What is War?

There is a book which most people my age have read - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. For years I have loved his work, but never got around to reading the one book of his which is most assigned in high school literature classes. I bought a copy of Slaughterhouse Five a few months ago and let it sit on my bookshelf asking to be read. Finally this week I picked it up.

I have always loved Vonnegut's take on life. In fact I often choose him as the one dead celebrity I would have liked most to meet in my lifetime. There are many reasons I suppose, but mostly it was his recognition of our common humanity and the collective stupidity that is bound to destroy it. The real beauty however is in Vonnegut's ability to describe events outside the Western paradigm (I doubt he would ever have used "Western paradigm" in his writing. It is much too elitist).

In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time at some point during World War II. Throughout the novel he slips lucidly from one moment in life to another and back again (and so on and so forth). At one point Billy is watching a World War II movie on television and time begins to reverse, making war to seem something totally alien to us.

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."

Answer yourself this question - what is war? The obvious answer is that war is a disease that affects humans in which opposing factions go crazy and attempt to kill the other side off before its "enemies" can do the same. The key to winning is to be consistently prepared for a bout of insanity. To do so, powerful people seek out more power by spending money on additional weapons instead of food or other things for the less powerful. This is called security.

Imagine war as depicted in this excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five. Imagine if war was constructive rather than destructive. I would imagine mankind would be much farther along if it weren't so concerned with destroying things.

Antoctopus

So I've committed myself to a road trip next summer.  Seeing the country has always been something I wanted to do, and it looks like next summer following graduation I will finally be able to do it.  This particular trip was the brain child of Colin and I, and we have come up with a handful of "musts" for the trip:

1. We have to structure where we go around places we can find to stay - This is of course simply for practical reasons.  The two of us know people here and there and I think we can map out a course that will provide us with as much free lodging as possible.  

2. We have to make sure we stop at certain locales - If we're going to do this we have to see the Grand Canyon and things like that.

3. Outside of the two previous guidelines, there cannot be any plan - A big part of this trip for me is to break out of the monotonous routine of everyday life.  I've been insistent that we structure the trip as minimally as we can.  Finding places to stay is just a smart thing to do, and making sure we see certain things is just a way of making the most out of the opportunity, but I am not willing to set any guidelines outside that.  If we decide that we want to spend a week somewhere after arriving, we can do that, because there is no next destination to get to.

So far we have places to stay in the following cities/areas:

-Rochester, NY

-Twin cities, MN

-Anchorage, AK

-Portland, OR

-Washington

-San Francisco

-Austin, TX

-Washington DC

Needless to say we need to add a lot more places to this list, but it's not bad considering the trip is about a year off...

Nostalgia

1:03 on a Saturday afternoon and I'm still in bed.  I suppose if anyone asks I can blame it on a hangover, but that would be dishonest seeing as how I only had two drinks at the bar last night.  Maybe a better way to put it would just be a total lack of motivation to do anything.  Or maybe it's because I can't help but dwell on the past.

I learned yesterday that other animals endure stress the same way we do, but once whatever it is that is stressing them has gone, they simply let it go.  For this, I am jealous of them.  

My whole outlook on life is based on what has happened and how it has affected me, and not what will happen and how I will affect things.  I dwell, I ruminate, I linger, and it keeps me from doing what I want to do and being who I want to be.  Often times my lingering just leaves me depressed and I'm no fun to be around.  I'm sure anyone that reads this (if anyone reads this) who knows me can attest to this point.  

That being said, I do not think that having a full understanding of the past is such a bad thing.  Yes, the bad things that have happened have simply happened and there is nothing to do to change that fact at this point, but I think that in order to move forward you have to know where you came from.  Everything in life moves you to where you are.  I guess my life experiences have led me to be a 21 year old college student spending his one day off a week in bed writing useless blogs.  I have been thinking a lot about this rut or whatever it is that I've been in recently, and I think what I need more than anything is to just get away from it all.

I don't know where to go, or for how long, but I feel like I need my "Walden" experience.  This is probably useless because I'm sure as soon as I got up into the mountains or wherever I want to go I would get homesick.  

If anyone has a cure-all for this shit let me know

Dump your Blackberry

I have come to realize how impersonal and mechanical our society has become. The daily interchanges we share with each other are increasingly had through some form of technology, and in the fleetingly rare case that we can actually interact face to face there is some sort of technology that interferes. This isn't to say that the development of new technologies and better communications is a bad thing, but it is certainly inhibiting the ways in which people have communicated for millennia.

