“I’ve been hoping I could find something that would be named after me.” – Principal Skinner
“And you’ve never found anything?” – Bart Simpson
“Once, but by the time I got to a phone my discovery had already been reported by Principal Kohoutek. I got back at him though, him and that little boy of his. Anyway, that’s why I always keep a cellular phone next to me.” – Principal Skinner
The decade in review pieces have begun to crop up, but there’s one reminiscing topic I’ve yet to see, and which I don’t think I am going to see: cell phones. My sneaking suspicion is that most of the people writing the decade in review pieces had a cell long before the calendar turned over to triple zeros and don’t really think of it as a last-ten-years kind of development. But it wasn’t until the beginning of this decade that those little things became utterly commonplace. Of all the changes in the past ten years perhaps nothing has affected the way ordinary Americans live their lives more than cell technology.
At the beginning of the decade cell phones were still basically a luxury item. Having one no longer meant that a person was a movie star or a drug dealer, but it wasn’t yet uncommon for someone not to have one. Neither the phones nor the plans were cheap and the quality of the calls was awful. There were “roaming” charges (remember those?) if you tried to use it more than about fifty miles from home. And even the most expensive plans generally had minute restrictions that were extremely tight. In short, it wasn’t yet something that many people could use as their primary telephone.
Of course, even that last word – telephone – is becoming something of an anachronism. Now a telephone call is just one of a wide range of communication techniques that can be performed from just about anywhere. With more and more cellular devices offering full internet access (and with the ever increasing variety of ingenious ways engineers have created to allow a tiny device an almost PC-level of control) the dream of having everything on the go is within reach. (Whether or not that’s a good thing is a discussion for another time.)
It can be almost difficult to remember now, but there was life before cell phones. Families at amusement parks had to set a place and time to meet rather than just arrange something as the day developed. Car crash victims might lie on deserted roads until someone got to a phone and called the authorities. Even the simple act of having a conversation with someone out of town was a serious commitment as long distance charges (remember those?) were nothing to sneeze at. All that’s gone. Pizza can be ordered on your way home from the movie. Lunch arrangements can be changed on the fly. Talking with someone on the other side of the country is routine and unremarkable. At the store and wondering which item to purchase? Call it in.
Cell phones have become ubiquitous. Not that long ago being able to communicate from anywhere was the stuff of science fiction, now it’s an (almost) indispensible part of modern life. And their true power only began to be realized once almost everyone had one. Everyone being accessible from anywhere is perhaps the biggest change in the way day to day life is conducted since . . . what? The automobile maybe? It’s that level of societal change. And it happened in almost the blink of an eye.
None of this is news. And in 2019 we’ll look on even the smartest of today’s “smart” phones as laughably primitive. But a fundamental aspect of our lives has changed and it happened so quickly we rarely ever talk about it. Seems worth mentioning, though.
“I don’t agree with his Bart killing policy, but I do approve of his Selma killing policy.” – Homer Simpson
Approximately 69 million people voted for Barack Obama last year and in doing so, whether they like it or not, each one also voted for a continuation of the Afghan War. That’s not the way we generally think about it, but it’s true. Obama never made any secret of the fact that he was planning on continuing the Afghan War. Oh sure there were the usual campaign “specifics” which were hotly debated at the time and then forgotten six seconds after the networks declared a winner, but his general position couldn’t have been clearer.
I happen to be among the people that think his campaign position on Afghanistan was little more than cynical political calculation. By campaigning for a renewed focus on the Afghan War Obama largely immunized himself from typically brainless politico-speak charges that he’s just a namby-pamby, weak-kneed, limped-dicked liberal. But it came at a cost, one that must be paid in the blood of American troops, Afghani troops, and Afghani civilians.
By positioning himself as the right man to win, whatever that means, in Afghanistan Obama played into and reinforced one of the more insidious falsehoods of Bush the Younger. For seven and a half years the most powerful man on earth scared the living fuck out of American citizens with frightful Muslim bogeymen. While he was at it he also endlessly propagandized the myth of fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here. That sentiment is both bloody and ludicrous, but it’s so pervasive that in a radio interview last week I actually heard an active duty soldier parrot it back. Like it or not that lie and the political sentiment behind it are still out there and still very powerful.
