Russia, Ukraine and the US: A Brief History and Analysis of the Ukraine War

Here we go again.  The eastern-most expansion of North Eurasians (Russia) is clashing along the frontier of its empire with the western-most expansion of North Eurasians (the United States).  History hasn’t ended, contrary to Francis Fukuyama, the political philosopher who asserted the claim in The End of History and the Last Man, written shortly after the US victory in the Cold War., whose title is all you need to read of the book. No matter how elaborately the claim is argued, it is founded on the false premise that history progresses in a linear fashion to some idealized destination.  The Great Power conflict of the Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It just went underground for a couple of decades, like a mini-Dark Ages (more on that later).

The ink was barely dry on the first-draft history of the US’s Afghanistan debacle (one which both empires suffered in sequence, Russia first, adding two more exhibits to the proof of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires), before the US provoked a renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine by seducing Russia’s long-standing sidekick (Ukraine) with promises of cooperation and aid, and eventually, NATO membership, i.e., protection under the US nuclear umbrella. Russia has the largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world, estimated at about 6,000 warheads, of which about half are of the ‘strategic’ (i.e., not ‘tactical’) variety, capable of raining death and destruction on enough of the world’s population that they could effectively destroy civilization.  The US has a similar capability.  Russia did not want Ukraine under the US’s nuclear umbrella because it would mean Russia couldn’t use its umbrella to manipulate and control Ukraine, and because it might allow the US to place some of its nuclear weapons closer to Russia.  Ukraine fell for the US’s advances and refused to negotiate with Russia, even as the US pledged there would be no US troops committed to Ukraine’s defense and it had only hinted at, but not yet clearly promised nor yet welcomed Ukraine under its umbrella.

In the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, just as a revanchist* Vladimir Putin was coming to power in Russia, promising to the Russian people much as Hitler had promised Germans almost a century before, that he would Make Russia Great Again (MRGA?), journalist and author Robert Wright was looking around at all the globalizing ‘progress’ humanity was making at becoming organized under a single, one-world, supranational government and wrote a book (Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny) optimistically declaring its inevitability.  Wright ignored that all the national governments thereby displaced would likely not be as happy as him about such a development. There was apparently no end to the giddiness that Cold War victory induced in American academics.  (*revanchist means ‘someone who wishes to reassemble an empire’, not to be confused with revisionist as a WSJ reporter did the other day, which could mean something nearly the opposite with regards to history).

I was rereading Wright’s book as Russia launched its latest invasion of Ukraine.  I couldn’t help but think regarding both Wright and Fukuyama that it must be quite humbling for an optimistic futurist to have one’s sunny, long-range predictions proved false within only a couple of decades (i.e., within one’s own lifetime). I googled Wright and Fukuyama.  It appears neither have issued contrite admissions of error or offered retractions.

Glass-half-full types need to consider what happens if the glass tips over and empties out.  The prospect of the US getting dragged into direct conflict with Russia through the Ukraine war, a conflict that would almost certainly end with the complete and utter nuclear annihilation of both sides and much of the rest of the world, makes Wright’s prediction of a world in which everyone happily (more or less) gets along under one overarching, supranational world governing power seem, let’s just say, a tad naïve. While his basic premise that it was inevitable that human society becomes more complex and intertwined over time is correct, the impetus for the burgeoning social entities thereby created is their own survival and the destruction of their rivals.  Social complexity begets social complexity for the purpose of competing with socially complex rivals.  With each advance in creative and social complexity mankind has likewise advanced in destructive simplicity and effectiveness.  All it takes now is pushing a few buttons and we end up where we began, scouring the Earth for sustenance, perhaps devouring each other (as we’ve mostly killed off the large mammals we hunted to sustain us before agriculture), if there’s enough of us left to make hunting each other profitable.  If there’s no one left to cannibalize, Fukuyama will have proved correct. 

Geography

If one wishes to understand the Ukraine-Russia conflict, one must first look at a globe (not a map, but a globe).  Turn the globe to center in your field of view the Fertile Crescent, an arc stretching from the coast of present-day Israel in the west (some historians start the crescent-moon-shaped arc at the Nile River Valley), up through western Syria to southeastern Turkey, and over and down along the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys in Iraq.  This is where mankind first developed agriculture.  This is also a chokepoint for migration between Africa, where modern humans originated, to Eurasia, the vast continent to which they initially migrated and flourished.  From the top of the Fertile Crescent arc in southeastern Turkey follow the land north (i.e., don’t take the sea route by going west in Turkey to arrive at the Dardanelles/Bosporus between the Aegean, Sea of Marmara and Black Sea).  Past Turkey, east of the Black Sea, will be Georgia (a former Soviet client state and an object of Russian invasion in 2008), Armenia and Azerbaijan (also former clients), and a sliver of Iran, along with a small mountain range, the Caucasus (from where the term ‘Caucasian’ originates, which means ‘a white-skinned person of European descent’ in American English—exhibiting for the gazillionth time that language just makes stuff up as it goes along).  Upon reaching the Caucasus and passing through Georgia, you have reached southwestern Russia.  Bounded to the west by the Black Sea, the east by the Caspian Sea and the south by the mountains giving the region its name, the Caucasus opens north onto the vast western Eurasian steppe that stretches from Ukraine southwest to Romania and Hungary; northwest to Poland, Belarus, the Baltics and Germany; north to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Finland, and east to the Ural Mountains (after which there’s more steppe—most significantly, that from which the Mongols arose).  The Fertile Crescent to the Caucasus could be considered an upside-down people funnel flowing north, spilling its contents onto the western Eurasian steppe.

The steppe is vast, fertile, and indefensible, the latter because it’s a steppe (i.e., mainly flat) lacking in natural barriers (e.g., oceans, mountains, and even trees), aside from its ample number of waterways, which are both barriers and conduits.  Probably because of its habitability, indefensibility, and migratory importance, it has been the subject of countless wars and battles, in both historical and pre-historical times.  The soil of the steppe has probably been soaked in as much human blood as any other on the planet. Looking on the Wright (bright) side, all that spilled blood must have added to the land’s fertility, no doubt part of the great Panglossian design.

It’s easy to grasp on a globe the vastness of Russia relative to Ukraine, or anywhere else, stretching as it does from eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean.  Just start at Moscow and spin the globe right to left (opposite the Earth’s rotation).  You’ll be halfway around the world before Russia ends.  Better yet, look down at the globe from the North Pole.  You’ll immediately see the Arctic Ocean is ringed half the way around by Russia.  The Soviet Union was even vaster, including Ukraine and a host of vassal states to its west and south.  As the American Vice-President Kamala Harris pointed out when trying to explain the conflict (not to kindergarteners but adults), Russia is a very big country that is invading a much smaller country next to it (paraphrased).  Russia’s population however is not as vastly larger than Ukraine’s as its land area might imply.  Russia has only a bit more than three times the population of Ukraine.  But Russia could easily fit half a dozen Ukraine-sized countries west of the Urals, and probably twice that many in Siberia east of the mountains.  Most of Russia’s population lives west of the Urals, though getting hard statistics on exactly how the population is distributed is difficult.  An educated guess would say Siberia is to Russia as the Mountain West is to the US—sparsely populated outside of a few urban corridors. Or perhaps more aptly, like Canada is to the US; bigger in area but much smaller in population, as the sparsely populated taiga fades north to barely inhabited tundra.

Prehistory (from earliest days until the collapse of the Soviet Union)

The 10^th century (from 901 to 1000 ad) is considered by some historians (the lazy or ideologically progressive ones) the darkest of the Dark Ages.  It’s the sort of century where it seemed little ‘progress’ was made in the cultural evolution necessary to reach the utopia that optimists like Fukuyama and Wright promise is culture’s ultimate destination.  But the Byzantine Empire reached its zenith during the age.  Leif Ericson founded the Greenland colony. England unified under a single king and became properly English.  Early in the century, Chinese warlords for the first time used gunpowder in battle; late in the century, the Song dynasty reunited China.  The Mississippian culture got its start in the Southern US; the Toltecs in Mexico.  France granted the County of Rouen to the Viking Rollo, starting the principality that would become Normandy (named for the Normans, or North men, i.e., Vikings). The last reindeer and bear died in Britain while the last lion died in Europe, probably somewhere in the Caucasus.  Closer to our subject matter, the first Bulgarian Empire, a Bulgar-Slavic state, reached the zenith of its power in the Balkans, including in western areas of what is now Ukraine.  And finally, the Kievan Rus’, a state begun as a series of trading and raiding posts on the northern banks of the Dnieper River in the previous century by what’s generally agreed were Norsemen who became Slavicized over time, expanded its reach south to establish its headquarters in Kyiv, planting the kernel of culture that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine would later claim as their own in contriving their origins myths. 

The Kievan Rus’ leader Vladimir the Great punctuated the end of the dark century by adopting Christianity as the Kievan Rus’ official religion, leading the whole city of Kyiv to the river for baptism.  He probably chose Orthodox Christianity because of the importance of the Byzantine Empire (which was Orthodox Christian at the time) to Kievan Rus’ trading and raiding imperatives.  The Kievan Rus’ were to the Byzantine Empire what the Germanic Barbarian tribes had been to the Western Roman Empire, antagonists in part, but exploiting to great profit their proximity to the Empire and its wealth.

10^th century history is a riotous, complicated mess, especially regarding the Kievan Rus’ and the area of what is now western Russia, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine that the Kievan Rus’ proto empire came to encompass. Looking at it now from the span of a millennium away is like looking at the canopy of a jungle from above and trying to tease out the path each branch of each tree and vine took to make it to the sunshine.  But dismissing the century as dark because there was no single ascendant political entity keeping a tidy catalog of events from which to concoct a narrative is to favor just-so narratives of historical progress to a destination over twisted, contorted and confused realities (and to ignore the Byzantine Empire).  The truth of eras dominated by powers like the Roman Empire are as twisted, contorted and confused as were the Dark Ages, but great power scribes and historians neatly distill things for posterity in ways that make them seem less so.  Sometimes the best history is written in the genes.

The Yamnaya were unknown to history until science developed the capacity to sequence ancient DNA. In the southern reaches of the area dominated by the Kievan Rus’, archaeological, linguistic and most prominently, genetic evidence, now points to a quasi-nomadic group of pastoralists arising there around 5,000 years ago (3000 bc) and spreading west, east and southeast.  Much like the Mongols 4,000 years later, the Yamnaya leveraged an adaptive advantage for warfare on the steppe into expansion and conquest.  (The Yamnaya perfected the art of horse-drawn carts to facilitate movement; for the Mongols, it was horseback archery.)  Both empires killed or enslaved the male populations of their conquests.  We know because their legacy Y chromosomes disappeared. Upwards of 90% of today’s West European males carry Yamnaya Y chromosomes.  As for the Mongols, there’s an estimated 16 million men living in areas that were conquered by the Mongols who today carry just the Great Kahn’s Y chromosome.  Presumably, there’s at least as many more carrying the Y-chromosome of other Mongol warriors and chieftains.  Russians and Ukrainians share almost enough Yamnayan DNA to be brothers, carrying (respectively) an average of 46.8% and 42.8% of Yamnayan autosomal DNA. To illustrate the impact the newly-discovered Yamnaya had on history, it is considered likely they are the source of the Indo-European language family from which all the Germanic (including English), Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian languages are derived.

