Author: Robert Koehler

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Opinion The Last Word

Disconnecting War from Consequence

Militarism in the U.S. continues, unabated. (Photo: Michele Ursi | Dreamstime.com)

Twenty-two years ago, Congress put sanity up for a vote. Sanity lost in the House, 420-1. It lost in the Senate, 98-0.

Barbara Lee’s lone vote for sanity — that is to say, her vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force resolution, allowing the president to make war against … uh, evil … without congressional approval — remains a tiny light of courageous hope flickering in a chaotic world, which is on the brink of self-annihilation. Militarism keeps expanding, at least here in the U.S. If there’s a problem out there, option one is to kill it quickly. Problem solved! This simplistic (and utterly false) mindset, which is always present — the companion of fear — may have a grip on American politics like never before, as demonstrated in the recent debt-ceiling standoff, in which President Biden came to an agreement with the Republicans that social spending will be slashed but “defense” spending must continue to expand.

You know. It’s the only thing that’s truly crucial. Poverty? Collapsing infrastructure? Underfunded schools? Climate disaster? We can worry about that stuff later, but as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy explained to reporters recently: “Look, we’re always looking where we could find savings … but we live in a very dangerous world. I think the Pentagon has to actually have more resources.” In other words, the U.S. is not a country with the maturity to discuss and analyze complex issues, such as the future of the world. Hey, it’s dangerous out there! It’s full of terrorists and dictators. That’s all you need to know. “Weak on defense” is the equivalent of “wants to defund the police” — a politician’s death sentence by advertising. No matter how much hell war creates — no matter how many families it displaces, no matter how many children it kills — we’ve got to be ready to wage it, you know, whenever we feel like it. And the mainstream media, in its basic coverage, doesn’t question this or delve into a complex analysis of the world.

But we are still a country that is slowly and complexly evolving — no matter that the powers that be, for the most part, don’t know it. Let’s return to that AUMF vote, passed in the wake of the 9/11 devastation. Barbara Lee, whose father was in the Army, serving in both World War II and the Korean War, knew about the human costs of war. After 9/11 she was deeply uncertain what the nation’s immediate response should be. She attended the memorial service at the capital, held the day of the vote (and attended by four former presidents plus the sitting president, GWB). There, as she told Politico, the Reverend Nathan Baxter, as he led the attendees in prayer, called on the nation’s leaders, as they considered how to respond, to “not become the evil we deplore.”

His words struck her in the soul. She had planned to challenge AUMF — she saw serious problems with it — but now she had certainty. She edited her prepared speech as she returned to Capitol Hill. There, she told her colleagues, “There must be some of us who say: Let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today. I do not want to see this spiral out of control.” She had no idea — until the vote began — that she’d be the sole member of Congress to vote against AUMF. And soon enough her office was flooded with calls and emails. They were both for her and against her, but many of the latter were vicious. She was called a traitor. She received death threats. Plenty of people, especially as the antiwar movement grew, also declared, “Barbara Lee speaks for me.” But the fury of those who hated her vote, who were shocked that she had the audacity to speak the truth, demonstrate the self-feeding loop that war creates. Instantly, all complexity vanishes and you’re either for us or against us. And if you’re against us … uh oh. Watch out.

She also told Congress that day: “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”

These are not the sort of words that status-quo America listens to, even in retrospect. My God, 20 years of war in Afghanistan, eight years of war and unspeakable carnage in Iraq. The U.S. was the official loser (though not its military-industrial complex). We’re not any safer; we’re way less safe. But it’s all dismissed with a shrug. “We live in a very dangerous world.” All we can do is keep upping the military budget and keep refusing to listen to Barbara Lee.

When will this change? The collective psychology of it goes pretty deep. Perhaps the presence of war in the national psyche bears a relationship to the presence of guns. The United States, as Scientific American pointed out, is “the only country with more civilian firearms than people,” which, according to researcher Nick Buttrick, is a phenomenon that began in the American South after the Civil War.

