Bits and Pieces – July 22, 2023 - "American Sniper"

After a short hiatus, I’m hoping to get back to posting on a regular basis. To start I’m going to put together short commentaries on what’s in the news, and, more importantly what’s not in the main stream media, while I work on longer analytic posts.

Today’s edition follows.

A while back I wrote a piece on gun control titled “It’s Not the Guns, It’s Us. The gist of the post was that the US is and has always been a violent society, from the original settlers’ genocide of native people, through slavery, and right down to our culture today. (I’ve reposted it below, for those who missed it the first time around.)

So I was not at all surprised to read about this in “War Made Invisible” by Norman Solomon. The top grossing movie in 2014 was American Sniper, which according to the NYT, was “one of the 10 most influential films of the decade”. “One of the key themes of American Sniper is the strong culture of machismo—the masculine-oriented aggressiveness, competitiveness, and glamorization of danger—found in the U.S. military”.

Reflect for a moment on how that film might have affected a teenage boy (note that we are always talking about male perpetrators when shootings take place) who, as an adult ten or twelve years later, has access to a weapon which could replicate the “heroic” actions of the movie character. Killing “bad guys” is, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, as American as cherry pie. Who gets to determine who the “bad guys” are? Why not me?

January 27, 2023 – It’s Not the Guns, It’s Us

Like many of my fellow Americans, when I woke up Tuesday morning to the reports of another horrific mass murder in California, there was little emotional response, no feeling that “we’ve got to do something, anything, to stop this slaughter.” I, like too many others, have become desensitized, numbed by what has become an all-too-common event.

“We’re still trying to understand exactly what happened and why, but it’s just incredibly, incredibly tragic,” said state Sen. Josh Becker, who represents the area. Tragic yes; unexpected, no.

By the next day the political response was focusing, as it always does after these tragedies, on gun control. But wait a minute, doesn’t California, which has seen 3 mass shootings in the last week or so, have a mandatory waiting period for the purchase of firearms? Doesn’t the state ban assault rifles? Didn’t the legislature adopt a “red flag” law that allows guns to be seized from people believed to be a threat to themselves or others? And haven’t California voters overwhelmingly approved limiting the number of bullets allowed in a gun’s magazine? And yet …

Don’t get me wrong. I’m totally in favor of gun control. In my perfect world, we wouldn’t even allow guns for hunting. At least against a hunter with a bow and arrow, the deer would have a chance. But we don’t live in that perfect world. We live in the United States of America, where violence is accepted as the solution to all problems, in many cases the only solution. It’s a fact, as H Rap Brown quipped, that “violence is as American as cherry pie”.

Think about it. The country was settled by violence, as the English immigrants did all they could to exterminate the native peoples and expropriate their land, rounding up the few that weren’t killed and forcing them onto reservations (later making movies about how the savages were killed by the heroic cavalry coming to the rescue of peaceful white farmers).

The US grew into a powerful industrial society by forcefully enslaving millions of Africans and exploiting their labor. What is more violent than slavery? And, country expanded its borders by waging war against its neighbor to the south, referring to Manifest Destiny as its justification. It’s okay to kill when God’s on your side.

American society has glorified war during its entire history. Many of its early leaders where military heroes; its national anthem is about a war – “and the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…” The statutes of its heroes, more often than not, are of generals (until recently even Confederate generals, who were traitors to the Union).

Although it managed to avoid having a large standing army until just after WW II (due in large part to very weak neighbors and two oceans), it relied on a growing internal force to “keep the peace” domestically by applying the violence of the state to protect the interests of the wealthy. And, since WW II, it has maintained the world’s largest military, with a budget greater than combined total of the next 11 largest military budgets in the world.

Today, the US government spends the American people’s hard-earned money to extend Its military reach to every corner of the world so that it can take out (the nice way to say kill) those forces (that is, human beings) it deems the enemy almost anywhere (along with an occasional wedding party), while at the same time condemning other countries that have used force just outside their borders claiming it is necessary to guarantee their national security.

