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By Michael F. Duggan

“What set the Afghanistan war apart was not that it was the longest war in U.S. History but that it was more quickly forgotten than any other conflict in which the United States had ever participated.  As if by agreement, the American people and their government erased the Afghanistan experience from memory even before the bloodletting had ended.”

-Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 2016

The metaphors for it are clichés: blood in the water, a feeding frenzy.  Those participating in it are variously sharks and vultures or else armchair generals and Monday morning quarterbacks.  When politicians of both parties and reporters of all stripes pile on en masse, it is because they sense vulnerability in a president and his policy.  And there is nothing more insufferable than the sanctimony and superiority of people, many of whom could not have cared less about Afghanistan for the past twenty years, suddenly becoming exasperated over an inevitable ending.

Where have they been up to now?  I am no expert on Afghanistan—I have never been there and I do not speak Dari or Pashto—and yet it was clear to me that the United States and its allies began losing when the mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to nation building.  In military terms, its fate was sealed when U.S. strategy moved from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency (COIN).  To put it bluntly, it was lost when the U.S. put its commitment and money into the hands of warlords and corrupt middlemen.  To Afghans, Americans are infidels and invaders, occupiers and outsiders, and nothing—no “hearts and minds” campaign—will ever change these perceptions.  A majority of Afghans would never accept the rule of such people or those who cooperate with them.  Why were these rather obvious facts not reported by the same corporate media journalists who are now so conspicuously aghast?  

Sure, we saw David Muir go to Afghanistan a couple of years ago in pompadour and a tight black tee shirt and uncritically report the official line about the looming “endgame” there.  We saw courageous network careerists inserting themselves into stories with impressively dangerous backdrops while reporting conventionalist clichés and showing little actual understanding of the nation or its history.  But where was the coverage of how the Taliban had been increasingly dominating the countryside for years?  Where was the broader context of the Afghanistan war in relation to the India-Pakistan struggle for Kashmir?  Where were the stories of Pakistani support for the Taliban, the sanctuaries in Pakistan and its permeable 1,616-mile long border with Afghanistan?  Where were the stories of Afghan warlords taking American aid?  The American people had long forgotten about Afghanistan because the American media had mostly forgotten it and knew precious little about it from the start.

There is a lot of talk these days about “how this could have been done in a more orderly way,” but what are these controlled and regulated roads not taken?  How do you pull forces out of a nation whose government has already fled and whose army has laid down its arms?  Two of the more vexing narratives making the rounds are those of David Axelrod and Chuck Todd.  Axelrod observes that Biden’s zeal to pull out of Afghanistan got too far ahead of the program that he had already pushed back months beyond the original deadline in May.  Presumably Mr. Alexrod would have preferred a more drawn-out collapse and the protracted fighting that would have gone along with it.  Todd is baffled over why the U.S. withdrew most of its ground forces before its diplomatic staff and civilians.  I suppose that he would have preferred U.S. forces to engage in a fighting retreat once it became obvious that we were leaving , and this with no in-country diplomats to talk to the other side.

David Brooks recently made an ex post facto “light at the end of the the tunnel”/”we were turning a corner” argument worthy of Lyndon Johnson or Walt Rostow. The idea is that because al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a 13% favorable rating among Muslims in eleven nations suveyed by the Pew Research Center eight years ago (and because of related numbers on the decline of Islamist terrorism and the unpopularity of fundamentalist rule), it is possible that a modern, liberalizing Afghanistan was in the offing if “we” had only stuck it out a little while longer.¹ “I thought we”—presumably the 1% of Americans who actually do the fighting these days and which do not include David Brooks—”had achieved some level of stability, and we could manage the problem.” Pretty to think so. Mr. Brooks would do well to ask why the Taliban was winning the war outside of the cities in the years after this 2013 poll was taken. Rebel forces without popular support don’t win insurgencies against powerful occupiers and their domestic allies. A more relevant statistic would be the percentage of rural Afghans who approve of, or are willing to play ball with the Taliban.

To be frank, I had little use for pre-presidential Joe Biden.  I thought he was just another cynical and unprincipled politician—a middle-of-the-pack mediocrity that seemed to embody so much of what was wrong with his party for the past half-century.  As president however, I like his ambitious domestic programs, his focus on the pandemic, and his declarative tone.  As far as I can tell, he is the first president since John Kennedy to constructively buck his military advisors over a major policy decision.  Having the guts to do that by itself should garner kudos and historical notice.  He promised to get the United States out of Afghanistan and he did that.  What the nation needs now is presidential leadership to tell the truth about a war that was lost many years ago and not a mea culpa that would be cynicially exploited by others for political gain.  Being right he needs to tough it out and to be the leader that he appears to be.

The fact that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been ugly is a responsibility that should fall on the shoulders of those who began this mostly forgotten war, those who enabled it for almost two decades, those who escalated the conflict, and those who lied or kept silent about the failure of policy there.  It is also the responsibility of so many talking heads who had forgotten the war (or never really cared about it) and who are now so indignant.  Perhaps next time the U.S. will opt for a more orderly kind of chaos, whatever that means. Or better yet, perhaps the United States will not get involved in unnecessary wars of choice in the first place.

Note

1. See the PBS News Hour, August 27, 2021. See also David Brooks, “This is how Theocracy Shrivels,” August 27, 2021, The New York Times. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-concerns-about-extremist-groups/

By Michael F. Duggan

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein                    

I’ve seen this play before.  We all have.  We saw it play out in Saigon in 1975 and we saw the Soviet production in Afghanistan a generation ago.  It has run its course in Afghanistan so many times that it has become reminiscent of Nietzsche’s cosmological theory of eternal recurrence, the idea that history repeats itself forever.  It is a tragic rerun of an inability to learn historical lessons and to apply them to policy.

The details vary greatly, but we all know the plot: after a long, indecisive, asymmetrical conflict, the occupying power tires and decides to leave the fight.  It starts to withdraw its troops.  The opposition goes on the offensive—fills the void as it opens—and provinces and cities fall more quickly than expected.  Caught off guard, the major power announces the withdrawn of diplomatic personnel.  The country falls to the enemy causing a refugee crisis.   

