Body Parts

Housing Is Not Yet In Recovery

The housing sector might have stopped its free fall, perhaps reached bottom, but it is not recovering. It is moving sideways. The national economy as a whole cannot recover strongly without housing recovering. In order to buy a house, people need savings for a down payment (in the new era of traditional credit requirements) and an income. To obtain an income, people need jobs. To have jobs, businesses must expand. Much business expansion depends upon housing expansion, as the housing sector is one of the largest markets for manufacturing and services. A vicious cycle. How can we break the cycle? Not by expanding government programs, creating new entitlements, expanding governmental bureaucracies, and imposing new taxes. We have to do it the old fashioned way: research and innovation create new industries, new industries create new markets, new industries and new markets create new jobs. New jobs generate income. Income enables workers to buy houses. But nothing is planned by the Obama administration to contribute to such a breakthrough.

Comments on 1960s Journal (4) Political Journey

My political journey from Democratic Party liberalism to radicalism to Republican Party conservatism passed between two craggy mountains of emotional trauma. My 1960s journal begins at the first mountain, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. My grief sealed my passage into radicalism. The journal's last entry, a letter, unintentionally points to the second mountain. The entry describes my nightmare about an atomic attack on a American large city. In the dream, my wife and I and friends watch skyscrapers topple. We lose our homes.

The second mountain of trauma was my grief at the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City on Nine-Eleven. My nightmare came true, but my two children, and not I, were at the World Trade Center on that day. They fled Manhattan to refuge in Brooklyn that morning, safe. Thanks to my wife, I, too, was safe at home. While I was in Boston, without telling me, she changed my airline flight from Boston to Los Angeles from the morning of Nine-Eleven to the evening of the tenth. By Nine-Twelve, I was a conservative. Twenty one years after I closed my journal, the remnants of leftism in me flashed into smoke as instantaneously as newspapers in the heat of the jet fuel inferno.

The emotional trauma were not the cause of the shifts in my political allegiances. The trauma, rather, were the windows through which I could see new worlds of concern and experience. Psychological distress broke down my detachment from the world; reality caused the shifts. On each occasion, I realized that I had been living in a shadow world. Suddenly, I was thrust into a new world that was real, vivid, and immediate. These moments were paradigm shifts. The old world now made no sense and was false. In the new world, all old puzzles were solved. The new reality forced rationality and conviction upon me.

I describe my journey in dramatic terms, but in truth my political life has been undramatic. I was largely detached from electoral politics. I directed my energy into nonpartisan civic projects. I always had a strong civic commitment, an allegiance to localism, more than dutifully voting. For several decades, I worked as a volunteer on community boards and supported historic conservation and preservation projects in Old Citrus Town. This work satisfied my abiding need, no doubt inculcated while growing up in a northern New England village, to contribute to my community.

I had channeled my ideological persuasion into academic scholarship, helping other scholars to build a post-modern interpretation of my field. My ideological mission began to weaken twenty years before Nine-Eleven. I took up the study of the role of technology in society. A major left and Green thesis was--and is--that technology has its own immanent, destructive, social force. It dehumanizes humanity. It enslaves societies by removing free will. I showed contra-Heidegger that technology is an existential structure of freedom. Then I turned to study technology, enterprise, and engineering in the industrial revolution. Reading the scholarship of economists and historians of technology, I could see that the left interpretation of the industrial revolution, dominated by Marxism, was incorrect. The blessings of material progress, prosperity, and social advancement were indebted to technology, the guarantee of private property, entrepreneurial freedom, and capitalism. The dark satanic mills, that Dickens painted on the landscape of nineteenth century Britain, were actually light houses on the road of progress in human betterment. Before Nine-Eleven, the intellectual props to my left view of America had dissolved. The horror of Nine-Eleven blew away the cobwebs of dogma that festooned my leftist shadow world.

Comments on 1960s Journal (3) State of Mind

When I wrote the journal, I was certainly of two minds. The journal is the product of one mind, assuredly not my state of mind most of the time. I was a married graduate student, working long hours toward my advanced degrees, anticipating a professional career. I liked marriage and flourished in its emotional security and in the modest material comfort of my life with my working wife. We enjoyed an active social life with a group of friends, most of whom were also graduate students. I was not alienated from my graduate school or fellow graduate students, or my professors. I felt high confidence in my mind and abilities. I wanted more instructional support from my major professors than I got; but I did not want to attend another graduate school. I admired the faculty who supervised my graduate training. They were brilliant scholars and teachers, esteemed in their fields. Two of them won Pulitzer prizes, and all won scholarly prizes of one kind or another. I knew that earning their high recommendations was one of the most important, if not the most important, aids to my career.

