Sand Box Diplomacy

politics, Trump, War,

While we live in Arizona, everyday we wakeup in the morning and wonder what crazy things Donald Trump will say or do. Pretty well everyday there is something.

Recently, like almost every day, we have been “blessed” with stories about tweets from the so-called ‘Leader of the Free World.’ I don’t consider him that, but he does. The latest brings tweeting to a whole new level. The tweet was part of an exchange of sorts with Kim Jong-un the leader of North Korea i.e. the leader of the unfree world. Kim had reported earlier that at his desk was a button that he could press to launch nuclear weapons that could reach the United States. That did not sit well with Trump of course.

Trump responded with a tweet that said, “Will someone from his depleted and food starving regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger one and more powerful one than his, and it works.” It is  almost inconceivable that two grown men would act this way. What is even more inconceivable is that both of them have control of nuclear weapons that could kill millions of people. We see childish schoolboys with nuclear weapons threatening each other and risking the lives of millions of people, both with very limited intelligence. This is what the world has come to. How did it happen? At least North Korea had no choice in a leader. That is their excuse. What is America’s excuse?

Do Good Guys commit Atrocities?

Television Shows, War,

Dennis Stout,  a member of theAmerican  First Brigade of the 101st Airborne during the Vietnam War, was asked on the Ken Burns Television series if he had seen any atrocities on the part of American soldiers. He admitted he had. Stout was from Phoenix Arizona and had served 9 months in combat from 1966 to September 1967, but he had been there for a year. He spent most of his time with a small handpicked group of soldiers called Tiger Force. They spent weeks at a time in the jungle. They were “intended to out guerilla the guerillas.”

Tiger Force fought in 6 different provinces of Vietnam, repeatedly suffering heavy losses. As Rion Causey told it, “If you suffer losses and you lost your best friend it’s the officers who say no you can’t do that. If you do it then there’s consequences. But if the officers include a platoon leader and the Battalion commander are telling you that this is what you are supposed to do then it gets completely out of hand.”

Some at McV, an important base camp for American and South Vietnamese forces, realized that such a freewheeling outfit would be difficult to control. “But General Westmoreland and commanders in the field admired Tiger Force for its reliable ferocity.”

In the summer of 1967 Tiger Force was sent to the Song Ve Valley. The entire population had already been herded from their homes and crowded into a refugee camp. Some had come back to resume their farming life that they had traditionally done. “The valley had been officially declared a ‘Free-fire zone’ and Tiger Force’s officers took that literally. “There are no friendlies,” one lieutenant told us, “shoot anything that moves.” With a license like that from officers it is hardly surprising that atrocities occurred. How could they not?

“Over several months they killed scores of unarmed civilians. Among them were two blind brothers, an elderly Buddhist monk, women, children, and old people hiding in underground shelters, and 3 farmers trying to plant rice. All were reported as enemy killed in action.” These were atrocities, pure and simple.

Tiger Force was not the only platoon Dennis Stout witnesses that crossed the line. He also discovered a case where a Vietnamese girl was kept for 2 days and raped, and then on the 3rd day killed. She was raped by everyone in the platoon except for a medic, Dennis Stout, and possibly one other member. Every other member of that platoon raped her. According to the U.S. Army website a platoon contains between 16 and 40 soldiers. That is a lot of rapes even on the low end of the scale.

Stout complained to the Battalion Sergeant Major about the rape (he should really say rapes), but he explained that these things happened in wars all the time. He was told not to mention it and that it was a common occurrence. Stout also complained to the Chaplain who made an independent investigation. He found that this was true. The two of them then went to see the Sergeant Major who told the Chaplain to stick to religion and told Stout that he did not have to return for the next engagement.

Years later another soldier came forward with allegations of war crimes. An Army investigation found probable cause to try 18 members of Tiger Force for murder or assault. They found that soldiers had cut the throat of a woman and killed her. They also cut off the ears and killed 10 farmers before they stopped shooting. They also scalped a soldier. “But no charges were ever brought. The official records were buried in the archives.”

James Willbanks of the U.S. Army opined that all of them should have been charged with murder. “They should have all gone to jail. They were all guilty of murder. At the same time, I felt that incident was an aberration, not the norm, tarred all veterans, and there are 100s of thousands of veterans who went and did their duty as honorable as they possibly could and they are tarred with the same brush.”