If you watched the news in recent weeks you might have seen an uneasy correspondent reporting on the mounting Taliban victories—the capture of twelve provincial capitals and other cities.  We have seen the maps and the increasing percentage of the nation under Taliban control.  The collapse is occurring faster than expected (but presumably it was expected).  With the fall of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, the sense of urgency has turned to panic. 

The dismay of the reporters is reflective of a mindset of delusion, avoidance, and a lack of real understanding.  It is cognitive dissonance forced by harsh, undeniable evidence.  They still do not realize that the war in Afghanistan was lost the day the United States mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to long term nation building (and to be fair, the U.S. military accomplished its initial mission many years ago).  Like all tragedies, the outcome has been inevitable from the start.  The Taliban’s offensive may be ahead of schedule, but nobody should be surprised by the results.

Name an outside invader that “won” a war in Afghanistan.  The educated reader may point to the Arab invasions of the Middle Ages, and they would be right in that they succeeded in bringing Islam to the region.  Other local powers like the Persians might have had some marginal influence. But in general, the primary historical lesson of Afghanistan is that a powerful invader can only win in the short term and will be ground down over time.  Eventual defeat is inevitable and the less local the power is, the less likely the possibility of any success. 

The Greeks under Alexander won in the short term, but there are no Greeks there today (some Greek troops participated in Operation Enduring Freedom under the auspices of NATO).  The same can be said of the Mongols—the greatest imperial juggernauts in history.  They won in the short term but lost over the long run (is it a coincidence that they also lost in Vietnam and near Syria at Ain Jalut?).  The British fought three wars there.  It was the chessboard of the British-Russian Great Game of the nineteenth-century. And of course there was the Soviet war of 1979-1989.  

What was the U.S. trying to do in Afghanistan?  One hears a lot of talk about democracy, liberalism, and women’s rights even though there is no tradition of these things there.  These are the products of modern Western sensibilities, they are not the values of the Hindu Kush.  The countryside is dominated by fundamentalist Islam and the social structure is clannish and local and not universalist.  It is a non-reformed theocracy. Therefore it should have been clear to anybody with even a cursory understanding of history that a modern, liberalized Afghanistan was a pipe dream.  To echo a line from the Louise Bryant character in the movie Reds: Women’s rights in Afghanistan?  When? Just after Christmas?    

All of this should have been obvious from the start.  And yet another generation of the best and brightest had no such understanding and not only got the United States into a war there, but kept it engaged for twenty years.  As a result, a failed policy has once again had to run its course like an illness long after failure was apparent.  Once again the United States will lose an undeclared war in a region it made no real effort to understand.  Once again, the U.S. did not apply relevant historical lessons. Once again the U.S. will abandon allies once failure has become too obvious even for the true believers to deny.  Once again there will be a desperate refugee crisis and some of those who helped the American cause will seek refuge in the United States.  Once again ideology has proven to be a catastrophic basis for policy, and the blame for current events lies not in those pulling U.S. fores out of Afghanistan, but rather those who put them there and kept them there for nearly two decades. It is certainly not the fault of the U.S. service members who served and sacrificed there. They were given an impossible task.  

What are the lessons of the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan?  The first is that democracy and a system of rights necessarily exist within a cultural-historical frame and are not fungible.  They must emerge from inside a nation.  The second lesson is to never get involved in an insurgency where the insurgents have popular support and moral legitimacy with the locals (it is a good rule to avoid insurgencies altogether if there is no vital interest at stake).  The vast majority of the world’s problems are not amenable to military solutions.  It is also wise to avoid imperialist endeavors like nation building (for a fuller list of realist lessons, see the March 20, 2021 posting on this blog titled “Realism: a Distillation”). The fact is that, although it may be repugnant to Western values, the Taliban has more organic legitimacy in Afghanistan than any system imposed by outsiders.  We may not like what they stand for, but it is clearly their country.   

Questions remain: why didn’t Americans seem to care that their nation is about to lose another war for so long?  Why are they not more upset about the trillion or more dollars and the thousands of lives spent there (and where did the money go?)?  I suspect that the answer to these questions is that too small a percentage of Americans actually fight our wars these days—that there is too little shared sacrifice—for most of them to care if other people’s children die killing people who don’t look like them while spending their own children’s inheritance.  If this is true, it obviously does not speak well of us.

Why did a U.S.-trained army melt away before what now seems to be an inexorable foe (we shouldn’t be to hard on the Afghanistan army; if the most powerful military in the world could not decisively defeat the Taliban over a period of 20 years, what chance did they have?)?  

Although no good options remain for the United States in Afghanistan—and having no good options is the defining characteristic of a failed policy; the only thing worse than leaving this way would be to stay—it still has responsibilities there. The United States must use its Air Mobility Command to provide safe passage for those in Afghanistan who mortgaged their future on U.S. success and who may be treated as collaborators by the new regime. The only option at this point would be to get our local allies out of the country. We should not be thinking of possible outcomes in terms of V-E Day or V-J Day, but rather of Dunkirk, Operation Frequent Wind, and Operation Eagle Pull.

Americans embrace the solemnity of Veterans Day. We are moved by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But many Americans have a profound apathy when it comes to policy decisions that put our fighting men and women in harm’s way.  It is the Great Disconnect. As with the Vietnam War, many of the advocates and boosters of the U.S. post-2001 Afghanistan policy remain politically unscathed or have thrived while opponents of the war were marginalized.  How long can a nation whose people care so little about costly, ill-conceived policies and which rewards policy makers who have been so tragically wrong survive?  How long can a nation that rewards wrongheadedness and failure last? Will anybody be held accountable for this historical failure? Curiously, many American liberals have been quiet about their nation’s wars of choice.  Indeed many politicians and policy-makers considered to be progressives have been among the greatest hawks and interventionists over the past two decades.

The government in Kabul may hold out for a while with the help of U.S. air support and drone strikes, a shrinking island in a Taliban sea.*  The situation is reminiscent of that in Vietnam in the months before the communist victory and Nixon’s promises to reintroduce B-52 strikes if the North invaded the South.  But as every infantryman knows, you cannot win a war with air power alone.  And so we must accept that we have lost another war. This is what comes of nation building.