Then there is my journal: I was so alienated, critical, and questioning that I identified myself as a radical. Let me set aside the question of what this alienation meant, and first tackle the question of its source. Certainly, I had no personal cause to be alienated from America. America had not done anything to me personally. To the contrary, I succeeded by playing by the rules of the game of competitive, merit-based education. I was rewarded with honors, financial support, and a green light to all my intellectual aspirations. Nor had America ever held me back in any way. My opposition to the Vietnam War did not generate my alienation, nor did my alienation generate my opposition to the War. My opposition to the War was an intellectual matter. Quite simply, exempt from the draft by my 4F status, the War was not an existential issue for me (as I explained in my post about my radicalism, here).

The source of my alienation was my shock and grief in response to the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The journal expresses (here) the psychological wound I received from Robert Kennedy's assassination. Shortly after his murder, I found I could not look at myself in the mirror to shave, so I grew a beard. I shaved it off seven years later. The murders were political, I thought. I reacted by blaming America's political culture, rather than King's and Kennedy's assassins, for them.

Now I can see my continual exclamations of "stupid", imaginatively hurled at President Nixon and other politicians whom I rejected, as measures of my alienation and statements of how little the partisan political world made sense to me. Clearly none of these persons were deficient in intelligence in a literal sense, or lacked political savvy. (My literary imagination was deficient. Why didn't it occur to me to call someone a "pinhead" or "moron"?)

My alienation was, therefore, a narrow rejection of America's electoral political establishment and its culture. In retrospect, I experienced an imagined wound, rather than a real wound. In this sense, my alienation was an attitude, a psychological pose, that I took up. My alienation was not imposed on me. I did not earn it. It constituted a fantasy.

The self-delusion of the fantasy conveniently masked my memory of my own intemperate views. Years later, I told myself that I was unaware of the horrible consequences of America's sudden abandonment of the South Vietnamese. Yet, the journal reveals that I had contemplated the slaughter of South Vietnamese politicians after the Communists' victory with, what I thought was, tough-minded equanimity, here. I similarly told myself that I did not let my opposition to the war as a policy lead to disrespect of the American troops in Vietnam. After all, I had a college friend killed there. Yet, there I am, in the journal, making the crack that our soldiers were hired killers, here. These views reveal a failure of character.

I identify four qualities of my alienated state of mind as expressed in the journal:

1. Extremist fantasies
2. Moralistic
3. Apocalyptic
4. Detachment

These qualities all sprang, I believe, from my situation of not being involved as a political activist and not participating in an active political intellectual tradition. I subscribed to New Republic (but I read the magazine from the outside, not as a participant), the New York Review of Books, and Ramparts. I subscribed to Time news magazine, but canceled my subscription when it did not oppose the war. I did not stand on a ground of situated political experience. Entertaining a fantasy, I had no practical environment to counter the fantastic, so I swallowed ideas that a sensible person, enjoying my position in America, would reject. For instance, I nodded sympathetically--I am now embarrassed to say--to Charles Hamilton's terrorist proposal that ambushing police was a legitimate political tactic in America (here).

Fantasy though my alienation might have been, it was real to me. Being real, it motivated me. This motivation led me to a post-modernist assault on my academic disciplines, which I have already discussed, here.

(Revised.)

Comments on 1960s Journal (2): Post-Modernism

Many radical students of the 1960s returned to America's universities as professors. Beginning in the 1970s, they (perhaps I should say, we) brought along a cluster of new intellectual paradigms for disciplinary learning. These paradigms, which displaced interpretative philosophies, including Marxism, current in the 1930s-1950s, are characterized as post-modernism. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, the post-modernism we sponsored is the source of major intellectual banes of our era, especially moral and intellectual relativism and the denial of objective knowledge and realism. (Over the past few years, I have examined the weaknesses of the philosophical foundations of post-modernism--here. Recently, I have begun to develop a realist theory of values--here.)

The scholarly novitiates of the 1960s laid little of the philosophical foundations of post-modernism; rather, they applied post-modern theory to a new set of interests, such as literary analysis and gender and identity studies. Histories of post-modernism trace its origins to Continental philosophers, especially Heidegger, Sartre, and (in a revival) Nietzsche.

