‘The Somme set the picture by which future generations saw the First World War; brave helpless soldiers; blundering obstinate generals; nothing achieved.‘ A J P The First World War: An Illustrated History
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME, JULY-NOVEMBER 1916 Copyright: © IWM. Source:http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205019100
The ‘war to end all wars’ didn’t. World War II followed within a generation precipitated by a severe and unjust treaty that gutted Germany, and the end of all wars was a preamble to the bloodiest century in human history. To most of us World War I seems as remote as Agincourt or Rome subduing Hannibal.
We may remember vaguely that the assassination of hapless Archduke Ferdinand precipitated the conflict, but the truth is far more complicated involving decades old alliances and animosities, ethnic nationalism, imperial ambitions, petty grievances of ambitious men, lust for power, and fear. It’s always fear in one form or another that leads to killing lots of people.
World War I employed 19th century tactics and 20th century weapons from machine guns and more accurate artillery to mustard and chlorine gas. I’m old enough to remember my Great Uncle John who lived the rest of his life with one lung after losing its left side companion to mustard gas in the trenches. World War I was a woodchipper into which brave and terrified men were ordered to rush with great enthusiasm.
And the trenches, oh. Ankle deep or worse with fetid water ripe with human waste and blood and body parts and no relief. Overwhelming pestilence, stink, and misery, then the whistle blows to signal the next suicidal assault and attempt to gain a hundred yards and take the next putrid trench in front of them currently occupied by other exhausted men with ruined feet at least as terrified as those screaming and charging into their guns. Again, and again. And again. Surge forward. The next day, routed, quick snake crawl back to the trench you left yesterday only without some of your friends who lie tangled in coils of barbed wire with their intestines and brains glistening in the sun.
The Battle of the Somme lasted almost five months and incurred almost a million casualties. At the end British forces advanced seven miles. On the first day, July 1, 1916, British forces alone incurred 57,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest day still in a long British military history.
Governments wage war, governments of varying degrees of competence which profess to manage complex societies. At their best, they protect the rights of their people to live peacefully in freedom. But. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote so perfectly, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[i]
“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.” Jean-Paul Sartre
Every election since Kennedy v Nixon in my memory has been booked as the most important of our lifetime with loud predictions and with the lines growing more distinct every cycle. The most recent was as divisive and angry and fear filled on both sides of the divide as any I can remember. Yet, every two or four years, the balance shifts a little, and the culture rift grows wider. A few legislative bills are passed with much fanfare at the outset of each administration before things settle back into the accustomed sniping impasse. The culture has morphed into something unrecognizable, but each election comes and goes with the same lackluster candidates somehow even less appealing and more dispiriting than the last batch. They fill the news cycles with apocalypse. But apocalypse somehow holds off.
A case could be made that our postmodern culture struggles find their best analog in WWI – epitomized in the Battle of the Somme. Eventually victors may emerge from the trenches, but many bloody years are laid to waste, and the dead are legion. The dividing lines are so deep that peaceful reconciliation seems remote. Like sitting on the southern slope of the Grand Canyon and looking out, contemplating the depth and breadth. Impassable crevasse.
Mistrust and enmity on all sides. The issues divide us, and their proposed solutions remain obstinately irreconcilable. Ideology becomes culture becomes intragenerational habit becomes character.
Immigration reform means secure borders to protect a country, or it means welcome and refuge for all who want to come with little room for compromise. Immigration good and evil on both sides. Xenophobia and fear vs welcome and refuge to the poor and desperate. A nation defined by its borders and ability to protect them from human trafficking drugs and weapons. Or a nation defined by the Emma Lazarus poem quoted on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Citizens of good faith on both sides of the canyon.
Gender ideology is so bewildering and becomes more vitriolic and farther from any possibility of compromise almost by the week. XX and XY immutable, or bodies completely to be defined by self and the politics of identity? However, dear God, did we come to this?
Abortion is of course at its existential core a fracture incapable of compromise or healing. There is either a dead baby or not; the freedom of women is intrinsically rooted in the legal right to take the life of their children, or it’s not. No compromise possible between an empty manger and an infant in swaddling clothes. Between a stainless-steel medical waste bucket left in a surgical suite and a bassinet in a warm lighted room attended by love. Between courageous hope triumphant and a desperate fear succumbed to; between sacrificial love and power enforced with violence; between the ‘choice’ of ‘bodily autonomy’ and a baby in a sheltered womb: between death and life.
What is most difficult to comprehend for me is that most friendly folks that I meet on both sides of every impossible issue are agreeable enough in conversation, seemingly acting in good faith, entertaining even, easy, funny, amicable, kidding in line at the supermarket, pleasant companions along the way if we stay off the tracks and third rails. Most are acting in good faith according to the lights of their tribe. Up close, we get along. On social media, on editorial pages, as talking heads on television, we are vicious and condemning. Why is that?
Rene Girard wrote extensively about the deep human tendency to scapegoat that we all share and how we off gas our unmanageable internal pressures by defining somebody other than ourselves as the reason for our misery. And we do it by groups. History is full of examples, and it occurs between countries or countries find their scapegoats internally. Scapegoats are fools, knaves, stupid, or evil or some combination thereof. For post WWI Germans, the Jews were the source of their troubles. For Marxists, it’s the capitalist oppressor. For Black Lives Matter members, it’s white supremacists. For conservatives, it’s progressives. For progressives, anyone in a MAGA hat. Girard wrote, “Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate.”