Some people learned some important things about war. As one Vietnam veteran, Karl Marlantes, said,

 

One of the things I learned in the war is that we are not the top species on the planet because we are nice. We are a very aggressive species. It is in us. And people talk a lot about the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff. I have always argued it is just finishing school. What we do in civilisation is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies. And we have to recognize them. I worry about a whole country that doesn’t recognize it, because I think of how many times we get ourselves in scrapes as a nation because we are always the good guys. Sometimes I think that if we thought we weren’t always the good guys we might actually get in less wars.”

 

Sometimes we have to take a hard look at ourselves. We owe it to ourselves; we owe to those who come after us.

 

San Tan Valley Arizona: I am not St. Jerome

religion,

 

I am not like St. Jerome. He was one of the earliest Roman saints. He believed that heaven would not be perfect unless the saved could see the sinners roasting in hell. Since God was all powerful he would make sure the good guys get to see the bad guys paying for their sins. This is an incredibly nasty sense of heaven and hell, but he was made a saint.

Some travellers from the north are like that. As soon as they get here they check to see what the temperatures are like back home. The colder the better they feel. They feel gleeful thinking about their friends suffering back home.

You will be happy to learn, we are not like that.

Are we always the good guys?

Television Shows, War,

 

The American Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, demanded that the President of South Vietnam Diêm (Our son-of-a-bitch) dismiss his brother who had been responsible for the raids on monks that disturbed people from around the world, but particularly Americans who were supporting the South Vietnamese regime.

Lodge also began to explore the possibility of a coup. The Americans were not shy about sponsoring coups in allied countries. They have done it in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and many other countries. Why not Vietnam too? While John F. Kennedy was on vacation, the American Under Secretary authorized a cable to Lodge approving a coup.

Kennedy actually had not wanted a coup. He thought his advisors had opposed a coup. It turned out they had supported it without his knowledge. As a result the Americans supported a coup against their own ally. When Kennedy was interviewed by Walter Cronkite and told him, unless Diêm changes his ways or “there is a change in personnel there is little chance in wining the war in Vietnam,” that certainly could have been interpreted as support for a coup.

Many of Kennedy’s advisors, including his Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor, and the head of the CIA all counseled Kennedy against a coup. None of them liked Diêm, but they saw no realistic alternative. That is a lesson American Presidents have forgotten in many countries including Iraq and Libya. Disposing of an unattractive leader serves no useful purpose if the replacement is just as bad or even worse.

Former American Ambassador to Vietnam, Fritz Nolting, who had served in that capacity from 1961 to 1963 warned that if Ngô Dinh Diêm and his brother were gone there was no one in South Vietnam capable of taking over from them. He said, if we got rid of them we would be saddled with a descending cycle of mediocre generals. Was he ever right!

Other advisors on the other hand thought it would be impossible for the South Vietnamese government to last under Ngô Dinh Diêm’s leadership. Kennedy told Lodge, as a result that the Generals of South Vietnam should be warned that the United States did not want to stimulate a coup but would not thwart one either. In other words, the Americans would acquiesce in a coup, but did not want to be held responsible for it. That’s the way it is usually done–they act like weasels. The Generals took this as a blessing to plan a coup.

Kennedy later confided in his personal notes, that the almost inadvertent authorization of a coup was a mistake. He should have had a full round table discussion on the subject.

As a result, on November 1, 1963 the plotting South Vietnamese Generals led a coup in South Vietnam against President Ngô Dinh Diêm and his brother.   According to Lodge, that day every South Vietnamese he saw had a big smile on his wife. No one supported Diêm. He had burned too many bridges (or should I say too many monks?). Lodge believed that after the coup the chances of winning the war had greatly improved. Kennedy was not so sure. That might have been true, if the replacement for Ngô Dinh Diêm was much better. Sadly, Nolting was right, the General that replaced him was also incompetent. Kennedy was also appalled that the coup led to the assassination of Diêm and his brother.

The brutal murder of the South Vietnamese President Ngô Dinh Diêm and his equally corrupt brother Ngo Dinh Nhu on November 2, 1963 was a major turning point in the war in Vietnam. Until that time the Americans had been mainly “advising” the government of Vietnam in its war against the Việt Cộng and the North Vietnamese Army. At that time the U.S. had “only” 16,000 troops in Vietnam. Those troops helped to train the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) but also accompanied them on actual helicopter raids deep into enemy territory. It really was more than advising. It was engaging in battle, but it was done covertly.

