Knowing When to Quit

For all red-blooded Americans of a certain age, there are heroes of cinema which bring us back to our childhood, back to Nintendo, back to VHS, back to acne, back to basketball all day.  Among the characters who trigger instant and intoxicating nostalgia in my generation are Indiana Jones, John J. Rambo, John McClane, and Rocky Balboa.

And props to Sylvester Stallone for creating and personifying two of these four amazing characters.

Really?  This guy?  Yes.  This guy.

These four characters' sagas share something else: they all disappeared from the screen for over a decade and then came back when my generation was having children of their own.  The actors didn't need the work, but they chose to resurrect their characters, surely acknowledging the possibility of diluting their previous glory.

Indiana Jones is one of the most remarkable characters in movie history, as is Han Solo, both played during the same period by Harrison Ford.  Fans could be forgiven for assuming that the Indy saga concluded with The LAST Crusade.  But no.

When Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 2008, 19 years had elapsed since the release of the Last Crusade.  In other words, there were adults who saw the 4th Indiana Jones movie who had not been born when the 3rd Indiana Jones movie came out.

And it was awful.  Really, really awful.  There is a 5th installment in the works and, as a child of the 80's, I am positively thrilled by this.  But I doubt it will improve the overall caliber of the saga, and I fear it may in fact only further degrade it.

John J. Rambo is a much more complex character than many people realize.  The original Rambo trilogy, like the original Indiana Jones trilogy, followed a certain arc.  Also like Indy, John J's character took 20 years off between their 3rd and 4th films.

2008's "Rambo" (just call it Rambo IV, honestly) was not nearly as bad as the 4th Indy installment, but it was just as pointless.  People associate Rambo with violence, and not without reason, but in the first film. First Blood, Rambo killed one person (by accident).  In the 4th installment, he kills hundreds.  And he added nothing to his character's arc in the process.

John McClane had a 12 year hiatus between the 3rd and 4th installments of Die Hard.  The 4th film was actually quite good in certain ways.  But also, McClane went from a vulnerable, actual person to someone who literally drove a semi-trailer into a fighter jet.  So.....yeah. 

Overall, however, Die Hard 4 did not detract from the franchise.  But then this happened...

This requires no explanation; it was as bad as it looks

So far, we've covered Indiana Jones, Rambo, and Die Hard.  While I love these characters and will gladly and greedily consume any further movies with any of them, none of these sagas were made better by their additions following more than a decade of dormancy.

Now, for the exception.  Rocky Balboa is the only one of these characters whose latest iterations have added to the character and to the story.  The 6th and 7th installments of the Rocky saga are tremendous.  In these movies, Rocky is.....old.  Sick.  Slowing down.  Pondering mortality.  You know, real life.

He's not driving trucks into jets, he's not surviving nuclear bombs by climbing into a fridge, he's not unloading automatic weapons.  He's a person.  It's real.  It's devastating.  And it's fantastic.

The 6th installment came out 16 years after the 5th.

The 7th installment came out 9 years after the 6th, and at least one more is in the works.  He's not rushing it.  He's not relying on special effects.  He's following the actual moral arc of a character he created 40 years ago, and it is remarkable to behold.

There's such a thing as knowing when to quit.  Luckily for us, Rocky knows when not to quit.

To Invade, Or To Invite (Part II)

 
To invade, or to invite?  If the reader has not read the first half of this post, you can do so below.

The United States has committed grievous sins against the Muslim, specifically Arab, nations over the past two decades.  The only reason we need to consider inviting these people is because we've invaded these people.

The American government, media, and public have a disgusting relationship with this reality, bred through ignorance, evil, or an admixture of the two, which essentially denies our direct responsibility for military actions, whether overt or covert, which have led to the death of well over 1 million Muslims, the displacement and dispossession of millions more, and the undying hatred of tens of millions more.

In the first part of this post I attempted to illustrate a few (among many) examples of how invading Muslims leads to death, debt, and a surrendering of any pretense of moral virtue on our behalf.  Put simply: we borrow money our grand-kids will have to pay back in order to kill people who didn't attack us, and then we deny that we did any such thing.

The other side of this amoral coin is inviting.  Invading and inviting.  We kill people who did not harm us, we destroy their societies, then we invite their wretched and starving and bitter neighbors into our country.  And, just as we deny that we attacked them, we deny that they could possibly dislike us, or even have different values than us.

Muslim civilization is NOT the same as Western Civilization.  I'm starting small here.  Muslims from Muslim majority countries do NOT come from the same civilization as people from America and Europe do.  To deny the difference between civilizations is as intellectually idiotic as denying the difference between Barbecue and Sushi. 

