I’ve been bereft ever since this war started. I was the same way when Gulf War I started, then more so for Desert Storm, then even worse for Ukraine…. and now this… which we started. We were supposed to be the good guys, weren’t we?
Aren’t we now the “rogue nation”?
I was seven years old when my paternal grandfather died. He was a veteran of World War I, and what I remember about those early years when we drove to the old coal patch town where my grandfather lived, were the VFW parades, and the Memorial Day and Veterans Day rituals. The attitude -- if a seven year old can be said to have such thoughts, or maybe it’s a now near-60 year-old man imagining his seven-year-old self in those idyllic days of ignorance — was a feeling that,
”...because our elders and ancestors fought these wars, we were victorious, and now we’re gonna be OK.”
Now — at the same time, in 1974 when he died, two hours away my home was next door to a house with two sons who went to Viet Nam. The family across the street had a VW bug in the garage that was up on blocks, for the same reason. I knew that there were wars going on. I knew that when the son of the family next door came back, he was …. well, a seven-year-old kid doesn’t know what a “thousand yard stare” is, but he knew that when Bobby came back, that’s what he had.
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What I was thinking today…. when people say “we have to fight them over there, so that we do not have to fight them over here!” …. doesn’t seem like whenever we get done fighting “over there”, that we still, nevertheless, always find a reason to fight amongst ourselves right here? What I was thinking…. it was about that cute/not really cartoon about the two hunters, or runners --- there are many themes — desperately running out in front of and fleeing a charging bear:
The one says, breathlessly, to the other, ”I don’t know if I can outrun a bear, can you?”
and of course the second says, ”I don’t have to outrun a bear. I just have to outrun you.”
Isn’t that just the pure essence of unregulated capitalism?
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What seems to have changed since I was a kid, whether it’s me getting fifty years older, or the country now fifty years in the wake of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and now this twisted orange puppet of Putin who thinks like Marge Schott:
”Hitler was OK at first, he just went too far.”
Marge Schott lost her ownership of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team for that remark.
This crew running our country now seems to have gathered enough followers to get back into office for having said pretty much the same thing — although not always out loud — since they lost in 2020. So who really changed? Were they more crafty? Was the propaganda more effective? Or were we more desperate and gullible, and as we were running from the charging bear, the latent need to see someone else take the fall so that we can claim our own superiority as we step over them…. was that always within us all along?
In the hearts and minds of too many among us, I fear it was the latter. So the lesson seems to be (the one we are not learning) is that it only takes just a push to force economic challenges … push people back down Maslow’s pyramid of of motivation to their primitive survival instincts …to awaken the dark side among too many. And who better suited to create economic mayhem than the people who already have all the money, of course.
That’s really all Trump did; or whatever mass of moneyed interests that finance his puppet figurehead operation. Two things, in essence, are all they need to say, and repeat —
”I know who causes all your problems, and together ‘we’ will go after ‘them’, ‘those people,’ the others’.”
follow up occasionally with subtle reminders,
”Those people are still out there, you know… they’re right behind you, and gaining on you.”
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I look around, and what scares me is not so much Trump et al, or the new breed of “we’ll get it right this time” fascists who are seeking office. What chills my blood and brings me to the dark space — the thing that the therapists say makes me “not conducive to therapy” — is just how many people who were always among us who love this blood sport barbarism as an economic theory. “WE” will just eat “THEM” because “THOSE PEOPLE” are not worthy,
These are not warrior people. The people who scare me are .. well, my wife. People who used to be pretty boring and never said much. But now they are onboard with this thing; they don’t know anything about economics, but they just know that if they other guy falls down, he’s easier to step over than to outrun. So that has become their strategy for their own success: They don’t have to be great, the other guy just has to be worse: either so he falls down, and they step over him — or they see “them”, “those people”, “the others” always as the demon in the shadows, the bear always to be outrun...faster, faster, faster.
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I notice that among the science-minded, evolution by natural selection is accepted as the most likely explanation for how life evolved on this planet. In simple terms, in colloquial language, we used to simply say “dog eat dog”, “survival of the fittest”, “only the strong survive,” “eat or be eaten.” We used to talk about those ideas as a dystopian nightmare where the shadows loom large, the fear never subsides, and everyone sleeps with one eye open. That is a horrible place, to be sure.
Yet there is this weird thought that I have which I don’t see spoken about among many of us, and to me, it seems to be right there in out in the open — albeit unsaid:
Capitalism is really just a man-made system of evaluating the worth of people and things.
Capitalism operates, at it’s core, just like Darwinian evolution by natural selection:
Eat or be eaten, only the strong survive. There are no points for second place.
Isn’t it odd that the religious fundamentalists who scoff at evolution (“I didn’t come from no monkey!” — a phrase that only proves they are determined not to understand what evolution by natural selection actually is) — — are the same ones who are bipolar enough to embrace the same paradigm with enthusiasm and puritanical devotion as an economic model?
We see nature as harsh and barbaric, and we celebrate the modern world that has given us free time and leisure, because we (at least we used to) appreciate that we’re not always hunting or providing sustenance and maintenance just to survive. We like the thought that we only have to run from dinosaurs and bears when we’re in a movie theater. But then, in our not-so-wise wisdom, we went and invented economics. Mortal men thought this stuff up — mankind’s invention of it's own volition… this wasn’t a diktat sent down to us by a nefarious race of space aliens that zapped our brains with cosmic rays and made us bloodthirsty zombies; we invented this… humans did. We could make life as comfortable as we choose — but we don’t. The greatest fear among conservatives is laziness, sloth. So they invent these imagined demons, and the lions and tigers and bears, OH MY! who are always chasing us, to keep us from getting lazy.
But now it looks just like we are all just gladiators in the coliseum, and the oligarchs have an unlimited supply of lions. (I keep hearing “Send In The Clowns”, but it’s a Stephen King clown, with a balloon and a storm drain, then there’s a commercial interruption, “NOW, WITH MORE LIONS!”)
Now it’s just blood sport, and they build bigger stadiums with luxury skyboxes so the oligarchs that engineered this spectacle for their own amusement don’t even have to tolerate the other fans who pay the bills. I wonder if the gladiators who lost to the lions are ground up in the patê on their saltines.
Nature was harsh, and we used our big brains and opposable thumbs to create a more benign and noble space. We created a shelter, which we called civilization, where Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” actually has a chance to see us achieve self-actualization, once we got beyond mere sustenance and survival. We conjured up the ideas of safety, leisure, and comfort out of our own ingenuity and determination.
And then we went and devolved back to a system of evaluating the relative worth of one another which has become as brutal and unforgiving as any world with dinosaurs, charging bears, or the perennial alligator under the back deck that eats all the neighborhood pets, and why our kids can’t go out in the yard anymore. We invented economics — and we call it ‘natural forces’ — that is more horrible than anything our nightmares could ever dream up.
If there is a god, he can’t be impressed.
Whether we were given the big brain and opposable thumbs by a creator, or we evolved them from the atoms and void, from the primordial slime, what a betrayal of either ideas to sit here and watch this barbarism, and say we must not stop it.
