Dangerous Times Indeed

What, exactly, poses the most danger to the United States in this day and time?  Last week, I had a moment where the ideas of two remarkable people melded in my mind and formed the answer I’d been seeking.  I was halfway there in a vague way, and have articulated it in bits and pieces, but what I heard last week allows me to say what I mean more clearly.

First, if you think the greatest danger facing the U.S. is terrorism, your focus is in the wrong place.  Let me give you an analogy.  Two and a half years ago, I came down with appendicitis, and had to have an appendectomy in the middle of the night.  Once that ordeal was over, I had a thoroughly inexplicable (at least to me) pain in my left shoulder that was almost equal to the pain of the appendicitis.  I went to a neurologist.  He said, you have an inflammation of the brachial plexus nerve in your shoulder.  Understand, he said, this is not a diagnosis; it’s a condition, in other words, a symptom.  We can help you with the pain temporarily by treating the symptom, but to cure you we have to find out and treat the cause.  I need not beat anyone over the head by pointing out the similarities to our approach as a nation to terrorism. 

One of the two people I refer to is Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times.  For as long as I’ve been aware of him, his columns have said that the biggest problem we face is our addiction to oil, and our failure to take steps to reduce that addiction or create a viable energy policy.  We have contributed to the rise of what he calls petro-dictatorships, and find ourselves going to the Saudis, hat in hand, begging for lower oil prices, which failed.  This week I heard an interview with him on NPR, promoting his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  For more about Friedman and his credentials, see his website http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/

What sealed the deal for me, however, was the interview on NPR with Andrew J. Bacevich, a guy I’d never even heard of.  He was promoting his new book The Limits of Power:  The End of American Exceptionalism.  Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.  Since we’re constantly exhorted to listen to the people who “know” and have “been there”, Bacevich is a 20-year veteran of the Army who fought in Vietnam and retired as a colonel.  Last year, his son was killed by an IED in Iraq.  He makes the point that Congress has abdicated its responsibility; we have created an “imperial presidency” and the military is the arm of that imperial presidency.  We have no foreign policy per se.  Most importantly, we aren’t paying for our wars.  We’re borrowing for them.  He said (and I hope I have these numbers right), the U.S. is 10 trillion dollars in debt on a 13 trillion dollar GDP.  Because of this borrowing, he said, the American people have never fully realized the cost both in dollars and human terms of the war.  There has been no sacrifice. 

I’ve often thought that myself, walking down the aisle of the grocery store it sometimes hits me that there is no shortage of food and other goods.  The only time I’m ever confronted with the reality of the war is when I’ve been in an airport and encountered soldiers in their desert camoflage.  I believe that’s deliberate.  Our “leaders” would rather borrow to conduct the war than ask the American people to sacrifice.  Because if they did, the American people would probably have put a stop to it much sooner.  Then a more critical eye might have been turned to the causes and conduct of the war.

We are a nation on the verge of collapse.  No one is minding the store.  Yet to suggest that is equivalent in many circles to being at best, unpatriotic, and at worst, a traitor.  On a blog I read this morning, the blogger had a quote from C.S. Lewis, which went something like this:  We all like progress, but when you find you’re on the wrong road, the only thing to do is turn back and take another road.  Therefore, the person who turns back first is the smartest. 

Taking all that into account, here’s what I think is the greatest problem facing the U.S.  It’s anti-intellectualism.  Just the mention of NPR or the New York Times causes a whole host of people to immediately dismiss whatever was said, by whoever said it.  I blame that on the pathetic state of education in our country. 

That’s why we can have a serious debate about pigs and lipstick.  It’s why we can seriously want a ticket where the veep choice is a “hockey mom”, somebody just like us.  My neighbor is a used car salesman and a really nice guy, but would I want him to be the President or the Vice President just because he’s a lot like me?  I think not. 

I leave you with a quote from Thomas Friedman’s NY Times op-ed piece entitled “The New Cold War”, published on May 14, 2008.  He is referring to the fact that Iran is in fact a great danger, but the U.S. no longer has any leverage to bargain with.  He quotes an Israeli name Ehuud Yaari. 

“Simply put,” noted Mr. Yaari, “Tehran has created a situation in which anyone who wants to attack its atomic facilities will have to take into account that this will lead to bitter fighting” on the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi and Persian Gulf fronts. That is a sophisticated strategy of deterrence.

The Bush team, by contrast, in eight years has managed to put America in the unique position in the Middle East where it is “not liked, not feared and not respected,” writes Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator under both Republican and Democratic administrations, in his provocative new book on the peace process, titled “The Much Too Promised Land.”

“We stumbled for eight years under Bill Clinton over how to make peace in the Middle East, and then we stumbled for eight years under George Bush over how to make war there,” said Mr. Miller, and the result is “an America that is trapped in a region which it cannot fix and it cannot abandon.”

It’s time to start walking backwards down that road, shoring up strength as we go, getting back to where we have leverage.  Beating our chests and talking about how we are the greatest nation in the world won’t help, as China, India, and yes, even Russia emerge as the new super-powers.

A Doozy of a Dream

By 9:25 this morning, I had already had quite a day.  First, I woke up at 4:15 this morning, around two hours before I normally wake up.  That in itself isn’t unusual; I wake up around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. almost every night, but something in my semi-conscious brain says, “Not time to get up yet”, and I easily go back to sleep.  What was different this morning is that I couldn’t force my eyelids to re-close, a sign that my circadian rhythm was seriously out of whack. 

