I write philosophy, so when I start writing about political issues, I often feel I'm about to fail, unless there is some underlying philosophic observation I can splay before a gasping crowd that explains something about what are for me always more obscene political concerns. As I've aged, the obscene generally has acquired less meaning. There is so much that is obscene in the world, it melts into the background of what is important.
The philosophic premise I am going push forward here is, we should not concern ourselves with politics, because this has not been effective and instead, we should consider politicians and their attendant pundits alike to be lowly beings, like used car salesmen, peddling junk while telling us they have the best used cars anywhere in town.
The argument against every argument, and no less every political argument, goes like this: When a modern human says, That doesn't make sense, he means that doesn't make sense empirically. But empiricism and logic have been known for a very long time, since the time of the Greek philosopher Zeno, not to stand even upon their own tenets, let alone any more rigorous test of reality which is neither empirical nor logical, and generally not even close enough to either to merit our consideration of the methodologies of their mad proponents.
Take for instance, war. War is the empirical fusion of skewed information, raw and wholly unfettered terror, and, an obsequious piety all given to us with a swashbuckling disregard for the logical direction into which we are all headed. The anti-war forces are so similarly empirically constructed, it seems too, that there isn't any truthful answer possible within the well compassed grids of these interlocking spheres of deductive engagement. We need to pluck ourselves from this entanglement to consider avoidance of the recurring quagmire.
Vietnam was a terrific mess, and thus far, a bigger mess than Iraq by far. There were lies that brought us into Vietnam too. There were false beliefs about ideologies that bolstered the engagement and embracing of that debacle. There were racist undertones that seemed for a while to make all the carnage more acceptable, at least until a picture of a young, naked Vietnamese girl running down a street with her body afire with Napalm surfaced in the media like a breath of fresh anti-war air that made us gasp, and choke, and feel even sicker to our stomachs. The pictures of My Lai however, made this snapshot in time pale.
Vietnam's wasted expense was just as ridiculous, and it was just as poorly measured. Some of those who came home from Vietnam after a tour of duty turned out to be far more dangerous than any threat Vietnam ever posed to our country, if it ever posed a threat to our country at all. Quite a few horribly inept politicians got their doleful careers jump started by letting others call them "war heroes" for their service in Vietnam, while other Vietnam vets came home to die, became socially paralyzed within our society, and, a very few Vietnam vets came home and were able to forget about what they were either dragged off into, or volunteered for, one of the biggest mistakes of their lives and the country as well.
There were those less decorated war heroes who fought the war in Vietnam here in this country too. They mostly suffered the same fate as the Vietnam war vet who fought on the side of the military obeying the directives of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services.
Mostly those who got caught up in the Vietnam war, either fighting it, or fighting against it, were by the wounds they suffered culled from the main stream of our society, and thus, they ended up socially adrift for decades afterward.
They learned to hate Disco, which was one way they found they could comport with the rest of their then contemporaneous American peers. They watched on TV the Shaolin martial arts soldier in Kung Fu, finding there a fantasy escape into which they could devolve some of their anger. Some of them got a Harley Davidson after Easy Rider.
Some got a small piece of land in upstate New York, Maine, Oregon, Washington or any number of other rural out of the way places across the U.S. They all got drunk or, stoned, or, more likely, both. Some of them got Herpes or, Hepatitis, A or C, or, again both, and, quite a few committed suicide by any number of chance chosen methods, heroin, fast cars, booze or a bullet placed neatly up underneath the roof of their mouth and off into their brain.
A reasonable number for the time and its effect ended up in and out of mental institutions and prisons, some, for the rest of their lives. For a long time within American media outlets and police stations the phrase, "[...] another Vietnam vet [...]" was uttered in a useless but common refrain. Thirty years later, some are still committing suicide; still feeling culled from society, and, still feeling Vietnammed.
During Vietnam there were those moms and dads, brothers and sisters who supported the troops. They believed in the abstract ideological lies they neither understood too well or ever believed their government would lie so profusely about to them. All that mattered was that there was a good reason or, no good reason to be fighting the Vietnam war, or to be fighting against the Vietnam war, and that was all that really mattered, like a betrothal made in hell.
The mistakes didn't matter. The deaths, while they represented a horrific weekly-tolled and televised march toward an ever greater catastrophe, they didn't matter either. It didn't matter when four students got shot dead at Kent State by National Guardsmen, because the arguments for and against the war seemed to logically outweigh any point of it mattering any more than it already did.
Likely many more than a million Vietnamese men, women and children died, most of them from bombs dropped by the millions out of the sky by Airforce pilots like John McCain, these distinguished fly-boys, and they didn't matter either as long as everyone was so entrenched, and the dollars kept flowing, feeding the whirring, whining and roaring meat grinding, metal tearing, and human suffering machine of war for and against it, against and for it.
