Meditation on Triggers for Civil Religion
Hear me now, believe me later.
Surreal Experience
As an American “military age male”, there have been 3 times in my adult life during which headline news and civil circumstances have left me to feel uncomfortable inside my own skin:
9/11
Election Night 2016
Jan 6th
My dad read a lot of Tom Clancy when I was growing up, so…I read a lot of Tom Clancy growing up.
Pretend you didn’t read a lot of Tom Clancy (easy), and you did watch a lot of The Office (very easy).
You probably agree that Pam and Jim make a cute couple!
Well, imagine reading Hunt for Red October and then trying to picture the actor portraying Jim as Jack Ryan, a CIA desk jockey who eventually becomes POTUS.
You’re welcome, that is what surreal feels like.
Tom Clancy was an insurance broker and frustrated writer when he sold his first of several fiction novels.
He weaved several relevant narratives into his story arcs.
This is a curated set of details from Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan universe, published during the 90’s:
the United Islamic Republic (stand-in for Iran) grooms a sleeper agent who joins the Secret Service in order to assassinate POTUS
after a U.S.-Japan war with casualties, a Japan Airlines pilot, distraught over his son, successfully executes a plane-based terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol
During the ‘73 Yom Kippur war, a nuclear warhead is lost, sold on the black market, and decades later used as a WMD against a high-profile target: the Super Bowl broadcast
Those plot points were the product of a writer armed with nothing more than declassified military briefs, an immersive curiosity, and highly vivid imagination.
I over-slept one Tuesday morning in 2001 and learned about 9/11 from reading AOL Instant Messenger away messages of fraternity brothers and friends.
CNN.com and MSN.com wouldn’t load due to the overwhelming web traffic.
I walked to a TV and stood in my boxers to process the image of one already-collapsed tower.
A housecat mewled between my bare legs.
On 9/11, I experienced the sensation of living in a world imagined by Tom Clancy.
If you read a lot of Tom Clancy, you were casually familiar with military capabilities, grokked inter-agency coordination, and could foresee multiple vectors of threats to the Republic.
If you read a lot of Tom Clancy, 9/11 was a catastrophic failure of imagination by the American civic technostructure.
Tom Clancy had written about multiple over-lapping national security fall-downs, at least one of which resulted in madsad terrorist lads flying planes into high-profile targets.
Someone had written a book describing a jetliner directed at the U.S. Capitol as a form of vengeance coming from a place of trauma and suffering.
Then, someone else read it like it was an inspirational instruction manual.
If a former insurance broker with an over-active imagination could see into the future, then the best and brightest tasked with protecting American citizens needed to check out more library books.
Between Jack Ryan, Admiral Greer, John Clark, and the Navy SEALs, there was a quick and tactical - if fictional - response on the table.
SEAL Team Six is a part of the Tom Clancy universe, as depicted in the novels.
This was literally “a clear and present danger.”
As I picked up the housecat and sat on the couch, what I saw was a failure to imagine failure.
The term “military-age male” is routinely used by military officials in counterinsurgency operations.
The term refers to boys and men over the age of 16, irrespective of whether or not they are actually participating in hostilities.
In a counterinsurgency op, all military-age males may potentially be “combatants.”
Military-age male is not synonymous with combatant, but is used to mark people for differentiated treatment in conflict zones. Male bodies are a shorthand for "combatant" when assessing collateral damage, particularly with regards to drone warfare.
Before and during an op, various systems identify, analyze, calculate, and report back estimates and actual collateral damage of military-age males.
A side-effect of being classified as a military-age male, who also read a lot of Tom Clancy, was witnessing how easily fellow Americans could “otherize” their own.
Inside my own skin, I lived through the experience of my people skeptically viewing me as collateral damage in the War on Terror.
A benefit of being a military-age male was building well-developed muscle memory to pattern-match and denounce all terrorists as inhumane, sociopathic weirdos.
Including domestic terrorists.
As an American military-age male on and after 9/11, for some terrified and insecure people, I would only ever be a “sand n——.”
Inside my own skin, I recognized that certain American bodies have always been viewed as threats and dehumanizing language and behaviors are an instinctive and pathological response of terrified people.
Terrified people are - by definition - insecure.
Stop-Sign on a Sand Bar
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the gift of prophecy, but Apollo cursed her so that no one would believe her predictions.
In December 2015, we spent Christmas in San Diego when I had a Cassandra moment. I could foresee what was going to happen over the next year. Nobody would have believed me.
Five months earlier, a washed-up reality TV host had announced a long-shot run for the presidency.
Two weeks before the holiday, fourteen years after 9/11, the performance artist tweeted out a call to ban people of the Muslim faith from entering the country.
We had driven to Coronado to visit the dog beach and by the afternoon were hungry.
