Testosterone Toyboys

[blacky@cbn.net.id]

Living in a 3rd-world tropical paradise like Indonesia (aka Indo-Amnesia) gives one a unique angle on world events, and with this perspective in mind I have concluded that the bewildering aggressiveness of the US government and many of its citizens may just come down to too many male hormones sizzling.

Too much meat-eating, violent TV, pressure and stress. And the humiliation of being knocked off your perch by a bunch of unwashed greaseballs with box-cutters, thwarting your 30 billion dollar a year so-called intelligence establishment, is such that you might just want to lash out at anybody convenient.

I am told that police dread getting involved in domestic disturbances more than any violent crime, simply because when they show up all the tension and anger can easily explode their direction. Is it like that? 

Otherwise it's puzzling, and living as I do in a low-energy, rather passive society (Javanese civilization being thousands of years old, and kind of petered out) it's quite startling to considerthe way many Americans are behaving.

I just came across the following bit, in an article I got while roaming through the archives of www.theatlantic.com. It is certainly ironic how things turned out:

“While other military institutions look "strategically" -- and thus more abstractly -- at the future, Leavenworth, because it concentrates on training captains and majors (the middle ranks), "is where the rubber meets the road," Major Chris Devens told me when I visited recently. For instance, forget Republican rhetoric about a unilateral foreign policy. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Adams told me that in just about every circumstance that planners here have looked at -- nuclear meltdowns in Eastern Europe, collapse of a central authority in sub-Saharan Africa, military offensives against drug and crime syndicates, and so on -- the "intervention scenario is international"; the United States will "rarely go it alone anymore." Prairie Warrior assumes "coalition brigades" of French, British, German, and other foreign troops fighting in a "multinational environment," according to Colonel Rolly Dessert, who organizes Prairie Warrior. Of the 1,300 officers participating in Prairie Warr
 ior this year, ninety are from seventy friendly foreign countries.”

in: “Fort Leavenworth and the Eclipse of Nationhood”, The Atlantic Digital (1996)

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/leaven/leaven.htm 

Is this the place to insert a well-timed “oops”?

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Cheers

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