The standard account of this new learning obscures the role of America's own intellectual traditions in the making of American post-modernism. My personal journal shows that it was possible to build the intellectual foundations of post-modernism from other sources.

In the journal, I developed a number of principles that would be basic tenets of American post-modernism. These are, briefly (follow the links to the journal entries for full discussion):

1. There is no human progress (here);
2. Human nature does not exist (here);
3. Language shapes reality (here);
4. Meaning replaces causality in historical analysis (here);
5. Critical analysis proceeds out of the destruction of dichotomous polarities of thought (here).

My ideas did not come from the standard sources, because I was unfamiliar with most of them. I did not read any of the works of Foucault until the mid-1970s. I did not study Heidegger until the 1980s. I did not read Sartre's writings (except for "Existentialism is a Humanism", which I read in college) until the 1980s. Though post-modernism rejected Marxism (Marx's philosophy being mired in modernism), Marx was a major influence on the study of the sociology of knowledge, whose practitioners espoused some post-modern principles. I read in the sociology of knowledge in the 1960s, but did not study Marx until the 1980s.

My route to post-modern principles was, rather, through the history and philosophy of science. Historically, the first decisive assault on modernist theory came from Einstein's relativity theories, followed by quantum mechanics and Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum phenomenon. Einstein's and Bohr's scientific revolutions demolished the Newtonian edifice of science upon which modernism was built. They were reinforced by the American philosophy of pragmatism, which developed the implications of Darwinian evolution and also arrived at some post-modern principles. These great scientific revolutions and their attendant intellectual consequences were one of my major focuses of study in the 1960s.

A second American route to post-modernism grew out of the mid-twentieth century concern with values and value theory. The dominant interpretation in American sociology, structural-functionalism, was based on values. Social cohesion and stability was explained by American commitment to a set of core values.  American historians described the dominant interpretation of American history as "consensus history," meaning that American agreement on values, rather than conflict, was the basis for American civilization. A new academic field in the 1950s, "American Studies," unifying literary analysis and historical research, was devoted to the study of the role of values in shaping American life. Using values to explain American history and society countered Marxism, which postulated that social organization was based on class conflict, rather than consensus.

As my journal indicates, I was preoccupied with American values. Sometimes I seemed to think Americans had no values, sometimes that they had objectionable values, sometimes that core values had gone astray, always that they needed new values. I had studied major sociological writings (e.g., Parsons, Merton) about the role of values in structuring and shaping American society.

At the time I was writing the journal, my intellectual interest was in extending the analysis of the influence of values, being done in other historical fields, to the study of the history and philosophy of American science. To do this, I hypothesized that leading American scientists (before world war two) had a set of values that defined an ideology of science for them. In the 1960s, I had not read Thomas Kuhn's, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's interpretation of science grounds scientific paradigms in value commitments by scientists; Kuhn's influence on me waited until the early 1970s. Nonetheless, the sociology of knowledge approach I took in studying the ideology of scientists, relativized scientific knowledge, tearing it from its modernist moorings. With scientific knowledge set adrift, for me, I began, in the journal, to deny the basic philosophical postulates of modern science, thereby leading me to the principles I explored.

Comments on 1960s Journal (1): Radicalism

In my journal, I identify myself as a "radical". The label of radical should be read with caution. I was not a radical in the sense of being a political activist. I was not a political revolutionary. I was a registered Democrat and did not belong to a radical organization, such as SDS. In the years covered by the journal, I spent one weekend as a volunteer working for Eugene McCarthy in Pennsylvania, I marched in one anti-war demonstration in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I attended a few anti-war rallies, and I attended a few lectures by anti-war and black power radicals. I took a minor role in the organization of graduate students at my university. I was a serious graduate student conscientiously working on my advanced degrees, with little time to do anything but read and take notes on the large literatures for which I was responsible, and research and write my theses. A fellow graduate student reported to me that my major professor, who supervised my thesis, thought I was conservative and nonpolitical. He was surprised to learn I had political opinions and had spoken out at a graduate student meeting, calling for reform of grievance procedures. His surprise revealed how seldom I expressed my views publicly and how much the radical ideas I expressed in my journal contrasted with my conventional reputation in the graduate school.

