How to Find Meaning in a World of Shifting Standards

"If we are searching for meaning in a world of shifting standards, literature is one place we can find it. All of us have periods of our lives when meaning is lost, and other periods when it is found again. It is an inescapable part of the human condition to be borrowing meaning from one another. No man is an island. Or as William Blake said it:

The bird a nest,
The spider a web,
Man friendship."

Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope

Professor Dyson, who in my opinion is the best living author to come from the cloisters of science, was talking (in 1983, at the height of the Cold War's final phase) of how to restore meaning to life when it lies under constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

Those of us who have been paying attention know that the so-called "end of history" in which the uneasy nuclear standoff between Russia and the West supposedly ended was a clever piece of public relations during the Clinton Administration with very few real ramifications.

While the size of our and the Russians' nuclear arsenals has shrunk somewhat with the withdrawal of our first-line Peacekeeper ICBMs and their obsolete and much-less functional classes of ICBMs, enough missiles and warheads remain and can be rapidly retargeted to cities and military bases in both nations to cause the near-instant death of tens or hundreds of millions. And the Russians under Vladimir Putin have not been shy about threatening to use them on us lately if we deploy non-nuclear, solely defensive anti-ballistic missiles and guidance radars in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Between this gradual erosion of the nuclear peace we thought we had negotiated with the Russians, the North Koreans' inexorable march towards being a callous, rather psychotic nuclear-armed dictatorship, and the eventual conversion of the Middle East into a spiders' web of nuclear tripwires strung by the Iranians, Israelis, Syrians and eventually the Saudis and Gulf Emirates, we are heading directly toward what can at best be a much less stable revival of the Cold War in which there are not two poles of opposition but several - Shiite versus Sunni, Syrian versus Lebanese and Saudi, Muslim versus non-Muslim and of course, Arab versus Israeli.

And we and our children and grandchildren will have, as we lose loved ones in a multi-generational war on terrorism or as mushroom clouds rise over town or desert, perhaps even here, to search for meaning in a world that seems to have none. Freeman Dyson's words are no less true for having been uttered 26 years ago during the last Cold War. Now, in this undeclared, weakly-defined and much less stable new Cold War, we have to crack our books and use the Internet to connect with the men and women who have gone through the same challenges as us - constant threats to our lives and livelihoods, the specter of death or dissolution and lived to write about it.

I am probably going to use this blog from time to time to show where literature speaks to me personally, and to us all in this depressing, frightening time of endless crises and unending war.
I can't think of a better way to use this space.

Defending the Bad Against the Worse...

"They who in folly or mere greed

Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse -
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."

Cecil Day Lewis, "Where Are the War Poets?" 1943

In the middle of World War Two, one of England's better poets took time out to sum up the only logical attitude toward politicians in the democracies - the people who dare to lecture the rest of us on our civic duties while pocketing bribes and pandering to blocs of idiots with voter registration cards in their wallets.

It's still not such a bad attitude today.

We may have to send our sons and daughters overseas to fight in stupidly conceived and executed wars in order to protect the rest of us from those who would kill or enslave us for their warped version of God or social justice - or their own greed and parochialism. We may have to pay taxes to support stupid make-work projects as well as the things that we need to have in order to have a civilization.

We don't have to be enthusiastic about it, though, and when we get a chance to change things, we should. Just over half of us thought we were changing things, apparently in November 2008. Just under half of us thought we were defending the bad against the worse.

In times like this, healthy cynicism about the motives of ANY politician is the only antidote to lies told us "for our own good."

Thoughts on Force Protection From a Father

Eight years into the Global War on Terrorism, and four years after my son died in Iraq with eight other men when a roadside bomb detonated under their Bradley Fighting Vehicle, I've had time to think about how the war was fought. Specifically, the thing called "Force Protection" which supposedly guards the lives of our troops overseas.

I think the concept is a contradiction in terms. You send a military force into a country to fight the enemy. Its protection lies in its intrinsic military strength and the match of force type to threat, nothing else.

Bush, Rumsfeld and company did it completely bass-ackwards, when it came time to put more troops in Iraq in 2004. They took reservists and Guardsmen who were given a lick and a promise in the way of training in the summer of 2004 at Fort Hood and other training depots (they never got their full span of training at Fort Irwin's desert warfare training facility) and sent them into a hot war, through streets they did not control in vehicles which turned out to be inadequate to what by then was a known enemy tactic.

Of course, I want to know how terrorists obtained a seemingly endless supply of artillery shells to make into roadside bombs when the Iraqi Army was supposedly beaten.

Those troops should have been intensively trained over a long enough period to assure their combat capability. We should, as a longer term consideration, rethink our Army's "big-unit" fixation. Big tanks, big armored personnel carriers, and big units don't win the day as often as small, fierce, rapid units such as the US Marine Corps Marine Expeditionary Units.

In fact, it strikes me that for the anti-terror mission, the Marine Corps is a MUCH better fit of force to threat than the US Army.

