This Is All So Goddamn Unnecessary

Iran, and Courage, and The Waste Of It All

(writing this on my phone on a train so no audio today; I'll drop a recording tomorrow)

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The hippies were naive, but can you imagine how wonderful it must have felt before they knew that? When giving peace a chance felt like a real option instead of a cliche. When the power of songs and LSD was gonna help us break the chains of everything that came before. When Woodstock felt like a revolution.

The year is 2026, and tech bros are microdosing to biohack themselves into optimum productivity. AI music is flooding Spotify. And peace has no chance--not when war is so lucrative and violence so much fun.

In 2012, I got accepted into UChicago. I was just two years out of the military, and desperate to put that life behind me, so I told no one about my past. Obscuring a core fact about your own past is an amazing way to make no friends, by the way. If you would ever like to cut off all possible human connection, that's the way to go.

UChicago was, to put it mildly, a bad fit. The single-minded determination of everyone around me, faculty and student body alike, to work at Goldman Sachs--specifically Goldman Sachs for some reason--baffled and disgusted me. It was their holy grail, the pinnacle of human achievement. "Don't worry," the head of the philosophy department told me when I went to an orientation for prospective majors. "Goldman Sachs loves atypical degrees. We place plenty of graduates there."

About halfway through the one and only year I spent in that den of iniquity, I attended a mandatory lecture for all freshmen. I can still see the enormous auditorium from my seat in the nosebleed section. Vivid recollection of the slender young professor who took the stage--too young for anything but a PhD, no time for life experience outside of academia. Her subject: the nature of courage.

I remember her declaring herself a philosopher—it was her job to answer such questions, she said. I remember she explored a variety of definitions she disagreed with, though I couldn't tell you what any of them were. But I can close my eyes and find myself instantly back in that seat at the moment she projected an enormous version of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Beigade" onscreen.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

This, she told us in soaring, premeditated prose, was the true definition of the virtue of courage.

What I should have done—what I almost did, blood boiling and teetering on a knife's edge—was stand up and shout that none of the elites-in-training sitting in this audience would ever find themselves in the goddamn Light Brigade. No one in this room would ever die retrieving equipment from a river in full body armor because some dumb fucking lieutenant ordered them to do it: something that happened to two soldiers during my second deployment. No, these elites-in-training would be the one *ordering* those soldiers to die, likely from the safety of some policy institute or congressional office. I should have told them they were all lousy, rotten cowards and walked out and never returned. God, if only! All I needed to do was stand up and open my mouth; the rage would have taken care of the rest.

But I didn't. I sat there and took it. I spent another several months trying to make it work before finally dropping out after my first year.

My administration is taking every possible step to minimize the risk to U.S. personnel in the region. Even so, and I do not make this statement lightly, the Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission. We pray for every service member as they selflessly risk their lives to ensure that Americans and our children will never be threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran.

-Donald Trump

Far more civilians than soldiers will be killed, maimed, psychologically scarred by Trump's unilateral, unconstitutional declaration of preemptive war. And no doubt the people in Trump's orbit are incredibly excited by the prospect. But the big nut comes from the prospect of Our Brave Troops sacrificing themselves for the whims of the ruling class. Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to do and die. What a rush! What a thrill, to see such courage from the comfort of the War Room or through a TV set.

The Iranians live under an oppressive, horrible government that has killed tens of thousands for protesting, that oppresses women and gay people and anyone who doesn't obey their theocratic authoritarian regime. They do, in fact, sponsor terror, including the Taliban that fished those two soldiers out of the river and ransomed their bodies. My unit paid up and told no one. The soldiers got funerals with full military honors, the families got a folded American flag. I wonder if they know what really happened.

Perhaps there will be regime change, somehow. Opposition to Iran's authoritarian theocracy is widespread, but so far as I know there is no leader. Closest they get is the Shah's relative, who's spent most of his soft life in Europe. Can he really run a country? Maybe we're about to find out. Or maybe Iran will plunge into chaos and civil war. Maybe it will become one of our puppet states, to play with and throw away.

Or maybe Trump will drop some bombs, declare victory, and leave the country with its regime mostly intact. Who can know. Who can say. All I know is that we have no input. Congress has abdicated their responsibilities entirely, public opinion means nothing at this point. Haven't you heard? Ours is not to reason why.

We have more in common with the people of Iran than we do with the ghouls dropping bombs on them. People everywhere mostly just want to live in peace. They want to raise a family, they want to earn reasonable pay for an honest day's work, they want to go on vacation once in a while. Brutalize them long enough and they become brutes, yes. When you take those simple needs away, people become violent and hopeless. And the people with power take those little things away, again and again, for all of history.

I am on a train to Connecticut. The Northeastern winter grey has fully broken for the first time in months; the sky is blue, the sun is warm on my skin. There's no reason for so much suffering. This world could be so beautiful. Imagine all the people, living life in peace...

And I don't know why that peace feels so out of reach, when that’s all damn near everybody wants. I don't know why the monsters insist on violence and pain. We’re well past the 60s and irony replaced optimistic dreaming long ago, which makes the question sound pathetic and naive. Still, I would like to know. You start to understand the concept of original sin, in moments like this--not within the human soul, but in the human race. Something has gone wrong in God's creation. The devil wormed his way inside, where he gnaws relentlessly on the flesh of this world.

Maybe, if the rulers of our countries are so eager for death--of protesters, of civilians, of martyrs in uniform--maybe they should stop reasoning why so goddamn much. Maybe they should do the dying for a change. Courage, I'm told, is a virtue. Who am I to stand in their way?