Tag Archives: war

Why Has the World Gone Downhill? An Analysis of Violence

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One of the common tropes in storylines, especially for fantastical fiction, is the idea of returning to a period of time when things were “the old ways”, kind of like a time travel journey to the 1950s, or even a trip to the ancient past. The main character is seen as a fish out of water as he or she tries to use his or her knowledge of that time (and his or her future time) to get through such an experience. Now, part of me was thinking of focusing this post just on the writing aspects of this sort of speculation, but while I was thinking this through, I started to wonder something, and specifically I was wondering why we became what we are today rather than having continued the way things were “back in the day.”

This was prompted by an article covering a shooting that took place in Denmark and how that community (and that country) is now having to do things to make sure that such a tragedy doesn’t happen again. In other words, they are going to become a lot like other places around the world where violence is somewhat expected. I mean, no one wants to be caught off guard, right?

And that got me to thinking about that infamous line that used to happen in the United States whenever something tragic occurred. If this was the 1950s, the response would be something along the lines of “I can’t believe such a thing like that could happen here.” Or my other favorite: “I can’t believe Bob did that because he always seemed like such a nice guy. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen here.” I think you might be getting the picture.

In the 1970s, that message, while still happening in areas where you wouldn’t expect to hear it (part of the response to gun shootings that were happening in rural areas rather than urban settings) slowly changed to “I can’t believe that happened here. I mean, it’s not like we live in Chicago/New York/Detroit.” In other words, it was starting to happen in urban environments, so we were starting to expect stories like that, but it shouldn’t happen in a place like Wheatfield, Wyoming (if that was a real place). But now, it’s happening all over the United States, so that every new story that happens is treated as a one-off case of an almost expectant event, even if where that event took place might have been speculation before it happened. It’s happened so much in the United States that we’re now starting to be surprised by these stories happening in other countries, rather than by ones that happen in the United States.

So, because of the way these trends work, we’re going to be seeing more and more of this violence happening around the world in places where we’d last expect to see it. And then we’ll have to be surprised by something worse, like the level of violence, the perpetrators of the violence, or some other factor we haven’t considered yet.

Which leaves one important question:

Why?

Why are we seeing this sort of thing becoming a norm for our communities? Are we desensitized to violence so we now accept it as a part of our natural order? Is the human species evolving into a much more violent, chaotic creature that holds little regard for fellow humans? Is that creature devolving into the types of people we used to be before we took the Hobbesian path and developed government around us to protect us from each other? Is it because our means of hurting each other have become much more convenient and useable? Or are there other factors that cause us to do the sorts of things we do to each other these days?

Desensitization

There’s a lot of theory that addresses this possibility, mainly making the point that as people are exposed to more and more sensations of a certain type, they no longer find themselves affected by it and either no longer seek such sensations or have to increase the type of exposure to reach that level of influence again. We see this all of the time with the drugs we take, from cigarettes to alcohol to both legal and illegal substances. Most of the time, the first exposure to the item causes an initial positive reaction which is then transferred into a loss that needs that input again. Continuous exposure acts as a certain punctuated equilibrium, which means we get used to a higher level of usage and continue to have to increase the dosage to provide the same “high” that we had before.

For violence, there’s no reason this wouldn’t work the same way as well. We become comfortable with the amount of violence we’re exposed to and then seek out higher levels of violence. As exposure theory goes, it makes sense.

Or does it? The problem with exposure theory is that the influence might increase for an individual, and it would take more and more violence to affect that person, but why would this somehow translate to people in other areas now experiencing violence where they didn’t have it before? The theory doesn’t explain that, unless the idea of violence is that it’s more of a virus that spreads rather than something that occurs in pockets and then spreads out, affecting those previously exposed to it.

Another possibility involving that theory is the types of violence inherent in the system. An argument is often made about video games, television and movies that might be desensitizing people, and unlike the virus affects of spreading violence, these would feed on subsequent communities just by the appearance to where people would consume these types of media. Again, that’s assuming these activities to be a causal factor rather than as a recognition of the violence (meaning no causal effect at all, or very little at least).

But I don’t want to just ignore the possibility because from first hand experience, I remember being a fan of horror movies when I was growing up. I remember watching the very first Nightmare on Elm Street with a bunch of military coworkers, and I was shocked at the violence in that movie, and it was extremely scary (at that time). Having watched many horror movies during that period of time, I remember watching that original movie again years later and thinking how tame it was in comparison to “real” horror movies. I certainly didn’t feel that way the first time I watched it. So, there’s a bit of desensitization going on there, or it may just be a stimuli adjustment. Or it may have no connection at all to violence because if one sees it as “reaction to being scared” rather than “reaction to violence” there may be absolutely no ties whatsoever. Again, something to keep in mind when analyzing such phenomena.

Evolution of the Species

This is one of those possibilities that truly scares me because with evolution, you have the whole survival of the fittest thing going on, and if the fittest is the most violent, then we’re in for some really bad problems. But what if our dilemma is that the human condition is now one that is favored through violence rather than through cooperation? There’s a strong believe that through our evolution, we have reached a point where social communities are what propel us forward beyond the previous adaptations and around other species that didn’t achieve this level of evolutionary maturity. Okay, if that’s the case, why is violence becoming more and more a response to how we handle these social encounters instead of community and broad cooperation? If our evolutionary process made sense, there would be a strong possibility that people would find ways to get along in diverse circumstances (instead of taking a gun to work and killing the boss during an altercation) and on an even higher level, we should probably see fewer wars and regional conflicts.

