Peace time, War time

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I've been thinking.

Everyone knows "peace time," and nearly everyone knows that "war is hell," but too many fail to know what "war time" is. To see with only one eye of peace, or only one eye of war, is to lack depth of perception. Unfortunately, no one else has the ill breeding, or sense of humour, to write of war and peace in the same paragraph. But I do. We need both eyes.

Wars still happen to Canadians. Life became all too real for 40,000 Canadian tourists caught overseas in the summer of 2008. They demanded parliament to get them out when the Israelis invaded. Only with depth perception can we consider whether Canada could have helped Lebanon to prevent such an invasion, or, afterwards, to fix the causes. I will discuss Lebanon later.

I've been thinking that being "educated" is no indication of whether one "gets" war time. I once attended a professor's guest lecture, the sort with wine and cheese afterwards. The prof showed us slides of pages of Japanese scholarly articles from before the war. Most of us couldn't read the calligraphy, still, the pictures of people's heads told the story. Before fascism, explained the prof, but not now, the Japanese were conscious of being a multi-racial society.

After the lecture I sipped my wine standing with a mature Japanese lady who, like me, was from off-campus. We were joined by a young woman. She told us she had a degree, and was now halfway to a masters degree. She had an interest in art history she said, and there was a respected artist she liked, a household name. The young student had been astonished, and very disapproving, to see his war time racist anti-Japanese posters. In the telling us this she screwed up her face and shuddered. The Japanese lady and I merely exchanged looks. How could we tell this educated innocent girl she was being so ignorant?  We let it go.

I could have said that during war time you hate the enemy with all your heart and soul. On Guadalcanal, if I am around a narrow jungle trail and suddenly meet a Japanese, and we leap to fight in vicious hand-to-hand combat, then a poster that helped me to hate was a good thing.

With war comes a tunnel vision that makes you try to reduce your own casualties by focusing on killing the enemy. If you are preparing to land on a pacific beach then you rain down as many artillery shells as you can spare. (As a Canadian said about the controversial expensive gun registry, "If it saves even one life it's worth it") You are heedless of blasting the nice pretty palm trees, careless of the it-takes-a-thousand-years-to-grow coral. As your shells are falling you feel no pity: not for the big fat enemy general, and not for the poor little fellow beside him, his skinny unarmed trumpeter.

It might seem mad to bomb the general's little trumpeter, or his nerdy radar operator, but war is a tunnel vision, a madness; war is not a time for detachment or humour. Of course we can see such partisan times in civilian life too. To say, "There's no fairness in love and war" is to say there's no being "fair minded," not during certain isolated bubbles of time. I have certainly been known to tell jokes about God, in-laws and marriage... but never in church on the afternoon of a wedding. Certain beliefs and attitudes, at certain times, are just not done. As Grandma would say, first approach a marriage with both eyes wide open... and then going in you should shut one eye.

In this day and age, when there are so many resources, not just print, it is wrong for anyone, not just educated people, to be ignorant before going into a war. And then, if we think the war is still worth doing, then it's worth shutting one eye. To research after going in, to ask for fresh obscene photographs while your war is still raging, is just obscene: It would be asking too much of yourself and others. Grandma would be scandalized.

Time heals. Only after a war is over might we regain perspective. We might then, perhaps, be amused at how the Canadians, during the Great War, changed the name of their city to that of a well known general, Kitchener. Before that? It was called Berlin. Fine, but to laugh at this during wartime is just not done. Not when certain soldiers are coming home early: The blind, the halt and the lame. Nor would this be a time to point out that maybe the war was based on a few trivial points of disagreement.

Let the hot blooded public stay hot, and let them delegate the peace negotiations to the coldblooded, formal diplomats. The rest of us just can't do it, any more than we could spank our children in cold blood. (Maybe we could, but then our children would never forget having Vulcans for parents)

A civilian comparison to war's madness could be a man who talks sensitively of "the sorrow and the pity" of French civilians in WW ll. He has no issues with appearing homosexual and he will, accordingly, gracefully weave and pivot past all the bar tables. Until he gets in a fight. Then tunnel vision—heedless—tables crashing, drinks smashing; not for even a second will he glance away to view with sorrow the collateral damage he is causing. Not until he has won or lost.

