Current Music: Intercontinental Music Lab - Oh My Beautiful Problem Child
Whoo. Last few weekends have been busy. The weekdays, not so much. It's like summer vacation, only without money!
Last week I was at the White brothers' Farm Party. What is the Farm Party, you ask? Well, it's exactly what the name implies--a party on a farm! Long story short, due to a horrible family tragedy early in their lives, Alex and Jeremy White inherited a sixty acre piece of land in rural Connecticut, so they have partial ownership of a pleasant little farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere to which they are welcome to invite guests as they please. Since their parents used to hold parties at the farmhouse during their college years, and neither Alex nor Jeremy had the opportunity to do so when they were in college, the brothers White have made up for lost time by turning the Farm Party into an annual tradition. Five or six years from now, when their respective circles of friends are popping out babies and showing up to the farm with sproglings in tow, it will probably become one of those awkward friends-of-family events that Junior will be making excuses to avoid every year. But, for now, it's still just a bunch of early-to-mid-twentysomethings who met in college sitting around a bonfire by a beautiful manmade pond, skipping stones and smoking weed and talking about President Obama's foreign policy. Very 1960s. I wasn't sure how I was going to handle a party of this duration considering that twenty minutes is long enough for me to get uncomfortable at a typical party--four days seems like the epitome of indolent excess--but in this very relaxed, casual environment, in the company of wonderful people I knew well and had missed dearly, it was actually pretty manageable.
I spent most of the party talking to Oberlin friends ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) magicmethyl, Matt, and Peter about theology and American politics. You'd think that with all the drugs going around (of which I did not partake, save a judicious amount of alcohol) it'd degenerate into the kind of stereotypical bullshit flinging contest you see in stoner movies ("You know...God is, like, really big." "Whoa...that's deep."), but given that these were all very intelligent people who were bringing some real world experience and a great deal of book learning to the table, it wasn't like that at all. Matt is an intern on Capitol Hill, and has kept a close eye on what's going on in American politics; magicmethyl is a chemistry grad student who has been keeping tabs on U.S. Army recruiting practices at his school; and Peter (who taught the taekwando exco) is a graduate history of science student who has read more books on modern anthropology than I knew existed. What's fascinating is that, alcohol excepted, the drugs didn't seem to inhibit anyone's ability to participate in reasoned intellectual debate--they just made the emotional reactions far more intense. Like how one dude, tripping on half a hit of LSD while also smoking a bong and nursing a can of Pabst, thought it was hilarious that a tiny tribal cult in the Middle East would become the biggest religion in the world, enough so that a guy raised in Taiwan to syncretist parents could become a Christian millenialist in the American tradition. I mean, I thought it was interesting, too...but this guy was literally falling over laughing. Falling over, and laughing so hard he was crying.
