Custodes?

Most of the world is ignoring - except as a topic for idle comment - the bloody business going on in Syria.Mind you, the usual suspects (the Arab League, the UN) are saying the "right things"; they'd like to see the killing stop, they'd like "someone" to step in. The West, including my own country, is deploring all this nasty killing though rather sotto voce so as not to have to, you know, do something about it. So, as usual, it seems like everyone would like to guard the nice people being so brave and anti-dictator-y in Homs but no one really wants to BE the "guards", the actual guarding process being so messy and all.

And the Syrian government, having taken as a parole another Latin maxim - oderint dum metuant; let them hate so long as they fear - goes on its merry way killing those in opposition to it.

And I have only one real question; if Syria, why not elsewhere?

I mean, the Syrian government is rather nasty, although by historical measure not all that vile, and even by much of current global practice not so much more so than many, including some that my country lavishes public affection and tax largesse upon.

But if the current ratissage in Homs (and elsewhere in Syria) is not practically the very definition of civil war, then, what is it? Yes, the rebels are getting hammered in a very bloodily unequal fashion. Since when has the suppression of rebellion become a non-contact sport?After the failure of the Third Servile Rebellion Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves along the Via Appia. In the aftermath of Sherman's Atlanta and Savannah campaigns thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Southern civilians suffered hellacious hardships. Many probably starved, or died of various diseases, or exposure. Rebellion is, and by political calculus must be, a hazardous thing; Tokugawa Ieyesu is said to have claimed that nothing justified rebellion other than success.

So perhaps I'm a fool, or being deliberately obtuse, but I fail to see in this ugly little civil war a casus belli for anyone not a Syrian in the same way I didn't get the enthusiasm for jumping into the Lybian fracas. While the al-Assad government is a pretty bad guy I don't see a "good guy" here any more than the Lybian TNC looked plausible as "good guys."

And, frankly, this current enthusiasm for leaping into other people's civil wars seems to be setting up a bad idea as conventional wisdom. It took a long time to set up the current Westphalian state system. It has a hell of a lot of flaws, but right now it seems about the best idea we have for providing people with the things government provides. And one of the fundamental pillars of the Westphalian state is the assumption that rebellion against the state is just that, and that unless a foreign state wishes to ally with the rebels in hopes of helping them become the state - with all the subsequent diplomatic and political connections that implies - the best thing that foreign state can be is neutral.

If we want to attack Syria, to my mind we'd be better off - as I insisted we should have done in Lybia - to just make a treaty with the rebels and jump in on one side. The notion of "fighting for peace" seems silly to me in that it promises to expend at least treasure if not blood for very little tangible gain.

Hey, I don't like bullies, either. But I've been in enough playground fights to know that stepping into family fights to try and stop the hurting usually just gets you nothing but bruises while seldom solving the problems that started the fight in the first place.So you might say that everything I needed to know about Syria I learned in third grade. Not that I expect that anyone is going to listen. Just sayin' so I can say "I tol' ya so." I'm kind of an asshole like that.

(Cross-posted to MilPub)

Into the Fall

I am feeling tremendously pessimistic and depressed about my nation today.And it's not because of any particular, or recent, event.

Although the generalized lack of public unease regarding the extralegal assassination of a U.S. citizen seems to point up the combination of overall indifference and governmental chicanery that has characterized our decade-long movement - I can't figure out whether to characterize it as a "march" (with the military associations of the term appropriate to the "War on Terror" that is used to justify it) or a "creep" (given the underhanded and duplicitous way it has been managed, for the most part) - towards a nation set about with the machinery of surveillance, secrecy, and "Nacht und Nebel"-variety legalisms.

No one has explained to my satisfaction why what happened to al-Awaki could not happen to anyone, anywhere, who is accused of "...inspiring attacks against the U.S." The guy was an anti-American SOB and an enemy of my nation. But not an "enemy" in the sense of a soldier, not even an "enemy" in the sense of an intelligence officer. He was a propagandist, a talker, the Tom Paine of Islamism. If talking shit about this country is a capital crime, if promoting violence against our "leaders" is punishable by death by missile without the bother of trial or conviction, I'd better be damn careful about driving around outside of busy public streets.But that's not it, really.

Here we are, in Year Three of the Lesser Depression.

Millions of Americans are jobless. Millions more are clinging desperately to poor or part-time work. Corporations are sitting on fat piles of jack but neither hiring nor expanding capacity because - surprise - all those un- and under-employed Americans are purchasing two things; jack and shit.

They're mostly using this lucre to buy up OTHER outfits...which are then "streamlined" and "outsourced"...putting more poor dumb bastards out of work.

The wealthy, who have hoovered up the spare cash showered on them by tax breaks and Republican largesse like a commodities trader in Vegas going through blow and hookers, are wailing about "class warfare" (quite effectively!) while raining economic death on the lower 80% like Flying Pencils over Rotterdam. And at least half the public - those same poor dumb schmucks getting carpet-bombed with cramdowns, foreclosures, downsizing, and layoffs - seems anywhere from unconcerned to actually excited about this.

In fact, the only real opposition to this massive comforting-of-the-comfortable and affliction-of-the-afflicted seems to be coming in the form of a bunch of juggalos and slackers sitting down on Wall Street; maced by the coppers, mocked by the banksters, ignored by the press...a carnival of fools on a fool's errand.