But we don’t. Instead, after several wars to end all wars, we’re still as violent towards each other as we’ve ever been. Right now, our Congress is meeting to figure out how to give our president more authority to attack people we don’t get along with. For some reason, no money is being discussed for allocation that will be spent to foster peace with the people we don’t get along with. The response to this criticism is “it would be a waste of money because they don’t want peace”. And we know this why? Because we’re currently trying to kill them while they’re trying to kill us (or at least allies of us). In our present sense, we see what we’re doing as justified, yet we’re still doing the same violent things we were doing in the past, and now we just have more efficient ways of doing it.

So, the question is asked, are continuing to become a more violent people? And I don’t mean just the United States, or the west, or anything like that. I mean humans as a whole. Are we just becoming more violent?

Or were we always this violent? Except we had governments that were capable of keeping us from killing each other (except during national campaigns where they got to send people out to kill in their names)? If you’ve ever been to war, it’s a pretty brutal experience. Oh, we like to fluff it up with 21st century technology and act like we’re doing something much different than how our forefathers fought, but when it comes down to it, you still have people out in the middle of some place they don’t want to be trying to kill a bunch of other people who don’t really want to be out there doing that either. And we pin medals on the ones that come back alive (and sometimes those who didn’t), and then create celebrations for the sacrifices they made. But in the end, we’re rewarding a bunch of people who are doing things that civilized people probably shouldn’t be doing any way.

But of course, someone will say that the others guys MADE us do it, that they were out there doing atrocities. And I’m sure the other guys will say that those of us attacking them were doing all sorts of affronts to humankind, like sleeping with each other on the wrong days of religious texts, eating something that someone’s interpretation of God says people shouldn’t be eating for arbitrary reasons that someone else will defend to the death, and all such other reasons (some good, some ridiculous, and some just straight out confusing, even to the people following them).

Which kind of pushes the whole Hobbesian argument that maybe we’ve been comfortable and safe from the mannerisms of our fellow humans by a simple agreement to follow some arbitrarily chosen noble whose real purpose is to make sure that people don’t go around killing each other all in return for a promise to make sure that those who DO kill each other will be held responsible for such actions (so that might keep them from doing so). If our only reason for avoiding violent tendencies is because of some agreement our ancestors made with each other, then it might not be surprising why a civilization that tends to teeter closer to anarchy might not feel the need to follow preordained orders of a monarchical society that leads for the simple reason that those in charge just feel they should be in charge.

Think of it this way. If you’re a citizen of an order that you don’t believe in any more, because few in that society do, and lump that in with a belief that there’s no reason to live the life that your ancestors did because that’s only going to provide a lifetime of hardship and destitution, there are people in your life (or on the edge of it) you don’t like, and you see violence as an option rather than something to avoid, I wonder if that would explain why a lot of these events are becoming a norm rather than the anomaly they used to be.

I mean, let’s be honest. I don’t have the answers. But I do have a lot of questions, and I’m starting to suspect that people aren’t really asking questions any more but are just pontificating about what they think are the answers to a whole lot of questions that people stopped asking.

Why the U.S. needs to stay the fuck out of Syria’s conflict

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Sorry for the vulgarity, but sometimes it just seems like it’s necessary.

Anyway, as the U.S. is getting ready to start up a new campaign of military violence against some place most people in the U.S. can’t point out on a map, I just wanted to offer my rationalization for why we shouldn’t be involved in any way, shape, or form. My reasons could be the expected ones, which involve:

1. We have nothing to gain by killing people in Syria. They don’t matter to us. They’re having a civil war. Either make it about us, or do your own thing in your own miniscule corner of the world. We need to stop thinking our input is really all that important to people who generally don’t like us anyway.

2. Syria has never been a great friend to the U.S. anyway, and after we bomb them, they’re not going to suddenly think “You know, those Americans who dropped those bombs on our local hospital and killed many of my relatives seem like pretty okay guys. Maybe we should start conducting trade with them tomorrow after I visit everyone I’ve ever known in the hospital.”

3. All lists require a third item, and I hate being seen as someone who doesn’t do what other people do.

No, my reason is different, and it’s simple. As a matter of fact, I can sum it up in one word: Emus. And Australia.

emu

You see, in 1932, there was this war that was fought in Australia between the government of Australia and, well, emus. Yeah, those dorky looking birds that look a lot like ostriches but are called emus. Their most redeeming value and attribute is they make a really ridiculous sound when they speak. That’s about it. Oh, and they shit a lot.

Anyway, Australia was having this real problem with emus back in 1932 and decided it needed to stop them from eating all of their crops, so they did what any industrial nation would do and declared war on a bunch of stupid birds. So, mobilizing their army of soldiers and cannons, they went on a safari in the outback, put one on the barbie and then unleashed holy hell on the emu terror. Only, they discovered something they didn’t know before. When you shoot at a bunch of very fast moving birds, they run. And they run fast. They also hide. So, after the first skirmish, which I like to call The Battle of Waterfowl One, they discovered a few of them died, but most of them lived and ran away. This caused the Australian army to have to chase emus across the land, and they discovered that they didn’t do it very well. They also discovered that no matter how many times you shoot an emu, they tend to not die. They just take the shots and continue running. And the ones that are shot are now angry, so they come at you like, well, emus very angry after having been shot.

The war didn’t go well. By most accounts, the Australians lost this war, and it’s forever been considered one of the biggest military failures in all of history, right up there with Stonewell Jackson being shot by his own troops because he forgot to tell them he was returning from intelligence gathering and not to shoot at their own guy who might be coming at them from enemy lines really fast.

