Understanding America, the wounded land
Published on: Sunday, May 28, 2023
By: David C C Lim
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US troops leaving Afghanistan.
“The Wounded Land” speaks of this sensitive European-American writer’s tender feelings for his adopted country as he traversed it with his wife and experienced America as an outsider. Habe, a Hungarian, had fought for France at the start of the Second World War and became an American citizen in 1941. A successful novelist and social commentator, Habe’s “Our Love Affair with Germany”, has been selected by scholars as being “culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”(quote from The Book Depository).
They were travelling from New York towards California in a luxurious railcar and having a late breakfast in the cabin when news came over the in-cabin radio that John Kennedy had been shot in Texas, the state they had just visited. The couple was stunned. They had met the young president the month before in New York City. They were impressed with his positive and uplifting ideas for his country. Passing through the South earlier, they had seen posters calling the Kennedys ‘communists’, and for them to be ‘knocked out.’ The bile against the couple in public was shocking, but they had never thought it would end in the murder of the president.
Hurrying to the dining cab to share the news with his fellow passengers, Habe found only cool indifference.
“Isn’t it frightful,” he said to the black waiter, who nodded and asked if he would like French or English mustard.
Habe and wife had been travelling westward towards Hollywood in conjunction with the launching of his book, ‘The Countess’. On this journey he met with Americans from New Yorkers and northern blacks in Harlem, to white supremacists and southern blacks in the Deep South, and, in the vast state of Texas, wealthy oilmen.
Habe notes the smallest details as he passed through each of the states on his way west, but it is his unerring insights into the American milieu that are significant; time-tested, one striking observation remains curiously telling sixty years on:
“But this land of America is so huge…it fashions its own natural phenomena, its storms and hurricanes, cloudbursts and snow blizzards. This Nature without a God has produced and molded human beings different from those whom we know, tougher, simpler, their eyes fixed on distant horizons…They are resolved to remake humanity in their own image…ready to face the unexpected and armed to meet it, pressing forward always, for good as for evil…”
It was a fresh eye-opening description of the America as Habe found it in 1963; an historical snapshot of a land and its people at the threshold of cataclysmic change. Reflecting on the wide expanse of the Midwest where he was born, distinguished diplomat, scholar, writer and political commentator George F. Kennan, writes:
“I came to see this native region as a great slatternly mother, sterile when left to herself yet immensely fruitful and creative when touched by anything outside herself.”
There appears to be a consensus between the two writers on the nascent greatness of the American nation. Although to Kennan there was a ‘sense of essential decency and moral earnestness’ in the energy, Habe could detect no such virtue or constraint in the efflorescence of that greatness.
The America we know today appears to be the result of the ‘resolution to make or remake humanity in their own image’ by its ’tougher and simpler’ people as observed by Habe. The transformation had not always been for the benefit of humanity motivated as it were by self interest and the sense of pride and self entitlement.
Kennan himself appears later to become disillusioned with his country. He was depressed with the bi-partisan support for the Vietnam War which he knew would lead to ‘further loss of life, more expense and more taxes, further bitterness and demoralization among the youth, further neglect of domestic problems.’ He decided, ‘in the interest of his disposition, to avoid as far as possible confrontation with American life.’(The Kennan Diaries, George F. Kennan, edited by Frank Costigiola, Norton & Co., 2014.) Yet, he could hardly maintain the attitude as he was to live to a hundred, and to witness further wars and the inconsistency and inconstancy of America’s fortune and policies.
Writing in 1984 and from a better perspective after the Vietnam War, accomplished writer and historian Barbara Tuchman (Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age (1956);; The Guns of August (1962) The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War (1965) A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978)) identified the source of this American hubris that Habe had sensed:
“[The] illusion of omnipotence…that American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from the can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from World War II.” “ (The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam , Barbara Tuchman, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1984.)
According to Tuchman, it explains America’s decision to move troops into Vietnam even after witnessing the bloody defeat of the French forces in Dien Bien Phu. The feeling was that Americans could do better, ignoring French General LeClerc’s warning that it would take half a million men, and, ‘Even then it could not be done’.
