Who to Blame for American Hatred and Violence?

by Alexander Cockburn

Meanwhile, Congress postures about terrorism, which Bill has supposedly encouraged by his pardon of the Puerto Rican nationalists. In fact, there is something constructive that Congress could do about terrorism. It could mandate a national registry, to be compiled by the Pentagon, of all serious unstable veterans of the U.S. armed forces. As with sex offenders, the whereabouts and domiciles of these people, many of them psychic time bombs, would be publicly posted. The numbers would be large. To give you a sense of scale, after the Vietnam War, 500,000 vets sought psychological help, according to the Veterans Administration.

One venue for hearings on such a strategy could be the special Senate committee being set up at the instigation of Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, designed to probe "the decline of America's culture." Brownback told Roll Call recently that "what we want to do is take the long view and the deep view of how did we get a culture the way it is today that has got so much violence and so much hatred, destruction and mayhem that is part of it."

Hollywood fears that such hearings will turn out to be senators grandstanding for the cameras, lecturing movie- and record-industry tycoons about family values. I doubt this will come to pass at any serious level. These days, the role of Hollywood in campaign financing is far too weighty to permit any serious insults to Tinseltown. But Brownback's committee is a fine idea all the same. If our culture is more violent and degraded than before, what has been the role of the state's training in violence and use of that violence in the armed forces? Uncle Sam puts guns into the hands of 17-year-olds. Some of them embark, with the blessings of the state, on military careers of appalling violence, and then, are discharged into civil society without further ado. One consequence was Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Brownback sounds as though he is ready to seize the challenge. "Quick blames such as movies and video games are not the answer," he told Roll Call. "None of this provides a satisfactory answer of: 'How did we get to the point of where we are today?' We think if we can answer that question, we can start to look at: 'How do you get out of this?'"

These are sensible questions. And if the committee examines our culture as the expression of a society endlessly fighting wars, the role of war in the degradation of our culture has resonances far beyond the training of young people to a career of violence and killing, justified in the name of the state.

Years ago, I was in a Chrysler transmission foundry in Newcastle, Ind. I got into a conversation with a foundryman about social decline, and he suddenly asked, "Do you know where the rot set in?" He answered his own question: "Cost plus, in the second World War," by which he meant the erosion of conscientious practices in manufacturing by the "cost plus" system of pricing by the arms producers. No matter how shoddy and indulgent the work, they would bill for all costs (at an inflated rate), and then, tack on the profit margin.

As Secretary of War Stimson said, "If you are going to ... go to war ... in a capitalist country, you have to let business make money out of the process, or business won't work." Over 70 percent of all war and civilian contracts went to just 100 of the country's 175,000 manufacturing companies. The nation's manufacturing passed forever into the hands of a few giant corporations, taking us to where we are today.

This brings us, of course, to the edge of Brownback's second question: How do we get out of this? The hearings, addressing the roles of war and of big business in cultural rot, could be sensational. But bad news: Brownback has apparently been talking to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, in Roll Call's words, has been "long known for his interest in figuring out ways to solve the culture crisis." The black family will no doubt once again be identified as the prime suspect in eroding the national culture. War and big business will slip off the hook once more.