I stayed over at a friend’s house to get up for an all-day hike. Early (way too early) the 3-year old sprung up and darted around the house buck-naked. My first thought was, “ARE YOU NOT COLD!?” And then I remarked with gladness that my friend and his wife had left the boy’s genitals intact despite American social pressure to mutilate in the medicalized ritual known as routine male infant circumcision. This cultural practice is a violation of the infant’s rights to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity.

Now, he (and his little brother) will have the choice. If he wants to permanently and irreversibly cut off part of his natural, intact penis, he can do so when he turns 18. In fact, he can cut off the whole thing if he wants. But a vanishingly small percentage of men choose to do this when they have fully informed consent and knowledge. And the ones that do are generally mentally ill.

In “Manwatching” by Desmond Morris, the esteemed anthropologist mentions circumcision in a lengthy chapter on body adornment, social mutilations, and cosmetic decorations. The passage goes:

“Despite these attempts, the only widespread forms of permanent body mutilation that still survive, apart from sailors’ tattoos, are the piercing of ears for earrings and the cutting off of the foreskin in the ritual of circumcision. Tribal mutilations, such as lip-plugging, tooth-filing, ear-stretching, and the removal of parts of the female genitals, have failed to find favor in the modern world. Circumcision is, in fact, the only really severe form of primitive mutilation to have resisted the modern trend towards abhorrence of body-violation. If, as used to be the case, it was performed at puberty instead of at infancy, that too would no doubt have vanished long ago, swept away by the outrage of the initiates. But the protests of babies are more easily ignored, and with the false accolade of medical hygiene to help it on its way, the genital deforming of young males continues unabated.”

Notably, the blurb on circumcision is preceded by a description of the practice of forced tattooing and scarring, and followed by a description of the practice of infant skull-squashing and female foot-binding.

“Manwatching” is one of my favorite books. It was written in 1977 and unfortunately non-therapeutic genital cutting of minors who cannot consent is still prevalent. However, wise and ethical parents like my friend are saying, “No, this practice is ridiculous and wrong,” and they are helping reduce the rate to less than 50% of baby boys. This practice of bodily mutilation cannot be eradicated soon enough.

About the photo

A sculpture in Seattle on a recent sunny day that made me think of how adults ought to protect the young and do better when they know better.

Another striking and important piece of journalism illustrates the personal impact of the Iraq war on young Americans who were sent there.

The documentary

It is striking for many reasons, including how young they were, and how utterly betrayed they were by their superiors extending many levels above them. Then they inflicted vast suffering on the Iraqis. And then they came home to aimlessness, suicidality, and lingering questions.

Soldiers’ testimony

One young man illustrates the simplistic motivations they had for going to war, including wanting the coolness of being a young combat veteran.

Another man, who is black, came to the realization that the photo of him with his knee pinning down an Iraqi while holding an assault rifle, was “not okay” in the same way that the murder of George Floyd, involving a police officer with his knee on the neck of a black man, was not okay.

He articulated how woe begets woe, how the mercy of the oppressed for the oppressed is our only hope. Multiply Floyd’s murder by ten thousand, and you have something close to what happened in Iraq throughout my young adulthood.

Older leaders sending young people to die

I believe that many people’s sense of self expands over their lifespan to include their neighborhood, city, political party, nation, and (sometimes) the world and all its species.

Consider William James’s comments on the psychological sense of self:

“In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down, – not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.”

The people in charge of the US military at the time of the Iraq invasion run-up (Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Rice) were old. They believed that America was part of their selves and that the 9/11 attacks had wounded it. As long as Saddam remained in power, their selves lacked wholeness and integrity. They saw the lives of a few thousand young Americans (whose selves were focused on individuality, family, and hometown) as a small price to pay in order to make “themselves” whole again.

Look at the rantings of Putin on wokeness for how this applies to the current war in Ukraine. He views his self as including a Russian World, and as long as ethnically Russian Ukraine is separate, and liberal political ideas circulate in Russia, he is not whole.

Mentorship

I watched this documentary as I realized that younger people in my life are coming to me for support and guidance and I hadn’t understood this until now. I don’t know how to mentor a person but I know how to simply be a friend.

Endless braindead warmongering

I also found an article noting that no US political party (and no organized faction in either major party) has stepped forward as the anti-war party. Everyone favors escalating military spending and far-flung military operations with no clear goals.

From the article:

“The 2024 election cycle has only just begun. But the prospects are not good that we will have a serious presidential candidate who dares to disagree with current war policy. Never before has the chloroform of conformity been inhaled so deeply.

As has been famously observed, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.

We can assume that any treaty will include America agreeing to foot the biggest part of the reconstruction costs. This amount may far exceed the funds needed to rebuild the schools for all the poor children in America. It may exceed the funds required to provide training for all the workers who will be put out of jobs by artificial intelligence.

We have a $31.5 trillion national debt, in good measure due to our military spending and forgiving trillions in debt as an incentive for other countries to forgo military solutions to problems.”

