Errors of Judgment

A couple of years ago I gave a talk about the dangers of Utopianism. I said that those who have a simplistic view of life’s problems can end up being even more destructive in their attempts to make things better than those who act with malicious intent. ‘The Road to Hell’ and all that. After my talk a friend asked me if I thought that The Anglo-American venture in Iraq should be categorized in the same fashion. At the time I dodged the question by saying that we were too close to the situation to be able so see what the final outcome will be. After all if a few specific battles in 1864 gone differently President Lincoln could have lost the election and history would be dramatically different. In the same way a few things changing in Iraq will greatly affect how future generations view this campaign.

A few weeks ago this same friend asked me the same question and asked if the intervening time had led me to alter my answer. For the most part it remains foolish to forecast what the end result of the war will be. However, we can look to some things that could have done better and could in turn have made our little game of guess-work go more smoothly.

The main criticism that I have had of W, Rumsfeld et al has been that they confused what it would take to defeat Hussein with what it would take to run Iraq. For the first point they were absolutely correct. Despite all the criticism to the contrary before they went in, they managed to take on the largest army in the Arab world, advance 200 miles in 4 days in the face of opposition, and take the enemy capital in three weeks of combat. That campaign, led by Gen. Tommy Franks, was brilliant. I've heard of Iraqis who had only the propaganda to hear of the war who were absolutely shocked that morning in April of 2003 to see American tanks rolling through their streets. They'd only heard about Iraqi victory after Iraqi victory. This campaign cost "only" a few dozen American lives and few Iraqi lives as well. It was a textbook military action.

However, to defeat Hussein's army was only one thing. To rebuild Iraq was another. Whether it was a naiveté about the goodness of your everyday Iraqi or a misplaced insistence not to play the role of the conquering foreigner, The Anglo-American forces failed to exploit their advantage. Instead of maintaining the perception of invincibility created by their charge up the Tigris and Euphrates they soon were perceived as first indifferent and then as impotent in the face of the chaos in the power vacuum. They managed to cause far more damage by playing Mr. Nice Guy than had they been a terror to behold. People are not nice, and it was foolish for them to think that their hatred of Hussein was the same thing as a love for their fellow man.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22349336-2703,00.html

Either of two things could have avoided this situation. The first, and least likely, was that the UN could have organized massive peacekeeping forces. This was unlikely for two reasons. The first is that the UN is perhaps the most useless organization in the world when it comes to conflict resolution. You might think that they would have learned their lesson out of the 90's with the Balkans and Rwanda. UN forces there sat and watched as Serbs and Hutus killed their neighbors. That this hope is a shadow is shown by the UN's paltry response to Darfur in which their peacekeeping force amounts to 26,000 troops that cannot interfere, but can only "observe." However, we never got to see even this pathetic effort. The UN pulled out the first time they got hit. How they expect to resolve conflict if flight is their first response is beyond me.

The other thing that could have helped was the Iraqi Army. Many argued that just as the German Wehrmacht had to be de-Nazified in 1945 so the Iraqi Army needed to be de-Baathified. This makes sense. You can't end a tyrannical regime by keeping the tyrants in power. The question remains is whether the baby went out with the bathwater. After the war in Europe, many who had been not only foot soldiers but also officers ended up in the new West German armed forces. They were able to help build up their country from the chaos their leaders had unleashed. Has our zeal to rid the land of Hussein’s cronies in the Baath Party led us to leave the Iraqi military without teeth.

Without an effective military you don’t have a nation. You have a bunch of people who are little but prey. Until there is an Iraqi Army strong enough on its own to police its own cities and to defend its borders on its own we can’t leave. So long as we are doing this job for them we leave ourselves vulnerable to pressures from other regions of the world. Iraq must stand.

Now many folks have come to just this conclusion and have decided that the best course for America is to cut our losses and get out before more of our blood is spilt. They say we started this mess by going in and the best thing for all concerned is to get out now. Unfortunately this has the same logic as someone kicking a hole in a ship and deciding that going back to his cabin is the best thing to do.

The answer is not go away and pretend it isn’t happening. Many on the Left have let their visceral hatred of the President blind them to the fact they’d be far less comfortable were radical Islam to become the dominant force in the world. Many on the Right have joined in with the short-sighted calculations of those who cannot see beyond next year’s election. The first group pretends that the radicals will sit down quietly and join Greenpeace if we leave, and the second group pretends that preempting our immediate pain will forestall greater pains later on. Both see this deep and global conflict in terms of American political jousting. Do we really think Bin Laden cares which freedom-of-religion and equality-of-gender advocate is in the White House?

