Postwar US.: The Scapegoat Is Gone

By Stefan Kanfer

THERE is a phantom pain that endures even after the wound is repaired. Now that a cease-fire agreement has been signed, there is still a persistent wince in the American body politic --the feeling that somehow, somewhere, soldiers are still pulling triggers. In fact, given the fragility of the ceasefire, they well may be, but even if all shooting really stops, the idea of peace will take getting used to. After ten years, the Viet Nam War has become more than a national curse. It was also a national excuse.

The proliferation of drug abuse, crime in the streets, lack of respect for authority, racism--all these were conveniently stenciled "made in Viet Nam." The war's impact, goes the conventional wisdom, went against the American grain and splintered the country into discrete and angry factions. The bombing of Orientals was a symptom of the ethnocentricism implicit in American history. The great father figures of the presidency were shown to be aloof and unresponsive to their children. Parents, policemen, establishmentarians--all figures of authority--were correspondingly devalued. Moneys were diverted from welfare projects to military hardware, and in response, minorities turned to violence and despair.

Like all cliches, these commonplaces contain large components of truth. But the war is over now, and soon the scapegoat will be led away. Then it will no longer be possible to see all domestic evils as the orphans of war. As partisan historians have taken pains to show, violence is in, not against, the American grain. The glorification of the criminal is not the product of new films like Super Fly but ancient legends like Billy the Kid. Drug abuse did not flower with the poppies of Viet Nam; it escaped the ghetto in the early '60s and spread to the American midstream. As for authority figures, it takes no sociologist to realize that institutions and establishments, from universities to Senate subcommittees, had been ossifying for decades.

The acknowledgment of these facts will not necessarily be pleasant--but it should be healthy. It can force Americans to regard themselves in an unclouded mirror, to see the war not so much as a cause as a symptom. Only then can the repairs begin.

Traditionally, American conflicts have a long-lived emotional residue. The Civil War, for example, left resentments and changes that are still felt in American society. If that conflict annealed the Union, it also lacerated the country so deeply that it lost hold of what Alistair Cooke called "the glory that will never be restored." World War I presented a grave shock to isolationist America. Afterward, the nation suffered what amounted to a great fever of xenophobia and anxiety, and the recovery period was appropriately dubbed the Aspirin Age.

Like those much bigger but somehow simpler conflicts, World War II and Korea, the Viet Nam War will doubtless bring back its own harsh pathology. It has already left scars that cannot readily be mended. "War does things to the language," as New York Times Columnist Russell Baker warned, "and the language in revenge refuses to cooperate in helping us to understand what we are talking about." The language has also taken its revenge at home, from the Vietspeak of "fragging" and "pacification" to the home-brewed jargon of "pigs" and "fascist conspiracies." The campuses have again begun to turn silent (as in the '50s), not in a spirit of tranquillity but with a sense of impotence and self-interest. The rage of the antiwar demonstrators has dissipated without a true sense of initiative or accomplishment. The once powerful liberals, pursued by such unforgiving histories as David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, still try to understand their guilt and re-invent their philosophy.

Above all, there is the damage to the country's self-image. One of the most persistent and persuasive observations by Viet Nam commentators has been that the war, and the revelations of My Lai, the perversity of the overdog, the abuses of power, conspired to destroy not only the sense of America's omnipotence but the sense of American guilelessness as well. And yet, how true will that prove to be?

A brilliant historian once described the American participation in a controversial war: "In the lives of the American people," she wrote, "it was the end of innocence." The writer is Barbara Tuchman, the book The Zimmermann Telegram, and the event described, the American entry into World War I. The U.S., it would appear, is capable of losing and recovering its innocence not once, but over and over again.

Of course, innocence is never wholly restored. Yet U.S. society can be amazingly resilient and forgetful. It has often shown a healing ability to forget --or, as Mark Twain had it, to "dis-remember"--the sins of the enemy as well as those of the self.

No doubt most Americans are eager to forget the war, and one way to do it is simply through moral cupidity, a deafness to the reverberations of the past. A more hopeful and very American way to forget is through action.

Traditionally, America has rushed to repair the damage wrought by U.S. aims abroad. Surely, this time, that tradition should encompass aid to the two countries so long besieged: both Viet Nam and the U.S. There is much chance for action at home.

It is clear that the war's end will not bring the long-touted "peace divdend" of cash to solve almost every social need. But peace can bring other dividends, not least a resurgence of energies and concern. Hanoi and Sai gon, for example, are not the only war-wasted cities; there are a score in the U.S. desperately in need of repair. There are still Americans starving, as well as Asians, and still many citizens in need of homes and education and the prospects of hope. These unsatisfied needs cannot be blamed on Viet Nam. If the cries of the needy persist in the '70s there will be a social tragedy: the rav ages of peace.

A domestic recovery period need not engender new national egotism. It need not mean the rhapsodic nonsense of The Greening of America, nor the belligerency of the brass-collar Americans. It could instead produce a new sense of reality. What is needed is a civilian DMZ, where the polarized Americans can gather, a place somewhere be tween the moral amnesia of those who would totally forget the war and those who proclaim a perpetual, self-lacerating mea culpa that would take the place of progress. Perhaps this war has bro ken the rules of history. No one can be sure. It can only be observed that in other times, in other wars, the American soul has been marked missing in action, only to return safely home to begin anew.

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