Impersonal Warfare

In my last post I talked about sneering and mistrust as the natural way for a soldier to deal with the reality of his work. The vast majority of modern wars (with significant exceptions) are matters of masses of anonymous men seeking out and killing masses of other anonymous men. That, at least, is how it seems from the point of view of those who run the wars, and many of the people who prosecute those wars. This too, is a psychological defense mechanism. Wiping out a blip on a computer screen or a little green shape on the drone’s camera is such an impersonal thing, which, I firmly believe, is the real reason for the modern emphasis on super-technology in war. It is not because of the practical effectiveness (it is, on the whole, immensely impractical) but because of the psychological leverage it gives us.

Things are not so sterile for the front line soldier. Faced with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, a yelling voice, and the sensory reality of sweat and blood on the body, the front line soldier cannot hide behind computers. Instead he has to resort to a more primitive method of psychological distancing. He has to convince himself that the enemy is somehow less than he is. Anything can be used as leverage for this “othering” of the enemy. Skin color is an old favorite, but uniforms will do. Language is a solid choice, carrying as it does connotations of a whole alien culture. Specific habits of the enemy, can be subtle proof of inferiority. (Iraqis usually squat instead of sitting to answer the call of nature. Therefore we are superior to them.) Real or imagined wrongs done by the enemy to people I somehow identify with are the best leverage of all, because it provides not merely a psychological but as pseudo-moral justification for violence. It is justice, meted out by the soldier. This is also a useful handle for demonizing anyone on our side who proposes a more moderate course.

The end result, the goal and object of this process, is the othering, the de-humanization, the objectifying of the enemy, in order to make him easier to kill. Sometimes this rhetoric is at least subjectively sincere. The person spouting it really believes it. More often I suspect it is a bastardized attempt to cover up the psychological damage of hating another person. The louder the rhetoric, the more I suspect it is only skin deep. The really dangerous person is the one who believes it so completely he doesn’t feel like it needs to be explained.

This is a brief, rough sketch of a reaction to the impersonal violence of modern warfare (personal violence is something else entirely. It is the natural refuge of men who are no more than cogs (albeit willing cogs) in a machine that cares little more for them than for the people it wields them against. (This should not be understood as an indictment against impersonal government. That should be discussed separately, but after a certain point, all human government has to be impersonal. It’s part of the nature of government.)

But as I said, I believe there is another way, although it is not open to most people. I’ll get to it in another post.

It's All Obama's Fault

Thursday morning I went for a run. It was still dark out, but my plan was to do 50 minutes total along the sidewalk. Now that the snow has melted I’ve discovered that the sidewalk runs straight north almost to the Puget Sound. It’s mostly downhill on the way out, and then, of course, uphill on the way back. I ended up running only about 48 minutes because of it. I turned around at 24 minutes, expecting it to take me longer to get back since I would be running uphill most of the way. Instead, to my delighted surprise, I actually ran almost exactly the same speed on the way back making it in at 48 minutes. Close enough. I let myself off the extra two minutes for good behavior. Someday I’ll have to drive the route to see how far it was.


However, this blog concerns something that happened in the first ten minutes of the run. As I said, it was still dark out, and although the sidewalk is pretty good, there was one place where one of the segments had heaved up out of the ground, probably from a tree root, and it was sticking up about three inches higher than its neighbor. My left toe caught that lip in the dark and down I went, knees, heal of the hand, forearm and shoulders, a very awkward looking shoulder roll back to my feet and I kept moving. I was cranking under my breath, but I was still going. The heels of my hands were the most painful parts at the time, but I could tell my knees had been pretty banged up. At any rate, it was too dark to examine them, and I didn’t want to slow down so I pushed on and forgot all about it until I got back to my apartment. Unlocking my door, standing on the well-lit landing, I finally looked down at my legs and saw this:

It turns out I did take some skin off.

Of course it’s always a mistake to judge the severity of a wound by the amount of blood (and that isn’t even a lot of blood). If there is a lot of sweat, it dilutes the blood and makes it flow further and faster than it otherwise would, so even a little bit of blood can cover a lot of area. I washed these and the other abrasions off pretty thoroughly when I showered, and then ignored them.

But I realized, it’s all Obama’s fault.

Well, not Obama exactly, but it is the government’s fault, and he is the head of the government so we’ll blame him. Does Washington (D.C.) not care about its people? They should know that sidewalks with cracks in them are hazardous. They should know that running is hazardous. People get injured like that in countless numbers every year. Why isn’t Congress doing something to mitigate that? Like mandating knee and elbow pads for runners, or providing everyone with free head lamps, or outlawing running during hours of darkness?

I mean, if this administration can’t protect me from the consequences of my own choices, what good is it?