Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  This is to say nothing of the book’s prose, which is incurably bad, as in this barroom scene: “Men had their arms around the oily backsides of women.” Arms around their oily backsides? How does that work, exactly? “There were shouts and laughter, and almost every one of the red velvet chairs was occupied. A massive wall-to-wall mirror reflected the filmy bath of cigarette smoke.” Filmy bath of cigarette smoke? “I felt an intensity of emotion, a fleshy intimacy, that seemed to be based on confinement and therefore could never be duplicated in the West.” So: he is having an orgasm? “While extramarital affairs in the West were mainly a result of middle-class boredom, here I felt they served deeper needs. With politics and public life so circumscribed, there was a huge well of authentic emotion that even the most ideal of marriages could never consume.” I have no idea what this passage even thinks it means.

  When he reaches Greece, where he lived for several years, Kaplan chides scholars for ignoring “the most recent 2,000 years of Greek history... in favor of an idealized version of ancient Greece, a civilization that had already died before Jesus’ birth.” But this is precisely Kaplan’s technique in looking upon the rest of the world: Find one epoch, fixate upon it, project outward in the most intellectually irresponsible method imaginable.

  Some truly nutty books followed Balkan Ghosts, among them Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2002) and An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (1998). What Warrior Politics really gives Kaplan is the chance to show what he and a bunch of geniuses have in common. First, Churchill, whose “unapologetic warmongering arose not from a preference for war, but from a breast-beating Victorian sense of imperial destiny—amplified by what Isaiah Berlin calls a rich historical imagination.” That sort of sounds like someone we know. Onto Livy, whose “factual errors and romantic view of the Roman Republic should not dissuade us from his larger truths.” Sound familiar? Then Hobbes, whose “concepts are difficult to grasp for the urban middle class, who have long since lost any contact with man’s natural state. But however culturally and technologically advanced a society is, it will endure and remain civil only so long as it can in some way imagine man’s original condition.” What original condition might that be—throwing spears at woolly mammoths? Kaplan does not understand man’s original condition any better than this so-called “urban middle class,” which is just a bit more diverse than Kaplan imagines. Malthus, then, who “was humiliated by the literary elite of the day, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley” Did Malthus go to a “non-prestigious” college too?

  Along the way Kaplan writes, “The short, limited wars and rescue operations with which we shall be engaged will... feature warriors on one side, motivated by grievance and rapine, and an aristocracy of statesmen, military officers, and technocrats on the mother, motivated, one hopes, by ancient virtue.” What ancient virtue is that? Achilles disfiguring Hector? Consulting a haruspex about whether to invade Syria? Using an executioner class of soldiers to slaughter men who have surrendered, as was the rule of ancient warfare?

  At the end of the book, he imagines a “nontraditional American-led empire,” which would mean... what? “The power of this new imperium will derive from it never having to be declared.... Joseph Nye Jr., dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, speaks of ‘soft’ American hegemony.” But if men are essentially and savagely unchanged, if we need to know about our elusive mammoth-hunting “original state” to understand how craven people are, what possible guarantee is there that this American hegemony will be soft? That Kaplan can quote John Adams saying that “there is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others,” shows something quite distressing: Not even he understands what he writes.

  Amazingly, An Empire Wilderness is even worse. This book followed The Ends of the Earth—Kaplan’s account of a world riven by ethnic tension and unstable governments—and describes his journeys around the American West. What does Kaplan find? Ethnic tension and unstable governments, what he calls the “coming medievalization of the continent.” Renaissance fairs and President E. Gary Gygax? No, he means the “globalized settlement” like the one he finds in Kansas City, with its “cappuccinos, French pastries, and designer seafood in the midst of the formerly beef-eating prairie.” Designer seafood? The prairie itself ate beef? He has dinner at a “Eurobistro,” and wonders “if traditional patriotism may become a waning formality.... How much longer, I wondered, will the patriotic marches of John Philip Sousa move America’s inhabitants?”

  On he goes, antennae bristling for all indications of the deSousafication of the American landmass. In a Los Angeles restaurant, he finds a crowd that is “young, heavily Oriental, and fiercely middle-class. . . . I sat down at an outdoor Thai-Chinese restaurant for an early dinner. The manager was Japanese, the hostess Iranian, and the other help Mexican immigrants.” He walks into a Chinese grocery and says, “I could have been in Hong Kong or Taiwan.” If he had continued and said, “or in a Chinese grocery in Los Angeles,” he might have been onto something. He goes to Orange County, which he “was prepared to hate,” but his visit to the Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach leaves him “as impressed as I had been when I had seen the great squares of medieval Bukhara and Samarkand,” and God help him. In Orange County, however, he has one big question: “Will this place fight for its country? Are these people loyal to anything except themselves?.... Rather than citizens, the inhabitants of these prosperous pods are, in truth, resident expatriates, even if they were born in America, with their foreign cuisines, eclectic tastes, exposure to foreign languages, and friends throughout the world.” Friends! How dare they.

