by Roy Scranton
But as I sat over my vodka on my last night in Iraq, looking back at my service there and considering what I’d seen and what I’d heard, especially from Iraqis themselves, I realized it didn’t matter what we’d intended. What mattered was what we’d done. We’d invaded a sovereign nation on a pretense, fucked up the lives of thirty million people, started a bitter, bloody civil war by pitting one religious sect against another, then left and pretended it had nothing to do with us. We’d helped strengthen fundamentalist religious extremists in the Middle East and put intellectuals, journalists, and activists at risk. A few people made a whole bunch of money, and a whole nation was left in shambles. Whether or not breaking Iraq into pieces had been a deliberate plan from the beginning, as some evidence suggests, the war had been nothing but a murderous hustle. The politicians who ran the war had shown no higher ideals than robbery and plunder, and I’d been nothing but their thug.
As an historical agent in the vast, crooked enterprise that was the Iraq War, I had helped cause immense suffering, and I had profited by it. I had let it happen, and I had made it happen. And when I thought of the pride I’d taken in my service, the combat pay I’d spent vacationing in Paris, London, and Berlin, and the blood money that had bought my college education, holding them up against the lives I’d seen shattered by violence, the hopes I’d seen trampled, and the dreams for a better future I’d seen starved by neglect and choked by frustration, I could feel nothing but disgust and shame for having been an American soldier.
The night was growing late. Ayman brought out his bottle of arak and I poured myself a shot for the road, then stumbled out through the gate and back to my hotel. When I woke in the morning, still wearing my clothes from the night before, it took me a while to register where I was and what I was doing. Blue predawn light filtered through the gap in the curtains. I was leaving Iraq again.
Ahmed picked me up downstairs. Traffic was light and the city quiet. As we drove to the airport, we passed the winged statue marking its entrance.
I pointed out the statue to Ahmed: “I always remembered that angel.”
“Abbas ibn Firnas,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s not an angel. That’s Abbas ibn Firnas.”
Abbas ibn Firnas, it turned out, was a Berber-Andalusian inventor, poet, and musician who lived in the Caliphate of Córdoba—what is now southern Spain—in the ninth century. He had made the first recorded attempt at glider flight in Europe, using wings fashioned from vulture feathers. Firnas had built his wings, Ahmed told me, to escape prison.
As my plane rose into the sky, I watched Iraq fall away below. Five thousand years ago, this precise stretch of land, the fertile crescent running west along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, had been the birthplace of Western civilization. Twelve hundred years ago, it had been the heart of an empire spanning from Kabul to Tunis. Two hundred years from tomorrow, after the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world have been pumped dry and burned, it may finally see peace. [2014]
The Fantasy of American Violence
For a long time after I came home from the war, fireworks made me jumpy. They sounded like what they are, shrieking rockets and exploding gunpowder, and every Fourth of July set off Alert Level Yellow. I’d crack another beer and try to laugh it off, even as the friends I was with turned into ghosts of the soldiers I once knew.
Thirteen years ago, I spent the Fourth of July on the roof of a building in Baghdad that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Our command had suspended missions for the day, set up a grill, and organized a Star Wars marathon—the three good ones—in an old auditorium. But George Lucas’s lasers couldn’t compete with the light show playing out across Baghdad, and watching a film about the warriors of an ancient religion rising up from the desert to fight a faceless empire seemed, under the circumstances, perverse.
So instead of A New Hope, I watched scenes from Operation Iraqi Freedom: tracers, helicopters, distant explosions in a modern city under an increasingly senseless occupation. I could see the United Nations compound that would get bombed later that summer. I could see the memorial to the soldiers who had died in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, a giant turquoise teardrop sliced in two. I could see Sadr City, the wire-crossed slum that would give birth to Shiite death squads, and the Green Zone, where American proconsuls forged a new Iraq.
I was a Bicentennial baby, born in 1976; Star Wars was the first movie I saw, strapped in a car seat at the drive-in, and the film implanted deep in my infant subconscious a worldview, an idea of justice, and the desire to wield a light saber, all growing entangled as I grew older with the Bicentennial celebrating the American Revolution—another story of scrappy rebels fighting a mighty empire.
Star Wars managed a remarkable trick. Two years after the fall of Saigon and America’s withdrawal in defeat from a dishonorable war, Mr. Lucas’s Wagnerian space opera recast for Americans the mythic story so central to our sense of ourselves as a nation.
