Biggles of 266
1st Level Red Feather
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2001
- Messages
- 1,126
- Points
- 36
For men, war is swell
December 14, 2002
Phillip Adams
THEY say that men don't give birth. But they do. The penis, the most dangerous of weapons, calls into being the pistol, the revolver, the bayonet, the rifle, the bomb, the missile. As the big swinging dicks in Washington aim their weapons, let us acknowledge the simple fact that men have been at war since the dawn of time because they like it.
Arthur Koestler, who'd seen a bit of war, sadly observed that the most persistent sound that reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums. A lesser-known writer, John Rea, previously employed as a British schoolmaster, summed it up in a great paragraph: "War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories, the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war."
I think Rea has got the eroticisation of war just about right. Yet the love of war begins long before pubescence. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Pinker says that little boys as young as two rehearse adult aggression long before they're exposed to television or are given guns to play with.
It comes from the determination of the male to be dominant – the most successful spreader of seed. And it derives from one tribe fighting off another for food, water or the hell of it.
Take me and my mates, little boys at East Kew state school. We were killing each other from the age of five. Despite the fact our generative members wouldn't be loaded for years, we used our fingers as guns and made "Kssssh, kssssh, kssssh!" noises in the backs of our throats as we slaughtered each other, dying and resurrecting ourselves 100 times a day. Playtime was wartime and we massacred anyone and everyone we could imagine.
Given the era, our preferred targets were Germans, Japs and red Indians. Nowadays we wouldn't have to create enemies in our imagination – they'd be pre-imagined for us in films, on TV or, best of all, via Nintendo or PlayStation.
The barrage of death and destruction is so constant, so vivid, that it blurs with the real thing. (Which is why the televised coverage of Operation Desert Storm was all but indistinguishable from the carnage of the video arcade. And why the destruction of the twin towers was deja-viewing – because we'd seen it all before in Hollywood blockbusters. As had the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks.)
If you suppress this lust for violence, it doesn't really go away. It just simmers, intensifies, building up until it explodes. Look at Cambodia, with its culture of serenity, turning into the killing fields.
Take Bali, so beloved of Australian tourists. What we choose to forget is how decades of formalities, of a culture of smiles and emotional repression, detonated in the 1960s. How those charming villagers hacked each other to pieces – a slaughter of perhaps 100,000 people.
Nonetheless, altruism fights our warlike propensities. Like aggression, altruism has an evolutionary purpose. The same purpose. Survival. In focusing on social Darwinism, on the selfish gene, we tend to overlook this simple fact, observable in the behaviour of the great apes. For there are peacemakers in chimpanzee communities and species of monkeys that spend more time in conciliation and grooming than they do in squabbling.
Well, that's the approach we have to learn to take. Somehow we have to calm ourselves down. Beat our penises into ploughshares. Remember the central proposition of the hippies? Make love, not war.
Sounds like an intelligent approach. Distract the penis. Keep it busy. Make it happy. It's the best way to stop those little pricks in power – no names, no pack drill – from unleashing the pornographies of violence. The great sport of war. Brandishing their missiles and saying, "Mine's bigger than yours."
While fiddling with the human genome is rightly a cause of concern, it is clear that gene-splicing will soon make human beings bigger, brighter and longer-lasting. Hereditary ailments will be nipped in the bud. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if scientists didn't try to engineer a bigger penis.
While they're at it, let's hope they can find the gene for war as soon as possible and deal with that. Transgenic splicing can sound repugnant but if it requires borrowing from, for example, the sloth or snail, to slow us down a little, so be it.
Men worship war. They sentimentalise it, romanticise it, mythologise it, glorify it. Our most solemn ceremonies sanctify it. War gives us our heroes, our history and we remember only the atrocities committed against us. Not those committed by us.
Yes, from time to time, war protects our freedoms, but its principal purpose is to extend our borders and our markets.
And as a bonus, war magnifies the egos of the megalomaniacal men who, by and large, run countries. Who love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Blessed are the peacemakers? We rarely remember their names. Worse still, we give Nobel Peace Prizes to the warlike likes of Henry Kissinger.
Every generation promises itself that the last war will be just that. The last. Yet there's always another. More obscene and more destructive. And whether they're waged with machetes as in Rwanda or with cruise missiles as in Desert Storm, the blood is as red and the dead are as dead. And as history attests, the percentage of women and children who become casualties increases.
Perhaps we should bring back the golden age when two armies lined up on a formal battlefield and fired arrows at each other. Or, even better, when a couple of kings (or their so-called champions) fought it out. Just the two of them.
It'd be like world heavyweight boxing. A huge purse, squillions from the TV rights and unprecedented ratings.