We all know the plot, the course of events now playing out in Afghanistan.  The only question is whether or not American involvement will end with a photo of helicopters plucking people from a rooftop.

*This article was written before the fall of the Afghan government.

Book Review

By Michael F. Duggan

Patrick Cockburn, War in the Age of Trump, the Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran (Verso, London, New York). 311 pages. $29.95

From the first paragraph it is clear why Patrick Cockburn is widely regarded to be the greatest correspondent covering the Middle East.  His on-the-ground fluency with the details, the groups and players and their relative interests is superlative as is his grasp of the big picture.  When reading Cockburn, you become self-conscious of just how little you know about what is really going on there.  It also underscores just how bad the coverage of the region is by the corporate media.

Cockburn [KOH-burn] comes from a family of celebrated Anglo-Irish aristocrats that included Sir George Cockburn, the British admiral who was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for burning Washington D.C. in August 1814.  His father was the communist journalist, novelist, and Spanish Civil War correspondent, Claude Cockburn.  His brothers are the late gonzo mainstay of the left and editor of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn (A Colossal Wreck), and Harper’s Magazine editor, Andrew Cockburn.  His niece is the actress, Olivia Wilde. 

He is the author of nine books and is the recipient of the Martha Gelhorn Prize, the James Cameron Prize, the Orwell Prize, and too many other awards to list here.  

The book is a collection of essays—a dispatches—from the Middle East from 2016 to 2019.  It covers the war in Syria, the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa, the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, the worsening relations between the United States and Iran, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, the abandoning of the Kurds by the United States, “the rise and fall of the de facto Kurdish sates in Iraq and Syria and the final elimination of the self-declared ISIS caliphate, which culminated in death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Cockburn also shows how local players are proxies for great powers. He destroys the illusion that the impulsive and erratic polices of the 45th President of the United States in the region—ostensibly flowing from a revitalized “America first” sense of isolationism—were less problematic than those of previous American leaders.  Although each of the book’s ten parts begins with an introduction, each dispatch is a standalone piece grouped by events and the reader jumps into each without additional preparatory context.  The writer assumes the reader to have some fluency with the events he describes.  It is not a book for beginners.

As a friend of mine observed, where the late Robert Fisk was “hot” in his dispatches from the region, Cockburn is cool, analytical, detached.  His writing comes off as neutral—like Hemingway, in a sense—painting a detailed picture by describing events in detail and letting the reader come to his conclusions that are anything but neutral in siding with the truth.  On his approach, he writes:

“As in a previous volume, I look at events from two angles.  One is contemporary description using writings and diaries I produced at the time; the other is retrospective explanation and analysis from the perspective of today.  Both have their advantages: it is important to know how events looked like when they were still happening, but also to see retrospectively ‘how things panned out’ and what was their true significance.”   

On the difficulties of covering wars, he writes:

“War reporting is easy to do but difficult to do well.  It faces many of the difficulties of peacetime reporting, but in a more acute—thought more revealing—form.  No one taking part in an armed conflict has an incentive to tell the whole truth and every reason to say only what benefits their side.  This is true of all journalism, but in times of military conflict, the propaganda effort is at its most intense and is aided by the chaos of war, which hobbles anybody searching for the truth about what is really happening.”

The book covers a lot of ground in detail, but for me a powerful overarching theme is that America’s post-September 11 wars of choice have been especially pernicious in that, after years of death and destruction in already unstable regions, they eventually create no-win choices between cutting one’s losses in defeat or else delaying defeat with continuing losses.  From a policy perspective, the only thing worse than abandoning allies in the never-ending wars of the Middle East, is staying.  The problem is that when the U.S. pulls out of a fight (whether it is in Iraq, the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, and now the withdrawal from Afghanistan), it necessarily means leaving allies who risked everything.  The result is that the United States has garnered a reputation for being a bad friend.  As Cockburn observes, there is a “saying spreading across the Middle East” that goes: “[n]ever go into a well with an American rope.”  

The book also underscores the apocalyptic dangers of intervening in regions with long histories (and equally long historical memory) and enormous sectarian ethnic and religious complexities at the urging of planners with little or no intimate understanding of the region, simplistic goals, and eschatological ideologies, like neo-conservatism.

As my friend, David Isenbergh observes, a failed policy is one where eventually no good options remain.  Under this criterion, the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and the abandoning of the Kurds are paragon examples of policy failure.  In exposing the “no good options” situation of how post-2001 U.S, policies in the region devolved during 2016-19, Cockburn frames the dilemma for those of us who opposed these wars from the start: since withdrawal is a lesser of evils, how do you minimize the leaving of allies in the field, a tidal wave issue now mounting as the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan.  If there is a point that those favoring withdrawal from the endless wars (e.g. Andrew Bacevich and the Quincy Institute) and Cockburn could agree on, it is not to get into these wars to begin with.

Cockburn is a writer of the first order, but this is not an easy book for the causal reader.  It is so laden with important details that it requires the reader’s full attention.  There is no index and so it is hard to skim (other than to judge from the titles and events of the book’s ten sections).  None of these observations are meant to be a negative criticism, only a cautionary notice of the book’s seriousness. 

Although War in the Age of Trump is a little over 300 pages, its specifics and in-depth regional intimacy make it slow going; to be honest, I am still reading it, taking it on one dispatch at a time.  Anyone who wants to really know the recent history of the Middle East must take Cockburn into consideration.  They must read him, but first they must work their way up to the level of this book. I only hope that I am almost there.

Warner Brothers, 2014. 159 minutes

Movie Review

By Michael F. Duggan

“Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in here, up North, back East, wherever, some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?  ‘Gee,’ he thought, ‘I don’t know.’”
-Sortilege (narrator)

“Sometimes it’s just about doing the right thing.”
-Lt. Detective Christian “Big Foot” Bjornson  

How is it possible that this film lost money at the box office?

In college I was assigned either The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow, but I don’t think I read either.  Friends who did read Thomas Pynchon either stood in awe of him as a Napoleonic figure of contemporary literature (even Gore Vidal seemed to walk a little softly around him in his reviews), or else saw his work as lacking coherence and believed that his V was inferior to, say, Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch.

