Chris Hedges is a Dolt

One week ago, Chris Hedges' Truthdig post began with,

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men, women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was strategically and militarily indefensible. The Japanese had been on the verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance. It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions, which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of death.

 As a scientist, I have gone through a range of emotions and responses to this condemnation. But, the most appropriate is Carol Kane's line from Annie Hall, “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”

Battling stereotypes often comes down to accountancy.  I could counter Hedges' block condemnation of scientists by enumerating science's triumphs starting with victories against communicable disease. Smallpox is estimated to have killed at least 300 million people in the 20^th century. Overall fatality rates were 1-in-3, and as high as 80% for children. Now the disease is gone. Polio, measles, and pertussis were also heading to near extinction, until anti-science, anti-vaxers kicked public health to the curb and watched children die. Who, in these examples, are the moral idiots?

Assaying science's benefits misses the point, though. Instead, Hedges' essay is really the mystery of the dog that barked in the night. He condemns scientists, technicians, communists, and fascists by name, and rapacious capitalists indirectly. Who else is left? World War I, he tells us, negated three hundred years of Enlightenment. He brings in Freud to describe the dark side of human nature and lists writers, artists, and musicians who explored that darkness. (Why did sourpuss include Henri Matisse? Where is the gloom in fauvism or his large canvases or the vast colored-paper collages that characterized Matisse's final work? And, how could anyone be gloomy who created a household that included both wife and mistress?) But, Hedges omits the guides who can bring us to the light. We get plenty of villains; where are the moral geniuses?

I infer from Chrs Hedges other writing that religion is the missing piece. Unfettered science dooms us all; only religion can save us. We must not drink freely from the fountain of knowledge because it is polluted with powerful poisons and tainted with hubris and deification delusions. Holy men must carefully separate and distill, then only they will fill our cups with the good and hide the bad. This approach may not eliminate “ancient lusts for war, violence and death,” but, thank god, those passions will remain unamplified. Eliminating atomic weapons and missiles and aircraft, transforms mass murder into hard slow work. Death tolls will be minimized by inefficiency.  We must look elsewhere for "the most potent agents of death."  Rwanda in 1994 is a key example. (Okay, so I'm heading back to using numbers.)  Limited to knives, machetes, and hand-held weapons, the killing rate averaged only 5000-to-10,000 people per day from early April through mid-July.

Just a small part of America's nuclear arsenal could kill two million people in a few seconds. In contrast, Pol Pot needed three long years to murder an equal number of Cambodians. His Khmer Rouge accomplices had to use starvation and executions with outdated guns. They sought an agrarian society free from intellectualism. Wearing eyeglasses was a sign of book learning, and grounds for execution. No totems to science there.

I lived in Los Alamos, NM, from 1980 to 1982. The town had 27 churches and 3 bars. Really.  At first, I just assumed that the scientists and engineers needed absolution from their weapons work.  There must have been, I thought, so much guilt and moral uncertainty that the town needed 27 churches to counsel all the worried souls.  Three bars also made sense.  Excessive drinking had to be done quietly in private because alcoholics or binge drinkers might lose their security clearances.  

After a few months, I realized my naivete and ignorance.  Piety and weapons work were comfortable partners in a long-term relationship.  God and country.  America's enemy was also, conveniently, religion's foe.  The message to Los Alamites from the pulpits was simple and clear:  you are doing righteous, good work.  Sure, a few outsiders showed up with protest placards every August 6th and 9th; but the local churches had no part in those barely noticed demonstrations. 

When I questioned one of the stalwarts about the need for a nuclear stockpile that could kill everyone on earth several times over, he pointed out that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked.  Thirty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no country had again used a nuclear weapon against another country.  He and his colleagues believed they were protecting their families and country.  They were not amoral cogs in the vast military machinery.  They really believed their work to be good.  And, their churches -- all twenty-seven -- concurred.

Yes, the Los Alamos scientists and engineers were irrational in their weighing of benefits and risks.  They ignored the environmental destruction that the nuclear arms industry created at home, and downplayed the financial waste.  Those are human traits that we all share.  And, so, back to Chris Hedges, I wonder if he can identify a golden age when rational thought dominated science and technology, and when art, music, and literature were always uplifting. The scenario actually sounds horrible to me. Something like a Twilight Zone re-creation of Lake Wobegon. Hedges' doesn't identify a refuge – either historic or hypothetical – from his stereotype-filled dystopia.

