George Bush : All My Sons

When I was growing up in Bangalore, a few of my well meaning friends roped me into an amateur production of Arthur Miller’s ‘All my sons’. My advent into the theatre world, I realized much later, was more due to a paucity of bodies, than because of my personality or histrionic abilities. Anyway, it was good fun; I was young, I had never heard of Arthur Miller before and all I remember of the miniscule part I was playing was having to empty an imaginary pipe several times on an imaginary tree before filling it with supposedly aromatic tobacco. The production finally never saw the light of day due to the various commitments of all the persons involved; the marriage and emigration to Australia of two of the cast also did not help matters. While my dreams of Broadway’s lights were fleeting, readings of the play and a subsequent interest in the works of Miller, left me with a lasting impression of the central character in the play.

Joe Keller, a pillar of American society and business, manufactures critical spare parts for American fighter planes taking part in the various cauldrons and infernos that was World War II. One of the many consignments being supplied to the War department contains parts which are seriously flawed. Business dynamics and exigencies of striking while the iron was hot ensure that this truth is camouflaged. Ultimately these flawed spare parts, sends spiraling to earth more American fighters than what squadrons of Japanese Zeros and German Messerschmitts could manage, including amongst them an aircraft piloted by our hero’s son. Joe Keller is arrested and later released. There is an emotional climax to the play, with someone, a daughter or another son I think, haranguing this man about his avarice and greed which leads to the death of his son as well as other fine young American soldiers. Final Act, Final Scene has Keller, climbing a staircase, brokenly muttering, “They were all my sons, they were all my sons”. A little later, a shot is heard from upstairs. Curtain falls. Much applause!

Now what is the connection between a character from a play and George Bush, great white christian leader and protector of the free world, you may ask? To answer that, one needs to go to this link on CNN’s home page (http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0409/list.us.casualties/frameset.exclude.html) which gives a list of American casualties in Iraq and also the history of American casualties in war since the War of Independence in the late 1700s. Looking at the Wars fought by the Americans in the last hundred years, some of them, World War II and Afghanistan, may be justified because of direct aggression on the United States. World War I, too could be excused as the United States was catapulted into the war after the American ocean liner Lusitania, was sunk by a U-Boat. All the other conflicts – Korea, Vietnam & Iraq – arguably, have no just cause either in the form of direct aggression on the United Sates’ sovereignty or any threat to its national security.
These casualty statistics are or were fine young men, maimed and killed in distant lands, many oceans and seas from their farms and their families and loved ones, not ‘fighting on the beaches or fighting in the fields or fighting on the hills’ to save their country, but dying for unknown causes. Did Truman and Johnson and the Bush senior and junior, ever think about the families, the wives and the children of these soldiers, before sending them off to their deaths? I guess the need of staying on top of the totem pole as the world’s super power justifies sending young men in the prime of their lives to early deaths. And what about the millions of, seemingly normal and rational, Americans that one sees supporting the war in Iraq? These people, in all probability, do not have family members dodging bullets of desperate insurgents. And chances are, they know nothing about what it means when a close family member dies.

When will the collective American conscience awaken and say “they were all my sons”? And will the day dawn, when George Bush dismantles his mighty war machinery and say “they are all my sons” and call an end to the killing?