War: What Is It Good For?

A couple of things arrived through my transom recently which happened to intersect in an interesting fashion, in much the way Mexican Spanish vocal traditions meshed with German polkas to produce Tejano. Sadly you can’t dance to tragedy. 

The first of these was a commentary on Tucker Carlson’s embarrassingly unselfaware visit to a Moscow subway station from Fareed Zakaria, who weighed Carlson’s wonderment against his criticism of New York subways. It’s true, Zakaria agreed, that Moscow’s stations look like cathedrals while New York’s are basically peripatetic toilets. But, the reason Moscow’s subways look like Renaissance paintings come to life, he explained, is that is that they were built under the bloody iron fist of Joseph Stalin. There is in fact a strong correlation between autocracy and the erection of world wonders. It stands to reason that, given a singular will and a pathological indifference to the human grist that must be ground to leave a mark commensurate with one’s self-evaluated greatness, autocratic nations occasionally produce The Great Pyramids and those tacky luxury-hotel chic artificial islands in Dubai. By contrast, the things democratic societies produce tend to be practical. There are a lot of people in New York and they need to get around, so they built a people sewer. Can we fill the stations with gold framed oil paintings? Well maybe but people are gonna tag that shit so maybe keep it simple. 

The thing is, it’s great having the stuff, but I think we can agree nobody wants to be the grist. So I don’t think arguing the alternative to the Stalinist playbook is worth my time, unless you, dear reader, happen to be a member of the oligarchical elite, in which case, how ya been buddy? Haven’t I always been very friendly with you?

The second thing was the landing of Odysseus, a robotic spacecraft built by a private company, lifted into space by a private company on the commission of a public institution, on the moon. Say what you will of the achievement, whether it’s a brilliant approach to slashing the cost of space travel or the first volley in a new wave of corporate exploitation by the medieval right of conquest, it’s worth asking how people did this in the 1960s and why it’s such a difficult feat to reproduce. The answer, I believe, is encapsulated in the very word “moonshot,” which is now the easiest way to describe a project that captures a significant proportion of the attention and resources of an entire society, and a large one at that. Odysseus cost something like $118M to build. By contrast, the Apollo Program with it’s $178B¹ price tag, cost as much as a couple regiments of Odysseuses. Odysseusi.²

By any standard the moon landings were a staggering technical achievement. But what blows my mind is the underlying fact that the United States was able to generate the collective will to pull it off. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the expenditure amounted to less than half a percent of U.S. GPD in 1961 and just under 3% of the federal budget. One can easily forget how mammoth the U.S. actually is. Nonetheless, maintaining a 3% budgetary expenditure for 11 years is quite the trick. What is particularly impressive is that this was done in service of something that wasn’t a war—technically speaking, as we shall see. Lest we lose sight of the propulsive energy of wars, the Apollo Program cost a fraction of Vietnam ($1T over a decade more or less) and was absolutely dwarfed by World War II ($4T over four years).

Contrast these commitments with President Obama’s 2016 so-called moonshot to vanquish cancer, for which Congress ponied up a measly $2.3B over seven years—just over 0.002% of GDP and about 0.009% of the federal budget. Moonshot? Not.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is this: Democracies love a good war. Ok maybe “love” is the wrong word, but what is clear is that war is the one thing that will consistently drive a polity to unity. And Apollo, it turns out, is no exception. Apollo was not a weapons platform, but tied as it was so neatly to the arms race with the Soviets, it may as well have been. Oh it would be a wonderful world if violent competition between nations could be neatly redirected into the pursuit of really towering human goals rather than being squandered in the manufacture of ruin, but the Cold War was the only war that ever came close and it’s not a great prototype. People living at the time were fixed like pinned butterflies under the insistent threat of instant fiery annihilation. I haven’t had grenades dropped on me but I can tell you that awaiting that deadly flash of heat and light wears on a person over the years.

War hero.

Apollo was a missile in more ways than one. The intended effect was two-fold. For U.S. audiences it was expected to return some must-watch TV and great issues of Life Magazine and National Geographic, replete with diagrammatic cut-away illustrations of the command module and the lunar lander. For Soviet audiences it was a gesture as primal as wearing a wolf’s head to a primitive battlefield: I will fucking kill you and rip your still-beating heart from your chest with my bare teeth. That’s what all those guys in horn-rim glasses with pocket protectors and slide rules were saying to the Soviets. Imagine the abject terror of that deep neolithic mind, that collective unconscious still buried somewhere in the archives of the human brain, to the proposition that the enemy controls the fucking moon. It was a stroke intended to show overwhelming technological and industrial might, to cow the Soviet population and to make it abundantly clear to them that they had about as much chance as a potato to defeat the West. 

