Uncertainty

The things that happen, happen. Is there any use in regret? The moralistic moral is that we ought to learn from the past so that the future will be better. Do you think the future will be better? It’s a fifty-fifty proposition. From a conservative Christian worldview, the world will get worse, first. From a liberal view, well, evolution is such a wonderful thing: from the bloody struggle of survival, where the weak are consumed or become extinct, we arrive in time, somehow, at paradise. Is there a middle way here? Can we triangulate? I’m sure, but why bother.

This is the Ninth of August. Significance? Nagasaki. The second bomb. The one that may not have been necessary. Some would say the first wasn’t necessary. I’m forgetting what the estimates say, of how many American lives were spared by negating the need to invade Japan. And how many Japanese lives were spared, as well. Some estimates say very much over a million. We must have noticed by now that civilians get killed. Collaterally. Current events in Lebanon might remind us of that fact, but anyone who reads my little blog has the intelligence to see all sorts of alternative possibilities. Oh, the situation is different because blah blah blah.... We can all play that game. But the fact is that in a real war innocent people suffer. In wars of theory, the blueprint wars, in mere battles, things go swimmingly. But in the messy business of all-out war -- well.

So I read a thoughtful and heartfelt decrying of the existence of nuclear weapons. (Here, here, here.) War. What is it good for? My first reaction was cold. I try to be a cold man. Nagasaki? Hiroshima? Tough. Don’t bomb Pearl Harbor and your babies won’t be incinerated. This is, and is likely to remain, my opinion. But the human side of me, the compassionate side, the “Christian” side, weeps for the motherless infants who sit crying unattended in the ashes. Everything is at least a dichotomy, and most likely a googlotomy.

From a pragmatic point of view, we might as well ask after the benefit of bullets. I venture to say, indeed, that of all the methods to kill humans that have been devised and made popular, nuclear bombs have killed the fewest. Hundreds of thousands, yet that is the fewest. Flashing swords, knobby clubs, flaming arrows, big rocks, cannonballs, bullets -- crosses -- I’m pretty sure most of these have killed many more. Maybe boomerangs have killed fewer. So it isn’t the numbers that’s so horrifying, about nuclear bombs. It doesn’t take nukes to commit genocide. Machetes will do very nicely, thank you. It’s not the push-button ease. Since when has the repetitive business of mass executions been a disincentive? It’s not even the possibility for destroying the world. If you’re a biblical Christian, you know what’s coming. If you’re not, well, the difference between your own death, and the end of the world, is only theoretical. One of my adolescent insights was that the end of a life is the end of a universe.

So what, then? Why is this day different from all other days? It’s emotional. It’s that it was us -- US -- who dropped the bomb. The bombs. The first, at least, was a necessary thing. But we regret, regret the hard and brutal choices we make, that a greater evil be avoided. We regret doing the lesser of evils.

Buried in these pages is a discussion about lying. I said it was a good thing to lie to Nazis, to save hidden Jews. A correspondent said it was a sin that must be repented of, but that he would do again. My conclusion was that if you would do it again, you didn’t repent, and cannot repent of it -- being unrepentable (since you know you would repeat it) makes it an unforgivable sin. An illogical conclusion, therefore the premise is invalid. It is not a sin to lie to Nazis. My point? We’d drop the bomb again. It is no sin. Odd, isn’t it, how there are evils that are not sins.

I was thinking about these things yesterday, when I was cut off in traffic and forced into an oncoming vehicle. No one was hurt. The vehicles are severely damaged. I was cited for “Failure to yield.” This essay is considerably different than the one I would have written prior to all this. It would have been more lyrical. We are changed by what happens.

In quantum mechanics there is the useful idea of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. We can know the velocity of an electron, or the position, but not both. By learning one, we forever exclude the possibility of knowing the other, for that instant. The act of observing changes reality. Simply by perceiving, we have an effect in the universe. (There are interesting ideas about God’s omniscience in this, but that’s too far afield.) The sound a falling tree makes is different, depending on whether or not there is an observer. Hmm. What has this to do with Nagasaki?

Being alive -- the very act of existing -- is a responsibility. We avoid one thing, and run into something worse. We smile at a child, and he remember with love for the rest of his life the kind person who gave a silence blessing in a crucial and formative moment. We fail to countermand an obsolete order, and a second bomb is dropped, killing tens of thousands. We share cool water by the roadside and our throats are cut. We stop and stoop to aid a fallen stranger and we are remembered forever in a parable.

