Who Controls Our Guns

Splinters

Who Controls Our Guns

Ready on the left; Ready on the right

Ready on the firing line

Three hundred million in the light

Sights glistening all the time

Recall that guns don’t kill; but people do

Soldiers, cops, and now, you too

Can start a flood of red

And kill them all except the dead

While knowing you have amendment rights

To keep your neighbor in your sights

And snuff his life in any season

For damn near any reason

             

            As I started my research on this issue of gun control, I quickly learned that “gun control” is an oxymoron in these United States.  I will provide some detail to support that assertion, but there is no realistic way to control the estimated 310 million guns within our borders.  Despite exaggerated claims that President Obama was determined to confiscate weapons, no guns have been confiscated and the proliferation of firearms has accelerated beyond human logic.  Despite highly publicized mass killings and voluntary “buy-back” programs, the number of gun deaths grows despite higher gun prices and negative publicity.  There seems to be a uniquely American love affair with firearms.  Deaths by firearms in our nation exceed 30,000 per year.  In 2014, the number of automobile deaths exceeded those from firearms by a few thousand with 35, 543 to 32, 351 for firearms.  In 2011, there were 14 states where gun deaths exceeded motor vehicle deaths.  The National Traffic Safety Board has actually reduced automobile deaths by several thousand annually by focusing on safety in design and construction of autos.  The auto is designed for transportation.  The firearm is designed to kill.  We cannot design safety into an item meant to kill.  People speak of a mechanical safety or storage security, but if your design to kill works, it kills or injures people and animals. 

Intuitively, we understand that proliferation of automobiles will result in more death and injury.  It simply makes sense that the more autos there are on the road, the greater the chance for serious collisions.  Wayne La Pierre of the NRA, on the other hand, spouts that it is bad guys that kill with guns and that all you need to prevent death by a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun (to kill him before he kills you?). In Wayne’s world, the number of guns is immaterial.  Now, that was easy.  Oh wait, Wayne did not tell us how to do that!  Are we to have designated shooters like we have designated drivers?  Maybe we need the old fashioned posse to hunt down potential shooters.  Maybe Zimmerman of Florida could be a posse leader and we could use NSA data and replace the 4^th Constitutional Amendment with the 2^nd.  There is yet a further irony in the La Pierre position.  It is flatly against 74% of NRA members who approve of some form of gun control (e.g., closing the gun show loophole).  In other words, Wayne is able to tell NRA members that they are wrong and that any control is bad control.  It is amazing that so many NRA members could be so wrong.  But then, does Wayne support members or gun manufacturers or does he simply support Wayne La Pierre?

            Thirty percent of firearm sales occur at gun shows.  There is no requirement to use background checks at gun shows.  Perhaps they would impede commerce?  Maybe this is where we could find some of the bad guys that Wayne says cause the death problem.  If we applied Wayne’s logic to prescription drug sales and we had prescription drug shows, would we feel the same about 30% of those sales being essentially unregulated regarding background checks?  To show how ubiquitous guns are, allow me to offer a bit of trivia.  The Iver Johnson Arms and cycle works was once headquartered in the bustling metropolis of Fitchburg, MA (now about 40,000 souls).  Both President McKinley and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy were assassinated by Iver Johnson pistols.  It was a small company.  We frequently invited the president and owner of Iver Johnson, Luther M. Otto III and his wife Priscilla, to dinner and he simply loved my mother’s cooking, especially a typical Italian (four meat) pasta dinner and her unbelievable pastry.  Luther went hunting with my dad and seemed affable enough.  I would assume that most of the other gun manufacturers could be similarly described and while they may covet profit, they do not seem to be lusting for blood.  My guess is that if told that the rules had changed for safety, the manufacturers would adjust to the change and not seek sales of assault weapons for ordinary citizens.  Luther Otto used a Beretta over-and-under shotgun for bird hunting although Iver Johnson also manufactured “over and unders.”  He never used an assault weapon for hunting, even for deer.  Assault weapons are inherently designed for killing people in numbers.  In my Army career, I got physical with a soldier only when assault weapons were involved.  In two cases, the soldier ignored all safety rules and turned the weapon back toward fellow soldiers.  In one case, I simultaneously took the loaded assault rifle from the soldier and knocked him to the ground.  In the other, I grabbed a 40mm grenade launcher while striking the soldier to avoid accidental discharge.  That is not prudent in most cases where an assailant has a loaded military assault weapon, despite Wayne La Pierre.  It was my job to disarm these soldiers, but that is not the case in schools, theaters and churches as we witness in recent times.  We need something more universal and less risky to keep people safe in more ordinary and likely situations.

