The Art of War

War is obviously not an uncommon state of affairs in the course of human affairs. But today the world is engulfed in war. It’s not limited to Europe or Asia. It’s ubiquitous to some extent because of the internet and the viral nature of ideologies, which were once the province of esoteric tomes. Take for instance the Egyptian revolutionary Sayyid Qutb whose writings might have seemed esoteric in the 50’s and 60’s when they first appeared, but fire al-Qaeda today. There's of course the war in Syria and Iraq where government forces are trying to prevail against ISIS and in the case of Syria, those opposed to the Assad regime. In Yemen the Saudis are fighting the Iranian backed Houthi rebels. In the Ukraine Russian back rebel forces remain a constant threat to the government and Israel remains a powder keg, with right wing settlers and Hamas forces competing to insure the failure of any peace accords. The Boko Haram kidnap school girls in Nigeria and Kenya remains under threat from al-Shabaab, the terrorist organization that staged a bloody massacre in a Nairobi shopping mall in 2013. There is a ancient Chinese treatise called The Art of War by Sun Tzu and the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz who wrote On War, famously said “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” The idea of attack is, of course, a theme in sports as well as war; in sports an opponent is thought of as the enemy though, with the exception of riots by overly avid soccer fans, winning is seldom aimed at the total annihilation of opponents, as it is in war. But there's lot of overlap. Boxing and mixed martial arts are probably the ultimate war games and the idea of the counterpunch, i.e. of  using your opponents strength against him or her is a strategy that, for instance, guerrilla forces like the Viet Cong have used against standing armies with their more traditional combat techniques.  Game theory, with its Prisoner’s Dilemma and Trolley Problems are central subjects of war strategy and armies around the world regularly participate in war games as part of their training. Those who send drones from command centers in the Midwest to targets in the Middle East are in fact playing a real life version of computer gaming and in fact there are computer gamers, kids of 10 or 12 in some cases, who would find it as easy to destroy an avatar on a computer screen as they would a real life enemy. In modern warfare there's often little difference between fantasy and real life since the “technicians” fighting some of these battles neither face the enemy nor experience the consequences of their act. The pilots who flew the Enola Gay had a very good idea what they had done when they unleashed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but Osama Bin Laden’s compound on a computer console would look much the same as a phantom enemy hide out to a gamer. Yet literally most analysts and commentators who talk about defeating ISIS, which is the great threat today, all talk about the need for boots on the ground, which is to say standard warfare, the kind of thing that soldiers are supposed to learn at West Point and the US Army War College (where "I Ain't Gonna Study War No More," is definitely not the anthem). The Russians defeated Napoleon in 1812 and the Germans in l943. Had the Russian generals learnt from experience? Or had they always possessed a secret the enemies simply weren't aware of--either in terms of strategy, logistics or just plain human psychology? Were they privy to the same knowledge that allowed the allies to prevail in the invasion of Normandy? Everybody knows everything. If it’s been said, it’s been done and if it’s been done it’s been said. So what is it that makes one army triumph over another? The quality of the fighters, the quality of the leaders, the justness of the cause, the fervor with which it’s embraced, or all of the above?