When the fight is over, it's over. One of my best drinking buddies was a bouncer. We met the night he manhandled me out the door... With peace the other eye dominates: The hate vanishes, respect shines, and people come home with Japanese wives. I once flew on a Canadian Forces plane to Germany beside a returning German wife.

The point is that war is a bubble in time. My nerves couldn't stand it otherwise. To have a "permanent war" is a contradiction, an oxymoron... to have hatred permanently, for cruelty not to be unusual, to have this for my whole lifetime, would destroy my soul, just as "permanent war" would surely destroy my nation by rendering us dispirited, cynical and corrupt. I suppose I've just described a modern Muslim terrorist, or the old republic of South Vietnam.

And what of Lebanon? Could Canada have helped? When the cruel Hezbollah were firing big rockets into Israel, but before they triggered the invasion by kidnapping two innocent peace time Israeli soldiers, could Canada have helped prevent the war? Of course: We already had RCMP in Haiti, and surely we could have sent more police to Lebanon to help arrest some Hezbollah and seize the rockets, but... our war eye was then closed. Just as it was closed when, with soldiers in Afghanistan, at first we kept lowering the nation's flags to half mast, as in peace time, every time somebody died. Surely, using our uncommitted  peace eye, once a few RCMP had been wounded, or killed, we would have "pulled out" and left the poor Lebanese to their fate.

Something similar happened when the US tried to guard relief food in the Somalian city of Mogadishu. Not having anyone to attack, no uniformed bad guys to engage the wartime eye, the peace time regular soldiers were not psyched up for the challenge. As described in the book Blackhawk Down, as few as 19 killed were enough to make the US back off from feeding people. The cynical equation flew around the world: If you can kill as many as 19 G.I.s (nobody knew how few) then the Americans will pull out. This "Mogadishu Doctrine" was true as far as it went, but it only went as far as peace time.

A war time viewpoint means that we lose our pity, and furthermore, we lose our denial of death. "As many" as 19 becomes "as few" as 19. In contrast, peace time is deny time. If tomorrow we were to begin building a Hoover dam we might proudly publish estimates of how many tons of angle iron and cement would be needed. But there would be no consulting of Workmen's Compensation Board statistics. Denial means no publishing scientific estimates of deaths.

I would think switching to a war time viewpoint is not like flicking on a solid state radio, perhaps it is more like warming up an old vacuum tube TV set. In regards to Lebanon, while those two kidnap victims had been in a peace time mode, I believe the rest of the Israeli army heated up to a war time mode. I say this because weary troops walking back after the cease-fire were so cut off from civilian concerns that they asked, "Did those two soldiers get freed?" This seclusion from news of the real world indicates a secluded bubble, a war time world where suffering casualties blunts feelings.

In our civilian world, of course, we use seclusion too: Aggressive football players start the season away in training camp. On certain U.S. campuses, according to the student football expose Meat On the Hoof, the players will have their own dormitorys and dinning facilities, ostensibly for teamwork and nutrition, but actually to be secluded from the liberal arts students who don't take football so seriously.

I wrote the following after the invasion:

What of the Hezbollah? From what I have read they had a war time viewpoint, and it seems this view is enduring past the cease-fire. Therefore, if a Lebanese policeman my age, a husband and father, paunchy and balding, tries to arrest a Hezbollah, and dies... then it follows that neither the Hezbollah, nor his wife, or his wife's good sister, will feel a single tear.

What of the Lebanese soldiers? Are they being secluded from other Lebanese, including the Hezbollah, in order to warm up to war time? Are they seeing "racist" posters of Evil Hezbollah? I totally doubt it. I totally doubt their sergeants are saying, "Listen up, stuff happens, none of us will live forever!" So despite Lebanon's cease-fire ideals, I'm sure they won't have the guts to disarm the Hezbollah.

