How Many Minutes to Midnight?

Now we’re getting to the real meat of what the recent election of Donald Trump was all about. On Friday, March 17, the President’s new Secretary of State finally gave voice to his boss’s policy, and it wasn’t pretty. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned of a possible first strike on North Korea to eliminate that nation’s emerging nuclear capabilities. He said that “all options” are being considered to counter North Korea’s latest moves, including its recent ballistic missile tests. Tillerson tried to couch his threat in diplomatic language, but his message seemed clear to all who heard it:

Certainly we do not want for things to get to a military conflict. We’ve been quite clear on that in our communications. But obviously, if North Korea takes actions that threaten the South Korean forces or our own forces, then that will be met with an appropriate response. Let me be very clear: The policy of strategic patience has ended.

Notice that Tillerson didn’t say, “if North Korea takes actions against us or our allies.” No, he said “takes actions that threaten the South Korean forces or our own..” Which is a way of saying that ‘a threat can be anything we say it is.’

The following day, Saturday March 18, in China in a meeting with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Tillerson reiterated his warning, saying that the nuclear ‘threats’ from North Korea had reached danger level, though, in an apparent effort to reassure the Chinese, he refrained from repeating his first strike threat: “I think we share a common view and a sense that tensions in the peninsula are quite high right now and that things have reached a rather dangerous level,” he said (never mentioning, of course, the American-South Korean joint military exercises that contribute heavily to that “tension”). Minister Wang Yi tried to further calm the waters, saying that the issues should be resolved by talks: “Now the situation on the peninsula arrives at a new crossroad, where it could be further escalated into conflicts, or finding a way to restart negotiations by strictly implementing relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions,” he said. But the U.S. Secretary of State had already said that “the policy of strategic patience” had ended, meaning, presumably, that mere talks weren’t enough anymore.

Though one would think that the chief diplomat of the United States would have at least some faith in talks for resolving conflict, his sentiments are quite in line with the thinking of Tillerson’s master, President Trump. The new President doesn’t much like talk. He prefers action, and, if necessary, military action, and if really necessary, nuclear military action. What’s the point of having nukes, he is reported to have said, if you don’t use them?

So now we have what may be the most dangerous nuclear situation since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Then, the United States and the Soviet Union stood toe to toe over the Soviet placement of ballistic missiles in Cuba—only 90 miles off the coast of the United States. The United States set up a naval blockade to stop Soviet ships from putting the final touches on the missile batteries, and demanded that the Soviets dismantle the ones already built. The Soviets refused and kept its tankers headed toward Cuba, with nuclear submarines as escorts. No one knew what would happen when the tankers met the American blockade. American generals like Curtis LeMay had already urged a quick first strike to knock out the missiles, but President John F. Kennedy waited, hoping that some contact with his adversary in Russia, Nikita Khrushchev, would resolve the crisis short of nuclear war. And at the last minute, Khrushchev did, in fact, communicate his willingness to dismantle the missiles if Kennedy would do the same with American missiles in Turkey. This negotiation averted the nuclear crisis, even though neither Kennedy nor subsequent presidents lived up to the quid pro quo.

Now, however, the two main actors, Donald Trump in the U.S. and Kim Jong Un in North Korea, are quite different characters from Kennedy and Khrushchev—both of whom were seasoned politicians and men of considerable sanity. Trump and Jong Un, by contrast, are rank amateurs, and worse, among the most unstable national leaders on the planet. Both have the emotional and intellectual maturity of teenagers. Both are driven by a narcissism so extreme that it would be considered pathological in any healthcare setting (though in politics, narcissism seems almost a required trait). And both seem similarly driven to prove to the world that they are big, and bad and as brave and fearless as their fathers. In short, we have two mentally- and morally- and emotionally-stunted leaders sitting in control of the most fearsome weapons ever invented, and eager to demonstrate that they are quite willing to use them. They remind one of rival gorillas circling each other for control of a pack, stamping loudly, growling to show their teeth, pounding their chests to display their fierceness. Only that, with gorillas, it is only one or both who could be torn to pieces. With our paranoid primates in charge of our two benighted countries, it’s half the world that could be drowned in wreckage and fallout. Not to mention the millions of bodies on site that would be incinerated.

