Lies and Beliefs: Leslie Gelb on THE POST, The Pentagon Paper, Dominos, and the US in Vietnam

This is from Leslie Gelb on NPR on THE POST film and THE PENTAGON PAPERS (the writing of which he oversaw). Specifically, he believes the real story is not that The Powers That Were in the USA lied but what they believed true.

But the main reason we got involved in the Vietnam War was because of what we believed, namely that we were in a mortal struggle with communism - Soviet Union and China; that the domino theory applied, that we if we allow North Vietnam to conquer South Vietnam, the dominoes would fall throughout Asia and the rest of the world.

Add to this theory subsidiary theories: JFK on the Green-Beret approach to counter-insurgency, Robert McNamara on rational ways to run a war. And I'll add (again) that people could argue that the USA won the Cold War in Vietnam precisely by showing how much money we were willing to spend, how many S.E. Asians we were willing to kill, how many of our own troops we were willing to have killed, captured, wounded, and/or maimed to stop even so minor a "domino" as Vietnam to fall.

That is a non-figurative meaning of "bear any burden" and a possibility for "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" — including putting your body on the line to aid in a Great Game of power politics, and to keep your country from losing its first war.

ISIS, Vietnam, and Historical Memory

Apparently, Letters to the Editor of The Ventura County Star published on line do not appear in Google searches. I will therefore immodestly post them. <http://www.vcstar.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/letter-vietnam-syria-and-isis>, 6 Oct. 2015. Reference: Star editorial 4 October, "U.S. talks while Russia uses its military force."

ISIS, Vietnam, and Historical Memory 

         The editorial board of the Star stresses its reluctance to "throw U.S. military forces at the world’s problems," noting among other upshots of U.S. warfare after World War II that "Vietnam is in the hands of our enemy."

         Not exactly.

         Vietnam is now a country Americans visit peacefully, with which we trade on the scale of billions of dollars annually, and with which we are in informal alliance against Chinese ambitions. As far as human rights go, Vietnam does poorly, but better than Saudi Arabia, our way-too-close ally.

         We lost the Vietnam war, and America is nevertheless doing all right and would be doing better if we had not fought. By definition, no literally vital interests of the United States were involved in Vietnam, but well over a million people are dead, plus other casualties and destruction.

         There are lessons there about land wars in Asia and getting involved in civil wars and taking sides in insurgencies. 

         Those lessons need to be remembered as we face ISIS in the Middle East: a militant and fanatical movement that can give rise to a truly mass movement that can threaten world peace as nothing we have seen since the 20th-century Fascists. We need a diplomatic solution fast that eases out Assad and makes us effective co-belligerents against ISIS with Iran and with Russia.

Victims Who Count and Don't Count: PRISONERS and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (26 Sept. 2013)

Note: The date on this essay (again) is 26 Sept. 2013, and it deals with movies. The topic, however, is relevant for real-world police shootings, media coverage of kidnapping and child abuse, and a number of other topics. The analysis of how audiences evaluate the suffering and deaths of dramatic characters goes back to studies of Christopher Marlowe's 16th-c. play Tamburlaine the Great, especially Part I, which celebrates the historical mass murderer.

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            All fiction requires some "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," but the excellent 2013 movie Prisoners requires a good deal of suspension of disbelief for a bit over two-and-a-half hours. Among other things, you have to believe, tentatively, that the citizens of a small Pennsylvania town would comb the area strenuously searching for two missing little girls, but that a brain-damaged young man (Alex Jones) who is a person of strong interest to the police on the case can drop out of sight for a goodly while without much attention being paid by anyone. The point for this essay is that that nonchalance about the disappearance of a marginal young man really isn't difficult to believe, and not just tentatively. Nor, for the point of this essay, should we ignore that it's no spoiler if I tell you that audiences are only moderately upset by the on-screen torture of that brain-damaged, marginal young man, while they would not tolerate — indeed, law-enforcement officials might prosecute — on-screen torture of the little girls, even if the images with the tortured girls were in some advanced-version CGI or animation and there was no question of harming or exploiting actual child actors.

            Discussing Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, my students would talk about "the Rape Scene" and strongly condemn, justly, the vicious young thug Alex "DeLarge" for leading a home invasion and gang rape. They would also condemn him for murdering the victim, Mrs. Alexander, and I would have to tell them to hedge a bit there: our source for the cause of her death, a while after the rape, is the testimony of her husband, who is not in sound mental health; and death by the trauma of rape is a convention going back to at least the 18^th-century novel Clarissa, and is a convention with problems. In any event, if they want to condemn Alex further, I would tell them, they can note that Alex also batters Mr. Alexander, and then forces him to watch his wife being raped; when we next see Mr. Alexander, he is crippled and crazy. "After this, therefore because of this" is a logical fallacy in the real world but standard in stories: If Mrs. Alexander is horribly raped and then dies; it's legitimate for many in the audience to take that to mean that, as her husband is convinced, she died from the rape; if Mr. Alexander is battered with savage artistry — Alex stomps him while singing "Singing in the Rain" — and then goes mad; it's legitimate for audience members to infer that the pain and horror visited upon his wife and him drove him mad.

