Extremism is Lighter than a Feather, Centrism is Heaver than Mountains
Maintaining an independent viewpoint takes a lot of work. You not only do you have to collect evidence to support your views; you have to evaluate the quality of that evidence and compare it to contrasting views. It is so much easier to take the party line and repeat the empty platitudes of the herd. Not looking at complex public issues and figures like two dimensional cartoons is a burden. Establishing a context for each issue in reference to its own merits instead of a prefabricated party line is like building a road through the wilderness instead of taking the freeway.
Former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower once said, "There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos." That might possibly be true on lonely roads that nobody ventures upon, but where there is a lot of traffic, dead things get ground up pretty quickly. It's the ditches to the left and right that tend to accumulate the corpses of ideas that don't stand a chance in traffic. With the advent of the Internet, we're seeing traffic in ideas that have long been bypassed by the major media and political groups.
The greatest risk associated with principled centrism is risk itself. One of the reasons I respect
Clifton Amsbury, even though I disagree with virtually everything he says, is that he fought in the Spanish Civil War as a matter of principle back when people were still arguing meaningfully about socialism. I write in support of
BlogIran, and I live in terror of the day they are going to call me and ask me to go and help over there. I just got married, my finances are not the strongest, I'm getting old, and I will never be able to look Clifton or myself in the eye if I don't go when there is a reasonable chance that my participation in rebuilding Iran will help.
The great thing about current wave of extremisms is that they no longer require you to work to make something real; just send a check or beg for money, repeat the party line, or show up at a rally and be mediagenic. Doing something real means taking risks; every time I write that Iran should be free, I do so accepting the risk that somebody wanting to be free is going to actually ask me to do something real. It would be so much easier to advocate policies that require nothing real from me.
This inextricably brings me to suicide, which is the ultimate denial of reality. There is no real consequence for suicide bombers, which is why they are risking exactly nothing. By seeking rewards in the next world, they are abandoning their responsibilities in this one. Death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than mountains. The suicidal do not accept their duty to their fellows. In exactly the same way, if not the same sanguinary result, people who abandon their political identity to the will of the cause do not accept their personal responsibility to be independently aware. This is profoundly shown in the repetition of irrelevant objections to meaningful action. The endless quibbling of the politically correct is a ritual mortification of intellect in avoidance of the duty to confront real change.
(Thanks to
Cara Remal for the inspiration.)
Kicking Michael's Hiney!
Been there, done that! I agree that I need to see more of the world, though.
create your own visited country map
or
write about it on the open travel guide
I am OK with the level of travel I've accomplished in the US. Although one of my cousins lives in a state I haven't visited yet.
create your own visited states map
or
write about it on the open travel guide
TrackBack for Michael
Enforcing the Stench of Hypocrisy
Lieutenant Macala held it together until after we finished the boarding. The moment we were all onboard the boat and had cast off, he leaned over the far side and let fly a heroic technicolor yawn. Mr. Macala had shown fortitude, not letting the smugglers see him hurl. Considering the time it took to get the paperwork cleared through all the international agencies to bust these smugglers, his was a fairly heroic struggle; although not the kind of thing you get medals for.
The smuggler's ship was a small one, but it had plenty of oil storage (bunkers). That was the whole point; get to Haiti with a small or no cargo of approved goods and full bunkers, then leave with just enough fuel to make it to the next open port, and pocket $20+ a gallon of fuel delivered. Due to the laws of supply and demand, petroleum was selling for $40 a gallon on the streets of Port au Prince. Even a dinky ship like this could pay for itself in one run.
Our task was to enforce UN sanctions on the outlaw government of Haiti. The standing outlaw government of Haiti was military in nature. The ousted government was headed by a machete wielding ex-priest who advocated managing dissent by beating opponents unconscious and then burning them alive in gasoline soaked tires. We enforced the sanctions by making sure that the vessels caught smuggling were refused entry on their next run…unless the ship had changed owners. Ship brokerages were doing tremendous business cycling titles on marginal vessels that year; I wonder if anybody tracks the economic impact on the fig leaf industry of international sanctions? We were effectively writing traffic tickets to impose international will; this was also not the kind of thing you get medals for.
Mr. Macala was a maverick ex-enlisted who really could hang; what put him over the edge was the goat. I pride myself on my openness to international cuisine, but even I draw the line at four-day-old fly-blown goat rotting in the sun. There it was, sitting on top of the wheelhouse, stinking up the ship. Nevertheless, this crew's rations were much better than what the Haitians ashore got to eat. At various levels of covert trade, a fair amount of money was changing hands; but the Haitian crew of this ship wasn't getting much of it, and our boarding party wasn't going to stop any of it. All we were doing was imposing more severe poverty on the most severely impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere. Food and chivalry were both in short supply in these waters in the spring of 1994, but we had plenty of multilateralism.
The blockade of Haiti smelled as bad as the goat. We let through just about anything resembling aid provided by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), but blocked most things resembling trade. The previous year we had been looking for potential weapons going to Iraq. This year we were looking for unauthorized poverty relief. Did I mention that medals were in short supply on this station?
I don't like to think about the boarding's I did off Haiti. I got to serve with some great folks on the boarding team, but we knew we weren't averting a threat to our nation and we had the experience of doing so. The previous year we had controlled the access to one of the world's key trade routes, in 1994 we were choking trade in a backwater. I suppose that's what put me off of multilateralism, NGO's, and the UN. That and the goat.