  Kaplan then surveys the Arizona-Mexico border. On the Mexican side are a bunch of Mexicans. On the American side people are speaking Spanish, “but to me they might as well have been speaking English. Whether it was the high quality of their leisure clothes, their purposeful stride—indicating that they were going somewhere, rather than just hanging out—the absence of hand movements when they talked... they seemed to me thoroughly modern compared to the Spanish speakers” over in You Know Where. (The italics, I swear, are his.)

  At a basketball game in Tucson, Kaplan notices that “the entire crowd, as well as every cheerleader, was white, in many cases with honey-blond hair, while almost everyone playing on the court was black. Wasn’t this a bit like ancient Rome, in which the gladiators were often from ‘barbarian,’ that is, subject races?” I recall having a similar realization of this “blunt racial fact,” in Kaplan’s words, at about twelve years of age at the Mecca in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, watching the Bucks lose to the Cavs. I have to admit, though, I never took it this far: “The shrieking blond crowd and the sweating black players may indicate a society’s way of coping with racial tensions rather than dramatizing them.” Or it may indicate Robert D. Kaplan’s racism as he thoughtlessly compares perspiring black Americans to barbarians.

  On a Greyhound bus this man who survived Ethiopia and Afghanistan nearly goes to pieces among what he calls the “Greyhound underclass.” They are fat, and loud, and Jesus Christ, could someone please shut up those bawling kids? “Can democracy flourish among people like this?” he wonders. When he gets near Canada, he makes a startling discovery: “Canada can’t hold together,” he for some reason quotes a former mayor of Missoula, Montana, as saying. Kaplan agrees that things look pretty bleak for Canada, and writes, “So far, most Americans have not thought much about the psychological effect of the peaceful disintegration of an entire Atlantic-to-Pacific middle-class nation on their northern border.” There is at least one obvious reason why they have not much thought about this. In Vancouver, Kaplan writes, “we may be seeing something else, too: the erotization of race.” The reader leans forward; this will surely be priceless. “As another Vancouverite told me, if you walk down the street and look at who’s holding hands with whom, you’ll observe that whites find Asians, particularly Asian women, with their small-boned symmetricality, highly desirable.”
I hear they have tiny little snatches, too. “Still,” Kaplan says, “Vancouver has something special, a cohesiveness evinced by the never-empty streets and interracial couples: people would fight for this, I thought.” Great. But are they not Canadian? And isn’t Canada doomed? What if they fight us?

  Never fear. Kaplan has found our saviors. They are called the American Military.

  Imperial Grunts, Kaplan’s gritty account of life among America’s front-line soldiers in the War on Terror, is the first of what he promises will be several books. Kaplan had the full cooperation of the Department of Defense while researching this alpha volume, and despite being treated by the military like “an oddity, a threat, and a VIP all at once” Kaplan grew close to the soldiers. He tells us how this was possible: “When the battalion found out there would be a journalist among them, there were rude complaints, another fucking left-wing journalist. Then an 18 Delta medic... used the NIPRNET to check me out online. He downloaded some of my articles and pronounced me ‘okay’ to the others.”

  Kaplan describes receiving a “command briefing” that began with an Orwell quote: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Imperial Grunts is that peaceable sleep’s lullaby. The book is not merely an account of twenty-first-century soldiering; it is also Kaplan’s attempt to define, defend, and justify American “imperialism.” On this point Grunts is a thesaurus of incoherencies.

  “Indeed,” he writes, “by the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice.” To say the least, the notion that the United States effectively rules the planet is an emaciated one. Does Kaplan not remember the endless haggling the United States was forced to do on the eve of the Iraq War to enable its use of other nations’ airfields? Do other nations’ desires and integrity really mean so little to Kaplan? But at the Pentagon, we learn, Kaplan gazed upon a Mercator Projection of the U.S. military’s areas of responsibility and saw a planet chopped up into jagged rectangles of supposed command (CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, and so forth). He “stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the U.S. not constitute a global military empire?”

  In an interview, Kaplan has said, “our challenges abroad are exactly like those of other empires in history.... You don’t like the world ‘imperial’ for America? Tough luck.” So what is Kaplan’s understanding of imperialism? “Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world.” Okay. But then: “The grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial.” Got that? And: “America’s imperial destiny was to grapple with countries that weren’t really countries.” It is? They aren’t? “Imperialism was less about conquest than about the training of local armies.” Oh. “All America could do was insert its armed forces here and there, as unobtrusively as possible, to alleviate perceived threats to its own security when they became particularly acute.” But didn’t you just say that—oh, wait. He’s still going: “The Americans wanted clean end-states and victory parades. Imperialism, though, is a never-ending involvement.” Before long you’re wondering if taking a good old-fashioned American dump in a U.S.-dug latrine in Yemen is not also “imperialism.”