            We like to think that these United States are populated with advanced and rational people, but when we compare ourselves in firearm deaths to other developed nations, the results are disappointing.  According to Wikipedia, we are nowhere near Sweden, Germany, Israel or Ukraine or even Switzerland that has wide distribution of weapons.  We are a little worse than Paraguay and Nicaragua and only slightly better than Mexico that kills 11+ per 100,000 compared to our 10+ per 100,000.  Humanosphere noted that the US has a firearm homicide rate 6.6 times that of Portugal, which is the highest in Europe.

            Back in 2012, Igor Volsky, based on a Republican poll by Frank Luntz, wrote that, although there was a difference between NRA members and non-members, that the following was true of NRA members:  1).  74% supported background checks on gun owners and gun shop employees; 2).  71% supported prohibiting terrorist watch list members from acquiring guns;  3). 64% wanted gun owners to tell police when a gun is stolen;  4).  74% wanted concealed carry permits restricted to owners having completed a gun safety course;  5).  Concealed carry permits should not be given to perpetrators of violent misdemeanors  81% and/or domestic violence 78%.  Non-member numbers were higher except in cases of previous violence or domestic abuse restrictions.

            Given the near unanimous support for some forms of gun control, we need to ask why our nation has been spectacularly unable to implement any significant change.  The answer is both simple and complex.  The simple and unrefined answer is “money.”  When we follow the money, things get more complicated.  The cycle of dues and other payments to the NRA and affiliates continues on in payments to Congress.  For 2014, there was $984,000 spent by organizations for the NRA.  As for lobbying Congress; 18 of 35 assigned that NRA lobbying duty formerly held government jobs.  Outside spending amounted to over $28 million with only $36,001 spent for Democrats and only $92,034 against Republicans.  Much of their election candidate investment ($11,053,416) went for Republican candidates, but the largest single outlay was about $16 million against Democrats (negative ads seem preferred by the NRA).  Most NRA contributions to legislators slid under the FBI $10,000 reporting requirement with the favored legislators getting $9,900 each from NRA organizations and larger donations made to strictly Republican committees.  All these data were duly reported to and later released by the FEC, IRS and Senate Office of Public Records.  Here, we see that the members of the NRA may, at times, act against their own interests in order to support the goal of protecting the 2^nd Amendment.  The NRA leaders, despite their irritating methods, are skilled at turning a phrase by blaming the victims or stirring emotions to defend the 2^nd Amendment whether it is actually at risk or not.  They are able to make it appear that it is under attack, mostly by liberals and not conservatives.  I have no feeling that being emotional in return will change anything except the volume of the discussion.  Surely, after Columbine and Sandy Hook, we have learned that emotions created no changes and little could be more dramatic and emotional than attacking school children.  Firearms manufacturers want to sell weapons.  Politicians want to be elected and money is “free” speech.  We could ratchet up the spending for liberals or against conservatives, but that would certainly cause a similar reaction by NRA leaders.  We could increase our invective against those leaders, but surely would face a defensive reaction of NRA members that might make things worse.  Logic might help, but, by itself, is unlikely to move many people.

            Although there is no guarantee that any one approach will achieve success, there is intuitive support for sequencing a combination of actions that will move us to increase that probability.  If we begin with a campaign that poses no immediate threat to the special interests of the gun industry or to the members of the NRA, perhaps there could be a grass roots call for serious country-wide discussions of ONE item, for example, a demand for background checks at gun shows or, perhaps, restricting (not banning) assault weapons so that all collectors would permitted to own and use those weapons under rational controls.  We need to keep assault weapons from the mentally ill and from men of ill will.  We need a national tracking system.  We can underwrite larger turn-in programs, perhaps using public monies as incentives.  Perhaps if we made it easy to track weapons, some people might get upset, but a pilot program could easily demonstrate that tracking is not equivalent to confiscation.  People need to report lost or stolen weapons.  If we created an iron-clad policy of no-questions-asked reporting (as in turn-ins), we might make a small dent in the large problem of gun proliferation.  I would leave it to more experienced negotiators to select an option that is measurable and that will encourage gun owners and the nation at large.  We meanwhile need to openly and frequently report on the national health issue of gun violence so that we understand that it is a daily problem and not only a mass murder issue. We need to remind NRA members that we are in wide agreement on many control issues and we need to put money on the constant drum-beat of our specific agreements.  The Supremes in black robes have made it clear that money is speech.  We all need to make gun control a priority in fund drives and local programs so that we attain the awareness and the mechanisms to reduce gun violence, if not to the level of the UK, then perhaps to the level of Portugal.  Thirty-two thousand Americans die from gun violence each year.  Let us select a goal to reduce that by implementing the best ideas of our citizens including NRA members who have already shown an interest.  We could try to incentivize gun manufacturers as we once did farmers to slow production.  Each of us could think of ways to work on the numbers and while we do, it seems reckless to have no end to adding guns to the market.   This will not be easy and many factors work against our success including the very recommendation to keep the public health issue publicized.  Fear is a powerful motivator and it sells guns even better than the NRA.  Success will be slow, but if we have chosen valid measures, we can stay on track.

