American oblivion vs. a world ready to blow up in our faces.
What do we need to know about world affairs and why?
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
by framersqool:
For all its Hollywoodish flaws, one of my very favorite American battle epics on the Second World War has always been 'Tora, Tora, Tora', for its surprisingly well-researched and historically faithful recounting of events one Sunday morning just before Christmas of 1941, in the far-flung American paradise-colony of Hawaii.
Of all the unforgettable moments that masterpiece has to offer, probably the most revealing line regarding Americans' traditionally sparse knowledge of and interest in world affairs comes as a young sailor is scrambling madly across the deck of an American warship come suddenly under fire, called to battle stations while standing sleepily at anchor in the remotest naval base on the planet:
'I didn't even know the Japs were sore at us.'
A line in another great wartime epic from that same cinematic period of full-color, richly-detailed, Exceptionalism-challenging military operas, 'The Sand Pebbles', is recited again and again by other US sailors, this time in 1926 in the heart of China:
'What the hell happened?'
This question is never met with any answer, because none of those sailors ever had a clue what was happening all around them in the middle of a decades-long civil war in the most densely-populated country on earth, and is indeed our flawed but well-meaning hero Steve McQueen's final line in the script, and the last words of his sailor-man Jake Holman's young life.
Fast-forwarding to this very moment in history:
How many college-educated, upwardly-mobile, tech-savvy, credit-worthy, going-places Americans today could provide you on request with a knowledgeable discourse on any of the following topics directly relevant to this current war in Ukraine?
Transnistria, Belarus, Kaliningrad, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sakhalin & Kuril islands, Hezbollah (yes, that Hezbollah), Aleppo, Grozny, Dagestan, the Suwalki corridor, Karelia, German & Japanese re-armament, the Kosovo-Serbian border, the Stockholm-Helsinki bid for NATO membership, Viktor Orban, Tayyip Recep Erdogan, Israeli neutrality (yes, THAT Israel, which has rarely been neutral about much of anything), Shahed drones, the ratio of Russian icebreakers in the Arctic against those of all other nations with an interest there, the cannibalizing of Russian civil aviation, Bashkortostan, the status of Russian language and culture in the central Asian republics, the deployment of young women as strategic bomber pilots in the Russian air force, the role of Wagner Group in the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe (etc), Dmitri Medvedev, Yelena Kaminskas, flow rates of Russian natural gas pipelines still in operation across the heartlands of Ukraine, the role of ancient (Russian) organized crime syndicates in the UN-sponsored Black Sea grain corridor from Odesa Harbor, the role of the International Red Cross as a war-materiel procurement axis to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the presence and reach of 'cultural associations' directly managed by the Russian Foreign Ministry and the FSB in every nation on earth with a Russian-expatriate presence, the rapid demise of the Kremlinologist and Russian-language-specialist trades in American academia since 1991, the traditional roles of deception and misinformation in Russian counterintelligence since the Romanov years.....
I could make this list quite a bit longer, but maybe you get my point.
What any or all of these has to do with The American Taxpayer's perennial determination of grabbing up every workaround available on both sides of the law to avoid paying taxes at all, you'd have to ask them.
I don't run with that herd any more.
I didn't care for stepping in its shit while not ever knowing where the stampede was headed. There are cliffs and gullies and potholes along that route, and I'd rather see them coming with a clear field of view than be herded into them none the wiser until it was too late, having purchased a ticket out of my own pocket to participate in a mass headlong rush into oblivion.
But I can at least claim a cursory knowledge of each of these topics, or within minutes do enough homework to deliver a respectable-enough talk in brief, on how each of them relates to events in Ukraine since February of 2022.
And when examining them all in a broad-tapestry sense of world affairs generally, can quite plausibly assure you that some shit is about to hit any number of fans, as my fellow Americans still aren't real clear on who might be sore at us or why, and will certainly be utterly at a loss to explain what the hell happened, when it does.
Why pay attention?
Why the hell NOT?
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.