Like many who have raised small children, I was often surprised by the sophistication of the rhetorical devices s employed to persuade me to act in accordance with a child's wishes. Among children speaking American English, particularly notable is a subtle equivocation of the word “fair.” For example, a five-year-old, denied the enjoyment of a slice of cake so large that he would have trouble carrying his plate, might observe incisively, “Father, surely, you must realize that your actions in this case are simply not fair. I am compelled to request, sir, that you reconsider!”
Or words to that effect. Experienced parents will know that this is an excellent moment to begin an exposition of the concept of etymology, and having done that, to apply this concept to the word “fair,” so as to invalidate this otherwise compelling argument. For the sense of “fair” here implied by the child, as describing something “proper, just,” or later “equitable, impartial, unbiased,” is said to have developed only in the 13th or 14th Centuries.
But “fair” is a much older word. Contrary to the child's implication, he is actually using it in the original sense, as denoting that which is “pleasing to the eye, bright, clear, pleasant, agreeable, pretty,” a sense going back to the times before English was English. Now certainly, a cruel refusal to permit the free enjoyment of sufficient quantities of cake is neither pleasant nor agreeable, but it does not follow from this that the decision is unjust. Thus this is an equivocation, not an argument. Once these points have been articulated to the child in question, he will typically nod ruefully, acknowledging the flaw in his reasoning, and calmly allow the matter to drop.
These days, this older sense of “fair” sees little conversational use, and is mostly preserved in phrases such as “fair weather” or “fair-skinned,” as well as in the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. (Let us not dwell on the fact that “fair-skinned” means “lighter-skinned,” lest we be forced to consider that the proto-Germanic tribes may have to be canceled. Tolkien's already a goner, I think, though it's been a while since I checked the roster.) It is the older sense that I have in mind here, which, naturally, brings me to the subject of nuclear apocalypse.
I have already mentioned in an earlier post that, as a precocious youth in the 1980s, I read (and watched) a number of fictional treatments of the Third World War, which we feared then in a way that is now difficult to recall. Whereas these days, we sensibly fear chest colds and unseasonably warm weather as harbingers of the End, back then, our melodramatic terror was focused on the thousands of awesomely destructive weapons that the world's two great powers were prepared to use against each other at a moment's notice.
Some of the fiction certainly tended towards melodrama; I am thinking here of Nevil Shute's On the Beach, which portrays humanity's last days in a world in which all life is gradually being extinguished by radioactive fallout. Though Shute was an engineer and an old-school Englishman, and the emotional tone of the work is remarkably restrained in comparison to the subject matter, the scenario of its setting is pure, hyperventilating doom-mongering. Dozens of countries – even Albania – have acquired nuclear weapons, and as if out of pure spite, all have been constructed with cobalt “jackets,” so as to maximize the production of fallout and the longevity of the resultant radioactivity. A minor dispute rapidly draws in every major power, and all of them use all their bombs against each other, destroying every city in the northern hemisphere. But that's not all – the fallout generated is so intensely radioactive, enduring, and widespread that it poisons the entire atmosphere, spreading gradually south with the air currents, progressively exterminating all non-microbial life as it blankets the surface.
So many aspects of this scenario are unrealistic as to render its dissection tedious. Now, to be fair – in the “just and proper” sense – to Shute, we can consider this story, on which the book does not dwell, as merely a driver for the novel's exploration of the human reaction to extinction. On that basis, it isn't completely without merit, at least as a window into what the stiff-lipped generation of Britons who had fought two world wars imagined the reaction of their society might be. (The contrast with Mad Max or, more directly, The Road is telling.) But to be truly fair in this sense, we must not ignore the fact that it was both intended and received as a work meant to “raise awareness.” Despite its emotional restraint, this puts it into the same category of lying propaganda as the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, with which the ignorant are terrified into rejecting debate by invoking outlandish horrors.
More subtle, and ultimately more effective, was the 1984 novel Warday, written by Whitley Strieber1 and James Kunetka. Intending to convince their readers that a limited nuclear exchange was not “winnable” in any meaningful sense, the authors adopted the conceit of writing as themselves from 1992, in an America that had fought a thirty-six-minute war with the Soviet Union on 28 October 1988, one initiated by the Soviets in response to the American deployment of a space-based missile defense system. In this fictional history, Washington, New York, and San Antonio were the only major cities destroyed, along with the ICBM installations in the northern interior; space-based weapons were used to generate a massive electromagnetic pulse. The authors tell their stories of living through this war and its immediate aftermath, then portray a journey through the postwar remains of America.