The point: War is quite often unexpected. Great nations were destroyed in the past because nations thought they were incapable of failing at military maneuvers. If you look at the Gulf War, that’s exactly what happened. We went in with the hubris of a nation that can’t be defeated and then after a great military campaign (fighting emu equivalents of enemies) we then ended up bogged down in a decade of minor skirmishes that continued to take the lives of American soldiers. We’re still there now.

So, we should be very wary of just jumping into a conflict because we heard they did bad things. Sure, we don’t want the next German Hitler running around, but not every conflict is Nazi Germany running around the world trying to enslave the population. Sometimes a regional conflict is just that: a regional conflict.

Just ask the Australians. I’m sure they’d love to talk about their great Emu War.

The Alternative to the Run up to War with Iran

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A couple of years back, I remember posting on a number of message boards that I suspected we were being led towards a war with a Middle Eastern country. I pointed out that our intelligence was HORRIBLE in that area of the world, and that most of our evidence and analysis came from people who were hearing everything second hand from other people who had an actual stake in causing problems between our countries. And then there was a whole bunch of “evidence” presented that I indicated only proved that there were buildings that looked like they had stuff in them, but we didn’t know what was in them, although we were being told weapons of mass destruction were in them because trucks drove up to them. Even Colin Powell stood in front of the UN and told everyone that there were definitely weapons of mass destruction because he had a Powerpoint presentation, which obviously had to be true because Powerpoint has never resulted in incorrect information being relayed to viewers. Anyway, people told me I was full of crap, while the other half of the people told me to shut up. And then shortly after, we went to war. With Iraq. But saying, “I told you so” is so deflating after the country has gone to war, so let’s just say that I commiserated with everyone else, once they stopped celebrating that we were at war and realized that we were, in fact, at war.

Well, it’s kind of happening again. Although people will probably say that they don’t see it. And others will probably tell me to shut up. But I see the exact same signs happening again, in that we’re leading towards a war with Iran because they’re some evil axis of power that does, well, evil things. And they hate us. So, we really will eventually have no choice but to go to war against them and change their evil ways by killing lots of their people, occupying them, teaching them government corruption and then spending the next decade figuring out how to get out of there and leave their new regime to their newly found corrupt ways.

But I wanted to write this to say that we should be concerned because this doesn’t have to happen. Sure, Iran hates us, as they probably should. I mean, we’re all infadels that sleep with our goats, or whatever it is they think we do. Basically, I think it can be narrowed down to the idea that they hate us because we don’t worship out of the same book that they do. Meanwhile, we feel we should invade them and educate them because they don’t worship out of the same book that we do. Of course, our Constitution says we really shouldn’t be discussing that book any way, but we haven’t really read that document in awhile, so we’ve kind of forgotten that. But suffice to say, we’ll probably go to war with them because we don’t understand them any more than they understand us, and neither one of us is really patient enough to sit down and listen to the other long enough to realize that we’ve both really stupid and believe really ridiculous things, which if you think about it is something we actually share in common.

Which is really what we should be focused on: What do we have in common? I’ve been talking about this for years, from my original thesis, Friendship Over Time, which basically means that as cultures start to develop similar customs with each other, they build friendships. And as we create more shared customs, our friendship grows until we have an allied partnership. We’ve seen how this can happen over centuries with nations that once hated each other but are now comrades in arms (and without arms…weapons). People learn to get along because they realize they share too many things in common to want to risk those shared activities. It’s why playing Ping Pong with the Chinese during the Cold War probably kept us from firing missiles at the Chinese during the Cold War. Yeah, it’s a lot less simple than that, but you get the idea.

That’s what we need with Iran right now. Build friendships with the people around them. Find the things they like to do that we like to do and see how we can build off of those shared traits. Think about it. What do we share with the Iranians right now besides a desire to build nuclear weapons? Do we both like to fish? Play soccer? Baseball? Stone virgins for talking to men in public? Or what? Are there activities we COULD share with each other if we found some forum to do so? Granted, we’re probably not going to want to approach each other through religion because those are our failings at friendship. So, we’d look for things we both like to do. If we want to employ State Department people to actually pursue peace, THAT is what they should be looking at, not trying to find some way to negotiate for things that neither side wants to talk about. The ways of peace that existed in the 18th century shouldn’t be the way we pursue peace in the 21st century because somewhere back in the 20th century, we discovered that those methods actually led to nonpeaceful things, like war.

So, as you start to hear the run up for war, I’d like to share with you the basic idea that we do have another way. We just have to be active in trying to pursue it. And honestly, it’s never going to happen from our government because our government is populated by people who have all trained in the same Kool Aid for decades of Cold War failures. Peace can be achieved through the people who aren’t in government. And we already have the vehicle to do it.

It’s called the Internet. We’re already conversing with people in countries that used to hate us. The other day, played World of Warcraft with someone who lives in Vietnam. He speaks English, but he plays on a US server because he wants to know more about America. So, he and I went and beat up demons together. Look. We shared something in common. We both liked casting spells against demons in a game that both of us play. Look how hard that was.

The Internet completely makes this possible if we’re interested in actually using it to do just that. Sure, we can text each other about how outrageous Snookie and The Situation are, or we can start communicating with the people out there who are interested in actually talking.

