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Killers

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John Coyote has written a raw and powerful poem, Killer on the Road, about being a soldier.  The style is terse, the language rough.  The odd grammatical lapses, whether from art or habit, lend the poem a particular ragged urgency, like the sharp edge of a rusty piece of scrap metal.  This comes just in time for the latest debate, about whether or not to bomb something, anything, in Syria.

We suffer no shortage of moral pronouncements from either side, each more strident than the last; Coyote gives us something more precious, and far more useful: a portrait of a human being caught in the crosshairs.  In fact, it’s two human beings, caught in each other’s crosshairs, colliding, willy-nilly, in a reality of neither’s choosing.  For once in our most recent polemics, we see the enemy,  a suicide bomber, in his full humanity:

They killed his brothers.
They came to his country and torn it down to rubble.

He believed in a eye for a eye.
He will be in paradise soon.
Tears fall from his eyes as he think of his wife sleeping alone.

Suddenly, the suicide bomber is no longer a symbol, a cause, but an ordinary man, steeling himself to do what he believes he has to do, however delusional that may be.  Coyote makes no excuses here, pushes no particular agenda.  He simply points us to a reality we routinely choose to ignore: beneath the bomb filled jacket beats the heart of Homo Sapiens, one of us.  It doesn’t mean he’s justified in his actions.  It’s a mirror, pure and simple.  This is not a particularly new insight; battlefield correspondence from soldiers down through the ages reveals the same.  What’s new here and now is the permission to see it while we are still engaged in the conflict.  The soldier who, reacting instinctively to a threat, kills this man, ends up looking into this mirror, too long, perhaps, for his own good:

He hold pictures of a man’s wife  with two children.
He wonder why he has to kill this man?

He should of been home tossing a football with his brother or something.

He cries for the Iraqi he killed.
Old Sargent said he was a hero.

At this point, it’s too late for redemption:

He would do his duty and go home.
He don’t talk of God or Jesus anymore.
He just wishes for the blood to leave his hands.

There is no happy ending here, no satisfying resolution.  Scales drop from the eyes, but a lot that’s good in human values drops with them.

It’s a picture we need to hold onto while we’re making decisions that can kill not just bodies, but human spirits as well.  Coyote is clear about where he stands: stay home, no more killing.  Others might come to a different conclusion; there is the matter of precedent concerning chemical warfare to consider.  Either way.  Just let’s go into it with eyes wide open.

A little perspective, please

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Jews being executed at Ivangorod. Source: Wilkimedia commons

Jews being executed at Ivangorod. Source: Wilkimedia commons

I see a lot of gloom in the public literature lately, the idea that we have come upon horrible and chaotic times, the like of which have not been seen in recent history.  Certainly, some concern, even alarm, is justified, especially where global climate change is concerned, and I wouldn’t hesitate to acknowledge the seriousness of various international crises, especially those in the Middle East, but let’s step back a bit and take a deep breath.  How is humanity really doing these days?

Look, I’m no Pollyanna.  We’re not in Utopia, folks, I understand that.  And I fully understand the literary bias towards the dismal.  Doom looks more serious than optimism, pessimism is often mistaken for clear-eyed realism, and both are so attractive to writers facing a blank page that it’s no wonder how often they succumb.  I even approve of the role of writers as coalmine canaries, carriers of unpleasant but necessary information for the welfare of the society.  What I do object to is the increasing surrender to despair and bitterness (ahem, poets).  This abjectness is understandable for the victims of the various disasters occurring around the world.  It is inexcusable from people who, consciously or unconsciously, present their work as a sober reflections on reality.

Compared to the 20th century, the 21st, so far, is a cakewalk.  Are there wars springing up everywhere?  Not anything like World War I, in which 18 million lives were lost.  Soak that up.  18 Million.  But that was a drop in the bucket compared to World War II.  Estimates of fatalities in that war range from 60-85 million, about two thirds of which were civilians.  In addition to the roughly 6 million Jews that were fried in Nazi ovens, at least that many non-Jews were also executed: Roma, homosexuals, socialists, Catholic clergy, even persons whose great crime was that they were handicapped.  Not just in the line of fire.  All these people were systematically rounded up and executed, like so many floor sweepings.  Humans.  Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.  I often hear people sigh and wonder at the apparent inability of Africans and Arabs to live in peace.  They’re amateurs, compared to Europeans.

Let’s not forget the two major revolutions in the last century:  Russia and China.  In the Soviet Union, it is estimated that more than half of the 20-30 million casualties attributed to World War II can be tied to purges and forced mass migrations instigated by Stalin to rid himself of elements he considered disloyal.  The modern troubles in Chechnya and other hotspots in the Russian Federation can be traced directly to this.  Huge masses of native Chechens were moved out, and ethnic Russians moved in to replace them.  The gulags were full to bursting, in unspeakable conditions:  sawed-off oil drums as indoor latrines, little or no heating.  Often, inmates would waken in the Siberian morning with their hair frozen to the wooden pallets they slept on.

