Greg Proffit Writing

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  • Which Do You Prefer?

    Every person, myriad times throughout each day makes decisions about what to say or do from the menu of options available to them at the time of the choice. 

    This bears unpacking a bit. You are reading this right now. You could have chosen to do something else instead. But reading this showed up on the menu of choices available to you and you chose to do so. This process was in play before you knew about it, and it will continue now that you do know about it. 

    Not all options are available to choose at all times. Neither of us can fly to the moon, or even across the room under our own power, for instance, even if we desired to do so. And, to be certain, there is a catalogue of historical debate amongst philosophers and behaviorists over whether or not any of us is truly free when we choose any action. That is the age-old debate over ”free-will” vs. determinism. I am unqualified to dive too deeply into those waters, though I have taken a swim in them from time to time.

    I’m writing to bring attention to the fact that when we act as if we are free to choose, there is something driving and impelling those choices. That something I will call ”preference”. There are two or more options available on the menu; and the one we choose is the one we prefer. How could it be otherwise? 

    I’m writing this now, at this moment, rather than doom-scrolling through Twitter, crawling back into a warm bed, going for a walk in thirty degree drizzle, reading news, turning on the television, etc. I’m writing because it is what I prefer to be doing with this slot of time, energy, and attention more than anything else I could be doing. You are doing the same thing.

    It is important to note that preference does not equal desire. I have desires that I may actually prefer more than my current choice, but at the time of my choosing they were not on the available menu. I desire to be walking a secluded beach with my girlfriend in seventy degree weather with a light breeze in our hair, watching the sun come up over the ocean. But that is not on this morning’s menu. I’m sure you have desires like that.

    Our choices are driven by our preferences. This phenomenon is a fact we experience over and over. This is what makes the concept of free will feel true. Seen in that light, no one can take away another’s free will, because there is no power that can be exerted to take away another’s preference as long as more than one choice is available. You may severely limit the menu of options available to an individual. You may wickedly create for them a reality that is a constant choice between the lesser of two evils. But you cannot take away their ability to choose what they prefer from the remaining options.

    This realization has helped me interpret both my own choices and behaviors as well as those of  others. Watch what someone does or refuses to do. Listen to what they say or refuse to say. You are seeing the external manifestations of their internal preferences, moment by moment, event by event, day by day.

    I am overweight because on the whole, I prefer it to the effort and attentiveness that is necessary to lose the extra pounds. I work for my self as a commissioned salesman, with all of its accompanying risks, because I prefer it to a rigid schedule and losing autonomy in my workday.

    The example of overweight-ness is illustrative of the fact that preferential choices happen in the moment. They are myopic. They are not contemplative of the long game, unless…unless you put that contemplation on the menu. Because to be sure, I prefer health to obesity, in general. I prefer activity to lethargy, in general. I prefer self-control to sloth or gluttony, in principle. 

    A key then to making better choices, is to pick those which will be a balance of preferred outcomes both in the present and into the future.

  • Cliffhangers Galore!

    What a start to the new year, huh? Last week was momentous, and this week and the next promise more of the same.

    The country is reeling from an attempted insurrection on Wednesday, January 6th, incited by the President himself against the Legislative branch of the United States government and inside of the Unites States capital building where the Legislature was engaged in the pro forma certification of the electoral college votes from the states. Terrorist rioters roamed the halls chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and searching for Nancy Pelosi by name.

    The resultant aftermath of analysis and hand-wringing has been must-see TV of real-time history.

    There are many unknowns this morning:

    Will Mike Pence do the right thing and invoke the 25th Amendment?

    If done, will half of the remaining cabinet go along?

    Will Trump pardon himself, his allies, his children, his cronies, the participants in Wednesday’s coup attempt while he can?

    Will the House, under Nancy Pelosi’s speakership adopt and pass Articles of Impeachment?

    Will the House adopt provisions under Article 14 to remove seditious representatives?

    Will the Senate adopt provision under Article 14 against Senators Cruz and Hawley, possibly others?

    Will the Senate convict if the House passes Articles of Impeachment?

    Is there enough time left to do any of the above to remove Trump before the January 20th Inauguration date?

