Categorical Aperitif

I'm sorry, but I was in a foul mood yesterday and just did not feel up to posting. Had I done so, I probably would have just pointed to "Getting Through the Bad Times" by Sam Smith.

We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an adhocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity, a term from Latin America where they know it well—a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

[...]

By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire." The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the Americans would.

DeGaulle understood the difference between the illusion and reality of empire. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Yet like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies or solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get the chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naiveté but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works better for everyone.

This state is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we have chosen.

Oh, you crazy Quakers. I was contemplating this state yesterday, a day devoted to remembering some of those who have paid the price for our choice of the deadlier, more futile alternative. Thus my melancholy.