Tuchman added, “Wooden-headedness, the ‘Don’t- confuse- me- with- the- facts’ habits, a universal folly never more conspicuous than at the upper levels of Washington with respect to Vietnam.” This ‘arrogance of power’ says Tuchman, ‘was the failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill!’ (The March of Folly).
Wooden-headedness, it seems, has prevailed to this day. The bitter lesson of defeat in Vietnam was not learned, and not because there was no awareness or want of the desire to learn from experience. The influential periodical, The Foreign Affairs, (No.22, 2005) featured an article by Melvin Laird, Defense Secretary under Richard Nixon entitled, ironically,‘ Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam.’
Ironically too, it was only after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan (2014-2018) that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction interviewed hundreds of veterans of the war in a confidential project known as ‘Lessons Learned’. (The Afghanistan Papers, Craig Whitlock, Simon and Schuster, 2021.)
The Afghanistan Papers contains a condensation of the comments and criticisms of the interviewees in the project obtained, together with the hand-written notes of the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, only after the author filed a lawsuit under the ‘Freedom for Information Act’. The author also reviewed the stories told in the ‘Oral- History’ project conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
What the book contains has been described as ‘a searing indictment of the deceit, blunders and hubris of senior military and civilian officials, with the same tragic echoes of the Vietnam Conflict.’ (Reviewer Tom Bowman of the National Public Radio (NPR)). Apparently the lessons of Vietnam have not been learned.
A recent study by Brown University on the costs of the wars post 9/11 found that close to nine trillion dollars was spent, and the cost in terms of lives directly and indirectly due to the wars amounts to around 4.5 million deaths. The costs of the present war in Ukraine have not been factored in.
As wars and skirmishes continue to take their toll on American lives or resources to this day, one wonders how much of that could be put down to ‘wooden-headedness and ‘arrogance of power’ and how much to financial interests.
Tuchman knew that it was not simply the urge to solve problems and conflicts that motivates America to engage in adventurism overseas. Nor was it goodwill. It was rather the overweening power that the Pentagon now has. Reviewing the budget of the military, a decade after Vietnam, she concludes:
“When military and military–connected interest penetrate government to [the extent of controlling funds], the government becomes more or less the prisoner of the Pentagon.” (Practicing History, Barbara Tuchman, Knopf 1983 )
In a letter written in 1988, Kennan commented on the role of the Pentagon in the Cold War that remains relevant to this day:
“…the CIA and the Pentagon – appears to live and act on the assumption that we are either at war with Russia or about to be.”
And in 1997 he foresaw the trouble that would come with the deliberate expansion of NATO: “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period. I feel I should state that view publicly.”
Wars can also be senseless, as billionaire investor and author, Ray Dalio puts it in “The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail”, Simon and Schuster, 2021:
“Stupid wars often happen as a result of a tit-for-tat escalation process in which responding to even small actions of an adversary is more important than being perceived as weak, especially when those on both sides don’t really understand the motivations of those on the other side.”
Tuchman does not leave out the role of the media in pushing the lunacy of war on the nation. As she sees it, television feeds the president’s personality and ego needs and this in turn could be exploited by the war machine:
“Because his image can be projected before fifty or sixty million people, the image takes over and it becomes an obsession. He must appear firm, he must appear dominant, he must never on any account appear ‘soft’, and by some magic transformation which he has come to believe in, he must make history’s list of ‘great presidents’.” (Practicing History.)
The Afghanistan Papers gives an example of the military feeding the ego of the president in its account of George W Bush’s short flight in a Navy Plane marked ‘Navy 1’ helmeted and in a flight suit to the Aircraft Carrier ‘Abraham Lincoln’ offshore California. Bush then changed into a business suit to address the crew, and the world, and filmed dramatically against a glorious sunset, boasted of having accomplished his mission in Iraq.
“Irony in history is inexorable,” says Tuchman. The Wounded Land tells of how dangerous it could be for a president not to follow the script produced by the war machine and its cronies in the intelligence agencies. Habe, writing in the early sixties had even then sensed that antagonism.
