“Humanity is on the threshold of a true global community–in the midst of this cultural convergence we have the historic opportunity to compose evolutionary principles for a more sustainable expression of civilization, a government of life and for all life.” ~ Global Peace Solution (2004)

A teardrop of water fell from the ceiling sky landing in the ceremonial pool below slowly sending ripples and rings outward to the installation’s coping.  Eleven Tears is a memorial work of art to 9/11 victims at the World Financial Center building overlooking the ongoing One World Trade Center construction site. On Sunday, May Day, I visited Ground Zero for the first time. It was a somber pilgrimage–and little did I realize–while there, the attack on Osama Bin Laden’s compound was taking place.

Like for so many others, 9/11 had been a life shattering, and ultimately, life transforming event for me–hearing of Bin Laden’s death brought up conflicting emotions of elation and sadness. All the trauma and travail of the last ten years came rushing forward. A sudden attack on home soil, 3000 dead, the absolute determined brutality of the hijackers-being rid of the individual who inspired multiple acts of mass murder was a relief–but how could the healing begin?

9/11 fundamentally changed our way of life, the way we travel, it instigated wars leading to hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, displaced; we’ve wiretapped without warrant, tortured, and sent the drones in. Protected civil liberties have been sacrificed for security.

The war on terror has brought our nation to an existential precipice upon which we stare down into an abyss of overreaching militarism and secrecy–both enemies of republican democracy–which would forever be left behind should we now succumb to the gravity of fear.

With the leader of Al Qaeda now dead, we have come to a crossroads in which our nation’s larger priorities can, and should be, examined.

Taking Inventory

“Life carries us hither and thither and destiny moves us from one place to another. We see not save the obstacle set in our path; neither do we hear, save a voice that makes us to fear.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

A friend of mine once gave sage advice. People do what’s important to them. This axiom can equally be applied to nations–as America proceeds into the 21st century, examining some of our outstanding attributes and what makes us unique in the eyes of others, can help better equip us to deal with an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

President Calvin Coolidge’s famous aphorism-the business of America is business-is an apt description of a particular American mindset, but certainly an attitude found in many other countries. When compared to the rest of the world, the United States does have a noteworthy emblematic pursuit, not merely business, but the business of war.

Business of War

Discussing the pros and cons of globalization–whether the triple-bottom line, inequitable economic policies, or trends toward “enlightened capitalism”–is a topic I’ll save for later. But the Pentagon, as a corporate-handled global military hegemon, or leader, is chief among unique characteristics of our national enterprise. We currently maintain, at an exorbitant expense, military superiority over much of the planet with 7000 bases (6000 here, 1000 abroad), and U.S. troops stationed in a shocking 77% of Earth’s nations. The United States military spending exceeds the next 45 highest spending countries in the world, combined. Totaling over $1.5 trillion dollars per annum.

Some lesser well-known facts to consider about the U.S. global system of war:

* U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the worst polluter on the planet, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical corporations combined

* DoD is the largest employer in the United States, with over 1.4 million men and women on active duty, and 718,000 civilian personnel

* Half of all Federal tax dollars go to military spending: base budget, emergency supplemental funding for Iraq and Af-Pak wars, veteran benefits, classified “black” ops, and interest on past war debt

The World as a Neighborhood

“The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out military footing.” ~ Dave Lindorff, Your Tax Dollars at War

To put current U.S. military spending into perspective, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that our world community is a suburban neighborhood of about twenty homes.

Many homes in the neighborhood are little wooden shacks without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation. About five of the twenty have green lawns and internet access. The United States, with nearly 5% of the global population, is one of these homes–but it doesn’t look anything like the others in the neighborhood.

While some homes may have a curbed sidewalk or white picket fence bordering them, ours is a sprawling compound surrounded by a 20-foot concrete security wall topped with coiled razor wire. Turrets and watchtowers frame every corner with carbon-arc searchlights and guards manning machine gun nests. But it doesn’t stop there.

Remote control aerial drones with CCD cameras venture forth from our property patrolling the neighborhood to keep an eye on potential or “emerging” burglars; an assortment of motor vehicles ranging from electric golf carts to up-armored Chevy Suburbans with dark tinted windows tool around the subdivision, street-by-street, armed with rent-a-cops ready to fight or carry out “preventive missions”. To top it off at any given moment at least two manned hot air balloons fly thousands of feet in the air over the entire neighborhood to provide extra surveillance 24/7.