Does not that have the ring of authenticity?
Or as someone far wiser than I (or Dr. Girard for that matter) said so very long ago, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Matthew 7:3
“How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.” Mother Teresa [ii]
[i] The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
[ii] From the website of California Family
I’ve missed many bandwagons in my life. I missed buying in early with Enron. I missed investments with Bernie Madoff that could have made me rich. I completely missed the wave to be rich because I wasn’t born yet when Charles Ponzi schemed, won, then lost. (shown in his mug shot picture here).
millennia, and you can hold it in your hands. Heavy stuff. Gold also has intrinsic value as it is used in many industries for many purposes and can be formed into lustrous beautiful designs
The problem when an unregulated immature genius owns both a trading company and the exchange on which it trades is the mixing of money and the lack of controls. Be like an out-of-control Bill Gates owning Microsoft and NASDAQ, but with less oversight. In August, SBF was the wunderkind who last year cashed out $300 million burying it into his own maze of tax haven Bahamian bank accounts. He allegedly took and mixed investor’s money who traded on FTX with his corporation’s and used it to prop up Alameda, which had started to hemorrhage.
Years ago, I was on the road often in Maine and carried a pager. That was my introduction to being always on call. Prior to that, I would call my office for messages a couple times a day. I knew where the best payphones were in many towns and cities. My favorites were hanging on a wall by a table on which I could spread out necessary supporting documents and notes in a warm café with good coffee, free refills, and a tolerant owner. I kept the numbers of several of them in my planner and could schedule incoming calls.
In 1997 Sebastian Junger published his first major book.
Proponents dearly love to frame the conversation in superficially clever emotional terms (“Keep your rosaries off our ovaries.” Or “Our bodies, Ourselves.”) or some version of freedom necessary for women to succeed or marginalizing the pro-life position as religious ‘extremism.’ They decline the opportunity to conduct a reasoned moral argument. The syllogism looks like this: A.) It is always morally repugnant, and no justification exists to deliberately attack and destroy innocent human life. B.) A fetus is just another word for small developing human being. Therefore, C.) Deliberate killing of a human fetus is morally repugnant. No religion is required for the propositions or the conclusion. Some prominent atheists are pro-life advocates with arguments based on logic, science, and the existence of objective truth that is knowable.
The red pumper bounced onto the driveway of the large ante bellum colonial with siren blaring. The house had once served as an inn, and currently was occupied by a half dozen mostly benign refugees from other late sixties communes. The flames fully engaged the structure and were seen through the windows. Everyone got out.
A “domestic disturbance” was treated like this: no police involvement because they were too far away to help. Bia, a recent resident, had moved into an apartment next to a small store front downtown, where she opened up a sheet metal artisan shop, welding and cutting small decorative pieces sold at craft fairs. Her boyfriend was an odd, slender, bearded, pony tailed archetype prone to buckskin jackets, cowboy hats, silver buckles and a 14” Bowie knife carried in a sheath on his belt. Bia’s daughter was my daughter’s age, and they became friends during the few months since Bia arrived in town. In January, our phone rang about eleven one weeknight, long after our bedtime. She called because we were one of the few she had gotten to know. The boyfriend, whose name fades, let’s call him Jim, was drinking, smoking dope and hitting her. Could I come down to help? Sure, I agreed, groggily.
steed, well actually, an F150. What could be better for a chainsaw guy than getting to play knight errant? On the way to her place, I practiced some tough threat lines involving emergency rooms, reconstructive dentistry and eating through a straw, all of which turned out quickly to be completely inadequate to the situation. The denouement was less than noteworthy. Jim had fled out the back door on the snow over the ice of Lake Minnehonk. I followed his tracks into the dark, axe handle in hand, and found him seventy yards out on the ice in a tee shirt disconsolately sitting and shivering in the snow, his knife still in its sheath. I asked him if he had a place to go. He said he did, in Waterville. I told him that’s where he would be staying. He started to cry. Bia packed a duffle bag into his dented Saab with Boulder County Colorado plates, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him. I went home to bed; Rita was glad to see me.
Back in April, the sun rose earlier each day on the eastern horizon and set later and farther to the north on the western horizon until the summer solstice sprinted by on June 21st. The daylight prior to the solstice persists a few minutes longer each day in felicitous, tiny, precious increments. Early mornings are more welcoming, and evening sunsets linger. Here on our little island, the sun rises over the Sakonnet River or the Atlantic out on Sachuest Beach and sets over Narragansett Bay.
We often sit and pray after morning Mass in the Fatima grove across the driveway from our parish chapel. A week or so ago, we heard a loud rending of wood and a crash down the street. There had been no sound of saw or axe, just the destruction. Later we looked for the cause of the disturbance. A large weeping willow had split apart and two thirds of it blocked a nearby road. I thought of the old philosophical question from Dr. George Berkeley, an Anglican Bishop and philosopher in the 1600s, about a tree falling in the woods and whether it made a noise if there was no one there to hear it. It does.
No sophistry, no rhetoric, no emotional, political, jaded language about rosaries and ovaries, theocracy or state power or keep your hands off my uterus or any of the shopworn slogans, just this: Why does the big person get to kill the little person solely because the big person wants or even needs to do so? As a right?
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