Valentines and Bombs

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So what was I thinking, posting about bombs on Valentine’s Day?  Regular readers know my fascination with holidays.  Valentine’s Day is another one of those that simply gets plowed under by the sharp shares of capitalism.  We work on Valentine’s Day, of course, after waking to news of yet another multiple shooting at a university.  Is it any wonder that we think about bombs on Valentine’s Day?  As Tina asks, what’s love got to do with it?  In 2016 we were taught that the politics of hate is how elections are won.  Surveys consistently show Americans favor stricter gun laws but congressmen love money more.  Maybe love does have something to do with it after all, Ms. Turner.

Love, it seems to me, was the best thing Christianity had going for it.  While the Gospels aren’t entirely consistent on this point, the figure we call John (not the Baptist) focuses on it.  Jesus spoke of, indeed, insisted on love.  “God is love” some radical went so far as to write.  But love gets in the way of selfish agendas.  We can wave Bibles around, and hold them up for photo ops, but they do no good that way.  Besides, love might, in some instances lead to sex.  And we know that Augustine won that argument centuries ago.  We don’t have a widely recognized holiday celebrating that dour saint, however.  Perhaps we should take a cue from the fact that nobody knows which Valentine yesterday really commemorates.  Isn’t love best when it can even be anonymous?

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

I often ponder why it seems so difficult for people to love universally.  Yes, we do annoy each other.  Yes, we have conflicting agendas.  If, however, we pause for a moment and consider we’ll see that other people have feelings just like us.  They too want to be loved and appreciated, and held by those closest to them.  This is not a bad thing.  What’s so wrong with love, after all?  We pour money into the military industrial complex and try to regulate who can love whom.  And we say we’re living the religion touted by the New Testament.  I always try to keep Valentine’s Day special.  It can be tricky on a Tuesday when work will bear its inevitable load of problems to solve.  Still, if we all paused when we faced a people-related frustration on Valentine’s Day, and said to ourselves (saying it aloud would only cause problems) “I love you” to the person causing our frustration, I wouldn’t have been thinking of bombs on Valentine’s Day.

How To Build a Bomb

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We see footage of the tragedy in Ukraine.  Or the miles and miles of film documenting World War II with its hell from the skies bombings.  Bomb after bomb after bomb.  I recently wrote of how tragic this is in the light of the Turkey-Syria earthquake.  Just a few days before that, the New York Times ran an interest piece on how bombs are made.  Now, there’s no excusing it, but boys seem to like explosions.  Although I’m a pacifist, I was fascinated by how long the process is and how specialized the work, to make a bomb (technically a shell, but the result’s the same).  And then we see the footage and realize all this time, money, and technology are going into objects to be shot at other human beings.  Rise and kill.

It is an indictment of our species that we spend so terribly much on destroying others of our own kind.  Some of this is evolution, surely, but some of it is consciousness gone awry.  Nobody wants to be the victim of somebody else’s bombs.  At the same time, there are different political philosophies in the world and our history has made us distrust, and maybe even hate, one another.  I think of Putin and his hatred of the west.  And then I think how close we are.  From mainland to mainland, Russia and Alaska are only 55 miles apart.  If you include the islands, that figure drops to 3 or 4 miles.  And an entire ideological world.  This is such a strange fiction we’ve created.  

Some experts tell us that our systems of allowing strong men to rise to the top (and note, female belligerent national leaders are quite rare) will inevitably lead to war.  Of the making of bombs there is no end.  These guys in the news story require bomb making to take home paychecks to support their families.  Even now there are war zones throughout the world where it’s not safe to wander because of ordinance.  Some of them are even here in the United States.  On a visit to a friend in West Virginia we went to Dolly Sods Wilderness area.  It’s rugged and wild and beautiful.  Once used as an area for military training, unexploded ordinance still exists there.  Visitors are warned of this, of course.  But there are other mined and fought-over areas where the innocent are still killed long after the war has ended.  As an adult boy I’ve become less impressed with explosions.  If you live long enough, ideally, you should begin to understand life is a gift, and not something to be thrown away.  Or taken by someone else’s bombs.

