Dept of War

What are we fighting for?

Every day of this Presidential administration feels worse than the last. Each utterance or act a slap to the zitty teenaged face of democracy and decency. I say teenaged because that’s how old our country is compared to the rest of the world. Our democracy we once made such a revolution about is a fragile experiment, currently lost in the messy weeds of puberty. Or if you want to overlay this with a whittling sort of metaphor: our democracy is a sculpture of a teen made of wax or very soft pliable wood. The figure gets leaner and leaner with every aggressive swipe of the political carving tools, until there is very little left. This teenager looks like it has anorexia, weak in the knees.

But then there are the teens in my household who are healthy and eat their greens, “woke” because they read, care, and get enough sleep to think clearly. These two are, along with anyone else of their generations, our future. And I feel both confidant in this and terrified. Along with their college diplomas, we will be handing them so much to fix. Will they be punky like Greta Thunberg and fight the power, or will they get a job and try to more politely work from within. In any case, I can be grateful, as I often am, that I happened to have two girls and not boys. Since the boys of this age perhaps would be drafted to serve in WWIII by then. For which they’ve been well-trained. Boys who grew up in the land of spending thousands of hours practicing extermination in video games, and figuring out where the exits are should there be yet another school shooting.

Each painful chunk scooped out of these teens feels like the last excision we can survive. Surely we can’t lose anymore after this chunk or that. Surely this one will make a difference! We thought that after Sandy Hook—26 dead from rapid fire, 20 of them small children—will definitely change gun laws, but it didn’t, and it’s been 13 years and innumerable mass shootings since, each as awful as the last. Surely a Presidential candidate saying things like “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?” or “They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy” would not win an election, right? Right?! Wrong, and then wrong again. Surely, the actual acts of gilding the White House with tacky gold decor for millions, or inciting a coup that led to the death of multiple officers, or turning the office into a megabucks opportunity to further enrich the ruler in crypto coin billions, or calling all the Epstein victims a hoax, or, or, or…there’s so much loss to his gains, but no, no, nope. Nada. Not a thing matters. Nothing.

You might start to get the impression that nothing matters anymore. Or everything matters but we’re powerless. So maybe why not forget civility and humanity and “the rule of law” and take arms to do something crazy. To me yet another last straw was declaration of the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. This certainly helps set the tone for what they’re going for, and I believe it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. This move undoes decades of the relative calm established after WWII when President Truman gave a speech about the importance of turning the existing battle nomenclature in place since our nation’s founding into more of a sense of peace (which happened officially in 1947 when “war” became “defense”). To not be aggressors on the world stage but peacemakers, defenders of democracy, because the soldiers (who survived) were happy to be home and we were happy to have them and we wanted anything but another world war like those two terrible ones, which we haven’t had since, which you would assume is a good thing?

Seal of the United States Board of War and Ordnance, created in 1778. It was used by the U.S. War Department until 1880. (Ordnance means “artillery.”)

Oh no, says Pete Hegseth (Fox News personality/US Secretary of Defense War), in this spoken word-sounding jingle he recited alongside Trump the other day at the Resolute desk:

This name change is not just about renaming, it’s about restoring.
Words matter.
It’s restoring—as you’ve guided us to, Mr. President—restoring the warrior ethos.
Restoring victory and clarity as an end-state.
Restoring intentionality to the use of force.
So, at your direction, Mr. President, the War Department is going to fight decisively, not endless conflicts.
It’s going to fight to win, not to lose.
We’re going to on offense, not just on defense.
Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.
Violent effect, not politically correct.
We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.
So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.

Thank you for your leadership and clarity.
We’re going to set the tone for this country, America First.
Peace through strength, brought to you by the War Department.

Violent effect, raising warriors. Is that offensive to you enough? Forget legality, too tepid. We need this reality show of strength to be American, to be a leader, to be this Mr. President, to be a man. What’s a young man in such a nation to do? This very week—a school shooting in Colorado overlapping with the divisive conservative wingding Charlie Kirk shot in the neck by the suspected 22-year-old who objected to this man enough to kill. Most liberals quake in our boots at such events and pending the party affiliation of the shooter, because we know that any act of violence from (or perceived/assumed to be from) our side will be met with a great excuse to say, attack any large city with the National Guard, declare war on our people and institutions. One of their own though doing bad deeds?—though statistically the norm (the Anti-Defamation League quotes the vast majority, 76%, of extremist-related murders come from the far right), renders only hopes and prayers. Something against one of our own?—as when Democratic Minnesota House Speaker, Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her home, in June, along with her husband, and their dog—under the rug.