If you weren’t a “citizen of the compound”, how would you feel about the people that lived there?

Maybe a little freaked out?

Hyper-Vigilance to the Point of Overreach

“We cannot wait for the final proof-the smoking gun-that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” ~ George Bush, in run-up to the Iraq War (Oct 7, 2002)

Uber-skeptic Michael Shermer recently wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about why prophecies of doom are so commonplace in human history. He explains that this propensity to see catastrophe everywhere is directly linked to the evolution of the human brain as a “pattern-seeking belief engine”.

Simply put, if our ancestors did not heed the rustling in the grass just beyond sight as being made by a dangerous predator, sometimes, they became lunch. Our thinking and survival strategies eventually evolved to respond to all imagined threats as real danger.

When this tendency toward hyper-vigilance is exploited through politics of fear–and then combined with backdoor alliances between Wall Street, Washington, and the defense industry–a perfect storm in runaway militarism is created.

Military “Empire” as Fait Accompli

I don’t mean to m
inimize the importance of successful strategies for defense, or the service provided by our Armed Forces. In fact, the military superiority that the United States maintains over the planet could even be rationalized as being the unavoidable product of a constitutional mandate.

Essentially, what we know as the Manhattan Project, the top-secret race to develop the world’s first working atomic weapons, never ended. The United States emerged from WWII with its industrial base intact and was the only nation to possess the atomic bomb. But when the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1949, the threat of nuclear conflagration became real.

This triggered a comprehensive arms race to maintain military and technological superiority to guarantee survival, as our Constitution’s preamble commands, “…provide for the common defence…and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”.

George Friedman explains the spoils of military superiority in The Next 100 Years,

“…every ship in the world moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is guaranteed-or denied-at will by the U.S. Navy… This has never happened before in human history…This has meant that the United States could invade other countries-but never be invaded. It has meant in the final analysis the United States controls international trade. It has become the foundation of American security and American wealth.”

Global military empire has been a constitutional fait accompli; and the price tag, trillions upon trillions. But there have been long-term costs-cultural, environmental, and spiritual-for our nation to have constructed, maintain, and continue to expand the most massive military machine ever assembled in the history of humankind. Of all the trillions spent, think about the missed investment opportunities to better our schools, health care, or modernize our infrastructure here at home.

In 2011, we are still playing out the World War II / Cold War narrative–but it’s quickly coming to a close. As we move forward, re-tooling our national security apparatus for the 21st century starts with re-examining the best way to achieve long-term security-simply, we have to find other, more creative and innovative ways to, “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”

Transforming the New World Order

The liberal international order that emerged after World War II was lead by the United States. This system has been framed by post-war agreements, and institutions like the United Nations, G-8 & G-20, WTO, etc. It is characterized by Westphalian principles of sovereignty, rule of law, territorial integrity, and noninterference. But this world order is changing, and nation’s roles shifting. As America moved the international order forward in the latter half of the 20th century, now, she can take on a more reserved leadership position sharing responsibilities with rising economic powerhouses like Brazil, China, and India. However, this movement should not only apply to changing economic roles, but also to security responsibilities as well.  

Embracing this shift from economic globalization to global community should also include spreading out the security responsibilities currently shouldered by the United States Department of Defense and the American people. An interdependent and shared international security infrastructure will bring a more robust and deeper sense of security. This is already occurring in the martial sphere with the continued expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO recently deployed troops from 45 nations under one command in Afghanistan-the most ever in history-as reported by Global Research in “Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army”.

Largely, the American people are still saddled with the financial obligations of building this international security network, protecting its shipping lanes for trade, and therefore, guaranteeing the stability of the global economic system. This stability translates into massive profits for transnational interests, and although these benefits due not accrue to everyday Americans directly, in some cynical way, our military commitment protecting the global system does satisfy the axiom, “the business of America is business.” Nevertheless, it is not sustainable to continue to burden one nation’s citizens with the responsibility of securing, maintaining, and expanding the transnational corporatocracy-something must give.

