14 March 2004

It is the week of the anniversary of our military victory in Iraq and I am thinking about the strong strain of Puritanism in our collective lineage. It goes a long way to understanding our national intolerance It runs from the thundering moralists in New England like Cotton Mather to the fire-and-brimstone, snake-handling primitives of the South. Pleasure is wrong, and we will burn in hell for it.

I think that accounts for the notion that having a good time suspicious, and leads to things like Prohibition. If we think today that the USA Patriot Act threatens our individual liberties, take a look at the Volstead Act that put teeth in the 18th Amendment sometime. We are split right down the middle on just about everything as a nation. The Democrats are frothing at the mouth about the President. It reminds me of the French who muttered "Better Hitler than Blum" before the Second World War. Can't blame them, I suppose. They were tired from having the First War fought in their national living room.

It is that whole Red-Blue thing from the last election and it hasn't changed. It is a culture war, and I don't know how to address it.

When I was sent to War College I joined a seminar of earnest professional military officers and senior civilians from across the government. They were bright people and a fun group. But one day we got onto the subject of the oddly-named War on Drugs. Our class was split right down the middle on the issue of decriminalization. Some of us thought it was a straightforward question. You could call us the "Blue" side of the seminar.

Legalize, control, tax, we said. Eliminate the narco base that is destabilizing Latin America. Fund programs for addicts out of the taxes. Allow peaceful smokers to puff in peace and dismantle the huge machine to "prosecute" the war, and free the thousands of small-time non-violent users we are warehousing in our vast prison system under mandatory sentencing guidelines. We would reap savings and taxes.

The other half of the class was aghast. The topic seemed on the verge of rupturing the camaraderie of the seminar. The "Red" side of the room was resolute in the notion that drug use was wrong. It had to be resisted on every front, regardless of the fact that interdiction seemed to be a losing cause, and was undermining our notion of privacy and property. It had to be stomped out, this human desire to feel good, and if that meant putting up with the crime that attends the maintenance of an illegal habit, the blight and the slide into anarchy of Latin America, that was just too bad. There could be no surrender to this immoral conduct.

I was reminded about the other live wire of American public life. It used to be Social Security that could not be discussed in a rational political discourse, but that is child's play compared to the issue of Abortion.

If you speak to a pro-choice person, the issue is about individual liberty and personal choice for women and family planning. Speak to an opponent and you are talking about murder.

Stark, simple, black and white. No compromise and no surrender.

We lived across the street from a catholic Navy family when I blundered into what I thought was the gray zone of how hard the choices were. Abortion should be the last resort of family ploanning, and "It's an awful choice to have to make," I opined. "But it is a choice that is up to the woman, her partner and her physician and none of my business."

To the nice folks across the street I suddenly became an accomplice to murder for even harboring such views, and our relationship cooled markedly.

I don't talk about it anymore, since it is a no-win discussion. People either agree with you or they think you are an apostate.

There is a strain of this in the war news, too. They say that a committed Christian who wears his faith on his sleeve could not be elected most other places in the West. I don't know. It seems to make the blue side of the country a little nervous.

So the news this morning is five more dead kids in Iraq, more bombing, more carnage. The big troop rotation has been nearly completed, and we have a whole cast of novices in the combat zone. They will have a steep learning curve. The radio murmurs about the rescue workers hearing the cell phones going off in the pockets of the dead. It was the same mechanism that the assholes used to detonate the devices. They found one gym bag filled with explosives coupled to a cell phone. It was set to the "alarm" feature and the terrorists had screwed it up, just the way I do when I try to operate some of the advanced features on my phone which do not include high explosives.

Naturally, most of the physical evidence in these bombings is vaporized. The SIM card was intact on this phone and this morning, sixty hours after the attack, four Moroccan and two Indian men are in custody.

Whether the video from al Qaida is legit or not, we will soon enough have the truth about who is responsible. I hope there is someone from the Franco era who can be called out of retirement to manage the debriefing.

The question at hand is how this will affect the Spanish General Election. The Norwegians, bless them, have come across some internet documents that suggest the attack was part of a strategic plan to change Spain's commitment to the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq. There is a strong stain of isolation in the Spanish electorate, a natural reaction to a heritage of imperial conquest, I suppose, and intensified by the isolation of the only fascist regime to survive World War Two.

The conservatives were supposed to be a couple points ahead before the attack, and the voting is heavy today.

It is always easier to be an after-the-fact commentator, but I will give it a go today. It is Sunday, after all, and the excitement about the announcement of the brackets for the NCAA Basketball Tournament will happen later today and sweep this story from the front page.

I know what I would do. I would march down to the poll and cast my vote for a strong, vigorous response to the terrorists, roll them all up and hurl them into the sea the way the old Spanish ousted the Moors from Iberia in the Reconquista. Osama remembers, and talks of it frequently in the ebb and flow of Islamic history. He has the luxury of living in the 14th century and has someone else make his cell-phone calls.

But I am an American, and there is a strong streak of intolerance in me.

I think the Spanish will take the other course. I think they will vote to retreat, bring the troops home and try to ride this one out away from the center stage as a supporting player to the American colossus.

But I could be wrong. I did not have to pick through the wreckage and hear the cell phones go off in the pockets of the dead. That is not a Blue issue, only one of Red.

A sea of it.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra