The View from the Couch: Fear Factor

There is some proof that these United States feel less like killing convicts locally when foreign wars are being waged. Part of that, however, given the Vietnam experience, was earlier Supreme Court decisions that put executions on hold; now that states can kill the legally condemned, it is nonetheless done with less zest, given that the public's appetite for state-sanctioned murder is lessened when soldiers and noncombatants are being killed willy-nilly elsewhere fighting various evil doers. The Nineties and the Zeros haven't been an age of assassins here in the states. At least, not the one obscure shooter and one famous victim sort. 9/11 was a type of assassination, because its perpetrators were willing to kill themselves. When a nation sees its primary enemy being the suicide bomber, the collective psyche recoils at the notion of the single killer, the mad man on a mission. Even so, our famous assassins of the past all appeared to want to get away, though none seemed good at it; indeed, Lee Harvey Oswald didn't bother to buy a ticket to the movie playing in the theater where he was captured; that is what raised suspicion and brought the law down on him. Our Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVee, flaunted his no licence plate ideology, which got him arrested. These guys were asking for it. Though large trends aren't perfect protection, the lone assassin, American-style, seems these days a bit out of date. Not to say Obama is safe, or Hillary Clinton either, for that matter. But things are different from the Sixties and the Seventies. This thesis could be expanded, but not here. And in one other large, but similar area, the national mood has been changed. That is in the treatment of the soldiers and veterans. It is almost as if the public has learned one lesson from the Vietnam experience: Separate the war from the warrior. One of the myths of the Vietnam war era is of veterans being attacked, spit upon, when they returned home from Nam. In my 1974 novel, The Meekness of Isaac, there is a scene where a veteran tells his friend that before they left Vietnam they were told to watch themselves when they got home, that others had been attacked. More than thirty years later, it is clear that it was the military itself that promulgated these tales, however lurid or unsubstantiated. The Nixon government wanted to have an us-versus-them world, to separate the soldier from the public, in order to tamp down anti-war sentiment and to build up resentment against the anti-war activists. Regardless, none of that is working during this time of war; the public is all on the side of the soldier, the veteran. It is a subtle change, but a potent one, just as it is unlikely that Barack Obama's campaign will be ended by a lone assassin. In an important way, Hillary Clinton is misreading the temper of the times, alas, once again.