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My day job involves collaboration and consensus building. To make myself as effective as possible in my professional roles, I've learned to keep my thoughts about sex, politics, and spirituality strictly to myself. Of course these three are my favorite (some say, only) topics when my friends and I get together, but that's why they call it work.

I woke up on the first Saturday in Lent, wanting to get some thoughts off my chest. I thought to myself, I might not be able to say all that, but Earthquake could. Thanks, eq! As with all rants, this was more important for me to write, than it is for you to read (so please feel free to go read some erotica instead--I strongly recommend this option), but I'm posting it here for, um, reasons of historical curiosity. Yeah, that's it.

What I Try Not To Think About

Are those my boxcars rumbling in the night?

Perhaps that phrase requires some explanation.

I'll start by confessing that I'm a Christian, of a sort, and that I was trained as an historian. (I assume that everyone here already knows I'm heavily into sex and erotica. It's sometimes complicated to be a Christian feminist mystic leather dyke pornographer, but someone has to try to do it, or at least enjoy the struggle. Sex and spirit are two names for the same ultimately indescribable energy. But I digress.)

As a trained historian, one way I cope with news is to think, "How will this seem to historians thinking about it one hundred years from now?" The duct tape nonsense made me think of the fad for bomb shelters (and John Crowley made a wonderful movie about that, using archival footage, that I wish everyone could see) and you know how useful they were. This distancing helps me try to discern activities that are truly useful, from those that are not, and even if I'm proved wrong (history teaches that almost everyone IS proved wrong, so I'm philosophical about the likelihood that I'm also wrong), it helps me get through the day. My goal is to get some work done whether or not others are panicking. If there's a "stupid bomb" with my name on it (actually there's one with all our names on it, and it's in the White House, oh God I wish I were joking) at least I'll have made some forward progress before I go down.

Now that you've got Christian+historian, you can probably guess what I mean about the boxcars. One of the things some of us Christians mourn, is why the moderate Christians in Hitler's Germany -- with the notable exception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- didn't speak up (let alone act) to oppose the Holocaust. Many people knew on some level that boxcars full of their neighbors were rumbling towards the camps, and yet did nothing. It's one of the spectacular failures of the community of faith.

Anyway, I learned a lot of things from studying history in the specific context of the United States (hereinafter US - I avoid the name "America" as it's rude to my neighbors in Costa Rica and Brasil), and so I'll just list a few things I've noticed in relation to the history of so-called "foreign policy":

• War is how USians learn geography (if we ever do)
• Perception trumps reality; for example, our adventures in Korea and Vietnam were profoundly affected by our leaders' perceptions that we had "lost" China
• All that USians have truly had as an advantage in war, are abundant natural resources and some luck (both of which we have now almost completely squandered)
• After a conflict (except in a few specific cases) we find ourselves looking back at the contemporary arguments and saying, "What we were thinking!"
• Even though attempts at international cooperation are often frustrating, it was A Bad Thing when the League of Nations fell apart

There are a few of us in the States who never got over the last Gulf War: (1) veterans of the conflict, who have all kinds of health problems stemming from exposure to depleted uranium and other noxious substances, and (2) those of us who have not, in the intervening decade, been able to stop thinking about the effect of U.S.-led sanctions on the health and nutrition of the Iraqi children who weren't even born during the conflict. I am in group (2), while staunchly supporting group (1); our section of the movement strongly opposed the the authoritarian regime in Iraq while working to publicize the effects of the sanctions and ask our fellow USians whether this is truly what we want our tax money to be doing. My own part in this was sadly small, but I took heart from the fact that as of this writing the last two U.N. officials in charge of the so-called "Oil for Food" program resigned in protest at its effects on the civilian population, and recently former weapons inspector Scott Ritter has been the most vocal discussant on the sanctions and Iraq policy in general...

I am a Marine Corps officer. We never operate outside our code of honor and integrity. The truth is paramount. This is not a nation that should be building on a body of lies. As the inconsistencies of consecutive American administrations' policies on Iraq start to emerge, my position is starting to become recognized as a sound position. People start to recognize that much of what the U.S. has done has been outside the international law, outside the framework of United Nations Security Council resolutions, that Washington purports to support.

I was cheered up by Robert Byrd's speech, of course, and then as I was working on my rant about the boxcars, above, one of my favorite bloggers (and editors, for that matter) was also thinking about some of the same historical parallels. I'll let him have the almost last word; Patrick Nielsen Hayden's full blog entry is here, and the relevant quotation is:

We are led by knaves, criminals and morons. Bullies, sadists, and fools. Even by the standards of everyday politics, this Administration is made up of notably ghastly and hapless human beings.

There really isn't a nice way of saying this. The people we are are being led by are stupid, vicious, and crazy. We all want to avoid acknowledging this, and we're all wrong. The rest of the world can see it perfectly clearly, and they're increasingly disinclined to be polite about it. Like the Germans of the late 20th century, we will spend the rest of our life explaining to one another how we got here and how we let it happen.