Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Might the
Coronavirus Be a Peacemaker?
Could a
post-coronavirus planet be one on which the U.S. military and the national
security state were no longer the sinkholes for endless trillions of
taxpayer dollars that could have been spent so much more fruitfully
elsewhere?
commondreams.org/views/2020/04/14/might-coronavirus-be-peacemaker
Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That’s right,
the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview with
a Chicago Tribune reporter, he offered this bit of wisdom on the subject of history:
"Say,
what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000
years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I
don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's
tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only
history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."
As it happened, Napoleon
Bonaparte died only 42 years before Henry Ford was born and I’m not sure he
tried to cross anything except a significant part of Russia (unsuccessfully). My suspicion: Ford may have been
thinking, in the associative fashion we’ve become used to in the age of Trump,
of Julius Caesar’s famed crossing of the Rubicon almost 2,000 years earlier.
But really, who knows or cares in a world in which “bunk” has become the
definition of history -- a world in which Donald Trump, in news conference
after news conference, is the only person worth a tinker’s dam (or damn)?
In fact, call Ford a prophet
(as well as a profiteer) because so many years after he died in 1947 -- I was
three then, but you already knew I was mighty old, right? -- we find ourselves
in a moment that couldn’t be bunkier. We now have a president who
undoubtedly doesn’t know Nero -- the infamous fiddling Roman emperor
(although he was probably playing a cithara) -- from Spiro -- that’s Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's
vice president who lived god knows how long ago. In fact, Agnew was the crook who fell even before his president was shown
the door. But why linger on ancient history? After all, even yesterday’s
history is water through the gate,
if not under the bridge, and in these glory days of Donald Trump, who cares?
Not him, that’s for sure.
A President Who Deserves the
Medal of Honor?
All of this is my way of
introducing a vivid piece of imagery that our president snatched out of the
refuse pile of history and first used in late March. It was a figure of speech
he’s repeated since that didn’t get the kind of media commentary -- hardly a bit of it -- it deserved. Nor did The Donald get
the praise for it he deserved. Henry Ford would have been deeply proud of him
for bunking, as well as debunking, history in such a fashion.
We’re talking about a
president who couldn’t get a historical fact right if he tried, which he has
absolutely no reason to do. After all, in early March, facing the coronavirus,
he admitted that he had no idea anyone had ever died of the
flu. Weeks later, he spoke at a news conference about mobilizing military personnel to
deal with the modern equivalent of the flu pandemic of "1917." (“We'll
be telling them where they're going. They're going into war, they're going into
a battle that they've never trained for. Nobody's trained for, nobody's seen
this, I would say since 1917, which was the greatest of them all.") He
was, of course, referring to the catastrophic "Spanish flu" of 1918 in which his own grandfather died, but no matter. Truly, no matter.
After all, that must have been 1,000 years ago in a past beyond the memory of
anyone but a very stable genius. Under the circumstances, what difference
could a year make?
Which brings me to the
bunkable historical image I referred to above. At his March 24th coronavirus
briefing, speaking of scary death counts to come (or perhaps, given what I’m
about to mention, I should use that classic Vietnam-era phrase “body counts”),
President Trump offered an upbeat glimpse into the future. His exact words were: “There’s tremendous hope as we look
forward and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Ah, yes, the light at the
end of the tunnel. Such a bright, hopeful, and striking image that others among
his supporters and administration figures promptly ran with it. Speaking of the
then-latest grim coronavirus figures from New York state, for instance, Fox
News’s Laura Ingraham said: “If that trend does hold, it’s really good news about
when this nightmare actually peaks, and then we start seeing light at the end
of the tunnel.” Surgeon General Jerome Adams added, “What the president, in my
mind, is doing is trying to help people understand that there is a light at the
end of this tunnel.” And Admiral Brett Giroir, the administration’s
coronavirus testing coordinator, chimed in: “There are beginning to be
indicators that we are getting ahead of this -- that there’s light at the head
of the tunnel.”
A week later when things had
grown far worse than he predicted, the president added, “We're going to have a very tough two weeks"
before the country sees the "light at the end of the tunnel."
Now, historically speaking,
here's the strange thing: you could barely find a hint -- whether from Donald Trump, his advisers, or media
sources of any kind -- of where, historically speaking, that striking image had
come from. In official Washington, perhaps the sole echo of its ominous past
lay in the sardonic response of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"The light at the end of the tunnel," she said, "may be a train
coming at us." Or, as a friend commented to me, maybe it was light from a
refrigerated truck like the ones New York hospitals are now using to store the overflow of dead bodies from the pandemic.
