Archives for 2022

A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud

March 20, 2022 By David Griesing 2 Comments

It’s hard when you’ve been through a difficult time (like we all have since the coronovirus landed), finally feel that you’re coming out of it, and then discover that the promised relief has suddenly been snatched away. That’s how the last three months has felt: with the lull in vaccinations, the resurgence of the virus, and the lingering impact on schools, work and the ability to keep your chin up.

I’m writing this on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, and the recaps around that day have been everywhere. I mostly stopped paying attention after the wake-up-call of one of them, Frontline’s review of the terrorist attack and the fear and disasters that followed (right down to the botched evacuation from Kabul’s airport two weeks ago). Their documentary, America After 9/11, made this passage of time feel “all of a piece,” twenty years when I’ve felt that we’ve mostly spiraled downward as a country, both here at home and out in the wider world.

It only made the cloud that was pressing down already feel that much heavier.

In thinking about recent debacles, I often “follow the money” as I look for the culprits in a saga like these post 9/11 years have been: the sheer, staggering cost to all of us (in dollars) and for more than a few of us (in post-traumatic stress, dismemberment, addiction, and lives lost on the battlefield or to suicide).  For example, I realize that my daughter has known almost nothing other than these sad 20 years.

Perhaps numbed by these human costs, my alarm only escalated when I saw (as you saw) America leaving behind hundreds of millions of dollars of vehicles, weapons, equipment, uniforms, indeed whole military bases when we departed from Afghanistan and nobody, nobody seemed to have made a list of it all so those of us who had paid for it knew we’d left behind, what it had cost us, and why we thought it was “Ok” to just pass it on to the Taliban.

Trillions of dollars were apparently spent in our foreign wars since 9/11. What does that level of spending even mean? It numbs the mind until you start breaking it down and realize that the cost of a single Humvee could support a family down the street (wherever you live “in our homeland”) for a year or more. No one seems to want the public of you and me to know the specifics beyond these unfathomable cost estimates—because then, presumably, someone would have to be held accountable, like you would a thief who’s gotten into your house (or shop or school) and is made to empty his pockets, one item at a time.

It’s a convenient slight of hand—this vaporous expense—because the industry behind the war machine we’ve abandoned near Kabul stands to become even richer if we “ditch the old stuff” and get to make a newer, shinier, even more expensive war machine the next time around.  Because after all, when we’re confronted with some new threat, we’ll say, as Americans always seem to say when we’re afraid: “Of course. Buy it. We’ll worry about whether we can afford it later.”

The cloud that presses down continues to grow as I appreciate how little discussion there’s been about this aspect of the bungled evacuation from Afghanistan, indeed our abandonment of all our post 9/11 nation-building and democracy-exporting efforts. The cloud further discombobulates when I realize that we’ll do it all over again if we don’t pause, re-think and ultimately re-group very differently as a result of these misadventures.

Of all people, it was Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and U.S. president during much of the 1950’s—this man who helmed our last great war—who said it most eloquently, perhaps because more than almost anyone he knew what he was talking about and had the gumption and stature to speak the truth. Something brand new had come out of WWII, a military-industrial complex, that was bigger and more worrisome than any commander-in-chief or even government could control. If we’re not mindful (Eisenhower warned), this new war machine will jeopardize the health of our country and its brightest prospects in the future.

Eisenhower put his warning into his farewell address to the nation at the end of his term—literally his last important words to us as president, and surely his most prophetic.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society….
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Over the past 60 years, Eisenhower’s worst fears have largely been realized, their frightful impacts “economic, political, [and] even spiritual.”

Moreover, it bears noting that the military-industrial-complex has grown beyond the companies, consultants and influence peddlers that had already joined forces by the 1960s. For example, attempts are increasingly being made to integrate the Silicon Valley tech companies more closely into governmental functions like data capture, surveillance, cyber-security and cyber-warfare. (See “As Google, Microsoft and Amazon Seek Bigger Defense Role, Some are Leery,” an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday of last week.)

Of course, there are several reasons for the alarming rise of disruptive, profit-oriented “power centers” like this and similar ones that seem to always want to slow dance with our government. There are also reasons we never get around to pushing them away. The same pharmaceutical industry that rips the public off in most years comes to our rescue with a revolutionary vaccine—so it can’t be that bad. The military-industrial-complex (or MIC) that gorges itself on billion-dollar defense budgets saves us from more terrorist attacks after 9/11, so it too can’t be that bad.

These periodic reprieves make us (and our elected representatives) seem to forget all the bad stuff for a while and we never find the will to do all the post-mortems that we (and they) should also be conducting–like why prescription drugs are orders-of-magnitude cheaper in Canada or Mexico, or why the entire American government seemed to be hoodwinked into the Iraq war by “weapons of mass destruction.” Any impetus for reigning in these industries seems to be undermined by their occasional but far-too-expensive star-turns as “national saviors.”

Moreover, a megadon like the MIC operates in and provides high-paying jobs in every US city, state and territory. Because it’s a manufacturing and job machine too, it makes regular and generous campaign contributions to every elected official where it operates as “a cost of doing business,” or, more accurately, as “a cost to keep the business coming.”  Since most elected officials easily spend as much time fund-raising as governing, there are powerful financial incentives to refrain from “biting the hand that feeds them” and even cutting the MIC back down to where it already was when Eisenhower rang his alarm bell.

