On a daily basis, now, we see the rise of arrogance and belligerence in the world. It seems to be seasonal, and we're entering a new season of it. One of the most striking examples of this is the Philippines, where the sociopathic President Rodrigo Dutarte proudly advocates and oversees the murder of thousands by death squads and now -- surprise! -- finds himself at war in his home province against an uprising linked with ISIS. I read a story in The New York Times that quoted a civilian caught between these two murderous forces. It's the-same-old-story from the Vietnam War and other wars, including gang wars and police violence in places like inner city Chicago. Civilians caught in the crossfire. Donald Trump, of course, adores Mr. Duterte's authoritarian impulses, as he does Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's in Egypt and the Saudi royals on the Arabian peninsula. His connection with the authoritarian Vladimir Putin seems quite unsavory and somehow revolving around greed. How did it come about that the world should descend into this kind of seasonal maelstrom of overweening authority? Has it always been like this? And now with i-phones and everything connected on the internet we just have more access to information, making us more aware of how crazy life is? In exceptional American, we've deluded ourselves that being "ill-used by fate" -- what the Vietnamese heroine Thuy Kieu was stoically inured to -- is a very un-American fate. Faced with difficulty, we take charge, kick some ass and take some names. If things aren't going our way, we fake it and make things up. Then, we mobilize and drop huge bombs and kill people from 12,000 miles away while sitting in an air-conditioned cubicle sipping a Diet Coke, anticipating the end of our shift and going home to play with our kids and watch TV.
During Memorial Day ceremonies, I attended a reading of Martin Luther King's famous Riverside Church speech where he linked the Vietnam War with the Civil Rights Movement. Many believe this is why he was assassinated. It was chilling to hear the speech and recognize the resonances with our own insane time. He wanted to know where we in the US had gone wrong. Why didn't we support the liberation movements fighting to lift the yoke of colonial oppression in places like Vietnam? He was the rare case in 1968 in that he knew the history and he publicly articulated it: The anti-colonial liberation movement in Vietnam had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with our forces against the Japanese and, in 1945 when the war was won, had quoted our Declaration of Independence from colonial oppression in their declaration of independence document. For speaking this, the man was murdered.
I'm not as naà ¯ve as I was 50 years ago on that mountaintop overlooking the Cambodian border in Vietnam. I know the rise of a seasonal wave of Social Darwinism when I see it. We're probably closer to civil war in this country than at any time in modern memory. As is the nature of our times, this civil war may break out in "acts of terror" by "losers," as Donald Trump would say. In an unprecedented fashion, President Trump is playing hard to his core constituency, the people who mobbed to his speeches, people he'd stroke like a giant cat by hollering, "Punch him in the face!" when a heckler disrupted his words. He's abandoning sensible Republicans on things like the Paris Accords. He sucks up to Saudi Arabia and Israel, as he intentionally insults Germany, France and Europe. Established coalitions are being thrown into topsy-turvy confusion. Political factions, including the fragmented left, begin to wonder what strange bedfellow they should bunk up with. Corruption and war have crawled into our entertainment industry and found a lucrative home. We are becoming addicted to the i-phones we carry with us everywhere and becoming more and more lost in the world of the internet, which is becoming a major crime scene and cold-war zone.
As a kid sitting atop that huge mountain in the midst of the most beautiful terrain imaginable, the Se San River winding its way through it like a golden snake, I could never have imagined the leadership of America that had sent me there to help kill Vietnamese would eventually lead us to the cataclysmic condition we're now living through. And let's not delude ourselves: While not letting others off the hook, American leadership is implicated profoundly in the current disastrous state of the world. The slow-motion train wreck we read about on a daily basis makes me nostalgic for that simple meeting west of Hanoi, fueled by terrible, home-brewed beer, with a former enemy who years earlier would have wanted to kill me, and vice versa, because, in that case, my leaders could not find the humility to sit down and work out their problems with his leaders.
A Vietnam vet friend of mine tells me I should apply for PTSD status. Maybe it's because of my brother and so many friends who served in the infantry that I feel it would be wrong. I really don't feel I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I feel that the spirit of social Darwinism and war has become so intense that everybody in our culture suffers from war stress. What I have is Survival Guilt and POCS: Pissed-Off-Citizen-Syndrome. Bill McKibben, the environmentalist leader who founded 350.org, said it best in a Times op-ed following President Trump's abandonment of the Paris Accords. He cited the "dysfunctional American political process" as the cause of our problem. That problem, he wrote, isn't "because [Trump] didn't take climate change seriously, but also because he didn't take civilization seriously."
We're being dragged into a Hobbesian world of war in which everybody is being pitted against everybody else. We're no longer imperially hunting the Vietnamese in far-away forests. Leaders like Trump are now fighting for themselves first and planning to search out and destroy those weaker and poorer than they are. The Resistance is growing and reaching into the mainstream. Maybe it's not too late to learn something from the Vietnamese about resilience and how to resist and survive the crushing of the cooperative spirit.
Finally, from The Tale of Kieu:
Roosters crowed at the moon. She walked and walked,
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