Every once in a while I count my blessings. One that I have been thinking about recently is the blessing I have by dint of growing up manly. I’m the oldest of four boys and grew up in a neighborhood where everyone respected my father. Everywhere I went, I heard “Your father’s a good man”. And I lived long enough to hear that I was a good big brother from my sibs.
So without trying to be a big man (because my uncles and father and grandfathers were alive into my adulthood) I became a big man. One of those virtues I have come by organically is understanding proper gentlemen and the gradations downward. But the one I want to focus on today is the virtue of courage. That counts especially for courage in defense of yourself and of those who depend on you.
I think about this constantly. Am I any good at preserving the good? What happens if I go away? The reason I believe that I can grill myself on such questions without doubting myself is because (my blessing) I grew up with three younger brothers behind me. There was no place I went without the inherent understanding whatever kind of scrape I got into, I had three brothers. I hated to lose in front of them. They hated to lose in front of me. We played football and basketball together. We did tons of home improvement chores together. We did an enormous amount of hiking and camping together. It’s something of a pity we didn’t study together - we never quite understood that we might have all been doctors if we wanted to. We weren’t materially ambitious so much as we were morally and ethically ambitious. Every one of us was referee material. We demanded fair play at all times. We hated cheaters, spoilsports and corner-cutters. We did the work. Pops made sure. We passed inspection. We told the truth. All of this made us fearless. All of this made us defensive, in that best way. We weren’t Ghostbusters, but people called on us. Apart or together we were competitive, stand-up guys.
Since October 7, we’ve seen a consistent story: The Biden administration views its support for Israel in purely defensive terms, and feels a duty to restrain Israel’s offense. The American hug comes with handcuffs.
None of our hugs came with handcuffs. It was unthinkable. We wouldn’t allow any of us to be attacked yet undefended. We couldn’t imagine a situation where we would allow a violation to stand. So I wonder these days what it would be like to never know the comfort of an inherent strength. What would it be like to be afraid to speak the truth and to fear calling out monkey business?
One of the things I remember growing up was my father saying “I’m sick of looking at this mess!” More often than not he would track us down and find out who’s responsible for it, and we’d get a kick in the pants and get busy cleaning it up. But occasionally it would be sorted out by Dad magic. The mess would never stay. Never. There is a vigilance that comes with confidence. When you live responsibly, you understand how much work it takes to get things right. Or wrong.
Doc, retired of the LAPD in the green shirt above, told me once that you have to do a lot of bad stuff to get into prison. The chances of a cop catching you red-handed, arresting you and you losing your liberty is almost never a one shot deal. You have to be doing a significant amount of crime to get busted and convicted. By then, it’s a way of life. Repeat offenders are the bulk of criminals. It’s a developed habit. Cops and robbers know each other’s practice. It seems to me that the rest of us are mystified by the behaviors of those who are powerful and capable on both sides of the law.
From my generation in Britain, it was always the question: Would we be able to do what our grandparents had done? You know, living through The Blitz in London night after night and not losing their faith and not losing their strength.
I know this feeling, this need to be capable of delivering us from evil. I know what it’s like to break up fights, to get to the bottom of disputes, to draw lines and stand behind them. I didn’t always treasure these instincts, I didn’t always nurture these talents. I fell into them by being a first born son and being told that when Dad is gone, I am the man of the house. I took it seriously, but I had no idea how much it would eventually mean. I didn’t realize how many never know.
When I got my first corporate full-time job at Xerox HQ in El Segundo, I was at once impressed at how everyone dressed like characters from the TV show LA Law. It was the corporate destination of my undergraduate dreams. Yet there was a sloppiness in the discipline there. I kept thinking to myself what my father would be saying about this place: “I’m sick of looking at this mess!”. Ultimately Xerox fumbled the future. That failure stuck with me. They lost their Alphas. Those people went off to 3Com, Adobe , Sun Micro and Metaphor.
I didn’t realize how many never knew.
[A]political Aside
Doc wants me to talk about our recent hurricane and what has or has not gone wrong. This gets complicated and dealing with the political aspects of what commentary and reporting is going on right now about North Carolina is something I stay away from. Still, I absolutely understand his desire to protect. It’s very deep in him and having that concern violated generates a sense of betrayal. I sense that it is so intense in him that it keeps him pacing, like a lion in a cage of his own fashioning. “I can see all of you just fucking things up. You better be glad I’m in this cage. I don’t want to rip you to shreds, but boy do you deserve being ripped. I’m sick of looking at this mess!” This is what patriotism does to the expatriate. It’s like watching your childhood home burn.
I struggled similarly in un-becoming the conservative black writer that I no longer am. I had this sense of civic engagement that I only knew how to express politically. It made me sound partisan when I didn’t want to be, and I ultimately fell out of specifics to first principles. In the end, my first principles were abandoned by both parties, and here today we have at least one candidate who doesn’t understand the First Amendment.