What of U.N. soldiers? A senior Israeli officer, during the fighting, asked that any U.N. force be composed of combat troops, not "troops near retirement," not troops "seeking a vacation in the orange groves." That old Israeli knew that in peace time, when the soldiers on base know each other's faces, life is very precious. I remember in the Airborne we were shocked, the news flew around the base, when a sergeant died of a heart attack during a morning run.

To boot up to a wartime viewpoint requires a commitment. Will the U.N. troops make that commitment? Will they help disarm Hezbollah so that democracy is refreshed? Not if the troops are as lousy as the ones in Rwanda. We shall see. I for one will see with both eyes.



Sean Crawford

Calgary, Alberta

footnotes:

~ A longer version of this essay which included my military "aide to civil power" experience, Two Eyes for War and Peace was written in 2008 and posted to my new web site in 2009.
~All of the 40,000 tourists in Lebanon had passports; some loved Canada, others are believed to be prostitutes: They claimed to love Canada, but were actually using Canada they would a "customer, " to have a fire escape door.
~As a child I liked the story of The Little Trumpeter in the Read Aloud series. The beginning symbolized how Americans were watching football the morning of Pearl Harbour. As the good guys are watching baseball the bad guys quietly line up for battle at the edge of town. The little trumpeter is shown with long hair like a peacenik.
"'Blow!' And blow he did."
At a war crimes trial (his side drew mustaches on the statues in the park) he tries to escape what he deserves by claiming he doesn't even carry a gun. The King gets angry and locks him in the highest tower. Why? Because his trumpet started the whole thing. Looking back, I guess, dear reader, he symbolized civilians like me and you.

~It was in the shadow of the Hezbollah that I wrote my first two Battlestar Galactica essays.

Sarah, Terminators and Feminists

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

The original Introduction was bookended by these two paragraphs:

As a teen my self-confidence and honesty was threatening to other boys, which really warped my behavior. ( I clammed up) Before liberation everyone's behavior was warped. I barely wish to recall what it was like for everyone to believe that any lone man in a large group of women was always more functional, with more leadership and can-do spirit, than everyone else in the group. But that's how it was in the pre-feminist years.

...

"Male" was the standard and female was second rate. For example there was a "morality scale" researcher, with a scenario where the man was faced with stealing drugs for his dying wife. The scientist made no allowance for females having morally valid yet different-than-his solutions, such as using dialogue... And it was not until years after "women's libber" was no longer in our vocabulary (we said "feminist") that a judge ruled that the legal defense standard, of acting just like any "reasonable adult" would do, must include the standard of the "reasonable female adult" too.

Sarah, Terminators and Feminists

Having a hatred for war and a fondness for feminists, I have a soft spot for the tormented Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah is a single mother who knows that an atomic war is coming but instead of being paralyzed by her knowledge of Judgment Day she is determined to do whatever she can. One might assume that T2 is violent, (yes) action-filled (yes) and ... nonfeminist. (no) No, it is a moral movie: To see Sarah is to glimpse feminism. 

 For several years I was a nonvoting member of the University of Calgary Women's Collective and Resource Center. One of the other males at the center did that thing where a man dresses in spongy body armor head to toe, (cap-a-pie) and then the women are encouraged to hit him as hard as they can. The results may go beyond learning literal self-defense: On a metafilter web site a woman describes how from such practice she swiftly became empowered to react differently in so many aspects of her life. Feminists believe in empowerment.

