We are not at war-we are warring

“We are at war.”

Orwell was never more right. I heard the above comment on NPR yesterday (11/9/07) during a discussion of the presidential candidates. The analyst was wrong. We are not at war, but we have entered 1984, the world of perpetual war. It might be Oceana against Eurasia today, but we could be fighting Eastasia tomorrow.

While we are not at war, we are warring. To actually be at war we have to be fighting some other nation-state. What we are doing is messing around in someone else’s civil war, which we started. Incidentally, democracy is not a panacea that delivers peace. It can actually have the counterintuitive effect of causing war. What real democracy does is empower the majority of the people. Now if only a few people have most of the wealth, and all of a sudden the poor have power, it is only rational that they try to redistribute the wealth to themselves. This is potentially socialism. The people who own the wealth hate it, and call it communism.

Democracy also has a problem if there are factions, like Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. The federalists warned about that as we wrote our own constitution, which is why there are so many dikes in it to thwart democracy, since the most dangerous faction is the majority of the people. We laud the checks and balances in our constitution, but those checks and balances are there to keep democracy from getting out of hand, more than to check a powerful executive. Just think, most people want universal health care, but we don’t have it. Most people want to protect the environment, yet we’re the ones causing more global warming per capita. Most people want to get out of Iraq, but we’re still there. In this country, it is democracy that is being checked. Why don't citizens of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have voting representation in Congress?

But enough about democracy, back to war. How did we get into this civil war in Iraq? We got involved because someone committed a crime in the US. Who did it? Somebody. Not a nation-state. Just a bunch of somebodies. Most of these somebodies actually came from the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, but they sell us a lot of oil so we can’t do anything to them. But we’ve got to look strong! We can’t just let some somebodies push us around, and kill 3,000 people. We have to attack! So we start a civil war in another country.

If someone commits a crime, you don’t call it war. What’s the difference if a foreign national commits a crime, or a citizen? Do we call it war if an Englishman steals a purse from an American? What if a Saudi shoots someone? What if an American citizen, Ronni Moffitt, is killed by Chilean operatives in Washington D.C. in Operation Condor in 1976? If Bush had been president then, that would have given us an excuse to attack Bolivia, since the president/dictator of Chile at that time was Pinochet, our guy. The Saudis are our guys.

Hence we are not at war, we are warring. How else can you tell the difference? Just leave. If a nation-state follows you home, then you’re at war. Bush and Cheney would say that we fight over there so we don’t have to fight here. It’s the same logic as the Cold War and the domino theory. And like the Cold War, we designate the enemies and make the war, even if it has nothing to do with communism, or terrorism. We also waste money and lives in Iraq (and cause the death of more than 600,000 Iraqis) that could actually make life safer over here. Instead of actually investing in security in “the homeland,” we put the names of political writers like Naomi Wolf on the No-Fly List to harass them and keep them from making democracy a reality, from enforcing the will of the people, and getting us out of Iraq.

Why "No Fiction Necessary"

I suppose my first entry into my blog should be why I would call it “No Fiction Necessary.” For many years I’ve been pointing out to students in my classes choice bits of history that are too strange to believe. Kind of like a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of goings on. But in a course I taught this Fall with G---, he forced me to wonder why I prioritized factual strange happenings over our own imaginings, the kind of thing artists and poets create.

After all, what does it matter that a bizarre little twist of life happened? It means, I think, that our expectations of what is to come might have to be shelved, and we would be more wary of what lurks around the bend, literally. Asian religions or philosophies, such as Buddhism, and translated for us by Jung, make a rather big deal of these freaky little happenstances in our lives, as if they might be a sign.

An aside on that word, “happenstance.” I was mulling language over one day after reading the Bhagavad-Gita. It says something about detaching yourself from the fruits of life, and attaching yourself to the process. I started considering the word “happy.” Hmm, I thought, for most words that have a “y” on the end the initial part of the word means something alone, like “funny” and “fun.” I looked up “hap” and discovered that it meant “good luck.” Hence, to be happy meant that you were “good-lucky.” To be happy then, meant that good luck would happen to you, which if you were either spiritual or superstitious—you choose—meant that someone was smiling down on you, or up, depending again on your perspective.

So to focus on quirky little, and sometimes big, happenstances (notice now that you have a deeper understanding of the word?), means that your life actually has meaning. Your path is not just a chaotic, statistically driven, slog. Rather, it is a magical path, full of mystery and grace.

An example is in order, I believe, for you to completely grasp this aspect of No Fiction Necessary. But actually, there are three categories of examples, illustrating three modes of the fantastic. The first is a feat that defies credibility. The second is coincidence beyond belief. The third is an ironic outcome.

To illustrate the first, the feat, I will tell you a story about my wife. Growing up in the Sierra Tarahumara of Chihuahua, Mexico, M---- lived in a house with no electricity until she was five, and no plumbing until just a few years ago. Heating was all done with wood—piñon and juniper scents wafted through her village. In her late teens, she was walking a friend of hers (nickname Nalgas de Liebre, or “hare buns,” both for her bony structure and rabbit-like sexual proclivities) to the end of the lane that led to her house, about the length of a football field. At the end, near the dirt road that wound out of town, M---- spied a tail sticking up out of the tall grass, black with a streak of white. M---- had always tried to get her brother to capture a pet skunk for her, like the litter of raccoons (mapaches) that he had trapped. He, showing good sense, had always refused. Now was her chance. Bunny-buns said there was no way she could catch it, and left for town. M----, now alone with her three-year-old son, approached the skunk, which did not flee. Bending over and gathering it in her arms, she carried it to the gate and put it gently back on the ground and laying hold of the tail, steered it down the lane to her house. Once there, she picked it up again and maneuvered it into a cage.