Obama bought into that while he was running for office and thus his rhetoric on Afghanistan remains politically gung-ho even as the casualty filled realities of staying there make themselves plain. Yesterday the amusingly information free catchphrase-du-jour was “finish the job”, but I’m quite certain that there will be more euphemisms before that war winds to a close. Whatever the fashionable terminology though, the government of Hamid Karzai will continue to be supported by American troops. Anything less feels to many Americans like an invitation to catastrophe.
About the only consolation to be taken from the above is that Obama is only wedded to the Afghan War politically whereas his predecessor was wed to it both politically and personally. If by some unholy miracle Bush the Younger were still president he’d be defending everything that had ever gone on there as part of some master narrative of tough guys with flinty grimaces on the cusp of winning the day. Obama at least seems to view Afghanistan as the mess that it really is instead of some perverted presidential passion play. So while he’s politically trapped himself into continuing it, quite possibly for his entire current term, he doesn’t seem fond of it.
That’s the only silver lining as we prepare for what everyone fully expects is a speech on Tuesday where he will announce his second escalation of the Afghan War in less than a year. Most serious political and military observers view this decision as essentially a guarantee that the war will continue in some form or another through the 2012 election, still almost three years away. (Unless, of course, we’re imagining miracles and this small, unilateral increase in troops is just what it’ll take to pacify untold thousands of square miles and untold millions of angry people.) Granting that such agreed upon certainties can often be wrong, things don’t look quite as bleak in the long run.
As implausible as it now seems that this waste of lives and money will end before the next presidential election, assuming Obama keeps his job it seems just as implausible that he would blithely hand this war off to his successor in 2017 as it was handed to him in 2009. In 2012, with the credibility that comes from ending the Iraq War without the dire predictions of right wingers coming true, pledging to end the Afghan War in a sensible way will be enormously easier. As I said above, Obama doesn’t like this war; he doesn’t see continuing it as demonstration of his genital confidence. He simply needs it for political purposes.
Whatever number of extra troops Obama announces is almost irrelevant. (Other than to the troops and the Afghanis, of course, but nobody cares what they think anyway.) The ending of the wars of Bush the Younger is dictated by the timetable of our presidential elections. Two in one term was simply too much to ask of a country as misled as ours.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to appear in a tortilla in Mexico.” – God
Ever get the feeling that somebody’s watching you? Of course you do. Everyone does. Upon feeling this, have you ever looked up or around only to see that you are correct? Again the answer is almost certainly “Yes”. Towards the end of Supersense: Why We Believe the Unbelievable”, Bruce Hood tells us that approximately 90% of people believe that they can tell when someone is looking at them. 90% is a big number, it includes people who are religious and irreligious, men and women, smart and stupid, short and tall. But it’s false. You have no means of detecting when someone is looking at you if you can’t also see them. None. You’re just more likely to remember the few times you were correct instead of the many you weren’t. Yet nine out of ten people think they can detect something that isn’t there; nine out of ten people think they have a supernatural ability. Why?
That, broadly speaking, is the question that occupies Hood’s book and it’s a damned good one. Even atheists tend to be superstitious; they’ll avoid walking under a ladder, or tossing salt over their shoulder, or, in one of Hood’s favorite examples, donning a sweater that was once owned by a murderer. On the surface this would seem to be strange, why would a person who explicitly does not believe in supernatural forces care in the least about wearing a perfectly good sweater just because it had once belonged to a murderer? But he describes with fascination, and a hint of glee, that once told of the sweaters provenance people will shrink from it, skittish even about touching it, much less donning it.
Hood is an expert on cognitive development and that is where he finds his explanation. He describes how the human mind is wired for intuition, which basically boils down to finding patterns, even where none exist or there isn’t remotely enough information to rationally detect one. This is where the killer’s cardigan fits. Most people don’t know even one sweater wearing murderer, much less more than one. The sweater is therefore both novel and associated with something bad. The intuitive part of the mind shrieks an alarm (new + bad = avoid) even as the rational part of the mind says that the killer is in prison and the sweater isn’t the least bit dangerous. Trusting rational thinking over intuition like that isn’t easy. Doing it all the time is close to impossible, hence superstitious atheists.
Hood goes to great lengths to point out that while such things are irrational, they are also perfectly natural. He goes through numerous examples of experiments with child development, demonstrating how kids think and how that thinking changes as they grow and their brains develop. One of them asked children about how animals came to be. If you ask five- to seven-year olds they’ll either say that god made them or that animals have always been like that. If you put the same question to ten- to twelve-year olds, you’ll get a mixed response of religion and evolution, depending on their home environment. But if you ask eight- and nine-year olds you’ll get a very creationist account of how things came to be, regardless of whether they have religious or irreligious parents. In short, a part of our brains are hard wired to see purpose, whether or not there is any. That wiring is naturally present in childhood and sticks with us as we grow.
