"Droll thing life is-" says Marlowe, the narrator of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose." Such intentionally profound observations on shared experiences like life and death sometime seem too grandiose to be taken seriously in this era of habitual irony and fashion-driven snark. From a cultural perspective, the clever, solipsistic work of Jonathon Ames is for understandable reasons more digestible to 21st century readers than the gloomy poignancy of Toni Morrison or the dead-serious prophesying of Don DeLillo, as is for moviegoers the characteristic jouissance of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris over the darker Dostoyevskean preoccupations of Match Point. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, a masterpiece of deep brooding, speaks from too deeply underground to be heard by most of us, just as Wagner's Die Walkure is today more of an achievement in grand Camp than style (as is opera in general). As the time stretches further outward from 9/11 it seems clear that what is lost in the absence of The Serious in our cultural lives is lost equally in our social and political lives. However, as the following piece attempts to illustrate, we are at a turning point in America's history, when old leases on definitions regarding our values and our place in the world are up for renewal. At this historic juncture, whether you are publicly or privately engaged or wholly disengaged, the "merciless logic" of our time demands nothing less than seriousness … … because what happens to the lining of the cheek when there's always a tongue shoved in it? It gets turned into an orifice. Consider the handful of America's finest urinating on Taliban corpses last week.
The search for the proverbial rotten apple is never as intense as when accumulated evidence tells of a rotten bunch. ABC news reported last week that the soldiers in question should have known better for all the training they received in how to treat the enemy dead, which plainly suggests that despite the stainless ethos of Hooah, the Corps is vulnerable to the unflattering sportsmanship of losers within its rank. In an immaculate show of grace, Rick Perry chimed in that it was just kids being kids. "Unless you have been shot at by the Taliban," says Tea Party frosh congressman Allen West, "shut your mouth, war is hell." Interestingly enough, the Corps itself appears to have taken a different, wiser approach to the incident, launching an investigation predicated on the question, "What happened in the Marine Corps that this happened?" With its whiff of Sartrean musings, this sounds somewhat unrealistic coming from as old a guard as the USMC. According to a spokesperson, the investigation will take a "holistic look at everything surrounding the issue." So what does the Corps take everything to mean?
Not much, apparently. Commandant Gen. Jim Amos was the first to announce publicly the pending investigation. What YouTubers saw, he suggests, was behavior "wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history," which agrees with what the New York Times quoted Pentagon Spokesman George Little as saying: “The conduct depicted in the footage is utterly deplorable and … it does not reflect the standards or values American troops are sworn to uphold." Representing the State Department, Hillary Clinton echoed the sentiment, stating the act was "absolutely inconsistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel," adding grimly that the perpetrators “must be held fully accountable.” Like Kurtz's perceived apostasy, wherein he traded the bounty of his European privilege for the uncivilized wilds of "darkest Africa," these comments pose the issue as a betrayal by the few of the values of the many. So everything, yeah, with the doublespeak caveat that the USMC's idea of the word has serious limitations: in this case four men, one cameraman, and one, distressingly stupid up-loader.
But is it as simple as Amos, Little, and Clinton would like to suggest, that these marines were anomalies in an order reliably held upright by virtue of deeply ingrained democratic values and military discipline? Was their act so anathema to the consistency of the honorable "warrior ethos" that they'd drop the "holistic look" so soon, disappointing the faith dead French existentialists for a moment thoroughly and doubtlessly enjoyed ("What happened in the Marine Corp that this happened?" Why this, why anything?). Or simpler still, as Representative West and Governor Perry intimate?
