moral casualty of vietnam

This was written in that balmy, pre 9/11 era when the war clouds on the horizon were mostly over Columbia.

CHARLES MANSON, PRO-LIFE?

Can you imagine Charles Manson turning pro-life and campaigning against abortion? Would his assistance be welcome in the anti-abortion movement? Charles Manson, for those of you too disgustingly young to remember, directed the horrendous raids in Los Angeles, in which his "Manson Clan" invaded the Tate and LaBianca households, slaughtered the occupants, and desecrated some of the bodies.

Back when the Vietnam War was still going full blast, the murders and trial were somewhat more sensational than even the O.J. Simpson affair. Back when the Vietnam War was still going full blast, to be sure. Back when 200 body bags or more were coming back every week. Back when the standard operation of the war was the "search-and-destroy mission," an expedition into the surrounding countryside, not to take and hold land, but simply to kill as many people as possible and be celebrated in Robert McNamara's infamous weekly press briefings as "body counts" and "kill ratios."

Back when "free-fire zones" meant shoot anything that moved in certain areas. Back when "popping dinks" meant shooting Vietnamese for sport. Back when photos had an extensive underground circulation, showing napalmed children, bodies shredded by plastic shrapnel that could not be detected by X-rays, and soldiers posing behind decapitated Viet Cong bodies, like hunters posing with a deer. Back when Air Progress, December 1968, hardly some hippie, peace creep rag, said of B-52 carpet bombing tactics: "For the most part enemy ground fire in South Vietnam has seldom been effective above 3000 ft. Thus B-52's drop as low as 5,000 ft. to put their bombs closer to friendly perimeters- and let Stratofort crews check the results. But when the Boeing bombers go over the Demilitarized Zone, and occasionally into the North Vietnam panhandle, they move to higher altitudes to avoid more sophisticated antiaircraft weapons." Back when you could easily get yourself called a Communist or a coward for objecting to any of this, or even today, even by some self-styled "pro-life" campaigners.

Some thirty years later, to be sure, you can still overlook all this, blame everything on the "brutal Hanoi regime," and still enjoy good standing in the "pro-life" movement. as Rep. Henry Hyde did in a Wall Street Journal piece last July. In such circles, I would suppose, it would be considered irrelevant or even offensive to call the Manson Clan rampages "search and destroy" missions in miniature. In the real world of moral formation, however, it is completely relevant, indeed, the more offensive, the more relevant. Louis Brandeis' famous dissent, that when the government breaks the law, it invites every man to break the law, is hardly some narrow, technical dictum. No, it embraces the very core and essence of morality, without which no human society can survive.

"Pro-life" moral concerns badly, badly need to bring a thing or two out of the Twilight Zone. Let's look at the rise in social pathologies over the past quarter century or so, in particular at the corrosive effects of the Vietnam War on American society. Square, traditional, "pro-life," Norman Rockwell types have yet to realize it, but it was the Vietnam War that destroyed traditional authority and gave the drug culture, the sexual revolution and the rip-off ethic their biggest boost. It gave the Vietnam generation a morally tragic choice between the square, traditional culture that supported the war and the hedonistic, dissolute counter-culture which just dropped out to escape it.

James Lincoln Collier, The Rise of Selfishness in America (Oxford University Press, 1991), traces the gradual rise of dissolute, hedonistic lifestyles through the 19th and 20th centuries. Previously confined to the vice districts, they were celebrated in risque novels in the 1930's. In the 1950's they gained additional exposure in Playboy and the beat movement. It was only after the demoralization of Vietnam and Watergate, however, that they spread throughout American society. A gradual encroachment became a flood of drug use, illegimate births and broken families. Figure today's eight and ten year old "super-predators" pushing each other out of windows and whatnot are the offspring of teen age mothers born about then.

If you like Vietnam, you will love Columbia. It is not so much a matter of refighting Vietnam as of restoring moral credibility. It absolutely requires repudiation of quite a few policies, past and present, with about the same moral stature as a Manson Clan rampage. Otherwise the "pro-life" movement has about the same moral stature as Charles Manson.