I must apologize, first of all, for my silence these many months. I will put forward two excuses: 1) a surfeit of issues, all vexingly interwoven and complex, that combined to overwhelm me; and, 2) a perfectionist tendency that seemed to demand of each blog posting a fully realized and intricately sourced essay.

 

My son the online music critic reminds me that I should treat the blog less formally, like a journal entry: each one a snapshot of my most tentative thinking in the given moment; or like a piece of an ongoing conversation, like the newspaper column I contributed here in southernmost Indiana – between 1992 and ’94 – to the Perry County News.

 

As for the first problem, the cacophony of vexing issues, Jonathan Schell’s review-essay in the December 10 issue of The Nation, “A Colder War,” offers a rhetorical angle on the question of war (which ever seems to foreclose any substantive discussion and movement on peacetime concerns like healthcare and simple economic justice). It also bears on my increasingly pacifistic stance on the issue, a stance for which I am ever being dismissed as merely – or perversely – naive.

 

The assertion of my naiveté really boils down to this bit of advice that my good father used to give my adolescent self: “Brett, get your head out of the clouds and join the real world!”

 

The question I have dared to ask in that respect is this rather Quixotic one: who determines which of the plethora of proffered “real worlds” is, well, real? And this corollary: given the 20th-century’s inglorious history of “wars to end all wars” and peaces to be achieved only by the making of more war, with the principal effect of constantly escalating threats and a ramped-up rhetoric that would seem to be preparing us (for the illusion of security at home) for perpetual preemptive war on foreign soil, isn’t it about time that we seriously question these hawkish prophets-of-realpolitick’s own grip on reality?

 

And why are we so egregiously indifferent to the greater and lesser apocalypses we continue to wreak in others’ backyards?

 

In my short story “Mist Over Mount Fuji” (Tertulia Magazine, October 2005) the protagonist wonders about “Kenneth Burke’s ‘wan hope’ (in the latter half of the 20^th century) that ‘in the sheer muddle of current international relations’ the very contradictoriness of competing nationalist aims might cancel each other out, thus preventing ‘a perfect fulfillment in a perfect Apocalyptic holocaust.’”          

 

Schell – while neither overstating the case for, or underestimating the case against – suggests a surprising historical precedent for a version of Burke’s hope, a version that is certainly less accidental and even slightly more vigorous.

 

Schell’s subject is the present installment (Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race) in Richard Rhodes’s ongoing series of books on the nuclear age in its most sweeping context. The revelation, for me, is Rhodes’s characterization of both Reagan and Gorbachev as (Schell’s words) “nuclear abolitionists”: “The unbearable tragedy is that when the two leaders came to within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to proceed to their common goal [...] the enterprise was tripped up by misleading advice from some of the very war fighters whose premises Reagan had rejected.”

 

More precisely, the characterization (Schell’s paraphrase again) of Reagan as “not only an unlikely nuclear abolitionist” but a man “guided by a visceral revulsion against nuclear weapons,” and one who “may have been unwilling to launch nuclear retaliation even if the United States were attacked with nuclear weapons first”; and likewise, that of Gorbachev, who “once participated in a war game simulating an American attack on the Soviet Union” and, “when the critical moment came, balked”: “I will not press the button even for training purposes,” Gorbachev purportedly said on that occasion.

 

As Schell writes of his own response to Rhodes’s account: “If these reports are correct, they leave half a century of strategic calculation, all of which has depended on the certitude of nuclear retaliation, a shambles. They suggest that a radical rethinking of the conventional wisdom regarding nuclear arms is not only decades overdue but also possible.”

 

They also suggest a vital reason for insisting on the rejection of our current rhetorics of attack, of character assassination, of talking heads shouting past each other and past the deep substance of the issues; to engage instead in a pragmatic and ultimately moral “rhetoric of assent” (as Wayne Booth called it), one that might allow us to move past our most visceral antagonisms and mutually condemnatory judgments.

 

I have always had mixed feelings about Ronald Reagan, who for all his misguided imperialism has often struck me as embodying something of the good-hearted and optimistic ideals of my own German American forebears. Likewise, my grandfather’s hero Teddy Roosevelt, that paradox of imperialist excess and humane progressivist passion.

 

Discovering a corresponding virtue in our present Commander-in-Chief, the ever reckless and ill-spoken George W. Bush, has clearly been a harder task for me. All the more reason to remind myself that civility and self-disciplined restraint in discourse, even at its most impassioned and urgent moments, is a virtue worthy of our constant pursuit.

 

Even if, in the heat of rhetorical battle, we sometimes vehemently – and without too much regard to delicacy – must call the moment’s adversary on his unconscious or conscious lies.

 

Afterwards, perhaps, we can also remember that adversary as a human figure, protagonist of a personal drama or tragedy that in greater or lesser degree resembles our own.

 

----Brett Alan Sanders