Frozen Toothpaste

wickenden (ASA)

It can seem like there are hundreds of them. Those little phrases that tell you that you should make the most of today. Like, “Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.” Or “We’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.” Or “Live everyday as if it were your last.” Or “Tomorrow, you’ll be dead.” OK, admittedly the last one isn’t one you’ve heard before.

I think it’s odd that most of these sayings insist that today is only important if tomorrow you won’t be here and alive. As if, when you find yourself alive tomorrow, everything that was important about today will be unimportant. As if “the fierce urgency of now” is only fierce or urgent in the face of impending death.

Perhaps it’s not actually odd. It’s somewhat sensible: the so-often-ignored remarkableness of being alive is much easier to see if tomorrow we won’t have this so-often-ignored thing anymore. To quote Joni Mitchell, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” Perhaps it’s only when we the see the clear difference between being alive and being dead that we understand the unmistakable value in this thing called life.

And to quote — because this seems to be a topic much discussed in the literature — Marcel Proust wrote:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were suddenly threatened to die… Think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, our life hides from us, made invisible by our laziness, which certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

I think Proust, like all those other sayings and songs and phrases, makes a valuable point. And I suppose what I want to say is that I wish that it didn’t take the thought of our impending end to make us realize that every single day you wake up alive is truly an amazing day. Surely there may be some terrible things you’ll go through today, and tomorrow, and the next week, but you’re still alive. “It goes on.”

And so while I intimately understand why writers and poets so often bring up the thought of death, I wish we could learn to take note of life in itself. I’ve not said this as eloquently as I would like, but I’m just glad I got a day in which to say it. And I’ll leave you with Proust’s more eloquent — and somewhat ironic — elucidation of the problem with constantly valuing life only in the face of tomorrow’s death:

The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

The wars about which there is the least dissent, both contemporary and historical, are those which are judged to have been good, necessary, and just. And though there can be extensive debate against how much any war fits any or all of these categories, it’s hard to doubt that a war that is seen as good, just, and necessary is a “better” war than one that fit into none of those categories.

We can use Iraq as an example. Some would contend that America’s invasion of Iraq was none of the above. Not good, not necessary, not just. The vast consensus at the time, however, was that it was a good war, and if not a just war, at least necessitated by weapons of mass destruction.

Goodness in war is something judged by external moral absolutes. America’s mythical neoconservatives like to fight wars against evil. In such a black-and-white world, all wars waged by America are inherently good. Even if one doesn’t believe that America is always on the side of the good, there are some clear situation where we unquestionably wage wars on the side of the good. World War II, which is generally the most clear-cut war in history, saw the Allies fighting the good fight. It would be essentially impossible to define either the Nazis or the Japanese, both of whom believed they were racially superior and thus engaged in genocidal tactics, as much other than evil.

Necessity is perhaps more difficult to pin down than good. Realists, who believe in unwavering pragmatism in foreign policy, generally prefer to fight only the necessary wars. One can easily say that it is necessary to fight back when your territory has been invaded and your citizens are being killed. Leaving aside the Dalai Lama, who doubts the necessity of war for even self-defense, it’s generally acknowledged that a defensive war is a necessary war. More recently, it has also become recognized that in cases of genocide, war is necessary. It is with this belief that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia — ending the reign of the Khmer Rouge — was necessary, that United Nations intervention in Bosnia was necessitated, and NATO action in Kosovo was legitimate.

This, however, gets to the final and most difficult point. When is a war just? Some liberal institutionalists believe that a war is only just if it has the blessing of the biggest international body of all: the UN. In this view, only the intervention into Bosnia was just. Because NATO intervention into Kosovo didn’t come with United Nations assent that it was good and necessary, the war was unjust. Others would say that assent from any existing multilateral institutions can make a war just. Thus, intervention in Kosovo, because it was blessed by NATO, was more legitimate than intervention in Iraq, where assent only came from an ad-hoc “coalition of the willing.” As it was viewed at the time, Vietnam’s intervention into Cambodia was actually the least just of all of these; it was completely unilateral.

But most commentators now agree that Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia was if not just, at least good and necessary, and thus worthy of respect. Rarely is a war waged by anyone seen by the whole world is good, necessary, and just. In this respect, WWII is a widely recognized exception.