Or we can let the responsible adults lead us to war and kill them instead. I mean, really. It’s your choice, although history hints at which one you’ll make. So as you suit up to go play soldier in some Middle Eastern country, I’ll be suiting up to go on a quest with my friend from Vietnam. There are demons to kill, and we’re just the guys to do it.

Why the Class War Has Not Yet Begun

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I keep hearing a lot of talk about class warfare these days, but as of this day, I have yet to see an actual class battle take place. But the signs of impending doom seem to be all around, and yet it’s almost as if no one seems to believe such a thing is possible, so they don’t prepare for any such thing. Yet, it’s so hard not to see all of the signs of problems all around us, and then wonder if people are just jumping over backwards to do everything to avoid the inevitability of calamity. I don’t know. It just seems like it should be so obvious, but people are so not interested in changing their status quo, that they’ll do anything to avoid thinking about it.

But things are bad all over. We know that the power and all of the goods are quickly being hoarded by very few who pretend that it’s the “natural order of things”. And whenever people point it out, they’re accused of being socialists, communists or what ever “ist” can be thought of at the time.

But things are really bad. I don’t just mean the economy. I mean the economy ebbs and flows. That’s what economies do. But there are so many people who are falling to a hopeless despair and giving up. At least during the Great Depression, there was a sense that after people hunker through the hard times, at least there will be a sense of good times to come. Now, you don’t feel that. You get a sense that a few very rich people want all of the resources, and if they don’t get it, then they’ll do whatever necessary to put down anyone who gets in their way. The ones who are suffering don’t see a future sense of prosperity. They see either eventual death, a moment of respite that might last until they die, or despair. You don’t really see that much different than that.

In the past, you used to be able to at least see another place you could go where things are better, but when you’re in one of the most powerful countries in the world, where are you supposed to go instead? Europe isn’t doing that well. Anywhere else is a cesspool, filled with people killing each other over stupid, little things that make no sense other than to brutal people who live in brutal times.

It seems like there’s a class war about to begin, but everyone keeps waiting for someone else to make the first move. I’m not even looking for a future leader to make things better. I’ve pretty much given up on that. I’m waiting for something else, something that resembles Mad Max and Tina Turner singing about a place called Thunderdome. At least they had cool cars that chased each other back then. I guess it’s something to look forward to.

Advocating Peace Elsewhere & Still Needing to Get Your Shit Together At Home

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Over the last few days, President Obama has been trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This isn’t anything new. Every president from Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and Kennedy have been trying to do the same thing. NONE of them have ever succeeded. A couple of them got momentary results that sounded great, like Carter. And the world was so grateful, they even gave some of these presidents Nobel Peace prizes for their great efforts. But in the end, the peace fell apart because Israel and Palestine know only two modes: Cease fire and open fire. Long term peace isn’t in their vocabulary. They have generations of hate between them so that the only way they’ll ever end up with peace is for one side to completely eliminate the other. Sorry, but the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, hoping for better results.

But that’s really not even the issue I want to discuss. What I find even more fascinating is that we have a president right now who is trying to instigate peace (I guess he wants to actually earn that Nobel Peace Prize he got for just showing up for work without actually doing anything to deserve it; hey, I voted for him and supported him, but even I know that was the most ridiculous prize awarded in the history of the Nobel, right after the one they probably gave to Vlad Putin for creating peace by wresting with bears). No, what I want to talk about is this ridiculous tendency we have to try to create “peace” around the world when we can’t seem to figure out how to instigate it in our own country.

Believe it or not, there is a non-violent civil war going on in the United States right now. The only thing missing is actual violence, because we have a line right down the middle of the ideological sides of the country, and neither side is capable of getting along with the other. Just look at the current state of the Republican Party. There’s a man running for their nod for president (Gingrich) who is being chastised because he dared to side against Republicans through some of the usual stupid things he normally says (like disagreeing with Ryan over the budget mess). At the same time, we have members of Congress on the right who are probably going to lose their backing because they might have made the mistake of being friendly with other congress members on the left. And then we’re starting to see the same kinds of actions from the left, chastising their own members for daring to work with the right. The Gang of Six (a group of legislators who dared to come to the middle and try to work things out) has been deep sixed (for lack of better words) because the rest of their parties are outraged (outraged, I say!) that members on one side would dare to come to any kind of consensus with the other.

If you go to places like Wisconsin, you see entire parties rallying against the others to the point of advocating criminal actions against the other side (how dare you leave the state to avoid a lopsided vote!). Read a column by Ann Coulter, or even the more even-handed Michelle Malkin, and you read nothing but vitriolic hatred waged against the other side. Read (or listen to) anything coming out of Michael Moore’s camp, and you experience the exact same kind of hatred from the other side. People in this country are communicating behind battle lines and the hatred is so present in practically everything they say that I’m not surprised that this country has become completely dysfunctional. No one is willing to cooperate with each other because everyone is so angry, and when people become angry they become incapable of thinking clearly and justly. The goal is to achieve points in an ideological battle, not consensus and understanding. And even worse, they’re incapable of even recognizing that, or if they are capable, they see it through filters that see the other side as the one responsible and everything they do is rational and just. These are the kinds of conversations that appear as screaming sessions on late night news shows, where people aren’t communicating, but they’re trying to get as much of their arguments in as possible because if they stop to listen it would take away from the time they get to present their full case.