The war was brought home, and when bank buildings and other more public buildings started blowing up stateside, it looked like the end was near. When hundreds of thousands were tear-gassed and billy-clubbed all across the country, that didn't matter either. When White Christmas was finally played, as the North Vietnamese Army stood poised and then rolled and marched into Saigon, it having been hastily vacated by the U.S. military in a hideously bizarre scene of not quite biblical proportions, Apocalypse Now, it seemed it was over, the logical stupidity, the empirical ignorance, the not matteringness, the deaths, the carnage, the alienation... It seemed it was over.
But it was not over.
In a flip-flop of suddenly anti-pseudo-philosophic proportions seemingly from Hades itself, those who supported the war and the fight for Vietnam and its people, the most patriotic among Americans who supported spending so much money on bombs, troops, and dead for Vietnam refused anything more for Vietnam. All they wanted then were the bodies and the bones of MIAs, as if they mattered.
Vietnam was quiet, deadeningly, and, economically isolated until very recently, thirty years later, as the economic warfare continued. Ever since, those who fought against the war in Vietnam have been calling for the lifting of sanctions against the Vietnamese people, for trade with that country to help repair, heal and end the damage inflicted upon it by the war, and to finally set the mistake right, or as right as it could be made given how wrong it was, how entrenched everyone was.
I think it is safe to say half the Vietnam vets and the anti-war Vietnam insurgents are no longer with us, in one way or another. It is utterly dumbfounding to think so many did not live to see the end of the Vietnam War, the lifting of economic sanctions from that small southeast Asian country forty years later after our Vietnam War began, as the end finally came.
For thirty years, our Vietnam Veterans in Congress had not enough desire to end the war, so they let it go on, like a tea kettle on the economic sanctions burner on high having long since boiled away all the water that could have sustained and helped heal the Vietnamese wounds, worries and whys of war.
Iraq will likely come out the same. The moment U.S. troops are pulled out of that country, a policy of economic warfare will be put into place that will continue the killing, the mayhem, and, the horrible wasting mistake.
The U.S. is right now spending $3 billion dollars a week on Iraq with bills for unspent billions in disabled liabilities piling up in the back end of this war, but when U.S. forces are pulled out, those who were all for spending that money will shut off the spasmodic dollar spigot, and the Iraqis won't get one U.S. penny more. The government, our government will embargo Iraq again, just as it was embargoed under Saddam and continue the killing for years and decades to come.
For those who have been sure the current war, like Vietnam, is not about the Administration's professed though idiotic moral goals, even in the myriadness with which these explanations have come to us, here, they will find some small and bitter justification of their views. Though it still does not make this war, or any other, either worth fighting, or fighting against, yet again. It just doesn't matter, because this was all done before with no net result, as it has happened again, with no lessons learned because some denied the parallel so long, and no one knew the extent of it.
What is required is, a fight to move the goal posts entirely, and change what feebly passes for human reason. Honestly, it would have been better had the U.S. never invaded, and once the invasion was underway, if the Iraqis had all rolled over and played dead. But human beings are belligerent, stupid and immoral, and they will likely bequeath yet another such logical debacle embossed again so suitably with the empirical methodologies of Aristotle and Alexander, two Macadonian barbarians that lived thousands of years ago.
Study the cause of our misfortune, return to and understand the causes.
We all have to stop listening to these foul Rights of Man politicians and pundits who want to rile us into supporting whatever it is they want us to support. It is better it doesn't matter before hand, better than it is after they get the life-culling machines rolling again.
Life is greater than wealth, greater than anything, except of course all the tempting lies told to the gullible by all these many Alexanders propped up by their ever so empirical Aristotles. The Rights of Man, indeed, and, Napoleon. You have but one right paramount, not to listen, so you can see no reason to follow your reason into war, for or, against it.
In every era humans believe they have seen progress. The only progress is philosophic progress, which only comes spaced by many millennia, from the least likely of sources and inconsistently from these. All the rest is mere animism, a belief that our pseudo-progress happens for some benign reason guided benificently by a careful hand, an animystical belief, like science, or, the Rights of Man.
Have you never seen a rat with his neck snapped in a trap? The rats would say, Stop setting these traps.
Lincoln said it best, You can fool most of the people some of the time, which he then proceeded to do. It happens every Election Day. It happens too, as duty calls at the start of every war, just before the anti-war forces set their own trap.
All these wars are empirical wars now, both for and against them. They make sense, if you are not careful and listen.
The philosopher Zeno could on one day deliver an address to any crowd that would have them enthusiastically supporting any war, and the next day, address the same crowd and have them condemning it in a rage. But Diogenes the greatest of Greek philosophers would say, Why would you listen to that old fool? Why would you listen to anyone? Life is wonderful enough without all that.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
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