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• Saturday, May 10, 2008 01:14 PM

  @DCLaw1

  --- apologies to everyone else is the number of following posts seems excessive, there's just too much good discussion going on in here and I'm trying to keep track and engaged ... ---

  Thanks for bringing up the point about this being part of a much larger thing. To me, there are multiple big-picture dangers converging ... and I'm sure that compared to reality, the view that seems to me expansive is hopelessly myopic.

  You mentioned the creeping (now barrelling) militarism. I wrote an essay about this back in 2000, when it was already a brow-furrower. I got it wrong, then, because I thought that the 'inputs' then (cultural ones like veneration of 'the Greatest Generation, usually only narrowly for WWII; high-special effects-budget movies that made a videogame out of combat --- including harrowingly 'realistic' movies like 'Saving Private Ryan' or 'Pearl Harbor'; the videogames themselves, etc plus ideological ones like 'liberal interventionism', nationbuilding, etc) would combine with demographics to produce a public desire to seek out a new 'generational challenge' through warfare. The essay's point (aside from calling out the danger) was to argue for another more constructive outlet like national service, expansion of VISTA/Americorps, a Green Manhattan Project, or something similar to soak up those energies. It makes me want to cry, thinking back to those halcyon days when the cultural trend was still just a ripple ...

  Another component is a 'negative space' of institutional gaps created by decades of neglect in essential services (mostly publicly provided), oversight of industry, civic education, and so forth ... all of which seem to be mutually reinforcing so that, e.g. the media, suffering under harsh and unregulated economic conditions and rising professional expectations in the ranks, and poor decisions by management, ceases to exercise the functions we expect of them. (To say nothing of various resulting govt failures)

  Finally, we have the culmination of a political and ideological movement (i.e. merging of many movements), decades old now and composed of many parts, with a very long view of their objectives, that skillfully knits together a range of fringe interests to game the system for their own benefit and the accumulation of their own power. They take advantage of the gaps and the cultural trends, exacerbating them along the way.

  Or, um, did you mean something else? :>

  —quickstrategy Read quickstrategy's other letters
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