#428: Lies Will NOT Set You Free

Sometimes several events converge into something like a prism that splits out the colors of our lives and offers us a clearer view of our reality.  February 2015—approaching the 12^th anniversary of the Iraq invasion-- brought one of those convergences.

First, Jon Stewart announced he was leaving The Daily Show later this year. Shortly after, his friend Brian Williams of NBC was caught fabricating elements of his news stories from Iraq. Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was climbing to #1 one as the top-grossing “war movie” of all time--just as the trial of Chris Kyle’s alleged killer approached its conclusion (the guilty verdict arrived as February ended).

When Williams’ deceptions surfaced, the commentary on The Daily Show was vintage Jon Stewart.  First, because Stewart had long proven that he would not spare his friends.  Second, because he once again found a way to wring insight out of humor--with a stinger of truth:

“Finally!” Stewart said.  “Finally someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War!”

This was no cheap laugh, since Stewart had been among our chief skeptics challenging public officials about Iraq since 2003. His viewers are well aware that he believed the war was mounted on a vast fabric of lies for which no one has ever been held to account.  Thus his joke about Williams’ echoed 12 years of commentary on the failure of U.S. media to hold our leaders in check. (You can see Stewart’s scathing commentary here: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/j3ware/guardians-of-the-veracity )

This also implied that Williams’ fabrications were part of a larger failure by the U.S. news media.  In retrospect, the image of Williams’ many appearances on Stewart’s “fake news” show now acquire a bitter, even tragic cultural irony: we now know that, as the comedian interviewed the newsman, it was the comedian who provided the honest truth and the news man who invented stories.  And Stewart’s popularity stems largely from his viewers belief that he is generally a more reliable source on public affairs than the so-called “news professionals.”

Certainly, the mainstream media (like NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN) in recent years have tended to fake objectivity by employing a strategy of “one side says this, the other side says that” to cover major controversies over public policy, while the partisan media (MSNBC, Fox News, talk radio) have tended to preach consistently and predictably to their respective choirs.

The result is that we no longer develop a public consensus about controverted issues, because no one offers a critical judgment on them.  So camp followers stay in their camps, and the mainstream news treats every question as a 50-50 proposition.  Thus, 12 years later--after the U.S. invaded a sovereign nation based on lies, paid for it on credit that exploded our national debt, killed 150,000 people, and triggered a hellish upheaval in Iraq that now includes ISIS--there is still no official public acknowledgment of guilt, shame, or remorse.

And Jon Stewart’s joke summarized this entire sorry truth like a prism showing us the true colors in our light.

This media failure enables bad public policy that costs lives, damages human rights, and promotes injustice and terror.  It also conditions the American public to take bad policy for granted and even accept rationalizations that label our policy mistakes “heroic” and label those who carry out that policy “heroes.” (No doubt such distortions are aided by residual guilt over the mistreatment of veterans returning from Vietnam 40 years ago.)

Thus the public is encouraged to confuse our veterans’ service with their accomplishments.  This masks the uncomfortable truth: yes, of course, our veterans have, by definition, served their country.  But that service has not accomplished what is generally claimed.  Has it protected us?  Not in Iraq, because there was no threat in the first place.  Has it preserved our freedom?  No again--and who thinks Americans are as free now as we were before 9/11?

Amid all this, American Sniper became a box office smash.  Based on social media reactions and media commentary, it appears most of the ticket sales are to viewers who see Chris Kyle as an American hero.  This has provoked liberal and left-wing rejection of the movie as “pro-war propaganda,” led Michael Moore (whose uncle was killed by a sniper in WWII) to remark “I was always told snipers were cowards,” and probably cost American Sniper many Oscar votes among the liberal Hollywood establishment.

CrossCurrents readers know my opinion that viewers often missed the real movie on the screen, instead projecting their own meaning onto the images they see  (see CrossCurrents #418 on the film “Gravity”).  This has clearly happened to millions of viewers of American Sniper.

Conservatives on the right see a story of bravery and dedication under fire to protect America from its dangerous enemies.  Liberals on the left see a glorification of war that fails to expose the lies about Iraq and promotes the fiction that our invasion protected us.

Both sides are blind to the movie itself.  Granted, some actions in it required bravery and dedication.  Granted, the movie totally ignores the historical and political context of the Iraq invasion.  But the truth is that for 2-plus hours American Sniper tells another story.

