-core Communist who ended up being blacklisted by
Hollywood after the war. I dont know whether Doolittle actually said what
Trumbo had him saying, but Im sure it was the message the government wanted
the American people to hear – and that the American people wanted to
hear: that we were supposed be morally superior to our enemies. Imagine the
reaction if Spencer Tracy as Doolittle in the movie had yelled, Burn those
Japs alive!
Yet that is exactly what our Army Air Force did. Indiscriminate
fire-bombing of Tokyo was the rule later in the war, and then came Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. In Europe, American planes fire-bombed Hamburg and Dresden; if
the war there had lasted a few months longer, they would doubtless have nuked
Berlin. Historians are familiar with this, even if the general public isnt,
and that has led a number of them to argue the case for moral equivalence
– that America behaved just as badly as its enemies, and not just in
combat. What about internment of Japanese residents including citizens, in the
United States during the war? Wasnt that just the same as the Germans putting
Jews in concentration camps?
Only, the Japanese were never consigned to the gas chambers. Some of
them even joined the U.S. Army and fought in Europe – the 1951 movie Go
for Broke! celebrated their heroism. Our
government finally apologized for their internment in 1988. Would Nazi Germany,
had it won the war, ever have apologized to the Jews – assuming any
survived? Japan didnt get around to apologizing to China for the 1937 Nanking
massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, until
1995 – and in 2007 100 deputies of the Japanese parliament denounced
their government for doing so, claiming that the massacre was a fabrication.
Would even the most conservative congressmen here ever dare to pretend that
Tokyo and Hiroshima and Hamburg never happened? America is a country where the
truth will out, where attempted cover-ups have always failed, where, sooner or
later, our leaders are called to account.
America is a country that still makes mistakes, but can still learn from
its mistakes. We can freely debate everything from the war on terror to
Obamacare. It may be significant that its most virulent critics hate that about our country. The far Right has admired
right-wing dictators from Rafael Trujillo to Ferdinand Marcos to Anwar Sadat.
The far Left embraced Josef Stalin back in the 1930s, and today fawns on Hugo
Chavez and even Muslim autocracies. In Jane Haddams mystery novel, Cheating
at Solitaire (2008), Stewart Gordon
(loosely based on Patrick Stewart), himself a Man of the Left who favors a
welfare state, cant understand the sort of people who think having to live in
a world with Fox News was much more oppressive than living under a government
that would execute you for sleeping with your boyfriend, especially if you also
happened to be a boy.
America is a country that
is continually reinventing itself. It is a nation that has become
multi-cultural in fact as well as in name – even during the era of racism
at its worst, it embraced ragtime and jazz. It has been enriched by the
cultures as well as the labors of its immigrants, and those immigrants keep
coming – from Europe, Asia and even Africa. They come here to change
their lives, to reinvent themselves. The New York Times today featured one example: a young woman from India
who developed an online networking service for helping students with their
homework:
When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of
Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She
was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on
problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.
Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm
rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,
she said. But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting
help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.
The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation
of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza. Ms. Nath, who was the first woman
from her hometown to attend the prestigious engineering school and later
escaped an arranged marriage to become an entrepreneur, conceived of the site
for homework help in 2009 during her first year at Stanford Graduate School of
Business.
Pooja Nath is a new American. But she is a true American. She probably
doesnt care a hoot about DC Comics, and would care still less about our little
sandpile if she ever came across it. But she surely believes in Truth, Justice
and the American Way. And doubtless also in civility. We would do well to honor
that in our own discussions and debates, and in our daily lives.
July 4, 2011