It should also be noted that a war that seems good and necessary, if not just, when it begins is not necessary seen as such when it ends (or in historical hindsight). It’s hard to deny that America’s involvement in Vietnam, beginning with Eisenhower and not ending until the presidency of Gerald Ford, was initially seen as good and necessary. Good because Communism was broadly seen in America and the western world as irredeemably evil, necessary because without it all of Asia would fall to the evil of Communism. Yet today — and in some quarters, at the start of the war — it’s recognized that it was neither good nor necessary. The Vietnamese may have embraced communism, but are widely seen to have been seeking only independence. And the string of dominoes theory — if one falls the rest will too — is widely recognized as both unrealistic and silly.

Thus, in hindsight, Vietnam is seen as neither good nor necessary (it was never widely seen as just). It is thus widely seen as one of America’s lowest moments and worst wars. Wars that were not good, and not necessary, and not just are usually and understandably sources of national shame.

And though one could reasonably argue that all wars are a shame, it’s hard to deny that without at least goodness and necessity, or justness and goodness, or justness and necessity, a war truly is a shame.

I recently stumbled upon a spoken track by the folk singer Harry Chapin called “My Grandfather,” and was pleasantly surprised by how much it resonated.

My grandfather was a painter. He died at age 88. He illustrated Robert Frost’s first two books of poetry. And he was looking at me and he said, “Harry, there’s two kinds of tired. There’s good tired and there’s bad tired.”

He said, “Ironically enough, bad tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people’s battles, you lived other people’s days, other people’s agendas, other people’s dreams, and when it’s all over there was very little you in there. And when you hit the hay at night somehow you toss and turn, you don’t settle easy.”

He said, “Good tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost. But you won’t even have to tell yourself, because you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days. And when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy. You sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say, ‘Take me away.’”

He said, “Harry, all my life I’ve wanted to be a painter and I’ve painted. God, I would have loved to have been more successful, but I’ve painted, and I’ve painted, and I am good tired, and they can take me away.”

Now if there is a process in your and my lives, in the insecurity that we have about a prior life or an afterlife, and God (I hope there is a God — if He does exist, He’s got a rather weird sense of humor…), but let’s just…

But if there is a process that will allow us to live our days, that will allow us that degree of equanimity towards the end, looking at that black implacable wall of death to allow us that degree of peace, that degree of non-fear, I want in!

Let me be clear from the outset: I think that The Story of Stuff, a web video starring Annie Leonard and aimed at raising awareness about the dangers of mindless consumption, is an admirable project with an even more admirable goal. And were I a few years younger I may have even felt it was important or inspiring. Today, I find it to be incredibly annoying.

The Story of Stuff makes the same errors that I find so vexing about environmentalism in general. Though most activists don’t like to admit it, activism is a field marred by unrealistic idealists who imagine that but for some tragic flaw the world would be an entirely different place. For most environmentalists that bogeyman is named “big business,” “corporations,” or “the government.” These forces are the reason people act in ways they shouldn’t, for it is the bogeyman who rapes the land, makes loads of junk that people neither need nor want, and then shoves that stuff down their throats. Soon after, he makes them throw that stuff away in the least responsible way and buy more of the same stuff they didn’t want in the first place.

This is a convenient and understandable story, but that’s doesn’t make it right, and that certainly doesn’t make me any more willing to tolerate it. It’s a message laced with helpless victimhood and painful pessimism that sees the world in total crisis.

And though you wouldn’t know it from watching The Story of Stuff, we are not in the middle of a hopeless crisis from which there is no way out. We are not idiot machines who’ve subverted our will to that of the bogeymen.

Surely the world’s got it’s fair share of problems. Global warming has still not been adequately addressed. There are places in the world where it is still acceptable to put workers in harm’s way working with hideously dangerous chemicals or working in terribly dangerous mines. Places where clear-cutting is accepted and slash-and-burn tolerated.

But I don’t see The Story of Stuff as the proper response to any other these problems. The deeply cynically video is more likely to make me pull my hair out than to make me an activist or “no impact man.”

