I can’t remember when I first heard her, but it was early in my life. The song was written in 1945 and Piaf had been well known since her discovery in 1935, the year after I was born. I’ve never learned French well enough to speak it fluently, but I read it, and even in this state of abject deprivation my debt to it is incalculable.

That single word, that inflected e, opened a world of possibilities to me. I understood immediately that in our multicultural milieu Americans, particularly writers, are inheritors of a fabulous treasure of argot and patois. Regionalism, pronunciation, emphasis, pause, cadence, meter—and so much more—were all set out before me as the instrumentality of ideation. There were not just different languages but immense variations within a language. By delighting my ear Piaf had sensualized it to every other human being. My New York rose sounded to me sadly pedestrian compared to her Parisian rose.

Slowly, as I trained my ear to savor the speech of fellow Americans, their accents and mannerisms crept into my poetry and fiction. When I joined the Navy and found myself in a boot camp company populated mostly by Appalachians I was more excited by what I heard than the job of becoming a sailor.

Soon I heard the inestimable Patsy Cline and the eerily haunting high lonesome sound that permeates a broad segment of American culture. I heard a mountain twang that I was sure came from the heat songs of summer nights. I had never heard anything like it, attuned as I was to Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. And as I think back to that encounter with country music I realize how much I owe as a writer to Sinatra’s impeccable diction. I remember deciding as a young writer that Bing Crosby’s boo-boo would not cut it for me, but Sinatra’s clarity would take me by the hand.

The mountain recruits would ask me to repeat phrases or just say something so they could savor my New York patois, and I would ask them to return the favor so I could hear that twang and that enchanting interrogative in their declarative sentences. I was fascinated by their ability to draw extra syllables out of familiar words. It was not unlike Piaf’s e.

This is exactly what we’re not doing as a people, not listening to each other, not marveling at our differences, not cocking an ear to our many ways of experiencing life. Rather we’re insisting on sameness and being right at all costs. It never occurred to me those Appalachian boys were speaking correctly and I wasn’t, and I don’t think it occurred to them that I didn’t know how to speak English. We were brothers in arms getting a helluva kick out of our differences. Did we kid each other? Yes. But we didn’t try to punish each other for not conforming to our peculiar ideas of what it meant to be American, which is exactly what so many radio haters and politicians are trying to do today.

And now we’re losing that admirable virtue as a people of relishing our differences. It is, after all, what enables us to appreciate our films and our entertainments. New Yorkers know they don’t sound like Josie Wales, and Americans who do sound like Josie Wales know they don’t sound like famous athletes or singers from the East Bronx. But some of our pontificators think they know exactly how to sound and woe to the rest of us who don’t. This doesn’t strike me as very American.

I hear in my own poems and stories the unmistakable influences on English of Yiddish speakers, of Sicilians whose first language was Italian, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Chinese, Dominicans, French, all enriching English in their marvelous accents and creating new speech patterns, new expressions, new linguistic demeanors. I hear them celebrating a language that has been evolving for many centuries, a language for which there is no authorized version.

I know that the gestures of Sicilians speaking in Manhattan have influenced my writing. I know that Yiddish word play has influenced it. I hear a tailor from Tashkent in my poetry, his plosives and syncopated way of stressing each phrase as he tries to master the language. I fondly imitate him. I hear the unique way of seeing the ordinary implicit in African-American speech, in rap and hip-hop.

I could attend university for a lifetime and never learn as much about the evolution of language as by listening to our own people in the streets. But if I were to say that there is a right way and a wrong way to speak English, to sound, to sing, then all those riches would ebb away and I would be left with some damned fool’s idea of English, namely my own.

And all this I owe to Edith Piaf and that that quavering e in the word rose.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought in boot camp, to speak English the way these Tennessee boys do. But when some of them asked me to write letters for them to loved ones I realized they were thinking it would be wonderful to know English the way this stranger from Noo Yawk knows it.