I recently watched the movie version of his out-of-character 2009 novel, Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and am still trying to sort it all out.  It is a mystery that takes place in Southern California in 1970 when the dream of the 1960s is devolving into gonzo, sleaze, and paranoia (think Hunter S. Thompson, the LAPD, outlaw bikers, Nixon’s FBI, Altamont, the Manson family, etc.).

The story revolves around doper Gordita (real life Manhattan) Beach psychiatrist and private detective, Larry “Doc” Sportello, played sympathetically and with wonderful deadpan by Joaquin Phoenix.  It combines a good, if tongue-in-cheek—frequently silly—feel for Southern California during the final days of the Age of Aquarius with a parody nod/tribute to older noir detective novels/films (complete with a hippie girl astrologer as narrator).  With this sleeper’s impressive star power it is baffling that it went mostly unnoticed.  A hair’s breadth under two-and-a-half hours, it feels a little long, and yet I can’t think of what I would have cut or tightened-up.  Like a Kubrick film, it creates a world in itself with its own feel.  It has a judiciously-selected soundtrack, the cinematography is superb, and although mysteries are not my usual fare, I liked it a lot.

Supposedly the lead was offered to Robert Downey Jr., and watching it, one can only imagine (to the point of distraction) what he could have done with the part.  That said, and although Downey may be a genius at playing brilliant-but-flawed characters, I like him least when he plays straight-up California.  It might have worked magnificently, but I am glad Phoenix got the part and it is hard to imagine Downey playing it better. 

Other impressive performances are delivered by Josh Brolin as hard-ass police detective, Christian F. “Big Foot” Bjornsen, Katherine Waterston as careless hippie chick and Sportello’s ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth, Owen Wilson as wayward surf music sax legend, former heroin addict, and reluctant government snitch, Coy Harlingen, Martin Short as a cartoonish dentist working as a transparent front for a drug cartel, and a constellation of memorable minor roles (including Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, and Boardwalk Empire veteran, Michael K. Williams).

The plot is too involved to go over (one of the film’s few shortcoming along with its considerable running time).  Suffice it to say that it involves the disappearance of a billionaire land developer Michael “Mickie” Wolfmann, a Southeast Asian drug cartel, and the mysterious reappearance of a lost love.  The three trailers are cut to make it seem like at least two different films.¹

Unless you intend to watch it two or three times and keep an elaborate flowchart of characters and organizations, don’t rack your brain trying to follow all of the twists and turns of the main plot, the strands of characters and leads weaving in an out of the story.  Just let it flow over you with a general awareness of the action.  In the end, the film works as a morality tale disguised as an overly intricate period farce.  What Catch 22 is to WWII, Inherent Vice is to California of 1970.  And like Heller’s novel, this story—ostensibly a mystery with a convoluted plot—is much simpler and more profound than it appears at face value.

Alfred Kazin observes that Catch 22 is a depiction of the corruption of war, an accretion of absurdity and farce around a small core of stark existential terror—of the horror of violent death in war.²  Don’t let the comedic wallows in the Southern Cal drug and sex cultures of a half-century ago—the caricatures of dopers, crew-cut LAPD thugs, FBI suits, outlaw bikers with swastika facial tattoos, and adorable hippie women-children—fool you.  The film, in my opinion, and in spite of its trappings (and without giving away too much of the ending), is about simple decency and what “nag(s) at you in the middle of the night,” the possibility of redemption in a dark Manichaean world, and a lost love redeemed.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZfs22E7JmI&t=63s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURVDOgwL60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTRMkQzFYHI
2. Recounted by Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 34-35.

By Michael F. Duggan

“Successful imperialism wins wealth.  Yet, historically, successful empires such as Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, have not remained rich.  Indeed, it seems to be the fate of empires to become too poor to sustain the very cost of empires.  The longer an empire holds together, the poorer and more economically backward it tends to become.” -Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations                

With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, my thoughts have turned again to the perils of empire. Last night I was reading Robert Fisk’s 2006 essay “What the Romans would have thought of Iraq,” and I was reminded of discussions I had with friends almost two decades ago about analogies of the present-day world to the classical.

One such discussion centered around a generalized comparison casting the United States as Rome and modern Europe as Greece. The U.S., like Rome, can be vulgar and heavy-handed; Europe, like Greece, is more refined. We are younger as a civilization and tend to be impulsive and non-reflective. They are older and more circumspect and philosophical. We are practical, like the Roman aqueduct builders. The Europeans are more theoretical and aesthetic. We are imperial; they are a problematic confederation. Like the Romans, we love our weapons and blood sports.

There are also comparisons to be made between notable Roman leaders and U.S. presidents. Washington was our Cincinnatus—the statesman of the Early Republic who voluntarily relinquished power to return to his farm. One could make plausible comparisons of the Roosevelts to Augustus and Julius Caesar—patricians who embraced the masses as well as massive state-funded capital projects (TR was also an imperialist). One could also argue that more recently there have been presidents who resemble Sulla and Nero. The emperor that I find most compelling and most relevant to our own time is Hadrian.

Hadrian was the second-century leader who realized that the Empire was overextended and sought to preserve Roman strength via consolidation. He was a military man who was liked by his men and as emperor traveled to the farthest reaches of the Empire to visit and talk with them. At that time, Rome was the world for those in the West, and he declared where it ended (e.g. Hadrian’s Wall). He suppressed insurgencies not of his choosing in the Middle East with impressive brutality. In spite of this, he has long resonated with me as a sensible leader trying to address the empire’s most pressing problem: its own massive scale. A number of years ago I posited a parallel grand strategy for the United States based on consolidation that I call “Neo-Hadrianism.” (https://www.georgetownjournalofinternationalaffairs.org/online-edition/on-containment-and-islamism-moderate-realism-for-a-fractious-age-by-michael-f-duggan). I also keep a silver Hadrian coin for good luck.