How will this change anything?Here we are in Year Nine of the "War on Terror".

The seemingly limitless capacity of my nation for pointless diddling in ungovernable foreign nations (or should I parenthesize that - "nations", since it's hard to characterize Afghanistan with the same term I'd use for Switzerland or Belgium. Or perhaps not...) remains without a foreseeable end in sight. Perhaps the most ridiculous - the eight-year tenure of Six Flags Over Nothing, a.k.a. the Third Gulf War, a.k.a "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - is heading for the ash bin but the Afghan farrago looks set to run longer than "Cats" and given the lack of either interest in or condemnation of the Libyan capriole by press and public there seems to be no reason why this Adminstration or any other shouldn't repeat the same business in some OTHER Third World shithole tomorrow or next week.

And here we are.

We've got people running for office who spout patently comical nonsense and are taken as serious in the national press. We have a national identity that seems more than ever to be composed of trashy reality television, muscular acephalic "patriotism", fiscal and financial rapacity, and public indolence.

And the REALLY depressing part is that I have no idea what I, or "we" - those like me who dislike the idea of Back to the Gilded Age as the next three decades - can do about that.

The degree to which partisan politics has bent to wealth has made me feel like my widow's mite is less mighty than ever. Which forces me into either trying to bend one party or the other to my pitiful will or contemplating a Third Party, the iocaine powder of U.S. politics.

My hope for some sort of political backlash of the sort that blew in the New Deal after the LAST time the plutocracy shat the bed is all but gone. We had the opportunity for that in 2008 which only proved the degree to which our Galtian overlords had learned the lessons of 1932; choke the populists with cash, flood the public forum with bought stooges, and deflect the moron mob with trivialities and manufactured fears.

And - as delightful and cathartic as the notion of taking Wall Street and Capitol Hill by storm and decorating the Tree of Liberty with the plutocrats and their purchased legislators is - the idea of violent revolution isn't really acceptable. The historical examples are dire; always followed by either anarchy and counterrevolution, or tyranny.So I enter this autumn as morose about the next decade as I've been in a long, long time. I cannot see a way forward, and there is no way back.

What will come, I cannot guess.

But looking around me I feel very...fragile. A glass vessel in a wilderness of hammers.

I like to think that I can "control" my life, and have a strong effect on the lives of my family.

But it's when I look at the world and my country that I realize I'm deluding myself. We're are ALL riding the whirlwind. It's the times we think we have everything under control that are the illusion. The corrupt politician, the remorseless corporation, the random inattentive driver, the casual virus, the slippery stair...all of these are out there, waiting to change our lives in a moment.

And those of us without the wealth and power to hold back those changes...all we can do is live every day to the fullest, love our children recklessly, caress our lovers without thought of tomorrow.

Because tomorrow may bring horrors.

Or may never be.All we can have is each other, and today, and hope. And just for today, for me, hope is a guttering candle, flickering in the hard winds of a trouble world, looking despairingly close to snuffing out.

The Red Flag

The recent failure of the U.S. governing class to understand that the immediate (i.e. next decade's) problems are not those of debts and deficits but of jobs and joblessness make the recent news from London something of a nasty reminder of what happens when a substantial portion of your working-age population ends up jobless for long periods of time.I think we need to remember that we are not Japan. Young American men (and women) without a job are not going to behave well for long. Why bother? What is there to lose? In the U.S. you ARE your job. And if you have no job, how much do you have? Freedom? You have the freedom to lay about, eat junk food, and do squat. As much as that might have appealed to me at age 14 for about three weeks, spending the bulk of my twenties or thirties...or fifties...doing that?



I'd probably go out and loot a 7-11, too.No question that we will have to grapple with the question of how much the U.S. governments need to take in and how much they need to spend. But before we do that we need to get through the next stage of the Great Recession (can we start calling it a Depression yet?) without finding a sizeable chunk of our population out of work and on the dole. Because that's not a good thing for them, it's not a good thing for us, and it's not a good thing for the country.There's a reason that that crafty old patrician FDR and his New Deal pals didn't just push through stuff like Social Security and unemployment insurance but created a bunch of make-work agencies; things like the CCC and WPA and the big government construction projects were a smart reaction from people who were watching what the Soviets and Italian Fascists were doing with their young people - stuffing them into armies and "labor corps" and other make-work jobs. Things like the Bonneville Dam and the CCC kept idle hands from becoming devils' playgrounds...and idle brains from getting stuffed with fascist or communist ideas. Those New Deal guys knew that having a bunch of working - i.e. military - age guys just hanging around with nothing to do was a hell of a good way to start trouble.



I'm not sure if we need a new CCC. But I'm hella sure that we don't need a bunch of stuffed hairbags in DC gassing on about the Terror of Deficits when 10% and probably more of the U.S. public is out of work and stands to be for a long, long time, at this rate.



Because despite what they tell you on TV; were not that much smarter, or better behaved, than we were in 1932. And now, as then, as the London Council is finding out...if we don't figure out how to get those guys back to work or find something for them to do, they'll find it themselves, and the rest of us might not like it."I'm out of work and on the dole,

You can stuff the red flag up your hole."

The Policeman's Lot Is Not A Happy One

From Cairo, yesterday......you have to wonder; what will he choose, when the time comes?