Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Blogs Are Electronic Letters

This will be short, because this topic is over-done, and has little direct relevance to you.

The word ‘blog’ is trending downwards as a search term, and it’s good that it’s going away, because it was always a little too technical.

When we look over the historical record, we notice that our ancestors, even average people, wrote much longer letters than we tend to write today. Even private love letters tended to be quite involved.

Modern blogs simply hop into the same niche that was formerly occupied by the long, often-shared, letters that people wrote to their personal and professional connections. E-mail and other notes mostly jump into the spot held by the memo, the telegram, and the hand-delivered message.

It has been sometimes said that the letter-writing impulse had evaporated. It hasn’t. It just re-asserted itself in another medium.

Historians will use blogs from our period in the same way that they use letter archives to piece together a historical narrative. Journalists like to flatter themselves by saying that they write the ‘first draft of history,’ but that first draft always has to be checked against more reliable private archives which can be cross-checked against one another.

Blog posts are simply digitally carbon copied to more people at once, and archived by automated librarians.

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Islands of Security

In 20th century America, four major trends drove real estate development. To simplify, they are:

  • Fiat mortgage credit
  • Interstate highways and other government infrastructure like electricity
  • Civil Rights-related ethnic migration
  • The occult reaction against Civil Rights (‘Drug War’ / ‘Giuliani Time’) that re-settled formerly chaotic cities.

All of these trends are unraveling, and even reversing, as I write this. You can read more about the infrastructure issue in the review of a book on that topic that I wrote earlier last year.

As the reaction against Civil Rights crumbles due to financial, moral, and political issues, there must be someone to rush in to the vacuum.

It is not so much that society will collapse because of a lack of means to hold itself together, but rather that it will crumble owing to a lack of courage (both physical and intellectual) to prevent that from happening.

The country at large will continue to lose its economic vitality and social stability in an inexorable fashion. Economics involves free exchange, rather than exchange under compulsion, and as exchange under compulsion crowds out free exchange, the economy must shrink, and property must become less secure overall.

It would not surprise me if we were to see a return to the security norm, which is islands of order surrounded by vast areas in which bandits can attack travelers with impunity. While it will take some time for this reversion to happen, it seems to me to be a likely speculation, an easy bet to make and to win on.

Providing security will require some mixture of obligatory militia and private (as opposed to nation-state) professional security. The value of the real estate under protection will grow to the extent that it is better-protected at a lower price than the alternatives.

We have already seen, overseas, that the Federal government is more than willing to cede its monopoly on logistics and high-value security operations to mercenaries and other firms that can do the job better at a lower price. There is more pragmatism at the Pentagon than most are willing to give it credit for.

The reason is less intellectual and more, perhaps, based on some mixture of cowardice and bean-counting. Elites know that the public security forces are unreliable. When they have a choice, they hire mercenaries. Given that this is the case, it will be harder to prevent the lower social orders (the remnants of the middle class, non-elite corporations) from doing the same to protect themselves and their holdings.

The enormous prison systems created in a vain hope to ‘reform’ the bastards of the world will crumble and fade, because they have grown far past the ability of the host society to maintain. On a global scale, the West can’t afford to bear the burdens of the Rest while reproducing itself.

Something must give, and it will.

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Book Review: Breakfast With the Dirt Cult

“Breakfast With the Dirt Cult” is a sad novel. It’s also frequently funny.

It’s a better read than some of the others that I’ve read, like “Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green.” The author, Samuel Finlay, is a reader of mine, and was kind enough to send a copy. Many reviewers have remarked that the Afghan and Iraqi wars have spawned far fewer novels as compared to some of those further in the past.

Part of the reason for that is contained within this novel: the people who fought the war are more alienated from the rest of society as compared to war-fighters in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. They’re a minority who endure what was once a formative experience for American men, something that they all had in common.

The narrator, Tom Walton, takes up the bulk of the plot. What’s going on with him internally tends to be more important than what’s going on around him. He’s a loner:

On his first trip to New York City, he had developed the habit of carrying around a newspaper, and since then it had become one of his personal SOP’s when by himself in a city. It was something lightweight to pretend to read so that he didn’t look pathetic when he stopped somewhere alone.

Before he’s deployed to Afghanistan, the specialist Walton falls in love with a Canadian stripper, whose fondness keeps him going during some of the more difficult times in war.

One of the themes running through the observations is that women tend not to treat their Army men terribly well. Whereas Vietnam vets groused about Dear John letters, modern soldiers have to handle their lovers sending them amateur porn breakup videos.

Observations of the differences between Americans and the Afghans pop up from time to time:

Haji hadn’t been tamped. He’d kept his traditions and culture. He’d kept his fucking identity. His village and his tribe meant the world to him, and he defied all comers to remain the sovereign lord over his domain. If you would have told him about things like Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, global civil society, or liberal intergovernmentalism, he’d have been pissed off for having his time wasted on such bullshit. He might have even shot you for it if he really felt like showing his nuts.

It’s not exactly a political or anti-war novel. Where there are criticisms, it’s of the people in the media and those involved in planning the war, who are much more insane than even the screwed-up proles that make up the enlisted men.

“Show of force and askin’ questions. A bunch of bullshit,” Sergeant Bronson murmured over a cigarette. “Some of the Hajis have a case of the ass over the new constitution. These people don’t realize theri constitution fuckin’ sucks anyway ’cause the motherfuckers who wrote it don’t go out to where all the Hajis stand by the side of the road and shoot at each other just for fun.

In the end, an old-timer diagnoses the main problem with the modern Army:

The sergeant had sighed wearily, then readjusted his BDU soft cap so that it rested in a more relaxed position. After staring sadly at them for a moment, as though looking into the future, he’d said, “Look fellas. Today’s Army… well… y’all are a bunch of pussies. But that ain’t your fault, ya see, ’cause America today is a bunch of pussies.”

Some of the marketing copy about the novel being about ‘coming of age’ and the ‘horrors of war,’ I didn’t get. The main character, Walton, seems to enjoy the war part of things a lot. It’s like a high-octane version of the Boy Scouts. He gets shot at on mountains, has to cross rivers, and hikes around a lot.

The part that is unbearable is the peace, and being treated like garbage by women, along with living in a culture that’s insane. That part is what’s harder for the main character than having friends die and being shot at. The nihilistic sexual politics are what drives him over the edge, traumatizes him, much more than the war does.

The war part is straightforward by comparison — even when getting shot, it mostly makes sense, at the lower level.

While I wouldn’t call ‘Breakfast’ high literature, it’s an affecting, readable novel that speaks authentically about a certain people in a certain time. Most of the verbiage around the War on Terror experience gets filtered through Baby Boomer sensibilities about the Vietnam War that don’t really translate well to younger people who are enduring the fallout from that generation’s social-revolution-making.

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