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John Marsh What makes Thomas Mcgrath's " Crash Report" so immediately intriguing is the decidedly anti-populist for this famously populist poet last stanza. McGrath challenges his readers to " examine a case on record, " to make sense of the apparent contradiction between calling two grossly unequal deaths one " real" (going " down over Paramashiru" ), the other " phony" (the result of " joy-riding" equally 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 doesnt matter a damn. To you, real or phony, theyre all the same.
And in the dead mens summers where theyll never feel the sun Its of no importance. Everyone dies for your sins. (25 - 28) McGrath borrows the language of crucifixion Christ died for our sins 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 motives save the Jews from the Nazis, to defend Democracy from Fascismto 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's 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's 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 without which war could not proceed. The one-dimensional patriotism McGrath targets in " Crash Report" also compels people to suppress any but the propagandist ic 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's 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 deaths happen for a reason because no death happens by accident reads, 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 the 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 all too easy abrogation of responsibility Mcgrath's " Crash Report" will not allow to pass without comment. The poems 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 Jarrels " The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner, " whose speaker laments at the outset that " From my mothers sleep, I fell into the State" (1) a 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's " Crash Report, " is notas in Jefferscomposed 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 the " 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's kind as programmatic and naive pacifism. For if World War II somehow qualifies as just even though tainted by incalculable injustices (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) the 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 just and unjust alike could rely upon the same patriotic surrender of the will (Nixon's " silent majority" ) that World War II received. It is this unthinking, static patriotism that Mcgrath's " Crash Report" finally condemns. The stopped clock of unthinking patriotism may be right twice a day (World War II and perhaps Kosovo) but 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 young men, Americas or its " enemies" of such a record. 33 d
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