In search of parking to stop and get burgers, we pulled up to a stop-sign. In the lane next to us a woman was driving a Mercedes.
At the cross-walk, a man wearing jeans, a t-shirt with an unbuttoned flannel, and a baseball cap walked in front of us. It was 3pm on a Saturday in Coronado and he was clearly inebriated.
While crossing, he reached the mid-way point. There, he noticed that the driver of the Mercedes next to us happened to be wearing a hijab. The only thing this woman had done was obey a traffic signal.
The man paused, turned to the lady driving the Mercedes, puffed up his chest, and flicked his unbuttoned shirt, as if provoking her to do or say something.
In stunned silence, we watched the scene play out. The drunk guy just turned and moseyed along, likely to sleep it off.
At that point, I could see the future.
The clowny washed-up performance artist was going to win.
Hurt people hurt people.
The clown had given express permission for hurt Americans (those with PTSD, personality disorders, pathologically contrarian tendencies, and a compulsion to hurt) to even more aggressively “otherize” their own.
The phrase "in vino veritas" is a Latin expression that means "in wine, there is truth."
It suggests that a person under the influence of alcohol is more likely to speak their hidden thoughts or be more truthful.
It was now going to be okay, cool, and even encouraged to say the Quiet Part Out Loud, flaunting insecurities and traumas on innocent bystanders.
As Election Night 2016 drifted into midnight, I wrote a post on Facebook, “I can’t believe this is happening.”
That was a lie.
I had been blessed like Cassandra, but cursed because no one would have believed me from watching an interaction at a stop-sign on a sand-bar.
The Coronado experience, the campaign season, and election night were the second time I felt uncomfortable in my own skin.
Catilinarian Vibes
When you study Latin in school, you end up reading a lot about Roman history, culture, and belief systems, because - it turns out - they were the last people to speak in that dead language.
For years, I followed author and 18th century military historian Thomas Ricks on Twitter.
Over the course of 2020, he promoted his book, First Principles, described as as a reflection on role and influence of ancient Greek and Roman thought on the first four American presidents, specifically.
Most of the source material referenced in First Principles is available at Founders Online, hosted by the National Archives.
I placed the order in late December 2020, and received the book in mid-January 2021.
Reading about the influence of Greek and Roman history days after Jan 6th was a surreal experience.
That was the last time I felt uncomfortable in my own skin.
My skin crawled while reading a book that revealed ancient truths.
Ricks draws a vivid picture of critical events from the Roman Republic.
The Revolutionary class of the American Enlightenment referenced Greece and Rome the way we now incorporate memes, GIFS, and emojis into our daily correspondence in messages and on social media.
In an era where “virtue” was valued above everything else, the founders regularly trolled each other by making comparisons to wicked characters from history.
Being labeled “wicked” was the cultural equivalent of comparing someone to Lee Harvey Oswald, O.J. Simpson, Jussie Smollett, Harvey Weinstein, Elon Musk, and Jeffrey Epstein, all wrapped up into one ethos.
Both Catiline and Caesar demonstrated their wicked natures by organizing insurrections against the Roman Republic.
Only Caesar was successful.
In the papers and correspondence of the American founders available online, there are more than 30 references to Catiline.
Catiline attempted a violent - and failed - take-over of the Republic by cobbling together a coalition of veterans of recent armed political street violence, the poor from Roman Flyover Country, and ambitious politicians with stalled careers.
The founders obsessed with wicked actors and were paranoid about flaws in the system of governance which could enable a modern-day Catiline.
They were constantly trying to design a system of governance and principles of the Republic, so it could face an insurrection after a lost election, because the loser was big mad.
The Revolutionary class of the founders were trying to avoid timeline that enabled a Catiline.
The founders were steeped in ancient culture and regularly dragged each other in public and private.
Hamilton wrote that Jefferson represented the Catilines and the Caesars by proposing lawless liberty as a toxic message to the people, feeding delicious but poisonous vibes to make them easier victims and growing a legion of deluded followers.
Kind of like an ancient QAnon.
John Adams called Aaron Burr a Catline, a Bankrupt, an unprincipled Scoundrell, a dam'd Rascall and a Devil.
They were not fans.
The only valid and lawful reason to bring a bunch of zip-ties to the U.S. Capitol is if you are a contractor hired by the General Services Administration to do maintenance work in the building.
Unless you are an unprincipled scoundrel who was also a damned rascal and devil, the terms “zip-tie” and “U.S. Capitol” do not go together in a sentence.
January 6, 2021 was a Catilinarian conspiracy against the American Republic.
The difference between the Roman and American Catiline is that the American Catiline managed to survive his insurrection against the Republic.
The American Catiline still lives rent-free in everyone’s head, making some people’s skin crawl and proposing lawless liberty to others.