Monthly Archives: April 2023

By Michael F. Duggan

Yes, I know, it’s not really over.

Unlike popular wars, there are no parades and celebrations after pandemics. The COVID-19 virus is still among us; a couple hundred Americans still die from it every day, give or take, and the number of new infections is diminishing. The emergence of another killer strain of the disease sometime in the indefinite future is a possibility. But the worst of the great visitation is perhaps a year or more behind us. Gone are the days of refrigerator trucks serving as temporary morgues outside of large urban hospitals, and a mostly maskless status quo has quietly and unselfconsciously crept back. After so many months, “COVID fatigue” had set in, and it was to be expected.

The country is different now, altered by the disease. The pandemic drove the trend of working from home by orders of magnitude, and the number of Americans who no longer go to the office every day is at a level that would have taken decades to reach in more ordinary times. High school girls now attend class in pajamas and bedroom slippers. It is possible that the suit and tie (and the jacket and tie) is dead in all but the highest levels of professional life, and outside of the most special of occasions. On its face, this accelerated casualness looks like a chronic lack of effort. How are we to expect people to return to greater rigor after three years where solitude and diminished standards were the norm?

And then there are the casualties. There are young people who feel cheated out of milestone high school and college experiences, and we can only wonder what the long-term impact of the pandemic will be on those who were three to six years old at the height of the crisis, and were just becoming aware of the world and social interactions. There are the “long haulers” whose health may be permanently damaged by a virus whose symptoms ranged from none at all to a slow gasping death alone in tent-like hospital wards.

And of course there are the dead, 1,121,819 Americans by the latest court, and the real number might be much higher. That number is almost twice as great as the one for all of the U.S. combat deaths in all of our wars, given as 666, 441. In the same way that the country quickly forgot the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 and got on with the 1920s, or how we have never faced the Vietnam War with complete frankness, we are not acting like a country that has been through a world and national-historical tragedy of the largest proportions. We are not acting like a country that has just lost more than a million of our neighbors.

I suspect that there will be important histories written about the COVID-19 pandemic over the coming years and decades. But then, how many Americans really read history?

By Michael F. Duggan

Eulogy delivered at Arlington National Cemetery, April 24, 2023

I want to thank you all for being here.

I am glad that the weather has cooperated so magnificently. Outdoor events in the spring are always dicey matters.

There is a story about how President Eisenhower was asked to be the commencement speaker at Penn State in 1955.  His brother, Milton, was president of the university, and it was to be an outdoor graduation.  And as is so often the case in these latitudes in May, storm clouds were moving in from the west. The event planners were not sure what to do, and Milton asked his brother, the president, if he thought the ceremony should be moved indoors.

“You decide,” Eisenhower said, “the last time I worried about the weather was June 6, 1944.” The story is neither apocryphal nor is it fully true; he also worried about the weather in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

But it is a gorgeous day with no chance of storms, and I thank you for coming. My dad would have been honored to see this group assembled here today.

My father was a soldier, a combat infantry officer: West Point ’59, airborne, ranger, special forces.

He was born in the small hamlet of Paia on the island of Maui, Territory of Hawaii on August 20, 1936.  The son of teachers, his family moved to Oahu after the Pearl Harbor attacks—a formative event of his early life.  His father’s family is famine Irish by way of Ontario and North Dakota; his mother’s family, from Texas, goes back to Jamestown.

He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1954 and attended the University of Hawaii for a year before being selected for the United States Military Academy at West Point, his brother, _____, had gone off to the Naval Academy at Annapolis a couple of years before.  And so, after 19 years of perfect weather, crystal blue seas, and palm trees, I suspect that the Academy and the winters of the Hudson highlands were a rude awakening.

But he graduated in 1959 and was commissioned into the infantry.  After completing the Airborne and Ranger courses, he married _____ _____ in New York City the day after Christmas, 1959.  We moved around a lot, and I lived in 10 houses and apartments by the time I was 9—the life of an Army family. But it was a wonderful upbringing, we lived and traveled throughout the US and took trips to Austria, Germany, England, and Scotland, and so, in the words of Jimmy Doolittle, “I could never have been so lucky again” (by the way, Doolittle is over in Section 7A of the cemetery, which I believe is that way).

My dad had a full career as an Army officer with progressive assignments in airborne infantry units.  He served two combat tours in the Republic of Vietnam.  A master parachutist, he jumped out of an airplane 104 times and participated in approximately 150 helicopter combat missions. 

