American Tough Guys

>"He had a lot of frustration with what an insurgency is--that we are fighting a bunch of cowards who won't fight us man to man, who hide amongst women and children, who don't wear uniforms."
American soldier describing his sergeant in the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, from Raffi Khatchadourian, the New Yorker July 6&13, 2009.

>"They wouldn't fight us like men. They wouldn't wear uniforms. They'd shoot at us from the fields and run away.They should have stood and fought, like men."
Former German soldier explaining why it was necessary to shoot villagers who lived near the scene of an attack against German troops, The Sorrow and The Pity.

>"In 2005, he forced nearly seven hundred prisoners, wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip flips, to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat, pink handcuffed together, to a new jail...The men were strip-searched both before and after the march...Arpaio also told reporters, 'I put them on the street so everybody could see them.' He marched another nine hundred this April."
William Finnegan, The New Yorker July 20, 2009.

>"This is not us. This is not America," President George W. Bush, in a televised speech about Abu Garib prison photographs showing naked, blindfolded prisoners forced to form human pyramids.



So what is a tough guy? Who is Us? Are these guys, Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona, the officers of the 101st Airborne, the jailers at Abu Garib not Americans?

I think they are very American. They are American Tough Guys. Our home grown phony Tough Guys.

To my mind, a real tough guy is the little kid who faces an apparently physically superior opponent and goes right at him, as if being smaller, weaker in body meant nothing. It's the old, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog," thing.

David might have been considered a tough guy, conquering his fear of the giant. From the giant's perspective, however, David should have been forced to fight with a sword and from Goliath's point of view, David's use of technology which allowed him to strike from a distance and to run if he missed, might make David a coward who should have stood and fought like a man.

One question: Is it possible to be "brave" in the asymmetric warfare of the American army vs the Afghani insurgents? Is the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona a tough guy only as long as he is surrounded by armed deputies?

From where do American males get their notions of bravery and toughness?

There's a great Second City line, "You ain't gonna become a great basketball player working moves against your father in the driveway. You got to play inner city on the playgrounds with no referees."

At some level, white American males like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and like Colonel Michael Dane Steele and his murderous sergeant Eric Geressy,of the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, all know they have been playing in the driveway their whole lives, protected and supported by the Man. And they know, deep down, they are wusses.

Overcompensating wusses.

In my white suburban high school, members of the wrestling team could look across from their locker room into the locker room of the basketball team. After practice, the wrestlers were always pretty beat up, dehydrated, mauled really; it was all they could do to pull on their clothes over the battered shoulders and necks and hips. They look across the hall to the basketball players in their dressing room, trying to get all inner city in-your-face with each other, doing the male displays of pseudo ferocity.

And the wrestlers would shake their heads and look at each other from under their brows and smile. "Tough guys," someone would say, and everyone would laugh. The wrestlers knew what tough meant.

Tough meant stepping out on the mat with nobody but yourself on your team. Tough meant when the whistle blew you had to step toward your opponent, never take a step back, and there was nobody to pass the ball to, no heavy artillery or helicopters to call in to help.

Anyone who has watched The Wire from start to finish knows what tough is. Those inner city Baltimore kids on The Wire are tough guys, heaven help them, and not because they really want to be. They have to be. They are as tough as any one in Mogadishu. And they are not imagined characters, they are not fiction. Nobody could make those kids up. Those are kids who David Simon and Ed Burns know. They have no parents, no homes beyond what they can scrounge in a vacant building, no support beyond the drug organizations for which they work as hoppers on the corners, which treat them as dispensable pawns. Those kids exist on the corners of every American inner city. They are tougher than Col. Steele and certainly they are tougher than Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

So who is tough?

Let's examine the American tough guy, Colonel Steele. (Great name for a tough guy.)

"We give the enemy the maximum opportunity to give his life for his country."

Cute, huh?

How about, "The guy that is going to win on the far end is the one who gets violent the fastest." Steele exhorts his guys to "whip somebody's ass." His soldiers are going to go after the enemy and, "Kick their feet out from under them...bring them back and put them in a room...give them an open-mouth kiss and tell '''em we love 'em...If you mess with me, I will eat you. You're the hunter. You're the predator. You're looking for prey."
(Khatchadourian, New Yorker)

Steele walked on to the University of Georgia and made the team as an unrecruited offensive lineman. That's how tough he was. Of course, that is only one step away from playing in the driveway with your father.