In undergraduate college, I was not politically active; I would go so far as to say I was not politically aware. I did not read a daily newspaper or watch television. I occasionally listened to the radio (Paul Harvey's program was my favorite). I did not belong to a political club or social fraternity. I served my mandatory two years in ROTC (Air Force), without protest, unlike some of my classmates who left the land grant university, because they refused to participate in ROTC. When JFK was assassinated, my senior year, I was briefly shocked, but I was not distressed in a lasting way. My girl friend and I had a trip planned to a nearby city, which we did not cancel and took on the day of the assassination. I remember being remonstrated by a man in a city park for showing insufficient sorrow, because my girl friend and I were obviously enjoying our visit to the city. In my first two years in graduate school, I strongly supported the Vietnam War. I defended the war in lengthy correspondence with an old college friend, who opposed the war. Only in 1966 did my view of the war change. My jump to the anti-war position resulted from my being a teaching assistant for a brilliant, intellectually left historian, who could see no national interest or foreign policy justification for the war at all.

The same year, 1966, I was called up for the draft. I wrote to my local draft board requesting an extension on the date for my physical and AFQT (following which I would be inducted, in the normal course of things), so that I could complete my master's thesis. I had no concerns, however, that I would be drafted. I knew several childhood diseases would disqualify me. As I expected, I was classified 4F. I did not oppose the war, therefore, out of a fear of being drafted. If anything, my exemption from military service dampened my willingness to speak out publicly. The war and the draft were not existential issues for me. I thought I had not earned a public leadership role in opposition to the war. (See my extended discussion of my experience with military service.)

Also, I was not a 1960s radical in life-style. I thought of myself as alienated from the American mainstream, but this alienation existed comfortably within my enthusiastic enjoyment of married, mainstream life. I disdained the alternative life-style from free sex to communes to free-loading. I had contempt for the mush-brain thinking that characterized much popular imagery and literature of 1960s radicalism. I did not experiment with drugs; I have never taken any illegal drug, not even marijuana, not once. I did not drink a lot of alcohol or drink to excess. My father and my father's father were alcoholics. I was wary of over-drinking. I loved wine. My wife and I enjoyed trying new wines and matching them with foods. I did not care for rock and roll as a musical genre. I liked the Beatles, though a musical friend had to explain to me what was innovative in their music. My main musical loves were Broadway musicals, jazz, and new jazz. I was happily proto-bourgeois. I understood clearly that life's greatest gift to me was a clear mind and I did not want to do anything to cloud it.

To the extent that my private journal has any larger significance, it is, I think, because it throws light upon several under-appreciated aspects of 1960s radicalism, which I exemplified.

First, radicalism could be a broad intellectual stance, not simply political opposition to the Vietnam War or a psychological state or life-style choice. My radicalism pushed me toward philosophical views that would later be called, post-modernism. I will discuss these views and their sources in another post.

Second, I thought of myself as left, but I was not Marxist or a Communist. I did not embrace socialism or the abolition of private property. I was intellectually opposed to Marxist theory. My immediate frame of historical reference was the second world war and the struggle against totalitarianism. Totalitarianism repulsed me emotionally as well as intellectually. I was an individualist and proud of it. My anti-war position was within a strain of indigenous American radicalism that linked back to Progressives, such as Jane Addams, who opposed the Spanish American War and other Progressives who opposed U.S. entry into World War I. This radical tradition with which I identified was over-shadowed by the radicalism of Marxists and Communists in the anti-war movement and has since, I am sure, been forgotten.

A long-held principle that would qualify me as a radical made little appearance in the journal. This principle is world government. Since early high school, I believed that America's national sovereignty should be limited in favor of the United Nations, or some kind of world government. I thought world government was the best means to prevent total war, such as the world had recently been through, and to control nuclear weapons. In high school, for two years I participated in the model UN. This experience cemented my youthful idealism. My conviction in the necessity of world government would last until 9/11, when it became obvious the UN was a charade, world government was a figment of leftist ideology, and only sovereign national strength could protect us.

Third, what I did with my radical views shows one of the ways left radicalism entered the American universities in the 1970s and later. I channeled my philosophical radicalism into professional scholarship in my discipline. My scholarship helped to shift my fields (the history of science and technology) toward leftist pedagogy and theory. My scholarship had this influence without any explicit political label for its political position. It is a mistake to think that domination of America's elite academe by the political left is simply a matter of professors being registered Democrats or  voicing their explicitly left-wing political opinions in the classroom. The more serious--and insidious--leftist influence is the very structure of the academic, disciplinary learning they teach to students. I will have more to say about this in my discussion of how the ideas in my journal presage what was later called post-modernism.

