Author: Captain Future

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb used in warfare. Three days later, President Truman began a pattern of lies that characterized the nuclear age.

But another lie also emerged from World War II, when the kind of bombing we see today–from the air, on urban centers and civilian populations–was first done regularly, on a large scale.  The lie is that bombing is an effective, reasonable and legitimate method of waging war, whereas there are other despicable and illegitimate acts committed by uncivilized and ruthless enemies, called terrorism.

The truth is that bombing is terrorism, and it always has been.    

As Norman Solomon recently reminds us, the immense explosion at Hiroshima was followed by an immense lie. On August 9th, President Truman told the Amercan people:

“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.”

Solomon continues:

Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb’s deadly power — in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. As a result of those two bombings, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, immediately or eventually. If Truman’s conscience had been clear, it’s doubtful he would have felt compelled to engage in such a basic distortion at the dawn of the nuclear era.

In fact, Hiroshima had no military bases, and had not been bombed before–one of the principal reasons it was chosen for the A-bomb, so its destructive power would be more obvious to the Japanese and clearer for Americans studying those effects. It was considered a “safe city” to the extent that some parents in California who were forced into internment camps, sent their children to the safety of Hiroshima. So the victims of the U.S. atomic bomb likely included American children.

Truman’s was the first of many lies of the nuclear era, including the initial lies about the effects of radiation. Some 75,000 people died in Hiroshima from the blast and fire of the Bomb. Five years later, radiation effects more than doubled the dead, to some 200,000. The vast majority of those who died from the Nagasaki bomb were from radiation, months and years later.

But the biggest lie is not about the atomic bomb, but the very practice of bombing. The facts show (as described in Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing and Gerard DeGroot’s The Bomb: A Life, among other works) that the effect of bombing cities is not a strategy of war but a strategy of terror, and that it doesn’t work.

The idea of this kind of bombing is not to kill enemy combatants or destroy military bases, but to destroy the population’s will by terrorizing them with the threat of random death and destruction. Although the idea of this kind of bombing is now apparently acceptable, it is relatively new in the history of warfare.

 While many nations experimented with it, especially imperial powers who bombed restless colonies, it was first used as a policy by the British in World War II in Germany. It did not result in a revolt of the German people against its government. The U.S. followed in its bombing campaign against Japan, at first aimed at military and industrial support targets, but eventually using saturation bombing against cities. It was the failure of this campaign to terrorize the Japanese population into submission that led to the decision to use the atomic bomb.

As Gerard DeGroot points out, when We (whoever We are) drop bombs, it is to destroy the enemy’s capability to fight–the logic that says if you are going to destroy the enemy’s tanks, then destroy the factories that build the tanks, and kill the people who work in those factories. But when They bomb Us, using the same logic, it is brutal, indiscriminate killing. “The difference is contrived–a matter of perspective. Indiscriminate bombing means killing civilians for the sake of attrition–the killing is the object.”

But it isn’t only attrition, and in less than the kind of total war that World War II was, it is more obviously aimed at terrorizing the enemy population. Hezbollah fires bombs into Israel to terrorize the population, hoping to eventually win concessions or ultimately to destroy the state of Israel. Israel fires bombs into Lebanon to destroy rocket implacements but also to terrorize the population into not supporting Hezbollah, either by allowing them to operate out of their neighborhoods or by supporting them politically. The strategy in both cases is the attrition of terror.

Argument on the morality of targeting civilians in war go back hundreds of years. All too ironically, the first known code that forbade the killing of non-combatants was promulgated by Abu Hanifa, a legal scholar in Baghdad. Western powers adopted a double standard: war between “civilized” European nations would be conducted in this civilized manner. But war against lesser peoples was total war, against the population as well as combatants. Primitive people were not only lesser, but more easily frightened by western technology’s advances in explosives and methods of delivering them. World War II ended even these distinctions.

Now bombing is normal, and far from being the last resort, it is often the first option. Nations use it now because it is cheaper, and since no troops are endangered, there is no grumbling at home about the loss of life. Bombs of all kinds constitute a thriving business. In use, they have a very brief productive life before it’s time to buy more. And there’s plenty to chose from. Small groups can plant various kinds of bombs along roads or in parked vehicles, or use suicide bombers. Larger organizations can use bombs attached to small rockets. Nations can use bombs with sophisticated targetting capabilities, launched on rockets or fired from ships or dropped from airplanes. Long range missiles with thermonuclear weapons are still pointed at the U.S. and Russia.

From the smallest to the largest-yield weapons, bombs are instruments of terror. They sever the limbs of children, burn babies alive, destroy homes that send families into a tailspin of poverty, wreck the urban infrastructure that makes daily life possible, and send millions of traumatized people wandering into nightmare through the piles of broken homes and schools and hospitals, shards of bone, crushed bodies, smoldering flesh, hot twisted metal and clouds of toxic smoke, because they are supposed to. This is what bombs are for.

Promoted by Steven D.

The Iraq war is becoming as long and agonizing as Vietnam–one poll says it is even more politically divisive.  Chuck Hegel said last week that the situation on the ground in Iraq is an “absolute replay” of Vietnam.  And there are other resemblances as well.

Rather than make comparisons for you, let me simply tell a few stories about that time that seem relevant to recent discussions here.

Such discussions, acrimonious and very emotional at times, were common in the decade beginning in 1965.  Before getting into the nature of those discussions, let me share what someone has recently told me about the mechanism of response in these situations.

When we feel threatened in some way, or simply when conflict arouses our attention and instincts, we fall back on basic responses: fight, freeze or flight.  In terms of brain chemistry, our ability to reason becomes impaired, or at least secondary. We literally cannot hear what others are saying, if it s contrary to the threat we feel. 

This happens in situations of real danger and stress, so training for soldiers, first responders, etc. is very important, so they act more or less automatically.  This is also exploited by certain kinds of training, to act as the trainers wish you to act, regardless of what the situation may actually call for.      

However, this response is also a tendency in verbal conflicts, which is why it’s often wise to take a breath and back off for awhile.  It is also why, when we judge what people said and did in stressful situations, we need to judge the entire context.
Even decades later.

I obviously can’t speak for everyone who was young in the Vietnam era.  So when I say “we,” it’s shorthand for the people I knew.  However, there were a lot like us.  If you were draft age, and especially if you were in college, you were involved in these discussions to some degree.

Some of us talked about Vietnam and associated moral and political issues virtually every day.  Some years (for me, the late 60s) there was hardly a conversation in which these subjects didn’t come up.

There was one set of discussions about Vietnam:the politics, history and other contexts of the war.  These began with the campus Teach-Ins in 1965 and became a major part of our education.

All of these discussions were in the context of a lot of information on campuses and in print–books, and extensive journalism, analysis and argument in the New York Review of Books, Ramparts and other publications.  Many organizations sprang up and issued pamphlets, booklets and newsletters.
We listened to new young leaders and to established public figures, more and more of whom–from old Left firebrands and new poets to anthropologist Margaret Mead–were talking about the war and all the issues involved.

We also had novels (like “Catch-22”, “Slaughterhouse Five”) and poetry influencing the discussion.  And especially music, that dealt with issues pretty directly (Dylan’s “Masters of War” for example) or contributed in terms of spirit, and of suggesting alternative culture and ways of being.

There was a related set of discussions having to do with the morality of participating in an immoral war.  It had to do with decisions that young men like me were being forced to make, because we were being drafted.  For us, the discussions went beyond politics and academic discourse.  We were trying to decide what we were going to do, because we were being forced to make a decision, about our lives, about life and possibly death.

I turned 18 in the summer of 1964.  I walked down the alley from the building where I was working, for the Voter Registration Drive sponsored by the Democratic Party and the local of the AFL-CIO’s political committee, called COPE (I don’t remember what the acronym stood for) to the draft board registration office.  Actually, I hobbled.  I was on crutches from catching a football as I was falling into a ditch.  I don’t recommend it as recreation.

 I had the student deferment (2-S) during college, but we still had to report for physicals when called.  I got called in 1967 during the highest draft call month of the war.  My first physical was in Chicago, a chaotic nightmare of hundreds and probably thousands of young men in their underwear standing in lines and filling out forms.

 We quickly learned that who passed and who didn’t was almost entirely arbitrary, based on whether the person examining you at each station wanted you to get out or not.  In my group, the top swimmer on our college team got out because somebody was a fan of college athletics.  I was in the next line, and I was (and am) entirely deaf in one ear. I passed.

