AN AMERICAN VICTORY
Mayer, Milton
n American Victory by MILTON MAYER What set me to thinking was a line at.the end of a New York Times dispatch from Saigon: "Though civilians who once espoused them have come to consider them...
...The virgin land is deflowered...
...We believed them because whatever we did had to be not merely done, but believed in...
...A national state (unlike a Job, a Socrates, a Jesus) had to do whatever it had to do to survive...
...Painful and chastening...
...What it set me to thinking was that I had read something like it somewhere long ago...
...The trauma is past...
...We are no longer disappointed...
...The delusion is dead now, in the space of a lifetime...
...No more national pride...
...We know what the national interest is, and what it requires...
...The ruler need not be virtuous, but he must appear to be...
...But ours had been established in a Utopian euphoria...
...Could it have been in a Fourteenth Century Florentine treatise called // Principe...
...True, we had still to complete the extermination of the original Americans—but it was the British King who (according to the Declaration of Independence) incited "the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions...
...True, too, we had to complete the enslavemerit of the Negro—but it was the British King (according to the charge deleted from the Declaration "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia . . . and some of our Northern brethren, too") who "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who have never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere...
...It had its own nature and its own law— the law of self-preservation by means necessarily ignoble and pernicious...
...We believed them...
...n American Victory by MILTON MAYER What set me to thinking was a line at.the end of a New York Times dispatch from Saigon: "Though civilians who once espoused them have come to consider them meaningless publicity stunts, the Tet truces will continue...
...No more cornball chauvinism...
...The American delusion that we are the last best hope of earth is dead...
...We must obey our blood and occupy new markets"—but we had to do it because it was "in the Almighty's infinite plan . . . that American law, American order, American civilization plant themselves on those shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright...
...What statesman, ancient or modern, other than an American President, could have affected such high-minded innocence...
...There is nothing so important as to seem humanitarian...
...We old folks, though we are no longer traumatized, are still numb with our shame...
...We are no longer dismayed...
...It is three out of three now...
...matters of state and matters of personal life were two entirely different things...
...We Americans have never been able to believe that our government was like other governments...
...I suppose it was our guilt that required this delusion of us...
...Everywhere else a cynical dichotomy prevailed, and always had...
...No more white knights for them...
...This is the beginning of wisdom...
...In 1898, when we began our conquest of the world, there were hard-rock realists among us who knew how to read the "manifest destiny" proclaimed by that man of transparently manifest destiny, William McKinley...
...As we were liberating Cuba from the Cubans (and Puerto Rico from the Puerto Ricans, and Hawaii from the Hawaiians, and the Philippines from the Filipinos), Senator Beveridge came clean and said "We are a conquering race...
...We have surrendered our moral assumption unconditionally...
...We have become what J. Edgar Hoover says the Communists are—"masters of deceit...
...And if, as the Times says, "nobody believes the Communists," why, nobody believes the Americans, either...
...Before we had none...
...A generation ago I was a CO...
...The virgin people, too...
...But they were the suave and the few...
...In cutting ourselves off from Britain, we had cut ourselves off from the blasphemous British Realpolitik which thundered, "Thou who hast made her mighty—make her mightier yet...
...We have a chance now—not much of a chance, maybe, but a chance...
...From FDR's, "Your boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars," to LBJ's, "We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home," all the intervening lies about Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, Laos, Thailand, the U-2, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Tonkin Gulf have hammered home the brutal realization that our government is no more credible than any other...
...That was American talk...
...could be moral, but organized society (composed of men) could not be...
...There are Americans who want to see the Vietcong win now, and in wanting to see the Vietcong win they display no more nor less than the wholesome American favoritism of the little fellow against the big fellow in a fight they have no stake in...
...That was the American evangel...
...The last was Adlai Stevenson, "my official liar," as Kennedy called him privately...
...Other countries—all others —had done the same...
...We do not expect our government to be honest or honorable...
...It was William Howard Taft's Christian concern for "our little brown brethren" that exercised the many, and Albert Beveridge's "mission of our race, trustees, under God, of the civilization of the world," that transported them...
...We have settled for being what Machiavelli called "men as they are, not as they ought to be...
...They knew what "the white man's burden" was to which Kipling summoned them...
...To announce an abrogation of them would be to seem inhumani-tarian, which none of the combatants wants to do...
...But the rising generation has reacted...
...as long ago as 1965 two out of three Americans told the pollsters that they believed that the government "only sometimes tells the truth...
...This New Nation, with its New Form of Government, was to be a righteous nation—the first such in history and a model to mankind...
...That was the evangel that produced the evangelist who, in 1919, undertook to evangelize the world with the gospel of "open covenants, openly arrived at...
...Men MILTON MAYER is a staff member of the English department of the University of Massachusetts...
...We had slaughtered the Indians and stolen their land and then enslaved the Negroes and oppressed their descendants...
...including the Americans, who are equally prepared, if the truth about the Pueblo should ever out, to hear it either way...
...These lies were not lies to the Americans of their time, not even to those who indited them...
...Ours was the only country which never did anything in its own interest, but always in mankind's (and, of course, God's...
...It is painful to cornball chauvinists like me to contemplate that there are decent Americans (and by now millions of them, certainly) who want to see their country fall on its face, just as there were decent Germans (if not as many of them) who prayed for Hitler's defeat...
...We were not satisfied to be self-satisfied men...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do?," includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...
...We understand that it can't be, and why it can't be...
...We were bound and determined to be self-satisfied citizens...
...and the present C.O.'s who hop it to Canada are just as conscientious, without the ridiculous sense of responsibility to a myth...
...We know we aren't much good now, but at last, and at least, we know what we are...
...We are no longer shocked...
...And if it ever appeared otherwise, it was because the bloody and benighted beneficiaries were incapable of comprehending that what was good for America was good for them and for God...
...but whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth...
...who couldn't imagine copping out of his responsibility to his country...
...But the death of delusion must be counted a victory...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
