Posted on 07/07/2005 11:51:19 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Happy birthday America, you suck. That seemed to be the sentiment of National Book Award winner James Carroll in a July 5 Boston Globe column. "After the fireworks, the music, the rhetoric of freedom -- what then? The party is over. Can we think about what, exactly, we were celebrating?" Carroll asked. "Today's date puts the question of how high-flown American ideals square with the quotidian reality of what the nation is becoming." Carroll ended by wondering: "What kind of nation does our flag fly over now?" He answered: "Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our President demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why." In between, he declared: "The American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes."
CUT
....But what about today? In assessing post-celebration realities of the national moment, it may help to recall that America has never been an innocent nation, which is seen in its having constantly sought to appear as one. Indeed, the planting of the flag in self-affirming virtue is how the hallowed standard comes most readily under fire. The most poignant honoring of the flag of which I know is the US Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, the magnificent bronze rendering of the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of five weary leathernecks and a Navy medic raising the flag on Iwo Jima....
The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue.
As much as the defeat of militarized Japanese fascism was a victory, the war was also a tragedy, and the Iwo Jima image of desperate men around the flag acknowledges that, too. A new American tragedy is unfolding in Iraq. Not even its supporters pretend to see glory in this war now, and who imagines anything like "victory" any more? But if an iconic American image of the Iraqi struggle emerges, it will probably not resemble the Iwo Jima statue because amputation and mutilation have become hallmarks of the GI experience of the "improvised explosive devices" that ambush them....
The "bursting in air" of July 4th is an implicit glorification of war. On the day after, can we think of those combat survivors who will carry the real cost of the Iraqi war in their bodies forever? And how can we think of those American daughters and sons without thinking of their even more numerous Iraqi sisters and brothers?
What kind of nation does our flag fly over now? Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our president demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why.
END of Excerpt
For Carroll's July 5 column in full: www.boston.com
"Who is James Carroll and why do we give d@mn what he thinks? Esp. since he seems to be from the PRM that continually re-elects scum like Ted Kennedy?"
If there isn't a secession movement going on in MA, there should be. So many anti-American, self-hating liberals hail from that place, it would seem they should just declare the state a different country and be done with it.
I thought most Americans enjoyed the 4th of July - until this prophet of doom started his handwringing.
I went to the link.
Carroll's unguent assertions would gag a maggot on a gut-wagon. The smarmy interviewer is a towel-holder of the lowest type.
These people have no shame. None.
Anyone ever seen James Carroll and Ted Rall in same room together?
I usually don't read ANY Globe columnist to completion. Joan Vinnocchi I have once or twice, because her stupidity was SO over the top, I just hadda see how far she'd go with it. She's like one of those people who watches five minutes of one of those Capitol Gang type shows, and then goes to a party and spouts the opinion she heard like she thought of it on her own.
"But the left, which worships the imaginary "childlike" innocence as being a folk song-singing outstretched hand holding "bread" or "comfort" can't get over these ridiculous myths."
Up until the islamic facsists put a bullet in their heads. Their abject stupidity and bankrupt philosophy renders them unable to understand.
James Carroll is a laicized priest who hates the Catholic Church almost as much as he hates America. For him, it is forever 1968.
>>>Any music that requires cannons as percussion is OK with me.
How about AC/DC's, "For Those About to Rock" at the fireworks next year? 8^)
Living in Cambridge Massachusetts reminded me of comic Steve Sweeney's line about Harvard anti-nuke protests: (paraphrase) "We're against nuclear proliferation, so when the Russians nuke us, the radiation from their bombs won't kill us 'cuz they know we're on their side, right?"
The left is who we will have to fight in the future.
Freedom is neither a gift or right. It has to be fought for and will only last if maintained. You are correct.
All government grows oppressive with time. That is why the average life of a government is only about 270 years.
You know if those of us that fight ever lose it will be the worthless scum like this terrorist sympathizer who the mullahs will come for first.
Fitting, as AC/DC was blasted over huge speakers before our guys (4th ID?) went into some-town-or-the-other in Iraq.
Zactly.
Considering that Napoleon's France was America's only ally at the time, it is very ironic. But then, we are a magnanimous people.
Yeah, it's not like the Muslims ever attacked the U.S. We started this, right? :-b...
I'll donate money for his plane fare to Iran so he'll be happier.
I will wiz on his grave when he dies. This will keep me alive a long time. At least long enough to outlive this turd.
Is this written in Dan Rathers Pseudonym?
"Today's date puts the question of how high-flown American ideals square with the quotidian reality of what the nation is becoming."
Funny, but I can go hours, maybe all day without using the word "quotidian." Perhaps, weeks and years. In fact, I doubt I've ever used the word. Yet, I've been getting paid weekly for 35 years to get my point across to readers.
How did I ever do it without saying or writing "quotidian?"
I mean, it's not an everyday word.
Then again, I've never knowingly deconstructed anything. I think it would just take too long to break that idea down into concepts.
I'll betcha a buck E.B. White never used either word. And, he always got his point across.
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