Look Forward in the New Year

The official explorer of the National Geographic--a great title--Wade Davis has a new book out on why ancient wisdom from the earth's vanishing peoples remains important to us. Davis fans will remember him for A Serpent and The Rainbow, his investigation into voodoo and how zombies are created. He didn't have to leave Washington to find that out. Wade Davis has explored the Amazon and Peru.

Arthur Danto's wonderful and small Andy Warhol argues that Andy was the most important artist of the second half of the last century. It is a good read and he makes a cogent case. The only piece of work he mentioned that I have not seen is Roger Maris Swinging the Bat. I have never even seen an image of it. I also never knew that the Brillo Boxes were made of wood and handcrafted by woodworkers in New York City. The most interesting rift in the book was Danto's discussion of why Andy's film Empire State is a masterpiece--it's philosophy at its most fun. Since I have a small library about Andy, I was skeptical that this book would be worth it. It's masterful.

A personal project of mine this year will be to revert to my Divinity School days and read theology. Last year, my Harvard Divinity School classmate Forrest Church died. He leaves a treasure trove of theological writing that I have yet to read. As America's polarization now seems fixed between the religious right and those who support a secular society with some respect paid to science, I need to arm up for what looks to be a brutal intellectual struggle.

More and more I am convinced we lost almost a decade in the fight against terrorism. The recent outbursts by Dick Cheney and the Republicans have only solidified that belief. I believe the cottage industry of producing books and studies on Islamic Fundamentalism has failed to illuminate the problem. Trace the route of the underwear bomber and his class background. It's clear there is no front in the war against terrorism and that we need a new paradigm to unravel what I think are awesome strategic errors that actually put the financial well-being of the United States at risk. It will be interesting to see whether the past decade will be seen as some mistake or false start or the time when America made such structurally wrong decisions as to start its decline as a superpower.

I think this year will test the military-terrorist complex in the United States and raise central issues about what a $1 trillion a year buys us. Is the war to combat terrorism simply another money-making venture or does it have anything to do with making our nation secure? We experienced in the first year of Barack Obama the fight on Too Big To Fail in the economy; now we will see the same in the whole security industry. What is it that compels the United States to act on a gigantic scale when smart, sharp thinking could save us alot of time, energy, money and people's lives?

Our soldiers have now served in some cases twice as long as the entire World War II. Despite the bravado of our armed forces, they are showing serious problems with PSTD and other stress related illnesses, which we have known from study after study affects people who are on active duty too long. We will be experiencing blowback from this for years. We simply hollowed out our military for reasons that now escape me.

The underwear bombers postings about his despair reminded me of the terrible days in Liberia and Sierra Leone when child soldiers were conscripted by warlords and commanded to commit the most awful acts imaginable--lopping off people's arms with machetes and tearing babies out of women's wombs. Today, these child soldiers are pariahs, shunned by society, and haunted by their acts. Programs to rehabilitate them to some semblance of functioning have by and large failed. Their sleep is disturbed by nightly nightmares and they had to be detoxed from their regimen of dope and booze. They are lost and one wonders how many of the underwear bombers will also end up lost like the child fighters.