The Spirit of St. Louis

This was not a football weekend in the continental United States, the kind that glues sports aficionados to their flat screens.

We don our leis in Honolulu to hula the Pro Bowl that usually precedes the Super Bowl, this year a contest between the New York Giants and the Boston Patriots in Indianapolis, which got an added plug when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels delivered the “loyal opposition’s” response to President Obama’s SOTU 2012.

The Pro Bowl. It’s dismissible to real sports fans since it is more of an exhibition in sunny Honolulu, football’s glamorous parade of talents for next year’s season, or a vacation for tired gladiators who almost made the Super Bowl, or a consolation price for distinguished pigskin players who are seeing the sunset of their game.

Those glued to their TVs Saturday might have noticed something else coming down on the shadows of the big arch south at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. A welcome home parade to returning soldiers from the War in Iraq marched to the Spirit of St. Louis. Not unlike the forgotten, ignored, and denied Vietnam vet returnees of a previous generation, this time the Iraq occupiers were welcomed with pomp and circumstance. New York tarried too long to ticker tape as Mayor Bloomberg played occupy-and-seek on Wall Street, though he did meet official objections when he broached the subject for a parade in the Big Apple.

Saturday’s parade. Two common but enterprising guys named Craig and Tom got the ball rolling, secured funding support from St. Louis’ Anheuser-Busch and Mayflower movers; 100 floats plus 25 performing groups went down the usual city parade route from Market and Broadway, ending at the Union Station where 50 organizations set assistance booths to get post-9/11 era vets segued into the country’s labor force. Assimilation and integration of veterans into “normal” society is always a challenge to the Veterans’ Administration as the horrors of war get replayed in the terror of negligence and indifference of the home front.

We joined the teachers’ network teaching Vietnam in 2005, and support the healing intents of the Wall on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It allows us to take the Defense Department and the Pentagon seriously so our comments on the military, on matters of budget and personnel, strategies and tactics, maneuvers and occupations, are not done willy-nilly. We are in dialogue with the proponents of the Spartan side of law and order from the Athenian side of open port, welcoming culture—open hearts, minds and arms.

The military. “Persons in uniform” is a term used for those in a tightly disciplined command structure. Clarity of the objective of a mission with the willingness of troops to subsume their individual interest to its accomplishment determines the efficiency and efficacy of a group goal. Catching Saddam Hussein and ensuring that there are no weapons of mass destruction was an articulated goal post-9/11. Osama bin Laden’s neutralization was added into the bargain. Opportunists also ran off with bundles of Uncle Sam’s green, in construction and war materiel! It is done. It is finished.

We worry when soldiers we consider to be under misguided autocratic governance and nursed in cultural roots of rigid communal structures (e.g., China and NoKor) are further encouraged to lose their individuality to a Command. We worry when we see troops become robotic in their assumption of roles. We hope for the reverse when we take our ruggedly individualistic citizens into the military command on the assumption that corporate-ness enhances their individuality. We are still hoping.

Our Marianas vets. About a thousand returned vets reside in the Marianas, I was told. We would be the last to disparage their service. The VFW in the Pacific chose us as their Teacher of the Year awardee in 2005. We did not take the recognition lightly. But being a social studies teacher committed to the standards of educated analysis based on verifiable facts, there is need for illuminating conditions and situations in the universal market of “truths.”

Dialogue. It is the military culture we exported to many parts of the world, the one we take for granted in dominating many aspects of American life, that we question. We drain the public coffers to support fear-induced military adventures, rely on command structure vets for CEOs, and utilize the metaphors of combat to describe our strategies of achievement and positions of advantage. Military superiority is not a statement of fact but a defensive assertion of an illusion from Cold War mythology. The metaphor of warfare as annihilation of the enemy in combat is devastating; when Armageddon is desired, the doors of dialogue are closed.

The Spirit of St. Louis. So this Saturday’s parade was a welcoming gesture to the American image of taming the unfamiliar and alien, birthed by Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight in a single engine plane from NYC to Paris in 1927. Ours now is a challenge on how to garnish the American can-do confidence and see it in the corporate embodiment of a welcoming parade to close out the self-inflicted wounds and terrors of post-9/11 fears.