    How many more Trump staffers and cabinet members will resign this week?

    If you tried to write this many storylines and cliffhangers into a fictional television series, you’d be laughed out of the writer’s union.

    But here we are. Keep that seat belt fastened. The captain has not turned off the seat-belt sign.

  • I Can’t Figure Out If It’s The End or Beginning?

    This kind of thing doesn’t happen here…right?

    Yesterday, January 6th, 2021 will undoubtedly go down in history as either one of America’s darkest days or as the precursor to the end of American Democracy. 

    Most Americans, including myself, having grown up here, have also grown accustomed to a cultural bubble from which we look out at the world with a kind of smugness. We may feel ourselves blessed, or we may believe we have an exceptionalism, but we’ve felt an immunity to the kinds of upheaval that we’ve witnessed in other countries and among other cultures. 

    That smugness is gone. The storming of the Capital will be indelibly etched on the minds of all of us who sat watching it in sickening horror and revulsion. For me, it echoed the feelings of helplessness and disbelief of 9-11. 

    Yesterday showed that some former-Americans, former brothers and sisters in a shared national family, have been radicalized into something else entirely. That horde has been fed on lies and conspiracy theories. They ingested and internalized them. And yesterday they received marching orders from the President of the United States himself, Donald J. Trump, to ”go to the Capital”. With a religious-military fidelity to his command, they acted to fight back and retake ”their country”. He told them weakness wouldn’t get the job done. They rewarded his belief in them with a ”righteous” show of force. 

    If you poke your head out of the American cultural bubble, and take off the nationalistic blinders, it is entirely predictable that yesterday’s insurrection was a possibility. We have all been too naive to think this couldn’t have happened here. We don’t build madrassas in the US. It turns out we didn’t need them. Rather, we have FOX, and OAN, twitter, and facebook. 

    Politicians obviously believe in the idea that they can say things to their followers that the followers will believe. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the politician himself believes it, only that it will be beneficial to the politician to get the follower to believe it. 

    When a politician preys upon a certain type of individual who may not be the most intellectual, or may not have learned critical thinking skills, or developed the power of healthy skepticism, the politician is treating that kind of follower like one does who trains an attack dog. The politician is conditioning and controlling the follower with the promise a certain type of reward in return for a predictable behavior and response. 

    Ideologues, demagogues, religious ”prophets”, and con-men have used these techniques to train and control their adherents and ”marks” for centuries. Rarely so in America.

    The stormers of the Capital, came to Washington, DC at the behest of their leader, Donald Trump, to prevent the ”theft” of an election he has repeatedly claimed to have been ”stolen from him” and has told them was ”stolen from them”. Many came in para-military garb. Many came armed with weapons that included axe handles, hockey sticks, batons, pistols, and pipe bombs. 

    They came with flags bearing the name of their Leader, and with flags bearing the symbols of their political ideology. They came having been told they were the true Patriots and the true defenders of Freedom. They believe that about themselves. As all true-believers everywhere, they believe it enough to act on it. At the end of Trump’s speech in front of the White House, he gave the radicalized, weaponized, flag-waving mob the Capital as a target. And off they marched.

    Like a well-trained pack of dogs…

    What the hell did we think was going to happen?

    What the hell do we think will continue to happen over and over again if we allow Trump and all of his complicit conspirators who radicalized this horde and millions just like them all around the country, get away with it scot free?

    The correct response can bring this nasty, horrible chapter to an end. My fear is that our leaders are too craven to give the correct response and that yesterday was only the first thread to pulled out of the fabric of our Democracy that will unravel the whole thing. 

    It’s too early to figure out if it’s the end or beginning, but I know the bubble of naivety has burst.

  • Hair Of The Dog, Anyone?

    Last night saw the ascendance of the Democratic party to likely control of the United States Senate by the slimmest of margins with the projected victory in the Georgia run-off race of Democrat candidates Raphael Warnock and the likely victory of Jon Ossoff, whose race is too close to call at 7 am this morning. 

