Hoist on our own petard

I've always liked that line. First off, it's Shakespeare, and Shakespeare pretty much rocks. And not only is it Shakespeare, but it's Hamlet, and Hamlet is the model, I think, for our age. What, you think self-doubting heroes who bumble their way to glorious death are just everywhere in classic literature? Were there no Hamlet, there would be no Holden Caulfield.

I could be wrong about that, of course.

Oddly enough, my whole "I could be wrong" meme developed when I wrote an English literature paper arguing that, umm, Hamlet was a comedy. Long story, I'll tell you later. The professor was not overly impressed with my arguments.

But back to being hoist on our own petard.

I've opposed our current Mesopotamian adventure since before it kicked off. I have watched with shock and horror as one bad decision after another was taken. It has been like watching a train wreck, or maybe General Elphinstone in the First Anglo-Afghan War. I used to play a game called "Which Decision Really Was Fatal" for Elphinstone's command. But I digress.

You know, if this had all happened say a century ago, in 1903, as Operation Mesopotamian Freedom----it would have been a lot easier. First, of course, there's what I call the "Hillaire Belloc Rule." (The difference is that we have got/the Maxim gun, and they have not.) But also---and this is what gets me to thinking of petards----America has been the prime mover behind a paradigmatic shift in how the world thinks about itself.

Today, even the most repressive regimes adorn themselves with the trappings of democracy and self-determination. (The old gag line about the more representative adjectives in the formal state title the more repressive the regime remains true, witness the DPRK. Not merely democratic, not merely a republic, but a people's republic at that!) Why do they do that? Well, it's our paradigm. It's what we do.

And some of that, I think, a lot of it actually, is due to America. As much as I loathe Woodrow Wilson (pestilence be upon him), it's hard to overlook the Fourteen Points as a revolutionary document. All of a sudden, we committed--at least for the record---to considering the good of the populations we ruled, and to open covenants openly arrived at. From Wilson and the League of Nations to FDR and the United Nations, from the Nuremberg trials to the NATO charter, we have committed---at least for the record---to abjuring war as an instrument of national policy, we have committed to negotiating, to appealing to the international community, to sitting down with a good pot of joe and talking out our differences.

Why, the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO's charter, only listed two times when the use of force was authorized, those being the event of an attack upon a member state, and pursuant to authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations! (Yes, there was also another Clinton-Serb Corollary that exists de facto if not de jure.)

"Because we can," in other words, is no longer a good enough excuse.

So here we are, hoist on our own petard. We sold the world on the commitment (at least for the record) to human rights and international law, and stripped away a lot of the "wonderful toys" (to quote Jack Nicholson's Joker) that sovereign states used to enjoy. In 1903 the limits on naked colonial power were only beginning to form, as the British discovered in South Africa against the Boers. We---well, the USG---could have stormed into Baghdad in a perfect orgy of "Krag-based rehabilitation" and no one would have said boo. Gunboat diplomacy was still not only the rage, it was still regarded as legitimate. This hearts and minds nonsense didn't play, back in the day.

(Quick note: I'm just saying "hearts and minds nonsense"---I don't think its nonsense at all. I'm pretty much in favor of human rights myself, and I think that if you're going to be running a counterinsurgency hearts and minds is the very, umm, heart of the matter. But it's fun to say hearts and minds nonsense, and so I did.)

Of course, at the time that we really ginned up our radical, Arthurian paradigm, the USG played a role on the world stage entire orders of magnitude more restrained. When we were talking up limits on aggressive war, we didn't have, so to speak, so many chips in the game.

I don't think we, as Americans, even realize what a radical world we inhabit, our world, our bubble of America. We are fat because we have won. Mankind is hardwired for a Hobbesian existence, nasty brutish and short. The Lord's Prayer begins "Give us this day our daily bread" which breaks out to "Please, God, let me feed my family today." We've beaten that, here in America. I suppose you can starve in America, but you kind of have to work at it. I remember reading Michener's Poland, and in the middle ages some seneschal or other fancy word for deputy assistant thug to the local gang boss was ecstatic because, for Christmas, his liege gave him some hog scraps. Meat!

People who can afford to eat will eat a lot, because that's how we're wired---we evolved (whether socially or genetically or both or neither) knowing that starvation, famine and death by hunger were facts of life, and the banana you turn your nose up at today might be the last food you will ever see. Ever. Before you starve to death. So you don't turn your nose up at bananas.

(Of course, if you can substitute a nice juicy fat medium rare ribeye for that banana, even better.)

Just as we're wired to gorge on food, we're wired to brutally hit back at those what hits us. We are wired for tribal violence, and deep down we all know that that other tribe? They're not really human. Not, you know, not like us. The wogs start at Calais, and in the 19th century the idea that the Irish were white was laughable---they were subhuman, apelike man-things, and Thomas Nast drew the cartoons to prove it.

This belief that the other guy really is human, as human as you and me, that's something new. (I think it's a pretty good idea, myself.) Whether based on the Christian revelation that all men are children of God, or on some generalized idea of equality springing from precepts of pure reason, civilization is a thin cloak we wear against the naked savagery of the "Real World." Panic us, anger us, rouse us, challenge our beliefs or our faiths---we yearn to lash out.

If you shoot my dog, I'm gonna kill your cat, just the unspoken rules of rap, says Jay-Z.

If he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue, says Sean Connery in The Untouchables.

Well, America has been able to feed itself amply since at least 1945, and we're still getting fat, because we can. And America has been a larger player on the world stage since at least 1945, and we're still playing by the old rules, or trying to, trapped between paradigms, full of pious and (in my opinion) sincere beliefs about the brotherhood of man, while the monster lurks within, raging to vent its bloodlust in all the old glories of slaughter, rape, уничтожение чужих (the destruction of the other).

Heinlein said we were killer apes, and I think he was right. Heinlein was as far as I can tell a pretty staunch atheist (rather, one might say, like Christopher Hitchens, except that I think Heinlien would have kicked Hitchens' butt on general principles). To him, maybe, this human rights business might have seemed as ridiculous a fad as the Dutch passion for tulips (the one that almost destroyed their economy, I mean). As a libertarian and a Christian, I have all kinds of reasons to approve of the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. I don't think we're just killer apes, in other words.

I think we are, like the blues, a mixture of the sacred and the profane, endowed by our Creator with not only souls that strive, however imperfectly, to be Godly, but also with reason, with which we can strive, however imperfectly, to find a better way of doing things.

And I think, in my heart of hearts, that the radical experiment that is (or was) America has done much to better mankind, and I'm not denigrating little things like the "Green Revolution" or transistors but mostly I'm talking about ideas. I really do think that. God made us all, and He gave us faith and reason. But, Lord, it can be a hard row to hoe. It is hard to be Christ-like, we are all flawed, fallen, fallible and hopefully forgiven. It is hard to overcome the savage alpha predator instincts hard wired into us by evolution. We know we should, of course . . . . And I think, in my heart of hearts, that we have been hoist by our own petard.

I try not to judge us (yes, me too) too harshly. I think we have been trapped between paradigms, that we have given in to our sinful nature, that we have fallen short of our goal---but it doesn't mean we can stop trying.