           

Peace,

George Giacoppe

25 June 2015

Deep Violence

My thoughts on violence have been prompted by recent news items and books I’ve been reading, plus some longstanding thoughts on the nature of human violence and/or non-violence. To begin with, the ‘great’ Dominique Straus-Kahn was just last week revealed to have been an active participant, while he was head of the IMF, in orgies that would have pleased Caligula. Not only were prostitutes routinely involved, not only were no condoms used, but Straus-Kahn himself, as his encounter with a chambermaid in New York made plain, was distinguished mainly by his sadism. It apparently isn’t only wild or frequent sex that tickles Straus-Kahn, but “rough trade” as it is called. He gets off forcing women, violating women, humiliating women.

            Then of course, there are the recurrent stories of ISIS and their apparent addiction to violence above and beyond the call of duty, especially their by-now notorious public beheadings. It is not enough that the leaders of ISIS indulge in public killings of prisoners and all those caught in the net of their successful invasions; they have apparently decided that videotaped beheadings with a sword both add to the fear with which they are perceived, and to the reputation that attracts supporters and fighters. And what this, in turn, indicates is that while most of us assume that such viciousness would turn people off, the opposite may be the case. Indicating how violent you are seems to stimulate the affiliative gland.

            And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this. The United States, after all, has the reputation throughout the world of being the most violent nation of all. Our citizens are armed to the teeth, possessing some 300 million firearms according to most counts. Our foreign policy has been one of almost continuous violence, not just in the big wars like WWI and WWII and Vietnam and Iraq, but also in smaller wars like those in Iran, and Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and Panama, and Chile and Cuba and Korea and just about every area of the planet. And our weapons have also been state of the art, featuring the biggest bombs (we’re the only nation ever to use atomic weapons), the fastest planes and ships and vehicles, the most lethal and destructive weapons. The result of all this “policing” has been almost universal admiration. Everyone wants to come to America (or so we are told), everyone wants to be American, everyone wants to be on the business end of the killing (not to mention being in the corporate business of killing), especially now that we have weapons like drones that virtually insulate our young killers from any danger on the battlefield.

            So while some of us may imagine that we humans have turned the corner on violence (cf. Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of our Nature), it appears that the aggressive impulses of humans are quite alive and quite well, thank you. Nature seems to thrive on violence, and humans, like all other animals, have evolved to depend on violent impulses that flare quickly and lethally whenever there is a perceived threat. And this is something that most of us can understand: threats to one’s well-being, to one’s life come often in daily affairs, and the rapid, violent response often seems the only way to fend them off. To survive. These responses may be tamped down in civilized settings where violence becomes the sole prerogative of the state, but they are never fully lost. Evolution takes much longer to change than the few years that violence and killing have ceased to be everyday occurrences (and Jared Diamond assures us, in The World Until Yesterday, that in New Guinea and other primary societies, this truly has been only a very few years).

            What is really at issue here, though, is the kind of gratuitous violence mentioned above, and highlighted in Richard Flanagan’s brilliant novel about WWII POWs, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The novel’s hero is a Tasmanian doctor, Dorrigo Evans, who is part of a crew of Australian POWs forced by their Japanese captors to help build the notorious 285-mile Bangkok-to-Rangoon railroad. The Aussies’ section of the rail line—which would come to be praised as one of the greatest engineering projects of all time, one the Japanese finished well ahead of schedule due to their ruthless use of more than 180,000 Asian laborers (i.e. slaves, half of whom died) and 60,000 Allied POWs (one-fifth died)—was tasked with cutting through sheer rock with the most primitive tools. Flanagan spares no details in describing the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers in forcing the POWs to work, no matter how ill (from malaria, beri beri, cholera, horrible sores and injuries), no matter how enervated from starvation. The suffering he describes, the horrible conditions in which his men have to live amid jungles steaming from typhoon rains, seems beyond human endurance. And for many it is. Death is constant, a daily ritual that Flanagan describes with an almost macabre eye. In one episode he dramatizes one of the cremations that the POWs are forced to carry out daily to ‘bury’ their dead: they ignite a huge pile of bamboo into a roaring pyre that is then fed with the emaciated bodies of ten or twenty of the most recent dead. On this particular day, the usual pastor is missing, so Colonel Evans is pressed into service to say a few words about God, even though his true sentiments rebel:

Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be his name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fuck God for not saving us, fuck God for not fucking being here and for not fucking saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo. (187)