This is the legacy, the heritage we’re in danger of losing with our mindless polarization and our disastrous insistence on being right. I’m amazed, as I look back, that I never thought I spoke better English than those Yiddish speakers on Second Avenue. Instead, I thought they had access to a humor that would always elude me. I never thought I spoke better English than the Sicilians who came to my stepfather for help with this and that. I thought instead that they had a way of emphasizing and confronting language that ran away from me like water.

So why do so many of our politicians and pundits think they know so much and are so right? Where is their curiosity if not their decency? Where is their respect for others? —Djelloul Marbrook

Hear me read and talk about poetry

My given name is Djelloul. It’s fairly ordinary in Algeria. But here in America it’s not. Keeping this name, rather than changing it to a more American-sounding name, has been a saga.

My first five years in Brooklyn, living with my maternal aunt and grandmother, raised no issues about Djelloul. But in boarding school in West Islip, populated with a large contingent of British evacuees from Nazi bombing, my name ran into trouble.

I was called Jello, Jerome, Jules, Ta-loo, Da-loo, and many other takeoffs on this un-American name (more about that later), and to make matters worse, I myself didn’t know if the name was French or Algerian. As it turned out, the French, who ruled Algeria from 1835 to 1962, Gallicized Algerian names, just the way our own Ellis Island immigration officials used to do—officiously.

My own maternal family never learned to spell the name properly. In her nineties my mother was still misspelling it.

I didn’t really get much of a handle on my dilemma until I went to live with my stepfather when I was 15. He had arrived at Ellis Island from Misilmeri, Sicily, as Domenico Giovanni Guccione, a descendant of the famous uGucciones of Florence. He left Ellis Island as Dominick John Guccione.

But Italian Christian names were quite recognizable to most Americans once they had been anglicized. Many Irishmen, after all, were named Dominick, and many Englishmen and Irishmen were named John. But Djelloul was another matter. There were no English equivalents, not even remotely.

At prep school in Manhattan, at Columbia, and throughout my Navy career I encountered no difficulty with my name. Gone was the disconcerting razzing I had experienced in boarding school. Often in the Navy I was moved by the heroic efforts of noncoms and commissioned officers to say my name correctly. Their attitude was that I was a brother in arms and deserved to have my name said properly.

But when I was discharged and applied for a job as a newspaperman once again my name was a problem. For those of you who are familiar with the diverse bylines of, say, The New York Times, this will seem improbable. But in the 1950s in America it was deemed awkward to sport a “foreign” name. There was of course nothing foreign about it. I was an American citizen, a veteran. But perception is powerful, and I was told to change it. To what? I liked my stepfather’s name, Dominick, but the hiring editor folded my name up like an accordion and came up with Del. So Del Marbrook I was throughout my newspaper career. Most people thought it was short for Delmar or Delbert and they were flabbergasted when I said it was short for Djelloul. Jehwhat? they would ask.

It took me a long time to recognize that this seemingly innocuous name change—I needed that job, so I wasn’t about to protest—was damaging, because it implied I couldn’t go about being me, and it also implied that an acceptable disguise was better than being perceived as “foreign.”

It also raised questions about the nature of foreignness. Is Joaquin, for example, as foreign as Djelloul? Is Singh or Piotr or any number of other names? In short, are we all foreign if we’re not Anglos or people posing as Anglos? Are the Irish more American, say, than the Italians, or the Swedes more American than the Russians? Is it “better” to look North European—even if you happen not to be of North European origin? I think the answer to that question, if you look at our elected officials, is yes. And that’s a little horror all by itself, one we have yet to fully address.

So my name has brought me into confrontation with many of the same issues we either confront every day or choose not to confront. It has prompted me all my life to consider the nature of Americanness, and it has enabled me to understand why a Native American named Running Elk, for example, may be given to know by others than he is not as American as a neighbor named John Smith. Running Elk and Djelloul know they’re Americans, but do their neighbors?