The Apollo missions were every bit as ballsy as the Normandy invasion or the defense of Little Round Top. They weren’t bloodbaths, but blood was shed, most notably by Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, who burned to death on the launch pad inside Apollo 1, casualties of a cold war. These were battle missions, but with a dollop of sheer naked hubris to spike the intensity.

Did it work? Well, we did get the magazine issues.

As I say, though, I’d much rather see our world’s martial energy directed into projects like these, rather than projects like what’s happening in Ukraine and Palestine. I’m not sure anyone but a mad person would think otherwise, but it may be a moot point either way; I don’t know how much control we have over these sorts of things, even in influential circles. It’s something worth thinking about, but I’m going to lay it away for another day. We have more fundamental matters to discuss. 

The thing is, I think we’re perched atop a really big box of TNT right now. It’s also possible that we’re about to get brained by an Acme-branded catapult or that we’ve run off a cliff and haven’t yet noticed, but however you slice it, this is observable in real time, and it’s not nearly as funny as it was on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. There’s a fairly high probability that fairly soon we will find ourselves driven violently into a state of fixed national purpose, and while it’s impossible to know in advance with certainty — maybe not even better than a coin flip — in what way one can or should try to influence that, I am certain that it’s not being taken seriously enough, and I am equally certain that mammoth dangers lie in wait. No one historical analog will tell you what’s going to happen, but each is a synopsis of something that can happen. 

That can be a positive thing. It’s easy to look at the historical record and note the assassinations and usurpations, the famines and the pandemics, the betrayals and the ruthless annihilations. But for every Pearl Harbor, there is a Cuban Missile Crisis. For every salting of Carthage a Berlin Airlift. A maze successfully run. A Minotaur forever swallowed in a sea of counterfactuals. And you don’t have to be a doe-eyed optimist to see this. These cards are in the deck; we’ve seen them. 

But how do we ensure, or at least lean on the probability that those are the cards that are dealt?

A couple months ago I wrote a post nominally about current affairs, which as I have stated before is something I don’t typically enjoy doing. In my estimation it wasn’t a good piece of work. I’m sorry if you liked it — it’s not that it lacked people-pleasing power, but rather that it barely resembled what I was actually thinking. What was going on inside my head was multifarious, jagged, seething, electric; what reached the page was like the baggie the eight-ball came in.³ 

I’m glad I wrote it; thinking about how it missed the mark is what led me to this sentence you’re reading right now. There’s too much going on in the world right now to fit neatly into a single 1,500-word serving. I can’t make assumptions, dear reader, about what you know and what you don’t. And I can’t pretend I know everything about these matters. Quite the contrary: what I don’t know, printed double-sided in ten-point type, could be dropped on large cities to crush and smother the inhabitants. But there are a few things I do know, and one of them is that I need to learn and I need to share what I learn. I recognize that I am enthroned at the center of a human network of staggeringly underwhelming size, but it’s not the job of the raindrop to wonder what sort of effect it’s having on the rainstorm. Let’s rain.

All of this is an extremely long-winded way of saying I’ve got a few topics I want to write on. I think this will make up the bulk of my writing here for the next several months, but I reserve the right to suddenly change my mind and scribble out an ode to Little Debbie snack cakes or a monograph on which guitar picks are the right guitar picks and what sort of freak you are if you use really thin ones that feel like playing with a slice of American cheese. And rest assured that the novel—I really need a codename until I’m able to reveal the subject matter—is still percolating in the background. There’s a great deal of research that needs doing there and I think I’d like to keep that process under wraps. 

Margaret Atwood said that war is what happens when language fails. It’s a statement you can quibble with if you assume she’s talking about negotiations, but I think Atwood meant “language” in it’s full panoply of meaning. I’m not going to engage in the drafting of treaties or peace accords, but language is also a tool for understanding and persuasion, and I can certainly make a contribution to understanding. Whether I can or will persuade remains to be seen. 

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. See you next time.

1. All dollar amounts adjusted for inflation.

2. My daughter says it’s Odyssei. I buy that.

3. No, I’m not a cokehead, I just dig the metaphor.