For those of us who remember the Eighties, there are distinct echoes of the controversies of the time – it is clear that its authors were not Reagan Republicans – but these are far more muted than, say, The Day After Tomorrow's depiction of a thinly-veiled Dick Cheney as personally culpable for literally destroying the country. Somewhat surprisingly, considering the times and the subject matter, neither nuclear winter nor the Nuclear Freeze play large parts, although Warday was perhaps the first work of fiction to emphasize the effects of high-altitude electromagnetic pulse. In a way which now seems prescient, the authors do make the repeated point that it was America's technological edge, and the Soviets' fear that they were hopelessly outmatched, which brought war close when this book was being written.
Rather than dwelling on technical disputes about its depiction of nuclear warfare, or judging its implication in the hundreds or thousands of series of mass-produced, wish-fulfillment airport novels concerning survival after “EMP” now available on Amazon.com, I want to consider the sense of tragedy that Warday conveys. While not a literary classic, it is neither a thriller nor a polemic, and the writing is markedly better than one would expect from a book of this type. (I know; I used to read a lot of them.) Even in its persuasive mode, it does not condemn villains; it laments well-intentioned folly. It is written in many voices: both of the authors write sections in the first person, others are selections from fictitious government documents, or surveys of public opinion. But the bulk of the book consists of interviews with a wide range of characters that they imagine encountering in their travels, from anarchist bandits, to a Canadian businessman, a Catholic priest, foreign relief officials, a salvage worker, a former Undersecretary of Defense. All are depicted in a way which is at least partially sympathetic. Though it reports mass death, radiation sickness, devastating famine, and the ravages of plague, all of these are either contained in dry memoranda, or alluded to as memories of past suffering by those who have survived them. Many of its phrases struck me at the time, and remained with me through the years. For my purpose here, I will mention two.
The first is taken from one of the driest “interviews” in the book – deliberately so – an Army general commanding a massive salvage operation in a contaminated and abandoned area. The style is clipped and flat, an attempt at a certain kind of professional military voice, dispassionate and purely factual. The Atomic Age's dream of a general. I remember some version of this, actually, from the 1990s, although the culture has changed, and generals are expected to be smoother and more blandly political now. This character is actually one of the most unambiguous vehicles for the authors' message, but that was not the part that I noted at the time. After delivering a briefing on his operational results, the general takes a moment to make a personal statement. He says, in part:
“[The war] has revealed toughness and gristle and fellow-feeling that we didn't even know we had. There was a time when I might have said, 'If a nuclear war will toughen us up, let it come.' Having lived through one, I would not say that now. […] Not a day passes that I don't wish for the soft old America with all its faults.”
The changes that I have seen in my own country, and in the world, since I read these words are surely less than those seen by this imagined general. We have lived the polar opposite of the history that Strieber and Kunetka imagined. Nor do these words inspire nostalgia; when I encountered them, I was young, and had never felt the world move on. Instead, what is expressed here is sorrow for a kind of loss of innocence: the people of this wrecked America are more virtuous, more aware of the realities and worth of life, but he wishes that they had never had to learn. Because the learning hurt, and more of it will come, and it is hard to look back on some forms of suffering and judge them justified by the good that they have brought about.
In late modernity, too, we have learned many things like this, or ought to have done so, by now. Perhaps we should have known them before embarking on the great voyage that I described in my last post; perhaps some did, but were gradually shouted down. But though I suppose that I am glad that I saw the stoplights, that I caught warning of the tidal waves rushing in on the raisin farm, sometimes I still wish for the old world back, with all its faults. The world as I saw it before I understood.
Is there any merit in this feeling? or is it simply a childish shrinking from a hard truth? In part, it is the latter, but only in part. The second fictitious interview that I will cite from the forgotten novel Warday is set on a train in Georgia. The subject is a Southern man, a solidly middle-class pillar of his community, albeit in an unusual line of work: he is a funeral director, or as older euphemisms would have it, an undertaker or mortician. He recounts the immediate aftermath of the war in his area, which was largely untouched, and the practical difficulties that he encountered in his business of preparing and burying the dead. And then, as if in an aside, he notes that his own wife died back during the famine, and that he expects one of his children to soon die as well. He recalls, briefly, the child's delight in life before the war, his brief promise, and says:
“I’ve gotten real close to the Good Lord. I pray all the time. […] I’m burying more than people now, I’m burying a way of life. Praise the Lord. I am burying a world that was so fair.”
