Ageist Comment on the Candidacy of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden

 NOTE: I supported Bernie Sanders last time around and still like him. Joe Biden is the only candidate I've actually met (although if the Democratic list gets any longer, most Americans may end up having met at least one candidate, just by probabilities) — and I like Biden. Still:


The advice given to Harry Truman has broader use: To get major things done in the USA, one often must "scare the hell out of the American people." One area for fear may turn out to be economic, another is more immediately existential.

The US has a formal doctrine of "First Use" of nuclear weapons. The US has a formidable nuclear arsenal and has placed great trust in the President on how/when to use those weapons. The relevant laws need to be changed, but the launch codes are currently available to an angry old man of limited stability. 

Donald Trump's opponent should not make the argument her- or himself — it should be less of an argument than innuendo, and such innuendo is the job of VP candidates and "surrogates" — but the Presidential candidate running against Trump must be clearly different from Trump, including not another old man.

The candidate must be someone who can be relied on not just to take the 3 AM call but to take the midnight visit by the officer with the launch codes — and not a visit the President has invited.

About Those Ultraviolent Video Games: A Plea for More Graphic Realism

            Until very recently if I heard or read "RPG," I understood it as "rocket-propelled grenade" and not "role-playing game," so I'm obviously no expert on gaming. Still, I watch a fair number of animation shows on television — plus The Daily and Nightly Shows — so I see a lot of commercials for games.

            (And that is "see," or see fragments of; I turn the sound off during commercials and listen to an audiobook if I'm on an exercise machine or read if I'm watching from a couch. So screw you, advertisers! May you contract crotch rot and leprosy on your hands simultaneously while all your teeth fall out except one and that becomes impacted! Four minutes of commercials?!? Die, rot and be damned, scum-sucking swine! …. But I digress.)

            Anyway, I have watched a good many commercials for first-person-shooter games aimed at young people (males especially) and, although hardly the most gentle of people in my fantasy life — I curse telemarketers even more than advertisers — I find the general sensibility of many of the games to be disturbing.

            So I have a suggestion: a highly modest itty-bitty proposal that the governments of the United States, Japan, and other games-producing nations, parents groups, Tipper Gore, and similar relevant entities should "incentivize" (i.e., threaten and bribe) game-makers to develop and offer EXTRA BONUS FEATURES!!!! that might help young users consider a bit the implications of their battle-themed games.

            The Bonus Features would need to be appropriate for different games but most could include for the first level role-playing as EMT's, fire-fighters, Army medics, Naval hospital corpsmen, triage nurses, surgeons, the "green ghouls" of Mortuary Affairs and such, with points being scored for coming in after the initial game and cleaning up. The players who save the most lives and limbs, get the corpses identified and on their ways back to the families of the dead, do the best with the most immediate psychological trauma — these are the winners and can move on.

            The next level would be bomb squads and engineers and demolition teams and construction workers, who can score points clearing away the destruction and starting to rebuild the homes and factories and water supplies and power generation — the infrastructure destroyed in the initial game. And those who rebuild the local area the best can go on to further levels playing counselors, public servants, and diplomats; NGO agents and other leaders and workers who put together societies after the first-person shooters and strafers and bombers and all have finished their play.

            I'd have the Bonus Games highly realistic, and especially graphic from the points-of-view of those handling the wounded and maimed and working with corpses in Graves Registration. A high degree of gore might make the Bonus Games creepily attractive to the sociopaths and psychopaths among the players, but the Dexter/Ted Bundy demographic is small, and it may be just as well if they spend their time playing games. For children, teens, and young adults closer to the medians, means, and modes on psychological curves — for normal young people — a dose of realism in their games would be a damn good thing.

Military Options in North Korea (7 March 2013)

      According to an opinion piece by Henry M. Seggerman in The Korea Times back in December of 2010, "North Korea has 11,000 heavy artillery pieces pointed at Seoul and could kill one million Seoul residents in a few hours. North Korea can continue with provocations without any fear of heavy South Korean retaliation." This is a bit hyped. Although estimates go up to 13,000 artillery pieces, the formulation I recall for effective fire was "5,000 artillery tubes," and, as Popular Mechanics — of all publications! — points out, North Korea is incapable of rendering Seoul "flattened," nor would Seoul be consumed in, in one translation, "a sea of flames" in a North Korean attack.

