archive2003

In the Midlands, England
23 March 2003

Hi all

If you want to know about a Mercedes, you best go to a Mercedes dealership and ask a bunch of questions. If you want to know about an empire, you had best go to one and ask a lot of questions. So that is what I did in England this past week. I visited a few early churches, and a stone circle ala Stonehenge. Had a proper English lunch of sausage with bubbles and squeak (you don't even want to know) in a proper English pub, and I asked as many questions as I could from the remnants of the last great empire, you know, the one that the sun never set on... only it does now.

One thing I learned right away about empires is that they rise and fall. The other thing I learned is that you never quite know when the rise began. Most empires, or so they tell me, grew through military conquest, and then only later were there social and economic bits added to the mix. Every time we were driving through the lovely English countryside and I would remark about what a pleasant road we were on, my friends would say, "Well, of course, it is a Roman road." Every fourteen to sixteen miles we would come upon a large village. This happens to be the distance that a Roman legion would travel in a day. I wondered how long our roads will last - two or three thousand years? Except for some of the Indian trails that we have turned into roads, probably not.

And so now what are we to make of this new empire of ours in the making? It's already different. America did the economic and social conquest first. Only afterwards has it begun the military bit of world domination. What shall it be called? I'll leave that to the marketing and branding folks at the White House. I suspect they are already working on it? Something to do with the New American Century perhaps. And no doubt it will have the word "peace" in it. "Perpetual war for perpetual peace", as historian Charles Beard said so prophetically in 1947 about modern US foreign policy.

So watching events from the remnants of a fallen empire you see things a bit differently. I watched the bombing of Baghdad, "the bloody onslaught" as the headline in one British paper said. I don't suspect American media called the invasion "an onslaught", but I may be mistaken.

So there we were on the first full day of spring walking through the beautiful Midland countryside. The onslaught was well under way by then. It was a warm morning, yet still had a hint of crispness to the air. If ever the word "serene" could be attached to a place, it could be attached to that place at that moment. My friend, Andrea, began to speak quietly. She said, " It is in my folk memory (English people have such things as folk memories as it turns out) that it was on a day just like this that so many boys left for the trenches in the Great War. They were going to their deaths and they knew it. Funny eh, that I would think of that?"

There were a few other stories that I suspect didn't make it into the media in America. Fortunately, you didn't see the pictures of the twelve-year-old boy from Basra with the top of his head missing. But many people in Europe and the Middle East did. Nor, fortunately, did you see the "interviews" of the American POWs. I was outraged that the Iraqis did that (even though they did not sign the Geneva conventions). I was outraged when the North Vietnamese did it to captured American airmen. Just as I was outraged when we paraded "unlawful combatants" past cameras Camp X-ray. It may be worth noting that in the first two cases those doing the parading were themselves on the receiving end of American bombs.

So there we were having a proper English lunch in a proper English pub talking about the bombing. There was no talk of "shock and awe" here. More like "dismay and disgust". You see, many of the folks here either remember, or grew up in the rubble of a previous iteration of "shock and awe" - the German bombing of England in World War II. And we weren't far from Coventry, where the magnificent cathedral there was shocked and awed into oblivion. And then there was talk of "smart bombs". I concluded from the conversation that only in America would those two words be linked without the least bit of sarcasm. As an American, it is terribly difficult to be at all self-aware sitting in a proper English pub having a proper English lunch and not feel a bit simplistic and naïve.

And then I thought again of September 11th. In a way America was attacked by some of the smartest bombs imaginable. They were guided to their targets with pinpoint precision, and scored direct hits in three of the four cases. From the point of view of those bombs there was no collateral damage - the bombs did exactly what they were intended to do. All those lives ended with such clear, stark and brutal intentionality. Such is the stuff of smart bombs.

So there we were at the Rollright Stones in Warwickshire. This stone circle is less well known than Stonehenge, and so in a way it is more accessible and perhaps more interesting. There is great mystery to these places. Where did the stones come from? What were they for? Who were the people who engineered these circles, and what were they like? How did they get these stones here from wherever they came from? And then I thought that about the same time these folks were putting rocks one on top of another in these circles, an ancient civilization was emerging just south of what is now Baghdad some five thousand years ago. Only no one was now standing in silent awe at what those ancient people had created. No contemplation. No questions. It occurred to me in that moment some site just as important, a marker of who we were, of where we are from, probably was being obliterated. Such it is in war, all thoughts lead back to the carnage and the suffering. In that moment the people in Iraq - American, British and Iraqi people - were all together somehow in the middle of this circle.

Finally, we went to visit the great Lincoln Cathedral in Lincolnshire. It is old by any reckoning, even by English standards. As you stand in front of the great doors to the cathedral and look up at the stonework - its massiveness and its fine detail, or as you look up at the incredibly ornate stained glass windows, or as you stand outside and listen to the choir practice for Evensong, you can't help but feel as countless generations of ordinary folk must have felt a they did the same thing, you can't help but feel awe.

And then I realized that just as "smart bomb" is a uniquely American phrase, so is "shock and awe". I am often shocked at what we humans will do to each other, but I am awed when I am in the presence of a power that is beyond words, or human comprehension.

We Americans have a lot to learn about so many things, awe being near the top of the list.

Keep in touch

Edd

PS If you feel so inclined, please feel free to forward this to friends and colleagues. But once you have received a forwarded HigherPortal and you would like to receive future dispatches, please contact me via e-mail (address below). I'd like to have some idea as to who is receiving these. Thanks.

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econboy@earthlink.net

No Links to the war in this dispatch. I'll catch up on my reading next week.

http://www.rollrightstones.co.uk/
http://www.lincolncathedral.com/