Month: January 2014

In the arsenal needed for gathering knowledge, these words are among the most powerful.  If you want to understand something, you have to start by not understanding it.

I wonder to what extent actors lose contact with their real selves.  Constantly playing other people, do they unconsciously lapse into roles in dealing with others?  Conversely, do we “normal” people sometimes become actors in our own plays?   Do we make fiction of our own lives?

I really do seem to have lost the taste for alcohol.  My last three trips to the place where most everybody knows my name and I have a mug with my name on it if they forget, I drank club soda in my mug.  I could have had beer or something else, but I didn’t want to.  I didn’t need it.

The more I look at this, the more I think addicts–and I of course include alcoholics in this–are to their chosen poisons roughly what kids diagnosed with (note I did not say “who actually have”) ADHD are to Ritalin.  Ritalin calms them down by speeding them up.  It is a stimulant.  They are not actually hyperactive, but hypoactive, and that causes them to bounce off the walls.  So it goes in theory, at any rate.  My intent is not to comment on the medication of our children.  My own are unmedicated, and that is about as much control as I have.

But the addict seeks to numb feeling because he or she has too little of it.  More specifically, they have layers of emotions, and the outer layer is dull.  What the drugs or alcohol do is anesthetize that outer layer, which allows inner layers to come out.  The quiet man becomes noisy; or the angry man finds better cause to express his anger.  The heroin addict, perhaps, finds that he can commune with his inner self only when he is shooting up.

We see this theme that addicts only feel normal when they are high, because having habituated themselves to the drugs, their sense of self has changed.  I think this gets things backwards.  I think they get high initially to feel normal, to suppress one set of emotions to allow another, truer set of emotions out, and finding that it works, they keep doing it.  And asking them to stop doing it is asking them, in effect, to abandon their sense of self, to abandon their connection to true feelings, to who they are.  It is asking them in some respects to die, at least until they find a better way to live.  This is why it is so hard to get many to quit: they have no where else to go.

The task, then, is liberating honest feelings without the use of drugs.

The connection with trauma is simple: trauma cuts you in half.  You have a part that is hurt which has not healed–which lives in a timeless space–and the part which had to go on, which has done on, which may be outwardly well, successful, and well adjusted, because it learned to maintain appearances.

Many, perhaps most, people who have had trauma in their lives get from one side to the other without really dealing with it.  Culturally, we lack good methods–in my view, religion is as good as any, and better than most–and until recently the simple task of survival left little time for wallowing in feelings.

But we live in an age where we need to do better.  There are many ways we can end life on Earth.  And there are many ways in which many of us have already lost contact with emotional authenticity, not least because the gravity of our culture seems to pull us in that direction; we seem poised, in fact, to generalize the sociopath as a cultural icon.

This movie touched a number of nerves.  I do have some tangential connection with some of the events, and as usual will process them–in this case, publicly, here.

I have reason to believe that if the SEAL’s had brought an Air Force Close Air Support specialist with them, they would not have lost Comms, and would either have been able to extract early without hitch, or bring down fire and death on those attacking them.

What many may have missed in that movie was the tribal culture portrayed, at least in my view and understanding.  When Marcus Luttrell–the real one, playing another SEAL–without credit–unless I am mistaken–knocked over the coffee and asked the newby to clean it up, he was enforcing a code of conduct.  That newby had not been initiated, and was at that point still a rung below on the ladder.  He didn’t fully belong at that table–or in combat with his brothers– until he recited his oath in front of his peers.  If you watched carefully, the actors were plainly given direction to take the whole thing very seriously, despite the levity that had proceeded, and despite the apparent ridiculousness of the verse.  It mattered.  It meant something.  There was a life before and a life after.

One has to keep this in mind when considering the view I have seen expressed by other services that the SEAL’s don’t always play well with others, with other services.  Specifically, the Air Force has trained special operations personnel–called Combat Control Technicians, or CCT’s–who are roughly to Close Air Support and Comm’s in general what SEAL’s are to underwater demolition, and Green Berets to counterinsurgency and Foreign Internal Defense.  It is their forte.  They are the best at it.

Had Murphy’s team had one of these guys, we likely never would have heard of this mission.  He never would have won the Medal of Honor.  Remember that the reason he won it was his decision to break cover to get to a place where he could transmit, so he could call in reinforcements and extraction.

