Who Wills the Collapse? A Response to Mac Loftin

I intended this as a pitch to Christian Century in response to Mac Loftin's September 2 column, "What US Veterans Taught Me About The Odyssey." Their submissions inbox is currently closed. I'm publishing it here instead, because the argument doesn't require their permission to be made.

Mac Loftin's account of reading The Odyssey with a group of veterans at his local VA is careful in a way I don't often get to say about civilian writing on war. He credits the men in his reading group for their insight, not just their trauma. He doesn't claim their war for his own. He builds on Jonathan Shay, whose decades of listening to Vietnam veterans produced Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America; clinical-lit built from testimony treated as evidence rather than anecdote. And the antiwar reading Loftin lands on, following Simone Weil through Euripides and the Gospels, is one I mostly share. This is not Adam Joyce theorizing about defense budgets from a taxpayer's remove, and it isn't Melissa Florer-Bixler borrowing a congregation's citizenship for a windfall passport story. Loftin actually did the work of sitting in a room with veterans for a year.

But I want to press a question his essay doesn't ask: which parts of the argument actually belong to the men in that room, and which parts only borrowed from their company?

What the veterans get to say

Read closely, the veterans in Loftin's group are credited with two things: a diagnosis (the poem describes what we'd now call PTSD) and a literary correction (Odysseus takes ten years because some part of him doesn't want to). Loftin says outright that this reading is stronger than Christopher Nolan's. I believe him. I've watched veterans do exactly that kind of close reading because "he built a strange contraption to hang them all slowly" isn't background detail to a man who's had to think about what his hands are capable of.

But the essay's actual destination — that America should welcome its own "well-deserved and self-inflicted collapse" as a matter of gospel-consonant hope — is never attributed to the reading group at all. It's Loftin's synthesis, arrived at through Weil, dressed in the company of veterans who are quoted disliking Odysseus, not veterans who are quoted wanting their country to fall. That's the tell. The men in the room are treated as informants where the text needs texture, and set aside where the argument needs a conclusion. Shay's model doesn't do this. His diagnostic categories were built from extended testimony, over years, and stood or fell on what his patients actually said. Loftin's theology of collapse doesn't stand or fall on anything the veterans said. It stands on Weil, and the veterans supply the room tone.

The collapse nobody in the room is asked to pay for

There's a further problem, and it's the one I keep finding underneath these essays regardless of who writes them. Willing a civilization's collapse "in the spirit of the gospels" is a theological claim with a cost, and the cost doesn't land on the person making it from a lectern or a laptop. It lands first on the men who were in that room, or on VA waitlists, on pensions, on whatever thin safety net survives a state actually collapsing, on families already absorbing what ten years at war did before anyone asked them what should happen to the country next.

Weil, whom Loftin invokes as his authority, understood this better than her borrower does. She didn't just theorize suffering from a study; she took factory jobs and limited her own food in solidarity with people she'd never met, because she believed a claim about someone else's suffering was only as good as your proximity to it. Loftin keeps Weil's conclusion (collapse as a kind of grace) without her method. He wills collapse the way Adam Joyce wills a gutted military budget: from the administrative center, at zero cost to the one proclaiming it, dressed in the moral weight of people who will pay for it whether or not they were consulted.

Lament assumes the city was yours

Horace Vernet's 1844 Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem is a painting I keep coming back to: the prophet slumped in the rubble, not composing a treatise on why the city deserved what it got, but grieving a city that was his. Jeremiah doesn't get to lament Jerusalem as a bystander. He warned it, was imprisoned by it, and when it burned he stayed in the wreckage rather than take the empire's offer of comfortable exile. His grief costs him something, because the city was his to lose.

Loftin's collapse costs him nothing, and that's the tell underneath the one I named above. He can will America's fall as a hopeful, gospel-shaped ending because the essay never asks him to be inside it when it happens; collapse as a genre he's narrating, not a city he holds sweat-equity in. If Christians are to be prophetic rather than merely critical, the posture has to be Jeremiah's: this was our city, these were our people, and the fall is a wound before it's ever a lesson. You don't get Jeremiah's grief without Jeremiah's citizenship.

The Song of Deborah names the alternative with more precision than I can. Judges 5 doesn't only celebrate the tribes who fought at Kishon — it curses the ones who didn't. Reuben stayed "among the sheepfolds" debating it. Dan "remained in ships." Meroz is cursed by name for staying home while others bled. The text isn't neutral about people who benefit from a covenant they never risked anything to keep. It has a word for that, and the word isn't prophetic. An essay that narrates a coming collapse with something close to relief is Meroz writing the liturgy for Kishon's victory: fluent about the battle, absent from the field, and unmarked by any of its cost.

I don't think Loftin is being dishonest. I think he's being consistent. If you never actually believed in the country's democratic promises, if what you had instead was possession of them (the way an heir possesses land he never worked), then losing it doesn't cost you anything, and welcoming the collapse is just honesty dressed as theology. But if you ever loved it, if it was ever yours the way Jerusalem was Jeremiah's, you wouldn't need to be shown the bodies before you flinched. That's the difference between a prophet and a spectator: one already knows what will be lost, because he's lost something like it once. The other one finds its collapse interesting.

What actually persists

This is where I think Loftin is circling something without landing on it. He's right that Homer's antiwar current survives centuries of empires that would rather have forgotten it. That's a real pattern, and it's the same one I've spent the last year tracing through Hebrew scripture, Greek epic, and Arthurian legend: marginalized forms of memory that outlast the centers that tried to absorb or erase them. But the labor of carrying that memory forward has never belonged to the person narrating the reading group. It belongs to the substrate; to the northern tribes under Solomon, to the conscripted soldier-turned-psalmist, to the veterans in that VA basement who will still be there paying attention to The Odyssey long after this column has cycled off the homepage. Patior ergo possumus — I suffer, therefore we can — was never a metaphor. It names whose bodies actually do the "re"membering, and it's rarely the ones who get the byline and a paycheck.

What I'd put in its place

Loftin doesn't need to stop reading Homer with veterans. He needs to stop being the one who gets to decide what their reading adds up to. If a magazine believes what a piece like this implies, that sitting with veteran testimony produces truth a civilian couldn't reach alone, the way to prove it isn't running another civilian's account of the room. It's running what the room actually said, under its own names, argued on its own theological terms, and paying for it the same way it pays for everything else it decides is worth the space.

Logan M. Isaac, HoSM, is an Iraq veteran and professed Hospitaller of Saint Martin. He's also in the middle of a reboot of this most recent book, God Is a Grunt (Hachette, 2022). Follow him on Bluesky @loganmartinisaac.com.