I talk about my name and the contemplations it has aroused in me and others in a poem called “Djelloul,”which has been the featured poem this winter (in the orange box) at From The Fishouse, An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets. I hope you’ll listen to it. If nothing else, it will tell you how this oh-so-opinionated blogger sounds. —Djelloul Marbrook

Last night, wrestling with insomnia, I happened on the 1957 movie A Face In the Crowd with Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal.

As I watched Griffith’s hypnotic, guitar-playing Arkansas drifter—he hadn’t yet captivated the country as the sheriff of the imaginary Mayberry, North Carolina—I realized how the use of plain speech for dark purposes can dupe the masses.

Lonesome Rhodes, the Griffith character, has an abysmal mean streak, but his pleasant country accent and homespun humor disguise it. For a while. Too long a while. He doesn’t mean a thing he says. But the people love him because he seems to be telling them the simple truth as opposed to the varnished rhetoric of a ruling elite. He appeals to their common sense and individualism.

Lonesome reminds his audiences of Will Rogers, first on radio and then on television. But unlike Rogers, Lonesome doesn’t give a damn about anybody. He knows that a country boy with a winsome  humor can charm the skin off a snake in a nation that has mythologized rural virtue and demonized city manners—a nation that persists in demonizing half its own self, the growing half.

He knows how to play an audience like his gee-tar. And so he does until the long-suffering Patricia Neal, who discovered him, in a fit of remorse lets his audience hear him mock them at the end of a broadcast when he thinks he’s off the air.

When I joined the Navy from Manhattan back when the Silent Generation had just reached adulthood I encountered rural Southerners for the first time in boot camp. Some of them would become dear friends. I loved their near-perfect way of saying things that couldn’t be said any other way: not hardly, for example. There’s simply no other way to express that sentiment. I reveled in the musicality of their many Southern accents. And I recognized, as a young poet, that Southern speech, particularly when it has an Appalachian twang, can convey a conviction that goes a long way towards persuading us of anything.

It wasn’t uncommon then (or now) to hear Southerners say that Yankees in suits prompt them to check their wallets. But many a Southerner might be surprised to know that a Southern country boy in New York often elicits the same distrust in people who presuppose his manner of speech to be disingenuous, meant to beguile and allay.

I wound up in Rhode Island when I was in the Navy, and when I was discharged I went to work as a reporter for The Providence Journal. It amused and amazed me when some of my Navy buddies from the South told me they had been in some New England town and seen a big statue dedicated to an unknown soldier of the Grand Army of the Republic. It took me some while to fathom that they thought Southern towns had somehow cornered the market on patriotism, and I had a hard time convincing them not to fly the Confederate battle flag while cruising through New England towns. I told them it was kind of like zipping past a speed trap in a red Corvette.

Their surprise that Yankees might harbor some suspicions of Southerners did not seem to me regionalism or provincialism. I thought of it as the great power of a mystique, the same mystique with which Lonesome Rhodes convinced even city slickers that when he said something it was true because he didn’t talk like those fancy . . . well, anyone you want to denigrate. It’s always when we believe our own mystique that we’re most likely to buy a lemon.

I thought of George W. Bush, a highly privileged Yale graduate, a man waited upon all his life by swells in suits, affecting a rural Texas accent so that we would believe that he is a man of the people, a man who sees through the hypocrisy and evil intent of all those big bad guys with briefcases. He didn’t strum a guitar, but he sure did strum our prejudices and fears for a while, and he left us with a battered and polarized country. Promising to bring us together, he whipped us into armed cultural and regional camps.

Here we are, a fast-urbanizing country, with a predisposition to believe country speech because of the myth of its moral superiority over city speech. I know of no reason in my experience—and I have lived in the country and the city—that a man from Hope, Arkansas, or Crawford, Texas, should be believed over a man from Hell’s Kitchen or Canarsie, New York, simply because of the sound of his words. Liars and snake oil salesmen abound on farms and in city back alleys alike. But so do men and women of integrity and honesty.