It's not exactly surviving on the corner in Baltimore.

So he gets to Mogadishu and he tries to be all tough with a helicopter and all the firepower of the United States Army and he gets his ass handed to him and loses eighteen soldiers. Those corner boys in Mogadishu didn't have to make tough talk and hang a sign above their office door, "Carnivore." They were looking across into Steele's locker room and laughing at him.

Of course it's frustrating when the other guys don't get dressed up for game day in their uniforms and they see your guns and your airships and they decide they can hurt you by being smarter than you.

It's no surprise there are people like Sheriff Joe in Maricopa, Arizona. He's real tough, as long as he's got the attack dogs on his side.

When he builds his tent prison he says, "I put them next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste disposal plant." He creates chain gangs. He gets himself a tank, paints the howitzer muzzle with flames and paints "Sheriff Arpaio's War on Drugs," on the sides. He has his jailers overpower prisoners, fourteen to one (real brave guys these jailers) has them strap the prisoner in a restraint chair and Taser them with stun guns. Got to be tough to do that.

That men like Sheriff Joe exist, is no surprise. He runs his own little Abu Garib right out in the Arizona desert.

But what is really interesting is President Bush's remark that this sort of sadism is not what America is like, at its core. Americans are not like this. This is not us.

Or is it? Sheriff Joe has been elected to five four year terms in Maricopa County.

For twenty years he's been parading prisoners and everyone in Maricopa County knows what he is doing. The good people of Maricopa County cannot even claim, as the Germans claimed when the concentration camps were opened, "We were unaware of this evil."

There's a great scene in Band of Brothers (the HBO adaptation of the true story of Easy Company) where the 101st Airborne liberates a concentration camp just outside a picturesque German village and the soldiers of the 101st airborne in 1945 are sputtering with rage and they storm into the village and confront the villagers who claim they had no idea.

"No idea? That camp is less than half a mile from here: On a hot day, when the wind shifts, you had to smell it from here."

I'm not sure any of the soldiers from the 101st Airborne which liberated those camps would recognize much more than the screaming eagle patch about the current 101st Airborne.

On the other hand, there were soldiers of the 101st who refused to shoot Afghani men who were simply digging in fields, farming, when the soldiers arrived.

Ordered to shoot, the soldiers refused.

Now that was tough.

Experts, Economists and Posers

I love experts. Don't we all? Remember in that distant dim past when your father was an expert? He had all the answers, or at least he had some answers and sometimes he was actually correct.

My own father was not an expert about a lot of things, particularly mechanical things. You could not ask him how to fix the lawnmower or the car. He'd tell you to take it to the mechanic.

The mechanic though, now there was an expert. He could get the car started, which was truly miraculous. He crawled under our car once and whacked something underneath with his hammer and the car started right up without anybody having done anything to the battery. "You have to know where to whack it," the mechanic said.

So, yes, there are some experts in the world, but mostly they are technicians, scientists or engineers. Those guys know stuff that works.

But then there are economists, especially Nobel prize winning economists.

Milton Friedman fascinated me, because for a practitioner of the dismal science, he seemed very sure of himself--none of that self doubt or obsfucation you got from Alan Greenspan. Milton Friedman knew precisely what caused the Great Depression: The government clamped down on the money supply, raised interest rates and poof, there went the economy. None of those other problems you might have heard about which contributed were important: The government had driven farmers to plant fencepost to fencepost with consequent erosion, the Dust Bowl and the Grapes of Wrath. And then there was the worldwide economic mischief emanating from the treaty of Versailles, none of that mattered. Milton Friedman could point to a single cause: regulation. The Federal Reserve should have loosened its grip on interest rates and there would have been no Depression.

I listened to him interviewed on NPR and he knew we over regulated the world. My father, who had lived through the Depression never seemed to understand what caused it, but here was Milton Friedman who was so certain. I was so impressed I mailed away for the casette tape of the interview and I listened to it over and over to be sure I was not misunderstanding what he had to say.

On the same tape, in the same interview, he left the topic of the Depression and he started talking about disbanding the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA is just another federal bureaucracy up to no good, restraining the wild horses of inventiveness in the drug industry. No need for the FDA, Nobel laureate Friedman said. Regulation is bad.

