Again, Done and Learned

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Larry’s Number One Rule For Life and Business:

Do what you said you would do,

When you said you would do it,

The way you said you would do it.

Larry Winget

My last posting to “take stock” of this essay site, Done and Learned, back in March 2011, was nearly 30 essays ago.

You ask: What’s new? Well, I’ve had the honor of having an essay translated into French. And not for France or Canada: For the US. This I know because I was translated over 75 times, while my statistics feature shows very few hits from France. So I know the translations are being done in the US, probably by a French class, while using the Google translation feature… To have a machine capable of translating languages is an old dream of science fiction, a dream especially poignant in Canada where we have not one but two official languages. I didn’t know the dream had been achieved: Isn’t anyone shouting it from the rooftops? Machines aren’t perfect; it translated the noun “mundanes,” a slang term I used, as being capitalized. But still, an amazing translation.

The translated essay was one that would appeal to young students, Japanese Anime Cartoons. I explained to the mundanes that not all cultures view cartoons as being for laughter or solely for children. It was one of my less artsy, straightforward essays, and maybe that’s a lesson for me: be less artsy. I could have helped the kids by immediately posting another teen oriented essay, such as Man and Girl, from my life before the age of tricky on-line predators, about me and young love… But, and it’s a big but, none of the hypothetical students, nor their teacher(s) could be bothered to write a comment on my essay-blog about what was going on. So then I couldn’t be bothered either. (Maybe in October I’ll post)

Over the last few days I’ve had at least 10 translations into yet another language, for yet another piece, one that touches on citizenship and why our friends from non-democracies, including visible minorities, don’t “get it,” and how they don’t join the volunteers in the National Guard.  That’s New Citizens and Soldiers from June 2013.

Such reservists, like many anime lovers, tend to be in their late teens and early twenties. When I was that age, before the web, I had a network of young ladies I would call up to socialize with. Ah, those long telephone calls of youth, remember? If I called and got an answering machine, and if I hadn’t called for any particular reason, then I would be embarrassed and just hang up. Not anymore. One day a young woman let me know she just dies of curiosity if she doesn’t know who called. I decided right then and there that my embarrassment was not more important than some one “just dying.”

Today, it seems to me, the same principle applies to translations. Even if there are only a few of you, about 10, in a community center learning about good citizenship, and you feel embarrassed about it, then you could still say “hello” to the writer in his comment section… Because I would at least like to know what language it is!

So what else is new? Since I write in English, you would expect that I would get more hits from the US, with its bigger population, than from Canada. And I do. But only since about the time of my last “taking stock” (Done and Learned) essay. (Before that I had more Canadians) What’s happened? Did Google change an algorithm? I suspect the web is not as level, nor as anonymous, as Google would like to pretend. I first began to suspect information was being kept on web users when I began to see how the advertisements that popped up were suspiciously local. Since then I’ve seen a newspaper article confirming this Orwellian spying.

I’ve noticed now that I always get a few hits from the US very soon after each new posting. Perhaps I am on some RSS feeds (The feed is like an e-mailed Google search page)

Also new is attracting a few people like me: Since my last taking stock essay, judging by my stats, a few people have been motivated to go through my archives to read old essays. I do that too, for my favorite essayists. (Who are listed in Surfing Essays in Feb 2011) It’s nice to think that a few others are  "keeners,"enthusiasts for essays, too.

At work I enjoy hanging out with the keeners. In our personal lives, of course, we choose different hobbies; we are all keen about different things. Same with our lives as citizens. Except for… going to war… If the nation doesn’t all get keen, if a war is not taken seriously, then, whether people at home realize it or not, they are being damaged. Why aren’t Americans together? And why aren’t they doing what they said they would do? Perhaps their trumpet blew a soft uncertain note. Perhaps the people did not think enough, or get “grounded” before their declaration of war.