Where most people start getting uncomfortable is when the question arises that asks if the differences between culture can be qualified.  In other words, if two cultures are different, can we then say that one is better than the other?

The purpose of this post is not to answer that question, but to illustrate the danger in denying that differences even exist, even if we refuse to assign different moral values to the different things in question.

Here is what Western Civilization is based on in brief:  rule of law, separation of church and state, limits on the power of the government, legal equality for all minorities.  The West does not do these things perfectly, because the West is run by people and people are not perfect.  

But Plato, one of the founders of Western thought, in the Platonic Ideals, tell us that we need to recognize that perfection is impossible while simultaneously recognizing that not trying to get just a little bit closer to perfection every day is to waste your life entirely.

The West is not perfect, but it has crawled slowly, painfully, bloodily, so bloodily, towards an ideal.  The Muslim world is, by and large, not on that trajectory.  There is no separation of religion and state in mainstream Islamic theology and politics.

Here we have police beating women for being dressed "immodestly".  This was filmed, of course, in New York....or not.

The state of women in the Islamic world is miserable.  The state of ethnic minorities in Muslim nations is deplorable.  The state of Jews in the Muslim world is...well, there aren't any.  But there are Muslims in Israel.  The state of gays in the Muslim world is to be seconds from death at any moment.  I could go on.

This does not mean that most Muslims are bad people.  They simply come from a different culture with different values.  The question at hand is: if we invite people from a very, very different culture into our country, will those people adopt our values, or will they act on the values from their home countries?

Tolerance is great, but tolerating in-tolerance is suicide, especially for minority groups.  Let me be super-blunt: if you are gay, or female, or Jewish, or Christian, or atheist (these groups account for about 98% of the U.S. population), you would be in mortal danger in most Muslims nations if you tried to live the life you take for granted in the United State.

This question, and this tension, is as old as the republic itself.  What types of people can the United States absorb and still be the United States?  Earlier waves of immigrants and refugees were eyed with suspicion, apathy, or outright hatred.

But for most of this country's history, immigrants were from cultures and countries far, far more similar to the United States than 21st century migrants, refugees, and immigrants from the Muslim world.

And, and this is no small point, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Mexico were not coming from the very countries that the United States had been invading and destabilizing.

Vito Corleone came to Ellis Island fleeing Sicilian crime in Sicily, not American drone strikes in Sicily.  There's a difference.

We can take the moral leap of welcoming radically different people into our society as an act of mercy and altruism.  OR we can take a much smaller moral hop of STOP KILLING MUSLIMS AND DRIVING THEM OUT OF THEIR HOMES AND INTO OURS. 

To Invade or to Invite? (Part 1)

The American relationship with the Muslim World is at once cynical and naive, simultaneously culpable and ignorant, defined from every angle as an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge obvious truths about the immorality of invading peoples' home and the absurdity of inviting them into ours.

So, to invade, or to invite?  In my opinion, we should do neither.  As a statement of unfortunate fact, we are doing both.  This is immoral and stupid.  Were we immoral without also being stupid, we would pick one or the other.  But, since our policy is both immoral and stupid, we find ourselves doing both.

First things first: what is the cost of invading Muslim nations?

The first Gulf War of 1991, fought to redeem and restore a disgusting, anti-Semitic, medieval family to the throne of an artificial nation created 30 years before as essentially a naval refueling station for the West, killed 150,000 people in 6 weeks.  All for Kuwait.

Because what kind of world would it be without this guy?

The ruling family of Kuwait thanked us for our efforts by carrying out ethnic cleansing, expelling the tens of thousands of Palestinians living and working in their country.  And we thanked ourselves by building what were meant to be permanent U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, the holiest land for Muslims.  

Many Muslims were not impressed by the persecution of the Palestinians or the stationing of American soldiers in Arabia.  One Muslim who wrote and spoke about this event extensively in the 1990's comes to mind....

What could go wrong?

After the 1991 war, the United States enforced sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children. Children.  The U.S. did not dispute this fact; instead Bill Clinton's Secretary of State solemnly informed us:

Not big into that whole "conscience" thing, huh?

This is the woman who said that any woman who did not support Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 deserved a "special place in hell".  Way to keep things in perspective, Masters of the Universe!

The 2003 invasion of Iraq led to the death, by decade's end, of one million Iraqis.  But it was all for a good cause, right?  We had to invade Iraq because...oh honestly, fuck it, I can't even pretend to make light of this anymore.

