Pride and Carnage - David Loftus

[Note: this is part three of a commentary on a guerilla protest mounted by Veterans for Peace on Friday; if you haven't read part 1, obscenity as protest, and part 2, the tactical use of obscenity, you should read those first.]

I’ve never understood the phrase “I’m proud to be an American.” For most of us, U.S. citizenship is something over which we have had no control. We were born here; to be proud of that fact makes no more sense than to say “I’m proud I have brown eyes,” or “I’m proud that I’m five feet nine inches tall.”

You can be proud of an achievement -- something that took effort, determination, and the decisive use of your talents -- like running a 4:25 mile or writing and delivering an effective speech -- but the happenstance of where you were born? That’s incomprehensible to me. It makes as much sense as saying “I’m proud that I won the lottery.”

Now, I’m pleased to be an American. Sometimes (such as when I was traveling for three months in West Africa) I feel pretty darn lucky to have been born here; it’s about as good as having won the lottery, when you consider the many theoretical alternatives of historic time or geographic place in which one might have found oneself. I’m often proud of my country’s attempts to live up to her great ideals and laws, but just as often ashamed and disgusted by her failures to do so.

These wars are one example. Seven and a half years ago, as war appeared imminent in Iraq, my book discussion group read The Threatening Storm, by former CIA intelligence analyst Kenneth Pollack who laid out the arguments for war with Iraq. At the end of our discussion, the members of my book group voted on whether we thought the U.S. should go to war. With roughly half the room I voted firmly against it, and subsequent events have convinced me that I was right.

One comment about the VFP banner posted to my discussion list said: “wars are a necessary evil, because there are people out there who would dearly love to kill you and everyone you love.” To respond that “wars are a necessary evil” is no answer at all to the question of whether this or that particular war is necessary or whether it is being fought in an effective way … rather in the same way that objecting to the word “Fuck” in a public banner simply avoids the more critical issue of the purpose for which it was flown.

I am fairly certain that not very many people in Iraq or Afghanistan (or Kosovo or Libya or Vietnam) really did want to kill me or the people I love. The few who might have desired to do so had no way of getting to me or to my loved ones, never mind anyone else within the continental borders of the U.S., so protection of Americans as a justification for those wars is a red herring.

Wars may be a necessary evil, but my reading of history suggests they’ve been an evil to which human beings have turned far too often, unnecessarily; which have caused untold suffering and death, for little or no or false reasons; and which almost never did anyone any good except for the odd arms dealer and his employees.

So I’d say the current wars, like so many others, are an obscenity that far outstrips the tastelessness and shock value of “fuck.”