Dead Letters, Dead Men: Memorial Day, 2007

Dead men on the field at Gettysburg -- July, 1863

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?

-- Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart.

And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

-- 2 Corinthians 3:2-6

As of today, the day before Memorial Day, the "war" in Iraq has claimed the lives of close to 4,000 men and women of the "coalition." Of these, nearly 3,500 are Americans (and 1,000 of these Americans have died in the last 12 months alone). The number of wounded is well into the tens of thousands, and the number of Iraqis, civilians, soldiers, and everything in between, is unthinkably high -- which is probably why the U.S. doesn't bother to count them. An approximate figure for the Iraqi dead, along with good statistics on American and coalition casualties, and links to wire reports confirming the numbers, can be found here.

As we noted, among the recent casualties was Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich, son of Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University. In today's Washington Post, Bacevich has written a powerful column, which bristles with honesty and, that truly invaluable and often invisible thing, the truth. As one blogger puts it, Bacevich's piece is "the equivalent of a hard blow to the solar plexus. It's hard even to catch your breath when you read it." Bacevich begins by recalling letters he has received -- letters blaming him for his son's death. The rationale for these accusations has become well established -- dissent, in this view, equals treason, in the form of giving "aid and comfort to the enemy":

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son's death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging "the terrorists," opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops -- today's civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

The duty is to fall in lockstep with the discourse of the dominant culture, which, in this case, is a requirement to remain silent. The "proper" course of action, especially on the day before Memorial Day, is to "memorialize," or, as William Spanos puts it, in his reading of Melville's critique of this very same ideological problem, to "monumentalize." As the reliably repulsive Jules Crittenden says of Bacevich:

I don’t know what Bacevich’s son thought about this war, but he enlisted and became an officer after it began. Rather than honor his son’s choice and its consequences, Bacevich has decided his son was duped by a fraud that is called the United States of America.

According to Crittenden (and his insufferable ilk), the only allowable speech is the speech of reverence, which is a form of what Spanos calls "docility" -- and what Thoreau means by "undue respect for law." This drive to "fall in line" follows what is in Spanos's view the "will to monumentalize the American past," which manifests itself in an "obsessive effort to annul -- to silence -- the ambiguities that would undermine its authority -- and the national consensus on which it relies." Bacevich refuses to fall into this monumentalization, even (and perhaps especially) in the context of his son's tragic death -- one more at the hands of the "unscrupulous man in power." Instead, he thoughtfully considers "the ambiguities" of what "duty" means, and the ambiguities of the position, as father to a son who fought in a war the father opposed (in perhaps an odd reversal of the standard Viet Nam narrative), in which he found himself:

What exactly is a father's duty when his son is sent into harm's way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

And this "duty," as he found it, was to speak and write as clearly as he could to articulate his opposition to the dominant discourse, which has been saying for some time that military force may be used to remake the world in the image of America, and that what we have is a "long war" that is not only unavoidable but "winnable." Bacevich strenuously disagrees with those who propagate these views:

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. "The long war is an unwinnable one," I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. "The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We've done all that we can do."

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others -- teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks -- to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

What Bacevich laments here is the situation of the dead letter, the message that doesn't get through. Bacevich has been a rare commodity, a truth-teller, and as Melville knew as well as anyone, the truth is rarely well-received. Melville advocated a "ruthless democracy," something we would know little about, mainly because the idea, as he wrote to Hawthorne, is "ridiculous to men":

So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth -- and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughingstocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men.

Perhaps the central problem with "the Truth" is that it is often riddled with contradiction, with ambiguity and difficulty. Spanos, a nearly devout Heideggerian (if such a phrase is permissible), suggests the truth is like the Heideggerian "nothing," with which the world will have "nothing to do." Bacevich, so far as I can tell, would probably have little or nothing to do with Heidegger, but he does seem to feel that all his writing has been for nought, that he "was doing nothing":

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier -- brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

How could he feel otherwise? But we will have to disagree. Bacevich has been, of course, doing something very serious and very honorable, doing his best for both his son and the rest of us by speaking the truth to power, doing what Melville said Hawthorne did: "he says NO! in thunder." And Bacevich does so, perhaps more than anywhere else, in this piece. The message may fail if the recipient will not receive it, but the sender has nonetheless upheld his end of the deal, has done what he can to fulfill his duty to himself and to others. The tragedy arises from the recipient who returns the letter unopened. Congress, even under the control of the Democrats, supposedly elected to listen to the reason emanating from the likes of Bacevich and, indeed, a majority of the American people, did just that, returned our collective letter unopened, when it capitulated again to the President, allowing for a continuation of war without end in Iraq. In response to this, Bacevich does not offer empty talking points or expedient and local critique; instead, he goes right to the heart of the matter, identifying the structural problem beneath the veneer, what Spanos calls "the dark underside of -- the shadow that belongs to -- the luminously white truth discourse of America." Here is Bacevich:

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."

To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

The corrupted structure of our institutions negates democracy itself. This is how the Law erases the people for whom it supposedly exists. The Law rejects the letters sent to it -- letters sent in the name of Justice. Just ask Kafka, whose famous supplicant spent his life in devout docility before the law, only to have the door slammed in his face as he died. So what are the options? We are either reduced to silence or continue shouting -- or writing -- into a seemingly indifferent void. I believe (and I hope) that Bacevich is not like Melville's Pierre, who is turned to stone (as his name suggests) by the state of a world which rejects him (and which he rejects), but like Melville himself, even (or perhaps especially) if he becomes like the "exhausted Melville" Frederick Busch has described:

And so we come to the exhausted Melville of 1852. He begins to speak -- it is nearly impossible, still, for him to be silent -- of what obsesses him: the failure of crucial messages to get through.

Bacevich's message is crucial, yet, currently, the message as message fails to get through. The repeated failure of the message, then, may be seen to become something else -- the message of the undelivered message, the message of the failure of messages. At the end of Bartleby, the narrator laments the sad story of his former copyist, as he hears it through some unidentified source, long after the fact. Bartleby, he has heard, was once a clerk in the "Dead Letter Office at Washington." It is surely significant that these letters are not only dead, but dead in Washington, just as the voice of the people, in the form of our votes and writings, seems to likewise be dead on arrival in that city. The Law kills letters as vehicles of meaning, or, in a different register, vehicles of spirit. Letters as written documents are reduced to individual letters, material things devoid of significance, just as Bacevich notes that "free speech" is reduced to a "means of recording dissent," as opposed to a cause from which we might expect an effect. These letters, meant to convey something, end up conveying nothing, and thus lose their value as messages:

Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring -- the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity -- he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Melville wrote this two years after Moby-Dick sank like the Pequod itself. Moby-Dick was itself a dead-letter, delivered by a poet-prophet who takes on, among his other guises, the voice of the messengers from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." But to tell whom? It was to tell us, whoever we were then; Melville was a prophet for America, whose variously formed admonitions could have served, in their way, as a potent series of arguments not only against the political atrocities of his own day, but of ours. His messages, even today, have a hard time getting through to anyone -- but they are still here, still in circulation. And Bacevich, who writes and speaks the truth, sends out similar messages.

This Memorial Day we lament the thousands of senselessly murdered human beings in Iraq and in our own country. Lt. Bacevich, so long as we can remember him rightly, not simply as material -- as neither what Tim O'Brien called "some small bit of rectitude...salvaged from the larger waste," nor the stuff out of which we monumentalize our ambiguous history -- but as an emblem of the ongoing pursuit of Justice over expediency, can be reincorporated into the letters we send as spirit. Such letters are never dead.