            However, Seoul is only 35 miles from the border with North Korea; North Korea has mobile artillery and rockets; North Korea does have an air force and a large army; and North Korea has had time to infiltrate the Demilitarized Zone with the South with, well, God knows what weapons. After noting serious problems for the North Koreans with their military, a subdued report by The International Institute for Strategic Studies states that"In any conflict, North Korean artillery, firing from fortified positions near the DMZ, could initially deliver a heavy bombardment on the South Korean capital. Allied counter-battery fire and air strikes would eventually reduce North Korea’s artillery capability, but not before significant damage and high casualties had been inflicted on Seoul. Similarly, the North Korean air force could launch surprise attacks against military and civilian targets throughout South Korea before allied air superiority was established. The potential delivery of chemical or biological weapons by artillery, short-range missiles and aerial bombs is an additional threat – especially to unprotected civilians."

            At any given time, the US has some 30,000 troops in South Korea as what even respectable sorts used to call "trip-wires," and my friends and I more cynically called "hostages": A North Korean attack would bring in the US, and we do have the firepower to reduce North Korea to a wasteland.
            But not without a lot of fallout — starting with nuclear fallout — on South Korea, and problems with the Chinese, North Korea's neighbors, and the main US creditor.

            Short-form: There really are no military options on the Korean Peninsula. Not sane ones, not for the US of A.

            The non-military option I suggest is to give the North Koreans what, for the last couple decades or so, they've said they've wanted: direct negotiations with the United States and a peace treaty ending the Korean War (or "Police Action" for the pedants who note that the US Congress never declared war).

            But, you might well say, the North Koreans have developed and are deploying nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

            Okay, I respond, that is a dangerous thing for them to do but understandable.

            Consider this. China invaded Tibet and remains in Tibet, and the United States and "the International Community" viewed that aggression with alarm and sent strong notes of protest … and that was that. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and got hit with the Gulf War (Iraq War 1.0) and what we call "The Iraq War" (Gulf 2.0 and following), upon the tenth anniversary of which I am writing this essay. What were the differences between Iraq and China prompting different responses to aggression?

                        (1) There are reasons to believe that Kuwait actually is a country with historical existence. Still, its most immediate existence comes from the drawing of lines on imperial maps. Many of those lines don’t make sense in terms of tribal geography, ethnic and linguistic groups' territories, and other matters of practical concern (like a port for Iraq) — and in a rational world such political lines would've been drawn differently to start with and, again, in a rational world, be peaceably readjusted today. But trying to redraw lines in our world leads to trouble, and it is an important rule among the countries that emerged from the old European empires, "Successor states to the European empires shall not attempt to change their borders by force." Saddam broke that rule.

                        (2) There are a whole lot more Chinese than Iraqis.

                        (3) Iraq and Kuwait have a lot of oil, with them and their oil near Europe and not all that far from the USA; China has coal and is close to the US only by container ship.

                        (4) China has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

            George H. W. Bush pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait; George W. Bush defeated Iraq in war and overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein. And George W. Bush included in "an Axis of Evil" Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

            Iran and, relevantly here, North Korea, can't change much about their differences with China — they're not going to change geography or geology —with one exception: they can get atomic bombs.

            And North Korea is getting a deliverable bomb, and, however loony much of the North Korean leadership might be, that is a rational decision.

            Fortunately, the North Koreans don't have much capacity to deliver nuclear bombs, plural, and we have over-kill. North Korea can cause a whole lot of damage in its region now, with conventional weapons, and may be able eventually to nuke a USA city or two, which would probably end republican government in the USA but otherwise not represent "an existential threat": as World War II and its aftermath demonstrated convincingly, countries can lose a number of cities and survive.

            However, as World War II demonstrated even more convincingly, destroying cities is very unpleasant for the former inhabitants thereof, and, if les so, for their surviving families, friends, and many fellow citizens.

            So we have a stand-off with North Korea, and a very dangerous one, and not one that won't be resolved just with sanctions: the minute North Korean elite will not be hurt much by the sanctions, and they don't have to worry about being turned out of power by their suffering subjects in a 2014 (or 2016) election.

            So let's do what we have to do: cut a deal.

            The North Koreans want a peace treaty; let's negotiate one and as much as possible get the hell out of Korean politics. South Korea is a major economic power, and China is a major power every which way. Let us be an honest broker and good Pacific-rim neighbor — but let the Koreans deal with Korean problems, with quiet help from the Chinese.

            And we can continue quiet efforts to encourage the Chinese to be a bit more decent to the people of Tibet. 

