Bomb Them Back To The Stone Age - The Allure Of Total Destruction

President Harry Truman didn't exactly want to bomb the Imperial Japanese back to the Stone Age, but close; and so he dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and shortly thereafter the Emperor offered his complete surrender. 

 

During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to show the Red Chinese little mercy and advised Truman to go north of the Korean border and bomb them to smithereens.  

During the War in Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, military advisor to Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater advised LBJ's government to bomb the North Vietnamese 'back to the Stone Age'.  Johnson of course wanted to do so, eliminate the terrorist North in one fell swoop, but the 'hearts and minds' policy of the US Government - i.e. protecting civilians at all costs, thus encouraging them to switch sides and become partisans instead of Viet Cong insurgents - made that impossible, 

Instead, Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon unveiled Rolling Thunder, the air campaign in which fleets of B-52 bombers dropped massive explosive payloads on North Vietnamese positions in the South and on Haiphong harbor.  That show of might would either bring Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table or force him to surrender. 

Truman, angered that General MacArthur went against his orders, and considering him a dangerous man, a loose cannon, relieved him of command - a bad decision as it turned out because 'The Red Menace' was exactly as the old soldier expected.  Mao and his legions became strong enough to become a serious threat to the region and to America. China went on to be the biggest arms and materiel supporter to North Vietnam, prolonged the conflict, and contributed significantly to the North's victory and the Communist reunification of the country. 

Donald Trump's hawkish generals advised the same Stone Age policy in America's war with Iran.  Regime change was obviously not enough, they said.  We eliminated the Ayatollah and mutilated his successor, but Iranian rockets keep falling on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the trucial states. Iranian missile silos have been carefully distributed throughout the country and are hidden well underground, so surgical strikes cannot totally eliminate them.  Armed drones are similarly deployed, and despite the best CIA and Mossad intelligence, many remain undetected. 

Iran has shown resilience and no fear.  They not only killed thousands of their own civilians during street protests, but have lashed out at friend and foe alike to show their military power.  It is a hateful, brutal, totalitarian regime which knows only violence; so there is only one way to eliminate the terrorist threat of the Iranian theocracy, say the hawks, and that is total destruction, reducing every official hiding place, every arms facility, every energy stockpile to rubble. 

The problem with total war, say more moderate military chiefs, is that the Iranian people are our allies, unlike the complicit Germans and Japanese in World War II.  We cannot afford to wipe them off the map, nor would we want to. 

So what to do? There isn't a day that goes by that Donald Trump doesn't want to pick up the phone and tell the Armed Services Chief of Staff to pull the trigger and unleash hell, destroy the country, then shelter the refugees and rebuild the country in America's image. 

The same holds true for Gaza and Lebanon.  Hamas has shown itself to be a worthy client of Iran, attacking Israel, arming and rearming itself to continue its avowed extermination of the Jews.  Hezbollah in Lebanon is no different.  They are implacable enemies of Israel, faithful clients of Iran, and have vowed to continue their aggression until the last man standing has fallen.  

Israel has done the needful.  It has not reduced Gaza to rubble, but nearly.  Netanyahu has his hand on the Stone Age trigger and is ready to pull it, eliminate Hamas, its tunnels, its armories, its depots, and its barracks.  There is little hesitation in his war room, for the population like that of Nazi Germany is not only complicit but collaborating.  Blowing the whole place off the face of the earth and making the region safe for Jews and enabling Jewish expansion might not be such a bad idea. 

There seems to be no end to war, and wars have always been fought for the same predictable, expected, familiar reasons - territory, resources, and geopolitical influence, all the international expression of human nature.  From childhood to adulthood, the same ineluctable, irresistible forces for dominance and survival persist. 

What is less widely acknowledged is an attraction to the power and glory of war - the Sturm und Drang, the apocalyptic fires of devastation, the savagery, and immense godlike power of raining death and destruction down on the enemy, seeing a fireball rising to the sky, pillars of black, cumulus smoke, and bits and pieces of the destroyed target spiraling up and up and back down to earth. 

Wars could not happen unless they satisfy some primal urge  It is not enough to say the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were needed to complete a German historic circle; or that the Pope's legions marching across Europe were only to annihilate the Muslim invaders in the Holy Land, that Russia simply needed a warm water port, that Iran felt a Persian destiny to control the Middle East, that the United States feared the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. 