            In our discussion of the film, a number of my students needed to be reminded that it wasn't just "The Rape Scene" but "The Rape, Battery, and Crippling Scene": Mrs. Alexander is a victim, but so is Mr. Alexander.

            This got me interested, so I did some timing on the film and an informal (as in totally unscientific) survey of a couple of classes asking about victims of violence in A Clockwork Orange. Few of my students caught that in terms of screen time, the primary victim of violence in the film is, at least by my rough calculations, the ultraviolent sociopath, Alex.

            My conclusion was that violence against Alex really didn't count much for my students or for audience members generally for Kubrick's Orange; and I pushed this issue a bit with my students as to why this happened with Orange, and more generally. (Definitely more generally: for one thing, audience reaction to violence is an important issue in studies of the plays of Shakespeare and, maybe more so, those of Christopher Marlowe.)

            Primarily, my students didn't count as violence what they saw as more or less legitimate punishment by agents of State and society. This is common: unless they're reading about something grotesquely cruel like breaking on the wheel, most people don't consider even executions acts of violence. They are. The State claims a monopoly on legitimate violence — although that gets complicated — but even the most legitimate violence by the State is still violence. Less extremely, one of the reasons school violence has decreased greatly in the last century or so is that school children, especially schoolboys, are no longer routinely beaten. Having lived thirty-five years more or less around the corner from a large high school, I would protest only moderately against the reintroduction of flogging in the schools — but no honest debate about hitting kids can proceed without the basic observation that hitting people to cause them pain — especially when the people you hit are small and weak — is an act of violence (injuring them with the blows is evil).

            My students were also willing to judge leniently, and often enjoy, acts of violence done for revenge and acts of violence performed subtly: In a central sequence, Alex is immobilized in a chair and tortured, but tortured pharmaceutically, with nothing immediately perceptible by the audience except Alex's squirming, voice-over distress, and eventual screams. By means of the torture sessions — politically formulated, application of "The Ludovico Technique" of aversion therapy — with the conditioning sessions, Alex is rendered harmless and released, to be attacked one way or another — and symmetrically with his attacks on them — by his former victims.

            So a main criterion here — as Elizabethan dramatists knew — regards who is doing what to whom. Watching A Clockwork Orange, audience members who might feel a little guilty identifying with Alex in his criminal violence can enjoy a bit more freely the cruel but esthetically appropriate (if also illegal), revenge-violence against Alex. And that's, against Alex and against many other eventually victimized victimizers through the great tradition of Revenge drama running from Hamlet and its less respectable tragic and melodramatic cousins to the first Mad Max movie to the Dirty Harry and Death Wish films to I Spit on Your Grave to, well, to a whole genre including by one recent count at least 140 movies.

            More problematic is that Alex is a physically healthy young man, in the film of ambiguous age, but definitely older than the juvenile juvenile delinquent of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and definitely intelligent, lacking the excuses and pathos of Prisoner's Alex Jones. With Alex "DeLarge," we encounter a variation of what Robert Martin and I have called "The Law of Todd.".

            Todd was a film-studies student writing on gender issues in how "the camera" handles violence. He noted that feminist critics were correct, that the camera often luxuriated in images of violence against women; he added, though, that the camera is often casual in handling violence against men, especially young, healthy men: a casualness rarely seen in the handling of violence against women and never seen, as far as he could tell, with violence against children.

            I came of age during the Vietnam War as a healthy, draftable young male who got pissed to hell at my fellow Americans who, occasionally, got strongly distressed by the occasional accidental killing of women, children, and old people in Vietnam but weren't overly upset by the routine intentional killing of young, healthy, usually conscripted male fighters. Many of my fellow Americans also didn't get upset by our killing of National Liberation Front "Viet Cong," female fighters or killing children or other noncombatants by aerial bombardment — but that gets into other issues.

            Relevant here and now — in an essay written in 2013 — is that "Law of Todd" casualness of the camera-work in hundreds of fictional movies reflected a cultural attitude on the expendability of young men and in turn reinforced that attitude — and was thereby directly dangerous to actual young men.
            And to others, given that once wars get going, a lot of people beyond the various warriors are going to end up dead; but that, too gets to those other issues.

            I was a healthy young man when my political consciousness got formed and was considered White by most people. I was insufficiently aware of my privileged status at the time, but even looking back I'd say that that privilege was balanced in part by my expendability as far as the camera was concerned, and as far of much of the US government and people were concerned.

