Here are some veteran-related links for your Memorial Day reading, which I hope you will enjoy. All of them should probably have been Notes or Tweets, but, well, see the subtitle of this post.
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The First Memorial Day
First, please give this four minutes of your time:
It’s a cool story. Of course what I focused on was how he communicates it. They don’t hand out Pulitzers for nothing, it turns out!
Two Quick Hits
And now for something completely different. Psychedelics are back: lawmakers press House Armed Services Committee to approve research into psychedelic drugs for PTSD treatment. Apparently 27% of veterans since 9/11 have been diagnosed with PTSD, and there’s some evidence to suggest that drugs like MDMA can help prevent suicide and drug abuse. The initiative seems to have bipartisan support, so it’ll be interesting to see if it goes anywhere.
You may have also seen astory about veterans in New York being evicted from their temporary hotel accommodations so that the state could put migrants in the hotel instead. Of course, none of that was true. The men weren’t veterans, they weren’t evicted, and there were no migrants. Why was it a story, then? Because a veterans organization knew that right-wing media would run with it without checking their sources—it confirms their priors, as the statisticians say. So the organization promised cash to a group of unhoused men if they pretended to be veterans and circulated a lie about their eviction. The cherry on top is that the organization never paid the men.
The Politics of Debt
Next up, a longer read. Paul Krugman very clearly does not read this blog! He posted this extended discussion of why governments don’t have to pay off their debts like us mortals do—instead, they have to service them. Check out the historical example he uses.
By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British government’s debt, according to Bank of England estimates, was 184 percent of G.D.P. — far above America’s debt at the end of World War II. Most of that debt, by the way, consisted of consols — perpetual bonds that pay interest forever but never require repayment of principal. Still, even those can be retired. So how did Britain pay off its Napoleonic debt? It didn’t.
Reviewing the whole history of British debt over the centuries would obscure what happened (modern numbers are so large that historical movements become invisible), so let’s zoom out just a little and focus on the period between 1776, when Britain began an expensive colonial war you may have heard about, and 1851, the date of the Crystal Palace exposition celebrating industrial and technological progress:
Sure enough, British public debt when Prince Albert opened the Crystal Palace was basically unchanged from its level when the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo 36 years earlier. The idea that we should expect governments to pay off their debt isn’t just ill-informed, it’s also centuries out of date.
In fact, Britain’s willingness to let its Napoleonic debt just sit there is in a way even more remarkable than America’s later willingness to live with its World War II debt. After all, 19th-century Britain didn’t experience sustained inflation, and while it was experiencing economic growth at a rate never before seen in history — hence the Crystal Palace — that growth was still fairly slow by later standards. As a result, debt relative to national income was still quite high in 1851: 130 percent of G.D.P.
Yet as far as I know, panicky moralizing about the debt didn’t dominate British politics, which seemed to adopt the attitude satirized in “1066 and All That”: “The National Debt is a very Good Thing and it would be dangerous to pay it off, for fear of Political Economy.” Instead, the public was preoccupied with issues like the Great Stink of 1858.
Perhaps one of my distinguished and well-connected readers could direct Professor Krugman to my post from a month ago?
Because all of you are learned readers of this fine blog, you know that, in fact, panicky moralizing about the debt did dominate British politics for the decade after Waterloo. The result was that the government drastically cut back its spending as a percentage of the total economy, eventually reaching its nadir in British history in the mid-1830s. Krugman is right that by the 1850s, concerns about the debt were no longer the dominant political issue. He’s also right that Liverpool and his successors didn’t try to pay down the debt; instead, they just focused on servicing it (which is, again, what forms the foundation of a government’s credit rating—someone please tell congressional Republicans). I completely agree with Krugman that governments shouldn’t worry about debt the way households do. I would just add that while governments shouldn’t worry, that doesn’t mean that they don’t.
A surprising number of memorable nineties headlines involved armed confrontations between civilians and the authorities. In 1992, in reaction to the police beating of an unarmed Black man, Rodney King—and to years of aggressive policing—Los Angeles broke out into five days of violence that killed sixty-three people. Later that year, a siege and a shoot-out at a white supremacist’s cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, left three dead. Then came Waco (1993), McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing (1995), and the Unabomber’s arrest (1996). In 1999, two teen-agers in Columbine, Colorado, seeking to top McVeigh’s body count, waged war on their own high school. The next year, dozens of armed federal agents stormed a house in Miami to seize a six-year-old, Elián González.
