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CounterPunch
October
15, 2002
A Bird Lover's
Guide to Chickenhawks
or Chickenhawk a la Mode
by BEN TRIPP
A chickenhawk, dear readers, is one of two things:
either a voting-age pedophile, or a warmonger who has never gone
to war. It's an unattractive word.
I have little to say about the Man/Boy
Love crowd, just as I have little to say about the habits of
cannibal chimpanzees. But there is much to be said about the
other chickenhawks, the kind that can't wait to send someone
else off to fight. Particularly as there's a bunch of them in
Washington hell-bent on starting a war with Iraq, even as we
speak.
When a war comes along, the civilian
President, who is also Commander-In-Chief of the armed forces,
must figuratively lead our nation into battle-whether or not
he's been in combat, or the military, or even worn a garment
with epaulettes. Abraham Lincoln, who invented the log, served
in the Blackhawk war, long before the Blackhawks started making
helicopters. Lincoln never saw a moment's combat, but did a
lot of marching, and gained an appreciation for the price of
war- he saw folks without scalps during a time when you were
considered naked without a hat. When the Civil War broke out,
President Lincoln wanted no part of it. But he listened to his
generals, conducted the Northern campaign with diligence, and
in a bond which has lasted some six score and eight years cemented
our nation back together.
George W. Bush couldn't cement the handle
back on a shaving mug. He served some of a tour of duty defending
Alabama from the Viet Cong, but the only scalp he ever saw was
firmly affixed to George McGovern's head. Yet Bush has a hunger
for war (or at least Karl Rumsfeld does, which amounts to the
same thing, as Rumsfeld rents the basement apartment in Bush's
head). The war in Afghanistan doesn't count as a chickenhawk
action, because we didn't pick the fight, it picked us. It was
a defensive action, like burning a forest down because there's
a beehive in it. But this war on Iraq is a chickenhawk's war,
through-and-through. It's all about rattling sabers and being
a Big Man (forget about the oil- let's do).
Chickenhawks are all of a type. They
have money and privilege, often inherited. They're white and
aging and deeply invested in power. Most of today's chickenhawks
not only haven't been to war, but studiously avoided it by any
means available. The excuses range from the embarrassing (Rush
"Anal Cysts" Limbaugh) to the evasive (Dick "I
Had Other Priorities In The 60's Than Military Service"
Cheney). Donald Rumsfeld, like Bush, flew fighter jets, but
missed both Korea and Vietnam due to poor scheduling. He did
some wrestling, but all-torso Greco-Roman is not the same as
grenades and bayonets.
What psychological aberration addicts
a man to war when he's never even smoked one? Let's look at
the inward motivations for a chickenhawk to initiate hostilities
with Iraq. Power is a big factor, and the opportunity to amass
more wealth; war as a distraction from domestic matters is also
in play. There are natural resources to be had, and a vast scheme
for realigning the Middle East through 'regime change' (a bloodless
term for a nasty business, as "abattoir" is to "slaughter
house"). There is even a small chance that self-defense,
in a 'Minority Report' kind of way, is at work. All of these
points have been cried from the housetops by fierce orators declaiming
across the dismal alleys of American discourse, and in my opinion
they dignify with statecraft what is ultimately a sordid personal
problem: chickenhawks have never entered manhood.
What we're talking about is an inferiority
complex crashing up against megalomania on a global scale.
In aboriginal cultures, there is a ritual
ascendancy from child to adult. Ask any Yanomami. You're 13
years old, minding your own business, and all of a sudden the
shaman takes you off behind the shed and subjects you to ritual
death, from which you emerge transformed and never really see
eye-to-eye with Mom again. You are handed a spear and an obscene-looking
wood shaving to affix over your genitals, or in the case of the
more serious cultures some portion of your genitals is removed.
I own a Maasai circumcision knife, and I assure you anyone who
survives an encounter with that thing is more of a man than me.
Assuming the wounds heal properly. Then you go off and hunt
some dangerous animal, manly fashion.
