onparkstreet

Afghanistan 2050: A Chronic Low-Grade Sameness. Or, Each Life, A Story.

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(Alternate title: When Borders Need To Heal….)

When we got to the Southern Afghanistan-Balochistan camps the first thing we noticed was the quiet. Even more strange than the lines of donated tents, the numbers of people, and the bizarre floating appearance of the inflatable camp hospitals dotting the landscape, was the relative silence. This surprised us.

Inside the largest camp hospital we found the recovered bodies of the missing Afghan-Americans. A make-shift morgue had been arranged with each body properly tagged in a kind of digital tattoo ink that kept a running score of the date of death, body temperature and presumed cause of death. The previous group of traveling NGO physicians (our hospital ship was semi-stationed for the duration at Balochistan Port) had left a good set up. Above each body “hovered” a bodily representation – a CT/MRI compiled projection – so that the morgue had the appearance of something spectral and otherworldly, the souls of the dead afraid to leave, anxious to ensure the truth.

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Who Could Have Guessed ?

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On May 18th of this year, I went to a talk at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs by General David H. Petraeus. It was entitled AN UPDATE FROM U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND.

And then: an article in Rolling Stone appears all over the internet before the hard copy even hits the stands, there is a MEDIA-PUNDIT-INTERNET uproar (with some justification) followed by the stepping down of one General, a stepping into a different role by another, and a new Commander of U.S. Central Command. The new Commander is General Mattis – another pretty quotable guy.

Life. Unpredictable, eh?

If any of you are still interested, I’ve translated some of my “worse-than-chicken-scratchings” notes of the event below. Have a look, if so inclined (and hey, I’m not a professional journalist so it’s not like my notes are the gospel or anything).

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“Mama, mama, you got some money for me?”

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This part of Chicagoland tells a story and it’s a pretty familiar urban tale: the rise and fall of a neighborhood. Rickety houses in complete disrepair mingle with neatly kept bungalows – the stalwarts, I like to call them – whose trimmed lawns and white painted bars over windows and doors tell a different story. Someone here has a job.

The stories people tell me and the stories I’ve run across.

During the mid nineties, I rotated through the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office for a few months during one of my medical resident rotations. One of the autopsies I witnessed involved a suicide in jail. The pathologist had gone to the jail, as I recall, and brought back some personal artifacts in order to put the case together properly. One of the artifacts was a suicide note and I was allowed to look through it. I remember something like this: “noone ever loved me my mom wanted to abort me noone wanted me noone wanted me.” The words aren’t exact, but I remember the white notebook paper the words were written on and the round loopy “running together” handwriting as clear as day. I always say none of this stuff gets to me but I remember a few details with such clarity that I wonder if it is really true.

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“The Decade of Envy”

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“Were the 1980s really the Decade of Greed? There were stories of some people making lots of money, but did that make them or all of us a lot more greedy? Is resenting the success of others a reaction that people of goodwill should have? As Des would say, isn’t prosperity – even if it’s other people’s – a good, not a bad thing? Certainly during the eighties there were cases of behavior that looked “grasping” to an antisocial degree, but was this so widespread – was it in all our hearts – that the whole decade deserved that obloquy?

Perhaps the notable feature of the decade was not that some people made money but that so many others were so bent out of shape by that. If some yuppie got a bonus, what was that to us? Rather than the Decade of Greed, wasn’t it really the Decade of Envy? Or the Decade of Envy, Jealousy, and other resentments there was no reason for those afflicted to sound so proud about?

Subjectively, far from being a Decade of Greed, the early 1980s were years of hard work and maximum productivity, better in my opinion than any period that has come since. For me and a lot of other people, the eighties were the young-adult Wonder Years, when autonomy came to the fore and we could finally do the things we were in uncomfortable preparation for all the years before that.”

– Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards

“Let us go back to work!”

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Hot Air links to this speech against the feds’ moratorium on drilling by Gov. Bobby Jindal and picks out the following key phrase: “let us go back to work!”

Is there a better way to summarize the spaghetti-diagram of legislated rules and regulations that bind, hold-down, dampen, repress and retard the engines of economic growth? Why hire that extra person when you don’t know who will staff the latest alphabet soup regulatory agency and what the regulations will be? Because you know, it’s all so empirical and science-y, man, watch and learn:

1. Legislate new regulatory board.
2. Staff new regulatory board.
3. New regulatory board writes new regulations.
4. ?
5. 10% GDP growth! Yeah for us!

By the way, America’s biggest cheer-leader had the following to say in his press conference with UK PM Cameron:

And, in fact, in the first G20 visit that I made, in April to England, I was very clear to the rest of the world that what they cannot rely on is an economic model in which the United States borrows — consumers in the United States borrow, we take out home equity loans, we run up credit cards to purchase goods from all around the world. We cannot alone be the economic engine for the rest of the world’s growth. So that rebalancing ended up being a central part of our long-term strategy working with the G20

Mr. President, I know you mean well but you are ONE MASSIVE DOWNER.