Intentional memory is helpful in a moment such as this. I say intentional, because in the blur of nationalistic noise, it’s an arduous process cutting through historical overdubs. Incidents like the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam spring to mind, as do the psycho-sexual abuse in Iraq at Abu Ghraib, the shooting stateside by the unraveled soldier at Fort Hood, and the "kill squad" made up of the eleven soldiers recently convicted before a military tribunal of war crimes for the murder and mutilation of three unarmed Afghan civilians. If these acts are not deemed by the top political and military brass as "consistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel," then they too are exceptions to the rule. Were it just a phenomenon of low-level troops desensitized by the machinations of war, that would be one thing, but the behavior has been modeled from the highest reaches of American power, clearly seen in the previous administration's use of torture and the current one's campaign of targeted extrajudicial assassinations.
With so many challenges to American values in the conduct of our military personnel (and executives) at home and abroad, is there a point at which what our leaders term exceptions become the rule, in that by both frequency and content they are genuinely reflective of a very real glitch in our proclaimed values at this point in history? The inquiry returns us to Kurtz: if we assume for a moment that his continental betrayal was the peculiarity of a megalomaniacal individual of weak moral fiber, we must conclude that he was, like the marines in question, just another anomaly in his own family tree. But this 'bad apple' or 'lone wolf' explanation is too easy and smacks of an unacceptable level of laziness and moral cowardice.
After all, it's not just one man's dark heart that Conrad indicates in his multilayered title. It suggests also the malady of decency and soul palpitating beneath the thickest, most radiant of exterior balms. His work was based in large part on the Caligulean feats of King Leopold's unsavory record of sadism and greed in the Congo. Singular as he was in his ubermensch qualities, to dismiss Kurtz as a 'good boy gone bad' is to ignore the possibility that his betrayal of so-called civilized values was the logical conclusion in a trajectory of Occidental beastliness. His personal crimes reflected the value system of a nation in particular and a continent at large. By superficially stepping outside the system, Kurtz becomes a mirror to the grand colonialists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Any failure to recognize this awards Europe a free pass to disown its prodigal son and disassociate itself from the brutality which renders historically conceivable its majesty. And free passes, which translate here into the inability to look inward, are what a nation like the United States has relied upon to uphold its notions of exceptionalism, authority, and grace. Without these kinds of passes handed out at every recital of the dominant narrative of our nation, historical figures like King Leopold and Andrew Jackson remain an ocean apart, and the young nation's religious embracement of Manifest Destiny and Human Bondage are to this day diagnosed as symptoms of ignominious growing pains rather than a pervasive cancer of the skeletal structure, or, continuing Conrad's metaphor, whispers of a heart murmur instead of cries of full-fledged disease.
In Apocalypse Now, the adaptation of Conrad's book to the silver screen, Coppola makes it his business to burn dissociative free passes like draft cards. Complete with a ragtag crew of cowboy militants who add romantic soundtracks to their kills and 'hang ten' off the shallows of blood soaked beaches, Coppola's soldiers represent nothing less than American cultural exports minus a fair trade agreement with the country doomed to receive them. Captain Willard, depicted by Martin Sheen, is a deeply flawed military hit man; by taking Kurtz's life, he attempted not only to reckon with the beast within himself, but the more comprehensive, snarling, paranoid, id-driven monster that manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin incident and sent America Commie hunting in Southeast Asia. It's hard not to notice in Coppola's film a grand indictment of the flipside of heralded American values, the dark underbelly which, while not officially recognized by storied Defense Department secretaries like McNamara, Rumsfeld, or Panetta, is essential, and therefore sacred enough from the filmmaker's perspective to the core of American values for its death to be dramatized alongside the slaughter of an ox. In this adaptation, the individuals are far too human to be held singularly accountable for the moral recklessness of their behavior, for whether placed in the malarial waters and dyspeptic jungles of Vietnam, or the backseat of dad's Bonneville at the drive-in theater with Sit-Down Sally Sweetheart, they are undeniably products of the same cultural assembly line whose moral vision and technological efficiency manufactured the likes of Charles Manson and Richard Nixon.
