By Myles Ludwig
I’m in a melancholy mood today.
Two things have been on my mind this week. When I thought enough about them, I realized they were the same: we don’t know what we don’t know.
That much-mocked Rumsfeldian tautology has resurfaced with a vengeance this week and it applies as much to the current Syrian situation as it does to the profoundly personal questions of life, aging and death.
First, I have to admit that I’ll gladly chew up the words of my last Sunday column about the possibility of a military strike on Syria in which I took a swipe at President Obama. The results of this past week have shown that, not only was there a third way to resolve the immediate threat of a Buschian preemptive, which, in light of the current situation and its potential for horrible and extended ramifications, just seems nuts.
But, dang, now we know the idea did not just magically appear, but had been lying on the dining room table like cold mashed potatoes and overcooked Brussels sprouts for quite a while. Even discussed long before Kerry’s so-called “off the cuff” remark. A few knowledgeable political commentators revealed they had known about it all along, but did not tell us. Why?
Anyway, most of the media — and me — had egg splashed in our face.
We did not know what we did not know. It reminds me of those October days of long ago when we seemed like we were on the precipice of the Cuban missile crises and I walked across the hallowed quad of the University of North Carolina on a moody, rainy Chapel Hill night, fearing the world I knew was about to end.
Remember those Cold War days of brinkmanship?
I recall being present at a speech Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered to a packed Harriet Himmel hall on a visit he made to Florida several years ago. One phrase stuck with me: an American’s sense of history extends only as far back as breakfast.
Will we never learn to believe none of what we hear and only half of what we see?
Were all the major players in cahoots all along? Just lying in weeds for the right moment?
The present gambit isn’t great, but it enables President Obama to save face, appearing analytical, tough-minded, a bit belligerent and simultaneously peace loving; lets Congress off the hook for now; saves Assad’s face, not to mention his nether regions, while legitimizing his reign for now; and transforms the muscle-flexing Vladimir Putin into a heroic figure riding the Russian cavalry to the rescue, and changing the conversation to chastise us for our exalted notion of “American exceptionalism,” a deeply held bit of national narcissism that smacks of our earlier romance with the jingolicious idea of “manifest destiny.”
Conspiracy theorists will certainly believe the crisis was manufactured to benefit everyone except the beleaguered Syrians involved in their bloody civil war.
They might be right. As Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
The other thought I’ve been considering is about how we view our lives and the aging process through a similar telescopic lens. We fool ourselves daily with the idea that there is no termination point ahead, no stop sign. That keeps the motors running, even when sputtering. No dog knows its life will end, at least we don’t think so. And every culture is sui generis, seeing that view in a way that suits itself.
As a pre-boomer, I am heading into the unknown. I have plenty of company of course. We are trotting along towards the inevitability of dementia, if we live long enough. There are exceptions, of course. But for most of us, our memory is being sucked out daily, our personality vacuumed out dust bunny by dust bunny, so that we end up on the event horizon, falling into a black hole where the concept of self has little or no meaning and we are reduced to living in a primal state of functioning or non functioning organs.
It’s a dismal prospect, to have come so far as to amount to so little; to gain mental acuity while losing physical strength until both reach the point of diminished returns. As Norman Mailer once said not long before he passed away: I eat less, drink less, write less. Soon I will be reduced to a dot.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.