The Cold War was fueled by Russian paranoia and American ignorance. Russia was rightly paranoid, having lost 30 million citizens in a war against a former western ally. America was inevitably ignorant, having the great gift of World War II being fought everywhere in the World except the Americas.
To put 30 million Russian dead in perspective, it is 100 times as many Americans that died fighting the same Nazi enemy. It is 30 times as many Americans than have died in all of America's wars from 1776-2011. Combined.
The Russians were paranoid because they knew that 30 million people could be killed in war; after all, it had already happened once. The Americans were ignorant to that possibility, never mind that reality, because they had thankfully never endured it.
Robert McNamara was the architect of many Cold War policies. Like most powerful Americans of his day, he serially misunderstood our rivals, to the point where potential allies instead became blood enemies. The Russians. The Chinese. The Cubans. The Vietnamese.
Each of these adversaries simply refused to behave "rationally" or "American", thereby confounding the "best and the brightest" among us.
The Fog of War is one of the best documentaries ever made, to put it simply. In it, the octogenarian McNamara looks back at his career and makes stunningly honest assessments of his own conduct. At the end of his life, McNamara made profound admissions of that universal truth that life is lived forwards and understood backwards.
Examples of McNamara's late-found honesty: "I behaved as a war criminal" "What makes something immoral if you lose, but not immoral if you win?" Both of those thoughts were spoken by McNamara regarding his role in planning the saturation bombing of Japanese cities in World War II.
Unfortunately, the humility and wisdom of these quotes came to McNamara in his 70's and 80's rather than in his 30's or 40's or 50's. For those interim decades, McNamara persisted in his inability to walk in any other man's moccasins.
I came across a beautifully written anecdote that articulates this blindness perfectly and is worth quoting at length:
McNamara has just been told by a subordinate that the Soviet Union was not following what McNamara considered the "logical" strategy regarding nuclear weapons.
"That was too much. McNamara ripped the pointer from Foster's hands and slammed it against the charts. 'No, no, no!' he shouted, coloring dangerously. 'As a Red marshal, I'm going to put them all on the cities!' "
"A stunned silence followed, in which no one said, 'Well, Mr. Secretary, but you're not a Red marshal.' To McNamara, nuclear war was the end of his world, to be treated with fitting millenarianism."
"To real Red marshals--Sokolovsky, Malinovsky, and others--who had fought from Stalingrad to Berlin against the best army in the world, twenty million to forty million dead was an experienced historical fact."
"This did not make them aggressive. It might indeed give them second thoughts. But it did make them grimly confident of enduring in ways that the civilized secretary was fortunate in not being able to imagine."
When powerful men lack imagination, the unimaginable is often just the push of a button away.
America is an exceptional country. The root of "exceptional" is "except". For example: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States can a mentally ill person buy an automatic handgun with an extended clip without breaking a single law.
Here's another: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States would society blame the freedom of speech for massacres committed with legally purchased guns.
The massacre in Tucson drew forth the inevitable platitudes, the appropriately somber faces, the childish gestures masquerading as introspection. The general lesson learned by the people in power has been that we should be more polite to each other.
A mentally ill manchild shoots 20 people in 30 seconds with a legally purchased gun, and the response of our "leaders" is that if only cable news hosts weren't so animated, this might not have happened.
The idea that words cause gun massacres is one of the most profound abdications of common sense I have ever witnessed. The most passing and glancing knowledge of human nature, which most people attain by the age of 12, tells us that occasional and sometimes violent disagreements are the price of admission to the human species.
People fight. People get drunk. People make bad decisions. It takes 1 second to pull a trigger. I takes a trillion years to atone for that.
Any honest person will think of the moment they've been the most angry. That one point in your life (or maybe there have been several) when you were just ready to KILL a motherfucker. Think of that moment. And then think where your life would be right now if you had been holding a gun in that moment.
And you don't have to be a bad person to have had that thought; it's simply human nature. We all get there from time to time.
Sometimes, the words of others can stir these violent and vengeful feelings. But in no other nation EXCEPT the United States can an angry man safely and surely secure a gun.
Our problem in this nation is not that we are free to say inflammatory things on television. Our problem is that we insist that our constitutionally-given freedom to bear arms is as sacrosanct as our God-given freedom of speech. And that is simply psychotic.
Speech is impossible to regulate, and only a human-hating and God-hating tyrant would even attempt to do so. Guns, on the other hand, are made by people. As such, people can regulate them. And all people do. EXCEPT Americans.
Americans, apparently, would rather blame God for their own sins. They won't blame their guns. So they blame their tongues.
I work the dream. I work in an "integrated school", an institution which was at the core of the Civil Rights movement. The sad truth, however, is that when integration was forced upon America, whites fled for the suburbs.
