[Note: This blog is today's letter to a dear friend from high school, a women of intelligence and talent recognized for her fine children's books. Because she liked it, I though to share it with my readers.]
Dear Jeanie,
Why do I pick on you with this letter of woes? Because you are the one person whom I know who cares deeply about the same issues which I do, though we sometimes disagree.
I now have a sense of impending doom. Twenty years and a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, and the Taliban takes over the country in less than a month. Those who fought and died or were maimed in Vietnam did so in vain, not only in these direct effects, but also in the failure of the country to learn anything. Today’s generals and admirals did not fight in Vietnam, but their teachers at the military academies did; those teachers either learned nothing themselves or did not teach it, or, if they did teach it, their students did not learn it. And the same is true of all those political science majors. The bitter irony about Afghanistan is that while we, in our hubris, sought to extend democracy abroad, we, in our hatreds, ignored its erosion at home. How long will it be before Republicans reveal their affinities with the Taliban?
As a former military intelligence officer—ignore the oxymoronic phrase—I have to credit the CIA with yet another major failure. I remember with a certain wryness the fall of the USSR. A friend of mine was the chief of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern European desk. As the collapse began, I ran into him and jokingly asked him what he knew that I did not. He laughed and said that I probably knew more than he did. I sometimes think that I may have. The problem is that the CIA is all about toys for boys; they sit at computer consoles and do their work as if they are playing video games although satellite and sensor technologies can tell us little important, and nothing important about the cultural and morale factors which play such a large role in third-world insurgencies. Instead, they should be following the example of Mossad, the best because most HUMINT-reliant intelligence service in the world. You certainly have noticed that Israel can target the apartments, not just the building, of Hamas leaders; they have Palestinian agents on the payroll.
And climate change, for all the talk of slowing and stopping it, is proceeding logarithmically. I remember talking to my son, a geologist, also a naturalist, perhaps ten years ago about the recurrent underestimates by climatologists in the previous thirty years. My question was whether the underestimates reflected a systematic but unperceived bias in modeling or the reluctance of scientists to declare the true state of affairs at the risk of their credibility for being perceived as alarmists.
Meanwhile, science in a rush, as the pandemic requires a hurried response, is losing ground to troglodytes, who have a suicidal anti-science agenda. What they call mandates as government overreach in matters of covid-19, they ignore when it comes to shots for chicken pox and measles, seat-belts, drivers licenses, et alii. We have so dehumanized ourselves that individuals are willing to ignore the usual instinct for self-preservation for the sake of making themselves a living-breathing political statement—madness on a mass scale.
And the new anti-racism is itself racist. I just heard from a previous Shaker Heights school board member and chair, and now City Council member, that the SHSS is eliminating all the academic enrichment or advanced programs because they have continued to reflect differences in racial participation. In the name of racial equality, the effort to raise those who suffer the consequences of weak socio-economic and educational backgrounds is being abandoned to achieve equality by eliminating opportunities for the talented as well as the advantaged. In other words, the new anti-racists are admitting that they cannot figures out ways to close the gaps and are implying that those for whom they are trying to engineer equality are just not up to it. Oregon has just declared that it will not use proficiency tests for the next three years. In all likelihood, they will not return. The absence of academic standards will do nothing for education, less for employment, either in or out of state, as employers come to suspect the competencies of Oregon job applicants, and nothing for self-knowledge.
All of this grumble and rumble reduces itself to a single thesis: no longer is American the “can-do” country. Today, American cannot do, and I see no way for it to reverse itself. As a new anti-racism movement shows, even the Left is imbued with ill-conceived, not to say irrational, approaches to serious problems. And both sides, the farther one goes to extremes, become more like each other. I have always thought of myself as a “radical moderate,” that is, fundamentally committed to the basic principles of democracy and fair play. I have an eight-word code of conduct which I try with great determination to live by: seek truth, do right, demand justice, pursue peace. Understandably, lots of people find me more than a little bit discomforting.
Of course, I must grumble. In a few weeks, a gutter collapsed, a toilet bowl malfunctioned, smoke detectors have erupted at all hours (the first one at 4:50 am last Sunday), and my air conditioner died. The latter disaster was difficult. It took over two weeks to find, price, and install a new system, when outside temperatures were triple-digit and inside temperatures were in the mid to upper eighties. When the outside temperature got down to 90, I opened all the doors in a trade-off of higher temperatures for drier air; the humidity build-up from me, four dogs, and two cats was stultifying.
My mother tells the story of the day she found me sitting on the floor in my bedroom and snuffling in sadness. When she asked me about it, I said that I was “sunk in my own despair”—a line right out of Little Toot! (She should have known that I would become an English major.) But that is pretty much how I feel about the state of the world today. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it is an approaching train.
Love,
Michael
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