But what about all those people who would be harmed by dangerous drugs if we didn't have the FDA to interpose itself between the drug companies and the population of unknowing people out there willing to swallow whatever they find on the shelves of their pharmacy? That's what we have the courts for, replied Dr. Friedman. That's what Tort law is all about. A self correcting system. The invisible hand made visible by the jury system. If a drug company was irresponsible and made a harmful product, it would be sued into oblivion.

Dr. Friedman knew that answer. He was very sure of himself.

I thought he was kidding. But he wasn't.

I started talking to my casette player, as if he could hear me: But what about all those people who took the drugs for years before the wayward drug company got sued into oblivion? What about all those thousands of English kids born without arms or legs because their mothers took thalidamide? The FDA stood between thalidamide and American mothers, and spared us a lot of suffering, lives lived in disability.

The other problem with Professor Friedman's facile solution to preventing mischief by drug makers is our legal system is actually a pretty miserable tool for controlling mistakes rooted in technology, science and other things lay juries cannot understand.

The doctors who get hauled in front of juries tend not to be the careless, the indifferent, the "bad" doctors. They tend to be doctors who got thrown into a situation where a bad outcome was going to happen, one way or the other.

The chief of neurosurgery at Cornell New York Hospital once told me he never had any fewer than seven suits pending against him and the same was true for the head of every other head of neurosurgery around the city. "Now, we may not necessarily be the best neurosurgeons in New York City, but it's not real likely the chief of neurosurgery at each center is going to be the worst surgeon. So why do we get to spend so much time in court? Because we get the cases dropped at our feet who have been hauled around and rejected everywhere else."

What this meant to me is this Nobel prize winner did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about. When he talks about economic models, numbers, and uses lots of economic lingo, he can intimidate me into thinking he knows more than I do. But when he starts talking abut something I know about, I see the emperor with his clothes.

Which brngs to mind the whole notion of what a Nobel prize in economics means. These economists cannot do controlled, double blind prospective experiments. If they cannot do testing of their theories, what could they possibly know?

There are Nobel prizes in chemistry and in physiology and in medicine. The prize committees may not get the credit to the right people, but they generally point a spotlight on an important advance: The discovery of insulin, the identification of the HIV virus, the understanding of cholesterol metabolism.

But what does a prize in economics mean? Would a prize in astrology be any less meaningful?

Admitedly, I do not know what I am talking about here. I cannot understand the mathematical models which economists generate, display and defend. I am as uncomprehending as those juries who hear medical malpractice cases and patent cases.

But I can at least understand the verbal descriptions of the implications of the inscrutable math. One may be thoroughly intimidated by the numbers, but in the end, you get a statement in words: When Milton Friedman says all we need to prevent a Depression is the Fed loosening up the money supply by lowering interest rates and you see the Fed dropping the interest rates to zero and the econonmy continuing its plunge as if that safety net did not exist, does it not make you wonder?

When Friedman says markets stabilize because smart investors will buy when all the morons are selling, but that does not happen in 2009, does that not make one wonder?

In science, there is sometimes a tenuous consensus: We accept the propositions the heart pumps blood (except when it doesn't) and insulin lowers blood sugar, (except when it doesn't), but there is far more unsettled than settled. Physicians (we are not talking about surgeons here) are humble. They know what we know today, what we are using as current knowledge will be disproven or at least altered with time and we do what we can with the tools we have until we have something better. But we do not snigger at those with whom we disagree because we know we may be right today and wrong tomorrow.

A friend of mine, who was an analyst at the CIA on the Russian desk, told me about her boss, who placed a very tightly organized, concise and authoriative document on the President's desk which said, in essence, the Soviet Union was firmly in the grip of the Communist party and the reigning powers and would remain that way for the foreseeable future. That was 1989, a week before the Berlin wall fell. I think I recall correcty that savant was fired.

But what of Mr. Greenspan and even Mr. Bernanke?

We all want to believe there is an expert out there who actually knows. Like our fathers, when we were kids. Maybe Paul Krugman, who sounds like he knows. His stuff is there edged in print in the New York Times. It must be correct.

And he won a Nobel prize in economics. Just like Milton Friedman.