In the 1970s, he commanded a Basic Combat Training battalion at Ft. Jackson, SC.  His career also included an early overseas tour in South Korea and an assignment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, among others (he was the guy who briefed the Chairman of the JCS back when it was Creighton Abrams, namesake of the M-1 Abrams tank and the room that the reception will be in at Patton Hall).  He retired as a full “bird” colonel in 1985 after 25 years of service.

And his awards include the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars with V—”Valor”—device, a Purple Heart, and many others.

In terms of his professional life, there was a kind of military purity to him.  He was trained to be a career soldier at the tax-payers’ expense, he would tell me, and was skeptical about the “political guys.”   

After his military service, he began a second career as an Assistant and Deputy Director and lobbyist for the American Legion, where he prepared and presented testimony before House and Senate Armed Services Subcommittees in support of a variety of veterans’ issues.

One of these was the concurrent receipt of military retirement pay and veterans’ disability compensation which passed Congress in 2003-04. I think was his proudest post-Army accomplishment: he told me that they owed the veterans their retirement, and that the wounded had paid for their disability compensation with their blood.  He retired from The American Legion in 2007 with more than 20 years of service.

But as impressive as his service was—real accomplishments, involving great risk and sacrifice—all of this is also the stuff of resumes.  There is a saying that there are old soldiers who would rather show you their medals and those who prefer to show you their wounds. As it happens, he was perfectly happy to show you either or both.  He was proud of his service and made no secret about it.

And yet the outward signs, his medals, badges, and insignia, were not, I think, reflective of the biggest part of his character.

Shortly after he died, my mom began receiving sympathy cards and phone calls, some from relatives, friends, and classmates of course, but what was striking was that a number of them were from people she and I did not know—veterans and retired servicemen and servicewomen.  Some of the condolences were from veterans with PTSD, people who he had helped navigate the various veterans’ bureaucracies, and people he had helped get into programs, including twelve-step programs.

When I was cleaning out the trunk of his car, a man who I never met before, came up to me on the street and offered his heartfelt condolences and went on and on about how he had helped him. There were also the more recently-wounded veterans that he had met as a volunteer in wards at Walter Reed-Bethesda to whom he had spoken in a way that only someone who has been there can do.   

He also worked with the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs helping those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries—the signature wounds of those conflicts.  But he knew this stuff and was happy to help, both in a professional capacity and on his own time as a volunteer.

Many of us fly the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.  Some people put “I support the troops” bumper-stickers on their cars.  But how many of us actually volunteer at veterans’ hospitals?  (I know that _____’s father volunteered at Bethesda and so did my sister when she was a teenager).  My dad did as well, as a kind of third act.  So, after a year in the Maryland V.A., he transferred to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda to work as a Red Cross volunteer, again, with veterans suffering from PTSD and TBI.

He was himself combat wounded, and if you have not been wounded, it is a community—a siblinghood—to which you can never belong.  I think that for a veteran, volunteering in a hospital ward of the combat wounded—as he did—it is a two-way street of healing, and I know that he especially valued this service and his Red Cross vest.   

But except for his vest, he gave little indication of his help to others.  My sense is that he saw it as a duty and it was probably too personal to mention. Medals and ribbons are conspicuous and there is a certain anonymity to the wearing them—they are symbols whose general meaning is inferred. They do not quite tell the full story.  But volunteering in a ward of the wounded is a quiet and personal duty.  

A few weeks before he died, he said that he admired my sister, _____, and that she tried harder than most people. Effort counted a lot with him, and it was sheer doggedness that had gotten him through West Point.  And he said that my mom was the love of his life.

Like all of us, he was full of ironies and contradictions: a soldier who had served two combat tours, he always seemed a little too concerned about his health.  He jumped out of airplanes for a living, and yet I could never coax him into go parasailing with me at Ocean City.  He also had a sense of humor that could be downright silly. For instance his favorite marching cadence at West Point had the sardonic refrain: “For it’s GI beans and GI gravy… gee I wish I joined the Navy.”

He was a soldier who loved Peter, Paul, and Mary, and tested my sister’s patience by playing Elton John CDs while driving to the beach.  Apparently Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a particular favorite.

One of my earliest memories is of him standing in the doorway of our apartment in Queens New York one morning when I was three.  It was 1966 and he was leaving for Vietnam for the first time.  He told me in words I can hear now that I was “the man of the house.” 

But even at the age of three, I had no illusions. It was my mom who was the real CEO and the person who managed the finances, scheduled interstate moves every 10 to 12 months, took me and my sister to Rockaway Beach with my cousins, the _____, as well as to the American Museum of Natural History, Mets games, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, and the movies, just to name a few things.  She magnificently ran the show day in and day out.  She also taught us how to be comfortable in any and all company.    