 Were I to hit a man in such armor, my first blow would likely be at half strength, but then my next blow would probably land at mostly full strength. For a number of women, though, blow after blow is delivered at only a teeny fraction of what they are capable of: such is the power of social conditioning. Call it “learned helplessness.” In all fairness, those same women would strike desperately hard if their child was being threatened. I respect Sarah Connor for her self empowerment to strike hard: Not only does she learn to use various military weapons but even after she has a life sentence to the insane asylum, even when her life is over —or at least into limbo— she is determined to stay as physically fit as she can. In that hopeless jail, if she has nice muscles, it has nothing to do with attracting men. 

Of course feminists can attract boyfriends and have families and worry about their children. Sarah’s tribulations are during the cold war, when all children, worldwide, are at risk. Some day our grandchildren may be baffled at how we could learn to live with the horror of missile silos, but we did, the same way we could ignore how women didn’t have equal rights: Humans are good at denial. During those dread times we could choose to try our best to stave off Armageddon, or we could be passive. In those strange days when most people would wimp out, be overwhelmed, throw up their hands in defeat... while I felt like Crazy Eddie who, after being condemned by the king to death, got the king to commute his death sentence "for one year" so that he could "teach the king's horse to sing..." then, in those trying times, I could always depend on the Women's Movement to keep up with me, to keep slogging away at my side. Feminists believe in peace.

 When a man confronted Eddie for being crazy enough to think a horse could ever sing, Eddie answered gaily, "A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might learn to sing." As a boy I learned the lyrics to a spiritual: "...Joshua fit (fought) the battle of Jericho, and the wall come a-tumbling down." During those years when I was encouraging people to "hold on" to "never give up" because there might be a miracle, I never imagined that one day a horse over in Berlin would sing. Sarah never gives up. She can't: She can't forget the vision of herself in a gingham dress, which Sarah could never wear, in a park with her children, whom Sarah could never know. Who can forget seeing her other self and the children in that searing deadly wind? Not Sarah. She won’t dial down her consciousness. Feminists are willing to know things.

 Given her obsessed lifestyle, with no chance to attend a weekly women’s consciousness raising group, it is unlikely Sarah would stop to think long enough to call herself a feminist. But she acts like one.

Sarah is barren of sisterhood yet in her lonely way, she finds a philosophy. In T2 she angrily confronts a scientist, Dr. Dyson, who will soon be largely responsible for triggering our Day of Judgment. Losing her temper she yells that people like him kill because they cannot create life, cannot feel a child growing. In the book version by Randall Frakes she goes on to point out that men's version of creating is to give their name to the guns that they create. Meanwhile, the Calgary Police Service has adopted a new service pistol and wouldn't you know, it is named after Mr. Glock.

 In my young adulthood I watched as a few "woman's libbers" got other women the freedom to have jobs as notary publics and judges, doctors and police officers. We take this for granted now, but not then. It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

 My own mother believes in peace, but I can't deny there are other cultures, equal to ours in the sight of Allah, but not the same as ours: There are places where mothers teach their children to hold on to a double standard for women, and for foreigners, to hold fast to their hatred, and, in the end, to value hatred over peace. “Oh well,” says Eddie and I, “at least in my father's lifetime no two democracies have ever declared war on each other, so perhaps as democracy spreads...?”

Democracy is where two heads are better than one. Sarah, unfortunately, has little access to the democratic give and take of free speech. Bereft of a circle of empowering sisters she is alone with her knowledge of the coming horror...

 Alone, Sarah almost destroys her soul but then she suffers a child to be her call unto sanity. As young John says to a robot, "Don't you get it? Haven't you learned anything? You can't go around killing people." And she cries.

 Feminism, being for equality, includes men too. As my dictionary says, it means “political and social and economic equality to men.” I am picturing, from just before "women's liberation," a “power to the people” 1960’s male activist: As he feels confident and equal, as he feels truly empowered, then he will no longer need the crutch of having women make the coffee.

A feminist visiting Sarah's asylum would ask if the patients, men and women, are being empowered to be all they can be, by growing as much as they can, by making as many decisions as they can. Democracy in America, as the French observer De Tocqueville once explained in his classic, is where a free people make little decisions, often, so they will grow fit for making big decisions, occasionally, at the voting booth. Perhaps democracy, then, is a prerequisite for people to be motivated to even care to know what growth is, let alone care, Allah willing, for the growth of women.

