Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for Moby Dick was driven by the thirst for revenge. The great white whale had maimed Ahab – in soul as well as body. Ahab was consumed by the passion to restore his sense of self, and make himself whole again, by killing his nemesis – a compulsion that his wooden leg never let weaken.
America’s “war-on-terror” has become our national mission for restoration. The psychic wound is what grieves us; it inflames our collective passion for vengeance. The physical wound is already healed. By now, it must be memorialized in order for the scar to be seen. It never did impair our functioning. In that sense, little more than a broken toe. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was genuine fear of a repeat attack – something that we now know never was in the cards. Our enemy has been emasculated; the great Satan was shot dead in Abbottabad. Only pinpricks at long intervals from within our midst draw blood.
Catharsis has eluded us, though. We still seethe with emotions. We suffer from the free-floating anxiety that is dread, from vague feelings of vulnerability, from a seeming lost prowess and control. A society that talks casually about ‘closure’ on almost all occasions cannot find closure on 9/11. Instead, it has a powerful need to ritualize the fear, to pursue the implacable quest for ultimate security, to perform violent acts of vengeance that neither cure nor satiate.
So, we search the seven seas hunting for monsters to slay; not Moby Dick himself, but his accessories, accomplices, enablers, facilitators, emulators, sympathizers. Whales of every species, great and small, fall to our harpoons. The dead and innocent dolphins far outnumber them. Fortunes of war.
Since there is no actual Moby Dick out there to pursue, we have fashioned a virtual game of acting out the hunt, the encounter, the retribution. We thereby have embraced the post-9/11 trauma rather than expunged it. That is the “war-on-terror.” That war is about us – it no longer is about them.
After 12 years of war, the military's most elite forces are ‘frayed' and reporting struggles with alcohol, sleeplessness and emotional numbness.
In a survey of active-duty special operations forces, nearly 10 percent of respondents reported potential alcohol abuse or dependence, 8 percent said they were uncharacteristically irritable or angry, and more than one-quarter of those surveyed said they were sleeping five or fewer hours a night.
Many marriages among these frequently deployed troops also are struggling — more than 14 percent of survey respondents said they were less than happy with their marriages, while 17 percent said they wish they had never married.
The goal of the survey was to hear directly from the force, and U.S. Special Operations Command is implementing several initiatives to tackle these issues, including hiring more psychologists and nutritionists, and putting in place a system to give service members more time at home, said Navy Capt. Tom Chaby, a SEAL and director of SOCOM’s Preservation of the Force and Families Task Force.
“We knew the force was frayed, that there were challenges,” Chaby said.
Many of these challenges came to light when Adm. William McRaven, the SOCOM commander, conducted town hall meetings, held 455 focus groups and met with more than 7,000 of his troops shortly after he took command, and they were confirmed in the survey, Chaby said.
Paul Craig Roberts discusses the dismantling of the U.S. constitution and the current Great Recession. With opening review of headlines by Alex Jones.
Phi Beta Iota: We embrace a diversity of commentators among our collective, in part to provide our hard-working subscribers and visitors with a panorama of cultural intelligence related to public intelligence in the public interest.
Egypt: Starting Friday and continuing over the weekend in Egypt, 80 to over 120 members of the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Mursi demonstrators died in clashes in Cairo, Alexandria and other Nile Delta towns. The health ministry reported 792 people injured. The Brotherhood said 4,500 were wounded.
The interim president has authorized the prime minister to empower the military to make civilian arrests. A final showdown with the Muslim Brotherhood is emerging.
In north Sinai, Egyptian security forces began “Operation Desert Storm” against anti-government elements and tribes. The first official report is that government forces killed 10 militants and captured 20. According to al Ahram, the government estimates there are 500 active militants. The government has more than ten times that number.
Tunisia: A general strike in reaction to a political assassination last week emptied Tunis and grounded some commercial aircraft on Friday. On Saturday thousands protested against the Islamist-led government. Protests continued on Sunday resulting in clashes between pro- and anti-government groups. Anti-government groups have threatened to create an opposition counter-government.
Police clashed with anti-government protestors in Sidi Bouzid. This is the Tunisian town considered to be the birth place of the Arab Spring because it is where the first violent protests occurred in December 2010. The murdered opposition leader, Brahmi, came from Sidi Bouzid.
I begin with an apology for the three generations that preceded you. I am 72 and a member of the generation of your grand and sometimes great grand-parents. My generation did many things to change our society for the better, sometimes in street demonstrations resembling those you see now in Europe and the Middle East, but we never valued what we had or how we, as Americans, were succeeding. We forgot how to govern ourselves.
And perhaps for that reason, my generation, born between 1925 and 1945, never raised a President. It followed that the post-war generation of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush would be ill -equipped and unconstrained by the historical perspective necessary to govern *the* Superpower in a unipolar world. As a consequence, your generation, including your older brothers and sisters, have been robbed of the security and promise which supported my youth. Your generation has compensated with new means to communicate and ways to frame your identities. And it is from these ways and means, new ways and means to govern ourselves must emerge. Your generation can master the new because you are already creating it. This site, with your help, tests that idea.
The Site opens with Professor Sheldon Wolin's 1988 discussion about American democracy. The democracy he describes differs from the democracy many of us believe ourselves and advertise ourselves to be a part of. Twenty-five years later, your chance to judge the accuracy of his assessment is just beginning.
Reason and feeling each have gifts and limitations. Used well together they generate wise caring. There are examples of wise caring in earlier human societies and we have an opportunity today to build on them and enhance that capacity in our whole civilization.
Down deep within us – underlying everything that we think, feel and do – we find our needs burning brightly along with our values (the cultural expression of our needs). When I say “needs” I’m referring to deep universal needs, such as our needs for love, expression, nutrition, control, respect, etc. I’m not referring to the specific desires and strategies we pursue – like a new car or time with our children – in an effort to meet those fundamental needs.
Our fundamental needs and values are the wellsprings of our motivations. They stimulate us to understand what we need to do to find satisfaction and happiness. We use two primary tools in that pursuit: feeling and reason.
Feeling manifests as sensation, emotion, empathy, resonance, and gut impulses and responses. Our feelings orient us to what we want and get us moving toward and away from things. In contrast, reason works with facts, evidence, ideas, and logic. It helps us appraise what we want and don’t want, to make meaning of what’s happening, and to clarify HOW we should satisfy our needs.
