In My Lifetime

The more time that passes, the more it becomes manifest to the reality-based community that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were probably the worst stewards of this nation's wealth and safety that we have ever had. In my lifetime, these two men have been in charge for over half of the time. And they have ruined us.

To the non-reality-based community, of course, these men are remembered as heroes, as visionaries, as leaders who made us feel good about ourselves, as men who knew evil when he saw it and did not shirk from confronting it. Staying up all night drinking feels good, too, but the morning always comes.

In reality, however, these men governed through denial and fear. Denial that the rules of economics, or even simple mathematics, applied to the Greatest Nation in the World. Denial that any person or nation that did not bow to our superiority could be anything other than Hitler incarnate. Denial that our nation was anything other than the love child of Jesus and George Washington. And fear. Always fear.

Reagan and Bush were charlatans of the highest order, leaders who serially and unfailingly kicked the can down the road, burdening ourselves and our children with debts that are literally impossible to repay, racking up most of this debt to build and buy weapons that will never be used, all the while convincing many if not most Americans that they were "protecting" us.

Hard as it may be to believe, Reagan and Bush each individually accumulated more debt than every other president combined. Dwell on that for a moment. These two "fiscal conservatives" each spent more than every president from 1789 t0 1981 COMBINED. What is most distressing about this profligate dereliction is that these men are remembered fondly as fiscal conservatives. And Stalin was pro-life.

They each represent something that is quite distressing about our culture. American Exceptionalism is the delusion that the rules of history do not apply to the United States. You can't perpetually spend more than you earn? We're AMERICANS. You can't conquer Afghanistan? We're AMERICANS. You can't expect invaded and occupied nations to welcome the subjugation of their nations? We're AMERICANS.

These two men were profoundly skilled at avoiding responsibilities for their actions, and they both actually believed that saying something made it so. They both truly felt that America is the greatest nation in the world, with the greatest citizens in the world, but that the government comprised by, of, and for those very citizens was a tyrannical and amoral maw of corruption and inefficiency

Accordingly, both men aimed to destroy the government of the nation they so "loved", theoretically with the aim of proving that Americans are so great that, as opposed to every other civilization in human history, we don't even NEED a government.

The after-effects of these policies have crippled, and will continue to cripple, this nation severely. Reagan and Bush, of course, did not cut government spending; THAT would have been ideologically coherent, a vice neither man is often accused of as having possessed.

Instead, Reagan and Bush accomplished something much more insidious. Step one was to ridicule the very idea of government. Step two was to cut taxes so as to starve the government whereby it would inevitably falter, thereby "proving" the theory that it was inherently worthless. Step three was to spend record amounts of money, even while cutting the amount of money collected. Step four was to guarantee that the record spending was funneled nearly entirely to the military.

This is the worst of both worlds. With the kind of debts these two men ran up, you would think they had handed out Ivy Leagues educations to every American teenager. Or supplied clean water and penicillin to every human on earth. Or built great universities and hospitals across the third world. But no. We spent our trillions on weapons we can never use and on some weapons which, when they are used, simply drive us further into debt.

And through this charade, these men are lauded as leaders who "made America strong", who made us "feel good" about ourselves. I for one, don't get a glowing feeling when I consider that my birthright, and that of my grandchildren, was spent on hydrogen bombs and space lasers before I was out of short pants.

And what have these men protected us from? Ronald Reagan is credited with saving the world from Soviet Communism, as if Mikhail Gorbachev and the dozens of peaceful protests movements throughout Easter Europe were inconsequential, as if those were merely footnotes to the real reason for victory, namely that America bankrupted its children and grandchildren for the sake of being able to brag that "we won" the Cold War.

George W. Bush is credited by protecting us by being stoic and unwavering in the "war on terror", as if he were not in charge during the most criminally negligent moment in the history of the security state on 9/11, as if he had not started two wars which have each lasted longer than the Vietnam War and which show no sign of ending, and if he had not reaped near universal contempt and scorn, prancing about in flight suits like some tawdry autocrat.

Both of these men are remembered for greatness, but they have been our greatest failures. Theirs is the greatness one earns by taking the whole country out for drinks, buying round and round, only to skip out on the tab and leave us drunk, disheveled, penniless, and with no ride home.

The Telegram

Nikita Sergeivitch Khrushchev. Peasant. Tyrant. Everything in between. But when some future historian looks back at the 20th century, unburdened by the reflexive JFK-worship that plagues our contemporary scholarship, the two men who saved the 20th century from itself will be understood to be Khrushchev and Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev will go down as one of the great men of all time. Perched atop a decrepit and tyrannical empire, Gorbachev did what no other leader has ever done; he acknowledged that history was against him, that his empire was held together will duct tape and terror, and he allowed it a peaceful death.

