Of all the death that this society endured during the 60's, there were two sorts. The micro and the macro. On the macro side were the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, with an average age of 19. 19. No voting. No beer. No fatherhood. Just high school and then death. Add to that 3,000,000 Vietnamese, and macro is macro indeed.
On micro side were the handful of political assassinations which greased the wheels of the larger slaughter. Medgar Evars. John Kennedy. Malcolm X. Martin King. Robert Kennedy. Fred Hampton.
And of all those losses, each one unbearable in and of itself, the loss of Robert Kennedy was the greatest.
By all accounts, Robert Kennedy was a spoiled brat who never had to hold down a square job, a petulant and moralizing son of a bitch, who paraded his ruthless ambition for his older brother as selfless public service, like the most cynical Roman general, seizing power "for the good of the republic".
None of these accusations are necessarily untrue. Bobby Kennedy was no angel. He played a part in pursuing the assassination of Castro and the wire-tapping of King, among other sordid acts. But Bobby changed.
There are certain things you can't fake, even if you are as cynical and hypocritical as Kennedy haters believed Bobby to be. And Bobby Kennedy did not fake his reaction to John Kennedy's murder.
For reasons which can only be adequately parsed in another blog, Bobby Kennedy lived his last 5 years believing that he was partly responsible for his brother's death. He changed. He learned, overnight and instinctively, to relate with those who have suffered unbearable loss.
And during his campaign in 1968, Bobby was saying things no American politician with a realistic chance of being elected president had said before or has said since.
He talked of moral failure in Vietnam, as opposed to simply bad judgment.
He talked about poverty as an act of criminal negligence by American society, as opposed to simply the unfortunate collateral damage of the nearly-perfect free market.
He talked about life, love, about intimate things, about what makes us human. He quoted Sophocles to all-black crowds in inner-city ghettos in the North. He visited dirt-floor shacks in the south, drawing news cameras into places where American children died of hunger, where many had ever seen a white man, never mind a television camera.
Was he riding his brother's corpse? Was he cynically changing his politics to accord with the polls? Was he destroying the Democratic party by running against the sitting Democratic president?
The answers to those questions only seem important because we are trained to see them as such. But if you think about it, those questions only matter to a few people. People with no floors in their houses didn't care about these things. Bobby Kennedy understood that.
There has been no man in American life who comes close to Bobby Kennedy in 1968. President Obama is the only man who has drawn the same frenzy from as many citizens, and as genuine as that frenzy was, and I must confess with pride to weeping with joy when Obama was elected, Barack is not a revolutionary. Bobby was.
And then he was murdered. Just like his brother, shot in the brain while with his wife, in front of dozens of onlookers.
When Teddy Kennedy eulogized his brother, he distilled what we had lost. Teddy had lost 4 of his 7 siblings to violent death. 2 in planes. 2 with bullets to the brain. And that shattered and flawed man was left to try to explain what Bobby's death meant.
Here is what he lived in those last 3 years: "Some men see things as they are and ask why; some men dream things that never were and ask 'why not'?"
Our largest loss.
The upcoming trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will be less than flattering for this nation. But what is far less flattering than this circus-to-be is the fact that it took this long to get to this day and that there are many among us who consider following the rule of law to be a sign of weakness.
These people, mostly Republicans of course, are outraged by the idea that such a bad man would be given a trial, with the implicit assumption being that only good people should be tried, which in turn raises the questions of why good people would be on trial and what we should do with the bad people if not try them.
The idea that a murderer be given a trial seems scandalous to these critics, far more scandalous of course than kidnapping, torture, and detention without charge, trial, or contact with families or lawyers.
There is only one rational reason why KSM should be denied a civil trial. If he were a soldier of a foreign force. The very critics of the trial are precisely the same people who insist that KSM is not a "lawful combatant". He is NOT a soldier, they say.
I am willing to buy this. He's not a soldier. He didn't wear a uniform. (None of our enemies have worn uniforms since World War II...might be time to update the rules for the first time since TV was invented)
But if KSM is not a soldier, then he must be a civilian. And if 9/11 was not a legitimate act of war, then it must have been homicide. And civilians who commit homicides are given trials. Period.