They shouldn’t blame their government. As an executive said when planning a revolution, in my own words, “We have enough work to do trying to organize the underground, we can’t be worrying about propaganda as well. Let that be done by others. Besides, if the people don’t already know why we are rebelling, then there’s no good reason for us to revolt.” (See footnote)

So where is the US American’s sense of propaganda, urgency or interest? I have sympathy for them: In my lifetime, starting with the war on poverty, which was declared in congress one day in the1960’s, I have seen the US lose more wars than in all the previous generations combined. I can understand Americans not wanting to see themselves, yet again, as quitters or losers. But still, they need to step up and take responsibility, not leave the issue hanging. Perhaps they could “save face” by re-framing their war on terror, even if all they did was change the label to being a “campaign against terror.” As it is, after a certain essay of mine in April, I don’t know if the US people are all wimping out, or if blogosphere folks are abnormally apathetic. (I don’t have enough Internet experience yet to know)

According to several newspaper reports, President Obama may be hoping the issue will quietly die out: He has never uttered the phrase “war on terror.” Well, let’s hope he never takes up playing the trumpet… Here is a quote from my essay in April:

By this point I can imagine some U.S. reader sputtering indignantly, “Drinking water! (sputter) plausible denia—(sputter)… Are you crazy? Listen, Americans are really smart and really responsible—so there!”

At which I can only reply, as gently as I can, “All of my readers are responsible. And you, dear reader, may well prove me wrong. Go ahead: try the “citizen thing.” Go to your downtown library, or bookstore, and ask them to include a war on terror section. Tell them how your fellow citizens want to seek out new information, new concepts, and boldly put their actions where their commitment is… I am sorry to say I think you will fail… Then you may write a comment here to tell the rest of us what happened.”

Since April I have referred my readers to that page from several other essays. The response? Nothing. At. All.

What’s new for me is learning something I regret to say: Perhaps Americans… don’t deserve my support. Perhaps I’m foolish to have spend my time composing some essays at the intersection of democracy and terror. It’s too bad. I still have deep sympathy for those who have lost loved ones. (When a boy I knew was killed in action I took time off work) As for me, at the risk of losing my spirit… perhaps I will declare a separate peace.

Sean Crawford

Wiser but sadder

July 30, 2011

Footnote

The “in my own words” part is based on a book, central to my December 2010 essay The Brass Cannon, entitled The Moon in a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. 

Peace time, War time

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I've been thinking.

Everyone knows "peace time," and nearly everyone knows that "war is hell," but too many fail to know what "war time" is. To see with only one eye of peace, or only one eye of war, is to lack depth of perception. Unfortunately, no one else has the ill breeding, or sense of humour, to write of war and peace in the same paragraph. But I do. We need both eyes.

Wars still happen to Canadians. Life became all too real for 40,000 Canadian tourists caught overseas in the summer of 2008. They demanded parliament to get them out when the Israelis invaded. Only with depth perception can we consider whether Canada could have helped Lebanon to prevent such an invasion, or, afterwards, to fix the causes. I will discuss Lebanon later.

I've been thinking that being "educated" is no indication of whether one "gets" war time. I once attended a professor's guest lecture, the sort with wine and cheese afterwards. The prof showed us slides of pages of Japanese scholarly articles from before the war. Most of us couldn't read the calligraphy, still, the pictures of people's heads told the story. Before fascism, explained the prof, but not now, the Japanese were conscious of being a multi-racial society.

After the lecture I sipped my wine standing with a mature Japanese lady who, like me, was from off-campus. We were joined by a young woman. She told us she had a degree, and was now halfway to a masters degree. She had an interest in art history she said, and there was a respected artist she liked, a household name. The young student had been astonished, and very disapproving, to see his war time racist anti-Japanese posters. In the telling us this she screwed up her face and shuddered. The Japanese lady and I merely exchanged looks. How could we tell this educated innocent girl she was being so ignorant?  We let it go.

I could have said that during war time you hate the enemy with all your heart and soul. On Guadalcanal, if I am around a narrow jungle trail and suddenly meet a Japanese, and we leap to fight in vicious hand-to-hand combat, then a poster that helped me to hate was a good thing.