The difficulties of “oversight and management” of the MIC are further compounded by two other factors, locked without end into their own, counterproductive back-and-forth.

Millions of Americans work in companies that contribute to our seemingly perpetual war efforts (indeed, a few of you might be reading this now). Once again, it feels like “biting the hand that feeds you” to question the implications of your work, at least until your son comes home from war with traumatic brain injuries or you’re shocked into wondering “how it was all worth it” while watching something like our sad retreat from Kabul two weeks ago.

But even then, even with personal or citizen-based horror about the MIC’s impacts, the impetus to do something about it, to complain or protest, to agitate for a different way of conducting America’s affaris, is undermined (somewhat) by self-interest—it’s my paycheck, after all—but even more so by fear:  fear that if “I” want our country to spend less, do less, dismantle the-worst-of-the-MIC, then when the next national security threat appears (because of course it will, and of course we won’t be ready for it), “I’ll” be blamed for wanting us to cut back on our so-called “defensive and offensive capabilities”—like failing to manage a winning football team effectively. This vague concern about complicity silences the better angels that tell us: surely, there are higher motivations than fear that WE COULD AND SHOULD be responding to as individuals, as communities and as a country.

It all seems too big to do much more than stew about. But isn’t awareness that you’re a drunk or an addict (with the MIC as your fear-reducing drug) the first step towards a cure?

Despite new news cycles about virus patients triaged in Idaho hospitals or our kids being afraid to go back to school, I’ve been trying to linger over the SYSTEMIC imbalances (I think the word is right when used here) that the military-industrial-complex has introduced into my life and work because it seems to me that much of my life and work would have been different (and better) these past 20 (or more) years if we’d been working to achieve different priorities as a country—priorities with aspirations like the moon-landing a few years after Eisenhower spoke—instead of whatever shell-game we’ve been playing ever since.

Awareness of how our national treasure and bandwidth are being spent is, I think, the first step towards choosing to spend these scarce commodities more judiciously.

For example, some of us want to de-fund the police to allocate energy and resources to other community priorities. I think it’s far more complicated than that because police departments are (among many other things) just the tip of the MIC iceberg.  All you need to prove it is to see local police departments like ours in Pennsylvania taking to the streets with military grade equipment that they’ve gotten as surplus from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What we’re fighting, and shouldn’t be fighting, is all around us.

_{Pennsylvania police departments have received more than $6 millionin military ordinance over the past few years.}

I’m writing about this particular cloud today because, eventually, we’ll learn how to manage Covid-19 more effectively and because our 24/7 news cycles suddenly stopped covering the incompetent way that we just evacuated ourselves out of our country’s longest war. Our whole, sad, 20-year experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, from beginning to bitter end, merits enough of our attention to reach at least the beginnings of a judgment—and maybe, several judgments about it.

I think our experience requires following the money and wondering whether the priorities we’ve been financing are really worth as much as we’ve been paying (economically, politically and even spiritually) for them: because in a world of limits, if you’re paying for one thing you’re NOT paying for some thing else—and bearing the opportunity costs.

As I sat down to write to you yesterday, on 9/11, my plan was to acknowledge the cloud I’ve been operating under (that maybe you have been operating under too) for the past month or so and point in a more optimistic direction. I wanted to look back with you from 2050 and glimpse the world that even now we’re beginning to create to meet the demands of a healthier, more sustainable planet. (Instead, I’ll do that next Sunday, in a Part 2-post.) But as you’re suspecting from my shift from the objectives of a military-industrial-complex to those of a carbon-reduced environment, our priorities will need to change as we stumble towards a different and more necessary future.

In the meantime, we’ll start to confront our financial limits, how much we can put on the credit card without a pay-off, what we can and cannot afford. Even in a fear-inducing world, a free society can only afford so much security—and, after all is said and done, HOW MUCH MORE SECURE DO YOU FEEL in the wake of our government’s flushing trillions of your dollars away? If we’re serious about healing our home-planet, we’ll have to “right-size” the military-industrial-complex that purports to protect our corner of it.

There’s simply no alternative.

It will be a messy, polarizing discussion, two steps forward and one back, with gridlock for years at a time (because that’s what a democracy does), but a debate about our biggest most expensive priorities may already have begun at the Kabul airport—and the more voices that join in that debate the better.

Follow where the money’s been spent and where new dollars are going. Priorities are realized with budgets and by those with the wisdom to guide those budgets into accountable actions.

The debate that we’ve been needing to have for at least 60 years may finally be getting started.

(By the way, the illustration up top of a human under a cloud, was created by Simone Golob.)

This post was adapted from my September 12, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Instant History of the Past Week in Ukraine

March 7, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, we’ve all seen the pictures of mothers with their children and old people fumbling in distress in Ukraine—to leave the bombing, to find refuge.

Maybe because they cut so close to the bone and because we’ve seen so many similar images from Syria, Greek islands, Afghanistan and Myanmar, our early warning systems kick in and we become numb before they can sink their teeth into us too deeply.