(Revised.)

December 9, 1969, Tuesday Evening

There ought to be practical guidelines to judge whether a culture is breaking up, that is, passing from one form to another of qualitative difference.

These guidelines can be given under four categories: (1) values, (2) cause and effect, (3) the role of cultural elites, such as intellectuals, and (4) the problem of cultural dislocation of individuals.

(1) Under the category of values, we may establish the following guidelines to indicate cultural break-lup:

a/ It is not possible to determine what actions are right, only what ones are wrong;
b/ New values cannot be added to the value-consensus (that is, value-clusters are contracting, rather than expanding);
c/ Logical or evaluative dichotomies, which had previously provided the conceptual framework for understanding the problems and changes of a society, no longer accommodate all experience (for example, individual/society, public/private, domestic/foreign, progress/status quo, radical/conservative, and efficiency/inefficiency;
d/ Hierarchies of authorities lose their hierarchical character;
e/ A widespread assumption exists that, to solve problems of the future which are not yet fully emergent but which are anticipated, values will have to be changed to unknown (but presumably functional) forms.

(2) In the category of cause and effect, we may establish the following guidelines to indicate cultural break-up:

a/ cause and effect frequently have unexpected relationships, for example, a cause that was expected to have a minor effect has a major effect, or an effect or symptom exists for which no definite ascertainable cause can be located;
b/ It is not possible to predict, beyond obvious and logical categories, the impact of innovation on institutions and values;
c/ Generational changes no longer pass through regularized hierarchical patterns (that is, generational changes cannot be normalized or rationalized);
d/ Social conflicts cannot be resolved or accommodated within normal political processes, that is, politics no longer provides the institutional means to solve problems.

(3) In the category of the role of cultural elites, we may establish the following guidlines to indicate cultural break-up:

a/ Progressive intellectuals deal with current social conflict by envisioning alternative futures in which the conflicts are resolved, but cannot specify the institutional adjustments required to reach the envisioned future;
b/ Normalized co-ordinates of decision-making do not seem convincing to large groups, or to a number of elites, that is, the normal patterns of value-references by which decisions are logically reached are no longer accepted widely.

(4) In the category of individual dislocation, we may establish the following guideline to indicate cultural break-up:

a/ It is difficult for numerous individuals acting together for the same goal to have similar motivations.

These guidelines indicate that cultural forms have broken down. That is to say, cultural forms (values, reference patterns, modes of expression, etc.) no longer provide individuals in a society with the normal illusion that they can percieve the future. It can, of course, be argued (and this argument would conform with my own convictions) that the reason that persons do not perceive the future is that the future does not actually exist. But this does not detract from the fact that most persons in normal times have at least the unconscious illusion that they can perceive the future. The loss of this ability to perceive the future is simply the loss of cultural means by which to perceive (even if to perceive illustory) the future. And this loss is what I mean by cultural break-up.

December 2, 1969, Tuesday evening

[Letters dated September 1, 1969, and October 17, 1969 are not published.]

I just returned from seeing the new Paul Newman film, Butch Cassidy. I had been intensely tired when I returned home this evening from the day's work, and I went to the movie, hoping it would entertain and relax me. It did both. Although one disturbing feature of the movie was the appearance of violence toward the conclusion of the film. Paul Newman and Robert Redford, as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American bank robbers who have fled the incroachments of turn of the century civilization by running to Boliva, well, Newman and Redford, find themselves as bodyguards for the payroll of a Bolivan mining company and having to be defned the payroll against outlaws. In one climatic gunbattle, they kill some six or seven Bolivan outlaws, and the violence clearly disturbs them. And it disturbed myself as well. The killing scene was shot in the well established "Bonnie and Clyde" genre, in which the action is in slow-motion, with bodies exploding, blood bursting out, and the bodies falling and twisting in a grotesque ballet.

This killing scene (immediately before which Newman/Cassidy turned to the Sundance Kid to confess: "I have something to tell you; I have never killed anybody before;" To which the Sundance Kid replies, of  course, "Now is a hell of a time to tell me.") alienated me, unsettled me, disturbed me, in a subtle way. Before I had been engrossed in the movie, but during the killing scene, and after, I discovered myself withdrawing inwardly, mentally turning away from the violence, and, the knowledge of it.