I think of these words often now.
The authors of Warday, so far as I can tell, really did fear that the world that they inhabited, the time of Reagan's “morning in America,” would not endure. That it was headed for ruin. They were right about this. Though the coming desolation is not the sort that they feared, we are now becoming able to smell it in the breeze, to see it blue-tinted on the horizon. There will (hopefully) be far less physical destruction, death, and suffering. But it will, in the end, be just as complete and irrevocable.
Sometimes it is hard not to wish for this end, to urge it on. When one sees the self-parody into which so many of Western modernity's most cherished ideals have inexorably descended, the lazy masturbation of our pursuit of happiness, the puerile, spoiled rebellion against authority, the disgusting phantasms which we increasingly venerate, even as we settle into an ever more delicate and squeamish bureaucratism, it is hard not to give in to this feeling, at least in one's own heart. But this is a mistake, and not an honest one.
It is easy to walk through a medieval cathedral and lament the Christendom that is now long gone; I have done so many times. So much was lost in the stripping of the altars, in the Reformation that led inevitably to the Enlightenment that bears much of the blame for bringing us to this extremity. But it is easy to forget that Bach was a product of the West's earliest flowering, and lived in that same Enlightenment. Would history be better if Bach had never been? No one who has known his work can possibly believe this. And Bach is very far from the only good that the West has ever produced, as even the most inveterate critic must admit. Living at sunset, it is tempting for us to forget, or to deny, that “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!”
And that bliss, that spirit, animated a drive that did achieve real advancement, that has helped and is helping people without number to ease their burdens and their suffering. And if some have had their burdens eased too much, their suffering reduced to their detriment, so others have at least not stood helplessly and watched their children die a wretched death from some nameless pestilence, seen them grow caged in some tiny cell of a place with prescribed and cramped horizons, forever ignorant of all the broad wonder of the wider world. And though we have learned that perhaps the familiar horizons are something that we need more than we thought, that perhaps most of those exposed to the wide world remain ignorant, and prefer to construct their own narrow cells from the parts that they like, still the trade has not gone only in one direction. All men for all time have looked upon the beauty of Thuréina the goddess, first daughter of Mamánda, the mother Earth – the bright moon in the sky. We alone have reached out to her and touched her shining face. And even if we did it mostly for our own glory, mostly to show our own mastery, still it was a masterful and glorious deed. And when we had carried it out, despite all of our motives, we had at least the decency to say that we had come in peace for all mankind.
I have lived my whole life in the days after men had touched the moon. I can remember her hanging high over the parade field in the morning, when I was first in the Army. In accordance with an American military custom of indefinite age – at least a century and a half, and so, for our young country, ancient – we were mustered, daily, around the edge of that field at sunrise. We stood in our ranks and saluted as the flag was raised and the bugler sounded "Reveille" – and he was a real bugler, standing across the plain from us at the base of the flagpole, not a recording, as is now most often the case. At times it was hot and muggy and I was already exhausted and miserable, but at other times there was a crisp breeze, and the bright flag spread out in the air while the wheels of the pulley that raised it softly squeaked. It was beautiful, and seeing that flag go up, I could feel part of something great, something worth dying for. “The forces which guard my country and our way of life,” in the words of the Code of Conduct that we all had to memorize, first issued by Eisenhower early in the postwar era, back when the new American way of life, the one that we all now live, was being defined and constructed. “I am prepared to give my life in their defense.” How much more so in the evening, just before chow, when we would form up again and listen to the bugler play "Retreat" and "To the Colors" as the flag went down. These two were beautiful, elegiac and mournful, and though it was "Taps" that I later heard played at my own soldiers' funerals, it is these two other melodies which have always brought to mind the honored dead at sunset. It was a long time before I considered that “Retreat” was meant to signal defeat and flight from the field of battle.
