July 14, 2006
No Man is an Island
Waynesville, North Carolina
July 14, 2006. Bastille Day. 8 am. rain.
I dreamed last night that the French government still owned a section of land on the Texas-Louisiana border that is held jointly now with the Alabama-Coushatta Indians. An obscure provision written into the hastily assembled Louisiana Purchase treaty of 1803 and recognized later by Sam Houston’s Republic of Texas remained somehow unchallenged when Texas became a state at the beginning of the American Civil War.
The strange territory was an island the size of Manhattan in a bend of the Sabine river, the eventually undisputed southwestern border of the Louisiana Purchase. France had used the already displaced Indian tribes as scouts and allies against the Spanish and the murderous and uncolonizable Karankawas of the Texas coast. A friendship between a French field officer (a protégé of Napoleon) and a Coushatta chief had sealed the secret deal into the arcanely worded French version of the treaty—the version eventually signed by Thomas Jefferson, himself. The almost mystical force of the hidden provision had traveled down through succeeding sovereignties in much the same way that Indian reservation lands (some of them, at least) have survived today.
A strange coalition of Indians and backwoods French creoles occupied the island into modern times and when the last descendent was near death, a folklorist doing a story about the island’s history discovered its strange legacy.
The US government agreed to accept the validity of the French and Indian ownership of the land (this is a dream, remember), provided that it now be divided up into small plots and sold to the highest bidders as long as they were American citizens. In the dream I was not one of the buyers. But I marveled over the published maps of the subdivided island and my dream evolved into a dream within a dream of a romantic rendezvous with a secret lover in a cottage in the Big Thicket Wilderness near where the island was located (in the dream) and where the real-life Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation is located today.
When I awoke this morning I was thinking at first, not of the dream, but of the newspaper story I read online after midnight last night about the troubled life and tragic denouement of the US soldier accused of raping a 14 year old girl in Iraq and murdering her and her family. Initial news accounts suggested that the soldier was from western North Carolina. But it turns out that he grew up in Midland, Texas (President Bush’s hometown) where he had trouble in school, academically and socially, trouble with drugs and alcohol, and where he eventually received a GED just before going into the Army last year in a program that might well have been administered by a friend and former colleague of mine.
A fictional dream. A horrifying reality. One of the intriguing revelations in the still unfolding story of this hapless soldier is that he was only able to get into the US Army after being given a so called “moral waiver”—a pass on what would have normally been his disqualifying character defects—because the US government is now desperate for warm bodies on the front lines of Iraq and elsewhere around the world. As it turns out the number of “moral waivers” has been steadily increasing since the war in Iraq began and now runs well over 10,000 a year.
Over thirty-five years ago, during the Vietnam war when I was a soldier in Korea, I discovered the existence of “moral wavers” as the outside entrance of a revolving door whose inside exit was often labeled, “unsuitability discharge”—essentially the discharge this young soldier received after he had already committed the atrocities but before it was discovered (or at least made public) that he had. As I say in my memoir, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” I encountered a number of “misfits” during my tour of duty as a company clerk. Some of these men, already possessing a history of misdemeanor violations, sought transfers to Vietnam in bizarre psychological twists not unlike the fatal attractions of moths to candle flames.
A few of these so called “misfits,” did indeed get shipped out to combat in a war that desperately needed cannon fodder. How they served or whether they or the Vietnamese civilians they had contact with survived is anybody’s guess. Others, as I say in my memoir, were never transferred because I filed their applications in a bottom drawer of my desk and “accidentally” forgot about them even as I was beginning to lay the groundwork for my own unsuitability discharge.
Some portion of these latter-day “volunteers” for Vietnam had been accepted into the Army with “moral waivers.” At least one that I knew personally, had entered on a “moral waiver” after a successful plea bargain with a patriotic judge, to serve time in the military in lieu of prolonged incarceration. I have no reason to believe that this was not a common event in 1969 given the ubiquitous drug culture of the late 1960’s and the ongoing need for fresh blood in Vietnam.