What’s worse, in Trump’s case, is that North Korea is a perfect target for this bully. A tiny underdeveloped nation, it has alienated most of the world with its policies and bluster and recklessness; with its total disregard for its people’s health and welfare, preferring to waste its treasure on nukes and missiles and a standing army of millions. Of course, the United States demonstrates a similar penchant, especially under Trump, to prefer guns over butter (witness his recent budget draft), though not to the same extreme degree. No matter. North Korea will not gain much sympathy throughout the industrial world, and that makes it a perfect target. So does the fact that in the West, concern for Asians never amounts to much in the first place. With huge populations, Asians seem quite dispensable to many Americans—witness the attitude towards killing Vietnamese in our recent war there. Eliminating a few million in North Korea might seem quite appropriate to many of our Neanderthal brethren.

Add to that the tendency for Donald Trump to divert attention away from intractable problems by initiating what seem to be unthinkable thoughts or actions—such as the recent totally unfounded tweets accusing former President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the election—and you have an almost perfect case for initiating the perfect distraction: a military action against a universally hated foe. Who would want to pursue alleged connections between Trump and the Russians or worry about his monstrous healthcare plan or obscene budget when a nuclear strike is threatening or happening in Asia? No one. The best way to rally the nation round the flag is to start a new war. George W. Bush knew that. Hitler and Goebbels knew that. And Donald Trump knows that. Stir up fear in the homeland and everyone salutes the flag and rushes to enlist. The wall to be built on the Mexican border uses the same fear in a smaller arena. But a nuclear strike against North Korea? That would have them running to erect statues of the Donald in all the parks in the land. Wouldn’t it?

In truth, it’s really quite insane. And that’s what makes it even scarier. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would see that diplomacy must be used to the very end, and beyond, before nuclear threats. Even the Chinese Foreign Minister saw that, and said so. But in America at this stage of the game, common sense is the least available commodity. And so, here we are. With two teenaged boys displaying their nuclear penises and engaging in a pissing contest whose outcome no one can predict. Because no one knows if either one of these little assholes really has a lick of courage or not.

And that, my friends, may be the most dangerous element of all.

Lawrence DiStasi

Using Dead Heroes

In Donald Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress last night, the highlight was generally conceded to be the tribute to the widow of Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens, who was slain in the Trump administration’s first foray into actual battle. Faking great emotion (fakery being his strong suit), the president first mentioned Owens’ sacrifice, then pointed to his widow in the gallery who was obliged to rise while keeping back her tears, and then kept pointing and applauding for long minutes while the cameras stayed on the grieving widow openly weeping for her slain husband, while Congress members clapped and cheered boyishly, madly. The whole spectacle was mawkish hero-worshipping at best, and gruesome war-mongering at worst, making it seem as if Owens had died in a critical battle of a major war to “keep the country safe.” In fact, Owens died in a badly-botched commando raid on the village of Yakla in Yemen that took the petty officer’s life needlessly; but since it was Trump’s first taste of war (being a hapless Commander in Chief is the closest he’s come to combat, never having served in any capacity in the U.S. military—the now-Chief was deferred four times while in college from 1964 to 1968, and then in 1968 got a medical deferment—though he has claimed that the military school he attended in high school gave him more military experience than those who’ve actually served…like John McCain, we presume), he had to make it seem like the Alamo. With the hero allegedly (according to Trump) looking down from Heaven upon the gathering in Congress and exulting in this sacred hallowing of his memory.

            The problem is, a New York Times article on Feb. 1 (“Raid in Yemen: Risky from the Start and Costly in the End,” by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger), gave many details of the elite commando raid, and it was anything but heroic. First planned by President Obama, but deferred because a night without moonlight would not occur until after his presidency was done, the raid was approved hastily and with little debate by Trump’s new national security team looking for a decisive victory to highlight the decisiveness of the new regime. Unfortunately, the problems began at the outset when, possibly due to noise from drones scouting the invasion area, the target al-Quaeda stronghold learned of the attack. Thus, the critical element of surprise was gone and though the commandos knew it, they pressed on anyway. What resulted was a vicious firefight and attack on the whole village of Yakla in which the United States lost both Petty Officer Owens and an expensive Osprey aircraft worth millions, and the village lost numerous civilians including women and children:

“The death of Chief Petty Officer William Owens came after a chain of mishaps and misjudgments that plunged the elite commandos into a ferocious 50-minute firefight that also left three others wounded and a $75 million aircraft deliberately destroyed. There are allegations — which the Pentagon acknowledged on Wednesday night are most likely correct — that the mission also killed several civilians, including some children. The dead include, by the account of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Qaeda leader who was killed in a targeted drone strike in 2011.”

