Thank God we live in a country where military insubordination ends with catty dishing in Rolling Stone rather than tanks around the White House.
Of all the classical democratic and republican ethics and virtues that our government ignores at will, the separation between the military the the elected leadership has remained surprisingly strong.
The president made the correct decision in firing General McCrystal for his insubordination. And thank God we live in a country where the punishment for insubordination is a golden parachute rather than a lead slug.
For the general to mock the civilian leadership is the most fundamental sin of our system of government. Since the world is not nearly as neat as we would like, the general is often right. But if he undermines the president, he is wrong by definition.
Despite all that, McCrystal's critique doesn't really have a leg to stand on, since he is criticizing the president who embraced McCrystal's military advice of doubling down in Afghanistan. He asked for it. He got it. Then, when it didn't work, he sandbagged it.
But the issue is not McCrystal, who i presume is a very good man. The issue is the policy. My last blog was about the hamster wheel. So is this one, I now realize.
This war is the longest war we've fought in our history. And it won't end until we decide to stop fighting it. We've gotten nowhere. Afghanistan is no better off than it was 9 years ago, and neither are we.
It's just a hamster wheel. But the wheel spins quicker recently, lubricated as it is with blood. American deaths are now approaching Iraq numbers. We're on pace to lose 100 American lives in Afghanistan this month. For what? Can anyone answer that question?
I can. For nothing. For false pride. For an illusion. For the feeling, carried even by Barack Hussein Obama, that war, deep down, is necessary and not altogether bad.
The fundamental gift of Western Civilization (to accompany its many curses) is that it offers the promise of getting off the hamster wheel. Western culture broadly embraced the idea that time and existence is neither cyclical nor pre-ordained; life is not a predetermined and endless hamster wheel, but rather a blank terrain upon which we can plot our own course.
That is a profoundly important gift to humanity. Like so many accomplishments, whether attained by individuals or by entire cultures, it has often ceased to be an inspired gift and instead mutated into an excuse for complacency and arrogance. Nowhere is this more clear than that most western of western civilizations, our United States.
We in the United States habitually congratulate ourselves on our greatness, while often ignoring that it's actually been quite some time since we achieved something great. We congratulate ourselves on the election of 1800 rather than castigating ourselves for the election of 2000.
We are raised from birth to see ourselves as trailblazers, and conscious and consciencious shapers of a better future, but quite often we are blazing nothing at all beyond treadmarks on a hamster wheel. Nowhere is this more clear than in the fields of education and energy.
Education and energy are two idols of American politics. All politicians, regardless of ideological huge, bow at the altar of these twin totems. They endlessly intone upon the importance of each, all the while consigning national policy on both to a hamster wheel.
First, for education. Education is funded locally. This is the first clue that national politicians are being disingenuous when they speak of its importance or when they insist that all children have "equal opportunity" in education.
Here's how education policy consigns us to the hamster wheel rather than the ladder or the open road or however else you would have it: education is funded by local cities and towns.
So, if you live in a poor city or town, the funding for your schools will be very poor.
Accordingly, you will receive a poor education. Then, you will have poor job opportunities, meaning you will get a poor job. With a poor job, you will never have any hope of moving out of your poor neighborhood. And when your poor children are born, they will attend the same poor schools that your poor ass did.
That is a hamster wheel. Millions of children are consigned to poor schools, poor choices, and poor futures simply because they were born in.....a poor neighborhood. Now, you might think that poor neighborhoods would get MORE money for schools. And you'd be wrong.
Conversely, of course, if you are born in a rich neighborhood, you will go to rich schools, giving you rich opportunities to gain a rich job and enable you to remain rich so that your children will go to rich schools.
So even in the country that claims to be classless and based entirely on law and merit, who your parents are is still the single best indicator of where your life will take you.
Now, for energy: we all know that the U.S. uses more oil that any other nation and that an-ever increasing proportion of that oil comes from foreign, often hostile, forces.
And what do we do with our oil? How do we use it? To get more oil. We need to get oil because without oil, how could we get more oil? Hamster wheel much?
The biggest consumer of oil on earth is the U.S. military. What does the military use all that oil for? Well, protecting oil.
In 2002, we bought oil from Iraq to fuel our tanks and planes to invade Iraq so that the oil in Iraq would be secure. Because we needed it for our tanks and planes. Which were now occupying Iraq. Circle of life.
The biggest air force in the world in the U.S. Air Force. The second biggest air force in the world is the U.S. Navy. They both consume reservoirs of oil so that they can protect the dwindling reservoirs of oil remaining.
That is not a policy, it is not a plan, and it is certainly not a path. It is a hamster wheel, and a greasy one at that. If only we had an education system that could teach our children to think through such fundamental contradictions....
Between last week's deadly raid on ships bound to Gaza and Helen Thomas' recent remarks, Israel is once again dominating the headlines. And as usual, most opinions offered betray fundamental ignorance of the matter at hand.
Ms. Thomas' comments that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine and go home" were swiftly and justly condemned. Most of the coverage of the event, however, focused on who would get Ms. Thomas' freshly-vacated seat in the White House press room rather than on the factual and ethical merits of her statement.
Most analyses of Israel, regardless of their speaker or author, fail to acknowledge 2 inescapable facts. Firstly, there was a moral imperative to give Jews a defensible homeland after the Holocaust. Secondly, the Palestinians were punished for the crimes of the Europeans when their homeland was taken from them.
Both of those facts are as true as anything could ever be. Why then are most people incapable of agreeing with both of these facts? Because most people have an agenda, and whatever their preconceived notions may be, they will inevitably ignore one of these two facts.