It’s random, and there is no guarantee. It suits God’s will sometimes that we be martyrs. It suits Him that we be blessed. In this turmoil we cling to no certainty except that which is insured by faith -- a non-physical reality, outside the sidereal influence of Heisenberg’s principle. Does this comfort the orphan? If you sit weeping into your hands, alone even in the midst of your family, you might have an answer. We are all orphans.

J

Nagasaki Sunset

After the light stabs

sword-sharp out of the clear sky,

wielded in fierce wrath;

after the heat swells

like a river, a long tide

that shines like a tear;

after the thunder

beats the world, hammer of a

hard and foreign god;

after winds sear this

fragile paper land with a

last Kamikaze;

after the earth moves

thoughtless as a small

sleeping child’s finger;

after this flower

blooms and is fading like bright

autumn confetti;

afterward, silence,

then, and the light fades

in Nagasaki sunset.

-----

I wrote this string of haikus some 25 years ago. It was a January, so can't really be considered a commemoration. Notice how I paint Japan in such delicate images. I really do seem to have taken sides. I've changed a few words, this quarter-century later, in deference to my greater perspective. A lot can change between your early 20s and your late 40s. But even so -- poor Japan.

But Japan is "poor" only because it lost the war. It is not arrogant now, only because it was humbled. We can pity the criminal even as he endures his punishment. But the criminal must be stopped. And Japan needed to be defeated. When it was pillaging the Far East it felt no pity for its victims. Japan was no better than Hitler, and it was no better than al-Qaeda. It was a slave power, and needed to be destroyed. What would the world be, if Japan had prevailed? A horror -- well, more of a horror.

The first bomb was for the war. The second bomb was by way of justice. God deals with humanity through its nations. Citizens benefit or suffer because of the policies, the wisdom or folly of its leaders. Luck of the draw. Do the innocent suffer? Contend over the matter with Adam. Then look in the mirror. There's no such thing as justice, and precious little righteousness. Our best is far less than perfection.

This is my position, refined by the fires of time. I could not ... or rather, would not have written this poem, today. A haiku must use delicate and natural imagery, and the irony of such usage given this theme seems inappropriate to me, now. Inconsistent? I'm not always sarcastic.

For dramas that play out upon the great stage of world events, we must understand that the author is God. The Holocaust really was that: a religious conflagration to a god, or perhaps to God. Nuclear bombs must be on that same scale. They alter the script -- which is, technically, impossible, given the guiding hand of Omnipotent Providence. No. They are part of the plot. We are not puppets, but we are players. We can and do flub lines, but the play goes on. Our responsibility is to conscience and integrity. But our obligation is to God.

Again, again I come back to the theme of conciliation. Given an ego that would rule creation, we have so little real power. Nations that do not resolve this conflict internally, must lash out as a plague upon the world. We, as individuals, are mostly victims, sometimes victimizers, and hardly ever heroes or saints. We must be reconciled to this imbalance. Because we live in a fallen world, groaning, groaning under the burden not of its pain, but its frustration. It would be perfect, the way a shark would be perfect. So long as we identify with such a creation, we are its creatures. But it is not the world with which we should be reconciled. No. Not the world.



J

UCH

So now it's time to be serious about Obama. Potentialities are spent. Now it's reality. Which means verbiage like Unity and Change and Hope must be banished for the moment from political discourse like a squirt of tobacco juice, even if only temporarily into a cheek pouch. Hillary's mad eyes for the prize have blinked, and the tall dark steely man from Illinois takes it.

It's been a few days. The numbers, I'm informed, bear it out. I wouldn't know. But I must have faith that they wouldn't lie to me. The first thing I thought was, Hillary will be on the ticket -- this, despite some previous speculations to the contrary that may have appeared in these pages. And that gave me pause. A slight dread. Cuz I do think that ticket could win. For some reason Hillary's supporters, the hardcore ones, value her even over a Dem win, and the story is that they will vote for McCain. Even with a soft right, most of the independents along with the disaffected Dems would still give it to McCain.

Our hope, then, lies in their egos. Hillary would take the deal. And what a deal. It ain't the White House, but Blair House will do. Think of her VP efforts as the Blair Bitch Project. Tee hee. Git it? Bush is stupid, and Hillary is a bitch. See? And would Obama go for it? Today it seemed to me that, no, he wouldn't. This messiah would want a more devout apostle. Cuz what we know, for a certainty, is that Hillary is not about harmony, not about unity, not about the good of any simple abstract. Hillary is all about, well ... you know. Same as Obama.

