Days of Sour Division
I shot this on the day that Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President. Powell supervised one invasion of Iraq and helped gin up another. Obama, when he had real votes to cast, voted more funds – more and more – for Powell’s second Iraq misadventure.
The title is from Laurence Binyon’s poem, “The Fourth of August,” which conceived the First World War in the noblest of terms:
Now in thy splendour go before us.
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us
In the hour of peril purified.The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thought dilate,
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.
Wilfred Owen had something to say about that enthusiasm, that “ardent” vision of the same war, of course:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Coincidentally, I’d been reading Dispatches, Michael Herr’s chronicle of his time in Vietnam during what the Vietnamese refer to as The American War. I’d also been recalling a 1996 essay by James M. Hopkins on the anniversary of both the start of the First World War and the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that Lyndon Johnson used to gin up a full-scale war against Vietnam. Hopkins drives from Binyon, through Owen and straight to Kipling’s “Common Form,” from Epitaphs of the War:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.