Sacred Trust

 Even by the standards of the always-horrendous war in the Middle East, which has consumed the region for the past year, there was something particularly gruesome—that sticks in the memory—about the attack using exploding pagers and walkie-talkies this week in Lebanon. Imagine these micro-explosions suddenly going off around you, all over the country, and having no idea what was causing them or how to avoid them. My heart broke upon reading the stories of people unplugging TVs and computers from their walls, because they simply had no idea what might go up in flames next. 

I get that Hezbollah officials are a legitimate military target. They are engaged in active hostilities against Israel, launching frequent attacks that have internally displaced thousands of civilians from the country's north. But the "exploding pager" tactic was almost certain to sweep in countless innocent people who had nothing to do with the militant group and its activities. It is the essence of an indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, taking insufficient care to protect noncombatants. The New York Times tells one story of a nine-year-old girl who picked up her father's pager when it beeped, in order to bring it to him. It exploded in her hand, killing her. 

The Ethics of Deterrence

 Well here we are again: once more living amidst the "chafe and jar/ Of nuclear war," as Robert Lowell put it in the early 1960s. Our moment of peril might not be quite as extreme as his—but it could certainly escalate to a similar fever pitch, depending on the actions of the various governments involved. Lowell even wrote that the rumors of nuclear confrontation in his era had lasted "All autumn"—and so too, we are experiencing another nuclear fall.  

I'm referring to Putin's recent response to the possibility that the U.S. and the UK may approve the Ukrainian use of long-range weapons to fire on the interior of Russia. Putin expressly declared that he would consider this an act of war by the NATO powers. And while he didn't mention nuclear weapons specifically, the implication was clear: he was reminding the British and American authorities that they were confronting a nuclear-armed power. 

Musical Banks

 I was reading Samuel Butler's Erewhon this week, and came to the section of the protagonist's travels in which his Erewhonian hosts conduct him to a mysterious building called the "Musical Bank." The building—an imposing and beautifully-wrought edifice, with stained-glass windows—is one for which all the inhabitants of Erewhon profess the highest esteem. They all become offended if anyone insults these institutions in their presence. They all claim to aspire to want to attend these buildings regularly. 

And yet, the narrator notices, they seldom actually deposit their money in these banks. The inhabitants of Erewhon, he observes, actually use a system of dual-currency. One currency—the hard one—is what they employ for their daily transactions. It is the only one in which they will accept real payment in ordinary economic life. The second currency—which the narrator describes as a kind of "toy money," is that which they deposit in the Musical Banks. It does not appear to be good for anything else. 

Take Defeat

 Look, we're all nervous about this upcoming presidential debate. Not so much because we fear Harris would do a bad job. But just because: we all remember what happened the last time around. We are all still traumatized from Biden's performance in July. That debate, as we all recall, was so abysmal that it utterly reshaped the election. It forced Biden to end his candidacy. In short, it marked his defeat. And so, it was a day that reminded us all that very bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes, that is, the bad guys win the round. 

I was thinking yesterday in this regard about the triumph of evil and mediocrity in the world: how the J.D. Vances of the world succeed where better people fail. I was reminded of a line from Yeats, in which he advises the noble failure to simply accept obscurity as the price of having kept their honor. "Be secret and exult," he bids them. And when I went back to look up the poem in full, I was struck by how perfectly it described the entire experience of that first July debate. Indeed, it could have been written to console Biden in the failure of his election hopes.

A Pot of Sack

 How fortunate is our generation that we have the first intellectual vice presidential candidate in many a year! Of course, that venerable term does not mean all it once did. In yesteryear, it connoted a certain wide range of reading and broad exposure to many ideas. Now, when we say "intellectual," we mostly appear to mean that someone has read a few blogs, and come away with one idea, which they have since held on to like a vise. 

Today's intelligentsia, after all, consists of people who learned just enough philosophy in undergrad to label themselves "effective altruists," and then to move, by a circuitous path, from this belief to a worship of a superpowerful computerized deity called "The Singularity," and then to move from that, by a path still more circuitous, to becoming fascists. 

Listen, Biedermann!

 It will be very hard to explain to future generations why, in the democratic West, there was still so much debate—as late as 2024—as to Vladimir Putin's motives in Eastern Europe. For more than a decade, we've watched him hive off little pieces of all his neighbors, one by one, under a variety of pretexts. Then, fulfilling everyone's direst and seemingly most hyperbolic predictions, he one day up and invaded one of them outright. If anyone was still protesting in January 2022 that Putin had no ambitions beyond settling a variety of ambiguous territorial disputes at his borders, one would have thought that the events of the next month would have shut them up. But no... the same people are still at it; still making the same case!

The equivalent here with regard to domestic politics would be January 6. Before that fateful day in 2021, people might have said, "Oh, Trump will probably accept the results of the election. All these liberals saying he wants to be a dictator are overstating the case. They are engaged in typical partisan exaggeration." And these voices would have had precedent on their side. After all, all the previous presidents, no matter how bombastic or demagogic, had accepted the results of the democratic process. They might have huffed and puffed, but they stepped aside in the end. So people were entitled to predict that Trump would do the same. Yet, January 6 should have settled that debate once and for all.