Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 20, 1991 TAG: 9102200480
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT TURNER JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I sense an image. Effluent, the foul sewage of hatred and fear, rushing like a creating flood through a millrace, tapping the roiling stream, the fever dream we call history. Once again the death-pale millstone turns, coaxed into a merciless, creaking momentum. It does the work we have assigned it, turning to grind a fresh batch of an evil flour of despair, to make the bread of illusion that does not nourish.
Give us this day our daily dread.
It is a time of war. But then, of course, it always is.
The pedant in his musty robes paces before his lectern, then pauses to handle careworn notes. He raises tired eyes to address the plastic faces of his students.
"There are two kinds of war which infect the puzzled children of Earth," he says. "Take this down please. There is daily war and staged war."
His listeners respond with glazed eyes and hints of automated smiles.
"The weapons for the two faces of war are the same, although the manner of their use is distinctive. Staged war, you see, is dramatic. It assigns dramatic roles, permitting people to wear striking costumes and to caress machinery of vengeance. It intoxicates and exhilarates for a short season, for it offers the illusion that one's mortality is less certain than that of the despised brother. Evil will be slain. We will get even. We will give greater emptiness than we will receive.
"By the rule of irony," the pedant continues, "staged war permits the virtues of courage, loyalty, steadfastness, and patience to be dressed up for the service of producing ashes. Staged war is assertive; it does not pretend to be loving or caring. And, in this sense, it is more honest than daily war. But, ultimately the product is the same. Ashes.
"By contrast to staged war, daily war is boring, tedious and banal. Its casualties do not have their names gathered on monuments; there is no facade that speaks of glory. For the casualties are numberless, silent, like the windblown snow of a wintry morning."
"We take little account of the small murders committed in kitchens, in classrooms and on playgrounds, in divorce courts and in traffic jams. Yet, it is out of daily war that staged war must inevitably emerge from time to time. The tide of conflicts, the stream we sometimes call history, must, from time to time, overflow its banks.
"In daily war we pretend to control the Janus-faced god of hate and fear by assigning its evils to others and by ignoring death; in staged war we pretend to control hate and fear by assigning its evils to others and by embracing death.
"But beyond these distinctions, the weapons of warfare are the same. And so, you ask, just what are weapons?"
The plastic faces do not reply. The pedant's words seem to float like moats of dust in a shaft of sunlight. They do not offend.
"The weapons of war are three: First, never be still, never listen when you have a chance to be right. Second, believe nothing that is obvious. Third, honor fear, but never call it that."
"Let me elaborate," the pedant continues. "Never be still when you can be right. For to be right is to find comfort in defining another as wrong. To be right is to hold up uncertainty and call it truth; to be right is to win. To win is to assure your brother that he has lost; to guarantee your sister that she has been degraded and made less that you may imagine for a fleeting instant that you are more.
"Never believe what is obvious. Never entertain for long the deep knowledge that the longing for love in each of us is nothing less than innocence. For that is blasphemy; it undermines the conduct of war. We must never imagine for a moment that our innocence is more important than our guilt nor face the fearful possibility that it is more real.
"And, finally," the pedant continues, "we must honor fear, but pretend it is not fear. Fear must be given other names, and these are legion. We may speak our pain in the tongues of Babel. We may evoke the gods of righteous anger, prejudice, social injustice, selfishness, lack of discipline, bureaucratic inefficiency, disinformation, abusive parents, drug abuse, a lack of law and order, food addiction, laziness, sloth. But we must never speak of fear for what it is: that it is the absence of love.
"And so, out of daily war there come pageants of fear and death. And, when the pageants begin, there can be no doubt that there is good and evil, that evil must be slain, that innocence is a childish myth. And that is the way it seems until the time of war ends in the time of ashes."
"So what do you suggest?" a student asks, doodling in the margins of a spiral notebook.
"Well," the pedant says, "what I say means very little. The problem, I'm afraid, is far too bothersome to face, since we are devoted to daily war. And the answer is too simple to be believed. It always has been."
"But do you support the war?" asks a student. "Why, I have always supported the war," replies the pedant. "But, with practice and devotion, I hope that my support will falter."
"This is all beside the point," a student declares, having heard quite enough. There are murmurs of assent. "The question is, do you support our troops in the gulf?"
Reflecting, the pedant says: "You see, the question is made up of fear thoughts. It has no sane answer. I must support the courage and innocence of the warriors as best I can. But I cannot, in the context of insane events and premises, propose that I have sane answers."
"Then you will protest the war?"
"Perhaps, in some way, I will protest the war. For whatever value that may offer. Although, until the time of ashes, I suspect that will mean little. In the meantime, I think, I will pay more attention to the silent course of snowflakes than to the electronic rhapsodies of fear that will accompany this particular pageant. And each day, I will try again to lay down the weapons of daily war."
"Then you have nothing practical to suggest?"
"No," said the pedant. "There is nothing practical about war."
So, it is a time of war. Tomorrow, perhaps in the spring, perhaps not, but eventually, there will be the time of ashes.
by CNB