Society's best hope is more knowledge, not less. Some of it can even protect us from self-delusion.  

Drop Back Another Quarter Century

Similarities between the Great and Lesser Depressions are obvious: banking collapse, liquidity traps, and upper class twits moving confidently in the wrong direction.  But, the intransigence of the Very Serious People (as Paul Krugman calls the always wrong and never in doubt crowd) also echoes World War I.  Austerians have transformed economics into a trench warfare.  Middle-class and poor people are being ground to paste.  Their savings have been eradicated.  Their once most valuable assets are as worthless as Confederate bonds.  Higher education, long identified as the ticket for upward mobility, is a dead-end section of trench bottomed with quicksand.  

Comfortable generals in grand far away places exhort the hoi polloi to climb up and out of the trenches.  Stop being so damn lazy.  Be entrepreneurs.  Take risks.  Be like us!   You, too, can become self-made, rags-to-riches, Horatio Algers.  You only need the will and gumption to run successfully across mine fields, under concertina wire, and through machine gun fire.  Anyone can do it!  But, hush, the generals  keep secrets.  They know that only a few people will make it rich.  Most will end up exhausted and broken; either caught in the trenches or eviscerated in no mans' land.  The generals know because they planted the mines, unrolled the concertina wire, and hired the mercenaries manning the 100-shot-a-minute guns.

When Will it All End?

It's always about the money.  Every time and every place.  America's gunnuttery will stop when business balks at the costs.  Aurora's mass murder differs from the Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Gabby Gifford prequels because James Holmes picked a private business filled with paying customers.  Movie theaters across the country will now pay more for security and liability insurance.  I don't know who will cover medical expenses for Friday's injured victims; but, I'm certain that theaters will be held responsible following any copycat attacks.

The gun lobby is successful because they have all the money.  Gun manufacturers, right-wing millionaires, and paranoid anti-government nutters have created a powerful lobbying organization.  No one else comes close.  Moral arguments and public health advocates are overwhelmed.  Michael Moore won a small concession from K-Mart by generating bad publicity for the company.  K-Mart made a business decision  -- the chain stopped selling hand-gun ammunition -- that was motivated entirely by their bottom line.  Morality was not part of the calculation.  


But, now, maybe the slaughter in Colorado will have a positive, lasting consequence.  Gun violence may cost big business some real money.  And, suddenly, supporting the gun nuts might become too damned expensive.  

It's all about the money

Libor, schmibor.  I expect money guys to cheat.  Why not?  When your world is all about money, when your career is defined entirely by the amount of money you make, and when your social status is based on how much money you have, then people will cheat.  The small scale stuff is easy to rationalize.  What's the big deal about diddling Libor by a basis point or two?  Do a favor for a friend who will make money today.  He owes you one.  Right?  Hey, it's easy money.  No one's going to notice.  


Now, move from the global casino of world finance into a real casino.  You're going to be watched very carefully.  Sit down to play blackjack, and you are on TV.  You better keep your cards on the table top.  Move them to your lap, and somebody is going to remind you about the rules.  If you transgress a second time, you will be told to cash in your chips and leave.  Don't come back. 
  
Some guy starts getting lucky at poker.  Expect him and the dealer to get plenty of attention from house security.  In a real casino, winning too often, beating the odds, isn't a sign of vast intellect and financial prowess; it's a red flag.  Bernie Madoff could never have made a nickel on a casino floor.  He knew it, too.  Cheating at cards is for chumps.  Real money comes when no one can watch too carefully or when the watchers sell their silence.  


So, all I ask is that the Wall Street honchos holding my retirement funds and mortgage and bank account get the same attention given to the poor bastards in one of the casinos up the road.  

Sixty-Eight Years After D-Day

Yesterday was the 68th anniversary of D-Day. I wonder how many men who survived those beaches on that day remain alive. A 20-year-old soldier would now be 88. Must be some left.

My father often described waking at dawn on D-Day to see the sky black with airplanes from horizon to horizon. All were flying south towards the English Channel and France. Dad was stationed at a small airfield in Kingston Bagpuize in England near Abingdon and Oxford. Everyone – soldiers and civilians – knew the invasion was imminent, but few knew the timetable or the weather-related delays. Information was particularly scarce at Kingston Bagpuize; the airmen and planes were not part of the early morning action. Instead, they waited for news and sat with mixed feelings created by their safety in the docile English countryside 150 miles from the war's great battle.

