Last night's very satisfying production of Shaw's Arms and the Man, at the tiny but determined Writers Theatre in Glencoe, provided a few good laughs, along with a sobering realization: in the 110 years since the play was written, we're still being sold the same bill of goods about war, patriotism, bravery -- and love.
Arms and the Man is mostly about the follies of war -- or really, the follies of the way war gets sold to the citizens of warring nations. Written more than a century ago, Shaw's play is still fresh in many respects, but none more so than this: what is sold as bravery is often mere foolhardiness, and what is sold as necessary and patriotic is often calculated and cowardly.
Self-deception is a human characteristic that replicates itself in nations and in individuals. We tell ourselves stories about love that are concocted of the same ingredients as our war stories: bravery and devotion, passion and purpose -- and just a pinch of the truth.
One of the astonishing contradictions in our current public priorities is the effort expended on legislating life's sanctity on the one hand, and fertilizing the ground for mass slaughter on the other. This contradiction mutates and appears in our personal lives, where, we are told, love is sacred -- as long as it is strictly limited to existing between man and woman, or, more impossibly, husband and wife, the single relationship most likely to deprive love of its oxygen.
(Equally misguided are the efforts to make unconstitutional the burning of the flag. Meanwhile, across the globe, flag makers can't keep up with demand for American flags, so eager are angry nations to light them on fire and stomp on them.)
Some wars might be necessary, their prosecution clever and heroic. It may even be that there have been wars, or battles, that saved lives, channeling fury into combat that otherwise might have mushroomed into genocide on an even more ghastly scale than the battle achieved.
But as Arms and the Man reminds, what we are told and what the soldier knows from experience have nothing in common, save the source of disinformation and decision.
I predict that we will someday look back on the War in Iraq as a success, but it won't be our soldiers who are painting it that way, and historians will make careers on debating the veracity of that claim.
On that selfsame day that success is proclaimed (not counting our president's battleship proclamation), we will be commanded to love and forgive our enemy, as the Bible requires. On that day, we will admire love as the pinnacle of God's creation -- much the way we might admire a butterfly, pinned in a glass case.
--T.A.
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