This is a war that must be won, and to be won it must be fought. Some of us like to think that fighting is not a nasty, disgusting business. But there simply is no clean war. There is no war where civilians don’t die and soldiers don’t kill. The dangers of Utopianism that were disgusting two years ago stand still. If we withdraw we will be turning millions of souls over to the affections of those who consider broadcasting beheadings of relief workers to be a service to God. What choice do we have? We must, in the words of The Untouchables’ Elliot Ness, never stop fighting till the fight is done. We have to stay there and fight until no one can say that we were driven out. The smallest window otherwise will be a golden ticket inviting attack after attack after attack. God help us.

Bumper Sticker Ideologues

I’ve often thought that there must be some negative correlation between bumper stickers and intelligence. It seems that the greater the number of bumper stickers to be seen on a car’s back end, the less intelligence can be found thereby expressed. It doesn’t matter which end of the political or cultural spectrum is being advocated, bumper sticker ideologues seem to try to make up for the shallowness of their thought-life by the sheer depth of their plasterings.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not actually against bumper stickers as such. I think it’s great if you want to make a joke on your car or support your Alma mater with some adhesive space. I’m just against trying to make wide ranging statements about life in the world on an 18 by 4 inch billboard while traveling at 70 miles per hour. You simply can’t make an argument like that. It is not so much that I disagree with this or that opinion that you have, but how substantive can you be on an over sized index card?

For instance, take the example of Einstein was a Vegetarian: Think about it. This, I suppose, is designed to connect Einstein’s intelligence with the rather dubious dietary practice of ignoring the fact that we have the same sorts of teeth in our jaws as do our friendly neighborhood carnivores. Aside from the question of what being an expert in Astrophysics has to do with knowing whether Bessie the cow is our friend or our food, you kind of wonder what our vegetarian friends would make of a bumper sticker relating the ardent vegetarianism of someone born just ten years later and from the same neck of the woods as Ole Albert. Hitler Was a Vegetarian: Think About It. That’s right; Ole Adolph was a vegetarian, non-smoker, and non-drinker. I’ll bet Bessie seems a tad tastier now, eh?

Another of my favorites is, You Can’t Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms. This has the advantage of sounding oh-so important without going to the trouble of saying anything at all. Of course you can’t hug a child with nuclear arms! There are plenty of other things in this world that you can’t hug a child with. Buicks for example: They simply are not huggable at all. It’s just that Buicks are not designed to hug children. They are designed to be a way you can spend far too much money on gas. Nuclear arms are likewise not designed to hug children. They are designed to be something so unimaginably awful that no one in his right mind will get up from the negotiating table and risk open war. They are designed to make damned sure that that huggable child can grow up to create inane bumper stickers of her own one day.

Lately I have come across a couple of stickers related to just how God fits in with politics. The first one is fairly innocuous. It simply says, God Bless All Nations – No Exceptions. I’m guessing that this is a response to those who, for some crazy reason, want God to bless America. However, there are others that seem to think that wishing good for one’s own people over and above those who are not is a bad thing. Well, I’m sorry folks. I am more interested in the good of Americans than I am the good of anybody else! I also more interested that my nephew wins his basketball game than I am that your kid does. This doesn't mean I hate your kid. It just means that I love those connected to me more so than I do those who are not. My love for America supersedes my love for some random human just as my love for that same random human overrides my love for a shark who’d like to eat him.

The second one just misses being redundant, but ends up being just plain condescending. It goes something like; God is not a Republican or a Democrat. Yes, thank you very much. I had already gotten the impression that God was around for a little while before Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson started running for office. The thing is, the way I just wrote it isn’t how it shows up on a car near you. What it actually says is;

God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

So what does this sticker actually say? It says that you are really ticked off when you people confuse GOP and GOD. Fair enough. If each party was listed equally then you’d be making a fair statement that we could all get on board with. But it also says that you don’t think that this is a lesson that Democrats need to hear. It says that you are either so naïve or arrogant that you don’t think this is a street that goes both ways. If you don’t think Democrats do this too then just sit and listen to religious liberals opine at a party. They are as disgusting as any Pat Robertson clone ever dreamed of being.

So please, if you want to put something on the back of your car, just make sure it’s short and sweet and preferably tries to be no more serious than the space allows. But if you do want to make a cultural statement, and you actually think the world is more complex than a five word essay, then do me a favor. Do what reasonable people with a need to emote do: make a blog where you can pontificate to your heart’s content. I think we’ll all appreciate your car’s back side more in the end.