    Like many Americans, I watched the returns until the wee hours of the morning when GA election officials called it a night. Warnock was comfortably ahead by around 35,000 votes and Ossoff behind by about 1200 votes when I retired for a few hours sleep. I was encouraged this morning to learn that Warnock is the projected winner of his race with a margin that will be outside recount territory. 

    Ossoff has also pulled ahead in his race by some 16,000 votes as of 6:30 am. The current .38 margin would fall inside the .5 margin for a recount that could be demanded by his opponent, David Perdue. There are approximately 70,000 votes remaining to be counted and all of the media outlets are reporting that the overwhelming majority of those should break to Ossoff and will give him a recount-proof margin, thus securing a Democrat majority in the Senate.

    If that result holds, the country can finally say so long to Mitch McConnell as obstructor-in-chief in his role as Senate Majority Leader.

    The 2020 election cycle has been the dominant topic of interest for a year. Even in a year when a virus became the leading cause of death in America, we’ve grown numb to the scale of the virus numbers, but the political show has had enough plot twists to addict us.

    The deadliness of the COVID virus, having claimed nearly 360,000 American lives, can be attributed to Trump’s determination to ignore the virus in the light of his reelection bid. Then, of course, for the first time in modern history, he has refused to concede an election that he lost by over 7 million popular votes and by 74 electoral college votes 306-232.

    Today marks the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in Congress where the historically pro forma counting of the state’s electors is set to happen.

    But wait…a number of seditious GOP representatives have been joined by a handful of traitorous GOP senators vowing to ”refuse” recognition of the electoral college count, planning to mount challenges to the slate of certified electors submitted by several states.

    Trump has been championing the theory that Mike Pence can name the electors he wants in his role as President of the Senate today, because, you know, so many VPs have historically chosen their preferred presidential winners for us in the past…NOT!

    Most pundits view today’s threatened actions as a political stunt with no chance of overturning the legitimate result, but, it will be yet more political theater. And, once again, it will be must-see TV. And depending on the magnitude of the disruption the traitors incite, it could last well into the night.

    As if following the final vote tallies in GA, and watching the unfolding of the idiocy in Congress wasn’t enough, a large crowd of willfully ignorant and gullibly deceived Trump cultists and right-wingnuts are expected in Washington, DC today as well. They are expected to do what the stupid do, which is to act stupidly. I’m sure they won’t disappoint.

    In a season where even the most politically agnostic have been forced to imbibe more in the way of campaign ads, a drawn out election count, the refusal of concession by the sitting President, MAGA protests and threats, last night’s special election in GA, and the promised drama in Congress today, this has been the worst drinking game in history. 

    But with today and tonight still to get behind us, and with so much on the line, and having developed both a habit and a tolerance, all I can say is, ”hair of the dog, anyone?”

  • When “Civility” Begets Incivility

    As the father of seven children, I distinctly remember a handful of occasions that were formative for not only one of the kids in need of discipline or punishment for their own infraction, but that also served as a precedent setting example for the other kids. Instances when forbearance would have amounted to neglect, because the underlying message of “civility and patience” was likely to foster, if not encouragement of the behavior in the other children; at bare minimum an attitude of normalization.

    An unprovoked and angry child lashing out in physical or emotional violence against a sibling or parent would fall into this category, for instance. Allowing such outbursts to go undisciplined and unpunished is to allow the offending child and the rest of the family to go un-cared-for. Failure of the parent to act in such a case is not something the offending child can be blamed for, it is dereliction of parenting itself.

    The family unit consisting of parents and offspring is often referred to as the smallest social unit and the following quote by Ashley Montagu is widely accepted as true:

    “The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.”

    Parents, good parents, not only want their children to like them, they want to be able to like their children, too. They want to demonstrate and inculcate what it means to be good human beings.

    In unpleasant moments when a child commits an act that requires disciplinary action from the parents, the parents take the necessary response with an eye towards the future well-being of the offending child and of the family as a whole. They are willing to endure the momentary loss of positive feelings and affections from the punished child to achieve long term values like respect, stability, unity, and love within the family. They are displaying a narrative about what the family is like. They are creating emotional security by enabling a sense of confident well-being.