One sees debates about which service’s special operations personnel have the toughest training.  This is a hard question to answer; but to my mind who has the toughest JOB is easy: CCT’s.  They have to do all the things other Operators do, but while essentially being Air Traffic Controllers, where mistakes get friendly’s blown up.  You have to do, in other words, what is by general consensus one of the most stressful jobs on the planet WHILE UNDER FIRE.

CCT’s further have the challenge of always being the odd man out. They get embedded with Navy and Army units who are very tight, and very skeptical of outsiders.  They have to prove themselves, and in general do it without outside support.  

This part I will now leave alone, but thought it worth saying.  I mean no disrespect to anyone.  Frankly, I walked in expecting to be shaking my head, but realized that I needed to suspend judgement in the face of the clear courage of the men, and the extraordinary circumstances.  They were all noble men, and a credit to the best parts of the American spirit.

What I will comment on, though, is this notion of tribes.  It has often seemed to me that one reason for war is precisely the effect it has both on calling forth the best energies of people, but also how it creates intimacy, closeness, love, among men.  Women will always have the battle, the war, of childbirth.  Men have nothing like this.  War, I feel, has often served this purpose.

I think of the American Indians waging their frequent wars with one another, wars which were not genocidal, not final, not intended in general for conquest, but almost as something to do.  They were outlets for excessive energy.  For much of history, in a great many places, war was roughly the equivalent of that situation–which I have found myself in once or twice–where somebody challenges you to fight, and you show up with your people, and they show up with their people, and neither of you really wants to fight, but you can’t back down.  You roll around a bit, exchange a few hits, honor is satisfied, and the people around you separate you.  No real harm is done.

What we need, I continue to feel, is tribes formed outside of violence, in which the risk-taking is entirely internal, entirely emotional.

I had proposed some time ago that on-going Holotropic Breathwork circles could be formed, in groups of roughly 20, in which people repeatedly share deep, emotionally strong experiences, and use those experiences to develop greater openness and trust, but only within that group, on the deepest level.  You share a bond of knowledge shared within the group, but not outside it.  This, it seems to me, is much like what the SEAL’s create in their own rituals.

And this model could be deployed easily and endlessly.  The logistics are not that complicated.

This is my present goal.  I wake up and go to sleep trying to meet this endless ocean which manifests in my experience as Life, a life bigger than me.  I see a transparent world, endlessly in motion, but defined by rules which can be amended and improved.  That is what I see.

I think prudence and a capacity for thinking in the long term and acting daily upon that thinking should be sufficient in most cases to preserve peace.  This would include diplomacy, and working daily to build and strengthen what is good.  Violence is either “the last refuge of the incompetent”, or “the last recourse of an exhausted mind.”

But plainly violence is sometimes preferred to subjugation.  It is not possible to develop optimally, at least for most, in slavery.

And in my own case, I would likely be a tough, ruthless soldier.

I have said before that in my view ethical decisions are best undertaken within the constraints of being local, imperfect, and necessary.  Inherently, this is a sort of relativism, but one which compares the relatively better with the relatively worse, with both measured next to the goal of universal peace and glowing happiness.

When the SEAL’s in Lone Survivor, let the goatherds go–and I think in the actual event there was only one, but I may be mistaken–they condemned perhaps 20-40 other men to death ON THE OTHER SIDE, as well as all those on their own side who died.  All in all, let’s figure 80 lives were lost in Operation Red Wing(s?).  And this does not factor in added Marines killed because the target of the operation was not killed, or everyone else who died getting him killed (which I assume was accomplished at some point). It also does not factor in deaths in the village where Luttrell was sheltered, if in fact they were attacked (I think in actuality they were threatened but not actually attacked.)

Sober analysis clearly indicates that much less death would have occurred if they had simply slit the throats of the goat herds, and buried them somewhere they were unlikely to be found.  Or left them to die of exposure, as Murphy proposed.

War is hell, as Sherman said, and the task it to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, if one decides to wage it, which is not a decision that should ever be made lightly.

My suspicion is that Luttrell may have been protecting others by making himself the locus of the decision to release the prisoners.  Certainly, that would make sense.

Morality is not always about feeling, but about using your mind to determine what is most right.  It is not ONLY about mind–heart must play a role–but it involves both.  It involves your entire self, at least in my view, and no moral decisions can be permanent in a changing world, but this does not mean all of them do not exist in a continuum of relatively better and relatively worse.

