Posted on 10/22/2007 6:40:16 PM PDT by dufekin
William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word "cyberspace," way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:
Alejandro looked over his knees. "Carlito said there is a war in America."
"A war?"
"A civil war."
"There is no war, Alejandro, in America."
"When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?"
"That was the 'cold war.' "
Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. "A cold civil war."
Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun's vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.
"You don't follow politics, Tito."
That's quite a concept: "A cold civil war." Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it's tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author's formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'd dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Someone else says, "America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government." Etc. But it's that one phrase that makes you pause: "A cold civil war."
Or so you'd think. In fact, it seems to have passed entirely without notice. Unlike "cyberspace" a quarter-century ago, the "cold civil war" is not some groovy paradigm for the day after tomorrow but a cheerless assessment of the here and now, too bleak for buzz. As far as I can tell, April Gavaza, at the Hyacinth Girl website, is pretty much the first American to ponder whether a "cold civil war" has any significance beyond the novel:
What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as "[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation." In that respect, is the current political climate one of "cold civil war"? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election ...
Indeed. A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.
Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.
Obviously the vast majority of Americans are not foaming partisans. It would be foolish to adduce any general theories from, say, Mr. "Ed Funkhouser," who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, "who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?" An hour and a half later he realized he'd forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: "you are a f--kin' moron. and probably queer too!" No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse. Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the "regime change" and "inside job" types have set the pace.
But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies. In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop's Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn't exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things -- the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus -- but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained -- the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance -- but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.
Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:
Hollywood's latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?
A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper -- "Taser this: F--k Bush" -- and the Denver Post hails him as "the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious." Anyone audacious enough to write "F--k Hillary" or "F--k Obama" at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?
Speaking of which, Columbia University won't allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you're bebottoming.
It's curious to encounter the soft-left establishment's hostility to the state. Go back to that line of Gibson's: free peoples develop "Stockholm Syndrome" about government all over the world, not least in Stockholm. It seems a mite inconsistent to entrust government to manage your health care and education and to dictate what you can and can't toss in the trash, but then to fret over them waging war on your behalf. Perhaps the next president will be, as George W. Bush promised, "a uniter, not a divider." Perhaps some "centrist Democrat" or "maverick Republican" will win big, but right now it doesn't feel that way.
Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain's Harold Macmillan famously replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Yet in the end even "events" require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. "The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we're doing here," one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review's Rich Lowry this week, "in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact." As Lowry remarked, "This is the lonely war" -- its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front. In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation." The "cold civil war" may be another "consensual hallucination," but for many it's more real than "the lonely war."
That's exactly what it is.
Mark Steyn with another gem. Food for intellectual thought.
His columns are the kind you read slowly, because of all of the profound thoughts contained therein.
Many here on FR allude to a looming type of civil war, that society has fractured along invisible fault lines, some dealing with reality and some dealing with rabid liberalism, some along the lines of failed Socialist policies that are trying to be resurrected, even after their utter failure has been exposed.
In American history this fractionalization of political thought reminds me of 1860, when the fissures of the body politic became deep, undeniable and irreversible.
I can only pray that the election decision next year does not become a close result ala 2000, but a decisive decision by the American electorate, one way or the other.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Shades of 1860 indeed.
The nomination process is failing before our eyes, too many, too early, "final" choices made NINE MONTHS BEFORE the election.
There will either be a religious right third party, or a fusion "national unity" center party, or even both. The left will rally around Hillary, and the GOP nomination won't be worth a pitcher of warm spit.
The witch may very well be elected with 35% of the popular vote, with 65% of the votes split to her right.
She will of course govern as if she won in a landslide.
Game on.
Unlikely. The separation between the conservative red states and the liberal blue cities is a profound chasm; the two sides increasingly operate off different perceptions of reality and different reasoning processes. The difference is as stark as night and day: capitalism versus socialism, Judeo-Christian morals versus atheistic moral relativism, American exceptionalism versus United Nations membership, victory as annihilation of terrorists versus victory as denial of terrorists.
I don’t know that it’s even theoretically possible now to unify the two sides of this chasm. Heck, The New York Times today published an editorial declaring that high taxes yield economic competitiveness. I don’t know any Oklahomans, now enjoying the lowest tax rate in the country, who could take such a contention seriously. But New Yorkers believe it. So we need to raise taxes to resuscitate the flailing economy, or we need to maintain or lower taxes (and drill for oil) to continue the prosperous economy.
There are many sides with multiple chasms.
CW2 Ping.
We’ve been using the expression “Cold Civil War” here on FR for at least four years, but it’s still nice for Steyn to notice.
Hree’s a link I found in about two seconds to Cold Civil War, from 2003 on FR.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1004834/posts
"The Iranian question will be revisited. Due to a national emergency the presidency will be temporarily eliminated in favor of some kind of collective leadership via Congress or the states, with the possible participation of the military. There will be a second civil war with tremendous loss of life."
Not a cause for confidence.
Still, You cant deny that Steyn is a master wordsmith
Reply #19: "I agree 100% with Prager, and I call the phase we are in "THE COLD CIVIL WAR.""