Ego. Ego will save us.

Unity? Only when it doesn't require compromise. Change? Yeah, to my way of thinking. Hope? Well, I'm winning, right? We will spend spend spend like drunken sailors -- a safe group to disrespect -- and tax to do it, and that won't harm the economy, and health care will banish illness, and an even more centrally-controlled public education will make even the bitter gun-slinging religionists sensible, and gay marriage is in the Constitution. Why, don't you see the point? U-Topia no longer means No-Place. It means 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and its sephorahtic penumbra emanating from number 1 First St. NE, The City of God.

Never mind that the greater part of Obama's actual national experience comes solely from his presidential campaign experience. Ahem. Did you get that? The moribund bulk of his actual experience on the national scene -- everything he will know from first-hand experience -- derives exclusively from delivering set speeches to adoring throngs, and from glad-handing Audi-drivers at upscale mall boutique photo ops. His experience in actual governance will extend no further than balancing his household check book. If he does that. Given his financial dependence on Rezco, it's a doubtful proposition.

Never mind that his life experience has been as a privileged prep-school only-child groomed for unquestioned self-esteem if not for any actual quality of honorable character. Perhaps that was thrown into the mix as well. We would hope so. From this pampered origin he matriculated from several most-elite Universities, into the Career of His Choosing. Something the media elects to style "community organizer." Fast-forward, and he's a "civil rights attorney." Well, it's not a shameful thing, in itself. Sometimes civil rights need an attorney. There was some talk that I can't be bothered to remember about his major and almost-only client being some insider bigwig who ended up funding Obama's political career. So what; all that means, probably, is that he inspires loyalty. That's a good thing. Altogether, a favored if not really inspiring curriculum vitae.

It isn't a matter of qualification. A natural-born citizen aged 35-plus is qualified. Qualified cannot then be the word that embodies our concern. But where is this man's actual talent? In unifying? He just broke from his church of two decades. In making changes? See above. In inspiring hope? Well, yes, but what is hope? If it remains only hope, we might call it an Apple of Sodom -- pleasant to look at, filled with ashes.

His talent is in speech making.

What is it that the left loathes about Bush? His smirking cockiness? His unquestioning self-assurance? His certainty in the rightness of his cause? Um. Surely you see it? How is this not Obama? Bush is incurious where Obama's intelligence is scintillating and far-questing? And the evidence for this is? -- Obama's firm grasp of historical detail? Alas, his bizarre ignorance was blasted into radioactive outline like silhouettes on a Nagasaki wall by his illiterate instant-history about Kennedy meeting with Khrushchev. Not a template for success. A complete disaster, in Kennedy's own estimation, that emboldened Khrushchev to ship nukes to Cuba. And how, Kennedy then wondered, could he show he really was a tough guy? How about boldly facing down International Communism by sending in advisors to Indochine? What could possibly go wrong?

Self-confidence is requisite in a leader. There should be something behind it, that supports it. Neither Bush nor Obama may have been qualified by actual life-experience to assume that office most high. Bush was touched rather more by it, given his job as enforcer for his presidential father, but we'll dismiss that. What separates these two is, simply, ideology. Not all readers here will be conservative. That's fine. Bush isn't all that conservative.

But the distinction between conservative and liberal, between right and left, must be found here: in practicality, or in impracticality. What works? What proves theory, or not? What adapts to reality, rather than requiring that reality conform to opinion, however grand? If mankind were basically good, perfectible, then social engineering would have produced results other than those revealed throughout the previous century. Alas, observation has not supported such a conclusion.

We do the good that we can, without expecting human nature to change. Only circumstances change, by formula. We must deal with humanity as if it were a closed system. We can redistribute resources, but we create nothing new. That requires something from outside the system, the natural system -- it requires the, uh, supernatural. Yes, that is possible too. Not by formula.

Conservatives understand this. We are not sufficient. We all start out idealists. As babies -- the perfect egoists. Then we must learn, less than half of us, that we are not sufficient. I hope you're not confused -- I'm not talking about rugged individualism and self-reliance and indomitable will and all of those marvelous character attributes. I'm talking about knowing that we are limited by our nature. We are our character, and nothing more, that counts.

Obama? What's all this got to do with Obama? The left does not learn from reality. Obama is the most left politician who has ever come within reach of the presidency.