Another example Hood cites is that of the Auld Sod Export Company, which sells authentic dirt from Ireland to sentimental Americans. Hood points out that due to US import restrictions the sod has to be sterilized before it can be imported, thus the dirt is just that, dirt. It contains no seeds, nor essence of life, nor any bacteria; it is clean enough to eat. Yet for plenty of people this dirt is special enough, “sacred” as Hood describes it, to be worth purchasing. Even though there is no natural difference between this dirt and dirt geology deigned to place elsewhere, the intuitive part of the brain places an importance on it.
Since all people harbor those same thinking mechanisms, Hood argues that trying to be completely rational is both impossible and, more importantly, anti-social. Recoiling at the killer’s sweater demonstrates to other people in the room that you too abhor murder. Purchasing Irish dirt displays your affinity for the Emerald Isle. Every group of people, no matter how small or large, holds certain things sacred, holds certain ideas to be above a rational cost-benefit analysis. If we did not, we would have no means of bonding with other people, and as a social animal we need that almost as much as we need food.
It is that last point, that the sacred makes the social possible, to which Hood devotes the final, tiny chapter of this book. Quite frankly it would’ve been nice if he’d expanded that part a bit. Through more than two hundred well footnoted pages he builds a clear and convincing argument about the inherent nature of superstitious belief, of seeing patterns where there are none, of confirmation bias bedeviling us all. But only at the end does he touch on ideas like the social importance of things like sacred Irish dirt and murderer’s sweaters.
If our reactions to some things, positive or negative, are a form of social glue, what else does that tell us about ourselves? Could the strictly rational itself ever become sacred? If everyone possesses some intuitiveness and some rationality, what kinds of social and environmental factors push people more towards one than the other? Hood doesn’t really address these issues in the book, and while there’s a plainly obvious reason for that – he’s dealing with a lot of sacred cows and wants to keep his book on firm scientific ground – it still would’ve been interesting to get his take on some of the more open ended questions that are raised by his conclusion.
Nevertheless, “Supersense” is one of those rare books that can put a lot of past experiences into a new light in an “Oh, that’s why I felt that way that one time” kind of way. Books and articles about how the brain functions often do that sort of thing, but rarely are they as comprehensive as this one.
“I forgot to clean the lint basket in the dryer. If someone broke in to the house and did laundry it could start a fire!” – Marge Simpson
There has been much – and much publicized – Red hang wringing over the decision to have Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other guys (whom nobody cares nearly as much about) stand trial in a federal courthouse New York City. There’s been enough of this absurd theater, which so self evidently oxymoronic that it can only really be described as “belligerent worrying”, to support half an episode of The Daily Show. There’s obviously a lot of comedy to be had in the sight of chest thumping wanna-be warriors cowering in fear of a heavily shackled man, to say nothing of the easily mocked hypocrisy of serially over-reacting nimrods like Rudolph Giuliani. But there’s more to it than just the usual right wing cant of nouns, verbs and “9/11”s.
That refrain, so effective for so long, is fading into history right before our eyes. That is an unambiguous positive for the country as a whole. However, for those who’ve long seen it as their best rhetorical weapon it is a disaster of world changing proportions. This goes not only for office seeking members of the Republican Party, it runs straight down from them through the entire electorate. The 2001 attacks, which have been culturally shorthanded as “9/11”, were more than just a political weapon to be wielded by Bush the Younger and his adoring supporters. “9/11” was a cultural phenomenon that dwarfed any fad in recent history.
It was on t-shirts and bumper stickers, in popular songs and on television. It provided an all encompassing justification for American nationalism at every level from televised Washington talk shows to barbershops, barstools and beauty salons. Every time someone’s conservative uncle went off at a family picnic the entire cultural force of “9/11” was there to back him up. In every conversation about the wider world between teenagers (some of whom would grow up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan), “9/11” was there. Long after the rubble was cleared and the victims mourned, “9/11” stayed. It quickly became less a terrorist attack and more a revival movement, perhaps the greatest America had seen in a century or more. But like the Great Awakenings, like the drive to prohibit alcohol, indeed like all revival movements, this one cannot sustain itself.