Had this most recent horror in Iraq not come to light (and maybe even though it has) it would not surprise me if the solution to the current shortage of combat soldiers and to America’s overtaxed prison system were not resolved together at once by offering prisoners early release in exchange for combat service in America’s ever expanding “war on terror.” If Islamic terrorists are demented, amoral fanatics, as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush might argue, why not send America’s “criminal element” over there to meet fire with fire instead of wasting their “talents” making license plates and lifting weights. You could get killed over there of course. “But Hell!” I can hear Rumsfeld tossing off a one-liner, “prisons are not that safe, anyway!”
There are unlikely connections between last night’s bizarre dream and the morning’s even more bizarre musings about the most recent American atrocity in Iraq. There seems to have been an unconscious connection in my mind between Napoleonic empire building and that of the modern United States of America. The Louisiana Purchase came to pass because Napoleon had over extended himself, his imperial visions and, most fatally, his armies.
By the time he had crowned himself Emperor of the “Revolution” (go figure), he had designs on conquering not only the traditional European kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire (plus Russia!) and the ancient oriental empires once held by Caesar and Alexander the Great, but the New World as well.
He treated his map of the world the same way he treated his battlefield maps, making lightening quick decisions about troop movements, logistics and the internecine political intrigues of his natural blood brothers and Machiavellian cohorts. Cash flow was a constant problem for Napoleon but he was a wheeler-dealer. When Yellow Fever was destroying his army in Haiti and his military campaigns in Europe began to falter he saw a chance to refinance them by selling land to America that he didn’t actually own. The Louisiana Territory still belonged to Spain when the deal was made. He promised Spain Tuscany in exchange for Louisiana. But he didn’t own Tuscany either and in fact was never able to deliver it up to Spain as promised.
And so American empire building may well be said to have begun with an illegal quid pro quo for land that nearly doubled the size of the country at the time and turned out to represent nearly a quarter of the country today. The only thing left for America to do to own everything from sea to shining sea was to cheat the indigenous peoples and the Spaniards and Mexicans out of the rest of the west. Had Napoleon been true to the ideals of the French Revolution and used his formidable leadership skills for peace instead of war, the United States might never have become an empire at all.
With its back to the wall now, America (no matter who our president is) is in roughly the same position as Napoleon was after his futile attempt to conquer Russia. Our blind hubris is leading us right down the path to Waterloo. And like Napoleon who was in denial about his own fate right up until his death imprisoned on a lonely island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, America seems to be dooming itself to a tragic end.
So beloved was Napoleon, the man, that, like Jesus and Elvis, legend has it that he didn’t die an untimely death on St. Helena at all, but faked his own death and escaped to Louisiana, there to live out his natural life in secret obscurity, perhaps on the very island in my dream.
In Syria, at the beginning of his career, Napoleon summarily executed his Turkish prisoners of war and when his troops were decimated by the plague, he had his sick soldiers poisoned rather than spend any more time or effort to keep them alive. By the end of his reign he was reduced to conscripting children to fill his insatiable appetite for conquest.
Sound familiar? Subverting the American people’s aversion to a universal draft after the debacle of the Vietnam War, the American government, ever as resourceful and every bit as delusional as Napoleon himself was, has found another way to a backdoor draft. You could call it the coalition of the ill-advised, the ill-fated, and the just plain mentally ill.
Meanwhile, the Alabama-Coushatta Indian tribe (the real one as opposed to the one in my dream) filed suit in federal court this week against Jack Abramoff and the right-wing Christian lobbyist, Ralph Reed (currently running for Attorney General of Georgia), for conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering in their efforts to extort money from competing tribes who had been going about the ”legitimate” business of developing gaming operations on their “sovereign” tribal lands, pathetically small as those tribal lands are. (The island the size of Manhattan was a dream, remember)
And as Hezbollah replaces the PLO as Israel’s nemesis, America’s adventure in the Middle East is beginning to look more and more like a Napoleonic hallucination.
It is sometimes difficult for me to determine whether the fiction of my dreams or the facts of my realities are easier to believe.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
--Larry L. Dill
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