The Most Dangerous Season

I remember the fall of 1983 well.  I was in twelfth grade.  The dreary ordeal of high school would finally end in the spring.  I didn’t pay much attention to the world beyond my small town, didn’t know much about the world beyond.

Aside from the routine of schoolwork, I was engrossed in the pop culture of the moment—music, movies, the occasional book.  The Second British Invasion was underway, and the airwaves buzzed with synthpop.  But there was one artist who dominated the radio and a nascent cable network called Music Television that year.  We had heard the first singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller the previous fall, and subsequent tracks would keep hitting through the end of the year.  We had watched MJ’s electrifying performance of “Billie Jean” on the Motown 25 television special a few months before.  We eagerly anticipated the first airing of the video of the title track, which would finally arrive in December.  That year’s yearbook would even feature a small section devoted to the Thriller phenomenon.

But there was a larger world beyond mine and that of my classmates.  Although we were aware of the ongoing Cold War, it did not register as important to us.  Our teachers never discussed it save for a passing reference toward the end of our required U.S. history class.  We were required to view the TV movie The Day After, which would air that November.  I admit it scared the hell out of me, but it quickly faded from memory as smaller concerns again filled my mind (such as the “Thriller” video).  Looking back, I should have taken a good look around.

That fall brought a number of incidents which should have driven home the precarious nature of the U.S.-Soviet standoff other than a network TV special with cheesy special effects.  These went beyond the boilerplate rhetoric emanating from Washington and Moscow.  That fall saw events that exacerbated tensions to the point where the world came closer to a thermonuclear war than it had at any time after the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

There was the stuff that was reported in the news.  In September a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air 747 that was off course due to a navigational error; Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia was among the dead.  The following month, U.S. forces invaded Grenada, whose pro-Cuban, pro-Soviet revolutionary regime had descended into a factional coup.  (This came on the heels of the unrelated truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.)  In protest of the Grenada intervention, a fringe group called the May 19^th Communist Organization planted a bomb in the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol.  It detonated after the Senate had adjourned for the day; no one was hurt. 

Then, there was what wasn’t reported until much later.  The truly scary stuff.  At the end of September, the duty officer at the Serpukov-15 nuclear control center near Moscow was alerted to incoming NATO ballistic missiles.  Tensions had been building for the past two years as the U.S. expanded its nuclear arsenal in West Germany; the first Pershing II missiles would be fielded by year’s end.  The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, noticed the suspected attack indicated only a handful of incoming missiles rather than the expected full onslaught.  Petrov correctly deduced a malfunction of the Oko early warning satellites and did not order a retaliatory response.  This decision earned Petrov a reprimand and effectively ended his military career.  It would be many years before he would receive the recognition he deserved.

That wasn’t the only close call.  November saw that year’s NATO Able Archer exercise.  Able Archer 83 was a command post exercise that simulated the precipitating events which would in turn lead to DEFCON 1 and the opening moves of a nuclear war.  The Soviet leadership watched what they misconstrued as an actual ramp-up to an actual nuclear attack.  Operation RYAN had been stood up in 1981 at the behest of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov to monitor NATO war preparations.  Signals intelligence through RYAN led Andropov, by then the General Secretary, and the rest of the Soviet leadership to believe Able Archer was the precursor of a surprise attack. 

Later revelations would help explain their apprehensions.  It seems that nearly 20,000 U.S. troops were airlifted into Europe ahead of Able Archer, an airlift which required 170 aircraft flying under radio silence.  NATO headquarters moved into its wartime bunkers.  Intelligence also indicated that NATO was modifying its nuclear release procedures.

Several factors may explain why Able Archer 83 didn’t touch off World War III.  There was some skepticism within the KGB, according to double agent Oleg Gordievsky and other KGB officers who published memoirs well after the fact.  Andropov was in poor health—he would die three months later—and may have been hesitant to mount a preemptive attack despite his longtime suspicions of Western intentions.  Or it might have been that the U.S. Air Force commander in the theater advising NATO leaders not to respond to the reactive Warsaw Pact military buildup.  Some of the decision process on both sides may remain unknown to both historians and the public.

Much of this did not come to light for years, though subsequent releases of classified documents have expanded our understanding.  I can only express relief that nothing escalated to the point of war.  And that I was blissfully ignorant of it all at the time.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Eyes Open

I underwent my first faculty evaluation for an online class last year.  We’re evaluated by our department chair every four years; my last eval was pre-pandemic when I was mainly teaching in a live classroom.  These evaluations, on ground or online, include an anonymous student survey on their take on my performance.

It’s easier for me in a live classroom where I can gauge the students’ reactions to me in real time.  I can pretty much predict how they will describe my performance.  Online, I’m blind.  So, it was with a frisson of trepidation that I read over the survey comments.

