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the situation ethics that many of them profess to abhor, especially since they did not rush to the recruiting office when Richard Nixon was elected. Just as the boomers have come to imagine that they would welcome a shot at ?the nobility that illuminated the lives of our parents and grandparents,? the generation following the boomers nourishes the idea that they would have behaved more honorably than the boomers did in the Vietnam era, that they would have gone to fight for the national weal as their grandparents did in the Second World War, that they would not have availed themselves of Canada or the academic deferment.
The strength of this delusion is such that it survived even the Gulf War. In February, 1991, David Maraniss, of the Washington Post, interviewed seven Vanderbilt undergraduates about Operation Desert Storm. All were twenty or twenty-one years old, roughly the same age as the troops poised to liberate Kuwait and invade Iraq. Five of the seven supported the war, none were willing to fight in it, and all were opposed to military conscription. ?This might sound selfish, but I think it would be a shame to put Americas best young minds on the front line,? said one, and another, ?I can?t see myself shooting a gun.... I don?t feel I could be an effective soldier.? On the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, a Princeton senior was even more unequivocal in his espousal of student entitlement, and his acceptance of the idea that America now had a Hessian class that could fight this and future wars, an army of the socially and economically disenfranchised from the skid rows of the American dream. ?Is it hypocritical of me to support the Persian Gulf War in which some of my peers are dying but not be willing to put my life on the line?? he wrote. ?I don?t think
so____America?s military is, at present,
essentially a mercenary force.... We must remember that our soldiers have freely contracted to expose themselves
to great risks____No one is arguing that
our volunteer troops are expendable. But we should be willing to risk their lives even when our immediate security is not on the line. After all, they agreed to be used that way.?
What the Gulf War showed was that enthusiasm for war now rises in inverse proportion to the inclination to fight it.
THE NEW YORKER. NOVEMBER 16, 1998
Ronald Reagan was the avatar of this new patriotism, patriotism as a spectator sport, with war the sport. Grenada was the kind of war Reagan liked?small, winnable, and with more medals passed out than there were troops in the engagement. When he talked about Grenada, Reagan made it seem like Iwo Jima revisited, a national antidote to Vietnam. ?We restored that island to liberty,? he said. ?Yes, it?s only a small island, but that?s what the world is made of?small islands yearning for freedom.? Reagan worked as a war leader in this kind of limited action because he had an actor?s presence and sense of the moment. He loved to salute; I doubt that America has ever had a snappier saluter as President, and he did it whenever he got the chance?to the colors, to honor guards, getting on or off Air Force One or the Presidential chopper. Saluting was a visual metaphor for his leadership. Unlike most actors, who salute in films as if they were waving good night to a date, Reagan knew how to salute?crisply, fingers pointed, movement squared. There was only one thing wrong with this piece of actor?s business: he was a civilian. Saluting is a military courtesy, a sign of respect for senior rank. Only officers are saluted; the junior grade salutes, the higher rank returns the salute. If military personnel are not in uniform, they customarily do not salute. As President, Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the largest army in American history, usually held his hand, or his homburg, over his heart on saluting occasions, as civilians are supposed to do.
THE patriotism inspired by ?Saving Private Ryan? is like Ronald Reagan?s saluting?appealing and not particularly relevant. The post-?Ryan? patriotism of the middle class is a virtual patriotism, meaning you do not have to do anything about it except express it and wish you had been at the conflict in question. It comes not from the actuality of a war but from a movie about a war. To find patriotism at the cineplex reduces it to a style, a look. ?Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success,? Benjamin Disraeli once said, and in today?s atmosphere it seems necessary to add that there is no mutual suffering in a place where you can buy butter-flavored popcorn
BOOKS
and a three-dollar box of Mil Since ?Saving Private Ryan,? in combat has been extolled as qua non of patriotism. It is nc otism is the acquired devotion t straction?the nation?while under fire is personal and ins The soldier who falls on a hand giving up his life to save the m squad, is a hero, but such a spli impulse is unpremeditated, not Virtual patriotism demands the of heroes. Yet heroes, Samuel H written, create a problem: ?Th too close to the center of war? and whether they mean to or act out the mottoes on the flags slogans on the posters.?
Before Wilfred Owen was I the last week of the First World tried, in a letter to his mothe: scribe no man?s land, separa' trenches of the warring armies. ? the eternal place of gnashing o he wrote. ?It is pock-marked lik
LYRICL
A dazzling.
BY C
I
I	isn?t often you come across po-
etry that makes you want to turn to the stranger next to you on the bus, grab him by the collar, and say,
?You have to read this!?
But that?s how I felt when I read a small poem called ?96 Van-darn,? in Gerald Stern?s ?This Time: New and Selected Poems? (Norton; $27.50). It begins,
?I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight / complete with sheets and ripped blankets; / ing to push it across three d . ways /or coast along under j faint stars.? Born in Pittsburg | Stern, the son of Eastern ! | immigrants, is the kind of : sleeps on the fire escape to w