The first hard evidence that it was petering out was probably the 2006 election results. But it wasn’t until the last presidential campaign, especially as Giuliani became more and more of a cartoon, that speculation began in national media circles about how we were now living in a post-post-9/11 world. Cutesy phrasing aside, that was an astute point and now we’re seeing it put into reality. This is also part and parcel of why closing Guantanamo is such a bugaboo for terror crazed nationalists. Guantanamo is for prisoners of war, if it’s closing doesn’t that mean the war is ending too?
Putting Mohammed on trial in New York (and, as nobody but Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, even that still isn’t good enough) is the beginning of the end for the cultural fad of “9/11”. The event that everyone at the time agreed “changed everything” actually didn’t change very much at all. For people who go for kitschy “9/11” porn, like bald eagles with tears in their eyes, the 2001 attacks delivered on the failed apocalyptic promises of Y2K and those “Left Behind” books. It was the ultimate in righteous justification, but it wasn’t the apocalypse; after all, here we are eight years later.
None of the above is to suggest that there aren’t millions upon millions of Americans for whom the culture of “9/11” is still roaring along. There are; but there are less of them this year than there were last year and next year there will be even fewer. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He’s just a name, albeit one that has the renown and malice of a spook story to significant chunks of the country. So long as he’s in legal limbo in some exotic tropical prison the myth of the all-capable terrorist mastermind can continue. But when he’s carted off to some anonymous, out-of-sight/out-of-mind concrete box, no different than any other convicted murderer, that’s when his name will fade.
It is in the interest of right wing politicians and their blabbering surrogates to object to that outcome. It will cost them a powerful bogeyman and erode the culture of “9/11” (which they have so egregiously exploited) even further. And so we are left with their belligerent worrying.
“If we quit now we’ll never know how badly they’re gonna beat us.” – Homer Simpson
There is an almost papal quality to watching the anticipation of Barack Obama’s decision on a new Afghan strategy. The leaks and rumors are flying fast and heavy, but in the meantime there’s no deadline on his decision (Red charges of “dithering” fell flat) so all the chattering classes and the byline brigade can do is watch the White House for the white smoke that will mean we have a new Afghan strategy.
What I haven’t seen pointed out anywhere is that the only decision he could make that would actually qualify as Big News is one of the few he is explicitly not considering: a withdrawal of most or all of American troops from Afghanistan. Whether he sends 40,000 more troops or just three extra guys named Ted the Western effort in Afghanistan is going to continue. There is a very strong case to be made that setting a deadline on American involvement and beginning the process of winding down the war is the right thing to do, in both military and humanitarian terms. But those arguments have no place to be heard because the most compelling reason for continuing the war is, and remains, domestic American politics.
I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.
These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.
Indeed. But Wills confines himself to speculation about Barack Obama as a one term president. What he doesn’t address (like I said, it’s a short piece) is what effect that would have on the (presumably) Republican 2012 victor. If the Reds won back the White House on the strength of charges about Blue weakness on “terrorism” and other “national security” type questions they would be almost compelled to send the American military gallivanting around the globe in search of those ever elusive Bad Guys. In other words, a withdrawal from Afghanistan that was so politically costly to Barack Obama as to make him a one term president could very result in more war, not less.
It is nauseating conclusion, that American troops must die on the far side of the world so that foolish Americans at home can be kept away from the levers of power. But it is inescapable. A Red victory in 2012 would be seen, by the victories party and by much of our hackneyed media, as a vindication of the theory of perpetual war, of making America safe by forever fighting abroad. The damage they could wreak with that righteous sense of fresh vindication and political justification is almost beyond imagining.
None of that will come as any comfort to those whose lives will yet be lost or shattered as Obama plods ahead in Afghanistan. That goes for Americans, Afghanis and other alike. But those future casualties, however certain they may be, shrink to insignificance when placed next to the corpse pile amassed by Bush the Younger. That man did tremendous damage to this country, its people, and its politics and there isn’t enough political genius in the world to mend it in a mere four years.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with history can tell you that not everyone who dies for their country dies gloriously for their country. Sometimes they die in pointless avalanches of shit, or in ill conceived gambits by incompetent superiors, or simply by vicissitudes of chance. The history of war is the story of the young dying for the mistakes of their elders. The walking dead of Afghanistan, those who will die (or be shredded) between now and the exhaustion of the conflict, are just the next in that tragic line.
