Letter 2 America for April 15, 2014

Dear America,

The news hasn't changed much over the past five or six weeks, and that means that we continue on our path toward self-destructive crisis and strife.  Russia sits next to Ukraine like a cat next to a bird cage just waiting for everyone to look away for a moment.  A disappeared airplane with two hundred thirty people aboard continues to be unaccounted for, and the prospect of accounting for it recedes as time passes.  And of course there's Syria, in which the public interest has faded with our collective attention span.  There are still faint calls for American and/or international intervention such as that which the Jordanians have recently tentatively entered upon, but overall, it seems that the world has realized that radical Islam is the risk that anti-authoritarian rebellion invites us to take,  We've seen it in Libya, Egypt, Syria and quite possibly in Tunisia where the Arab Spring started with the solitary self-immolation of a man who had had enough.  What it portends for the world is that the "enemy" we have all been searching for since the end of the cold war is not quite as well defined as the "communist threat" that used to be our international adversary.  But we have ceased to recognize that these particular killings were a relatively minor manifestation of a far larger...indeed profound problem.  We face an implacable form of righteousness that insists on dominating everyone, not being satisfied with self-control as a path to heaven.  The Jihadist form of Islam is not interested in conciliation, much less reconciliation with the rest of the world.  Reactionary Islam seeks to create a universal caliphate that controls the life of man, not just of men.  It is where Christianity was six to eight hundred years ago, which is understandable since it has taken Christians six to eight hundred years to get over the need to dominate the world.  We should have learned all this from bin Ladin and Afghanistan, where congressman Charlie Wilson took it upon himself to help arm Osama's Mujahadin, which in turn emboldened them to form an international movement that has killed hundreds of us with terrorism.  President Obama seems to have learned that it does us no good to support anyone in the Arab world at this time if what he seeks is change.

And speaking of reactionary Islam, the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing is this week, and we continue to celebrate it as if the entire population of Boston had been injured in the attack and the fact that it has survived is some kind of heroic miracle.  The phrase "Boston Strong" is getting on the nerves of even some Bostonians, and many of us wonder why there wasn't an "Oklahoma City Strong" or a "New York Strong" campaign when each of those cities lost hundreds more people in a single attack than Boston did.  It is almost as if the City of Boston is a monolithic entity and it is celebrating itself while never considering the possibility that this whole campaign was nothing but a money-maker--like the "America Strong" feature on Diane Sawyer's ABC Nightly News--devised by some smart merchandisers to capitalize on the tendency toward narcissism and pride that we have not only developed, but now cultivate as a nation.  But while this celebration of the martyrdom of not just the victims, but of the population at large goes on, no one contemplates the underlying issue, which is that as time passes, not only do we see more and more instances of mass murder and mayhem, we seen those with the delusion that only they are right becoming more and more willing to turn to it in order to make their points.  That is what Boston should be talking about rather than relishing its role as "The Hub."  That's what Boston is called...The Hub.  People outside Boston think that it refers to the hub of New England, but having lived there once, I can tell you that it refers to the universe, nothing as limited as a geographical region on earth.  Just ask any Bostonian.

And while this all goes on in the rest of the world, there are the Republicans continuing to empty and reload their foot-shooting pistol like there was no tomorrow, which, if the news is any indication, there may not be.  Conservatives celebrate themselves by harkening to the siren call of blatherskites like Ted Cruz, who insists that they should all have their two hands tattooed, one with the word growth and the other with the word opportunity, as if those two concepts are the answer to all our problems.  It's more of that old, "let business be business" boosterism that seeks to let the rich get richer while they cheer from the sidelines as the rest of us do the work that makes them, and keeps them rich.  Don't increase taxes on the rich because they support us all, and don't regulate their businesses even though they pollute our drinking water and our air.  The whining about regulation from conservatives like Cruz and Rand Paul continues without so much as a nod to the chemical spills in West Virginia and North Carolina by coal related businesses that caused people to suffer all kinds of symptoms, made their drinking water non-potable, and ruined a couple of rivers for the indeterminate future.  But Paul thinks that everyone should be free to do those things as a matter of right in a free country, and so does Cruz, not to mention Donald Trump, who has somehow deluded himself into thinking that he is smart and has something useful to offer us all in the way of political and moral wisdom.  These are the people whom the Conservative movement wants to lead us into the future, which might well look much like the beginning of the last century...or China today.

Your friend,

Mike