This is the environment we live in today, and yet our president is trying to foster peace elsewhere. If President Obama wants to foster peace, how about actually trying to do it here. I don’t mean compromising, or making the other side look bad, because that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years. I’m talking about actually putting forth a serious initiative about creating peace in the United States. Stop using rhetoric to push agendas, unless the agenda is to stop using rhetoric to push agendas. We’re really good at anger and hatred; I’d like to see how good we can become at being a unified country again. We haven’t been one for a very long time now. And I’m sure a reader is probably thinking to himself/herself, “well, that’s because of the people on the other side.” And that’s why we’ll never move forward.

Which is why we’ll never have peace in the Middle East, I should point out. Because as much as I’ve been talking about the stupid rhetoric of the people in the United States, believe it or not, it’s the same reason we’ve never had peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Both sides have to be right, to the point of swords and death. Compromising means weakness, and thus, a direction we can never move. Why would anyone expect a country where we can’t agree on whether or not fixing the budget is a national priority that we’d somehow be able to instill peace somewhere else?

Explaining the Libyan Conflict to College Students Who Don’t Care

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I’m a college professor who teaches political science to students who generally aren’t interested in the information. It’s a required course, which means you end up with a lot of students who are in the class mainly to fulfill a requirement and then get out. The information is irrelevant to them. It’s not important. It’s information best left to people who deal with that sort of information. Which kind of brings me to an aside. Years ago, I was a counterintelligence agent working in a foreign nation. I was working with some very dedicated people. I had an assistant who was sponging off me, trying to learn everything he could so that one day he could be an agent himself. I remember him asking me one day when we were involved in something that would take a novel to explain (and could have very well qualified for science fiction status) when my assistant turned to me and said: “Aren’t there people in our government who handle these sorts of things?” And my response was, which I’ve never forgotten: “We are those people.” His response was classic: “You really should be getting paid a lot more than you are.”

Which brings me back to teaching college. I was discussing current events of the day, and a student mentioned that we were now attacking Libya and then asked: “I don’t understand why we’re doing it? Why are we attacking?”

This was one of those questions that most people don’t have to deal with because either they’re hip on what’s going on in the world and are more a part of the argument than the reasoning, or they’re part of that group of people who are oblivious to what’s going on in the nation and the world around them, kind of like most college students tend to be. We like to think that college students are the smarter of the young people out there, but quite often they’re clueless, mainly because their interests are still high school interests that have yet to evolve into something more worldly.

So I stood in front of class and tried to bring it back home. We had been talking about the War Powers Act of 1973, that details when a president can and cannot commit troops to war, and as much as I tried to explain it, the questions kept coming up with how a war can actually take place when the resolution basically says that it really shouldn’t. I tried to explain that the War Powers Act was a response to the Vietnam War, where Congress no longer wanted a president to be able to commit the country to war without a resolution of war first, but then also explained that real events in real time were always a test of boundaries, and right now we were going through yet another test of the boundaries set forth by the Act itself. I went through and explained the ramifications of Bush II’s escalation of war from an angered country after 911, and how it had everything to do with the state of the Act today. Little by little, I was able to explain what was going on, but each time I peeled another layer of the political onion, I found yet another raw debate waiting to emerge.

In the end, I was left explaining that events are happening right now in which the future has everything to do with how things play out on a day to day basis, that quite often you couldn’t rely on a textbook or legal definition to reveal what was right and what was wrong. Often, more than sometimes, the events of tomorrow have no predictability because people today are rarely rational, even though political scientists tend to veer towards the rational actor theory (people do what is most natural and, for lack of better word, rational).

It was one student, sitting in the back of the room, texting her friends during the lecture, who offered probably the most poignant question of all. “What will this mean for us in the future?”

And she meant for young people like her, those going through college and trying to create a life for themselves. Realizing the nation was already at war in two other places, the revelation that we might be at war in a third caused a texting student to stop texting long enough to ask what this might mean for her future.

And I had to tell her that I didn’t know. Politics is all about how rational actors respond irrationally to events that often make little sense in a solitary context. It’s why political scientists should never predict, even though they keep trying to do so. All I could respond with was confusion and knowledge of the past, because I realize that nothing in our future is truly new, as we often fulfill the axiom of history repeating itself. What that axiom never points out is that most people don’t have a solid foundation of history to recognize it when it does. You see, most people are like my students in that class, oblivious to the world around them, and equally clueless to the past because they didn’t think it was important enough to study at the time.

What a No-Fly Zone Really Means

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I really shouldn’t have to write this post, but it bothers me that so many people don’t understand what it really means when they advocated for a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s like we’re playing some kind of video game where America (or the west) is so powerful that we have all of the cheat codes enacted, and there’s no way anything bad can happen. Well, we just declared war without actually declaring war again, so in case anyone thinks this is something less than that, you’re wrong. We’re now at war with Libya for as long as it takes to scare a dictator into surrendering, backing down or something equally improbable. In reality, we’re demanding he step down, which then means he either escape to another country that might take him, hope his own people won’t kill him or put him on trial, or that some other equally undesirable event doesn’t befall him. In other words, we’re asking someone to take a path of worse consequences than the one he’s actually in right now. We did the same thing to Saddam Hussein, who held out until we had to put troops on the ground, decimate his country, kill LOTS of his own people, and then finally capture him hiding out in a cellar somewhere, hoping he might not be caught.

Right now, the French have attacked with aircraft. It’s possible one plane has already been shot down. Details are hard to come by this early in the war. But they have engaged the Libyans on the ground.

Which means people are already starting to die. So, no amount of posturing, pretending or ignorance gets us away from the fact that our entrance into this war means people will now die. Yes, people were dying before, but we’re going to be killing people ourselves now. We don’t get to paint over that with new paint and then put up a new car fragrance ornament to hide the smell. We’re killing people now. And we may lose some of our own. This is war.