I also remember the young officer (a white guy) in charge of instructing us on filling out our forms.  He was very authoritarian and by the book.  Then when we were done he closed the door, and told us that anybody who went to Vietnam was a sucker, so get out any way you can.    

Before that day and after, I consulted draft counselors in Chicago.  There were several sets of them, from various organizations, and although they all gave you the information you needed about your rights, and the forms, etc. they each advocated a different approach to resistance.  The Quakers advocated conscientious objector status.  A more political organization preferred overt resistance, and jail as protest.  However, by the time I was drafted, at least one of these groups changed their tactic.  Draft protestors were singled out in prisons, they learned, and so they advised against going to jail if you had any other alternative, such as leaving the country (which generally meant Canada.)

The moral questions we had to answer were many.  They started with locating our beliefs about war. Am I against this war, or all wars? Under what conditions would I fight or kill?

Is it moral to avoid the draft when another will have to take your place?  Is it moral to accept the draft and refuse to be a combatant, meaning another will take your place on the battlefield?  On the other hand, is it moral to do anything, inside the Army or outside, that enables the war machine to continue?  

For draft age men, there were practical questions that resulted from these quandaries. When I am called what should I do? Do I comply and hope for the best, hoping that either I don’t get into combat situations or that I will make moral decisions if I do?  Go into the army, and request a non-combatant role?  But aren’t non-combatants enabling others to kill, and isn’t that equally immoral?  

Do I resist and go to jail, and risk being in situations where I choose between being harmed and harming?  Again, the issues of violence and nonviolent resistance.  

Do I refuse by going to Canada, leaving behind everything and everyone I know?    

  To help answer these questions, we learned more. We learned more about how we would be trained, how the military worked, and how that would limit our choices once we were in it.  We learned a little about what we could expect in prison.  There was even less information on Canada, but we knew it meant we couldn’t return, even if our families accepted our decision.

This makes it sound like a wholly rational procedure.  It wasn’t.  It was nuts.

We saw a memo purporting to be a Selective Service document called “Channeling.”  It said that part of the purpose of the draft was to channel young men into activities that help the state–either in the armed services or into war work areas that were deferrable (weapons research perhaps), or if they were malcontents and protestors, channel them to jail or out of the country.  

Those not faced with these imminent decisions debated the best ways to resist.  Work within the electoral system–though there were few antiwar candidates?  Was revolution the only answer?  Analysis of the war led to analysis of reasons for the war, which led to moral issues involving racism, cultural as well as political imperialism, the military-industrial-academic state.

We spent a lot of time talking to each other about these issues, and trying to persuade other guys that fighting this war was wrong, that the army wasn’t what they thought it was, and once they went in, they would regret it.  These got to be passionate arguments, with a lot of angry words.  Some women ended up in tears of frustration and sorrow for what these young men would be doing, and doing to themselves.  

Besides the draft, there were also recruiters who came to campus, and we had ROTC on our campus as well.  On the theory that reducing the number of people who go into the armed forces would reduce the ability to fight this immoral war, we protested recruitment on campus, and harassed recruiters when they showed up.  We challenged them, as we challenged politicians, to start telling the truth.  Because they were all lying, just about all the time.

There was no active protest against ROTC on my campus that I recall, but I do remember looking up from a newspaper I was reading in the student union to see a classmate in his ROTC uniform, and spontaneously giving him the Nazi salute.  To me this was a bit of guerrilla theatre, something out of a Beatles movie even.  But to him, as it turned out, it was very disturbing.  We had a long talk about it on the patio outside the union building many months later, just before graduation. He told me his feelings about defending the country, and learning about honor and duty, and also about trading a couple of years in the Army for what they paid towards his college education.  I told him my feelings about protesting the war and refusing as a patriotic act, and so on.  It was a sad conversation–especially since graduation was taking place at the same time as Bobby Kennedy’s funeral– but a real one.  I’m glad we had it.  A few weeks after graduation he was sent to Vietnam.  He’d been there for two weeks when he was killed.  

While months earlier, as I agonized over all this, I used every delaying tactic and bureaucratic opportunity I could to delay induction.  By the time my induction physical was scheduled for Fort Des Moines, Iowa, I knew what I was going to do.  First, I knew my rights down to the paragraph, and what appeals were due me.  I had all my hearing tests and other information about possible physical disqualifications.  

If all my efforts failed, I would refuse induction by stepping back when the oath was given.  That would trigger more appeals.  In the meantime, I had my conscientious objector papers ready to file.  CO status was hard to get if you weren’t a member of a church recognized as pacifist.  I was raised Catholic, and the Crusades weren’t a real good precedent.

But if I was going down, I would go down writing. I remember including the lyrics of a song called “Universal Soldier,” written by Buffy Sainte Marie, but made popular by Donovan. It began:

He’s five foot two, and he’s six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears…
…He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon in the war and without him all this killing can’t go on…
It ends:
He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more/they come from him
And you and me/and brothers can’t you see/this is not the way we put the end to war.

I had come to the conclusion that it was a violation of my constitutional rights to be compelled to kill somebody.  So I wrote that.  I felt putting myself in position to be told to kill somebody, or to aid in killing people, without my informed consent, was immoral.  I said that by pursuing an immoral war, the government and the army had ceded its moral authority.

But I had also come to the conclusion that personally I would not survive the army of these times.  I was convinced that whatever I had that would be of use to the future would be destroyed in the army.  It would drive me crazy in one way or another.  (And in that I was sort of proved right.)  Jail was the same kind of alternative.  If I let them force me into one or the other, I figure they’d won.  The war against the war was a guerilla war.

So if all else failed, I was going to head for the border.  This was a big deal for me, because I had little conception of how I would survive.  I’ve never been good at the making a living part of living, and I was really naïve then.  My family was sympathetic about what I was going through, my parents didn’t necessarily support the war (they had doubts) but they were frightened to death of the idea that I might refuse induction. And in any case, you soon learned that when you face these decisions, you really face them alone.  

I took a long bus trip from Iowa City to Fort Des Moines, paid for by the Army.  As I was the only member of my group on this trip, I was designated by the Army as the head of it.  It was my first and last command.

I bunked at the barracks with a lot of farm boys pleased as punch to be going into the army and getting away from home, plus a few other college kids who found each other quickly and formed a squad for mutual self-protection.  The army guys in charge pushed the kids around, but left us on our own.

My physical turned out to be a battle between the sergeant at station #1, regular army (black), who was thorough and flexible to the point that I was certain he was more than ready to let anybody who didn’t want to be in the army just go home, and the doctor at station #9, a draftee (white) who eventually told me that no matter what I did or what my test results said, he was going to pass me, because if he had to do his two years, everybody did.

This physical lasted three days.  I had my hearing tests, and #1 sent me to a doctor in town for confirmation.  With confirmation in hand I went to #9, who passed me.  Same with other physical ailments.  But I was getting the idea that #1 was going to let me string this out as long as necessary, so I began inventing things.  I filed petitions based on the first ten amendments, separately, and on the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I wrote in rhyme wherever possible. I moved to the psychological claims.

 As a kid from a working class culture I’d never even seen a psychiatrist up close before, but they sent me to a couple.  After two and a half days of this, I was pretty convincingly crazy.  I thought there was a film crew following me.  To this day I don’t know if it was a hallucination or not.  Just before one of my appointments, I was facing a closed door.  After twenty minutes or so, I saw the door open and a nurse come out of a broom closet, smiling at me.  That’s when I went in to see the shrink.            

There was a different #9 that day and they wished me good riddance. They also told me that I’d never get a real job with this on my record.  It took me a long time to recover from that period of time, the year or so from the first physical to the second, and I doubt I did completely.  Between the two, Martin Luther King was killed, and the candidate I counted on to end the killing, Bobby Kennedy was killed.  In the chaos of all this I couldn’t take certain courses seriously and fell slightly short of my graduation requirements.  Others of lesser academic standing had been given a waiver when they were that close.  But as a well-known antiwar loudmouth, I was not.    

I guess I’ve gone on so long about this to give you the context for what I’m about to say, which is the point of this diary.  I did what I had to do to survive, body and soul.  I did not survive unscathed.  No one did.  There were no moral certainties and though I’d been excessive at times in my criticism of those who became part of the war machine, I was ready to see things in a context which was in some ways larger, and in other ways, very specific.

