What price, insurrection?

In Oliver Stone’s 1986 somewhat autobiographical take on the Vietnam War, Sgt. Barnes asks some of his men, and not rhetorically;

“Death? What do you all know about death?”

The character of Barnes, eerily played by Tom Berenger, was a killer. A soldier who had more than crossed the line, he had redrawn the line. Charging head first into combat,  resorting to murdering women, children and even his own men in a series of seemingly mindless responses to the vagaries and brutalities of war.  Yet he is revered by his men as a leader… they will follow him into the gates of hell and cheer on his most barbaric acts. One can make the argument that the contention between the evil Barnes and the good Sgt. Elias in the story is a textbook examination of the duality of man.

Today we have this thing called the Internet, and on it we find the wasteland that is facetiously called social media.  I’ve been writing and exchanging ideas with others all around the country and the world since the latter part of the Usenet days, and I have to say that things have not gotten better as the technology has advanced.  People hide behind screens, keyboards and mobile devices to regularly say stuff that if they said it to someone’s face they’d risk getting punched in the face or, at the least, told to get lost.   The bluster, self absorption and  narcissism are so thick you could cut them with a  knife.  Well, if they were actually real and not, like, virtual or something.

Memes; be they photos, animations or videos are the stock in trade on a day in, day out basis.  A picture is worth a thousand words, or so I learned at an early, pre internet age.  In social media, where brevity is sometimes enforced with a limit on words or characters, one photo properly annotated like the one at left is apparently worth a hundred thousand words. I arrive at that estimate because of how often that particular photo, annotated in one way or another with some witty take, pops up in various venues.

The other thing that the rise of the internet and, in particular, social media has done is reduce the attention span of the average user to about the same as that of a fruit fly.  News articles are routinely tagged with how much time it will take to read the content, and the shorter the better.  We all know Twitter was launched based on getting your message across in 140 characters or less.  But who knew that Facebook posts of 40 characters or less are the ones that get the most engagement?  Ideas and images fly back and forth at such a mind boggling pace that the attention of a user has to be grabbed within a few seconds or they move on to the next thing and whatever you’ve shown them is forgotten just as quickly. Videos of some schlub getting his head viciously bounced off the pavement for being stupid are revered with millions of views. Horribly dehumanizing pranks are perpetrated on video and celebrated and the victims of those pranks held up for ridicule.  Is it any wonder people want to move along quickly?

On the other hand, having all that in mind, I suppose I should be thankful if one or two people someplace in outer Mongolia actually take the time to read this article.

Being as involved as I have been for virtually all of my life in the study of politics, the struggle for civil rights and matters surrounding the use and carry of firearms I’ve seen what may truly be the darkest underside of the internet and social media, outside of the realm of revenge porn anyway. Experts who know nothing abound, every one has an opinion of everyone else’s opinion with both opinions often being based in less than a full set of facts.  Our deeply polarized political climate hasn’t helped;  issues are cast with stark, bright lines dividing left from right when the reality more often is colored in shades of gray. Hate and invective is lobbed back and forth at will  by the bucketful and, because everyone gets to hide behind their keyboard, the more vile the hate and invective becomes the better it plays.

Since the first election of President Obama in 2008 I’ve seen a growing divide of haters on both sides of the aisle.  The election of President Trump in 2016 and the “blue wave” of 2018 seems to have only brought it out all the more.  And it seems like everyone is preaching some form or another of revolution, of civil war. Antifa groups claim to be anti fascist when their tactics and deeds are straight out of Ernst Rohm’s playbook. Their stated intent is to destroy the American government and replace it with something sort of socialist, or something. It’s kind of hard to say because there’s lots of millennials involved and getting any three of them to agree on a single thing can be difficult.  Then there are three percent and oathkeeper groups who love their country and who pledge to fight to the death to defend the nation, the constitution and the American way of life.  Being, for the most part, rugged individualists who really just want to be left to go their own way, these groups often can’t agree on what to have for lunch, let alone how to coalesce together and fight a war of insurrection.

Yet, the clarion call across social media I see time after time is that we are headed toward a civil war.  Oh it’s going to happen, they say. It’s the only way to preserve our country and our way of life. People who I often describe as keyboard commandos talk about revolution and stacking bodies like it’s something they would do for entertainment on a lazy summer afternoon.  And while I’ve seen any number of cogent arguments otherwise, including the one I am making right here, this mindset among some seems to persist.  Both sides of the political argument, left and right, seem to hate each other at the street level even though in the halls of power the two sides always seem to find a way to pass more laws, create more regulation, raise new revenue and find more ways for government to exert more control over every facet of the lives of every individual.  I strongly suspect that the powers that be actually prefer all of us to be bickering back and forth between ourselves because then we aren’t paying attention to how we are being screwed, and probably won’t even realize it when it truly is too late to do anything about it.  Funny how that works out, eh?

The people of the United States fought a cataclysmic civil war in the 1860’s. The north and the south, as independent nations, each raised hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of troops to do the fighting. Tens of thousands died.  It was a different, simpler and tougher time.  Common people lived on subsistence farming or worked in manufacturing industries under what could charitably called brutal conditions. LTC Dave Grossman notes in his seminal works that people in those days understood what killing was as, more often than not, they had to kill their food to subsist from day to day. They understood that it was necessary, at times, to kill. Particularly so when it was kill or be killed.  People were harder, and it showed in the pitched, often hand to hand, savagery that marked many of the battles.  The American Civil War was the first total war and it echoes still today a century and a half later.

But the America of today is soft.  While there are truly hard men today they are mostly found, in my experience, in the ranks of our military and of our public safety services. The truly hard men don’t talk about it; they do what they have to and move on.  The average American, on the other hand,  has become far too comfortable with all of our modern conveniences. Too many have become too beholden to government  for their sustenance. Too many are so self centered or focused on mindless idolarity of mindless celebrities that they haven’t the first concept of war, or of the killing that war begets.

And into the online fray steps the keyboard commando; talking tough so people will think they’re a bad ass, when in reality most of them would likely wet their pants and head in the other direction at the sound of the first volley. It gets back to Sgt. Barnes’s question and the answer seems to be, in this case, that they know nothing. If this is who thinks they are going to be fighting the government to save my freedom I suggest, as an older but still much harder man than most, that they get back to the latest version of Call of Duty and enjoy themselves.  I mean, how are you going to have a civil war when the guys from Meal Team Six can’t agree on their favorite Happy Meal?

A far better writer than I once put the exclamation point of every revolution, every where:

“When the shooting stops, and the dead are buried, and the politicians take over, it all adds up to one thing: a lost cause.”

The politicians have taken over. They’ve divided us. They’ve conquered us.  And they never fired a shot. We as a society have accepted that, apparently. But if we are truly to embark on the  path to political change, it passes through four boxes, as illustrated in this convenient meme….  see I can do that too!  And the rules are such that you have to work them through in order.

We’re nowhere near the cartridge box yet. At least that’s the way I feel about it.  Anyone who says we are is either stupid or is trying to start something they are incapable of finishing.