He explains how a president can be loved and hated with equal passion, and be murdered in a motorcade escorted by outriders and the secret service, in broad daylight before hundreds of people; how a whole nation could be hood-winked into believing that the killing was the deed of a lone gunman with a mail-order Italian- made rifle.
“It was a political murder,” Habe concludes with uncanny prescience, given that the incident had just happened:
“[Kennedy] was murdered because he could not…prevent ex-generals, enemies of the state, warmongers, and armaments-profiteers from propagating hatred in the newspapers, at meetings, on the radio, and on television, and from using these mass-media like giant hypodermic syringes with which to inoculate the masses of the people.”
To Habe, the culture and elegance that the Kennedys brought to the White House, Habe, drew the ire, not admiration for the couple in Washington, another reason why the Kennedys were hated:
“Luxury is a purchasable commodity, elegance is not, and in the Washington of the Kennedys, money had been dethroned. Dethroned were the wives and the widows of millionaires who had hitherto held the social scepter or wielded the social axe. Dethroned too were the wives of the generals or of Middle-Western Senators…And finally the Texas oil magnates were dethroned.”
He adds, “Now I understood the fury of Society and the hatred with which they spoke of John and Jacqueline Kennedy.” The old, white and wealthy did not take kindly to being put in their place.
Habe was closer to the truth than he knew.
Sixty years on, after thousands of books have been written on the assassination, some pushing, some de-bunking the so-called ‘conspiracy theories’, America’s Nobel Laureate singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan released the song ‘Murder Most Foul’ in the depths of despair and despondency in America in the time of the pandemic, and after the election of Biden which was seen as a triumph for the establishment, and business-as-usual Washington.
The song, a haunting narration accompanied by soft piano and mournful strings in the background, seems sometimes to channel JFK, and sometimes his killers:
“He said, ‘Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?”
“Of course, we do, we know who you are”
“Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car.”
“We already got someone here to take your place.”
‘Murder Most Foul’ is the imprimatur of America’s greatest songwriter on the theory of a political murder, and it was a kick in the teeth of those who have derided and dismissed the ‘conspiracy theorists’. It finally planted the truth behind the murder firmly and indelibly into the cultural consciousness of America. David Talbot, author of ‘The Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years’ and The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government’ writes:
“I believe the ‘they’ Dylan is referring to is the high-level national security operation led by deposed CIA Director, Allen Dulles that targeted Kennedy who was trying to prematurely end the Cold War, and then engineered the cover-up of the crime.” (David Talbot, quoted in Salon’s article on the song, April 4, 2020.)
It was, in other words, a challenge to the Security State, it was like Dylan saying, ‘So there.’ For a full seventeen minutes the singer voiced the dead president’s thoughts, stuck in time as it were; a vision of the three tramps, racing to Parkland Hospital, and down the triple underpass. The disembodied voice also asks for songs and music likely known to him, to be played, and finally:
“Play ‘Darkness’ and death will come when it comes/ Play ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ by the great Bud Powell/ Play ‘The Blood Stained Banner’, Play ‘Murder Most Foul’.”
Talbot explains: “Dylan signaled that he was prompted to release this stunning song about America’s decline by the current pandemic, which has exposed the sickness and the corruption of our institutions and leadership.”
In December, 2022, news anchor, Tucker Carlson over live-television asked a trusted source familiar with the still classified CIA documents: ‘Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American president?’ The reply: ‘The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.’ (Reported in The Intercept, December 22, 2022.)
Carlson, who has also been a very vocal critic of the U.S. – Russia proxy war in the Ukraine was promptly sacked by, or ‘parted company’ with Fox News. The mainstream media support of the war in Ukraine it seems is unequivocal and would brook no dissent.
It is also remarkable that Habe had then compared the media to a giant hypodermic syringe, thereby anticipating the massive impact of the mass media on the psyche of the American people well before the internet age.