 When I first saw Sarah she was a simple, single girl. An emissary from the future warned her: She was going to find strength she never knew she had, grow in ways she never thought possible. And grow she did. 

 Sarah reminds me of my own world. It wasn't very long ago that editors would not publish Andrew Vasche's mysteries about an ex-con, Burke, who fights child pornography rings, because nobody could believe such rings existed. Now we believe. Feminists, at first feeling alone, and being told they were crazy, have helped us to know that such horror exists.

If Judgment Day is a moral movie then it must have karma. It's only right that a shrink who messed with Sarah's mind has his own mind blown, such is the shrink’s karma, but what of Doctor Dyson? How could a husband and father have a rendezvous with death? Easy: Because of Cyberdine Industries. That's where a suspended pteradactal alludes to nuclear winter, where their secret vault requires two keys, turned simultaneously, to open up. When I was a child of the cold war hearing the sad air raid sirens being tested, “sorrrrrryy,” we all knew that if the man in Washington ever “pressed the button” it took two keys to empty out the silos. In that vault at Cyberdine was the “button." There rested the preposterous robot hand and the impossibly advanced chip.

Dyson saw. He was a scientist and citizen who knew that science and democracy requires questions and transparency, knowing that if an invention requiring a previous series of steps suddenly appears, then either the steps have been kept secret or the device has been stolen; he was a scholar who knew how to search the science literature and scrutinize the newspaper files, those files which would have led him to Sarah Connor's story; he was a man of planet Earth who knew we all must be alert to question strange new paths of death, from factories putting mercury down pipes into the sushi of Tokyo bay, to pesticides killing the higher animals, to fluorocarbons rising up to blast the ozone; …and so when Dyson was ordered, "don't ask!" and when he agreed not to question that button in the vault, when he passed along those orders, when he silenced an idealistic young long haired scientist, then, like a good Muslim German, he failed in his duty as a scientist, citizen, scholar and moral human being. Dyson failed.

 "The future is not set," said the emissary to Sarah Connor. "There is no fate but what we make." I agree. I believe devoutly, “Our greatest enemy is despair.”

 So hurray for Sarah! For me it is almost worth the price of admission just to see, for one second, my hero do a victory hop and skip in the prison hallway. In that second I see a human being go from victim to survivor, from shuffling peasant to purposeful citizen. In that moment I see a person of holy fire: Sarah will always create her own empowerment.

Sean Crawford

Still traveling through time,
at one second per second,
Calgary 2009

footnotes:

~While I look for peace, I have also written an essay for a clear-eyed view of war.

~For more on karma and morality, see my essay Morality, Boys and Hollywood, originally entitled Terminators and Boys, of July 2013.

~I still get homesick reading the pre-feminist 1940's Martian Chronicles. We had thought the future was set, that we were fated to more gadgets but no social change.

~The biggest surprise ovation I will ever receive was at a weekly (for ten weeks) peace meeting.

The meetings were so big that a huge lecture theater proved inadequate for the first meeting; (people were sitting in the aisles) we subsequently had to use a music recital hall. Most of us were from off campus. After someone complained about the futility of declaring the campus a "nuclear free zone" I said that yesterday I felt the same, but here, today, I was trying to be positive, for such declarations are not an end but a means to an end, a way of moving us further along the road to a solution that we cannot conceive of yet.

Without mentioning Crazy Eddie I reminded them of other unpredictable miracles such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stopping the White (A-bomb) Train, miracles that offered a way out from a hopeless terminal condition.

I said building peace is like everyone working together on a giant mural while you can only see the one little leaf that you are painting so painstakingly. You don't just quit. Instead you have a blurred vision of this big world that we are all working towards... And then, starting from off on the right, everyone in the hall applauded long and loud in solidarity.