Bowie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3SjCzA71eM

I am still processing my feelings.  You had to mourn the loss of those men at the end of Lone Survivor.  If you have not seen it, their pictures were set to a revised version of this song, which I have always assumed was about homosexual lovers.  It does have a feel to it, though, which helps me understand why it was chosen.

I have an odd sensibility: in general simple sadness does not make me cry, but courage, pushing the envelope and falling over, going for it without reservation, suffering bravely–these get me.

As I ponder it, there is something mythic about this film, something I can’t put my finger on.  Maybe it is love.  Maybe it is connection with our own mortality and sense of the importance of life.   I don’t know, but it is very real.

May you be blessed with a beautiful misery that teaches you something useful.

Longer post.

The first thing that warrants saying is that we are and were in Afghanistan in part FOR the Afghan people.  Clearly, the stated and presumably actual goal was denying Al Queda the sanctuary the Taliban granted them for training and organizing missions of death and destruction against civilian targets.  But to this must be added that the Taliban were oppressive oligarchs disliked by most Afghans, who seem to me to mainly value being left alone by everyone outside of their valleys.  I have in the past used the analogy of hillbillies, and I think it is pretty close.

Thus, when people want to put a racist tint on the movie, this itself is racist, as I said in the previous post.  Leftist critics seems unwilling to separate the violence we do to one set of–I will use their implicit term–“darkies”–from the violence one set of “darkies” does to another.

Put another way, because they are unwilling to grant the categories “relatively better”, and relatively worse–which in turn depend upon granting the utility of a continuum grounded on one end in Goodness and the other Evil–they turn a blind eye to atrocities of the most horrific variety, if they are committed by one group of darkies against another, and they call the efforts of American soldiers to defend one group by attacking another evil.

This is racism.  It is considering a group both homogeneous, and inferior; inferior, because unworthy of ordinary human rights; inferior, because violence and death visited on them does not matter; inferior, because they are utterly foreign to the rich, smug, elitist sacks of shit that write for papers in LA, New York, and elsewhere, people who suffer little, fear no violence, and face neither consequences for the ideas they propagate, nor any reckoning, in which their victims confront them with the atrocities they aided through their complicity.

There is little difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan, at least in the racism of the Left, and utter indifference to the suffering inflicting on cultural others: “darkies”, as they would call them if they were honest.

Read this piece on the Communist atrocities in Vietnam: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page21.html  Click on the picture for a very partial listing of their crimes, which were much, much more vicious than anything Calley or others committed, and which differed significantly in being matters of official, high level policy originating in Hanoi.

Likewise, the Taliban have often killed civilians, have decapitated women and children, shot babies at point blank range, murdered homosexuals.  None of this gets any play in the leftwing press because they DON’T CARE.  Again, they are all darkies until they need them for political purposes, then they are quite good at acting like they care.

The issue came up as to whether or not those lives were wasted.  What I kept thinking was that our men deserve a better war and better missions.  As I have said before, I believe that 9/11 was a larger conspiracy, even though I can’t pretend to know who all the bastards were who were involved.  It seems clearly to have involved Islamic terrorists, but it remains my strong belief that American and possibly international financiers, or shadow elites played a role as well.  It is indisputable, in my view, that Tower 7 had to have been brought down by explosives, and that fact alone makes it necessary to consider a quite large scale conspiracy.

For simplicity, here is my take on this again: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/10/plausible-911-conspiracy-theory.html

It’s not great, not my best, but remains in my view good enough for the large picture.

As far as the quality of the deaths, their meaning, let me say this: that meaning is not yet written.  What did they die for, in the grand scheme of things?  Love.  Love of country, of family, of freedom, of the Navy, of the Teams, of their jobs, of their brothers.

This movie has moved a lot of people.  It has stirred patriotic fires.  And in my own view, things have not changed that much since Gettysburg.  Does our task not remain the protection of freedom, of decency, of the rule of law, of the rule of, by and for the people?  As Lincoln put it:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us —
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I have been saying for years that we consecrate the deaths of our soldiers by choosing to live engaged, active, useful, responsible, informed lives.  We curse them by living self absorbed, frivolous, cheap lives.