For instance, at work, I have found that as more and more people get Blackberries, people in any form of service industry are treated more and more like they are part of a machine. You simply walk up to the counter and tell the thing behind it what you want and after paying and waiting a few moments, you are on your way. And thanks to your Blackberry, you have been emailing, texting, web browsing, etc. all along. The "hello, how are you?" routine is becoming increasingly rare.

There is more to this than just the loss of face-to-face interaction and curtosy. The more we allow each other to exist solely through various technological mediums, the less likely we are to maintain the image of the humanity of others. People stop becoming people and just become names stored in hard drives. This disconnect doesn't allow us to see ourselves in others because we are real, and they are simply data arranged in ways that represents what is supposedly a person on the other end. When we forget this basic tennant, we submit our own humanity.

The human experience has and always will be a social one. Without each other our species would have never survived. It took groups of people to hunt game and gather nuts and berries before we figured out how to farm. And once the aggricultural revolution came about, it took groups of farmers to provide for a society. The induction of the written record has allowed scientists to work hand in hand with their predecesors in history despite living centuries apart. In essence, we rely on one another for our survival and for social progress. Now that we have reached a point where technology is erasing our sense of others and simply focusing our concerns on ourselves, what will become of our society?

Thankfully, another aspect of humanity is that people are capable of adapting to change. So will the loss of interpersonal interaction lead to humanity's downfall? I doubt it. I would like to think that this is some sort of intermediate stage and that in the future, further developments in technology will bring people back together.

...or maybe I'm just crazy.

And yes, I realize the irony in writing all this on a blog, while checking my email, texts, and Facebook.

You should read this

It was suggested to me that I start a blog, and like the rest of us, I am highly susceptible to suggestive thinking. I have no idea what purpose this will serve, or what I will write here. Chances are it will simply be a collection of stream of consciousness writings. So let me apologize in advance to any of you that stumble across this thing for subjecting you to my various rants, mostly political.

So where to begin? Well I'll start by explaining the title. The line comes from Tool's Jambi. I thought it worked in that blogs are just a means to project your opinions onto others. And we never think we are wrong in our opinions, do we? So this blog will serve as my mountain upon which I give my sermons or something like that. It's not that I am preachy, although I can be, but sometimes blogs only serve to feed the ego (I will try to avoid this).

Like I said, this blog is a manifestation of suggestive thinking. Suggestive thinking is usually harmless (case in point: this blog), but it can also be disastrous. Let's pretend that you are a factory worker in some state in the Southwest. You work for a large multinational corporation which has decided that in order to save money its going to be moving the job you do over to Southeast Asia because the labor is so cheap. So you are laid off. "What the fuck?!" (that's you talking). You're pissed but you don't know who to be angry at because after all, the company did give you and your family pretty good benefits for a while there and you were able to buy your house and send your kids to school because of it. Nearby, there is a politician who really wants your vote. He feels for you, man, he really does. So he comes to your town and holds a rally and says to you, and others like you, that the reason you are out of work is because those damn illegals are crossing over the border and stealing everyone's jobs. "Hell yeah," you say.

And so you buy into a lie that helps you channel your frustration at something tangible. The politician gets elected. Everyone is happy right? Well except for the fact that there are lots of people buying into this and there has been a significant rise in anti-immigration violence in the U.S.

So suggestive thinking can either lead to blog creation or social unrest.

It's amazing to me how easily people are swayed in their daily lives, and how unaware they are that they are being swayed. As a personal example, I work in a cafe that sells mass-produced coffee and food filled with corn syrup, enriched flours, and hydrogenated this and that. What never ceases to amaze me is how people will order whatever it is that is on the back menu boards. On the back wall there is a three-part menu and six pictures of various items for sale. I figured out that between the various food and drink options there are literally hundreds of thousands of combinations people could order (if you want to count things like regular vs. decaf as a discernible difference), and yet most people will order whatever the pictures tell them to order. And once a month when all those posters change, so too do the popular orders.

Sure it's not like people are being duped into buying things they necessarily don't want, but if people are this willing to allow outside influences to dictate the flow of their daily lives, what are they willing to decide for themselves?

You should buy a peppermint mocha latte and a classic coffee cake.

You should blame the illegal immigrant for taking the job that your company actually just moved overseas to save money.

You should agree that Iraq is a threat because they have weapons of mass destruction.

You should get an iPod, everyone else has.

You should support Israel in her search for peace because she is our ally dammit!

And so it goes...