When American casualties increased, and images of those dead were regularly seen on American television it became increasingly difficult to sell the American public on the idea that these were just advisors. After the assassination of the Diêm brothers, American policy in Vietnam took a dramatic turn. President Kennedy was also assassinated 3 weeks later and Lyndon Johnson became the new President. Johnson tried to follow Kennedy’s low-key approach to Vietnam until 1964 when American participation in the war increased sharply.

After the coup the question the Americans had to ask was whether or not the Generals would be able to create a stable democracy. Kennedy asked that question, but because he died 18 days later, he never really got an answer. Lyndon Johnson would have to deal with the issue.

Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter, was a perceptive commentator on the War in Vietnam. He pointed out that Americans thought they were an exception to history. They could never back the wrong side in a war. Americans are the good guys. They are always the good guys, Americans thought. Yet Sheehan said, “But the War in Vietnam proved we were not an exception to history.”

Johnson had opposed the coup that deposed Diem, thinking it would make a bad situation worse. That is exactly what it did. As Le Quan Cong, a VC soldier said, when Diem was killed the Vietcong was very excited. They thought they were about to liberate the whole country. They attacked night and day. As he said, “More and more puppet soldiers surrendered. More and more young people joined our forces.”

By then, “40% of the countryside and 50% of the people were effectively in the hands of the Vietcong.” Meanwhile the Generals that had overthrown Diem were bickering among themselves rather than concentrating on the war effort. As Robert Rheault of the American Special Forces said, “The assassination of Diem set in motion a series of coups each government was less effective than the one before it.” It was just as Nolting had predicted.

In January 1964 General Nguyen Khanh, with U.S. encouragement and support, completed another coup. Johnson told McNamara to show that he had U.S. support. Johnson told his advisors, “no more of this coup shit,” but Khanh lacked support too. Other generals continued to jockey for power thinking he had no legitimacy.

Things were far from stable, no matter what Johnson said. Johnson turned a blind eye to calls from the Buddhists for a genuinely representative government they thought they would get when Diem was overthrown. There were 8 different governments between January 1964 and June 1965. “All of the leaders were so close to the Americans they were seen as puppets.” That immediately destroyed their credibility. One of Johnson’s aids suggested that the national symbol of South Vietnam should be a turnstile.

What continually amazes is the extent to which politicians in America tied themselves to the most dubious of political leaders in far off lands. Often those leaders were incompetent, corrupt or both. Yet the careers and legacies of American political leaders were irrevocably connected to those leaders and once committed those American felt they could never sever that connection. Why were they not able to say, “you know we were wrong. We thought we had people to work with in Vietnam. That proved not to be the case so I am calling our soldiers home. We would like to work with the people of Vietnam to keep out the communists if that is what they really want but we can’t carry the load alone especially when the local leaders are not worth supporting with American lives. We would love to help but just can’t do it.” After such statements where American leaders came clean to the American public, would Americans not accept the decision of their own leaders and say thanks for not wasting any more lives of their young soldiers? Instead political leaders like Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon committing themselves to supporting Vietnamese leaders no matter how clearly it was evident that nothing good would come of it. Inertia is a powerful force.

This is particularly important today for American political leaders seem to have learned nothing from past disastrous experiences. They continue to support autocratic and corrupt leaders in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Burma, the Philippines, Chile, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, and so on and so on. The list is nearly endless. Such a policy seems absolutely suicidal and has proved disastrous over and over again, yet American political leaders keep doing it.

I am reminded of what one American leader said about Antonio Somoza a vicious and corrupt former leader of Nicaragua who said, “he is a son-of-a – bitch, but he is our son-of-a – bitch.” Why do American political leaders think they always have to support a son-of-a – bitch no matter what? Why not just abandon them at the outset or at the very least give up on them when it becomes clear what they are? They don’t really need son-of-a – bitches on their side. There is usually (always?) a better way, no matter what the masters of real politick believe.

Sadly the answer is clear–we are not always the good guys. In fact we often not the good guys.