Even stranger, that thread is from Oct. 21, 2003, almost 4 years ago to the day.
Besides, I've done a bit of wordsmithing myself.
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Whatever it takes.
Ahhh... I should have recognized that you coined the term.
I’d be chapped too.
Jim, thank you for your thoughtful comments.
This may be a controversial thought, but I believe that the 2008 election is the Republicans to win or lose, especially if the Demon candidate is Her Heinous.
Because of what is at stake if she is the nominee, many on the right, even if Guilani becomes the R candidate, will vote against Hillary. Resistance will be against a third party, knowing full well this is the only way Hillary gets in. I wouldn’t put it past Hillary that she is actively trying to make this happen, that’s how political cunning she is. To me that’s the only explanation for Ron Paul’s inexplicable showing in the polls, and the man is certifiable.
But if the Republicans cannot defeat Hillary in 2008, a candidate with more real dirt on her than any other candidate in American history, and the GOP pulls another 1996 Dole/Kemp disaster, they deserve to join the Whigs on the ash-heap of political history.
I’ll be a broken glass Republican just one more time.
But never again. By 2012, we’ll have a constitutionally based third party if the GOP doesn’t get its bearings again.
Then again, we may have a new civil war before Hillary’s first term is over.
The illusion is over.
It’s fine with me, I’m sure others used it before me. I just googled it, and that FR thread from 2003 came up first. I almost fell off my chair when I read down the thread looking for the first mention of CCW, and came across 19. I didn’t read it that closely though, maybe it was already used up thread.
“The separation between the conservative red states and the liberal blue cities is a profound chasm; the two sides increasingly operate off different perceptions of reality and different reasoning processes. The difference is as stark as night and day: capitalism versus socialism, Judeo-Christian morals versus atheistic moral relativism, American exceptionalism versus United Nations membership, victory as annihilation of terrorists versus victory as denial of terrorists.”
That is one of the most profundly perceptive statements I have read in some time. Kudos to you for articulating it so well.
May I borrow it?
Wierd Karma
Sure...go ahead.
The question is what might turn this into a "Hot" civil war? Despite the common fantasy on the fringes of the Left very few in the entire world are being assaulted for attempting to turn their respective governments toward world socialism, but quite a few are being assaulted by their respective governments simply for hoping for some sort of democracy. One might have thought that this fits into the "progressive" paradigm, and one would have been mistaken - these movements are, broadly, abandoned and even cursed by "progressives." I cite Burma, China, Tibet, Iraq, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Cuba as examples. That list isn't exhaustive by far.
What we have here is a blatant abandonment of principle in favor of faction, politics in its most primitive, unthinking, tribal form. One of the things that makes it primitive is its proclivity for violence. We see this today in the identity of who gets shouted down on campus - left or right? Who gets their tires slashed at election time, their cars keyed, their signs stolen, left or right? And so the answer to the question of what might turn this into a "Hot" civil war is, I am afraid, the mere ability of the violent Left to get away with it.
I can think of several things that might encourage that. One, with us already, is the willingness of clearly partisan media to ignore or excuse acts of violence on the part of those whose cause they tend to view sympathetically. Another is the systematic disarmament of the enemies of the Left. Those who think "gun nuts" are the only ones to be concerned about this had better reconsider. Another still is the encouragement of violence by proxy in the form of inflaming sundry grievances on the part of the resentful. Yet another, and perhaps most dangerous of all, is the capture or subversion of state resources toward political violence that is disguised as enforcement of legitimate authority.
It is that last that concerns me the most. When politics at the national level is as tribal as some on the Left appear today we have the very real possibility of turning this "Cold" civil war into a "Hot" one. And inasmuch as the Left has displayed a consistent tendency to presage its acts by accusations toward the Right, one can readily imagine that those who desperately fantasize about a BushCo police state might not flinch at establishing a real one of their own. Those who cannot or choose not to differentiate between their own paranoid imaginings and legitimate abuse are more than capable of the latter.
The Jews found out about all of this in Nazi Germany - systematically divorced from political representation, systematically disarmed, hostile media giving moral sanction to systematic violence against them, and finally systematically murdered by a people so morally confused by then that it seemed justifiable. I invoke the "system" repeatedly here because no one in it bore personal responsibility until it was thrust back upon them at Nuremburg. It was a thoroughly evil fantasy world that manifested itself in the real one. It could happen here.
If it ever does, the resulting Hot Civil War would end up violent beyond imagination. Some on both sides fantasize this with the eagerness born of ignorance. In the comic books the blood is only red ink. In the movies, corn syrup. In the real world, it's blood.
All IMHO and subject to debate as always, of course.
Good enough place to bump this thread.
Shades of 1860 indeed.
And 1929, possibly. And in some ways, Spain before their civil war. With some Balkanization tossed in, Aztlan style.
Well put. I've seen an awful lot of this on this very site.