The allure of war is primal, primeval, responding to urges set in ribonucleic acid chains in the first homo sapiens and long before in those genetic sets of the jungle, the ocean, and the veldt. 

So not only are the generals in the war room anxious to use the magnificent store of arms under their control, they must use them.  They are just as programmed to blow things to smithereens as their counterparts in the past. 

One Vietnam War fighter pilot described his experience this way:

There was nothing like it.  I was God, Shiva the Destroyer, a master of the universe flying no more than a few feet  over the treetops, unloading death and destruction, howling in the cockpit over the roar of the engine and the explosions below, dropping napalm and seeing the forest explode in a firestorm with great orange clouds of fire, ascending to 5000 feet, looking down on the smoke and ash and burning, incinerating carpet below.  It was magnificent.

 

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  

Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war until the Biblical nuclear destruction of Japan. This was the apotheosis of war. Atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed them completely in a few minutes of unthinkable power.  Wars of annihilation and Genghis Khan were back.

It was not until Vietnam that the spectacle of a fiery superhuman war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

The Founding Fathers of America were brilliant in their understanding of human nature and therefore wrote a Constitutional provision for civilian oversight of the military.  They understood that if generals had control of a large store of weapons, they would want to use it.  As importantly Jefferson and his colleagues understood that using this military might is a fulfillment of the most ineradicable male desire- to blow things up.  

Just as Hamilton argued for and got a provision in the Constitution for an intermediate legislative body to protect the nation from the will of the rabble, Jefferson insisted upon civilian control of the military - a buffer, a safe zone.  Of course both men are turning over in their graves.  The rabble rules and the military always wins out. 

'How much can we blow up?', Trump was reported to have asked his Joint Chiefs, hoping for 'A lot' as the answer, but modern warfare since WW II has always been political, complex, and often unclear.  'The fog of war' as Clausewitz said, and the President had to listen to opinions all over the spectrum. 

If Iran pisses him off, Trump is likely to unleash hell and be done with the bloody mess; but the days of the Crusades, Genghis Khan, and Hiroshima are long gone.  Still, the red button is still armed and waiting on the President's desk in the Oval Office, and only time will tell. 

Why Beauty Will Always Turn Heads - And Inner Worth Will Always Play Second Fiddle

Frances Laughton was a beautiful woman.  She had been a beautiful, adorable child, a stunning runway-ready adolescent, and a promising starlet in college.  She had been fawned over, admired, chased, and desired for as long as she could remember.  Such was her remarkable beauty that no one ever bothered to look past it and and inquire about her intelligence, moral code, perceptiveness, or creativity. She loved the attention as a little girl, but as she got older it rankled. She was nothing more than a gussied up doll, and that had to change.

 

For a while she flirted with a femme fatale persona. Her beauty, her sexual allure, and her feminine irresistibility had men wrapped around her little finger, and with that mystical power she knew she could really go places, do things, be somebody.  Beauty greased the wheels of power. 

Yet she was always bothered by the fact that if getting ahead in the world was nothing more than trading on genetics - she had done nothing to get or deserve her good fortune - then success was worthless as far as social justice, honor, or moral rectitude were concerned.  For true personal integrity and to be a model for right action, the irrelevancies of God-given gifts must be dismissed and removed. 

At Brown she had tried to become part of Students For Democratic Action, an influential campus group that took its inspiration from SDS, a radical student organization of the Sixties, strong enough to engineer the takeover of Columbia University, energize the civil rights movement, and influence the outcome of the war in Vietnam. SDS members were outspoken and never shy about the use of violent measures to promote progressive causes. 

 

Brown's SDA was a far cry from its militant forbears, but it still cause enough of a ruckus to force the administration to at least consider a quota of twenty-five percent gay, lesbian, and transgender faculty and to double the admission rate for minority students.  

Consider they did, but not much came of the hoopla.  Brown, not among the elite of the Ivy League but still an influential junior partner, had enough wealthy alumni to reject any such politically-driven, idealistic, and ultimately nonsensical moves which would further erode the academic integrity of the university and tarnish the reputation of its founder. 