We don't have any such ritual in our
culture, unless you include the Bar Mitzvah, which can be pretty
tough if the band is no good. American males remain like children
until their late teens or early twenties; sons of privilege who
go to grad school are pushing thirty before they properly leave
the nest. George W. Bush was one of these. This late entrance
into manhood is one of the reasons our teenagers are such a pain
in the toches. In the aboriginal cultures, there are
no teenagers. Only very short men with acne and high-pitched
voices. Where is the crucible which molds today's man? When
does he become a man, leaving the child behind? And don't say
it's when he gets his driver's license. That's when he leaves
his parents behind, in the driveway. But the child remains.
In George W. Bush's case, maybe the cathartic
ascent to manhood came when he stopped drinking at age 40, or
when he executed his first Texan, Clifton Russell Jr., in 1995.
Bush was 49 then. Maybe it was when he graduated from Harvard
in 1975 (age 29), or when he was arrested for DUI in 1976 (age
14). Actually I don't think he ever became a man. I suspect
he's still waiting for that moment to come, and I think all the
chickenhawks suffer from this, whether like Rumsfeld they just
missed the chance to go on that first hunt or like Richard Perle
they chickened out and hid in the palmettos. So they're eager
to fight war, if not personally. They want to be men at last.
War is manly stuff. Genghis Khan, the Mongol conqueror who made
"Look, mommy, a pony!" the most frightening cry of
the 12th Century, remarked:
"The greatest joy you can know is
to vanquish your enemies and drive them before you, to ride their
horses and seize their possessions, to see the faces of those
who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their
wives and daughters in your arms."
Nobody called old Genghis "Pooty-Poot",
I guarantee you that. He may have been a little rough on Central
Europe, but Genghis at least knew what he was talking about:
he rode his own horse into battle, and they were rinsing the
bloodstains out of his hat well into the 13th Century. He was
no chickenhawk. He also said, "violence never settles anything,"
which is a sentiment pretty typical of war veterans throughout
history. Men who have never been to war lack the perspective
which only comes with experience. Like grandma said, there's
nothing like wading through a quagmire of blood and guts to get
your head screwed on straight. The problem with today's chickenhawks
is that they're so used to having everything done for them, they
think by sending other people off to war, they will make themselves
into men by proxy.
If this seems like a tenuous idea, consider
how much your own childhood shaped who you are. These men were
boys once, and for a lot longer than most of us. George W. Bush's
Daddy, George Senior, was 20 years old when he flew a raid on
Chichi Jima during WWII. You want to talk about catharsis, this
guy's plane was crippled but he kept on fighting and crashed
in the sea in as heroic a manner as can be imagined. After a
distinguished public career, same Daddy became President the
old-fashioned way, by getting elected. That's a tough act to
follow, and it may explain George Junior's obsession with defeating
Saddam Hussein better than all of the geopolitical rationales
in the world. Because as tough a warrior as he was, George Sr.
never caught Saddam. This is Junior's big chance to show up
his Pops. He's had all of life's rewards handed to him: wealth,
power, baseball teams, the Presidency: just this once he wants
to win one for himself. I get the feeling the same can be said
for all the chickenhawks, at some level. They're a bunch of
insecure, angry children, sliding inexorably into old age without
having tasted real manhood for themselves. No matter what they
achieve, no matter what rewards, it is all consumed by the tapeworm
of self-doubt. It's the rest of us who have to suffer and die
while their endless initiation ceremony grinds on.
So here's my suggestion. Let's get all
of them together one night on a small tropical island, light
a bonfire, break out the jug liquor and get a little noisy.
Beat on some drums, dance around in masks, you know the effect
I'm going for. Get them good and scared. Then the ceremony
begins, with George Junior and Cheney and Perle and Rumsfeld
and DeLay and Limbaugh and Kemp and Lott and all the rest dressed
up in school uniforms, forming a writhing conga line, maybe with
pacifiers in their mouths so they can channel their bottled-up
boyhoods. They dance and weep as the drums throb toward an urgent
crescendo, the fire leaping like an angry god--the moment is
here: these old boys will at last become men! And then we run
like hell for the boats while a battalion of the other variety
of chickenhawk, released from prison for this purpose, descends
upon the circle of ancient children.
C'est la guerre.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter. He can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
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2002
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