As democrats in such an upside down, it’s in our best interest to condemn any violence from anywhere and stick to the guidance of MLK, Jr. and Gandhi and the rule of peaceful protest. We have no choice. I know I said I’m sitting this one out; I feel the same disenchantment we all feel about what can we achieve on the streets, and I too have begun to wonder if there’s any point to any of it. But an elderly man gave me pause this week, and got me more hopeful and inspired than I have been in many months. I may even engage again with the resistance with more than just words.

Sheldon Malev, 87, is a white-haired, retired professor at the local community college, a psychologist, and he narrated to me his history as an organizer that began in the early 1980s when he started the tenants political action committee for his apartment complex in Greenburgh that grew into a whole Westchester Tenants League for which he was the leader. Now, his whole life later, shorter and not up for long bouts of standing, he is nonetheless here on the sidewalk at a busy intersection protesting weekly with folks loosely affiliated with the national Indivisible group network, in front of the White Plains Tesla showroom. At first this was part of “Tesla Takedown” effort when Elon momentarily went bonkers on our Federal accounting after hours, but since it has become just a fine public spot to be seen by passersby, protesting the regime in general and every act and utterance in particular. At this intersection is a bus stop, and that’s where a young newly minted PhD, Xavier, had 20 minutes to wait for the next bus. He asked Sheldon what this was about and who were they with, and because Sheldon is so dynamic, soon got swept into the mission.

Now Sheldon wants to form (or really revive) the same county umbrella and local connectivity for Indivisible that he once created for his tenants association. People were really activated in Indivisible for Trump’s first go, but not as much here now it seems. I too was active with some of their actions then too, but have since disengaged. Fatigue. That tepid feeling. Slightly, but not enough numb. Since I’m not dead yet, Sheldon got under my empathic skin and encouraged me to join him for a lunch, or at least watch in on the national weekly Zoom (“What’s the Plan? A Weekly Discussion with Indivisible’s Co-Founders”), which I will. “The onslaught of news, the chaos coming out of the White House—it’s all meant to overwhelm us. It’s a deliberate strategy to sow confusion and make us believe we are powerless to fight back. The antidote: Coming together in community to process what’s happening, to sift through what’s important and what’s just noise, and coalesce around strategies for fighting back.”

What does our version of fighting back look like? The founders of the Indivisible movement are a young couple, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, with two young kids. Surely the biggest founder of their passion for these punk politics is their kids, this precarious future we are meant to entrust to them. They’ve done their research. They talk about how they looked into what enabled other countries to overthrow authoritarian regimes. Data reveals a crucial tipping point. Three-point-five percent. This is the percentage of the population that supposedly needs to take to the streets in active peaceful protest, in one day, with their signs, making their voices heard—to initiate a domino affect that can topple an administration. At this stage in the US that would be 12 million people, so that’s their goal to hit that at their next national act in October.

Indivisible is behind the very successful No Kings Day (anywhere from four to six million estimated protestors, as quoted from various sources in the Guardian, in the US, many more around the world) and they are doing this again on Oct. 18. Sheldon and Xavier and accruing friends would like to add White Plains to the map of locations that day. By then if they can get, in one day, 12 million people amassed in our streets, then perhaps they’ve done a thing. And the thing will start to matter. That many people causes traffic clogs, major nuisance; it’s extremely visible, and begins to sway the inactive to start joining the masses. And by then once it starts to matter, then it’s all mattered really, because everything that has come before this has led to this moment. And things will begin to change. It has to be peaceful because we have to be better than them, you know, the ones with the guns. We can move the needle. I feel my own needle moving toward wanting to join in again.

In a culture of “war” words, when we have to “fight climate change,” “fight Covid,” “battle cancer,” “combat misinformation,” and basically barricade our very bodies and babies against bullets, rape, and innumerable official affronts to our human rights, I stand with Sheldon.

Exterior view of the War Department building. A carriage stands on the street outside the building.

A poem to close it out from British poet Robert Browning, “Love among the Ruins,” 1855

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro’ the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop—
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country’s very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.

Now the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run
Into one)
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall

Bounding all
Made of marble, men might march on nor be prest
Twelve abreast.
And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'er-spreads
And embeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone—
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.

Now—the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks—
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.

And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away—
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.

But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,—and then
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
Gold, of course.
O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]