The sound of freedom

There’s a lot of music associated with Independence Day—Sousa marches (I’m rather partial to “The Washington Post”), various country anthems (yeah—not going there), Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”… And I don’t think any Fourth of July concert can end with anything but “God Bless America”.

Well—that or the 1812 Overture; which technically was written by a Russian and is about a war in which the U.S. did not fight. But you get to fire cannons and shoot off fireworks at the finale, which pretty much makes it ideal for closing out an American patriotic event.

But here’s one song that really encapsulates for me the whole notion of the new, independent nation and its subsequent history:

Unalienable Rights

Know what I love about Independence Day?

Well, naturally I love revisiting the Declaration of Independence, that exquisitely beautiful document that sets out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

And I love the notion of the Founding Fathers weighing all their options and agreeing that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Well, damn—can’t see that happening in any political body around the world today. Can you? Certainly the onliest pledges our Congressmorons care about are the campaign contribution variety. And they no more possess honor of any stripe than they possess the ability to squirt cider out of their ears.

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally think is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, a lot of stuff has been happening in the past decade, in all three of the branches of government. And the evil that men do does indeed live after their terms in office or on the bench. But I have to believe that this is more of a cha-cha than a straightforward and inexorable march in any direction. Those Founding Fathers, man—they had soul.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can.

Sliding Sisyphus

Okay, yeah, I know—this may get up PETA’s nose, but I think it’s the perfect illustration of the Myth of Sisyphus, and by posting it I’ve spared you from having to read the essay about that by Albert Camus:

Plus—it’s, you know, really funny. Which I assure you, you will not get from Camus.

You’re welcome. 

God's hobby

Yeah, alright, you knew I’d have some questions about the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision. The majority ruling said it has limited application, but as near as I can tell, it’s actually opening such a sack of snakes that it’s going to keep several thousand law firms in Testonis for decades.

Not to mention filling campaign coffers for Congressmorons of every political stripe.

Because first of all, the decision (as written by Justice Samuel Alito) speaks of “closely-held corporations” as essentially humanoid and being entitled to run their business on the values of their closely-held owners, including claiming exception to Federal law by reason of closely-held religious conviction.

But you know—they’re talking about Christian religious convictions, because the Hobby Lobby owners were objecting to providing insurance coverage for several types of contraception that they believe (and it is belief, because scientific definitions pretty much refute their notions) these devices and medications are abortifacients. And they oppose abortions.

Well, maybe that’s indeed a limited application, because outside some parts of Pakistan and Africa where Islamist extremists have been murdering medical teams trying to vaccinate people against polio, it really has been only Christians who seem to object to 21^st Century health practices. Actually, they’re objecting to 20^th Century health practices.

(Although I imagine there are many aspects of sharia law that appeal to our Baptist Taliban, so there may be some accommodation down the road.)

I’m kind of spitballing here, that the Hobby Lobby crowd are getting their guidance in these matters directly from the Almighty, Who has somewhere decreed that these forms of contraception are somehow in violation of…well, the will of God.

So I therefore find it really interesting that Hobby Lobby (and therefore presumably God) is totally down with vasectomies. Oh—and Viagra.

Well, what’s up (um) with that? Because I’d have thought that erectile dysfunction was pretty much God’s way of telling you your shagging days are over. And therefore taking anything for it is interfering in God’s will. Big time.

(I worry that the God of Hobby Lobby seems overly concerned with a voyeur's view of women's sexual activities. Like some omnipresent-but-not-omniscient omnipotent-yet-impotent Hugh Hefner. Am I the only person creeped out by that?)

Or what about antibiotics? They screw with biological destiny, don’t they? They kill off little lives in their millions; how come they’re okay? Oh, only human life in its most rudimentary cellular form is of concern? Okay.

Well, what if you’re prescribed antibiotics because you have some kind of sexually-transmitted disease? Seems to me that curing the clap ought to be a clear no-no, because good Christians, engaging in “legitimate” sex (c.f., Todd Akin, R-Mo., and “legitimate rape”) surely would not be visited with an STD, right? So any kind of, you know, condition of questionable provenance is going to be on the non-coverage list.

And how long after that comes stoning adulterous women, honor killings and bride burnings? Because those are all deeply-held religious values also.

Unintended consequences

When I was writing my quick-and-dirty précis about the Sarajevo assassination that set off what we now call the First World War, I should perhaps have slapped on a caveat: there was a whole lot of simplification involved in that.

Well, I had to take liberties, didn’t I—historians are destroying rain forest resources at a rate of knots churning out monographs on the subject. So I was kind of doing you a favor by synthesizing it down to a couple of paragraphs. Okay—25. If you want all the details and nuances, you’re going to have to man up and read some seriously heavy (literally and metaphorically) tomes.

It got me thinking though, about how the major powers and Serbia were each thinking that what they were embarking on was a short, localized war that would result in territorial gain at little or no cost. There wasn’t a one of them that wasn’t planning on how they’d rule over new acquisitions, made either by conquest or post-war negotiation from a position of strength. (Well, okay—maybe the Ottomans weren’t. They really were just trying to hold on to that leprous, tottering conglomeration they already had.)

