Fathers and the war machine

 On the back page of today's New York Times Sunday Review Section is an article by Thuy Linh Tu, entitled "An American Dream Built on Warfare."  Thuy Linh Tu is professor of Asian American Studies at NYU. The opinion piece is a melancholy reflection on the life of Dr. Tu's father and the place she grew up when he left Vietnam and the family found their way to Torrington, Connecticut in 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon. Or "Liberation of Saigon," if you view it through the eyes of the winners of the Vietnam War.

The story of how, after living through the bombs America dropped on the heads of him, his wife, and his countrymen and women, Tu's father ended up in a small New England town making bomb parts for his adopted country to drop on other people touched me deeply. Not just for the pathos of Tu's father's destiny, but for the fact that Torrington is the town where I was born. My father, too, worked in one of its many small factories. I am a product of the world she writes about, the scores of small New England towns that grew out of the industrial revolution to become the engine of the American war machine. Towns that provided a decent living for its inhabitants, which included a large number of immigrants. Thuy Linh went off to become a university professor on the salary her father made working with aluminum, the metal that "lets jets soar, makes tanks lighter, keeps canteens from rusting." 

My father worked at the American Brass Mill, on Water Street, just a few blocks up from the center of town. Both the Brass Mill and Tu's Torrington Company are long gone, washed out by the migration of American manufacturing to places with cheaper labor costs - and places without unions where it is less likely people like Tu and my father can today afford to educate their children and allow them to become university professors.

Tu left the Torrington Company at some point and began working at Howmet, another company that manufactures parts for the war machine. Thuy Linh doesn't identify the location other than to say it is "a few miles away" from Torrington. I take that to mean she is referring to the plant in Winsted, which is the town in which I grew up, nine miles north of Torrington. An even closer connection to the story, in other words.

I'm trying to get my head around Thuy Linh's conclusion that her father ended up working for America's war machine and the irony of it all. Her final sentence is "the warfare state always has its winners and losers. Sometimes, it's hard to know which one you are."  Part of me - the lefty anti-imperialist part of me - wants to shout, "Right on, girl! Give 'em hell!" That depends on which American narrative you choose to tell. If you tell the tale of American imperialism - a very real and very ugly story - which includes not only Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but brutal misadventures in Central and South America and other parts of the Middle East - it's easy to conclude, as I have done many times, that Stalin's genocide in Ukraine and Hitler's Holocaust are to a degree matched by America's genocidal near elimination of the North American Indian, its history of slavery and segregation, and you-name-it other examples of human wretchedness. Jingoist Americans like to think we're the good guys, but it ain't necessarily so.

But there's another part of me, the part that wants to tell the counter-narrative, and maybe start with the fact that The Torrington Company also made sewing machine needles for Singer Sewing Machine, ball bearings for bicycle pedals and other useful products which had nothing to do with war, and, unless I'm badly mistaken, you can't have a brass band without manufactured brass. And also wants to remember that part of the story was the defeat of Hitler. And these days providing the Ukrainians with the stuff it takes to keep Putin from turning his "there's no such country as Ukraine" narrative into a reality. The American dream has motivated no small number of good guys as well.

Two things seems certain. One is that what one chooses to learn from history is arbitrary and very much depends on how grounded your moral system is in basic ethics - which I take to mean the commitment to avoid violence and deceit. And the other is that what makes sense today may not make sense tomorrow and there's truth to the warning that hell is paved with good intentions. We simply cannot know the answers to the big questions with any certainty. Is Germany doing the right thing in arguing that they can't stop giving Putin billions for his oil, which he is then free to turn into bombs and artillery for use in Ukraine? Were Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik and Angela Merkel's efforts to keep close ties with Putin a mistake? Are we repeating Chamberlin's appeasement in Munich in holding back from going all out against Putin? Is war the answer, after all?

How are we to know?

Short of greater efforts to understand what's going on, on the part of every one of us in the democratic world, greater efforts to engage with policy makers, greater commitment to rational, non-ideological approaches to problem-solving, I don't know if Thuy Linh's question about whether Torrington, Connecticut can survive, and if so how, has an answer. I doubt it. And whether her conclusion, that the American dream was built on warfare, is justified. I think the whole story needs to be told, in all its complexity.

Faith is a bad word in my vocabulary. I prefer things like responsibility, effort, watching for opportunities to do good, and reason. But in this case, I have to admit that I have faith that engagement is the answer, and not worry. Call it an American weakness, this belief that all problems can be solved if we just roll up our sleeves and get to work. And to that I have to add the Lutheran admonition: "Be sure you're right; then go ahead!"

But it's the cultural heritage I've been given to work with, and until I see something better, I'm going with it.