Hereford Texas to San Tan Valley Arizona: The arc of the Moral universe is long

religion,

Today we wondered when we woke up, if we could make it all the way to our rented home in San Tan Valley. We were both sceptical that we could do it, but we got up early and headed out. Our practice is to leave after first light (this is easy) and to stop before dark. Many of our friends travel with much more diligence. We are slackers. We meander.

At first Sarah (the GPS) was asleep again. She just does not like the cold. Like us. But Chris made a spectacular discovery. She pulled out a small disk from the GPS and warmed it up in her warm hands. Sarah sprung to life! There was as much rejoicing in our car as there was in heaven when the prodigal son returned. We made a radical decision. We said Sarah could pick the route. Let the GPS select the fastest route. That is precisely what we did. And it worked.

It did not take long and Sarah led us right back to Interstate 40. Sadly, we missed Cadillac Ranch as a result. We stopped for gas where I saw a green T-shirt with a John Deer Tractor emblazoned on it and the simple words: “John Beer.” Can you get more profound than that?

On the way we continued to listen to NPR. They had some kind of a New Year’s Eve show. It was very interesting. They played a small part of a famous speech by Martin Luther King.  We listened to the speech and marvelled at King’s abilities as an orator. His images were compelling. His cadences were hypnotic. His phrasing slow, letting his words sink into the hearts and minds of the hearers. His message was riveting. Even though King knew there was no direct path to freedom. He knew the road was crooked. There were turns and cutbacks that only a meanderer could traverse. I don’t know if there could have been a better way to launch a New Year. What a great thing to hear on a New Year’s Day in Texas!

Here is part of that speech (I apologize for not getting every word right as the recoding was not as clear as it could be):

I must confess my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rotten places of frustration, meandering points of bewilderment (that hit home for me the meander!) There will be inevitable setbacks. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered, and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear drenched eyes have to stand beside the burial of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs, but difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future and as we continue our charted course we may gain some consolation in those great words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod. Better the chastening rod we cast felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sigh, we  have come over the way that with our tears has been watered. We have come treading our pass through the blood of the slaughtered out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast.”

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry, it will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights let us remember there is a creative force in this world working to pull down the giant mountains of evil. A power that is able to make a way out of no way, that can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right, “truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right, ‘Be not deceived.’ God is not lost. Whatsoever a man soweth, that, he shall also reap. This is our hope for the future with this faith we will be able to sing in some not distant tomorrow with a cosmic past we have overcome; we have overcome; deep in my heart I did believe we would overcome.”

I actually listened to the speech again courtesy of YouTube. Sometimes I love technology. Martin Luther King like all of us fell short of perfection, but  he was a truly great man.  I could not help comparing his speech to tweets I have read about the current occupant of the Whitehouse. The comparison is shocking. King spoke without belittling anyone. He did not attack anyone. He did not brag about himself. He did not spew out ill thought out political Pablum. He just spoke to encourage  people to continue the good fight no matter what the obstacles, no matter what backward steps they have to take. He knew the road to justice was not straight and true. But the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. He believed that. I want to believe that.

We also listened to CBC radio by virtue of some new technology–a CBC app. We could listen to highlights streamed to our car speaker. It was fantastic. The discussion of modern work was extremely interesting. I loved the quote from Bertrand Russell the hero of my youth (and old age too come to think about it): “The end of civilization is to fill leisure time intelligently.”

At Holbrook Arizona, Sarah told us to turn south and we obediently complied. The roads were in excellent shape. Chris put on my fantastic playlist of songs–the best ever playlist. We listened to 3 hours of wonderful music.

The only problem was the winding mountain road at night. As long as it was light it was all right, but it got dark before we were done. In our eagerness to make it all the way to San Tan Valley we forgot about this winding road. That gave us more stress than we liked. Old people don’t need stress.

We arrived in San Tan Valley Arizona about 8 p.m. tired and stressed out but happy. I did not take long to crash.

 

 

Our-son-of-a-bitch

Television Shows, War,

America has had a bad history of supporting brutal dictators around the world. This is a policy it still engages in to this day. Take a lot at the Saudi Arabian regime for one example. Names that spring to mind include Noriega in Panama, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, but the list is much longer than that. It would take a long time to list them all.

