Nostalgie De La Guerre

Donald Trump flirts with reviving the American Imperium.

In the short story “The War Prayer,” which Mark Twain wrote in response to the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, a minister is extending God’s blessing to the troops in some unnamed foreign conflict when he’s interrupted by an aged berobed stranger, “his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale.” The stranger takes the minister’s place at the pulpit and pronounces: “If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.... When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory.”

The stranger then recites a prayer for death and destruction:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.

The story, which Twain’s family prevailed on him to withhold from publication during his lifetime lest it be judged blasphemous, isn’t subtle, but then neither is war. About ten years ago, after seeing some color photographs from the battlefields of World War II, I mentioned to a friend who was a veteran of the Iraq war that it had never occurred to me that that the Greatest Generation’s war wasn’t fought in black and white. “Nope,” he said, “it was in color. War is always in color.”

Which leads me to Donald Trump’s nostalgia for the sepia tones of the American Imperium during the presidencies of William McKinley (around whom the GOP has already built a cult) and Theodore Roosevelt. Trump’s lunatic desire to extend U.S. sovereignty to Greenland and Panama’s Canal Zone is the subject of my latest New Republic piece. My article explains, among other things, that if any colonial power were to lay plausible claim to the Panama Canal based on the number of lives lost building it (none can), the United States would have to take a back seat to France. Nous l’avons acheté, nous l’avons payé, c’est à nous.

You can read my piece here.