The Beauty of Life

In a book of pictures I once saw a beautifully ugly face. It was of a woman from somewhere in Asia. There was something appealing about this poor woman’s face that was fractured with ancient wrinkles and a magnificent smile. Her face was not one that will ever grace the cover of Madison Avenue’s magazine covers with their perfect beauty, but there was something in that grin that was more flawless than that of some gangly fashion model with air-brushed skin. There was something incredibly beautiful about seeing a smile break out onto someone’s face and seeing them giggle at something even if you have no idea what they are laughing about.

No doubt you’ve seen little moments like that in your daily lives. Last November I was at my wife’s family’s house for Thanksgiving. She has a niece that was just a year old. She is a chubby little thing. The niece that is, not my wife. Little Aurora doesn’t know that much about social interactions just yet. She doesn’t know how to make a clever remark or to tell a joke that will capture everyone’s attention, yet that didn’t stop her from holding everyone’s eye captive for the whole weekend. She brought incredible joy to her audience simply by cackling at simple pleasures like riding “horseback” on her aunt or seeing her uncle make faces at her. There is something so wonderful and right about seeing a child giggle uncontrollably.

Think of all the art museums you’ve been to and the utter awe you feel at those times. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard that if you go to the Sistine Chapel in Rome you have to look at the ground. I’m sure the floor is perfectly nice, but that is not what is meant. What I’ve heard is that the efforts and skill of Michelangelo’s ceiling are just so astounding that it is more than a human mind can handle. Think of that! Something that a human being can make can be so incredible that it can only be taken in by small doses! We’re talking about the artistic equivalent of staring at the Sun!

Have you ever had a moment like that? Have you ever seen a work of art, or maybe read a book, that moves you down to the core of your being? It doesn’t have to be a hoity-toity work like Da Vinci or something found in a museum. Where have you seen human craftsmanship so carefully applied that you just have to stand back in awe?I have an example that you probably won’t think of. I’ve worked in the restaurant business for something like ten years now. The most amazing thing to me about working there has nothing to do with my job at all. I wait tables. That’s really nothing more than sweet-talking people into buying more food than they want to buy. What is amazing to me is watching the cooks work when it is incredibly busy.

The next time you go to a restaurant on a Friday or Saturday night, if the place has an open kitchen where you can see the cooks, go and watch them work while you wait for your table. If it is a good kitchen you will be amazed. I remember when I was working right in front of them how efficient they can be. You’ve got five or six guys running at full speed in very close quarters while carrying around things that are literally flaming hot. They are able to keep track of all these orders and all the minutiae that go into preparing your food. When I see them get into their zone I am astonished that no one gets hurt, no one misses a step, and no one misses an order. It is a work of art.

Not all works of art are found in museums or are the product of any human mind. Some of my favorite sorts of things of beauty are to be found in the natural world. You can see there the immense glories of the stars and the planets. I have always been a bit of a space fiend so I am a little biased, but sometime go someplace far away from the city. Here in town you can see maybe ten stars in the nighttime sky. Go some place far out into the countryside and just look up into the deep, deep blackness. Look at the diamonds of brightest burning stars so far away from our eyes. Look at the Milky Way band itself as it hovers over you and around you. When I see such things I feel so very small and so very fortunate at the same time just to be able to see and enjoy them.

When I was a little boy my family traveled to Switzerland several times. There are few places on our spinning globe so wonderful just to be in than that tiny country. When would arrive my body would still be operating on North American time. While this left me in the uncomfortable position of falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon, it did afford me the opportunity of waking up before the sun first peeked out from the night. It was at those times that I saw what to this day is one my fondest memories of stunning beauty.

I would wake up early and go out on one of the many balconies. At first it would be the same twinkling majesty that I mentioned a moment ago. Then ever so gradually the blackness would slip into a pale, pink glow. After a few minutes the rose-tint would bleed into a deeper shade nearly red in its intensity. The coloring would soon drip onto the highest peaks of the mountains around me and would pour down until the heights would be ablaze with light while the valleys remained in darkness. I will never forget those times.

I truly wish that all the scenes of nature that I have seen were so inspiring. But you know as well as I do that ‘Mother Nature’ often acts in a way that is hardly nurturing. I believe it was Woody Allen who said that nature is not ‘mother.’ He said it was a restaurant where everybody eats everybody. We have all seen instances only in these past few years where the gentle hand of nature was one that smothered her children rather than one that lifted us up.