At this point, when America and the world are already waist deep in blood, gore, severed eyeballs and destroyed lives, it’s better to wade through to the certain shore than grasp for an early exist and risk falling head first into the mire. Make no mistake, that is the danger of a one-term Barack Obama. It can be couched in the polite terms of The New York Review of Books, but everything we know about Obama’s likely opposition in 2012 means more war, more waste and more death, especially if one of the main points of contention is that Obama “lost” Afghanistan. One sounds closed-mindedly partisan when saying that, but it doesn’t alter the facts or the stated attitudes of the opposition.
Obama’s only political vulnerability on Afghanistan comes from looking weak. Those of us up in the gallery can only hope that he’s savvy enough to keep himself in office without getting in too deep. Passing zero wars onto his successor isn’t enough; he has to do it in a way that keeps the number at zero after he’s out of office.
“Have I ever told you kids about the Sixties?” – Aging Hippie Teacher
Since The Wire wrapped up early last year, Mad Men has become the new “it” show for critically acclaimed television. It’s smart, it’s unique (how many other shows are set in a sixties advertising agency?), it’s well written and well acted. It’s a show to which non-television websitesdevoteseriousattention. Sunday night it finished its third season run with its characters still reacting to the recent assassination of John Kennedy.
That the show is crafted with extraordinary care goes almost without saying, but the main hook is the fact that it takes place in the early sixties. If it were set in an ad agency amidst chirping Blackberries and edgy “Web 2.0” campaigns it would garner but a small fraction of the attention it does. The late sixties and early seventies, with everything from Vietnam, hippies, Black Power, feminism, and all the rest, are a story that’s been told, retold and mistold a thousand times already. But the early sixties, when the cracks in the post-war American dream began to show, is an almost blank spot in our cultural memory, as such it is ripe for fiction.
But our easy fascination with this mostly unknown era isn’t only due to the fact that it was overwhelmingly overshadowed by the political, cultural and social fireworks that followed it. It’s also just a result of timing. Like Westerns during the 1920s dawn of Hollywood, Mad Men is set in a time that is rapidly passing out of living memory. Less than one in five of today’s Americans were born before the Eisenhower-Kennedy era ended in Dallas. Consider that Don Draper, who is what passes for the show’s main character, fought in the Korean War. Korean War vets today are all in their mid-seventies at least, and most of them are older. People who can actually remember the time portrayed on the show are a small and shrinking minority.
But they are with us still and it provides some startling context when you think about it. How many in the show’s audience know someone who could’ve been career woman Peggy Olson four and a half decades ago? She’d be about seventy now. A doting grandmother with an early career her descendants barely know about, perhaps? Or committed corporate type who, as the odious phrase goes, “had it all”, or tried for it, anyway?
Or what about Salvatore Romano, the deeply closeted commercial director? Stonewall is less than six years away from the current time on the show. His career path could’ve made him similar to guys like Harvey Milk, prosperous men who tired of the closet and formed the nuclei of the first openly homosexual communities.
Paul Kinsey, the show’s resident bearded liberal, might be a bit too old to have become a hippie dropout. But perhaps he ended up as one of those discouraged, old line lefties who shook their heads sadly when Ronald Reagan was elected and wondered what the hell happened. Carla, the Draper’s housekeeper and nanny, might have been one of the wizened old colored ladies who cast her vote for Barack Obama with tears in her eyes, never having thought the chance would come in her lifetime.
Of course there are also the Draper children. Sally, the oldest, would be getting to college just in time for the Summer of Love, and to rebel against her spoiled, emotionally distant parents. Bobby would be close behind her, though he’s probably just a few years too young to get drafted for Vietnam. Gene, the baby, would be graduating high school right as the early 80s recession was hitting, today would be in his late forties.
Speculation like this, conscious or not, is part of the attraction of Mad Men. (Is that really what childhood was like for people who are in their forties and fifties today? Did grandma seriously have to dress like that to go to work?) It is set in a time that most people cannot remember, and yet not so far back that we cannot see in it the outline of things to come, the forces that shaped the world that exists today. Obviously only the show’s creators know what will become of these characters, but whatever happens to them they are recognizable as people that are all around us still. It’s history on the cheap, well told and well executed. That, more than anything, makes it stand out from the vast wasteland, makes it demand attention, and gives it extra layers in which each viewer can place themselves and others.
“See it’s a miniature version of the A-bomb, the government built it in the fifties to drop on beatniks.” – Herman
There is a scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1988 movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” where the intrepid band of heroes finds themselves talking with the Roman god Vulcan. He’s in the weapons manufacturing business and describes to them his greatest creation, the ICBM:
Here’s the relevant exchange:
Baron Munchausen: What does it do?