  The ideas in Imperial Grunts are garbage, but the book is often absorbing. Here credit goes to the spectacular locales (Colombia, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, Mongolia, Afghanistan) Kaplan visits, though they are usually described in incompetent etudes such as, “to the north loomed a Planet of the Apes landscape.” Once he reaches the Philippines, things get interesting. With some Green Berets Kaplan goes to a restaurant, where he describes the local women, whom he calls “girls,” as “typical Filipinas: small-boned, symmetrically featured [again!], and walnut-complexioned beauties, with twangy, mellow Spanish-style voices and subservient oriental manners, a devouring mix of South America and Asia.” But for one Green Beret vanishing “for an hour with a girl into the darkness of the beachfront,” the evening is, Kaplan assures us, “innocent.” U.S. military personnel are forbidden from fraternizing with local people, in my view wisely. Kaplan, though, writes, that this forbiddance was “a shame.... Had this been the old Pacific Army, some of these men would taken some of these girls as mistresses.” And then gotten them pregnant, and left, and reduced them to pariahs within their culture. Soon enough the horny Green Beret returns to their table. “Driving back,” Kaplan writes, “someone joked about smelling his finger to see where it had been.” That needless “to see where it had been”: pure Kaplan. The man’s cluelessness is equally apparent at a funeral for a slain soldier in Afghanistan, where Kaplan describes the “thumping, rousing song” that is played: Barry E. Sadler’s Vietnam-era chestnut “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” It is not a thumping, rousing song. It is kitsch as surely as the old Soviet sing-along “The Internationale” is kitsch.

  The soldiers themselves like the song, however, and that is enough for Kaplan, who goes gaga for nearly every soldier and Marine he meets. (“He seemed to have a somewhat cold and surly nature” is about as negative as Kaplan gets about a soldier. He does note, however, that many soldiers’ inability with foreign languages is “where the American Empire, such as it was, was weakest.” Solution: more imperialism.) The problem with loving every soldier he meets is that the soldiers themselves, in Kaplan’s hands, quickly shed their individuality. The loss of individuality may be the necessary point of military indoctrination, but a writer has no such excuse when writing about them. While Kaplan is always careful to provide us with Stars and Stripes-style enumerations of their ages and hometowns, they are but in a few cases allowed little texture or eccentricity.

  Why does Kaplan so adore these rough men? Because they “had amassed so much technical knowledge about so many things at such a young age.” He refers to their “brutal, refreshingly direct” manner. One soldier in the Philippines, Kaplan writes, “made snap cultural judgments of the kind that would burn an academic’s reputation, but which in the field prove right seven out of ten times.” And that’s 70 percent! (“The Afghans are just great,” one soldier says. “Yeah,” says another. “They love guns and they love to fight. All they need are trailer parks and beer and they’ll be just like us.” These are presumably the kind of snap cultural judgments that have thus far served us so well in the War on Terror.) “Nobody,” Kaplan writes fondly, “is afraid to generalize in the bluntest terms. Thus, conclusions do not become entangled in exquisite subtleties. Intellectuals reward complexity and refinement; the military, simplicity and bottom-line assessments.” But rest assured they are scholars, too: One soldier is reading “Cervantes in the early-seventeenth-century original text,” while another is “dipping into the complete works of James Fenimore Cooper.” “Bad things happen in the world,” Kaplan is told by a soldier. “You do the best you can, and let the crybabies write the books.” The soldiers’ and Marines’ various thoughts and feelings, as transcribed by Kaplan, are rarely more complicated than this gunky self-congratulation.

  “The American military is a worldwide fraternity,” Kaplan writes, filled with “singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes.” The soldiers “talked in cliches,” he informs us. “It is the emotion and look in their faces—sweaty and gummed with dust [gummed with dust, you say?]—that matters more than the words. After all, a cliche is something that only the elite recognizes as such.” That is surely why, Kaplan says, “these guys like George W. Bush so much.... He spoke the way they did, with a lack of nuance, which they found estimable because their own tasks did not require it.” Besides, those cliche-conscious elites are yellow anyway. As one soldier tells Kaplan, “I believe character is more important than education. I have noticed that people who are highly educated and sophisticated do not like to take risks.” Kaplan himself seems to have come to shar
e this harsh essentialism. One Marine, Kaplan notes, “was not interested in what was interesting, only in what mattered.” In an earlier book, Kaplan could write: “Such interesting objects, I had told myself, each separated from the other by centuries, could be connected only through a lifetime of study, and what could be a better way to spend a lifetime?” He could also write that a traveler is “an explorer of everything interesting.” No longer.

  There is at least one problem with this dismissal of the interesting, seeing that what is interesting, when dealing with foreign cultures, is very often what matters. “We need people who are quick cultural studies,” an Army major general tries to tell Kaplan, which Kaplan deduces not as “area expertise; that took too many years to develop,” but as “a knack... a way of dealing with people.... The right men would find things out and act on the information they gathered, simply by knowing how to behave in a given situation.” Sounds easy enough. And what kind of soldier would be least equipped, emotionally speaking, to deal with vexed, confusing matters of religion and culture in nations understandably sensitive to foreign occupiers? If you said, “Evangelical Christian soldiers,” well, you could not be more wrong. Kaplan argues that Evangelical soldiers, whose entire worldview is founded upon accepting that everyone who is not a Christian will roast on Beelzebub’s spit, is in actual fact the U.S. military’s strongest asset, seeing that “morale could not be based on polite subtleties or secular philosophical constructions, but only on the stark belief in your own righteousness, and in the inequity if your enemy.” God will just have to sort them out.