The written comments are optional, which means they are usually left by students who either love you or hate you.  The latter category of comments included a disparaging description of me as “woke.” 

Woke is a funny choice of a snarl word, since it never really caught on among liberals and progressives.  The only occasion I remember using it in the classroom was a few years ago.  I had slept poorly the night before, and that day’s talk was not one of my best.  After a couple of stumbles, I paused and apologized and told them why.  I facetiously remarked that I should be more woke.

No, woke the way it’s used by conservatives is just part of their funhouse mirror vision of how they think people to their left are.  In the case of the critical student, he (it was probably a he) meant that I had failed to cater to his prejudices.  Concerning the course, there is really very little ideological content.  If my material has a flaw, it is that it is maybe a little more rah-rah about the status quo than I actually feel about it.  If it is woke in this student’s estimation, it’s likely it’s because I acknowledge the existence of non-whites, that we took our land from its indigenous occupants, that slavery and Jim Crow actually happened, that police violence is visited most often on Blacks and other people of color, that LGBTQ people have rights, and so forth. 

It is disconcerting for me the way each of us lives within our own media-driven ideological bubbles.  I grew up in an era where there were only three television networks (four if you counted PBS), most moderately large cities had at least two daily newspapers, AM talk radio was fringe, and the internet was in the future.  There was already a deepening rift between left and right, but there weren’t cable news and social media to channel extremist ideas unrooted in fact.  I am sure that the present climate of mutual mistrust explains the distaste for my classroom statements among some of my distance learning students, and that the quasi-anonymous online environment where teacher and student will never meet personally emboldens them to proclaim their beliefs with little concern for their potential offensiveness.  Pity.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Cultural Desert

My dwindling “Saved” queue is finally at zero.  My music streaming service updated its site and now offers fewer of my favorite musicians and tracks.  My preferred podcast platform is going dark at the end of August.

It seems that some of the best cultural experiences the internet offers are drying up.  The hardest hit for me is Netflix’s discontinuing its DVD service.  The funny thing about that development was its streaming service offered better content 10-12 years ago.  Particularly during the time when Netflix partnered with Starz, I could access all kinds of obscure titles in streaming format such as films produced by the East German studio DEFA.  As Netflix transitioned into content creation, its streamed titles interested me less and the reason I continued to subscribe was mainly for the DVDs.

I’m not sure what I will do now.  I read recently that TCM had cut its staff.  Programming quality there seems to be slipping, and I watch that channel less frequently than I did before and during the pandemic. 

A casual reading of recent news coverage surrounding our culture industries points to COVID as a culprit.  Movies and music helped me through the lockdown, and I know I wasn’t alone.  When it came to music, I listened to familiar favorites, discovered new artists, and fell in love all over again those I hadn’t listened to in ages.

The spike in demand for streamed music increased the value of copyrights owned by songwriters and recording artists while yielding comparatively little return in the form of royalties, which in turn led to what I will call The Great Catalog Sell Off of 2021.  (Bruce Springsteen was reportedly the biggest winner, receiving more than a half-billion dollars for his body of work.  The buyer was Sony; I think they can afford it.) 

The passing of copyrights from what must have been scores of songwriters and recording artists into the hands of a narrow range of new owners is ominous.  It’s true that owning the rights to numerous catalogs afford economies of scale which make streaming profitable in a way it would not be for individual artists.  But it also means that un- or less-profitable artists or their works are more likely to be withdrawn.  I hope this prediction is wrong, but my tapered listening diet of late is anecdotal evidence in that direction.

Time was, there was money to be made from “long tails” marketing to a clientele who wanted niche goods and services.  Online commerce would lower the transaction cost incurred selling to small groups of customers.  I used to believe that.  But like a lot of conventional wisdom, this may not have been true in the long run if ever.  With the growing trend toward concentrated ownership in media, less mainstream consumers will be shut out.

Concentration of ownership in any industry is not a good outcome.  It compels media platforms and outlets to dumb down and reduce the diversity of content available to the viewer or listener.  In the business world, you have to positively spin changes even when they don’t benefit or work against the consumer.  I’m not convinced and you shouldn't be either.  New is not necessarily improved. 

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Spectator Sport

It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time.  I’m not sure which night it was—March 19^th or 20^th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.

I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003.  I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces.  The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on.  The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.

The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety.  I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it.  The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome.  The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.

And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold.  One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off.  Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.

The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program.  I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

Part of me wanted to believe that last part.  But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq.  I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences.  Seems quaint looking back.

I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution.  The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it.  Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support.  Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.

The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years.  We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal.  It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on. 

But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention.  Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.  Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones.  Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.

There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders.  The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency).  The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever.  Iraq ranks low on many human development indices.  (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)

The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students.  There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes.  Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time.  Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.).  Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar