It's twelve degrees outside, which, through the arcane meteorological (Did you mean, "meteor logical"? asked dictionary.com. Why, no. No, I didn't) formula of Wind Chill, is three. Three. A few degrees colder and the cat would freeze in place and shatter when struck with a pebble thrown by vengeful shrews. And they'd be right to take advantage of the opportunity--Bob killed seventeen of the hapless rodents this year, displaying a hitherto unknown depth of vicious happy fun bloodlust. Didn't eat them. Just killed them, and brought them up onto the deck as offerings to He Who Feeds Me.
Not that the relatives of the fallen will get their chance--when it's this cold out, Bob stays indoors, like humans. In weather like this, my mind turns to thoughts of how to keep a sealed lead-acid battery running at -16°C. See that? I switched to Celsius because it seems like a much more impressive engineering problem. Which, of course, it isn't--choose the right battery, and you've got yourself decent cold-weather performance.
But I haven't ventured out much, on bike or otherwise, except to visit some friends of ours who run a B&B nearby. Nice folks, and during one of our various conversational detours I was reminded again of just how isolated my particular sort of thinking has made me. Innkeeper John has a real problem with Mr. Bush, and is thus susceptible to Mooreish shenanigans. Which is unfortunate, but what hey, politics is just politics, as no one said, and I've learned that not everybody Must Understand That Michael Moore Is A Narcissistic Hypocritical Bastard, and I've learned not to instantly correct misunderstandings or outright propagandization in the course of an otherwise non-pedantic conversation. Does it matter that Inkeeper John was sucked in by the Humvee armor story when I know that it's not the Humvees that are the problem--85% of those are armored--but the trucks? Nah. Doesn't really matter.
That doesn't mean I don't twitch in my seat. But I do exercise restraint.
Still, practically no one that I'm in frequent contact with is a big fan of the Iraq campaign, not that I'm really a fan of people bleeding and dying or returning home from scenes of daily mind-searing carnage to an ever-shopful America.
But what I am a fan of is acknowledging that outside of the shrink-wrapped edges of our borders, history proceeds apace. Maybe it's the fact that I can trace the roots of our current Middle Eastern problem back for 5,000 years that lends me this perspective. Or perhaps it's my acute interest in the cuneiform writings of Hittite goat merchants. Whatever its origin, my sense of the long march of human activity is instinctive. While we have debates about why every one of our highly-equipped technologically superior troops is not armored (which would be a first in the history of combat), or about whether a sitting President needs to reveal where he places his penis, much of the rest of the world continues on as it has for most of humanity's existence: scrabbling for food, trying to keep children from dying, and killing each other in the name of one god or another.
Although I certainly understand the motivation of the "progressives," they make me sad as well, in much the same way that watching a blind man run headlong into a brick wall would. Yes, it would be better if we could encourage the spread of our ideals through some method that more resembles a cogent argument than a rock to the skull. And they really are our ideals, despite the sectarian and partisan flesh that clings to their bones.
But we here in the midst of the American experiment have been ambling along into unprecedented prosperity in the midst of unprecedented violence. Eight million dead in Congo by 1908. A million in the Mexican revolution by 1920. A million and a half in Armenia by 1923. Eight hundred thousand in China by 1928, and another three million by 1937. Almost three million in Korea by '53. Seven hundred thousand in Algeria by 1962. One and a quarter million in Rwanda and Burundi between 1959 and 1995. Three and a half million in Indochina between 1960 and 1975. Almost a million and a half in Ethiopia between 1962 and 1992. A million in Nigeria between '66 and '70. One and a quarter million in Bangladesh in 1971 alone. Over one and a half million in Cambodia between 1966 and 1970. A million in Mozambique between '75 and '93. Almost two million in Afghanistan between 1979 and 2001. Another million in Iran and Iraq in the Eighties. Two million in Sudan the following decade. And, neatly bookending the century, over three million in Congo between 1998 and now. Add to all of that that seven million in the First World War, and, if you're not too numb, toss in another forty million or so for the Second, plus another ten million for Uncle Joe.