But we’re less likely to shut ourselves down when events fall outside familiar grooves, not “more victims/different country” but something it’s harder to recall seeing: like those clips of Ukrainian men (and more than a few boys) who’d been living safely in Europe but left their families, friends and jobs behind to board buses and trains for their homeland this week, drawn by some quixotic but irresistible impulse, even though they never held rifles before, had been warned away by their country’s on-going destruction, and knew they might never survive their rescue attempts.

We couldn’t take our eyes off uncommon valor like that, or stop wondering what we might do in their shoes.

When poet Stephen Spender recalled similar impulses almost a hundred years ago, it wasn’t a fool’s errand in a jaded eye but the fragrant whispers of a flowering nobility that he captured.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
(“The Truly Great,” 1928)

It shows how far we’ve come (or fallen) that the perfume of greatness seems so unfamiliar today, but also through the magic of our technology that it somehow got embodied by these heroes on our news screens this week.

Who fights for one’s country these days? Who leaves so much behind to step into the jaws of the beast in a vain or noble attempt to stop it from closing? Observers like us in the West saw and felt what Spender was describing this week.

And we couldn’t take our eyes off of it. It surprised, maybe embarrassed us, as we confronted our own convictions or their shallowness. But while those closest in, the French, Germans or Poles, wondered whether they’d do the same, they also looked to their fears as a world of ordered boundaries was upended. The unthinkable Bear at the door was all too thinkable now.

Exactly one week ago, as a result of the West’s changed perceptions about Ukraine and the heroism of its president and people, several “historic” things happened. I’d call it a kind of awakening. And while it usually takes the perspective of 20 or 50 or even 100 years to decide “what just happened,” I was persuaded—by sharing the perspective of an economic historian from Columbia and his interlocutor—that several developments in recent weeks really did change the historical arc that we’ve been traveling on. We realized certain things, made some momentous decisions as a result, and implemented them with lightening speed and lethal effect. As a result, I’m persuaded that nothing that follows will ever be the same as it was only a few short days ago.

In addition to the obvious pitfalls of writing an “instant history of the past week,” there are some advantages.

Informed historical judgments can place the rush of on-going events in a broader context. They can put characters like Putin, Zelensky and Biden, themes like sanctions, supply chains and energy interdependence, into a story that tries to make sense of its sub-plots.

And you don’t have to buy-in completely to this kind of storytelling. Instead, you can use such explanations as hypotheses to be proven or disproven by whatever happens next on the world’s stage. But this time you bring with you a few suspicions that you’ve almost nailed down.

_{Ukrainian civilians confront a convoy of Russian troops this week in a vain but valiant attempt to turn them back.}

I became interested in the explanations of history in college. Not as a professional interest but as a continuing sidelight that’s has made me follow “the world news” everyday and always wonder what it meant.

I took a course that became three courses about the sweep of historical events and I was hooked: trying to answer questions like “what explains” a Napoleon or a Hitler, or how “the Black Death” in Europe undermined feudalism? (The beginning of an answer to this last one: by helping increasingly scarce laborers to appreciate their economic value.)

I took this interest into what seemed to me the historic events of my lifetime. Globally, it was the end of the Cold War, the recent pandemic. (Why did they happen? What would follow?) And from a more localized, American perspective: the cultural shifts of the Sixties (involving the civil rights of African Americans and women, Earth Day and the environmental movement) and finally, 9/11. It was sometimes possible to see the Before-and-the-After side-by-side because the changes around each one of them were so profound.

A two-part conversation between Ezra Klein, at the New York Times, and Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia, identified similarly transformative moments around the recent invasion of Ukraine. (This paywall-free link is to both a transcript of their exchange and a recording of their conversation.) It was compelling that Part-One of their get-together occurred almost immediately Before and Part-Two immediately After the unprecedented response to the invasion by a startlingly unified West last Sunday. Klein called Tooze back this past Monday to reflect on events that neither of them had predicted just nine days before.

I’ve separated my summary of their observations in Part One from the comments they made in Part Two of their conversation. Taken together, I’d argue that five historic changes either happened or can be confirmed around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past several days.

PART ONE OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (FRIDAY FEBRUARY 25)

1. A Western-Liberal illusion was shattered.

Once Russian military forces crossed the Ukrainian border and invaded its sovereign neighbor, it was no longer possible to believe that the benefits of international peace, finance, law, trade and cultural exchange would outweigh national grievances and territorial imperatives that lingered from a previous age. No invading army had crossed a national border for 50 years. It could no longer be assumed that the mutual advantages of a global “community,” following an ideological Cold War with the West, would constrain either Russia’s desire to expand its sphere of influence against the constraints of NATO along its eastern flank or China’s claims on Taiwan or over the South China Sea to the beaches of Japan, the Phillipines and Vietnam.

Russia’s seizing of Russian-speaking Crimea and support of “breakaway “republics” in the Donbas region of Ukraine had not been enough to dispel the West’s illusion that all nations shared its dream of global prosperity and harmony. Neither had China’s subversion of Hong Kong, in violation of its 50-year treaty with the UK, or trade sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. But those rose-colored glasses finally shattered when Russia marched into Ukraine.

