Mood of the Nation
Why am I so soft in the middle
When the rest of my life is so hard?
— Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me Al"
According to polls, support for the war has stayed steady at about 70 percent. (In the U.S., that is; hardly anywhere else in the world can popular support be found.) The numbers further break down as 40 percent strongly for the war and 20 percent strongly against. Of the remaining 40 percent, three out of four “softly” favor the war. Which means that if the last statistic could be turned around, if three out of four of the soft group could be turned against the war—or if it is too late for this war, against the next “preemptive” war—then the opposition would include half of all Americans.
In his novel Brighton Rock, Graham Greene explores the mind of a serial killer. Essentially he contrasts a bad person, a good person, and an indifferent one, and he suggests that the indifferent person is the worst (for Greene it is better to acknowledge goodness by turning against it than to pay it no mind, for rejection is but one step from redemption). Sometimes I wonder which is worst, the muddle in the middle or the pro-war camp, some of whom are at least acting on a coherent system of beliefs (though these same people seem suspiciously often to personally profit by the actions taken). How can a person be indifferent or unsure in a case such as this?
Perhaps it comes down to education. In my state of California, childhood education has declined in recent decades by every measurable standard. Meanwhile, children and adults alike feast on a diet of “reality” TV and video games. As a result, it sometimes seems we have bred a generation of stupid, complacent automatons, who sway with the wind, aping the opinions they are fed on their TV screens and caring only for the material things that punctuate in fifteen-minute intervals their vicarious electronic existence.
But no soul (Greene would say) is unredeemable. And that is the reason why one more voice must speak. Through moral and intellectual education people can learn to feel and to think. And then perhaps the muddled middle will come to be appalled by endless atrocities, and it will rise like Lazarus to cast out our deceitful and shortsighted current regime.
One can hope. When I turn on the television, I see a report on “the mood of the nation.” The visual shows people watching the same program that is broadcasting the report—the nation is in the mood to watch this very channel! We are, it seems, all embedded together. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the screen the latest stock prices march by like soldiers in a row.
Thomas Christensen, with Carol Christensen, is the author of The Discovery of America and The U.S.–Mexican War, and the translator of books by Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Laura Esquivel, José Manuel Prieto, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and others.
This essay was written in 2003 for an anthology entitled Shock and Awe: Responses to War, edited by Peter Laufer. Because the publisher went out of business (after more than 30 years), the book has gone out of print, so I am posting it here. I think it has proven reasonably prophetic.
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