George versus Saddam, proudly sponsored by Texaco.
[email protected]
December 14, 2002
Phillip Adams
THEY say that men don't give birth. But they do. The penis, the most dangerous of weapons, calls into being the pistol, the revolver, the bayonet, the rifle, the bomb, the missile. As the big swinging dicks in Washington aim their weapons, let us acknowledge the simple fact that men have been at war since the dawn of time because they like it.
Arthur Koestler, who'd seen a bit of war, sadly observed that the most persistent sound that reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums. A lesser-known writer, John Rea, previously employed as a British schoolmaster, summed it up in a great paragraph: "War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories, the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war."
I think Rea has got the eroticisation of war just about right. Yet the love of war begins long before pubescence. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Pinker says that little boys as young as two rehearse adult aggression long before they're exposed to television or are given guns to play with.
It comes from the determination of the male to be dominant – the most successful spreader of seed. And it derives from one tribe fighting off another for food, water or the hell of it.
Take me and my mates, little boys at East Kew state school. We were killing each other from the age of five. Despite the fact our generative members wouldn't be loaded for years, we used our fingers as guns and made "Kssssh, kssssh, kssssh!" noises in the backs of our throats as we slaughtered each other, dying and resurrecting ourselves 100 times a day. Playtime was wartime and we massacred anyone and everyone we could imagine.
Given the era, our preferred targets were Germans, Japs and red Indians. Nowadays we wouldn't have to create enemies in our imagination – they'd be pre-imagined for us in films, on TV or, best of all, via Nintendo or PlayStation.
The barrage of death and destruction is so constant, so vivid, that it blurs with the real thing. (Which is why the televised coverage of Operation Desert Storm was all but indistinguishable from the carnage of the video arcade. And why the destruction of the twin towers was deja-viewing – because we'd seen it all before in Hollywood blockbusters. As had the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks.)
If you suppress this lust for violence, it doesn't really go away. It just simmers, intensifies, building up until it explodes. Look at Cambodia, with its culture of serenity, turning into the killing fields.
Take Bali, so beloved of Australian tourists. What we choose to forget is how decades of formalities, of a culture of smiles and emotional repression, detonated in the 1960s. How those charming villagers hacked each other to pieces – a slaughter of perhaps 100,000 people.
Nonetheless, altruism fights our warlike propensities. Like aggression, altruism has an evolutionary purpose. The same purpose. Survival. In focusing on social Darwinism, on the selfish gene, we tend to overlook this simple fact, observable in the behaviour of the great apes. For there are peacemakers in chimpanzee communities and species of monkeys that spend more time in conciliation and grooming than they do in squabbling.
Well, that's the approach we have to learn to take. Somehow we have to calm ourselves down. Beat our penises into ploughshares. Remember the central proposition of the hippies? Make love, not war.
Sounds like an intelligent approach. Distract the penis. Keep it busy. Make it happy. It's the best way to stop those little pricks in power – no names, no pack drill – from unleashing the pornographies of violence. The great sport of war. Brandishing their missiles and saying, "Mine's bigger than yours."
While fiddling with the human genome is rightly a cause of concern, it is clear that gene-splicing will soon make human beings bigger, brighter and longer-lasting. Hereditary ailments will be nipped in the bud. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if scientists didn't try to engineer a bigger penis.
While they're at it, let's hope they can find the gene for war as soon as possible and deal with that. Transgenic splicing can sound repugnant but if it requires borrowing from, for example, the sloth or snail, to slow us down a little, so be it.
Men worship war. They sentimentalise it, romanticise it, mythologise it, glorify it. Our most solemn ceremonies sanctify it. War gives us our heroes, our history and we remember only the atrocities committed against us. Not those committed by us.
Yes, from time to time, war protects our freedoms, but its principal purpose is to extend our borders and our markets.
And as a bonus, war magnifies the egos of the megalomaniacal men who, by and large, run countries. Who love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Blessed are the peacemakers? We rarely remember their names. Worse still, we give Nobel Peace Prizes to the warlike likes of Henry Kissinger.
Every generation promises itself that the last war will be just that. The last. Yet there's always another. More obscene and more destructive. And whether they're waged with machetes as in Rwanda or with cruise missiles as in Desert Storm, the blood is as red and the dead are as dead. And as history attests, the percentage of women and children who become casualties increases.
Perhaps we should bring back the golden age when two armies lined up on a formal battlefield and fired arrows at each other. Or, even better, when a couple of kings (or their so-called champions) fought it out. Just the two of them.
It'd be like world heavyweight boxing. A huge purse, squillions from the TV rights and unprecedented ratings.
George versus Saddam, proudly sponsored by Texaco.
[email protected]
