But you probably know them as Papilio cresphontes, the largest butterfly in North America. I’m told what I witnessed this afternoon in Barb’s Zinnia bed was a mating ritual. Amazing to behold.
As one (female?) flitted from flower to flower, the other (male?) hovered a couple of inches behind, never landing on a flower.
That’s the conclusion of Laura Jedeed, a freelance journalist who deployed to Afghanistan twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009-2010.
I remember Afghanistan as a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking want us there. We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter. […] It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left.
And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.
I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever. There is no third team.
We knew how Afghanistan was going to end way back in 2008. In this scene from Rambo III Richard Crenna warns the Russian commander how stupid it is to start a holy war in the middle east in the name of freedom.
And this from 2009. Matthew Hoh, a former marine saying Afghanistan is not worth U.S. lives.
“I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there,” Hoh said. “I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.”
“The Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.” (Wikipedia)
From James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom:
“In November 1854, (Missouri Senator David) Atchison and other prominent Missourians led an invasion, of “border ruffians” into Kansas to swell the vote for the proslavery candidate. Derided as “Pukes” by norther-born settlers, many of these lank, unshaven, unwashed, hard-drinking Missourians had little material interest in slavery but even less love for “those long-faced, sanctimonious Yankees” devoted to “sickly sycophantic love for the nigger.” The border ruffians won the first round. Casting more than 1,700 ballots that a subsequent congressional committee found to be fraudulent, they elected a proslavery delegate to Congress.”
“How should I mourn friends who threw away their lives because irrational politics overrode rational thoughts of self-preservation? What should I say to the grieving spouse you leave behind? “Well, at least they died doing what they loved to do” becomes even more ludicrous when what they loved to do was LIVE! I probably won’t go to your funeral at all. It’s your fault that I have to make that choice. I don’t want to be your pallbearer.”
“Your life began with a kind of singularity. A personal Big Bang. Without warning, you emerged from unconsciousness into a sea of light, color, smell, faces, feelings, and other completely unexpected phenomena, and there was nothing to do but attempt to navigate it. It was the ultimate “cold open” – no context, no explanation, just things happening.”
“You can learn to see that mysteriousness in the world again, on purpose. You can practice looking at what’s in front of you as an infant might see it. It’s all just textures and feelings, that have no real names and carry no explanation. Looking at the world like that comes with a certain kind of relief to the compulsive mapper, because what’s right in front of you is never as busy as the map. […] It comes down to just looking — seeing what’s there, and nothing else, as you once did.”
“The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.”
This bit of wisdom is from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a Hindu spiritual teacher who lived in Mumbai. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. What is “the world I can perceive?” All perception — every experience — is via the five senses, so my world is what I can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Right here, right now. And it’s constantly changing. So my world is a tiny sphere of sensations that is unique to me. Everything else is conceptual, existing only in my head.
I don’t remember where I read the phrase, “Consciousness creates reality,” but that seems ever more true as I age. If I look closely enough, most of my problems (worries, anxieties, fears) exist outside my tiny reality sphere.
“The Kekulé Problem” is a 2017 nonfiction essay by writer Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute. It was his first published work of nonfiction. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, “is a machine for operating an animal” and that “all animals have an unconscious.” McCarthy goes on to postulate that language is purely a human cultural creation, and not a biologically determined phenomenon. (Wikipedia)
“You may have read a thousand books and be able to discuss any one of them without remembering a word of the text.”
“The unconscious wants to give guidance to your life in general but it doesn’t care what toothpaste you use.”
“The unconscious seems to know a great deal. What does it know about itself? Does it know that it’s going to die? What does it think about that?”
The essay checked a lot of my boxes: awareness, consciousness, ego, thoughts.
“It’s [hard] to get a man to understand something, when his community and identity depends on his not understanding it. […] Instead of tie-dyed shirts, they donned red “MAGA” hats. Instead of being young adventurers running away from their parents, these “front-row Joes” (as he calls them) tended to be people who were “retired or close to it” and “estranged from their families or otherwise without children”; they also had “plenty of time on their hands.” What they found was that “Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer.” His rallies gave them a “reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married—and later divorced—by Trump’s second year in office. […] Trump’s status as both a “rock star” and, simultaneously, a persecuted victim made him an attractive leader for this kind of movement.”
How Trumpists Prey on Loneliness, and Loneliness Preys on Trumpists