    Our country is at one of these watershed moments. The American Parent, which I will call the Democratic Institutions extant, has tolerated the tantrum of a spoiled child, allowing it to go undisciplined and unpunished. While true the spoiled child is no longer a minor and is ready to leave the family home, the memory of an adult-aged child pitching a 3 year-old’s fit is not going to leave when he does.

    The other children, having been brought up to believe that there were rules that applied to everyone equally, have been watching from the sidelines to see what the parent will do about the fit-throwing child. They’ve watched and heard as this child has begun to call the parent and the other children ugly names, even blaming them for his bad behavior.

    The children are now pretty convinced the parent isn’t going to do anything at all about it, and the older ones wonder what that portends, while the younger are imagining what they’ll be able to get away with.

    Does the parent seriously think this scene will ”go away” when the child leaves home, that it won’t have a malingering effect on the children who remain?

    The older children have heard a parent saying we must be ”civil” towards the brat, perhaps reach out to him, that he will grow out of it, and soon we won’t have to tolerate this behavior. And each time the parent uses the word civil, the younger children know that the parent, refusing to punish the bad-behaving sibling, has completely lost site of what civil used to mean to the family.

  • First Day of the First Week…holding breath

    Today, Sunday, January 3, 2021 is the first day of the first full week of the new year. And a momentous day it is too. Here are a few highlights of the day and the upcoming week.

    The new congress will be sworn in making the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives considerably narrower.

    Today marks the anniversary of the US killing of Iranian General Qassim Suliemani. There are concerns that Iran may attempt a retaliatory strike against American targets.

    Today also marks the beginning of what will certainly turn out to be week of tremendous consequence in the history of the United States:


    1) Tuesday is election day in Georgia for both of that state’s senate seats. The Republicans hold the senate majority going into the election by a 50-48 margin. If the two Democrats, Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock win their special elections, the senate would be split 50-50, with newly elected Vice President, Kamala Harris, a Democrat, holding the tie-breaking vote.

    2) Wednesday is the day Congress will tabulate the electoral college votes submitted by the states. All of the states have submitted legally verified electors giving President-Elect Joe Biden a substantial EC victory of 306 votes to 232. This event would ordinarily be pro forma and largely symbolic. But there are rumblings that GOP representatives and senators are planning to challenge the slate of electors submitted by several of the states where Donald Trump lost in an effort to use the procedure to overturn the election and hand it to Trump.

    3) Lame Duck President Donald Trump has called for Wednesday to be a day of protests over what he claims is a ”stolen election” in Washington, DC. The MAGA contingent will be joined by members of several right-wing para-military groups including the infamous, ”Proud Boys” who have told their members not to wear their typical black and yellow colors, but instead to blend in amongst the other MAGA protesters. The day could turn violent. Perhaps even violent enough to provide a pretext for Trump to declare martial law in the District of Columbia or even in a broader more general sphere.

  • The Danger of Populism To Representative Democracy

    Representatives Support Populists at Their Own Peril

    Representative democracy depends on an electorate willing to entrust the job of governance to representatives so the electorate is free to go about its day-to-day business secure in the knowledge that its representatives will promote, secure, and protect their delegated interests without the need of their daily involvement.

    A populist leader, on the other hand, needs the continuous attention of the electorate the way facebook needs a user to stay engaged on its platform. For both facebook and the populist leader, attention and engagement is the desired and necessary commodity. For the leader, the more attention and engagement he can capture, the more important and useful that attention becomes to his ambitions, and thus, the more powerful he becomes.

    Secure enough of the electorate’s attention, and their other representatives, at whatever levels of government, become powerless and moot except as figureheads and yes-men to the real leader.

    At this stage, the other representatives have effectively lost representational power. That power had derived from the will of the people who elected them but has now been co-opted by the populist for his own use. Clearly, alone, He can represent the will of the people so much more directly and efficiently than some unwieldy number of elected office holders. 

    Thus, ironically, the more backing and support the representatives give to the populist, the more they undermine their own power and necessity. The populist makes use of the worst impulses of pure democracy to discredit anyone who stands in the way of the majority support he has won, or claims to have won. In fact, the populist’s control of the majority (base) means they really need no other representation than that of their supreme leader.

