Shades of Marshall McLuhan

However it may seem, this “blog” is largely a quest for understanding. I want to understand how people think, and why. I want to know why we’re doing the astonishing things we’re doing.

It’s nothing new. People who know me will tell you I’ve been doing this sort of thing all my life. The picture that leads this essay is one that has been in my residences since I was fifteen. It’s famous, of course – seventeen year old Galileo saying, “Shut up – let me think!” It’s how I’ve always thought of my relationship vis a vis my fellow human beings.

As I said elsewhere on my website, it was the reason that classmates and townspeople back home called me “Lip” and “Paladin,” and the reason I would one day bear the nickname “Spock.” High school classmates said in our Graduating Class Prophesy that I would one day be the one to capture the Abominable Snowman. I was always investigating news, trying to find out what the truth was. I wanted to know what was real.

I couldn’t, for instance, help being suspicious of what the papers and radio reported. All too frequently, what they reported as truth was obviously false to a mathematician or scientist. One day – still a sophomore in high school - I discovered a quotation from Aldous Huxley – “The great tragedy of science,” he remarked, “a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact.” I made the quote and the reasoning behind it mine.

History became my favorite subject of study – after physics.

My penchant for putting to the acid test what people believed and demanded that I believe didn’t make me popular. My inquisitiveness where things like the Holocaust, Biblical stories like the Great Flood, and the like kept me in hot water continually – and always with those in authority.

When people tell you that you must believe what they believe and tell you, they don’t take kindly to having you prove they’re wrong. In fact, it infuriates them.

Still, I can’t help it. It’s what led me to make my living as a private investigator. I love forensics, the questioning and proving or disproving of anything. So it is that the only television I watch these days is the news and the pundits associated with it.

So it is that I’m really worried about my country.

There a dozens, scores, of examples, but let’s use one from last night’s news. Four more of our young people are dead in Iraq. More are wounded. More are being returned for second and third tours there, another chance to be among the dead and wounded being reported anew every, single day. Astonishingly, the country goes on dithering about what ought be done.

Worse, words-only warriors, heroes like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and others, continue the harangue that says things like the new Iraq Study Group Report are treasonous, not to be taken seriously, and the like.

The report says generally that things aren’t going well in Iraq. Wow! That’s a revelation, isn’t it? But it’s treasonous to notice. If you don’t hear the echo of Germany in 1933 there, you know nothing of its history (you haven’t seen the movie, “Mortal Storm,” either). If you don’t recognize the tone and tenor of Josef Goebbels’ radio addresses then in that of Rush Limbaugh; well, it means you haven’t heard the Reichsminister’s speeches.

Typical of the Iraq Study Group’s report critics is Glen Beck. Beck, for instance, points out that none of the people on the study group are generals. If, he says, we pull out of Iraq – “cut and run” – we will have “lost the war.”

Let’s indulge me my penchant for dialectic, forensics, logic, and scientific method and hold it right there for a minute. That happens to be the very kind of rhetoric that made me the eternal skeptic I am. To begin with, I ask myself who is this guy? Normally, in debate or a court room, anyone who asks that his opinion be considered presents credentials, reason to believe that he knows more about the subject than is generally known. The logical fallacy otherwise is known as “disputandum ad verecundiam” – appeal to authority.

More, it is Beck himself who by way of discounting the study and those who made it points out that none of the people on the Iraq Study Group are generals. Beck wonders how the members of the group came to be chosen for it.

Well, now – that’s an interesting point. How is it that a guy who didn’t so much as wear a uniform dares criticize the Iraq Study Group because they aren’t generals? Who is Glen Beck? Check his biography.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Glen+Beck+biography&btnG=Google+Search

Who are any of the pundits foisted upon us by FoxNews, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest? I’ve already published here the military records of people like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, et cetera. “Did not serve.”

I spoke of things conspicuous by their absence the other day. Conspicuous from all the bloviating done by these words-only warriors is any evidence – hardly a scintilla – of anything one might recognize as reason for anyone with even the most fundamental knowledge of military tactics to believe anything they say.

You will not, for instance, hear the term “Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model” (look it up – I’ve spoken of it before here). You will not hear of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Vegetius, Saxe, Frederick the Great, or any of the recognized authorities on military strategy. You will hear, however, the broadest possible generalizations, all but mindless recitations of emotionally appealing nonsense like “cut and run,” “stay the course,” and other examples of the “last refuge of a scoundrel.”

I can’t help wondering how these birds came to be in a position that millions take seriously their mindless haranguing. How does Beck – for instance, again - an alcoholic who “did not serve,” a guy whose logic and reasoning are demonstrably on a level lower than most high school kids locally, came to be in a position to criticize the Iraq Study Group?

Shades of Marshall McLuhan. What, being on TV makes you an authority? On everything?

In the recent segment that prompts me, Beck joins the words-only wannabe warrior cohort of the right wing news media in arguing that “losing” in Iraq will mean we have lost the “war on terror.”

Well, Spockian character that I am, I can’t help wondering – inasmuch as the “war” we seem to be talking about is supposedly world-wide – how “losing” in Iraq can mean we’ve lost the war. What, are we going to surrender? To whom?