With war comes a tunnel vision that makes you try to reduce your own casualties by focusing on killing the enemy. If you are preparing to land on a pacific beach then you rain down as many artillery shells as you can spare. (As a Canadian said about the controversial expensive gun registry, "If it saves even one life it's worth it") You are heedless of blasting the nice pretty palm trees, careless of the it-takes-a-thousand-years-to-grow coral. As your shells are falling you feel no pity: not for the big fat enemy general, and not for the poor little fellow beside him, his skinny unarmed trumpeter.

It might seem mad to bomb the general's little trumpeter, or his nerdy radar operator, but war is a tunnel vision, a madness; war is not a time for detachment or humour. Of course we can see such partisan times in civilian life too. To say, "There's no fairness in love and war" is to say there's no being "fair minded," not during certain isolated bubbles of time. I have certainly been known to tell jokes about God, in-laws and marriage... but never in church on the afternoon of a wedding. Certain beliefs and attitudes, at certain times, are just not done. As Grandma would say, first approach a marriage with both eyes wide open... and then going in you should shut one eye.

In this day and age, when there are so many resources, not just print, it is wrong for anyone, not just educated people, to be ignorant before going into a war. And then, if we think the war is still worth doing, then it's worth shutting one eye. To research after going in, to ask for fresh obscene photographs while your war is still raging, is just obscene: It would be asking too much of yourself and others. Grandma would be scandalized.

Time heals. Only after a war is over might we regain perspective. We might then, perhaps, be amused at how the Canadians, during the Great War, changed the name of their city to that of a well known general, Kitchener. Before that? It was called Berlin. Fine, but to laugh at this during wartime is just not done. Not when certain soldiers are coming home early: The blind, the halt and the lame. Nor would this be a time to point out that maybe the war was based on a few trivial points of disagreement.

Let the hot blooded public stay hot, and let them delegate the peace negotiations to the coldblooded, formal diplomats. The rest of us just can't do it, any more than we could spank our children in cold blood. (Maybe we could, but then our children would never forget having Vulcans for parents)

A civilian comparison to war's madness could be a man who talks sensitively of "the sorrow and the pity" of French civilians in WW ll. He has no issues with appearing homosexual and he will, accordingly, gracefully weave and pivot past all the bar tables. Until he gets in a fight. Then tunnel vision—heedless—tables crashing, drinks smashing; not for even a second will he glance away to view with sorrow the collateral damage he is causing. Not until he has won or lost.

When the fight is over, it's over. One of my best drinking buddies was a bouncer. We met the night he manhandled me out the door... With peace the other eye dominates: The hate vanishes, respect shines, and people come home with Japanese wives. I once flew on a Canadian Forces plane to Germany beside a returning German wife.

The point is that war is a bubble in time. My nerves couldn't stand it otherwise. To have a "permanent war" is a contradiction, an oxymoron... to have hatred permanently, for cruelty not to be unusual, to have this for my whole lifetime, would destroy my soul, just as "permanent war" would surely destroy my nation by rendering us dispirited, cynical and corrupt. I suppose I've just described a modern Muslim terrorist, or the old republic of South Vietnam.

And what of Lebanon? Could Canada have helped? When the cruel Hezbollah were firing big rockets into Israel, but before they triggered the invasion by kidnapping two innocent peace time Israeli soldiers, could Canada have helped prevent the war? Of course: We already had RCMP in Haiti, and surely we could have sent more police to Lebanon to help arrest some Hezbollah and seize the rockets, but... our war eye was then closed. Just as it was closed when, with soldiers in Afghanistan, at first we kept lowering the nation's flags to half mast, as in peace time, every time somebody died. Surely, using our uncommitted  peace eye, once a few RCMP had been wounded, or killed, we would have "pulled out" and left the poor Lebanese to their fate.

