Abraham Lincoln, 1848, inveighing on Polk’s war with Mexico:
Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy—he plunged into war.
Plus ce la change….
Vonnegut, in 2005:
Also Vonnegut, also in 2005:Killing industrial quantities of defenseless human families, whether by old-fashioned apparatus or by newfangled contraptions from universities, in the expectation of gaining military or diplomatic advantage thereby, may not be such a hot idea after all.
Does it work?
Its enthusiasts, its fans, if I may call them that, assume that leaders of political entities that we find inconvenient or worse are capable of pity for their own people. If they see or at least hear about fricasseed women and children and old people who looked and talked like themselves, maybe even relatives, they will be incapacitated by weepiness. So goes the theory, as I understand it.
Anyone who believes that might as well go all the way and make Santa Claus and the tooth fairy icons of our foreign policy.
By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country, 20th Anniversary Edition, Seven Stories Press, 2005. pp. 74, 76.
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