Tooze and Klein saw foreshadowing from Russia and China around 2008, after Russia had recovered from the economic devastation following the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s and China pivoted from the Beijing Summer Olympics to the rise of a Xi Jinping. Back then, both China and Russia started chaffing publically about the dominance of the global framework that had been established by the U.S. and Europe a half century before. After the Russian invasion 10 days ago, the West could no longer operate on the assumption that free trade, open communications, and the greater prosperity of home populations would make Russia and China “just like us,” freer, more open and democratic. The world is divided again, less because of communist ideology and more because of national aspirations that cannot be denied.

2. Russia and China effectively used the West’s open, global framework of trade and finance to build “war chests” that could enable them to resist the West’s dominance within their geographical “spheres of influence.”

Since its near financial collapse in the 1990s, and particularly after the sanctions that followed its seizure of Crimea in 2014, Russia used its access to the international banking system to build its financial reserves through its energy and natural resource sales, reduce its dependence on foreign currencies like the dollar or Euro, and make itself more impervious to external interference, including economic sanctions. (Adam Tooze discusses the financial games that Russia played at length if you want to read more about them.) For its part, China also used free trade and access to a global financial system to enrich and strengthen itself at the West’s expense. Once again, wrapped in the illusion described above, the West was slow to appreciate the negative consequences that came with what it believed was “its benevolent dominance.”

3. Supply-chain security involving critical materials becomes a central feature of every country’s defense policy.

As a consequence of #1 and #2, the interdependence of energy and semi-conductor markets (to take just two examples), impose limits on Western sanction regimes and make the future take-over of a country like Taiwan (which leads the world in the production of semi-conductors) even more fraught. Only a couple of years ago, few observers in the West were concerned about these supply constraints and the necessity of home-grown accessibility to critical products and resources.

These three changes in Western perception all hardened with the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, as recently as last weekend most observers believed that the invasion would quickly overwhelm its resistance, that Europe would continue to tolerate unpredictability around Russian energy supplies, and that Russia’s economic interdependence with Europe (i.e. the benefits of prosperity all-around) would continue to keep Europe safe and secure.

As a consequence, the West’s initial responses to the invasion—which had been telegraphed for weeks—“meant to sanction Russia, to cause pain to the country and particularly to its ruling class, but not to crack its economy, not to cause undue harm to their own economies, which are interwoven with Russia’s,” as Klein described it.

Then last Sunday, perhaps after viewing a week of Ukraine’s brave civilian resistance, watching its nationals return to fight, its grandmothers face tanks, and listening to the eloquent pleas of its president to NATO, the EU and the US, the West was ready to make even more fundamental departures with its past.

_{Throughout the invasion, Zelensky has maintained regular video contact with the people of Ukraine and the world outside, bolstering not only Ukrainian morale but also summoning Western solidarity and resolve that had never existed before.}

PART TWO OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (ON MONDAY MARCH 1)

4. The West declares economic war against another nation for the first time since World War II.

Last Sunday, the EU and US announced economic sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank and virtually all of its other financial institutions in a bid to bring the country to its economic knees as the punishing cost for its invasion of Ukraine. It’s an economic war that’s not only been brought to Russia’s leader and the oligarchs behind him. It’s an economic war that is likely to have devastating and long-lasting consequences for the Russia’s 145 million people. Adam Tooze:

[W]e are now applying Iran-style treatment to not just a nuclear power, [but to] the number two nuclear power in the world, the old Cold War antagonist, in the middle of an active shooting war in which we are taking sides [and] in which they are not making the progress they expect. And we are threatening by this means to deliver a devastating blow to their home front. I mean, panic in the streets, total disruption of the ordinary lives of tens of millions of Russians.

Today, every American going to the grocery store or looking for a used car is worried about price inflation. But in one fell swoop, the Western sanctions implemented by a united West on Sunday launched “a full out economic war” with far more profound “inflationary” consequences for every person who relies on the ruble to live day-to-day. Coupled with the EU’s unprecedented decision to send military arms to Ukraine (and Germany’s reversal of its earlier refusal to do so), Tooze accurately analogized these counterstrikes to the aggressive American posture immediately before it entered World War II (with its Lend Lease program in support of its European allies). Indeed, it was enough of a body-blow that Putin put his country on nuclear alert immediately thereafter. One result is that a nuclear war, unthinkable just a week ago, is today more of a possibility than it has been for over 35 (and maybe 60) years, depending on how you calculated the Soviet threat level in 1985 and 1960.

It doesn’t take boots on the ground to go to war today. While the West is struggling mightily to avoid a larger conflagration, the economic war it has launched is real and its consequences deep and possibly irreversible. And instead of taking weeks or months to mount, this kind of war began almost instantaneously, impacting a global network of trade, insurance and currency exchange fine-tuned to global disruptions that are far more modest than this invasion.