It was two and a half years ago that I was in Chicago with my family for Christmas. I don’t remember if it was late that night or early on the morning of the 26th when the reports started coming in, but I do remember that I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A massive tidal wave had swept through parts of East Asia leaving hundreds dead in its wake. A day or so after that the hundreds had turned into thousands. I couldn’t believe that as many as 7,000 people had died from a natural disaster. Soon that tragic number climbed higher and higher still. People from as far away as Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Sumatra lay dead in their homes or lost to the sea forever. It is said that around quarter of a million people lost their lives on that single day. God alone knows how many have died since from water-borne disease and malnutrition. One of the greatest natural disasters in human history had come and gone and there was no one to blame.

Closer to home, this past year’s quiet storm season could easily beguile us into forgetting the devastation we saw in our own backyard just last year. I remember watching the early reports of the incipient hurricane Katrina as she boiled up from the south Atlantic and churned her way across to our shores. With all the wonders of our most magnificent technology there was nothing we could do to stop a major city from being wiped out.

Neither our compassion nor our power could do anything to stop the devastation. We all wanted something or someone to blame. Everyone from local municipal officials to the President of the United States was strung up in the minds of the entire world as we demanded an answer as to why it could have happened. We knew that this sort of thing was not supposed to happen. How can a natural thing be bad?

A few paragraphs back I mentioned how amazing it is to see what can happen when you have a group of skilled human souls. I think it impresses us all to see a master with his craft. But what is our reaction when we see a master at his craft when that craft is destruction? How do we respond when we see great effort and skill poured into something revolting? We’d all be more comfortable thinking that great skill and great intelligence were somehow mutually exclusive to great evil. Tragically, we’d all be fooling ourselves if we thought that this was so. We’ve all seen too much to think that this is so.

Think for a moment of these past 100 years. How much effort was put into butchering millions and millions? We all know of the Nazis and their death camps. We’ve seen enough documentaries to each teach a class on the horrors that went on during those sickening years. At least for me I think that I have seen so many such things that I lose touch with the reality that happened. I forget how very much care was put into making the death machines do their deadly deeds. I forget that they had to arrange train schedules to bring the supplies of gas into the camps. I forget that someone built those morbid showers knowing how impure a purpose they had.

I see the amazing technical ability of the German people put to such a use and something inside me screams that something good has been twisted. I look at those events, as well as the horrifyingly common fellow examples, and I don’t know what to do or to say. Just as there is something wondrous about watching a group of skilled people work towards something beautiful, there is something ugly about seeing that same sort of intelligence warped into an amazing horror.

You can see this same sort of ugliness with the same sort of people that I spoke of so glowingly at the start. I don’t mean the great evil that otherwise beautiful people can create. That is what I was referring to just before. I mean you can see the effect of such ugliness in the lives on the receiving end of such works. Think again of the beauty of seeing a little child at play. There is to me a joy simply in watching little kids play.

Sometimes I think I’d like just going to a playground to take pleasure in the uncomplicated joy of a three year old slipping down a slide. But I don’t go hang out at playgrounds watching little kids. It isn’t because there would be anything wrong with me doing so as such. However, you know as well as I do why I can’t do that. I cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of children at play because there are men who look like me and talk like me who take pleasure in children. They take pleasure in children in a way that makes the most stern of us grow sick as little else can.

Have you ever spoken to someone who was abused as a child? That’s a silly question. Unless you’ve never met more than two people you have met someone who is forever marred. The stats tell us that something like one out of every three girls you meet and one out of every four or five boys has been stained by the most twisted of desires. Speaking to such a one is heartbreaking. You can see their very soul shattered. Women who will never grow to trust a man, while they will always be desperate to do just that. Males who never quite become men, but you cannot call them boys because their innocence was ripped from their spirits long ago.

There is not a one among you who will look at such a situation and say to me, “That’s okay. It’s just a part of life.” Every one of you will have seen in your life someone who will never be okay because of what someone has done to them. You have all seen someone who will never quite recover from that death in the family early in life. You have all watched as someone crumpled under the weight of a sickness that only gets worse.

We all have that one thing that angers us to no end. We might not have seen much grief in our own lives or even in the lives of those we know. But I’d bet that there is something for each of you that makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs that something isn’t right. Something is not the way it is supposed to be! You don’t have to be told by some abstract philosophy or some religious text that for an adult to pour out his sexual desires on a child is wrong. You don’t need me up here to tell you that human ingenuity should be used to help others and not to devise more and creative ways to inflict pain in those around you. You don’t need some intellectual justification to be sick to your stomach when you see body after body after body floating in the waters of New Orleans or Indonesia.

