I grew up thinking sadness was part of life. Over the years I have noticed that another view is growing in popularity - sadness is a signal something’s wrong and ought to be changed. Worth thinking about, though I am not yet persuaded.
I thought, too, in youth that work is hard. Actually, it was an unexamined assumption that experience made me look at and modify. Work I enjoy isn’t difficult at all.
All this by way of introducing a book that requires effort on the reader’s part. I am working my way, joylessly, through Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, first published in 1979 and just re-issued by Franklin Square Press. This is a fact-filled and dense history of America in the Spanish-American War and World War I. (An off-beat interpretation, I’d guess.) Karp describes the coincidence of imperialism abroad, corporate dominance and repression at home. Sound familiar?
There is a reward for plowing through this work, namely the good news that those periods ended. For a time, at least.
PS Karp’s history is particularly relevant as we celebrate the capture of Saddam Hussein. Judging from newspapers and TV, the Administration will use this happy event to reinforce the largely inaccurate story that the US warred on Iraq in response to alQaeda’s terrorism. (See Bob Woodward’s Bush at War (Simon & Schuster, 2002), widely considered friendly to the President, for indications the White House saw 9/11/01 as a chance to move ahead on an existing geo-political scheme involving preemptive war on Iraq.)