A Face In the Crowd, a black and white film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Shulberg, is a reminder that down-home manners, whether genuine or mock, are no guarantee of honesty. Lonesome Rhodes, like Adolph Hitler, knew that a little truth could be bent into a huge lie. Yes, the German masses were oppressed by a haughty elite that didn’t give a damned about them, but it wasn’t the Jews. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad ass, but he didn’t attack the Twin Towers or the Pentagon and he wasn’t in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Yes, Big Pharma deserved the ridicule Lonesome heaped on it, but Lonesome was a loathsome scoundrel and shouldn’t have been followed to the corner store, much less to the pinnacle of fame and fortune.

It’s a movie that thankfully wasn’t made in color, because color would have masked the sleaze and stench of that mean hobo and his exploiters. The black and white film is a constant rebuke of Lonesome’s colorful slang and fake charm. Kazan and Shulberg make the black and white film their collaborator, and it’s as much a Greek chorus as Walter Matthau’s ironic presence.

The most memorable face in that crowd, by the way, is that of the young Lee Remick, playing a cheerleader and radiating such beauty and sexual heat it almost derails the story line. Once you spot her in that crowd you don’t care if the Second Coming is around the corner. She’s out to seduce Lonesome, who hands her a cheerleading crown, and she recognizes a fellow seducer. The pudgy trickster and the seventeen-year-old cheerleader fall on each other like starved coyotes. This is her moment and she knows it, just as Lonesome knew his when he saw it.

What we’re left to decide, always left to decide, is whether their moment is any good for the rest of us, whether anyone so seductive is good for anyone else.

In the movie Shulberg is himself the Greek chorus. I suppose the American electorate in the 2008 election was that chorus, but it came almost too late and at the cost of too much life, limb and liberty. —DM

The safety of American seamen is deeply rooted in the American psyche. Our Navy was born to protect our merchant ships and earned its bones putting an end to Barbary piracy. If we are perceived now as a toothless dragon it will damage our new administration at home and abroad.

Our Navy has been very good at explaining the difficulty of responding to Somali pirates, but that’s not what Americans want to hear. They don’t regard the Navy as a public information office—they regard it as the guardian of our shores and our ships at sea. We may pay the politicians to stuff their own pockets and take care of their buddies, but we expect much more from a Navy whose founding rationale was the protection of our ships.

The Navy, the Bush administration and now the Obama administration can explain away, but unless the taking of a single American seaman is redressed forcefully, the public will lose confidence in both the administration and the Navy it oversees. In the past, Washington under Republicans and now Democrats has called piracy an international problem, as if that were a substitute for action. Piracy is an international problem, but now that an American has been taken it’s up close and personal, and continuing to call it everybody’s problem isn’t going to wash. It comes across as a weasel-wily.

The public doesn’t want to hear excuses and explanations. It doesn’t want to hear about “appropriate action” and “proper authorities.” This issue is too ingrained in American history to treat it like just another emergency. The public needs not only to hear from President Obama: it needs him to step in. Granted that it’s difficult to punish a Somali government that doesn’t exist. But the White House must understand that if it seems to be trying to talk its way through this crisis it will diminish itself in the public eye. This is a high-impact emotional issue. The commander in chief must act like one.

We didn’t allow the British and the French to impress our sailors, we didn’t pay tribute to the Algerian pirates, and if we allow starving Somalis to take our seamen and hold them hostage, we will seem less like a superpower and more like a paper tiger. Even worse, President Obama will lose face with his own people.

He needs to step up to the plate. Now. And while he’s at it he might take a look at why the Somali seamen are so desperate. Most of them are fishermen whose traditional grounds have been turned into a toxic dump by European business interests. —DM

It wasn’t just two styles of leadership, it was much more. There were officers from ensign to admiral who functioned acceptably if not well sorting through the various tasks and their demands. And then there were those extraordinary few whose minds grasped the mission of the ship, its place in the fleet, and the fleet’s place in the scheme of things.