I’m not against a war. I just want people to know and understand that they’re in one now. Sure, we’ll all go back to the mall on the weekend and buy videogames, dresses and other crap, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that we have aircraft in the air right now bombing people we don’t know anything about, and probably never will, especially since they will be dead soon. Hopefully, it won’t be as bad as some previous wars, and hopefully the survivors won’t grow up to hate anyone from the west, planning our deaths decades from now while we’re celebrating  a holiday or just going about our usual business.

This is war. It sucks. Don’t let anyone try to pretend it’s anything more pleasant.

But they will. Because that’s what spin doctors do with these sorts of subjects. Just hope that we don’t end up having to send soldiers over there to “finish what we started”  because someone in power who will never see combat can’t see any other way around the “dilemma”. War sucks, and it rarely turns out the way you plan, intended, or desired.

Now, back to American Idol and whatever we were doing before I so rudely interrupted with reality.

I’m Curious…Is America Over?

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

us flag  

Towards the end of the Roman Empire, after centuries of power, prestige and prosperity, the great nation crumbled inwards as its inability to acclimate to new events and changes finally led to an eventual collapse. Historians often point at the Visigoths and other non-melting immigrants to the empire that finally brought about Rome’s demise, but it may be possible that the sacking of Rome was more a symptom than a cause of it undoing, as it had probably seen its end on the horizon for at least a century before it realized things were as dire as they became.

Which leaves one to wonder if there had been a number of people who saw it coming but just kept hoping that things would last long enough for their own retirements, the ends of their own mortality and beliefs that it would last just long enough for their children to escape the eventual destruction that was sure to come. Somewhere, at some point, there had to be a number of people watching the horizon, realizing that the end was near, suspecting that it was closer than they were seeing through their focus on the distance.

Which then brings me to today, to looking at our own civilization, our own society and the wonderment at whether or not the Visigoths are already within our borders.

For years now, we have been struggling with cyclical recessions that seem worse some decades than others, yet we continue to tell ourselves that things are still great, that we are still the great empire that we once were. We are Americans, and we see ourselves as the successors of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, having lived through the various vicissitudes of struggles, always emerging with the belief that we are better for the efforts of our past, kind of like a version of the “if it doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger”.

Yet, I’m left wondering if we are still the same country that stood up to the British monarchy in the 18th century and then again at the dawn of the 19th century. Are we still the people who rushed to defend Europe during the first and second world wars, emerging as the victors, producing what we believed to be a shining beacon of freedom to the rest of the world to always aspire to. Or did something happen that changed us so that the next generations were no longer the same people who could pat themselves on the back as the nation of people who believed they were most definitely a part of an exceptionalism that we believed no other nation could achieve, yet every nation under the sun might one day aspire?

After the Vietnam War, the United States changed, or at least it may have metamorphasized into something different than what we believed it to be. Instead of that nation that others aspired to be, I start to wonder if we began to live on laurels of people who lived before us, convinced that the rest of the world would always see us as the exceptional Americans we believed ourselves to be, even though journeys to other nations would allow to us to see how little other people actually respected us and believed us to be that shining beacon we still kept adding to our resumes.

Over the years, we have supported vicious dictators who killed their own people, all in the name of feigning friendship to us. When a cold-blooded killer emerged to power in some far-off land, we turned our eye and accepted him because he offered us future economic incentives that we used to enrich already very wealthy people in our lands, even though the majority of the people in our country did not benefit as well. And then we sent soldiers to other lands to defend evil people whose only connection to us was they weren’t the “other guys” who we didn’t like a little more than the ones we were supporting. And now, a lot of those choices our forefathers, or our actual fathers and grandfathers, made have come back to haunt us over the years. Where we sided with bad people because they had fossil fuels we could use to propel ourselves to the local Wal Mart, the children of those who suffered no longer see us as the friends we used to believe we would be seen as because of our past dealings.

Which brings me to today. A lot of very wealthy people in this country seem to control the majority of the government, the economic power and even every decision we might make as a nation. The common person has little input, power or even a voice in this current era of government, which leaves me to wonder if all of our efforts led us to create a dynasty of misplaced power that is only now starting to become cognizant of the dangers that lie in the path before us.

Essentially, we have a nation where those who hold the strings of power have little to no connection to the majority of the people who have to live in that paradigm of a society. The last election should have actually been a wake-up call to those holding the reigns of power, but instead voices of complaint have managed to yield no response from those who are now being tasked to make some kind of comment. We have a nation of leaders who claim to represent large segments of people with whom they have never communicated, and yet believe themselves to be worthy of such power.

As was pointed out previously, there had to be Romans at one point who realized there was something on the horizon yet coming closer to the protection of the front gates. Is that repeating itself today, but we’re reacting the same, partying in the chambers of the Roman Senate until the Visigoths finally overthrow us, slaughtering us in our sleep because we never even realized there was a problem in our midst?

All I can hope is that I retire or reach the end of my coil of mortality before it happens. Some may not be so lucky.

The Future of America is in its Past

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In case you haven’t noticed it lately, America has stagnated and isn’t really moving forward anymore. I know most people don’t want to face that possibility, and most people reading this (which means anyone aside from my stuffed animals and imaginary friends) will probably just ignore it and hope for the best. Unfortunately, we’re a bit beyond that option, and even though most people will attempt to embrace that plan, we’re kind of screwed if we do.

