American war hero who threatens to wound a whole new generation

REMEMBER George Bush? He’s the president of the United States and will be until he leaves office in January 2009.

It is easy to forget this in the midst of all the understandable hype surrounding the current battle for nominations to be the next president.

Watching The Valley of Elah, the new film directed by Paul Haggis, provides an antidote to the glitz, glamour and pantomime that was on display during Super Tuesday.

Starring Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam vet attempting to find out what happened to his murdered son at a military base after he had returned from service in Iraq, the film serves as a reminder of why November’s election is so significant, given that it looks like Republicans will opt for John McCain who could be even scarier than George Bush when it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy.

The Valley of Elah depicts the dehumanising effect of war, the impact on families when young men and women are sent to Iraq and the fact that the US army is a misogynistic beast that must be constantly fed and watered, and never stopped in its tracks or called to account.

One of the anodyne press releases for the film quotes Haggis as insisting this is a film about “good people who have to make terrible decisions”, but the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones is more accurate when he suggests the film is a reminder that “blind, mindless patriotism is very dangerous”. There is an honesty here about what the war is doing to people — in Iraq and in the US army — and it’s the sort of honesty that is derided by John McCain and his fellow warmongers.

In McCain’s defence, it will be claimed that he has a track record in speaking out against the use of torture, having suffered horribly because of his incarceration during the Vietnam war, and liberals otherwise sceptical of the Republican party will cite his support of immigration reform as another reason to indulge him.

But the truth is that McCain will always be a soldier first and a politician second. He was reared to be a senior army figure, despite a dismal performance in naval academy and his initial rejection by the National War College before his father pulled rank.

McCain is the man who jeered at the notion of humanitarian aid to Rwanda and Bosnia and who at a campaign rally last month sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ hit Barbara Ann. He has suggested North Korea should be threatened “with extinction” and is happy for US troops to remain in Iraq “for 100 years”.

Aggressive intervention on a scale even Bush did not consider could be the consequence of McCain as commander-in-chief, and it is also likely that any Democratic candidate in trying to prove her or his credentials when facing a war hero during the election will also begin to talk tough and compromise their rhetoric of change as the Republicans cite “national security” and “staying the course” in Iraq as their mantras.

For all the talk of interesting characters, charm and hope, McCain is running on the same policies that Bush has pursued.

It is worth remembering this given the extent to which the American election process is showbusiness, backed by obscene amounts of money, which does little to remind us of the complexity and divisions of the United States.

At the beginning of Bush’s last term in 2004, US historian Godfrey Hodgson’s book, More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century, provided a disturbing survey of American politics and society since Nixon.

The continuing rise of the Republican party and of a new conservatism have not, Hodgson argues, spread affluence and equality in the US. On the contrary, the dismantling of the Roosevelt minimalist welfare system has made the US increasingly resemble the class-stratified societies of 19th century Europe.

It is now a country with a healthcare crisis that has left 47 million Americans without health insurance That book was just one of many contributions made by Hodgson in assessing American society and identity over the years.

In his book America In Our Time, published in 1976, he noted the things “that young Americans were discovering with pained surprise in the 1960s: that industrial society uses people as well as makes them more affluent, that there is a good deal of hypocrisy about politicians’ patriotism, that a lot of middle-class virtue is a sham … a generation of young Americans emerged from Birmingham and Dallas, Mississippi and Vietnam into disillusionment and cynicism”.

The problem is, as The Valley of Elah underlines, many more young Americans will emerge from the era of Bush and Iraq in the same way, and having a president who is too old, too erratic and too hawkish will do nothing to ease their pain.

McCain carries far too much baggage to be anything other than another divisive president. He is still sneering at the 1960s, challenging Hillary Clinton last October about her support for a grant to build a museum on the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival. He was keen to emphasise that he was not at Woodstock: “I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time”, invoking the memory of his torture by the Vietcong. That earned him a predictable standing ovation from the Republican diehards.

McCain’s refusal to countenance a change in foreign policy is one of the reasons why Obama is appealing to so many.

IT IS not an exaggeration to claim that his election could change the image of the United States overnight. Of course, Obama has waffled a lot, but a young intelligent man carrying little baggage and talking hope is a lot more preferable to an ageing warmonger who has definite targets and little intelligence.

Obama may be short on specifics, but he delivers his message with force and he has tapped into a desire for change that is not just of relevance to the very young.

It is striking the extent to which invoking the ghost of John F Kennedy, which could appear sentimental and mawkish, seemed to strike a chord with a lot of those who were around to vote for Kennedy.

There will always be cynicism about the extent to which Hillary Clinton is wedded to nothing other than political expediency and a feeling that America has had far too much of the Clintons.

But the significance of a woman breaking through the glass ceiling of American politics is profound. Many of the American women who lapped up Betty Friedan’s classic book The Feminine Mystique, which ignited the women’s movement in America in 1963, have been waiting for their moment.

“I just don’t want to see America go backwards” has been one of Clinton’s mantras during this campaign, and like all such soundbites, it can be derided, but backwards is precisely where the US will go with another blind and mindless patriot in the White House.

Amidst all the hysteria of Super Tuesday, that is a sobering and frightening thought.