I don’t know how peculiar this is, but every morning when I wake up I go through a sort of vague checklist, querying my body on how it feels.  It’s the mental equivalent seeing if you can wriggle all your fingers and toes after waking up from surgery.  This morning, the Body said:  I don’t feel rested.  I feel like hell.  If you force me to get up now, I will feel like hell all day long.  I will have no energy, will accomplish nothing, and will mope about in a fog.  I don’t even want any coffee (a truly alarming sign).  And don’t even think about trying to go back to bed, especially after the sun comes up.  You know I can’t sleep in daylight.  Not to mention that godawful racket from the expletive-deleted birds. 

Apparently my eyelids had gotten a divorce from the rest of the body, so I had no choice but to drag the body out of bed.  I poured a glass of wine and went to the computer, where I checked email (none), surfed a bit, did the New York Times acrostic, and played a few useless games of Solitaire.  Finally, at 7:00 A.M., I was determined to give sleep another try.  Upon lying down, my last conscious thought was “This is never going to work”.  I woke up at 9:25 A.M. after realizing that I could not possibly keep my appointment with Diane von Furstenberg in my nightgown. 

That was the conclusion of a particularly vivid dream, which was remarkable on several fronts.  First it was notable for having events occur in sequence, whereas often dreams seem to be a series of unrelated vignettes which hop from one to the other with no apparent logic.  Second, the settings were for the most part real, rather than surreal. 

I’m not one who believes that dreams “mean” something.  I believe it’s the brain’s way of getting rid of the flotsam and jetsam of daily life and de-stressing.  Technically, scientists believe dreaming is necessary for “data organization and memory storage”.  Still, the fact that the brain is capable of this–of taking emotional and intellectual data and translating it into visual experiences during sleep–is one of the most mysterious and awe-inspiring of Nature’s mysteries.  Nor are humans the only species which dreams.  Since dreams occur during REM sleep in humans, it’s generally believed that any other species which experiences REM sleep can also dream.  Of course we can’t know that for certain until those species develop language and can tell us their dreams, but the signs are pretty obvious.  Thus, my grandmother was right.  When her old hound dog would yip softly in his sleep, and pump his legs ever so feebly, she would say, “He’s chasing rabbits”.

In the beginning of my dream, I’m standing in the side door of my actual house, looking at the back yard of the next-door neighbor where two young men are riding bicycles back and forth.  I’m wearing my maroon nightgown with the silver suns, stars, and crescent moons on it; the one I bought at Sawgrass Mills eons ago in Fort Lauderdale, and haven’t actually worn in years.

When the young men realize I’m watching, they come over and enter the gate in the fence directly across from my door.  The first one says, “Do you remember me? I once stayed here.”   And in fact, he looks familiar.  I say, “I do, but whose friend were you?”  Meanwhile, the second man is taking their bicycles and stowing them out of sight around the corner in my back yard.  When he’s done, both men come in the door and begin making themselves at home.

“Wait a minute!”  I say.  “What are you doing?  I didn’t invite you to come in or to stay here.”  The first man says, “Here, let me help you with that.”  He comes over and removes a necklace I’m wearing and lays it on my (real) mantel.  Suddenly I realize they mean to do me harm of some kind.  Surreptiously, I remove my cell phone from my purse and run out the door and out the gate without getting caught.  My little dog runs out the gate with me.  I think about letting the other two out as well, but I’m hoping that the Rottweiler will somehow hurt them or chase them away.  (That would be hard to do, since he’s been dead for 2 1/2 years.)

I try to dial 911 on my cell phone, but can’t see the numbers.  I run across the street to my (real) neighbor Shirley’s house and bang on the storm door.  “Call 911!” I screamed.  Then I collapsed in the grass.

The next thing I know, someone is trying to get me to sit up and saying, “We need to get you some help.”  I’m terrified.  I can’t open my eyes, so I can’t see who it is.  It’s as if my eyes are glued shut.  I’m afraid it’s one of the villains who has caught up with me.  At last I pry open my left eye with my fingers and see two things:  the person trying to get me up is a female police officer (thank you, Shirley!)  And the two men are leaving my house, but wait!  There are now three others with them!  Five men on bicycles!  I was in even more danger than I thought!  As they ride away, they have the absolute nerve to wave at me.  “They’re getting away!” I said to the police officer.  “Don’t worry about me, go get them!”  (Have I been reading too many Westerns, or what?)

But she insists on putting me in the patrol car.  However, rather than getting help for me, we ride around searching for the villains.  As we circle back around to my house, there are now several police cars in front of it.  One very handsome, debonair, and sardonic plain-clothes officer is standing outside his car with his gun out–always a plus in dream-men.  Suddenly, the villains start pouring out of my house!  They had circled back around and re-entered while we were searching for them.  And they have multiplied again.  Now there are 12 or 13 of them, all but one with bicycles.  The police advance on them.  “Don’t shoot the dogs!” I cried. 

They are all caught and hauled away.  Now I’m safe, and while the police comb the house for fingerprints, I suddenly remember my appointment with Diane von Furstenberg.  It’s too late to cancel, it’s too late to take a shower, I can’t go in my starry nightgown…The End. 

The good news is that when I woke up this time, the Body announced that it felt just fine.  It felt the way a body is supposed to feel when it wakes up in the morning.  Well-rested, if a little groggy.  And it wanted coffee.