            Flanagan’s achievement lies not only in portraying the suffering of the POWs, though. It also lies in making plain how the Japanese soldiers and officers are themselves pressed to perform their duty for the Emperor who has decreed that the railroad be built—this to prevent the Allied navies from decimating Japanese convoys delivering supplies to Rangoon by sea. And so he gives us their interior monologues, mainly their parroted pride in the Japanese spirit, “that Japanese spirit that was soon to daily travel along their railway all the way to Burma, the Japanese spirit that from Burma would find its way to India, the Japanese spirit that would from there conquer the world” (95). He gives us the gruesome reflections of Colonel Kota, about his pride and joy in having learned, again with this Zen-type spirit, how to behead prisoners with one expertly-placed swing of his sword. And he gives us the Japanese military’s tried-and-true method of implementing this inexorable spirit to get the POWs to work no matter how ill, or weak, or half dead: violence. They beat and batter and bludgeon at the slightest slacking from work, deviation from protocol, or respect for their masters (all POWs, according to the Japanese military code, are contemptible for having surrendered rather than fighting to the death). In one episode, they beat, in front of the whole company of POWs, the sergeant Darky Gardiner, who had actually been excused to the hospital, so debilitated and half-dead was he. No matter. He is publicly beaten for hours, and then is so nearly dead that he falls into the open latrine where he can no longer keep his balance, and drowns. It is at this point that Flanagan gives us his hero’s grim vision of reality as he is now forced to see it:

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence. (221)

And though this vision is only fleeting and does not last, it nonetheless prompts the reader to dwell upon it, and wonder about its truth. For there can be little question that many, if not most, of the great projects undertaken and implemented by men, by their leaders, by their governments, have been borne on the awful shoulders of violence. From the pyramids to the celebrated victories of generals like Caesar or Napoleon or Eisenhower, the use and misuse of, the contempt for common men’s bodies have been ubiquitous. For what else could get soldiers to race into battle facing certain death; or slaves to drive their bodies to exhaustion; or farm laborers to work amid poison pesticides; other than the threat of violence? And the question Flanagan’s meditations inspire in us is the old one: how many deaths is a pyramid worth? Was the building of the Siam to Burma railroad worth the deaths of more than a hundred thousand human beings? Not to mention the unimaginable suffering endured even by those who survived? And at the end, was the American exultation in victory, in ‘justice’ that followed the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki worth the deaths and horrible suffering of those who were vaporized by it?

            What is, after all, worth such a price? The truth is, we are faced even now with this very question. The leaders we vote into office keep making these same justifications that essentially come down to mass violence: we cannot stop global warming, we cannot put a cap on the use of fossil fuels because our economy depends on their use. The jobs of coal miners in Kentucky depends on their use. Free trade depends on their use. The very engine of civilization depends on their use. But is it worth risking the lives of thousands, millions, the entire human race if it means that the planet heats up to the point where not just civilization but humans as a species (not to mention god knows how many other species) can no longer survive? What could possibly we worth that sacrifice? How many humans must die to get our leaders, to get all of us to wake up and see that there really is a crisis at hand?

            But of course, nature never asked that question as life evolved. Violence was simply an integral part of the design. And as part of the design, it has remained integral to the evolution of humans even as their ingenuity has steadily made it more and more lethal, more and more cruel and destructive, until we are at the point where whole species are vanishing due to its application, where whole worlds may vanish as a consequence of its insane logic and its peripheral effects.

            So where do we go from here? It’s anybody’s guess. One thing should be clear, though. Devising ever more destructive, ever more violent ways to bludgeon our way through a tottering world doesn’t seem like such a good option anymore, at least not for humans. At least not if we want to continue.

Lawrence DiStasi

Autoimmune

                 

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” He was right as far as he went, i.e. inveighing against the timorous moderation of the middle classes. But Wilde’s truism pertains only in the short run. In the long run, success, and especially excessive success, can turn not only problematic, but disastrous. Consider the phenomenon now widely known as “blowback” (Shakespeare referred to a similar turnabout more poetically as “hoist by his own petard.”) The United States has suffered from this confounding product of its success several times in recent years. Perhaps the most well-known instance concerns Afghanistan. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Russians sent their forces to Afghanistan in order to keep it under the control of the pro-Soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), but they ran into fierce resistance by guerilla groups like the Mujahideen (lit. one engaged in jihad; actually begun as 19^th century opponents of British rule). Seeing this as an opportunity to laden the Soviets with their own Vietnam, the U.S. Government (and others like Saudi Arabia) gave enormous caches of arms, ammunition, money and general support to these mujahideen, routinely referring to them as “freedom fighters.” Among these ‘freedom fighters’ was a wealthy leader from Saudi Arabia called Osama bin Laden. The mujahideen eventually (1989) forced the Soviets out, ousted the DRA’s last president in 1992, and consolidated into what Mullah Mohammed Omar called the “Taliban.” Osama bin Laden was then able, from this relative safe haven in Afganistan, to organize al Quaeda, and eventually its 9/11 attack upon the new enemy he had switched to—his one-time backers, the United States of America. The Taliban, of course, became the rulers of Afghanistan for a time, and, despite eleven years of war by the U.S. forces against them, continue to wreak havoc against US-backed puppet governments in both Afghanistan and Pakistan to this day.

