[The Intercept] I WAS DRIVING home from a militia muster in the Virginia mountains last summer ‐ after another day immersed in preelection talk of civil war ‐ when I found myself reflecting, as I often have in the year since, on Norman Mailer's "The Armies of the Night."The book is about the 1967 anti-war protest at the Pentagon and, more broadly, the factionalizing unrest of that period and how Vietnam fueled it. It also explores how the quiet or mostly quiet acquiescence to horrors abroad, horrors carried out by U.S. troops in the name of an entire democratic nation, degrades a society. At one point, the narrator imagines himself encountering "Grandmother, the church-goer, orange hair burning bright" at a slot machine in Las Vegas. "Madame, we are burning children in Vietnam," he tells her. "Boy, you just go get yourself lost," she replies. "Grandma's about ready for a kiss from the jackpot."
The book turns its lens on the left as well, even on the anti-war protesters marching on the Pentagon. In its violent climax, as soldiers bludgeon young demonstrators in the night, Mailer cites an account that appeared afterward in the Washington Free Press, a newspaper founded by campus radicals. It was by Thorne Dreyer, then 22, who went on to a prolific career as a writer and activist. As the beatings commenced, Dreyer wrote, "I began to resent the ‘super-militants' who created so much pressure to stay. Because that was nothing but goddamn bourgeois politics. … People have to come to terms with what violence means. It's not something to groove on and cleanse your soul with."
I see a desire for violence as catharsis in many protesters on the left and right today and in the people cheering them on from their living rooms. It's an effect, I think, of the two full decades of war that Americans will mark on this year's September 11 anniversary, with the drone strikes and commando raids of the so-called war on terror carrying on in the background even as American soldiers leave Afghanistan and end their combat mission in Iraq. War, especially interminable war, does this to a nation. It makes people want to claim the sanctity of combat for themselves and to inject the stakes of conflict into their lives. The protesters at the Pentagon were there to stand against the violence of Vietnam, but some of them wanted a piece of that violence for themselves. They were jealous of the soldiers in that way; the war had infected them too. The difference with the post-9/11 wars is that there's no draft and there have been no corresponding liberal armies in the streets, at least not any focused on the nation's foreign conflicts. People crave the trappings of war more as they understand it less, and these modern wars, to a degree that would probably shock the people of Mailer's generation, have been absent from our collective political consciousness.
At the same time, all of us still know, in some perhaps unacknowledged part of our minds, that we each own a piece of the sublime suffering that has unfolded for 20 years on the frontiers of the American empire, the incinerated children and demolished cities, the service members coming home to die by suicide. Even those who never served have been grooving on the violence of the war on terror for years as armchair militants. Many Americans, like me, have never known adult life without it, growing up against the backdrop of terrorist threats, removing shoes at airports, invasion, occupation, Guantánamo Bay ‐ stakes we understand to be so terrible that the only answers are drone bombs, surveillance, civilian casualties. We've learned to put our morals on hold and ask forgiveness later as we assent to whatever it takes to extinguish the threat. We've become accustomed to labeling people as insurgents and terrorists, too, and to all the moral permissiveness these terms imply, moving us well beyond the orange-haired grandmother's passive assent.
And inevitably, it has all bent back on us. These wars have seeped into our lives and discourse in ways that color how we see not only the wider world but also our neighbors ‐ Muslims at first, then our political opponents. They've made Americans more war-like, opening our minds to ideas like collateral damage and unbounded conflict that are now taking hold in our politics.