May 20, 2007
Meat No Longer
Okay guys, I know this will be a challenge because it's Sunday morning and you have Frank Rich and the entire wedding section to read too, but you probably won't stumble upon this wonderful essay by Marclord in the newspaper - "When Nations Lose Their Love for War;Or How to Evolve for Dummies". For your convenience, the five most important paragraphs have been excerpted below:
The capacity to organize into collective forms of protective violence saved the human race in wars against predators like lions and tigers and bears, oh my, all of whom were once well above us on the food chain. Where tigers still roamed in unguarded situations, surprising numbers of us were recently meat; upwards of 50,000 people a year were eaten by tigers in India as recently as a half-century ago. But as a race, we long ago refused to accept our status as "meat." When collective organization didn't save us from such a fate, we were motivated to diligently acquire technical solutions, the means to overcome or at least shore up our weaknesses. We made tools which could hit at distances, extending beyond the reach of tooth and claw in order to project the force required to stave off wolves, lions, tigers and bears, to enhance our own ability to eat or tame the largest mammals, and to elevate our status as a predator worthy of respect and fear. Our minds wished for arrows, missiles, and spears, and as if by magic, like the satellites which traverse the orbits of the skies, our nimble hands extruded them.As we organized ourselves into tribes, races, and nations, while we trained our wounded, wished solutions on our tormentors, we began to use these tools on each other, too, more and more. We didn't stop until the tools reached counterproductive levels of overkill. And here we are, hostage to our solutions. Hollywood apocalyptic fantasies can finally come true, with terrorists nuking Key West as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis flee it in the movie "True Lies," as the predators we once feared are captive in zoos and clinging to a marginal-species existence, and as Republican presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) got the biggest cheers in the debates the other night when he said, "I would double the number of inmates at Guantanamo."
Americans still naively believe, perhaps more than any other people, in the application of death-dealing technologies as palliatives for achieving peace. Probably because of prior successes in shared experience, that belief is sealed into the permeable pores of our mythology like a poison gas, the protective wrapper of which was ripped off when we gained the status of Sole Superpower. As Bill Murray said in the movie 'Stripes,' to inspire his fellow post-Vietnam Army classmates in boot camp: "Hey! We're Americans, and we've been kickin' ass for over 200 years. We're 10 and 1!"......
This will be different from Vietnam. Vietnam was a wasteful war fought over flawed ideology and theory, but having no appreciable oil reservers, it wasn't an Energy War. When we pull out of Iraq, we will have lost privileged access to resources which power the engines of the the high consumption upon which our way of life is based. The blame-storming will make Vietnam's wrenching, frustrating, insecurity-inducing debacle look like the aftermath of a game of Stratego in comparison. Back then there were some tremors of a required change in lifestyle, but our culture preferred tp reach for more violence to bully and quell them. This is different. When it comes to oil, this war is for keeps. That's why the daily and nightly attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad are being censored and not reaching us, why the car-bombing of the last open market there cannot be photographed or written about in the press. Its' too painful to admit. It's the whole mythology of twentieth century America we're losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're losing a way of life, and that is not unacceptable.
Yet we'll have to face it. Defeats have much to teach. I'm hopeful that America as a country can rise to the challenge defeat poses, and that after it, we'll engage in a great spiritual growth. Victory has a joyous momentum which the Greeks knew naturally bred hubris and led to tragedy. When you gain mastery over something, gain adulation, and become too good at it, if you don't get corrupted and distracted, you'll eventually just get bored. In our cores as humans, it has been more the process of mastery we have reveled in than its end points, and our most delicious joys have not been found in the mutations of murder, but in charting, as a race, a course to the new and right directions which have never rested on rewards. At this point of violent overkill, many are the nations which have lost their love for war, and which are ready for moving on to the kind of the species-wide, collective maturation needed to deal with that capacity for overkill before it extinguishes us.
Interest piqued? Out of A-Span? No? Go ahead, read the whole thing.
Photo note: A metaphorophoto - Transformation of a certain kind of patriotism. Emergence of a rainbow helix from the cloaca of a frog hidden behind the flag - a hopeful image.
A tale of the law of attraction. This shot was taken right after the discovery that funeral pyres where multiplying on the bluffs. The Queen of Good Taste was certainly upset about that! Then she discovered nine rainbow whirlygigs , anchored by frogs, hanging off of the porch of the victorian cottage next door. They had been left as housegifts by the first tenants of the season. The Queen of Good Taste had been focusing on what she didn't want, and, low and behold, she got nine more. Making the best of things, she turned the whirlygigs into photo subjects. By the end of the day all but one had blown away.
Posted by Dakota at May 20, 2007 06:56 AM