I am not for a moment trying to say my experiences were equivalent to what soldiers went through in Vietnam.  I was in a lot of protests, got into a few scrapes when total strangers could be violent because of your hair length, and caught my share of tear gas, but it’s a whole different order from being under fire, in that context day after day, and coming home with those kinds of wounds.  And for the record, I never spit at a returning soldier.  Ever.  

In personal terms, I was already clear about each of us making the best decisions we could at Christmastime the year of the Christmas bombing, when our families were trying to be cheerful and live in happy America, and my best friend from high school and I were talking about what we were going to do about our draft notices.  His decision was to accept induction, to request non-combatant duty.  If he was ordered to Vietnam as a combatant, he would refuse to go.

 I understood his decision and supported him, as he understood mine and supported me.  We were as close to being brothers as I’ve experienced.  Eventually he was inducted and sent to Korea as a chaplain’s assistant.  I wrote to him and sent him packages, which considering the shape I was in at the time, was considerable effort.

Later, I expanded this horizon and it happened like this: I was hitch-hiking at the edge of a highway, and saw a guy in an army uniform running towards me.  This didn’t look good—me with my long hair and guitar case.  But I stood my ground and waited.  When he got to me he was beaming.  He had just gotten out, and he was happy to see anybody who looked like me.  You guys were right, he said.  

Shortly after that I began hearing about Vietnam Vets Against the War and this guy named John Kerry.  They were at the next big demonstration in DC, so I marched behind them. My band of brothers had expanded.

Of my closest friends from home, three had been in the Army, two of them in Vietnam.  One was decorated for bravery under fire as a medic.  The other, the kid from the African American family next door who I played war with when we were little, was an officer and also a hero.  He saved a bunch of lives, and did all kinds of good things back in the states.  There was a street named after him somewhere.  As I’d generally been his commanding officer at home, being the one who made up the story we played out, I took some satisfaction in this.  

 My college housemate moved to Canada–I drove a van load of his stuff to his new home.  He still lives there.  He’s thinking of standing for the legislature.  Another protestor I knew from college used to be the chief of staff at the White House.  After working to register voters for LBJ, I’d protested against him, and that burned my political bridges back home.

We all made our decisions, we all lived our lives.  I don’t judge others’ choices, even though a lot of judging still goes on.  Some Vietnam vets have never forgiven civilian protestors, even after reconciling with their adversaries in the field of battle. I don’t understand that exactly, but I accept it.  Still, many vets and protestors did reconcile, did come to a common understanding that we all make choices, according to circumstances we found ourselves in; according to the cards we were dealt.  And we all have to accept the consequences.

In the heat of the moment, some men in Vietnam committed atrocities.  They have to live with that, and with whatever judicial consequences ensued.  I don’t entirely agree that given the same circumstances we all would make the same decisions, but I was sure that I would not allow myself to be put in the position of having to make those kinds of decisions.  Not in that war.  That these guys in Washington wanted to put me in that position still makes me angry.

Somebody who I respect, an older writer who was also an antiwar advocate, cautioned me against becoming a pacifist, because you never know, a righteous war might just come along.  It was pretty unlikely, but possible.  I went with the unlikely part.  I went with what I knew about the people leading the government then.

I believed concretely that to deprive an unjust government and an immoral war of your body as a weapon is a moral act. I believe that in the abstract it is wrong to do anything to further an immoral war. But I made decisions on just how far I would go with that, and others made different decisions, if they even believed that.  Nobody had to pass any sort of test to march against the war, or vote against it when they got the chance.    

I honored and supported war resisters then, both in and out of the armed forces, and I do now.  I don’t judge the soldiers who are in Iraq, not without knowing their story.  They’re only a pawn in the game of the Masters of War.  I’ve got a relative there now, the husband of a cousin’s daughter.  We pray for his safe return.  My best friend’s daughter is married to a Iraq vet.  She’s a wonderful kid and she’s helping him adjust.  I haven’t met him yet but he sounds like a great guy. He’s working in alternative energy.

It all makes me think of the introductory chapter to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which he and his friend sit down with a bottle of whiskey to recall the war, but the friend’s wife is hostile.  Vonnegut asks her why.  She says because you were all just children then.  Vonnegut agrees, and he subtitles the book, the Children’s Crusade.

Look at the faces of the Americans over there, especially the dead.  They are children.  Now some of them are dead children.      

The organization I know the most about, and I respect them tremendously, is the GI Rights Hotline.  The local group is composed of lawyers, physicians and educators, and lots of Vietnam vets. (I wrote about them here.) They are fighting against war “one soldier at a time.”  But they support the soldiers they counsel.  They try to help them get their rights to medical care, and to help for their families.  How the warmakers in Washington treat soldiers and their families is deeply immoral, a complete scandal.

But the Hotline also counsels kids being recruited in high schools, telling them about the empty promises and outright lies by recruiters. Some will go anyway, to get away from home, to meet new people, which they will.  Some will change their minds after what they see and experience, and want out, and the GI Rights Hotline will try to help them.

When I was junior high age I had a plan to go to the Naval Academy.  I probably could have gotten the congressional appointment.  But then I found out I wouldn’t be accepted, because of my hearing.  The clarity of chain of command, the discipline, the dedication to duty appealed to me.  It still does to some extent and it may yet prove useful, though I doubt it will be in a purely military context.  I would never compel anyone to do any kind of “service.”  Compulsion is just plain wrong.  When we need selfless service, and we have mechanisms worthy of that dedication, we won’t be in short supply.  After all, people are ready to join Starfleet right now.        

In case you missed it, over the weekend the AP issued a weather forecast, for this week, next month, and the rest of your life.

The AP likes to keep it factual and punchy, if not short and sweet.  So here it is:

For the next week, much of the nation should expect more “extreme heat,” the National Weather Service predicts.

_In the month of August, most of the United States will see “above normal temperatures,” forecasters say.

_For the long-term future, the world will see more and worse killer heat waves because of global warming, scientists say.

After that, you might be inclined to look for stories about Scarlett Johansson, or American Idol (although given the above news, I can’t believe people find much comfort in the statistic the Idolateers are fond of spreading around, that more people voted for the current Idol winner than ever voted for a President of the U.S.) But some of the details might answer your questions about what’s really going on, which suggests what we really should be doing.
 
And since then, more hot news: More than 60 percent of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Today(Monday), power grid operators are predicting record-breaking power use in the Midwest as a result of the heat.

So what is going on? No, climatologists aren’t blaming this particular heat wave on global warming, at least not exactly.

Heat waves and global warming “are very strongly” connected, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis branch chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The immediate cause of the California heat wave — and other heat waves — is day-to-day weather, he said.

But what they can say is that global warming contributes to every heat wave, including this one, by changing general characteristics. For example, “what global warming has done is make the nights warmer in general and the days drier, which help turn merely uncomfortably hot days into killer heat waves, Trenberth said.”

And this is turning out to be a major lesson in what we need to do to cope with the Climate Crisis, because:

…recent studies in the past five years show that climate change is at its most dangerous during Extreme events, such as high temperatures, droughts and flooding, he said. “These (heat) events always occur. What global warming does is push it up another notch,” Trenberth said.

Which brings us to the longer term forecasts.

…the computer models show that soon, we’ll get many more — and hotter — heat waves that will leave the old Dust Bowl records of the 1930s in the dust, said Ken Kunkel, director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Illinois State Water Survey.

This is today’s reason for why we have to get beyond Climate Crisis denial and get to work on both aspects of it. First, fix it: when you know what’s likely to happen, you can prepare for it (even if it doesn’t happen, wouldn’t that be better that getting caught unprepared?) Scientists are telling us to prepare for worse and more frequent heat waves. We need to use what we’re learning in this one and what we’ve learned in the past to prepare for the next ones, and to fix whatever can be fixed–in public health, in energy distribution,etc–that looks like a problem.

For example, many if not most of the 150+ people who’ve died due to this month’s heat wave were elderly, living alone. The Mayor of Fresno said the realization of this has turned his entire city “into one big Neighborhood Watch.” So fixes don’t have to be high tech or expensive or even all that complicated. Though some of them are going to be, like dealing with flooding problems in places like Bombay with the more frequent and much more intense rainstorms that overwhelm the infrastructure.