            It is a kind of progress that the camera nowadays can dwell on the suffering of men as much as that of women. And it is unambiguously good that the cinematic taboo remains against handling casually violence against children; and it is better that casual violence against children is becoming increasingly taboo in much of the real world.

            Still, it is bad that violence against children remains, but also bad that violence against older boys and young men is not taken seriously enough; it is bad that State violence and acts of violence by other authorities are usually not seen as violence at all.

            The State usually demands a monopoly on legitimate violence. In the United States we balance that doctrine with the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms and loose laws on self-defense and a cultural acceptance of much "self-help justice."

            Violence is violence. Some violence is justified: up to and including lethal violence in self defense, up to and including shredding people with high explosives if warfare is the least evil of your options. Most violence is not justified, and just about none is good.

            In A Clockwork Orange, punishing Alex is appropriate, and imprisoning him is an act of societal self-defense. Torturing Alex is wrong, as is depriving him of effective free will, which is the upshot of the Ludovico Technique "therapy" that makes him unable to strike back. In Prisoners, torturing Alex Jones is understandable but wrong, and it is to the credit of Prisoners that it explores the complexity of the moral issues of that torture. The problem remains with the audience: we should be far more upset by the torture of the Alex of Prisoners and a bit more upset by the torture of Alex of A Clockwork Orange.


            Generally, violence in films is something we should think about more and enjoy less. Violence in the real world is something we should think about a hell of a lot more and tolerate one hell of a lot less. 

Authority: Academic and Other (8 Feb. 2014)