Peaceful Resolutions

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It came as a shock.  Raised as I was in a nation enamored of weaponry, I did not realize that many countries in the world do not have armies.  In some places, such as Israel, service in the military is compulsory.  In approximately twenty nations, however, people are secure enough not to require armies.  It’s probably symptomatic that such nations are fairly small in land area.  The more you’ve got, the more you want to protect.  Without materialism would we even need militaries?  Yes, we fight over different religious beliefs, but those conflicts are tied to a sense of ownership as well.  This is “our land” and don’t “you” tell us what to do in it!  I can imagine a world where armies need not exist.  The key, it seems to me, is love.

In a Simpsonesque way, of course, hostile aliens might invade.  Could we not try to come to a peaceful resolution?  Or could we not learn to protect ourselves without having to be in a position to destroy those who might prefer a more socialistic lifestyle?  Those who might look different?  Those whose moral standards push us to think more broadly?  Like many people I’m dismayed at the unconscionable size of our military budget.  Killing the world once over is no longer enough.  Now we have to try to pollute space as well.  Where are those aliens when we need them?

The fact is nations exist on this earth without standing armies.  They don’t cause trouble and some of them are extremely bookish (no surprise there).  Can we imagine what our world would look like with an education budget swapping places with the military one?  Do we dare even think such dangerous thoughts as peace and mutual goodwill?  Is no-one big enough to stand up to Adam Smith (with kudos to Thomas Piketty for trying!)?  The wealth of nations could be applied to make well-fed security mostly a reality.  We lack the will.  Well, most of us do.  I draw comfort knowing that several small nations around the world feel no need to waste their budgets on weaponry.  Their rich may not own dozens of houses fit for dozens of kings, but they have perhaps a peace of mind that no amount of military might can give.  We don’t seem to understand that weapons cater to fear, and that, as one religious text says, “perfect love casts out fear.”   

Armed Forces

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You ought to feel safe with the U.S. Navy so close by.  The naval base at San Diego is the second largest surface base in this particular branch of our sprawling military system.  From my hotel room I can watch the ships chugging through the harbor and from the Convention Center you can see quite a spread of naval real estate.  Still, all this hardware doesn’t make me feel safe.  Perhaps because I’m a child of the sixties, I can imagine a world at peace where military budgets don’t literally take food from the mouths of hungry citizens.  The last time I was in San Diego for AAR/SBL I toured the USS Midway aircraft carrier.  It’s clearly visible from my room.  I was amazed at both the technology and the obvious expenditure for such a craft.  It can’t be easy to set a city afloat.

Whenever I experience things like this I can’t help but wonder what we might accomplish if we loved each other as a species and put our heads together to try to solve our problems.  Lack of water—perhaps ironically in this naval city—is a serious global issue.  Poverty is the ghost of civilization.  The grasping of power by the driven but inept is clear worldwide.  We build great, complicated war machines.  The noise generated by the helicopters charging overhead bespeaks their weight and weaponry.  Down here in the southwest there are places civilians just can’t go because our military is busy keeping us too safe to allow us to wonder what they’re up to.  Black budgets must be nice.  I stand here among religion scholars and dream.

Ironically religion often leads to the fear that leads, in turn, to militarization.  We want to protect our “way of life.”  We’ll follow the prince of peace into war any day.  Just give the signal and release the missiles.  It doesn’t make me feel safe at all.  One time on a family visit, we drove through Norfolk, Virginia.  We stayed at a cheap hotel, because, well, we’re cheap.  The metal door was heavily reinforced with a stolid steel lock.  Navy men, we were informed, didn’t always behave well while ashore.  The locks were to keep us safe from those protecting us.  We stayed only one night and left early the next morning.  So I while the annual meeting away under the watchful eye of our largest line item on the budget.  They’re keeping our bodies safe, but who’s keeping track of our souls?

Private Matters

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Mercenaries have long been part of human culture.  With some exceptions, people really don’t like to fight to the death meaning that wars have often relied on those willing to fight for pay.  As society buys more and more into capitalism—and capitalism always means you want what someone else has—we’ve had to pay armies to become a massive part of our national existence.  In the United States the military budget is the most massive drain on taxpayers’ dollars, dwarfing all other areas of government spending.  Even Dwight Eisenhower, himself a military man, warned the country of the military-industrial complex.  It was becoming too powerful, he believed.  Knowing better, we continue to spend to curb our fears—generally unfounded.