Old Skool Systems Analysis

“The struggles of the present age require new modes of thought for new ideas-not old wineskins. New forms and expressions of an interconnected human consciousness demand the transcendence of the boundaries of the past.” ~ Terrence E. Paupp, Exodus from Empire

Finding solutions to new problems starts with challenging previously held assumptions in order to begin to find the quintessential “right question”. Shaking up the status quo isn’t as revolutionary as it sounds because there have been organizations doing just that advising U.S. policy for decades. “Systems analysis” is a methodology developed after World War II by the think-tank RAND Corporation to tackle large, complex dilemmas. Solutions are sought by empirically breaking down problems into individual components and statistics, and then through a multi-disciplinary approach, arriving at the right answers.

Alex Abella’s book about RAND, Soldiers of Reason, describes systems analysis as being “American to the core” and refusing “to be constrained by existing reality…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract.”

In a world moving beyond 9/11, we need to scrutinize old premises to find the new questions and answers to succeed in our objective of national and global security. Many in the left, or anti-war/peace movement, talk about dismantling the U.S system of war and oppose it in the same manner-through direct opposition–that that system itself has mastered–an exceedingly difficult task.

A different question for the anti-war movement might be: how do we transform a global system of war toward a community-based system of interconnected, cooperative security?

Changing the trajectory of a system that feeds off the mastery of direct confrontation has to involve an evolved, inverse expression of power; composing solutions on a new field of battle so-to-speak, and not fighting on old terrain.

Joshua Cooper Ramo in The Age of the Unthinkable relates this idea through a 1974 Nobel speech by Austrian economist Friedrich August Von Hayek,

“Politicians and thinkers would be wise not to try to bend history as “the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner a gardener does for his plants.” To see the world this way, as a ceaselessly complex and adaptive system, requires a revolution. It involves changing the role we imagine for ourselves, from architects of a system we can control and manage to gardeners in a living, shifting ecosystem.”

Seeds of peace sown at all levels of political, social, and corporate power-throughout global civil society-will be the connective tissue filling any vacuum of power created by re-tooling our national security infrastructure. The exponential growth of non-governmental organizations (it is said that 90 per cent of all NGOs were created in the last ten years) will provide th
e organizational vehicles engaging people to participate in moving civilization to higher levels of consciousness.

For example, this is the vision of the Euphrates Institute’s upcoming Warriors for Peace program; inviting “individuals who are not afraid of taking on today’s biggest challenges–who get that overcoming divides, ending conflict, and ameliorating the globe’s environmental challenges require relentless energy and a new set of weapons and strategies.”

Deeper Security through Shared Destiny

“Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.” ~ Lao Tzu

In a former life as a recording engineer and producer, we would spend hours mixing hundreds of elements together to make one singular, coherent expression of music. A good mix begins with building a sound stage from the bottom-up and through additive synthesis, making adjustments on the fly to reach harmonious balance. It’s not unlike tending a garden-and it provides some insight into how to bring balance to our national priorities. We may not know the exact ratio of hard and soft power to invest in, but knowing which knobs to “tweak-up” and which to “tweak-down” to make a solid mix is pretty obvious.  

Francois Rabelais said, “Nature abhors a vacuum”, and in this light, seeking a higher degree of diversification and balance for the way we ensure domestic security would be wise. With overreaching military spending on the traditional accoutrements of power-bullets, bombs, tanks, planes-and falling victim to the classic blunder of preparing for the “last war”, we need to turn-down military overreach and turn-up new modes of dynamic diplomacy and engagement.

Simply put, meeting force with force alone, responding to violence with more violence, is only half of a balanced security portfolio-to wit, you can fight fire with fire, but you also can fight fire with water; squelching the flames of conflict before they ignite. The “water” in this case means amplifying a particular worldview-increasing the number of people who look through an intercultural lens of shared destiny to thwart conflict.

Throughout human history, the co-mingling of destinies for neighboring peoples has proven to be a successful peacemaking tool, either through intermarriage, trade or co-habitation. Directing a portion of our current enormous defense spending toward building bridges of peace, connection, and creating a common narrative of “shared destiny” will be a more effective national strategy delivering a deeper, resilient form of security for our world beyond 9/11.

