Category Archives: War

03/07/2026
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Hope, Love, War

753 Words: Crazy

I’m trying to wrap up my book, a history of WFHB now titled How Hard Could It Be? The Stories of WFHB, while simultaneously trying to keep from screaming into my pillow over the president’s little war in Iran. All big wars start as little wars. So even the tiniest conflict can swiftly spiral into a nuclear exchange.

So, personally, things are dreamy. All I have to do on the book is finish the introduction, itself titled “How & Why.” I’m working for both the Limestone Post and Bloom magazines. My radio interview program, Big Talk, is chugging along. The cats are healthy. The Loved One is still hot as a pistol. Glabworld, right now, couldn’t be better.

The non-Glabworld, though, is scary as hell. Wars. Creeping and overt fascism here in America. AI spreading as malignantly as COVID did some six years ago. Climate catastrophes ramping up as we approach the ’30s. Out of control wealth inequality causing widespread poverty. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. The Saudi Crown Prince. Viktor Orbán. Vladimir Putin. Pete Hegseth. For chrissakes, today there are enough global villains to menace three or four different eras.

I hit a landmark birthday the other day. 70. Sheesh! Honestly, once you hit that number, you can’t pretend any more. You’re old. Way old. Every year that passes now — every day — is a gift. Icing on the cake. There was an old Native American saying — I forget where I first read it, either in Black Elk Speaks or Little Big Man or maybe even some other book — where a young man says to his elder, “Grandfather, today is a good day to die.” Meaning: life is good, I feel able and robust, and if worse came to worse, if this were to be my last day on Earth, I’d be happy.

That’s the way I look at life now. As an old coot. A very old coot.

Yet, this world is as threatening and dangerous as it’s ever been. Nuclear annihilation can happen in the next hour. Climate calamity in the next decade. What right do I have to feel content?

Every right. The only message I’ve ever valued from my Roman Catholic upbringing was this line from a sermon I heard once: “We are here to love and to hope.”

If all I can control are my sanity and my disposition, then I’ll do so to the best of my ability. I’m not listening to radio news anymore. I’ve long since given up on TV news. I have no news feed on my smartphone. I’m not harangued by breaking news alerts. I do scan several newspapers (online, of course) each day to keep up but, otherwise, I’ve more or less quit gobbling up every shred of horrifying bulletins as I once did. I don’t slip into op/ed rabbit holes warning of impending doom.

I haven’t separated myself fully from the events of the day. I’ve simply erected a guard rail so I don’t tumble into an abyss of despair.

One thing I’m doing is listening to upbeat music. Sunshine pop from the ’60s. Soul and funk from the ’70s. Hell, even Glenn Miller pop hits from the 1940s.  Here’s a tune that might buck you up, as it does me. It soars. It celebrates joy. It’s needed today more than when it was a hit back in 1979:

Or even this, a song that acknowledges the evils in this world but urges redemption:

Of course, a simple, joyous love song will do:

If today’s the last day for me — or for all of us — at the very least we can go out singing about love and hope.

By the way, I was just reading about the exoplanet K2-18b. It orbits a star some 124 light years away from us. The James Webb Space Telescope has been keeping an eye on it. and has turned up evidence it may very well harbor life. No, the ‘scope hasn’t ID’d intelligent aliens scooting around the planet just yet. It has, though, turned up chemical signs of life. How cool!

Here’s a European Space Agency artist’s conception of the globe:

K2-18b.

It’s blue and cloud-swirly, just like our planet.

Do creatures live there? Are they intelligent. Do they love and hope? Do they fire nuclear missiles at each other.

Hell, for all we know they once may have populated the entire planet, and then found themselves embroiled in a global war. They may have wiped themselves out. Of course, I doubt they intended to. That’d be crazy.

10/19/2023
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Hamas, Israel, War

1000 Words: The War Species

I take no side in the latest Middle East dust-up. Of course, “dust-up” is almost an insulting term considered some 4000 people — mostly innocents — have died in the Israeli-Hamas War.

It’s not that I take no side in any war. For instance, I’m four-square in favor of Ukraine kicking the living shit out of the Russian invaders in their war. These two wars are the ones we, in this holy land, pay exclusive attention to. Your neighbors and relatives’ll wring their hands and moan about what a horrible and dangerous world we live in based only on their knowledge of those two conflicts while remaining unaware that some 110 wars, as defined by international law, are raging to one extent or another around the globe.

That’s right: one freaking hundred and ten wars are turning tens of thousands of soldiers into hamburger and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, dear friends, and acquaintances into grieving, juddering wrecks.