But another way to assess the damage is from the perspective of the average Russian. According to one report this week, “the fall of the ruble since Russia invaded Ukraine could add 4 to 5 percentage points to Russian inflation, which [already] stood at 8.7% in January.” That’s another order of magnitude reduction in what Russians could buy with their rubles a little more than a week ago. Tooze again:

[T]here is serious reason to worry about lower middle class Russian households [in particular]. They’ve been squeezed hard over the last five, six, seven years. Their incomes have not been going up. They’ve been piling up debt. One of the first things that happened today is the interest rates went to 20 percent. So that’s going to immediately bite into your income. So there is a serious risk here of major economic and social fallout.

We’re talking the destabilization of an entire economy from the ground up.

While it will take the Russian economy some time to “devalue” itself, the impacts on its citizens will escalate in the coming weeks and months with particularly grave consequences for these same lower-income folks who, until now, have been the bulwark of Putin’s “democratic” support. Couple that blow to its citizenry with the escalating costs to the country of an invasion (that was supposed to be over by now) and of fighting a Ukrainian insurgency (if it ever succeeds), and Russia could soon be flirting with the same economic bankruptcy that it faced after the Cold War. And from what Tooze, Klein and others seem to be saying, China either can’t or won’t come to Russia’s rescue.

So however much it is obscured by the daily blizzard of “news” and our other diversions, for the first time in most of our lifetimes, we in the West are on “war-footing,” and have no way of knowing where this confrontation will go next.

A final Before-and-After event also happened last Sunday.

5. The defeated countries in World War II—Germany and Japan—are either bolstering (or considering bolstering) their military capabilities for the first time since they were pacified 75 years ago.

In this regard, Germany announced (in some shame over its lack of preparedness) that it is authorizing an unpredented increase of $110 billion in its defense budget. Moreover, for the first time since its creation, the EU (as a unanimous block of 28 nations) has authorized the delivery of $500 million in weapons to a country that’s not an EU member. This is on top of armaments and military supplies provided by the US and NATO. (The icon of St. Javelin, up top, is Ukraine acknowledging one of America’s most appreciated military contributions, namely the Javelin anti-tank missile.)

Moreover, as China engages in saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Japan is also actively contemplating its rearmament. With these developments, the so-called Pax Americana that was promised after the Cold War but already wobbly before Sunday, was surely dead thereafter.

Five developments that have likely changed the course of modern history.

After the terrible loss of blood and treasure in Afghanistan by many of these same Western countries—economic losses that have yet to be quantified for those of us in these democracies who have covered them—it (sadly) appears that we are off to the same bloody and costly races again, with hardly a pause to take a decent breath.

Of course, the consequences are not only to where the West spends its money but also to where it doesn’t (either because of massive new defense expenditures or the lack of available band-width to consider anything other than national security concerns). For example, how do we also fight a war against global warming and biodiversity loss and on behalf of a habitable planet? Is this battle now, somehow secondary to our survival?

What really happened over the past seven days is that half (or more) of the world suddenly changed its priorities—and it’s not at all clear that in that flash, enough of the citizens of the West have even noticed.

This post was adapted from my March 6, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Owning Your Own Shadow

February 4, 2022 By David Griesing 2 Comments

As someone who has tinkered with the title and sub-title of his book repeatedly—the “working titles” are still Work Life Reward: The Call & Response of a Good Life At Work—I love it when any other author (or the “book title folks” at the publisher) come up with “the right one.”

Owning Your Own Shadow, a 1991 book by Robert A. Johnson, is such a title, in part because “shadow” includes the good and not-so-good aspects of this unacknowledged part of you. In additon to the personality traits or obsessions that you need to take (perhaps) reluctant responsibility for, your shadow also embraces qualities that would or could be transformational if you hadn’t buried them in a bid to conform to the culture’s (your family’s, your community’s and the overall society’s) expectations.

That is, the rangy, ragged, unorthodox, magnificent but largely disowned parts that fill people out and can truly make them whole.

That’s what I want to talk about today—particularly, the “golden, often heroic” face of our shadows—and I borrowed Johnson’s title, along with his notion of ownership, to begin the discussion.

Of course, a quote from the always-quotable Oscar Wilde could also have started out today’s post. In The Critic As Artist, Wilde said: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” That characterization still begs the question of whether “Wilde’s truth behind the mask” or “Johnson’s unowned shadow” are for the better or for the worse—and their concepts clearly include both darkness and light—but again, it’s the light in the shadow (or that’s hidden by a mask) that interests me most.

Why do we persist in disowning the quirkiest, oddest, most singular, imaginative, creative, “golden” and “heroic” parts of ourselves, when we can (and should) be relying upon our shadows to make our greatest contributions and deliver our deepest satisfactions?

According to Johnson (as well as Carl Jung, whose groundbreaking insights he relies upon), the parts of us that seem lost in shadow are the parts we have banished or repressed because the culture finds them socially unacceptable, contrary to established norms, too-at-odds with its overall “comfort zone” to tolerate. So we try to banish these tendencies and drives, refusing to acknowledge any ownership of them at all. But it’s a fool’s errand because every single thing that we do produces a shadow, and it belongs to us whether we accept it or not.

For example, every hardworking and productive person creates a shadow that wants to goof-off and waste time, but at the same time, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge her shadowy motivations (as if they were a slippery slope). Or a person may assume that others are more capable than he is, burying in his shadow the talents that are inside of him too. For him, a shadow of his greatness is always there, but every time he looks at it somebody else seems to be wearing it.