The Mongolian Golden Horde swept west in the 13^th century, conquering and subjugating the Kievan Rus’, devastating its centers of power (Kyiv, e.g.) and bringing its states and principalities into the largest land empire the world has ever seen.  The Tartars, as the Kievan Rus’ knew them, ruled nearly two hundred and fifty years, but left the conquered to their own devices, happy to simply collect tribute.  During Mongol rule, a new polity centered on Moscow arose from the Kievan Rus’ ashes. When its ruler, Ivan the Great, refused in the late 15^th century to pay Mongol tribute and the Golden Horde had by then become so decadent and weak that it could not force payment, a fledgling empire was born.  A half-century later, Ivan the Terrible (the Great’s grandson) rebranded the polity the Tsardom of Russia. After a succession crisis (the Time of Troubles) Michael Romanov was elected Tsar by a council of nobles (1613), beginning the dynasty that would last until the 20^th century. By the end of the 17^th century, Russia stretched from eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean.  Early in the 18^th century, Peter the Great again changed the country’s name, this time to the Russian Empire (though its leaders would still be called Tsar, echoing the Caesars of ancient Rome), modernized and westernized its economy, established an oceanic navy for the first time in its history and founded St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea coast as the Empire’s new capital. 

After Peter the Great died, another succession crisis ensued and the Romanov dynasty biologically (if not politically) most likely ended with the accession in 1762 of Catherine the Great, a German princess without dynastic connections who had married an heir to the throne (Peter III) who was summarily dispatched (killed) shortly after his accession (perhaps by Catherine’s supporters). Catherine initiated a Russian version of Europe’s Enlightenment while further expanding and modernizing the Empire.  Her grandson, Alexander I, established Russia as one of Europe’s Great Powers with his defeat of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861, two years before slavery was abolished in the US, but it proved insufficient.  The same stew of dissatisfaction that freed the serfs simmered for decades, finally boiling over with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 in which Russia’s last emperor, Nicholas II, abdicated the throne. The Bolsheviks, not satisfied that they were safe from the Romanov dynasty’s return by their exile in Yekaterinburg (i.e., Catherine-burg in English, named after Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine I, in western Siberia), executed Nicholas and his entire family in 1918.  It wasn’t an outlandish concern.  An episode early in the 17^th century saw Ivan the Terrible’s son, Dimitry, rise from the dead twice (in the form of False Dimitry I and False Dimitry II), to claim the throne. 

Russia’s modern era began when the Bolshevik revolution resulted in four states, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Transcaucasian SFSR joining in 1922 to form the Soviet Union, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR, which would last just shy of seventy years.  During its three score and ten, the Soviet Union entered an alliance with, then was invaded by, Nazi Germany, which it eventually unconditionally defeated; put the first man in space; crushed revolts of its Warsaw Pact clients, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; invaded and humiliatingly departed Afghanistan, and most importantly for today, acquired a nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy the world several times over.  The nuclear arsenal remains, now in the possession of the Russian Federation, the rump of the Soviet Empire.  During the first decades of the post-War era, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a cutthroat superpower competition and nuclear standoff known as the Cold War.

Relative to Russia, Ukraine has very little history as an independent state.  It shares its cultural beginnings with Russia in the Kievan Rus’ state that collapsed with the Mongol invasion. From there, the land that eventually would become modern-day Ukraine was ruled by whichever Central/East European power was ascendant at the time, from a Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth (circa 17^th century), to the Russian Empire (variously), to a brief independence after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 before becoming a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922.  During the Soviet era, the Holodomor initiated by Stalin in the early 1930’s starved several million Ukrainians to death.  Ukraine later hosted some of the fiercest fighting of World War Two between Germany and the Soviet Union.  During the Soviet era, there arose a nationalist movement among Ukrainian exiles in Canada that attempted, with some success, to weave a unique national identity for Ukraine from the threads of its history. 

Post-Cold War History

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. All its former member states, including Ukraine, declared their independence and there was nothing to keep them from it.  Russia, the core of the empire, fell into an anarchic sort of dog-eat-dog capitalism that reduced professional classes to shop vendors and street sweepers and menial laborers to homelessness and starvation.  As routinely characterizes anarchy, a few strongmen grew obscenely wealthy and powerful, in this instance via looting the country’s vast natural resources with the help of what remained of the Russian government. The law of the taiga (the Siberian version of the jungle) ruled.  Zero-sum (winner take all) transactions prevailed as the state reverted to the semblance of a chiefdom (something to which humans aren’t logically destined according to Mr. Wright). While Western political philosophers condescendingly and patronizingly declared that mankind’s historical progress had reached its destination with the ascendancy of Western values, Russia reverted to barbarism. (Ukraine’s post-Cold War experience was, in the beginning, similar to Russia’s).

After eight years of Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic rule as Russia’s first elected president, Vladimir Putin was appointed Prime Minister (by Yeltsin) in 1999, then was elected President in 2000.  He served for eight years before reverting to Prime Minister in 2008 (because of term limits), then was reelected to the presidency in 2012, where he has served since, pledging that he won’t seek another term when the present one expires in 2024. 

Putin accreted power like people go bankrupt—slowly, then all at once.  It was probably his reelection in 2012 that solidified his all-powerful hold on Russian government. Russians, having had an awful experience with democracy under Yeltsin, seemed eager to trade a bit of democratic freedom for some autocratic, even Stalinist, order and security.  (In Wright’s terms, grown weary of all the zero-sum transacting, they opted to submit to a strong ruler who could promote mutually beneficial, i.e., nonzero-sum, relations.)

Just as the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler, the collapse of the Soviet Union created Putin.  To go along with the humiliation of the Russian people’s greatly reduced circumstances (most of them anyway), they’d lost the pride they’d had in belonging to something big and historically important.  The privations of Soviet socialism at least had as their justification a proclaimed (if dubiously) higher purpose.  But with the collapse of the Soviet experiment, and the Russian Orthodox Church already having been squashed to virtual extinction by godless communism, the people had nothing left in which to believe.  Putin set about to give them a country in which to believe and of which to be proud, while at the same time revivifying the Church.

Putin has many times claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20^th century.  A century that included maybe 20 million Soviet dead (maybe more) in the Great Patriotic War (World War Two); Stalin’s purges and famines; the Bolshevik Revolution; defeat, sort of, in WWI; defeat (not sort of) by the Japanese in Manchuria. Russians were quite busy in the previous century, living interesting lives, as if under a Chinese curse.  (But they probably wouldn’t appreciate my saying that.  Russians and Chinese don’t usually get along so well.  Or didn’t, until Xi realized that if he allied with Putin just before Putin invaded Ukraine, he’d look like the tame, sane autocrat by comparison. At least until he invades Taiwan.)

NATO, the Cold War alliance ostensibly created to defend against Soviet aggression after World War Two, became, along with the European Union, a post-Cold War alliance to economically and militarily isolate and overwhelm Russia.  It has steadily expanded eastward, relentlessly adding former Soviet clients and member states to its rolls.  States that have joined NATO since the fall of the Soviet Union include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999; Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in 2004; Croatia and Albania in 2009, and finally the Republic of Northern Macedonia in 2020.  In response to Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, two more states, Sweden and Finland, applied for NATO membership.  Aside from Belarus and (nominally) Ukraine, with the accession of Finland, NATO will touch every western border of Russia, from the Artic to the Black Sea.  The governing premise of the Alliance—that an attack on one state will be considered an attack on all (Article 5 of its charter)—has yet to be tested in the European theater.  With eventually 32 ‘independent’ states in the NATO alliance once Finland and Sweden join, the chances are high that the first test will be when one NATO state attacks another.  But the more important question is whether a Russian nuclear attack on a NATO state would induce retaliation in kind.  If Russia dropped a tactical nuke on the Republic of Northern Macedonia, would the US retaliate in kind, risking its own security? France and Germany recently made direct overtures to Putin to negotiate a settlement of the Ukraine war, perhaps revealing a sliver of light between the interests of the US and the countries it shelters under the NATO nuclear umbrella.

On December 5, 1994, the US, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine signed what became known as the Budapest Memorandum.  Ukraine agreed to give to Russia all the nuclear weapons remaining on its soil from its Soviet days, in return for which the US, Great Britain and Russia agreed to protect its independence, territorial integrity, and sovereignty.  All three of the US, Great Britain and Russia have broken their promises to Ukraine; the US and Great Britain for failing to protect Ukrainian independence, territorial integrity, and sovereignty; Russia for invading and annexing Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and more extensively, in 2022. But the Budapest Memorandum was not a treaty, just a feel-good statement of intent backed by nothing.

Current Events Leading to War

The Ukraine-Russia War did not start in February of 2022, but eight years earlier with the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 that came after Ukraine ousted, in a February 2014 coup popularly called the Revolution of Dignity, its Russia-leaning President, Victor Yanukovych, who had suspended (at Russia’s behest) preparations for Ukraine’s membership into the European Union.  The coup was openly supported (and presumably covertly supplied and aided) by the US.  Russia immediately invaded and annexed Crimea and soon after civil unrest in southern and eastern regions of Ukraine (most likely instigated by Russian infiltrators) erupted in what became a long slog.  The War in Donbas, the area from where Yanukovych had drawn most of his support and was thereby more pro-Russian, was still simmering when Russia reinvaded in 2022.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba signed in November of 2021 the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership, a non-binding (in the sense that like the Budapest Memorandum, it didn’t rise to the level of treaty) expression of feelings detailing how wonderful each thought the other was, how much they individually and collectively hated Russia, and how they would each work together to get Ukraine a spot under the US nuclear umbrella, i.e., membership in NATO. Shortly afterward, Russia expanded its troop buildup along the Ukraine border, a buildup that had begun in March of 2021 and been continuing in fits and starts since. On February 20, 2022, Russia reinvaded, this time in the north around Kyiv and in the east around Kharkov, which has so far failed to accomplish much for Russia besides the conquest of Mariupol, a port city on the north coast of the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine, in territory under the de facto administration of the Donetsk People’s Republic (a breakaway state loyal to Russia).  Russia has however succeeded, at least momentarily, in galvanizing NATO solidarity.  And Putin has provided the Biden Administration with a scapegoat to lay the blame for its myriad ineptitudes upon.  According to the Administration, it’s ‘Putin’s inflation’ that’s driving gas prices to the stratosphere.

