Alas— No Hoopla

My wife and I went downtown last Thursday to join the celebration. The Iraq War had ended, and I remembered the iconic photo in Life magazine taken on the day World War II ended— that classic image of the sailor kissing the nurse. I missed the end of WWII (actually I didn’t exactly miss it, but I was only three years old at the time) so I wanted to experience all the celebration-of-victory hoopla for myself this time. Alas— no hoopla. Maybe because there was no actual victory. Covered incessantly by the media with “imbedded” camera crews, Iraq just turned out to be a really, REALLY expensive, long-running and mindless reality show in which viewers eventually lost interest, so that the show finally got canceled because of low ratings. It will be interesting to see what they come up with to fill that time slot.

It Was All About Ms. Aguilera

Let’s face it. July 4th really isn’t America’s day to shine, at least not beyond our borders. July 4th is our homeland celebration, but when it comes time to show the world why the U.S.A. is a big deal, that honor is reserved for Super Bowl Sunday. It was claimed that Sunday’s game was seen by one billion people, which means that 850 million foreign TV viewers were watching. America does three things in a bigger way, and better than any other nation on earth— self-congratulatory patriotism, television advertising, and good old rugged, smash-mouth football (not to be confused with soccer), and Super Bowl Sunday showcased all three of these core competencies. And then, just to show the world that we have a sense of humor, we selected— to lead us in singing our Nation Anthem— a “vocalist” who looked like a Barbi doll, but who didn’t know the lyrics or the melody to the Star Spangled Banner. Francis Scott Key’s musical composition was evidently viewed as merely a guideline for individual interpretation by Christina Aguilera.

There was an even more patriotic time in America’s past, during and after World War II, when a singer named Kate Smith routinely sang God Bless America and The Star Spangled Banner. She knew all the lyrics, and she hit every note with perfection. She always made the song be “about America.” Christina Aguilera made Sunday’s performance of our National Anthem be all about her. It didn’t work out all that well.

Ungovernable? You Bet!

During the last ten years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the human race (whatever the culture) has pretty much become ungovernable, and this week’s revolt in Egypt helps prove my point. Blame it on the Internet. Even back at the inception of the Internet more than two decades ago, the really smart people realized that this new way of sharing knowledge was inherently seditious, and there’s no doubt that— if the governments of the world had known then what they know today— the Internet never would have been allowed to flourish. Even the best futurists back then, however, could never have predicted the impact of social mediums like FaceBook and Twitter, and WikiLeaks.

For ten thousand years or more, governance has always been a delicate dance between government and the governed. The United States, over the last 235 years, has arguably done the best job of consistently getting this balance right, but even this nation has experienced some monumental hiccups. Coming out of WWII, I believe that the American people were far too compliant and trusting of their government. The delicate dance was unbalanced, and McCarthyism and Vietnam were two pathetic results, both fueled by a government that exploited paranoia about communism and citizen trust to prey on the governed. The HUAC congressional outrages of the early 1950s could have been stopped before they gained any traction by just a few well-placed riots and a press that was willing to explain what was happening. Facebook and Twitter would have had a monumental influence as well.

The last two years have shown us street riots in France and Greece and England and Tunisia and, now, Egypt— but most Americans still think that it could never happen here. I say, “Wanna bet?” The U.S.A. is dead broke. The ultimate solution to the deadbeat status of the country is new taxation, most likely in the form of a national sales tax on everything but groceries and medicine. Problem is, now you’ve got the Tea Party (Taxed Enough Already), and these are some of the same self-proclaimed patriots who rushed out after Obama’s election and stocked up on guns and munitions in quantities never before seen by the American arms industry outside of a wartime setting. They weren’t doing this just to boost the economy. Wait and see what happens if the U.S. government, led by Obama working with the Republican congress, decides to try and implement a national sales tax. Wait until the Tea Party gun owners all simultaneously get cheesed off about a second presidential term for Obama, and they network with each other on the Internet. Wait until there’s a convergence between a new tax policy and a mindset that believes Obama is a Muslim and foreign-born (and did I mention that he has dark skin and kinky hair?)— and all of this is played out within a poorly educated, white trash population of people who can’t find a job or pay their mortgage. You think it can’t happen here? Guess again.

