One of the worst qualities of the Baby-Boom generation is their propensity to view their own personal concerns and desires as if they were universal moral imperatives. The most notorious
example of this was their opposition to the Vietnam War, during which they turned a perfectly typical lack of enthusiasm for warfare on the part of those who will actually have to do the fighting, into a sweeping judgment that the war was itself immoral.
This annoying trait has never been put on more ostentatious display than here in James Carroll's memoir about his tortured relationship with his father during the war years. Joe Carroll, who had quit the seminary just before his ordination as a priest, went on to become a lawyer, an FBI agent, an Air Force General, and the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Having judged himself unworthy to be a priest, he and his devout wife Mary placed their hopes in their sons, with James, after his older brother Joe contracted polio, becoming the natural choice to become a priest. James did go through the motions of joining the priesthood, though it's never clear from his narrative that he held any genuine religious beliefs, but as he became increasingly involved in the Catholic Left anti-War movement of the 60's & 70's, he eventually quit the Church. He has since become a bestselling novelist, a Boston Globe columnist, written this prize-winning memoir and has just written Constantine's Sword, a "historical" account of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church (see Orrin's review).
These are the bare bones of the story and they suggest a young man whose opposition to the immorality of the Vietnam War causes a crisis of faith. In point of fact, the War seems to have had little to do with Carroll's personal crisis, certainly its morality had nothing to do with it, instead the story he has to tell is that age old tale of youth rebelling against authority. I'm loathe to engage in psychoanalysis, being both unqualified and not much of a believer in its efficacy, but Carroll uses the term Oedipal so often and the book is cast so clearly in the form of an Oedipal drama that it's hard to avoid doing so. Start with the fact that he outdoes his father by actually becoming a priest, where Joe fell short; continue with the way that this profession figuratively wed him to his pious mother, whose entry to Heaven would be virtually guaranteed by virtue of having borne a priest; move along to his utter rejection of his father's profession and an eventual adoption of complete pacifism; then conclude with his decision to leave the priesthood after his father had been forced out of government and crippled by disease. It's hard to see how Vietnam actually matters to any of this psychodrama : had his Dad been a butcher, Carroll would have become a vegetarian, had he been a fireman, Carroll would have been an arsonist. This is a mere story of generational tension dressed up in the ennobling guise of a great moral struggle.
The most revealing aspect of Carroll's self-portrait and the account of the moral dilemma he supposedly faced as a result of the War is his complete failure to consider the consequences of peace on the Vietnamese people. His opposition to the War, as he himself depicts it, is almost exclusively a function of the fact that he's made uncomfortable by the means that were being used to conduct it. There is not a single word of consideration here of what would, and did, happen to the people of Vietnam once America withdrew. The moral calculus at work seems to be that it is better that Vietnam be destroyed by Communism than that a single American have to commit an act which will trouble his conscience. That is a perfectly honorable argument to make, and a necessary corollary of pacifism.
Even this shortcoming would not be so bad were it not for the impact it has on the rest of the book. But one result of his failure to treat this issue is that he ignores what was certainly a central motivation of Cold Warriors like his father. They certainly prosecuted the War because they had considered the consequences of not doing so and found these consequences unacceptable. While it is possible, perhaps even accurate, to argue that they were wrong in their determination, simple fairness requires that Carroll give them their due and look at their legitimate motivations. Deprived, by the author, of the beliefs that drove them, they are presented as one-dimensional characters whose sole purpose is to stand as convenient villains in Carroll's little morality play.
At one point in the book Carroll places the "blame" for American involvement in Vietnam on the Catholic Church and the advocacy for intervention of folks like Cardinal Spellman. Though delusional, this assertion is of a piece with his blaming the Holocaust on the Catholic Church, as he does in the aforementioned Constantine's Sword. One has, first of all, to be troubled by a man who attributes such power to an institution which after all represents a minority of the citizens of Germany and the United States and which has proven incapable of influencing those nations on such issues as birth control, and the like. Secondly, one can't help noticing that there's an element here of reenacting the Oedipal drama with his biological father, his rebellion now directed towards the figurative father, the Church, perhaps even God. The cumulative effect of these two books is to suggest that the greater problem lies not in the sins, real or imagined, of Joe Carroll and the Catholic Church but in the psychological conflicts of James Carroll.
Finally, Carroll claims to have arrived at the viewpoint that war is always unjust. How then would he square his concern over the Holocaust with this position ? He makes much over his obsession with the threat of nuclear war : but if we'd had the bomb in the late 30's or early 40's, or better yet, if Churchill had it, would Carroll really oppose dropping it on Hitler and the high command of the Nazi Party, no matter how many innocent civilian lives it would have claimed ? Would he really be unwilling to sacrifice 30,000 or 40,000 or however many in order to save the tens of millions who ended up dying during the War ? For an author who writes with such smug self-certainty about the purity of his own moral vision, and who is so eager to judge the moral failings of others, he somehow manages to avoid the really hard questions that his newfound philosophy raises. For all that these books are about the author himself, they ultimately reflect fairly little deliberation over the ramifications of the moral choices that he's made.
Which brings us to the final legacy of the Baby-Boom generation. They have succeeded brilliantly in rebellion, in rejecting the institutions, the morals, and the beliefs of their parents and the other generations that came before them. The problem they have left behind is what should replace the Judeo-Christian culture which they've done their best to destroy. Perhaps in this sense James Carroll's book is a signal text for his generation : just as he speaks eloquently about rejecting the faith of his fathers but falls silent about what has replaced it, his generation stands amidst the rubble they have created and have no idea what to erect in its place.
GRADE : D-
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