His favorite film was From Here to Eternity.  Set in Hawaii, it came out the year he graduated from high school.  As a young man, he looked a little like Montgomery Clift, and he internalized some of the film’s themes, like boxing.  He would go on to box at West Point, and taught me how to throw a punch and a football.  He ran three miles a day in combat jump boots—Corcorans—well into his 50s.  

He embraced the easily spoken but hard-lived values of duty, honor, and service, and the services he rendered, but about which he never spoke, of are in some ways the most admirable.  And there is something poetic about an old warrior who dies in peace after helping others as a second and third act. Ambulatory to the end, you could say he died with his Corcorans on.

He was away a lot when I was young. But he instilled in me a love of history, literature, and the outdoors.  It is because of him that I voluntarily chose to attend a military high school. It is no doubt because of him that I got my doctorate in US History; when he returned from Vietnam for the second time in the fall of 1969, he brought with him The Golden Book of the American Revolution (a book that is still on my shelf) and then, for my next birthday, I received the accompanying volume on the Civil War.  And so, at the age of six, I was hooked. 

He emphasized the importance of education and service to others, and was unendingly generous.  He had an abiding love of his family, the Hawaiian Islands (and Hawaiian shirts), West Point, Army football, grilled steaks, gardening, and old rock and roll music.

So aloha, Dad, and thanks for everything.  We love you.  “Well done, be thou at peace.”  

By Michael F. Duggan

The claim that if you want security you must give up liberty has become a mainstay of the revolt against freedom.  But nothing is less true.  There is, of course, no absolute security in life.  But what security can be attained depends on our own watchfulness, enforced by institutions to help us watch—i.e. by democratic institutions which are devised (using Platonic language) to enable the herd to watch, and to judge their watch-dogs.
-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 636, n.62

We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissent)

Why do monopolies raise prices while decreasing portions and lowering the quality of ingredients, parts, and services? They do it for the same reason psychopaths do what they do: because they can.   

Governments, like businesses, are not moral or immoral.  Like an nonsocial organism in nature, they are amoral and are only as good as their people, ideology, laws, and actions; a nation is what a nation does, both good and bad.  They will do whatever they can within the law and sometimes well beyond it, limited only by the bounds of the possible.  Unrestrained, they may do what they can get away with, and all governments lie to their people in varying degrees.  They are a necessary evil (underscore both necessary and evil).  Given all of this, what will become of democracy and liberalism in a time when the state is able to follow most aspects of a citizen’s life simply because it can?

Consider the following story.  On July 12, 2012, a 10-year-old girl was walking home from a store with her 2-year-old brother in their South Philadelphia neighborhood.  As they walked by a parked car, a man got out and grabbed the girl, but she fought back and the boy screamed at the top of his lungs.  The man got nervous, got back into his car and drove off.  The whole thing was caught on a street camera and the video was widely circulated on television and on social media.  Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, the perpetrator turned himself in and is now serving 17-34 years in prison. 

Given what could have happened in this incident, it is impossible not to be pleased b they outcome.  Philadelphia Mayor, Michael Nutter, observed that the quick resolution to the case “demonstrates the power of getting information out or having good video.”  ABC news reported a police source admitting that the video “was the catalyst in breaking the case.”

That night I called a friend, a believer in the Fourth Amendment (another happy ending to come out of Philadelphia), and a critic of the surveillance state. I made the point that one could not argue with the results in this case.  His haunting reply cut to the heart of the matter: “Yes,” he said, “I suppose that there are some advantages to living in an authoritarian system.”  As it happens, street crime was not a major problem in Nazi Germany and in other nations under totalitarian regimes.  The question is how far in that direction should the citizens of a liberal republic be willing to go?

It is undeniable that surveillance technologies sometimes work in these kinds of cases and are useful in finding suspects after the fact.  No doubt they also provide a fair measure of deterrent value as well.  I am told that one cannot walk across downtown Washington, D.C. (or London, or New York City, or…) without being off-camera for more than a few seconds.  It turns out we are all TV stars.

But have we given away our privacy too easily?  One of the operating costs of a liberal republic is the higher crime rates that go along with people having the freedom to act on bad impulses.  Rights allow us to do all kinds of bad things. The First Amendment gives constitutional protection to a wide range of lies and deception.  On the other hand, the same technological revolution that wrought today’s surveillance technologies has also created powerful new criminal tools and provides the venues for their use.  It’s a cause-and-effect thing: technology helps create the problem and then provides solutions that come at a cost to our civic lives. 

