Waging War with Flying Pandas

Over the years, I've heard a couple of creative suggestions for dealing with our nation's enemies. One of these suggestions in particular has stuck with me as a real possibility for making a different sort of attack against those who pose a threat. This suggestion was made in jest. But the more I've pondered it, the more I think it might hold real promise as a strategic/tactical measure in times of war.

The suggestion was made by Andy Rooney during one of the commentaries he'd deliver at the end of every 60 Minutes TV program. He proposed that, instead of dropping explosives on our adversaries - we should carpet bomb them with all kinds of material goods. We should drop load after load of all the kinds of commodities that American families are famous for having in such plentitude.

We could of course drop the necessities of food and clean water. However, Rooney also proposed that we drop objects that are essentially frivolous but that make for distracting good fun. We could parachute down house slippers that look like kittens, bags of potpourri, video games, crocheted Kleenex box covers, clocks that chirp the hours, coffee mugs dedicated to "The Best Grandfather in the World," butterfly hair clips, and on and on. We could drop whole Wal-Marts full of goods on our enemies, blanketing within their borders on and on, around the clock.

Rooney pointed out that a bombing campaign of that kind would really help maintain full employment throughout our economy. We'd need every worker available to crank out these goods and to package them for parachuting. At the same time, we'd catch our enemies completely off-guard. While they were geared up to strike back against machine gun fire, hand grenades, mortar shellings, and missiles - they would hardly know how to combat a 6-foot stuffed panda come flying at them. What's more, they'd be completely disabled trying to store all these possessions in their homes. We'd make them as glutted as we are. With their living spaces chock-full of Elvis-on-velvet paintings - they'd be too bogged down to come out and fight.

Rooney signaled how truly he was saying all this in jest when he ended his commentary by reflecting, "On second thought, we really shouldn't bomb countries with all our stuff. That would be too cruel." Better stick to TNT.

But wait a minute! Why does that suggestion of a way to wage war have to be a joke? Couldn't some version of that approach in fact work a lot better than conventional bombings? Since people so often become soldiers in order to escape poverty or boredom, wouldn't a barrage of delightful merchandise occupy them in less destructive ways? Not that most of our current terrorist foes necessarily come from poor families. It's been shown that many of them actually come from supportive, middle-class families. But their anger often stems from a more general sense of privation and humiliation. So a judicious supply of some of the goods necessary for them to start their own all-consuming businesses could perhaps deflect them and their likely supporters more than gunpowder has been doing. People seeking ways to express qualities of dedication, commitment, and zeal, could find outlets other than religious fundamentalism.

But if we were to seriously adopt such a strategy, there would be many other things to consider about the nature of the products we deployed. We'd have to be sensitive to the cultures of the countries into which we dropped our goods. No liquor on Muslim countries. No milk products on populations that generally couldn't digest lactose. Nothing so chauvinistically American or in such quantity that it played into resentment against what's been perceived as U.S. materialism or paternalism. Also, we couldn't launch so many free goods into a country that the influx would destroy what was likely their already fragile economy. Nor could we drop stuff in such a way that our largesse would give rise to cargo cults among any receiving tribal peoples below.

We could perhaps include some whimsical, purely frivolous items such as those cuddly kitten house slippers. But in reality, we shouldn't drop an indiscriminate mix of goods. Most of what we drop should be genuinely useful in the context of the countries where we drop it. In addition to dropping laptops, radios, books, illustrated how-to guides, and other means of self-learning - we'd want to drop practical self-help things, especially when fighting against poorer nations. Some possibilities might be biogas ovens, water purifiers, pumps, antibiotics, insecticides, bicycles, baskets, jars, coolers, ice, tents, anti-bacterial soap, spackle, batteries, pens and paper, incidental spare parts and nuts and bolts and nails of all kinds, basic tools, saws, and stepladders. When doing this as a serious stratagem, we'd probably want to represent the shelves of Home Depot more than those of Wal-Mart.

Then just because we'd be bringing bounty rather than devastation to the enemy, we shouldn't assume our soldiers would be in any less danger making the deliveries. Our pilots would probably be subject to as much or even more repulsive force than when they were dropping bombs over their targets. This has frequently been the case whenever any country has tried to deliver humanitarian aid to combatants. The heads of State, the heads of the different fighting factions, are fierce in trying to prevent anything helpful getting through. Such outside help diminishes the leverage and overall power they exert. So as a simple self-defense measure, our soldiers might still have to pack plenty of TNT along with their chemical toilets.