I have been disturbed for the past several years about the commentaries I have read on the masacre of Song My. I have been disturbed by what I perceive to be the failure of the national newspaper commentators to establish an independent evaluative position from which to make a moral judgement or from which to make a moral judgement of the whole war. James Reston, especially in the divine Times, but Tom Wicker perhaps also (and surprisingly) have clearly fumbled in their consideration of this massacre.

These commentators have all accepted, to a more or less degree, that the massacre at Song My was unique, and if not unique, certainly does not characterize the American military activities in South Vietnam, as a whole.

Now my position is that the Song My massacre, although different from other American military activities, perhaps, by the savagery of its murders, is not a quantum leap different from the othermilitary activities. Song My was not really unique; perhaps only more repulsive to our bouregois sentimentalism because American "boys" murdered women and children who were pleading for their lives immediately before them. I do not think, however, that this sort of murder in which the murderer stands before his victim and watches the blood explode in front of himself is any more murderous than bombing a village to death from 10,000 feet or by an artillary bombardment from ten miles away. Murder is not less murder because the perpetrator and the victim are separated by a great distance, or by silence, or by the sanitary environment of a B-52 cockpit or by the forests between the fire base of the artillary and the target village.

My criticism of the commentators is as follows: They have attempted to deduce the moral distinctions necessary for judging the Song My massacre from the functional distinctions between different methods of killing enemies. This attempted deduction, it seems to me, is essentially incorrect, for the reason that by deriving moral distinctions from the differences between military means of killing enemies they cannot possibly conclude that the military means of killing the enemy are, in general, immoral. Now, if the manner in which a person draws a moral judgment must inevitably conclude that the subject is in general moral; that is, if he cannot possibly conclude the subject is in general immoral, then this is not a free moral judgment. And if it is not a free moral judgment, then it is not a moral judgment at all. It is simply an apology, however complex and involved, for the subject in general.

The commentators, then, like the President, the administration, the Congres, and the liberal establishment, the conservatives, and the population generally, have accepted the military's judgment of the Song My massacre: that the Sony My Massacre certainly was immoral, and certain violates codes of acceptable military conduct, but the massacre was unique, not characteristic of the American warfare system in general, and cannot therefore impugn the warfare in general as immoral. The warfare in general is moral.

The commentators have not searched for a critical basis independent of the military's version of the story, or the military's method of judging the situation, from which they might possible decide the military's activity, not only at Song My, but in general, to be immoral and repulsive.

How does my criticism of the comentators (and the military) judgment of Song My proceed, in detail?

We have no reason to believe that hte various military policies for winnng the war have been implemented for any other reason than military efficiency. There are problems with the presidential and military definition of what constitutes winning the war, but let me go first to the latter issue, military efficiency. Some of the different policies instituted by the military for the destruction of Viet Cong population (which includes Viet Cong soldiers, and as well, Viet Cong "sympathizers", i.e. women and children in Viet Cong controlled areas) include: (1) in areas that are not entirely in the control of the Viet Cong militia, the removal of the  population from their villages and their re-groupment in concentration camps (called euphmastically, "New Life Hamlets"); (2) in areas that are under the control of the Viet Cong, and in which American military presence is not power enough to force the wholesale removal of the population, the declaration that the area is a "free-fire zone" in which all persons are declared to be enemies and therefore worthy of killing, and the saturation bombardment of the "free-fire zone" by artillary, bombers, and naval gunfire (when this was available); (3) Search and destroy missions, in which the objective is to engage and destroy combatant enemies; (4) pacification, by which is meant the inclusion of hamlets behind a defensive parimeter of enough strength to protect the daytime administration of Saigon-oriented bureaucratic government. These are the main military means of killing the enemy or rendering him ineffective.

It is not a military policy to send American brigades into the countryside where they would identify Viet Cong and Viet Cong sympathizers, and having made the identification, destroy them, as, say, the population of Song My was destroyed. The only reason we have to believe that this is not a military policy is that, first, we do not have enough troops to do this, and that, second, it would therefore be inefficient.

It is not necessary for the military to undertake a policy of the personal soldiery exterminations of enemy population for the simple reason that it is more efficient to accomplish the same destruction by aerial and artillary bombardment. How absolutely moral considerations do not enter into the question of what is an efficient policy is indicated by the use of chemical and biological warfare to destroy food crops in the Viet Cong areas, although it is recongized that this results in the starvation of the non-combatant population as well as depriving the Viet Cong militia of food supplies. Such chemical and biological warfare is repugnant to all humane persons in the world, but this fact is of no force in the military mind.