Just a few weeks before I began to take part in these traditions, Eisenhower's successor at the time, William Jefferson Clinton, went to Normandy and gave a speech to commemorate D-Day. He addressed those present who had fought on that day, and he told them,
“Here are the generations for whom you won a war. We are the children of your sacrifice… We flourished in the Nation you came home to build. The most difficult days of your lives bought us fifty years of freedom… Five years ago, the miracle of liberation was repeated, as the rotting timbers of communism came tumbling down. Now we stand at the start of a new day. The Soviet empire is gone. So many people who fought as our partners in this war, the Russians, the Poles, and others, now stand again as our partners in peace and democracy. Our work is far from done.”
Indeed, it turned out to be very far from done. I wore that flag on my shoulder for many years: in counterinsurgencies and invasions, wars on drugs and terrorism and for freedom and democracy. I saw it taken from coffins, folded, and handed to widows as they wept. I saw its boundless wealth, its matchless capability, and its indifferent cruelty. We carried it with us and raised it on top of a bombed-out hangar in Iraq on 11 September 2003. We climbed that hangar – it was dome-shaped, concrete, built by Frenchmen for the government that we had just destroyed – and flew it from a pole that we had set up for the occasion, when the sun was going down and the terrible heat had begun to lessen.
Even then there was disquiet in my heart, as well as love, when I looked upon that flag in that place. And now, when I see it, I am only troubled. I can recall the memory of that feeling, but not its substance. The flag to me is now like the face of a woman who left you in some way that inflicted damage. Was I the one abandoned, or did I abandon it? How is it that I see that flag as outsiders see it, how its red-white-and-blue imply now also other flags of other colors, rainbows and pastels? How is it that when I hear us loudly condemn the erstwhile “partners” that Clinton named above, the Russians, for their brutal and unjustified invasion of another country, I see that flag atop that hangar still? That the words for which I was prepared to die now seem so hollow? How is it that my son will never feel the same way about that flag as I felt in my youth, or as my own father felt in his, that the soundtrack to his life will be “Retreat” and never “Reveille?”
Though I can say much in answer to those questions, and by now feel bewilderment only when I deliberately provoke it in myself, I still remember the flag going up in the bright morning sunshine.
And even here, so close to nightfall, as the flag in our heart is taken down, much of the good of the West and of what it chose to keep from Christendom persists, and many are the fair things that have not yet passed away. When they do, it will likely not be all at once, though it will be faster than we are prepared to accept. And it will hurt so much to lose them, even for those of us who know their hidden flaws. What those veterans of Normandy came home and built was not entirely crooked. Those who see that much or most of our way of life and thought is bad and unsustainable ought to acknowledge that it is still pretty, and comfortable, and pleasing, and peaceful. Even some of the dreams of the West that have turned out to be poisonous delusions were beautiful, and people loved them. We can lament the wrongness of our culture's principles without denigrating the sincerity with which they have been held, the sacrifices that have been made to put them into practice, or the hope that they gave to the suffering and to the oppressed.
Now we know better, you might retort. At least, some vanishingly tiny minority does, though we can hope that it is growing. Now we understand how to distinguish the blessings of modernity from the curses to which we attached them, now we can see which of the blessings are actually curses themselves. Perhaps we do, to some extent. But if we know, if we understand, if we can see, then our response to the apocalypse must be more than “good riddance to bad rubbish.”
I do believe that we must acknowledge that the West has come to its end, although that end will be prolonged. As I said in my last post, it is clear that the modern West can't be fixed, that “people are losing their faith in its religion and their affinity for its way of life,” and that we must be willing to leave it behind. But we should at least pause and pray before we bury the old world in our hearts. It was, in truth, so fair.
Postscript: I am aware that Whitley Strieber is best known for his 1987 book Communion, purportedly based on “paranormal” experiences that took place in 1985. Indeed, I well remember the display stands in front of Waldenbooks, with all the creepy alien faces staring out at you – it is now widely recognized that the cover of this book had a large part in creating the iconography of the “greys” in UFO mythology. At the time, recognizing the author's name, I picked one up, read the back of it… and put it back down. Since then, Strieber has pumped out a series of fringe works, at first focused on alien abduction, and eventually ranging further afield; he also maintains a vast and kooky website. There is controversy over whether he is now a madman or a charlatan. I still recommend Warday, although as a crazy person myself, I cannot judge him too harshly. Even Isaac Newton calculated the end of the world based on secret codes in the Bible, although, as these writings went unpublished, they lacked snappy cover art.