Vulcan: Do? Kills the enemy.
Baron Munchausen: All the enemy?
Vulcan: Aye, all of them. All their wives, and all their children, and all their sheep, and all their cattle, and all their cats and dogs. All of them. All of them gone for good.
That’s as good a starting point as any for understanding a device that Neil Sheehan, in the subtitle to his marvelous new book “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War”, describes simply as the “ultimate weapon”. That isn’t hyperbole. ICBMs are it. There is no defense against them and even the most ardent and irrational of missile defense advocates concede that countries with the resources of China or Russia could easily construct weapons of sufficient sophistication or quantity to overwhelm any defense, no matter how extravagantly funded. This is particularly scary when you consider that if even one of these things were to be actually used in a war would count as a one of the worst disasters in human history.
Told largely though the story of Bernard Schriever, an Air Force general and one of the men most responsible for the American missile program, “A Fiery Peace” documents the conception and construction of America’s missile forces. It is a tale masterfully told. Sheehan delves into the deep background of not only the geopolitical realities of the time, many of which are poorly remembered today as everything is lumped under the unchanging rubric of the “Cold War”, but also of the various technical, bureaucratic and military factors that enabled, and required, the construction of nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The context that necessitated and created so terrible a weapon is a tremendous story in and of itself and Sheehan does an excellent job of seeing both the forest and the trees. So when some of the Cold War’s greatest hits (the Berlin Airlift, Francis Gary Powers and the nonexistent “missile gap”, the Cuban Missile Crisis) make their appearance they are given just the right amount of attention. Important people that take center stage have their backgrounds and personalities described in detail, but not excessively so. Similarly, the book goes over the formation of the modern American military after World War II, including the creation of the Air Force as an independent branch of service, but it doesn’t get bogged down in unnecessary minutiae. Given the potential for topics like these to sprawl keeping things broad and still focused is a hell of a triumph all by itself. Sheehan’s previous book, “A Bright, Shining Lie”, was a good way for a lay reader, who doesn’t want to plow through a dozen or more books on the subject, to get a decent handle on just how fucked our Vietnam adventure was from the get go. “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” serves much the same function for the weapons on which our strategic invulnerability is still based.
But the book isn’t a hagiographic history of the square jawed men who defended America and all the righteous things they did. Even in the heady and ideological days of the early Cold War less than scrupulous defense contractors threw fits and tossed up political roadblocks when their profits were threatened, whether or not their product was the one the military wanted or not. Bureaucratic infighting was as potent a derailment then as it is today. Personal likes and dislikes, both within the military and outside of it, had huge and lasting impacts. For example, Schriever was an excellent golfer and used that fact to greatly aid his career, but objectively speaking the ability to put a little white ball in a small hole with a crooked stick is unrelated to anything in the field of rocketry.
Ticks and quirks of that nature had enormous effects in the infancy of our Byzantine military procurement and development processes and they are very much on display here. The creation of a new industry, what we now call aerospace, was a necessary evil and not a pretty process, and it’s impossible not to read the stories of its birth without seeing the germ of today’s war crippled federal budget. Sheehan fights, mostly successfully, against nostalgia for bygone times, but it’s almost quaint to see the Defense Department having to routinely trim programs because of Eisenhower’s insistence on keeping costs down.
There is also an undeniable comfort that comes with reading about the Cold War, even if you set aside American triumphalism. After all, we, homo sapiens sapiens, survived it. Today we see that result as basically inevitable. Communism didn’t work and ideological differences that seemed war worthy sixty years ago look positively silly in hindsight. But the survival of the species was in genuine danger and those silly differences could’ve very easily murdered us all.
To take but one serious danger that was poorly understood at the time, there is the issue of fallout. When Vulcan described his new toy to the Baron he neglected to mention that using them in large quantity dooms the user as surely as the target. Sheehan makes chillingly understated reference to this a couple of times, but during the 1950s, when nuclear weapons were still largely a bomber-based, and therefore defeat-able, weapon, the idea of fallout was poorly understood by the men responsible for its use. They believed that waging an all out war on the Soviet Union was possible because they didn’t know, or didn’t care to know, that setting off that many bombs anywhere would likely have killed almost everyone in the US as well. It’s one thing for leaders to ignore unintended consequences in decisions about whether or not to go to war (certainly we’ve seen some examples of that these last few years), it’s quite another for one of those unintended consequences to include the end of civilization as we know it.
