All My Sons

The story of the Boeing-Bell Osprey is even more sinister: Last August, eight Marines, including a colonel, were investigated by the corps for falsifying test data about the troubled chopper, resulting in reprimands but no trials. Unavoidable accidents are one thing, but dooming soldiers in the field in order to cut production corners or to rush into operation an experimental aircraft is a heinous crime. And yet a peculiarly American one. Reading reports of the two helicopters, one is reminded of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons and its character Joe Keller, who knowingly shipped cracked cylinders for fighter planes during WWII. At play's end, Joe, who avoided prison by sticking his partner with the blame for 21 pilot deaths, says of these fatalities, "I guess I didn't realize they were all my sons."

Now that the Justice Department has charged John Walker Lindh with "conspiring to kill American citizens," it might do well to look at American industry and its allies within the military. Whether U.S. soldiers die from bullets or accidents, their deaths can all be traced to some cause, and not all the culprits are sitting in cages at Guantánamo.

OUR SONS THE FANATICS

"He chose to embrace fanatics, and his allegiance to those fanatics and terrorists never faltered."

—Attorney General John Ashcroft,
condemning John Walker Lindh

"Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus."

—Senator John Ashcroft,
upon receiving an honorary degree
from Bob Jones University, 1999

"Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

—Senator Ashcroft praising Confederate values
in a 1998Southern Partisan interview

THE TIMES, THEY HAVE A'CHANGED

Carol Jahnkow has seen the influence of American war culture spread in signs great and small, from the way big media snaps its shoe-polish rag at Pentagon briefings to the presence of military recruiters at high schools in San Diego, where she has been a peace activist since the late '60s. Although these have not been great times for self-described "secular pacifists," it is soft-spoken nonconformists like Jahnkow, toiling beyond the liberal glow of northern cities like San Francisco and Berkeley, who keep alive the spirit of dissent in Southern California.

Today she denounces what she calls the "militarization" of San Diego's annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade, which was held this past Saturday.

"It had a very large presence," she says, "of armed-forces units and law-enforcement groups like the FBI, DEA and Border Patrol, who marched and recruited at the parade. They're part of a system whose glorification of violence runs against everything Dr. King was about. The parade organizers told us that Martin Luther King belongs to everyone — that this was their idea of diversity and inclusiveness."