Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 7, 1991 TAG: 9103070464
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Now the hope is that the guns of February will be followed by a domestic "era of good feeling" in which competing philosophies will unite to tackle those seemingly intractable problems of crime, rampaging deficits, inefficient schools and other assorted ills of American democracy as it enters its third century.
As the man of the hour himself put it, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." That was the ex-wimp and now unbeatable champ, George Herbert Walker Bush. And it was only a few months ago that leading Democrats (and some Republicans) sensed that he would be a one-term president. That confirms yet again the ancient admonition, "The wisdom of the wisest man is foolishness to God."
No question, the Vietnam syndrome cut deeply into the American psyche. Can you really blame everything - from a $335 billion deficit to falling world market share for U.S. manufacturers - on a war that ended 17 years ago and which never truly involved vital American interests?
But the strain of pessimism lurking just beneath the surface of American life does seem to date from the Vietnam era. While its genesis seems too complex to blame simply on the war, other causes may date from about the same time. The struggle for civil rights, to take one example, spawned expectations for a new dawn that millions of poor blacks believe they have never seen and doubt they ever will.
The great environmental movement and thousands of TV shows gave birth to a conviction that American business was evil and we were choking on our own excrement. Watergate and other scandals convinced many that the government itself was evil at worst, incompetent at best.
Vast increases in appropriations for education, law enforcement and welfare have not been matched by a public conviction that our schools are better, our streets safer or our poor happier.
Falling expectations may help explain why so many professed themselves astonished that our expensive and much-lampooned weapons seemed to work. As one headline proclaimed: "The era of $600 toilet seats has been vindicated."
Equally astonishing to pundits was the enthusiasm that most Americans showed for this war once it began. Sensitive souls, accustomed to having their peevish views upheld by major organs of the American press, were no doubt offended by the sea of flags and ribbons. It is not without significance that these were more likely to be seen in humbler precincts, on inexpensive American cars rather more often than on expensive foreign cars.
This phenomenon was, I believe, a direct product of the Vietnam syndrome. The plain people saw the American military reflecting itself, not the elite of prestigious schools, jobs, etc., and were determined that this time the soldiers in the field would not suffer for any lack of support on the home front.
Some now fear that the heady wine of victory will go to America's head, giving us a taste for the "what we say goes" syndrome that will invite more costly foreign adventures, just as the exaggerated rhetoric of the Cold War gave rise to Vietnam.
But that doesn't seem very likely. Reflect upon the months in which public opinion was prepared to take on even a third-rate power: the back and forth of polling data, and the sharp divisions in Congress almost to the moment the first shots were fired. Again, the plain people had a pretty good idea of who would do most of the fighting, and they were circumspect until the eve of battle.
The result itself confounded most "experts" and came closest to the Spanish-Americn War or those brief contests of Britain's march to empire. "God," as Napoleon cracked, "is on the side of the heavier artillery."
Wars always have unintended results. Surely, Hitler did not believe that his policies would end by bringing into the center of Europe the two powers for which he entertained the greatest contempt, Soviet Russia and the United States. Nor could those American isolationists of the 1930s have envisioned that World War II would end with their country occupying a summit of privilege, prestige and prosperity that no other country could come close to matching for a generation.
In fact, no great power has ever existed without the martial means to impose its will in extreme circumstances. America was united from sea to shining sea and has held her own for 200 years because enough of her people were prepared to confront redskins, redcoats, Mexicans, Germans, Japanese, Russians and Saddam Hussein. While hardly a morality play, those who would substitute moralizing for military prowess may have received a reminder that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
But military power has never been a substitute for a domestic political economy that works hard and works smart. While no one should ever expect a great democracy to be a neat house of harmony, the danger to America still comes from that deep division at home as to the proper choices among competing philosophies to deal with those intractable problems of deficits, etc. And that division will not go away simply because we won, in the phrase of 1898, a "jolly little war."
George Bush may be unbeatable, but his opponents in control of the Congress are equally unbeatable.
by CNB