SITREP, I
--Hogwarts Coat of Arms,
the new "E Pluribus Unum"?
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you
--Stuck in the Middle With You,
Stealer's Wheel
Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper
--William Rawley
It's a beautiful mornin'
I think I'll go outside a while,
And just smile.
--Beautiful morning,
The Rascals
______________________
America is like Disney World's Magic Kingdom. We have left Frontierland and Liberty Square, now residing squarely in Fantasyland. We live as though Harry Potter is real. We receive our tutelage at Hogworts (aka The Media News).
We believe in entertainment and alternate realities; we are saturated in it. In fact, we are so estranged from the daily requirements of life that we -- to include our leaders -- cannot define what our national health should look like. Much like "the leadership" stood agog before the dipping barometer in advance of 2005's devastating Category 5 storm Katrina, we see the wreckage ... we CREATE the wreckage ... yet the lack the ability to pull up the brakes, or to take another track.
Leaders which are primarily self-serving lack the ability to lead others. Our national policies are largely self-destructive, despite the inclusion of words like "care" and "defense". The rubes in the despised flyover states considered good by the these politicians only for the fodder of their party vote and photo ops have shown that they know the gig is up.
The day of the true Statesman is gone. The People now know that neither the Right nor the Left will improve their lots or protect them from their too-often dismal lives. "Hope" is the provenance of them that has, or at least, those that have access to mentors and tutelage, goods not often seen in the downward cycling hinterlands or the decayed inner cities.
Like almost all revolutions, we forged a nation in fire and blood. Liberal thought and action was played out on the field of battle.
Revolutions are not conservative events; the U.S. Revolution was no exception. All that is great about our nation sprang from liberal concepts. Sadly, for too many today, to be a liberal is an exclusionary thing.
Hypocritically, liberalism has become perverted to denote a creed sanctioning all behaviors, while concomitantly ostracizing those deemed not "liberal" enough. We have betrayed the great competition of ideas we once had between the Madisons and the Jeffersonians.
We use tinny words like "progressive" to describe thought and action which should rightly be called "liberal" but which we know is a term which has passed its "use by" date.
Politics has become an ego project. One is either enveloped in the "aren't we cool" fold of rube-baiting, or one is a rube. (Pick your side of the fence, and you will be facing the Other.)
There is a third group, however, and its members disdain the absurd theatre. It is remotely possible that our salvation may be there.
The military realm should be logical and linear, but that is not serving us well today, for the events that we call war are neither logical nor linear. The old paradigms do not plug into the new chaos.
Since our assumptions are illogical, our tactics and strategies cannot succeed. As said previously (Symbolic Targets), we fail because we insist on calling counter-terrorism "warfare". Nothing done militarily since 2003 has been warfare.
What is HAS been is the use of military might in an attempted suppression of an idea. Ideas are not defeated with either drones or foot soldiers.
Wars are opposing nation-states pitting their armies against one another with realistic military and political goals as their drivers. Wars are based upon objective facts.
next: SITREP II
Labels: counterterrorism, liars, liberals, progressives
posted by rangeragainstwar at 3:00 PM
9 Comments:
Well written and stated. Here's my two cents: "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange, mixed affair we call life, when a man takes this whole Universe for a vast practical joke; though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." --from MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville
You say the military might be a third way.
I don't say you're wrong on that, but from my vantage point, most of the people crossing from either the military into politics or into the media, or speaking from their positions as very senior officers, have completely bought into the basic concepts of the war on terror.
So that doesn't seem to help either. Presumably the farther away we get from an era of actual warfare, the farther away the people responsible for indoctrinating future soldiers will get from that, too.
David,
I don't think an officer is going to be promoted too far if s/he doesn't buy into the war on terror and other related ideas that are doctrine. The military isn't exactly a bastion or appreciater of creative, free or independent thinking. Furthermore, the odd rebel isn't going to be invited to speak as a pundit on the MSM because all MSM foreign policy reporting is all the same and is coming from the same kool aide drinking sources. Actually, the source is more the people that mix the kool aide.
avedis
Yet therein lies the problem. Imperial war and cultural collapse corrupt every institution eventually.
I don't single out the military here. Universities, for instance, are supposed to be logical and critical spaces, too. That's not just a byproduct; it's supposed to be THE product. Yet they have become breeding grounds for social discontents, primarily.
Knock off one potentially useful institution after another and you're left with anarchy eventually.
David,
We are on the same page, but I am going to amp up the model. I am going to propose that universities are THE PROBLEM. The military is controlled by civilian leadership. Civilian leadership gets its ideas and policies from think tanks. Think tanks are fed by universities. All kinds of disconnected from reality notions come out of universities. Remember Francis Fukuyama and The End of History and creating our own reality, etc. that laid the philosophical foundation for the invasion of Iraq and other planned MENA invasions? The GWOT? All originating with the think tanks.
All the aggrieved minority and victimization ideologies are coming out of universities. Everything that is influential re; policy, but totally idiotic in real world application has come, ultimately, from universities.
avedis
If what you are basically saying is that the education system functions as mainly to create a specialized group of wild-eyed ideological dreamers while failing to provide useful job skills to the rest, I think I would have to agree with you on that one.
David,
Right. Universities teach some useful skills. These skill sets are immediately clearly validated. An engineering graduate builds a bridge and it doesn't collapse. Better yet, it is an aesthetically appealing bridge and it is lower cost than older methods. A medical school graduate can perform the life saving surgery and the patient makes a full and speedy recovery. The chemist creates an insecticide that allows the crops to survive predation and doesn't toxify the environment too much. In these - and nay other - scenarios the university has basically performed the role of trade school. It is teaching what has become a highly intricate trade, but a trade nonetheless. That is good.
It is the social and political sciences realm where the lunatics are running the asylum. There is simply no immediate way to prove or disprove a theory. Yes, doubt can be cast on the theories, but the theory makers are very good at squashing doubters. The theories get put into action in the real world on faith and group think. It is only then that we get to see how wrong they really were; only after much human misery and much has resulted. Then the purveyors become weasels. They bob and weave and excuse make and double down.
The social science are the refuge of scoundrels and the fantasy prone. They also happen to be the ones informing the policy that the military gets stuck with.
avedis
You're right, maybe I should have been more specific.
I guarantee you, however, it's the social sciences and humanities people who are running around organizing silly things like the black graduation "ceremonies."
avedis,
You have taken the words from my mouth. Yes, the workers in hard sciences are akin to tradesmen. A disservice and pity that vocational track work suffered such a condemnation a few decades back. These are people who make things to further and ensure a safe society (hopefully).
Too true: The social science are the refuge of scoundrels and the fantasy prone.
And as you say, it is they who dictate the tempo of our national policies.
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