Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

With the events in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States increasingly became a “culture of war” with a sense of global purpose, prone to jingoistic eruptions. The rhetoric of war became that of patriotism.

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly,
to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy.

— Ben Lerner / “The Lichtenberg Figures”

The Splendid War created this, becoming the template for every American “small war” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was a “war of choice” that started in a wave of idealism and disintegrated into brutality. America’s dependence on overwhelming force would form the assumption that, as in Cuba, war should be quick and relatively bloodless. Instead, outgunned opponents became an insurgency: the U.S. response throughout the coming decades would proceed with such near-identical ruthlessness as to seem scripted. Though usually treated as separate conflicts, the wars in Cuba and the Philippines should be seen as a continuum—one that begins with two similar Cuban and Filipino poet-martyrs who shape their nations’ identities and ends with the United States entering as a savior, only to become a scourge . . . As we’d already done to Native Americans, in order to save them, we had to kill them.

Not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation.

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

no more money for the endless
throat of money. no more 
syllogisms that permission
endless suffering. no more.

— Sam Sax / “Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges”

The culture of war became indelible: a new Orwellian world in which, according to Paul Fussell, war becomes “peacekeeping” and the acceptance of any act “in the name of freedom” a citizen’s duty. “Those who challenged the authenticity of American altruism were by definition evil-doers and mischief makers,” observed the historian Archibald Cary Coolidge. “So fully were Americans in the thrall of the moral propriety of their own motives as to be unable to recognize the havoc their actions often wrought on lives of others.”

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

Today my mum said she doesn’t remember
arriving at my house with a dishcloth,
doesn’t remember me telling her
my kitten stayed overnight at the vet,
that I’d be coming over to help with bills.
What she remembers is now.
She knows her memory is a ship
leaving port without permission . . .

— Kelli Russell Agodon / “Dementia Is a New Way to Be Buddhist”

It’s easy for moral certitude and blindness to be one. At its heart lay a darker certainty: those who needed our help were lesser beings—because they were not American. It lay in the order of things that they accept American guidance; dissenters were not only misguided but corrupt, and thus enemies. The myth plays out often—in my life, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The leaders we elect always act surprised when things go awry.

Since one classical definition of mental illness is the tendency to repeat obviously self-destructive behavior, one wonders how deeply our cherished myths make us willfully blind and mad.

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

What I’m Listening To:

Everything we love is gonna start to die
It’s only a matter of time
Till all we love has gone and died
It’s only a matter of time
Till all we love has died
At least we tried
At least we tried

— Poliça / “Li5a”