"… you will respect my authoritah!" — Eric Cartman

            In Joe Haldeman's classic SF/Vietnam-War novel The Forever War (1972 f. — the composition dates are complicated), there's a dialog between newly-minted Major William Mandella and Colonel Jack Kynock, Mandella's "Temporal Orientation Officer" (it has been a long war, involving moving humans through the galaxy faster than light, so time within the novel also gets complicated).
            Relevant here is Kynock's discussion with Mandella of Mandella's psychology, about which Kynock may know more than Mandella, since he's seen Mandella's profile, which is too highly classified for the eyes of a mere major. Mandella questions his own competence for command, and Kynock tells him that, actually, Mandella does "have a certain potential" for leadership. "But it would be along the lines of a teacher or minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll made a hell of a bad officer unless you shape up" (opening of part IV, "Major Mandella").
            That is, "shape up" from the point of view of the Army.
            I found this dialog interesting on more than esthetic grounds. I had been a member of both a high school and college fraternity, had considered a military career, and I ended up teaching. The fraternity experience — the college part at least — I'll weave in and out of this essay. My potential military career story starts with my taking two years of high school ROTC, and then quitting in part because I had stopped growing at 5'2" and, at least at that time, I was two inches too short to be an officer in any of the military services of the United States. I was simultaneously, however, two inches too tall to be "4F" and "unsuitable for military service": so I still had to take two years of college ROTC, face getting my ass drafted and sent to Vietnam, and couldn't even be a cadet platoon sergeant, 'cause it'd look silly to have a platoon march with so short a man in a visible position. I did not have a good attitude toward the University of Illinois ROTC requirement.
            Still, I appreciated getting introduced to history in college ROTC, and spending a few hours a week in a quasi-military context was useful for my fraternity work. I could advise new-initiate active brothers to be alert in ROTC before they dealt with pledges; new initiates, I advised, should imitate the regular Army officers and NCOs and avoid acting like the cadet officers: i.e., they should be polite and confident and not assholes on their way to being fragged by their own troops — although a US-led hot war in Vietnam with fragged second-lieutenants mostly came later. (Not to say that a variety of unfriendly fire bringing down over-eager second lieutenants was something new with Vietnam, but "fragging" as a term was new.)
            Anyway, I took note of the behavior of regular Army officers because I was and am somewhat like William Mandella, but just somewhat; Mandella may be a nicer person than I am — and Joe Haldeman is a much nicer person. In part, I did want to impose my will on other guys, though surprised when I got away with it.
            A new initiate once asked me, "'Lich, what would you have done if one of us pledges hadn't obeyed you?" I paused and said, "Oh. (beat) That never occurred to me." And then I waited another beat until the irony became obvious, and I laughed and admitted to mild amazement each time I was obeyed. The trick, I explained to the guy, is to give an order courteously and sounding like it never crossed your mind that you'd be told to fuck off. And then I passed on that advice to emulate regular Army officers and avoid acting like the cadet variety. (The eventually fragged Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House [1978] had real-world antecedents.)
            So from the frat angle I was interested in authority, and also as a new student of history and just beginning student of human behavior. Older boys and young men are fairly easy to order around, but they're mostly used to taking orders from their parental-age elders. It takes a bit of doing to condition pledges to accept authority from other guys pretty much their own age and additional effort to get active brothers to accept the authority of people they live with, know, and have elected.
            I was intrigued that pledges would take my orders and actives (mostly) follow the rules; and when we had to come up with a new pledge policy after one particularly disastrous semester, I worked with the group devising new policies, even doing a bit of research.
            And, what the hell, I was also interested in my own psychology since I got off as much as the next guy — or almost; we had a couple or three really weird brothers — ahem, I was interested because this side of downright pathology I got off as much as most on the "S" part of the old frat-lodge S&M fun and games.
            As the 1960s wore on though, and as I started my teaching career, my concerns got more serious.
            With the 1960s wearing on, so did the Vietnam War; and, more personally, I saw violence much less deadly but much, much closer to home — I was in Chicago for the riots of 1968 — and I started reading on violence and on authority, most especially Stanley Milgram's experiments from 1963 f. studies of, as stated in the title of his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority.
            Less sensationally, I found myself "behind the big desk" in classrooms and in authority, and uncomfortable.
            I had no problem with imposing my will on pledges if I could: I never ordered them to do anything really wrong (for which the next part would not be justification), and they really did have the choice to say "fuck you" to me and follow that up with "and just fuck it!" and depledge. There was strong social pressure to stick with pledging, and moving would be inconvenient; but it could be done.
            All the courses I taught when I started teaching were required courses, and if my students dropped my section, there could be bigger inconveniences than moving from a fraternity into a dorm: like not getting into another section and slowing down their "satisfactory progress toward the degree" and, in some cases, putting in danger a scholarship or a draft deferment.
            More was at stake, and giving a low grade offered me no straight-forward Thomas Hobbesian "sudden glory" or Marquis de Sadean kick from imposing my will on — as in harming — other people. From my high school fraternity on, the bigger kick for me was to indirectly "impose […] ideas on other people," to get them to do what I wanted them to do, by convincing them to do it.
            Or getting them to believe the truth of my interpretation of … whatever.
            I wanted the students to respect and accept my authority as a teacher, but my authority, as someone who knew the material and could help them learn it and pick up some handy skills (like writing and critical thinking).
            Do note my arrogance here: I wanted to be respected for my authority, for what I knew and could do and to teach. I wanted respect for my personal authority, a variety not given me and enforced by the University and the State, but authority totally mine. I did not want subservience from students because as "instructor or record" I would assign each a grade.
            First off, subservience from students as students kind of disgusted me. I hadn't gotten subservience from pledges in either my high school nor college fraternity, and by the time I started teaching it was "been there, done that" for getting obedience. More important perhaps, in the classroom the bureaucratic "authority" of the grade (etc.) undermined my authority as a scholar and teacher and intellectual. I couldn't be sure if I'd convinced a student, or if the student went along with my ideas just to suck up.
            I suspect most of the students also couldn't be sure. Certainly, one guy said in class, looking a little shaken, "I'll write whatever it takes to get an 'A' …; I guess that makes me kind of a whore."
            Uh, yeah.
            I'm not a Christian or a Platonist, and I do not celebrate Mind over body — or even separate the two; but if it is wrong to prostitute one's body for a grade, to suck up to an instructor physically, it is also wrong — if more socially and academically acceptable — to prostitute one's integrity by pretending to agree when one isn't convinced.
            Now there's no problem if a good Christian student starts off an essay with a phrase like, "In a secular, materialist (godless and probably damnable) reading …" — and goes on to apply that approach to a literary text or an issue in history or a problem in evolutionary biology. Indeed, it would be unethical for an instructor to downgrade for such an opening: one can insist that a student know something or other, not that a student believe. As John Stuart Mill stated in a particularly strong illustration of the principle, "[…] there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist in the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief in them." Similarly, it would've been okay if one of my devout Freudian instructors insisted on my handing in a rigorous Freudian reading of, say, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, provided s/he had no problem with a brief cover note noting that I found ideological Freudianism, let's say unpersuasive (let's not say in addition, at least not on a cover letter, "and pernicious as clinical psychology and a little creepy").
            Haldeman's Major William Mandella is a better man than I am because he would want "to lead from empathy, compassion" as a primary motivation. I approve of empathy and compassion, but I'm a bit more into the arrogance of thinking I have something to say — obviously, since I write essays — and as a teacher I was pretty sure I had useful things to teach. That is the sort of authority I wanted acknowledged. I wanted not so much to impose my ideas on my students or anyone else but to have those ideas respected: listened to, considered, thought about, and respected enough to challenge.

            I know and knew that if my teaching didn't lead to credits and grades and a diploma, that I would've had precious few students and soon no job — and might've gotten punched out on my way to be fired. Still, I didn't like that kind of external authority because it undermined authority I that is — so long as my mind holds — intrinsic to me.