Phrases To Make You Oh So Proud

1/ Giving Back to the Community:


This is one of those lovely ditties which has been transmogrified. It started, near as I can tell, with athletes who were making a shameful amount of money for playing baseball or basketball or whatever, and they spent some money on athletic equipment for neighborhood kids or something of that ilk and they said they were, “Giving back to the community.” Which meant: “I’m so filthy rich, and feeling a little guilty about it, so I’m giving some back to the people who pay way too much to come out to see a game so I can get this outrageously inappropriate salary and live in a twenty-five room house far from the inner city where these kids and whatever parents may be available to them live and struggle to make ends meet. So I’ll spring for some balls or bats or whatever the sports companies who endorse me will sell me for cost.”

All that was bad enough, but now you’ve got all sorts of shady characters wanting to use the phrase.

I was at a meeting where some doctor was trying to persuade other doctors to take call for free for the emergency room, so his group could keep control of the hospital and ensure his own revenue stream would not be impaired. He said this would be a good opportunity for the doctors to donate their time to a worth cause, “To give back to the community.” Of course, what it really came down to, was he wanted the other doctors to give more to him, but giving back to the community sounded so much better. Then one of the other docs stood up and said, “I give back to the community every time I walk through my office door, every time I accept five dollars from Medicaide for a twenty minute office visit, every time I answer my beeper at three in the morning for some patient who just ran out of her pills and wants me to call the all night pharmacy, every time I write out my check to the bank to pay off my medical school loans. I’ve given back to the community more than I ever intended to. It’s time the community gave back a little to me.”

So GBTTC is a red flag. It usually means, you are about to be screwed again.

It’s a kissing cousin of “Volunteerism.” Ever hear some politician who voted against day care for kids of working mothers, or voted against support for food for the poor start talking about how all that should be done through the private sector, until it’s pointed out there’s plenty of stuff like that the private sector doesn’t want to touch with a twenty foot poll, so then he says, “Well, we need some good hearted volunteers to take this on?” Which means, he’s not willing to stick his neck out and pay for these necessary services, these safety nets, but maybe the churches or some local club will do it. But virtually every time you have some well meaning church member serving food to the homeless, cleaning up a park, scrubbing graffiti off a wall, that’s a job he is taking away from somebody who could be getting paid for it, making an honest dollar for work which, if it’s important enough to get done is important enough to pay for.

I see a volunteer and I see a scab, some well meaning soul who hasn’t thought about what might be going through the mind of the unemployed stiff who would love to get paid for that service of cleaning or serving or working on infrastructure that volunteer is devaluing by doing for free.

2/ Role Model

Oh, here’s a good one. Started in sports like so many other stupid clichés. Babe Ruth ought to be a role model. In America, we can’t have somebody in public life who is simply good at one thing, like hitting home runs without his being good at everything, flawless in character, loving to children and dogs, faithful to his wife, proud to fight for his country, giving back to the community, volunteering to pick up trash by the river and donating to church charities. A freaking paragon of virtue.

It’s not enough to hit home runs.

If he did it on steroids, what kind of role model can he be for kids? Well maybe kids can learn that you can be a hero at home plate but pretty flawed in a lot of other ways. Maybe that would teach kids a more complex world view than, “He hits home runs. He good man. Be like him.”

Kids, most kids, are probably smarter than that. It does a severe disservice to kids to present them with “Role models.” We deprive kids of all sorts of complexity in their thinking when we start yammering about, “Role models.”

We ought to be feeding kids a steady diet of “The Wire.” That would teach them about “Role models.”

We ought to be telling kids about guys who are nice to their dogs and wives and children but they are commandants of concentration camps and so when you look at someone who seems admirable in some ways, look again and see if you can see the blood stains on his hands.


3/ Support Our Troops

All you have to do is buy the $2 decal for your car and you are an instant patriot. That’s actually more than is usually asked of you to display and reaffirm your patriotism. Usually, the biggest patriotic duty is removing your baseball cap at the ballpark and singing the national anthem with tears running down your check and across your American flag enamel pin on your T shirt and then you can go home and cheat on your income taxes.

4/ Utilize

Why use a cheap easy to spell word like “Use,” when you can utilize a 50 cent word like “Utilize.” Hemingway tried to kill “Utilize” in the Sun Also Rises, and he did a pretty good job, but people don’t read much any more and certainly not The Sun Also Rises, so the weed grew back.
5/ Reticent

Politicians, radio personalities, virtually everyone except people who went to Catholic schools, or maybe the better public schools say someone was reticent to take action, or reticent to do this or that rather than “hesistant.” Of course, people can be reticent when they are hesitant or just too smart to speak.