barbarian: noun…a member of a group of people from a very different country or culture that is considered to be less socially advanced and more violent than your own…Cambridge Dictionary
“Almost Nothing They Can Do” Pete Hegseth, 29th United States Secretary of Defense (now officially retitled Secretary of War, so, I guess 59th Secretary of War ) and former co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, while claiming that Iran’s defense industrial base is “nearly completely destroyed.”
We went to the New Cuyama Buckhorn Cafe last week. Actually, we went to the Carizzo Plain with Aston and Eileen to see a superbloom, and the Buckhorn, in the next valley over, is the closest interesting place to stay. The superbloom was mostly burned out, as Michele had predicted, but it was still nice to get out. And both the Carizzo Plain and the Cuyama Valley are out there, out there defined as being relatively empty of what we call civilization.
At the New Cuyama Buckhorn Cafe, during cocktails, or maybe post-dinner digestifs, we got into a conversation about hunting with the bartender, who was a goat herder. I’m against hunting. He was passionate, almost spiritual, about it. When I was a kid, like most kids my age and demographic, I had a .22 rifle. I shot squirrels with it, and years later, I went dove hunting with a borrowed 12-gauge shotgun. I didn’t like it. It turns out that I don’t like killing animals. But the bartender not only liked it, but was passionate about hunting.
Well, like killing animals is not the way he put it, and he would probably not agree with the sentiment put that way. Still, either way, or any way, either of us put it, we strongly disagreed. But, one thing we did agree to agree on is that it is morally better to acknowledge the carnage we are doing when we kill an animal up close than just blithely walking into a market and buying a piece of meat, ignoring that our delicious dinner was once a living, breathing animal.
Another story that, I think, is connected to the first story. In early May 2010, Michele and I retraced, in reverse, an historic route used by the Bennett-Arcane party to escape, as they put it, Death Valley in 1849. We were having a hard time getting up and over a slick, steep granite slab, and we got into a conversation with a couple of guys in a Chevy 4×4 who were trying to help us and also trying to get up the drop-off. I wrote about it in a post I made in early May 2010, and I’m just quoting it here.
The driver of the Chevy was a Predator pilot, stationed near Las Vegas. According to the company brochure, the “Predator is a long-endurance, medium-altitude unmanned aircraft system for surveillance and reconnaissance.” However, Predator is also armed with Hellfire missiles, and our new friend, here on for a weekend adventure, spends his work days – in an air-conditioned building near Las Vegas – killing unsuspecting terrorists in Afghanistan. These terrorists are not really terrorists; they are unsophisticated, dirt-poor tribesmen, many with poor weapons and bad eyesight, who pride themselves on their manly warrioriness, and killing them, as Michele said, from a place near Vegas just seems wrong. But he was helping us, so it wasn’t that wrong.
It is a common belief that people in combat experience PTSD, depression, and anxiety because of the constant fear of being wounded or, even, killed. But drone pilots, even those thousands of miles away from danger, like our friend with the Chevy truck and an easy chair in an air-conditioned room, get PTSD at the same rate as soldiers on the front line. I think it is the killing of people, the act of killing our fellow humans, that gives people in combat PTSD.