Kennan complains of the unseemly glee with which the news media, particularly television, greeted the onset of the Iraq War:
“What this [preparation for war] is doing has already acted like a burning match to dynamite for the American media, particularly television, which immerses itself delightedly in what it already perceives as a new war. I take an extremely dark view of all this - see it, in fact, the beginning of the end of anything like a normal life for the rest of us.”(George Kennan, A Study of Character, John Lukacs, Yale Univeersity Press, 2007.)
Kennan was right, the Wounded Land is now deeply divided. The familiar black-white, male-female, conservative - liberal divisions have splintered into dozens of very vociferous identity groups, each strongly advocating their causes, to the point of violence in many cases. The values and ideologies America has tried to export to, and impose on other countries, have come home to roost. They have infected their own homeland with more virulent variants; the intolerant culture of Wokeness, in which equality in everything is the mantra.
The young Dylan seemed to have a foreboding of the present tumult in American schools in his song, My Back Pages, written when he was 23:
“A self-ordained professor’s tongue, too serious to neglect; Spouted out that ‘liberty’ is just equality in school;
Equality, I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow.” (My Back Pages, Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964)
But legislative equality, says Habe, cannot solve the racial issue in America. It is the recognition, appreciation, empathy, and even love that Black America needs from the Whites. Racial crimes remain top of the crime statistics in America.
Reading Habe’s ruminations on the America that he found in 1963, one is not surprised that the once great beacon of hope is rapidly unraveling as rival groups consolidate their ideological positions and launch vicious and unrelenting attacks on their detractors. Those on the fringes of society are left to live their lives in a haze of despondency and danger lurks in the Wounded Land. No place is safe, be it a church, a school, a shopping mall, the subway or just on the sidewalk..
The New York Times now appears to acknowledge that perhaps all is not well in the land of the free:
“Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed”, a recent header reads. Writer Roxane Gay warns in the piece that it is ‘now increasingly not safe to be in public, to be human, to be fallible’. She cites cases of mindless shooting of innocent people in the public space; being killed as a result of turning into a wrong driveway or knocking on a wrong door, or generally of just rubbing people the wrong way. (The New York Times, 4th May, 2023).
“The conflict in the land,” says Carlson, “is not about politics. It is about the very moral foundation of our civilization.”
Political opponents have become political enemies, and no quarter is asked, or given and anything can be used to destroy your enemy, including once hallowed institutions. Politics have become a zero-sum game.
Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore recently in his post, ‘Rumble with Michael Moore’ (Episode 286), asserts that all Republican presidents since Eisenhower had committed treason against the United States. Moore’s Rogues’ Gallery includes Ronald Reagan who was revealed to have bribed Iranian officials with promises of weapons to keep the Americans in the Embassy in Tehran detained until after the 1980 election so as not to give President Carter an edge. Moore could not wait to include Donald Trump in the line-up.
As the Anatomy of Hatred shows, America has not changed much since the sixties; the sleaze and corruption and vicious victimization of one’s political opponents are all business as usual, albeit now taken to new heights. Habe observes:
“Corruption has become an institution, which is inevitable, since the whole social order would collapse if it were once admitted that not everything can be had for money. Every oil-magnate has a couple of tame judges upon whom he can rely, every tax-consultant “happens to know” a well disposed tax-collector, every night-club owner is on “old boy” terms with a few policemen. Some people earn their living as professional “alibi witnesses”.
In his final chapter, Habe sets in context the murder of John F. Kennedy, and in it, we see a land much like the present America which Kennedy had tried to change:
“John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered because he loved his country too well to love her blindly, because he knew the mistakes, the weaknesses, and the backwardness of his homeland , his people and the society in which he lived, because he respected education, demanded intelligence, and admired culture, despised stupidity, fought against illiteracy, mistrusted go-getters, as such….”
Strange as it may sound, American Hubris was predicted long before it assumed the mantle of a world superpower. Renowned healer, psychic and clairvoyant, Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) gave his final reading on the world powers in June, 1944 before his death in January, 1945:
“What is the spirit of America? Most individuals proudly boast, ‘freedom’. Freedom from what? When ye bind men’s hearts and minds through various ways and manners, does it give them freedom of speech? Freedom of worship? Freedom from want? Not unless those basic principle are applicable, for God meant man to be free..”
