Masters of War

When Dylan’s Masters of War song plays on my car radio in 2018, my head warbles to the sound of an off-screen harp, as if in movie flash-back-mode to… 

Danny and Teddy Simonovsky’s living room. Echo Park. Downtown Los Angeles. Any Friday night in 1964, ’65, or ‘66. 

The darkened room is filled with angst-ridden and pock-marked sixteen to eighteen-year-olds, trying our damnedest to look and sound like Buffie Saint Marie, Joanie B, and Bob D. 

We know all the words and chords, all the harmonies, and all the meanings which we discuss endlessly at lunch in our inner-city school cafeteria. Over time, too many of our male classmates leave their graduation gowns in a pile, sunny days in June, stash their tassels and year-books with family, and don the dull khaki green of bright shiny new Army recruits ready (yet also green) for sardine box-shipment off to the jungles of Viet Nam. 

These Friday nights are a time to let down our center-parted hair, to air our grievances, and to plan the next march against the insanity. Too many of our buddies are coming back in boxes or severely and permanently bent by what they see or are made to do while dodging Napalm - our own country’s lucrative (Dow Chemical Company) invention of Hell on Earth - a gift that keeps on giving to succeeding generations. 

War leads to more war. Betcha can’t have just one! Try one, and you’ll see. But this one is a Just War. Hah! We fall for that unjust justification too often. There is no just war if the motive is tainted one bit by greed. Do you know one that isn't? 

In 1967, I see the Joffrey Ballet production of Kurt Joos's The Green Table in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at Los Angeles Music Center. The ballet is the most searingly visual anti-war statement I have ever seen up close and personal. Joos and Fritz Cohen first presented this scathing depiction of how wars are planned and war's true cost in 1932, winning first prize in a choreographic festival of new ballet works in Paris. 

Black and white photos and videos of the war in Viet Nam grace our television sets while we eat our modern TV dinners in front of the sanitized gore.

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My own brother was one of Viet Nam's casualties. Granted, his body came home but much of his mind went missing, obliterated by attempts to forget his part in the war with liquid libation, dubious prescriptions, or beautiful as white-snow-coke. He’s quite a reader now, closer to eighty than seventy. Just don’t ask him what he’s reading, or to socially engage. That’s beyond his shingle anymore. The ears are gone, the stutter is pronounced. Reclusive is his modus operandi. He’s a survivor; not a thriver. He’s in compliance: Not drinking anymore but certainly not in recovery. I have almost as much survivor’s guilt as he does. I was lucky to be female, born half-a-generation later, and to avail myself of the healing modalities to which I had access for getting over what our father who aren't in Heaven, Howard was his name did to us both. Brother Mel did not choose a healing path. I miss him, or the "him" he used to be.

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A friend who saw lots of action in ‘Nam, and who was exposed to Agent Orange is now battling for his life. “Charlie,” as he calls his sternal cancer which has metastasized to his gut, is getting the upper hand and I’m pissed as Hell. I feel the rage against the very idea of war being shoved into the lives of young people. I rail against corporate greed. The letters I write to Nestlés, Dow, (now DowDupont), Monsanto, and Bayer nearly self-incinerate with fiery anger before I can get the stamps on with shaking fingers.

There are no just wars. 

On Sunday, our dear Pastor Ben Daniel at Church of Last Resort (AKA: Montclair Presbyterian in Oakland) offered a Peace Sermon. In it, he supposed getting rid of Hitler should have been accomplished long before 1930 wherever seeds of discontent and inequality were planted during and after WWI. When Adolf was not got rid of, the world was finally forced to remove his war engine with the Big War.

War begets war. Pastor Ben is right: Only Peace begets Peace.

I’d like to subscribe to this premise: War is avoidable, IF (longest word in any language), IF we sense in our fellow humans build-up of resentment of and struggle to get out from under indignities and inequalities, and IF WE WORK ACTIVELY TO RIGHT THE WRONGS.

Here's how Dylan sang it:

Come, you masters of war

You that build the big guns

You that build the death planes

You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it's your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain

You fasten all the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you sit back and watch

While the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

While the young peoples' blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatenin' my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain't worth the blood

That runs in your veins

How much do I know

To talk out of turn?

You might say that I'm young

You might say I'm unlearned

But there's one thing I know

Though I'm younger than you

That even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good?

Will it buy you forgiveness?

Do you think that it could?

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die

And your death will come soon

I'll follow your casket

On a pale afternoon

I'll watch while you're lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I'll stand over your grave

'Til I'm sure that you're dead

• 

         Bob Dylan

Here is a write-up of Kurt Joos's The Green Table with music by Fritz A. Cohen, (1932):

https://balletwest.org/news/the-green-table-at-85