Marc Savlov's review of WHY WE FIGHT in the
Austin Chronicle:
“The chief business of the American people is business” is
President Calvin Coolidge’s oft-quoted line from his 1925 speech before the
American Society of Newspaper Editors. Less known is his caveat directly
following: “Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the
chief end of existence … there are many other things we want very much more.
We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all
civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” Coolidge’s
out-of-context quote has been ground into the gristmill of cliché by decades
of over- and outright misuse, more often than not by those in business
seeking, as businessmen from William Randolph Hearst to Sam Walton have been
wont to do, to further not the American ideal but their own financial ends.
Why We Fight, Jarecki’s canny and somewhat overwhelming documentary, adds yet
another warning to Coolidge's by arguing – persuasively – that the chief
business of American business is nothing less than persistent and perpetual
warfare (rechristened when deemed necessary with less bellicose sobriquets –
i.e., “police actions”) and the funding and arming of myriad “friendly foreign
states,” several of which have turned out in recent years to be not as
friendly, or useful, as once presumed. After watching Jarecki’s film, it’s
embarrassingly, shamefully difficult to argue the point. Why We Fight opens
with a remarkably prescient and, apparently, wholly ignored warning to the
American people from outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower to guard against
the collusion of big business and our national tendency toward pugilism.
Citing as evidence the growing list of post-World War II conflicts the U.S.
has either initiated or allowed itself to become involved in (and thereby
fueling the economy by creating jobs at defense contractors and military
support companies such as Lockheed Martin and Halliburton), Jarecki paints a
grim picture of war profiteering run amok. First in the name of reining in the
Soviet Union and then, after the USSR’s collapse in 1991, with the hazily
defined goal of protecting our national interests from terrorism or the
promotion of Western-style democracies abroad, Eisenhower’s sage admonition
goes increasingly unrealized, while Coolidge appears to have entirely
misjudged the American psyche. For all its earnest zeal at pointing out what
should be, on the face of it, plainly obvious, Why We Fight is saved from
pedantry (or propagandism, depending on your state color), by the presence of
Wilton Sekzer, a retired NYPD officer who lost his only son on 9/11.
Grief-stricken and fully believing the current administration’s insistence on
a link between Iraq and 9/11, Sekzer manages to have his son’s name painted on
one of the none-too-smart bombs slated to be dropped on Baghdad (we see the
actual ordnance, at once both thrilling and horrific). Later, in the absence
of any WMD, Sekzer, the human face of the ghastly flip side of the military
industrial complex, is bewildered and angry – again. “I’m old school,” he
says. “If you can’t trust the President, then who can you trust?” I don’t know
about you Mr. Sekzer, but I like Ike.
Marc Savlov
[2006-03-10]
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