Outcomes never matter to idealists who are in it for the ride, the identity, and the self-awareness; so campus activism was just as meaningful as if it actually produced results; and Frances tried to join in.  She not only thought that it would be a way for her to challenge those who underestimated her while promoting an important political agenda. 

Yet, such a wish was clearly impossible.  She was treated as someone special rather than an integral part of a group.  No woman on campus came anywhere near her stunning beauty.  She was truly one of a kind, a unique combination of classical physical perfection and a nubile, languorous sexual allure.  She was tall, naturally graceful, with an inbred, untutored elegance.  As such she was treated as the goddess that she was. 

 

Everyone knew that they were in the presence of a generational beauty - or even more, since her symmetry, litheness, and female presence hearkened back to ancient Greece and Rome.  She was Venus, Aphrodite, Helen every Roman copy, and the most beautiful women painted by Leonardo and Botticelli. 

No one was interested in her inner self, and why should they be?  They were in the presence of a miracle; and so it was that Frances, from the beginning a deeply serious, committed, and intelligent woman took the first step of redemption. She would changer her appearance and become indistinguishable from the women of The Movement as unappealing as they were. 

Progressivism in its embrace of serious things, rejects anything that smacks of the false, the superficial, the nonessential.  The use of cosmetics is tantamount to treason, both a disregard for the existential nature of the progressive cause and giving in to the predatory, misogynist male.  The more a woman can resemble her Paleolithic forbears and become a natural woman linked to nature and the environmental forces around her, the better. 

One woman, Frances thought, did look like the throwback so often limned as the progressive model - prognathous jaw, prominent forehead, narrow-set eyes - and indeed she was the leader of the campus activists, chosen to lead demonstrations, to speak at forums, and to be the image of university progressivism. 

'Brutal', Frances thought; but the woman had what Frances wanted - belonging to a group that mattered and being taken for the responsible, dedicated, committed woman that she was.  And so it was that she began her transformation from magnificently beautiful starlet to fiercely ugly partisan.  She would not - could not - go so far as to regress ten million years, but she would at least alter her looks enough to conform to those of the group. 

The transformation of course had to be gradual.  It couldn't be a sudden as a nose job, going away for the summer with a beak and coming back cute and pert. No, the change would have to be progressive - tweaking and coloring of her hair, tattoos, studs, and rings, a dismal look, bad posture, and a sobering, snarly attitude.  By the time she was finished, her classmates would have forgotten how she first came on campus, would anoint her as one of theirs, and her future of mission, identity, and political integrity would begin. 

As much as she felt at home now that her 'inner self' had been exposed, seen, and appreciated, she felt out of place and irritable.  These ugly women and skanky, brutally sexless men and the environment they enabled were miserable. She preferred the company of the best and the brightest, the most beautiful, charming, and desirable.  She loved being a starlet, a prima ballerina, a goddess. 

She graduated with honors, said goodbye to her classmates and fellows activists, and headed to Washington to take up a position and Scientists for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit which focused on the environment and climate change, but dabbled in black causes and lesbianism as well. 

It was more of the same - the tedium of good causes, serious and fractiously ugly people, and the depressing, burrowing environment of gloom.  Why progressives had to be ugly, think ugly, and worry ugly was beyond her; but she had cast her lot among them for personal reasons, flying her inner flag, and she was not ready to take it down. 

As chance and circumstance would have it, she happened to be walking on Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House and saw one attractive, young blonde woman and stage-handsome men after another walk up the drive to the West Wing.  They had nothing like the stunning beauty of her former incarnation but at least were a welcome change from the dour, misshapen lot she worked with.  

Not quite an epiphany but an eye-opener.  Conservatives take things on face value and easily fit them into a clearly defined, neatly organized policy matrix.  There is no need to probe and parse when it comes to small government, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values.  One can be beautiful and still be taken seriously.  No dredging up of muck, no hand-wringing, no tears and flapdoodle necessary.   

Although it took a while to make the elision from stunningly beautiful woman to sloppy, bangingly unattractive progressive, it took only a morning to put back the pieces.  She emerged on Tuesday looking like what God had intended her to be. She flashed a smile at Scientists for Social Responsibility, said her goodbyes, and contacted her Republican Congressman in the hopes of moving quickly across the aisle into more congenial territory.  