I grew up knowing the end of the story. The United States prevailed against Germany in World War II just as we had beaten them before. I never imagined that people of my parents' generation had contemplated defeat or that the invasion might have been a history-making disaster. My father and I saw “The Longest Day” soon after it came out. I was eight. The movie fit a child's automatic patriotism; good guys prevail over bad guys.

As an adult, learning to cope with big uncertainties, I finally understood at least part of my father's fears on that day. Just before noon a pilot friend of his pointed to a small plane parked near the main runway, “I'm authorized to fly it. Why don't we head over the channel and see what's happening?”  Information. Are we winning or losing? What's really happening? Dad, though, had great instincts for understanding fear and confusion. Neither he nor his friend knew the passwords and codes required to enter the airspace. Soldiers in battle would shoot at anything. The small plane would likely be brought down by friendly fire. They just had to wait.

It was early evening when my father realized that all was well. The airmen at Kingston Bagpuize finally got their D-Day orders. Marc watched enlisted men loading crates of Coca-Cola into the big planes that took off and flew south. Not ammunition or medical supplies or soldiers suited up for battle. Coca-Cola. The Army could give priority to air lifting a small luxury to the battle area. Only one explanation fit. 

Game Over for the Climate

Read James Hansen's op-ed piece in yesterday's NY Times.  If you are a parent or a grandparent, an aunt or an uncle, you have a duty to act.  Passivity is not an option.  E-mail your Senators and member of Congress.  It doesn't take much effort.  Contact information for your Senators is available here.  You can find your Congressman or Congresswoman here.  Just tell them to read Hansen's article and to act.  Now.  

Let's take the crackpot Republican support for the Keystone XL pipeline, and turn it into a devastating election-year opportunity.  The message writes itself:  supporting the pipeline is an attack on our children and grandchildren.  Nothing is more cruel or more shameful.  

If you need extra ammunition, read Charles Pierce's "Accidental Activist" piece.  Here's my favorite part:

[Randy Thompson]'s laughed at the preposterous promises of an economic boom; at one point, TransCanada promised that the pipeline would provide 100,000 new jobs. It later was revealed that these jobs included employment in the "entertainment" industry that would spring up along the pipeline's route. "Strippers," Randy says. "They're talking about strippers. And temporary strippers at that."

Good News Squared

Good news is so scarce these days that I can't get over having two cheering items on two successive days.  First,the Brits came right out and reported:

We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company. 

OK, so it is a dog-bites-man story, but welcome and a long time coming nevertheless.

The second item requires a back story.  On April 11th, a barefoot, nightshirt-clad man shot at close range an unoccupied, specially-equipped SUV that the Santa Fe police department uses to catch speeders.  The vehicle was parked unoccupied at the roadside.  On-board radar triggers cameras that photograph the license plates of passing speeding cars.  Citations are issued electronically.  Here's the video from the SUV camera:


Two weeks later, responding to an anonymous tip, the police interviewed Scott Powell who lives close to the site of the shooting.  Powell owned a grey 2011 Audi that looks like the shooter's car.  The next day, Powell traded in that car for a new, blue Audi.  When the police returned to Powell's house to arrest him, Powell led the cops on a car chase through Santa Fe before being apprehended near a doctor's office.

Powell is 63.  He has no previous problems with the law.  He is well educated, lives in an affluent part of the city, and is a book dealer specializing in first editions and Irish literature.  He also has a permit to carry concealed weapons.  Yes, New Mexico is one of those states.  Gun nuts say we are all safer because good gentlemen like Scott Powell can walk our streets and drive our roads carrying hidden weaponry.  Until last week, the gunnies must have loved him.  What a poster boy!  No priors.  Financially stable.  He sells rare books; you can't find a better way to imply calm, gentle, and trustworthy.  Scott Powell is no George Zimmerman.

Scott Powell also seems to have gone bonkers.  No one wants him on their team anymore.  Police searched his house after the arrest and seized a .45 caliber automatic pistol. a .357 revolver, a Beretta handgun, a Sig Sauer handgun, an unidentified handgun wrapped in plastic, three Beretta shotguns, and a bag of "miscellaneous ammunition."  Powell's lawyer explained to the press that Powell has serious health problems including cancer, depression and attention deficit disorder.  The state of New Mexico found him fit to carry concealed handguns.  A crazy, depressed man with ADD and whole bunch of weapons.

Oh, yeah.  Stalwart, gun-totin', citizen Powell fired five shots at a parked car from 10 feet.  Two of those bullets missed completely.  From three paces away.

Feeling safe yet?