Today most of those freedoms are slowly being whittled away, through, Cayce says, ‘various ways and manners.’ These ‘ways and manners’ can only be the tenets of the Wokeness culture that has curbed many freedoms used to be enjoyed by the individual. Yet America still boasts of being the ‘land of the free.’
Cayce was also asked about the other nations. He says:
“What then of nations? In Russia there comes the hope of the world, not as that sometimes termed of the communistic, of the Bolshevik, no, but freedom, freedom! That each man will live for his fellow man! The principle has been born. It will take years for it to be crystallized, but out of Russia comes again the hope of the world. Guided by What? That friendship with the nation that hath even set on its present monetary unit ‘In God We Trust’ “
Note that Cayce had used as the name of the nation, ‘Russia’, though it was then widely known as the Soviet Union, and it set to pick up the mantle thrown aside by America. His ‘readings’ on the other nations are as surprising and challenging as they are insightful:
On England: “…from whence have come the ideas – not the ideals – ideas of being just a little bit better than the other fellow….that has been, that is, the sin of England.”
On France: “…to which the principle first appealed, to which then came that which was the gratifying of the desires of the body – that is the sin of France.”
On China: “The sin of China? Yea, there is the quietude that will not be turned aside, saving itself by the slow growth. There has been a growth, a stream through which the land in ages which asks to be left alone to be just satisfied wirh that within itself. It awoke one day and cut its hair off! This, here will be one day the cradle of Christianity, as applied in the lives of men. Yea, it is as far off as man can count time, but only a day in the heart of God – for tomorrow China will awake…”
On India: “Just as to India, the cradle of knowledge not applied, except within self. What is the sin of India? Self, and left the ‘ish’ off – just self.”
In a reading made to a two year old boy in 1944, Cayce predicted not peace after the World War, but that the boy would live to see ‘religious wars’ in his lifetime. Nations, like individuals, according to Cayce, are governed by spiritual laws which determine their character and their place in the world and the universe. (Edgar Cayce on Prophecy, Association for Research and Enlightenment Inc., 1968.)
Strange as it may seem also, the 18th president of the United States (1869-1877), General Ulysses S. Grant, had expressed the same belief.
The United States had coveted Mexican territory. It wanted to annex it, but did not want to be perceived as the aggressor or invader. Again with a touch of American hubris, this aggression for territory was seen as spreading the blessings of liberty and democracy to the less educated and racially inferior people south of the border. Grant admits:
“We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it….Mexico showing no willingness to come to the Nueces to drive the invaders from her soil, it become necessary for the ‘invaders’ to approach it within a convenient distance to be struck.”
Thus was the southern border shifted to the Rio Grande, and the huge swath of land stretching to the Pacific incorporated into the States. But there were consequences. It was an unjust war, and Grant, ‘the Civil War’s greatest general, was certain the U.S. was punished for it with a bloody and costly civil war that followed.
Writing during his last days while gravely ill in order to provide for his family’s uncertain financial future, he maintains:
“The Southern Rebellion [the Civil War] was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Personal Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant, First Published in 1885. The same playbook has been used in the Ukraine; arming the Ukrainians and encouraging them to attack ethnic Russians in the Donbas, thereby provoking a Russian invasion so that sanctions can be imposed following world-wide condemnation of the invasion. The lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan have been learned; this time America would send only money and arms and use its proxy to fight the war.
The whole world hopes that America realizes that there are consequences to the country for its acts. Sowing strife and dissentions overseas will only bring the same back to its own shores. Only then will the Wounded Land have a chance to heal, and with her healing, the rest of the world may then, and finally, live to prosper in peace and tranquility.
- The views expressed here are the views of the writer David C C Lim and do not necessarily reflect those of the Daily Express.
- If you have something to share, write to us at: [email protected]
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