While we get serious and fix it, we simultaneously need to do what we need to do to stop it–to stop even worse heating, even worse heat waves, droughts, storms, and finally a runaway shift in the earth’s climate that could make the planet unrecognizeable. We can debate the means–is the alliance announced today between England and California on trading carbon emissions going to work?  But at this point, addressing the problem is the necessary first step in responsible governance.

 Is it too late? We’re going to try to fix it anyway, so why not try to get ahead of it and do it right? As for stopping it, if it isn’t too late it soon will be, so if we are going to have any chance, we’d better get on it.

Besides, what are you going to tell your grandchildren–we thought we couldn’t stop it, so we didn’t even try?

Are we moving towards utopia, or oblivion? What does the national mood ring say? It might suggest how effective the Democrats “6 for 06” plan will be in the coming election.

Via Teagan Goddard’s Political Wire there’s this:

Washington Wire highlights evidence of a growing long-term deep funk among Americans in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll: “Among the six-in-10 Americans who say country is ‘on the wrong track,’ most see ‘long-term decline.’ More than two-thirds of those over 50 aren’t confident life will improve for ‘our children’s generation’; 62% of those under 35 agree. Americans are especially gloomy about the environment, health care, public morals and housing costs; nearly eight in 10 expect college to become less affordable. By 47%-24%, Americans fear the quality of jobs in the U.S. will get worse.”

It seems good for Democrats’ chances, but is it?  Let me briefly suggest my doubts after the jump.
The poll itself could be influenced by conspicuous warfare, and by the general aging of the population. Or it could be simple observation of the growing divide between superrich and everyone else, and all that means to most people, as the Bush administration has made clear which side its on. But if it’s accurate  as far as the American electorate is concerned, we’re on the Oblivion Express.

That tells us a lot about where our energy and attention goes.  It seems to me it’s going to take some direct confrontation with this mood to change it.

The Democrats this week came forward with their six issues for 06 under the banner of A New Direction for America, or something equally forgettable. While the issues are worthy, the whole thing seems to lack imagination and certainly daring. But that’s explicable from the first of the six items: national security.

The Democrats are in a defensive posture, still worried they lost in 04 because Bush convinced the country he could keep them safer, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. And every time the Democrats get out of the administration line on war issues, some Republican is warning that they’re throwing the election away, if not being flat out unpatriotic.

Security is of course a primary function of the federal government. But stopping there freezes us into a defensive and inherently risk averse posture. Unfortunately,the poll shows people see what’s going on: things are falling apart. We don’t need terrorists from elsewhere to destroy what Americans have had, we’re letting it happen slowly but surely.

My instincts about the next election are contrary to the posture and direction the Dems are officially taking. I see a lot of “re” words working, like rejection, renewal and responsibility. But most of all I see the need for a vision of the future that offers some hope, some real direction–not an empty slogan and a laundry list.

America, the world, is ready (or soon will be) to move away from oblivion, but the only way to do that is to move towards utopia. Utopia doesn’t mean a perfect society, but it does mean a better one–one that is more attuned to current and future needs, and making use of new knowledge and approach.

It’s a risk to say so. It’s a risk to offer a vision. But the right mix of reassurance and vision for the future could be the inspiration we need. When you feel you’re on the Oblivion Express, you’re not very motivated to do anything.  You may try to conserve what you’ve got, and keep the ride as smooth as possible.  You’ll listen to people who tell you to stick with what they know, including the leadership they know.

To get people to accept change, you must help them want change,and if you ask them to risk it, you need to give them a reason. They need a different destination, and in the public heart there are only two: oblivion or utopia.  

 We need a vision, and the leadership to get us started on that road to the future. The choice is utopia or oblivion. At least for the past half century, it always has been.

Climate Crisis denying is a lucrative job, but it’s getting very lonely.  In recent days, scientists who authored the two studies principally used by deniers to support their claims have written opeds saying the deniers are misusing and distorting their data, and that they fully accept the reality of global heating as caused mostly by our years of dispersing greenhouse gases.

One is in the New York Times today. Peter Doran is the coauthor of a 2002 study that found some cooling in Antarctica, which deniers Michael Crichton and Ann Coulter (among others) have cited as proof that heating isn’t happening, or that scientists don’t agree, or that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.

Here’s what Doran says…      

Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?

 Another scientist, whose data was misused by the Wall Street Journal and others, corrected the record in a Los Angeles Times oped reprinted here. This was a study of studies by Naomi Oreskes:

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Of actual skeptics, one in Virginia, it was revealed today, is on the payroll of coal-burning utilities. A secret coal industry memo calling for more financing of deniers admits that most deniers, scientists or not, have “no involvement in climatology.”

As is documented in An Inconvenient Truth, most climate crisis denying research was financed by the fossil fuel industry. And with another $10 billion+ in just the last three months soaked in by Exxon-Mobil alone, that financing is likely to grow. Considering all the available cash and the few folks with the credentials to claim it, if climate crisis denying were a stock, every broker in the world would be advising clients to buy it—a high growth opportunity. For as long as it lasts.

We are in a period of brutalization that continues to intensify.  The latest uptick in violent language and brutal policy may be evidence of the Bushites and the Rabid Right fighting for their political lives in the face of majority opposition, but it sets a new standard of brutality that affects the whole public dialogue, and all of us as individuals.

“Brutality” means humans acting like beasts (or at least how humans interpret animal behavior.)  It carries with it the expectation that human beings in a civilized society should progress beyond this automatic behavior when it is clearly inappropriate and counterproductive, especially in the long term. It also implies an attitude about the value and sacredness of life. Progress used to include moving farther away from brutality to the rule of consciousness and more “human” means of solving conflicts.  

Brutalization is shifting individual and societal standards to accepting higher levels of brutality as normal and acceptable. In civilized humanty, it is retrogression.  So how in the world, early in the twenty-first century, did we get here?

Our sense of the word “brutalization” comes from historian George Mosse, in his analysis of French culture during World War I.  In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement (June 16, 2006–online but behind a pay wall), Jay Winter characterized the “war culture” of the period, as described by two other historians, concluding:

“Thus the war became a kind of crusade, a morality play in which good and evil were evidently divided that those who cried `enough’ were deemed either deluded or dangerous.”

World War I remains such a profound event in European culture that a colloquium was held recently “on the explosion of extreme violence in 1914-15, marking a kind of degeneration of war into slaughter on a scale the world had never seen before.”  France and England lost 2 million men, four times the number killed in World War II.

The slaughter on one battlefield in 1917 was so extreme and so needless that a half million French soldiers refused to fight.  This forced a change in tactics, and changed the nature of the war.  After the war, a vast veterans movement of some four million arose in France.  They formed

“overwhelmingly pacifist associations, determined to make war unthinkable…They hated politicians, those self-serving evildoers who sent men to war, but never paid the price for their policies. Their voices were angry.  They had a cause and defended it as fiercely after the war as they had defended their part of the front during it.”

This war and this movement, Winter writes, had a lasting effect on French culture and policy.  He does not explicitly say it affected the skepticism and refusal of the French government to get involved in the US invasion of Iraq, but the implication is there.

We recognize the us/them buttons that politicians push, and their manipulation of our natural impulse to defend ourselves when threatened.  When Shakespeare wrote the phrase, “let loose the dogs of war,” he knew that war releases instincts that can become uncontrollable, and that feed on themselves.  A pack of violent dogs is a self-reinforcing mechanism.

 Humans can rationalize and compartmentalize, and so appear to themselves rational even when they aren’t.  Humans also can escalate violence beyond anything a pack of vicious dogs can accomplish, and justify it with the logic of attack and counterattack, with defense soon becoming pay-back and vengeance.  War fever is not even assuaged by victory, for there are always new groups to be defined as enemies, and to conquer.  

 But war itself does not necessarily start the brutalization process that can result in war, or determines how that war is conducted.  During the brutality of the Vietnam war, an immense dialogue took place on the meaning of war as well as that particular war.

It found in history a long list of voices crying out against the futility of war, the needless brutality and its ineffectiveness in solving problems.  It demanded that war be evaluated not just with numbers and geopolitical theories, but by  suffering, especially of the innocent, and the brutalizing effect on those who inflicted this suffering as well as its victims.  As the soldiers in World War I learned, they are often the same people.  