You could say that some officers, some enlisted men for that matter, grasped the calculus of the Navy—what it existed for, how its particular parts constituted a whole. And now, late in my life, I recognize that what I was witnessing back then as an awed young man on a huge ship was a version of that very dictum attributed to the mythic Hermes Trismegistus:
the center is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.

In 1600, unable to wrap its collective and dogmatic mind around the idea that the universe might be infinite and ever-expanding, the church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake. It abhorred the capaciousness of his mind. Sound familiar? Today, wallowing as we are in an ugly and surpassingly silly election campaign, we are grappling with the same issue. Control freaks are trying to limit our universe and to declare those who see its infinite grandeur heretics.

Nothing changes but the facts, and they can be rearranged, like statistcs, to suit the purposes of ideologues. I see, after all these years, that fundamentalism is essentially about control, about setting limits, about punishing others for limitless inquiry, as the church silenced Bruno. The possibilities of inquiry simply scare some people into trying to bully the rest of us.

I would like to say the Navy invariably rewarded those whose minds reached out over oceans and continents, beyond the confines of the ship and the fleet, but the Navy is like the rest of us. Sometimes it sees the grandeur, sometimes it fears it. I certainly did see captains and admirals in whose minds the big picture operated. And I saw younger men with such capacious, open minds. But the closed-minded were also rewarded for dutifulness and sometimes for just playing the system.

It would have been a lovely thing to enjoy these recognitions when I was young. I should have liked to see dogmatism and ideological obstinacy as fear disguised as certitude and integrity. Bruno was seen as a threat to the church. Imagine that, a little Neapolitan priest with a huge mind endangering the great big church. How can the church’s response to him be seen as anything but fear? Fear of inquiry, fear of the infinite.

Either we swim—tread water, really—in the flotsam of things or we embrace the ocean. And if we do the latter our minds become microcosms of the infinite whole. Is there any greater courage than that?—DM

Russia, deploying troops presumably to support separatist Abkhazia, has apparently moved from the disputed area into pro-Western Georgia proper. This is the outcome of our win-win policy in Iraq, the policy John McCain is now trumpeting.

Win-win in Iraq has meant to hell with Afghanistan, to hell with all our other strategic interests. It has meant fighting the wrong enemy at great cost. Never mind what win-win means. Does it mean, for example, that we intend to settle a running dispute between Shias and Sunnis that began shortly after the Prophet Muhammad died? Does it mean that majority rule in Iraq, meaning Shia rule, will ally the country with Shia Iran, a country we (and Israel) are now threatening in response to its nuclear ambitions?

And why has a press corps that gets all het up about lapel pins and Obama’s supposed elitism declined for so long to pin down John McCain and his supporters about just what win-win in Iraq does mean? The majority of Iraqis are Shias. That means, given a free vote, the government is going to be dominated by Shias. Iran is Shia. So does win-win mean going in there, getting thousands of people killed and bankrupting ourselves only to give the mullahs in Iran a new pal?  Is this the national security and foreign policy experience the Republicans are talking about?

Georgia, to make matters even dicier, has troops in Iraq which it wants us to fly home to face the Russians. It has also asked for NATO membership, but NATO has dawdled in the face of Russian hostility.

So here we are, talking about win-win in Iraq, allowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup in Afghanistan, and talking tough and empty about Georgia. Some foreign policy. Is this the vaunted expertise we want to opt for in November by electing John McCain? Will the press give him a pass on this, too? —DM

What the news needs more than anything else is historical context, the very thing news executives have always eschewed in favor of immediacy. Without historical context the news becomes a major cause of ill-considered, slogan-driven policy.

The news industry has given itself a pass for its culpability in taking us to war in Iraq, but while we’re remembering the distortions of intelligence data and the downright lies of the White House we ought to remember how CNN and Fox News melodramatically beat the war drums and how the print media failed at due diligence when there were plenty of Arabists around to challenge the war policy.