It shows us Kyle’s father praising his son for showing that he possesses “the gift of aggression,” and we sense the “kill or be killed” values in his upbringing.  It shows Kyle’s consistent denial of the inner struggle he suffers doing his job.  It shows his wife pleading with him to stay home, clearly conscious of the toll combat is taking on him.  Her one desire is for him to “be human again.”

What American Sniper reveals is the bleak reality of the damage war was does to the warriors.  As Boston Globe critic Ty Burr observed, “‘American Sniper’ may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it.”

Burr is right. The film may be SET in Iraq, but is not really ABOUT the Iraq war. It is about the experience of war itself. By ignoring the history, the politics, the arguments--even by ignoring the lies--Eastwood presents, not one particular war, but “WAR” as a generic reality in excruciatingly concrete detail. It echoes, with no little irony, the old 1960s slogan “The Real Enemy is War.” My wife and I left the theater a bit traumatized and not a little relieved to get out. Personally I would count it among the great antiwar imagery in movie history, along with “All Quiet On The Western Front,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon,” and even “M.A.S.H.”

But that does not explain the ticket sales, for we also worried that others would see a patriotic tale on the screen, rather than a cautionary tale.  Indeed, American Sniper’s success owes less to the reality Eastwood presents and more to the skewed expectations of his viewers.

Given our media failure, many people come to American Sniper assuming that the Iraq invasion was national self defense.  They admire Kyle’s technical skills and nerveless focus, and they accept his claim that he was merely killing to protect his buddies.  Such viewers forget that no sniper would be needed to protect our troops if our troops had not invaded in the first place.  They ignore Kyle’s own failure to reflect on his place in a fraudulent mission, content to function mechanically as a cog in the war machine.  And they miss Kyle’s denial of the toll his experience of war has taken on him.  When his wife shows alarm at her husband’s dehumanized state, her words and worry go unnoticed by such viewers.

Thus both liberals and conservatives miss the mark on American Sniper.  Liberals miss its dissection of the horror in all war because they’re too busy looking for a critique of the policies behind one war.  Conservatives miss the same horror because they project their acceptance of the fraudulent Iraq policy on the screen they are watching.  Thus liberals consciously lament something that is not there, and conservatives unconsciously add something that is not there--and they both miss what is there.

All this reflects our cultural malaise today.  We begin with bad policy from misguided leaders; this gets 50–50 treatment from an uncritical and unreliable media; this in turn conditions the public to accept distortions, deceptions, and outright lies.  So bad policy persists, heroes are praised, and God Blesses America at all our public events.

Amid such confusion, who will speak truth to power?  Who will call bad policy “bad policy”?  Who will say we disserve those who serve our country by sending them on bad missions?  Who will remind us that the real enemy is war?  Who will be our conscience?

The Hebrew prophets were once the conscience for their people. Many Christian saints (like Francis of Assisi) likewise spoke truth to the powers of their day.  Our Church attempts to offer wisdom to power in our day (two popes and Catholic bishops worldwide warned in 2003 that invading Iraq would “destabilize” the entire region), but our Church is too often ignored.

Perhaps the job has fallen to our comics.  Like the court jesters who once exposed kingly follies with humorous ridicule, satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert puncture the pretensions of the powerful and debunk our day’s conventional wisdom.  As Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan observed in his famous book Insight--A Study of Human Understanding:

Satire breaks in upon the busy day...It enters not by argument but by laughter.  For argument would presuppose premises, and premises that would be accepted easily also would be mistaken.  But laughter supposes only human nature…Moreover, as it is without logical presuppositions so it occurs with apparent purposelessness; and that too is highly important for, if men are afraid to think, they may not be afraid to laugh.  Yet proofless, purposeless laughter can dissolve honoured pretense; it can disrupt conventional humbug….Satire can help man swing out of the self-centeredness of an animal in a habitat to the universal viewpoint of an intelligent and reasonable being.

In doing this, our satirists make room for a reasonable critique that unmasks the lies America is living by.

Those lies will not set us free.  Nor will media that have abandoned their prophetic role because they themselves are now part of the corporate power structure.  Nor will an American public prone to patriotic platitudes.  So maybe for now we must rely on jokes to set us free, for those jokes can speak the truth no one else will.