No eagerness here, just dire warnings. A new CW would be a horror beyond imagining, combining elements of Spain in the 1930s and the Balkans of the 1990s. It would be a disaster. Don’t confuse warnings with desire, that is very foolish, similar to accusing the lookout on the Titanic of wanting to hit icebergs.
Rumor is that nader and paul have talked. You may be looking at this from the wrong direction.
LLS
You ever consider Steyn's line of work?
Very. But it feels nice to have coined the phrase 4 years before Gibson and Steyn.
Paul has not committed to supporting the Republican nominee. Indeed, he has sounded like he will not support the nominee unless he gets it.
Last week a FReeper talked about VP Cheney and the military seizing control if we have another contested election in 2008.
Over the years I've seen FReepers sound confident that the military would disobey orders from the government to take a stand with "righteous Christians" in a second civil war.
It's insanity. And it's this eagerness from both sides that has me worried.
“Many here on FR allude to a looming type of civil war, that society has fractured along invisible fault lines, some dealing with reality and some dealing with rabid liberalism, some along the lines of failed Socialist policies that are trying to be resurrected, even after their utter failure has been exposed.
“In American history this fractionalization of political thought reminds me of 1860, when the fissures of the body politic became deep, undeniable and irreversible.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1882512/posts?page=24#24
John Titor anyone?
Not that I believe Mr. Titor (or whomever), but it seems this whole idea of a CW in America’s future is not new.
1860 is the not yet by five or ten. This coming election could be a Kansas 1855.
Thanks for the link.
That’s some view of the future.
And entirely plausible, too.
There is definitely a Balkanization of America going on. And it is doubly disheartening that BOTH political parties are pushing it—as if they will be immune from the consequences somehow.
And 1929, possibly. And in some ways, Spain before their civil war. With some Balkanization tossed in, Aztlan style.
***Throw in Revelation Chapt13, and it’s like reading tomorrow’s newspaper.
You were ahead of your time.
“Cold Civil War” is such an apt description.
I agree about the eagerness issue - it’s insane for anyone to actually WANT a civil war, considering how bloody our first one was, and that the second will likely be even worse.
As for where the military would put its loyalty, in 1936 Spain and 1973 Chile, they did turn against their respective governments. Then again, there are other cases where the military stood by a liberal regime. We won’t know until it happens, and hopefully it won’t have to come to that.
To make 2008=1860, though, there would need to be two strong challengers to the "major" candidates, and I don't believe Nader OR Paul fill the bill. Furthermore, the left-wing moonbats know very well that Hillary is one of them.
If the GOP nominates a socon, then I think there will be a GOP liberal-RAT conservative "unity" ticket (think Bell-Everett), and there MAY be a right-wing Nader equivalent, as well (think Breckenridge). If the GOP nominates a liberal, there will be a conservative insurgency.
My main point is that the current party system and the increasingly entrepreneurial nature of running for office cannot stand the stresses that are going to be put on it between now and November 2008.
You’ve piqued my interest.
Can you expand on that view? I’m very interested, and I admit, my memory of the pre-Civil War Kansas situation is sketchy.
It's patriotic to be a traitor.
America, 2007 is frighteningly similar to Spain, 1936.
The Soviet-sponsored May Day celebrations drove a lot of conservatives over the edge.
That’s exactly what happened in Chile in 1970. Allende was elected with about 35% of the vote, with the other 65% split between centrist and rightist candidates. And Allende, of course, failed to take a hint and governed as if he’d won in a landslide, ramming radical Marxist policies into government.
I agree.
LLS
I think we will have a battle at the Convention if that is so... it has been decades... but it could be the safety valve that saves us... if needed.
LLS
I don't think there is any current candidate who is acceptable to both factions of the party.
We can count on fraud in many states this coming election. Can we hold it down? Or will it be done as boldly in daylight as in Kansas in those days, or as boldly as Hillary now stands dancing in the rain of Chinese money, with none demanding she be fined and the money claimed as proceeds of criminal and even seditious conspiracy and bribes?
Are we free enough to withstand the Chinese slavers?
BUMP
Thanks for taking the time to educate me on 1855 Kansas.
There was a lot of violence in Kansas as well, if I recall my history.
I agree with you about the fraud issue. It was an issue in 2000, but the GOP was too “gentlemenly” to confront it.
They also failed to do in 2004.
Hillary’s support bases are all in the major cities, whixh are Democratically controlled.
I lived in NJ for many years—election fraud in the inner cities was raised to an art form there.
Then after all of our hard work to overcome the Dems and voter fraud to lect a Republican governor, Christie Todd Whitman, she turned out to be a worthless RINO.
The comment about the “Chinese slavers” and their influence in 2008 is very prescient.
And why not—it worked for them with the last Clinton Presidential candidate.
Allende = Clinton?
IMHO, it would be a mistake to have a third party candidate. That’s how Bubba won the first time around.
I'm sure there are plans to accomplish this, but public opinion and actual policies in recent decades have mostly moved in the other direction.
Concealed carry "shall issue" is now legal in the vast majority of states. 20 years ago Florida was the first state to adopt this policy.
Public support for gun control has dropped a great deal in the same period.
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