Think of these things. The next time you hear some self-confessed expert tell you that it is arrogant to make moral judgments, think about these things. The next time you hear some egghead tell you that each culture determines its own standards of morality, think about these things. Remember that those folks living up in their ivory towers or their monasteries have isolated themselves by layers of arguments or repeated mantras from the nastiness that we all live in. Remember that there is such a thing as beauty and such a thing as evil and that we cannot ignore the existence of either just because they make us uncomfortable.

Bickering Over the Bomb

Each year as each August steams its way along we find ourselves treated to yet another round of debate about an event now sixty years past. Along with the more understandable harangues from various voices of our Japanese friends, newspapers and documentaries over here end up re-hashing many of the same arguments about America’s use of Atomic weapons as were brought out during the previous year’s anniversaries. While those attacking the bombs are without a doubt sincere in their hatred of slaughter I have never found most of their arguments convincing.

Arguments against the bomb come down to two basic complaints. The first is that the weapons employed by the United States in August of 1945 were far too vicious and indiscriminate to be considered morally legitimate. The second is that even had this first question not been a factor, Japan was at that point so devastated that the atomic attacks were superfluous to the point of maliciousness.

The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 120,000 people on August 6 and 9 respectively. Pictures and anecdotes from those horrific days can still make one’s stomach turn. Children turned to dust with their sheltering mothers hovering over them like charcoal statues. There can be no denying that the American weapons were both vicious and indiscriminate. These were cities that were attacked and not fleets or fortifications. Even had the target been solely comprised of well-armed warriors, can we really justify such a level of slaughter?

I have always thought that those who object to nuclear weapons because they kill lots of people must not know very much war. They don’t seem to realize just how nasty so-called conventional weapons can be. The immediate historical context of these events puts the lie to such a complaint. In the course of World War Two, somewhere between fifty and seventy-five million people were killed. This means that of this morbid total, over 99% managed to find themselves butchered by “conventional” weapons. Just few short months before Hiroshima up to 130,000 Tokyo residents as well as 100,000 citizens of Dresden, Germany were burned alive by conventional weapons each in a single night.

This scale of death is not the sole property of modern industrialized warfare. On August 2, 216 BC some 50,000 Roman legionnaires were slain by nothing more complex than swords, spears and arrows. Cortez annihilated the Aztec Empire with primitive muskets and cannon. Search through the pages and history and you will find time and again the massive slaughter of both soldier and civilian alike on a scale that will make the stoutest among us queasy from the toll. Humanity had been shredding its own numbers viciously and indiscriminately long before the invention of “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.” If you are going to protest the human cost of weapons, you need to begin a little farther back on the technological chain.

My question to these earnest protesters is why aren’t you there for these others who have fallen in war? Are those who are killed by atomic weapons somehow more dead than those killed by guns and knives? What is about napalm and high explosives that you find so appealing that you give it a pass for its killing punch? Why don’t you protest the existence of machetes after its prominence in the killing of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994?

The next complaint about the bombs’ use is that of its utter pointlessness. The argument goes that by 1945 Japan was beaten. The combination of British progress through Southeast Asia and American advances across the Pacific Islands left “The Land of the Rising Sun” with no option but surrender. The argument goes on to say that the coming American invasions of the Japanese homeland which was slated for November of 1945 and March of 1946 would not have been as costly as is often advertised.

A corollary of this point focuses on the role of the Soviet Union in this affair. Strange as it may seem in retrospect, while the Russians were deeply involved the war against Germany, they had thus far left Japan to the English-speaking world and the Dutch. This created the odd situation that central members of the Axis and the Allies continued to have full diplomatic relations with one another. Taking advantage of this peculiar situation, Japanese emissaries sought to find a way out of the war by using the USSR as a go-between.

It is further argued that only reason that the US was so determined to use the bomb was as an opening salvo in the imminent Cold War. The reasoning is that as it was clear that the post-war world would be dominated by the Russo-American rivalry and so we were directing the bomb not as a warning to Tokyo to surrender but to Moscow to behave.

Finally it is pointed out that it had already been agreed among the Allies that since Germany was now no longer a threat, the Soviet Union would use its now idle military to neutralize Japanese forces in China. They fulfilled this promise on August 8, 1945 with a massive invasion of Manchuria that crushed the largest segments of the Japanese Army still in the field. Today representatives of the Russian and Japanese militaries are adamant that it was this action, and not the American atomic attacks, which induced Japan to surrender on August 14.

These are serious charges. If the critics are correct then America is guilty of butchering tens of thousands of people for no better reason than a desire to throw her weight around. For the most part the facts cannot be denied. I wonder though whether or not this is the only conclusion possible.