In this story, war is a terrible thing we do only because we have to. In this story, the violence of war has a power that unifies and enlightens. In this story, war is how we show ourselves that we’re heroes. Whom we’re fighting against or why doesn’t matter as much as the violence itself, our stoic willingness to shed blood, the promise that it might renew the body politic.
The literary historian Richard Slotkin called this story the myth of regeneration through violence, and he traces it from the earliest Indian captivity narratives through the golden age of the Western, and it’s the same story we often tell ourselves today. It’s a story about how violence makes us American. It’s a story about how violence makes us good.
Looking out over Baghdad on the Fourth of July, I saw the truth that story obscured and inverted: I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.
Did it really take going to Baghdad to learn this? Hadn’t I read about the campaigns against the Cherokee, Nez Percé, and Sioux, the long war against Philippine independence, and the horrors of Vietnam? My grandfather served on a Swift Boat in the Mekong Delta, though he never talked about it; hadn’t trying to fill in his silence taught me about free-fire zones, My Lai, and hospitals full of napalmed orphans? The bloody track of American history, from slavery to genocide to empire, is plain for all to see. But reckoning with the violence itself was the appeal: I thought I could confront our dark side, just like Luke Skywalker, and come away enlightened.
Veterans and pundits often talk about the military-civilian gap. So few Americans serve, they say, that most of the nation doesn’t have any sense of what that service means. This is superficially true. The military is a professional subculture with its own rituals, traditions, and jargon. There’s a military-civilian gap, just as there’s a police-civilian gap, an oil rigger–civilian gap, a barista-civilian gap. But that’s not what these vets and pundits mean.
What they’re really claiming is that veterans know something civilians don’t understand or can’t imagine, and that this failure of imagination is a failure of democracy, a failure of dialogue, a failure to listen. What they mean is that veterans have learned something special through their encounter with violence, and civilians need to hear that sacred knowledge. This is where talk about the military-civilian gap goes awry.
The truth is, most Americans understand what our soldiers do very well. They understand that American troops are sent overseas to defend American political and economic interests, wreak vengeance on those who have wronged us, and hunt down our enemies and kill them. There is no gap there. The American military has a job, and most of us, on some level, understand exactly what that job is. The American soldier or marine is an agent of American state power.
The real gap is between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases a
nd corrupts.
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, American troops were deployed throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia for reasons that were confused then and remain dubious today, but on some unconscious level the myth of violence was at work, promising that waging war abroad would heal the wounds borne that day. We might have to get our hands dirty, but that trial itself would prove our commitment to American values. As George W. Bush said when we invaded Iraq (even though it had nothing to do with 9/11), “We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And we will prevail.”
That’s not how things would turn out, as wiser heads warned at the time, but in the frightened months after 9/11, the myth of violence was more powerful than the truth of war. As an American soldier in Iraq, I was both caught up in that myth and released from it: I could see what “the work of peace” really looked like, what American violence did to Iraqi homes and bodies, yet it remained my job to be an agent of that violence—a violence that neither redeemed nor enlightened.
On this Fourth of July, amid a crucial presidential election campaign, while American violence continues to rain down on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, as we continue to support violence in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and elsewhere so as to get a better price on oil that we then burn and dump into the atmosphere, precipitously heating the planet, we should ask ourselves what we’re really celebrating with our bottle rockets and sparklers.
There is another version of America beyond the noise our fireworks make: not military strength, but the deliberate commitment to collective self-determination. Perhaps this Fourth of July we could commemorate that. Instead of celebrating American violence, we might celebrate our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the ideals those documents invoke of an educated citizenry deciding its fate not through war but through civil disagreement. Instead of honoring our troops, whose chief virtues are obedience and aggressiveness, we could honor our great dissenters and conscientious objectors. And instead of blowing things up, maybe we could try building something.
It’s our choice. We make our myths. We show by our actions what our holy days mean. Forty years after the American Bicentennial, thirteen years after standing on a rooftop in Baghdad and ten years after getting out of the army, I won’t be out under the fire, cheering our explosions. I won’t be watching Star Wars, either. My America isn’t an empire or a rebellion, but an ideal; it’s not a conquest, nor a liberation, but a commitment. [2016]
III.