All of which makes people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert national resources with whom God has blessed us. And it makes their departure unsettling. It leaves us wondering: when the emperor’s next new wardrobe arrives, who will joke about its fake fabric?

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015

#390 Revisited: The Blasts Heard ’Round the World

On the anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, I am re-posting the blog I wrote the day after. It remains my most-read posting.

Initial reflections  on the day after the bombs went off...

      Patriots day is perhaps the quintessential American holiday, even though (or perhaps because) it is celebrated only in Massachusetts.  It marks simultaneously the beginning of the end of Britain’s occupation of the American Colonies and the birth, in rebellion and blood, of a new country. 

The iconic images surrounding Patriots Day are familiar to all Americans.  “One if by land, two if by sea.” “The midnight ride of Paul Revere.” “The British are coming!  The British are coming!” The shot heard round the world.  The Minutemen. Lexington and Concord.

And so each year, just after dawn, the Redcoats arrive again at Lexington Green to be confronted once more by the local Minutemen.  A shot rings out, and a skirmish ensues.  Men on both sides fall, and the colonial militia is driven back, and the Redcoats proceed toward Concord.  But along the way the British troops are terrorized by the rebels harassing them along their route and sniping at them from behind trees and rocks.  Meanwhile tourists follow the rebels, clicking photos of the reenactment.  Local churches offer pancake breakfasts for the visitors.

Schools and most workplaces are closed, so baseball fans leave home early for the annual 11:00 Red Sox game.  With luck, the Red Sox will win and the game will end early enough for the Fenway faithful to stream into Kenmore Square in plenty of time to watch the runners passing by.

More than 20,000 of those runners begin their day early far from Boston in the small New England Town of Hopkinton.  They’ve come from all over the world, and the runners with numbers have qualified for Boston by running other marathons with impressive times.  For many years, Boston was the only non-Olympic marathon that required runners to qualify this way.  It is, after all, the oldest annual marathon in the world. It was a sacred tradition here long before marathon running became popular.

More than 200,000 fans line the streets along the 26-mile route from Hopkinton to Boston. Boston’s quarter-million college kids take Patriots day as an annual rite of spring, cheering on the runners while partying outside for the first time since football season.

Patriots Day is the day Boston’s cityscape finally returns to vibrant life after the relative quiet of the long cold New England winter. It is the day Bostonians remember why they are blessed to live here.

Given all this, the crowds along the entire length of the marathon course are unrivaled for numbers, enthusiasm, and hospitality. The day I observed the 100^th running with my youngest son, we joined hundreds of thousands of spectators cheering for passing runners for five hours until we had clapped our hands raw and yelled our voices hoarse. For participants, Patriots Day is the day Boston opens its arms to the world and offers a running experience no other marathon can match.

But Patriots Day 2013 was unlike any other.  In Lexington and Concord, the battle reenactments were long finished. The winners of the wheelchair races had finished; the women’s and the men’s winners (both from Africa) had already earned their victories, the Red Sox had already won a walk-off 10^th inning victory, and the mass of “weekend warrior” runners were approaching the finish line flanked by the world flags lining Boylston Street.

And then at 2:50 the bombs created a new kind of Boston massacre.  These truly were blasts heard ’round the world, since the heavy media presence guaranteed that the images and sounds of explosions would achieve global reach within minutes. It is hard to imagine a more symbolically-rich venue to attack. 

As of this writing, there’s no public information about who did this or why.  But as shock gives way to outrage, two difficult truths are worth keeping in mind.

First, while the victims were innocents (including a family from my own Dorchester neighborhood) we should not project their innocence onto ourselves as a collective nation. It is tempting to pretend that such villainy is only for “others,” that we are only the victims and never the perpetrators of violence, and that America never attacks innocent victims. This is, unfortunately, just not true.

In fact, American has proved especially prone to using revenge as a pretext for killing innocents. After Pearl Harbor took nearly 2000 American lives, Harry Truman thought the Japanese got their just deserts when our atom bombs killed more than 100,000, mostly civilians—and most Americans agreed. When 9/11 killed nearly 3,000, Many Americans accepted the death of more than 150,000 Iraqis (mostly women and children) as just vengeance. We Americans are proven masters of overwhelming retaliation. Perhaps some of us are proud of that, but we cannot pretend we do not have blood on our hands.