            Blowback. Watch out what you hatch; it might come back to bite you in the ass. As, for another example, ISIS or the Islamic State now running rampant in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere is also the product of the idiotic American machinations in the Iraq invasion. We ousted Saddam Hussein, disbanded his army and de-authorized his Sunni military and government officers, and in so doing gave power to the Shia forces now allied with our presumptive enemy, Iran. We also paved the way for al Quaeda in Iraq to rise and grow (there had been no al Quaeda in Iraq before the invasion), and, they, allied with those Sunni forces we sidelined and offended, have become the core of ISIS, taking over half of the allegedly “free” Iraq we spent so much American life and treasure to “liberate.”

            Of course, it’s not just in international relations that this phenomenon exists. Consider the ‘success’ humanity has had, first when homo sapiens, with its big brain, out-competed all other apes to become the clear winner in populating the entire globe. So excessive has this ‘success’ become that the human population has now reached 7 billion and is on a path to exceed 9 billion within a few years (a mere 250 years ago, world population was only about 800 million!). Such runaway growth strains not only the planetary resources needed to feed, clothe and house so many human beings, but also the space that all other species require to live. And the waste products generated by this one runaway species, homo sapiens, have become a gathering menace to the oceans (think of the ‘islands’ of plastic now circling in several oceans; of the over-fished species now reaching the brink of extinction) and the land increasingly polluted by it. Allied with this, obviously, are the inventions that this one species has created to allow it to thrive. Forget fire and the wheel; antibiotics have succeeded in nearly wiping out several diseases that used to plague humanity. But their excessive use (not only for humans, but in keeping livestock ‘healthy’, which means humans consume antibiotics in their meat without knowing it) has contributed increasingly to the development of ‘super-bacteria,’ that is, those new strains resistant to antibiotics. The problem daily threatens to get out of control if any of these super strains outstrips the methods that are still able to contain them.

            All of these examples might be grouped under the one rubric of autoimmune diseases. Such diseases have become more and more prevalent as modern medicine has grown ever more successful in eliminating most of the conventional diseases that used to bedevil it. Little needs to be said about arthritis, except to point out that it is an autoimmune disease, i.e., one in which the body’s immune system attacks its own proteins, often with inflammation. The list of autoimmune diseases is amazingly varied and too long to include here, but it includes such diseases as lupus, rheumatic fever, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, eczema, some forms of diabetes, celiac disease, Addison’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Crohn’s disease, and many more, possibly including cancer itself. While there is no easily summarized general theory of these autoimmune diseases, one idea struck me as quite telling. Rob Dunn, in his 2011 book The Wild Life of Our Bodies, cites Tufts University researcher Joel Weinstock’s theory that sufferers from Crohn’s disease (wherein the immune system attacks the gut to cause severe digestive problems and intestinal blockages), found mostly in the U.S. and developed countries, were missing something that used to be common: intestinal parasites. Rather than the conventional idea that we get sick when foreign species invade our bodies, Weinstock theorized that our success in ridding the body of parasites left our immune systems devoid of their usual targets, the parasites like tape worms that almost all children used to have. In their absence, Weinstock theorized, the immune system attacks its own gut. Weinstock, Dunn reports, did experiments to show that by introducing parasites into the bodies of Crohn’s sufferers, many got better. There is more to the theory, but basically it involves the idea that the human body evolved with parasites to fight, and that without those parasites (including their possible production of compounds that suppress the immune system’s attacks against them), the immune system begins to attack its own flesh. And the more general point Rob Dunn makes is that our success in sanitizing our environment, our war against microbes, has upset the balance and relationship to all other life in which we evolved. And it is making many of us, no longer developing normal immunities, sick.

            The biggest example of the autoimmune epidemic, of course, has to do not with the individual human body, per se, but with the collective body and the planet on which humans must survive. Since the advent of the industrial age, humans have been burning fossil fuels to obtain energy, most significantly to run machines that produce power and heat, and machines to pamper us and transport us effortlessly around our cities and the globe. This burning of fossil fuels, mostly gasoline from petroleum but also fire from burning coal, has put enormous tonnages of CO₂ into the atmosphere, and created what is known as the ‘greenhouse effect.’ That is, CO₂ collects in the upper atmosphere and creates a kind of gaseous shell around the globe from which heat cannot escape. The result (heat coming in but not getting out) is global warming—a rapid warming of the planet that is unprecedented in human history, and threatens to melt the polar regions (already happening at an alarming rate) and raise sea levels to disastrous levels for coastal cities, and heat the climate so much that all flora and fauna, including those we depend on for food, will be negatively affected. The most important point about this CO₂ effect, this greenhouse effect, is that we humans are doing it to ourselves. There is no longer any serious question about this. Despite the climate deniers, virtually all scientists agree that climate change is human caused. It is our civilization that is at fault, we ourselves that are responsible.