Violence
& Communion
The Terror of the New
In 2001, German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen caused an international scandal when he made the following remarks about the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center:
Well, what happened there is, of course—now all of you must adjust your brains—the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practice ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn’t do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers.1
Critics denounced these remarks and sought to explain them by reference to Stockhausen’s characteristic megalomania, his occasional claims to have been educated in the distant star system Sirius, and the many controversies marking his long career as one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times took a more theoretical tack, charging Stockhausen with a failure to distinguish between art and life: “Art may be hard to define,” Tommasini wrote, “but whatever art is, it’s a step removed from reality.” He went on:
A theatrical depiction of suffering may be art; real suffering is not. Because the art of photography often blurs this distinction, it can make us uncomfortable. Real people, sometimes suffering people, have been photography’s unwitting subjects. That’s why we have photojournalism, to keep things clearer. The image of a naked, fleeing, napalm-burned Vietnamese girl is truth, not art. Images of the blazing twin towers, however horrifically compelling, are not art.2
Tommasini’s argument, though expressing a common sentiment, remains unconvincing. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which includes among its documentary transcriptions radio reports of the attacks of September 11 and was inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1962–1963 series of painted silk-screened photographs of car crashes, disasters, and suicides, is only the readiest example of “real suffering” that is also art. Nina Berman’s photographs of Marine Sergeant Ty Ziegel’s horrifically disfigured face and crippled body—you may remember her iconic photograph of Ziegel and his bride—are another. Berman’s photos of Ziegel were featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and have been exhibited widely in galleries and museums across the world. Whatever their putative truth content, Berman’s photos are both “horrifically compelling” photographs of an actually suffering person and aesthetically crafted objects exhibited in museums for the pleasure and edification of audiences. They are both “real” and “art.”
Anthony Tommasini is a prestigious critic and has written for the New York Times for many years. It is unimaginable that he is ignorant of the robust, long-lived tradition of innovative art practice that works to blur the line between reality and art. He may well not consider the work of Chris Burden, the Viennese Actionists, Karen Finley, and Marina Abramovitch to be art, but he must know that others do. Thoughtless Tommasini may be, but not naïve. Rather than consider him merely thoughtless, however, I would argue that Tommasini is stretching his argument not because he really believes art is divorced from reality, nor because human suffering is a forbidden subject, but because Stockhausen’s comments reveal discomfiting resonances between modern ideologies of art and the use of political violence.
Stockhausen had the sort of ego that would have scorned the idea that between artists and audiences there is any kind of equivalence. Such a genius knows better than his or her readers, listeners, and viewers, and moreover has an obligation to educate them, even and especially if this includes shocking them out of their preconceptions. The creator leads, the audience follows. Moreover, the artist’s role is explicitly rebellious, revolutionary, anticonventional—if not to épater les bourgeois or transform consciousness, at the very least to “think outside the box.” Stockhausen was right, in his way, to connect the violent resistance of al Qaeda to the Luciferan—or Satanic—rebellion so central to modern conceptions of aesthetic production. There is a line from Blake to Baudelaire to Kathy Acker, and that line connects de Sade, Duchamp, Stephen Daedalus, Wagner, Nietzsche, Dada, Andy Warhol, and The Threepenny Opera.
While I do not think anyone could reasonably argue that this tradition of Satanic modernism leads directly to Osama bin Laden, Stockhausen’s understanding of 9/11 as a work of art fits within a broadly high-modern conception of innovative aesthetic production. Theodor Adorno’s analysis of aesthetic autonomy buttresses this. For Adorno, the work of art—and especially the new work of art—manifests an immanent presence that by its very existence performs a negation, critique, and transformation of the social world from which it is created. Consider the following:
The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed.
Art is the social antithesis of society.
Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger.
Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants.3
Such statements are characteristic of a terror aesthetic in which art opposes contemporary society with
formal and conceptual, if not physical, violence. Stockhausen, indeed, was not the first to suggest kinship between terrorism and art. In Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II, the novelist Bill Gray asserts, “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”4 Nor were Stockhausen and DeLillo the last. Hilary Plum’s novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets addresses this very question, in its lyrical meditation on the limits of both writing and bombing as ways of “altering the inner life of a culture.”
It remains doubtful whether early twentieth-century avant-gardes, much less DeLillo’s novelist’s “raids on human consciousness,” ever achieved the spectacular power Stockhausen dreamed of or the philosophical force Adorno attributed to them. Art, innovative or not, does or does not make anything happen, on a scale of decades, and in ways so complex and difficult to pin down it might take a master artist to depict them. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, describes the infamous opening night of The Rite of Spring by focusing on Guillaume Apollinaire and the way he held his handkerchief. A seminal moment of aesthetic innovation is represented not as a spectacular event, but as background to a functionally metonymic detail. Modernism is condensed into a gesture. The part is the whole, and vice versa.