The fact that Japan was already defeated by time we dropped the bomb is a strange argument to make about war in 1945. I am sure that the hundreds of thousands of American, British and Russians who died in Europe in the war’s last months would have been comforted by the fact that Germany was already beaten. The Nazis did not stop fighting their lost war even when the Red Army was swarming all over Berlin and thoughts of victory were supplanted by dreams of a “noble” death. Why do we think that the Japanese would have been any different?

Those who would say so have to argue with two massive battles of that same year. Of the some 22,000 Japanese who had garrisoned Iwo Jima before the American invasion only 212 surrendered. On the American side nearly 7,000 fell trying to take a speck in the ocean only 8 square miles in area. At Okinawa a few months later only 7,400 Japanese out of 130,000 defenders lived to see the end. As at Iwo Jima American losses were high with over 12,000 dead. In this battle, the first on native Japanese soil, approximately a quarter of the civilian population perished as well.

Does this sound like a nation who was prepared to give up? Whatever peace feelers the Japanese might have been sending Russia’s way it was war that they were preparing for. The civilian population was being geared up to oppose the expected American invasion with whatever weapons they could fashion. The military was getting psyched up for a final, noble stand. Their hope was that in the face of the inevitably massive casualties among the American forces should we land in Japan, the American populace would agree to more generous surrender terms.

Anyone who continues to doubt their intentions should consider one fact. On the night before their surrender announcement, military units in Tokyo attempted a coup to force the emperor to keep on fighting to the end. They had heard of his intentions and could not abide the thought of defeat. People at war are often neither logical nor practical. Any American invasion of the Japanese homeland would have been far more devastating than the atomic attacks were.

The Russian factor also fails to convince if for no other reason than such arguments are mutually exclusive. On the one hand we are to believe that the bombings were unnecessary since peace was being sought through the Soviets. Then we are also to believe the bombings were unnecessary because the same Soviets were about to invade China and thereby defeating Japan. Whatever hopes the Japanese may have cherished for peace, the Russians were not at all interested in finding it for them. Someone wiping out your remaining bargaining chips is hardly the person to go to for mediation.

The final complaint, that the United States had the ulterior motive of preemptively facing down the Soviets, simply doesn’t make sense. Let us say that Truman and Churchill were conniving scare the Russians into a more amendable post-war position. After all, we had the bomb and they didn’t. Unfortunately for critics this makes as much sense as saying that police shouldn’t use force to stop one criminal presently wreaking havoc since it can also be used to scare another criminal from starting his mayhem. That America wanted Russia stay in line does not negate the fact that we were already at war with a nation that was still willing and able to continue the fight.

120,000 immediately died in the atomic attacks of August 1945. Even those who survived did so only with intense physical and psychological scars. But these things in themselves cannot make these weapons into a category of obscenity all alone. Over thirty million civilians were killed in the years 1939-45 even without atomic weapons. Those who survived conventional weapons also did so only with deep scars. War is a nasty brutish business without exception. It is not fair to the millions who died in the “normal” ways of war to say that their deaths are somehow less tragic or obscene. They deserve more.

The Humane Society

When we are born all our actions are passive. We must be fed, clothed, bathed and whatever else by another if these things are to happen at all. Even the few movements we do in fact do are instinctive. When an infant is presented with a breast, he turns to suckle even if it is not his or anyone else’s mother. When his bladder is full, empties it. If he is unhappy or uncomfortable, he cries. All this is done without thought, reflection or intention.

As he gets older he begins to take control of his world. The road to dominion starts with his own body. He learns that his hands are attached and that, to his delight, that he can move them at will. At first these movements are clumsy and often futile. Later on he learns that certain actions affect even those things that are not attached to his person. The bottle can be grasped; the rattle can be shaken and so on.

This goes further when he begins to pull the rug to bring the toy on it within reach. He can make mommy come when he cries or make daddy pick up the toy he has intentionally thrown on the ground. His actions make the world change. Soon language is added to his palette. By manipulating his body in his larynx, he can make his desires known and call attention to interesting things around him.

Throughout childhood this set of actions becomes less instinctual and more intentional. His shuffling steps become running and skipping and dancing. Grunts and cries turn to sentences and to songs. He trains his body to do what he wants even when his desires serve no bodily function.

Life becomes less and less natural. He eats things not as fuel in an indiscriminant fashion, but chooses which foods he wants to satisfy an internal desire. He learns that sometimes the most effective way to accomplish his desire is the indirect route. At first he stamps his foot and screams. Later he quietly pleads and puts his head on mommy’s shoulder. He learns how to seek the two in the bush in spite of having one in the hand by working for what can be rather than being satisfied with what is.