I think Antonio Somoza President of Nicaragua, one of the most brutal dictators ever supported by the U.S. was one of these brutes about whom an American diplomat said, “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” This was all part of Real Politick. If a political leader opposes our enemy he must be good enough to support. This was common in American foreign policy in the Cold War, but it has been part of that policy forever. Often that policy stinks. In South Vietnam that guy was President Diem. He was our son-of-a-bitch.

On June 10, 1963 journalist Malcolm Brown received an anonymous tip that something big was about to happen the next day in Saigon. So Brown went out with his camera, ready for anything. He had been told where to go and he went there. As it turned out a 73-year old Buddhist monk set himself on fire at a busy intersection and died a horrible death. Brown caught it all on film. The photo appeared around the world. I remember seeing it in Canada. It was hard to believe that anyone would do that to himself. Imagine the excruciating pain of the death. As he burned another monk chanted, “a Buddhist monk becomes a martyr.” He repeated it over and over.

President Kennedy acknowledged “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” Malcolm Brown won the Pulitzer Prize for the image. The monk’s death increased international pressure on the Diêm regime to announce reforms to mollify the Buddhists, but his promised reforms were never implemented.

This self-sacrifice caught the attention of the world. What were the South Vietnamese and their allies doing that would make a monk do that? Neil Sheehan said that he saw a poor woman take off her gold rings and drop them into a bucket for resistance. When he saw that, Sheehan said to himself, “This regime is over.” That was in 1963!

Contrast that with the reaction by Ngô Dinh Diêm’s sister. She clapped her hands gleefully at the sight of the burning monk and cheered. She said if she had been there she would have given the monk a match! She was power hungry, even though her husband was the leader of the secret police.

The martyr inspired others to immolate themselves as well. Soon people around the world began to realize that these Buddhists were serious. These were powerful statements. These images caused many students and Roman Catholics and others to join the rebels’ cause. It seemed noble. The South Vietnamese cause seemed crass and corrupt in comparison.

Activist Bill Zimmerman said that the civil rights movement had set the standard in the American South as to how people—ordinary people—who believed in a cause that was just could stand up to injustice. Anti-war activists learned a lot from the Civil Rights activists.

Anti-war activists, like Bill Zimmerman, were inspired by American Civil Rights activists who had allowed themselves to be beaten up or attacked by dogs or hit by the police. It was hard not to respect people who went that far. Then they saw a monk in Vietnam cover himself with gasoline and burn himself to death. That was a big step up. It was an extraordinary act of rebellion that inspired activists around the world.

During this time tensions increased between the Americans and the politician they had decided to support– Ngô Dinh Diêm. I day before a new Ambassador arrived in Saigon, after promising the Americans he would take no further repressive actions against the Buddhist minorities, he cut off power to the American officials and sent hundreds of special forces into Buddhist pagodas and brutally rounded up 1,400 Buddhist monks, students, and other rebels. It was hardly surprising that the Americans lost a lot of confidence in the leader they were supporting with large sums of money. Was this the democracy they wanted? When Americans complained Diêm went even farther, he declared martial law and authorized to shoot anyone on the streets after 9 p.m.

It was not just the Americans who were upset with Diêm. Everyone was mad at him. He closed universities, then other schools and even arrested students.

The world wondered, who were the Americans supporting in this war? Were they supporting the right side? Was the son-of-a-bitch worth it?

 

Fear: the whacky world of the Super-rich in Salina Kansas

Decline of the west, Philosophy/Ideas, Travel, , ,

 

We drove near to an ancient Titan missile site located near Salina Kansas close to the Nebraska border. We did not see it but I knew it was here. It was one of the two such sites in North America during the Cold War. The other was located in Green Valley Arizona where Chris and I lived for a month a couple of years ago. That one was turned in to a museum. We toured it with friends.

The second site near Salina is being developed as a security haven for the super rich of America. These are among of the most fearful people in America. The site is being converted into a super secure place for the super rich to hunker down. It is their luxurious bomb shelter, designed not just for bombs, but for any and every catastrophe. Rich people are getting ready for a crack-up. They are called survivalists. They want to survive the impending doom. We used to think of survivalists as woodsmen living off the grid, crackpots in some religious colony, and other assorted crackpots. Recently this has changed to included the super-rich especially hedge-fund managers and techies from Silicon Valley.