So it’s both a mitigation and an accusation to say that these bozos could not do the math and realize that Germany plus Russia plus Britain plus Austria-Hungary plus Serbia plus Turkey plus France could not possibly mean a small, localized war that could turn a quick profit. I mean—what kind of blinkers do you have to be wearing to not see that?

Well, I guess you have to be wearing single-focus nationalist doesn’t-matter-what-anyone-else-does blinkers. Serbs didn’t care what the Germans might be doing to their allies France and Russia; all they saw was the opportunity to grab up lands under the rule of the Dual Monarchy to build a “Greater Serbia”, as they thought had existed some centuries before.

(Two things about that—once they had Bosnia, Kosovo, Herzegovina and Croatia, they were planning to turn around and grab parts of Macedonia and Bulgaria, also for this mythical empire. And they were going to kill or drive out of these lands anyone not an ethnic Serb—so, Bosnians, Turks, Bulgarians, Jews, Albanians, Greeks, Kosovars, Muslims, Germans, Croatians, Hungarians, Slovenes…you get the picture. They’d already been doing this with conquests from the two Balkan Wars earlier in the century; this barbaric policy of “Greater Serbia” was not mythical.)

(Oh—third thing: that’s what the Serbs have been doing ever since Yugoslavia broke up in the early 90s. Come on—when was the first time you heard the term “ethnic cleansing”?)

Russians only cared about their allies as far as expecting Serbia to occupy the Austrians’ attention to the south and France to do the same with the Germans in the west so they’d have a shot at defeating them both in the east. The Germans actually had what they thought was a sure-fire cast-iron strategy for defeating France first and then mowing down Russia. The French were hoping that fighting a two-front war would mean that the Germans would not hit them full-force and that they’d be able to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which they’d had to fork over at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The Austro-Hungarians were just pretty much delusional in general, and the Ottomans were focused on preventing the Russians from moving in on the Turkish Straits, which were indeed one of those tsarist grab-and-go objectives.

And the British were hoping to God that they wouldn’t have to do very much at all on the Continent, because they were a sea power. But they also were hoping that any continental war would halt the German naval expansion; preferably before the two fleets engaged.

So—every single one focused on the best-case scenario for their own national interests, and no one envisioned, let alone planned for, the worst one. Much less one in which everyone loses, and continues losing for decades.

(Well, except for the UK’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. He predicted that the war would last at least three years, require armies in their millions and result in ruinous casualties. His fellow cabinet members blinked a couple of times at his lunacy and went on with their own plans.)

Actually, now that I think of it, pretty much like most corporate senior management today. And national governments.

But here’s what I’ve been playing with: if, by some miraculous gift of prescience, the military and/or political leaders of the seven starting players in this death-game had been able to foresee what road they were marching down with chests puffed out and sabers clanking (yes, sabers—this is not metaphor)…would they have halted? Would they have looked for other solutions to the perceived problems? Some sort of negotiation or diplomatic discussion between Austria and Serbia, perhaps brokered by Russia, Germany and France? Would the other powers have sacrificed their hopes of scooping up Turkish assets as well as putting everyone else in their (inferior) place for the sake of saving 16 million lives?

How about if you add on the 50 million or so killed by the 1918-1920 global influenza pandemic—would that have tipped the scales away from declarations of war?

In short—would they have found a way out that didn’t involve the wholesale destruction of their economies, their citizens, their resources and their futures?

Yeah...no; I got nothin’. Sorry.

After studying the personalities of those leaders for a lot of years, I still do not know whether they could have subordinated their chauvinistic and imperial mindsets for the better angels of their nature. In truth, I’m not exactly convinced that many of them had better angels.

(Stormtruppe geht unter Gas, Otto Dix)

But I’m hoping that if their citizens could also see that future—maybe just even a fly-over view of the German, French, Belgian, British (and, later, American) military cemeteries that follow a line from Alsace to Amiens—they would have revived the guillotine and selectively removed some of those leaders from the gene pool.

Pour encourager les autres, as they say.

Gratitude Monday: Cringe-control

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for the pretentious idiots in my life—at a distance, mind you. Because if they were close, I’d have to kill them and, while there’s no jury in the world that would convict, there would still be all that legal hassle. Unless I happened to be in Texas at the time, in which case all I’d have to do is enter the plea, “He needed killin’,” and maybe pay a fine or something.

There is one in particular, whom I only know third- or fourth-hand; virtually, in fact. This is a person who feels compelled to have the last word in every exchange, regardless of how inaccurate, irrelevant or idiotic that word might be. And he fancies himself quite the wit, although I only rate him half-strength (at most) in that department. (One of my journal comments: “He’d be Wildean—if Wilde were dim-witted and pig-ignorant.”)

However—here’s why I’m grateful for him and his ilk: he reminds me that not everything I think I have to say is worth the electrons it takes to transmit it. And that if I want to reduce my self-cringe factor, it’s not really a good idea for me to hit “Reply-All” and start typing at a rate of knots. Sometimes—well, frequently, perhaps—I should just shut the hell up.

(And to those of you who've received the thoughts that escaped that filtration process, I humbly apologize.)

Because I’m not always as clever as I think I am.

Just as this guy is never as clever as he thinks he is.