Even now our country inflicts suffering on innocent victims. Some even make the case that American violence is the evil twin of the Boston bombing: http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/the-boston-marathon-and-u-s-drone-attacks-a-tale-of-two-terrorisms/ . So while our outrage is certainly justified, we do well to avoid becoming self-righteous about our place in a violent world.

Second, while the perpetrators of the marathon bombing must be caught and punished, we should resist thinking that destroying all evil-doers will solve the problem of terror and violence in our world.

For Christians, this is an impossible dream. We believe we belong to a fallen humanity, a race who by nature can never completely purge evil from our midst. We can never destroy all the bad guys, for there will always be more of them in the next generation.

This means that true security only comes when we learn how to deal with evil even while knowing we cannot eradicate it.

This is, of course, what Jesus meant by his terrifying saying “Love your enemies.” He and his followers believed—and still believe—that evil and violence are NOT the strongest powers in our world, that retaliation is not the ultimate solution, and that there exists a love that can conquer hate.

For us, this poses a simple but tough challenge. Either Christianity is right, that love is ultimately stronger than violence, or else it is wrong. Either Gandhi and King and Jesus were right, that we must love our enemies, or they were wrong. But what we cannot doubt is that stamping out all evil people is a silly, naïve, and dangerous dream.

Martin Richard, 8, killed in the bombing

Bostonians are already acting to “retaliate” with love. The stunningly rapid and effective action of the first responders (some of them mere bystanders) seems to have reduced the death toll to unthinkably low numbers. The heroic marathon-like services of those working Boston's emergency rooms and operating theaters likewise minimized death and suffering. The flood of blood donors to Boston blood banks, and the widespread offers of housing and hospitality reflected the depth of Bostonians' care for the victims.

Some people have decided to join the ranks of the 8500 marathon volunteers in 2014. Some have vowed to run again. Some will host visitors. Some will simple turn out to observe, determined that next year’s crowd will outdo 2013.

Maybe someone will even propose making Patriots Day a national holiday.

After all, this is the city where the Revolution began. We know there are villains in the world, and we know it took force to expel the occupiers before. We are determined not to be occupied by villains again, and not to be driven by terror, but to live as we should, as a joyful and peaceful people, and thus deprive the villains of their victory.

And when we prove that no one can defeat the courageous hope and generous spirit of Boston, that message will be heard ’round the world.

  © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#390: The Blasts Heard ’Round the World

Initial reflections  on the day after the bombs went off...

      Patriots day is perhaps the quintessential American holiday, even though (or perhaps because) it is celebrated only in Massachusetts.  It marks simultaneously the beginning of the end of Britain’s occupation of the American Colonies and the birth, in rebellion and blood, of a new country. 

The iconic images surrounding Patriots Day are familiar to all Americans.  “One if by land, two if by sea.” “The midnight ride of Paul Revere.” “The British are coming!  The British are coming!” The shot heard round the world.  The Minutemen. Lexington and Concord.

And so each year, just after dawn, the Redcoats arrive again at Lexington Green to be confronted once more by the local Minutemen.  A shot rings out, and a skirmish ensues.  Men on both sides fall, and the colonial militia is driven back, and the Redcoats proceed toward Concord.  But along the way the British troops are terrorized by the rebels harassing them along their route and sniping at them from behind trees and rocks.  Meanwhile tourists follow the rebels, clicking photos of the reenactment.  Local churches offer pancake breakfasts for the visitors.

Schools and most workplaces are closed, so baseball fans leave home early for the annual 11:00 Red Sox game.  With luck, the Red Sox will win and the game will end early enough for the Fenway faithful to stream into Kenmore Square in plenty of time to watch the runners passing by.

More than 20,000 of those runners begin their day early far from Boston in the small New England Town of Hopkinton.  They’ve come from all over the world, and the runners with numbers have qualified for Boston by running other marathons with impressive times.  For many years, Boston was the only non-Olympic marathon that required runners to qualify this way.  It is, after all, the oldest annual marathon in the world. It was a sacred tradition here long before marathon running became popular.

More than 200,000 fans line the streets along the 26-mile route from Hopkinton to Boston. Boston’s quarter-million college kids take Patriots day as an annual rite of spring, cheering on the runners while partying outside for the first time since football season.