Instead of owning our shadows, Johnson argues that each of us distances ourselves from it by “projecting” our shadow onto someone or something else so “we do not have to take responsibility for it” by assimilating this part of our character into the self that we recognize and acknowledge. He continues:

Today, whole businesses are devoted to containing our shadows for us. The movie industry, fashion designs, and novels provide us with easy places to invest our shadow. Newspapers offer us a daily allotment of disasters, crimes, and horrors to feed our shadow nature outwardly when it should be incorporated into each of us as an integral part of his [or her] own personality. We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness [and our other shadowy parts] into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.

Stories about true crime, superheroes, political manipulation, sexual predators, militia groups, (name your non-conformists) as well as perfect athletes and actors, and “god-like” entrepreneurs (like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk) alos invite us to project our dark or “golden and heroic” shadows upon them instead of owning them ourselves.

Jung warned and Johnson echoes that banishing our dark shadows is easier for most people than liberating their golden ones. We often flat-out refuse to see the hero inside of us, resisting our potential because we might not be up to realizing it. On the other hand, projecting our golden shadows unto others is commonplace. It’s easier to worship from afar than to become (or to own) a lesser version of our loftiest ideals. “Some of the pure gold of our personality,” writes Johnson, “is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in…culture.” Neither we nor our families, schools or communities seem to be able to welcome or accommodate our heroic sides, or so we insist upon thinking.

It takes a conscious intent—a push against personal and cultural resistance—to reconcile with our golden shadow-selves. When we push back, the effort can be transformational because assimilation of the shadow unlocks reserves of energy, power and creativity that have been repressed or otherwise disowned. Assimilation also establishes an internal balance between how we live and work in plain view and the shadows we cast (but insist on ignoring) while engaged in these same activities. Johnson speaks of finding an internal balance between “heaven” and “hell,” but it is also the balance between “the lion” and “the mouse” in each of us. He writes:

The shadow also contains a good deal of energy, and it is the cornerstone of our vitality. A very cultured individual with an equally strong shadow has a great deal of personal power. William Blake spoke about the need to reconcile these two parts of the self. He said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy—and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.

Late fall and winter are particularly good times of year to acknowledge, explore and begin to assimilate a side of ourselves that will make us more energized, powerful and creative in the spring and summer, once we gather the courage and sense of adventure that we’ll need so we can face it.

To dig deeper, you can listen to a short lecture on YouTube in which Johnson elaborates upon his observations in Owning Your Own Shadow. I also recommend reading this short but provocative book.

_{A chance to pencil in the shadow}.

I suspect I was drawn to the shadows this week because it was Halloween last weekend.

Wearing masks briefly suspends real world rules so “a human can become a god, an ordinary citizen can become a king, a man can become a woman” in a form of shadow play that anthropologists call “rituals of inversion.”

Ritual celebrations like this give everyone a break before returning to conformity and more sobering realities. So every year, Halloween’s revelers are pulled back into the real world by All Souls Day. and the celebrants of Carnival or Fat Tuesday (at the other end of this calendar) by the long weeks of Lent. It’s also not a coincidence that days “where everything is turned upside down and the shadows can come out to play” occur during seasonal transitions, either as summer starts fading into winter in the fall, or as winter starts fading back into summer during the spring. They’re like pivot points where everything is up for grabs. With all of that in mind, I found it interesting to learn this week that the first Halloween parade in the U.S. took place not in New York City, San Francisco or New Orleans but in Hiawatha Kansas, in 1914–or in small town America, a place that may be a great deal more adventurous than many of us expect.

Because people everywhere need to get away like this—it’s replenishing to spend time behind Wilde’s mask—doing so makes it’s easier to come back to the same old thing tomorrow.

Perhaps because of Halloween, along with a tingling sensation that our culture itself is unsettled and struggling to decide where to land, but every time I turned on the radio or listened to a podcast this week, the subject seemed to be about owning your own shadow for more than one or two days a year—a more permanent kind of assimilation or reconciliation with our shadow selves. I found a couple of these journeys into the shadow-lands and back again particularly captivating.

For as long as I can remember there have been Renaissance Faires. I couldn’t imagine going and didn’t understand why any one else would want to until I learned more about them this week. At their best, they are vehicles that seem to enable their singular cast of players, artisans and dedicated historians to bask in the glow of their golden shadows. Children of the counter-culture Sixties, Renaissance Faires aimed to create a kind of alternate reality with “real” food appropriate to the time, hand-made as opposed to mass-produced crafts, Carnival-esque entertainments, champions competing in jousting and other games of skill or chance, along with the pageantry, music and camaraderie of others who’d also come to explore a different part of themselves. The transporting and reconciling aspects of these festivals became apparent in several of the participants’ stories on a podcast this week.

Because you can make a kind of living moving from one Renaissance Faire to another—one is staged somewhere in the U.S. at most times of year—one man spoke about the joys of playing his particular character over and over: a champion who had moved from serfdom to Faire-ground hero on the basis of his skills at one of the regularly staged contests. (Nearly every contestant seems to have a detailed backstory as well as knowing fans who follow him or her to multiple venues). This guy plays his hero ten months of every year, returning to Georgia for two months in the summer where there always seems to be a job waiting for him at a local pizza parlor.

