“It was a miserable damn performance, just like it always is. These people won’t listen. They make the same mistake over and over again in the same way”.

— John Paul Vann after the battle of Ap Bac in South Vietnam, 1963

One of the great themes of the ongoing unraveling is the establishment’s tendency toward failure and the choice taken — usually with great cynicism — to adopt over-elaborate and punitive strategies in the place of simpler, less destructive alternatives. At the same time, this failure strategy is almost always hidden behind a scrim of public theater which by itself indicates the managers understand the choices yet purposefully make the wrong ones.

Administrative failure isn’t new or a monopoly good of the current regime, nor is it entirely the by-product of our current unraveling. Failure is the 600-year-old stepchild of modernity. Along with contrived ‘scarcity’, failures of past regimes are offered as reasons to justify modernity’s expansion into every area of human- and non-human life. Without failures there are no reasons for more ambitious follow-ups. The cans are kicked; the latest- and greatest expedients are duct-taped into place on top of all the others. Complexity isn’t designed, it grows like a fungus; as failures emerge there are more complex responses which reveal more failures which in turn give birth to more complexity.

Permanently eliminating the sources or cause for failure is always judged to be ‘costly’ or ‘difficult’, it ‘takes too long’ or discomforts wealthy clients. Structural adjustments are rejected when the choice endangers some precious aspect of modernity. Because making minor reforms risks the entire enterprise, we hesitate and the status-quo becomes institutionalized.

Failure inhabits military adventures gone awry, policies that pitch the small- but self-sufficient enterprises into competition with gigantic- but credit dependent varieties, decrees which encourage evasions of the law rather than compliance, processes that demand the worst from people other than their best. Failure emerges from money- and credit policies that enrich lenders at the expense of borrowers, support asset prices rather than incomes, that sacrifice the future to the insatiable present. Waiting for us at the end of the road is the entropic failure for which there are no possible antidotes; the light at the end of the tunnel is a grave marker. “Here lies modernity” … when the entire edifice of patched and tattered expedients collapses with a sigh of exhaustion and disillusion.

The ‘Modern America’ the world’s citizens inhabit in 2013 sprang almost fully- formed from the US’s victory over Germany and Japan in World War Two. We defeated two military superpowers in two different parts of the world at once; this was our first- and defining, ‘If we can put a man on the Moon’ moment. Americans were competent; we did things right, we were efficient yet (somewhat) humane and civilized. Our armies triumphed without massacring prisoners or raping and pillaging, they gave candy to the enemy’s children. America succeeded in spite of internal differences and a crushing economic environment. After saving the world from Nazism and Japanese militarism Americans believed they could do anything including remake the debauched old world in their own, atomic-powered, tail-finned image … and to the large degree they succeeded.

America’s failure regime emerged twenty years later in Vietnam; which gave birth to ‘Blunder, American-style’. Vietnam war is the template for our subsequent- and ongoing failures: policy-making as play; denial, the over-commitment to faulty premises and propagandistic marketing, institutionalized stupidity and sadism, fetishized violence and technology, complexity for its own sake; the refusal to consider limits, preening arrogance and intellectual dishonesty; colossal/heedless waste of irreplaceable social capital — Americans’ narcissistic idealism and naive patriotism — all of this for non-existent gains. Ambitious, corrupt men set about to satisfy trivial personal ambitions; even as they failed, the country was broken: red versus blue, old vs. young, hawk versus dove, urban against rural, liberal/conservative. Beavis vs. Butthead … The great failure in Vietnam sits like Carlos Castaneda’s death upon the left shoulder of the United States. Everything the US does and has done since 1968 has been a desperate effort on the part of both the establishment and culture to re-write history; to find a different outcome to the Vietnam War. Continue reading →