In The Future, We Shall All Be Brian Williams!

There was a tempest about a year and a half ago about Brian Williams, NBC's news anchorman on the NBC Evening News, having made statements about his time in a war zone that were not exactly correct. Eventually Brian Williams lost his job, NBC apparently thinking that his credibility had been compromised and no one would take him seriously... even when he was reading scripts for the TV cameras.

During this time, two other individuals' stories about reports from war zones or riot zones came up: that of Bill O'Reilly of Fox and that of Hillary Clinton. Both had related stories that seemed to be at variance with what had actually been possible in the place and time they were at.

I may be mistaken, but no one seemed to bring up PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome; not even merely how people react after traumatic stress, and personally I think being in a helicopter 2 miles away from where people are shooting rockets at other helicopters, or getting off an airplane and hearing automatic gun fire nearby, or being in a hotel in a foreign city in which a large riot is occurring, to be my definition of traumatic stress.

We are indifferent to how stress affects memory, yet we have mightily striven to change our world into a mill of stress where we are ground between the upper and nether millstones of trauma. So we shall not even recognize our own distress for what it is.
In case you don't know, traumatic stress was a major component in the fall of Ancient Rome. It froze people into social norms that were prisons, it gelled their thoughts into mediocre repetitions of the past, it enslaved them to a state religion that had betrayed its Galilean roots.

We have ignored the stress of people who had the dirty end of the stick during the financial crisis and thereafter, we have ignored the stress of people affected by the Iraq War, we have ignored the stress on those affected by Libya, Syria, and all the other little places we love to destabilize.

Liberals now as well as conservatives are buying guns in record numbers. Our president soon-to-be seems to be on the verge of declaring a Crusade to avenge Berlin's truck terror.  And the Wall Street Journal and the Rupert Murdochs of the world want more war, more instability, and more suffering to fight against the disorder caused by stress; they prescribe more trauma to cure trauma!

Soon our Futures will be as corrupted by trauma as the past of our memories are!

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Trauma Dreams

I wrote some nonsense or other during that interlude of 2015 when Brian Williams was being disciplined for his memories of being in helicopters in a war zone and William O'Reilly was also excoriated for slips of memory while in a riot in Argentina.

And PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I know that if I were in a helicopter and another helicopter 3 miles away from me were shot down, I would be traumatized; I would be traumatized being up in a helicopter itself, having a fear of heights and a vast dislike of flying.
Ditto if I were in the middle of an urban riot anywhere.
My memories would be like hash.... something-something on a shingle, as the expression goes.

So the point is that we live in the 21st century...

The Traumatic Era

... real and imagined horrors.

The 20th century was merely real horrors. Now we add imaginaries and action figures of our nightmares.

Back before 9/11, President George W. Bush was pushing for gun controls in his program for Safe Neighborhoods. After 9/11 that all disappeared and the sale of guns began to rise, the Gun Bubble started, and we prepared the Patriot Act entry into the Weaponized Society...

... a society in which all were weaponized against those who were different and dangerous,
... and libertarians were weaponized against the infringements of weaponized governments who were out to get those who were different and dangerous,
... and pretty much everyone's hands are raised against each other.

The Gun Bubble started before President Obama. It started right at the beginning of the century: 2001.

It would be best to begin to understand the role of Trauma and Stress and PTSD in our lives.

New Scientist
The lifelong cost of burying our traumatic experiences
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429941-200-the-lifelong-cost-of-burying-our-traumatic-experiences/

Past trauma can mean not feeling fully alive in the present

The trauma caused by childhood neglect, sexual or domestic abuse and war wreaks havoc in our bodies, says Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score

WHAT has killed more Americans since 2001 than the Afghanistan and Iraq wars? And which serious health issue is twice as likely to affect US women as breast cancer?

The answer, claims psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, lies in what we now understand about trauma and its effects. In his disturbing book, The Body Keeps the Score, he explains how trauma and its resulting stress harms us through physiological changes to body and brain, and that those harms can persist throughout life. Excess stress can predispose us to everything from diabetes to heart disease, maybe even cancer.

Take his two examples. The number of Americans killed by family members exceeds the number that country lost in both wars. But it doesn’t stop there. Imagine the fallout for all who witnessed the murder or likely violence in the years preceding it. And women have double the risk of domestic violence – with the health consequences that brings – as they do of breast cancer.

Van der Kolk draws on 30 years of experience to argue powerfully that trauma is one of the West’s most urgent public health issues. The list of its effects is long: on mental and physical health, employment, education, crime, relationships, domestic or family abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction. “We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable… predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case,” says van der Kolk. When no one wants to hear about a person’s trauma, it finds a way to manifest in their body...

I believe it.

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The Uses Of Barbarity

Zombie Apocalypse Bloodletting?

Why does ISIS conduct so many grisly executions of people, whether they be combatants or villagers? Is it merely for the shock effect that the accompanying videos will have on the West?

That is hardly to be believed. The shock-effect of the ISIS iconography of violence is a side effect, a neat trick that makes it ever so much more appealing to the people behind the executions, but it is doubtful that it is the main purpose of such barbarism, for the shock-effect may increase the push for military intervention, not decrease it.

No.
The main purpose of ISIS' cruel violence to human beings - not to historical artifacts - is to produce soldiers who suffer from PTSD.

The men and women who have committed the atrocities will return home to their own countries; some will be witting agents of destruction, but by far the greater portion of returnees will be unwitting "Manchurian Candidates" who will be haunted by their crimes - not "brainwashed", but rendered compliant to anyone who is able to give them relief - and who will be driven to desperation to find some way to stop the constant revisiting of the horrors they committed.

They will find surcease of pain through talking with ISIS agents, who will counsel them in the therapeutic ways of violence against their neighbors...

One of the goals of the great satanic ISIS to to create an army of the damned stretching across the face of the earth, never resting from their pain, never finding escape from their damnation, ever prey to the unscrupulous manipulation of someone who promises some form of salvation.

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Benighted Twits

That's us.

I just watched Brian Williams interview with Matt Lauer.
Being asked why he told whoppers on late night TV, Mr. Williams answered that it "... must have been ego..."

As soon as I heard that, I put on my glasses (I don't wear them at the computer), turned my arthritic back, and looked right at the TV screen.
I knew that Mr. Williams did not believe in his heart what he was saying. Somebody talked him into some pop psych explanation and understanding of what happened, but it did not "click" with his intellect, but he accepted the explanation, because that's what he had to do.

He reminds me of not only PTSD victims (and PTSD exists on a range of severity and the trauma varies also), but others, such as Wendell Furry, friend of Oppenheimer, who invoked the fifth amendment during the McCarthy Era interrogations. After retirement and the death of his wife, he woke up yelling that the FBI was after him.

I also believe that Bill O'Reilly probably did not knowingly distort reality in his account of being in Argentina.

There is something going on, and we idiots do not understand it.

I really hate seeing a nice guy feel that he has to grovel to a bunch of benighted twits, such as we are.

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