Something similar happened when the US tried to guard relief food in the Somalian city of Mogadishu. Not having anyone to attack, no uniformed bad guys to engage the wartime eye, the peace time regular soldiers were not psyched up for the challenge. As described in the book Blackhawk Down, as few as 19 killed were enough to make the US back off from feeding people. The cynical equation flew around the world: If you can kill as many as 19 G.I.s (nobody knew how few) then the Americans will pull out. This "Mogadishu Doctrine" was true as far as it went, but it only went as far as peace time.

A war time viewpoint means that we lose our pity, and furthermore, we lose our denial of death. "As many" as 19 becomes "as few" as 19. In contrast, peace time is deny time. If tomorrow we were to begin building a Hoover dam we might proudly publish estimates of how many tons of angle iron and cement would be needed. But there would be no consulting of Workmen's Compensation Board statistics. Denial means no publishing scientific estimates of deaths.

I would think switching to a war time viewpoint is not like flicking on a solid state radio, perhaps it is more like warming up an old vacuum tube TV set. In regards to Lebanon, while those two kidnap victims had been in a peace time mode, I believe the rest of the Israeli army heated up to a war time mode. I say this because weary troops walking back after the cease-fire were so cut off from civilian concerns that they asked, "Did those two soldiers get freed?" This seclusion from news of the real world indicates a secluded bubble, a war time world where suffering casualties blunts feelings.

In our civilian world, of course, we use seclusion too: Aggressive football players start the season away in training camp. On certain U.S. campuses, according to the student football expose Meat On the Hoof, the players will have their own dormitorys and dinning facilities, ostensibly for teamwork and nutrition, but actually to be secluded from the liberal arts students who don't take football so seriously.

I wrote the following after the invasion:

What of the Hezbollah? From what I have read they had a war time viewpoint, and it seems this view is enduring past the cease-fire. Therefore, if a Lebanese policeman my age, a husband and father, paunchy and balding, tries to arrest a Hezbollah, and dies... then it follows that neither the Hezbollah, nor his wife, or his wife's good sister, will feel a single tear.

What of the Lebanese soldiers? Are they being secluded from other Lebanese, including the Hezbollah, in order to warm up to war time? Are they seeing "racist" posters of Evil Hezbollah? I totally doubt it. I totally doubt their sergeants are saying, "Listen up, stuff happens, none of us will live forever!" So despite Lebanon's cease-fire ideals, I'm sure they won't have the guts to disarm the Hezbollah.

What of U.N. soldiers? A senior Israeli officer, during the fighting, asked that any U.N. force be composed of combat troops, not "troops near retirement," not troops "seeking a vacation in the orange groves." That old Israeli knew that in peace time, when the soldiers on base know each other's faces, life is very precious. I remember in the Airborne we were shocked, the news flew around the base, when a sergeant died of a heart attack during a morning run.

To boot up to a wartime viewpoint requires a commitment. Will the U.N. troops make that commitment? Will they help disarm Hezbollah so that democracy is refreshed? Not if the troops are as lousy as the ones in Rwanda. We shall see. I for one will see with both eyes.



Sean Crawford

Calgary, Alberta

footnotes:

~ A longer version of this essay which included my military "aide to civil power" experience, Two Eyes for War and Peace was written in 2008 and posted to my new web site in 2009.
~All of the 40,000 tourists in Lebanon had passports; some loved Canada, others are believed to be prostitutes: They claimed to love Canada, but were actually using Canada they would a "customer, " to have a fire escape door.
~As a child I liked the story of The Little Trumpeter in the Read Aloud series. The beginning symbolized how Americans were watching football the morning of Pearl Harbour. As the good guys are watching baseball the bad guys quietly line up for battle at the edge of town. The little trumpeter is shown with long hair like a peacenik.
"'Blow!' And blow he did."
At a war crimes trial (his side drew mustaches on the statues in the park) he tries to escape what he deserves by claiming he doesn't even carry a gun. The King gets angry and locks him in the highest tower. Why? Because his trumpet started the whole thing. Looking back, I guess, dear reader, he symbolized civilians like me and you.

~It was in the shadow of the Hezbollah that I wrote my first two Battlestar Galactica essays.