Patriots Day is the day Boston’s cityscape finally returns to vibrant life after the relative quiet of the long cold New England winter. It is the day Bostonians remember why they are blessed to live here.

Given all this, the crowds along the entire length of the marathon course are unrivaled for numbers, enthusiasm, and hospitality. The day I observed the 100^th running with my youngest son, we joined hundreds of thousands of spectators cheering for passing runners for five hours until we had clapped our hands raw and yelled our voices hoarse. For participants, Patriots Day is the day Boston opens its arms to the world and offers a running experience no other marathon can match.

But Patriots Day 2013 was unlike any other.  In Lexington and Concord, the battle reenactments were long finished. The winners of the wheelchair races had finished; the women’s and the men’s winners (both from Africa) had already earned their victories, the Red Sox had already won a walk-off 10^th inning victory, and the mass of “weekend warrior” runners were approaching the finish line flanked by the world flags lining Boylston Street.

And then at 2:50 the bombs created a new kind of Boston massacre.  These truly were blasts heard ’round the world, since the heavy media presence guaranteed that the images and sounds of explosions would achieve global reach within minutes. It is hard to imagine a more symbolically-rich venue to attack. 

As of this writing, there’s no public information about who did this or why.  But as shock gives way to outrage, two difficult truths are worth keeping in mind.

First, while the victims were innocents (including a family from my own Dorchester neighborhood) we should not project their innocence onto ourselves as a collective nation. It is tempting to pretend that such villainy is only for “others,” that we are only the victims and never the perpetrators of violence, and that America never attacks innocent victims. This is, unfortunately, just not true.

In fact, American has proved especially prone to using revenge as a pretext for killing innocents. After Pearl Harbor took nearly 2000 American lives, Harry Truman thought the Japanese got their just deserts when our atom bombs killed more than 100,000, mostly civilians—and most Americans agreed. When 9/11 killed nearly 3,000, Many Americans accepted the death of more than 150,000 Iraqis (mostly women and children) as just vengeance. We Americans are proven masters of overwhelming retaliation. Perhaps some of us are proud of that, but we cannot pretend we do not have blood on our hands.

Even now our country inflicts suffering on innocent victims. Some even make the case that American violence is the evil twin of the Boston bombing: http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/the-boston-marathon-and-u-s-drone-attacks-a-tale-of-two-terrorisms/ . So while our outrage is certainly justified, we do well to avoid becoming self-righteous about our place in a violent world.

Second, while the perpetrators of the marathon bombing must be caught and punished, we should resist thinking that destroying all evil-doers will solve the problem of terror and violence in our world.

For Christians, this is an impossible dream. We believe we belong to a fallen humanity, a race who by nature can never completely purge evil from our midst. We can never destroy all the bad guys, for there will always be more of them in the next generation.

This means that true security only comes when we learn how to deal with evil even while knowing we cannot eradicate it.

This is, of course, what Jesus meant by his terrifying saying “Love your enemies.” He and his followers believed—and still believe—that evil and violence are NOT the strongest powers in our world, that retaliation is not the ultimate solution, and that there exists a love that can conquer hate.

For us, this poses a simple but tough challenge. Either Christianity is right, that love is ultimately stronger than violence, or else it is wrong. Either Gandhi and King and Jesus were right, that we must love our enemies, or they were wrong. But what we cannot doubt is that stamping out all evil people is a silly, naïve, and dangerous dream.

Martin Richard, 8, killed in the bombing

Bostonians are already acting to “retaliate” with love. The stunningly rapid and effective action of the first responders (some of them mere bystanders) seems to have reduced the death toll to unthinkably low numbers. The heroic marathon-like services of those working Boston's emergency rooms and operating theaters likewise minimized death and suffering. The flood of blood donors to Boston blood banks, and the widespread offers of housing and hospitality reflected the depth of Bostonians' care for the victims.

Some people have decided to join the ranks of the 8500 marathon volunteers in 2014. Some have vowed to run again. Some will host visitors. Some will simple turn out to observe, determined that next year’s crowd will outdo 2013.

Maybe someone will even propose making Patriots Day a national holiday.

After all, this is the city where the Revolution began. We know there are villains in the world, and we know it took force to expel the occupiers before. We are determined not to be occupied by villains again, and not to be driven by terror, but to live as we should, as a joyful and peaceful people, and thus deprive the villains of their victory.