I am fascinated that this is being developed by the very rich. Why is that? I don’t know, but I have a theory. I think the rich in America live in fear. They fear that their wealth will crumble and they will be left to their own devices among drug-crazed hooligans out to get them and their families and their wealth. In fact, I think (entirely without evidence of course) that this fear emerged out of a sense of guilt. American society–and American wealth in particular–is based on 2 ultimate horrendous injustices. The first was the genocide of Indigenous peoples that the first European settlers encountered in the New World. The second was the astonishingly long imposition of slavery on African-Americans. They were immigrants from Africa as Ben Carson famously called them. That injustice led to guilt, which leads to fear. Many rich Americans are incredibly fearful. I think many of them fear what Quentin Tarantino emphasizes in many of his films–i.e. the turning of the tables. In many of his films a very evil man tortures an innocent man and later in the film the tables are turned and he gets the chance to impose revenge for the injustice. I think that is exactly what many rich Americans feel deep in their corroded souls. They fear justice.

In American many rich people have wealth beyond anyone’s imagination. And the greater the wealth the deeper the unconscious belief that such wealth is not justified and then justice might be served some time soon.

Many of the super-wealthy have helicopters, all gassed up and ready to go when the apocalypse arrives. Many of them want to be ready for whatever arrives– unrest, revolution or environmental collapse. They live in fear that soon the gig will be up.

Many of them want to defend themselves. Some take archery lessons. I kid you not. Some of these guys are young yet incredibly rich (even though many also seem incredibly stupid). Welcome to modern America. One of them is Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars. Not bad for a 33-year old, but he is not happy. He is scared shitless!

Many of the survivalists have dreams (nightmares?) of collapse. Many of the survivalists, or preppers, are deeply concerned about political instability in the United States. They fear there will be widespread unrest. Huffman forecast “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” According to Evan Osnos, who wrote an article on this in the New Yorker, “Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.” That is what they fear.

People like Huffman believe that that the consensus that holds society together is fragile. As he said, “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.

Preppers or survivalists such as Huffman often have a good understanding of modern social media and the corrosive effect it can have on social relations. “Social media can magnify public fear. Huffman put it this way, “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.”

Osnos also reported on a study obtained by National Geographic that “found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k). Online, the prepper discussions run from folksy (“A Mom’s Guide to Preparing for Civil Unrest”) to grim (“How to Eat a Pine Tree to Survive”). Some of these things are hard to believe, I know.

No one knows exactly how many wealthy Americans have bought into this fear, but the numbers are not insignificant. Osnos asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. He guessed 50%.

There is something inherently barbarous about rich people taking such extreme measures to protect themselves from hazards that their own reckless disregard for benefits to other classes has wrought. Max Levchin, a founder of Paypal and of Affirm, a lending startup admitted this to Osnos, when he acknowledged, “It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared.” If only these multi-millionaires and worse spent some of their money helping others, or even if they moderated the exploitation of workers and the system in their own favor, and less time worrying about how they can survive the impending troubles a solution to the problems might actually be found.

Levchin told Osnos that he prefers to shut down cocktail party discussions on the subject by asking people instead,

 

‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”

 

While many captains of industry are unable to see anything that is not in their own immediate advantage, a few do recognize that there are vulnerable people out there who have been screwed by the system and many of them may seeks “solutions” to their problems that may involve insurrection, as far fetched as that may sound to some of us.

Many of the rich think, as the aristocracy of France did before the French Revolution that the poor can eat grass. Others fear revolution that might upset their privileges. Dugger said, “ “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape.”

Elite fantasies of escape are often exactly that–fantasies. There are all kinds of logistical problems. Many of the wealthy cannot see these problems. They assume there must be a way for them to escape. After all they deserve that escape. They have earned that right to escape. So at least they think.

Dugger one of the super rich, told Osnos about a lavish dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble, “ “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.” One of the guests was skeptical, Dugger said. “He leaned forward and asked, ‘Are you taking your pilot’s family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?’ The questioning continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn’t run.” You can run, but you can’t hide.