For his part, the son of the founders of the original Faire (a highly articulate fellow named Kevin Patterson) spoke about his continuing efforts to “curate” the festivals that he’s involved in for quality and historical accuracy because he (along with the attendees) care so much about both of them. A public radio reporter whom I listen to regularly dialed in to talk about a storytelling role that he’s played at a Faire each year for much of his adult life. All of these people leave the so-called real world on an enthusiasticly regular basis to embrace a golden shadow that lives in each of them and needs inhabiting. You can hear more of their stories in the hour-long episode of 1A called “Fare Thee Well: the Timeless Endurance of Renaissance Faires” by following this link.

In jarring contrast was a local talk show about the healing power of tattoos that people have gotten in response to personal trauma. Some women (in particular) have managed to find a kind of reconciliation with darker shadows that a tattoo also manages to move towards a more golden and heroic light after they’ve experienced rape, life in a combat zone, or suffered the death of a child.

For an often harrowing hour, guests spoke about how the permanency and visibility of their tattoos, together with the pain of getting them, had enabled them to not only grapple with the darkness within them but also to make their way to a better and more full-bodied story as they touched, looked at, or talked with others about the meaningful images they had chosen to brand themselves with. The discussion was around The Tattoo Monologues: Indelible Marks on the Body and Soul by Donna Torrisi, a nurse practitioner who treats victims of trauma and was a guest on the show. Along with Torrisi and several women sharing their experiences, the conversation included a trauma therapist and a professor who explores the range of therapeutic approaches to traumatic events.

Some of the women had gotten tattoos of butterflies or flowers for a parent or child who’d been lost so that out of the pain something permanent and beautiful was left behind. Others saw in the process of selecting the image, deciding where it would go on their bodies, working with the tattoo artist to realize the image, and even the pain of the emblazoning as ways to move from helplessness to control of the traumatic experience and how it would be remembered. Still others felt that their tattoos allowed them to reverse “the disassociation” they had felt during their trauma and replace it with something tangible that they could see and touch, that belonged to them, and that they owned. Finally, one woman simply said that her tattoo allowed her to speak about her trauma without words; the canvas of her skin becoming an embodiment of what she had experienced in the way that she wanted to express it.

After grappling with darkness, each of these women seemed to find the silver lining in their particular cloud, the gold in their particular shadow.

If you are interested in the full conversation, you can access it here (searching “tattoo monologues.”)

At this already unsettled pivot point between summer and winter (and maybe in our culture itself), I think it’s a particularly good time to push back against everyone else’s expectations and unlock both the energy and creativity that always lies in wait in a disowned shadow.

This post was adapted from my November 7, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

For the Birds

January 5, 2022 By David Griesing 3 Comments

I’d be lying if I told you that the first sounds I hear when I take Wally out in the morning are bird sounds. Instead, it’s the soft roll of tires on one of the streets that crisscross my neighborhood or urban beats booming louder than seems possible behind the windows of a passing car. But especially when it’s early enough, those sound-trails tend to fade into a quiet distance before too long, and the next things I usually hear are the local birds.

This time of year it can be the urgent squawking of Canadian geese, formed in a vee directly above us, after leaving the reservoir nearby and heading north by north-east in their annual migration. Or the tittering sparrows and wrens. But it can also be our talkative crows. They live in social groupings that have been called “murders” for as long as anyone can remember. While many explanations have been given, it seems that their name originated in folklore when many animal groups were described for dramatic effect by their characteristics, like an ostentation of peacocks, a parliament of owls, a knot of frogs, or a skulk of foxes.

Crows are highly social, mate for life, protect one another (including unfamiliar crows that are looking for help), and vocalize by using upwards of 250 different calls. This last character trait may actually go some distance towards explaining why crows are called a “murder” when they start chattering. Informal English has always accused the lower classes of “murdering” the common tongue.

Until a huge tree fell from an old neighbor’s yard and onto the new one’s next door, the resident murder would roost in its canopy and converse for hours. Wally would bark back at them when he was out and I’d also say “hello” if I thought of it. I’ve come to appreciate that our crows know exactly who we are and that we’re in some kind of conversation with them too.

Since they’ve been particularly noisy this week, their chatter made me take a second look at a book I read and reviewed here this time last year: Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, a word that means an object or, in this instance a story. with an infinite number of sides. McCann’s book is about the endless conversations, memories and illuminations that characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, how those relevancies and asides add dimension to a dialogue between two real-life fathers (one Israeli, one Palestinian) who has each lost a daughter to the murderous violence and struggles to transcend his loss. In the jumble of images, fables and impressions that he assembles, McCann continuously returns to the birds who also live in this elemental place, or pass through it on their annual migrations. “Our” crows made me want to re-revisit their stories-within-stories.

For example, this is the third of “the thousand-and-one” (or endless) digressions and reflections that make up Apeirogon:

Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry: hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.
It is the world’s second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels of sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass.
Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, by-pass roads.
Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast.
At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town.
Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremian monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, traveling in their talkative lanes.
They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers.