"White Flight" is the crude anthropological term for this phenomenon. The end result is that schools are still segregated, by fact rather than law, de facto rather than de jure. But the truly fascinating thing for me to witness is the dominance of the N word in schools that are less than 5% white.
I hear the N word at least 100 times per day at school. Not 2, not 30, at LEAST 100. Every day. This word NEVER escapes the lips of a white person. There are very few white people in the school, and most of them are teachers.
The N word is the most common verbal currency in my school. It is simply how the huge majority of students refer to each other. They don't call each other by their names; everyone is simply "nigga".
And it's a flexible word. It means friend, enemy, stranger, and everything else. It is used by all types of students. Including the handful of white ones. I went through the looking glass of race this week when I first heard a white student refer to a black student as nigga in a conversation with him.
They were discussing the particulars of a fight that had occurred earlier in the day. and Lo, the white boy said to the black boy, "nigga, you're crazy". And there was no pause, no drama, no reaction, nothing. The pointless conversation simply continued.
It occurred to me that this was either very good news or very bad news. The most charitable explanation would be that our society is so non-racist, indeed so post-racial, that the ugliest slur of racism is used casually as an ironic dispersion of our hateful ancestors.
But the less charitable explanation, which I fear is closer to the truth, is that the inextricable tentacles of hatred and self-hatred that are wrapped up in the N word have simply expanded to other races.
The good news is that the N word is no longer uttered by white men to black men. The bad news is that it is instead used casually by an multi-ethnic underclass that is as large a disgrace to King's dream as the original sin of this nation.
Sometimes it takes a 9 year old to make profound observations. While teaching Roman numerals to a group of 4th graders last month, we made a great discovery: the Romans didn't have much of an imagination.
While we were going through the ascending numerals, we ran into a wall. I, V, X, L, C, D, M.....and there it ends. So when a child asked me, "Mister, whats the Roman numeral for a million?" I realized that there was none. The Romans lived in a world of limits.
Being a huge nerd, I was much more excited about this discovery than the children, but it got me to thinking about worldviews. The Romans were the most advanced (which is not to say they weren't also barbaric) and forward-looking culture the world had seen.
They built, they conquered, they destroyed over unheard-of distances. They amassed unheard-of amounts of wealth, wrote countless words and documents, killed untold numbers of people, and dragged the world out of ancient times. The Roman eagle atop American flagpoles testifies to their lasting impact.
But they could not imagine a number over a thousand. There was no million. As big and as rich as their empire was, there was no concept of a million miles or a millionaire. As relatively advanced as they were in math, science, and history, there was no concept of a million tons or a million years.
M was the limit. Everything, absolutely everything, could be expressed in numbers no greater than one or two thousand. Even to write 10,000 in Roman numerals would be the clumsy and inelegant MMMMMMMMMM. If such a concept as a million existed, it would require writing M one thousand times.
It is one of the many ironies of history that civilization advanced as far as it did within such a limited and circumscribed worldview. Even a great empire, a great builder, a great killer of prophets, and a great shaper of modernity had its limits. And the limit was surprisingly low.
The United States' relationship with the nations to our South has long fascinated me. By using "America" as the universal shorthand name of our nation, we make clear how insignificant we consider the 20 nations to our south, each of which could just as easily be called "America".
America is not a country; it is a hemisphere. The United States is largely a legacy of England. France's legacy in the new world has been relegated to Quebec and isolated parts of Louisiana. Portugal's legacy lies in the rising behemoth of Brazil. But Spain's legacy in the new world dwarfs that of England, France, or Portugal. And it is growing.
It was the king and queen of Spain, after all, who financed and sponsored the European discovery of the New World. And while England founded what would become the dominant nation in the Americas (and eventually, the World), it is Spain's influence which runs deeper and wider.
Spain and England both have obvious linguistic legacies in the Western Hemisphere. Most people on our half of the world speak either Spanish or English (or both). But Spain's legacy runs deeper, and it is uniquely "American".
The tragedy of the "discovery" of the Americas was the near-extinction of Native Americans, which was accomplished by germs far more often than by guns. But in the Spanish sphere of the Americas, unlike in the English sphere, the Native Americans survived in a sense.
Most Spanish speakers in the Americas today are descendants of the offspring of European Spaniards and Native Americans, which is why most of them are not "white". Most English speakers, on the other hand, are "white".
In North America, there was relatively little mixing between Europeans and Native Americans. So when Native Americans died, they disappeared. But in the central and southern parts of the hemisphere, there was mass mixing between the cultures.
