Afghanistan is not “falling,” it’s continuing its history without us.
The Myth of Democracy, Interventionism, and This Random Couple I Saw Fighting in Their Car
I don’t know, maybe quarantine has made me an agoraphobe, maybe this is what growing older feels like, maybe I’m going crazy, maybe this is enlightenment, maybe this is what getting dumber feels like, all I know is that almost everyone and everything seems like a joke. Including myself.
The idea that anyone should be taken seriously, teachers, politicians, our relatives, ourselves, celebrities, doctors, seems so clearly illogical lately. Perhaps I’m just coming to terms with the beautiful knowledge that Trump’s ascendency revealed to America: if Trump can become president, then anyone can become president, and if anyone can become president, then who cares about presidents? And if presidents don’t matter, then geez— in the mythology of power in our civilization that we have been fed since birth, suddenly no one matters more than anyone else.
As my libtard (sorry, I had to) friends cheered the beautiful return to reason represented by Joe and Kamala, I watched in awe from a different reality as a septuagenarian who clearly has the vacant eyes of a person at the beginning of their death journey stepped into the oval office as everyone all cheered for competence, experience, and civility in the oval office. It feels trite to say, but it bears repeating that I was also asked to swallow the fact that Kamala had just months early done everything in her power to knock Joe out of the presidential race not by saying, “I disagree with my opponent’s policies,” but by saying, “he is a representative of an old, racist establishment that has no place in our country anymore.” (Paraphrasing). And yet here we are, they are the dream team; the old man and the cop. So we have gone from a razor-sharp wannabe autocrat with no experience to a spoon-sharp democrat with as much experience as one could hope from a president, and both feel equally incompetent to me. It gives me the uncanny feeling that the 51%-49% electorates bringing them to power are actually just very confused and have very little idea as to what exactly they are looking for in a leader or what exactly they want the country to look like.
The President’s Shoes are Dirty!
After Obama got his first intelligence briefing at a secure facility in Chicago, he joked, “It's good that there are bars on the windows here because if there weren't, I might be jumping out.”
As a sophomore in college, I had run through the streets of New York City screaming Obama’s name when he was elected. I really thought that he was going to bring about a wonderful change to the country, which would now no longer hold evil state secrets or take part in needless wars. It’s easy to forget now that a massive part of his campaign was that his administration would be the most transparent administration in history. I remember that “bars on the window” comment being the first betrayal I experienced. I wondered why someone so supposedly revolutionary would keep secrets on behalf of the military-industrial complex they had railed so hard against. His branding was so good that he was awarded the damn Nobel Peace prize only a year into his presidency. They didn’t even give him a chance to start a drone war in Yemen or assassinate a U.S. citizen!
It was around this time that I started to understand that no matter who you are before the presidency, once you step into the president’s shoes, you take with it all of the dirt that came before. I looked around me and realized that all my friends and family, including myself, would never spend so much time putting themselves in that sort of position. Obama was suddenly unfamiliar to me. Who in the fuck actually wants to be president? If it’s actually a goal of yours, I immediately do not trust you.
House of Cards
Around the same time Obama was elected, I was taking a philosophy class called Life and Death.1 A large part of the curriculum focused on justice in war, i.e., what it actually meant to follow rules of engagement and the ethical and moral implications of these rules. One of the papers we read was about interventionism; for instance, when America intervenes in Afghanistan to build a Western-style democracy. The thesis of the essay—which I still agree with, having not yet found any reasonable counterpoints—is that you cannot build a democracy for another country. A key point of democracy is breaking the shackles of whatever system felt unjust to the citizens so that they fight and plead and protest and make changes until they have a democracy that represents them. If you just roll in with tanks, copy and paste the constitution, and translate it into various dialects, you’re not building a democracy you’re colonizing, and as far as I can tell, there are few or no colonies which are also strong democracies. This is the house of cards that fell when we pulled out of Afghanistan a couple of weeks ago.
One of the great myths of Western democracy is that it is the first and only government where people pulled together to find a way to all vote and have some sort of group decision-making process. We act as if the Romans were the first people in human history to try and get together and decide something as a group, and that everything before and everything else is dictatorships and depravity. Yes, that’s our story, and we are sticking to it.
This myth is, of course, preposterous. There is nothing exceptional about our government other than that we have executed and exported it relatively well for a short amount of time. There’s a great and very short book by David Graber entitled Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology that lays out this argument and others which serve to break down this myth and give a greater understanding of how communities throughout history have organized. Much like Christmas trees are a pagan tradition rebranded, our democracy is really not all that special or original; we just rebranded it. We didn’t create it, and it’s definitely not the only option.
