BlogWood: MT Archives

Succumbing to the savage

Ben Tripp

America has fallen prey to the savage inside it. How did it happen? The same way it always does. Savage retribution for a savage act. Abstractions like honor, patriotism, and divine mission were brought out to screen the beast from view. An opportunity to kill was presented. Vengeance against the brown savage from Mesopotamia! Freedom! Terror! Madness. All our justifications for war were nothing more than drapery on the dragon. But they were enough to validate the claim that somebody, somewhere, needed to be slaughtered, raped, destroyed, their goods despoiled, their homeland taken away. Because we are still savages - something the older empires understood of themselves, and thus drew our scorn as we rushed into this campaign - we Americans were eager to strike out at the enemy, whoever that was suggested to be. Armed with righteousness, we triumphed.

But the amateurs in command of our own civilization refused to acknowledge the savage, because they are his slaves. They turned their back on the decades of detailed effort required to wrestle the savage back into its cage. They believed the mad notion that entropy would work in their favor. Now we find an American schoolgirl tugging at the leash around a naked, groveling war prisoner's neck. We find torture and cruelty for no other purpose than that it was not forbidden. We find more than a hundred thousand of our sons and daughters in a land without rules, without morals, without civilization - because we took it all away and turned our backs. The leader of that country was barbaric, but his land was known as "the Cradle of Civilization" for thousands of years. We dismantled the civilization ourselves, deemed it imperfect, replaced it with nothing, expected a new civilization to grow like a scab over the wound. Unless we find the will to resist history, the next civilization to fall to the savage inside us will be our own.