Anyone who has ever watched the Discovery, Military, History or Weather channels may have observed that they often give us far more food for thought than the so-called news channels. They are more reflective, less inclined to dramatize. Such was the case this week when the Military Channel reopened the case of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898.

With the exploding of the Maine, American foreign policy departed from its republican ideals to take a distinctly imperialistic turn. The impetus, of course, was money, business. We had considerable monies invested in Spanish-held Cuba, and we had embarked on the expansion into the Pacific Basin that ultimately brought us into conflict with Imperial Japan.

The press, led by the ultraconservative and hawkish Hearst newspapers, jumped to every conspiracy theory conceivable. The Navy commission established to investigate the sinking, pressured by Congress, concluded that it was an act of terrorism either by Spanish sympathizers or by Spain itself. The slogan, Remember the Maine, To Hell With Spain, led us into a war in which we ultimately seized Cuba and The Philippines from Spain and destroyed what remained of its empire.

The parallels with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that legitimized the Vietnam War and with George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s bogus rationale for invading Iraq can hardly be more compelling. But in each case a complacent, irresponsible press played a major role and then stood by acting as if it had had nothing to do with war hysteria but was merely an objective bystander. Ever since the press has been tsk-tsking all the way to the bank.

The Military Channel recounted that in 1974 four-star Admiral Hyman Rickover, a controversial maverick, headed another commission of inquiry that concluded that the Maine had sunk because of an explosion within the steel-plated ship itself. This cast doubt on the Spanish conspiracy theory but failed to put it completely to rest.

But now scientists, using computer modeling and cutting-edge metallurgical research unavailable in 1974, have shown that the explosion originated in a coal bunker by spontaneous combustion, a frequent occurrence wherever coal was used to power ships, and then ignited gunpowder in the Maine’s hold. So much for the Spanish conspiracy.

Here we have three instances in which a democratic republic, which had renounced empire and colonialism from its inception, went to war in behalf of imperialist interests on the basis of misinformation and even chicanery. And the press, which had been envisioned by our founders as a bulwark against government misdeeds, took part in inflaming public opinion.

The media role in the sinking of the Maine (which has been explored closely by scholars) and in the Vietnam and the Iraq wars should give us pause. What we think of as news is more a tsunami of ephemeral reports and events, self-serving interpretations and political posturing. Sometimes the press may argue, as it did regarding the Maine, that there was nowhere to turn for countervailing viewpoints, but it had no such excuse in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

The Internet, to which the news industry is reluctantly transitioning, offers a unique opportunity to redefine news. Indeed, we might usefully revisit the very word. What we need is information and contexts in which to put it. We need new nomenclature for the ideal media role in the 21st Century. Perhaps a word like context. The reason for hope is hypertext, which enables the news industry to put events in perspective. For example, when the White House was making its case for barging into Iraq in the name of democracy, the press could have said, Whoa, Remember the Maine, and then linked breaking stories to all those previous doubts about how the Maine actually blew up that winter’s day in Havana harbor. The press could have revisited the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its historical reexamination.

But even more significantly, the press could have turned each Iraq story into a virtual index of issues related to modern Iraq history. Readers would have clearly seen that the British had failed in the 1920s to create a balance among Iraq’s sectarian parties. They would have seen how many Arabists thought it a bad idea to invade. They would have understood the secular nature of the Ba’ath Party and the unlikelihood of its having made common cause with Al Qaeda. They would have been able to ask themselves who would benefit most from an Iraq incursion. The answer, of course, would have been big oil and Pentagon contractors.

All these matters eventually came into play, but too late, because our concept of news is not broad enough to prevent nitwit sloganeers and conspiracy theorists from hijacking foreign policy.