The Soviet Union could just as easily have ended in nuclear Holocaust as an anti-climactic whimper, and I credit Gorbachev with something in between profound and historical humility and saving mankind from itself.

But if Khrushchev had not done what he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gorbachev would be irrelevant. And I would never have been born. And if you were born after 1962, you would never have been born, either.

In 1962, the United States had surrounded the Soviet Union with land-based nuclear missiles throughout Europe and Turkey. It had also repeatedly tried to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro, with tactics ranging from sabotage to terrorism to proxy invasion to several failed assassination attempts.

To deal with these twin realities, Khrushchev surreptitiously placed land-based nuclear missiles in Cuba, hoping to make the America feel the same threat the Soviets felt while at the same time protecting his ally Castro. Whether this was justifiable or not depends on your objectivity and your politics. But suffice it to say, Khrushchev was hardly unprovoked.

Once the crisis came, both Kennedy and Khrushchev were advised to go to war by most men who surrounded them. The two leaders resisted these pressures. It is of course wholly absurd and unacceptable that any two mortal men had as much power over the life and death of billions of human beings as did Kennedy and Khrushchev, but at least we can be thankful that they stopped short of obliterating the world.

Kennedy is credited with single-handedly saving the word, especially in this country, and especially since his "martyrdom", which was really more of a cheap and vulgar spasmodic murder than an actual martyrdom. By this, I mean that Oswald wasn't trying to prove anything other than the fact that he existed. Kennedy wasn't really killed for any cause at all.

At any rate, we should consider Khrushchev, surrounded by men even more hardened, more paranoid, and less democratically-minded than those surrounding Kennedy. Khrushchev withstood immense pressure, and knowingly sacrificed his power and position in the world by backing down. It was much harder for Khrushchev not to fight than it was for Kennedy.

I recently taught my students about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and an excerpt from Khrushchev's telegram to Kennedy struck me as one of the most sublimely profound paragraphs ever uttered, a paragraph which may have literally saved the world.

"Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly well what terrible forces our countries possess."

An amazing sentiment. And one which reminds me of another quote, this one from Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara: "The indefinite co-existence of thermonuclear weapons and fallible human beings is a recipe for guaranteed suicide."

8 Years In

Q: If the richest country in the world invades the poorest country in the world, who will win?

A: Whoever can stay the longest.

This week marked the 8th anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan. In 8 years' time, this war has shifted from "the war" to "to other war" to "the forgotten war" to "the good war" to "the endless war". And there it will stay.

On September 12, 2001, the United States possessed the clear moral authority to employ violence against al Qaeda. That moment was the most morally unambiguous moment for Americans in 60 years; we wanted to kill, and we knew we were justified in our bloodlust.

I have a hard time owning those words, as they make me seem innately violent; I am nearly as far from that as is possible, but I am not a pacifist. And there are moments where violence is not only necessary, but also morally right. When someone rapes your mother. When someone flies a plan full of people into a building full of people.

That being said, our war in Afghanistan no longer remotely resembles its original manifestation. Our aim was to exterminate the people who planned and supported the 9/11 massacre. So we went to the country where their headquarters were. That made sense. But we fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this enemy from day one.

9/11 was not plotted in Afghanistan. It was plotted mostly in Germany. Yet we didn't invade Germany after 9/11. (Technically, we didn't have to invade Germany, since we're still occupying it from the last time we invaded, but I digress).

The Taliban government of Afghanistan was not sponsoring al Qaeda; al Qaeda was sponsoring the Taliban government. Usually, governments sponsor terrorist groups. But in Afghanistan, the poorest country in the world, the situation was reversed; the terrorist group was richer than the state, so the terror group sponsored the government rather than the usual arrangement. We fundamentally missed this from day one.

What this means is that the Taliban government was not the blood enemy of the United States. Are they medieval cretins? Yes. But they are not worth investing the wealth and blood and prestige of this nation to destroy. We can co-exist with the Taliban.

"Taliban" means "student" in Pashtu. So aiming to destroy the "Taliban" is like trying to eradicate "the intellectuals" or "the jocks" or "the conservatives"; it is a fundamentally impossible task, a contradiction in logic unless you're Hitler or Ghengis Khan.

The good news is that the huge majority of the people who planned, paid for, and carried out 9/11 are dead. The bad news is that we don't yet realize this and we are doubling down on a war that became irrelevant to our security about 6 years ago.

This war is turning into a Vietnam parable. Vietnam never had the intimate foundational context that 9/11 provides for us re Afghanistan, but the mentality and the strategy in these two war are distressingly similar. We stay and fight because the people who live there won't surrender to our self-evident superiority. Put simply, we kill the locals because they refuse to like us.

That never works. The fundamental problem is that every President we've had since World War II, including Barack Obama to some extent, insists on manifesting the delusional doctrine of American Exceptionalism. The idea that History does not apply to US.

"Every empire that has ever invaded Afghanistan has reaped only ashes? Well, Mr. Egghead, that's really interesting, but you seem to forget that we're AMERICANS." There is not a member of our national government that would contradict this theology.

History does apply to us, of course, and in our short history we have witnessed or committed every major sin and error of mankind. Ethnic cleansing. Slavery. Civil War. Legal discrimination. Domestic terrorism. Assassination. Stolen Elections. Imperialism. We've been there. We've done that. We just refuse to learn from it.

We're not Americans. We're Human.

The Wretched Few

He not busy being born is busy dying. And thanks to the reptilian rogues who comprise our Congress, my sense of cynicism is born anew. To paraphrase the Army lawyer who finally publicly and verbally bitch-slapped Senator Joseph McCarthy, "I never truly gauged the depth of your cruelty and recklessness...at long last, sir, have you NO shame?"

I'm not surprised that the health care debate is failing. I'm not surprised that the super-majority is worthless when the Democrats are "in charge". I'm not surprised that the Democrats couldn't get laid in a monkey whorehouse with a bag full of bananas. I knew all those things. And I knew that the Republicans were every bit as venal as the Democrats were lame.

But what I never accurately gauged was the extent to which both parties in Congress would collude to guarantee that the American people would not have access to the quality of care that the members of Congress themselves enjoy. Make no mistake; the vultures abound in both parties and the practical effects of their actions are that they are fundamentally allied with each other.

After all, when health care reform fails, the Democrats will blame the Republicans and gloss over the fact that the Democrats were in a position to pass reform without a single Republican vote; know this: it is the Democrats who will kill health care. The republicans just serve as a useful foil for pre-emptive excuses.

So the Democrats control the Senate, and they are preparing to come to the American people and tell them with a straight face, "we couldn't get the votes", assuming the people will forget that the senators ARE the votes. If there is no public option, it will be because the Democrats chose not to pursue it. Period.

So the Democrats are investing their energy now not into how to pass what the public demands, but into how to blame the minority party for the failure of the majority party to pass any meaningful legislation.

We know the Republican position on health care. It was beautifully (in the sense that a mushroom cloud is "beautiful") articulated by a leading Republican congressman at a recent town hall meeting. A woman in the audience rose to ask her congressman what she should do after losing her health "insurance" after she was diagnosed with cancer.

Firstly we should stipulate that this is the only country in the world where the above circumstance would ever occur. That being said, the congressman's answer was illuminating (in the sense that a mushroom cloud is "illuminating"). First, this woman should turn to charity. Then, she should turn to.....Medicaid! So, first beg, then go red.

Let's think about this: this is a congressman's "plan" on how his own constituents should deal with serious illness. First, the person should beg. Okay. Secondly, the person should pursue government-run health care (after they are already deathly ill). The ingenious aspect to this suggestion, of course, is that one does not qualify for Medicaid until they are dirt poor.

So actually, there are 3 steps to the Republican plan. Step 1: beg. Step 2: lose all your assets trying to pay out of pocket for medical bills. Step 3: after you have lost your car, your house, your retirement fund, and all other savings and assets, file for Medicaid (if you're still alive).

That's their "plan" for how to deal with something that happens to hundreds of citizens every day. In shorthand, their plan reads thusly: "go fuck yourself". Actually, "give all the assets you've saved for your entire life to hospitals and doctors....and then go fuck yourself."

One might ask why the Congress deems it unseemly to offer the American people the health care if gives itself. Yes, the Congress has awarded itself government-secured health care, which provides for any conceivable level of care. Each Congressperson pays about $600 per year for this blanket coverage. And let me put it this way: when a Senator gets cancer, he doesn't lose his insurance.

What can we say about people who would deny every single one of us the very things they grant themselves with our tax dollars? What can we say about lawmakers who refuse to make it illegal to take away a person's "insurance" when they get sick? What can we say about people who think it's okay for a person to lose every single thing they have earned and saved over a lifetime as the just punishment for the sin of getting sick?

I'd call them vultures, but that would be an insult. To vultures. The few, the wretched, the Congress.