"Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine" by Christopher Dickey
Christopher Dickey, son of poet and novelist James Dickey, gave a thoughtful lecture at Clemson almost a year ago as a part of the Calhoun Lecture series at the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs. It was about his father, the wars of his father's generation and the wars that have followed,the never-ending war on a notion known as terror, about human dignity. I think it should be required reading for every American voter.
On his father's poetry:
"Drinking from a Helmet," written almost two decades after WWII by James Dickey, comes back to the theme of involvement and detachment. The poet is getting water from a truck on a battlefield; a place where the fighting is mostly over. Afraid to take off his own helmet, he picks up another one that has been discarded on the ground. As he drinks from it he comes to think it belonged to another soldier who has died. He sees his own boyish reflection in the water...
Selected ripples rove through it,
Knocked loose with a touch from all sides
Of a brain killed early that morning,
Most likely, and now in its absence holding
My sealed, sunny image from harm.
He becomes fascinated by a growing sense that he knows the life of this soldier he never knew, whose death he never saw.
I stood as though I possessed
A cool, trembling man
Exactly my size, swallowed whole.
Putting the helmet on, the poet’s mind joins with that of the dead man, who is resurrected – reincarnated— in him."
On dignity:
"...just about the time I was writing this speech, “dignity” started to be a buzzword in U.S. administration rhetoric. J.Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, used it some 27 times in his Ramadan address to the Iraqi people on Nov. 7, 2003. President George W. Bush referred to it when he stopped in at Baghdad airport for Thanksgiving. But the standards they set for dignity, unfortunately, are theirs for the Iraqis, not necessarily the Iraqis’ for themselves."
On today's wars and inhumanity:
"...more than fifty years after World War II, and more than thirty years after my father wrote that poem, technology, especially American technology, continued to dehumanize the inhumanity of war until, by the late 1990s, we were able to convince ourselves, at our great distance from the destruction, that such a thing could be waged as a war that was humane. Now, that’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it. Because a humane war,especially one waged from a sanitary distance, is implicitly an EASY war. It doesn’t have to be righteous. It doesn’t even have to be memorable....
...You know, history does not end except, perhaps, in academia. But if you ignore the past, ifyou refuse to connect cause and effect, and you start to think that war is without consequences – at least for you in your comfortable suburban home — then war can come to seem perfunctory, eventrivial, except for those who are on the ground beneath the bombs...."
On our great mistake:
As the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner pointed out in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, expansion and imperialism are inimical to what, precisely, we Americans think we are. They are “a grand onslaught on democracy,” said Sumner, they are “at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people.”
Generally, Americans — and their leaders — have understood this, which is why, despite the present administration’s rhetoric about spreading democracy, the heart of its message has been quite different since September 11: not that we will change the world, but that, in the end, the world will not change us.That is why it was so important to get the message out, unofficially and meretriciously, that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11. That is why it’s important that some sixty percent of the public think that’s the case. Because if it is not, then we have embarked on exactly that kind of expansionist and imperialist project our forebears warned us against, and we see that this war in Iraq could change us every bit as much as we’re likely to change the world. The media have played a strange role in all this, becoming technological accomplices in a grand illusion.
(pdf link)
(non pdf link)