The 2001 anthrax incident is another case at hand—a string of developments without context. If the FBI can convince us, as it is now trying to do, that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biochemical researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who recently committed suicide, was in fact the man who in 2001 killed five people and threatened many more, will the media remember that it was the anthrax scare and not the September 11th attacks that frightened us into allowing our civil liberties to be eroded in the name of national security? And will the media reopen the case with the same vigor with which they have reported each development? By reopening the case I mean, Will the media point out that a nation of 300 million souls was made docile by fear that foreign terrorists were using anthrax powder against us rather than a domestic terrorist for reasons that are not entirely clear?

If the media continue to refuse to take responsibility for the issue of context, if they persist instead in providing a steady stream of developments and smart-alecky punditry, they will have forfeited the opportunity of a century to redefine American journalism in the name of public enlightenment. The media have traditionally taken the position that it is for historians to make sense of things, to provide overview. But in a world as fast-moving as ours we can’t wait for the historians; we must instead take advantage of what is already archived. The current formula of literally poisoning news with punditry is a sorry excuse for putting news in context. It accelerates the polasrization of an already profoundly polarized society, because it daily invites partisans to pick their poison, leaving independent-mind citizens to fend for themselves.

There will always be a segment of our population that prefers ideology to fact, simple-minded solutions to nuanced examinations, and war to peace. Profiteers depend on this predilection for easy answers. One would think, would hope that the press would be the antidote to knee-jerk hawks and profiteers, but the press is owned by big business and takes its responsibility to make money for investors more seriously than its First Amendment responsibilities. A democracy can never be reminded too often that war is big business.

That is why the idea of citizen journalism is so spectral to press moguls. The idea of being no longer capable of hyping and propagandizing news by ownership of media outlets is truly intimidating. And yet nowhere in today’s presidential campaign is the issue raised of who will control the Internet. That’s no accident. It’s the last issue corporate media wants raised.—DM

And even if we were to become a military state like ancient Sparta the morale, the genius of the state would be best served by everyone serving equally. How else can children of wealth discharge their duties to a state from which they have benefited? Everyone should be willing to defend a state in which they believe, whether by active military service or by engaging in such projects as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

The argument should be not only about the quality of the army but the quality of the state and the ideals it holds. The argument is too one-sided, too limited to military science; the broader interests of the state should be considered too. The military does not exist for itself; rather it exists to uphold and defend our ideals, and it should not be allowed to take part in dismantling them in the name of expedience. Not even Sparta for all its militarism would have countenanced that.
We should consider, too, that historically the use of mercenaries is a measure of a civilization’s decline. We have used soldiers for hire in Iraq. When Iraq’s medieval empire under the Abbasids decided to use mercenaries it foreshadowed a breathtaking decline. The same may be said of Rome and the Ottoman Empire and many another world power.

By eschewing the draft we are making the case for an elitist society, saying not that Yankee Doodle will defend us when necessary but that poor Yankee Doodle will do the job. If the lords of the land, our fatted upper class, is unwilling to send its children to war it tells us they’re Americans for what they can get out of the rest of us, not because they believe in our ideals.

If we are to remain as egalitarian as we say we are, as egalitarian as those who wrap themselves in the flag and try to make traitors out of dissenters say we are, then let the rich put their money where their collective mouth is. If their children object to war, let them serve in other capacities. This is not just a military issue, it is a social issue. We do not exist to serve our military. We do not exist to adjust to it; it exists to protect our commonly held birthright. If we become a military state, or merely a state that panders to its military-industrial sector, we forfeit that birthright.

But by all means let us rid ourselves of a circumstance in which old, overweight white men wearing flag pins and waving for the camera send children of color, poverty and despair to war—and then desert them when they come back broken. —DM

Last Sunday on the George Stephanopoulos show we were told by Ted Koppel to forget about withdrawing from Iraq because we’re there to stabilize oil prices. Who did we hear say that, except of course the Sunday agenda-setters? It may or may not be true. Our presence may stabilize or it may destabilize the Middle East. But here we have the press driving the issues.

