A Memorial Day Divided

In the United States our collective relationship to Memorial Day has been evolving in strange ways over the course of my lifetime, but this year it has arrived in especially absurd existential terrain. The end of the draft in 1973 polarized the nation's experience of military sacrifice.  In 1980 18% of the nation's citizens were war veterans. That ratio had fallen to 6% by 2022. In the decades since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, Memorial Day has been a yearly commemoration of terrible loss for millions, a day to barbecue at the beginning of summer for tens of millions of others.  

This bifurcation has arguably never been as wide as it is now. With 50,000 troops deployed, "Operation Epic Fury" is the 6th or 7th largest active deployment of U.S. troops since 1945. Fifteen service personnel have died in the conflict. As low as that number may seem in the abstract, the families of those men and women feel their grief and loss as keenly as those who lost loved ones in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. While they mourn, the war that took their family members' lives, though far from over, has become vague background noise for the rest of the country. 

 Memorial Day was first observed in the midst of the national trauma following the Civil War. The pall of grief was universal in those years. Virtually no family had been spared by the cataclysm. A day to pause and cope with loss facilitated collective healing.

It is hard to escape the feeling that as a nation we have lost the plot. The tragedy at the heart of Memorial Day is the fact that in order for all of us to live freely, some of us must see our lives cut short. On this holiday we should pause to honor those who have made that sacrifice, and offer comfort to those who feel their loss most deeply. 

The sacrifice of our veterans should generally be above politics, but we cannot engage the absurdity of this year's divided Memorial Day without confronting the callously negligent leadership that helped bring us to this impasse. Thoughts and prayers on one day do not truly honor those for whom the day is sanctified. We will not recover the meaning of Memorial Day until we understand that every use of the military involves risk, every deployment of our soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and marines can lead to the ultimate sacrifice of one of the nation's sons or daughters. We cannot claim to understand such truths until we demand that our leaders act accordingly. 

What Next?

 

We live in strange and interesting times. If a dozen years ago one had staged a scene in which a fortune teller predicts that war with Iran will come, and its author would be Donald J. Trump, it would have read as satire or farce. Now that war is upon us the raw reality feels only slightly less strange than fiction.

                Why have the US and Israel waged war on Iran? The idea that Iran posed some imminent threat or that this was a necessary step in the dismantling of Tehran’s nuclear program are both implausible.  My best guess (and in this I am far from alone) is that this new conflict is a product of January’s US raid on Venezuela. The swift impact of that operation has made Trump eager to use force again, and he saw political advantage in staging a strike on Iran that would be perceived as consequential.

                What next? Difficult to say. Setting aside the many legal and moral uncertainties surrounding this operation, the very basic question of how this can end is dizzyingly open-ended. Violence and destruction on the scale we are witnessing surely must effect some change in Iran, but exactly what kind of change is anyone’s guess.

                All of this is made more fraught by the fact that Trump himself does not seem to have ever asked the question “what next” of himself. Or rather, if he did , he immediately answered it nonsensically, concluding that the Iranian people will end this war for him by “rising up” and replacing their government with one better suited to US aims.  Trump  is certainly ignorant enough to believe that regime change in Iran, the dream of successive American administrations since the tenure of Jimmy Carter, could be achievable through the application of air power alone. But it is a measure of just how much the foreign policy machinery of the United States of America has been degraded that no one intervened to tell him how silly it was to broadcast such notions to the world before he stepped in front of a camera.

                What Trump does not understand about Iran is that though millions of people in that society hate the repressive regime of the ayatollahs, even more people (many of them comrades of the 30,000 Iranian protesters recently murdered by the government of the Islamic Republic) hate the prospect that Iran could become a puppet of the U.S. just as much. The ayatollahs came to power in 1979 because they embodied the one institution in Iranian society that had retained its independence from both the Soviet Union and the U.S. Iranian security forces were unwilling to fire on demonstrators in 1979 because many of them believed the Shah to be an American puppet, and they could not in good conscience hurt their fellow Iranians in the Shah’s name.

                The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone. The ayatollahs have been brutal and oppressive in their control of Iranian society and culture, but they remain, in the eyes of a critical mass of the Iranian people, independent and authentically Iranian. If Iran’s citizens are faced with a choice between following the US and following the ayatollahs (effectively the choice that Trump is laying before them), the ayatollahs are likely to win out.

              For this reason, no matter how much of Iran’s military power is degraded by the very sophisticated ordinance being deployed by the US and Israel, regime change is not likely to result. As in the time of the Shah, the security forces are the only element of Iranian society possessed of the material force necessary to effect a true transfer of political power. Many of the most capable elements of the Iranian military, such as the Revolutionary Guard, are ideological “true believers” in the Islamic clerical regime. Even those units that are not so zealous in their belief are likely to side with the current government no matter how fluid the strategic and political situation becomes, out of fear that to do otherwise will surrender all of Iranian state and society to the control of the US and Israel, an outcome virtually all Iranians would abhor.

                The only way that Trump and Netanyahu could overcome such inertia would be by deploying ground forces within Iran, and that is almost certainly an impossibility. Iran has 91.5 million people as compared to the 25 million souls who lived in Iraq when the US invaded that nation in 2003. Iranian society is riven in even more complex ways by ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian divisions than the society of Iraq, and the population possesses vastly larger reserves of social, cultural, and material capital.