Like the later Roman Empire, the days of U.S. military and economic predominance are numbered and the question is whether its decline will be controlled and managed or if resistance to changing economic and geopolitical realities will lead to an uncontrolled collapse.  Will the American empire end with a sensible post-globalist grand strategy of consolidation, or will it end with a bang or a fizzle?  Rationalization and denial are the twin pillars of human psychology, and ignoring realities now coming into focus could lead to a catastrophic collapse or else a dismal protracted decline and an end to the American Century just short of an even hundred.

Rather than continue to embrace the problematic role of the world’s military and naval hegemon, the United States should adopt a policy architecture allowing it to operate more effectively as a robust regional world power with capable land, air, and sea forces to match.  This would allow the nation to protect its vital interests and to meet its treaty obligations while still acting as a world leader in international coalitions to preserve peace and order and to restore the status quo in instances where the territorial sovereignty of a nation has been violated by another.  Such a role would also be an effective means for fostering the international cooperation necessary to address the unfolding world environmental crises. 

Unchecked power brings with it the potential for corruption, hubris, and an unselfcritical sense of entitlement as witnessed by policies enjoining intervention in the internal affairs of other nations.  Americans decry allegations of foreign interference with their elections yet see no contradiction in their nation overthrowing or helping to overthrow inconvenient regimes in far flung parts of the world and open-ended occupations.  The role of the world’s policeman in furtherance of an activist neoliberal worldview by interventionist means has worked against the United States.  The euphemism of “regime change” for one-sided war and the Orwellian designation of “humanitarian intervention” for aerial bombing campaigns have sullied rather than strengthen the reputation of the United States as a force for good in the world, a reputation seen by other nations in recent decades as honored in the breach.

United States military hegemony as the security and enforcement elements of economic globalization constitutes a form of imperialism that is at odds with American first principles.  As a practical matter it is also an unsustainable drain on our economy. Economic globalization has resulted in massive disparities both at home and abroad.  Both a neoliberal world economy and American military preeminence as its protector are as undesirable as they are unsustainable.  As a latter day incarnation of the Great Game, it is a distraction from more important matters like the unfolding environmental crises. 

An entire generation of Americans has grown up to see no anomaly, no abnormally in their nation bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, killing thousands of people in the process.  Several generations of Americans have witnessed their nation use undeclared wars as a basis for foreign policy.  The unintended consequence of this is an inversion of Clausewitz’s “war is an extension of policy” to a state of affairs where policy becomes a justification for military budgets and an endless gravy train for the defense industries.  Budgets may thus become drivers of policy.  Undeclared military campaigns, assassination-like drone strikes, and a never-ending state of semi-war can be used, not only to justify new weapons systems, but to provide convenient venues to test them in real world conditions.  As the demise of the Soviet Union well illustrates, economies typified by little growth and which rely on a manufacturing sector based on the production and export of military goods—as opposed to the durable goods of a healthy consumer economy—are both artificial and symptomatic of decline.

There are notable differences between ancient Rome and the modern United States. There was a brutal honesty to Roman expansion, where our imperialism is generally justified by claims of bringing democracy, economic development, rights, and rule of law initiatives. When the legions showed up in a region they said “we are here; surrender or die.” In such instances, the victims were spared the added indignity of having their deaths justified in terms of high-sounding words. I am in no way advocating Roman brutality. Rather I am saying that the dead and maimed of war don’t care a damn about the lofty motives and justifications of occupiers.

It should be noted that Hadrian’s project of consolidation eventually failed, that empire has a momentum and allure—a will of its own—that is irresistible to those operating under it as it runs course (and bad policy must run its course like an illness). Empires eventually become unsustainable and burn themselves out. Nations that embrace a role that is proportional to their size and resources tend to do better in a mode of steady state than nations that rise to a grand imperial scale and then collapse into a second or third-rate status of post-imperial proportions.

Will Joe Biden turn out to be a latter-day Hadrian, and, if so, will he be more successful than the Roman emperor whose earnest effort and namesake can still be seen traversing the hills and vales of northern England? Pulling out of Afghanistan is a good start, as is the extension of the START Treaty. But an aggressive stance toward China and Russia suggests that not only is the foreign policy Blob back, but that it has the president’s ear.

All historical analogies eventually break down; history “rhymes” more than it repeats itself, as Twain reminds us. But there is enough historical resemblance of our problematic times to others to give us pause.

Please check out my new article on the philosophy of history at the peer-reviewed journal Symposion. Link and abstract are below.

https://www.pdcnet.org/symposion/content/symposion_2021_0008_0001_0045_0077

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsymposion.acadiasi.ro%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F05%2F2021.8.1.2.-Duggan.pdf%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0dTzG9rqVWRkkLQxdBpVk6VWvR0jX-mfWztEYzhgTs6RhmXzDZO59VsxU&h=AT1IY4LGQRPUQq9BlkmUjCBR8xBx965551VqCIwds9fSIc5ldXXl4aeYS1pf9saW7_KTSwWYxzLc-rcC2N6PtKVKox4U7rp8n3-tgc72sBSV9CRrVn-kOUpKM2Y1GGbdwpw&tn=H-R&c[0]=AT1Yh_ziVosjlj0rqX-J_PTl3dH0R79s6gcwHPhYbPZ8dF6mg_-5gcpvWGoqj–sVqKdS3_jVKSJTS6WvhZN4D9soqQORvPOb6cBx-wy6UmgVkmpZeGkq21t6YKmSQYUHdbDtUdc154YGbpZ0Spv1ViahQ

Abstract: This article examines the basis for testing historical claims and proffers the observation that the historical method is akin to the scientific method in that it utilizes critical elimination rather than justification. Building on the critical rationalism of Karl Popper–and specifically the deductive component of the scientific method called falsification–I examine his tetradic schema and adapt it for the specific purpose of historical analysis by making explicit a discrete step of critical testing, even though the schema is adequate as Popper expresses it and the elimination of error occurs at all steps of analysis. I add this discrete step of critical elimination to Popper’s schema even though the elimination of error occurs at every step of analysis. The basis for critical elimination history is the demonstrable counterexample. The study of history will never approach the precision of science –history deals with open systems that cannot be replicated like experiments guided by fundamental laws.But just because we cannot know something with the rigor of science does not mean that we cannon know it better than we do. There may be no objective truthin an absolute sense, but there is a distinction to be made between well-tested and poorly tested theories and therefore between history done well and history done with less analytical rigor.What I hope to show is how our historical knowledge may progress through good faith critical discussion –history is discussion –and the elimination of error.Keywords: critical rationalism, Karl Popper, black swans.