            The most dangerous autoimmune disease of all, in short, is the one threatening civilization itself. Humans of the last 250 or so years have been amazingly successful in using our large brains to adorn ourselves with the kind of comfort and products that not even the wealthiest potentates of old could have imagined. Success is ours! We have triumphed over nature. Become free as gods. We have won.

            The problem lies in the blowback. Our very success in producing machines to make us dominant and mobile and safe has led us into what appears to be the gravest crisis humanity has ever faced. Our machines have paved the way for a deadly reaction by the planet itself, by its feedback mechanisms, by what we might call its immune system. And what those feedback mechanisms are telling us, in the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, is: we have met the enemy and it is us. What they are telling us is: Change the way you think, the way you see; for if you do not, you will perish from your own success. It is as if humanity has suddenly regressed to an ancient Greek theater dramatizing in slow motion the peril that the Greeks found most threatening—the peril of hubris. The peril of presuming to arrogate to themselves the prerogatives of the gods. Whether collective humanity can gather itself and humble itself enough to alter its current disregard for everything but its own short-term comfort remains to be seen.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Disunited States of America

The Disunited States of
         America

We have taken a wrong turn

And GPS is no concern

We are lost and may not return

To where our cities burn

And our hearts are torn

As we face the occupying force

That fills us with remorse

Yet tells us to stand by

But cannot tell us why

Justice remains so blind

And the planets are aligned

To rip us all asunder

With home made fire and thunder

Cut the budget and inflict pain

It’s 1928 again

The news of Baltimore in flames is yet only the latest case of holding on with force instead of justice.  This happened in the “good old days” of the 20s when the gap between rich and poor became more than money.  It became the time of excesses.  We like to think of it in terms of the naughty speakeasies and the true grit of the poor.  The reality was something different.  It was hell.  Lives were shortened.  Workers were commonly shot by police and private hired guns to enforce the social contract that if you had a job, you should be on your knees thanking your benefactors.  Property and corporations were valued above life; at least the lives of the lower classes.  The widening social gap was emphasized by the numbers of poor.  We have grown.  We now speak of the “one per-centers” and the ever-increasing skewed distribution of wealth with far more poor than we had in the 20s.  The Supreme Court has again favored corporations and has taken the step with “Citizens United” to create permanent political reality to support the social developments of our time.  Historically, the Supreme Court even ruled in favor of child labor in 1918 and 1922 despite the good efforts of Congress.  The current Supreme Court continues to rule in favor of corporations over workers as in the case of Lily Ledbetter where discriminatory wages were upheld because Ms. Ledbetter did not file “on time” although she filed as soon as she discovered the facts that were previously denied her.  Corporations are not only “people,” but they appear to be favored people when compared to those of us who breathe and have colonoscopies.  We cannot depend upon the highest court in the land to adjudicate for the common man.

President Obama is no FDR and his latest maneuver to fast track TPP has made him a darling of ultra conservatives.  What could be better than to ship more jobs overseas while our cities like Baltimore have an unemployment rate above 50%.  Perhaps he wants corporate responsibility to suddenly break out among our multinational corporations.  Unfortunately, from history, he is far more likely to be setting the table for the feast to come for multinational Pharma and manufacturing firms.  The Disunited States will again cede sovereign powers to multinationals who/which will again preclude any nation from altering their control of labor and taxes.  If anything could bring on the “end days,” then widespread poverty, pain and social distortion will do it while we await the next financial collapse by those who are the heirs of the creators of the Great Depression and the 2007 Great Recession.  A recent essay by Tina Depuy lays out the hypocrisy of our legal system which has gone further to deny reality by jailing “deadbeat dads” as though by jailing them, we can get them to cough up money they do not have.   Reality indicates that our society will not likely hire anyone with a conviction.  So we perpetuate poverty for the deadbeat dad and for his family or former family.  It is a social stigma that cannot be erased that seems to be a return to the days of Dickens.  The same is true for student loans in the sense that they cannot be used in a discharge of indebtedness through bankruptcy.  The obvious irony is that people taking student loans are generally trying to better themselves through education but end up in deep debt.  There must be a better way to close the gap between rich and poor, because our laws and tax system do not do it.