Tangentially: I find it funny that magicmethyl doesn't do drugs, considering that he's a grad student in organic chemistry specializing in toxic organisms. :D
Odd behavior aside, the discussion was less of the caliber of high school kids discussing pop philosophy in the parking lot and more of the kind that accidentally founds nations. We spent most of Sunday debating about whether or not, from a legal and ethical perspective, the United States government should attempt to take out Osama bin Laden with a surgical strike, without first bringing him to trial, if the CIA discovered his exact location in Pakistan. Matt was for, magicmethyl was against. Considering that we're all Obies, I was expecting naive left-wing wishy-washiness ("Even it saves thousands of lives, I cannot condone violence for any reason!"), but the debate was surprisingly very well grounded in reality. magicmethyl, a self-professed pacifist, argued that murdering anyone, even a foreign terrorist leader, without bringing him to trial was situational ethics, sent the world the wrong message and would set a dangerous precedent for political assassinations in the future. He was firmly opposed to any kind of military action on foreign soil that did not take into account the ramifications on American foreign policy and the sphere of international relations as a whole, and concerned about the possibility of civilian casualties (for which he believed there could be no justification). Matt, having worked closely with the Democratic Party and the decisions of the senators he worked for, argued from Washingtonian pragmatism that Osama was already guilty beyond reasonable doubt, that passing up the opportunity would (from a consequentialist perspective) endanger more American lives, and that the ethics of foreign policy is inherently situational--that there is nothing to be gained from applying regional legal precedent to international law, seeing how foreign parties are under no obligation to observe domestic ethical standards. This became an animated discussion on whether or not there should be a distinction between legal and ethical precedent, and exactly what the role of the military should be in protecting American interests on foreign soil. In a lot of ways, with the relaxed atmosphere and the respectfulness of the discourse, it was like watching an informal version of a panel debate, with magicmethyl and Matt civilly, informedly, and intelligently presenting each side, and me interjecting every now and then to speak to the issue (as an outside observer and direct beneficiary of American foreign policy, given that the U.S. Navy Ninth Fleet has been the one thing keeping China from invading Taiwan for the last few decades), and Peter jumping in every now and then to say, "You know, there's a book I read, some title by some author, about exactly what you guys are talking about, and the author presents this opinion on he subject..." We'd also get color commentary from folks coming in and out of the discussion, like Charlie, who is Matt's best friend and also working on Capitol Hill and has heard all of Matt's rhetoric before, and Glen, who is like Silent Bob in that he never speaks but when he does it is amazingly profound, and judgewargrave, who would seize every opportunity to make an udder pun. Ha ha. Get it. Udder pun. (You won't, unless you know judgewargrave personally.)
It's exactly what I wish CNN's Crossfire had been--a debate format based on rational, respectful discussion on a complex topical issue by people speaking from a position of knowledge or experience. Shame that Crossfire degenerated into a series of straw-man-burning sessions between a pair of lunatics from opposite ends of the political fringe, until it was ultimately cancelled after Jon Stewart pointed this out as a guest on the show. magicmethyl is not nearly annoying enough to be Tucker Carlson, anyway.
As is true of any good debate, I discovered a lot about what I believe, that weekend. For one, I've realized I'm not a pacifist. I agree with the idea of world peace but I don't think pacifism, on a foreign policy level, is effective in achieving that objective--it only works if everyone else does it, and then it's all over when one person discovers he can wield a lot of power if he picks up a large stick. Neville Chamberlain didn't succeed in averting World War II in part because the Nazis knew he would not be serious about committing to war. Sometimes the passive threat of force is the best way to prevent that force from ever being used--it doesn't matter how many missiles you buy to deter North Korea from nuking Seoul if you're Japan and nonintervention is written into your national constitution. Good fences make good neighbors. The point of stationing your military abroad is not to invade foreign powers just for the hell of it but to convince them you might, so that they will think twice before moving in on your civilians and your other national interests--it's not to establish a balance of power but to enforce rules of engagement, so that a balance of power does not become the sole factor in preventing bloody, opportunistic WWI or WWII-style land grabs. I've been thinking about how the typical military tour of duty is four years of doing nothing interspersed with a total of maybe fifteen minutes of actual combat, and how the purpose of a garrisoned soldier is not to shoot people but to deter other people from shooting, and how all the best generals are the ones who resolve conflicts without firing a shot. It makes sense, from a certain sort of perspective--like the karate instructor who teaches you on the first day of class that the purpose of everything you learn from that day on is to prevent you from ever having to use it. And there's no good way of moving away from that, at the moment, that involves everyone laying down their arms. The implied threat of force is more than the possibility of invasion--it's one of the biggest diplomatic cards in a country's hand, and without it you have no power on the negotiating table, including and especially if what you are negotiating for is peace. (Paradoxically enough.) Just look at how much Taiwan, as a country that barely has enough military resources to devote to domestic-based defense, has had to concede in negotiations regarding eventual reunification with the mainland, if only because not making those concessions means Taiwan gets bombed off the face of the earth. Note also how, controversially, rumors of the recent development of Taiwanese Sky Bow II medium-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile systems capable of hitting Shanghai and Hong Kong has finally kept Taiwan from being backed into a corner at the negotiating table. It's cold--but the alternative is even worse. Let's pray that the existence of these weapons will prevent them from ever being used.