When M----‘s mother caught whiff of their approach, she hollered what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing! M----, with out-thrust chin, said that she was keeping a new pet. Like the skunk, M----‘s parents wilted in front of her confidence. Her father threatened to shoot it, but M---- guarded the skunk with her own body. Lest you believe that it was tame or fixed, the skunk then sprayed its new dwelling, and generally made a nuisance of itself until it died a week later, ostensibly of the same causes as the Arawak Indians and residents of New Hampshire, lack of freedom.

Do you believe it happened? I have eyewitness accounts, and the years of experience with my wife to know that it did. What does it mean? It means that there is more room to move in this world than we are taught, and that humanity’s plastic rules about what is possible, even relatively rigid ones dealing with nature, may be much more malleable than we assume.

The history of Mexico is rife with human doings that seem like one giant tall tale. Take Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. It might be the most impressive collection of audacious feats by one group of people in a relatively short span of time. Think about it, they attempted to conquer and control millions of people with a few hundred men. It is almost more amazing that they thought they could, than the actual accomplishment. We try to make sense of it by saying that the Spanish had the superior technology and the Mexica were paralyzed by their superstitions, but reading the eyewitness account by Bernal Díaz del Castillo dispels those myths. Those conquistadors were good-lucky. (I do not mean to say they were right in what they did, just that what they did was unbelievable.)

In my travels and conversations with Mexicans I have learned that these kinds of stories and adventures abound. I lamented to G--- that American storytellers and writers have a handicap when competing with Mexicans. We just don’t get a chance to experience fantastical stories growing up in Levittown suburbs. There’s a reason magical realism originated in Latin America. G--- concurred, and tossed me a nugget of a Zen koan, “They have their imaginations on the outside.”

I’m still puzzling on it. To have your imagination on the outside means that the wall that separates our dreams from reality was constructed by mimes. We modern cynics decry the possibility of true goodness in today’s world, and we stop searching for it. The path leads both ways, though. What we dream might become real, but the actual world could also turn into a nightmare. Fantastical accomplishments are not limited to the good. To wit again the conquest of Mexico.

Next post: Coincidence or Synchronicity.

First Pardner

If Hillary Clinton becomes president there will be two firsts: the first woman president, and the first president’s husband. What will we call him? First Lord, as in lords and ladies? That’s too gender oriented, but then so is First Lady. From a more gender neutral perspective, the First Spouse? Or perhaps the First Significant Other?

Or we could use a term that annoys me, First Partner. It annoys me because it makes love sound like a business arrangement. The other problem with it is that we might assume that the couple sharing the bed in the white house is a gay couple from an old cowboy movie, call him First Pardner. I would have no problem with that, but it simply wouldn’t be accurate.

Along with the conundrum of what we call that fellow hanging around the White House with nothing really to do except maybe overhaul our health care system, it would be Bill Clinton. Imagine that. Bill Clinton hanging around the White House with nothing to do. What do they say about idle hands? Just imagine what a field day the tabloids would have! If you think we have a dysfunctional press corps at the White House now, every presidential press conference would start off with questions about what Bill was up to.

Actually, it almost makes you want to vote for Hillary. Almost. She’s still the one who was on the board of WalMart. She’s still the one who recently said of relations with Iran, “All options are on the table.” Does that mean an all out nuclear strike is on the table? That’s what “all options” means to me.

And Bill strikes me as a kibitzer, a back-seat president of the worst kind. Hillary might even make him ambassador to France just to get him out of the house.

Playing Chicken in Iran

As I was reading the latest news about the Bush Administration’s current vitriolic rhetoric about Iran, I had an epiphany. I was thinking to myself, “Wow, it makes no sense, at all, to attack Iran. You’d have to be crazy!”

That’s when it hit me! I had thought exactly the same thing about Iraq, right up until we invaded. There is this great game that political scientists play called “chicken.” (Actually we don’t play it, we just watch other people play—we’re kind of voyeuristic that way.) The old-fashioned way to play is to drive two hot-rods at each other, or racing towards a cliff as fast as a lemming, and the first person to stop or swerve loses. Peculiar, isn’t it? This game, which falls into rational-choice theory, seems kind of a stupid thing to do. And the person who behaves more rationally in a larger context, loses.

So only stupid people play this game. OK, that makes sense. Bush was playing chicken, I was thinking. But still, the objective is to make the opponent swerve, and not crash. We can all see now that we crashed into Iraq. Not only did we crash there, but we’re still looking for more people to crash into!

But here’s an irony about the rational-choice theory game of chicken. To win, you have to make your opponent think you are crazy. Start screaming in tongues as you mash the accelerator. Blast Abba full volume on the radio. Stick your head out of the window and let your tongue flap in the breeze. Steve Martin on his first comedy album said that if he were mugged he immediately would wet himself. Mugger thinks, “This dude is crazy! I’m out of here!”

Which is why Ronald Reagan was brilliant. In his little game of nuclear arms escalation with the old USSR (do you ever miss it?) he started ranting about evil empires, and using lasers to blast incoming missiles from a string of satellites. They even called it Star Wars. Gorbachev thinks, “That Americanski is crazy! I’m out of here!”

So I was thinking in the run-up to Iraq that hey, Bush and Cheney must have studied some rational-choice theory at Yale and Casper Community College. Sure they were acting crazy, but that’s just how you do it! Then WHAM!

Now it’s Iran’s turn. Maybe it was always Iran’s turn. Maybe Iraq was just to let Iran know how insane we are. These guys are brilliant.