This dialogue was central but also other dialogues were part of it. The Civil Rights movement sensitized us to the racial and ethnic component of the us/them equation, to the fear of difference, of the alien.  Prejudices of the past were recalled, and the images of those Other racial groups that by then were obviously false.  The examination of socially supported gender roles and their implication in violence and oppression began even before the feminist movement, and men reevaluated what it meant to be a man.  Many started on a journey then to revive and refine techniques for solving problems without violence, and to develop new ones.

Today there are thousands of Americans involved in developing, learning and using what I call the Skills of Peace.  I divide these interrelated skills into outer (learning about cultures and histories), inner (learning about ourselves, our responses and motivations, as well as cultivating attitudes and learning skills to clarify our relationship to the world) and interface (methods of communication, negotiation; skills of mediation and conflict management and resolution.)    

The skills of peace are applicable in our families, schools and neighborhoods, in our political and on-line associations, as well as in international war and peace.  They give the lie to the cliché that although “we all want peace” it is unattainable, or we don’t have any idea of how to achieve it.

Our society and our culture spends billions on the skills of war and conflict. We pay little official attention to the skills of peace.  We even send soldiers into “peace-keeping” situations with little or no training in how to keep the peace, other than waving weapons, storming homes and conducting interrogations.  We do essentially nothing to counter the brutalizing effects on society, or the psychological traumas suffered by the children we turn into killers, and the resulting impact on their families and society.  But then, we’ve been notoriously lax in even tending to their physical injuries.

We spend a disproportionate amount of money and time on the skills of war, and that disproportion is one of the causes of brutalization. The self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing, and naturally escalating violence unleashed by war is another.  But brutalization can also begin in political choices.

The Brutal Road to Iraq and Torture

How has America in the early twenty-first century come to the point of justifying the capture, imprisoning and torture of people almost at random, with no regard for rights under the Geneva Conventions and more importantly, for generally accepted minimal rights in the civilized world?  How has this prosperous and advanced society turned back the clock on the painful progress towards a more civilized and less dangerous world, for which thousands if not millions have sacrificed their lives?

I believe much of the current attitude can be traced back to the 1980s, when the neocons in the Reagan administration pumped up the rhetoric to absurd heights to justify a proxy war in Central America, while they exploited a highly publicized and inflated rise in urban crime, which led to the reversal of trends in criminal justice.  In the 60s and 70s, there was an emphasis on the rights of the accused, to redress the balance of individual rights and society’s interest in preventing crime.  Perhaps most importantly as well as symbolically, capital punishment was no longer considered a just sentence or effective deterrent.

The subtext of that trend was this: A civilized society does not enact revenge for its own sake, nor does it feed a spiraling culture of revenge.  A modern civilized society finds more effective ways to deter crime and deal with criminals, just as many previous societies had done: without capital punishment.  Capital punishment brutalized society.

Though this is now accepted in much of the rest of the world, it is likely to be news to anyone who came of age in the US in the 1980s or after.  The culture has turned completely around, and justice is equated with vengeance.  You need look no further than the ever-popular crime dramas on television.  In the 60s, popular series like “The Defenders” and “The Law & Mr. Jones” portrayed defense attorneys as heroes, protecting individuals against abuses by prosecutors and police, against juries being swayed by emotional appeals to exact revenge, and against aspects of the law that treated the “innocent until proven guilty” unjustly.

 In today’s crime shows, the heroes are prosecutors and police who use any means necessary to convict suspects.  In surfing TV channels the other night, I caught a minute of a willowy blond prosecutor objecting to an accused killer not getting the death penalty because he had a biologically caused mental illness.  “We’ve convicted psychotics and schizophrenics before,” she complained.  This is typical.  You can see the difference even over the life of one series: “Law & Order.”

We all know of the cases of mentally deficient prisoners who were executed.  We know of other cases in which prisoners who committed crimes in their youth were executed many years later, when they were demonstrably no longer that person.  We also know that the US has the highest proportion of its population in prison than any other “civilized” democracy.  We know that there are innocent executed because they could not afford a decent defense, and that African Americans and other minorities are disproportionately jailed because of race as well as economics.

But crime and support for the death penalty were so politically hyped that even though the President has nothing to do with capital punishment, it became the central issue leading to George Bush the First defeating Michael Dukakis in 1988.  This despite the fact that the vast majority of voters were untouched by violent crime, except through their television sets.  Having hyped the threat, politicians exploited natural fears by promising to get tough, and enacting three strikes laws and bringing back capital punishment.  There was no more “coddling” criminals, despite the fact that crime was being committed largely by men too young to have a history of being coddled. No more attention to the economic crises in the inner cities, or the collapse of manufacturing jobs, or the patterns of racial injustice.  

Meanwhile, demographers showed that the jump in urban crime was largely predictable by the jump in the proportion of young men, and would abate as the trend reversed.  Which is what happened.

By 2004, capital punishment had become such a non-issue that when John Kerry said he was opposed to it, hardly anyone noticed.  But the brutalization had done its work.

The demagogic appeals of the 1980s had expanded into a rhetoric of the right wing which is historically startling in its violent oversimplifications, outrageous untruths and brutal assumptions.  But there were also countertrends contending for the national soul.  It took the match of 9/11 to set this house aflame again.

Terrorized by the War on Terror

By choosing to regard terrorist attacks as acts of war rather than criminal acts, the Bushites not only gave terrorists the identity they craved–the identity as warriors that would inspire new recruits–but they both hyped the threat and used the resulting fever to justify extreme acts, including official patterns of brutality.

The terror of terrorism is in surprise, and the power of terrorism to inspire fear is directly related to its novelty as well as the violent imagery associated with it.  It is certainly not proportional to the threat.

Ben Friedman in the San Francisco Chronicle (February 19, 2006):

Conventional wisdom says that none of us is safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are.

Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans shows how vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about. By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism.

In 2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the number killed by car accidents.

Even if attacks killing thousands were certain, the risk to each of us would remain close to zero, far smaller than many larger risks that do not alarm us, or provoke government warnings, like driving to work every day. And if something far worse than Sept. 11 does occur, the country will recover. Every year, tens of thousands Americans die on the roads. Disease preys on us. Life goes on for the rest. The economy keeps chugging. A disaster of biblical proportions visited New Orleans. The Republic has not crumbled.

The terrorist risk to the United States is serious, but far from existential, as some would have it.

Yet the Bushite mantra that 9/11 had changed everything was so ubiquitous and powerful that to deny it was next to impossible for years, until it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  America did learn it was vulnerable to the kind of attack it had not suffered before, and should have quickly protected itself against this vulnerability.  Some of this was done, but not all that was needed.  The Bush government took another course when it invaded Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks for political gain.      

 More than 3,000 people were killed by terrorist acts on 9/11/2001.  This resulted in invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where civil war killed more than 3,000 people in Iraq I just last month, and some 6,000 in the past two months.  The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq is likely to surpass 3,000 soon.  This is often the logic of war–of any war, just or not.  When a society must defend itself with whatever means are necessary to fend off destruction and hold back an invader, that logic is tragic but must be accepted.   When a war is created for political and economic ends, and sold to a democracy with lies and manipulation, it is more than tragic.

The Bushite rhetoricians positioned this war without a nameable enemy as an archetypal fight to the death between good and evil.  In such a battle, the good are always good, and can never do evil, just as the evil are always evil.  Creating these archetypes is a normal function of war, which both sides do.  It is also common to use racial and religious stereotypes, and to characterize the enemy as less than human, as beasts.

Bush also oversimplified and distorted the adversary’s position, as hating our freedom, by which he meant, our shopping malls. So Americans are fighting for their way of life, meaning our shopping malls (because Americans were never asked to curtail spending and pay for war) and not meaning our civil liberties (because Americans are forced to give up accepted rights of privacy, rights within the justice system, and access to accurate information on government activities.)

Such oversimplification and distortion not only leads to brutality, it is itself a form of brutalization.  It is a brutal view of the world, and denies the humanity as well as the possibly legitimate grievances of the Other, the enemy.  In denying that the Other is civilized, it justifies acting outside the norms of civilized society.  It makes us uncivilized and brutal.

Through surrogates like Ann Coulter, their flunkies in the press, and in their own voices, neocons and Rabid Right Republicans are pumping up the rhetoric of violence.  Brutalization also increases in times of violence, as is the case now in the Middle East.  While half a million people are roaming Lebanon because their homes have been destroyed, a commentator on Fox brags of the US military capability to turn Syria “into a parking lot.”   This is brutalization speaking loud and clear.