    And if a lower level party representative (be they a governor, or election official, state legislator, or congressman, or senator) should be so bold to contradict or interfere with the populist, he will swat them away by turning their voters against them. The loyalty is to him personally after all, not to anyone or anything else.

    If you doubt these claims, consider Julius Caesar’s usurpation of the powers of the Roman Senate. The only variable being that he controlled not just the populace, but also the military.

  • All Politics Is Personal, Sometimes Too Personal

    I lost my brother in the run-up to election day, 2020. He didn’t die of Covid. He didn’t get killed fighting a fire. (He’s a fireman in our neighboring state). I lost him by talking politics and by not supporting Trump.


    Neither of us have a college degree, though we both have children with degrees or who are finishing them. So, we fit the ”non-college-educated” white men demographic. Sans degree, I have nevertheless been an insatiable reader on a variety of topics from the time I learned the skill at the age of four.

    My younger brother didn’t acquire the same voracious appetite for learning, nor the insatiable curiosity to discover truth that I did. This is not to say that I am smarter than my brother or better than my brother. I’m just different than him in regards to the comparative volume of information we have respectively consumed. He is much smarter than I am in the fields he does know about.

    Political Ignorance


    However, like many people who consider themselves to be “conservative”, my brother is easily triggered by buzzwords and slogans like these: Socialist, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Systemic Racism, Communism, Law and Order, Left-wing Radical, Elitist, Universal Health Care.

    By triggered, I’m saying that he has a visceral, violent reaction to the very mention of these terms. This happens because he feels personally threatened from what he thinks these ideas represent. His reaction is to defend against these intrusions attacking what he considers it means to be a free American.


    In the course of our discussions, I routinely asked him to define terms. ”What is socialism?” I’d ask. Or, “do you know what fascism is?”

    And almost without exception his response would be, ”Why don’t you tell me what it is”.

    So, I discovered early on that my brother did not understand the political spectrum. He did not know that Communism is at the far left, and Fascism is at the far right. He just knows they’re both “bad”. And he somehow equates both to what he calls “Liberal Democrats”. He’s not alone in this. A surprising number of American citizens are politically ignorant.

    Like my brother, many don’t understand what each of the governmental types mean. They don’t know the differences in economic policies, societal effects, or the effects on taxation or wealth distribution. And they are ignorant that some aspects of these feared political ideas already exist in the United States system.


    I tried in vain to explain to him that his job as a fireman was almost purely socialist. He agreed that local government, and not private companies, owns all of the fire station properties and equipment. He acknowledged that tax-payers fund his salary, not “market forces”. But, even so, he struggled to grasp the implications. In the end, he refused to concede that some services that serve the public good need to be run by a government, not by a board of directors whose primary motive is profit.

    The US economy is not as “free-market” as he’d been led to believe


    I told him in a purely free-market economy, a house fire would be an opportunity to make money. The owner of the station would be within his rights as a capitalist to negotiate the costs of service. He owns the trucks, and employs the firemen. So he sets the prices according to how much he can charge. He could even refuse service if the home-owner couldn’t pay. Proceeding, I asked him to consider how dangerous to communities fire-service would be as a capitalist venture.

    I tried to get him to see that some services such as fire service and health care do not best serve the public interest as for-profit ventures. I explained that our military and our police departments are set up on the same ”socialist” principles with regard to ownership of the physical plants, facilities, equipment, and ”means of production”, and without regard to profiteering as the ultimate end of those institutions.


    He struggled with the concept of tax-breaks for corporations and subsidies for farmers also being socialist policies. All of these concepts strained my brother’s understanding of political reality. Contrary to what he has been led to believe, we don’t have a free-market economy based on pure capitalism. To him and many like him ”socialism” equals evil, and that’s the end of the argument.