Total Victory (But Not Recently)

65 years ago today, the Japanese formally surrendered to the United States, ending World War II. It would be the last time that a wartime foe would unconditionally surrender to us, although it would certainly not be our last war. For the last two days, some of my conservative friends have been behaving as though this total wartime victory happened just last week as they complain about Obama’s end of combat in Iraq, acting like they think it should have ended like just World War II. That fact is, a lot has happened between those two events.

We left the Korean peninsula in 1953 leaving the power and prestige of our enemies, the Chinese and the North Koreans, undiminished in any way. But Eisenhower was president then, and he was a Republican. We left Vietnam in 1975 after having been defeated ourselves, leaving Ho Chi Minh victorious and 58,000 of our young men dead for no good cause. But Gerry Ford was president then, and Ford was a Republican. We pulled out of Lebanon in 1983 having achieved nothing whatsoever but the loss of 241 Marines who died while sleeping in their own barracks. But Ronald Reagan was president then, and he was a Republican. We left Iraq (the first time) in 1991while George H.W. Bush (another Republican) was president, leaving Saddam Hussein and most of the top Iraqi leadership firmly in place to fight another day. That could hardly be called “unconditional” surrender on their part.

What makes Obama unique is not that he is ending a war under conditions that are worse than when the war started. All U.S. wars have ended that way for 65 years. What’s unique is that Obama is the first president to go through this frustration who happens to be a Democrat. And by the way, he’s also black. That’s why my conservative friends are upset.

Why Do They Think the Truth Is So Unworkable?

There’s an old adage that says, “In war, the first casualty is the truth.” The problem is that modern institutions (government, business corporations, and religions) all seem to look at everything as a war. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all these institutions have systemic lying as one of their primary functions or core values, but I will say that the truth is looked upon as their enemy. Whistleblowers don’t get their power and their 15 minutes of fame by lying. Whistleblowers threaten institutions by telling the truth about institutional lies, and that’s considered dangerous.

It wasn’t always this way. During World War II, Edward R. Murrow reported bad news for war-torn and bomb-ravaged London with nightly candor, while Gabriel Heater gave his unvarnished assessment of U.S. setbacks in the South Pacific with no attempt to sugar coat the losses. By honestly admitting some of the truth to the American people, the real and essential “secrets” like the Manhattan Project could be safely kept under wraps. That’s because the American people, and people in general, aren’t totally stupid. When they are fed a constant diet of happy talk, they develop an intense hunger and craving for some real undiluted truth, and this is grounded in a certain kind of intuition that people have about happy talk. They instinctively know it’s mostly a lie. This isn’t being cynical, it’s being wise.

In the last four months, we’ve seen what happens when the truth is finally exposed after all the “happy talk” efforts have been tried, only to fail. Who can forget the images of the Vatican during Holy Week, 2010, as the Pope tried to swim against the flood of pedophilia accusations that poured in from around the world? You could almost sense his frustration that his traditional authority and power to burn heretics at the stake had been taken away from him. And this was followed by revelations about the devious inner workings and vulgar bonus payouts that defined Wall Street, even as that institution demolished a half century of American prosperity. Then came the BP oil spill. If happy talk and lies from CEO Tony Hayward could soak up oil, then the Gulf of Mexico disaster could have been minimized. Trying to repair the corporate image, BP hastily hired some local Cajun goobers to appear in the BP television commercials in the hope that happy talk would still carry the day if it came from someone without a British accent.

Which brings me to Julian Assange and his WikiLeak revelations about the Afghan War. We should ignore the Pentagon assertion that the leaked information will threaten American lives. The military always makes this claim when any truth whatsoever comes out about the conduct of a war. The only thing threatened will be Pentagon credibility. Now we know that at least one helicopter was brought down by a heat seeking missile supplied by Iran. News flash to the Pentagon— the Taliban already knew about this, and if young American servicemen who fly on helicopters don’t know about this, then they have a right to know the truth.

So here’s the question. Why do they think the truth is so unworkable? It’s because the true believers who populate all modern institutions think it’s their God given right to insult the intelligence of others outside the walls of their own particular institutional fortress, and to do so with impunity.