But brutalization is expressed not just in blood-thirsty rhetoric, but in indifference.  Indifference to suffering, and to those causing suffering. The constant barrage of violent news is like getting hit on the head with a board.  It desensitizes, which is an effect of brutalization.

Brutality is commonly an instrument of authoritarian rule, and brutal definitions lead to a logic of authoritarianism.  They don’t call dictators “strong men” for nothing.

Brutalization is now so pervasive in this society that we barely recognize all its manifestations.  When it becomes part of cultures–created for example by the Cheney rules–it becomes harder and harder to oppose it, and then even to recognize it.  But it links the authoritarian White House to the torturers at Guantanamo and the rapists and murderers in Iraq. It is ever-present in the violent rhetoric of the right, that expands the definition of the Other, and brutalizes not only the Other in foreign lands, but in the political opposition at home.  It leads to citizens of small towns harassing, vandalizing and threatening violence on the families of other small town citizens, over a zoning dispute, or a public official over a word in a speech, taken out of context or even misheard.

We need to identify brutalization: its manifestations and causes, and shine a light on it. We do not need to add to it with conscripting more cannon fodder for brutal dictators by any other name. We need to put political muscle and will behind accountability, and to promote a government and a society that values and uses and learns the skills of peace.          

Now that Al Gore’s movie and resulting articles and TV (including a docu on Discovery Sunday) are bringing the moral imperative of the Climate Crisis into wider public awareness, it’s time to get clear on what we need to do about it.

Because there are two crises within the Climate Crisis, requiring two sets of actions. Right now people are talking about the evidence of the first crisis–the extreme weather, melting glaciers and other visible and measurable effects–but they are talking about solutions for the second crisis.

We need to do two things: fix it and stop it.  Here’s what I mean:    
 
 Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club wrote last week about the effect of an ongoing pattern right now of unaccustomed torrential rains on the city of Bombay, India:

Friends in India tell me that a strong consensus is emerging among meteorologists there that global warming has permanently intensified the monsoon pattern on India’s west-central coast, and that Bombay simply was not built for, and cannot handle, the kinds of rainfall events it can now expect routinely.

For Bombay to function properly, an entirely new underground drainage and sewer system will likely be required — a monumental challenge, as it will have to be built underneath an existing city of 18 million people. The price of such a construction project is virtually inconceivable, and in a country as poor as India, dubiously affordable. Yet all this is the result of very modest climate change. It doesn’t begin to answer the question of what happens to Bombay when the Indian Ocean rises as predicted.

The problems these rains are causing to Bombay are happening now, and are likely to happen for some years to come. They are largely the result of climate change caused by the infusion of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that has already happened. No drop in CO2 emissions due to solar panels or unplugging TV sets is going to keep Bombay from being inundated by these rains. Nor will hybrid cars rebuild New Orleans or prevent it from being devastated again.

That’s because the Climate Crisis is two crises. The first set of problems are results of greenhouse gases already affecting the atmosphere. These will cause problems for the rest of this decade and more.

The second set of problems will come as a result of greenhouse gases we send into the atmosphere now and in the future. Not only do they extend problems in time, they make them worse.  And scientists worry that a tipping point will be reached–maybe in 10 years–that will make truly earth-changing effects inevitable, and may wipe the planet clean of the web of life we know.

The first result of accepting the reality of the Climate Crisis should be that we pay attention to its current consequences instead of trying to ignore them just so the oil companies don’t have to admit the Climate Crisis is real. We need to fix what needs to be fixed, and that alone is going to take focused attention as well as enormous creativity, commitment and resources.

We need to be ready for what may come, to anticipate and prepare for these problems. Mobilize creative engineers, get them working with scientists; get public health ready for new patterns of disease. Nations must come together for mutual aid, before we start fighting over water and food as well as energy sources, as climate patterns change.

And while we are fixing what we can’t stop from happening, we need to be working to stop further damage in the future, because we can do something to prevent even worse consequences down the road. That’s the saving the planet part. That’s where energy conservation and new clean energy technologies come in. We’re saving a future for our grandchildren and future generations, and for the kind of earth that has sustained us.

In other words, we need to fix Bombay’s current problems. And we need to stop future heating so the future flooding of vast areas of coast, including Bombay, doesn’t happen, or is considerably less than projected. And the apocalyptic effects that passing a tipping point would make inevitable for a century or more.

In both cases we’re fighting for civilization’s survival. People can talk blithely about how the odds are against us anyway, and some people or at least some lifeforms–some nice roundworms perhaps–will survive anything the Climate Crisis can throw at us. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t say much for us if we don’t use all we’ve learned and all this civilization has given us to keep it going, in a necessarily improved form.

I agree that the Climate Crisis is our best candidate for either pushing us into our next stage of evolution, or finishing us as a civilization. With the world as it is going, one ugly, monstrous conflict on top of another, high tech death and billions to a predatory few while the duped and the unfortunate suffer horribly, it’s not hard to conclude this civilization is not worth saving anyway. I just don’t think we’re morally true to life if we don’t do our best to reduce suffering, step up to the challenge, and take that next step.

But we’ll stop ourselves in our tracks if we don’t get it straight. We have to fix it and stop it. We have to do both, separately and simultaneously.

Promoted by Steven D. Get to know your favorite Captain better.

When I chose the Internet ID of Captain Future, I didn’t realize that right wing bloggers often used “captain” in their names. I was paying playful homage to heroes of my childhood who often seemed to have that rank and title, like Captain Video, Captain Midnight and of course Captain Kirk (though I tended to identify more with Mr. Spock), and the captain who brought these figures and what they represented into the adult world: Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

These childhood heroes–which also included Superman, Robin Hood, Lancelot, the Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger, as well as Saturday morning space opera commanders—championed the weak against the tyranny of the strong. They stood for social justice as well as the rule of law, and personal qualities of integrity, honesty, intelligence, courage and loyalty.

I’ve been re-evaluating my own identity, on the net and otherwise, politically and otherwise, as I passed a personal milestone–one that the Boomer generation faces, ready or not. Some words about my journey, which may have something to do with yours, if you make the jump.  
 
Cross-posted at Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily (the illustrated version) and eventually elsewhere.

Those early TV heroes (partly in response to public pressure) kept violence to a minimum. They never killed even the worst villains— Captain Video didn’t even used the word “kill.” They tried peaceful solutions first. They stood for tolerance and friendship across boundaries, opposing tyranny but honoring peace. (To my benefit, some socially conscious blacklisted American writers found employment writing for kids’ adventures in England, like the Robin Hood series.)

I’ve been astonished recently to see that right wingers are trying to co-opt Star Trek to support their ideology. It doesn’t, and it was in many ways the adult version of those Saturday space operas. Episodes f Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger dealt with the dangers of radiation, and these series (as well as “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet”) often promoted peaceful solutions and disarmament. After Buzz Corey, the hero of Space Patrol encountered a planet that had destroyed itself through hatred, he returned to earth determined to see that it didn’t happen there.

Space Patrol was the police arm of the otherwise peaceful federation of interstellar governments, United Planets. The others were similar. Like Star Trek, they saw human institutions evolve and correct past patterns of prejudice and conquest. Starfleet, like Space Patrol, combined military discipline and organization with peaceful and principled purposes: universal rights, respect and communication, exploration without exploitation. Having diligently erased poverty and disease, Star Trek’s Earth is united. People work not for money but to “better themselves and the rest of humanity.”

“Recent science fiction must be accorded high credit for being one of the most active forces in support of equal opportunities, goodwill, and cooperation among all human beings, regardless of their racial and national origins,” said Dr. Hermann J. Muller, discoverer of the genetic effects of radiation, a few decades ago. “Its writers have been practically unanimous in their adherence to the ideal of ‘one free world.”

Space opera from Flash Gordon to Doctor Who is a wonderful combination of myth, adventure, philosophy and science fiction. Although I didn’t know this when I thought of using the name, the original Captain Future was a pulp magazine hero in the 1940s. An orphan raised by a disembodied brain, a robot and an android, he is a brilliant scientist and athlete, with “a strong sense of responsibility” and desire to help others, who offers his services to the President of the Solar System. I’ve never read any of the stories, though the covers suggest it was a pulpy but imaginative amalgamation of elements familiar from the likes of Batman and Superman to Buckaroo Banzai. (Captain Future was resurrected in a Japanese anime series, apparently remembered in France and Germany for its music, and as the subject of Allen Steele’s 1996 Hugo-winning novel.)