Are the “bad guys” – the language being used these days concerning the “war on terror” kind of shows one the level of discourse we’re into here, doesn’t it? – going to invade? The Unites States of America – three hundred million people, with the biggest, most expensively equipped military in human history – will be defeated (that’s forced to surrender and be occupied by an enemy, isn’t it?) by AK-47, RPGs, and improvised explosive devices?

How in the hell is that supposed to come about? What the old Soviet Union knew it couldn’t do, what Red China knows it can’t do, and what every military strategist capable of playing parlor games knows – that to invade and successfully occupy the United States is impossible – is going to be done by al Qaeda or the “insurgents” in Iraq?

What the four hundred, sixty billion dollar a year U.S. military can’t do in Iraq – twenty-two million people with no army at all – al Qaeda is going to do here? Are you kidding?

Let’s back up a minute. First, and as every game theorist knows, all games are encapsulated by the rules of the particular game. That means you have to know what the game IS. What is “losing?” “Winning?” What’s “the course?”

Anybody who claims to be a tactician or strategist – and be accepted by other tacticians or strategists – first demands to know how he will win. What, or where, is the goal?

Dear reader, my primary interest in all this is no longer the war and how we got into it. It isn’t even my interest here to argue and prove my theory that the U.S. suffered a military industrial complex coup d’etat in the late fifties or early sixties. If you don’t add up the evidence of what’s going on to realize that the only possible goal for what the government is doing in Iraq is staggering – and my reference there is the nation and its middle class - profit for military industrialists, you’re too far gone (too “challenged” mentally) to rescue.

You’re a sheep and you’ll follow any Judas goat at all to any slaughterhouse.

What I’m wondering today is how a nation and society of people like this one can be hornswoggled into taking seriously the eminently absurd pronouncements of yellow, tabloid journalism like today’s television. Will someone – and I’m serious; write – tell me how in the hell you come to take seriously anything a Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Al Franken, or their incoherent like says?

And I mean “incoherent.” I’ve said it before here, but it bears repeating. Night after night, morning after morning, I fill tape recorder tapes with record of one illogical asseveration after another, argument after argument that wouldn’t hold up in an eighth grade English or debate class. Go back and consider again the crack-brained reasoning in that “cut and run” thing. THINK about it.

No, I did NOT say “emote” about it. THINK! Reason. How could terrorism possibly defeat us? If round the clock – for years - bombing be fleets of bombers couldn’t defeat Nazi Germany, if the horrendous B-52 raids of the Vietnam War could not defeat North Vietnam, how many terrorist attacks would it take to make the United States surrender?

More to the point, how could “winning” in Iraq possibly win the war on terror? Explain that to me. Tell me how is it then that “losing” the regional – national – war in Iraq means we’ve lost the global war, that on terror? Huh? Huh? Huh?!
Let’s assume for a minute that we “stay the course” – and the course demands “victory,” and “victory” is everything our fearless leader says he intended with “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Iraq becomes a U.S.-style democracy, everything is peace and light.

Okay? What have we gained where our own safety is concerned? Al Qaeda and all the Arabs who hate us as the Great Satan will stop shooting and rush to contribute to our slipping standard of living? The price of crude oil will drop to twenty dollars a barrel? Iran will stop trying to develop nuclear weapons?

Let’s concede everything the words-only warriors hand-wringingly harangue about. Iran gets the nuclear bomb. They magically get a flying carpet – it’ll take that, because they’re at the Katyusha and Silkworm rocket stage right now otherwise - with which to deliver it to a target here. Or just in Israel. THEN what?

Put yourselves in Iran’s shoes. Put Iran where the Soviet Union was during most of the supposed Cold War. Or Communist China. Imagine that that you’re crazy enough – and Ahmadinajad just might be that crazy – that you launch a nuclear attack. What do you KNOW will happen?

Let’s say you manage to kill fifty million people – “infidels” - here. Or somewhere. What do you think – KNOW – will happen?

Sure. You – and everybody in Iran, your country – will be with Allah and seventy-two somehow horny virgins (shows you how far from reality those characters are, doesn’t it?). And there will still be two hundred, fifty million of your enemy here in the real world you never managed to locate. All the faithful you left behind get to start that part of the arms race you lost all over again – from scratch. Another six hundred years and you’re back where you started.

Try to imagine (just from the little that you know about strategic military tactics that you’ve been permitted to learn through blizzard of behavioral conditioning and misinformation on the subject you’ve been subjected to by your government in the past three decades) what it would take to force the United States to surrender – give you everything you want. Convert to Islam. Lay down our arms, so you can kill us all.

You’re al Qaeda and you’re planning the demise of the Great Satan. What do you do?

One last, thing, a question for the military-industrialists who are running this show, and whose pundits are leading us to slaughter: With the fifteen trillion dollars we’ve paid you since 1946 to protect us from our enemies, this is what we get? With fourteen nuclear carriers and scores of nuclear submarines packing god knows how many nuclear missiles, fleets of B-1s, B-2s, and bat-turning supersonic jet fighters of every possible capability and description; with Buck Rogers, gee-whiz weaponry beyond the imagination of all but the most imaginative, we have to surrender to raggedy-ass, assault rifle armed, al Qaeda ankle-biters?

Here’s another “study group report,” from one guy: We need another security team, a better bodyguard. Things aren’t going well.