Those who insist that KSM is NOT a soldier who was captured during lawful combat must acknowledge the logical conclusion of their argument; if KSM is not a soldier, he is a civilian.
To escape this clear-as-day contradiction, these people invented a third category: unlawful combatant. These are people who commit violence against this nation on behalf of a hostile foreign movement, but they are not classified as soldiers because they don't follow the "rules" of war (as we wrote them).
But neither are they civilians. Why? Well, because....they're....evil. And evil they are. But was Ted Bundy not evil? Was Charles Manson not evil? Was Timothy McVeigh not evil? Was Ramzi Yousef not evil?
Those are just a few people, some Americans, some not, who have blown up buildings and/or murdered dozens or hundreds of Americans. Yet all these men were given civil trials. They were convicted of homicide. They were sent to prison. And we threw away the key. Why would it be considered scandalous to deal with KSM this way?
Because the critics fear what the trial will tell. Specifically, it will spell out the folly and the danger of the Bush policy, which classified people captured in the war on Terror as neither soldiers nor civilians.
Americans involved in the war on Terror, of course, are all seen as either innocent civilians or equally innocent soldiers. So an American soldier in Iraq is more "legitimate", more "lawful" than the Iraqi fighting to expel foreign invasion of his country.
There is no 3rd category for us. But our enemies? They're ALL 3rd category. And isn't that convenient.
This trial will show us the utter moral, legal, and logical bankruptcy of Bush's position, which held that anyone who would dare raise arms against us has automatically surrendered their status as a human being. And since only human beings can have inalienable rights, that solved that problem.
Instead of being brought before a military commission (as a soldier would) or before a civil court (as a civilian would), these 3rd category people were found to have absolutely NO rights, which meant in practice that they could be kidnapped from any nation in the world, tortured, held without charge or trial, denied contact with lawyers or families, and held until the end of time or until America was "safe" again, whichever came first.
And who can say that this approach has not damaged us? It is perhaps the most vulgar iteration of American exceptionalism; the belief that the rules don't apply to us. This belief in practice gives us programs such as those implemented by Bush.
Torture is illegal and waterboarding is torture, but it's not torture when Americans do it because....they're Americans. And Americans don't torture. And so forth.
Now the world will see this sordid affair for what it was. KSM could have been tried by a panel of military judges or by a civilian judge years ago. That wasn't done. Now that it is being done, we have to explain to the world why evidence obtained under torture is now admissible in a court of law, and why murdering Americans is the greatest sin under heaven, so much so that a millenium of legal precedent evaporates in its face.
It is natural for people to wonder, even before the twilight of life, what they will be remembered for. One can learn about one's self by posing this question. And so can nations.
Today's arrangement of 200 nation-states is a snapshot of a fleeting moment in history. The very idea of the nation-state is only about 300 years old. In those 300 years, nations have been born, killed, and reincarnated. In the last 60 years alone, the number of nations has increased from less than 50 to more than 200.
To take an even broader view, the location of today's continents is also a snapshot. We know about continental drift; if the very location and composition of Asia is not sacrosanct, then how sacrosanct is the 38th parallel bisecting the Korean Peninsula? Not very.
The point is that nations, just as mortals, pass away. It need not necessarily be a sad thing; in fact, death is the most democratic institution on earth. And we all love democracy. Well, what will the United States be remembered for when it fades away?
There are all sorts of reflexively jingoistic answers, of course, beginning with the assertion that the United States never will fade away because Americans can do anything. For those of us who are sober-minded enough to accept that the USA can't cheat death, we still might tempted to say something about democracy or somesuch.
We all think that the United States is a unique nation in some regard. And we're right; we are a unique nation. But not always for the reasons that we presume to be. For example, democracy.
The only period in our history when the United States was somehow uniquely democratic was from the Revolution until just before the Civil War. It is true that during this period, the United States was the only large nation with principles of democracy practiced among most of its citizens.