You see, the birds also get caught up in the violence that inflicts this corner of the Levant, one of the birthplaces of the human world. But at the same time, they give wing to the aspirations that can also emerge from the grief of many of those who live there today.

_{Two bird masks that I bought, several years ago, from a couple of backpackers who had set up shop in an Upper-West Side parking lot, just back from Latin America and financing their return to life in NYC.}

It’a probably not “five hundred million birds” in Apeirogon‘s migrating sky anymore. While the enormous bio-diversity loss is not what preoccupies me most about birds this morning (it’s more their soaring possibility), the decline in their numbers is still alarming.

For example, in 1970 there were nearly 3 billion more birds in North America than there are today, a decline of nearly a third. It’s impossible to wrap one’s head around a number like that, easier to simply notice how many fewer birds you’re hearing or seeing wherever you are today. They’re another of our dwindling resources.

Confronted by murder on this scale, I always want to go beyond noticing and “do” something about it. But as I learned (and reported here) after listening to a couple of wildlife experts, the next time I come upon, say, a baby bird who’s out of its nest, it’s better, almost every single time, to assume that it’s fine, that mom knows exactly where it is, and that it will be happier and far less afraid without my “help.” Usually, the better lesson is to simply notice, or to double-down on what I’m already noticing about the world I’m trying to inhabit: like how much it’s worth to me knowing that the birds I’m encountering already know about good parenting and that maybe what I need to do most “in order to save them” is to understand them better and appreciate them enough.

Which is why I wanted to share with you a groundbreaking tool that, for the first time, enables us to identify the birds that are still around us by their songs and other forms of vocalizing. A bird-song identifier that’s as accurate as this one has never been generally available before.

Over the summer, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology released its Merlin Bird ID app, which enables its users to identify some 400 North American birds (and counting) by the sounds that they make. According to one armchair reviewer, the app doesn’t claim to be 100% accurate, but “it comes very close.” It’s developers relied on a crowd-sourcing initiative that continues to draw upon a database of notes and recordings contributed by tens of thousands of citizen scientists through the Lab’s eBird Initiative. In what Fast Company called “a Shazam for bird songs,” the Merlin app turns a Babel of voices into one-on-one concerts that tell you exactly who’s playing a particular instrument.

I couldn’t agree more with that armchair reviewer when she wrote: “Love can’t save the environment, but when enough voters fall in love [with pieces of it like this], they can surely shift the political winds….”

We can’t fall in love with what we’re unaware of, or know almost nothing about.

_{When I was 3 or 4, I took this book with me on the first vacation I can remember, beginning with our drive from Connecticut to Florida. Along the way, I tried to match the birds I was seeing outside our car with the pictures in the book, but I still remember how hard it was to never know (except for the robins and the crows) whether I had gotten it right.}

While falling in love with birds again or for the first time are two of “the why’s” behind the Merlin app, here are some other things that are worth knowing about it.

You can find out more about the app, including where to download it for use with your smart phone, here.

You’ll need to be outside when using it. After opening the app, once you hear a bird talking or singing, choose “Sound ID” in the menu and hit the microphone button. You will immediately begin to see a “spectrogram” of sound waves scrolling across your phone screen, effectively “taking a picture” of its vocalizing. By using its algorithms to compare that picture with others in its database, the app will provide you with the bird’s identity. Clicking “This is my bird” after recording the date and their geographical location will save the sighting and share its specifics with the underlying database to improve the app’s future performance—effectively turning all app users into data gatherers and collaborators.

Using another feature in the app called the Bird ID Wizard comes at bird identification more incrementally. It asks you three questions about the bird you’re hearing (and hopefully seeing) before narrowing the likely possibilities: what size is it, what are its principal colors, and where did you see it (e.g. at a birdfeeder, on the ground, soaring or flying?). The app then provides you with a list of possible matches, which you can narrow further by using Sound ID or by taking and uploading a picture of the bird you’re seeing. The Wizard feature expands on the specifics you notice along the way to your identification and introduces you to other birds making similar sounds, adding more layers to your appreciation and to the thousand-and-one stories that you’re telling yourself about the birds around you.

Finally, if all of this listening and looking has peaked your interest even further, there is ebird, an inter-related app that feeds and utilizes the same database of bird sounds. With ebird, it’s possible to share your most unexpected sightings with an extensive community of birdwatchers as well as to track the sightings that others have had of particular birds you’ve become interested in.

This last adjunct to bird song ID reminds me that as winter approaches, neighbors of mine will be conducting their annual bird census. They ask people with birdfeeders like me whether they can observe what’s happening in my yard and whether I’ve been seeing any unusual visitors this year. These are the folks who came long before the Merlin app but are likely a part of its data gathering now. They’re invested in noticing as much as they can about the birds around here during a barren time when leaving seeds for them brings them closer, makes them more visible, and encourages them to keep us company.

Particularly as the days get shorter and colder and the overall muck of daily life starts to pull you down. it may be as good a time as any to let the wing’d updrafts and cacophony of bird sounds help to lift you up too.

This post was adapted from my October 24, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Archives for 2022

A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud

An Instant History of the Past Week in Ukraine

Owning Your Own Shadow

For the Birds

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