Orion > Thoughts on America

These are the words of the tune played by British military musicians as British troops and their Hessian hirelings surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Va., on October 7, 1781. Lord Cornwallis and his men, both the homegrown and the hired, were caught between Colonial troops and the French on land and a French fleet offshore. The ships had wrecked Yorktown. Fires raged all about and death was everywhere, both civilian and military. Quite possibly the finest professional army in the world surrendered to what at a glance almost appeared to be a guerrilla force, but it was a superbly led and organized one. The British had thought they had the key in grasp to put down the rebellion five years earlier. That is, when they took New York. The music was appropriate. The world had, indeed, been turned upside down.

Six and a half years before the surrender, Paul Revere rode to warn that the British were about to march on Lexington and Concord, way up in Massachusetts. His act was one of treason. The rider knew the penalty. The prescription for traitors was to be hung, taken down before they died, then disemboweled and their intestines burned before their eyes. The posthumous atrocity was to behead the corpse, cut the body into quarters, and mount the pieces on spikes for all to ponder. Barbaric practices have been stock in trade for people and governments all over the globe since we started keeping track of such things.

The third story is of an Englishman riding a train through the great basin of the Mississippi a couple centuries later and marveling at the abundance of it all. To no one in particular he was heard to mutter, "Damn George III." That was not a mean-spirited pun. George III was the stubborn monarch who, with other British politicians, had stonewalled the colonists' petitions. His prime minister resigned after Yorktown. A new government was formed to frame the peace, which was concluded almost two years later in Paris on September 3, 1783. George III later went insane.

On September 11, 2001, the world was once more turned upside down. It has been upended time and again - sometimes by nature (go ask the dinosaurs), sometimes by the barnacles of time and complacency, but most often by humans. In many cases it ultimately takes the form of war, which by definition is merciless.

So to treat the events of September 11 as unprecedented is not quite true. Some things about it were. The conversion of commercial airliners into guided missiles was unprecedented because airliners are relatively new. The scale of both the targets and the operation were stunning. The targets were symbolic. While the audacity was not new, the effect was. It was almost as though it were staged for television. It reminded people of movies!

But there was more old than new in it. The disregard for human life was not new. The suicidal nature of the hijackers was not new. The level of hatred that fuels such ventures was not new. The intrigue and secrecy of the undertaking was not new.

Our reaction, naturally, was one of shock, grief and outrage. President Bush's choice of the word "war" was not inappropriate. What that means in this case remains to be seen. There must be a response to assuage our hurt. The meek have not generally inherited the earth. Great societies produce warriors. They all have, as have we. But the nature of this conflict has also been turned upside down. "War" remains undefined in its particulars. So we turn to that maligned species known as the politician and hope for the best. Let it be a search for wisdom as well as a call to arms.

The question seems to be, "Why do they hate us so much?" Maybe for the same reason that the down-and-outers always resent the rich folks in the big house on the highest hill. Maybe because they feel their legitimate aspirations have been thwarted. Maybe because of our hubris born of decades of plenty, while others have grown up in refugee detention camps. And maybe because of that great old mischief-maker, fundamentalist religion. Nothing makes killing more palatable than a sense of holiness, with the promise of martyrdom.

Added to that combustible mixture is a new fundamentalist orthodoxy, globalization. This puts tremendous tensions on the established orders, economic, cultural and traditional. As Thomas Friedman argues in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, "Finding the proper balance between the Lexus and the Olive Tree is the great overriding challenge of our times." To view the rush to globalization as fundamentalist might seem odd. But it is the recent prescription of choice for all that ails the world.

This tidal wave has stumbled on an old rock: "All politics are local." That rock has truth imbedded in it. Are nations, even regions, crazy to feel threatened by their loss of identity, culture and tradition? Are people who worry about a degree of self-sufficiency in food production, fuel and other mundane but essential things Luddites? I don't think so. But this economic steamroller does seem to say, "My way or the highway."

A kinder, gentler British politics might have averted the Revolution, but the root causes would have had to be addressed before Lexington and Concord. We might be singing "God Save the Queen" instead of "God Bless America" but for that. And maybe not. It took a long time, but we have for some time considered ourselves brothers or at least kissing kin to the British, and repeatedly comrades in arms. With modern weaponry and science we no longer have that luxury of time to heal such grievous wounds.

Now we must have action, and I'm sure we will. This generation of politicians faces a herculean task. The catalog of possible horrors surpasses the military: deadly diseases planted in feed lots with thousands of steers, nerve gas deployed in subways, and on and on. We don't have 50 or 100 years to work out the kinks as we did with Great Britain. To meet this challenge without compromising inherited freedoms is going to be very difficult. But we must seek it. As for "eliminating evil," that is quite beyond the reach of any government anywhere, anytime. We will just have to do the best we can.

The World Turned Upside Down by Maurice Telleen

The World Turned Upside Down
by Maurice Telleen