America's Age of Denial
Commentary: If you told me on October 22, 1962 that America's most formidable enemy in 2008 would be Iran, I would have been flabbergasted.
July 31, 2008
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Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, Wasting Away.
-- the Beatles, "When I'm 64"
I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps the best day of the century. It was, in fact, the day of the failed German officers' plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
My mother was a cartoonist. She was known in those years as "New York's girl caricaturist," or so she's called in a newspaper ad I still have, part of a war-bond drive in which your sizeable bond purchase was to buy her sketch of you. She had, sometime in the months before my birth, traveled by train, alone, the breadth of a mobilized but still peaceable American continent to visit Hollywood on assignment for some magazine to sketch the stars. I still have, on my wall, a photo of her in that year on the "deck" of a "pirate ship" on a Hollywood lot drawing one of those gloriously handsome matinee idols. Since I was then inside her, this is not exactly part of my memory bank. But that photo does tell me that, like him, she, too, was worth a sketch.
Certainly, it was appropriate that she drew the card announcing my birth. There I am in that announcement, barely born and already caricatured, a boy baby in nothing but diapers – except that, on my head, I'm wearing my father's dress military hat, the one I still have in the back of my closet, and, of course, I'm saluting. "A Big Hello—From Thomas Moore Engelhardt," the card says. And thus was I officially recorded entering a world at war.
By then, my father, a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma, had, I believe, been reassigned to the Pentagon. Normally a voluble man, for the rest of his life he remained remarkably silent on his wartime experiences.
I was, in other words, the late child of a late marriage. My father, who, just after Pearl Harbor, at age 35, volunteered for the military, was the sort of figure that the—on average—26-year-old American soldiers of World War II would have referred to as "pops."
He, like my mother, departed this planet decades ago, and I'm still here. So think of this as… what? No longer, obviously, a big hello from Thomas Moore Engelhardt, nor—quite yet—a modest farewell, but perhaps a moderately late report from the one-man commission of me on the world of peace and war I've passed through since that first salute.
On Imagining Myself as Burnt Toast
Precisely what do I mean to say now that I'm just a couple of weeks into my 65th year on this planet?
Let me start this way: If, on the evening of October 22, 1962, you had told me that, in 2008, America's most formidable enemy would be Iran, I would have danced a jig. Well, maybe not a jig, but I'll tell you this: I would have been flabbergasted.
On that October evening, President John F. Kennedy went before the nation—I heard him on radio—to tell us all that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." It was, he said, a "secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles—in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." When fully operational, those nuclear-tipped weapons would reach "as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru." I certainly knew what Hudson Bay, far to the north, meant for me.
"It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy added ominously, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." And he ended, in part, this way: "My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred…"
No one could mistake the looming threat: Global nuclear war. Few of us listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access to that SIOP, we—I—knew well enough what might be coming. After all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies, even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to alien worlds, as in that science fiction blockbuster of 1955 "This Island Earth," or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging radioactive monsters. Now, here it was in real life, my life, without an obvious director, and the special effects were likely to be me, dead.
It was the single moment in my life—which tells you much about the life of an American who didn't go to war in some distant land—when I truly imagined myself as prospective burnt toast. I really believed that I might not make it out of the week, and keep in mind, I was then a freshman in college, just 18 years old and still wondering when life was slated to begin. Between 1939 and 2008, across much of the world, few people could claim to have escaped quite so lightly, not in that near three-quarters of a century in which significant portions of the world were laid low.
Had you, a seer that terrifying night, whispered in my ear the news about our enemies still distant decades away, the Iranians, the... are you kidding?... Iraqis, or a bunch of fanatics in the backlands of Afghanistan and a tribal borderland of Pakistan... well, it's a sentence that would, at the time, have been hard to finish. Death from Waziristan? I don't think so.
Truly, that night, if I had been convinced that this was "my" future—that, in fact, I would have a future—I might have dropped to my knees in front of that radio from which Kennedy's distinctive voice was emerging and thanked my lucky stars; or perhaps—and this probably better fits the public stance of an awkward, self-conscious 18-year-old—I would have laughed out loud at the obvious absurdity of it all. ("The absurd" was then a major category in my life.) Fanatics from Afghanistan? Please…
That we're here now, that the world wasn't burnt to a crisp in the long superpower standoff of the Cold War, well, that still seems little short of a miracle to me, a surprise of history that offers hope… of a sort. The question, of course, is: Why, with this in mind, don't I feel better, more hopeful, now?
After all, if offered as a plot to sci-fi movie directors of that long-gone era—perfectly willing to populate Los Angeles with giant, mutated, screeching ants (Them!), the Arctic with "The Thing From Another World," and Washington D.C. with an alien and his mighty robot, capable of melting tanks or destroying the planet ("Klaatu barada nikto!")—our present would surely have been judged too improbable for the screen. They wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole, and yet that's what actually came about—and the planet, a prospective cinder (along with us prospective cinderettes) is, remarkably enough, still here.
Or to put this in a smaller, grimmer way, consider the fate of the American military base at Guantanamo—an extra-special symbol of that "special and historical relationship" mentioned by Kennedy between the small island of Cuba and its giant "neighbor" to the northwest. In that address to the nation in 1962, the president announced that he was reinforcing the base, even as he was evacuating dependents from it. And yet, like me in my 65th year, it, too, survived the Cuban Missile Crisis unscathed. Some four decades later, in fact, it was still in such a special and historical relationship with Cuba that the Bush administration was able to use it to publicly establish all its new categories of off-shore injustice—its global mini-gulag of secret prisons, its public policies of torture, detention without charges, disappearance, you name it. None of which, by the way, would the same set of directors have touched with the same pole. Back in the 1950s, only Nazis, members of the Japanese imperial Army, and KGB agents could publicly relish torture on screen. The FOX TV show "24" is distinctly an artifact of our moment.
A Paroxysm of Destruction Only a Few Miles Wide
Of course, back in 1962, even before Kennedy spoke, I could no more have imagined myself 64 than I could have imagined living through "World War IV"—as one set of neocons loved to call the President's Global War on Terror—a "war" to be fought mainly against thousands of Islamist fanatics scattered around the planet and an "axis of evil" consisting of three relatively weak regional powers. I certainly expected bigger, far worse things. And little wonder: When it came to war, the full weight of the history of most of the last century pointed exponentially in the direction of a cataclysm with few or no survivors.
Who paid you to type that bull[deleted]?
Or are you really that stupid?