In a recent interview I conducted with Rabbi Michael Lerner at J Street he laid out the purpose of shared destiny,

“…to help people get away from the fantasy that the way to get homeland security is through domination and control of other people, when in fact, the only way we can really be secure as a nation in the United States is through a policy of generosity and caring for others. In the 21st century we need to recognize that our well-being depends upon the well-being of everyone else on the planet, and that the only possibility of survival is for us to come together as a global community and address the tremendous damage we’ve done to the environment and work in environmental districts to develop ways to compensate and repair the damage we’ve done-both to the planet-and each other.”

Many observers have attempted to articulate the Copernican shift that’s taking place around the world moving from military Empire and “dominance-over” toward global community, interdependence, and cooperation. It is transformation hastened by people-to-people communication tools as interlaced networks of people spring up all around the world. The idea of the United States’ security being directly dependent upon the security of everyone on the planet seems to defy conventional logic, as does quantum mechanics or concepts like chaos theory. But the simple fact is finding safety for others will bring a more lasting and deeper security for us.

Joshua Cooper Ramo explores an idea called “Deep Security” as an attempt to frame a new grand strategy taking into account a world of increasing complexity and inter-conductivity. Old mechanistic models for organizing civilization with rigid inputs and outputs like that of a factory assembly line are giving way to more adaptive models that mirror the only examples of true sustainability we know of: natural ecosystems.

Ramo echoes this idea of mirroring natural systems,

“What we need now, both for our world and in each of our lives, is a way of living that resembles nothing so much as a global immune system: always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected, as dynamic as the world itself. An immune system can’t prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest of germs have deadly implications.”

Deep Security embodies a philosophical and political shape-shift from a classic Newtonian and mechanistic view of the world, to the deeper universe of the Quanta, where the impossible not only becomes possible, but probable; it morphs the politic of leading from the center, left, or right, toward leading from below. It pops a third dimension into what currently is a very two-dimensional political world.

Preparing for Peace

“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” ~ Kung Fu-tzu (Confucius)

I remember hearing a story evangelizing about the promise of President Eisenhower’s 1950s Interstate Highway System: “If you’re in the middle of nowhere in the plains of Kansas paving another lonely mile-don’t think you’re wasting your time.”

Certainly laying the asphalt and concrete of the U.S. Interstate Highway, foot-by-foot, mile-by-mile, was an act of perseverance and vision that, in sum, materialized as the largest public works program in history, facilitating an era of prosperity and advancement.

The incremental work of building cultural bridges of peace-one person at a time-may seem like laying pitch in the middle of the desert, but don’t think it’s a waste of time. It will be these connections between individuals who make global peace and sustainability their personal business, which will save civilization. The relationships that are developed today will pay peace dividends tomorrow by sending ripples and rings out into the world like the Eleven Tears install at Ground Zero.

“Nitzahon la shalom tze lechem l’chaim”-the victory of peace is the bread of life.

(“Our World Beyond 9/11” by Byron DeLear, Progressive Examiner, as published on Examiner.com)

I’d like to unpack a little American zeitgeist for you on the Afghan war.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 64% of Americans now think the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting; and an even more overwhelming 73% want a “substantial number of U.S. combat forces” to withdraw this summer.

To get a sense of the demographics of this vox populi, this same group of folks when asked about the Tea Party, replied 36% favorable, 48% unfavorable, with 16% having no opinion-seemingly, an accurate cross-section of the U.S. populace.

U.S. General David Petraeus reported on Tuesday and Wednesday to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, withdrawal of “some combat forces” may be included in a future set of policy recommendations for President Obama.

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy, stated that the proposed drawdown of U.S. and coalition troops, between now and 2014, “…in no way signals our abandonment of Afghanistan. President Obama and President Karzai have agreed that the United States and Afghanistan will have an enduring strategic partnership beyond 2014, and we are currently working with the Afghans on the details of that partnership.”

The problem with our near decade long war in Afghanistan is that the strategy is not based on any lessons learned from history, cannot be sustained due to America’s economic over-extension, and does not have clearly defined, nor tenable goals for success. With recent developments in the Middle East, our boots-on-the-ground traditional military deployment in Afghanistan, to fight a decentralized, asymmetrical foe (al-Qaeda), puts America squarely on the wrong side of history.