Several years ago, the department of defense, under MacNamara, estimated that close to 40,000 civilians had "accidently" been killed as a result of American warfare. Now, of course, these deaths were only "accidental" in the strained mind of the military. They resulted from a conscious policy of warfare which, it was recognized, would result in the destruction of noncombatants.

After having instituted these policies, which are different methods of killing the enemy, the military then, and only then, defines the morality of these means. Their position is that population removal and concentration camps, destruction in free-fire zones by artillery and bombs, in search and destroy missions, and by chemical and biolgoical weapons, are all moral (!) means of killing the enemy; but that extensive, face to face killing of noncombatants by the infantry is immoral. How convenient: the only immoral means of killing noncombatant enemies is the one means that seems to be militarily inefficient!

It is with these moral distinctions between moral and immoral means of warfare, which are simply based on prior-created military distinctions between efficient and inefficient means of warfare, that the military argues that the Song My massacre was a unique incident (and of course regrettable) resulting from the terrible strains of continuous combat on [of?] our good boys (our paid killers), but nevertheless it was immoral and will be punished. The whole military argument was that the incident was immoral and unique.

Now I think that the Song My massacre was no more "immoral" than the other means of killing noncombatant unfriendlies (although it was more repulsive in the immediate and emotional sense). The point is that Song My was immoral and so are the other means of killing noncombatants

The reason that I can take this position is that I, unlike the commentators, have rejected the whole military assumption that you should first decide what is militarily efficient and then make your judgment of what is moral and immoral. I start out from the assumption, first, that one should decide what is moral and immoral, and then, shape ones means. If the moral objective of the war is to protect the noncombatant populations, both friendly and unfriendly, then no action which results in the killing of the noncombatant populations is moral. This means no action: not re-groupment in concentration camps where, because of inadeuqte sanitary facilities, large numbers died in epidemics; not destructions of unfriendlies in free-fire zones; not by search and destroy missions; not by destruction of food crops.

If the rejoinder is made that well for christ's sake you have to be big and grown up and realize that in war some of the bystanders get hurt of necessity; then my response [is?] that war in general is immoral.

And this is precisely why the military and the government are so anxious to admit that Song My was a massacre and was immoral, because they also assert that it was unique. If the public were to think that it was no more immoral than the rest of the war, then they might consider the whole war immoral, and that is a conclusion the govt is anxious the public should not reach.

August 26, 1969 Tuesday Evening

This evening I roamed through my small library of philosophical works like a hungry intellectual lion, too hungry, however, to choose any particular work to devour. I picked up Hobbes Lev. Part I and started to skim the introduction. I am ashamed to say that I have never read the book. I took the copy out into the living room, sat down to read, but could not concentrate on it (although I definitely feel I can concentrate on something!), returned the book to its shelf. So I took down Nietzsche to read The Birth of Tragedy. But I could not read this. Nietzsche went back to the shelf. I took down Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, went into the living room with him. I glanced at my old pencil notations of important passages. I had read the work originally when I was a junior in High School (taking out the ... Public Library copy--I think it was the only person to have read it), then read it once again when I was a sophmore or junior in college. Could I read it again? I certain felt stoic tonight; but the emperor went back onto the shelf too.

Then I decided what I wanted to write. What?--the book which would place in type my long-standing disgruntles about America? A work on morals? Ah, the agreeable cop-out; I started once again to write here, in the intermittent journal.

July 5, 1969

[Extract from a letter dated July 5, 1969.]

At the moment, I am reading in dramatistic theories of socialization--George H.
Mead, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and Erving Goffman. Their work provides valuable clues to understanding the social relationship of the scientists to the lay public. I hope that their theories will help me to organize and to extend some ideas I developed ... with regard to the social function of the popularization of science.

July 4, 1969, Friday evening

I am words. My body is the grammar of the sentence which is my life. I am my own metaphor. I am the extension of literal meaning. I am the embodiment of transendence of context. I am the context, and I am the context of the context.

I control my life through words. Words control my life. My life is the dash -- whose term ends abutting the wall of another word. My life is the colon: between whose aperature meaning is sighted always beyond.

I am the life for which acting is idiomatic. I am the life intransitive.

I am the life transitive whose object is alienated by a slash/ .

I am the words which cannot crawl over their own name.