We have become an occupied nation where local police now dress and equip like military forces, complete with armored vehicles and automatic weapons for the street cop.  To “protect and serve” has become a distant memory and police abuse of their neighbors is highlighted daily in the media while we seem to focus on ethnicity instead of the common bond of poverty that gives ordinary people little opportunity for redress of grievances or opportunity for fair living wages.  The result is a natural outcome.  Once people have nothing to lose, then demonstrating and even rioting in the streets is happening and will worsen until and after the core issues are recognized.  Baltimore is largely a black city, but note that the demonstrators and protestors are a mix of races.  Poverty affects everyone.  At some point, the one-percent will be adversely affected, too.  Will corporations and the wealthy hire guns as they did in the 20s?  Bet on it, especially when the police tire of beating up on their families and friends.

Allow me to speculate further on the ways this nation can address our huge disparity in wealth and opportunity.  There are a few things that a nation can do to deal with the symptoms.  We can ignore them completely.  We can go all out on “law and order” and incarcerate still more citizens.  We can have a major distraction such as another war.  That approach seems to be broadly similar to the Roman “bread and circus” method of controlling unrest.  It requires increased labor and feeds the masses while supporting the military-political-industrial complex.  (To then ignore the injured warriors.) We can return to the policies just after WWII when wealth and opportunity equality was at its greatest in modern memory and act in the interest of the afflicted instead of the affluent by returning to taxes and education costs that help the poor.  That would require massive investment in infrastructure and people.  With the conservative grip on power and the false notion that the wealthy corporations and people will trickle down enough wealth for survival of the poorest among us, that seems unlikely.  It is perhaps the only way that real change can come about, but the reality is that, especially with Citizens United and with the Koch brothers alone spending nearly a billion dollars to elect extreme conservatives, reason will not prevail and unrest will worsen and erode the resources of a once great nation.  The mere fact that the conservatives have both power and the notion that war is good for profits may push us to the point where our military can no longer support a pretense of invincibility and will hasten our tendency to squander our power in foreign ventures to mirror the Iraq disaster.  At that point, we will become vulnerable to leaders like Putin testing our NATO forces in places like Estonia and when others will test us in areas such as Guam or any detached American geography.  We will concede power in ways that reflect our internal conflict as well as our real reduction of power.

Now if this view of our current condition seems pessimistic, and perhaps it is, there are not many options given the continued acceleration of the concentration of wealth in the wealthy.  The 20s and 30s proved that Communism was no answer, but there are failures in our current approach that are not yet repaired. The recent vote to eliminate the estate tax affected perhaps 1500 families but will cost these Disunited States of America perhaps $200 Billion over the next 20 years that might have been a down-payment toward balance.  There is no political will to change and there is power in the money that speaks volumes to describe our national priorities.  Money is virtue.  Money is real.  Money is spiritual.  Money is us.  The GOP has promised us they will take away healthcare and lower still more taxes for the wealthy.  Maybe Congress is the Circus.  Where is the bread?

Peace,

           

George Giacoppe

3 May 2015

geocopy@att.net

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"

“Only the dead have seen the end of war”

War itself invades us every day

At home, at work and, yes, at play

We cannot escape while we have breath

Indeed, it stalks us until death

And worse, we paint a moral face

On architects and stars of war

As though killing offers grace

To reach salvation ever more

CEOs and generals support the cause

While cash and fame await

But blithely fail to mention flaws

That leave lesser folks a fate

Of separation, pain and gore

From wars to come and those before

The quote above is attributed to Plato, George Santayana and sometimes to General Douglas MacArthur (who in turn claimed that Plato was his source). Our governments and our leaders claim to seek peace, but the body of work supporting peace is miniscule compared to the bodies that litter the history of war.  With key people on this earth demanding war, how will we ever see its end? Even recent history seems to place war on the highest level of human achievement, while relegating peace to rhetoric and dreamers.  I want to examine some of the mythology of peace while we also review our process for going to war and our penchant for self-deception.  We currently are in international talks to guide Iran away from nuclear weapons through negotiation, but if you were to examine the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, it seems clear that to our Congress as well as to the PM, the overwhelming favorite policy is to threaten Iran with force and that negotiation equals appeasement.  Only the disaster of war can prevent the disaster of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran?  Recall that Netanyahu was a strong cheerleader for Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  He declared unequivocally (2002) that Iraq was building nuclear weapons under Saddam Hussein. That clearly endorsed the phony intelligence foisted on us by the Bush administration.  Why should we believe him now?  He seems to have no additional information.