At first he plays with blocks without rhyme or reason. Soon he is building complex castles that he has never seen. First he plays with the dirt and the grass. Then his yard becomes a faraway land with battles and adventures. The more he distances himself mentally from being a cog in nature’s machine, then the more he is able to take from nature what he wants and to cause it to be what desires. Nature slowly becomes his.

As an adult this dominance grows. If he wants to feel alert and sharp, he drinks coffee. If he wants to feel relaxed and mellow, he drinks wine. Even his own state of mind becomes subject to his desires.

This is not his subservience to his own bio-chemical impulses, but an expression of nature and his own body as his possession. He must always obey nature in that he cannot drink a gallon of coffee or wine and still function. Yet it is this very submission to nature’s laws that allows him to make nature submit to him. He must sleep, but he sleeps when he chooses. It isn’t healthy to stand in the rain, but he does so if he chooses.

We all recognize that this self-conquest as maturity, but it is often indistinguishable from stupidity. If a man stands in the cold rain to catch a glimpse of a girl we call him a romantic, a fool, or maybe a pervert. This is exactly where humanity’s supernatural-ness comes to the fore. For people the choice of particular actions has a moral quality corresponding to their context.

If a male animal senses a female in heat then he must obey his instinct. No one thinks a dog is a fool or a pervert when he breaks into a yard to get at a bitch. No one thinks an ape is a fool if he passes on a gourmet meal later so he can have a banana now.

To be human means to cause your instincts to submit to your will and to manipulate nature in the same way. Yet it is for this aspect of our daily lives that the atheist has no answer. For him all is natural. We are not distinct in our desire for music from the animal’s desire for food.

By his reckoning we have no reason to judge a child’s actions as truly less mature. A child obeys his instinct and defiles himself where his sits without thought or care. This is natural. It is unnatural to discipline one’s body. Adults are the ones who are delusional to think there is a value to withholding a desired action.

To kill one’s rival as an animal is not sniffed at by their fellows or by us. To kill one’s rival as a child is prevented only by being weak and small. As an adult human, I am called upon to restrain my passions and instincts. I would be rightly condemned as outside the moral map if I obeyed every physical impulse.

Some might say that the natural attitude is exactly what is needed. They say we ought to get in touch with our inner child and to drop our taboos about sex. To them it is our separation from nature that has caused our misery and nature’s desolation.

But how many of really want to live in a world if we all acted “naturally?” Does the lion care if “no means no,” or if the lioness is not in the mood? Does he treat her as an equal and unique partner in spite of his physical superiority? Does he value the intrinsic value of his rivals’ cubs? No is the answer to all of these. He mates at his convenience. He lies on the grass while the lioness hunts for his food. He kills his rivals’ cubs without care as soon as their father is banished. Is this what we want?

Only humanity can have a humane society. It will not be by getting back to nature that we will achieve a good life. Nature’s society is brutal, selfish, and often cruel. Nature may have no place for hate, but it also has no place for love. It is only by the suspension of our own natural desires and, at times, the violation of natural laws that the concepts of goodness, beauty and love will ever have any meaning. Only by rising above ordinary nature can humanity be what we are naturally intended to be.

Driving Troubles

Just a few nights ago my wife and I were returning from something or another. On our road home we had an unpleasant experience. As the cars coming from an entrance ramp were merging onto the main road a car in the right lane scooted over suddenly to make room for them. A little abrupt but awfully nice. This was surprising, but not too troubling. I simply moved over into the empty left lane and the scooter scooted back.

When things stabilized again I started to move back into the center lane. My exit was coming up and I anticipated no further difficulties. But as we slipped back into our previous lane we had a most unwelcome greeting from our fellow traveler as the car that had moved around earlier began to blare his horn at us most insistently.

As far as it goes this was excusable. The best I could figure we had each begun to move towards the center lane at the same time. I had not seen him in my mirror since he wasn’t there. This was warrant for a mild outbreak of honking to signal his displeasure at my apparent recklessness. For this fellow, however, mildness was not a virtue.

He began to honk his horn. He did not honk his horn and then go on about his business. He honked his horn and honked his horn and honked his horn. Apparently he was under the impression that we still had not gotten the proper impression of his most noble displeasure because as he continued to honk and honk and honk he felt it necessary to drive all the way up until he was riding up on our bumper.

I tapped my brakes once or twice to “encourage” him to move right along. This worked but only for a time as he came back again to honk up close and personal. I was preparing to continue on past our exit since it seemed this avid driver would likely follow us to continue his disclaimer in person, but this presented the problem of just how far down the road we would find ourselves before cooler heads prevailed.