But there's an alternative reading to Kurtz's story, one that locates as the source of his conversion the fever of the Congo rather than the disease of the Western heart. In his acerbic essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," Chinua Achebe grounds his argument in his view of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist." It's not an alternative reading in the sense that he would disagree with Coppola's filmic treatment of the story described above. Rather, he deduces from the author's characterizations of the place and the people Conrad's personal interpretation of Kurtz's turnaround.
For Conrad, the Things Fall Apart author writes, "Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe stronghold between policeman and the baker to take a peep into the heart of darkness." This interpretation suggests that Kurtz's European values were obliterated by the visceral animal seductiveness of a place that is "the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." At first glance, you might assume that Conrad's work was informed by a deep resentment of the West, and Kurtz's fall was an artistic fulfillment of his private wishes. After all, how great could Leopold's legions be when his archangels succumb so easily? If it looks like Conrad was settling a score, look again. By identifying the Achilles Heel of high civilization, Conrad observes how close we always are to the edge where civilization falls back into the abyss of primeval screams. In other words, civilization's as indomitable as the madman's mind is sound, and it's in the region of this fragility that you find civilization's greatest triumph over barbarism. From this point of view, which Achebe argues is Conrad's, Kurtz's disintegration is cathartic to the European mind- rather than creating new anxieties, it eases the persistence of old ones, allowing in this "place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar … Europe's own state of spiritual grace [to be] manifest." If Achebe is right about Conrad, it is to the latter's credit that he recognized his way of life as something other than full-proof, credit that can be extended to neither America's leaders nor the majority of its people.
While the beast according to Coppola and Achebe has deeper roots than the whimsy of the individual, folks as disparate as Congressman Allen West and Chris Hedges are in agreement that war is hell, the obvious implication being that during war, bad shit goes down, and we're all prone to behaving badly. It would be naive to disagree with this view. My grandfather was a marine who was gunned down during the bloody campaign at Iwo Jima. The trauma the man suffered as a result of his experiences during that war stayed with him a lifetime. While he rarely discussed the details of his experience, in my presence anyway, I recall distinctly a visit he and my grandmother made to my parents' house after seeing Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Over a plate of pizza my grandfather uncharacteristically placed his face in a single hand and wept. He wept, probably for his dead friends and his youth, for the whole goddamned war and everything that went in and came out of it, including an older brother who had the special distinction of being killed in the Pacific aboard the USS Bullhead when the submarine was destroyed sometime between August 6 and 12, 1945, only days before Japan's unequivocal surrender. My grandfather was 73 years old and the war was still happening.
From West's point of view, the fact that war is hell does not make its exercise less palatable; it simply makes what happens during war invariably beyond anyone's reach to critique. That is unless you have fought in a war yourself (tellingly, he has yet to properly discuss those soldiers within the Corps who see the urination as a disgrace and another potential danger they'll have to reckon with). It is a simpleton's perspective with a formula that reads as follows: war exists; we fight wars; war is hell; anything goes.
The utter stupidity and evasive cowardice involved in this intellectually flimsy, morally vacuous view is in no way better displayed than when West and his ilk invoke the atrocities committed by enemy forces in order to excuse those carried out by our own. West:
I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?
Bad enough is West's rank need to put the marines' debacle in the context of enemy misconduct, but his suggestion that there was no media outrage over the mutilation of Americans is dishonest. While the corporate media, which plays the stenographer to Tea Partiers and Democrats alike, can be faulted for much (the Iraq War included), it bears zero fault in this.
Rick Perry sang the righteous hymn as well, to great fanfare at a recent Republican debate. Like West, he argues that the behavior of the troops is presaged by the volatility of their enemy and environment: They — they made a — a mistake that the military needs to deal with. And they need to be punished. But the fact of the matter — the fact of the matter is this, when the Secretary of Defense calls that a despicable act, when he calls that utterly despicable. Let me tell you what’s utterly despicable, cutting Danny Pearl’s head off and showing the video of it. Hanging our contractors from bridges. That’s utterly despicable. For our president for the Secretary of State, for the Department of Defense secretary to make those kinds of statements about those young Marines — yes, they need to be punished, but when you see this president with that type of disdain for our country, taking a trillion dollars out of our defense budget, 100,000 of our military off of our front lines, and a reduction of forces, I lived through a reduction of force once and I saw the result of it in the sands of Iran in 1979. Never again.