Though practically inviting Russia to invade by acknowledging its inevitability, the US nonetheless feigned surprise when it finally came.  President Biden claimed that Russia was ‘committing genocide’ and that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s elected president, ‘must go’, each utterance later retracted as gaffes by the American President’s handlers.  The US initiated a new round of economic sanctions (the first having begun in 2014).  Among other measures, the US froze Russia’s foreign exchange account holding some $600 billion US dollars in reserve, an action bound to reverberate across the foreign exchange markets for quite some time, possibly even to the point of imperiling belief in the dollar as the reserve currency of choice.  (Why store wealth in dollars when the US government believes itself free to confiscate dollars anytime it likes?)  The Russian ruble, after an initial plunge, inexplicably soared relative to the dollar, trading now (late May 2022) at a level higher than it was prior to this latest invasion. 

The EU tried to get its member states to agree to boycott Russian oil and gas, but they balked, settling only on Russian coal, which is immaterial to their energy needs. The US boycotted all three, but inconsequentially, as the US gets practically none of the oil, gas or coal it consumes from Russia. The US has tried to identify, isolate and sanction Russian oligarchs friendly to Putin but it’s hard to know how successful or effective its efforts have been.  The US recently passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including for weapons and humanitarian needs, to go with roughly $13 billion spent already, mainly on weaponry.  Poland offered early in this second round of the conflict to give Ukraine 28 MiG 29 fighter jets through the US, if the US would resupply it with US F-16’s. Poland did not want to be seen as directly donating the aircraft to Ukraine but apparently neither did the US, as the US refused the offer, citing logistical complications and the danger of escalation.  On a visit to Kyiv a few weeks after this latest invasion began, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US’s goal in supporting Ukraine is “…to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it has done in invading Ukraine”, which helps explain the assortment of weapons the US has been willing to provide Ukraine. As the US doesn’t seek a Ukraine victory, but only a Russian weakening, the mix of weaponry must be finely calibrated to ensure they’re not too effective.  Apparently multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) fit the bill, good for extending the conflict but not so good that Ukraine might leverage them to victory, as the US has recently agreed to supply them.

Analysis

In some respects, this is a garden-variety clash along the frontiers of empires (the US and Russian) to determine where the precise line of demarcation lies. That the US isn’t doing any of the actual fighting makes it no less a clash between the US and Russia (it could be said between NATO and Russia, but the US is NATO, so why obfuscate things?).  The US provoked Russia to invade and enticed Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion so it could use Ukraine to do exactly as Secretary Austin described.  But weakening Russia militarily was incidental to the main objective.  As often occurs, domestic politics wagged the foreign policy dog.  The US’s primary motivation for provoking the conflict was protecting US defense industry funding from the threat posed by the Afghanistan debacle.  The defense industry needed a replacement war and a reason for taxpayers to forget Afghanistan.  Provoking Russia to extend its Ukraine invasion provided it. Putin’s impetus was less clear (Russia being ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’), but the Russian state generally needs constant war to unite its people and justify its depredations.

Provoking Russia is a dangerous way to ensure that US defense industry funding retains a robust level.  The US empire has been expanding since the collapse of its previous rival, the Soviet Union, and now laps the shores of the Soviet Union’s Russian rump.  If the US goes too far pressing its advantage through Ukraine, it risks pushing Russia to extreme measures. Though Russia chose the war, it can’t now lose it.  Losing the war would threaten Russia’s existence.  It will therefore do what it must to keep from losing, including resorting to nuclear weapons. With inherently asymmetrical motivations between the antagonists (the US doesn’t care about Ukraine or about winning the war, it just wants to give Russia a black eye while protecting its defense industry funding; Russia doesn’t necessarily care to conquer Ukraine, but can’t lose to Ukraine), probably the best outcome would be a stalemate and negotiated peace that acknowledges Russian sovereignty in the Donbas regions of eastern Ukraine.  The worst outcome would be the US failing at calibrating its support of Ukraine’s war effort so badly that Russia feels threatened to the extent it resorts to nuclear weapons.  No matter how it goes, good outcome or bad, Ukraine loses.  Zelensky’s stubborn-headed ‘heroism’ is doing nothing but getting Ukrainians pointlessly killed, though the US defense industry is undoubtedly grateful for their service.   The world might lose along with Ukraine if the US overplays its hand.  Sun Tzu advised to always allow an enemy an escape route.  If the US doesn’t allow Russia an escape route, World War III may be the result.  And as Einstein observed, if there’s a World War III, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

A personal note

When I served in the US Army during the Cold War I was conditioned to hate Russians.  Though I knew next to nothing about Russia, having never met a single Russian and having never studied their history or culture, I thought I was cool for slapping a ‘Russia Sux’ bumper sticker on the Jeep CJ-7 I drove around Ft. Rucker during flight school. Six years later, in 1991, somewhere along a sand berm in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian desert where the borders of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait meet, I realized the Cold War and my conditioning to hatred of Russia had all been a big lie.  The US was as responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union (perhaps more so, because the US had less certitude in defense industry funding than did the Soviet Union).  For the US, keeping the Cold War pot of antagonism simmering was a means to ensure defense industry coffers were always full.  How did I come to the realization?  Because I was busy ‘defending the Constitution’ against a tinpot dictator thousands of miles away who had no means whatsoever of threatening the US or its Constitution.  The Cold War had ended in the worst possible way for the US military industrial complex (MIC), i.e., with the collapse of its funding foil the USSR, and it needed another funding mechanism.  So, the US invited Saddam to invade Kuwait (look it up), and voila, there would be no swords beaten into plowshares.  The US is doing it again with Russia and Ukraine.  The end of the forever war in Afghanistan meant new justifications for sky-high military budgets were needed so the US turned back to Russia, demonizing and vilifying an old foe to keep defense industry profits rolling in.  I thoroughly hate what my country is doing, as much as I hated it when my service concluded with a war to keep defense contractors and generals profitable and relevant (I did my sworn duty in the first Gulf War then requested and was granted a full and honorable discharge upon my return).  But this is a far more dangerous game the US is playing, more dangerous even than the game it played during the Cold War.

I’ve tried to be as objective in this analysis as I could but admit to despairing at seeing real lives and property being destroyed, again, just so the MIC has an enemy to support its continued profitability and relevance.  Is the prospect of a couple of years of flat profits so terrible for defense industry contractors that Ukrainians and Russians must die by the thousands? Couldn’t we just give the defense industry the money without them having justify it by helping to kill so many innocents?  My despair is misplaced.  History teaches that even were this war rejected for its blatant basis in profiteering, another would arise soon enough.

I wish Wright and Fukuyama weren’t wrong.  I wish that mankind was progressing to some enlightened state of being where everyone got along with everyone else for the mutual benefit of all.  But man is a wolf to man (Freud).  People cooperate only when a competing group of cooperating people compels them to it.  War is the clearest expression of mankind’s innate ‘unsocial sociability’ (Kant, as quoted by Wright). Great Power warfare, i.e., the clash of empires, is the fullest expression of mankind’s nature.  Contrary to Wright, world war is the inevitability to which ever increasing social and technological complexity will always lead.  Fukuyama’s history will have ended when the last man has succumbed to its depredations.

Book Review: Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (2013; English translation 2016)

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Book Reviews, government, politics

I’m not Russian.  I’ve never met or known anyone who was.  When I was a young officer in the US Army in 1985, I drove a civilian Jeep CJ-7 adorned with a bumper sticker, bought at the Fort Rucker Post Exchange, that emphatically and succinctly proclaimed in white letters on a black background (accentuating the good vs evil nature of its message) what I thought of Russia at the time: Russia Sux.

I was home on leave when in late 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.  I had by then spent a little over four years as a Cold War warrior, flying helicopters for Mom, hot dogs, apple pie and the American way of life.  Mr. Gorbachev hadn’t torn down the Wall; German subjects of the Evil Empire had, making it all the more poignant and clear:  We’d won!  The Soviet Union soon fell apart. 

I thought it the pinnacle of American achievement.  We’d won a war with hardly firing a shot (excluding Vietnam and Korea, which isn’t fair, but points to my naivete at the time). I assumed winning the Cold War, achieving what we’d for so long struggled, was an unmitigated good for the US and West and its way of life.  I was wrong. 

Within a year of the Soviet Union collapsing, we’d trained our war machine on Iraq.  There’d be no beating of swords into plowshares.  With the Soviet Union gone, we’d simply find new enemies. It was somewhere on a sand berm in the wee hours of the morning watching B-52’s rain death on Iraqi positions a few clicks away that I realized the Cold War had been a fraud, instigated and kept simmering for the sole purpose of lining the pockets of politicians with armament industry dollars.  Iraq, who we’d invited to invade Kuwait by promising beforehand to consider it an ‘inter-Arab’ conflict, proved the lie. 

Iraq led directly to al Qaeda, 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq II, ISIS and the rise of Iranian hegemony in the Levant.  Winning the Cold War was an unmitigated disaster for the US, not even accounting for the domestic decadence it fostered.

But defeat in the Cold War was worse, much worse, for the Soviet Union and her peoples than the victory was for the US and West.  Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets reveals how and why.

Alexievich can’t be said to have written the book.  More that she masterfully compiled it.  It’s a series of conversations she had with a variety of people from all walks of life and a variety of ex-Soviet republics, transcribed in plain verse and brilliantly translated from the original Russian (in that the English never seems stilted or awkward).  Alexievich lets her subjects speak. Rarely does she intercede or seem to be prodding.  They seem to treat her as a Freudian therapist, revealing secrets and feelings in a gusher of pent-up emotion.

I happened upon the book in my local used book shop (2^nd and Charles) shortly after Christmas of last year (2021), just as Russia began amassing troops on the Ukraine border for what would in a couple of months become an invasion.  I bought it, not because of the possibility of war, but because I’d grown through the years to greatly admire Russia; her people and history, but especially, her literature (who says leopards can’t change their spots?). I was a bit skeptical, considering the book had won a Nobel Prize, and was in a format (spoken history) unfamiliar to me.  It proved equal to the best Russian literature—to any literature—I’ve ever read.

Not only was it a gut-wrenching, emotionally exhausting, tale of real people living through harrowing times, it answered multiple questions of contemporary relevance.  Within a few interviews of former Soviets, the reason for Putin’s ascendancy and his Georgian, Chechen and now Ukrainian military operations became readily apparent.  Resentment, anger and confusion, even twenty and more years after the Soviet Union’s fall, drenched the book’s pages. It’s not only Putin who believes the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20^th century was the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s not only me who thought at the time it was the West’s greatest triumph.

It’s tempting to say Russians have long memories but that would hardly distinguish them.  All peoples, individually and collectively, have long memories, particularly when it comes to injustices they’ve suffered.  Better to say that Russians have a lot to remember and be resentful and angry over. Or, with regards to Stalin, a lot to selectively forget for the greater good of the collective.  I’ve no doubt there’s a heap these days of remembering and selective forgetting with regards to Putin, but he’s brought stability and a certain sense of revanchist glory to the Russian Empire.  He seems more a throwback to the Tzars than to the Soviet General Secretary–the people’s representative keeping the oligarchs in check just as the Tzars had done in their day with the Russian nobility.