You see, according to Tyler Cowen’s thesis, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, we’ve pretty much exhausted all of our free ranges for expansion and exploration, leaving us with pretty much nothing but what we already have. And America was never designed around resting on its laurels; it was designed to expand and develop out, something it can’t do if there’s nowhere else left to go. Now that we’ve entered this inevitable recession, we’re hitting a point where we start to realize that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and that all of those jobs that we expect to come back might just not, and thus, we’re going to have to figure out how to make lemonaide out of already eaten apples. Yeah, I’ve run out of metaphors, similes and allusions. I’m a lot like my country.

Americans live in a system that promises that anyone can do wonders with little as long as that someone is willing to put forth a bit of elbow grease. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a lie, something we’ve been telling each other for generations, even though the lie relied on a lot of extra room to grow that we figured would always be there for expansion. Once that land started running out and the resources as well, we felt we could keep telling the stories long enough to pull a bait and switch, figuring no one would live long enough to really ask any important questions, at least not before we retired and/or died first. Well, we’ve reached the saturation point of that possibility, so now we’re kind of stuck in a future that relies on the lies of the past never being called, like markers in a poker game where we’ve been holding two aces, hoping its the best hand in the game, even though someone else may have had three twos showing all along. Yeah, more bad analogies, metaphors and similies. I’m just full of it today. Or them. Whatever.

Which leaves me with an observation that is probably important because we’re now hitting a point where we’ve already been called on our bluff. Everyone wants to see the hands of the cards we played, and all of the money is already on the table. Man, I’m just going to push this bad analogy all the way to the bank.

So what do we do? We’re in the middle of the unending recession, and we’ve been pushing forward with the belief that it had to end eventually because that’s what recessions tend to do. But if our economy doesn’t really have the power to pull us out of the doldrums, then where do we go from there? What if the recession we’re in happens to be the harbinger of doom that we should have been expecting from the beginning? What if all we have left is that Pandoran conclusion and hope just isn’t enough? Where does a rapidly expanding nation go if there’s no more room within which it can expand?

Part of the solution was the possibility of an untapped area of manifest destiny that offered a never-ending canvas for exploration. By that, I mean the Internet and the ever-expanding territory of a cyber universe. Unfortunately, even that has its limits, as we’ve realized that eventually everything explored in that world has to have some ties to the old world as well. While it might be fascinating to think one could live within a cyberworld, in reality, one still has to maintain a certain existence within normal society, even if to fulfill certain Maslowian needs. Forever expansion means little if someone still has to eat, drink and sleep in normal civilization. The days of Matrix-like exixtence are not yet achievable, so we’re still stuck with having to full basic, simple needs.

Which leaves us with having to find ourselves new frontiers in a walled garden of our own civilizations. The United States could offer endless expansion in the days of praries that went on forever, but once we hit the Pacific Ocean, we started to limit our ability to travel further. Now, everything has been spoken for, so any further expansion comes at a step backwards, a sort of inward despansion, for lack of better word. Much as cell growth is halted and the cells begin to collapse within themselves, feeding off one cell to sustain another, our future is now a tendency to cave in on our progress and trade resources amongst our already established infrastructure as we consolidate and seek to find new frontiers within those already explored. Our future expansion then becomes within, rather than out, mainly because we are without.

If we’re going to survive this change in perspective, we need to realize that we can no longer cannibalize upon outside resources to which we no longer have access. For territory, we must look at that which we already control. For fuel, we can no longer just take from nations that have weak military forces as the world is becoming savvy to that approach and compensating to it as well. We are going to have to consolidate amongst our own people to determine new ways to fuel our movement by either designing new technologies that allow us to use our own resources or to lessen our movement. The simple endothermic physics involved should go without saying, but we’re often not that intelligent when it comes to such matters.

If we’re ever going to figure out our future, we need to look to the rest of the world and see how it has compensated for our future situation already. When Europe ran out of space, it sent colonists to the new world to explore. We are a result of just that. However, when we rebelled and declared ourselves independent, we cut off an avenue of expansion for Europeans, and thus, forced them to realize that their expansion was forever finished, that they would have to learn to live with what they already had. We didn’t think about their reactions or thoughts because we were too busy thinking about how unique we were in comparison to the rest of the world. But in reality, all we were was lucky enough to still have room to grow. Now, we don’t.

So, our future should very much be the same future that was faced by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. When they ran out of space to explore, they consolidated. They began to move back over themselves and create from within. They didn’t just stagnate and disappear as we seem to think will happen to us if we stop expanding and growing. If we’re smart, and sometimes we can be, we would realize that we need to start looking to our future by examining what others like us did in the past. If not, we’re going to continue to try to expand as Germany tried to do in the 1930s, before the rest of the world rose up and stopped them. We might not see ourselves in this light, but if we believe that our expansion is never-ending, and we see ourselves as exceptional to other nations, it’s hard not to see us moving that way. That’s never a good thing.

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will really listen, and we’ll go that direction regardless of any common sense or rational thinking. American exceptionalism relies on the very nature of believing in irrational outcomes to rational thinking. Think of it as a game theory where the result is an expectation of the highest payoff with the least possible chance of happening, but expecting it nonetheless. That’s kind of where we are today. I’d say more but American Idol is coming on soon, and we all know what’s more important.

My Thoughts on Memoirs and Autobiographies

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We live in an age where we seem to get a lot of autobiographical tripe paraded before us as legitimate prose and original content. Recently, previous political leaders have released their “true” stories of their administrative actions, including Decision Points by George W. Bush and Known and Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld. I’m not going to link them because I really don’t feel like hyping their work for sale because I think they can do quite well on their own as they try to force their manufactured truths onto the public through the usual channels.