These numbers come from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. The postgraduate school in  Switzerland monitors all the shooting wars going on across this mad planet, a hobby that keeps its faculty and students busier than celebrity gossip mongers, if that can be possible. The Geneva Academy finds that the hottest spots in the world are Africa and, natch, the Middle East where, together, some 45 wars are flaring as you read this. The vast majority of us don’t give the slightest damn about bloodshed in Africa, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the continuous flow of oil, precious metals, or other resources that allow us to play incessantly with electronic devices, scoot around in our cars, sink our retirement savings into, or hoard to keep out of Chinese hands. By such means, we can pretend that all is well outside our borders until, as occurred nearly two weeks ago, thugs and hoodlums started whacking the crap out of each other with moms, babies, nurses, doctors, professors, sanitation workers, cabaret singers, poets, and other bystanders suffering a shockingly outsized share of the bodily damage.

Well, maybe not so shockingly. Consider the fact that in World War II, the crème de la crème of organized human slaughter, the estimated number of deaths ranges from 45 to 85 million. Nobody could ever really pin that number down because, well, our technology was so good and the ferocity with which we used it so over the top that entire big cities were wiped off the map. It would have been as if Houston or Chicago were leveled, with countless Louisvilles, Oklahoma Cities, Sacramentos, Newarks, Albuquerques, and more disappearing under clouds of thick, black smoke. Sure, millions of soldiers died but their number was dwarfed by the incineration and butchering of just plain folks. Census and identification records similarly were scorched into ash so who knows how many people ceased to be in Dresden or Nagasaki.

Again, not that I particularly blame the Allies for unleashing their murderous fury. The Axis Powers were vicious, sociopathic mass murderers who had to be stopped and the only hammers we had against them were rifles, cannons, tanks and, ultimately, atomic bombs. But avid homicidal maniacs like Britain’s Air Marshall Arthur “Bomber” Harris and the US Army Air Corps’ Gen. Curtis LeMay both acknowledged their side had to win, otherwise each would be strung up as war criminals had the contest turned out differently. The lesson? If you want to win a war, your generals had better be more bloodthirsty than their generals.

As stated in this global communications colossus time and again, it’s my deeply held belief that we humans love the hell out of war. It excites us, moves us, even tumesces many of us in certain anatomical locales. Speaking of world war, the Great War, which necessarily had to be renamed World War I, was America’s first big foray into international mayhem. Being that our non-indigenous populace at the time hadn’t experienced waves of foreign troops sweeping across our soil, ravaging our homes, plundering our goods, and raping a large swath of our citizenry, the song “Over There” became a huge hit, parades for departing troops were held in most big cities, young men longed to enlist, and their moms and lovers urged them on to become heroes. Next thing anybody knew, thousands of American soldiers were being shipped back, armless, legless, paralyzed, poison gassed, filled with shrapnel and bullets, and mentally and emotionally crippled by the blood and guts they’d witnessed.

Who knew?

Well, anybody should have. Only we humans like to forget all the lessons of war just as soon as the latest war is ended. Then we go back to romanticizing it, even cherishing it.

That’s certainly what the young warriors of Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces do — and have done for decades. And it’s what we did when Vietnam was gradually becoming a recognizable term in 1964 and ’65. Both Hamas and the IDF can cite atrocities and provocations by the other side as justification for their martial zeal. Many Palestinians have been trying to destroy Israel and eliminate Jews in the Middle East since before the Hebrew homeland was established in 1947. And Israelis, the Holocaust still fresh in their memories, respond to every insult or attack in a manner that makes the original offense resemble a mosquito bite, Israel’s message being, Don’t fuck with us or we’ll fuck back with you times ten.

All wars are justified by the warring parties. All wars are fought for god and freedom. Yep, even the Nazis and the militarists of Japan told their respective people the blood they were about to shed was a task blessed by god and that liberty would be the reward.

Hitler and Goebbels said so. Tojo said so. Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and every other leader urging his country to take up arms said so. Says so.

What Hamas did was indefensible. What Israel is doing in return is similarly so. Neither side needs me to endorse it.

05/22/2023
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Bakhmut, Genetics, War

1000 Words: Kill Joy

Not, as a quick scan of the above headline might convey, killjoy as in “one who spoils the pleasure of others.”

No, I’m re-minting the term.

Here’s my new definition of kill joy: the excitement, the glee, the nearly sexual rush that humans get from war.

I’ve hammered on this many a time in this global communications colossus: we love war.