In the end this gentleman (I am making a biased assumption against my own gender in this case. Idiotic ravings of anger seem to be a specialty of ours.) only stopped his admonition when he got off the interstate himself. Since this was barely beyond where we’d intended to exit ourselves we were at little loss for the whole affair. We got to get our groceries and he got to express himself.

It is this expression that continues to puzzle me. Just what was it that he was accomplishing? Had he simply wanted to politely warn me that I had veered into his lane, then a rather ordinary tapping of the horn would have been sufficient. Had he been somewhat put off by my driving habits and wished to inform me of his angst a few short seconds would have accomplished this accordingly. Had he done this I might have felt properly chastised and been far more careful and respectful of the drivers in my fair city.

But just what was he hoping to accomplish by raging his horn for a full one or two minutes while driving along at 65 miles an hour? He cannot have been thinking that blaring the horn would make me feel bad. We all know what it is like when someone yells at you far beyond the point of reason. Even if we’re being decried for a fair reason we stop listening after the first chapter.

When this guy went from a short bark of anger to an endless diatribe of rage he changed himself from a man speaking his mind to a slave to his own passions. He ceased to be acting with any sort of control of himself. Had he been in control he would have seen that a three second honk would have been far more shaming to me than his two minute ramble.

From that point on he ceased to be speaking to anyone but himself. He wasn’t honking because of what he thought it conveyed to me. He was honking because his rage felt good. It felt good to vent out some of the anger that he felt inside. Doing that does more than simply to vent your anger. It feeds the anger and increases the pleasure that you can take from it. Anger is a powerful and self-sustaining drug that is all too easy to become a willing worshiper of.

How do I know what this guy was feeling? I know for the same reason that anyone else knows about this truly guilty pleasure. When someone does something that annoys us or even genuinely enrages us nothing feels quite so good as to let all that passion slip up from our hearts and onto their waiting heads.

It is the same thing as when we are feeling depressed. When we are feeling emotionally wretched, the logical thing for us to do would be to put on a happy face. We should go find the happiest, sunniest movie we can find to drive our dark spirits from us. After all the whole problem with feeling bad is that it feels bad, right?

As logical as that might well be, it is all too rarely that any of us actually do this. We’d rather sit there in our muck of melancholy and let it dribble all over our minds until we are wallowing in self-pity. Think about it. When you are in a grouchy mood you will bark at anyone or anything that comes across your radar. You feel a sick sense of pleasure because you were able to inflict trauma upon another.

These sorts of reactions to internal malaise should remind us of two facts that we’d all like to pretend are not twisted into our very beings. The first fact is that we aren’t all that reasonable beings. If we were clear-headed then the thing we’d want the most when we’re upset is for someone to come along and help us be cheerful. But how does it really happen in life? When we’re upset there’s nothing that makes us so very livid as someone coming along with a “sunny side of life” attitude. When we’re upset, we want to keep being upset.

Tragically it goes far farther than this. At those times we take pleasure in causing pain in others. If you don’t believe me then ask yourself why you bark at your neighbor or spouse or child when you are angry. Why do you bite the head off of someone who accidentally bumps into you when you’re angry when you wouldn’t when you’re in a good mood? Why do you mindlessly and endlessly honk you’re horn at someone when you’re running late when you don’t if you’ve got plenty of time?

We human beings are not nice people. We can pretend that we are gentle souls, and offer up self-justifications for when we do act out of our grumpiness. We can say that “They deserve to be yelled at!” We try our best to stifle our anger deep inside and end up either a passionless drone or stress-hardened heart. Or we can let our emotions fly which ever way they feel and live as a slave to our hormonal and circumstantial immediacy.

None of these seems a truly human life. To be human is to be more than a mobile emotion projector. There are times in our lives when things will anger us to no end and we cannot deny this. What we can do is to work to modify the manner in which we express this anger. We can work to see that we do not make ourselves the greater fool by exploding at the foolishness of those around us and to work to adjust our own behavior to others so as not to tempt them devolve into lesser versions of themselves.

New Year

This is a very, very, very short entry. I had another blog, but my teeny brain forgot how to access it and couldn't figure how to fix it. Oh, well. I've just gotten back from my honeymoon. This is a good thing. Mind you, it is not a good thing to be back. It is a good thing to have gone. My wife and I (still a strange concept) spent a week or so in the Pacific Northwest. It is a very happy place. I certainly hope to continue this blog. I also hope that I'll remember the codes. Otherwise I'll end up having dozens of blogs with no connection between them. That is all for now.