My problem with just these two works is that the reviews of these have pointed out quite admirably how the truth is extremely distorted in these works. The nation, and the world, knew what happened because we recently lived through these events, yet we have two spin doctors doing everything possible to rewrite the history of those times because they still believe in the axiom that the winner gets to rewrite the history. What both books do, and I watched an incredulously sounding interview on the Daily Show with Rumsfeld the other day that was just filled with attempts at reinventing history, is attempt to clean up a very dirty period in American history by pretending that certain things didn’t happen and others did. Both make a weak attempt to pretend that weapons of mass distruction weren’t sold to us as a given in the lead up to war with Iraq. Both books also attempt to pretend that the administration didn’t do everything possible to sell a war, even though so many other rational voices were urging for more time. The Iraq weapons inspectors were begging for more time, and the Bush Administration did everything possible to discredit their voices during this period. Colin Powell, in the greatest travesty of UN history, stood before the world and powerpointed the most falsified series of documents about WMDs the world has ever seen. To this day, that event gets glossed over, or ignored as much as possible, because there’s no way to get around the fact that the administration straight out lied about the lead up to war with Iraq. And that’s really the elephant in the room there that no amount of rewriting of history is ever going to change. Rumsfeld, himself, went way out of his way to cast Saddam Hussein as the best friend of Al Qaeda, and even his attempts at trying to rewrite the narrative on the Daily Show the other night did not change my opinion that this man is amongst the greatest disgraces to the American people of all time. Sorry, you don’t get to rewrite your history when everything you did was wrong, you lied consistently and you haven’t even acknowledged the wrongs you did in your past, especially when those wrongs led to thousands of deaths of young American soldiers.

Which then brings me to the whole memoir thing that seems to be coming out of the woodwork these days. It’s bad enough that we get tomes written by people who spend 200 and some pages lying through their ass because to tell the truth would be career and political suicide. There’s another kind of memoir that has been driving me nuts lately, and that’s the one that comes out from someone who has done nothing of greatness or significance, who somehow manages to get a million dollar contract to tell his or her life story.

First off, I have to point out that if someone is under 25, the chances of that person having a great life story that needs a book is quite minimal. Sure, you might be Alexander the Great, and have conquerered the entire known world by 30, but even he would have needed to wait a few years before writing his great autobiography, if he ever got around to doing it. But I’m sorry, Justin Bieber, who is only 17, or anyone of many celebrities who have done nothing but shake their asses in front of an audience for a few years, really don’t have all that much to share with the rest of us. I mean, honestly, how much more can Justin Bieber, at 17, tell us about his life on the road that is any more intriguing than a book by Robert Plant or perhaps Life by Keith Richards. I mean, at least these people “lived” an actual rock star life that might have a bit of content to them. Granted, I have no desire to read a book of this nature, but at least I know that which ones would actually have something interesting to tell me.

Recently, there have been tons and tons of crappy books being signed by publishing companies for autobiographies of unimportant people who haven’t been alive longer than the lifespan of my car. I’ve had this belief for a long time that a memoir should never be written by anyone who is not at least 35, and definitely not by someone who hasn’t at least done something so significant that rest of the world would stop and take notice. Someone who has spent an entire life in the movies might have a story to tell. Someone who is 13 and nominated for an Oscar because she played a spunky kid in some movie does not. A rock star who has had multiple divorces, four or five near death experiences, and quite possibly is known for ushering in the second age of rock ‘n’ roll might have a story. A Disney mousketeer who is now singing for teenyboppers probably doesn’t.

Which then brings me to the unimportant people writing important memoirs for the rest of us. Unfortunately, not all of us can be Jack London, living a bunch of different lives before finally settling down and giving us literature to ponder over for centuries. That means instead we get a lot of life stories from people who broke their cocaine habit, lived through therapy, had a really cool dog with a funny name, or just outright manufactured their history because it was the only way to get Oprah to let them appear on her show. Very few of those stories are important enough for us to really want to buy their books.

But even when someone does manage to have an important enough story for the rest of us to read, that person needs to realize he or she might not be the next Hemingway and should really stop at that one story. Dave Pelzer is a good example of this. I’m not sure if you’ve read his ground-breaking book, A Child Called “It”, which is his story of living with a seriously deranged and abusive mother. It’s a great book and really pulls at the heartstrings. Unfortunately, Pelzer felt he was onto something and has never stopped writing books about his life. The first one was great. The rest of them tired, old and overdone. At some point, you need to move on and show us that you learned something from your journey, not that the only thing you learned was it was very profitable and worthy of returning to the well over and over again.

One of the greatest memoirs I’ve ever read comes from probably the only man to ever do a memoir the right way. It was so much the right way that he spent his entire life trying to figure out how exactly to write it, and then spent his final years doing just that. I’m talking about the Autobiography of Mark Twain, which the author demanded not be released until 100 years after his death. And having just read through it, or at least the first volume of three that’s been so far released, I can say that he definitely knew what he was doing with an autobiography. I’ve learned so much about his time and the important figures around his life in so little space. Few memoirs are capable of ever transcending the page like that.

Unfortunately, we rarely get a Mark Twain to tell his story as only a Samuel Clemens can. Instead, we get lying politicians and self-important teenagers with a million dollar book contract. If only the middle ground was so much brighter.