Eight years of bungling

Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald’s book, “Crossing Zero”, aptly describes the feckless first eight years of the Afghan war,

“…the rapacious and incompetent mishandling of the country’s reconstruction monies, the confused misapplication of counterinsurgency/counterterrorism doctrine, and a telltale weakness for ignoring Pakistan’s open support for the Taliban, spelled disaster. After eight years and billions spent, the Bush administration’s efforts by 2009 had amounted to the virtual collapse of governance in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the spread of religious violence throughout the region, and the ascent of a narco-funded criminal enterprise global in scope. This is the legacy that has become President Obama’s war.”

Wasted lives and treasure

With America’s deficit for 2011 at $1,500,000,000,000-and our national debt at $14 trillion-the gargantuan annual expense of our military and wars is now threatening to implode our fiscal house. We simply have to find other, more creative and innovative ways to ensure our national security; the Cold War strategic pursuit of supporting strongman thugs, dynastic monarchs, mafia-esque dictators, is not sustainable, nor consistent with the democratic values that we demand for ourselves.  

In his New York Times column, Tom Friedman recently shared the absurdity of continuing to invest in a bad thing,

“When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask: What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?…Last October, Transparency International rated the regime of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan as the second most corrupt in the world after Somalia’s.”

House vote on Afghan pullout

Following on the heels of Gen. Petraeus’ report, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) took to the floor of the U.S. House on Thursday to debate the Afghan war after sponsoring a bill for an immediate pullout. Kucinich warned against the war being open-ended, with no end in sight. He predicted our presence in Afghanistan will continue until 2020 at a cost of at least another trillion dollars. With America’s skyrocketing deficits and debt, something, somewhere has to give.

Kucinich then fired off a series of rhetorical questions,

“Where are we going to get that money? Are we going to cut Social Security for that? Are we going to cut health care and funds for education? Where are we going to get this money? Are we ready to give up our entire domestic agenda so that we can continue on the path of a war to prop up a corrupt regime whose friends are building villas in Dubai, presumably with money that comes through the United States that’s shipped out in planes out of the Kabul Airport? We have to start standing up for America here.”

A different, globally interdependent approach to national security

“We have to start working with the international community on matters of security-and if we need to continue to track down anyone associated with mass violence against the people of our country or any other country, that should be matter of an international police action. And we must stop the policies of interventionism. We must stop the reach for empire; it is destroying our nation… We have to challenge the underlying premise about war being inevitable, because as soon as people start beating the drums of war, there’s an entire marching band and “Chowder Society” at the Pentagon and their people in the contracting business who are ready to make a case for war at any time-and at any place.” –Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH.)

In support of shutting down the war, Republican Dana Rohrabacher (CA-46) made a passionate plea,

“We cannot be a nation that occupies the rest of the world… our foreign policy bureaucracy… set in place a government structure totally inconsistent with the village and tribal culture of the Afghan people… Our troops are there to force the Afghan people to accept an overly centralized and corrupt system put in place by the State Department bureaucracy-I’m sorry, it won’t work. Any attempt to subjugate these people and force them to acquiesce to our vision of Afghanistan will fail… If we’re honest with ourselves, we know (this) tactic won’t succeed. To keep our troops there any longer is sinful! It’s a disservice to our country, but also to those young men who are willing to give their legs and their lives for us.”

Graveyard of Empires

Afghanistan is commonly referred to as the “Graveyard of Empires“, notably because of defeats and hasty retreats made by the British in the mid-19th century and Soviet Union in the 1980s, precipitating its dissolution.

In Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald’s book, “Crossing Zero”, a dire depiction of a waning U.S. empire is made. As a lone super-power, what if we faced the Truman doctrine of containment-except directed at us-restraining American power instead of protecting it?

Nathan Freier of the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute writes: Imagine, “a new era of containment with the United States as the nation to be contained,” where the principle tools and methods of war involve everything but those associated with traditional military conflict. Imagine that the sources of this “new era of containment” are widespread; predicated on non-military forms of political, econom
ic, and violent action; in the main, sustainable over time; and finally, largely invulnerable to effective reversal through traditional U.S. advantages.

This potential eventuality gives one pause to ask, “Will the American people ever wake up and see what’s really happening, or is it too late to turn things around?”

Diversity of America is key

Back in World War II, when the Allies were attempting to defend against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the total war doctrine leveraged all means of production towards the war effort; Detroit made ships, tanks, planes. FDR called our industrial infrastructure, “the arsenal of democracy.”