Cops, Civilians, and "The War on _______" (1 Feb. 2014)

             I'll repeat a story here from the "Troubles" of the spring of 1970. After the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, after the National Student Strike and disruptions at a number of major American universities, after occupation of sections of the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois by demonstrators and then Illinois State Police and then units of the Illinois National Guard — after a whole lot of shit went down, a group of very nice Methodists or Unitarians or some such thought it would be good to bring together "the kids and the cops" for some discussion sessions.
            Ah, yes: "What we got here is ... failure to communicate."
            The "kids" that showed up were largely graduate students in our mid- and late 20s — the "youth rebellion" never included all that many teenagers — and the cops were a pretty elite group from U of I in-service programs for police on their ways up in their departments.
            Relevant here is one word from the conversation between the professional students who were practicing low-power politics and the professional police who were living, for a while, like grad students: the word "civilians."
            The cops talked about the "civilians," and we asked "Who?" and then snickered.
            "Hey, man; this ain't 'The 'Nam,' and we're not the Cong — and you're not the 101^st Airborne."
            Still, we protesters got a kick out of "civilians," and both groups came to use it for people neither protesters nor cops.
            What turned out to be significant is that use of "civilians" by cops in general conversation, or, more exactly, what it represented, or, still more exactly, what it came to represent. For a long time, a lot of cops had felt themselves separate from "civilians"; by 1970, even highly educated and sophisticated cops were willing to express such feelings in words, to "civilians."
            That cops identified as a group and said so wasn't a big deal; I identified as a graduate student and teacher and more specifically a graduate student and teacher in English; the rest of youse guys were "civilians." In the decades since 1970, however, there have been trends that make that cop/civilian distinction significant, and given those trends, dangerous.
            Since the end of the Vietnam War and military conscription, there's been an increasingly wide gap between a voluntary professional military and a non-military civilian population. Simultaneously, there was quiet undermining of the problematic Posse Comitatus Act and undermining of the much more positive tradition of keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement except in extreme cases, most especially in forcing state authorities to recognize the Constitutional rights of Black people.
            Additional trends were to talk about a "War on Crime" and a "War on Drugs" and to back up the rhetoric not only with using the military for drug interdiction but also with militarizing police forces with SWAT teams and heavy armament.
            And along with that relatively low-profile use of the military to enforce laws — "Counter-drug operations" are part of the US Navy's SEALs' mission — there has been a medium-profile arms race among drug cartels, police forces, and average US citizens.
            I grew up in Chicago back when the City wouldn't have sent grief counselors over to my high school if some kid got shot. Still, it was a shocking story when my mother told us how she and her sister had to hide behind a car during Prohibition when a territorial dispute was moved along by a drive-by shooting with a "Tommy gun"; automatic weapons with magazines were rare. Such weapons are not so rare nowadays, and, indeed semi-automatics and firearms generally are common in much of the United States.
            Cops and the military may be converging, and both can legitimately see themselves separated from and other than the civilian population — at the same time as that civilian population is becoming, in one sense, less civilian. A cop must assume that many of the people around him are armed and trained, or, perhaps more dangerously, armed and untrained in the use of firearms.
            Throw into this set of trends something very good: most police nowadays are far more likely than, say, in the 1950s, to blatantly "profile" Black people and other minorities and mistreat them, at least not where the police brutality might be observed and recorded and cops behaving badly might find themselves and their departments sued. Nowadays, indeed, police officers are far more likely than in 1970 to be Black themselves — or Brown or female or Asian — and far more likely to treat civilians alike.
            The downside here is what I'll call increasingly equal-opportunity "wogification" of that civilian population: civilians are Other and not us and all potentially armed and dangerous and to be treated without obvious brutality — certainly no more public lynchings or castrations — but as if they were all dangerous criminals.
            And maybe detainees and POWs in those wars on drugs and crime.

So: So let me make a couple of suggestions.
            First, everyone, cool it with figures of speech using "war" unless you maybe want to combine William James on "The moral equivalent of war"with Arthur C. Clarke's observation in 2001: A Space Odyssey that space exploration could be as exciting as war. If anyone wants to talk about "the conquest of space," that's fine with me, just think a bit before you open your mouth about how big space is and how ludicrous the idea that it can be conquered. Aside from that: if it doesn't involve intentional production by the State of huge-scale property damage and impressive numbers of dead, wounded, and maimed, it ain't war.
            Second, moving toward third, let's call off "The War on Drugs" and replace crusades against crime with intelligent, compassionate, effective, and robust enforcement of sensible laws.
            And finally, we need some cautious disarmament. Indeed, even as long-term survival of human civilization on a large scale means substantial and rapid reductions in the total number of nuclear warheads, even so, quality of life in the United States depends upon gradual arms reduction among the military, cops, and civilians. Where we Americans are currently, the Second Amendment isn't so much guaranteeing the rest of the Bill of Rights as undermining key parts of it (think "stop and frisk" and locker searches at schools). We also need a cultural shift suggesting that truly tough guys and gals get by with martial arts and, at most, weapons more personal and elegant than point-and-spray descendants of Tommy guns or even aim-and-shoot cowboy guns.

            We need to get to more civil civilians and to cops who are less street soldiers with paramilitary backup and more civil civil servants and civilian officers of the peace.