Obama and Syria

By Wade Lee Hudson

When, with Syria on my mind, I posted “Manufactured Crises” last week, I did not address how such crises are resolved, partly because it’s hard to generalize. And sometimes they spiral out of control and those who precipitate them suffer unforeseen consequences. By and large, however, they get resolved short of total catastrophe and Cable News moves on to the next feeding frenzy.

So it is no surprise to me that we already have a possible breakthrough with the Russian proposal to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control.

When, thanks to a Facebook post by Norman Roberts, I read Wayne Bomgaars’ “President Obama’s Brilliant Strategy No One Seems To Recognize” yesterday before the Russian overture surfaced, I sensed that Bomgaars may have been largely correct. Now I believe his analysis has even more credence.

He argues:

So why then does our president appear to be beating the drums of war? The simple answer is he is now regarded as a hawkish leader before the US and the world. And he does so without having to fire a shot. He appears wholeheartedly in favor of a strike and is playing the part well. The hawk stands upon his perch without lifting a talon as Congress now takes any and all responsibility for lack of action on the part of the US. And during this entire debacle, he even manages to make republicans come out as anti-war; something even no one thought possible only a month ago.

I shared the link on my Facebook timeline, which prompted Justice St. Rain to share it as well. Overall the comments on those two posts, the comments on the FreakOutNation Facebook page, and how widely the post is circulating on the Web indicate that Bomgaars’ argument is credible.

Regardless, I remained convinced about the need to avoid getting caught up in the media’s addiction to crisis. In his 2010 book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & So Much More, Barry Glassner chronicled how our society foments fear about the future, rather than nurture healing in the present. About this excellent book, the publisher states:

In the age of 9/11, the Iraq War, financial collapse, and Amber Alerts, our society is defined by fear. So it’s not surprising that three out of four Americans say they feel more fearful today then they did twenty years ago. But are we living in exceptionally dangerous times? In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner demonstrates that it is our perception of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk. Glassner exposes the people and organizations that manipulate our perceptions and profit from our fears, including advocacy groups that raise money by exaggerating the prevalence of particular diseases and politicians who win elections by heightening concerns about crime, drug use, and terrorism. In this new edition of a classic book—more relevant now than when it was first published—Glassner exposes the price we pay for social panic.

I first encountered the concept of “manufactured crisis” as a tool of social control decades ago in At the Edge of History by William Irwin Thompson. Reflecting on the Syria crisis, the other day I looked for some of his recent work and found a February 9, 2013 essay titled “Thinking Otherwise: Cancer of Consciousness.” In this essay, he refers favorably to Naomi Klein, who presents a similar argument about manufactured crises in her Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Thompson comments:

In the cultural shift from the print media to electronics with the Internet and the World Wide Web we are seeing a new disease being transmitted along the channels of communication. People no longer speak to one another and listen, any more than pornography addicts love and make love to another person. People scream at one another and they rant in their chosen obsessional fixation...

He concludes:

Some of humanity has made the spiritual transition into Teilhard de Chardin’s Mystical Body of Christ evolving toward the Omega Point, while others are stuck in the sicknesses of religions rotting in the stinking compost heap of the disintegrations of civilizations. If you work to imagine the future, you just might see the present.  

The Apocaplypse is here and now and the Kingdom of Heaven is within, blooming without.

In response to “Manufactured Crises,” Shyrl McCormick wrote:

Thank you for this!  Your thinking and observations are very akin to Margaret Wheatley's So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World.

Wheatley states:

This book contains maps of how we ended up in a world nobody wants—overtaken by greed, self-interest, and oppressive power—the very opposite of what we worked so hard to create. These maps look deeply into the darkness of this time so that we can develop the insight we need to contribute in meaningful ways. 

This book provides maps for the future, how we can transform our grief, outrage, and frustration into the skills of insight and compassion to serve this dark time with bravery, decency, and gentleness. 

As warriors for the human spirit, we discover our right work, work that we know is ours to do no matter what. We engage wholeheartedly, embody values we cherish, let go of outcomes, and carefully attend to relationships. We serve those issues and people we care about, focused not so much on making a difference as on being a difference.

I resonate and plan to read this book.