Argue with me all you’d like but you’d be wrong. We get off on war. We write songs about it. We throw parades for our soldiers both before and after wars. We gobble up news from the front. If our country’s not currently fighting a war, we follow closely whatever other countries are slaughtering each other.

Absent real war, we root and scream and devote our undying loyalty to our sports teams. When they win, when they kill the other team, we holler and rejoice and stamp our feet until the stadium shakes. Hell, just this past weekend, Major League Baseball teams donned khaki green and camouflage caps. If we can’t draw blood from our enemies, at least we can homer them to death. There are no plans, as far as I know, for baseball teams to wear caps with peace signs on them.

In this holy land, as a rule, we spend more than half of our entire yearly discretionary budget on the military. The United States paid out some $877 billion for defense in 2022, more than the next 10 countries combined.

Don’t tell me we hate war.

Oh, sure, there are folks who wring their hands and moan about the horrors, the atrocities, the madness of war. They are a minority.

There is no Department of Peace. There is, of course, a Department of Defense. Formerly the Department of War. But the spin-meisters who pondered such things decided, some 75 years ago, that Defense sounded more palatable than War. A sop, I’m sure, to that occasionally loud minority that wails about the evil of war.

Perhaps it is evil. But it sure is a blast.

And, don’t get me wrong, the United States isn’t the only country that embraces war. Almost every other sovereign state in the world honors, celebrates, worships for pity’s sake its fighting forces. It’s just that we spend the most dough and devote the largest share of our industrial and human might to the making of war. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 declared this nation to be the “arsenal of democracy.” We supplied the British and the Russians with millions and billions of things made from iron and steel and any other kind of metal that could be fashioned into ammo and armor. So productive were we as our World War II allies were getting their factories bombed and their economies ruined that we emerged from the Great Depression richer and more powerful than ever. In the years since, we’ve decided that supplying our own military — and much of the rest of the world’s — with bullets, grenades, tanks, fighter planes, mortars, bombers, troop carriers, runways, bunkers, hell, you name it — is flat-out good business. Trust me, if we hadn’t taken up that task, another economic powerhouse would have.

Whenever the national budget’s up for debate our political parties tussle over financial outlays for Social Security or homelessness or health care or education or road building or any of dozens of projects and programs that might make people’s lives safer and more comfortable. Yet, when’s the last time you heard a politician running for office stand up and say Goddamn it, we spend too much money on the military! It’s been a long, long time, primarily because it’s a losing shriek.

The love of war is hard-wired in our genes. Our nearest critter relatives, the chimpanzees, long have been known to engage in war and killing. They kill members of their own species, researchers have found, for the same reasons humans do: to take over territory. That’s why human armies and gangs kill each other.

And the chimps, research has shown, dig the killing. Very few, if any, other animals, birds, or insects organize themselves to kill other members of their own species. The urge to do so is built in to the DNA of Pan troglodytes as well as Homo sapiens. Jane Goodall’s research into chimp behavior in central Africa in the 1970s, a 2010 article in the journal Science claims, found that “male chimps often organize themselves into warring gangs that raid each other’s territory, sometimes leaving mutilated dead bodies in the battlefield.”

The article adds: “Lethal aggression can be evolutionarily beneficial in that species, rewarding the winners with food, mates, and the opportunity to pass along their genes.”

That pretty much sums up humans’ real justifications and rewards for war, despite all the high-minded rationalizations propagandists employ to whip up their respective populaces. We believce we’re fighting for freedom; the irony is, so are our enemies. There must be something more to it.

An analysis of the long, brutal battle for the Ukraine city of Bakhmut in today’s New York Times put me in a mind to ponder our love of war. Bakhmut before last summer was an anonymous salt mining town in northeastern Ukraine, about the size of Bloomington, Indiana. Now, after its 70,000 or so inhabitants have either been killed or forced out, Bakhmut is a dead city. Nobody lives there anymore. Its buildings and infrastructure mainly destroyed. The devastation there has been compared to that of Hiroshima after the nuclear bombing.

The horrible irony is, there was no earthly reason for the Russian and Ukraine armies to fight so viciously over the place. “Bakhmut… happened to be where two armies collided,” the analysis posits. “Pride, defiance and sheer stubbornness quickly gave the city outsize importance.”

There’s been a Bakhmut equivalent in every war ever fought. A strategically pointless place where killing and destruction became total because…, well, just because.

You want a because? Alright, here it is. Because we love war.

Just Because. [Image: Ukrainian Armed Services]