Monday
In W. P. Kinsella’s baseball novel The Iowa Confederacy (Kinsella also wrote Shoeless Joe, upon which Field of Dreams is based), an Iowa amateur baseball teams battles the 1908 Chicago Cubs in a nightmarish 2000-inning exhibition game. Each time a run in scored in the endless extra innings, the other team somehow manages to score a tying run and things continue on. I think there’s a Native American curse involved somehow, but since I read the novel decades ago, I can’t remember for sure. In any event, the Cubs have to put off their regular season since ball players are honor bound not to end a game in a tie. Eventually the teams are pelted by a driving rain, and although they attempt to play through it, everything ends when the entire town is washed away.
I’ve been thinking of Kinsella’s book as I watch America’s “endless war” with the Taliban come to an end. It has had a similarly nightmarish feel to it, although in this case there’s an actual winner. But the book does have one loser, a witness who is wafted back in time to see the game and who passes up a chance at a fulfilling love relationship because he wants to know the game’s outcome. As a result, by the book’s conclusion, he is living an empty, lonely life. Think of him as the presidents—Bush and Obama especially—who could have ended the conflict earlier but did not and who now will be held accountable by history for the prolongation.
Another work that has crossed my mind, although in a reverse way, is A. E. Housman’s superb poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”:
These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
In the case of the Afghan War, it’s not clear who the mercenaries are. America’s professional army? The Afghans who were persuaded to fight for an Afghanistan that few of them really believed in, given that the country is more a collection of tribes than a nation (as we learned when many lay down their arms the moment America said it was leaving). Whoever the war’s mercenaries were, for 20 years they held the sky suspended and preserved the foundations of a fictional country. Girls became educated and everyone experienced unprecedented freedoms. The fighters, meanwhile, took their wages and many are dead
Unfortunately, when they stopped fighting, the heavens fell, the foundations fled, and many feel abandoned by God. Disaster has descended like Kinsella’s flood, and Afghanistan has once again earned its appellation “graveyard of empires.”
