Sleepwalking toward Baghdad

As the sand runs out on peace, America drifts alone toward a strange and unjustified war.

By Gary Kamiya

Mar 10, 2003 |

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

W.H. Auden's "September 1st, 1939," written after Hitler invaded Poland to start World War II, was much quoted in the United States after another terrible September day, 62 years later. The poet's dread, as he stared into a darkness about to cover the world, had become our own. Just as Hitler's invasion killed the cheap hopes of a "low dishonest decade," so the savage destruction of the World Trade Center had wakened us from our dream world, where history no longer existed and hatred and death only touched others. The poem was eerily prescient: In a coincidence so strange it would scarcely be credible if such uncanny anticipations did not haunt the history of literature, Auden invoked skyscrapers not once but twice:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream [ ... ]

A few stanzas later, he was drawn back to the image, denouncing "the lie of Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky."

Neither the strength of Collective Man nor of Authority was enough, on September 1st or Sept. 11, to prevent the worst from happening.

Perhaps the poem's most arresting -- and disturbing -- synchronicity with Sept. 11, however, is found in the second stanza, when Auden writes of Hitler's Germany:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

"What huge imago made/ A psychopathic god": the question echoed like an explosion, as the sight of the twin towers collapsing shocked the world. In America, however, it was not permitted to explore the final lines: to suggest that the evil unleashed by Osama bin Laden might actually be something that happened in history, and be susceptible to historical analysis, was immediately pronounced traitorous -- as if the desire to understand somehow was the same as justifying this horror.

Some things, it was argued then and now, cannot and should not be understood. Some evils are cosmic obscenities, anomic, existing outside all reason and causation. President Bush's declaration that the terrorists struck not for any reason but because "they hate our freedom" was a crude statement of this point. The impulse to declare that catastrophes are beyond the human order is as old as Job. And there is truth in it -- but not the entire truth. If all evil is unfathomable, chaos would have engulfed civilization long ago, for catastrophes befall us all.

Auden himself grappled with this issue. As Alan Jacobs pointed out in a penetrating essay published last year, Auden later repudiated his poem -- and he did so because he came to believe he had been too quick to explain away evil. The poem asserts that the harsh sanctions imposed by the Allies on Germany after World War I were one of the causes of Nazism. And he drew a moral comparison, perhaps even an equation, between those sanctions and Nazism: "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return."

Jacobs explains that as Auden came to understand the true nature of the Nazi regime, he realized that his lofty rhetoric, which implicitly posits that all have sinned equally and all are equally culpable, failed to distinguish between the sins of the Allies and the infinitely greater sin of Nazism.

In short, Auden came to believe that he had arrived too quickly at that moral-aesthetic height from which the varieties of human folly become indistinguishable.

Was Auden right to repudiate his poem? There is no single answer. But the fact that it still speaks to people indicates that he may not have been. In fact, the verses about Germany were never as crudely exculpatory of Nazism as he came to believe. In any case, as time passes, even the most dreadful horrors come to be seen sub specie aeternitatis: indeed, poetry that attempts to engage too specifically and polemically with politics is not usually the poetry that lasts. As an engaged work, a rallying cry of defiance to Hitler, "Sept. 1, 1939" falls short; but as a meditation on the darkness that infects the human condition, and a haunting description of what it felt like to watch the world collapse from the "neutral air" of New York, it remains strange and alive.

The strange life that courses through Auden's poem has made it, remarkably, relevant not once but three times: in 1939, after Sept. 11 and again today. Indeed, it may speak even more pointedly to us now, as we once again observe horror unfold in slow-motion -- this time a horror of our own making.

By a terrible irony, the poem that so many Americans read after Sept. 11 to comfort themselves and their wounded and victimized nation now reads as an indictment of our folly -- and an elegy for our lost reason. The "offense" is the terrorist attacks. And the culture that has been driven mad is our own.

This, at least, is the view of most of the people in the world -- one forcefully expressed by the British novelist John le Carré, who wrote a piece in the Times of London called "The USA has gone mad." It isn't just the Security Council, or the U.N., although America's isolation there is disturbing enough. That the overwhelming majority of people on earth -- regardless of their paid-off or strategically-aligned governments' official positions -- believe that America is going down a terribly wrong path is something that should inspire far deeper reflection, and doubt, among American policymakers, and the general public, than it has. When millions of people -- many of whom had wept and marched in solidarity with the great city of New York, capital of the modern world, just a year and a half earlier -- took to the streets in dozens of cities around the globe, Bush dismissed them as a "focus group." So much for the largest worldwide demonstrations in human history, a first stunning street plebiscite in a nascent global democracy.

America is about to launch the first unprovoked war in its history (or the second, if you count what Neal Gabler called its true precedent, the Spanish-American War), and it will do it essentially alone. After Bush's strangely robotic press conference last Thursday (the Washington Post's Tom Shales and the Times' Maureen Dowd spoke for many when they observed that the president appeared to be drugged), in which he was completely incapable of answering why a beefed-up inspections regime, backed by force, could not keep Saddam under control, there seems no hope that an invasion can be averted by diplomacy. Perhaps Britain will succeed in pushing back the date of the war resolution by a few days or weeks. But the hot weather is coming, the troops will soon lose their edge, and so very soon Bush will either press for a resolution authorizing force -- which the Security Council will reject -- or simply issue the invasion order. And soon thereafter thousands of tons of bombs will begin falling on Iraq, home of a vile and murderous tyrant and 23 million Iraqis, many of whom will die before their fellow citizens are released from Saddam's bondage and into an unknown future.

That future will be determined by three things: the fortunes of war, American commitment, and fate. Of those three, it is impossible to say which is the most fickle.

It is equally impossible to say with certainty whether invading a large sovereign Arab state will make America safer or not. Unless the war and its aftermath unfold as smoothly as a game of Risk played against a 6-year-old, however, the odds are it will not.

As the United States stands in rigid and increasingly pathological isolation, prepared to take an incredible gamble for no good reason, Auden's poem, with all its incredulity, bitterness, dread and humanity-lacerating guilt, resonates with uncanny power. It is music for the coming shadows.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

We have become all too familiar with "the lie of Authority," which promulgates patriotic myths to ensure compliance with demands that the individual might reject: It is on Fox News and its imitator MSNBC nightly. But Auden's audacity in this stanza is to link this familiar lie with the "lie in the brain" -- a lie of which all humans, Americans and Iraqis and French alike, are guilty. This is the lie that we exist alone, the lie of egotism, the lie that we do not need to love our fellow man. In a brilliant stroke, Auden reveals that these two apparently separate untruths work in the same way, making us susceptible to demagoguery and fear-mongering, leaving us short of our full humanity. Indeed, they are identical. The resonance with Christianity is unmistakable: "Though I speak with the tongues of man and angels, if I have not love, I am but sounding brass and a clanging cymbal ..."

What does any of this high-flown talk of love have to do with the looming war with a dangerous dictator? It would be absurd to interpret Auden's famous injunction "We must love one another or die" (which he later denounced as a "lie" and amended to the darker "We must love one another and die," before repudiating the entire poem) literally in this context -- as did the human shield in Baghdad who told Salon that he wanted to bring "inner peace" to the Iraqis and his fellow activists. The Saddam Husseins of the world do not need a hug. But there is a link between the poet's call for a revolution in every heart and the question of whether war is really needed to protect America.

Next Page: The brutal sentimentality of the Bush administration

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