    These discussions led invariably to discussions of health care and taxation. My brother doesn’t want his taxes to go towards paying for anyone else’s health care even when I pointed out to him that my taxes already go to paying for his government provided health care through his job at the fire department. Brushing that off, he argues that we do not want government involved in health care because the government is incapable of doing anything well. Again, I pointed to the fire department as an example of a government run enterprise that seems to perform its mandate quite well. But he sees universal health care or a shift to a single-payer government administered system as the hand of big government in his pocket taking away his American Dream and giving it to someone who hasn’t taken ”personal responsibility” for their own life and well-being.

    Vulnerability to fear-mongering


    My brother is not unique in his belief that his ”American Dream”, as he puts it, has come under assault by left-wing, radical socialists and communists who are just a bunch of elitists that want to give lazy people and illegal immigrants his money and provide them with free health-care for sitting around and doing nothing.

    He credits Donald Trump with increasing the value of his modest stock portfolio. Tax-payers, and not free markets, pay for and subsidize his fire department pension fund, just like his salary, yet he is afraid that Democrats ”just like Obama” will take it away. He says it is so much higher now than four years ago when Trump took office and gives all of that credit to Trump, not realizing that the increases in the value of his portfolio have been almost entirely due to Apple’s inflated stock valuation, that they pale in comparison to the ultra wealthy, and that his actual salary has been stagnant.


    My brother does not understand that the current capital gains tax laws favor the ultra wealthy by taxing those gains at a lower rate than their income tax rates. (This would not affect my brother). He does not understand that Biden’s plan to raise taxes only on those who earn above $400,000 annually would have no effect on him whatsoever.


    To be fair, my brother did recognize and express reservations about some of what he called ”un-attractive” traits about Trump. These were mostly related to his tone. But he justified those as the outcome of Trump having to defend himself against illegal ”spying” and a ”fake dossier” from even before he took office. Trump is a victim in my brother’s eyes, and is therefore justified to do whatever he has to do to fight back against his unjust attackers.


    My brother was even sometimes willing to admit that some of Trump’s actions were unsavory, such as his many bankruptcies, his unwillingness to release his tax returns, and his nepotism. But he found no fault with Trumps phone call to the Ukrainian president that led to his impeachment. He praised Trump for sending federal agents into Portland and vowed that if anything like that happened in our community he would be out with his gun and he didn’t care who was on the other side, even if it was my kids or myself (several of my older children took part in local BLM protest marches).

    Personal “Trumps” Principle


    My brother has been passed over for promotions in the fire department on a couple of occasions in favor of minority firemen, and is therefore infuriated at the very idea of the existence of ”systemic racism”. This is a deeply personal issue to him. Unfortunately, he conflates the term ”systemic racism” to mean ”universal racism”. When he hears the left decry ”systemic racism” he thinks they are claiming ”universal racism” which he rejects as not true. He will point to work relationships he has with black firemen as proof that he isn’t racist. When I asked him if he ever did anything with them outside of work he refused to admit that my question was relevant. I don’t think he is alone in this belief and reaction on this topic. Again, a failure to understand terminology.


    As our relationship deteriorated over many weeks, my brother began to call me ”crazy”, or ”un-hinged”, a ”radical leftist”, and finally a ”communist”. I told him that prior to this election, I had never voted for a Democrat candidate in my life. Nevertheless, he said that I was un-American, and that if I hated the United States so much I should leave the country. He said that my ”hatred for Trump” had made me ”dangerous” and that he was ”worried about my sanity”.


    I could not get him to believe that for me, politics is certainly personal, but that it is also more than that. That even though many of the actions Trump took and words he said really had no personal impact on me or my life, I was looking at history, principle, the Constitution, and the ideals that make America the country that it is and the country it can still become. And that on that basis, regardless of my personal portfolio or bank account, I couldn’t possibly support someone clearly on the path to dictatorial autocracy if not outright fascism.


    I asked him if there was anything that Trump could do that would be so serious that he would reconsider his support and he said ”No” there wasn’t. I could go on, describing our discussions and the withering away of our relationship, but what finally severed us was when he said that thanks to Donald Trump, he could ”buy and sell me”. That made politics intensely personal for me. Too personal, in fact. Thank you so much Mr. ex-President.

  • Wouk, Vonnegut, and the Moral Relativism of War

    I recently completed Herman Wouk’s two novel masterpiece, Winds of War, and War and Remembrance, a historical fiction about World War II.