Israel-haters act as if the Holocaust never happened. Israel-lovers act as if nobody lived in Palestine before 1947.
But the Holocaust did happen. And when Helen Thomas said that Israelis should "go home", she was asked where that home was. The first two words out of her mouth were "Germany" and "Poland".
The picture above gives the reader a glimpse into how the Jews (including women and children) were treated at "home".
Since Germany is where the Holocaust was conceived and Poland is where it was largely carried out, this goes beyond tone-deafness. I would try to come up with an absurdist analogy for such ignorance, but there simply isn't one.
Germany and Poland was indeed home for millions of Jews 70 years ago. But then the Germans and the Poles murdered nearly three-quarters of them. Is that a "home" that a survivor should have pined for in the death camps? Were Jews in Auschwitz thinking, "oh, if I only I could go home to Poland"? No. Because Auschwitz was in Poland.
So the surviving Jews clearly needed a home in which they were not a perpetual minority subjected not just too run-of-the-mill discrimination, but to physical extermination. And here's where it gets messy.
In any just universe, the Jewish homeland would have been carved out of Germany. Or Poland. Or somewhere else where they had lived for centuries. If the Europeans were truly interested in paying their blood-debt, they would have surrendered some of their own territory to the Jews.
But they didn't. Instead, the chose Palestine. Why? Two reasons. Reason the first: the Palestinians had no means to resist. The Europeans took this approach: why pay for our own crimes when we can force a defenseless third party to pay the debt for us? Reason the second: anti-Semitism did not end with the Holocaust, and although the Europeans stopped exterminating Jews, they still, deep down, wanted them gone.
And so Israel was created. "A land without a people for a people without a land", the saying went. A touching sentiment. Except, of course, for the fact that Palestine in 1947 was NOT a land without a people. There were people in Palestine. Specifically, Palestinians.
"Palestinian" is not a race. It is not an ethnic group, although most Palestinians are ethnic Arabs. It simply describes a person who lives in Palestine. It's like saying "Rhode Islander".
When Israel was created, most Palestinians were Arab, but there was a sizable Jewish minority. Even among the Arabs, there were large numbers of Christians. Palestine was very mixed and relatively peaceable. And then came Israel.
It is a matter of fact that hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes into squalid refugee camps for the sin of not being Jewish.
And that is precisely why this issue is so impossible; the Jews cannot be blamed for killing and dying for a defensible homeland in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Palestinian Arabs cannot be blamed for violently resisting the seizure of their lands. The only appropriate blame here belongs to the Europeans.
Yet it is the Europeans, and the Americans, who act holier-than-thou when it comes to this issue. They casually castigate one side or the other, with no reflection upon their own role in creating this disaster.
I doubt that any meaningful peace in Israel / Palestine will be realized in my lifetime. If Jesus didn't live to see it, I doubt I will.
Partly this is the fault of the people who live there. But it is also the fault of people like Helen Thomas and countless others, who indulge the extremists on one side or the other by trafficking in the fantasy that one side or the other should just "get over it" or "go home".
The fact is, both sides are home already. They are the equivalent of two mortal enemies consigned by the gods to live for eternity together in a ten by ten foot cell. And just like prisoners, "going home" is not an option.
The only civilization in the history of the world that has never been entirely subjugated is China. Every other civilization that has ever existed has, at one point or another, been conquered by germs, guns, or steel. Some have re-emerged. Some have not.
But what is it that makes empires fall? Generally speaking, great civilizations fall by devouring themselves. Sometimes they are devoured by their own ideas (Nazi Germany), sometimes they are devoured by their lack of ideas (Soviet Russia), but usually they are devoured by consuming all of their natural resources, in a drawn-out orgy of self-indulgence.
The stone heads of Easter Island are iconic talismans of the ancient past. But the Easter Islands are not like Stonehenge or the Pyramids; something different happened here.
The pyramids and Stonehenge were never "discovered", because people have lived with them since they were built. The Easter Island statues, by contrast, had to be re-discovered, because the civilization that built them disappeared.
How did this happen? The islanders exhausted their most important resource, thereby devouring themselves. What was that resource? Trees.
Needless to say, the islanders were very sophisticated people. If they were able to build the statues, they obviously understood that every time a tree is cut down, the resource it represents is gone until a new tree can be grown in its place.
Despite this, the islanders cut down every last tree on the island. Why? They needed the trees as construction material for their statues.
These statues were obviously profoundly important to the islanders. You can't eat statues, so the islanders clearly placed great value in them. Even to the point where every last tree was sacrificed, this sophisticated civilization just had to have its statues.
And they got their statues. But the price was extinction.
It strikes me that the American empire is on the same course. We can easily look back on the Easter Islanders with disdain, deigning them primitives, savages, incapable of managing their own resources. We look back and say, "how could they have been so stupid?"
But what will people say in 1,000 years of the American Empire, which tied its ankles willingly and knowingly to a resource that everyone knows is utterly non-renewable?
Unlike the islanders' trees, oil cannot be regrown. It is non-renewable. Yet we, "sophisticated" and "civilized" and "rational" as we are, have done just what the Easter islanders did. We just have to have our statues.
Our statues are not quite as aesthetic as those of the islanders; our statues are highways, McDonalds, aircraft carriers, and pesticides.
From 9/11 to the Iraq War to the ongoing oil spew, what recent catastrophe of ours has not been in some way a function of our dependence on oil? Oil brings us these catastrophes when it is plentiful; what hell are we in for when it becomes scarce?
"Respect your elders" is a phrase I always take to heart in my personal life. This adage should apply not just to individuals, but to civilizations. The Easter islanders may seem ridiculous to us now, but at least they got some good sculpture out of their suicide.