By Michael F. Duggan

Magicicada septendecim—what the hell was evolution thinking?

The seventeen-year cicada is a large, largely defenseless insect that apparently tastes good to every insectivorous bird and animal and whose survival strategy is to reproduce in such spectacular profusion that the combined appetites of the local natural world can’t keep up with it. How does it pull this off? Born underground, it stays there in immature form living a solitary life that must seem pretty pointless even by large, solitary insect standards for an arbitrary-seeming 17 years (compare this longevity to the four-week lifespan of a housefly). It then emerges simultaneously in uncounted billions. A supreme example of a lopsided lifecycle, cicadas only live for a a few weeks as adults, scratching that seventeen-year itch in a frenzied, buzzing orgy. The cyclic hum-bug is a fascinating natural phenomenon of the Mid-Atlantic states and a few adjacent latitudes of the nation.

One can only wonder if there is a metaphor here for the human condition or if the rest of the natural world sees us the way we see cicadas: a creature that takes forever to mature, becomes sexually obsessed at the age of 17, and then joins a noisy, overpopulated swarm. On the other hand, we live longer, are global in distribution, and are arguably better-looking.

By Michael F. Duggan

I know that this is not an original idea and that I am not alone in feeling this way, but the 2022 midterm elections loom on the close horizon as ominous horsemen of unknown intent. The riders are still too far out for one to discern their countenances or adumbrate their purpose. But one cannot look at events at home and abroad without a sense of national and world-historical foreboding of what they bring.

Again, this idea is not entirely mine; a friend called yesterday and offered the speculation that the ’22 midterms have the potential to make or break the nation, and by extension, the world. Without the hoopla of a presidential year, many Americans do not even follow midterm races. And yet next year’s elections could be the most consequential in U.S. history and will determine how we address our considerable national problems and an increasingly chaotic world to include the unfolding crises of the environment.

Next year’s contests will offer a choice for the nation that is as binary as the two-party system: either a possibility of hope and redemption, or else infamy and perhaps the end of the game, the end of what Jefferson called our experiment. And as the world’s largest economy, it is likely accurate to say, “as goes the United States, so goes the world.”

By Michael F. Duggan

“Zero population growth could be enforced only by a global authority with draconian powers and unwavering determination. There has never been such a power and there never will be.” -John Gray, Straw Dogs

“Stop, or I’ll say ‘Stop’ again.” -Robin Williams’ impression of an unarmed British policeman.

If the past year is any indication, the future of crisis management does not bode well.

The first tenet of legal realism is that the law is the command of a sovereign, whether it is a king or the collective administrative estates of a modern republic.  Where the command is not enforced, the law ceases to exist.  Laws that are not backed up by force or social custom are nothing more than a kind of literature or a historical curiosity.  In practical terms they become suggestions whose effectiveness depends on the whims of the least dependable among us, Holmes’s “Bad Man.”  Unenforced laws thus rely upon the least reliable to achieve their purposes.  Anybody who has driven on Route 50 between Washington, D.C. and Annapolis on a weekend will know what I am talking about.   

In instances where a jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to enforce the law, the most aggressive and opportunistic go unpunished and dominate, thus putting those who obey the law in danger or at a disadvantage.  Where no laws are enforced the most aggressive and opportunistic people take over and are more likely to enforce their own commands with greater vigor and violence.  Where the law is enforced occasionally, selectively, or haphazardly—speed limits for example—the result will be compliance only when enforcement elements are known or believed to be present, therefore precluding a predictable and well-ordered civil society.  Where the law goes enforced or does not exist—and in practical terms, the difference is trivial—the purpose of the law will go unmet.  Such has been the case for rules governing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic throughout much of the United States.

I have mentioned these statistics before and give them again because the numbers illustrate the issue more clearly than words alone: Taiwan, with enforceable rules in place, had 7 deaths without a vaccine.  New Zealand lost 26.  Vietnam, 35.  What do these nations have in common?  They are small and two are islands.  Taiwan has a large population for a small country— about 23.57 million (two million more than Florida, which has seen 35,306 COVID-19 deaths).  New Zealand has fewer than 5 million people.  Taiwan knew from previous experience with MERS and SARS of the danger of a new and highly contagious virus.  Taiwan and Vietnam are not especially diverse and one could possibly make a cultural argument that East Asian nations tend to be more communitarian than many Western nations.  New Zealand is diverse, but the civic-mindedness, moderation, and rationality for which New Zealanders are famous seem to have been the only things spreading among its more recent arrivals.  It is the rarest creature in the world: a diverse population with a shared normative policy outlook, at least on this issue.   

The odds of large, populous, and diverse nations spread-out over numerous jurisdictions (Brazil, India) behaving as effectively as these small nations are long without strict enforcement measures.  And so, with the authority to deal with the outbreak delegated beyond Washington for the first ten months of the crisis, the United States has now lost about 577,000 of its people to the disease.  But we could have done better.  With the response now taking on the characteristics of a national effort, things appear to be improving.

The United States never fully locked down.  Instead of a coherent national policy based on best practices recommendations with sensitivity to local conditions and needs, authority was delegated to states, counties, and cities, and these ranged from the sensible to the insane, to the belated, to the sensible-but-relaxed-too-soon.  Jurisdictions where enforceable lockdowns were in place sometimes gave into pressures from powerful local business interests and reopened short of victory.  Perhaps I do not understand the mathematics of contagion, but it seems pretty simple: if you put infected people in close proximity to uninfected, unvaccinated people, you will get transmission.  This has happened three times already and, even after more than 200 million vaccinations, the numbers had begun to plateau again.  Hopefully the vaccinations will outpace the spread of the disease.  