And in even dumber news, American idiots are volunteering to fight in Ukraine despite their meth convictions, lies, and harassment, “often with unchecked access to weapons and military equipment.” One of the morons who wanted to play soldier even defected to Russia shortly after arriving in Ukraine.

About the photo

Crows squabble, squawk, and play on a beach on Puget Sound in March 2023.

I am thankful for the beginning of astronomical spring.

THE PHOTO: A SQUIRREL

This Douglas squirrel munched on (what else?) a Douglas fir cone in Seward Park on Sunday. Other nature sightings included blossoming currant bushes, a spotted towhee, a Steller’s jay defending a nest, and chestnut-sided chickadees.

Someone told me that the little papery protrusions on a Douglas fir cone represent, in indigenous lore, the tails of the forest mice who fled the wildfires by burrowing under the cone’s scales.

IRAQ WAR INVASION ANNIVERSARY

I reflect today with sadness on a pointless and destructive war that cast a shadow over my young adulthood even as I, like most Americans, were mostly unaffected.

On March 20, 2003 and in the days after, I watched the cable news coverage of the US-led invasion of this distant country with some excitement at the night vision footage, dynamic maps of troop movements, and Dan Rather’s anchoring, feeling vague antiwar sentiment but with some trust that we must be doing it for a reason.

Read this article about the perplexing and perhaps unknowable reasons why the US started a war in Iraq. It points to towering hubris, failed policymaking, and failure to learn from mistakes. The author wrote the excellent “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq.”

I look on from the fiasco in Iraq to 20 years wasted fighting in Afghanistan. And now the US is sending billions of dollars and flooding the eastern European region with unknown quantities of weapons for a territorial dispute between a Vladimir and a Volodymyr.

I find myself fully agreeing with Republican Ron DeSantis on this point: Ukraine is NOT a vital US national security interest. Neither is Taiwan.

The weapons sent there will fuel conflict for decades. Next will come US-led wars in Africa or perhaps Taiwan. Oh, and then there are all the nukes. The extreme and growing size of US military spending, which both parties have repeatedly voted to increase, means we have more conflict ahead.

RECENT CAR CARNAGE IN THE SEATTLE AREA

On another downbeat note, I have noted recent human carnage on the streets of Seattle, all due to our car culture:

• Man killed in hit-and-run on Aurora Avenue in Seattle. The scum drivers sped off after killing a person.
• Driver killed after car goes off overpass in Georgetown. This one is fairly ridiculous. The fucking idiot was speeding, of course, when he drove off an obvious ledge to his death.
• A driver kills two men and then flees.
• A driver kills a woman in a hit-and-run in SODO.
• Drunk driver kills him or herself and two others in Puyallup.

I think hit-and-run drivers are the scum of the earth. But when you watch the news coverage, it turns out that every driver is potentially a hit-and-run driver. They are everywhere. The only way to reduce this carnage is to reduce the number of cars on the streets, slow them down, and separate them from moving people.

If you pay attention to car crash stories in the news, you realize the carnage is relentless. There is a recent safety initiative in Washington State with lots of good ideas, but we have a long way to go to reduce the destruction wrought by drivers and the design of our streets.

One person who is tweeting every incident of traffic violence on Seattle streets is Ryan Packer. Many of these serious incidents don’t even make the news, so these tweets are their only online mention.

CURRENT READING: THE EVOLUTION OF MINDS

Reading about the evolutionary origins of the conscious mind in “The Deep History of Ourselves” by LeDoux led me to “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” by Dennett. An example passage, following a discussion of complex acts of deception in predator-prey interactions, goes like this:

“The time has come to reconsider the slogan ‘competence without comprehension.’ Since cognitive competence is often assumed to be an effect of comprehension, I went out of my way to establish that this familiar assumption is pretty much backward: competence comes first. Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences. We have already considered the possibility of granting a smidgen or two of comprehension to systems that are particularly clever in the ways they marshal their competences but that may play into the misleading image of comprehension as a separable element or phenomenon kindled somehow by mounting competence.”

I would recommend “Deep History” for the clear writing, the art, the “single idea” nature of each chapter, and the narrative journey from the cooling of the early earth to human emotions. I trust a scientist over a philosopher any day. The Dennett book is good too, and is based on biology, but I am reading it simply for its different perspective and approach.

LAST WORD

I am grateful for the childfree lifestyle that allows me to sit down and read a goddamn book in the first place. My friend (bless his heart) had a recent sleepless night when his kid injured his other kid’s skull and they had to go the the emergency center. Then there was a another sleepless night over croup and another emergency center visit. Then he had to track down his crazy baby mama who had threatened to leave forever and then hitchhiked to the transit station in the dark.

Yet they say we need to procreate so that we’ll have workers to feed to the economy. Or perhaps to go fight in Europe, the Middle East, or Taiwan. Fuck that.

Birds, books and bikes > babies.