Robert A. Johnson was another person that Osnos interviewed. He saw the fear of his peers as “the symptom of a deeper crisis.” I agree with that. I too see the fear as a manifestation of fundamental unease about their place in modern society. They are unmoored and their wealth, which often is extreme wealth, is not able to fill the void. Johnson was the manager of a hedge-fund. He was also the head of a think tank. He called himself “an accidental student of civic anxiety.” From my own career, I would just talk to people. More and more were saying, ‘you’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

Osnos analyzed this situation this way,

 

By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”

 

It is difficult to discern why the privileged are so fearful. What do these ultra wealthy people have to fear. If money does not buy happiness, surely it buys security. If one thought that, one would be wrong. As Osnos reported,

 

As public institutions deteriorate, élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge of our national predicament. “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

 

Near Salina in Kansas, where we drove through on our way to Arizona, is interesting countryside. Osnos drove to the site where the luxury bunker in the old Titan silos is being built. It is called the Survival Condo Project near the town near Salina Kansas. When Osnos arrived he was met by a guard dressed in camouflage holding a semiautomatic rifle. The condo project is being built inside an underground missile silo like the one we saw in Green Valley Arizona. The developers are building 13 luxury condos. The facility housed nuclear warheads from 1961 to 1965. After that the site was decommissioned. The site was built in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union that was engaged in a long-standing “cold war” with the United States and its allies. The developers are led by Larry Hall the CEO of the new project. According to Osnos, “Hall has erected a defense against the fears of a new era. “It’s true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy,” he said. “They can come out here, they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around.”

Wow is that the best the super rich can do? Is there not more to life than being ensconced in a cocoon? To me that sounds horribly limited. I guess being rich is not all its cracked up to be.

Hall developed the property for which he paid $300,000 by spending nearly another $20,000,00 for renovations. With that he created 12 private apartments that he sold for $3in the case of full floor units and $1.5 in the case of half floor units. He sold them all except for one that he decided to keep for himself.

The silos in which the apartments are located are solid. After all, they were built by the Army Corp of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike. The inside has enough food and fuel for 5 years off the grid. Of course it will require that people raise tilapia in fish tanks and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps and supposedly renewable power that could function indefinitely, according to Hall. I am not sure how he would accomplish that.

In a crisis more drastic measures can be expected. According to Hall, “In a crisis, his swat-team-style trucks (“the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-calibre”) will pick up any owner within four hundred miles. Residents with private planes can land in Salina, about thirty miles away. In his view, the Army Corps did the hardest work by choosing the location. “They looked at height above sea level, the seismology of an area, how close it is to large population centers.”

That does not mean that each prepper has an individual bunker. After all, hardened bunkers are expensive and complicated to construct. The complex looked and felt like a ski condo that did not have any windows. What kind of ski condo is that? But it had a central area with pool table, stone fireplace, a kitchen, and leather couches.

Osnos had the benefit of a tour of the Kansas facility. It had many amenities. $20 million buys a lot of amenities. It has a 75-foot long pool, a rock-climbing wall, an Astro-Turf “pet park,” a classroom with a line of computers, a gym, a movie theatre and a library. According to Osnos “It felt compact but not claustrophobic.” Osnos also described the armory and related facilities:

 

We visited an armory packed with guns and ammo in case of an attack by non-members, and then a bare-walled room with a toilet. “We can lock people up and give them an adult time-out,” he said. In general, the rules are set by a condo association, which can vote to amend them. During a crisis, a “life-or-death situation,” Hall said, each adult would be required to work for four hours a day, and would not be allowed to leave without permission. “There’s controlled access in and out, and it’s governed by the board,” he said.

 

This is not exactly paradise is it? The facility also contained a hospital bed, operating table, dentist’s chair and food storage area. 2 doctors will be residents and 1 dentists. I guess they are wealthy enough.

One problem is how to get away with the absence of windows. Can you imagine it? According to Osnos, “The condo walls are fitted with L.E.D. “windows” that show a live video of the prairie above the silo. Owners can opt instead for pine forests or other vistas. One prospective resident from New York City wanted a video of Central Park. “All four seasons, day and night,” Menosky said. “She wanted the sounds, the taxis and the honking horns.” So that is what she got.

This is not virtual reality; this is whacky reality. Hall has given some thought to how people will live there, but I wonder if he has given enough thought. According to Osnos, “Hall said the hardest part of the project was sustaining life underground. He studied how to avoid depression (add more lights), prevent cliques (rotate chores), and simulate life aboveground.” Frankly I would not be satisfied with simulated life. Would you? I would rather have life. Or is even death preferable? This is particularly poignant when you consider that most (all?) life might outside the bunkers might perish.