As far as world-historical crises go, the COVID-19 pandemic—although still raging—is not of the largest kind.  What historical lessons can we take from the pandemic, the Great Abdication of 2020 and its consequences, and how might we apply them to potentially larger crises on the horizon such as those of the environment?  I think that even at this early point we can distill a few of the more obvious ones:

• Unenforced decrees are ineffective solutions to rapidly-evolving crises; half-measures produce half-results or worse, and they can actually extend the duration of the crisis.
• As with crises of international epidemiology, the problems of the environment will require coherent national solutions within a coherent global approach.  This will have to be based on cooperative nation states effectively enforcing guidelines founded on the best information.  In order to work, such an effort would require a critical mass of regions and states including Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, the Islamic Middle East, Japan and the nations of the Pacific Rim, Russia, South Africa, the Republics of Latin America, and the United States.
• The character of the crisis must be accessed and determined as quickly and accurately as possible. Likewise the most effective possible response must be devised as soon as possible. With the crises of the environment, we will have to get the solutions right on the first try.
• Nature does not bargain.  It does care about democratic form or rights (there is no such thing as “natural” rights; rights are human constructs).  Solutions must be formulated on the terms dictated by the crisis.  Beyond an unknowable and unpredictable flexibility, the environment will not forgive us our mistakes, excesses, and missed goals.
• All solutions and their enforcement must therefore be based on real situational dictates of the biosphere, and they will have to be flexible enough to change as those realities and our understanding of them change.  Carbon generation goals based on human schedules (for example) are meaningless if those timetables are not directly reflective of environmental realities.
• Approaches to the crises of the environment will have to include both social and technological elements.
• Finally, an effective approach to the climate will require strict laws and equally strict enforcement of them.

That last point is the kicker. 

If the pandemic demonstrated anything, it is that necessary measures have to be enforced in order to mean anything.  The various responses to COVID-19 have been a test case for how the world deals with a rapidly-developing global crisis.  It was a dry run that exposed what worked and what did not work, and the initial results overall are not encouraging.   

Americans were asked to make the most modest of sacrifices—to wear cotton masks, and to take a life-preserving vaccine free of charge.  Many flouted these simple and realistic measures and some still resist.  One is left wondering if some of our demoralized citizens have a conscious or unconscious death wish or if their mindset is somehow akin to those of suicide cults.  To the degree that we are succeeding or will succeed in defeating the virus, it is because of medical technology and the more sensible national approach of recent months rather than the willingness of all Americans for shared sacrifice. If we address the crises of the environment in a similar way, we will fail.

If we are faced with a far more serious set of crises over the coming decades, and it becomes clear that strict measures are necessary, say, the limiting of every couple in the world no more than one child (in order to address the overarching population crisis), or serious jail time for improper disposal of plastic (to address the plastics crisis), equally strict enforcement will likely be necessary to make such measures work.

If an existential crisis were to appear and necessary measures turned out to be politically impossible, then it is the system and not the solutions that is unrealistic.  This is chilling in its implications and hard to write because it suggests that remedies to an existential world crisis would require the absolute enforcement of laws.  If nature decrees it, it will have to be so, unless we are content with putting rights and liberties above life itself and the life of the planet, in which case our rights and liberties will die with us.  Jefferson’s great experiment will have failed along with an even more notable experiment of evolution.

If, on the other hand, such an approach worked—with uncompromising laws and their enforcement—powerful bodies of oversight would have to be put in place to prevent abuses.  Much of a liberal democratic system could be preserved so long as people willingly made the necessary sacrifices to ward off global catastrophe.  But the sacrifices would be significant and part and parcel with a complete reconfiguration of the human relationship with the planet.  A big part of this would be to strictly limit what people and industry could take from the world, and what they could put back into it.

Even with an effort with the nearly universal appeal of continued survival, this may not be possible.  Few national endeavors were as popular as the U.S. mobilization during World War II.  And yet perhaps a full quarter of all U.S. retail transactions during the war were illegal black market purchases by people trying to beat the system and flout restrictions.¹  If a robust body of laws were enacted with a goal of implementing something along the lines of the prescriptions of Edward O. Wilson in his book, Half-Earth, it is hard to imagine how it would be enforced without stern measures and a fair amount of persuasion. 

There are historical precedents in this country for installing desperate measures in desperate times.  During the Civil War, the Maryland legislature was planning to vote on the question of secession.  If it had voted to side with the Confederacy, the capital of the Union would have been 100 miles behind enemy lines.  The vote was therefore an existential threat to the nation, and to prevent it (and other threats such as the sabotage of strategic railroad lines), Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the cornerstone of the English common law and U.S. case law.  Lincoln’s justification was that by enforcing “all the laws but one” he could preserve all of the others.²  It was, Lincoln reasoned, a wartime measure necessary to secure the survival of the Union and thus preserve the United States.  So it would be with the crises of the environment.  As Robert Jackson warns, “without a little practical wisdom” the Bill of Rights could become a “suicide pact,”³  The implication is that survival is the first law and above all others.

Rights and security are binary elements of our system that exist in relation to each other like weights in the pans of a balance scale, a relationship that requires constant readjustment.  As with equality and freedom, they are first principles at odds with each other. When security goes up via enforcement, rights will suffer.  When people are given absolute freedom, security suffers.  There can be no final configuration to address this tension, this constant state of imbalance.  It changes as conditions changes, and thus governing is a never-ending sequence of fine-tuning based on changing social realities.  Of course, other than extinction, the greatest danger in a free country is the relinquishing rights. Once lost there is a chance that they will not be regained. 

Therefore, one of the most dangerous things a person can do is to flirt with draconian solutions.  As a rule I eschew eschatology, tribalism, and utopianism, preferring workable non-ideological piecemeal solutions and that is what I am attempting to frame here.  As Tony Judt writes in his final book, Ill Fares the Land, “If the twentieth-century taught us anything, it should have been that the more perfect solution, the more terrifying the consequences.”  There are no perfect solutions.  But there are workable ones.  The task will be to devise plausible and enforceable solutions while preserving liberalism and democracy.  To do this, we will likely be required to pursue a robust piecemeal approach with stern enforcement measures.  We will have to strike a balance, but it will have to be on nature’s terms.   

Of course if the angry extremism that is still widespread in parts of the country persists, a certain minority of Americans will not comply with necessary measures or perhaps even believe in the reality of the crises of the environment.  Fortunately, recent polls suggest that a large majority of Americans now believe that humans are altering the environment.  The now task will be to convince them of its existential seriousness as an impending reality.  Even more important than enforcement will be the general compliance with the law.

