WAR FOREVER
My entire early childhood was ghosted by World War II. I remember as a small boy going to Telenews with my mother in downtown Detroit, watching newsreels spin out short reels of planes dropping bombs, battleships firing guns into the air, soldiers massing for combat. Even shots of concentration camp victims and huge piles of naked skeletal bodies, the sight of which would make my mother grab me by the arm and rush us out of the theater. She said she was afraid she would see her own mother or father or sisters in one of those piles. We had learned from my uncle Milo, who had been in Auschwitz, that they had all been seized in Paris, pushed into cattle cars, sped by rail to Poland, then marched naked into fake shower chambers, and quickly gassed and cremated.
Soon came the Cold War and the terror of atomic and hydrogen bombs. At school we had regular air raid drills. We were taken down into the dank and gloom-shrouded basement, made to crouch and wait and listen to a teacher recite to us in a low voice, as if telling a scary campfire story, how we would be instantly vaporized if a bomb detonated on us at ground zero. There were TV movies of Russian missiles exploding on a big city and radiation spreading into the countryside and causing agonizing slow deaths. Soon came the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, and on and on.
This grinding, ghastly specter of war has pursued me for decades. It’s like a wound or a trauma spread out across my lifetime.
I watch in dumbfound horror as children, hunched over their phones or iPads, gleefully and obsessively wring violent death upon endless squads of designated enemies who continuously re-populate their screens. Is this the traumas of their parents or grandparents revisited upon them like the kiss of a vampire? Not so different from the games, with tiny toy soldiers, fitted with uniforms and armor, that previous generations played re-enacting and re-imagining Roman conquest wars, Napoleonic wars or even World War One.
Historians of ancient man tell us that pre-historic humans routinely attacked and vitiated neighbors to gain hunting territory and reap vengeance. Early written records recount much the same history. Even the noble Athenians of the fifth century BC, credited with the creation of great cultural inventions, routinely battled neighboring states and, of course, defeated the Persians as well as super-militant Sparta. On and on it goes.
Avi Lowe, in his recent book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, argues that as civilizations evolve to increasingly more sophisticated levels of technology there will arise a point where the survival of their habitat, their planet, will no longer tolerate the absorption of all resources because of technology and its deadly effluvia. It is as if we are, at our deepest base, at work with our genome, our species, our collective mind, to drive us deeper and deeper into the abyss that we create and re-create endlessly.
How do we reconcile our selves with our collective self?
As that little boy sitting in his school basement at ground zero, I thought of myself as a survivor. I was sure I would walk out of there, maybe with burning ruins surrounding me, but whole and intact. I am sure that every child puts down his video game and runs to grab a cookie and glass of milk, unfettered by the destruction that has played out in his hands minutes before. Even people marching to their death my envision themselves rising to heaven, clean and free. Or washed in a fiery pain the obliterates everything.
We are we at war, always. Why is peace at best an interim? I can walk out my door, head over to Central Park and stroll through the annual one-week glory of cherry blossoms clotting an arcade like a glen stolen from paradise. The sun shines clear and bright above me, the sky is as blue as a great lake. Meanwhile fire and death screams down on Aleppo or Mariupol or another corner of Afghanistan and murders people by the thousands. Peace, you see, is also a geographical interim.
How will the world end? Not with a bang or a whimper. It will be with war. Endless war.
That little boy, saved and allowed to live far—far enough—from the many ravages of war, still breathes easily. War has not caught me. Yet. We are all little boys, not brave, but complacent, buoyed by what good has been rendered to us. War is somewhere else, until it arrives at our door. We very naturally think we will survive. More feared of disease, of the pandemic around us, then of bombs dropping on our heads. What if war comes? Not to worry. We’ve been rehearsing for a million years.
Let’s toss out our toy soldiers, turn off the video game, stop reveling in the newscast.
Let’s forget war.
Shall we?
