Just bottle the smell of war

By DOLPH HONICKER

It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers: we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it.

--Frederick T. Martin,

The Passing of the Idle Rich (1911)

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

--Jay Gould, railroad financier

Virtually every American wartime president from George Washington on has expressed abhorrence for the killings and atrocities that go on. This current president, George W. Bush, and his chicken hawk vice president, Richard Cheney, are the exceptions.

This administration does not even question the use of torture.

The closest either man has come to hearing a shot fired in anger is Cheney's mistaking a hunting partner for a quail.

As our treasury sinks as deeply into the red as the blood being shed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush blithely demands that Congress pluck money out of thin air to pay for the endless carnage, unheard of during previous wars -- but shun the wallets of his wealthy benefactors.

There's no rationing; shop 'til you drop; no dollar-a-year industrialists as there were in World War II, which right-wing pundits favorably compare to Iraq by citing the lower number of deaths. It's the high percentage of permanently wounded that's going to hit home in the long run.

While Cheney is off getting a heart tune-up, Bush visits a military rehab center to play video war games with some of the legless and armless warriors.

Video games. If this is as close as Bush can get to war, I suggest he read a novel, Once An Eagle, by Anton Myrer, who graduated from Boston Latin and entered Harvard College in 1941, but left to join the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor. He served more than three years in the Pacific, took part in the invasion of Guam, rose to the rank of corporal, and was wounded.

The book, first published in 1968 by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, was published by the Army War College Foundation in 1997.

The Army War College? Yes. The novel, about the making of a general, Sam Damon, is one of the textbooks. Why?

Listen to Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. (ret.):

"First and foremost, this is a consummate anti-war book. ... His descriptions of combat based on his personal experiences engage all our senses. Myrer forces us to smell and feel the battlefield as well as hear and see it. His narrations horrify, provoke and frighten. No one who has experienced combat directly, or even vicariously, would seek it."

If you wonder what America is today with Democratic and Republican presidential candidates strutting across a stage like semi-trained seals, spitting out sound bites, each vowing not to raise taxes, you have to ask: How do you pay cops, firefighters, teachers and, yes, troops without taxes?

Consider these prescient words by Damon's mentor, Gen. Caldwell, on page 537:

"... what would emerge from (postwar America) would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta -- and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media ... whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of the boiling crest -- would hold the future securely in his fine right hand ..."

If only there could be a way to bottle the stench of the Iraqi war and release it full blast in the Oval Office, Congress and boardrooms of arms manufacturers.

Fortunately, Myrer's Colonel Beaupre has captured it all during a jungle battle. Don't turn away. Read:

"It was impossible to walk without stepping on the bodies--this tumult of crushed heads and sheared-off legs and tight bouquets of guts flowering from ruptured bellies. Flies clung in loose, weaving masses, like slick blued bees swarming; the whole valley hummed with their odious presence. Maggots worked in gross struggling chains at the gaping wounds, bloated and intent. ...

"If you could bottle it, Beaupre thought savagely, swallowing, fighting the hot clutch of nausea with all his might, trying not to breathe ... This smell. If you could bottle it, store it in some tanks just outside Washington or New York City or Chicago; and then when the drums began to beat, when the eminent statesmen rose in all their righteous choler and the news rags and radio networks started their impassioned chant, if you could release a few dozen carboys on the Senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Memours, Boeing ... the trading posts on Wall Street; and seal off the exits. Repeat every three hours as needed. Rx. By God, that would take some of the fun out of it. If you could only bottle it and feed it to the fire-eating sons of bitches, jam it down their throats."

Don't leave yet, Mr. Bush and Cheney for Myrers has a special message for you. Listen to his character named Bill Bowdoin:

"Every war has to be a gleaming crusade, with a hovering Grail of Joseph of Arimathea for only the holiest of eyes to behold. When the plain fact of the matter is the war resembles nothing so much as a big corporation going full blast, with its board of directors meetings and reports and prospectuses, its graphs and charts and shipping sections, layout and advertising--right down to the final product."

Anton Myrer spent 30 years researching and writing his novel. He'd never heard of Bush, Cheney, Haliburton, tag-team presidential debates and sound bites. But he sure got it right.

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Pythian Press.

Atheism now in the open

By DOLPH HONICKER

Thank God we live in an era where atheism can be discussed in public, even on Fox News, although the network gave short shrift to nonbelievers.

The appearance on the best-selling nonfiction list of three books by atheists has pushed reason to the forefront.

First was Sam Harris' The End of Faith.

