Religious War 2

The Cold War was a narcissistic engagement -- a dancing-war -- between two powerful, nasty states. Even the names were mirror images -- the US and the SU. Finally, one of them had the sense and courage to stop the dance-war. We required a new dance-war partner.

Very few candidates appeared when they were needed; the criteria were pretty tough. To get on the list, you had to be willing to kill really a lot of people, have threatening weapons, and be overtly in the grip of a wacky belief system. You must have no sense of self-satire, and be, as our former dance-war partner was, really, really vicious. You had to take great pleasure in being deeply hated by about half the world. And you had to be willing to impoverish your people. That is what we did and we were the good guys, after all.

Not so simple to find dance-war partners. We tried China, but the Chinese didn't want to play, for now. Neither did India; they apparently thought we were crazy to suggest such a thing. All of Africa was too busy. Brazil also had other engagements, at least for the time being.

Well, it all worked out and better than even the most optimistic among us could have hoped. Wasn't so easy, but at the same time we were losing one partner, we generated a new one! Imagine the skill -- and luck! Our best minds and huge amounts of money were needed to make it be so -- surely one of the great achievements of the late 20th century. The old "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" seems to fit, but I can't quite get the mapping right.

In the previous post, I talked about my life being a series of war episodes. I also remember, in the late 80s and 90s, quaint debates about what to do with the "peace dividend". All that money, which had supported the war machine, would be turned loose, and we could do some pretty good things for our folks. Yup. Good things. Imagine that. I'm waiting.

Well, what now? A dangerous enemy, with terrible weapons, driven by alien beliefs, willing and eager to kill, and against whom no force will be big enough. An enemy who mocks our way of life, our values, who are cowards, who won't even take care of each other, who abuse their own women and children. They dress funny, smell funny and look funny, too.

And that's what they think of us.

There have been two Muslim-Christian wars before. Each one lasted at least a couple of centuries. Now, those folks are real dance-war partners. That SU thing -- hey, didn't last even 80 years. Short-hitters. Quitters. No guts and no glory. The Muslim thing -- those guys are pros. No more amateur hour. Once they get into gear, they're like the Energizer bunny; they just keep going, and going, and going.....

We can anticipate many, many more years of killing. In the last blog, I posted that killing is a normalizing experience for America. Whenever something unusual happens, or we feel insecure, or there's a slump in the economy, or there is minor social change, we kill a bunch of people, and then we feel more normal, reach some sort of equilibrium. It's a dynamic that we have played out for the last hundred years or so. It has worked well for us, not so well for our victims.

One of the personal odd moments of the last 20 years came listening to a radio interview with a former SU spy, one of a group ordered to keep an eye on the border with Finland. The Finns had their own spies, and the two groups got to know each other, had the occasional beer, and in general worked out a fine arrangement. And I remember the voice of this spy from the SU saying, with great emotion "I have never felt more proud of my country than when it abandoned the Cold War". In the seconds after hearing that spy, I was terribly jealous. I wished so much that I could have been the one to feel that pride. I wasn't. And I don't think it will be my country that has such courage the next time, or even the time after that. No.

Not in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of my children. I don't know what it would take for us to abandon our savagery. A horrible economic depression, with complete failure of anything but a barter economy? A political awakening, as in the SU? Surely not a spiritual awakening -- hell, we have those twice a week. Maybe a grand despair, a complete loss of hope that life can possibly get better? Maybe, but my peasant ancestors stayed peasants, for maybe a thousand years before someone came out of the bogs. Is there anything that can push us into cooperating with the rest of our kind? Any way we can simply abandon the apparently central experience of the American 20th century, that we need to kill large numbers of people?

Sure there is, and maybe the green elephants flying over my house will poop elsewhere. Maybe not. I'm not giving away my shovel yet.


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