Of course, Pentagon officials at first denied that there were civilian casualties, but eventually had to admit to the ‘collateral damage’ when reports from Yemeni authorities and grisly photographs of the dead appeared on social media sites. Yemeni officials said that virtually the whole village of Yakla had been destroyed. Yemen’s foreign minister, Abdul Malik Al Mekhlafi, condemned the raid on Twitter as “extrajudicial killings.” The Pentagon and Trump tried to make it all seem worth it, because ‘real intelligence’ was gathered.

            So there you have it: this botched and ill-conceived and essentially useless raid is what Donald Trump in his speech to Congress and the nation tried to cast as a heroic battle against dastardly terrorists trying to invade and destroy us. He looked pained and compassionate as he clapped for the grieving widow, and waxed eloquent about her husband’s sacrifice, which he claimed God and the grateful nation would never forget.

            The Congress did its part, as noted above, by clapping and cheering madly for the heroic nation (with heroes like Owens fighting its battles, how could all Americans not feel heroic themselves?) that views itself as leading the fight for freedom around the world. And winning—for hasn’t Donald Trump said that the U.S.A. under his leadership is going to start winning again? And of course, it was clear that most of those who clapped—especially the fatly smiling President himself and his fatly smiling Repugnant colleagues—were cheering mainly for themselves. Donald Trump, though he had ducked out of the major war of his generation with deferments and medical excuses, had finally reached his apogee: the non-serving President had become a commander, a winner, a war hero by proxy. And all across the country, no doubt, his supporters, many of them having served and been maimed in the very war he ducked out of, bought the tale hook, line and sinker, and cheered and teared up along with him.

            War. It’s the old standby for all demagogues, able to bring the dumb masses to their feet in the fake emotion of flag-waving patriotism for fallen heroes. Works every time—at least for a little while.  

Lawrence DiStasi

Death etc.

I have recently turned eighty. That’s 80 years or eight decades on this planet (not counting the three-fourths of a year or so when I was gestating). And though there has been no apparent change in either my physical or mental capacity (well, not obviously; though I have been noticing subtle changes in my balance and in my endurance at simple tasks, and others may well notice less than subtle changes in my mental ravings), there has been just today a change in my thinking about endings. About death. It’s something most of us are reluctant to contemplate most of the time. Too depressing. We all know we’re mortal. We all know we’re going to die. Some day. But usually throughout most of our lives, we are able to set aside that some day to an indefinite “later.” I’ll deal with that later. For now, there’s too much to do, too much to see, too much to enjoy. Too many people to take care of or whatever momentary crisis needs our attention. With the passage of my eightieth birthday, however, thoughts of death have arisen unbidden. And I no longer have the inclination or the capacity to shove them aside.

            So here we are. Closer to the fulfillment of a lifetime than ever (notice how I just avoided that dreaded word “end”). And though most popular discussions about such times focus on accomplishments, or how much one has enjoyed life, or whether there’s still something one wishes to do or see or accomplish, it now seems to me that those questions are really only more attempts to put aside the real question. And that question is: what happens? What happens when I am no more? What happens to whatever it is I am when the most obvious manifestation of “what I am” has turned cold, immovable, inert?

            And here’s where we get into problems. It’s not so much that I fear the end, as Woody Allen once said (he added that ‘I just don’t want to be there when it happens’—which is another way of saying I’m afraid of the pain of death). That’s not the real problem. Because if the end is truly painful, then the release of not being there anymore would come as a relief. As something sought. No. The real problem with thinking about death is that we have no tools with which to think it. It is the great unknowing. For every other state that seems analogous to “not being,” such as sleep or being put under some consciousness-blotting drug (and the new ones are simply fantastic), we have the comparison that comes when we “wake up.” We come out of sleep or we come out of anesthesia, and we can think back to what we can remember or even not remember, for not-remembering is a kind of remembering: I don’t remember a thing. And we compare that with the state of non-consciousness in whatever way we choose. The problem with death is that there’s no comparable comparative state. Once we die, that’s it. There is no waking up (unless we happen to subscribe to the comforting notion of heaven or Valhalla or reincarnation or whatever myth we’ve been taught, all of which seem pretty obviously moot here). There is only the full stop. Death. Period. End of story.

            That is the hard thing to contemplate or comprehend. The impossible thing. Because, again, we have no waking state from which to view it. We’re gone, our ability to contemplate or comprehend is gone with us, and all that’s left are the people and world we’ve left behind—if we can even say they exist any more, because once our ability to see or sense them is gone, we don’t even know whether they, or the world itself still exists in any meaningful sense. Does it? We don’t know. We have no way to judge. No way to reason about it. It’s gone because we’re gone. Our contemplating of goneness is gone.

