Max Cleland and the Forever War of the Mind

Max Cleland’s New York Times op ed of November 6 speaks with candor and bravery about the terrible scourge of war and the facts of post traumatic stress. I will not endeavor to reprise Sen. Cleland’s discerning argument except to say that wars never end and America in its fervor for war as a Hollywood production never seems to imagine the human cost. And costs change just as medical technology and skill change. What I mean by this is that we can now save grievously wounded soldiers on the battlefield who formerly would have died–we can treat poly-trauma as its now being called; but we cannot follow through effectively, cannot treat the psychological effects of physical trauma. I will argue that a Puritan culture cannot conceive of the mind as a part of the body. Puritan culture imagines the mind as a moral field, a battlefield if you will. In this terrible figurative topography its “mind over matter” that counts. PTSD is a failure of the will. In this figurative topography “true soldiers” never stray. I’m tempted to write “etcetera” in a kind of Kurt Vonnegut-esque manner. “And so on.”

Two years ago I wrote the following poem after thinking about these issues and I dedicated it to Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. I was teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the time. Enough said?

 

Ode to Victor Frankenstein

You did it: you made a brother, a child.

You made a kind of mule—

A poor man’s mule

With watery eyes.

You built him so he would follow;

You made him lonely;

Gave him you;

Perfect in the giving:

No language;

Forests of veins;

Knees and ears; art

Of lost walking

Without destination.

And when you ran

You gave him division;

So even his new life

Was old.

 

 

S.K.