And when we prove that no one can defeat the courageous hope and generous spirit of Boston, that message will be heard ’round the world.

  © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#362: One Dark Night

The horrific midnight massacre in Aurora, Colorado confronts us first of all with the mystery of human evil. But it also challenges us to reflect on how violence has pervaded our culture--and even our leisure. Amid renewed calls for tighter gun controls come reports of death threats to critics making negative comments about the new Batman movie, even while the alleged killer portrayed himself as the Joker. Are we seeing something new: violence as play?

Actually, I suspect that violence has always overlapped with play, fantasy, and make believe. After all, western culture inherits a classic literature has always been shot through with violence. We cannot say Oedipal, or Achilles tendon, or Trojan horse, or Pyrrhic victory without evoking ancient images of assault, death, and treachery. Do we imagine that children in the ancient world never pretended to be the violent heroes of their epic tales?

I’m assuming, of course, that human nature was more or less unchanged by the time my peers and I donned fake armor and wielded plastic swords, or shot cap guns or air rifles or toy bows while impersonating soldiers, knights, cowboys or Indians. Over the years my own alter egos included Sir Lancelot, GI Joe, Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy - -all were on the side of good, but all were heavily armed, and all imposed their will by violence.

Such violent make-believe was reinforced by toy armies (from lead crusaders to plastic bazookamen), by cartoons and by comic books. Some of these simply portrayed the violence-without-consequences typical of Looney Tunes characters, but others showed real menace and super-heroic violence: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and others.

In all such make-believe, my peers and I assumed we were watching or acting out fictional events—yet the context was the real world: medieval Europe, World War II or Korea, the far west, or a modern Metropolis or Gotham. And we knew such recourse to violence was typical of the real world as well.

That’s why my father sometimes drew the line with violent movies and barred me from viewing films like “Sahara” or “Purple Hearts” or even TV shows like “Dick Tracy” on the grounds that they were “too real.”

But the days are long gone when kids can be easily isolated from such violence. Cable TV and DVDs and the Internet combined with computer generated special effects and massive advertising and products spinoffs to ensure that young people’s lives are awash in fictional villains and heroes of every violent stripe.

Nor do kids have a merely passive role. Video games have “matured” dramatically since “Super Mario” days, and now kids (of all ages) can rent or buy or download or stream games that echo their favorite violent movies, or fictional accounts of terror attacks, or even scenes from real-war situations in Iraq or Afghanistan. For some youth, such violence-saturated games are their chief recreation. And they all allow the player to participate in the carnage by killing at will with a click of a button. The active destruction on the screen takes a little effort and entails few if any consequences.

Historically, by contrast, real violence generally required physical effort (often grueling and painful) and entailed genuine risk (while killing, one might be killed). So real violence occupied a different plane of reality from play violence. In young people’s minds, the two were easily distinguished.

But not anymore.

Because while play combat has been getting more and more like a real combat, real combat has also been getting more like play. The science fiction notion of conducting war by remote control--by robots--has arrived in the form of drone aircraft.

Most people will be surprised that the first drones - -unmanned planes for military use--flew in World War I. But of course Hitler’s V-1 was a drone-like bomber: it flew like a plane with wings but lacked any remote control, and simply crashed and exploded when it ran out of fuel.

By the Vietnam War, drones were still crude and more vulnerable than piloted planes to being shot down, but they offered a decisive advantage: they did not risk American lives. By war’s end drones flew more than 3000 missions!

Since 9/11 drones have made dramatic advances, and if the Bush administration made drones a key player in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration has made them the dominant weapon in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

The temptation to rely on drones is obvious. Militarily, they’re now capable of pinpointing targets small as a truck or even an individual. And drones cancel out the major downside of manned aircraft: what was once the highest-risk of all military tasks was now a “no-risk” proposition: whenever drones fly, US servicemen remain safely back on base.

But those drones are not flying blind. They are guided by military technicians. They guide the drone on its assigned route, spot the intended target, launch their attack, and bring the drone home--all while sitting at digital screens before images not unlike consumer video games. In this sense, conducting war now comes to resemble child’s play.

So if drones preserve the benefits of war while driving down its costs, where is the problem? The problem is not military or economic; it is moral, for two reasons.

