SOME months ago, after the first stunning shock of Pearl Harbor, we Americans needed a shot in the arm to restore our ego. That ego, the product of the belief that we were the peculiar children of fortune, expressed itself in the vague assumption that we could lick any of our enemies in sixty days, without skipping a full meal with dessert, or missing a Sunday drive in the country. After the unhappy realization that we had been cruelly outsmarted in the first inning of the war, in the peace and quiet of a Sunday morning, our own tradition of assuming that everything about us was the biggest and the best, furnished us with a compensatory reflex. We fell into the bumptious practice of flexing imaginary muscles, and loudly proclaimed that as soon as we had completed an intensive course at the gymnasium we would get even with our enemies. We began pointing with pride at our resources, and without a blush plunged into the amiable self-deception of using percentages. If two tanks in a 10,000-tank program rumbled out of a factory where one had before, we gloated that production was up 100 per cent.
The Japanese, diligent little fellows that they are, saw to it that we received photographs of American officers and men surrendering at Corregidor, and equally impressive photographs of seas of British faces imprisoned at Singapore. Because we had been so well schooled in the callous disregard of the tarnished spots in our armor, we were able collectively to avert our eyes from these unpleasant photographs and give out some more statistics about what we would do next month, or the next month, and most certainly in the months after that.
Optimism Then Pessimism
President Roosevelt one fine day reminded the country that it was suffering from too much complacent optimism, and then we went in for pessimism. We government officials have told you and other groups in recent months that we could lose the war. But I suspect that our native conceit has accepted this line of thought as traditional advertising technique, the kind of message which sells hair tonic and cure-alls, full of terror in the first part of the ad and reassurance in the windup—the ads which say you are most certainly damned, but our product can save you.
It seems to me that our pre-Pearl Harbor egotism had such momentum that it is with us today in distorted and dangerous form. We go around saying "We can lose the war, but"— We may as well admit it—every time one of us says we can lose the war we think of this as pure rhetoric, part of the old pep talk. The assumption is, of course, we can't lose the war, but scare 'em a little and then in the windup of the talk give 'em the build-up about our great American heritage of freedom and what not, and how our courage and our self-sacrifice will bring us to victory over the forces of evil—and then there will be a people's peace, and amity and justice will pervade the earth, forever after.
How about, for a change, just saying that we are still losing the war. And realize that we damn well mean it.
Such realism, no doubt, would be a heart-racking plunge into cold water, but it probably will give us some idea of what we are up against.
It would remind us that not since the Civil War has this nation been called upon to suffer greatly.
It might drive us to the realization that morale is the spiritual capacity of a people to endure pain and suffering, and not a campaign of bill posters, pep talks and band concerts.
It might free us of the calmness with which we read of the ordeals of the Russian Army. All honor to them.
It might, in our shaken frame of mind, drive us to the Lincoln memorial in Washington, where on the north wall we could read the Second Inaugural Address, in which President Lincoln posed the disquieting proposition that perhaps the nation was being punished in those days for having enslaved a race.
What We Might Ponder
Thus conditioned to the unpleasant task of self-examination, we might ponder whether or not we have tempted adversity and slavery by trading our fine-sounding concepts of the freedom and dignity of the individual for a mess of advertising slogans and political clinches.
This painful technique of realistic self-analysis might even remind us that freedom, like any other virtue, does not exist in a vacuum. It must be worked and practiced to exist at all. And like any other virtue, it imposes upon those who would have it the unpleasant tasks of discipline and sacrifice. A materialistic people do not learn these tasks by reading posters or listening to pep talks, any more than you can learn to play the violin by the same methods.