A date that was supposed to live in infamy sometimes comes and goes without a mention in the papers anymore. Oh, you might pick up the paper on December 8th, and see a stand-alone photo of some elderly man in a wheelchair saluting a flag, and the cutline might say he once served in something the history books call "World War Two"--in some unit, in some capacity, in some area of the world. And then it's on to the football post-season. Which bowl did Arkansas get into?
Just this last week, we read that the last man from Easy Company--yes, that Easy Company, the airborne outfit featured in the mini-series "Band of Brothers"--had died. The men that you saw interviewed in the opening credits of that war epic no longer walk this Earth. Can you believe it's been 20 years since that war flick came out?
And it's been 80 years since December 7th, 1941. So long ago, it might as well be 1066. Or 1492. Or some other year in the history books that the kids must memorize, repeat on a test, and forget. Is World War II taught in American history, or "ancient" history?
And Japan is such a close ally--not just an ally, but a friend--that it's hard for some Americans these days to imagine a war with her. Just as it might be hard to ever imagine a United States at war with Germany.
It was a different world then, but not so different: Europe and Asia had been embroiled in the conflict for some time by 1941. But we were assured that the world's troubles need not be ours, and above all, we must not interfere in foreign wars. (Sound familiar?) After all, there were oceans to protect us from the bad guys. (Sound familiar?) It all sounded assuring enough, but what were we to do when the world's problems came to America? They did Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941.
In a few hours, more than 2,300 Americans were lost and a good part of the American fleet wiped out at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. But even before then we were involved in an undeclared naval war against German U-boats in the North Atlantic. We shouldn't have been surprised. But of course we were. Here beginneth the lesson, a familiar one:
Be prepared. The best way to preserve the peace, we had been duly warned, is to prepare for war. But we drowsed off. And called it idealism. That kind of sloth is almost part of our national psyche. After all, we didn't settle a new world in order to stay involved in the blood and turmoil of the old. It was all too easy to forget that there is but one world, and it grows smaller every day, what with one innovation following another in technology, commerce, communications, you name it.
Actually, we've never been isolated. Even our war for independence, lest we forget, was part of a world war in which we sought foreign aid at the court of the French sovereign--and received it in time to triumph at Yorktown with the arrival of Admiral de Grasse's fleet. Our splendid isolation is a myth and always has been.
Yet the myth persists. It even becomes political philosophy. Back in 1821, eloquent old John Quincy Adams explained why threats from abroad should and could be safely ignored: America could best serve the course of freedom by providing a good example, he said, by shining a light for other nations rather than fighting evil abroad. Or as he put it: "Whenever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Even now, it's hard not to rise up and cheer Mr. Adams' words. How appealing they are. And how convenient. Why waste our blood and treasure abroad when all we have to do is set a good example and wish others well? It all sounds so fine. Especially that line about not going abroad in search of monsters. But such a theory does dance around one question: What happens when the monster comes in search of us?
It did on December 7th, 1941. And it did later on September 11, 2001, giving Americans 60 years to go back to sleep, and forget that the world is tied together, like a knot. Now it's been 20 years since the last time the monster came looking for us, and found us on a Tuesday morning, not expecting that our own airplanes would be used against us. But that was so long ago now. There are people who voted in the last election who weren't even alive in 2001. That monster has been away so many years, we scarcely remember what he looks like.
"I sometimes wonder," American diplomat George F. Kennan once told an audience that had gathered in a great lecture hall to imbibe his wisdom, "whether . . . a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath--in fact you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could not have prevented some of these situations from arising . . . ."
One of the many lessons that Sept. 11 and Dec. 7 teach us--or should teach us--is that the oceans no longer protect us, like they might have done in John Adams' time.
It's been 20 years. It's been 80 years. Can we afford to go back to sleep? Or must we learn this lesson again, and again, and again?