Afghanistan— Prolonging the Inevitable

Let your mind drift back to 1776, and ask yourself, “How long would The King’s red-clad dragoons have stayed around if the Continental soldiers had been armed with automatic assault weapons and RPGs?” To understand that scenario is to understand present-day Afghanistan, a country that contains three guns for every inhabitant. And the bad news for American foreign policy doesn’t stop there.

Warfare (the waging of war) is devilishly complex, but war itself is actually quite simple. War is merely two sides that kill each other until one side can’t stand to be killed any longer. Throughout history, war was never any more complicated than that. In World War II, the Japanese Kamikaze attacks showed America that Japan had a greater willingness to die than we did, and it took two atomic bombs to break that Japanese will. Vietnam was simply a tragedy that came about because Lyndon Johnson thought that Ho Chi Minh thought like he did, and eventually the American public decided that this petty difference of opinion was not worth dying for. Which brings us to Afghanistan where the enemy not only has the will to die, but actually has the aspiration to die. Faced with that kind of cultural mind set, America has two choices. We can either sign a formal declaration of surrender and leave with our tail between our legs, or we can just leave. Either way, we will lose that war, not because we lack military power, but because we lack suicidal tendencies.

The Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or the insurgents, or the Afghan nationals (hell, we can’t even agree on what to call them) is an enemy like none other in our long history of enemies. They have no industrial infrastructure behind them, no munitions manufacturing capability, no heavy transportation, no armored vehicles, no air power, no spy satellites, no electronic eavesdropping equipment, no forts, and certainly no central headquarters like the Pentagon. Nevertheless, they defeated England at the height of the British Empire’s power, and they defeated the Soviet Union at the height of Soviet power. As one U.S. Congressman recently stated, “We are facing a 14th-century enemy with our 21st-century military force, and we are fighting with 18th-century military tactics.” Bluntly stated, they are defeating the United States at the height of American power simply because they welcome the chance to die.

Liberals and Conservatives seldom agree on anything, so when Liberal Vice President, Joe Biden, and Conservative writer and intellectual, George Will, both say the same thing, that has some significance. Both of them essentially are saying, “Leave Afghanistan immediately before any more American troops die needlessly.” We should listen to them.

Still Waiting for that Flying Car (part 2)

It would be difficult to overstate America's obsession with science and technology during the Great Depression. Four magazines best reflected the obsession: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Science and Mechanics, and Popular Aviation, all with beautiful color artistry on the cover each month showing some fanciful invention, and an accompanying article inside promising that the wizardry on the cover was just around the corner. Streamlined efficient automobiles, giant airships, speedy single-wing aluminum monoplanes, gigantic steamships of futuristic proportions, buildings constructed of new materials that would allow them to be built to a height of one mile all this was predicted to be just on the horizon. The most imaginative cover art composition, however, was seen in smaller vehicles with dual-use capability such as boats that could travel on land, and cars that could cross water, and especially cars and boats that could take to the air. The extraordinary inventiveness and artistic quality of these magazine covers have made them highly collectible in recent years, and in looking over published anthologies of the 1930s cover art, one finds that fully one out of ten depicted some form of airworthy car or roadworthy airplane.

When citizens in 1939, primed by a decade of exposure to such images on the newsstand, were promised flying cars by 1964, that idea was far less fanciful than the concept of atomic energy or uninterrupted highway travel. The situation becomes even more unbelievable when one finds that, although the designs shown in the cover art were universally impractical and unworkable, many were actually patented. And so the flying car was initially envisioned in the minds of magazine cover artists with no regard for practicality or functionality, and then it was subjected to a certain amount of patentable developmental study before being touted as a travel mode of the future in The World of Tomorrow showcase, but it was too late in achieving actualization and so it finally diminished in importance before ultimately fading from public attention. The thing of it is, it never stopped being a great idea. The logical question is, "What happened?"

What got in the way was World War II. Everything on the 1939 prediction list seemed to have immediate military application- everything, that is, but the dual function air-ground vehicle. The nylon research that would eventually find its way into the women's hosiery market was first applied to parachutes. Even the technology used to supply fresh fruits and vegetables year round had application for food supply in combat environments. The automobile industry, which might have been counted on to consider levitating models, simply went out of the car business during the war, and the aircraft industry was forced to focus exclusively on various types of warplanes. The war completely changed everything.

