Erskine Carter's "War, the Ongoing Spectator Sport" concludes and starts this volume of Critical Civitates. Carter, like all of our contributes, is a hidden voice, an artist who essays to be without publicity. His efforts are not honored in the mainstream media. His art is most often shared with friends and family, occasionally published in local newspapers, every once in a while published at the national or international levels, but not often. Carter is one of the many public intellectuals, public artists who, day after day and, often, night after night, create and communicate for the love of their people. It was a friend of his who encouraged Carter to submit an essay to the journal. We would never have known about him had it not been for his friend, though Erskine Carter would have continued to quill undauntedly. We privilege these hidden artists in Critical Civitates because their work as public intellectuals epitomizes answerable civic discourses existing within the shadows of our glocal reality. As editor, I hope you enjoy this volume of the journal, and I hope you will continue to tell others about what we are doing and continue to encourage the hidden artists around you.
Albert Mudwater
War, the Ongoing Spectator Sport
by Erskine Carter
In 216 B.C.E., Roman leadership was convinced its superior fighting forces would finally decimate Hannibal who had been plundering Italy since his unprecedented journey over the Alps in 218. Two years later, his terrifying elephants had perished, but not Hannibal and his allies whose string of victories threatened Rome itself. Legend has it the Romans were so assured of victory at Cannae that they erected makeshift stadium seats for select politicians and well heeled citizens near the battlefield where, to their utter dismay, they witnessed the greatest bloodbath of ancient times, the annihilation of eight Roman legions, thousands of their allies and cavalry, the slaughter of their paralyzed leaders and much of the awestruck audience themselves while Rome’s confident citizens awaited good news that unexpectedly filled them with terror.
According to Livy’s History of Rome, approximately 50,000 Romans perished, including 2 quaestors, 29 military tribunes, and 80 "senators or men who had held offices which would have given them the right to be elected to the Senate” (Book 22). Later historians claim even higher casualties, but the point is that Romans’ shocking defeat by an army half its size was the consequence of over confidence wedded to the fears, jealousy, incompetence, and short sightedness of its egotistical politicians and military leaders. According to Donald Kyle, “Hannibal’s invasion made Romans crave public demonstrations (which became gladiatorial games) that the state would punish poor fighters and reward good soldiers of whatever origin” (Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World 261): loaves of bread and plenty of blood-drenched circuses to distract and appease the populace.
Recent discoveries of a hunter and gatherer massacre in Kenya indicate war has been a spectator sport for at least 10,000 years, whether examining it in mutilated fossils, attending it live in ancient arenas, or watching it via modern media sources. The latter became most evident when television reporters funneled the Vietnam War into American living rooms and helped turn the tide toward American withdrawal and what President Nixon eventually and reluctantly declared Peace with Honor.
President George Herbert Walker Bush and sidekick Dick Cheney learned one valuable lesson from the Vietnam War: camouflage everything possible. Instead of loose in action, keep reporters on the sidelines, provide daily press conferences of meager unclassified information, and televise what looks like a video game, usually night shots of bombs bursting in air over Baghdad. As Hannibal had decided not to press on to Rome, so, too, did General Norman Schwarzkopf halt the advance on Baghdad. “My victory was based on Hannibal’s Cannae,” he wrote in his memoir.
“On the question of going to Baghdad,” he told PBS’ Frontline in 1997, “if you remember the Vietnam War, we had no international legitimacy for what we did. As a result we, first of all, lost the battle of world public opinion and eventually we lost the battle at home.
“In the Gulf War we had great international legitimacy…which said ‘Kick Iraq out of Kuwait’, not one word about going into Iraq, taking Baghdad, conquering the whole country and hanging Saddam Hussein… And, oh by the way, I think we'd still be there, we'd be like a dinosaur in a tar pit, we could not have gotten out and we'd still be the occupying power and we'd be paying one hundred percent of all the costs to administer all of Iraq.”
Twelve years later, given the apparent success of the Gulf War and ignoring the predictions of General Schwarzkopf, President George Walker Bush and sidekick Dick Cheney manipulated, lied to, and convinced much of the media, the United Nations and a gullible American citizenry to support an invasion of Iraq guaranteed to last only a few days and cost no more than 80 billion dollars. Anyone who has read this far knows the rest of the gruesome story. Once again, over confidence, arrogance, and egotistical political short sightedness won the day and lost the battle. So certain of success, the government embedded reporters with the troops, and the war was televised ad nauseum to a nation of spectators eager to watch the demolition of Iraq and former ally/enemy Saddam Hussein. “Mission Accomplished,” the spectacle known as Shock and Awe became perhaps the biggest blunder in American foreign policy, a foolhardy, hubristic catalyst of much of today’s turmoil, terrorism, and prejudice not only in the Middle East but throughout the world, including the United States.
No need existed to build a makeshift stadium on the Iraqi sands for those dissembling instigators to observe their eagerly anticipated victory turn into a debacle of carnage and desperation. Unlike many of the Roman elite, none participated in the bloodshed themselves; instead, everyone watched the horror unfold from the comfort and safety of white houses, congressional and senatorial offices, mansions, bungalows, apartments, ranches, saloons, and trailers throughout the land. And when the public began to oppose the fiasco it had so enthusiastically supported and helped create, well, this time, the tide had turned too late.
When “I read the news today, oh boy,” another prophetic voice sang in my mind:
“In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appalls,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.”
The words and worlds of John Lennon and William Blake are not so far apart as one might think. Fear abounds, people continue to chain their minds to fixed beliefs, children are mistreated and exploited, the poor struggle to survive, workers and their families exist on paltry incomes, narcissism trumps humility, and the blood and psyches of hapless young men and women stain red the palace walls where the nobles still plan the ongoing spectacle.
Today’s bread arrives as scanty handouts, inadequate healthcare, and shrinking possibilities for the future of many while the circuses are performed on television, the internet, at the movies, expensive athletic events and concerts, and lifetimes poured into cell phones. As in ancient Rome, we have plenty of circuses and not enough bread. Privileged or not, spectators all, war and suffering will be with us until we unlock the mind-forged manacles and refuse to watch and cheer but instead to act with kindness and understanding and fill the cups of bitterness and self-interest with love and compassion, as the dreamers so often remind us.
Erskine Carter, of Rock Island, Illinois, is a retired Black Hawk College English and Journalism professor.