Darkness and Light: Coda

    I thought long and hard whether or not to write something like this because I did not want to step on the memory of September 11, 2001 and all the heroism, pain, and heartbreak those memories bring back. But sometimes the coda is just as important as the musical piece or literary piece itself.
    So what's really changed since September of 2001? I mean, if one divorces themselves from the private tragedies that, no doubt, still engulf the families of those who were murdered that day, and if I can be coldly practical for a few minutes, not much has changed in our every day lives. I mean, the only people really put out are those who are frequent fliers and their constant dance with the TSA. But on a more global and general scale, the 23 years since 9/11 have produced two tragic outcomes: Afghanistan has reverted to the Taliban and, unexpectedly, America has disappeared down a rabbit hole. Barbarism, in different forms, is on the march in both countries.
    Americans intervened in Afghanistan in order to deny safe haven to terrorists and somehow to change that country for the better. Alas, after all this time, Afghanistan finds itself back in the seventh century. It was America that got changed, almost beyond recognition. Americans split down the middle and became their own worst enemies. Their politics grew hysterical and vicious and surreal. They took to despising one another.
    In the early days of George W. Bush’s presidency, everyone agreed that Islamist terrorism was the great threat. During Joe Biden’s presidency, to hear one side tell it, the most dangerous menace turns out to be white Americans—whiteness itself. Oh, and I almost forgot, "systemic racism." It’s worse than that: one might say that the great Satan is American history itself, which from the start (from our so-called founding in 1619 on) has been the story of a crime. The indictment is comprehensive: The bizarre theologies of wokeness connect to a thousand heresies—“cultural appropriation,” disrespect for someone’s “pronouns,” and other offenses that any sane society would find hilarious, except that in these days, since the turning of the American lake, such matters are deadly serious. There is no more humor in the kingdom of the woke than there was in Walter Ulbricht’s East Germany in 1954. People lose their jobs, their careers—they are ostracized and publicly shamed—for saying something regarded as incorrect.
    Back in 2001, Americans had a sentimental notion of encouraging Afghans’ freedom (the rights of women, for example). This was an old-fashioned impulse. But back in the homeland, the “elites”—in the universities, the media, Big Tech, government, big corporations, and cultural institutions such as foundations, museums, and symphony orchestras—were busy throttling American freedoms of thought and speech in the name of social justice. Forget merit, which is, of course, racist; “equity” is all. Race and sex, which the woke call “gender” so as to disentangle it from the reactionary, and dare I say it, the scientific realities of nature and make it seem, instead, fluid and discretionary, became neurotic obsessions. Denigrating and sometimes defunding the police have left major American cities increasingly defenseless against crime. As for gender, it has become woke writ that men may have babies. Out of wokeness, there is always something new and strange and marvelous. The concept of woman and motherhood, once sacred, is obsolete.
    Are things in America as bad as all that? Are they worse?
    Over the Labor Day weekend, I happen to fall upon the classic movie, Gunga Din. Watching it with a fine sense of mischief, the movie cast a goofy, archaic light upon what had happened in Afghanistan a few years ago.
    With the Americans gone back over the horizon and the Taliban donning captured U.S. combat gear and taking up their sharia whips as they returned to power after two decades in the hills, I found myself watching as Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (the Three Stooges by way of Rudyard Kipling, the British Raj rollicking along as manly slapstick) brought the story to a much happier ending than the one that President Biden improvised. Kipling’s sergeants subdued the murder cult of Thuggee up on the Northwest Frontier of India, close by Afghanistan, and restored order and good cheer to the British Empire. The character actor Sam Jaffe, wearing no more than shoe polish and a diaper, appeared in the title role. The Thuggees could just as well have been played by the Taliban.
    Unlike those scenes in Gunga Din, the scenes around Hamid Karzai Airport in August of that year suffered from the inconvenience of being real; yet they had some of the atmosphere—the style, the imagery—of the mayhem around the Thuggee temple in the movie. Except that, in 2021, there were enormous American airplanes roaring off to Doha; and there were no bagpipers to play “Bonnie Charlie’s Gone Away.” Instead of the happy ending of rescue, the scene at the Kabul airport was drenched in horror and panic and the knowledge of betrayal. The Americans left Afghanistan, following meekly the Taliban’s deadline, with a frantic, shameful efficiency.
    I thought back to the shock that precipitated us into our longest war. Americans took the 9/11 attacks personally, viscerally, and felt as bloody-minded as Teddy Roosevelt. Within weeks, President George W. Bush sent the American military into Afghanistan. Could he have acted otherwise? Of course. What did we want? “Rage and Retribution?” Revenge? Afghan democracy? A new and grateful friend? Rare earth metals?
    Fast-forwarding through two Bush terms and eight years of Barack Obama and four of Donald Trump brings us, glumly, to the soon-to-be curtain call of Joe Biden—brittle and grumpy and beady-eyed even in the early months of his term. Was Afghanistan another Vietnam? Close enough. There’s plenty of blame to go around for everyone—but especially for Biden in the way he mismanaged the exit. Losing expensive wars in faraway countries has gotten to be an American habit. Moral colonialism—missionary work undertaken at great expense of American money and blood—hasn’t worked.
    How should this sort of thing be done? Can it ever be done well? Maybe not. I recalled Evelyn Waugh’s classic and comic 1937 novel about journalism, called Scoop. Lord Copper, the nitwit press lord, publisher of the Daily Beast, is speaking to the paper’s garden columnist, William Boot. Boot, whom Copper has mistaken for a different writer with the same last name, is about to depart to cover the situation in Ishmaelia. Copper advises him to “take plenty of cleft sticks” with which to send back his dispatches. His final instructions: “The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the patriot side, and a colorful entry into the capital. That is the Best policy for the war.”