The percentage of Americans in that grim total is vanishingly small. About three hundred thousand for WWII, and one hundred twenty thousand for WWI, a few tens of thousands for Vietnam and Korea. The blessings of two vast oceans, friendly or at least indifferent neighbors to the north, and thoroughly conquered foes to the south have let us develop in a geographic bubble well-stocked with resources, both human and natural.
In 1994, while we debated the right to bear arms in great detail, as if that would somehow keep us all safe, Hutus armed mostly with machetes and rocks managed to kill over five hundred thousand Tutsis.
In 1999, we were shocked that an eighteen-year old and a seventeen-year old would march into a school and kill a dozen students and a teacher. Meanwhile, eight to ten thousand children fifteen years old or younger were serving on both sides of the simmering conflict in Burundi. 10,000 children between the ages of seven and fourteen were rounded up and brought to the front in Rwanda. And, that same year, the Ugandan army executed five teenage boys between the ages of 14 and 17 as suspected rebel soldiers.
And so, when I hear various "progressives" blathering about America's "culture of violence," I stand amazed at their ignorance. Here, most of us watch movies where the blood goes pshhhh! in slow motion, or play video games where we can make peoples' heads explode. Elsewhere, people kill each other as a matter of course over the same issues that they've been killing each other over for millennia. I should note that they actually kill each other. No popcorn in the dark or health packs to charge you up when the shooting stops.
It's no different in the Middle East, despite a century of oil wealth. While we Americans may have paid for the brains and the material that built the atomic bombs in the first place, I find it highly unlikely that we would have piled a couple into American Airlines jets and flown them into the Petronas Towers in Malaysia to make a point. And yet--call me a pessimist--I have no doubt that if Osama's boys could have secured a nuke or two, I wouldn't be here blathering on about all this.
I cannot see Osama without looking behind him through his ghosts, back through Sayyed Qutb, through Muhammad's seventh-century rejection as a prophet by the Jews of Medina and his subsequent conquest of Mecca, and beyond that, to the exploits of a rabble-rousing Gallilean carpenter, whose forebears took the land of Israel from Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. This is an unbroken history, a connected series of human actions, not some discrete set of stories, to be read one at a time like a Harry Potter book. The events of September 11 had just as much temporal and historical weight behind them as the founding of Israel in 1948, the cartographical creation of Iraq after WWI, the fall of Rome, or the destruction of Thebes by the Assyrians.
Given what our enemies themselves have said, I cannot see any humane or "progressive" solution to the problem of their existence. The Islamic theofascists--compared with whom the American religious right seems positively enlightened--are an excrescence of human nature, a metastatic cancer that infects and distorts whatever healthy ideals might surround them or come into contact with them, including our own. Thus, we bring death to civilians in pusuit of the carriers of the diseased ideology, and whatever good might evolve from Islam is, for now, obscured by its excesses. Anyone from the President on down who expects to see the full resolution of this situation in our lifetime without massive loss of life is ignorant of history and of human nature.
Bob the Cat spent six of her eight years living in apartments. When I would carry her outside, she would cling to my neck, shaking, because her world suddenly became much larger than a twelve by twelve foot room. Her eyes couldn't focus on the distant sky, and the movement of wind frightened her. But now that she's moved here, where there's a yard with grass that hides small creatures, her nature has reasserted itself. Evolution has made her a cuddly, fat, highly effective killing machine.
Our prosperity and our sheltered culture cannot protect us from a world that is more often violent than peaceful, and the dilettantes' ethics that we have developed in our privileged bubble over the past 60 years are inadequate. Now that cultural and religious conflict has produced soldiers who will not be rationally deterred and are armed with weapons that can span oceans, our nature will reassert itself, if only for as long as is necessary to rebuild the bubble (yes, I have just compared America to my cat).
Then, no doubt, we'll go through the whole cycle all over again, for as long as we can afford to. That's the nature of the city on the hill.
And now it's 2:30 in the damn morning and you've wasted another few precious minutes of your life. To bed with me! You, go get some coffee or something.
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