So we switched Presidents in 2009 and got a man who didn't believe in "stupid" wars.  A man who was judicious by nature and who would never overthrow a government he found distasteful because of the sober realization that what replaces such governments is usually much more dangerous.

Ah yes, No Drama Obama would surely spare us any more of this nonsense, for practical reasons if not moral ones.  Yeah, no.

"Hey, nice to meet you.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go borrow some money from China and use it to destroy your
country."

Libya was one of the safest, most prosperous Muslim nations with perhaps the highest degree of respect for and mobility of women.  And now?

The above picture needs no caption; we all know the drill by now.  Christians used to thrive in Libya. Now they are beheaded as the satanic thugs in black gaze across the Mediterranean towards Europe, licking their chops.

When America goes to war, most of our country treats it as a TV show.  It is not.  It is death.  That's all war is.  There's nothing heroic or romantic about it.  It is the ripping apart of human beings, the evisceration of men, children, grandmothers, and everything else.  It is 4 year old boys with their intestines spilling out of their stomach because a cluster bomb exploded too close to their house.  It is the father watching his child die, unable to do anything but swear revenge.

When the United States goes to war, what we are doing is killing people.  Thousands upon thousands of people, most of them entirely innocent.  Even the "guilty" ones are usually "guilty" of nothing other than what most people would do in such situations: defending their homes from invaders.

We need to grow up as a nation.  We need to understand the inherent immorality of war.  We need to stop the narcissistic nonsense that tells that people will "welcome" us if we invade their homes.  We need to develop some sort of consensus that civilized people are supposed to have almost without thinking about it:  killing is wrong.  It may occasionally be necessary, but it's always wrong.  And it always has consequences.

American interventions in the Middle East have not only killed literally millions of people in my lifetime; they have also forced millions more out of their homes.  Those broken and brutalized people are fleeing their homelands.  Before we can assess where they should go, we need to be honest about why they are leaving.

Godspeed, John Glenn

President Kennedy in the rear seat of an open limousine, What Could Go Wrong?

The death of John Glenn makes perfect sense in 2016.  There were few men like him left, men of a simpler time (which is not to say a better time) of clear-cut narratives of American greatness, the brand of greatness that had nothing to do with promising to build rape-proof walls across the desert.

John Glenn was not the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) or the first man to orbit the earth (Gagarin again).  Nor was he even the first American in space (Alan Shepard) or the second American in space (Gus Grissom).  He was the first American to orbit the earth.

The enterprise which Kennedy set forth and which Glenn pioneered was an audacious human endeavor, and uniquely American.  We promised to achieve something (landing on the moon) for which there was no existing technology, no mental framework, no consensus among experts that the thing was even theoretically possible (what if the lunar surface were covered by a layer of dust that would swallow up any landing craft?)

But the goal was set, and it was set very publicly, ensuring either outright triumph or total humiliation. 

Why would someone strap themselves into a can with less legroom than a compact car and then strap that can on top of a missile and then fire that missile into the atmosphere?  Because that's what it means to be human; you do it because you can conceive it. 

If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that we would indeed reach the moon by 1969, they would be capable of believing that.

If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that Fidel Castro would live for another 54 years, they would not have been capable of believing that.

If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that in 1972 America would abandon the moon and eventually stop even orbiting the earth, they would have been incredulous.

Annnnnnnd we're done here.

In the 1990's John Glenn returned to space on the now-defunct Space Shuttle.  This flight is as fitting a symbol of the demise of the American space program as Glenn's first flight was a symbol of its ascension.

What was the point of that Space Shuttle mission?  Or of any Space Shuttle mission?  To fly around in circles in Low Earth Orbit.  And that's cool, but...

Wait, didn't I already do this?

The Space Shuttle program flew well over 100 missions to nowhere.  It surely made important scientific observations and breakthroughs.  The launch and subsequent repair and improval of the Hubble Space Telescope was surely its most important accomplishment.

Where's that 5/8 wrench?

Why are we not spending more money on this???

But the uncomfortable and inconvenient question surrounding most Shuttle missions, including the two that killed all astronauts on board, was "why is this worth risking human life?".  There was no clear answer to that question.

Just as America's wars during Glenn's life became harder to explain, justify, or identify an ultimate goal, the space program did the same.

When Glenn was young, there was consensus on certain things that has been lost.  Some would argue that we are better off without that consensus, and perhaps we are.  But there is also a clarity of purpose that has been lost.  As Kennedy's contemporaries continue to shuffle off the mortal coil, we are left with that age-old question: is there really any such thing as the "good old days"?