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On "Crash Report"

John Marsh

What makes Thomas McGrath痴 "Crash Report" so immediately intriguing is the decidedly anti-populist庸or this famously populist poet様ast stanza. McGrath challenges his readers to "examine a case on record," to make sense of the apparent contradiction between calling two grossly unequal deaths熔ne "real" (going "down over Paramashiru"), the other "phony" (the result of "joy-riding"容qually heroic. By way of solving the dilemma, the poem accuses and condemns those readers who would possibly value such distinctions in the first place but for whom (just as for the dead soldiers) such distinctions finally signify nothing:

But for you, Gentle Reader, it doesn稚 matter a damn.
To you, real or phony, they池e all the same.
And in the dead men痴 summers where they値l never feel the sun
It痴 of no importance. Everyone dies for your sins. (25-28)

McGrath borrows the language of crucifixion佑hrist died for our sins葉o make a pointed critique of any death ("real or phony...[is] of no importance") that results from war. Except that these military crucifixions offer no redemption. Indeed, McGrath ascribes no higher motive葉o save the Jews from the Nazis, to defend Democracy from Fascism葉o these soldiers・deaths (or to those who so casually send their young men to die) than the desire to create heroes, to have the comfort of martyrs. Further, McGrath痴 appropriation of the cliched Victorian address, "Gentle Reader," also ironically names our sin as violence, our willingness (indeed, our satisfaction) in sacrificing young men to war. In short, not a poem we would expect to come out of the closing, idealistic days of World War II, nor a poem we would expect from a poet whose political and poetic sympathies lie with the people.

Perhaps because of these disappointed expectations, McGrath痴 vision reads even more bleakly than that other famously skeptical World War II poem, Robinson Jeffers・"Fantasy," whose speaker imagines the day of peace betrayed by "new men plot[ting] a new war." Except that in "Fantasy" Jeffers at least offers the populist belief that scheming men, and not the people dancing in the street, plot the new wars. In "Crash Report," the people may not directly plot wars, but they nevertheless earn psychological wages from the creation of national heroes and myths謡ithout which war could not proceed. The one-dimensional patriotism McGrath targets in "Crash Report" also compels people to suppress any but the propagandistic and heroic myths they willingly consume in the public sphere. The deaths by "joy-riding" and the deaths "over Paramashiru" are all "equal," or made to be, "In the book of Hearst痴 recording angel" (19-20).

"Yet not for us," the speaker argues of these distinctions between heroic and non-heroic deaths,

We can recognize heroes
Before they are dead or fogged in with medals.
For heroes the hearse must be called for a reason.
It is not by accident their lives are given. (21-24)

What would otherwise read as a tautology in the final couplet妖eaths happen for a reason because no death happens by accident羊eads, at another level, as an attack upon the word "accident," which, like the medals, tends to fog in (a wonderful image) other nagging, uncomfortable truths. For the soldiers, all deaths, whether by whisky and nurses or by enemy gun-fire, must by definition qualify as heroic. Even those seemingly non-heroic deaths (the result of "the wages of sin, etc.") would not have occurred if soldiers had not surrendered themselves to the patriotic fantasies of the general population. The readers of newspapers must take responsibility for all deaths葉he heroic ones and the drunken, debauched ones. To do otherwise is to substitute propaganda for humanity, to engage in a public washing of bloodied hands預n all too easy abrogation of responsibility McGrath痴 "Crash Report" will not allow to pass without comment.

The poem痴 cynicism, then, with its refusal to distinguish between worthy and unworthy deaths and its refusal to speak the idealistic aims of World War II, may well express the resentment of soldiers against war itself, since war necessarily subordinates soldiers to the exigencies of the nation-state. At a very basic level, a society at war uses young men, who may or may not understand the exchange they participate in. If so, "Crash Report," anticipates Randall Jarrel痴 "The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner," whose speaker laments at the outset that "From my mother痴 sleep, I fell into the State" (1)預 state which, "When I died, washed me out of the turret with a hose." A state, in other words, that in its rush to accomplish nationalist (or, to be optimistic, humanitarian) ends, treats men as means, not ends. Except, to return to the earlier discussion, the state in McGrath痴 "Crash Report," is not預s in Jeffers幼omposed of scheming men, but instead composed of "Gentle Readers." The ordinary men and women who revel in the creation of heroes and who smooth over unpleasant details葉he "heroes in handcuffs, out of War by Accident" (9). If acquiescent and blinkered patriotism is a sin, then soldiers do indeed die for our sins.

Read as a whole, "Crash Report" offers a decidedly cynical account of World War II, the only supposedly "good" war of the Twentieth Century, and the Greatest Generation that conducted it at home and abroad. However much we might like to preserve the belief that World War II proceeded from higher motives than unthinking patriotic warmongering and the fetishism of heroes, though, we nevertheless should not dismiss critiques of McGrath痴 kind as programmatic and naive pacifism. For if World War II somehow qualifies as just容ven though tainted by incalculable injustices (Hiroshima and Nagasaki)葉he two great military engagements that would follow World War II (Vietnam and Iraq), and the many other smaller engagements in United States・military history in the Twentieth Century, were decidedly unjust. Yet each曜ust and unjust alike幼ould rely upon the same patriotic surrender of the will (Nixon痴 "silent majority") that World War II received. It is this unthinking, static patriotism that McGrath痴 "Crash Report" finally condemns. The stopped clock of unthinking patriotism may be right twice a day (World War II and perhaps Kosovo)傭ut it is wrong (the Philippines, Puerto Rico, World War I, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq) many, many more times than it is right. McGrath reminds us of this checkered history of unchecked patriotism, and the numerous victims遥oung men, America痴 or its "enemies"熔f such a record.

Copyright ｩ 2001 by John Marsh

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