Another problem that might arise if we were to deal with our enemies this way is that we might risk seeing The Mouse That Roared scenarios develop in countries all over the globe. In that Peter Sellers movie, the officials of a (fictional) small, bankrupt Duchy decide to wage war against the U.S. Their plan, after what they assume will be their inevitable defeat, is to sit back and collect the reconstruction aid that the U.S. can be counted on to rain on its former foes. But if the worst we have to fear from a beneficent approach to battle is a declarations of war against us from the Grand Fenwicks of the world, it will certainly be worth the risk.

In spite of all the danger and in spite of all the diplomatic difficulty we'd face in finding the right mix of goods with which to bombard our enemies, the results could hardly be worse than the destruction and loss of life that current methods deliver to both sides. If I were President. I would seriously attempt this radical new approach to combat. Instead of dropping bombs on al-Qaeda and ISIL strongholds and all the surrounding population and terrain, I'd drop carefully considered care packages on much of the host territory - day after day, relentlessly. I'd turn that old saying into literal fact - I'd kill them with kindness. What Andy Rooney proposed in jest, I'd execute in earnest.

J'Accuse! Who Is Really To Blame for the Oil Spill?

Most people blamed abstract entities for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The entire company of BP was blamed. Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BR, was reviled, but only to the extent that he was seen to represent BP as a whole. Similarly, various government regulatory agencies and governments in general were blamed. Some people have criticized President Obama, but again, only because he stood for the U.S. Government as a whole.

However, my impulse is not to blame any abstract agency or any composite, corporate entity. I want to blame individuals. It’s true that there is such a thing as a corporate culture, and specifically some sick corporate cultures that push employees to all kinds of ruthless expedients just to make a profit. It’s similar to growing up in a bad neighborhood. The bad influences hold sway and eventually push many youths to conform to the criminal standards of their peers.

Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial, but generally convincing book entitled The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do; Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More. That title sums up her thesis that peer group influence, rather than parental mores, is the primary determinant of most young people’s behavior. She points out that if you take a juvenile delinquent out of his gang environment and put him in a relatively crime-free school in which criminal behavior is considered an alien, outlandish, and even laughable mode of conduct by most of the student body - chances are the delinquent will literally re-form.

Other authors have extended this concept of the primacy of peer group mores into adult settings. In the classic book The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that most people in Western cultures have long since moved from being “inner-directed” to being outer-directed and “other-directed.” Most people no longer stand stalwart in an individualistic identity transferred to them in the form of the mores and expectations of their parents. There is very seldom any “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” mentality in people. Rather, people are protean, assuming whatever shape fashion and their peers dictate. So now you CAN take the country out of the boy.

Considering the influence of peer pressure from another angle, it’s obvious that a twisted mob psychology can grip people at certain times and turn otherwise civil people into holocaust perpetrators. Everywhere we find instances of the madness of crowds.

So there’s a cogent argument that would blame people’s misdeeds on the pressures they experience from their peers, from their fellow students, from their prevailing neighborhood gangs, from their companies’ established cultures, from their society’s expectations. Nevertheless, I STILL want to blame individuals. I STILL want to name names. I STILL want to point the finger at specific individuals rather than at abstract, faceless groups such as governments or corporations. It’s individuals rather than teams I want to admire; it’s individuals rather than teams I want to accuse.

In a courtroom, we still ultimately convict the individual rather than the society that individual came from. We are more and more taking into consideration bad environments, extenuating circumstances, etc. But in the end, the individual stands alone in the docket. So I want to place each individual involved in any man-made disaster in the docket alone.

That’s why when it comes to the recent oil spill, I felt frustrated not to know the names of the individuals whose actions contributed to the accident. Certain individuals might be in the process of being called to account for the accident and might be prosecuted, but most of society’s blame still has been falling on those abstractions of company, agency, and government. No! I wanted to see the faces of individuals.

The closest that I was able to come to assigning such blame was through the "60 Minutes” interview given by Mike Williams, a chief electronics technician on the oil rig. Williams gave very intelligent testimony about the behavior that piled hazard upon hazard – until the final explosion. He talked about the series of mechanical failures that came about as the result of individual decisions. Williams told how someone okayed a plan to speed up the drilling into the Gulf floor. That caused the bottom of the drill hole to split, the way wood will split when a nail is driven into it at a bad angle or without benefit of a pilot hole. The mud that circulates through the casing around the drill bit and drill pipe to cool these elements consequently spilled into these cracks. The workers had to start drilling a new hole. I blame that individual who thought it was okay to speed up the drilling process.