What caused this? Two scholars of nineties violence, the historian Kathleen Belew and the sociologist Stuart A. Wright, point to militarization, not just of law enforcement but of civilians, too. After the Vietnam War, the weapons and tactics of war flowed into domestic life. In her book “Bring the War Home,” Belew describes political violence in the U.S. as the “catastrophic ricochet” of fighting abroad.
By the nineties, those ricochets were constant. The end of the Cold War relieved the country of a long-standing foe, but it didn’t bring peace. Rather, there was what the historian Michael Sherry, in “The Punitive Turn in American Life,” calls a “hydraulic relationship” between war-fighting and crime-fighting: the fewer enemies the United States found beyond its borders, the more it found within them. The Cold War’s conclusion had brought “unrivalled peace” to the world, President Bill Clinton crowed, yet to the United States it also brought amped-up wars on crime and drugs. Sherry notes the débuts, in 1989 and 1990, respectively, of “Cops” and “Law & Order,” wildly popular television shows about arresting and incarcerating people.
Locking people up was nothing new. But, by the nineties, the line that the United States had long drawn between its police and its military was badly blurred. Police departments relied increasingly on units, such as swat teams, that used military weapons, vehicles, equipment, outfits, and tactics.
Such units are “paramilitary” because normally, by law, the actual military can’t be used for domestic policing. Nevertheless, the late Cold War introduced significant loopholes into that law, especially where drugs were concerned. (It was by claiming, implausibly, that Koresh might be operating a meth lab that the A.T.F. secured military support and helicopters for its disastrous raid on Mount Carmel.) And arms-makers, desperate for customers after the Cold War’s end, found other ways to push military or “dual-use” hardware onto law enforcement. Local police chiefs were offered tanks and grenade launchers.
[…]
Sherry writes that, by the eighties, the wall separating the police from the military had already crumbled to the point where helicopters were “swooping down on alleged California pot growers,” some “blaring Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ ”
[…]
McVeigh grew up near a military base, and he was gun-obsessed from childhood. He joined the Army, where he remembered being made to scream “Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!” twenty times a day during training until his “throat was raw.” In the Gulf War, he killed two Iraqis and won a Bronze Star.
McVeigh quit the Army, yet he never fully accepted civilian life. His Army friends remained his most important contacts; he’d met Terry Nichols, his collaborator in the bombing, on his first day of basic training. He made other contacts at gun shows. He attended roughly eighty, where he distributed cards with the address of an F.B.I. sharpshooter who’d killed a woman at Ruby Ridge (and who’d been at Waco), hoping to spur an assassination. He also sold flares and flare launchers, for use, he suggested, against the “A.T.F. bastards” in helicopters.
Booth, McVeigh’s model, had brandished a knife and assassinated Abraham Lincoln with a derringer, a one-shot lady’s pistol. McVeigh, in contrast, was a walking armory. On the day of the bombing, he carried a Glock .45 with a Black Talon “cop killer” bullet in the chamber, plus a fully loaded ammunition magazine. The seven-thousand-pound bomb McVeigh built was a homemade device—barrels of fertilizer soaked in racing fuel—but it wasn’t an amateur job. With tactical acumen, McVeigh arranged the barrels as a “shaped charge” to point the blast toward the building.
The Oklahoma City bombing, which McVeigh called his “retaliatory strike” against an “increasingly militaristic and violent” state, damaged three hundred and twenty-four buildings and wounded more than five hundred people. It killed a hundred and sixty-eight, more than the number of Americans killed in combat in the Gulf War.
There’s lots more in the piece, which I highly recommend. Many of the issues it identifies, including why confronting protestors with military equipment is a bad idea and why military training and combat experience can radicalize veterans, are echoed in The Horrible Peace. I make no claims that those echoes provide any solutions to today’s problems, but I hope that by calling attention to their enduring nature, I can at least cause readers to bring a little more nuance and empathy to today’s debates.
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