So Much Moonshine

“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”

― George Carlin

Do you see it up there on the hill?

That first sentinel of fall, the north facing leaves turning brilliant red. Pretty soon the whole valley will bear that palette.

I love fall, as an old Southerner welcome the cooler temperatures, the occasional grey skies, the football, the slowing tempo of life for a bit. Peg's never been a fan--too much orange and brown--but has started to come around this fifth autumn in Corning, where the whole region catches a sort of pumpkin spiced madness. For them, it's the last glorious hurrah before the long, dark, cold winter.

But this morning I find myself, as has been the case for days, in sort of a rudderless funk over the shibboleths that all seem to be crashing down around me in this final season of life.

I've been reading The Demon of Unrest, which describes the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter and beginning of the Civil War. This morning I was struck by the naivete, maybe even stupidity, of the newly minted Confederate political and military leadership. They were completely obsessed with honor, drunk on Walter Scott novels, and had it in their heads that somehow valor would overcome the result preordained by the massive industrial power and concentrated population of the remaining United States. In some ways, the variables that drive the outcome of a conventional war are easy to predict: industrial capacity, population/demographics (you need enough young men to feed into the chipper), logistical infrastructure, technological sophistication. I guess martial valor has its place on the list, but it's a throwaway in terms of affecting who prevails.

It all has me thinking differently about something of which I was always sort of proud--my role in fighting a war of conquest in response to another war of conquest. Defending American investments in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia doesn't feel much like risking one's life for some core principles of the republic. Neither does slogging through rice paddies with an M-16 to prevent a faraway Asian people from deciding for themselves how they'd like to be governed. Or storming up San Juan Hill.

It's all bullshit. Every bit of it. And those of us who went were suckers--like everyone else, I was aghast when Dear Leader made that comment a few years ago at a military cemetery in France. But what made the remark so awful was that there was something to it. None of his family ever wore the uniform or stepped into harm's way, and none ever will. No Boston Brahmins on the front lines. The planter class who clamored for war in 1861 mostly sat it out because, after all, what's the point of defending slavery of there's no one back home to mind the plantation?

Yesterday came the news that our navy murdered eleven people on the open sea because, we're told, they were drug smugglers. No grand jury, no indictment, no due process whatsoever. Just straight to the execution for something that isn't even a capital offense. Dear Leader willed it, and our military leadership, hollowed out by politics and all too willing to slip on the arm band, carried out an illegal order with no apparent pushback. It's murder, plain and simple. But I guess that's what a military exists to do. As my grandfather, a veteran of a good war and a very bad one, liked to say: "Your job in the Air Force is to kill people and break things."

Time for intermission before I turn the sight to religion. I came across this slightly out-of-focus but on-point funny on a Facebook page populated by a bunch of old fighter pilots.

That about sums it up.

Last Sunday Peg and I came away from our encounter with Tibetan Buddhism feeling like the whole thing was a con. The monk at the front of the room babbled incoherently, asking periodically, "You get it?" I held back the urge to shake my head. He led a sort of communal prayer that we all be joined in death with the great and immortal triune god, prayed for guidance to help us on this walk of life. It all seemed strangely familiar to a good Episcopalian.

And it really is a pitch that seems to have the same bones across cultural lines, even if the clothing changes. We fear the unknown, and there's no greater unknown that the trip to the Great Beyond, or simply oblivion, that lies in store for all of us. Because there's no way to know any of that, and because we lack the basic tools of understanding our own existence, we look for some guy (always a guy, it seems) who'll come tell us he's talked to a burning bush, or camped with Elijah and Moses, or sat in a cave while Gabriel or Moroni dictated to him the nature of reality and the afterlife. But what if that guy was, after all, just a guy? Wouldn't that make all of this religion, well, bullshit?

And I played that role too, donning my collar and walking the ICU, trying to provide a little emotional support to folks in the most horrible moments of their lives without spouting something about fishing with Jesus or the like that always felt false to me. I got really good at saying nothing, but in a soothing way.

So here we are. In the end, patriotism and martial valor and religious zeal are all manifestations of human derived nonsense. "Everything I have written seems to me as straw," Aquinas allegedly said just before his death. I get it. God and Country can't give any real meaning to our lives. We just have to figure it out for ourselves.