Now, when I see these generals on screen with their security briefings, their cute little pins, and their nicely pressed costumes, I can’t help but feel like the next layer on the house of cards is falling, first the president, now the military, and eventually all the way down to each and every one of us and our senses of self.
Afghanistan is not “falling,” it’s continuing its history without us. We’re the ones that are falling.
Non-Interventionism Hurts Too
I’m trying to practice non-interventionism in my own life, and it’s hard as hell. Just yesterday, I saw this large man screaming at his much younger, much smaller girlfriend on the street. I pulled over to observe for a bit; she was clearly aware he could get physical because she had her hands down by her side and was making no effort to touch him or push him away. I could hear her saying, “Please step away from me and let me be.” She tried to get into her car, and as she sat in the front seat, he put his head through the open door right in front of her face. From my location, it looked like he was bending over and kissing her. I drove slowly by again and saw that he was screaming directly in front of her face. I pulled a U-Turn, pulled up alongside, and asked her if she was okay. He told me to fuck off but started to walk away down the hill. She thanked me, assured me she was okay, closed the door, and proceeded to drive off.
I pulled to the corner and parked to watch for a second. She drove a block up and parked at the gas station. She exited the car and sat on the curb as if she were waiting for him. On foot, he made his way to the gas station where he continued to scream at her and call her “a fucking rat.” I’m not sure what their story was or why she felt so trapped that she couldn’t drive more than a block away from this guy, but I realized my intervention lead to nothing. It made me feel good for a moment, and it seemingly made her feel safe for a moment, but everything went on without me as if nothing had happened. I was really just a nuisance and a distraction from whatever the final tragedy or conclusion or healing of their relationship might be. I just got in the way.
On the way home, I thought of Afghanistan and how silly it is that we thought going there with tanks would somehow make people love us or make us safer.
Fight or Flight
Even if money, oil, and proxy wars with China and Russia were not part of the calculations for going to war in Afghanistan (they were), even if we really thought we could attack our way to a better sentiment about Americans so that 9/11 wouldn’t happen again and there’d be a stable democracy in Afghanistan, it would still be a bad idea! It was a bad idea because apart from killing Osama, we just fucked around for two decades, killed a bunch of people, and left the Taliban with some great new guns and tons of fodder to still not like us.
When it comes to fight or flight, I’m a flighty guy, and I’m proud of it. But I do see that flight is kind of anti-American. I just don’t see why you would fight. I don’t think there are many things worth fighting over; this is why I’m bad at and skeptical of sports—there is no way I’m getting serious about some “points.” Of course, if there is an immediate, inescapable threat: fight. But these instances are so, so rare. Even the 300,000 U.S.-trained Afghani soldiers laid down their weapons in under 24 hours because American democracy wasn’t worth fighting for the way we wanted it to be. They’d rather let the also U.S.-trained Taliban take it so they could get back to life.2 Otherwise, it’s just the US fighting itself.
To me, it has finally been made clear that the Afghan people are completely unshackled and unconcerned with Western myths. They simply do not take us or our concerns seriously. Good for them. Are many of them shackled to a different sort of myth that results in its own kind of horrors? Yes. Can I live with that in the same way I live with the realities of our own government and its horrors? Yes. The moral of the story for me is that neither should be taken too seriously.
You don’t have to settle for mistreatment or injustice. You should fight for what you believe in. Just remember that you’re also a bit of a joke, just an amalgam of myths, memes, and microbiomes. You’re beautiful, you’re ugly, you’re in control, you’re out of control.
I don’t know how to end this post. Have a good day.
Oh wait yes I do, I end every post with a picture of my son and a picture of my breakfast:
I actually got a D in this class but was otherwise an A/B student. But I’m not sure which part I was worse at, life or death.
Speaking of life in Afghanistan. A small “fun” fact I find really fucked up: I’m currently reading This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan. He is writing about how we have been lead to believe that only in Afghanistan can you grow opium poppies, but this is not true. It was just a branding effort by the US government to mislead Americans into thinking that it was impossible to grow poppies in the US. The truth is, you can order poppy seeds online legally and grow opium in your backyard. We originally pushed the production of opium to Afghanistan and India in order to smuggle opium into China and hook a whole generation of Chinese people on opiates as a form of proxy attack from the West.