            And so we come to a dead end—all puns intended. And thinking about that dead end is what I, what we all fear more than anything else. The non-existence of ourselves. Of our ability to see or comprehend the world. Which we are sure exists and which we want to maintain in our body/minds and in its present state (if there is such a thing) for as long as possible. But with no me to maintain it, the world simply disappears. All its objectivity turns into an illusion. It depended on me to give it shape and form, and once I’m gone, it is gone too. It’s a bit like the notion in quantum physics where any object only exists when there is an observer to pop it into existence. Without the observer, we can’t tell what state it’s in. And that drives us crazy. Which is why death, the notion of death, drives us crazy. And which is why so many variants of the persistence of something—of some locus of consciousness like the soul that is prior to the mere matter that is the body—have occurred over the millennia. Unable to contemplate anything without us, we invent a state where some non-material, essential us is preserved. And lives on. Which is what we really want.

            The question is, can we dispense with this comforting notion entirely, and still contemplate death? Can we contemplate our own nonentity? Our own nonbeing? Our own nothingness?

            It’s not easy. I have been trying to do this for some time now. The world without me. And only one thing is certain: it won’t be the same world I now know. It will be the same world in many particulars, presumably, but the world that I perceive and roam through will not exist. Nor will I. And that’s the impossible part to conceive. Conceiving implies an “I” to animate it. Without an I, without me, what can be conceived? Can my death be conceived without me? Or is death only conceivable to those who survive? It seems so. Absence is only conceivable by that which is still present. Those who know me will be able to notice, and perhaps grieve, that I am gone. But what about me? Will I be able to see that I am gone? It’s like an Escher drawing. Recursion. How can I see myself when what I see with is not there?

            And the question then becomes, does it matter? Is it important to know what death is like? Well, at this moment, it is. To me. I would like to know. Or maybe it is a mercy that I don’t know. Maybe that’s what the real meaning is here. We are not allowed to know because actually knowing death would be too hard. Too painful. So we are kept in the dark until the dark comes, and then the issue has vanished anyway.

            I hate that. I hate to accept that. Knowing seems to me, seems to our entire culture, to be an unalloyed good. We should all know what we’re about. We should all know what we are. We should all be aware of what we’re doing and what is happening to us so that perhaps some of the hateful things wouldn’t be allowed. And yet, the most important question remains beyond our reach. We keep it beyond our reach for most of our lives, and then when we want to grasp it, we realize that it’s still out of reach, that, perhaps, we’re not meant to grasp it. But by whom? Who means to spare us this final realization? It’s almost like taking refuge in a putative big Daddy again. And that simply won’t do. There must be something to become aware of, some way to grasp the solution to the big question. But at this moment, I have to confess, I don’t have the key; and don’t know anyone who does. Don’t even know if there is a key. Or if having the key would make it any better. And yet. And yet it almost feels as if the key is there, tantalizing but just outside my grasp. And so all I’m left with is a kind of yearning, and a kind of frustration. Almost there, but not quite. But I soon will be. And that’s not a comfort either. It’s not like being impatient for the arrival of a big day when something grand will happen. It’s not like awaiting one’s birthday or Christmas when one was young, or a grand achievement when one is older. No. It’s like wanting to know something that, when known, will be, or might be the worst thing one has ever known. That’s what death could be like. Wanting to know something that one at the same time does not want to know. And so, driving eagerly towards it and at the same time putting on the brakes: no, wait, just another few days or weeks or years. Give me some more time to maybe find the solution, some prediction, some protection before it comes.

            Ah god. A consummation devoutly to be wished. Hamlet went over the whole thing four or five centuries ago. To be or not to be. Except that he was contemplating suicide. A choice. With a natural death, it’s not that we’re contemplating a choice. We’re contemplating an inevitability, some consummation (being consumed) we have no choice about. No choice whatever. And though we hate that, maybe it’s a good thing. If we had a choice, we’d be likely to screw it up like everything else humans do. So maybe it’s a good thing we’re compelled. Compelled under the utmost compulsion of all: death. The mystery that refuses to be solved. The final comeuppance to arrogant homo sapiens. You cannot solve this one, smartass. You simply cannot solve it or outwit it because that which you use to solve and outwit things is gone simultaneously with the thing to be solved. And, dammit, though I hate it, though it’s maybe not as it should be, it’s maybe simply as it must be, as it is .

Lawrence DiStasi