But we survived, and, like it or not, we did so at least in part because of the efforts of Schriever and others like him. There is an undeniable dissonance that comes with the idea of a weapon so terrible that its use cannot be seriously contemplated except in genuinely apocalyptic scenarios. Yet the existence of those weapons kept shooting wars between the two superpowers confined to the casualty and fallout free realm of fiction. Neil Sheehan has written a great book about their genesis.
“The death card?” – Lisa Simpson
“No, that’s good. It means transition, change.” – Renaissance Faire Fortune Teller
“Oh. Heh, oh, that’s cute.” – Lisa Simpson
“Ahhh, the Happy Squirrel!” – Renaissance Faire Fortune Teller
“That’s bad?” – Lisa Simpson
“Possibly, the cards are vague and mysterious.” – Renaissance Faire Fortune Teller
There were a few small elections yesterday and the never circumspect political-analysis industry is all over them today. Even good old Talking Points Memo and its reliably calm Josh Marshall succumbed:
Lot of tea leaves to read this morning and we’re going to be looking at all of them.
As usual, language gives away the game. “Tea leaves” is a common enough phrase, but the underlying assumption is that the configuration of your tea leaves holds some portent of future events. It doesn’t. And neither, for that matter, do last night’s results have much to do with next year’s Congressional elections. There’s one exception to that, but we’ll get to it later. First things first, let’s quickly go over why the twin Red and Blue victories from last night don’t matter all that much.
The Reds won the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. What gets lost in the constant portrayal of politics as an epic and ever connected team sport between Red and Blue is that individual politicians can and do matter. Jon Corzine lost his bid to stay Governor of New Jersey, and since he’s got a D next to his name it’s easy to begin frothing at the mouth over how this is some kind of a rebuke to Obama (even if the numbers don’t bear that out). But declaring Corzine’s defeat as either “bad for Obama” or “not that bad for Obama” misses the fundamental point that Corzine was an unpopular governor and probably deserved to lose his job anyway. A Corzine win would be no more “good” for Obama than a Corzine loss is “bad” for Obama, either is mostly irrelevant. Does anyone think Obama is in serious jeopardy of losing New Jersey in 2012? No? Then why are we talking about this?
Virginia is a slightly different case because it may very well be competitive in 2012. Obama won it in 2008, the first Democrat to do so in a great long while. But you could take Virginia’s electoral votes away from Obama’s pile and he’d still have plenty left to get back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If this election had been for governor of, say, Ohio there’d be some sense in seeing it as having the potential to influence 2012. But even if that were true it still ignores the fact that political conditions a year ago are very different than they are now, which also means that they’ll be different one and three years hence in ways we cannot accurately predict.
Similarly, the Blue victories in last night’s House special elections aren’t all that important. The fact that there is now a very liberal Democrat representing California’s 10th Congressional district and a centrist Democrat representing New York’s 23rd Congressional district doesn’t much affect the balance of power on Capitol Hill. It makes Nancy Pelosi’s job a little bit easier, and her job is pretty hard so every little bit helps, but in the grand scheme of things it just isn’t that important.
Even in New York’s 23rd district, where the big guns of the right wing failed to secure a Red seat in a Red district, the victorious Democrat Bill Owens didn’t win the seat in perpetuity. He’s only got it until this time next year. Then he’ll have to defend his Blue ass in that Red district. Things like this are why there’s no point getting sucked into the drifts and currents of instant analysis. The next election of any real importance is still a year away and to make these analyses even more pointless the election that everyone wants to talk about (look for the name “Obama” in any story about yesterday) is still three years away.
There is a case to be made that the events of the last week in upstate New York may have some bearing on what happens next year, but only in terms of who is representing the Reds. When the modern day Red Guards drove moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava out of the race with such vitriol that she ended up endorsing the Democrat they made a far bigger political impact than the relatively meaningless subtraction of one Republican from the House. After all, if the right wingers are encouraged by their one-step-forward-two-steps-back campaign in New York, then more non-fringe Republicans may find themselves under assault from the right. The political paparazzi are already training their sights on Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio in Florida.