All We Need of Hell

Harry Crews

Harry Crews’ Karate is a Thing of the Spirit was the literary man’s version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. All We Need of Hell is another war novel by Crews, who died in 2012. It's no longer in print, but deserves to be reissued. When we say war in relation to Crews we are talking primarily about inner turmoil (though there is occasional sniper fire). Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a another version of this kind of interiorized banter. Duffy Deeter is Crews’s anti-hero and one might suppose alter ego. We meet him fantasizing about Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz in order to prolong his orgasms with his coke tooting mistress Marvella Sweat. “Nothing centered a man like pain, “ is one of Duffy’s mantras (he’s a practitioner of Zen) who has a gym in his Winnebago where he also stashes a copy of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. During a particularly violent handball game, he delivers a Okinawan roundhouse reverse to a football star named Tump Walker, an acquaintance of his law partner, Jert McPhester. Jert’s a former University of Florida, All American who suffers from a severe case of coitus interruptus when Duffy finds him in bed with his wife, Tish. Duffy’s son, Felix, is a momma’s boy who favors Baby Ruths. Tish, a former gymnast, files for divorce when Felix hurls after an exhausting workout in which Duffy tries to shape the boy up. Crews pulls no punches. He’s the Ur-intellectual shock jock (not that there really have been any since him) and yet underneath all the fascination with pain and the courting of it, is another kind of pain that his character hardens himself against. And that’s the disappointment in love. “Could you love someone who constantly revolted you,” Duffy muses about his son. It’s a question that could be asked about any of the people Duffy encounters, including himself. In his search for redemption, Duffy Deeter does have something in common with Graham Greene “whiskey priest." Here however is Tump Walker, who turns out to be a great bon vivant and lover of life, on the subject of death: “The thing that pisses me off is that you got to die in the middle of something, you dig? Unfinished. You pick up a fine looking bitch in a bar and you’re on the way to her apartment to get in her pants and you get run over by a truck. That’s annoying. Yeah. Or you order the best steak in the place and while it’s on the way to your table, you pitch forward in  your salad, dead. That’s annoying.” The only annoying thing about this ribald and hilarious novel is that it too must come to an end.

                                      

Submission

Masochism, a self destructive impulse in which one derives pleasure from self-destructive, painful or self-abnegating impulses,should not be confused with submission. Submission, in the service of taming a raging ego, is one of the highest spiritual goals. For instance in martial arts, advanced students tend to demonstrate a higher level of humility than lower belts. There are exceptions but the greater the fighter the less the tendency to braggadocio and exhibitionism. Bruce Lee believed in economy of motion. He didn’t need to show off  his technique, to mix it up with opponents to win. Great martial artists submit to a creed, to a way of the warrior like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The problem of submission, of course, for those who don’t study something like karate or jiu jitsu, is who or what to submit to. Self proclaimed prophets are like the pied piper. Demagogues and tyrants can be charismatic, yet this kind of submission—which involves being a supernumerary to a fascist—is surely not the effective way to go. What is one left with? God, the Buddha, the dictatorship of the proletariat? Faith, by definition, is predicated on uncertainty. The further from materialization the ideal is, the more difficult it is to find, the more literal and instantiated, the more labile. People tend to disappoint as ego deflating ego ideals. Those who search for deflation are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Dead Birds

Dead Birds, the first of series of films by Robert Gardner the artist/ethnographer currently being shown at Film Forum, concerns the bellicose Dani tribes of New Guinea. The film, which itself was shot over 40 years ago, is a paradox to the extent that it presents a pre-Adamic world devoid of shame that is at the same time characterized by very modern seeming forms of ritualized aggression. Robert J. Flaherty’s classics Nanook of the North  and Man of Aran are early examples of  this kind of artistic ethnographic filmmaking. But one wonders if self awareness lurks in the even more primitive characters on which Gardner fixes his lens. To some extent the filmmaker preempts this matter by adopting the omniscient authorial voice and the question is one of attribution? Do the filmmaker's subjects experience emotion in the westernized way that the narration describes? Cultural anthropology and ethology, the study of animal behavior, and in particular aggression, both come to mind in watching this beautiful film, filled with lush and at the same time horrific landscapes and events (such as the death and cremation of a child).  Every society has it  peculiarity and supposedly advanced societies have their tribal qualities while a primitive society like the one Gardner records can seem to be performing a Beckett play in which violence has an absurdist edge. The battles that film documents call to mind religious rites (in which Gods are appeased by scores being settled) and also curiously our own culture’s obsession with competitive athletics. One difference between Dani culture and that of the West, is the marked lack of ambition, with no tribe attempting to do anything more than achieve equilibrium. There are no Napoleons, Ganghis Khans or Sun Tzus with theories on the Art of War. On the other hand what is uncanny is that the Dani rituals, in the end, are reminiscent of our modern concept of nuclear deterrence, in which the job of  each cold warrior is to make sure that the other doesn’t get ahead. People who suffer from OCD will also identify with the magical thinking by which the tribesmen attempt to ward off ghosts. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.