Then came Richard Dawkins The God Delusion.

Lastly, my favorite by a splinter off the True Cross is Christopher Hitchens' god (cq) is Not Great.

Though I once proposed, as Hitchens does in his book that all religions are man-made, I won't sue him for plagiarism for others have long offered this reasonable supposition.

Right off, let's dispose of the canard that morality rests in belief of a supreme being, whether it be Jesus, Allah or any one of a thousand and one other gods. Ask your preacher, priest or rabbi if he would abandon himself to adultery, rape, robbery and murder if it were not for his faith in the hereafter. Given that he's an honest man he'll tell you that no, his conscience won't let him, but ...

Following that "but" will come a string of arguments trying to convince you that his brand is the one true faith.

I use the masculine gender because the church of Rome, Islam and most mainstream Protestant denominations forbid women to assume the authority to pass on nostrums from the past.

Pope Benedict XVI makes no bones about it: the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church. All others are false.

When I read of the pope's elevation of 23 new cardinals, I was taken by his haberdashery. I wondered which Bible verses inspired his ornate vestments. Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield says Benedict "donned a long, golden silk cape, embroidered with scenes from the life (sic)of the saints that was held up by two altar servers as he processed down the main aisle."

Was one of them St. Francis Xavier? It was he, says Hitchens, "who brought the Inquisition to Asia and whose bones are still revered by those who choose to revere bones."

Religions sell the fear of hell the way George W. Bush sells the fear of terrorism -- good or evil -- my way or the highway.

Hindus set a time limit on hell. "A sinner, for example," says Hitchens, "might be sentenced to a given number of years in hell, where every day counted as 6,400 human hairs. If he slew a priest, the sentence thus adjusted would be 149,504,000,000 years. At this point, he was allowed nirvana, which seems to mean annihilation." But Christians found a hell from which there is no possible appeal.

Fundamentalists cling firmly to Old Testament myths. The National Park Service, pressured by Bush appointees, forbid rangers from giving an official estimate of the Grand Canyon's age to avoid offending the author of a Creationist book on sale in the park's bookstore claiming the canyon was formed by Noah's flood. Touchy, touchy.

As Sam Harris notes in his book: "Most of the people of this world believe that the Creator has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books, each making an exclusive claim to its infallibility."

Told in Sunday School as a kid that God created the heavens and the earth and then breathed into a cloud of dust to create Adam, thereafter performing a ribectomy to create Eve, I asked what seemed a logical question: "Who created God?"

"God has been with us always," said the flustered Sunday School teacher.

Lot's of things we can't prove "exist," says James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of A Jesuit Off-Broadway: Center Stage With Jesus, Judas and Life's Big Questions.

"Love, for instance," he says. "Many believers would say that they've experienced God's presence in ways that go beyond the bounds of reason. They stand on the seashore and feel profound longing. They hold their newborn baby and feel profound joy."

Is Martin saying atheists have no such feelings?

As Hitchens notes, "It may have been a Jesuit who was first actually quoted as saying, 'Give me a child until he is ten, and I will give you the man.'"

Since the Catholic church, having paid out billions for cases of sex abuse against children by its priests and bishops, "one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism," says Hitchens.

The astronomer Carl Sagan said he could look into the sky and admire its vastness without seeking divine origins.

Albert Einstein, addressing a writer troubled by a misrepresentation attributed to him, replied:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Years later, to another query, he said:

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

A few quickies from god is Not Great:

• Jehovah's Witnesses have refused blood transfusions for their children.
  
• Followers believed an illiterate scoundrel, Joseph Smith, was led to buried golden tablets by an agel named Moroni which, with help, he "translated" into the Mormon bible.
  
• Shia fundamentalists in Iran lowered the age of "consent" to nine, perhaps in admiring emulation of the age of the youngest "wife" of the "Prophet" Mohammad.
  

It's an empirical fact that elephants and mice die, as do mighty oaks and roses. Yet, in this 21st century, we have a president who questions evolution, believes it's his Christian duty to kill tens of thousands of innocents to plant his brand of democracy at gunpoint and that he will some day swap one of his earthly mansions for a more glorious one in heaven.

I submit that if all Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and others of faith held a massive prayer day it would have no more effect on the cosmos than this proposal by Robert G. Ingersoll:

"Would Calvin have been more bloodthirsty if he had believed in the religion of the South Sea Islanders? ... Would the Dutch have been more idiotic if they had denied the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and worshiped the blessed trinity of sausage, beer and cheese?"

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Copyright 2007, Pythian Press