(Famous last words, I know. Nukes are a different story altogether, because if anyone starts a nuclear exchange, everyone loses...and we did bring up at the Farm Party that the Nobel Prize is named after the inventor of dynamite because he believed that, upon seeing how terrible a weapon it was, all the world's governments would abandon warfare entirely. Ha.)
And, yeah, it was kind of a shock to learn from hard-sciences grad students that there is no scientific method--there is no single unified standard for performing experiments even in a given field. What the hell, scientists. I can't believe I've been lied to all these years.
The rest of what happened at the Farm Party is worth writing even more than I did above, but frankly there's not much to say. There were long hikes into the woods. There was fishing. There was badminton and capture the flag and volleyball and Chrononauts and Apples to Apples and Settlers of Catan, and Charlie shooting at cans of Pabst with a BB gun. There were jokes about horror movies, because, well, you get a bunch of young attractive people out into an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and look what happens. There were little brown toads the size of my thumb that gurgled about the grass looking for love, and families of Canada geese who fawned adorably over their goslings and shit everywhere, and a frighteningly lifelike cardboard coyote silently judging us from beyond the fence. There were late-night viewings of Terminator and Ghostbusters, both of which were more far misogynistic than anyone remembered (several people drunkenly shouted "COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE" during the Terminator sex scene, which was subsequently followed by "LIVE WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO COME"), and Blues Brothers, and charcoal-grilled veggie burgers and Pabst and hot dogs, and gossip about people we remembered from school, and warm wistful snuggly moments between people who wished they had dated at Oberlin but now realized it was too late.
I introduced prussianblueuu to the Nintendo DS! I've bestowed her with either a wonderful hobby or a terrible curse. Let's see how that works out. :D
I guess it was also interesting to discover vicariously what LSD is like. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd never do that stuff--I have heard enough horror stories about folks getting flashbacks decades after dropping their last hit, and my natural brain chemistry is fucked up enough without drugs of any sort. But talking to Jeremy's friends while they were tripping, listening to them narrate their experiences to me with unsettlingly deep interest--it's not like the movies portray it at all. I was under the impression that it was like staring into a brightly lit tie-dye shirt while standing inside one of those centrifuge things at an amusement park, and who knows, maybe at the right dosage or with your eyes closed it's like that--but that's not what Jeremy's friends described me. What struck me was that, unlike what you'd expect from a hallucinatory drug, their experiences were consistent--they were seeing the same thing when they looked at the wallpaper on the far end of the room. No images from deep within their psyches, no nightmares from their individual, subjective experiences--just what they uniformly described as a sort of vibratingness to the world. It didn't fool their brains into thinking they were seeing something that they were not--there was no change to their eyes or the parts of their brains that control visual input. They could see the wallpaper exactly the same way I did. What was remarkable was that what they were seeing was superimposed on top of it--like they had another layer of perception running parallel to the typical experience of seeing, and aside from that their eyes had simply forgotten about the distinction between imagination and reality. They'd burst into laughter as they parallel-perceived each other sinking into the sofa or floating above the ground, while still being perfectly aware that nothing was actually moving, that it was the drugs that were producing their altered perceptions and that nothing that they were seeing was real. Noticeably, the drugs were no impediment to their ability to move around a room cluttered with beer bottles without knocking over anything, nor their ability to be polite and respectful to each other (despite an unnerving and intense interest in absolutely everything and a tendency to find the most mundane events gutbustingly funny). Not really something I would ever want to try, if only if because it's far more entertaining to watch other people do it while I'm clean.
So yeah, Farm Party...it was, in retrospect, kind of like Cedar Campus. Yes. That's precisely what it was--a secular retreat. I'm happy I went. |