Our “civilization” continues to glorify war and gratuitous violence. Its media is filled to the brim with violence, celebrating death and destruction in too many ways to even count. Go to the movies, watch TV, play video games, etc., it’s all the same. And it’s been that way all of my 80 years on this planet, although it seems to be even more pervasive today than it was when I was a kid.

Our society’s response to problems and conflicts, both home and abroad is violence. Even when dealing with social problems in a supposedly non-violent way, we use violent terms, an example being the War on Poverty. Is it any wonder that ordinary Americans, particularly in time of personal crises see violence, even random violence, as the normal response.

To “protect” our citizens at home we have a militarized police force, generously funded with resources, not to help people, but to kill them (or, in a gentler form of violence, to lock them in cages). And kill people they do. The year 2022 was the deadliest year on record in the United States for fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people last year. As I write, the news is filled with reports of another murder by the people who are supposed to protect us.  These generously fund police departments are actually occupying armies, using their resources to keep people in line, especially poor people of color whose needs are not being funded.

Case and point. While there is no end to funding for more police and more weapons, universal healthcare can wait (forever?). The governor of California reported that, while visiting a man in the hospital, whose leg had been shattered by the gunfire during the latest mass shooting, he was informed that the victim was hoping to leave quickly to avoid high medical bills. The patient’s mother and son arrived later and told Gov. Newsom they were "worried he's going to lose his job at a warehouse the next day unless he can go back to work."

So there we have it. As our country and the world face the interrelated crises of global warming, runaway inequality, the COVID pandemic (and who knows how many more are waiting in the wings), a real threat of escalation to nuclear war, and the attacks from the extreme right on democracy, instead of devoting the resources needed to provide for the people of our country and our larger community, the world, we are pumping just under $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s one trillion) into the military and billions more into the police.

Until we can begin to deal with the violence that permeates our society, gun control will have only minor effects on the murder rates (both mass and individual) in the US. The glorification of violence and guns in the US has resulted firearms becoming the #1 cause of death among children 1-19 years of age. One more aspect of the policrisis we face.

 

Sanders on global warming and the climate crises

 

I've been beset by a number of personal issues lately and unable to work on blog articles. Hope to get back soon. In place of my rants, I've copied a stirring op/ed piece on the climate crisis by one of our heroes, Senator Bernie Sanders. This crisis is not something coming down the road, but one that is here for hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings. And it is intimately connected to other crises affecting us all, from a huge and growing crisis of migrants clamoring to escape its effects to feeding the extreme rightwing (or should I say fascist) movements in their attack on democratic values. Everything, as it turns out, is connected, so I think it's accurate to talk about the climate crises, or as one of my favorite writers, Adam Tooze, posits, the climate polycrisis.

This year is set to be the hottest in history. Congress must act now.
If there is not bold, immediate action to address the climate crisis, the quality of life that we are leaving our kids is very much in question

Bernie Sanders
Fri 7 July 2023

The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. This year is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, and this Fourth of July might have been the hottest day in the past 125,000 years.

Climate change is ravaging the planet. We are now seeing floods, droughts, extreme weather disturbances and wild fires causing unprecedented damage. If there is not bold, immediate and united action by governments throughout the world, the quality of life that we are leaving our kids and future generations is very much in question.

In the short term, we will be looking at more melting of the Arctic ice caps, rising sea levels and increased flooding. We will experience more drought and a decrease in food production. We will see major damage caused by intense storms, tornadoes and other extreme weather disturbances. We will see a decline in economic activity and the migration of millions of people as a result of water shortages. We will see a major disruption in all forms of marine life as a result of warming sea water and the acidification of the oceans.

Over last few weeks we’ve gotten a glimpse of what this dystopian future could look like. The unprecedented forest fires in Quebec, preceded by massive fires in Nova Scotia, British Columbia and Alberta, have resulted in dangerously unhealthy air all across the United States. New York, Washington DC, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities have reported some of their worst air quality levels ever as people with chronic illness have been forced to remain indoors. Meanwhile, during this same period, Texas has experienced a record-breaking heat wave. In Corpus Christi the heat index, a measure of temperature combined with humidity, reached 125F – close to the level at which humans are able to survive.