The Congressman like all men was bowled over by her beauty, charm and sexual allure.  Anything she wanted was hers, and so she took it, and back in her element was adored, admired, and desired. 

Her inner self? Well, that wasn't much to write home about in the first place, so it mattered even less here, whatever it was.  She moved about as though she were born for the job, used her native skills and remarkable genetic gift to her advantage and that of the Party, and could never have been happier. 

Superficial? False promise? Ignorant idolatry?  Nonsense.  Beauty is as beauty does, beauty rules, and she was enjoying every minute. 

The Doors To The Insane Asylum Open - And A Former Inmate Finds A Political Home In Washington

Harlan Banks had been interned for nearly a decade at the State Psychiatric Hospital.  His case for release had come before the Board of Supervisors a number of times, but since the necessary unanimous decision was never reached, he remained in the hospital. 

Harlan's illness began early, but the symptoms were too generalized in the population of young boys to be noticed as anything special or warranting attention - dismembering insects until they died on a skewer, electrocuting frogs with the transformer of his Lionel train set, crushing robins' eggs and writing 'shit' on Mrs. Helander's front door. 

A matter of discipline was all it was, nothing more serious; and although his erratic behavior had been noticed by the nuns at St. Maurice, the teachers at his elementary school, the bus driver, and the local patrolman, Mr. and Mrs. Banks sought no counsel.  A behavioral issue, a matter of early adolescent rebellion, the sign of a curious mind, they agreed. 

When in a PTA meeting his parents were advised that their son's behavior went beyond a reasonable doubt, and they might consider professional guidance, they had to face facts.  Their son was not normal, a hard pill to swallow for a family which prided itself on right behavior, prudence, and sociability.  

Perhaps most importantly, neither Mr. or Mrs. Banks had any disturbing behavior in their family history - if you discounted Uncle Harry, as nutty as a fruitcake but genteel, telling off-color jokes at Christmas dinner, wearing fright wigs at the weddings of people he never cared for, and wandering around Corbin Square in the middle of the night. 

No, Harlan's parents agreed, old Uncle Harry might be batty, but genes don't travel that way.  He was his own, lovable fool who had nothing to do with their boy.  Yet, the mystery of their son's increasingly mental behavior was always on their mind, and they finally decided to seek professional advice. 

After the personal interview with Harlan, the child psychologist frowned, and told the nervous parents that there was nothing serious to worry about, just a mild 'dissociative dissonance'.  In layman's terms, the boy was having trouble 'processing' and was circling about in his own world, trying to make sense of things most people had already figured out.  Watch and see, he said, and come back in three months. 

This was in the days before overdiagnosis and over-prescription, so the Banks did not leave the office with any medical conclusion or drugs to address the problem. The situation only got worse.  The boy was given to strange out-of-body experiences, claiming astral projection, whirling like a dervish in the rose garden, and howling at the moon in the middle of the night. 

His schoolwork suffered and his parents were told that he was too disruptive to remain.  It was time, they realized, for serious professional care.  Fortunately they lived near a major teaching hospital, one renowned for its psychiatric service. Dr. Fein, the Chief Attending Physician in the Department of Child Psychiatry, agreed to take the case, and Harlan began intensive counselling almost immediately. 

Dr. Fein and his staff were able to corral and tether most of the boy's aberrant behavior, so much so that he was able to complete an online high school program and be admitted to the county's junior college.  

He managed reasonable well there except for the occasional fugues where he bolted loose of the emotional restraints which bound him, and go amok - not in any way dangerous to himself or to others, but still concerning.  He had read a book on the ancient Aztecs who incorporated the spirit of wild animals and fought as panthers, cheetahs, and wolves in their battles with enemy tribes, and felt that he too could become the animals of the wild.  Whooping and hollering, hopping and jumping, crawling on all fours, he was found by the County police on a number of occasions lapping water out of the catchment basin of the Patriots' Fountain. 

Psychiatry and drugs having no effect on the young man, his parents had no choice but to agree to commit him to the state hospital where, as mentioned, he spent a number of years.  Thanks to progressive policies which had their birth in Washington, but were adopted statewide, most patients of the hospital were released, ready or not, and the community at large was asked to welcome them. 