Normally I would say, take heart. America is too sensible. But it isn't, anymore. Gay marriage? It is the perfect symbol of our times. More savory even than abortion. There has always been abortion. But now every wall is shattered, or may be. Because of this, why not? -- why not do what has never before been done? Elect a far left President?

I don't know why not. All I have to go by is the past, and maybe things will turn out differently this time, from all those other ideological revolutions like the French and the Russian and the Chinese and the Cambodian. You know -- change. It could happen, because we believe in hope, which means that things can be different than the past suggests. Somehow, somehow I insist on seeing this as a good thing. And I defy anyone to prove me wrong.


J

Hiroshima

Another August 6th. Hiroshima was 62 years ago today. Maybe we should retire it. It's getting old, the guilt. But I've been over that ground before. "I try to be a cold man. Nagasaki? Hiroshima? Tough. Don’t bomb Pearl Harbor and your babies won’t be incinerated. This is, and is likely to remain, my opinion." Yes, it remains my opinion, these 362 days later. It's my opinion, just from the math of the matter.

Kido Koichi, a high officials in wartime Japan, testified later that he believed the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. And as I wrote not too long ago, "An argument has been made that [the bombs] saved five million lives. US Army Intelligence underestimated Imperial airpower by five times. 'Every village had some type of aircraft manufacturing activity. Hidden in mines, railway tunnels, under viaducts and in basements of department stores, work was being done to construct new planes.' Japanese defense plans called for 'an initial force of 2,000 army and navy fighters ... to fight to the death to control the skies over Kyushu. A second force of 330 navy combat pilots were to attack the main body of the task force ... [and] a third force of 825 suicide planes was to hit the American transports. ...another 2,000 suicide planes were to be launched in waves of 200 to 300, to be used in hour by hour attacks.' And so on. And on. And on. You gotta respect the Japanese, as I am reminded each week on a variable schedule. But if the fighting had gone to that extreme, it would have continued to a genocide. I expect so. Three options: kill, die, or surrender. Lo, a Japanese national slogan of the day: One Hundred Million Will Die for the Emperor and Nation.

"But the symbolism, the symbolism of the bomb -- you just can't get around that. ... What would we do if we couldn't blame America?"

The universe breaks down into forces and particles. Well, not really. It is whatever it is. We conceptualize it as forces and particles. It's probably true that there are no particles. As for force, that's just a word that means something gets moved. What is it that's moving, if there are no particles? It could get very confusing. Where can we find clarity? By assuming there are particles and forces, regardless of the truth of the matter. It is a compromise. We have to agree with illusion in order to live in reality. It works out to a lucid dream, from which we wake only when the brain becomes irrelevant. So it seems to me.

So what? War is forces and particles. Utopian fantasies aside, we know from a diligent observation of human behavior that there will always be conflict -- as long as there is such a thing as human nature. You know it's true. Look at yourself. The private anger, the unspoken rage -- the ranting you do alone in your car -- it will not always be private. Jesus -- a man for whom humanity holds a general respect -- said that the poor will always be with us, and that until the end of time there will be wars and rumors of war. See? Individuals have a fate, and humanity has a fate. We are the slaves of our character -- part of which includes an urge to war.

Hiroshima signifies victory, and the high cost of defeat. Are there unintended consequences? It's a stupid question. There are always unintended consequences. I hung by my ankles yesterday, and a faulty two by four snapped in a freak accident and I fell 20 inches head-first onto cement. Directly onto my skull. That, my dear sir or madam, was an unintended consequence. After all my careful safety precautions. The intended consequence of whatever malevolent spirit behind the problem was that I be killed or crippled. I have a small knot on my skull. I have a hard head, apparently, and a strong neck. My own intended consequence was that I decompress my spine, undoing some possible theoretical disk issue. How ironic. I have redoubled my safety precautions, and will continue to hang. Isn't this an interesting story?

We didn't mean for there to be radiation poisoning. We didn't mean for there to be a nuclear arms race and the threat of the destruction of civilization. We didn't mean for there to be over forty years of anxiety about such things, and then a clintonesque holiday from responsibility, and then a renewed and more irrational threat with its concomitant anxiety. We didn't mean for our victory to be polluted by ambiguity, so that it would fuel hatred toward us by our own disloyal leftists, and by every petty non-American anti-American demagogue who needed to whip up his subjects at the thought of a Great Enemy. We didn't want to be an enemy. But we will continue to be the people we are, and exercise the character that we have, and live with the consequences.