Keep in mind these are the same folks who trumpet the song of American Exceptionalism from whatever soapbox is in their nearest vicinity all the way to political appointments, corporate cash, and ultimately the bank. Somehow, according to Perry, by pissing on corpses we prevent existential threats to our democratic principles and freedoms- in a word, to civilization as we know it. If Conrad did see Europe's superiority in its unrelenting grip on order, then in Rick Perry we see a man whose tenuous grasp points to an inevitable slip. Just remember the number of people Perry has executed in his godly state, some of whom were demonstrably innocent, others demonstrably retarded, others demonstrably juvenile, and still others with demonstrably incompetent legal counsel. Pissing on corpses understandably fails to register as a big deal when in eleven years the man's Christian American values led him to sign off on the murder of 234 people.
Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent with the New York Times, who, among other events, chronicled firsthand the genocide in Bosnia, has a more complex view on the matter. Yes, war is hell, and yes, it can bring about unsparingly and without surprise the worst in otherwise decent people. From here, however, Hedges' and West's views diverge sharply. The realities of war have taught Hedges that it should be waged only when every other alternative has been exhausted. War is Hell does not suggest to Hedges that all is permissible. After all, the proposition is absurd in its terrible reach. With its long arm, West's principle would sympathize, at least in principle, with the Serbs and Nazis of genocide, as well as the United States of the ultimate war crime, the unprovoked invasion, seizure and occupation of a sovereign nation.
Like Coppola, Hedges looks for causality. While under the Geneva Conventions the desecration of enemy dead is a war crime, Hedges seeks the larger, comprehensive picture. For years he has asked why America is in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place. Undoubtedly, geopolitical and economic interests played their part in the decision of the nation to send the troops and the contractors out, so Hedges, like a good journalist, has looked to understand exactly who these interests represented and whom they made good for gain. But there's another dimension to these empirical threads - the human one: what kind of a society made up of what kind of culture would allow in the first place wars of this nature and consequently, reflexively, justify the inevitable losses in every sense of the word on the grounds of a childishly simplistic War is Hell principle?
What's of paramount interest here is how far removed thinkers like Hedges are from the nexus where hardline right wingers like Perry merge with staunch bastions of the liberal front like Clinton and Obama. While the former will indeed stoop so low as unconditionally defend the depraved actions of military personnel, liberals commit themselves to the same position by making scapegoats of dysfunctional cogs in their ideologically blessed machine, defending most successfully time after time the myth of American righteousness. In the War on Terror anything goes, and the executive overreach of the prior and present administrations asks the citizens of the United States to simply trust them with the horrifying scope of their newfound, unconstitutional powers. And we do trust them, because we've been indoctrinated to believe the old banter on American values that our leaders have always peddled, that our cultural programs reinforce. We believe it because, with every crisis of contradiction, the problem is diagnosed, isolated, radiated, and removed. In both extremes, from Perry to Clinton, the assumption that American values themselves are beyond reproach is made, no matter the evidence brought before them or committed by them. Obama's signing into law of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 serves here as ample proof.
We have another proof in the case of Rod Blagojevich. When the disgraced governor attempted to sell the newly elected president's vacated senate seat, his crime was getting caught at an otherwise typical practice in modern plutocracy. What is the result of Citizens United, after all, but the creation and murder of political aspirants via massive sums of hard cash? Blagojevich's arrest and recent sentencing erased whatever meaningful connections people may have made from his actual crime to the larger picture of 21st century money-takes-all politics. Branded a criminal, a jailbird, a man about to 'do time,' Blagojevich is now another archetype in the American characterscape that makes deep pondering of his situation by ordinary citizens unlikely. In the end his downfall didn't expose the weaknesses that have crippled the republic, but confirmed the strength of the correctives that we consistently attribute to it. Weakness exposed, problem eradicated, it's another example of how the system works, especially in times of peril. In this sense, the great pissing debacle of 2012 will likely serve public perception as a foil to the selfless heroism of the Few and the Proud.