The arsenal of democracy has now changed. It is no longer the 20th century accoutrements of power: bullets, bombs, planes, tanks-no, the newest tools of democracy are social networking tools of people reaching out to people with their hopes, aspirations, dreams. This new arsenal is notional and abstract; formerly theoretical and academic-now, a very real catalyst lifting people to higher ground, overturning oppressive regimes, engendering what soon will become a “global vox populi.”  

As we examine the merits and faults of Afghan war debate and the business of American empire, let’s make sure not to get stuck in the rut of obsolete thinking, bogged down in the past. We must begin to embrace a new America connected and collaborating with the world’s nations, not by the end of an M-16 assault rifle, but rather through an RSS feed and tweet. This means shifting our funding priorities towards engagement.

Many of America’s detractors rightfully fear a singular super-power wielding a runaway and corporate-sponsored military. But beyond traditional power, to the world, America also represents the transformative power of innovation and technology now connecting the world’s people in ways never seen before. This is the diverse face of our nation, on one hand, we have supported a plethora of anti-democratic revolutions throughout the last century, on the other, we invented solar panels and made personal computing ubiquitous.

The Afghan war debate is really a debate about American empire and our role as global military hegemon. It’s a role we can no longer afford, and frankly, its fruits largely go to a global elite drawing the most from our world’s economic well-not to the people being maimed and dying in Helmand Province, nor the vast majority of our citizens, everyday middle-class Americans.

More time for war

Historically, America has been a warlike nation-and our war making is evolving into a permanent occupation.

George Friedman’s “The Next 100 Years” explains:

“The United States has been at war for about 10 percent of its existence. This statistic includes only major wars-the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam. It does not include minor conflicts like the Spanish-American War or Desert Storm. During the twentieth century, the United States was at war 15 percent of the time. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was at war 22 percent of the time. And since the beginning of the twenty-first century, in 2001, the United States has been constantly at war.”

Warfare has also become increasingly more violent for innocents-the meme about smart bombs and smart warfare only targeting bad guys, is a bad guise for an increasingly more terroristic enterprise:

“Civilian fatalities in wartime climbed from 5 per cent at the turn of the century, to 15 per cent during World War I, to 65 per cent by the end of World War II, to more than 90 per cent in the wars of the 1990s.”  ~ Patterns in conflict: civilians are now the target (UNICEF)

How do we as a national family deal with increasing military budgets and debt, heightened violence against innocents, and escalating force commitments with no end in sight?

These are soul searching questions that dig deep down into who and what we are as a people. As history marches on, avoiding these difficult issues will no longer be an option. Sure, it might be easier to pretend we’re still in the springtime of America, summer soldiers, sunshine patriots and all. But as Gould and Fitzgerald say in Crossing Zero, “the United States has crossed a threshold where its capacity for violence undermines its own standards of justice and individual rights without which the violence has no meaning. In other words, the United States has come to a turning point at which the purpose of the force it has created has become its own undoing.”

A dark realpolitik drives the mission

George Friedman, founder and CEO of the think-tank STRATFOR, reveals what really goes down in the minds of strategists creating American foreign policy-that our true intentions in Afghanistan are not nation-building, nor bringing democracy to an oppressed people, but an effort to destabilize, preventing emergent geo-political competitors.

Friedman refers to this as part of our national “grand strategy”:

“The goal of these interventions (Iraq / Afghanistan) was never to achieve something-whatever the political rhetoric might have said-but to prevent something. The United States wanted to prevent stability in areas where another power might emerge. Its goal was not to stabilize, but to destabilize. And that explains how the United States responded to the Islamic earthquake (9/11)-it wanted to prevent a large, powerful Islamic state from emerging. Rhetoric aside, the United States has no overriding interest in peace in Eurasia. The United States also has no interest in winning a war outright. As with Vietnam, Korea, the purpose of these conflicts is to simply block a power or destabilize a region, not to impose order.”

I submit to you, that this kind of thinking, however grounded in the wreckage of the past, is a kind of thinking that will destabilize our ability to lead in the world, and it will topple our nation in the future. If our soldiers only knew they were being used as tools, as a kind of cannon fodder-it’s time for America to awaken out of her media trance and face the music of our being led down a very self-destructive path.

Big picture?

