To Root Against Your Country

[gridlore]

Found this while Wiki-surfing. Art Hoppe was one of the Trinity of Chronicle columnists who instilled in me a love of English as an art form (Herb Caen and Stanton Delaplane were the others.)

Arthur Hoppe
San Francisco Chronicle
(First published March 3, 1971)

The radio this morning said the Allied invasion of Laos had bogged down. Without thinking, I nodded and said, "Good."

And having said it, I realized the bitter truth: Now I root against my own country.

This is how far we have come in this hated and endless war. This is the nadir I have reached in this winter of my discontent. This is how close I border on treason:

Now I root against my own country.

How frighteningly sad this is. My generation was raised to love our country and we loved it unthinkingly. We licked Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini. Those were our shining hours. Those were our days of faith.

They were evil; we were good. They told lies; we spoke the truth. Our cause was just, our purposes noble, and in victory we were magnanimous. What a wonderful country we are! I loved it so.

But now, having descended down the torturous, brutalizing years of this bloody war, I have come to the dank and lightless bottom of the well: I have come to root against the country that once I blindly loved.

I can rationalize it. I can say that if the invasion of Laos succeeds, the chimera of victory will dance once again before our eyes -- leading us once again into more years of mindless slaughter. Thus, I can say, I hope the invasion fails.

But it is more than that. It is that I have come to hate my country's role in Vietnam.

I hate the massacres, the body counts, the free fire zones, the napalming of civilians, the poisoning of rice crops. I hate being part of My Lai. I hate the fact that we have now dropped more explosives on these scrawny Asian peasants than we did on all our enemies in World War II.

And I hate my leaders, who, over the years, have conscripted our young men and sent them there to kill or be killed in a senseless cause simply because they can find no honorable way out -- no honorable way out for them.

I don't root for the enemy. I doubt they are any better than we. I don't give a damn anymore who wins the day. But because I hate what my country is doing in Vietnam, I emotionally and often irrationally hope that it fails.

It is a terrible thing to root against your own country. If I were alone, it wouldn't matter. But I don't think I am alone. I think many Americans must feel these same sickening emotions I feel. I think they share my guilt. I think they share my rage.

If this is true, we must end this war now -- in defeat, if necessary. We must end it because all of Southeast Asia is not worth the hatred, shame, guilt and rage that is tearing Americans apart. We must end it not for those among our young who have come to hate America, but for those who somehow manage to love it still.

I doubt that I can ever again love my country in that unthinking way that I did when I was young. Perhaps this is a good thing.

But I would hope the day will come when I can once again believe what my country says and once again approve of what it does. I want to have faith once more in the justness of my country's causes and the nobleness of its ideals.

What I want so very much is to be able once again to root for my own, my native land.

This column by Art Hoppe was published in The San Francisco Chronicle on March 5, 1971; he said it attracted more letters than any other column he wrote. Hoppe died Feb. 1, 2000.

Comments

Word!

[capplor.livejournal.com]

I see this for the first time, and remember, "Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it."

The sad part is, I KNOW the generals have studied history.

Re: Word!

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

The generals are obligated to follow legal orders, just like the rest of us. They can resign in protest, but most feel too much a duty to their troops to give up. So they do the best they can.

The alternative is just too horrible to consider.

Re: Word!

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Did you imagine I didn't know this? Some of those generals may be old friends, coworkers or immediate superiors I've lost contact with -- I was on active duty during the right era. Heck, the bosses had all served in Viet Nam, and all the PME of the time (including such that I did) featured "What we should learn from the Viet Nam conflict" rather prominently.

I remember ...

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Fred here: I remember when Art wrote that piece. I remember the dust clouds that rose around it. I remember studying it in both American History & Civics classes. I remember the cries for his resignation which continued even after Nixon stepped down. And I remember the empowerment it gave us youngsters who were staring conscription smack in the eye. That column, more than almost anything else I had read up until then, brought home just how much I needed my education, so that I, too, could hope to wield words with as much force and content as Mr. Hoppe did with such finesse and consistency.

His is a standard I still vainly strive to attain, thank you. Truly, I thank you.

Can I have my country back now.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Damn. Fucking. Straight.

I miss that man.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Want to hear something sad?

When I read this, I looked at the date of his death and thought, "Lucky man," because he didn't have to feel that way again.

TK

[collie13.livejournal.com]

Interesting; so did I.

I wish I could forsee us leaving our current military mess any time soon. I wonder if it will take another "60's" generation to get us out.

[su-liam.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is I think the draft had a big part in driving the anti-war passions of the sixties. Youth today know that, barring a suicidal act by Congress, if they don't like the war, they don't have to go. The knowledge that you might have to die for something stupid is a great motivator.

The great effect of this war, in the long run, is that it will dissuade the patriotic impulse of non-Conservative youth to join the army. Gradually, as the current generation of soldiers dies or retires, the Army will become dominated by indoctrinated right-wing, "believers." To some degree the all-volunteer military combined with the distaste for the military by a large fraction of liberals has already tilted the military to the right. This war can only make that worse.

Combined with the already really divisive politics in this country, the kind of mutual contempt that can arise between military and civilian people can only be disastrous.

Back then a civilian protester could say, "there but for the grace of God," when a soldier returned fron a bad war. A decade from now, that unity will be lacking. The sixties had protestors spitting on soldiers and that kind of stupid crap. The next decade or so, we could have freikorps going out to, "teach those liberal traitors a lesson."