    In and out! Ronald Reagan’s Operation Urgent Fury began at dawn on October 25, 1983. The invading force—elements of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82d Airborne, the Army’s rapid deployment force, Marines, Army Delta Force, Navy SEALS and others, a total of 7,600 Americans—made short work of Grenada’s Communist New Jewel Movement government. The operation, over in a day, liberated 631 American medical students trapped at the St. George’s Medical School. Thus did Reagan rescue the little Caribbean island of Grenada—the world’s second-largest producer of nutmeg, after Indonesia—from Communist tyranny and put an end to what was called America’s Vietnam Syndrome. “Our days of weakness are over,” Reagan told the nation. “Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.”
    In Afghanistan, 20 years is nothing. Strangers come and go: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Persians, the Sikhs, the British, the Soviets.
    The Americans also came. In the grand scheme of history, they left about a "New York Minute" ago. They can’t say they weren’t warned—by Kipling, for one:
    Over the Labor Day weekend, I happen to fall upon the classic movie, Gunga Din. Watching it with a fine sense of mischief, the movie cast a goofy, archaic light upon what had happened in Afghanistan a few years ago.
    With the Americans gone back over the horizon and the Taliban donning captured U.S. combat gear and taking up their sharia whips as they returned to power after two decades in the hills, I found myself watching as Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (the Three Stooges by way of Rudyard Kipling, the British Raj rollicking along as manly slapstick) brought the story to a much happier ending than the one that President Biden improvised. Kipling’s sergeants subdued the murder cult of Thuggee up on the Northwest Frontier of India, close by Afghanistan, and restored order and good cheer to the British Empire. The character actor Sam Jaffe, wearing no more than shoe polish and a diaper, appeared in the title role. The Thuggees could just as well have been played by the Taliban.
    Unlike those scenes in Gunga Din, the scenes around Hamid Karzai Airport in August of that year suffered from the inconvenience of being real; yet they had some of the atmosphere—the style, the imagery—of the mayhem around the Thuggee temple in the movie. Except that, in 2021, there were enormous American airplanes roaring off to Doha; and there were no bagpipers to play “Bonnie Charlie’s Gone Away.” Instead of the happy ending of rescue, the scene at the Kabul airport was drenched in horror and panic and the knowledge of betrayal. The Americans left Afghanistan, following meekly the Taliban’s deadline, with a frantic, shameful efficiency.
    I thought back to the shock that precipitated us into our longest war. Americans took the 9/11 attacks personally, viscerally, and felt as bloody-minded as Teddy Roosevelt. Within weeks, President George W. Bush sent the American military into Afghanistan. Could he have acted otherwise? Of course. What did we want? “Rage and Retribution?” Revenge? Afghan democracy? A new and grateful friend? Rare earth metals?
    Fast-forwarding through two Bush terms and eight years of Barack Obama and four of Donald Trump brings us, glumly, to the soon-to-be curtain call of Joe Biden—brittle and grumpy and beady-eyed even in the early months of his term. Was Afghanistan another Vietnam? Close enough. There’s plenty of blame to go around for everyone—but especially for Biden in the way he mismanaged the exit. Losing expensive wars in faraway countries has gotten to be an American habit. Moral colonialism—missionary work undertaken at great expense of American money and blood—hasn’t worked.
    How should this sort of thing be done? Can it ever be done well? Maybe not. I recalled Evelyn Waugh’s classic and comic 1937 novel about journalism, called Scoop. Lord Copper, the nitwit press lord, publisher of the Daily Beast, is speaking to the paper’s garden columnist, William Boot. Boot, whom Copper has mistaken for a different writer with the same last name, is about to depart to cover the situation in Ishmaelia. Copper advises him to “take plenty of cleft sticks” with which to send back his dispatches. His final instructions: “The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the patriot side, and a colorful entry into the capital. That is the Best policy for the war.”
    In and out! Ronald Reagan’s Operation Urgent Fury began at dawn on October 25, 1983. The invading force—elements of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82d Airborne, the Army’s rapid deployment force, Marines, Army Delta Force, Navy SEALS and others, a total of 7,600 Americans—made short work of Grenada’s Communist New Jewel Movement government. The operation, over in a day, liberated 631 American medical students trapped at the St. George’s Medical School. Thus did Reagan rescue the little Caribbean island of Grenada—the world’s second-largest producer of nutmeg, after Indonesia—from Communist tyranny and put an end to what was called America’s Vietnam Syndrome. “Our days of weakness are over,” Reagan told the nation. “Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.”
    In Afghanistan, 20 years is nothing. Strangers come and go: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Persians, the Sikhs, the British, the Soviets. The Americans also came. In the grand scheme of history, they left about a "New York Minute" ago. They can’t say they weren’t warned—by Kipling, for one:

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

    American presidents should read more poetry and satire and books of history before they go to bed or make big policy decisions. George W. Bush was too eager to go into Afghanistan. Joe Biden was too eager to get out. It’s over, in any case; Biden figures everyone will forget about it pretty soon. He’s probably right. I'm sure he will. Still, it’s not easy to respect someone who walks away from a mess he helped to create and mutters something about how you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. That's where we are, 23 years later.

write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com