All empires die. They come and go. History shows us this, Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, now we have “Pax Americana”.  If we in America don’t want to follow history’s inevitable prescription, we must demand our leaders make a new way. Given the track record, it would seem the only true and lasting empire would be one made of the common heritage shared by all humankind, the empire of our global family. A family not merely made of one species of life-but rather all species of earth life-the only true empire worth propagating is a government of life and for all life. To me, this would be a new and transcendent “arsenal of democracy” worth going into debt over by borrowing from China to help build.

I will be moderating a Great Minds event with authors Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, “Crossing Zero: The Afpak War at the Turning Point of American Empire” on April 5th, 2011 in Beverly Hills, CA. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to proctor@artnet.net (310) 858-6643. -BWD  

I think the last flick I’ve seen more than three times in theaters was Star Wars in 1977 when I was a sprite 11 years old. Yesterday, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” for the third time eagerly sharing each viewing with family and friends. Avatar’s latest box office has it ranked as the second highest grossing film of all time behind Titanic, another film directed by Cameron.

The 3D and CGI technological leaps Avatar entertains scatters a little pixie dust over one’s eyes summoning the sparkling magic of the movies we experienced as film-going adolescents. Words like “immersive” and “consuming” have been used to describe the digital deluge of artistry washing over the audience when literally bounding about the alien landscape of Pandora; a life-lush moon orbiting a gas giant planet in the Alpha Centuri tri-star complex. It is a “must-see” in big screen 3D.

There have been passionate criticisms of Cameron’s latest epic, but to me, these negative responses have not been a function of the film’s narrative per se, as much as subjective expectations projected upon one of the most expensive and anticipated movies in years. Avatar is like the “President” of feature films, and being situated at the top of Hollywood’s heap, has a difficult time pleasing everybody. But in many ways Avatar is living up to its role becoming bigger and grander than just about any other Hollywood film. Not only is it spearheading a revolution in consumer electronics and television with 3D flat screens and channels springing up (Sony, ESPN, DirecTV, etc), but it also represents one of the most penetrating and multi-faceted social commentaries to be delivered through a mainstream vehicle in years — without a doubt James Cameron’s most progressive offering.    

With Hollywood stick-figure simplicity and in no uncertain terms, Avatar’s plot revolves around a set of political propositions:

* the transcendent value of life’s interdependency

* a holistic view of environmental sustainability

* anti-Imperialism  

* anti-corporate exploitation

The story follows a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who has been offered a gig with a multi-stellar corporation bent upon mining a rare mineral on the moon Pandora. However, in order to gain access to the biggest lode of “unobtanium”, the corporation needs to displace an indigenous population of hundreds of ten-feet tall lithe and quasi-feline blue humanoids; known as the “Na-vi”. Sully is an Avatar Driver who remotely controls a genetically grown ten foot tall Na’vi body with his nervous system. Jake’s Avatar is able to breathe Pandora’s exotic atmosphere and interact with the endemic flora and fauna; eventually, enabling him to “relate” more effectively with the Na’vi natives as one of their own.  

Interdependence of all living beings and environmental stewardship  

We learn that the Na’vi practice a religion of connected harmony with their Mother, the life essence of Pandora, or perhaps all life, called “Eywa”. It is explained both scientifically and through religious narrative that there is a network of energy connecting all life, and that this energy cannot be possessed; it is only borrowed and returns to Eywa after the natural cycle of life and death. Like Native Americans, when the Na’vi hunt, a “clean kill” has the Na’vi hunter praying to the soul of the dying animal expressing gratitude for the sustenance provided to The People. Unnecessary death, destruction and environmental degradation are all considered an abomination to that which is sacred; harmony with nature and the preservation of the balance of life are principle tenets practiced by the Na’vi.

Jake Sully is taught the native ways, a la Kevin Costner in “Dances with Wolves”. He is torn between two cultures: his mercenary Marine brethren doing the bidding of a profiteering conglomerate — and his new family and way of life with the Na’vi. The human invaders are chasing down profits and resources for a healthy quarterly business report back home at the expense of utterly desecrating the embodiment of Na’vi life, their towering living lair in the form of an acres tall “Home-tree” and, in the process, killing many members of the Na’vi clan. Sully chooses to defend the Na’vi “good guys” versus the militaristic corporate “bad guys”.