So today, in the United States, 70% of the students in my classrooms have the complexion of Native Americans and speak Spanish as a first language. There simply is no equivalent in the English spheres. Most of my Spanish-speaking students are from the Dominican Republic, on the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus landed on Spanish ships in 1492.
500 years on, it appears that the Americas are, linguistically and ethnically, far more Spanish and Native American than they are English. As time passes and demographics inexorably create a "new" reality, the Americas will be dominated by the (diluted) blood of the natives and the language of the original conquerors.
People who have a deep-seeded and passionate feeling against homosexuality will inevitable reference the Bible as the justification for their prejudice. More specifically, they cite the book of Deuteronomy, a book of codes of conduct that makes the reader want to claw his eyes out.
To use Deuteronomy to justify homophobia requires keyhole vision, since the issue of homosexuality is just one of many issues covered in Deuteronomy. Most of the other codes have to do with dietary laws, hygiene, clothing, and so forth.
The ban on homosexuality is always spoken of in isolation, because to put it into the context it was actually written in makes its ridiculousness tangible and palpable. Here are some of the jewels that are also in Deuteronomy:
If a woman enters the home while menstruating, the house must be burnt down. If a person wears clothing made of 2 types of cloth, that person must be put to death. If a person digs a hole on the Sabbath, that person will be put to death. And on and on and on.
The Bill of Rights was passed into law 219 years ago today. And just like the Old Testament, it is subjected to a keyhole vision by fanatics and idiots. The Bill of Rights is infinitely more just, humane, and relevant than the Old Testament, of course, but both are used for similar ends by similar people.
The equivalent to the homosexuality ban in the Bible is the 2nd amendment to the Constitution.
The 2nd amendment guarantees protection for a "well regulated militia". For some people, this means protection for "individuals to own handguns and assault rifles". To suggest that this code was written for a world that no longer exists is a conversation stopper in the circles of power.
If there is ONE issue that is destroying our society, it is guns. All societies have young men. All rich societies have young men with penises, alcohol, and cars. But our society alone insists on allowing guns into this equation of youth, testosterone, and recklessness that is universal among young men.
And because we insist upon our citizens having the "freedom" to buy guns, we murder 20,000 of each other each year, while less "free" countries are not free to kill each other. In this country, we slaughter each other and jealously protect our "freedom" to do so.
How out of context is this insanity? Just like Deuteronomy, context is key. With all the obsession about the 2nd amendment, we would do well to ask ourselves, "what is the 3rd amendment?"
Here it is: "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house". When was the last time this was relevant? Around the same time the 2nd amendment was, I would argue.
When was the last time a "well-regulated militia" protected the United States from foreign invasion or a tyrannical government? When was the last time the government forced citizens to let soldiers live in their houses? When was the last time you burned down a house because a woman menstruated in it?
Nobody talks about repealing the 3rd amendment. Instead, we just did what we should do with the 2nd amendment: let it drift into irrelevance and die an ignored death.
The above photo is of Harry Truman during World War I. 30 years later, Truman was president, due entirely to the fact that FDR seemed to have thought himself immortal. When Truman was thrust into the presidency, he became the most awful and awesome warlord the world had ever seen, ordering cities full of human beings to be annihilated with nuclear weapons.
But when that war was over, Truman did something else. He ordered the American military to end racial segregation in its ranks. Prior to this decision, which was made after World War II but at the height of the Cold War, blacks in the military were cooks. After this decision, they became generals.
Before Truman used the power of the presidency to force integration in the military, he commissioned a study. The (white) army was interviewed, and fully 80% of America's soldiers declared that they would not serve with black Americans. The army that had just crushed Japan and Hitler was polled, and their answer was "no niggers".
Truman's response (and Truman was definately a racist by modern standards) was "too bad". He ordered integration in the face of the prevailing sentiment.
In 1948, black men were integrated into the American military. 60 years later, a black man was elected Commander in Chief. And now that man is confronted with the issue of gays in the military.
Like in Truman's time vis a vis blacks, there was a study of the military's attitude towards integrating gays. Unlike the survey regarding blacks, the survey regarding gays met with far more tolerance from the soldiers polled. This time, the majority of soldiers said they had no problem serving with open homosexuals.
Sixty years ago, the majority of our soldiers declared themselves bigots, and our President told them to get over it. Today, the majority of our soldiers declare themselves tolerant, and our President still hesitates.
Our president would do well to consider where he would be today if his predecessor had not been willing to unapologetically spit in the face of bigots.
The Cold War was fueled by Russian paranoia and American ignorance. Russia was rightly paranoid, having lost 30 million citizens in a war against a former western ally. America was inevitably ignorant, having the great gift of World War II being fought everywhere in the World except the Americas.