History? Yes, there actually
is a history here, even if it’s from a past so distant that no one, not even a
president with a “very, very large brain,” seems to remember it. And yet few who
lived through the Vietnam War would be likely to forget that phrase. It
was first used, as far as we know, in 1967 when the war’s military
commander, General William Westmoreland, returned to Washington to declare that
the conflict the U.S. was fighting in a wildly destructive manner was
successfully coming to an end, the proof being that “light" he spotted
"at the end of the tunnel.” (He later denied using the phrase.) That memorably ill-chosen
metaphor would become a grim punch line for the growing antiwar movement of the
era.
So let’s say that there’s a
certain grisly charm in hearing it from the president who skipped that war, thanks to fake bone spurs, and
has talked about his own “Vietnam” as having been his skill
in avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, in various home-front
sleep-arounds. He once even claimed to radio personality Howard Stern that
he should have gotten “the Congressional Medal of Honor” for
doing so. ("It's Vietnam. It is very dangerous. So I'm very, very
careful,” he told Stern, speaking of those STDs.)
In any case, to have picked up
that metaphorical definition of failure from the Vietnam era seems strangely
appropriate for a president who first claimed the coronavirus was nothing, then
a “new hoax” of the Democrats, then easy to handle, before
declaring himself a “wartime president” (without the necessary tests, masks, or ventilators on
hand). In some sense, President Trump has been exhibiting the sort of
detachment from reality that American presidents and other officials did less
openly in the Vietnam years. And for this president, Covid-19 could
indeed prove to be the disease version of a Vietnam War.
Given his success so far with
that largely unchallenged light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, I thought it
might be worth mentioning a few other choice phrases from the Vietnam era that
the president could wield at future news conferences. Take, for instance, President Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union Address:
“We have gone through a long, dark night of the American spirit, but now that
night is ending.” Or the classic description by an anonymous U.S. major of the
retaking of the town of Ben Tre in the wake of the Tet Offensive of 1968: “It
became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Or, should the president want
to stick with General Westmoreland, there’s always his 1967 National Press Club speech highlighting progress in the
war: “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into
view.”
Give Donald Trump credit. He
seems to be leading the richest, most powerful country on the planet in an
ill-equipped, ill-organized, ill-planned battle (though not in any normal sense a war) against the pandemic from
hell. Whether or not it ends in a Vietnam-style helicopter evacuation from that hell (or even from the
White House) remains to be seen, but at least the imagery chosen so far has
been unnervingly apt, though next to no one in our increasingly bunkable world
even noticed.
Peace in the Dark?
Still, in a Trumpian spirit,
let’s take the president and his team at their word for a moment. Let’s
consider what glimmer of grim hope might be discovered in that light they claim
to see flickering at the end of the coronaviral tunnel -- at least when it
comes to twenty-first-century American war.
Let’s start with the obvious: like
the Black Death of the 14th century that ended feudalism, it’s at least
reasonable to assume that, whenever it finally disappears (if it goes at all), Covid-19 will indeed have ended something on
this planet of ours. Imagine an American future (more than 100,000 body bags worth of it) in which the global
economy has been thoroughly cracked open and the Pentagon and the U.S.
military, perhaps the most powerful institutions in twenty-first-century
America, find themselves among the wounded and the crippled.
Let’s imagine, as with
the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that the coronavirus is likely to
run riot through the closed ranks of that military, filling some of those very
body bags. What, then, of the conflicts our twenty-first-century “warriors”
have been fighting from Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia and beyond, those
never-ending post-9/11 wars of terror (officially, of course, “on terror”)?
Will our troops, trainers, advisers, and military contractors soon find
themselves in what may be little short of pandemic wars?
Can you even imagine what that
might involve? One thing crosses my mind, at least: that such wars will become
too dangerous to fight and that, sooner or later, American troops might simply
leave Covid-19 battle zones for home. Such possibilities aren’t in the
headlines yet, although reports of the first tiny evacuations -- of Green Beret units -- from such pandemic battlegrounds
are just beginning to pop up and the first U.S. trainers in Iraq seem to have been withdrawn (“temporarily”) due to the spread of the coronavirus in that
country.
It’s true that these initial
small steps seem like anything but the equivalent of the final dramatic
evacuation from the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975 as North Vietnamese troops
moved into town. Still, with the first tiny evacuations seemingly underway, my
question is: Could the coronavirus turn out, in some strange fashion, to be a
grim, death-dealing peacemaker for Americans? The United Nations of diseases?
Is it possible that, on the hotter, more imperiled planet to come, the hundreds of American bases still scattered around the
globe in a historically unprecedented fashion and all those troops, as well as
the forever wars that go with them, could be part of our past, not our future?
Could a post-coronavirus
planet be one on which the U.S. military and the national security state were
no longer the sinkholes for endless trillions of taxpayer dollars that
could have been spent so much more fruitfully elsewhere? Could there, in other
words, be just the faintest glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel from
hell or is that still darkness I see stretching into the distant future?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire
Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).Previous
books include: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State
in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn
Greenwald). Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored
with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond,
as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top
of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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