We were also told in the same show that the election campaign is not about John McCain, or even us, it’s about Barack Obama. Really? Could have fooled us. We thought it was about the presidency, silly us. We were told it was about Obama’s flip-flopping (not John McCain’s or the pundits’), but we were not told that the whole issue of flip-flopping is a press invention because the talking press finds it difficult to squeeze meaning and nuance between advertisements. Inherently dodgy issues like flip-flopping don’t gain traction
without the press’s complicity.

To watch these shows is to watch Washington insiders telling us what the issues are, what is important, and telling us on airwaves we own. What they deem unimportant they simply don’t mention. Net neutrality, for instance. When Mr. Koppel issued his world-weary pronunciamento he failed to mention that the Iraqi government and most of the Arab states, if not all, think our continued presence destabilizes the region.

Iraq interested Mr. Stephanopoulos’s guests more than the economy, although the economy now interests the people more than Iraq. So we got Iraq, we got John McCain’s so-called steadfastness about Iraq, Barack Obama’s so-called wobbles about Iraq; we didn’t get any discussion about how McCain’s brittle ideology might be more disastrous than Obama’s altered positions. That’s what I mean about setting the agenda, the press’s agenda, not ours. We, the people, have expressed our concerns, but who is listening?

When the press takes a poll it’s not for the edification of the public, it’s taken for press fodder.

Ted Koppel says portentously that discussion about staying in Iraq is futile because we’re there to stabilize the oil supply, and that’s that. Thanks, Ted, now we know what our fate is. No discussion about whether we can afford to keep, say, eighty thousand troops in Iraq while we bankrupt ourselves and lose Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban. No discussion about what might be the Arabs’ duty to their own part of the world. This is what is called framing the discussion. It’s framed all right.

We’re not listening to discourse here, not in the sense that the Discovery, PBS or History channels shed light on subjects, illuminate our minds. We’re listening to the world as a handful of pundits see it, we’re listening to the agenda they think we ought to pursue, how they think we ought to think.

The entire issue of flip-flopping, which gets more slapstick by the day, serves the press’s phony certitude about matters, its unwillingness to explore the complexity of issues. The press is in large part culpable for the ideological polarization of the country because of its adolescent insistence that we make up our minds and seal them with Gorilla Glue. Neither life nor the affairs of man are like that. They are more like shifting sands and ocean currents, and whoever is unable to respond intelligently to change and to nuance is swamped. Imagine a sailor trying to hold a course against a wind shift. You can’t, because you’d be imagining a fool. And yet we make heroes of ideologues, we celebrate their inability or refusal to revisit issues in the light of developments and disclosures.

The very fact that the press takes flip-flopping seriously is an obscenity, but it also reveals media commitment to driving the agenda. If the press had simply taken the position that any scientist would take, namely that intelligent people keep their minds open to discovery, there would have been no flip-flopping issue at all. But the convergence of the media impulse to drive the agenda and the political desire to simplify issues into slogans has undermined public discourse in America. —DM

My most memorable experience in Navy boot camp in the early 1950s at Bainbridge, Maryland, was being shown the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, starring Henry Fonda. Each and every one of us knew the United States Navy wanted us to know that a man may be unjustly accused and lynched and that it was up to each of us to stand, like Henry Fonda, against the terroristic atmosphere in which men may be wrongly accused and even executed.

We filed out of that building into the hot summer sunlight awed and silent. The United States Navy had told us we were embarked upon a great project of upholding the flinty ideals Henry Fonda had expressed in that famous wartime movie. Not for nothing was such a film made while we were fighting formidable enemies of our dearest beliefs. We got the message. Loud and clear.

I can’t imagine after all these years that instructing our recruits in foreign policy could be half as important as showing them such a film. I don’t know what the sailors and Marines with whom I served would have made of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. (I remember playing baseball at Gitmo.) But I choose to believe that those of us who saw The Ox-Bow Incident might have believed that the enlistees at Abu Ghraib had been given unlawful orders. Orders for which no commissioned officer has been prosecuted.—DM