The other day I was reading about the private military industry.  I didn’t even know there was such a thing.  Yes, I’ve known of mercenaries since I was a kid, but I think was got to me was the word “industry.”  This has apparently now become a legitimate line of work, I suspect with tax breaks and other kickbacks.  What’s more, it’s recognized by governments as a legitimate business.   Perhaps I spend too much time in my own headspace—I am a Bibles editor after all—but I felt like I’d just crawled out from my scriptural rock.  There’s an entire industry where your job is to be a fighting force for hire?  Victory to the highest bidder?  The ultimate, weaponized free agents?  How does that feel?  Mercenaries have often suffered in reputation.  Now we recognize them as just another job.  I guess that’s one way to handle unemployment.

While the Good Book is considered outmoded by many, I do think it has many things right.  One of its most compelling messages is that we should be peacemakers.  We should love one another, seek to help, not to harm.  Nobody’s going to pay a lot for that, however.  War is more profitable.  Meanwhile the education industry—even it can be capitalized—suffers.  We don’t want to pay for cooperative ventures where the entire human race, and other species, might benefit.  That we deem too expensive.  After all, there’s only so much money to go around for bombs and missiles and whatnot.  How are we supposed to protect that which we’ve extorted from others if we don’t have a massive military?  I suppose we could hire freelancers, but then, that costs money.

 

Let There Be

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President Dwight D. Eisenhower was, as everyone knows, a military man. With the role of Commander in Chief, United States Presidents control a military that eats up an enormous amount of tax dollars. To keep us safe, we’re told. Even though he was a military man, in his farewell address Eisenhower warned the American people of the Industrial Military Complex, a group of companies that not only eat national budgets for breakfast, but also control the most dangerous technology in the world. Secrecy, we’re told, is key. We don’t want any other nation on earth knowing what we’re up to. In fact, most Americans have no idea of and no control over what we’re up to. When people like Edward Snowden come out, their tales are so extreme that it is fairly easy to dismiss them. Would a good government ever do that? Nah. We’re the good guys, right? These were the thoughts going through my head after I watched Star Trek Into Darkness. I always run a couple years behind, it seems, on major movies. This one disturbed me in a way uncharacteristic of the Enterprise and its crew.

StarTrekIntoDarkness_FinalUSPoster

Since it’s been out a couple of years I don’t need to give spoiler alerts unless some readers are even further behind than me. Okay: here’s a spoiler alert.

As James T. Kirk gets busted down in rank for violating the prime directive to save Spock, he takes over the Enterprise when Admiral Pike is gunned down in a top-level Star Fleet meeting. Vowing revenge, he encounters Khan, the eponymous villain of the old series Wrath of Khan. As Admiral Marcus had made an alliance with Khan the parallels with the Bush family and Sadam Hussein became clear. And when Scotty finds a super starship on a moon of Jupiter, secretly developed by Star Fleet to go to war with the Klingons, more than a touch of the Black Ops came to mind. Here was a government that couldn’t be trusted and that didn’t trust its people to know its intentions. When Khan pilots this Black Ops starship into San Francisco, the shot of it falling out of the air so resembled classified military craft that I actually shuddered. The destruction was a parable of 9/11.

Throughout the movie there is a dialog of ethics. Is it right to kill a known criminal without trial? Is it permissible to start an unprovoked war? Does might make right? Khan, despite being evil, tells the truth. The movie disturbed me because I can’t remember the last time I could truly trust the government. I vote Democrat because they are the party that seem to do the least damage to the planet and actually care for the poor. I was born, however, after the Eisenhower administration. John F. Kennedy was assassinated after my first birthday. My reading since leaving college has convinced me that we will never get the full story. Star Trek, although set in the future, has always been a projection of the present day. Those few groaners of episodes from the late ‘60s that delved into popular culture proved that. As I watched the crew of the Enterprise battling an enemy under its own flag I realized little has changed in the final frontier.