But "citizens" during this period is not to be confused with "Americans". Most Americans were not citizens at all, pre-emptively excluded by virtue of the accident of their birth. If you lacked a Y chromosome, for example, or if you were as dark as or darker than an Italian, you were out of the club.
So yes, we were the only vaguely democratic nation. But we were only vaguely democratic. If we had been a multiracial democracy, that would have been unique. If women had been allowed to vote, that would have been unique.
The savvy reader surely noted that the period during which our nation was relatively more democratic than all other nations was also precisely the period that we practiced chattel slavery on the most massive scale in the modern world. So.....yeah.
To re-iterate, when we actually were a uniquely free country, well less than 1/3 of American adults could vote, senators were appointed rather than elected, and millions of people born in this country were bought, sold, and worked to death without wages under color of law in a nation "based on laws".
Today we are democratic to varying degrees, but so is nearly every other nation. We have to look a bit harder to find our uniqueness.
What do we have aside from our form of government? Our wealth. But people won't remember us for our wealth, especially because the period of our unique wealth was paid for by two world wars, which were the two biggest windfalls in the history of the American economy. And especially America has the most uneven distribution of wealth of any industrial nation.
Our military might? Well, that's an interesting story. America used to be unique in a military sense because it was the only large nation that refused, as a matter of principle, to maintain a standing army.
Americans back then rightly feared what would come to be called the military-industrial-congressional complex, and intuitively grasped that aggressive wars are the greatest of sins, and that nations with standing armies had a curiously persistent habit of finding reasons to wage aggressive wars in the name of peace.
In contrast, Americans now think they are unique for precisely the opposite reason. We are unique now not because we refuse to live in a constant state of imminent war, but because we insist on reserving the right to destroy all life on earth in 20 minutes, should our Commander-in-Chief deem it strategically necessary.
The cynic might conclude that Americans presume they are unique, but are not particularly interested in the reasons for that uniqueness; the only principle at work is that we must be on top, regardless of what we are on top of or of how we got there.
For my money, if the human race as we know it is here in 1,000 years, the United States will be remembered for two things: inventing and using nuclear weapons and sending men to the moon. One out of two ain't bad.
Well, we've finally built our 9/11 memorial, and it's.....a warship.
There are many things about America that Americans seem to accept as being logical which in any other Western society would be considered scandalous. Things like health being for sale, minors being executed, and so forth. This week we witnessed another of those things.
9/11 was the most murderous assault perpetrated on this continent since the 1860's, and the worst attack upon this country by outsiders in our entire history. Such trauma is worthy of memorial. Such trauma BEGS for a memorial, for an official iteration of what it is that makes us human beings: memory.
There were two probable ways to physically memorialize that dark day, two ways to rebuild at ground zero.
The first way would have been to erect a big middle finger at the terrorists by building an even bigger shrine to American capitalism where the World Trade Center had stood, to signify our defiance by building essentially the same thing as had been destroyed.
The second way would have been to construct a memorial not to the World Trade Center but to the thousands of souls killed there. This iteration would have involved not an office tower, but some sort of somber, serene, and defiantly optimistic shrine, involving fountains or eternal flames or somesuch.
We did neither. Indeed, to this day Ground Zero, the mass grave of our lost innocence, is just an empty pit. In any other culture which treasures its dead and its history, this would be a scandal. Here it is not.
But perhaps worse than the calcified scar that remains in Manhattan, worse that what we have NOT built, is what we HAVE built. We have built a warship with the steel salvaged from Ground Zero.
What does this say about the lessons learned that day? That one more warship would have averted the tragedy? In fact, the lesson should have been that warships and similar hardware were utterly useless in defending against terrorism.
How is it that we have built an instrument of destruction to honor our dead when we have failed to do so much as plant a fucking tree at Ground Zero? Is this what the dead would have wanted?
This is a time for building. And, more importantly, this is a time for building things which are not intended to destroy but which are intended to honor and preserve.
Of all the death that this society endured during the 60's, there were two sorts. The micro and the macro. On the macro side were the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, with an average age of 19. 19. No voting. No beer. No fatherhood. Just high school and then death. Add to that 3,000,000 Vietnamese, and macro is macro indeed.
