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Has America lost its moral compass?

by W. E. Gutman

History, culture and tradition drive national values. In some countries, these values are so deeply ingrained that conventions, rituals and loyalties become embedded in the national psyche.

Sixty-two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan is waxing nostalgic. It is looking at its youth, hopelessly seduced by the West’s tawdriest trappings, and pining for an era when Bushido, the Honor Code of the Warrior, governed every aspect of life. In its purest form, Bushido elevates fearlessness, justice, benevolence and honesty. It also demands of its practitioners that they look backward at the present from the moment of their own death, as if they were already dead. Bushido, in effect, is the path to an honorable life. The Bushido of the Samurai was the spiritual basis for those who undertook kamikaze missions during World War II.

On April 12, 1945, Lt. Shinichi Uchida faced a terrifying mission --- crash his plane into a US warship. The young kamikaze's final letter to his grandparents was full of bravado.

"Now I'll go and get rid of those devils," the 18-year-old wrote shortly before his final flight. He was never seen again.

For many, such rhetoric is redolent of the militarism and fierce chauvinism that drove Japan to ruin. But for an increasingly bold cadre of conservatives, Uchida's words symbolize something else: the kind of guts and commitment, the “divine wind” that today’s Japanese youth seem to lack.

No one is publicly calling for young Japanese to kill themselves for the nation these days. But the renewed hero-worship of the kamikazes coincides with a general trend in Japanese society where the moral and intellectual defection of its youth and a fading ethic of idealism is now being mourned.

The estimated 4,000 kamikaze --- or "divine wind" --- pilots were named after a legendary typhoon that foiled the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's invasion of Japan in 1281. As many as 90 percent failed to reach the US warships they were meant to attack.

Despite the pilots' reputation abroad as suicidal fanatics, Japanese hearts have always had a soft spot for the kamikazes. Long celebrated in movies, books and comic books, the pilots are seen as innocent young men forced by a desperate military into sacrificing their lives to protect their country.

In contrast, while innocent young Americans are sacrificing their lives, limbs and sanity in a calamitous, immoral and unwinnable war, the hedonistic apathy of today’s “baby boomers” has all but obscured the exuberant effrontery and defiance of a generation not afraid to speak up against injustice, government lies, presidential chicanery and the sham piety of its spiritual leaders.

The 60s and 70s ushered an era oxygenated by the rise of an ebullient counterculture. Emancipated from the phony Puritanism of the finicky Fifties, cleansed from the obscenity of McCarthyism, sickened by the Vietnam War, the Kent State massacre, the Watergate scandal, America welcomed the Beatles, let its hair down, burned books in campus libraries, sets fire to ROTC buildings and donned Nehru jackets.

Malcolm X spoke out with vigor and eloquence. Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and comedian Dick Gregory, a drum major for civil rights, parlayed acerbic tongue and mordant wit into a brand of social activism that helped bolster black America’s self-identity. James Baldwin rose from obscurity to become a commanding figure in American literature. A cultural phenomenon, Alex Haley’s Roots offered for the first time a black perspective of life in Africa and unerringly records the bestiality of slavery. In Kunta Kinté are incarnated the horrors and heroism of the black experience. Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and George Carlin turned humor on its head.

Their irreverence and biting political satire challenged a hypocritically strait-laced society and helped redefine and broaden free speech. Jack Kerouac, the leading chronicler of the “beat generation” --- he coined the term --- shocked America with autobiographical sketches that reflect deep social angst assuaged by drugs, alcohol, spiritualism and scorching antiestablishment humor. His leading apostle, Allen Ginsberg, vented his rage against materialism with tortured lyricism.

Flower children preached love, not war. Oh! Calcutta, memorable for its brazen use of frontal nudity, male and female, and Hair, America’s tribal love-rock musical, opened to rave reviews. The plays would enthrall audiences for years to come. This was an age of rebellious sex and drugs and freedom from the shackles of convention and naiveté, a time of nascent impiety and suspicion toward the political structures that Americans take for granted and trust, an epoch long remembered and still reviled by the conservative core that lived through it and died a little.

I remember watching these transformations with relish. I rejoiced at the consternation these upheavals wreaked upon America’s squeamish psyche. They filled me with hope. For a change, I was proud to be an American. I saw in the politics of open dissent the same dauntless spirit that had infused the Patriots 200 years earlier.

Where are the flower children, the rebels, the draft-card burners and the gallant conscientious objectors and refuseniks now that we really need them? What happened to the conscience of America now that a dictator, who consciously and obstinately disregards the will of the people, is pushing America toward the brink? Why aren’t million-man marches flooding the streets of America and advancing on the While House and Congress to proclaim their revulsion? Has this nation lost its capacity to express moral indignation?

Neutrality is indifference degraded by indecisiveness. Silence and laissez-faire are tantamount to cowardice. Cowardice promotes negligence --- the criminal kind.

W. E. Gutman is a veteran journalist. He lives in southern California.

Bernal, Dissent and violence
Gutman, Has America lost its moral compass?
Amnesty International, China lags in implementing human rights promises
Nasser, Gaza beyond the humanitarian and political perspectives
Weisbrot, The western mainstream media and Venezuela
Carmona, Climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean
Pilgrim, Another hurricane season in the Caribbean
Denis, Defending the interests of small states

Kellberg & Duncan, Haiti's cautious government

Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy, Repression in Guyana is a CARICOM issue

Schaeffer & Sánchez, Why Paraguay matters
Schaeffer, A scandal a day in Brazil while Lula was away

Lauer, The CAFTA referendum in Costa Rica

Jackson, Now that they're killing people...