Whether we:
- push the current trend of "jointness" to a unified military service in which MEUs are the predominant arm of our land forces (with transfer of National Guard formations to the training and supply structure that serves the MEUs, and integration at every level of doctrine, supply and equipment between active, reserve and Guard elements);
- simply enlarge the Marine Corps to the point where it can once again serve to protect American interests abroad unaided by the Army, or
- gut the Army's training and doctrine to bring them into line with the Marines' much more effective use of manpower to control enemy territory by patrols on foot backed by light armor;
we HAVE to learn from our mistakes in Iraq.

I don't sleep well these days. I named my son "Armand," after his grandfather, my father, who also served in the US Army during the final days of World War II in Europe. Those of us with a smattering of the Classics know that I sealed his fate in the act of naming him "arms-bearer."

I raised him to respect and love his country, and was proud when he signed up with the National Guard. His mother and I went to Fort Sill for his Basic graduation exercises, and we were flushed with pride that our son had become a tough, professional soldier.

And it all pushed him into Iraq where he could die after ill-conceived error after error on the part of the people who were making the calls. Armand's death followed a prior roadside bomb detonation under his squad's Bradley (which left all hands unharmed) by two weeks, so the decision-makers can't claim ignorance of the specific nature of the threat he faced.

My son died because Army troops were laagered within walls instead of out in the field controlling the territory. He might still have died then, but at least it would have served a military purpose. I can't see one in the circumstances of his actual death.

If he had died in the street, his weapon at the ready, able to defend himself and his team-mates, in the Marine Corps, I think I might get more sleep.

Obama 1st term, 2nd term, 3rd term, 4th term.... ?

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hj111-5 shows that the Democratic Party, now that they have their placeholder in the White House, is serious about staying there forever. They want to repeal the two-term limit on the Presidency.

Not even during the Reagan administration, when there was considerable popular support for a third term for the Gipper, was any serious attempt made by the moderate and right wing politicians to repeal the two-term limit. There was a major reluctance to give even the benign and mostly harmless Ronald Reagan a chance to found a dynasty.

Now the Democrats want their dynasty. They've got ACORN to stuff the ballot boxes with bogus voter registrations that they can hire winos and dopers to cast votes with - here in Colorado, no voting station official has dared question a voter's identity - despite a lack of documentation as to the voter's identity or his or her registration - since the laws were changed to make such official curiosity illegal. ANYBODY can vote in Colorado, as a result. The vote may be "provisional" if a voter isn't on the registration rolls, but then it's up to the registrar of voters to find out whether the voter in question registered after the deadline, or at all.

But that's not good enough. The bastards want to keep their man in office until he dies, now that they know they can distort the electoral process to suit them. If we don't yell at our Senators and Representatives to send this bill to the round file, we won't have another chance to change.

How I passed Nuclear Science 2351 at LSU

Notes on "Freedom Fighters," Todd Rundgren's Utopia

"Tucked away in the darkest cupboard of your heart
there's a feeling you can't let out
In a way, you are just a soldier of the mind
You are marching, what are you marching about?

On your mark, now get set
Get back on your feet,
We ain't down yet!
You know we will get it
So don't you forget it
That the world rolls on...

Your reward will come
It's just a question of how and when
Look around, everyone is wondering where it's at
Do you wonder, or do you know?

Clap your hands! Raise your voice!
Some people will hide
They can't stand the noise
But we're freedom fighters
And we've got no choice....
But the world rolls on...

And the truth will come and the change will come
It's just a question of how and when
I can't believe my eyes.

In a way, you are just a soldier of the mind
In a way, you are just a soldier of the mind

On your mark, now get set
Get back on your feet,
We ain't down yet!
We're all freedom fighters -
And don't you forget it!
That the world rolls on... "

recorded by Todd Rundgren's Utopia
Lyrics copyright EMI Music Publishing

When this song came out, many critics dismissed it as trivial. I didn't. It spoke to me. I was what is charitably known as a "troubled teenager," and one of my troubles was an entrenched case of self-doubt nourished by well-meaning relatives who didn't want to see me get frustrated trying to do things they thought I couldn't do.

There was a lot of anger and frustration tucked away in dark cupboards of my heart, and it took a long while to find it and deal with it appropriately.

But this song helped maintain my will to persevere despite tall challenges - like taking Nuclear Science 2351 without, strictly speaking, having all the math prerequisites (I was taking them at the same time as the NucSci course).

I got a D at mid-term and decided to dig in my heels - I learned more math in that course doing the work than I have in any math course before or since. In fact, the understanding of statistics I took away from Nuclear Science 2351 has stood me in good stead professionally ever since, as a medical writer/researcher and as a clinical data analyst.

I blew the final in that course away, despite some of the problems in the course involving functions with about twenty variables, some of which had to be found in the Chart of the Nuclides (such as neutron capture cross-sections) in tiny print, prefaced by tiny greek italics denoting which variable was involved.

I aced it. I got an A on that final. I finished with a C for the course. And I am prouder of that C in Nuclear Science 2351 than I am of all the As I have gotten in the rest of my college coursework. The A's I got because writing is second nature to me. I EARNED that C, through sweat, hard work, and belief in myself as a soldier of the mind.

Thanks, Todd Rundgren, Utopia and Dr. Ronald Knaus.