The Enlightened Despot

A quote from John Keegan:

Unchecked, unguided, America has always risked being a Cyclops in world affairs, a blinded giant striking wildly at cunning outsiders.

In 428 BC the citizens of Mytilene rebelled against Athenian rule but were quickly put down. The Athenians then had to decide whom to punish and how. Cleon, a leading Athenian hawk, argued that every Mytilenian man should be killed and every woman and child sold into slavery. For, he asked, if Athens showed mercy, which of the other states would not revolt,

when the reward of success is freedom, and the penalty of failure nothing so very terrible?

Recently Karl Rove made the same point, less succinctly, with regard to torture:

They can now take these memoranda and go to prospective, you know, recruits and say, This is the worst that the enemy, the United States, would ever do to you….It’s given them a tool to make it more attractive to recruit people, and you know, this kind of thing is harmful to us over the long haul.

There’s nothing too profound about this parallel, as this sort of debate always comes up during times of war. But I would like to point out that since he was a leading hawk, Cleon felt compelled to actually go fight, which he did, bravely, until he was killed.

It’s also interesting to note that the Athenians spared most of Mytilene and lost the war, though for entirely unrelated causes, namely the unnecessary expansion of the war to new fronts and the effects of a devastating plague.

The applicability of all this to modern times is a question for our thirty readers.

As regular readers know, I am immune to the recession because I am a Marine. But my term of service ends soon, so I’m applying to business school. I’d prefer to go straight to work, but as the economy is lying in rubble around my feet I think it makes more sense to spend a few years safely in school.

Sadly, this has occurred to others as well. Business school applications are up 64% this year.

SCENE: The interior of an MRAP tactical vehicle on a mounted patrol somewhere in Iraq. MEIJI, the platoon commander, is sitting shotgun. FLORES, a young Honduran immigrant, is the driver. SCHERRETZ, from Alabama, is the gunner. Jennings, an east coast private school kid with a pot smoker’s drawl, is in the back.

JENNINGS: If you could spend twelve hours anywhere on earth, where would it be?

FLORES: Antarctica. I always wanted to go to Antarctica.

SCHERRETZ: With Jessica Biel.

FLORES: I always wanted a penguin as a pet.

SCHERRETZ: Jessica Biel is way better than a penguin.

ME: You wanted a penguin as a pet?

FLORES: Yes, I always thought I would have a pet penguin and I would be, like, ‘penguin man.’

ME: ‘Penguin man’? What can ‘penguin man’ do? What are his special powers?

FLORES: Well, he can like, um, he can swim in cold ass water.

ME: That’s it?

FLORES: Also, he can talk to like sea lions and polar bears.

ME: What would ‘penguin man’ say to sea lions and polar bears?

FLORES: Stop eating all the penguins.

ME: Stop eating penguins?

FLORES: Yeah, well, and like, eat more fish instead. Oh and I forgot, ‘penguin man’ can also talk to fish and sharks.

SCHERRETZ: ‘Penguin man’ sounds a lot like an even gayer Aquaman.

JENNINGS: What you said makes no sense, Flores. Polar bears and penguins live on completely different poles.

FLORES: They do?

JENNINGS: Yeah, Flores, they do.

FLORES: Well, ‘penguin man’ can still talk to polar bears. They’re bad ass.

As some of our readers know, I am an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. Though I’m legally prohibited from blogging about Iraq while there, there can’t be any harm in posting this conversation:

[Scene: an MRAP. 4 Marines and a Lieutenant are talking. The conversation has moved on to hunting.]

Marine 1: You know what’s really fun? Hunting alligators.

Lieutenant [perking up, assuming wrestling may be invovled]: How do you hunt an alligator?

Marine 1: Well, my daddy and me, what we’d do is we’d back our pickup right on up to the river bed there and put a big old hook on the tow winch and then put a slab of meat on that hook and let it out into the river. Then when a alligator bit it, you just push the button on the truck and the winch drags the alligator right on up there on the shore there. Then we’d shoot the alligator with a shotgun.

Lieutenant [seeing there is no challenge in this]: What’s the fun in that?

Marine 2 [disgusted at the Lieutenant's inability to see such an obvious thing]: Shooting a fucking alligator with a shotgun…

Oh, and Akhbar? Give me a phone call.

Good evening - or morning, as it is where you are. I am in some ways a new author, though close readers who know Akhbar and Frederick personally have probably seen my influence on a few posts from both.

My interests are varied, but I am going to restrict my posting here to science, the military, and what I imagine will read like very boring book reports on different issues.

I am a Marine, and I’ll bring my short experience in the service to the table. But I can’t, won’t, and don’t want to write about operational details, my predictions about what is going to happen in Iraq, or what I think of Obama as commander-in-chief.