The Kaboom Virus

We are not at war. Not. Say it slowly with me: Not. At. War.

The point needs extra buttressing just now, evidently.  In the most recent Republican presidential primary debate, devoted to the suddenly fraught issue of  national security, several of the nine contenders — that gang of yapping, half-trained poodles — strove to out-do one another in insisting that we are at war, by gum, and need to realize it and begin acting like it, soon, lest something or other bad happens: much as the denizens of an asylum, having trussed and stowed the guards, might gather in the light of musty lanterns to avow that a flea was a brontosaurus, a pimple a heart attack, and the common room in which they conferred really the hold of a gigantic spaceship bound for Mars.

First place, hands down, went to Governor Chris Christy, saucer-eyed and audibly salivating (IKYN: watch the tape) as he proclaimed his eagerness to shoot down a Russian jet , should the bad bears dream of violating the no-fly zone he means to declare in Syria, there in the Russkies’ backyard, because after all a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and in Jersey we say what we mean. Undaunted by the mild disconfirmation of his own Pillsbury Doughboy physique, Christy pronounced the lithe President a “feckless weakling” and treated the cameras to his best Stormin’ Norman: “Not only would I say I’d do it, I would do it. That’s what a no-fly zone means.” The next day he doubled down, informing Charlie Rose, “We’re already in World War III.” When Rose interjected, “But not with Russia,” Christie shrugged and did not quite say, “Hey, guy, what’s the dif?” — but the message was there in the manly twist of his eyebrows.

It was all by way of making us feel safe, you see, in these shocking times, when a fraction of our normal gun violence has been so unnervingly channeled through unfamiliar subcontractors, there in San Bernardino.  After the debate outburst Rand Paul, to his credit, made a wry face and told the crowd, “Well, if you like the idea of World War III, you’ve found your candidate.” The dollop of sanity did not noticeably deflect the current of darkly rumbling happy talk about just what we-all are going to do to the bad guys once we get our hands back on the executive levers and the nuclear codes and all.

It seems that the Republican plan for cooking the planet now has a Release 2.0. The old plan consisted of doing nothing much, just hanging around cashing huge campaign checks, bleating a few bleats about liberty and government overreach and so forth, while humanity pumps quadrillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and of denying any science that suggests this might be a bad idea, smearing and silencing activists as needed, till we all boil together, nine billion frogs in one cosmic pot. That plan was passive and much too slow. It made bad TV. The new plan envisions instead a swift, certain, direct pursuit of nuclear holocaust, Dr. Strangelove minus the laughs, period and Amen, at your doorstep quicker than a bouquet of Amazon.com flowers. Its emotional appeal, the thing that Raptures our happy jousting theocrats of the GOP, is curiously the same as that which enchants the suicide bomber. A jihadi’s gotta do what a jihadi’s gotta do. All hateful complexity to one side, please, and thinking brain disengaged. Life is simple, and death even simpler. Hold all questions till the afterlife. Then the flash, and then the darkness, and then those virgins, together with other rewards, no doubt, that a grateful universe sees fit to lavish on those who have preserved their manliness unstained, evincing honor and character and, you know, cojones.

I will be called a killjoy and accused of spoiling the Party. But I think there are real dangers entailed in calling war what is not war, especially when, in this exceptionally silly season — the season of Trump! — the world really is watching. A world that sees us as panicked and half nuts, ready to send the bombers God knows where next  — and eager, a la Trump, to strike out indiscriminately at 1.9 billion Muslims — is not likely to stand by idly wishing us a swift recovery from the fit. More to the point, probably, war is often simply a bad metaphor, an unwieldy paradigm that commits us to ineffective ways of acting while it blinds us to real solutions that lie near to hand. Call something a war, and you tend to build in over-reaction, rigidity, fanatical persistence long past the point of diminishing returns. You commit yourself to the total destruction of your antagonist, and to the exhaustion of your own resources and life’s blood in service of this single aim. So then you fight for a year too long in Korea and ten years too long in Vietnam. You invade Iraq and try to build a new country in the wreckage, you screaming bloody fool, instead of responding proportionately in Afghanistan, a different country by the way.

War is not a game played by gentlemen, not an option of statecraft, not “the continuation of politics by other means” (in Clausewitz’s ghoulish formulation). It is hell on earth and holocaust on a horse, and the only excuse for it, ever, is that it cannot imaginably be avoided. For those who still don’t quite get that, herewith a handy field guide and flow chart:

• If it can be called anything but war, in this age of planet-threatening weaponry, it should be.
• If you have not been in personal doubt of your own survival this week, we are not yet at war.
• If you have clean water, housing, and more than one meal a day, don’t even ask.
• If you have not yet experienced odds of survival that are no better than one in five (as for a Russian male born in 1923) or one in four (anyone serving on a German U-boat from 1940-45), we are not yet fighting World War III.
• To get a real feel for the above odds, take that Saturday night special that makes you feel so safe as it sits there in your nightstand. Load four or five chambers, your choice. Take a deep breath. You know the rest.
• If all the men in your village have been captured or driven off or killed, and all the girls and women over ten raped and enslaved, that could be war.
• If nineteen thousand young countrymen of yours, many of whom you know, were killed in three hours this morning trying (unsuccessfully) to capture German gun emplacements in the Somme, that is war.
• If you looked out your door this morning onto the blazing trinitite plain of Hiroshima, newly devoid of buildings, and saw a line of blind, naked survivors whose fingers and toes and arms and legs had been welded into new shapes and combinations, that is war.

But we are not at war. Yet. What we are about currently is something far more humdrum: a fairly routine police problem, with deep roots in human misery like all such, but roots that are neither novel nor mysterious: overpopulation, poverty, inequality, racial strife, religious fanaticism, political chaos, bad weather, globalization, breakneck technological change, insane gun policy, and the eternal human capacity for evil, perhaps in that order. If there is something new on the scene, it is a sort of apocalyptic nihilism that snakes out ecumenically across the globe, a desperate weary disaffection with life and all its blandishments, achieved or not, that leaves a hopeless few in every place wanting only to depart the stage in a flash of mayhem. Call it the Kaboom virus. It’s worse these days than the flu.

But it is not a problem you can bomb or shoot out of the air. The unmistakable Rx, rather, is more and better police work, of the kind that has seen us through from 9/11 to here, for all our nightmares. Police work, patience, calm, and above all a sense of perspective and proportion.

But of course there is no way to say any of this, under the feverish Klieg lights, without being accused of heartlessness, cluelessness, cowardice, blindness, apathy, laziness, treachery, and all the rest. Republicans will maunder on about the price of freedom when a home-grown Christian gun nut brings in a harvest, but none of them will otherwise tell the interviewer, Well, some problems you just have to live with.

When the archeologists from Andromeda arrive at last, they will judge (I give odds) that what did us in was not our weapons or unchecked population growth or even the internal combustion engine, but the TV, the cell phone, and the laptop. It is these, Commander Glbltz will tell his Leftenant solemnly, that completely destroyed their sense of perspective, and with it any capacity for rational action. For the quality of these toys is to abolish distance. The devices made them feel that one death was the same as a million deaths, that danger anywhere was danger everywhere, that the intolerable had already been exceeded. When ISIS burned that guy in the jumpsuit, perhaps, was the point past which nothing seemed to matter anymore, the point when one simply had to do something, even if it was a surpassingly stupid something. So they went crazy en masse and all became suicide bombers, one way or another.