After the war, the aircraft manufacturers rushed to take the heavy load-carrying capacity developed for bombers and apply it to commercial passenger transports, thus guaranteeing the fulfillment of the 400 mph, 200 passenger airplane prediction on the 1939 list. The car makers, upon returning to civilian production, were simply concerned with survival. Some like Chrysler and Ford and GM made the comeback successfully. Others like Packard and Hudson and Nash and Studebaker and the upstart Kaiser Company fell by the wayside. In such a turbulent time of market shakeout, the research investment needed to make a car fly was unthinkable. Moreover, the public no longer felt like it needed the product, and this more than anything else explains why the airworthy automobile languished in various design stages within the files of the U.S. Patent Office. Postwar car buyers were content just to be able to buy new automobiles again, and the engines that now used war-developed powerplant innovations made the postwar cars so much faster than the prewar models that drivers felt no need to actually leave the ground since most felt like they were flying already. Even those magazines devoted to science and mechanics which had fired the imagination of technophiles in the 1930s had now changed after the war. Photographic progress and development had now made color photographs, not illustrations, the standard for magazine covers, and since airworthy cars didn't exist, they couldn't be photographed. Wartime advancements had given science magazine cover editors things like radar and atomic bombs and V2 rockets to sell their periodicals, leaving the fanciful impractical imaginings of onetime cover illustrators marginalized in the dreamlike nostalgic cloudscape which characterized that distant America back before the war. Everything had changed.

The Last Reason for War

World War II was unique in many aspects, not the least of which was the fact that the rationale for fighting, the essential reason for the war, remained unchanged throughout the full four years of the conflict. From start to finish, all Americans knew exactly why they were involved, and that reason for war stayed constant. I believe that this, more than anything else, explains why World War II is the only war in the last century where the United States came away with a clear and lasting victory (patriots may wish to cite the 1989 Panama Invasion as an exception to this statement, but that’s beyond pathetic).

In most cases, the stated reason for war changes to adapt to circumstances, and the rationale at the end is very different from the rationale at the beginning. Once you understand this process, the history of the war is already written long before the last shot is fired. Consider a couple of cases in point.

Immediately following the American Civil War, the Government, with a victorious army needing a reason to stay in uniform, sent the troops out West to “make the land safe for settlers.” The military orders were to convert the Indians into peaceful Christian farmers and to “exterminate” those Indians who resisted the process. The word “exterminate” was actually used. By 1876, the extermination had given way to pacification and resettlement. Then an egotistical fool named Custer led his men to their deaths at the Little Big Horn, and for the next 25 years the stated reason for the “conflict out West” was to avenge Custer and to honor the sacrifice of the men under his command. It took a hundred years for the truth to be told when bumper stickers finally appeared on Volkswagens in the 1970s reading, “Custer Had It Coming.”

Fast forward to those 1960s. The U.S. was bogged down in yet another war with a fuzzy rationale and bleak future prospects. The stated reason for the Vietnam War, initially, had been to create a buffer against Communist expansion. The marching orders were to “neutralize” (“exterminate” was no longer fashionable jargon) those who supported the Communists. Then, in February of 1968 came the Communist Tet offensive, and all the rhetoric changed. Tet was the modern version of the Little Big Horn. For the next seven years, we languished in Vietnam for the stated reason that “we needed to honor the sacrifice of those who had already given their lives.”

Which brings us to Iraq. I won’t bother with the litany of phony reasons for the war that have come and gone. Suffice it to say that we’re now down to the last stage in war where the government says we need to honor the sacrifice of those who have given their lives. Whenever a government tells us that, we can know five things with absolute certainty. This applies to any government and any war.

1. The initial reason for the war was fraudulent.
2. The stated objectives of the war are unfulfilled.
3. The government is losing the war.
4. The current leader of the government doesn’t want a lost war on his resume.
5. The government is NOT in the least concerned with those who are sacrificing their lives in battle.

There is a saying that, “In war, the first casualty is truth.” It is possible, however, to cut through the lies when you know how to read the code.