Now, Harlan's 'aberrations' had quieted during his stay at the hospital - his animal ravings were few and far between, he ate from a plate with knife and fork, and could make sense like a normal human being; and so his elision into society was easier than for others.  The hospital out-patient services helped find him employment, and he managed to make a go of a normal life. 

It was then that he was contacted by a member of his Congressman's social welfare committee.  The Congressman was one of a group of progressives who insisted that the mentally 'other-abled' were as worthy of inclusion in the party's DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity) policy as black men or transgenders, and he needed a poster boy for his efforts.  The hospital recommended Harlan - a young man of reasonable intelligence who was still significantly disturbed but quite manageable.  He might do the trick. 

And so it was that Harlan was invited to Washington to serve as an intern in the Congressman's office, to help translate his mental experiences into legislative terms, and even to speak on certain occasions.  He would be an advocate for inclusion into the mainstream, an example of how the mentally ill should not be pariahs but members in good standing of society. 

Now, despite Harlan's outward composure, he was still as batty as could be.  He had visions, often fantastical ones of harpies and ghouls and others of Turkish harems in which he was a pasha in a sultan's palace, and he often painted himself with great mustaches and beards and marched around his room holding an elm branch as a royal scepter.  He was no more competent to serve in any official capacity as the man in the moon but such was the ethos of the progressive party - anything goes in a world of infinite diversity. 

At first his female colleagues kept him at arms length, fearful that he might lose his marbles and go after them in some fantasy of the Rape of the Sabine Women, but then he became not only accepted but a valued partner. His observations were regarded as unique, particularly insightful, and relevant - something that 'normal' people were incapable of.  There was something about the untethered mind that allowed for special perception and understanding. 

His ramblings about the natural world - the law of tooth and claw in particular - were considered metaphorically accurate.  Conservatives in their eagerness for battle had reverted to the law of the jungle and were no better than wolves.  His vivid descriptions of the savagery of the plains, the evisceration of the kill, the aggressiveness of the beasts were clearly about Israel's own inhumanity in Gaza and Donald Trump's massacre of thousands in Iran. 

Somehow Harlan's peculiar mental disability gave him unusual clarity - not logic by any means, but a sharp vision.  He could actually see lions ripping organs out of wildebeests or eagles ripping the hearts out of their prey.

When he looked out over an audience gathered to hear the Congressman talk about diversity, the superior, natural, tribal energy of the black man, the new age of sexuality ushered in by the transgender, he could see a primeval scene of flying pterodactyls, thundering triceratops, and hundred foot long snakes. 

When the Congressman addressed a group of black people he could only see them naked whooping and hollering around a fire, shaking their spears and raising their arms to an animist god.  If it was to a group of gay men and lesbian women, he saw an orgy of sucking, buggering, scissoring, and muff-diving as vivid as scenes from a Fellini movie. 

He didn't just imagine these scenes, they became real. The audience had been transformed by his power. 

Again, who is to say what mechanisms control the addled brain, and as soon as the Congressman ended his plea, the audience in Harlan's eyes returned to normal, and in the few words that he was expected to say, he offered encouragement, counsel, and good will. 

He was welcomed by all divergent groups as one of their own, and for that the Congressman received warm praise.  He had done his job and then some. 

When the mechanisms that were keeping his insanity in check began to falter, and he was given to tics, shakes, and Tourette's outbursts, nothing was thought of it.  If they, good progressives, had included him in their community, then it was unconscionable to criticize him for his diversity. Even when his meanderings became incomprehensible - no intimation of metaphor was possible - and his behavior became side show erratic, they said nothing.  This deranged, unhinged, wild man was just as welcome as a ghetto queen, pimp, or San Francisco bathhouse male whore.  

When word got around the Congressman's constituency that he had a wacko on his staff who had become one of his closest advisors, and this word got back to him, he realized that perhaps he had gone too far, and Harlan was progressively deleted from the program and finally cashiered.  Progressivism is one thing, but electoral victory is another. 

Harlan hardly knew the difference, so completely around the bend that he was after leaving Washington.  He couldn't tell heads from tails, shit from Shinola and the world was just one jumble of outlandish visions.  He finally was scooped up by the mental dog catchers - the nasty name for the outreach service of the state hospital - and interned once again.  There really was no other place for him, but for him it was no different than Congress, so he was as happy as a clam.