Then during a test, the drill was carelessly raised out of the hole, causing it to scrape away some of the necessary seal, the “annular,” that has to be kept intact in order to maintain pressure on the gas that will emerge. I blame the individuals who allowed and who executed this haphazard lifting of the drill.

Chunks of the annular started to appear in the liquid circulating to the top of the drill hole. When Williams called these chunks to the attention of some of the supervisors, they pooh-poohed his concerns. They okayed a go-ahead. I blame these indifferent individuals.

Because of the damaged seal, gas rushed out past the seal and was sucked into the rig engines. The rig exploded and eleven people were killed.

Williams reported a more fundamental human failing that preceded all these negligent decisions though. He talked about how BP supervisors and TransOcean supervisors disagreed earlier in this chain of events about what drilling technique to use. Men from the two different major companies involved in the drilling disagreed about procedure and predictably turned their disagreement into a jousting match. The men from each side were only intent on being right, on winning the argument. As TV judge Marilyn Milian says, it became a matter of “Quién es mas macho.” Or as Williams put it, the conference became a “chest-bumping.” I blame the men who let the discussion degenerate into verbal combat.

But that sort of impulse to turn what should be conversation into contest is all too frequent an occurrence, especially when all the conversants are men. This isn’t a sexist comment I’m interjecting out of the blue. There have been many serious sociological studies documenting (as a broad generality with many exceptions, of course) men’s and women’s different conversational styles. Deborah Tannen is one of the sociologists who has documented this difference most convincingly. In books such as You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, she observed how women tend to make a collaboration of their discussions, while men tend to enjoy pitting themselves against each other until a clear winner of the confrontation can be declared. Even those men who come out on the bottom of any particular exchange prefer to enter the next exchange as a contest, because there’s always a chance they might come out winners in that next verbal fray. Having rules, keeping score, driving towards a central victory, tends to be preferable to them than what strikes them as the indecisive, mealy conciliations of women’s talk.

So here blame gets bounced off the individual from another angle. Here the fault is seen to lie not in ourselves, but in our genetic inheritance from primal ancestors. We are acting out the gender strategies that made our early families most successful.

Deborah Tannen and other authors on the subject usually bend over backwards to make it clear that they don’t feel the women’s conversational style is superior to the men’s. The styles are just different. Tannen emphasizes that men and women simply arrive at resolutions with different shadings. Women’s style reflects the use of a mixed and muted palette. The decision reached is a committee compromise. Men’s style favors vivid primary colors. The dominant man’s view is imposed as a coherent whole, in a winner-takes-all flourish of primacy and consistency.

I don’t think I would be as generous as Tannen and others though in granting what’s defined as men’s conversational style equal validity with what’s defined as women’s typical style. Men’s styles too often do seem to result in a Gulf oil spill, in destruction, in war. The dominant man, having failed to take into consideration any countervailing views for fear that might signal weakness and therefore a loss of face, a losing of the contest – issues a plan that is therefore limited and preemptory. It’s “Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead” too much of the time when an issue is decided only by men engaged in verbal sport.

But can’t men see how damaging it is to operate by contest, to make every encounter an occasion for a challenge to a duel? Can’t they see how succumbing to this primal instinct to be the alpha male is no longer serving them, their communities, or the world well in most cases? This is where I would like to come in and shake those men who “chest-butted” in order to reach a decision about how to proceed with the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where I would like to name names, to assign individual blame. Rather than billowing regret about “big corporations,” “corporate culture,” “capitalist greed,” and the like – I would like to bring it all down to a personal level, to point my finger at Tom, Dick, and Harry (and Tony) each in succession and punish them for their destructive competitiveness.

My wish to place individual blame and to punish as a parent or a spouse might – with full frontal finger-pointing - is probably MY counterproductive impulse. When has blame ever really changed a person? When has simply yelling at a person, “Don’t BE that way!” ever spurred anyone to self-improvement?

It is probably better in some ways to hold those larger, more abstract entities responsible for much of the evil that men do. It is probably more productive to try to reform school environments, neighborhood ethics, corporate cultures, and societal presumptions than it is to try to reform individuals independent of the network of influences they operate in. But just as many men will continue to find women’s method of coalition emotionally unsatisfying, so I find putting the blame on abstract organizations emotionally unsatisfying. As futile as it might be, I still long to find out exactly WHO issued the order to speed up drilling in the Gulf of Mexico – and to harangue, blame, prosecute that person into making an apology, into making personal amends, and into becoming a better person in the future.

I don’t want to blame the wheel; I want to blame the faulty cog. I don’t want to blame the system; I want to blame the individual at fault in the system. I don’t want to blame the Devil; I want to blame the person who chose the Devil as mentor.