This first layer of story in Avatar recalls many scenes from our colonial history of conquering Empires and overrun indigenous peoples, indeed, we are still beset by the depredations of resource and human exploitation whether oil politics in the Middle East or sweatshop servitude in Asian factories supplying $3 t-shirts to the West. As I have expressed in the past, there are moral and spiritual inconsistencies with having our dollars dictate to the manner in which we treat other human beings, beyond that which we would tolerate for ourselves. As professed in a classic 60’s Star Trek episode, the values set forth in America’s founding documents must apply to all — or they mean nothing. Of course it would be unwise and currently impossible to extend the reach of Constitutional protections to all humanity, but purposefully participating and benefiting from the subjugation and exploitation of other peoples is anathema to any conception of moral consistency.    

Oil wars and destruction of Earth’s environment

This film is clear about where our current problems, if unaddressed, will thrust humanity in the near future. Our hero protagonist, Jake Sully, was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down while serving with a Marine Recon Battalion in Venezuela; and our villain, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), also with Marine Recon, was wounded years earlier in Nigeria (read: oil wars). After destroying all the green on planet Earth and killing their “Mother”, the humans are out and about the universe threatening other ecosystems. The implied takeaway, let’s not destroy our environment and export a corporate driven cancer of consumption into the universal community.    

Without revealing too much of the plot’s twists and turns and ups and downs, some observations that sets Avatar aside for special reflection deserve mentioning.

Newscorp as ecological evangelist?

There is a deep irony in the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp and Twentieth Century Fox have heavily promoted Avatar and its anti-corporate exploitation message, being that many times Newscorp and FOX News often cast political subjects in a very self-serving and corporatist light. Everyone is familiar with the “spin-zone” that is FOX News, but not so aware that FOX’s parent corp proliferates varying degrees of political spin throughout every time zone on planet Earth.

I am all too familiar with the breadth of Newscorp’s global holdings — satellites, newspapers, networks, publishers, studios — and the ramifications of all those venues consolidated and helmed by one political viewpoint are profound. The proof is in how Newscorp has lead the way in transforming news and objective journalism into a sensationalized circus of commentator clowns. The red noses are cute (Beck) but not when the circus tent collapses (ecosystem). While working for 20th in a past life, I helped produce a special project for Mr. Murdoch detailing the myriad tendrils and tentacles wrapped around virtually every media market around the planet, back then, we affectionately referred to him as “Darth”. It is awesome to behold the collection of corporations that make up Newscorp, one of a handful of consolidated media behemoths.  

Kudos have to go to Cameron for demanding the creative independence to frame his opus in exactly the way he wanted, and although Newscorp profits will have been lifted by Avatar, the meaning and message is clearly at odds with Newscorp religion. Good news is, making positive messaging profitable combined with real action on the ground will help us surmount the environmental and economic challenges facing humanity today. Surprisingly, Newscorp is doing its part with Avatar.  

Avatar’s technology as a gateway to understanding compassion  

Another deeper symbolic layer in Avatar is the manner in which Jake Sully’s evolution takes place, his character arc. As an Avatar Driver, Sully’s mind and nervous system is projected into another body, physicalizing the notion of empathy, literally embodying the concept of “getting out of yourself”. This aspect of showing empathy through a technological device that handholds the audience into what it really means to look through the eyes of another has great educational value for young minds. Sully “sees” the injustice looking through the eyes of the oppressed, and makes the choice to fight it. Kids and teenagers today are enraptured with real avatars through online chat rooms, websites like Second Life and first-person video games; they are all too familiar with the abstraction that takes place in projecting the first person perspective into second and third person. What Cameron’s film does so subtly for his audience is connect the experience of ego projection into a morally and socially responsible message and all the while makes it entertaining. It’s fun to do the right thing, a mythology worth promoting.

Responsible media  

Avatar joins the ranks of a handful of feature films over the years that have shaped public opinion and culture. Influential works like Gabriel Over the White House (1933), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Apocalypse Now (1979) or The China Syndrome (1979) have all had significant social impact. This is filmmaking at its finest, unfortunately a rare breed in an entertainment sphere that has largely been shown to degrade values more readily than build them up. Avatar reports for duty on the other side of this trend, and fosters a responsible and timely worldview in a roller coaster of a fun ride.

Don’t miss this milestone in movie making, I highly recommend it. Six stars.