I chose the name because the future has become a major personal and professional preoccupation. Looking back, I can see some of the connections from childhood to now: including my political coming of age in the Kennedy administration and the late 1960s rebellions and visionary quests, my 1970s interest in Buckminster Fuller and the fledgling futurist/futures studies movements, my book on the shopping mall as the embodiment of postwar America and its vision of the future, and so on.

Back From the Future

But a recent personal milestone caused me to reevaluate what I’m doing here: writing and posting on the Internet for free, under a name both comic and pretentious. Just days before George W. Bush and a few weeks before Bill Clinton, along with the first of our fellow Baby Boomers, I turned 60.

A decade ago, I looked forward to my fifties as my decade of fulfillment. I’d had reasonable success in my 20s and 30s: a writer and editor for the Boston Phoenix and a similar paper in Washington; I moved up to feature pieces in national magazines, and after long struggle, I became the author of a book I am still proud of, The Malling of America.

Now famous for its title if nothing else, it has won something like lasting respect across a wide spectrum. A chapter appears in lots of college and high school anthologies, and in the paperback edition I published with Xlibris, it still sells a few score copies a year through the online booksellers. But thanks in part to the non-interest and even hostility of my New York hardback publisher, and to my own inexperience, it got me the reputation as an author who didn’t sell. I went back to writing for magazines, and spent my 40s trying to get another book contract. I never did.

But on my 50th birthday I felt wiser in the ways of the world, and at the top of my game as a writer. I was taking a risk by moving west, but I felt ready to get back in the big game, on the big stage. No one gets very far without help and I’d had some in the past. Though I had no mentor or at 50, an agent or publisher who really believed in me, I felt I could earn that attention.

My fifties, I felt, would be the fulfillment, the justification of everything in the past. They would also set the pattern for my future, for my culminating accomplishments and at last my proper place in the world, with access to the means to be creative and productive. My fifties would be my redemption.

That’s not how they turned out. I did a lot of work in a lot of forms and areas. Most of it was ignored, including what was closest to my heart. Some of it got interest here and there, agents and publishers and media, and then the interest faded. I managed to get articles assigned and essays published that I felt could have opened doors to bigger opportunities. Nothing happened. And as finances became more of an issue, even my efforts on different career paths went nowhere. Instead of being fulfilling, my fifties were humiliating.

I’m proud of what I did get published, like “The Skills of Peace,” and a feature on the commemoration of a massacre that actually had something to do with the city of Eureka, CA deeding back land to the Wiyot tribe, which may be a first.

 I did some good work: an article and review on Buddhism, my essay in the SF Chronicle before the bombing of Iraq, on Wells and War of the Worlds, and my piece on Star Trek (behind the pay wall at the New York Times but which can be found on my blog, Soul of Star Trek.) I wrote some good book reviews, which sometimes got at least some attention for deserving books and authors.

I even got a little buzz from time to time when something I imagined presented itself in the real world. A lot of what I advocated in 2002 to make the Climate Crisis a moral issue (including calling it that) is now happening in the wake of Al Gore’s movie. During the 2004 Democratic convention, I hit upon what I thought was the perfect slogan for John Kerry–A Fresh Start–and wrote a memo about it that my one Washington Big Player contact sent on to the campaign. I never learned if anyone read it, but I can’t tell you how weird it felt to see Kerry speaking with “A Fresh Start for America” on banners behind him that final week of the campaign.

But nothing led to anything else, and that’s what I needed to happen.

Growing Character

How I approached 60 was helped specifically and principally by three sources: an article by Michael Ventura (also unfortunately behind a pay wall) and two books which I highly recommend to all Boomers: America the Wise (also called Longevity Generation in paperback) by Theodore Roszak, and The Force of Character by James Hillman.

The Ventura article was a dose of cold, cold water: Sixty is not middle age, he says, it’s the beginning of old age, and much of the work of old age is saying goodbye. It took awhile, but I accepted the truth of this. And one of the things I am saying goodbye to is career. Career is movement: forward and up being the desired directions. But the time for that is over. The world says so (as I’ve learned the hard way, nobody hires anyone over 50 if they can help it) and time says so, as in not enough of it.

But as I soon realized, this is also liberating. It’s like losing your hair or turning gray–for years it is a source of anxiety and fear. And then it happens: goodbye. The anxiety is over. Now it’s you. The same with career, and measuring success and failure. I’m this much a success, and that much a failure. But really, so what? Goodbye to the anxiety.

Goodbye to trying to make a career by exagerating one part of myself and making the rest of me look as much like everyone else as possible. Goodbye. Goodbye to looking at everything I do as needing to lead to something else. Now everything is what it is.

I have three modest gigs now which make modest demands, with modest challenges and a modest amount of fun, and they may bring in just enough money for current needs (no health insurance, of course.) I still have dreams of accomplishment, but modest expectations. We’ll see what happens.

But beyond saying goodbye, what is different about this new age of old age I’m entering? Roszak tells me to remember the dreams of my generation, the power of our numbers, and the natural impulses of getting older than can help make a better world. Hillman agrees, and adds that this Act III in the theatre of my life is itself a fulfillment, of character.

“Character traits include vices and virtues,” Hillman writes. “They do not define character. Character defines them.” Character is our uniqueness, as we express it and as it is seen in the world. “Character is presentational.”

Character is the shape of soul. Without the inflation of early ages, we are forced to accept ourselves, good and bad, with consequences pleasant and painful. We are no one’s ideal. “I walk through life oddly,” Hillman writes. “No one else walks as I do, and this is my courage, my dignity, my integrity, my morality, and my ruin.”

There are characteristics that come with becoming an elder. We must take responsibility for the past and we feel the responsibility of the future. In the role of grandparents (actual or metaphorical), we set our sights on the future we will not see.

“Before we leave,” Hillman writes, “we need to uphold our side of the compact of mutual support between human being and the being of the planet, giving back what we have taken, securing its lasting beyond our own.”

“In later years feelings of altruism and kindness to strangers plays a larger role…Values come under more scrutiny, and qualities such as decency and gratitude become more precious than accuracy and efficiency.”

What we say goodbye to as we age also reveals some hellos: hello perhaps to some sharper memories from the distant past. Hello to insights as well as embarrassments. Hello to other worlds. “Discovery and promise do not belong solely to youth;” Hillman insists, “age is not excluded from revelation.” Indeed, if the theatre is any guide, Act III is when it’s more likely to happen.

Act III is not just the end, it’s the resolution. But there’s something else about it that’s important: the character has lived through Acts I and II. We carry our history and the history we’ve experienced, not only in the weight and reference of our words, but in ourselves. I am all that I am, including the heroes of my youth, and those that gave me the imagery of my middle years (like the fourth Doctor), and those that inform me now. (Captain Picard, I presume.)

Meeting the Future

Something else happened in the past decade that is making a difference in my life and work: the digital revolution, the Internet.

As a writer I am no longer dependent on others to get my work out of the room of its making, into the world. Digital on-demand publishing enabled me to re-publish my book after it was out of print, and will provide me the option to publish new books when I’m ready. The Internet, the blogosphere connects me to an audience and to communities. I don’t need distant experts whose judgment is wrong most of the time to give me permission to have my say. I’ve got the key. There’s probably no money beyond the door, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything else. It is what it is. On my time, I work to improve myself and the rest of humanity.

So in my modest life, I can express myself and offer whatever I can to younger generations as well as to my own. I can be myself and let the words fall where they may. In my modest life, I can advocate for the kind of future I envision, my synthesis from the work of wondrous others, including those who came before me.

 My name is Captain Future. I’m here to save the world.

When I learned about Thomas Jefferson in grade school I was thrilled. Maybe it had something to do with the adventures of Johnny Tremain and the Sons of Liberty fighting for independence on Disneyland.  But he was a tonic in my Catholic classrooms: reason and rebellion in one package that the nuns couldn’t touch.

In fourth grade I copied the entire Declaration of Independence from a textbook facsimile in Jefferson’s hand.  I even imitated the handwriting.  In fifth grade when I ran a history class in our one and only “student teaches a class” day, I used Jefferson’s “Have we found angels in the form of kings” for my punchline.