Because I can’t manage to fit my problems with the video into a cohesive paragraphs, a few of my biggest gripes:

• The video’s presentation of the government/corporation relationship is comically insulting to both hardworking politicians and honest businessmen. This is not to say that all members of both groups fit that description, but I loathe when people go out of their way to deny the work of either. Showing the government polishing the shoes of a bloated “corporation” may be how you perceive reality, but it’s an immediate turn off to any and all that disagree.
• Not all collection of natural resources is done by clear cutting, strip mining, or general raping of the land. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a lot of it still is, but denying that some companies are working hard to be sustainable and responsible is an insult to both reality and those responsible stakeholders.
• Not everything about manufacturing is “toxic.” Make no mistake, I think there are plenty of dangerous chemicals in the things we produce, but you’re playing fast-and-loose with reality if you’re going to say that manufacturing is the simple practice of putting toxic chemicals onto stuff to produce toxic products.
• Why oh why are you bringing up George Bush? What relevance do his boneheaded proclamations have to do with anything?
• Americans in the past were not wiser and more earth-friendly by choice. We’ve not been made into mindless consumers by a shadowy cabal hell-bent on making people consume as much as they can. People like to have things. When they can have things cheaply, they’re likely to take that opportunity to have a lot of cheap things. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s human nature.

Mostly, I’m just disappointed by all of this. And it’s not just about The Story of Stuff either. Similarly egregious things are done everywhere in the “environmental movement.” Its default mode seems to be a deep pessimism coupled with a pervasive alarmism that stifles action.

There are big problems facing the world today. And that’s a great reason to offer a lot of practical things that people can do to cope with the broken system you see. But The Story of Stuff instead offers only one final minute packed with buzzwords that the average viewer can neither understand nor implement.

I dislike being so deeply critical of anything, but it’s the only way I know to express my deepest disappointment.

Emiliag (ASA)

A Bolivian province, Santa Cruz, held a referendum over the weekend. Unsurprisingly, voters in the oil-rich area supported greater autonomy — and keeping a greater portion of their oil revenue — from the central government. At least a few comments on the topic centered on the fact that Bolivia is an imagined community to which citizens feel only a weak allegiance. I, as you can see, felt compelled to say something about the topic.

It’s pretty had to argue against the fact that every nation is an illusion. The community of “Americans” is only as real as your belief in it. So too as the community of “the French,” “the Algerians,” “the Saudis,” “the Japanese,” or “the Mexicans.” It’s often forgotten that the history of “civilization” has been dedicated, with varying rapidity and skill, to creating cohesive nation-states. Slowly kingdoms sought to forge a coherent identity for their subject, and a sense of loyalty to far-away rulers that would otherwise be seen as strangers.

It’s not hard to understand that tribes are a simplified form of the modern nation state. One can easily imagine a group of 12 people getting together and deciding they’ll band together to assure for their mutual security and future. The nation-state is essentially this process writ large, and sometimes without the decision being agreed to by all parties.

Before France became a country with defined borders and a set identity, there were no French people. There were Parisians, Normans, Provencals, and Corsicans (to name only a few). It was an intentional project and to press upon them their identity not as regional or tribal, but national. Language is a powerful way to do this. All French speakers can, by virtue of sharing a language, see themselves as a coherent national community. Another popular way to forge national identity is war. Starting a conflict between two recently conceived nations is an easy way to consolidate their identities.

The United States prides itself on being unique in the nature of its illusion. We love to assert that we’re special because no Americans — with the exceptions of the Amerindians we willfully forget — have historical claim to this land. We don’t look the same, often don’t speak the same, and yet we’re all American. “The Great American Melting Pot,” is the School House Rock lyrics that leaps to mind.

We’re taught from grade school that regardless of our ethnic, racial, or personal history we’re Americans because we believe in and belong to the community of Americans. We’re part of “the people” because we chose to be, even if decades and generations ago.

And though this is an obvious statement that “Americans” are truly an illusory, imaginary group, we tend to forget it. To forget that French people weren’t always French. That Pakistanis weren’t Pakistanis until 60 years ago. That Bangladeshis weren’t Banglideshis until 50 years ago. That Eritrians weren’t Eritrians until 15 years ago.

By some estimates, it’s taken 5000 years to create the set of nations we know today. And the map still changes. Kosovo became a country not six months ago. All of these nations are illusions, based on historical flukes, choices, and random chance. And I, for one, hope that we never lose touch with how arbitrary these division are.