Still, some will resist strong laws addressing the environment.  With the rise of militias, it is possible that the enforcement of necessary policies will result in widespread, perhaps even generalized, violence.  It is not clear whether laws can work at all if a large minority of people will not obey them, even with the most vigorous enforcement measures in place.

To appreciate the importance of general compliance in respect to a system of laws and its goals, we need only look at the example of Marxist-Leninism.  Communism is based on egalitarianism and a presumption of altruism in the human heart.  But what happens in a nation that adopts a communistic form of government when its leaders realize that the motivations behind an egalitarian outlook and altruism are not the predominant human motivation?  In such a case, the system is not automatically self-reinforced by normative morality—the ideology is found to be at odds with other concerns of the people.  You then get compliance forced by the state.  You get the Soviet Union.

As regards the crises of the environment, I am not talking about perfection, but rather “good enough to work” for the sustainable, long-term survival of the planet and our species by strictly enforcing necessary laws while cutting back on a few notable ones.  What is the point of laws if the planet dies along with everybody on it?

What is “good enough to work”?  The New Deal was hardly a workers’ paradise, but it worked well as a program of large-scale piecemeal measures to address a serious economic crisis.  Even with a quarter of Americans flouting the law, the U.S. industrial mobilization with accompanying social restrictions also worked.  Both of these measures worked in spite of a fair measure non-compliance because the nation was still fairly homogenous.  

This time we faced a world-historical crisis and the results, other than in vaccine development and now in their distribution, were not impressive.  This time the solution—assuming it continues to work—was singular and technological.  It is dangerous to assume that technology will always save us, and there will be crises where technology will not be up to the challenge or will only be part of the solution.

The law is not morality, but as an external system of rules it stands in proximity to a normative ethos.  In order to work, a considerable majority of people must believe in the law or else grudgingly obey it out of respect for its legitimacy.  It must then be enforced for those not inclined to obey.  As regards the laws necessary to address the crises likely to face us in the coming decades, if anyone knows of a way to do this without force and the sternest of measures, I’m all ears.

Notes

1. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The War, 223.
2. See generally William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws but One. 
3. Terminicello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 37 [1949].

By Michael F. Duggan

“The word hip was used in those days to mean “knowing,” not to mean what was fashionable.” -Pete Hamil

I posted a version of this short essay in April 2019 as a part of a longer piece on language and usage (I originally wrote it two or three years before that). For the past day or so I have been revisiting the essays of Norman Mailer, and felt compelled to put it up again by itself.

Present rant triggered by a routine stop at a coffee shop.

I appreciate that language evolves, that the meanings of words emerge, evolve, disappear, diverge, procreate, amalgamate, splinter-off, become obscure, reemerge and overshadow older meanings, especially in times of rapid change.  I am less sanguine about words that are appropriated (and yes, I know that one cannot “steal” a word) from former meanings that still have more texture, resonance, authenticity, and historical context for me.

For example, over the past decade, and probably going back to the 1990s, the word “hipster” has taken on a new, in some ways inverse, but not unrelated meaning to the original. My understanding of the original meaning of “hipster” was a late 1930s-1950s blue collar drifter, an attempted societal drop-out, a modernist descendant of the romantic hero, and borderline antisocial type who shunned the “phoniness” of mainstream life and commercial mass culture and trends and listened to authentic (read: African-American) jazz—bop—(think of Dean Moriarty from On the Road).¹ 

He/she was “hip” (presumably an evolution of 1920s “hep”)—clued-in, disillusioned—to what was really going on in the world behind the facades and appearances. This meaning stands in contrast to today’s idea of “hip” as being in touch with current trends—an important distinction. It was a modern echo of Byron’s being “among” the crowd rather than “of” it. The hipster presaged the beat of the later 1950s who was more cerebral, contrived, literary, and urban. In the movies, the male of the hipster genera might have been played by John Garfield or Robert Mitchum. In real life, Jackson Pollock will suffice as a representative example. Hipsters were typically flawed individuals and were often irresponsible and failures as family people. But at least there was something authentic and substantial about them as an intellectual type.

By contrast, today’s “hipster” seems to be self-consciously affected right down to the point of his goatee-ed chin: consciously urban (often living in gentrified neighborhoods) consciously fashionable and ahead of the pack, dismissive of non-hipsters (and quiet about his/her middle-to-upper-middle class upbringing in the ‘burbs and an ongoing childhood once centered around play dates), a conformist to generational chauvinism, clichés, and dictates.  It is therefore snobbery or reverse snobbery (if snobbery can be thus qualified). Today’s hipster embodies the calculation and trendiness that the original hipsters specifically stood against (they were noticed, not self-promoted).  It sees itself as ahead of the pack, but most are squarely in its middle. Admittedly, hip talk was adopted by the Beats and later cultural types and elements of it became embedded in the mainstream and then fell out of favor. Today it seems affected and corny (as Hemingway observed “…the most authentic hipster talk of today is the twenty-three skidoo of tomorrow…”).²

I realize that this might sound like a “kids these days” grouse or reduction—and I hope it is not; upon the backs of the rising generation ride the hopes for the future of the nation, our species, and the world. I have known many young people—interns and students—the great majority of whom are intelligent, serious, thoughtful, and oriented toward problem solving and social justice. They are also angry, and there is a strong current toward rejecting the trends of previous generations among them (perhaps an echo of the disdain of the original hipsters with mainstream life). The young people these days have every right to be mad at what previous generations have done to the economy and the environment. Perhaps the hipsters among them will morph into something along the lines of their earlier namesake or something better.

If not, then it is likely that the word will continue to have a double meaning as the original becomes increasingly obscure or until another generation takes it up as its own with its own new meaning. And then old dogs like me will growl about it.

1. For the best analyses and commentary on the original meaning of “hip” and “hipster,” see Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” “Reflections on the Hip,” “Hipster and Beatnik,” and “The Hip and the Square,” in Advertisements for Myself.
2. See “The Art of the Short Story,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway Library Edition, 2.