And I think we forget easily the less obvious costs of military service.  I have talked to a number of Navy SEAL’s, and it is a hard life on families.  The wives have to be tough as nails.  Their men are gone sometimes a year or more at a time, doing they have no idea what, no idea where, and no idea when they might get informed their loved one died in a “training exercise.”

And I remember one career Teams member who said all he wanted was to build a better world for his kids, to protect them, to protect America, and who in his subsequent career was exposed on a daily basis to idiocies I have no idea how he endured.  I don’t want to cite specifics, but it was a government job, and they had a serious mission they could not begin to perform adequately because of restrictions placed on them due to leftwing ideology/ cultural nihilism.

 Remain awake.  This is to my mind a principle way of honoring our dead.  Serve them both by furthering the specific mission for which they gave their lives–denying Afghanistan as a terror training zone–and the more general mission of protecting liberty.

Sitting there in the theater, I have to say that I felt a sense that gets called surreal.  We sit there, comfortable, fat dumb and happy, and don’t realize that our HVAC, popcorn, running water, physical safety are all things which much of the world would consider luxuries.  We sit there and WATCH movies, watch other lives, but we don’t feel them.  We don’t understand them.  Normal Americans can’t begin to truly understand both the difficulty of lives in other nations (were you not amazed by that elderly Afghan who walked over a mountain to hand deliver a message?  I don’t know if this literally happened, but it is certainly possible.  I have heard stories about how tough these folks are.), and those of our military.

A year or two ago I was talking with some Army guys just back from Afghanistan, and they did two 36 hour patrols a week for most of the year they were there, and 2-3 more 12 hour patrols.  They averaged about 4 hours of sleep for the year, which is pretty damn amazing given how physically demanding their work was.  And these were just normal grunts.

In my own view, our wars have ruined too many lives of brave, sturdy Americans.  I am not anti-war, but we all suffer from the fact that despite having by far the most powerful military ever created, we cannot deter vastly inferior nations like Iran because of the constant internal sabotage by people within our political order I have called Cultural Sadeists, who actively seek to bring about our downfall, not to improve human life, but out of hatred, greed, and spite.

Our principle enemies, therefore, are within  our borders.  They are not just politicians, but the intellectuals and educators (propagandists) who continue to facilitate the moral sophistry which characterizes our public discourse, to the extent we have any.

These are my enemies, and I do what I can to fight them every day.

I went to the movies today, and I was sitting in the theater, watching the previews, listening to people laugh at humor I found utterly inane, and it struck me that clearly there are power elites.  We can discuss who they are, how they wield power, how much power they wield, what We the People’s recourse are; but their existence–in our own, as in every other large scale, complex political order–is indisputable.

And I thought: what, within their lives, makes them grow as people?  What do we have in place, within our system, to encourage the growth of the people who create the ideas which are digested, regurgitated, and fed to the masses?

When I watch a football game, if there is a clear pattern of dominance on one side or the other, I assume I can predict the outcome, and most of the time I am right (unless frickin’ FSU wakes up in the second half, and runs a TD in from their own end zone).

When you look at any large scale pattern, it is informed by the principles which inform it, by the institutional patterns, the default assumptions, default decisions, biases, tendencies, gravity.  Within Chaos can always be found orders, and sometimes one or only a few Orders.

The people at top seem to have jettisoned moral virtue, common sense decency.  They seem animated by a recidivism into the intrigues and crimes of the past.  All that we have built, morally, they want to wash away, destroy.

Do you believe that our power elites have in mind for us universal freedom, universal prosperity, and an on-going march in the direction of learning as societies and as a world how to give and receive uncritical, unrestrained, sincere love?  Do you think this?

Or do they use this rhetoric in pursuit of tawdry, old goals, of the sort the kings of old pursued in substantially every nation on Earth, goals of temporal power, pride of status, unique privileges and rights, and wealth?

How do we build a society in which the best among us are preoccupied on a daily basis with cognitive cleansing, moral purification, self exploration, and personal growth?

This is a good question, and that is a start.

I will have more to say, but will repost this comment from here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frenchrevolution/2014/01/15/lone-survivor-and-insufferable-anti-american-self-righteousness/

Clearing out Decembers pages–I still use a paper planner–and liked these three:

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies?  Erich Fromm

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.  Bonnie Friedman

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.  Mark Twain.