Here are a few quotes from Jefferson relevant to the moment.  Feel free to add your own.  

“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”

“…and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

“What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”

“We are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

“This is the fourth?”
–reputed to be Jefferson’s last words the day he died: July 4,1828.

If your country’s leadership, or even your whole society, is showing signs of insanity, especially when that insanity threatens you with sudden death or eventual destruction, how do you keep from going crazy? Beyond various therapies and spiritual practices, Internet confabs and snarkfests, the crap shoot of self-medication, etc., what are some useful attitudes and conceptual tools?

That was where I left off in my last diary about Doctor Strangelove and the insanity of the nuclear age.  I concluded that the film’s message could be summed up in a line from a Marx Brothers movie: there is no sanity clause.

This time I’d like to offer a few conceptual tools for understand the ruling insanity of our age.  Then hints of an attitude to help us cope, and especially to keep on working for a better future.

(For those who read my most recent Daily Kos diary, this is an extended version of its last section. And a warning: I am not a trained psychologist.  Just your average space cadet.)

In 1957, an aged Carl Jung was interviewed extensively for an educational film made by a Texas scholar.  Probably the most quoted lines from those interviews are these:

“Nowadays particularly, the world hangs on a thin thread.  Assume that certain fellow in Moscow lose their nerve or their common sense for a bit; then the whole world is in violent flames.”  After pointing out that there is no such thing in nature as an H-bomb, he continues: “…that is all man’s doing. We are the great danger.  The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche?”

But Jung didn’t mean just about the psyche of leaders (talking to a U.S. interviewer, he was gracious enough not to mention certain fellows in Washington as well as Moscow.)  He meant everyone.

“And so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of psyche is, how important it is to know something about it.  But we know nothing about it.  Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever.”

This is just as true today.  We know relatively nothing about the human psyche, and trends in psychology that emphasize manipulation by drugs and tricks don’t help much. We talk on the level of politics, policy, government, business, society as if the human psyche doesn’t exist or is of no importance–as if the field of politics is governed by its own rules only, and is entirely rational and conscious.  

But when something like the prospect of nuclear war or the Climate Crisis awakens fears and anxieties in us that are hard to consciously control, or when we plunge into depression because Karl Rove is getting away with it, the psyche asserts itself in a way that we can see.

But let’s be clear: people like Bush and Cheny are acting in large measure to further political and economic goals, and analysis of political and class interests, for instance, are valid. But they don’t tell the whole story.  Especially when politicians gather power by “pushing buttons” of the American public, who don’t really share their goals (and certainly not their profits.)

Also, though psychological analysis of these individuals (like Bush as a “dry drunk”) may be useful as well, they are speculative, and not the subject I want to address here.  

My argument for including psychological insight in the mix, along with other kinds of analysis, is based largely on my conviction that certain broad psychological concepts, mostly derived from Jung (though not all originate with him) can be applied to understanding why we react as we do, in the political as well as personal realm.  And these reactions have political, economic and social consequences.  People die, get medical care or don’t, are homeless, are hopeless, partly or even largely because of these reactions.

As Jung implies, knowledge of the how psyche works can help us see the world more clearly, reduce unnecessary conflicts, and help resolve conflicts when they arise.  They are among the skills of peace.

They can help us see more clearly what’s really going on, partly by reducing the interference of erroneously based reactions.   Even the simplest conceptual tools developed by Jung and others would be immensely useful in both analyzing our situation and in dealing with our own responses.  

Simply admitting that a phenomenon called the unconscious exists, and learning how powerful it is, how its manifestations mask themselves as rational products of consciousness, would be a tremendous start.

One key feature of thoughts and emotions that come from the unconscious is that they convince us they are based on conscious reasoning or observation.  They come equipped with their own rationale.

How do we know then, whether something comes from the unconscious or not?  By testing it against concepts that identify the form that unconscious expressions often take.  

We’re pretty familiar with at least one, mostly from the recovery movement: The concept of denial has entered the lexicon.  Denial is a powerful and persistent response that colors what we observe and how we interpret it.  It may arise when it hurts a lot more to accept a fact or possibility than to reject it–when to accept something shakes the very foundations of our sense of self, or picture of a relationship, or even our sense of reality.  

When we react strongly to something, it’s worth asking: am I in denial about this?  In the political realm, we’d ask some Republicans if they are in denial about Iraq and the Climate Crisis, and some Democrats if they are in denial about evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen.  It might help sort out the real issues and real disagreements.

But in the political realm, Jung was much more concerned with another concept: projection. One form of projection is seeing in others the qualities and behavior you fear in yourself.  

The simplest form of it is to observe how enemies are typically demonized in wars and other conflicts, but when they become peacetime allies, those terrible qualities of evil suddenly disappear.  Jung saw it in the attitudes of Americans and Soviets towards each other.  Projection could have led to  world destruction, and it still could.

Projection can be very complicated in political discourse, as when both sides call each other Nazis, or accuse each other of corruption.  Neither may be right, or one of them is right, or both may be right in terms of their specific charge.  But it is always worth asking, how much of this is justified, and how much is projection?  If that question isn’t asked, we risk overestimating or underestimated the real danger.

Projection can be used intentionally, and often is.  Bush and Cheney push the projection button with their demonizing of every opponent.  Rabid rightwing talk radio wallows in projection.  Karl Rove has raised projection to a dark art with his strategy of projecting onto opponents one’s own weakness.

Anticipating possibilities is one of our species’ survival skills.  But like other good things, such as antibodies, it can go wrong.  Fear and projection seem particularly to go hand in hand.      

We know nothing about it, was Jung’s cry of pain at the end of a long career. Basic psychological concepts are essential tools of peace, globally and personally.  Some of the understanding that eludes us when we don’t use them is possible when we do.  

That’s a general strategy.  There is a more specific one that applies to many other issues and our general situation.  It has to do with dealing with fear, despair and the sense of futility.  

Embracing Paradox

One reason we feel so vulnerable is inherent in our “either/or” way of thinking, an essential element in the 5,000 year history of what we call civilization.  It may come as quite a shock to us that so-called primitive humans as far back as the Pleistocene had a more complex response to their reality.

For example, as they felt very close to animals, consciously learned from them, and considered them the embodiment of essential spirits.  Yet they hunted and killed them.  Scholars of the period such as Paul Shepard believe this deeply troubled them, but they developed a more complex way of seeing reality, which to our thinking would be paradoxical, though to theirs was a kind of natural spirituality.  Some surviving indigenous cultures retain some of this.  Finding a way to deal with the opposites of life and death are central to all belief systems, philosophies and most art.

So how do we cope with the insanity around us?  How do we deal with suffering that could be averted, and a future that could be better but probably won’t be?  

Dealing with the contradictions in our own lives has been a challenge for a long time, and going on living when great catastrophe can strike at any time is a challenge of our time.  

In his novel, “The Time Machine”, H.G. Wells created a time Traveller who sees humanity as we know it end in the future, and he sees the earth eventually become lifeless.  How can anyone avoid despair with such knowledge?

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been,” the Traveller recalled. ” It had committed suicide.”  In an epilogue, the Traveller’s best friend acknowledges that the Traveller “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”

The friend’s conclusion is a single sentence that also sums up Wells’ lifelong faith:  “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”

This is not acceptance of evil in our time, or complacency or denial, but acceptance of the rightness of our struggles and our lives regardless of the ultimate outcome. We live as best we can in the moment, and understand that hope for the future is a quality of the present, and commitment to fostering a better future is an activity of the present.  It’s summarized also in a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentions Wells several time in his first novel.

“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

That’s the part of his statement most often quoted, usually with reference to Keats’ theory of `negative capability.”  But Fitzgerald went on, in a more Wellsian vein, and in a way that speaks most directly to us today:

 

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

   

Further Reading: In “Modern Man in Search of A Soul,” Jung wrote for the general public.  In such works as “Projection and Re-Collection,” Marie-Louise von Franz explores the complexity of projection, but this is fairly technical.  Probably the most accessible writer on Jungian concepts is Robert A. Johnson.  His “Owning Your Own Shadow” is a short and clear introduction to concepts like the shadow and projection.  Extending and applying these concepts specifically to war and other political matters of our time are two recent books, James Hillman’s “A Terrible Love of War” and Anthony Stevens’ “The Roots of War and Terror.”