Meanwhile, war drums today beat for further military intrusion in Iraq, Syria and Libya and on.  We seem to have forgotten that the 2003 invasion of Iraq created the instability that gave rise to al Qaeda of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had previously blocked.  AQ has now morphed into ISIS/ISIL bent on death and retribution, and now the cry for more “boots on the ground.”  Iraq was not a perfect law abiding nation prior to our invasion, but 80s history is that special envoy Donald Rumsfeld was instrumental in the sale of chemical weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein during the 80s under both Reagan and GHW Bush.  We didn’t sell the weapons we wanted .  We sold the weapons we had, to paraphrase Rumsfeld. Were those sales for some humanitarian purpose?  Didn’t Bush in 2003 cite chemical weapons as a reason to invade Iraq?  Hmm?  In the 20 years between our providing chemical weapons to Iraq and our invasion in 2003 seeking weapons of mass destruction, had there been some major change in Iraq that required our invasion?  Maybe our Attention Deficit Disorder?  Despite Cheney’s intelligence the answer is no.  We simultaneously say we hate war while we deliberately promote it.  Is it ironic that our avowed enemy, Iran, does have boots on the ground fighting Isis?  Maybe we should thank them just as they should thank us for destroying Sunnis in Iraq and making Iran and Shia preeminent there.

My introductory verse alludes to two entirely different views of war.  War-makers see war as their calling.  It has been so since before kings.  Most of us see war as inherently ugly, brutal and immoral.  It requires active killing, deprivation of freedom and property, anguish and pain.  War must therefore be uniquely morally justified in order to engage in it or wage it.  “War-makers” (my definition) include those who profit personally from it.  We have had profiteers who supported war for centuries including thousands right here in these United States.  They have been decried from the Revolutionary War onward.  We compare virtually every competitive activity to war.  This may serve as a lesson in itself as to why we tend to accept war as natural and even wholesome.  Football causes thousands of permanent injuries for players from children to professionals, but we seem to enjoy the macho competition while the players literally smash their brains at play.  Football offers a modicum of strategy and tactics; planning and preparation; qualities we ascribe to war.  There are other “supporting rationales” for war that seem more insidious.  We train our soldiers “to kill or be killed,” therefore justifying killing as self-defense.  We speak of far greater evils such as loss of freedom with falling “dominos” that will cause our demise (Vietnam).  We literally demonize our enemies to both stir up anger and energy to defeat an enemy and to reduce the moral questioning within a nation.  Almost laughably, Bush referred to the enemy as “evil-doers.”  Perhaps Pogo was more accurate:  “We have found the enemy and he is us.”  We minimize the human aspects of our enemy to justify killing for wars of choice as well as for wars of vital defense.  They become equal.  Enemies become targets or objects as well as monsters and otherwise inhuman beings and, yet, PTSD thrives.  It is hard to fool soldiers completely.  War veterans are killing themselves at the rate of 22 per day.  Perhaps the stress of “kill or be killed” is more than the human psyche can absorb without serious damage.

There appears to be still another “cover” to justify any war, still harder to accept: the myth that the greater good is served by our “we built that” pride.  We build “smart” bombs and weapons that spare non-combatants as though explosives and munitions had human caring motives when, really, the profit motive of the builders overcomes the conscience of reality.  We only use these weapons as a last resort?  When was the last time that we truly tried anything but war to resolve a conflict?  Even now, many “conservatives” are trying to derail negotiations with Iran.  We provide fame and acclaim to our military leaders who help organize our killing for us, with leaders like the now shamed General Petraeus.  The power bestowed on military leaders is unparalleled in human endeavor.  But is power the solution or the problem or both?  General Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex,” but was woefully optimistic in predicting what happens today when military leaders retire to be lobbyists for military suppliers of arms and advisors who create a revolving door of a political demand push for military spending.  Power/War becomes an economic driver that colors our political and social policies.

Smart bombs, dumb bombs; all cost billions. Is this trip (back to the middle east) necessary?  Let us check your baggage.  Are you going to make money on this war?  Are you pursuing justice, glory or just money?  We created huge new private organizations for logistical support of our combat forces.  This would stun Ike were he alive, but it brought Cheney’s firm billions that were not used to hire many loyal civilian Americans in war zones, but rather thousands of Bangladeshi and other low cost labor that had no loyalty to the US but increased Halliburton profits.   Air Force aircraft that don’t work safely are on the scale of $ 1 billion each, but the political-military-industrial complex buys them with impunity and demands more.  Peace cannot survive in this climate of greed.  Can we?

As a post note, we have seen a recent evolution of language to support insane concepts.  “Conservative” is a case in point.  In my lifetime, a conservative was someone who cared about preserving the environment, saving his/her money and other resources; reserved in social interactions or interfering in another’s life. My father was a conservative.  He was slow to accept checkbooks or sport shirts.  He would be appalled that “conservatives” now abused the planet for personal gain; that denial of facts would be a status symbol or that “conservatives” would start wars for money and lie about it.  Listen to Senators Lindsey Graham or John McCain for war coming to a neighborhood near you.

Peace,

           

George Giacoppe

10 Mar 2015