Consequences, intended or otherwise. But there it is. We cannot apologize for winning. The Japanese ran slave labor camps and conducted wholesale massacres. It is good that we won. We should be sorry for it?

Let's not regret reality. This is the best of all possible worlds. That it is also the worst of all possible worlds will not discourage us. Nobody gets out of here alive. What lies beyond, we can only trust to faith, to comfort us. While we are here, we must act with integrity as best we can, and apologize when we err, and make amends.

Our enemies, at home and abroad, mistake our kindness and our charity for a guilty heart and blood money. Only the guilty need concern themselves with that. As for the bomb, we will drop it again, if there is a greater good to be won from it -- as determined by the math. After all, the precedent has been set. Set by the generation that saved the world. We can save the world too. Perhaps by lighting candles and joining hands. Perhaps by being stern and fierce and unrelenting. Wouldn't it be nice if it could be the former? If human nature were different, I mean?

But it is what it is.


J

Again, Yet Another American Atrocity Once More

ood bath committed by the imperialist so-called Americans – AmeriCONS … oh, that’s rich – against the defenseless patriots of Samurai, who are only defending their sacred land against the so-called Christian invaders. One of your humble reporter’s trustworthy sources - a prestigious and widely-respected official in the former Iraqi government - states, “The American invaders are killing babies! Actually hunting down babies, for sport, may Allah, the Merciful, curse them eternally. And also the pig Americans, um, do many countless other equally evil things. Hospitals! They bomb hospitals! Baby hospitals, with crippled babies! And what else. Uh, many many evil things, Helmut my good friend. Trust me. Americans are all bad.” Clearly there can be no doubting such powerful testimony. The truth of it fairly screams at us.

As has widely been reported by we of the Media, this air assault on Sumatra is the most massive bombing campaign since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which over a million American Aircrafts dropped ten billion sixty-three million killotowns of atomic nuclear bomb devices, killing over ninty-seven million innocent Japanese babies, or maybe it was Chinese babies, I forget, but it doesn't matter, because the meta-truth here is that everything America does is wrong.

More lives have been destroyed by the so-called United States in the past week, in the senseless and unprovoked attack on innocent Samoa, than died in all the wars fought in the last century. In point of fact, over one hundred billion pregnant Iraqi women in Santa Monica have been murdered in this illegal war so far ... oh, no, I mean just in this latest American atrocity ... in fact, just today. CNN reports that Gorge Butch himself personally flew an F3Q$&6-)34#S Airplane Fighter JetCraft – manufactured by Halliburton - strafing schoolyards and dropping many billion cartloads of AIDS infected ordinances. But AIDS is not restricted to the gay population, you know, which is genetic - being gay, I mean. We're born that way. And God doesn't make mistakes. By which I mean the Goddess.

When interviewed by we of the Media, Butch stuttered like a monkey for a while, then he smirked and made up some words. Then he stared into space for seven minutes. What an idiot. How those of us on the Left are so intelligent for hating him so much. And did you notice how much he looks like a chimp?

The secret fascist military draft which is forcing so-called American youths, primarily persons of colour, in the secret genocidal conspiracy conducted by WASPs and other fascist racists, into the so-called American fascist war machine to kill all Moslems, because America is so racist and evil, and will soon be destroyed by the filth of its own corporational corruption, and your humble reporter, for one, can’t wait, although anyone who calls me unpatriotic is a fascist homophobe ... um, what was I saying? I seem to have lost my train of thought, transported as I am by my fervour and passionate love of truth. I'm very enlightened and rational and honest, unlike those stupid right-wingers. Buck-tooth Abners.

Of course, dear reader, as every intelligent person knows, there is only one point that we of the Media feel it important to make, and that’s about how bad America is, as is self-evident to all Progressive and enlightened thinkers, like me. If only we were France. France doesn’t have any problems at all. They’re so smart and beautiful. I wish I was French. Maybe I’ll learn French. That would prove I’m smart. Much smarter than a Christian. They’re all so dumb. How I hate them. And Butch. America stinks.

And so, dear reader, Your Humble Reporter trusts that the clarity and reason of the evidence herein presented is the final nail in the coffin of imperialist capitalist so-called America, which is all about invading innocent countries and killing babies, and doing other bad things too. Everything that’s bad. Just think America. I know I do.

Move On!

Helmut Crisp

PS – the XYZ Affair ... that was about how bad Republicans are, non?