Let’s not forget diseases.  Horrible as the AIDS virus is, it’s not anywhere near as deadly as the 1918 flu epidemic, which infected about 500 million people worldwide, and killed as many as 100 million of them, almost 5% of the world population.  This came on the heels of World War I, whose charms I discussed above.

I could go on.  China’s revolution held its own horrors, including the Red Guard madness of the 1960s.  I won’t even start on the psychological damage attributable to the Cold War, and its policies of Mutual Assured Destruction, an apt acronym if ever there was one.

So why all the doom and gloom now?  Maybe it’s the instant and constant access to the global if-it-bleeds-it-leads news media.  Maybe, in the case of the US, where we seem convinced that not only is the world coming apart at the seams, but all our politicians are either evil, crazy, or both, we’ve grown so used to comfort that our greatest fear is losing some, even any, of it.

On being tall

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Damn!  How short are you?

How’s the weather down there?

I bet you were a jockey in high school.

Say, would you mind getting something for me off that bottom shelf?

Wait, lemme put my foot up’side yours.  What size shoe do you wear?  That’s some tiny feet!

Up in front!

Hey, little guy, wassup?

For the record, I’m 6’5″ and wear a size 16 shoe.

A fable

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Crusty Paul sat in his apartment, water lapping at his feet, when there was an insistent knock at his door.  He sighed and got up to answer it, knowing full well it was Larry, his annoying neighbor from downstairs.  He opened the door, and sure enough, there was Loopy Larry, a look of stern admonition on his insipidly righteous face.

“There’s water dripping on my head again, Paul,” he said.

“Well, I’ve told you before, just get used to it.”

Loopy Larry sighed.  “Have you let the bath run over again?”

A flush rose to Paul’s face.  “So what?  It’s just your stupid theory that that’s what’s making water drip on your head.”

“It’s not just a theory.  Every time it happens, I come up here and you’ve let the bath water run over.  Look at your floor, for chrissake, it’s covered with water!”

Paul looked at him with an expression of someone explaining some simple fact to a rather dense child, for the hundredth time.

“If you look at the past, you’ll see there are lots of times when water just falls out of the sky, for no reason.  How can you say my bathwater causes your problem, when we know that happens naturally, all the time?”

Why we’re (not) all brilliant

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ID-10053123

By Africa. freedigitalphotos.net

It seems to me that the proliferation of know-it-alls (I have to include myself, unfortunately) in world culture is directly traceable to the rise of Wikipedia.  There’s the obvious point that we can get information on almost anything at a click, but there’s also the less obvious inference from the fact that it’s crowd-sourced.

Anybody can add his/her two cents worth, or so the myth goes.  That may have been true at the inception, but try it now, and see how far you get.  That whole wisdom-of-crowds thing got a pretty good thrashing, as it became clear in the early days of Wikipedia that a lot of garbage was being put up.  Eventually, the Wiki-editor was born, and now you need credentials to post, or even revise.

But the myth lives on, and the prevalent, if dubious, implication that one opinion is as good as the next.  Politically attractive as such egalitarianism is, it just ain’t so.  Ironically, everyone seems aware of this in regard to someone else’s opinions; we’ll have to look elsewhere for the root of our narcissism.

The other part of this illusion of expertise is the instant accessibility of information.  This goes back to a very common misconception of long standing: the idea that an expert is nothing more than a repository of data.  There have always been two stereotypes of genius.  On one side is Einstein, standing before a blackboard filled with utterly incomprehensible symbols, and on the other is Ken Jennings, the record Jeopardy winner.  To me, the two represent complementary aspects of genius: Jennings the large working memory, and Einstein the ability to see patterns and implications.  Somehow, in the popular mind, this has gotten reduced to access to large databases.  Presumably, in this view, Einstein simply knew the encryption key which made all those facts available to him.

A recent cartoon has a character saying, “I’ve outsourced my memory to Google.”  Would that it were so simple.  Having all that information accessible in your brain is inherently different from being able to look it up quickly on your computer.  It is where the Jennings and Einstein stereotypes merge; you simply cannot see the pattern in a dataset if you can’t see the dataset all at once, and that requires a large working memory, inside your calabash, not on your desk.  Worse yet, you can’t see the fallacy in any given proposition if you can’t quickly compare it to other propositions.

My students used to ask me how you can choose between two plausible, but contradictory propositions.  Well, googling it will not help.  You need to closely examine the underlying assumptions of the two ideas, as well as the implications.  You also need to see how compatible they are with other propositions.  This is possible without a good working memory, but very difficult.

Much easier to pick a side, and stick with it.  You see this mirrored all the time in online “discussions.”  A makes an assertion; B makes a counter-assertion.  From that point, it’s either alternating re-assertions, or ad hominem, frequently both.  There is an appalling scarcity of any relevance from one comment to another.  If an adversary’s point is acknowledged at all, it is only as a prelude to insult.  “You say x; you’re hopelessly naive.”

Internet knowledge is very broad, but shallow as a puddle, I’m afraid.  Add to that the fact that most search engines will give you what the algorithm says you want, and online genius can be summed up in one word:

Fool.