As a result of long-standing drought six western states that rely on water from the Colorado River have recently agreed to dramatically cut their water use. That river, which provides water for 40 million people and a $5 trillion-a-year agricultural industry, is drying up. The state of Arizona recently restricted future home-building in the Phoenix area due to a lack of groundwater, based on projections showing that wells will run dry under existing conditions.

Needless to say, climate change is not just an American issue. Despite the frightening impact of climate change on the United States, highly populated Asian countries are facing even worse challenges. Sea levels on China’s coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average. China’s coastal areas are home to approximately 45% of the country’s population of about 1.4 billion people, and contribute to over half of the country’s economic output. Major cities like Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen are all located along the Chinese coast and could face catastrophic flooding in years to come – creating havoc with the entire Chinese economy.

Last year, India experienced a searing heat wave, during which parts of the country reached more than 120F. In 2022, India experienced its hottest April in 122 years and its hottest March on record. It experienced extreme weather on 242 out of 273 days between January and October 2022. Long-term projections indicate that Indian heat waves could cross the survivability limit for a healthy human resting in the shade by 2050. The impact of these continued heat waves will not only result in more deaths and disease in India but will increase poverty as a result of reduced economic output.

From June to October 2022, heavy rainfall in Pakistan caused flooding and landslides at a rate nearly 10 times the national 30-year average. The floods affected nearly 33 million people, damaged 4.4 million acres of agricultural land and killed 800,000 livestock. In the aftermath, rising food prices exacerbated already stressed levels of hunger and malnutrition in the country. The number of people experiencing severe hunger has more than doubled since the floods hit in June: today, 14.6 million people are experiencing severe hunger in Pakistan and the malnutrition rates are dire.

Climate change is taking a major human, economic, and environmental toll in Europe, the fastest warming continent of the world. The year 2022 was marked by extreme heat, drought, and wildfires. Based on country data submitted so far, it is estimated that at least 15,000 people died in Western Europe alone specifically due to the heat in 2022. Among those, more than 4,600 deaths in Spain, more than 1,000 in Portugal, more than 3,200 in the United Kingdom, and around 4,500 people died in Germany as a result of extreme heat.

As devastating as climate change has been for the United States, Europe, China and other developed countries, its impact is even worse for the poorest countries on earth who lack the resources to protect their inhabitants from the growing hunger, disease and migrations that droughts and floods are causing. Here are a few examples as reported by the UN World Food Program:

South Sudan’s temperatures are increasing at two and half times the global average. This has resulted in extreme weather events including four consecutive years of flooding that have left half the country underwater. The unprecedented flooding has swallowed large swathes of the country while other parts are grappling with devastating drought. Today, some 64% of the country’s population (7.7 million people out of 12 million total) are experiencing severe hunger.

In February of 2022, Madagascar was hit with four tropical cyclones. These storms destroyed infrastructure, decimated rice crops and left over 270,000 people in urgent need of food. Today, nearly 2 million people in Madagascar are experiencing hunger and are in need of humanitarian assistance

In Somalia, there is no end in sight to the drought in that extremely poor country. Somalia has experienced five failed rainy seasons, drying up crops and killing livestock. This has resulted in 6.5 million people facing crisis levels of hunger.

It is no great secret that human beings are not particularly anxious to address painful realities – especially when it requires taking on powerful special interests like the fossil fuel industry. This time we must.

Our Earth is warming rapidly. We see this every day in every part of the world.

Drought, floods, forest fires and extreme weather disturbances are increasing. We see this every day in every part of the world.

Hunger, disease and human migrations are increasing. We see this every day in every part of the world.

Instead of denying this obvious reality, instead of doing the bidding of oil and coal companies, instead of fomenting a new cold war with China, members of Congress must develop an unprecedented sense of urgency about this global crisis. We must bring the world together NOW to address this existential threat. Failure to act will doom future generations to a very uncertain future. For the sake of our common humanity we cannot allow that to happen.