    In the volumes, Wouk catalogs the causes and effects of the war and the holocaust with careful attention to historical accuracy. Far from a recitation of dry history, he weaves a captivating story told  from the point of view of a fictitious family whose personal trials are woven through the war years.

    He takes the reader on journeys to Washington, D.C., Berlin, Moscow, Stalingrad, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Tehran, Pearl Harbor, Midway, the Leyte Gulf, and to many more locations familiar to world war II buffs.

    The reader accompanies characters on nighttime bombing raids, evasion of depth charges in a submarine, diplomatic conferences with Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, the siege of Warsaw, as well as the disinterment and burning of desiccated Jewish bodies, while searching those bodies for hidden loot and gold fillings to fill Nazi coffers.

    The purpose of the books, as stated by Wouk, is to induce the reader to recognize the existential folly of war.

    Wouk’s genius transported me to a Jewish ghetto I’d never heard of, used throughout the war for German propaganda, in which the inhabitants, learning of their imminent transfer to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, on the eve of their departure, in defiance of their SS captors, find courage in passages from the Torah, sing psalms of praise in Yiddish, and finally dance a “dance of death”.  At this scene and many others, I cried in remembrance, and at least for me, he succeeded in his aim. I am convinced that war has to end or we will end.

    I have also just finished reading, or rather, re-reading, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which is also an anti-war book. It is ostensibly about the allied fire bombing of the German city of Dresden at the very end of World War II which killed over 130,000 civilians, more than the number killed by the atomic bombs dropped on either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

    Though he also aims to convince his readers that war is no longer viable as an option for modern nations, Vonnegut has taken quite a different tack than Wouk.

    Whereas Wouk chronicles in great detail and with great skill the macabre scenes of air, land, and naval battle, prisoner-of-war camps, and Gestapo run Jewish ghettos, he  does so while interlacing episodes of individual heroism and moral courage.

    Vonnegut instead crystallizes the individual soldier’s existence as pure, unadulterated insanity and de-humanization. Vonnegut’s soldier is a clownish scarecrow caught up in a world he did not create, which he cannot understand, and in which he cannot escape being played as a pawn by powers he cannot resist. For Vonnegut, once the gauntlet of war is thrown down, the appellation ”hero” is forfeit. All the players are fools.

    Vonnegut’s basis for no war is its absurdity and moral relativism. Wouk’s basis is its cruelty and moral relativism.

    I have laughed so hard reading Slaughterhouse Five that I’ve nearly injured myself, and that has been one of the most healing things I’ve done in a long time.

    Wouk provided me a catharsis of tears, Vonnegut a catharsis of laughter. Either way, while I have nothing but profound respect and appreciation for our soldiers past and present, I’m purposed to glorify war no longer, nor to be its proponent as a solution for any problems extant, even militant Islamic extremism.

    As both Wouk and Vonnegut would no doubt point out, in the final analysis as measured by the toll on human life that we as Americans purport to value so much, is a victim of the bombing of a doctors without borders hospital less dead than a victim of a suicide bomber?

  • God is not a White, Republican (Democrat) American

    I have something to say this morning.

    It’s this:

    I love God. And, I love America.

    But I distinctly remember receiving the paradigm-shifting, thunderclap epiphany that ”God is not American, nor is He white.”

    (I was in the parking lot of the old Regency Theater on Albemarle Road in Charlotte, NC and I had tears streaming down my face because I’d just seen Dances With Wolves and I felt ashamed to belong to a race that had so misled and mistreated and murdered and manipulated American Indians)

    I’d rather love my neighbor as myself than be a card-carrying mouthpiece for a particular political idealogy. (Even though I too often forget that and become an ass-bag fool spouting political verbiage…as if ANY political system could actually impart spiritual life to anyone)

    I’d like to think that if I was the Samaritan in the parable, I would stop to help a bleeding and beaten muslim by the side of the road (or rap star, or liberal democrat, or tea-party zealot).

    I’m not sure I would and that means no matter how ”right” I am, I’m the one who’s wrong…

    Ya know what I mean?