Human nature may not change over historical time, but cyber technology has created an entire new cosmos for human venality; in all my years I was never robbed on the street, and yet people try to rip me off on the Internet or via robocalls every day (while editing this article, I was interrupted three times by automated calls from unfamiliar organizations).  What happens if security technology and our laws do not keep pace with technology-enabled crime in these dangerous new worlds?  The flip side of this question is: what becomes of a state that knows everything about its citizens?  Like the Vietnamese village of fifty-odd years ago, will a government destroy the foundations of liberal democracy in order to save it?

The cyber world has thus created a situation in which the very enforcement of the law may require the surrendering of privacy and rights.  On the other hand, where the law is not enforced, the law ceases to exist, and the most aggressive and opportunistic elements tend to take over (the later Roman Empire was flawed and corrupt, but by most standards, it was better than the early Middled Ages in much of Europe).         

Aggravating all of this is the fact that some of our national first principles are at odds with each other.  Equality and liberty, for instance: the more that equality is enforced, the less freedom; the more freedom, the less equality.  It is the same with freedom and security.  It is like a seesaw or a balance scale: the less that law is enforced, the more crime; the more the law is enforced, the less freedom.  The trick is to strike a tolerable, workable balance of rights and security.  And yet the power of the new technologies have forced situation of accepting a choice of either security or victimhood.  In the minds of many people addicted to their smartphones and other high tech face magnets, privacy and rights never enter into the equation.    

Even where security features are in place, safety is not guaranteed, and you may end up losing both your freedom and security.  All 19 of the September 11^th terrorists were caught on security cameras, and, although surveillance footage helped identify them after the attacks, they were still able to destroy the World Trade Center towers, hit the Pentagon, and kill everybody aboard Flight 93.  Likewise, the United States military could see every square inch of Afghanistan from space, and yet for 20 years Americans still came home in body bags before the Taliban took control of the country in 2021. 

Is the future one in which liberal democracy is replaced by a techno surveillance state as a lesser of evils in a dark Manichean world?  Are we already there?  The difference between Big Brother in the novel, 1984, and the estates of the modern surveillance state and its corporate allies—whether it is banks, businesses, and social media tracking your preferences and transactions via algorithms, local jurisdiction speed cameras, or a centralized government—is that Orwell could have never imagined the power of the technologies that watch or otherwise follow us today; Big Brother’s creepy, yet blandly attractive, know-it-all Little Sister, Alexa, is already a permanent guest in tens of millions of households.  But even this is small potatoes relative to what is already possible.  The level of surveillance in nations like China shocks the conscience. 

Some people shrug off these concerns with the argument: if I am not doing anything wrong, why should I care if intelligence or law enforcement agencies are watching me or accessing my DNA (and the related question: why shouldn’t the businesses and financial institutions I use know my preferences)?  The problem is that you might get a government you don’t like and who does not like you (and the businesses you patronize may share your information with less savory organizations).  If the past 7 years have shown us anything, it is the vulnerability of republics to illiberal demagogues and factions.  If an authoritarian government were to take over, it will be too late to change things.  It is probably too late already, given the power of today’s surveillance technologies and the amount of personal information out there.  And given human nature, if the technology exists, is will be used and abused.  

There is also a broader theoretical question here: at a certain level of technological development, does privacy, and therefore freedom—cornerstones of a liberal constitutional society—become impossible to sustain?  Although it is hard to know precisely what that tipping point is (and it may be well behind us), I suspect that the answer is yes: surveillance technologies will render liberal democracy a thing of the past. 

As with the private enforcement of local, state, and federal laws, and incarceration for corporate profit, domestic spying should never be condoned in a democracy, especially for profit.  Just as human misery should not be monetized, nor should private information.  These things are fundamentally harmful to the health of a liberal republic.  They are by their nature corrupting.  It is bad enough when a government continually spies on its own people, but to make such practices profitable not only cements them into place, it is also a long stride toward authoritarian rule.  Because the Internet has become such a pervasive part of our lives, it is easy to forget that one of its primary purposes is intelligence gathering against those of us who use it.    

Without law and the order it provides, there can be no freedom, privacy, or rights.  But things have gone too far, and we are like the frog in the parable that is slowly boiled to death as the heat is turned up gradually and without its noticing.  In writing this, I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonishment, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And yet because of the scale and ubiquity of today’s technology, I suspect we are well beyond that in practical terms.  And with AI and quantum computing (and hacking) about to come into their own, I suspect that things could get much worse over the coming years (in which case, these may be the good old days). Even without these things, the post-liberal techno state is already upon us.