It’s hard to overestimate the amount of suffering the fall of the Soviet Union caused for the Soviet people.  They went virtually overnight from being part of a grand (and to many, inspirational) experiment in socioeconomic organization, one that ensured all were equally poor but that none were abandoned, to being thrown to the wolves of the most exploitative form of capitalism since robber baron days. The ‘democratic’ era shortly after the Soviet Union fell was a socioeconomic experiment of a different, decidedly Darwinian sort.  While during Stalin’s day the Soviet Union had rejected genetic determinism for the omnipotence of socialization, after its fall, the law of the Darwinian jungle prevailed.  It was the Mad Max, post-apocalyptic movie that never got made.  Only in books like Secondhand Time was its story told.    

It’s difficult to put in words the emotional power of the oral histories Alexievich relates.  Taken together—everyone from a former Soviet field officer to an Armenian teenager in love–they weave a beautiful and complex tapestry of people and the convulsions of history that tore at their souls.   An excerpt of Alexievich’s own history, told in the prologue, offers a glimpse of what will follow: 

…The great bloodshed of communism had been lost to the ages [by the time of perestroika].  Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was ingrained in us.

…At a train station in Moscow, I met a woman from the Tambov area.  She was headed to Chechnya to take her son home. “I don’t want him to die.  I don’t want him to kill.”  The government no longer owned her soul, this was a free woman.

…So here it is, freedom!  Is it everything we hoped it would be?  We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle.  Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life.  Without any history…After perestroika, no one was talking about ideas anymore—instead, it was credit, interest, and promissory notes; people no longer earned money, they ‘made’ it or ‘scored’ it.

…Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

…There’s a new demand for everything Soviet.  For the cult of Stalin.  Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an ‘an unrivaled political figure’.

…Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the Great Empire, the ‘iron hand’, the ‘special Russian path’…there’s a new Komsomol [Soviet youth group], only now it’s called Nashi…

…At heart, we’re built for war.  We were always fighting or preparing to fight.  We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology.  Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized.  The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests.

…Was that really us?  Was that me?  I reminisced alongside my protagonists.  One of them said, “Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet.” We share a communist collective memory.  We’re neighbors in memory.

This is a great book.  One of the best I’ve ever read.  That it fortuitously offers profound insight into a conflict, that with a few more stupid off-the-cuff remarks by President Biden might become WWIII, is just gravy to its greatness.  

Book Review: The Tiger, a True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant (2011)

Prologue

Hanging in the trees, as if caught there, is a sickle of a moon.  Its wan light scatters shadows on the snow below, only obscuring further the forest that this man negotiates now as much by feel as sight.  He is on foot and on his own save for a single dog, which runs ahead, eager to be heading home at last.  All around, the black trunks of oak, pine, and poplar soar into the dark above the scrub and deadfall, and their branches form a tattered canopy overhead.  Slender birches, whiter than the snow, seem to emit a light of their own, but it is like the coat of an animal in winter; cold to the touch and for itself alone.  All is quiet in this dormant, frozen world.  It is so cold that spit will freeze before it lands; so cold that a tree, brittle as straw and unable to contain its expanding sap, may spontaneously explode.  As they progress, man and dog alike leave behind a wake of heat, and the contrails of their breath hang in pale clouds above their tracks.  Their scent stays close in the windless dark, but their footfalls carry and so, with every step, they announce themselves to the night. 

Despite the bitter cold, the man wears rubber boots better suited to the rain; his clothes, too, are surprisingly light, considering that he has been out all day, searching.  His gun has grown heavy on his shoulder, as have his rucksack and cartridge belt.  But he knows this route like the back of his hand, and he is almost within sight of his cabin.  Now, at last, he can allow himself the possibility of relief.  Perhaps he imagines the lantern he will light and the fire he will build; perhaps he imagines the burdens he will soon lay down.  The water in the kettle is certainly frozen, but the stove is thinly-walled and soon it will glow fiercely against the cold and dark, just as his own body is doing now.  Soon enough, there will be hot tea and a cigarette, followed by rice, meat, and more cigarettes.  Maybe a shot or two of vodka, if there is any left.  He savors this ritual and knows it by rote.  Then, as the familiar angles take shape across the clearing, the dog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling.  They are hunting partners and the man understands: someone is there by the cabin.  The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together. 

Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come from everywhere at once.

Thus begins the masterpiece that is The Tiger:  A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.  The man is Markov.  We will learn a great deal more about him before Vaillant is through, for Markov is the tiger’s first victim.

The Amur River watershed, its ridgelines, valleys and tributaries, is the setting for the events that follow.  Located in the Russian Far East, bordered by China along its west and the Sea of Japan and Straits of Tartar to its east, it is a spit of lush, sub-arctic forest (boreal jungle, in Vaillant’s words) where the tiger commonly known as Siberian gets its proper name, the Amur Tiger.  The events of Vaillant’s true story take place along the Bikin River, a tributary of a tributary of the Amur that rises in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains just inland from the Sea of Japan and drains west and north to meet the Takhala that then flows north to the Amur.

There may have been 75,000 Amur tigers when the Treaty of Aigun demarcated portions of the Amur River as the border between Russia and China in 1858.  The by-then weak Qing Dynasty had more pressing worries than the northeastern reaches of Manchuria, leading to the territorial concessions of the treaty and an influx of European Russians.  After the wholesale slaughter of tigers during the heady days of the Tzars’ imperial expansionism, followed by a ban on hunting after the Bolsheviks took over, followed by the anarchy following the Soviet collapse, there might today be 400 Amur tigers left.  It’d be hard to conjure a more potent example of mankind’s avaricious, rapacious nature and the effect it has had on the world in which he lives than the tale of what happened to the Amur tiger.  But that’s not what Vaillant’s story is about.  It’s about what an Amur tiger that felt it had been wronged did to man.  It’s hard in the circumstances not to root for the tiger.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy for more than just Vladimir Putin.  It put people out of work, people who in Russia’s Far East often moved to the taiga, the sub-arctic forest, to scrape a living from the land as their frontiersmen ancestors had done under the Tzars.  There were logging and mineral extraction industries in Russia’s Far East, but not enough to keep employed the legions of the redundant that the collapse created. Markov went to the taiga.

The Udeghe, Nanai, and Orochi, (native tribes of the Amur watershed who suffered much the same from eastward European expansion as their North American counterparts suffered from its westward version), revere the tiger, acknowledging its supremacy in the taiga. They do not try to eliminate the threat of the tiger by killing it; instead, they seek a peaceful détente with the beast, allowing it a wide berth whenever they encounter its tracks (people, even indigenous people, almost never see a tiger in the wild, though it can be assumed the tiger always sees them), and offer sacrifices to the tiger as if it were a god, leaving a portion of meat from a successful hunt of boar or deer. From years of experience coexisting with the tiger, they understand that getting crosswise with a tiger in the taiga, as Markov learned, rarely ends well.

These are just tidbits of what one will learn of the apex predator of the Amur, of its habitat and habits, of the impact mankind’s activities, particularly in the political realm, have had on its welfare, and of the people who live and die with the tiger in the taiga.  As with any great book, the expansion of the mind comes effortlessly and almost unwittingly, as Vaillant’s exquisite prose immerses one in the taiga where the greatest cat stalking the earth roams.  One almost feels the tiger’s presence as Trush and his companions sweep out from their single-file line of march just in time for the tiger to pounce from seemingly nowhere.  This is a great book about a marvelous animal, one which has been so finely honed by natural selection until it seems as if God handcrafted the creature himself.

The Amuri Tiger isn’t threatened by climate change.  It is threatened by mankind, in all his various activities, many of which are purported to be causing the Earth’s whole climate to change.  To focus conservation efforts on an abstraction like climate change while ignoring the real and immediate danger of extinction mankind’s discrete activities in the tiger’s realm impose is to see the forest but fail to recognize it is comprised of trees.

Shortly after finishing the book, I found myself in Columbus, Ohio on a cold late-March weekend with nothing much to do, so decided upon a visit to the Columbus Zoo.  Amongst a bounty of other animals displayed in habitats as natural as could be conjured under the circumstances (especially the gorillas), the Zoo had two Amur tigers.  One of the tigers was pacing back and forth along a fence maybe four feet from us. It reminded me of a poem by Valerie Worth I used to read to my kids from Carle’s Animals Animals:

The tiger has swallowed a black sun.

In his cold cage he carries it still.

Black flames flicker through his fur.

Black rays roar from the centers of his eyes.

<God, but I love tigers.>

The other tiger at the Zoo, as photographed from about 50 yards away, in a separate area from where the pacing tiger was kept.

When is a noose, not a noose?

When it’s a rope with a loop in it to make it a handy pull for a garage door.  But don’t tell any of Bubba Wallace, Nascar, or the Wall Street Journal as much.

Bubba still insists he was the victim of a hate crime, even after the FBI explained the ‘noose’ had been hanging off the garage door since the last Talladega race.

Nascar thinks it showed its wokeness by insulting its fans, assuming it was one of them trying to intimidate Bubba.

And the Wall Street Journal hilariously climbed on its moral high horse (and not in its opinion pages, but on its news pages), to explain that the fact the ‘noose’ had been hanging for months in the Talladega garage made the situation worse:

The revelation that the rope had been there for so long led the FBI to conclude it was not a hate crime specifically targeting Wallace, the one black driver at the highest level of Nascar.

It also meant that a noose, one of the country’s starkest symbols of hatred and racism, had been on display in a working area at one of racing’s premier venues for months.

Does that look like some dispassionate reporting?  Obviously, the WSJ is doing yeoman’s work for the systemic racism claims of the black power movement.  And garnering clicks.  It’s all about the clicks, baby.

If a noose (i.e., a loop in a rope used as a garage door pull) hangs in a garage for months and nobody notices it, how is it evidence of systemic racism? Or, of anything?

Loops in ropes have many uses.  Nooses in ropes have many uses.  Is it now literally a federal case (the FBI put 15 agents on the noose investigation) anytime a rope is found with a loop tied into it?  Are white people so full of guilt and black people so eager to manipulate it that anything that even remotely recalls one bad thing that happened to one black person in the past is now verboten?  Obviously.

How many things are now taboo for whites because blacks said so?  Anything they like.  Including even being white.  And especially being white without apologizing for it.

I don’t care what the idiotic fascists in the black power movement say.  I am a white Southern male and make no apologies for it.  I have never once in my life treated someone poorly because of their race.  I have many times been considered backward or racist solely because of where I’m from.  But I have never returned the hate.

I remember well the black guy from Detroit in my boot camp company in the Army.  As soon as he found out I was from Alabama he–to my face–branded me a racist.  I’d never said or done a thing to him.  Later, it was me and my buddy, also from Alabama, who carried him and his rucksack up the mountain after he passed out in the July heat during a twelve mile march.  I didn’t think of him as black when I did it.  I wasn’t oppressively offering aid and comfort to his cause because of my white patrimony and guilt.  I was just helping out a fellow soldier.

I doubt I changed his mind about me.  But that’s okay.  I wasn’t trying to change his mind about me.  I was making sure I didn’t change my mind about me.

 

 

What Black Lives Matter is Really About

It’s misnamed.  Should be either Only Black Lives Matter (OBLM).  Or, the Black Power Movement (BPM).

It’s not about systemic racism.  Systemic racism is just an amorphous term that can mean anything its purveyors want it to mean.  My daughter told me last night that the widely used Mercator projection used to make maps of the globe that distort areas away from the equator, making them appear bigger than they are the further one goes towards the poles, is another instance of systemic racism.

I responded that maybe the Mercator projection is used because the areas of most interest to map users when it was developed were temperate areas, i.e., the areas where they lived that were not too far from the equator or the poles, and it gave those areas the least amount of distortion. It’s hard to map onto a flat surface a thing that’s spherical.

No, it’s systemic racism.

Then systemic racism is nothing more than bigotry and guess what?  Everyone is a bigot.  It’s the nature of nature.  Like likes like and dislikes unlike.  It’s written in our, and every other creature’s stars.  And as bigotry is in our individual nature, it’s in all of our institutions and organizations.  Every living thing, from the biggest US company to the tiniest virus is bigoted.

BLM is no exception.  It favors itself over all others.  But most times, individuals and organizations disguise their bigoted nature.  It helps in achieving their selfish aims if others aren’t alerted to their bigotry.  Not BLM.  It’s so brazen, it comes right out and says it.

Here’s what the leader of New York’s BLM chapter said, from the New York Post:

The president of Greater New York Black Lives Matter said that if the movement fails to achieve meaningful change during nationwide protests over George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers, it will “burn down this system.”

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation,” Hawk Newsome said during an interview Wednesday evening on “The Story” with Martha MacCallum.

In case there were any doubt about the group’s aims, Newsome added:

“I just want black liberation, and black sovereignty. By any means necessary.”

Black sovereignty is another way of saying black power is another way of saying I want to do to white people what white people did to my ancestors.

BLM is the Black Power Movement.  It is Malcolm X finally getting his day.  It does not seek equality before the law (which, save affirmative action, blacks already have, and affirmative action bends the law to their favor, not against them).  It seeks to destroy the law and replace it with its own.  It does not seek to end systemic racism but to implement its own brand of systemic racism.

The hilarious thing is that stupid white people are letting this movement to subordinate their lives to black lives lead them around by the nose.

Just another marker along the way to the decline and fall of the American Empire.

 

Blue Lives Matter

Race riots in the inner cities.  Stores looted.  Police cruisers in flames.

White people gathered around their television sets in the suburbs to watch the protesting and rioting…and the launch of American astronauts into space.

All the while, a pandemic respiratory virus sweeps the old and infirm from this mortal coil.

Is it 1968?  Or 2020?  Could be either one (the mostly ignored Hong Kong flu that ran its course in 1968/69 took as many lives as coronavirus, but didn’t have the advantage of a good publicist).

Oh, yeah.  And both are election years.  But don’t expect the incumbent to bow out of the race like Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.

What does it mean, that 2020 is practically a repeat of 1968?  History’s supposed to rhyme, not repeat.   Save having Vietnam to fan the protest flames (Afghanistan not being remotely as deadly or unpopular, probably because no one’s being drafted to serve), 2020 is practically a carbon copy of 1968.

Is this some sort of dire omen?  Or is 2020 like 1968 because a new generation is coming of age?  That’d be hard to argue.  There’s nothing like the post-WWII baby boom generation coming of age in 2020 like happened in 1968.  2020’s young adults, the pampered millennials, are the grandchildren of the Boomers.  Perhaps that’s it–the grandkids are trying show up their parents by acting like their grandparents.  It’s nothing new for grandparents and grandchildren to conspire to squeeze the parents in the middle.  But that can’t be all this is.

Might information technologies explain some of it?  Televisions in 1968 transmitted scenes of rioters and body bags and the Apollo launches.  Cellphones in 2020 transmitted images of police brutality, protests, rioting, looting and another space launch.  Television was no longer novel in 1968, but its capacity to transmit information, especially images, was just coming into full flower.  It wasn’t until 1972 that color TV’s outsold black and whites.  Cellphones are in roughly the same stage of development, just coming into their own.

The difference with cellphones is editing and oversight.  Whereas in 1968 there were three networks (four, it you count PBS), all being carefully watched by the FCC, cellphones turn everyone into a mini broadcast studio and literally anything goes.  Televisions united us.  We had no choice but to watch what was on offer from the big three and PBS.  Cellphones isolate.  It’s an individual choice, what to consume from a cornucopia of choices.  What to believe.  With whom to associate. Cellphone mediated social media subjectivizes truth.  Makes it a matter of personal experience.  It’s solipsism run amok.

Smart cellphones, the apogee of consumer-driven technological development, augers the death of the Age of Reason.  The Enlightenment is over.  We’re all Roussean Romantics now, engaging the world through feelings modulated by a smart phone, believing that the more deeply a thing is felt, the more true it is.  Ironic isn’t it?  Turns out the whole point behind the rational investigation of the world that was restarted in spurts and phases by the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment ultimately resulted in the applied science of cellphone technology that allowed us to abandon reason so that we might wallow in our emotions.

Aside from the fun of marching in outraged protest, and the even greater fun of abandoning all sense of civility to loot and vandalize, it’s not clear what the point is to all the protests.  What might be accomplished?  The Minneapolis incident was an anecdote.  A bad cop did a bad thing.  As Heather MacDonald at the Wall Street Journal pointed out, using statistics and not feelings, there is no evidence of racial bias in the use of deadly force by police (The Myth of Systemic Police Racism), basing her conclusion on a study conducted by the National Academy of Science.  So what are the protesters after?  Expressing pent-up emotions in which their social media and quarantining isolation has them wallowing?

Engaging the world with emotion rather than reason is how one comes to believe the narrative that cops are all racists (even black ones, and against their own race).  The world is a very prickly place when one wears one’s emotions as one’s skin.  And an utterly indecipherable place when trying to think.

People who abandon reason in order that they might indulge emotion are easily manipulated.  The progressive movement depends on infantile people always credulously accepting whatever is their progressive leader’s program of the moment.  Woke is just another word for lobotomized.

My daughter, at 23, is skirting membership in the millennial generation.  She’s a cliche.  A privileged young white woman raised on social media who believes feelings matter more than anything and feels that the police brutality caught on a cellphone camera in Minneapolis reflects a deep-seated problem with the way blacks are treated by police.  She doesn’t know much of anything more than her feelings.  She’s not studied the problem to know any of the actual statistics.  She feels that cops are racially biased (presumably even non-white cops) against blacks, maybe Latinos, too (but let’s stick to blacks to keep it simple), and that her feelings are enough to justify her conclusions.

When I asked her what she thought the protests were attempting to achieve, she mumbled things like the ‘end of racism and police brutality’ and ‘racial equality’.  How did she think those things might be achieved through the protests?  Anger, at me for having asked the question, was her answer.

A few days later, I was up at the farm, slowly clearing a path through a jungle of vines, brush and small trees that had overtaken a neglected fence line.  I aim to replace the old fence and put some cows on the newly-enclosed pasture.  Next time coronavirus or something like it comes, which may be the last time we have anything resembling a civilization in which to deal with such a calamity, I intend to be already quarantined, able to produce my own food without need of interacting with a plague-filled world gone mad.  I’m sitting the next pandemic out.

I heard a text notification on the phone in the pocket of my sweaty, grimy jeans.  Taking off my gloves to dig the phone from my pocket and put my reading glasses to my face, I saw it was from the wife.  Someone at the summer camp for kids where the daughter was a counselor supervisor had tested positive for coronavirus.  The daughter would be quarantined for the next ten days at camp, and needed us to bring her some clothes and snacks.  I cut my clearing efforts short and headed home to gather up the stuff to carry to her, as the wife was still at work (sitting at our dining room table).

The daughter met us at the gate when we arrived a few hours later (the wife decided to take off work early).  She was furious.  Not at us, but at being held captive by the camp for a coronavirus quarantine. That’s when I realized how it must have felt to be one of the millions of young people like her who’d been confined to their tiny apartments in the quarantined, locked-down cities, an experience that well-off suburbanites like our family had not had.  The urban young’s anger at all things government after a few weeks of quarantine was like the detonator on a land mine, the slightest pressure bound to set it off.  The protests had more to do with the coronavirus lock downs than anything else. (The riots, looting and lawlessness were just advantage-taking of the chaos for some opportunistic mayhem).

The government (at all levels) had asked the governed to voluntarily forfeit their civil liberties to fight the virus.  In return, the governed got the same old government as before, with brutalizing police officers killing black men at their whim (anecdotal, to be sure, but that was enough).  Government broke the social contract in dealing with the virus without offering any improvements in return.  It infuriated people.  They spilled into the streets in protest.

Later on that evening, the son and I got into a spirited discussion about the police brutality leading to the riots.  He said his black friend, let’s call him Adam, always felt afraid of the police–that he might be stopped at any time.  Adam, only just barely dark enough to be considered not-white, lives in Atlanta, the black capital of the world.  I told my son that I could understand Adam’s feelings, but that they were illegitimate.  That Adam had no more to worry about from the police than anyone else in Atlanta.  He argued that feelings can’t be illegitimate.  I asked, what sort of policy measures could be undertaken that might make Adam less fearful?  Gibberish, was his answer, because there’s no policy measure to ameliorate an irrational fear.

One can’t control what one feels.  The heart feels what it wants to feel.  But the head is the handmaiden of the heart.  Its purpose for being is to test what the heart feels against its more objective perception of reality.  The head is the handmaiden, not the enabler, of an emotional heart run amok, just as a good handmaiden to a mistress offers objective insights as to the validity of what she’s feeling.  If it were actually the case that Adam was in danger of death by cop every time, for instance, he sets off on a trip in his automobile, his head would confirm his heart’s fears.  There is no way a clear thinking head could make such a conclusion in the case of a law-abiding black man in the city of Atlanta.  So his emotion is illegitimate.  That’s not to say the emotion is not real, but that it’s irrational.  And there’s no public policy measures can be taken that might fix one’s irrational fears.

I personally have a fear that I can’t control. I fear flying.  Is my fear irrational?  Of course.  Flying is the safest form of travel there is.  But the human heart has evolved to fear tight spaces that restrict free movement and to fear close contact with strangers, i.e., exactly the conditions of airplane travel.  Most people have no problem overcoming the innate impulses, thinking of the experience as an aggravation and inconvenience more than as a potentially deadly threat to their existence.  I know my fear is irrational, so I deploy my reasoning faculties (and a few Bloody Mary’s) to overcome it.  Adam can too.

But the point is, there’s no policy that airlines could adopt to assuage my irrational fears, nor should they.  There’s no point to me marching in protest against the airlines because I fear getting into an aluminum tube with a couple hundred other people I don’t know (the wife usually being the lone exception, which isn’t any help).  There’s nothing to do to make things better, save me working on my own heart.

Protesting because one irrationally fears the police is just as pointless as if I’d protested  because I get claustrophobic in an airliner.  The people who need legitimately fear the police are criminals.  There’s no evidence whatsoever of systemic racism in policing.  Adam’s feeling is illegitimate.  Just because he can get on Facebook and find others who feel the same as him doesn’t legitimate it.

I told my son that one outcome of all this is that the police will likely withdraw (psychologically, if not physically) from the black neighborhoods that need their presence most, leaving the law-abiding citizens that remain at the mercy of the thugs and gangbangers that run riot in them every time the police turn their heads.  I told him that the law-abiding people in the ghettos will be pleading for the police to return because they save far more black lives than any rogues of their number brutalize or kill.  In the last 365 days (as of May 26, 2020), Chicago saw 300 murders of blacks by blacks.  That would be a bad year for an Army division deployed to Afghanistan.  Where are the protests against the loss of those black lives?

Cops have the hardest jobs in the world.  They are expected to protect us all from each other, while not displacing a hair of civil liberties from anyone’s head.  In these civil disturbances they have been spit on, cussed at, had bricks and Molotov cocktails thrown at them, fired upon, stabbed, etc, and through it all been expected to endure it with the stoicism of a Spartan warrior.  The guys toeing the thin blue line between anarchy and civilization are my heroes.

Blue Lives Matter.  They’re the only thing preventing the delicate fabric of civilization from unraveling.

 

 

Get Ready for Corona Crisis 2.0

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.  “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.  She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.  Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.  (Genesis 3:4-7, NIV).

I’m thinking maybe they picked the wrong end to cover.

What were their eyes opened to?  The serpent said that they would be like God, knowing good and evil.  Why would knowing good and evil make them realize their private parts needed covering?  What is good and evil, and how does it relate to genitalia?

To an organism, good is whatever promotes its survival and propagation.  Evil is whatever impedes it.  All organisms (or actually, the genes they carry) seek eternal life (caveat–genes don’t actually seek anything, it just seems that way because configurations of genes that appear to behave as if they seek eternal life are the only ones that survive).  Reproduction through others is the only path (as yet) for human genes, and the genes of most other sexually-reproducing species, to achieve, if only partially, eternal life.  Once Adam and Eve became godlike, knowing good and evil, the naked display of their genitalia—of the window into eternity–was too powerful to handle.  It was as if staring life and death in the face every passing moment.  They had to cover up.

Why, now we know how dangerous is the human mouth and nose to human survival, do we refuse to cover them?

The mouths and noses of coronavirus- afflicted people are spreading death, a profound impediment to the survival and propagation of our genes. Yet, at least in the US, people act as if wearing a mask violates the whole individual-liberty premise of our founding.  Require that people cover their genitalia and no one objects. But mandate they wear masks and the founding fathers are turning in their graves.

Specific rationales for not wearing masks run the gamut, a showcase for the human capacity to find reasons for whatever their emotional impulses compel.  Consider the claim that masks aren’t effective.  A prominent Fox News doctor wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journalrecently where he claimed masks are only good to protect others from you–that they offer no protection to you from others, so wearing them is okay, but won’t do much good.  Think about that for a moment.

If I wear a mask, according to this doctor it will prevent me spreading the virus to others.  What if others are wearing a mask, too?  Won’t their masks prevent them from spreading the virus to me?  Logic is apparently not the life of television doctors.

Of course masks are effective at reducing the spread of a respiratory virus, particularly when everyone wears one.  And even if everyone isn’t wearing one, they will offer some protection to the wearer.  They might not keep out all the viral particles, but they’ll keep some out, reducing the viral load if one is exposed.

And viral load seems to matter a great deal.  Studies have shown that those who get the virus at a ‘super spreading’ event like weddings and funerals, sporting events, concerts, etc., are likely to suffer a more severe case of the illness than are those who get the virus from more casual, less concentrated contact.  A forty-year-old otherwise healthy doctor or nurse treating covid 19 patients who gets the virus and dies likely succumbed for the accumulated viral load (akin to accumulated radiation) finally overwhelming their immune system.

Compare Japan’s experience with that of the US.  Japan, with a population of 126.5 million, reports as of May 22, 2020 roughly 16,500 infections and 800 deaths from the virus.  The US, with a population of about 330 million, reports 1.51 million cases and over 95,000 deaths.  New York City, with 196,000 cases, reports almost as many deaths (16,149) as Japan has had cases.  Japan never shut down its economy.

When I pointed out as much on a Wall Street Journal comment board, the explanation was that Japan was lying about their statistics.  I responded that I used Japan as an example specifically because Japan is not China.  Japan is a liberal democracy.  It would be pointless for her government to try to lie.  Japan hasn’t the political machinery for suppressing truth such as China’s authoritarian regime enjoys.

What did Japan do differently than the US? A number of things, including isolating and tracking known cases.  But the factor that prominently stands out is that the Japanese wore masks in public.  Everyone wore them, from politicians, to subway employees and riders, to housewives at the grocery.

Imagine that you’re a respiratory virus.  Your goal (though you don’t know it because you haven’t eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), is the same as the goal of your host humans, to survive and propagate.  Your strategy for doing so is to replicate in the respiratory tract, in the process causing irritation such that you may be expelled to infect new hosts through their coughing and sneezing. How would you most like your human hosts to behave?  First, you certainly wouldn’t want them to wear any sort of facial covering that might lessen the velocity of the expulsions from their mouths and noses.  Second, you’d like them packed closely together so copies of you will have the best chance of reaching a new victim via a cough or sneeze or just the act of breathing.  Places you love?  Subway trains and platforms, airliners and airport check-in lines, cruise ships, stadiums full of people, bars with loud music so everyone has to shout, filled to overflowing concert venues, etc.  New York City, especially in late February and early March before her political leaders decided to close the barn door now the cow’s gone, was a coronavirus Garden of Eden.  Tokyo, with an even denser and much larger population to infect, was a barren desert so far as you were concerned.  It was just impossible to simultaneously get many of your kind past the mask of the infected one and the mask of another who wasn’t.

The amygdala in the human brain, an almond-shaped organ, is heavily involved in modulating responses to environmental stimuli that have existential implications.  It has four basic strategies when presented with an existential crisis, the four f’s as they’re known:  freeze, flee, fight or fuck. (Yes, fucking is a matter of great existential concern).  Freezing is first because it is a do-nothing strategy.  The amygdala is an apostle of Hippocrates—first, do no harm.  Freezing is the default.

So, the US froze.  Like a mouse (who has an amygdala) freezes when the lights come on and he’s caught out in the kitchen.  Freezing gives time to study the options—Can I get back to my hole underneath the cabinet without getting squashed by the lumbering human standing over there?  It keeps movement, which predators are primed to key on, to a minimum.  But it does little to protect an economic system from a respiratory virus, save somewhat reducing the number of strangers with which one comes into contact.  But numbers of contacts don’t much matter If no one’s wearing masks.  It only takes one contact with a viral-laden person at the grocery and then it’s carried home, to infect all those who are similarly frozen in place.

Freezing is as dangerous for an economic system as it is for a mouse.  The mouse is in the kitchen to solve another problem of profound existential concern, finding food.  Participation in the economic system serves the same purpose for humans.

The mouse can perhaps avoid the kitchen, foraging elsewhere if it knows the light is still on and predators are still present. We haven’t the luxury of completely avoiding the economic system if we aren’t one of the very few who are still subsistence farmers.  The light’s still on.  The predator’s still present.  But we have only the economic system to provide us with food.  We have to go out.

Thus, shutting or locking down the economic system can only be partial. At minimum, the food production and distribution system within it must continue to function, making the economic shut down seem more a puritanical penance—we only gave up the fun stuff hoping to appease the God that set this plague upon us–than any sort of real strategy for surviving the virus.

But why?  Why did it have to be this way?

The federal government, of course.  It used the virus to extend its power and reach into every aspect of American social and economic life.  It pledged to spend $2.2 trillion in fiscal stimulus it didn’t have, adding to the already trillion-dollar deficit expected this year before the virus.  It’s considering even more.  It doled out money to everyone who could fog a mirror.  The grandkids are on the hook.  But that’s okay.  In the long run, we’re all dead. In the meantime, the federal government, which should be declining in importance in the day-to-day affairs of life during this time of peace and prosperity, reestablished itself at the top of our minds, where it knows it always should be.

The Federal Reserve, taking its cue from the federal government proper, promised to print money at a furious pace, figuring it would double the holdings on its balance sheet from the $4 trillion left over from the last crisis to $8 trillion by the time this is done.  No Bad Loan and No Failing Company Left Behind.  But I bet it does better.  I bet it triples its balance sheet.

There will be precious little left of American capitalism once this is through.  Ever since the fall of the old Soviet Union, we’ve steadily and incrementally abandoned capitalism for the central planning that we supposedly despised in our old foe. What is the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which sets the national price level and decides on economic winners and losers, but our version of the Soviet Politburo?

The federal government even let virus hysteria afflict our forward-deployed warships, apparently not understanding the connection between printing money to appease the masses and the Pax Americana that makes such a thing possible.  Or possibly, the government well understood the connection between forward-deployed warships and the US dollar, but thought the risk of losing some measure of international fear of our military was worth indulging a bunch of sailors swept up in the social-media hysteria as an aid in proving the bona fides of the crisis.

Compare the per 100,000 population covid deaths, West vs East.  The following is derived from the Johns Hopkins University website as of May 24, 2020:

West

Country                                            Covid Deaths per 100k Population

US                                                                   29.68

UK                                                                   55.28

Spain                                                              61.38

Italy                                                                54.17

Belgium                                                         80.87

Netherlands                                                  33.83

Switzerland                                                   22.37

Germany                                                         9.96

Ireland                                                           33.05

Sweden                                                          39.20

Russia                                                              2.34

 

East

China                                                              0.33

Japan                                                              0.64

South Korea                                                  0.52

Singapore                                                      0.41

Taiwan                                                           0.03

 

Did I cherry-pick a bit?  Yes (but not egregiously just to make a point, check the website for yourself).  Are China’s numbers to be trusted?  No.  I didn’t include any Eastern European nations, save Russia, but their experience has been similar to Russia’s, so it can be used as a proxy.  It’s clearly the case, as one goes West, the virus becomes more deadly, until one reaches the US, where death rates decline from Western European highs by about half.  Is that because the US is doing better than Western Europe at dealing with the virus or is it because the virus gained its toehold in the US later than in Western Europe?  There’s no way to know, but I think the latter is probable.  And given summer is upon us, the virus will abate in the US due to seasonality before it does as much damage as in Western Europe.  This time.

What is clear is that East Asia did a much better job at dealing with the virus than did the West, if the goal was a lower death rate from the virus.  What did East Asia do differently?  Masks, for one.

Will the relative ineptitude at reducing fatalities in the West mean that the West is ultimately better off for the manner with which it dealt with the virus?  Possibly.  The virus kills the old and infirm, like a pack of wolves thinning a herd of elk in a Yellowstone winter.  The elk herd enjoys overall better health for the efforts of the wolves.  Perhaps the same will be true of the virus.  If so, the West’s ineptitude might accrue to its advantage in its ongoing struggle for primacy with the East.

This much is clear.  The US (and a great many of its Western allies, Sweden and Germany being notable exceptions) locked its economy down after the virus was already in community-spread mode.  The lock down threw millions out of work but was ineffective at reducing viral spread and consequent deaths, at least in part because the US refused to mandate masks in public.  The US got the worst of both worlds—economic calamity and a full-blown pandemic.

Considering the US did this to itself, one has to wonder, was it intentional?  Was the virus used as an opportunistic tool for the federal government to extend its power and reach into every realm of its citizen’s lives?  Looking at what the US did and not what it said, how could anyone conclude that it was anything but intentional?

The most potent anti-viral in the world, sunshine, is returning to the Northern Hemisphere.  While the virus will still be with us, it will find it ever more difficult to stay viable between the time it leaves one person’s mouth or nose and is inhaled by someone else’s.  It will likely appear by mid-September that we’ve got the virus licked.  It will be an illusion.  By Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead, October 31-November 2) the lengthening shadows of autumn will hearken its return.  The virus will be resurgent.  It won’t be Trump’s fault, but he’ll be blamed for it, and possibly lose the election as a result.  But it won’t matter who is the President.  What will happen will happen, regardless.

Given how politically beneficial making a crisis out of the virus was to governments of all levels, but particularly the federal government, none will be inclined to apply any lessons learned from the first round to this one.  Governments will do the same thing.  People will expect different results while governments hope the inept results are the same. Governments will get their wish.

Masks won’t be required.  The economic system will be locked down.  Over a million will be infected. Over 100,000 will die.  An economy still not fully recovered from the first round will be destroyed.  A greater Great Depression will ensue.  Only the stock market riding the Fed put will be immune, but only for a while, because this time famine and war will likely join plague and death for a complete set of apocalyptic horsemen.

The Fed will promise to double its balance sheet, again, which this time will mean conjuring $10-12 trillion dollars out of computer pixels.  The fiscal deficit will likewise reach levels as a percent of GDP never seen in US history, including during WWII and the Revolutionary War.  The limit to money creation will be reached.  The warships won’t sail, not for being infected with the virus but for the lack of money to operate them.  The end of Pax Americana will descend upon us.

It didn’t have to be this way.  We could have worn masks and gone about our business.  But the federal government couldn’t resist the temptation to turn a rather mild malady (as pandemics go) into a full-blown health and economic crisis.  All because it felt its grip on the American heart slipping.  But it will prove to have overreached in its effort to extend its power and influence over our lives.

Corona Crisis, Version 2.0, is apt to be a doozy.

Sin is always crouching at the door.  Thou mayest overcome it. (Genesis 4:7)

I doubt we do.

 

Corona’s Blessings

Yesterday was ‘cinco de mayo’ and I didn’t hear a thing about it, except that some of the daughter’s camp friends had a social-distancing-disregarding get together.  Her friends have been mainly ignoring the stop-the-spread directives, and it drives her crazy.  She wants to be with them but knows it would be wrong.

But otherwise not hearing a thing about ‘cinco de mayo’, not even in commercials on TV, not even in commercials on TV by that unfortunately named Mexican beer?  A coronavirus blessing.

There’s more coronavirus blessings than curses.  Many are simply things that are very difficult to see whilst running the rapids on the river of life but become apparent once we’re eddied out like now.

Some of them:

• Vastly reduced air and water pollution
• Fewer old and weak to care for
• An overall healthier population
• Finding out which are the essential and nonessential life activities
• Finding out that nothing about sports, dining out or vacation travel are essential
• Finding out how impotent is government
• Finding out how incompetent is government
• Finding out how willing people are to trade their civil liberties to the impotent, incompetent government for a false sense of security
• Finding out how little committed is the West to its way of life
• Confirmation of how craven, venal and avaricious is the media
• No traffic jams
• Confirmation of how pointless and inane is so much of what we worry over
• More time to spend with people who really matter
• Finding out who really matters
• Realizing how unbearably light is our being
• Realizing the limits of science
• Realizing how flimsy is the infrastructure of lies upon which civilization is built
• Time for long walks
• Time for quiet contemplation
• Realizing that most things we do are simply time-fillers between meals
• Confirmation of the narcissistic character of celebrities and the rich and powerful
• Confirmation of New York City’s narcissistic, drama-queen character among leading world cities
• No live baseball or golf or tennis on TV
• Confirmation of the partisan nature of scientific “truth”
• Realizing the inherent dangers of close-quarters city living
• Realizing China is not our friend
• Realizing how dangerous social media hysteria is to military preparedness
• Questioning whether there’s such a thing as progress
• Realizing the inherent class distinctions in America’s classless society
• Potentially realizing from where our food comes (if this causes famine).

That’s just a few. Our world will be different once corona virus is done with us.  But the change will be a Chekhovian process, not an event.  The road goes on forever and the party never ends.

Another ‘Rona Week

Where we are

The country’s been shut-in/shut down for almost two months now, cowering from the coronavirus. About 26 million have filed for unemployment. The virus shows no signs of letting up, or of even having noticed our efforts to social distance and shelter in place. We’ve finally figured out that wearing masks might help slow the spread and severity of a respiratory illness, probably a bit more than social distancing, but not everyone is wearing them.  The virus seems able to evade even masks when looking for a new set of lungs to infect.

The US, with only about 4.5% of the world’s population, has a third of the world’s reported infections and a fourth of its deaths. American exceptionalism.

How accurate are the reported numbers? New York recently did antibody tests on a cross-section of its population and found that as many as 2.7 million NY’ers have had the virus, which is roughly the same as the total reported infections worldwide.

There’s no vaccine or treatment on the horizon.

Cities vs Countryside vs Coronavirus

Cities do nothing essential for mankind’s survival. It’s why economic activity in them can be turned off as if nothing they did mattered.  It doesn’t.  Cities parasitize the efforts of the countryside. From the countryside flow the necessaries of life that keep cities alive.  So long as that spigot remains open, city folks needn’t do anything more than visit a grocery store to pick up their necessaries, compliments of the countryside.

Cities have always been countryside parasites, ever since first arising 10,000 years ago as a by-product of mankind developing the ability to produce food in lieu of hunting or gathering it. Cities arose as a place for people superfluous to food production (initially, mainly priests and rulers and their attendants) to gather.  Cities don’t produce food.  They depend on the countryside to provide it.  Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine/shut-in/shut-down, whatever they like, so long as the countryside doesn’t. It must continue laboring for the cities, regardless whether they’re rushing about to their next appointments, closing deals, preparing exotic meals, dreaming up new ways of expressing angst through art, cheating on their spouses, i.e., doing all their normal things, or coviding in tiny apartments, hiding from the virus.  Quarantined or not, no city would last a week should the countryside quit.

The ancient relationship of cities parasitizing the countryside abides, but it’s by now gone for so long it’s hardly even noticed, like a fish doesn’t know it’s in water. To be fair, part of the ancient relationship has been that cities necessarily pretended they were more important to human welfare than the countryside to motivate those most important  to human welfare—the food producers–to provide food for the ones who sat on their asses in the cities demanding it. And because cities are where the votes are and were, it is also ancient tradition that politicians not only bought into the lie but perpetuated it. The US Senate, being representative of lands (states) and not people, is a notable exception to this rule, and explains how US Presidents, via the electoral college, can be elected without winning the popular vote.  In the US, in effect, land is given a vote.

Usually it doesn’t much matter, which is the parasite and which the parasitized, city or countryside. But it does now. If the same criteria for quarantining in a city were applied to the countryside, both countryside and city would collapse. Cities depend on the countryside for their survival.

A recent advertisement by the CEO of Tyson Foods explaining that the food supply chain is breaking does not bode well for cities.

The Source of All Wealth

Imagine yourself a giant, standing smack in the center of what is now Indiana in the American Midwest around two hundred years ago. You take your giant’s clippers and cut down all the surrounding trees (they look like weeds to you) to make a clearing for a farm.  As the crops come in and animals fatten, you gather all the best corn, wheat, soybeans, cattle, chickens, etc., into a giant pile (tiny to you) in the center of the state, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned to buildings and people (the ordinary-sized). You name it Indianapolis.  Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside.  The giant is nothing but the grinding inevitability of the economics of life.

The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labor of one.  It only became possible with the development of sedentary agriculture around 10,000 years ago (ants developed the capability some 50 million years ago).  Hunter gatherers lived hand to mouth.  Only since agriculture did we start living hand to storehouse to hand to mouth and had enough extra to feed people who contributed nothing to the production of food, who instead built temples and managed relationships with the gods, exclusively fought wars, wrote poetry and prose, etc.

Agricultural surplus built the Egyptian pyramids. Their construction depended on Egyptian farmers growing food sufficient to feed many more than just those who worked the irrigated fields.  The nourishing spring flood of the Nile and abundant sunshine year-round made agriculture extraordinarily productive.  The pyramids were the result.  Thousands of years after the last pyramid was built, Egypt’s agriculture was still so productive that Rome’s masses were kept happily sedated by grain imported from Egypt (and perhaps, Egyptian beer) and entertained in arenas built by slaves who were fed with it.  Rome appropriated Egypt’s agricultural surplus for itself to feed and build its empire.

The US is today the biggest exporter of foodstuffs in the world.  But only 2-3 percent of the population works directly in food production, making roughly 97% (everyone else) of people, and all of what everyone else does, superfluous. By comparison, several times that proportion likely worked in agriculture in ancient Egypt.

Egypt’s later experience with Rome illustrates the need for defending agricultural surplus, i.e., wealth, once it is created.  Rome had the military power and will to take Egypt’s surplus, so did.  An aircraft carrier in port in Guam for a few cases of coronavirus that prevents it patrolling the South China Sea portends ill for the US’s ability and will to defend its surplus.  If the US can’t or won’t defend the surplus, someone else (China, e.g.) will take it.  It’s how the world works.  Ask Cleopatra.

Where do we go from here?

We’re gonna have to learn to live with the virus.  Like our hunter gatherer ancestors learned to live with lions, tiger and bears.  And how our more recent ancestors learned to live with a host of infectious pathogens (e.g., plague, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, malaria, yellow fever, cholera, polio, etc.) made possible by sedentary agriculture packing surplus people in cities.

There’s no cure, aside possibly from infection and clearance, and no preventative on the horizon.  We can’t stay shut down forever.

The virus is here and has spread to all corners of the globe.  Assuming Elon Musk doesn’t get his Martian colony up and running any time soon, we’re stuck here with it (besides, we’d likely bring it with us even if he did).  We can wear masks and wash the hands and social distance to prevent getting so heavy a dose the immune system can’t deal with it.  But we must carry on.  It’s fantasy to imagine we can live in suspended animation for long enough that the virus will somehow go away.

Strange weather to go with strange times

Another round of severe storms earlier this week, but that’s not what’s strange.  The cold snaps seem to be getting cooler as we close out April.  Strong winds yesterday and today gave a bite to the mid-40’s dry air we awoke to.  Air that’s not so heavy with humidity it sags is alone remarkable.  After all, this is Alabama.  And in the mid-40’s in almost May?  What’s next, a cool, dry summer?  That’d be more remarkable than the collective economic suicide the coronavirus has induced.

Quorum Sensing Sadness

Strange weather in Alabama lately. By ‘lately’, I mean since December.  January and February, bless their hearts, could barely string two days together that weren’t gloomy with cold rain.  March was as warm as May, and sometimes June.  And bursts of April have been colder than January.

Today (Sunday, April 19) repeats last Sunday’s reaping of the whirlwind.  Except today the rain and severe weather got started early, before dawn.  Last week as much was in the forecast, but nothing happened until late Sunday evening.

Weather patterns often seem to hold to a seven-day cycle, like our week, though seven days hasn’t always been a week’s duration in history.  Ancient Rome used an eight-day week; ancient China, ten.  And France as late as the revolution used a ten-day week (perhaps to show, like our government does with daylight savings time, that the new government was so powerful it could control time). Pre-history, in our hunter/gatherer days, we likely had no weeks, but marked time according to seasons—to the amount of daylight in the temperate zones and rainfall in the tropics.  Like so many cultural developments, seven-day weeks seemed to arise partly through convergent evolution, partly through diffusion.  All were a product of the new economy of sedentary agriculture.  Like agriculture itself, the seven-day week probably arose in the fertile crescent.  Its practice was first conclusively documented by the ancient Hebrews.

Seven days seems arbitrary but isn’t.  Seven days is born of the natural cadence of the solar year’s 365 ¼ days and the lunar month’s 29 ½.  A bit more than 52 weeks in a year, a bit more than 4 weeks in a cycle of the moon.  Like pi won’t ever yield a definitive number relating a circle’s diameter to its circumference, there’s no magic number for dividing and parceling and reconciling the lunar and solar year.  Seven days is as close as any.  A rhythmic cadence of time.  Six days to toil and one to rest, a not-quite-arbitrary cycle that was necessary with the advent of sedentary agriculture to break up the monotonous, featureless days.  A seventh day to remind one why suffering through the previous six was worthwhile.  The week as a tool for carving the square peg of hunter/gatherer genes to fit the round hole of sedentary agriculture.

It’s hard to say how long this weather cycle might last.  For weeks during January and February, it would rain every Monday-Friday and clear up for one or two of the weekend days.  Spring weather patterns are generally shorter-lived than those of summer and winter.  This may be the first and last of this one.

About the time God gave coronavirus to Alabama, He graciously broke the winter rain cycle.  The sun finally came out just as everyone came home, crowding my days. I needed to not be stuck inside with the family, and God provided.  Improvements on the two properties—a house in Mountain Brook and the farm on Lookout Mountain—resumed.  It’s been a busy couple of months.  I’ll gladly take one day of stormy weather for six days of sunny and not-quite-yet-miserable warmth.  Thank-you, God.

It’s claimed there’s over two million cases of coronavirus in the world right now.  I bet it’s a hundred times that many; maybe even a thousand.  There’s no way this virus is so prolifically spreading without which a great many more people have it than are showing up in the statistics.  New York City, the hardest hit city in the world by far, probably has better than half its citizens with an infection.

I think we’ll eventually discover that the reason so many of the infections are mild or asymptomatic is because the virus, while readily transmissible, only causes severe symptoms and deaths when a heavy dose is received in an exposure (or any dose is received in an immune-compromised individual, either for age or other health reasons).  Being exposed to a low viral load gives the immune system time to set its defenses and keep the virus at bay, turning it into a benign part of the ordinary fauna of human beings, like, e.g., the Epstein-Barr virus is a part of the fauna of probably better than 90% of people but only rarely causes problems (e.g., mononucleosis and post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder).  A study of Santa Clara County in California that tested the blood of 3,300 volunteers for corona antibodies showed that infection totals there might be understated by anywhere from 35 to 80 times the amount of known infections.  I bet it’s even more than that.

I came down with something earlier this week.  The first time I felt a bit out of sorts was after dinner Friday a week ago.  I put it down to maybe having developed a mild shellfish allergy (we had shrimp for dinner that night).  I felt flush and hot for no apparent reason.  I checked but had no elevated temperature.  The next day I felt mainly fine, until later that afternoon, when I felt mildly achy and somewhat fatigued, with a dry cough and runny nose. Over the next couple of days I felt the same sort of thing, except twice a day—once mid-morning and later mid-afternoon.  By Tuesday I was up at the farm working on some inside paneling for the pole barn and the spell came on hard about 2:00 in the afternoon.  I felt weak and ravenously hungry, though I’d had my normal breakfast and lunch and wasn’t working extraordinarily hard.  I ate some pasta salad I’d stolen from home and laid down and felt better after an hour or so.

The symptoms seemed, save a bit more debilitating, just what I experienced the countless times in the past when I’d gotten a cold, which may have been what it was.  Or, maybe coronavirus.  Colds are caused by the same type of viruses as corona, so maybe a mild case of it would feel like a cold.  Whatever it was, the prescription for me with a cold is to feed, not starve it.  And one of the best ways I’ve found to feed it is beer—the alcohol provides both a ready supply of energy and an analgesic for the symptoms.  I drank five that night, way more than usual, because each one felt a little better than the one before, which is not normally the case past about three.  I also ate way more than usual.  Between the beer and chili and pasta salad and chips and hot dog I had from about five in the evening until finally drifting off to sleep around midnight, I must’ve put away a couple thousand calories.

The next day (Wednesday) I felt much better upon waking but the achy, fatigued feeling with a scratchy throat and mild cough came back around mid-morning again.  I decided I needed something other than beer to feed the virus, whatever type it was, so ran down to the store (wearing a mask) and bought some cokes, milk and cereal. By Thursday when I left the farm to head home, I’d had three one-liter bottles of coke and several servings of Special K and whole milk, and felt much better.  No mid-morning or mid-afternoon spells since.  I still have a dry cough and runny, stuffy nose, but other than that, I’m good.  Through all those cokes and otherwise empty calories, I didn’t gain a pound.

Was it the coronavirus?  Who knows?  It could have been a garden-variety cold.  It also could have been seasonal allergies that got a bit carried away—a couple of weeks earlier, I’d taken myself off Flonase and an antihistamine that I normally take during the spring because I didn’t want my immune response dampened by drugs in case I got exposed to the virus.  I guess I’ll only ever know it wasn’t the virus if I get the virus.

I started back on my favorite stomach acid reducer—Zantac—on Wednesday, because it seemed something wasn’t right with my stomach.  Seasonal allergies affect my stomach.  Yes, it seems weird, but they do.  As Zantac has been taken off the market for having been discovered to have minute traces of a cancerous substance (NDMA) in it, my supply is limited and dwindling.  But I figured that if what I had was the coronavirus, using Zantac to help fight it was worth a few of my precious remaining tablets.  It seemed to help. Along with the cokes, i.e., the ready sugar and plentiful fluids, it seemed a knock-out punch.

Bacteria are capable of a neat little trick that makes them nearly qualify as multicellular when they exist in numbers.  They can ‘quorum sense’ through chemical signaling, discerning how many of their mates are close by.  Once they sense there’s enough of their number close by, they turn on genes that promote finding a new host.

Now the incredible part:  viruses that infect bacteria (phages) can listen in on the bacterial signaling to determine whether enough of them (the bacteria) are around to warrant their own breakout to seek more hosts.

Thus, a bacteria is so finely attuned to its environment that it knows when its kind have proliferated to the point it’s time to find another host, but the parasitical virus inhabiting them, which technically isn’t even alive, is also so finely attuned to its environment that it spies on its host’s communication with others of its kind to determine whether the time is ripe for it to burst out of its host and find another.

It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine that viruses infecting cells in a human body have something like the sensing mechanism of bacterial phages, excepting perhaps that the information they’d seek is knowing the activity of the immune system–of whether it is ready to kill and dispose of the cells the virus has infected—or of its host cells and the defenses they present.  We know the Epstein-Barr virus and the cells it infects (B-cells of the immune system) dance a little jig, testing each other’s strength. I bet we’ll eventually find something like quorum sensing in coronavirus, which might go a long way in explaining the disparity of severity in illness among similar cohorts.

Whatever sort of quorum sensing there is, the simple mathematics of infection mean that all other things equal, viral load at exposure should impact the severity of illness.  A lighter viral load should cause milder symptoms; a heavier load, harsher symptoms.  This is due to the nature of the body’s immune response.  Once the body senses the presence of a new viral pathogen, it takes time for it to configure, through self-selected modifications to the DNA of T-cells (the principal virus-fighting cells), a T-cell that is specifically designed to eradicate the new virus. Our T-cells have been modifying their own DNA since long before we knew anything about CRISPR.  T-cells modify their DNA by a process that’s only a little better than random, trial and erroring to the configuration that works best, and then proliferates the winner.  This takes time, all while the virus is racing to infect as many cells as it can.  If the virus gets the head start of a heavy viral load or a weakened immune response, the virus often ‘wins’ in the sense that the immune system loses the battle and the host dies.

Viruses always lose, however, when they kill their hosts.  They can’t propagate in a dead host.  Viruses don’t want to kill us.  They just want to make us sick enough that they can find their way out to find another host (through sneezing, coughing and breathing with the coronavirus—through diarrhea with bacteria-induced typhoid fever and cholera). It only seems they seek our death.  Those 150,000+ dead of the coronavirus represent an inexpertly evolved virus, inflicting massive and needless self-debilitating damage.  Viruses are just selfish little snippets of genetic code, like our own selfish little snippets of code that we call genes.  Which is to say, viruses are just like us, gene vessels tasked to be fundamentally concerned with nothing else but their survival and propagation.  As they depend on us for survival and propagation, killing us is not a good strategy.  It’s why the very deadly viruses like Ebola are also very unsuccessful at pandemic spread.

The whole coronavirus crisis has a sense of finality to it. Like nothing ever afterward will be the same.

Maybe I’m projecting.  Up at the farm, I had already decided that if what I had there turned out to be coronavirus, I’d just ride it out, dying or surviving alone and away from the people I love who I might otherwise infect.  And the prospect of death felt grim.  Partly for the irony of dying of a disease spread by social contact while I’m about as social as a bear in the wood.  But mostly I think for how utterly pointless this virus has revealed the whole of the exceptional American project to have been.  We’re so exceptional we’ve let a puny virus not much deadlier than a bad flu season destroy our whole way of life.  My sense of the American quorum made me sad.