Some survivalists have mocked Hall’s plan. They say they won’t pay. They will just attack when the time comes. To this Hall responded that he and his guards could repel all forces. And if necessary, the guards would return fire. How long could people survive a siege?

Some of the people who put down $3 million for a unit have strange fears. Maybe they all do. Osnos interviewed Tyler Allen a real estate developer in Florida who bought a unit. He worries about future “social conflict” in America. I do too. Allen also thinks that the government will deceive the public, as it has done in the past. He even believes that Ebola was allowed into the country “in order to weaken the population.”

Allen claimed that when he started suggesting ideas like this people thought he was crazy, but they don’t anymore. He said, “My credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.” Now to many it seems like a reasonable precaution.

Of course how will people get to their bunkers? The buyers don’t live next door. Tyler lived in Florida. That is a long way from Kansas. Tyler thought he would have 48 hours to make it to Kansas. Most people he believed, when the crisis came, would head to the bars while he headed towards Kansas. I guess he thinks they would be watching the action from “Sports bars.”

As I have said, all of this is driven by fears–in particular fears of the very rich. Osnos does not disagree,

 

Why do our dystopian urges emerge at certain moments and not others? Doomsday—as a prophecy, a literary genre, and a business opportunity—is never static; it evolves with our anxieties. The earliest Puritan settlers saw in the awe-inspiring bounty of the American wilderness the prospect of both apocalypse and paradise. When, in May of 1780, sudden darkness settled on New England, farmers perceived it as a cataclysm heralding the return of Christ. (In fact, the darkness was caused by enormous wildfires in Ontario.) D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific strain of American dread. “Doom! Doom! Doom!” he wrote in 1923. “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America.”

 

Not everyone has the same fears. Often ideas of the end times flourish during times of insecurity. Insecurity (fear again) breeds monsters. “Jack London, in 1908, published “The Iron Heel,” imagining an America under a fascist oligarchy in which “nine-tenths of one per cent” hold “seventy per cent of the total wealth.” Doesn’t that sound a lot like today?

Fear was not invented recently in America. It has always been there. There was fear earlier in the United States. The Cold War was brimming with fear. Many thought there were communists under every bed. Many feared nuclear annihilation. Thousands of people built bomb shelters in their basements and stocked them with food. Doom boom some called this.

There is no doubt that all of this is being driven by fear. Fear of disaster can be a useful thing. When the world realized that a hole was being punched in the Ozone layer because of chlorofluorocarbons (‘CFSs’) in the atmosphere they got together and adopted the Montreal Protocol to do something about it. They phased them out. That action has been a remarkable success story. But this is not happening here. Instead it is another case of the super wealthy doing nothing to solve the problem. They are using their money to buy an escape. That escape is illusory, but that is what these rich people want to do with their money. Instead of using it to help solve the problem, they are trying to run away from it. As Osnos said,

 

Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal… Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair. As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. ”

 

 

Another super-wealthy CEO had a much better approach. This is what he said,

 

There are other ways to absorb the anxieties of our time. “If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn’t buy a bunker,” Elli Kaplan, the C.E.O. of the digital health startup Neurotrack, told me. “I would reinvest in civil society and civil innovation. My view is you figure out even smarter ways to make sure that something terrible doesn’t happen.” Kaplan, who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, was appalled by Trump’s victory, but said that it galvanized her in a different way: “Even in my deepest fear, I say, ‘Our union is stronger than this.’ ”

 

As it has so often in the past, America is being pushed and pulled at the same time. On the one are people like survivalists, neo-liberals, and their political puppets who have shredded all of their fellow feeling in order to fill their bags with as much money as possible. On the other hand there are the kinder gentler souls who see a better way, but seem to be increasingly crushed by the more vocal and bellicose side. I don’t know who will win this battle, but I care. I hope that America (and with Canada dragging along behind) comes to its senses and abandons this philosophy of fear. Fear is all right but it must be managed. When it gives way to panic we have to realize that smart decisions will no longer be made. We must abandon panic; we must embrace critical thinking and fellow feeling. If we can do that then we will survive. If we are unable to do that, we will sink into the mire, or worse. We can sink into the whacky world of the super rich.