What happened in Afghanistan's the most recent example of a challenge to American values as they are traditionally propagated and understood. As such, it was predictably a polarizing event, sparking outrage as well as overwhelming streams of support from across the country. In both cases, however, and for reasons we have discussed, the reactions indicate serious problems for the empire.
The superficial reason for the outrage is articulated in the official statements catalogued early in this essay from the USMC, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Its dominant theme is that the marines are guilty of betraying unquestionable American values. That the Corps, supported by the Pentagon and the State Department, will apparently direct the attention of its investigation onto the particular marines in question instead of the culture of the Corps itself speaks to a refusal or inability to look inward at the belief-system and subsequent policy that renders possible this behavior. It signals the extraordinary confidence in our leadership of the American way as it expresses itself through military engagements. Ultimately, the compartmentalization of blame signals a dangerous blind spot in our moral vision, and the condemnation of the particular marines along with attempts to isolate the incident, heighten our hubristic sense of national self.
Conversely, the support, while it may appear otherwise, is less of detriment to the empire than the outrage. Pure Stupid is not a disorder that's hard to figure out. The Rick Perrys of the country who explain away the conduct of these marines are less guilty of hubris than simplemindedness. Clearly, they haven't read the Greeks and don't realize there's a price to pay for the desecration of the dead. Of course, their unconditional support of the troops is unsavory, but, unlike the rhetoric of outrage, it is at bottom an honest portrayal of crass American hypocrisy. In the end, the slick outrage and the dumb support work hand in hand to reify further notions of American values: we are tough, but we are fair, a persistent illusion in our moribund slide toward the end.
I began by invoking the words of Marlowe, who said that life is a droll affair. I'd be remiss to suggest that evidence doesn't point in this direction. But it's more than that, it's Kafkaesque, a kaleidoscope of relative truths and well-constructed illusions, with America its foremost exemplar. Just think that the starting point for this piece was marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Last week we had at presidential debates the word 'urinating' bobbing in the verbal toilet like a turd, as well as politicians and pundits solemnly explaining away a video we all saw showing our finest sprinkling their salt and performing last shakes over once-human life, laughing as though someone had just farted. We might imagine that the clown who uploaded the video had the same hopes for the thing going viral as every other schmuck who for their own hit-count vanity posts Highlights of Dumb for the week. Incredibly, it inspired an op-ed in the Seattle-Post Intelligencer titled, "You Pee for Me, Marine …" Seriously. For some, it rehashed memory of past enemy atrocities in the name of excusing our own, while for others, it spoke to the need to stand closer to our 'real' American values in this protracted attempt to impose at gunpoint what we think they are on others. For both reasons, it became a clarion call from coast to coast for why we fight.
After Kurtz's death, Marlowe has reason to believe that his life is mortally threatened. His respect for Kurtz was embedded in his observation that the man "had something to say," but it wasn't expressed in the mutability of words, but in the act of having "stepped over the edge" of Western civilization- a single, irrevocable, true step. When the time comes for Marlowe to make his final pronouncements, he's surprised to find he's speechless. Afterwards and still alive, he half-ironically reflects on how "The most you can hope from [life] is some knowledge of yourself," before adding, in complete seriousness, that "it comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets."
What are the truths of American values, and are we as a society culturally educated enough to do anything but blindly trust the definitions we were raised with? The pissing incident is important because no matter how we dignify it, no matter how we interpret its causes and its meaning, it remains just four representatives of the United States abroad emptying their bladders in the crudest of possible ways on dead human beings. Does reality even matter to most Americans if all we take from it is what we wish to see?
