The Road to Damascus

Who’s to Blame? - Apples of Discord - Changing Course

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Throughout Crisis 22 I stress literature, yet I don’t downplay politics. Even literature that doesn’t seem to focus on politics, such as Gogol’s Dead Souls, I use to a political end: the scam at the heart of Gogol’s famous novel has many parallels to the scam of Putin’s “special military operation.”

Given the complicated points of view I explore, and given the complex nature of the fiction I use to explore these views, I should make it clear from the start where I stand in regard to the following: who’s to blame for the present crisis, and how I see the relation between politics and literature. I’ll also take a look at my brief experience travelling in Russia.

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Who’s to Blame?

While I think the West should acknowledge the big mistakes it's made in the past — for instance, slavery, colonialism, the wide-scale bombing of Indo-China, and the invasion of Iraq — I don't believe that the West is responsible for the present war. Russia is clearly to blame for its full-scale attack on Ukraine and for its continued brutality against its army, infrastructure, and civilians — just as the Americans are fully to blame for their brutal bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. I don’t spend much time debating whether or not Russia is using massive violence in an imperial and colonial manner because to me that seems rather obvious — as obvious as a B-52 bomber over North Vietnam in 1972. I look to organizations such as the International Criminal Court to tally the exact distance Putin has gone down the path of genocidal destruction. I do this with the knowledge that he, like the Americans, won’t submit to the judgments of this Court anyway. Russia and the US both tend to refer to the ICC only when it suits them. Yet my focus isn’t on who’s to blame for their obvious carnage. Rather, it’s on how we think about and cope with the violence we see, and how we reach a deeper understanding of the dreadful situation we’re in.

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Apples of Discord

An example of how literature can get us to think and feel more deeply about politics can be seen in the final two verses of the 2007 lyric “The Long Road Out of Eden” by the Eagles. In a powerful, ambiguous, universalized response to the Iraq War, the Eagles get at the core of the problem:

I can imagine at least two reworkings of what one might call the primal political sin of massive violence, an evil that the US and Russia have engaged in at the most dangerous levels over the last hundred years. Lately, the Russians are engaging up to their eyeballs with their threats of using tactical nukes against Ukraine and conventional nukes against the West. The first reworking is directed (more specifically than in the original) at the US: 

The second is directed at Russia:

And yet the final verse is the same for both:

Both the US and Russia have bitten deep into the apple of warfare technology. They continue to develop their nuclear arsenals, and Russia repeatedly unnerves the world with the possibility of their actual use. Much of the world tries to stay out of this nuclear club, while nations like Iran and North Korea strive to become members.

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Changing Course

In all the versions of “Long Road Out of Eden” that I imagine, Damascus stays the same. Damascus is of course the Syrian city we know today, vexed amid the present nightmare of the Middle East — with the Russian airstrikes of cities opposing al-Assad, the Hamas slaughter of Israelis dancing in the desert, the Iranian missiles exploding overhead, the Israeli bombings and assassinations, the needless suffering in Ghaza, etc. Yet the road to Damascus has also symbolized something very specific for the last two thousand years: Saint Paul’s change of heart from persecuting to embracing Christians. In general, the road to Damascus symbolizes a change of heart leading to a change of course.

I don’t know if Putin can ever change course, but what of the other Russians? And what of the other players in this dangerous nuclear game — the Americans, British, French, & Chinese? When will they look up into the sky and wonder if maybe they’re headed in the wrong direction? When will they look deeply into the wide blue sky above us, with its notes of birds and its smell of napalm in the west wind, and see beyond it the endless black night in which we all spin?

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Next: ☕️ Politics and the Language of Literature

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