First, by making war so easy, so painless, so risk-free, drones are making the moral costs of war invisible. People may argue, for example, whether the use of drones against targets in Pakistan and Yemen is justified. We may argue if the civilian deaths in those attacks should be labeled “collateral damage” or if, instead, they earn Barack Obama (who authorizes each attack) the label “child killer.”

But what is beyond debate is this: the US killing of civilians by drones has been consistently ignored by the general public. Such killing is an indisputable violation of Catholic Just War Theory, yet I am willing to wager all I own that it will never become a major campaign issue in 2012.

Second, as drones threaten to become the future of war, war itself becomes less “real.” For drone warfare is warfare waged by computer, and it makes the violence of war an increasingly “virtual” experience, and thus less “real.” In so doing, it threatens to merge the practice of war with the rest of our “virtual” lives--not only our fictions and fantasies, but the virtual worlds we all now inhabit through smart phones, social networks, streaming videos, and digital games.

Indeed, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr brilliantly suggested that, whatever the Aurora killer’s motive, his murderous behavior not only carries terrifying echoes of the virtual violence all around us--but also reminds us that we all now hide behind the “mask” of our digital screens, just as the super heroes and villains that have become such a staple of our culture’s contemporary folklore:

It is possible for any of us, of any age or gender, to avoid reality all day in America by keeping our eyes fixed on our screens. They’re on our walls at home and in restaurants, in our living rooms and bedrooms, toted around in our knapsacks, fitting neatly into our hands. The screens sell us many things: video games both benign and ultra-violent, empty “news” about celebrities, Facebook posts from our most intimate 2,864 friends, trailers for the latest Hollywood blockbuster in which men fly through the air and blow up everything bad in their lives. The screens tell us that we matter, each and every one of us. To look away from the screens is to confront a world that says, in most cases, no, you really don’t.…The superhero movies that dominate our box offices are all about mild-mannered secret identities and the power that comes with donning a facial covering. We live each day through digital masks: screen names, online personas, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and on and on, each an attempt to show the world the face we want to be, rather than the face we fear we have.

As a kid, I generally could recognize the bad guys in westerns: they wore masks. Today our country kills behind the mask of computerized remote control, and most of us join in protecting our identities online while maintaining “virtual” contact with the world around us.

Then, one dark night, into this world steps a masked man with a gun who reminds us that virtual reality--especially virtual violence--is not real violence at all. And that real violence--like killing by drones--is no less real for happening beyond our digital screens.

©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012

#290 The Missing Antidote

On most social issues, Catholics’ opinions today reflect the rest of the population. In an age when Catholicism struggles to sustain its distinct identity, we have largely failed to establish a distinctive social platform among our people. I suspect that on many issues vital to America’s social and moral well-being, the problem is not that Catholics have rejected Catholic Social Teaching (CST). The problem is, they never knew what CST was.

Did most Catholics know their bishops, their pope, and virtually all the world’s bishops opposed the invasion of Iraq – and did they know why?

Did most Catholics test George bush’s assertion that Iraq was a “just war” by using the Catholic criteria for a just war?

When Catholics hear attacks on illegal immigrants, do they know CST calls migration a human right?

When Catholics here that healthcare is “a privilege, not a right” – do they know CST says the opposite?

When a mine disaster pits management against its critics, do Catholics know that CST always favors people over profits?

When policy critics attack “redistributing wealth” as “socialism,” do Catholics know that, in the face of income inequalities, CST labels redistributing wealth “justice,” not “socialism”?

Do Catholics know CST defends the right to private property – but says owners must always use property to serve the common good?

When America cuts back its nuclear arsenal, do Catholics know CST unconditionally condemns the use of nuclear weapons?

When America renounces “first use” of its nukes, do Catholics know CST forbids even the threat of nuclear attack?

When Catholics hear about “family values” do they know CST regards the human race as a single family – so that racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant attitudes all violate true family values?

Do Catholics know CST does not recognize “success” in war (whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else) as a moral justification?

Facing venomous debates about “Big” versus “Small” government, do Catholics know CST says size does not matter, but favors government that promotes the common good and a just social order?

I’m afraid that there is a yawning chasm between the vision of CST and the world view of many Catholics. Too many of them get their social values from secular society – from party politics, or media “pundits,” possibly from friends and family. If I’m right, on most social issues, millions of Catholics do not know their own faith.