So far the Red Guards have only cost themselves one measly House seat. (Albeit one that had been handed down like a Republican Party heirloom for 130 consecutive years.) But if they mount Crist’s head on the mantle next to Scozzafava’s they might cost themselves a Senate seat, and those are prizes too valuable to be trifled with. Closeted homosexual or not, Crist is widely considered to be the closest thing to a lock a non-incumbent can be for Florida’s 2010 Senate race. Absent a massive Red wave, which is only probable in the fevered masturbatory fantasies of people like Michael Steele, Rubio is a far weaker general election candidate. But that logic didn’t hold them back in New York and it may not stop them in Florida.
So the one thing we can take away from this year’s elections is that we need to keep a close eye on Republican primaries next year. Most states don’t have a third party with as much local clout as the Conservative Party does in New York, so further challenges are more likely to come from within the existing Red power structure. As for other effects, and what they might portent for 2010 or (drum roll, please) 2012, well, you can read all the tea leaves you want, but you’ll be just as successful with goat entrails, crystal balls or cable news political coverage. Some of those are stickier than others, but they’re all equally meaningful.
“Would you like to buy some Itchy & Scratchy money?” – Itchy & Scratchy Land Ticket Lady
“What’s that?” – Homer Simpson
“Well, it’s money that’s made just for the park. It works just like regular money but it’s, uh, fun.” – Itchy & Scratchy Land Ticket Lady
One of the oddest things about American politics, and given all of its quirks that’s a pretty bold statement, is the way dollars spent on the military are denominated differently that dollars spent on everything else. Oh sure, we use the word “dollars” for both, but we conceive of them very differently. A swing of just fifty billion dollars over ten years is considered of huge political importance to the various health care reform packages floating around Congress at the moment. Yet numbers like those would hardly count as a rounding error on the annual defense budget and no one bats an eye.
With that in mind, it was both encouraging and saddening to see Barack Obama put his John Hancock on a $680 billion dollar military budget this week. On the encouraging front Obama and War Secretary Gates managed to score almost unprecedented victories against some of our stupider defense spending grotesqueries. On the saddening front those victories consisted mostly of political symbolism rather than any actual decrease in our inconceivably swollen and wasteful budget. The always reliable Armchair Generalist has some of the disheartening details, but the real tell is that in all 744 words of that rather fawning New York Times article there was never a dollar figure put on the savings.
As TomDispatch routinely chronicles, spending this much coin on what we laughably refer to as “defense” is literally killing us. Those are dollars we could be spending on things like health care, infrastructure, police, economic development, technological innovation, etcetera. Jo Comerford laid it out there recently:
According to the Office of Management and Budget, what that actually means is this: 55% of next year’s discretionary spending — that is, the spending negotiated by the President and Congress — will go to the military just to keep it chugging along.
The 14 million American children in poverty, the millions of citizens who will remain without health insurance (even if some version of the Baucus plan is passed), the 7.6 million people who have lost jobs since 2007, all of them will have to take a number. The same is true of the kinds of projects needed to improve the country’s disintegrating infrastructure, including the 25% of U.S. drinking water that was given a barely passing “D” by the American Society of Civil Engineers in a 2009 study.
But these are military dollars we’re talking about, and enumerating what else we could be buying with them always seems to fall flat rhetorically. We’ve grown so accustomed to treating them like a wholly separate part of the budget that they no longer feel like the same thing; and in a country that loves any excuse to go shopping that is a damning indictment.
How did things get like this? The short and extremely accurate answer was provided almost fifty years ago by outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower. It’s been cited so often over the last few decades that it’s become unfashionably trite, but that doesn’t make it any less true:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual –is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
We have failed – totally – to heed Eisenhower’s warning. Over the intervening years the nearly ruinous results of that failure have become so common as to be unremarkable. Consider that the Times article linked above, an article about the military budget, a budget that has very few restrictions placed upon it because it is considered a matter of life and death, is not in the “News” section of the paper. It’s in the “Business” section. That’s a dead giveaway and it tells you all you really need to know.
The Obama Administration has done admirable things with the defense budget, most notably putting the costs of our sophomoric imperialism right up front along with the rest of the numbers instead of hiding them behind transparent euphemisms (“emergency funding”) like his wretched predecessor. It’s a step in the right direction, toward treating military dollars just like the regular kind. But in this case correcting the mistakes of Bush the Younger alone won’t be enough; this beast has been gorging for five decades and it cannot be tamed in nine months. Obama and Gates had to wage an intense, albeit relatively low key, political campaign to win even modest victories this year. Let’s hope they’re prepared for more, because only serious and sustained presidential attention has any chance of staving off war induced bankruptcy.
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 