But let me tease this. I have been following Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Konstantin Kisin more or less, and of the four I find Murray most compelling because of his grasp of the poetic and historical. Without truly the slightest idea what Political Science is supposed to be the objective study of, I still think it’s all a subset of philosophy and all of us sort of know that America is doing it wrong. So I’ve written (it remains in draft, incomplete) what I think voters should do this year, but I’m really frustrated at not having followed my own political instincts. I haven’t been lifting the weights. I haven’t been running the laps. I’ve avoided all of those political gymnastics and I have no political Alpha. It’s not my circus, not my monkeys and aside from those four who are not the ringmasters, all I see are clowns.
So maybe I’ll spit it out before I go on vacation this month. All I have are instincts, some humility and mocking humor - I don’t have talking points or stratagems.
I’m still really talking about Israel vs Iran. I’m still really talking about Iran’s tentpole in the group formerly known as the Axis of Evil. I’m still really talking about Abu Nidal and the Beqaa Valley and the hundreds and hundreds of years of Persia’s use of satraps and subdued people to get their hands dirty warring as proxies. I’m talking about the Iranian Islamic Revolution as the beginning of an era of spawning repeat offenders. Today we have war. Today we have death and destruction because we allowed people to badmouth first principles, like the right of a people to have, hold, defend and run their own nation and to hold nations accountable to treaty obligations.
The great irony here is that we’ve lived through this reticence before. During the Cold War, meddling was rampant. The US, China and the Soviet Union People had little restraint in undermining national sovereignty. None of the superpowers allowed certain nations to follow their own Alphas. It was very passive-aggressive. Never forget that during the Reagan Era, the watchword for all significantly violent geopolitical engagement was ‘plausible deniability’. In my lifetime only George W. Bush had the courage to defend in the way I’m saying. I wrote in 2006 of his positives:
George W. Bush could not wait to get over to Iraq and start stomping Saddam into the carpet. He absolutely did the right thing, so much more the better if he took Saddam's threat against Sr, personally. Bush has done what no president since Roosevelt has been able to do. Turn the Defense Department into the War Department. He did it in plain sight of the world community. He took the opportunity to once and for all put America on an old school military throwdown. No illegal funding of Contras. No CIA assassinations. No half-assed single helicopter rescue missions. No symbolic bombing gestures. Just hundreds of thousands of ass-kicking GI boots on the ground. And the biggest complaint anybody can really muster is 'You shoulda sent more' to which his perfect response is, we didn't want to turn Iraq into a police state.
GWBush and General Petreaus invented American military counterinsurgency. Whereas Odierno was executing a modern version of the blitzkrieg. It’s somewhat ironic that the Israeli Beeper Blasts (I know, somebody will come up with a better name) are the ultimate expression of counterinsurgency thus far. This is how war is prosecuted. We Americans fear and distrust the Alpha. We’d rather sneak around and snipe. We’d rather play tit for tat and not escalate if we can help it. We like our wars like dishes served cold. We like pinpoint cancellation.
Nobody says, out loud “I’m sick of looking at this mess!” with the intent of holding everyone immediately accountable and cleaning that up once and for all. Nobody seems to believe in total victory. All we want is a simple majority on our side, because we are, none of us, all about first principles. That’s why we don’t have any Alphas. We’re all faking it until we make it. Like a whole industry of manipulated data and bullshit theories and dramatic narratives and identity based math. We’ve tied ourselves into a Gordian knot.
Our republic has forgotten its battle hymn. At least the people running it today have. Have a listen.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
We have no such lords in view. Because we don’t, our energies are unfocused and distraction carries the day. We are indeed living in a semiotic swamp. Heh, I used to joke about that, now I know how close we are to actual Orwellian virtual reality, which means that Kafka is in the ballpark. It’s a good idea to have a Russian friend or two. They know what’s coming.
There’s a lot I cannot account for here. On 9/11 I believed it was the beginning of the end of the nation-state. I can’t say for sure which way that is going, but so long as there are constitutions and national laws and treaties between nations, then sovereignty is real. A nation can follow its first principles. Alphas may exist.
War might teach us the reality of true human cruelty. It might help us know what kind of misinformation, disinformation, mockery, insult and epithets are really worth. It might help us to recognize the difference between hate speech and orders of battle. I use ‘might’ with the awareness that we have a sufficient number of willfully blind cowards and credulous naifs suckling against the sows of infotainment, that they won’t believe any first principles or in anyone who does actually stand for them. There will always be those who swear no oaths of fidelity, who believe there is no truth in the world, only survival. It is wishful thinking to believe they will wise up and become responsible. This is especially the case when the handwringers propose a Ministry of Truth.
Any ministry of truth is the enemy of discovery. Discovery is indispensable to liberty. I leave you with a paragraph I discovered in the early 90s and it has been central to my thinking since the very beginning of the internet.
According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occurring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself.