Returning to America

A comrade in consciousness once told me that American's hate their culture so much they make a new one ever 10 years. I have spent a fair amount of this decade outside the borders of the USA, and so whenever I come back it always seems like I have a lot of catching up to do. For such a far flung Imperial power that takes an interest in telling just about every other country on earth what they should do, we are a remarkably insular nation. There is a logic, or perhaps lack thereof, that is truly unique which I would argue is virtually incomprehensible to an outsider, and to be fair, largely indefinable to the inhabitants. I will not seek to unravel that mystery here, but merely to appreciate how odd the land I come from truly is.
  I think it's safe to say that all places on earth are idiomatic to varying degrees. The thing about America that has struck me of late is the casual insanity of it all. I get the feeling more and more that people here are alienated in such a profound way that they have somehow developed an inbuilt immunity to modernity. Maybe its the rapacious consumer culture, or the incalculably hypocritical nature of American politics, could even just be that in our society its ok to just not give a flying fuck and so a preponderance of people here don't. In all likelihood, it is surely a synthesis of many things that makes this place so peculiar. It is an odd mixture of fear, respect and bewilderment that we illicit in the rest of the world. I feel genuinely fortunate to have become a historian in such a place and time, for I feel that never will I ever get to the bottom of this rabbit hole.
  Within my first 12 hours of being back in the USA a gang banger ran up on my cousin and I as we walked to his car in a not that bad neighborhood in LA. He was so twisted on drugs that comprehending his purpose was difficult at first as he asked random disjointed questions and stared wildly at us. Once we started walking away he started shouting his gang affiliation and asking us if we wanted to get shot. My cousin, who has lived in LA for over 10 years now, very calmly just said no, we didn't have any problem and continued walking away seeming almost bored with the whole situation. Once it was over he told me that this sort of thing happens all the time and that you just get used to it. In a country where anyone can have a gun and be crazy enough to use it on a complete stranger for absolutely no reason, one just has to take shit from people like that or carry a gun oneself with the understanding that if you pull it out you need to shoot to kill. No other economically developed country has such an ethos and is probably a large part of why the world must acknowledge our military dominion in so many places on the planet.
  While the gun debate in Washington manages to sink to even more asinine depths of lunacy it seems ever more likely that denial will continue to be the backbone of this country. How does this nation think it can have a dialogue about this issue when one side claims guns are essential to our freedom and the other side seems unaware that we owe everything we have as a nation to their use? An old frontier saying said 'God created man, but Colonel Colt made them equal'. That is bullshit on both accounts, but it does speak to the reason guns are so central to the psychosis that is American identity. You may not be able to afford much here, but chances are you can get your hands on a gun, and that what ever comes of that you will feel more powerful. Also, if you can believe in an all powerful God creating mankind you can surely believe that a pistol will make you free. Having said that, I would like to close with two quotes by religious men about this issue:
 "All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming." -Martin Luther (1569)
"our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is the one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing; by allowing these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes." -Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

The Trail We Traverse

For a historian, the passage of time is a sacred thing. It is a thread that weaves all humanity together into this baffling tapestry we call the present. Like walking a trail in a complete wilderness, one must take careful note of ones path so as to avoid walking in circles and also to insure that you can retrace your steps if you go the wrong way. I would never presume to say humanity is lost, but I would argue that we are not taking very careful note of the trail we tread. Here are some things that I think are worthy of contemplation.
1) The decision to alter our world has lead to the majority of land (and also the oceans) of earth being affected by human activity to varying degrees. This has lead to an exponential increase in population roughly corresponding to how much of the earth we have devastated to create what we want. If we don't come to some sort of consensus on how many humans is desirable and how many is disastrous it is very probable that we will kill every ecosystem on the planet after a few dozen more trips around the Sun. Considering we don't yet know how to produce something complex as a functioning ecosystem, destroying the ones we have is a rather dubious decision that at the very least we should be conscious of making.
2) The prevalence of doublethink as a fundamental aspect of social structures and thought is a development that not only deserves disciplined discussion, but also introspective analysis. "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them both to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then to promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed." I can't speak to life in the poorer portions of planet earth, but I can say with as much certainty as any human can say anything that doublethink is a fundamental part of life in America and Europe. The ability of America to claim it is preserving peace by waging war, or maintain international order by violating international law, speaks to the truth of this. Consider how every crises in Capitalism seems to spring miraculously from nowhere, even though the exact same thing has been happening for hundreds of years now. The maze of madness that is the modern financial system is a dungeon of doublethink that is so cavernous and crazy we only accept it because it is almost impossible to understand it. We should think deeply on this turn in the trail before we forget the way we came.
3) What sort of a planet and people do we want? Honestly asking this question and then acting accordingly seems like the best hope for us humans. If we can start a dialogue based solely on answering this one question, I think we would find that we all have a workable similarity in our answer. Sure some want injustice, ignorance and intolerance, but they don't have to openly admit it because people seem to be pathetically passive as long as they are fed and entertained. If this simple question became the basis of political discourse I think it is conceivable that we could quickly transcend mountains of bullshit that has confused our course for centuries. Some might say its absurd to hope that we can change what is dubbed 'human nature'. That claim would require that you completely disregard all of history and the phenomenal changes that have transpired in human society therein. Perhaps if we tried we could make people that not only learn how to live without destroying biodiversity, but also break the ages old rule of oligarchies.
These three ponder points are what have been bouncing around in my brain this first week of 2013. What once was a trail is now a road and thus seems to tell us where to go. All I hope is that whatever fate is in store for us we at least measure our steps, be conscious of the trail we take and all the ones we do not.