Beneath a Tattered Flag

“For the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy.” Anais Nin

Another Memorial Day to honor our war dead.

We remain at war – preemptive war, continuous war, perpetual war, and shadow war. Pious words will be uttered today by the president and others -- they will talk about heroes and sacrifice and bravery and freedom. We are still killing Afghans and Pakistanis and Yemenis, and inside our own borders another kind of war is being waged, equally continuous and perpetual – the war against the poor, against workers, against students, against the elderly and the sick, against the environment. 

We continue to operate our own version of the Gulag Archipelago – the prison at Guantanamo, where most of the inmates are on a hunger strike to protest years of detention without charges or trial. President Obama says he wants to close Guantanamo but that Congress won’t let him. This doesn’t wash. It’s politics, again. If Obama were to release those inmates who the Department of Defense has determined are not a threat, and one or more of them were to become involved in a plot or actual attack on American interests, the political fallout would be severe. Obama has the authority; he just lacks the guts to issue the order.

American flags will fly today, flutter in the breeze, and Air Force or Navy fighter jets will scream over baseball stadiums, and Major League Baseball will trot out some of our wounded veterans for the obligatory standing ovation, and everyone can feel proud and patriotic while CIA drones swoop low over the frontier in Pakistan, and another car bomb explodes in Baghdad.

Everyone can feel proud and patriotic while income inequality grows and democracy shrivels on the vine, and more people are excluded from college or priced out of gentrified neighborhoods. America the Beautiful. Life is grand up on the hill, surrounded by wrought-iron fences and stone walls, at the end of a private road patrolled by private security forces; the nearest school is private, too, and free of brown or black faces. All the segregation money can buy. Life is grand on Wall Street too, and in the executive suite, and at the country club.

The wealthy send the poor to fight and die in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; the wealthy say that war is moral but helping the needy at home immoral because it makes the needy dependent on the fruits of the producers. This is said without irony.

The flag is flying, red, white and blue, but the country in its shadow isn’t the same. We invade other countries, we kidnap people we suspect, we detain and torture, we kill without due process, and we mock the rule of law. I suppose we have always committed these sorts of crimes and transgressions, but now it’s simply more blatant.

For twelve years the most powerful military force on the planet has chased the Taliban and al-Qaeda across and around Afghanistan. Where has this got us? What has been gained? Twelve Memorial Days have come and gone, and we are still “training” the Afghans to police and protect themselves. How many years of training does it take before we can lower the stars and stripes and close up shop?