           A ground occupation in Iran would become much more violent and confused than what the US encountered in the Iraq war, and would likely last even longer.  Everyone on both sides of this conflict knows that, and so everyone will feel free to discount the possibility of a US ground invasion in calculating what their next move should be. Given such hard limitations, it is very difficult to infer what kind of concessions the US could wrest from Iran’s leadership that would give them the wherewithal to “declare victory” and bring this conflict to an end. Even harder is predicting what kind of pressure could bring whatever remains of Iran’s leadership to the point of surrendering such concessions.

         Given that regime change is unlikely and a US occupation of Iran is virtually impossible, predicting how all of this will end is a heavy lift. One hopes (prays) that even Donald Trump knows that the use of nuclear weapons as a form of intimidation is both morally and politically anathema, and would send the entire world down a very dark path. Barring that kind of disastrous outcome, the questions of how and when this war will end are difficult to answer. Perhaps the only question more difficult (as a matter of abstract principle, at least) is why this war started in the first place.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

 

Representative Al Green (D TX9) has done us the favor of providing an image that clarifies the nature of our current political moment. This of course was the photo of Green holding a hand-written sign that read “BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT APES” as Donald Trump passed by on his way to the podium to deliver the State of the Union speech. There is no better expression of the obscene disgrace into which we have plunged ourselves as a nation.

              In a sane world Green’s sign would be a complete non-sequitur, a declaration so obvious that the reason for it would be utterly inscrutable. In the world created by our 2024 election, Green’s expression was a very necessary, dignified and restrained protest. Reading commentators accusing Green of being somehow uncouth or disruptive must make any rational person queasy. After Trump tweeted out a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as chimpanzees with human faces, a sign reminding the “president” that black people are not apes is the very least that common decency requires. The mere suggestion that Green was somehow in the wrong is ludicrous.

         Perhaps what is most distressing in this moment is the response (or lack thereof) of Green’s fellow Democrats. Democratic leadership had reportedly pleaded with all of the party's members NOT to stage any kind of protest, out of fear of the political blowback that might result from a repeat of Green’s noisy protest of last year. When Green was ejected from the House Chamber for holding up his sign Democrats refused to rise for Trump as he ascended the podium, but other than that they registered nothing but collective embarrassment at Green’s protest. Embarrassment for what?

          The obvious question seems to have eluded Democrats: how could Green’s sign possibly be more embarrassing than the obscenity to which Green was responding? Democrats seem hypnotized into the belief that they must treat Trump with all of the dignity due to the presidency, despite the fact that Trump conducts himself in office with all of the dignity of a monkey throwing his own feces at everyone who comes within range. If Trump covers himself in disgrace (which he does repeatedly), then there is absolutely no political downside in taking any and every opportunity to point out that plain truth.

                Indeed, by registering “embarrassment” at righteous expressions like that of Green, the Democrats have trapped themselves into a political game that Trump has rigged for them to perennially lose.  If Democrats are the only party in American politics who are actually acting to preserve the dignity of the American presidency, Trump and the Republicans are free to make them into jackasses (donkey pun intended) every day of the week and twice on Sunday. The GOP is free to pretend to care about the dignity of the presidency as Trump spews racist invective and tweets out childish and vulgar rants. Republicans clutch at their pearls when someone like Green registers any fraction of the opprobrium that Trump’s obscenity merits. In the face of such hypocrisy, unless Democrats can affirm the simple fact that the presidency can have no dignity while the holder of the office behaves like a vile bigot, they will be made into fools constantly, and deservedly so.   

          What should have happened at the State of the Union? In a more just universe, Trump would have been removed from office for tweeting out his racist filth, so the speech would have been delivered by J.D. Vance. Barring that, everyone would have conceded Green’s point and sat to listen while Trump was forced to deliver his “speech” staring at Green’s sign.

Those scenarios only being possible in imagination, in actuality the Democrats should have walked through the door that Green had opened for them, quite literally. As the marshal came to escort Green out of the Chamber, Hakeem Jeffries should have risen to declare that unless Representative Green and his sign were allowed to stay, the entire Democratic caucus would follow him. When Trump and the GOP “called his bluff," Minority Leader Jeffries should have lead all of his Democratic colleagues to the exits (inviting whatever Republicans might have a conscience to join them).

So brash! So theatrical! Anyone who ridicules what I propose in such terms has been sleepwalking through Trump’s entire presidency. Apart from cruelty and humiliation, Trump’s entire program of “governance” consists entirely of brash theatrics. The only way to contend with such a political strategy is to beat Trump at his own game. If the Democrats had walked out with Green they would have owned the media coverage of the State of the Union. No message that Trump tried to get out would have had the slightest impact, even among the most diehard elements of his base. All anyone would have talked about is “what the Democrats did.”

Trump understands that in our progressively more ADHD culture, if they are talking about you, you are winning. By unabashedly stirring up controversy and provoking chatter, Trump has sold people a lot of BS. He only wins, though, because his antics go uncontested. He is the only one who ever has the audacity to turn his “values” into spectacle, thus everyone focuses on the spectacle and doesn’t look too hard at the “values” they embody. On the rare occasion that anyone asks him why he would accuse immigrants of eating house pets, incarcerate kindergarteners, or shoot at helpless people floating in the ocean he mumbles a string of lies and moves on to the next obscene gesture.

If Democrats had walked out with Al Green, there would assuredly have been a lot of tut-tutting, tsk-tsking, and snickering. But as soon as anyone asked them why they had done so, a simple answer was near at hand: “Because Trump is a racist.” Fair enough. Game over.