Guns had been tools, handy in rural areas for pest control. Then came the Emancipation Proclamation. Previously enslaved people — “property” — were suddenly free. They even had some political power. The world was no longer what it once was; the established order was gone. The world, from a white perspective, was suddenly chaotic, dangerous, incomprehensible. And white people were no longer on top. Gradually guns became fetishized as sources — and symbols — of strength. “Through your weapon, you could recreate order,” Buttrick said.

Is that not the American way? All you have to do is disconnect the consequences from the trigger, and you can keep pulling it and pulling it.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

AI Robots Invade the Classroom — So What?

Life is messy and writing is messy. (Photo: Glenn Carstens-Peters | Unsplash)

The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots. They’re coming!

Excuse me, they’re here. And they struck me as alien invaders, this recent manifestation of artificial intelligence on the internet, which college students, high school students — anybody — can download, feed a topic, and get it to write an essay for them. Is this technology’s next step, after Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner? Humanity is relieved of one more odious task — writing stuff.

“The chatbot,” Kalley Huang pointed out recently in the New York Times, “generates eerily articulate and nuanced text in response to short prompts, with people using it to write love letters, poetry, fan fiction — and their schoolwork.” Apparently, all you need to do to get the AI bot to produce a piece of prose (or poetry?) is give it a subject and whatever other information is necessary to define the topic you want it to blather about. It can then access the entire internet for its data and produce whatever — your English paper, your love sonnet. The possibility of student cheating has suddenly become dire enough that college professors are starting to rethink their writing assignments.

I have some advice for them. But before I get to that, I need to calm my own pounding heart. Writing — to me, as a lifelong journalist, essayist, poet, editor, writing teacher — can be difficult as hell, but every hour devoted to a project is a wondrous adventure, a reach into the great unknown, a journey of discovery, of learning, of becoming. I have described the columns I write as “prayers disguised as op-eds,” and it’s that word, prayer, that swelled and started palpitating as I stumbled on the existence of the writing bot. Should we let AI start writing our prayers? Should we shrug and simply stop being our fullest selves? Life is messy and writing is messy — it has to be. Truth is messy. If we turn the writing process over to the AI bots, my existential fear is that humanity has taken a step toward ending its evolution, ensconcing itself in a prison of conveniences.

“Due to its free nature and ability to write human-like essays on almost any topic, many students have been reaching for this model for their university assignments,” according to the website PC Guide, focusing its attention on an AI bot called ChatGPT, which recently proved smart enough to pass a law bar exam. “And if you are a student hoping to use this in the future, you may have concerns about whether your university can detect ChatGPT.” These words start to get at my primary concern about the whole phenomenon: Critics are missing the point, as they lament that the university’s grading system is under assault. OMG, has cheating gotten easier?

And suddenly it gets clear. When it comes to writing, there’s always been a gaping hole in the American educational system, a mainstream misunderstanding of the nature — the value — of actually learning to write … finding your words, finding your wisdom, finding your voice. Let me repeat: Finding your voice. That’s where it starts. Without it, what do you have? I fear this is a silent question that plagues way too many students — way too many people of all ages — who were taught, or force-fed, spelling and grammar and the yada yada of thematic construction: opening paragraph, whatever, conclusion.

I quote my mentor and longtime friend, the late Ken Macrorie, one of the teachers who bucked this system oh so many decades ago, when I was an undergraduate at Western Michigan University. He was a professor in the English department: “This dehydrated manner of producing writing that is never read is the contribution of the English teacher to the total university,” he wrote in his 1970 book, Uptaught. He was writing about his own career. He was trapped in a system that disdained most undergrads and their writing and often managed to force the worst out of them, aka academic writing, such as: “I consider experience to be an important part in the process of learning. For example, in the case of an athlete, experience plays an important role.”

Dead language! May it rest in peace. Artificial intelligence can no doubt do just as well, probably a lot better. Macrorie quoted this oh so typical example in his book — the kind of writing that is devoid of not only meaning but soul. His breakthrough discovery was what he called free writing: He had his students, on a regular basis, sit down and write for 20 minutes or longer without stopping — just let the words flow, let fragments of truth emerge, and share what you have written. Worry later about spelling, grammar, and such. First you have to find your voice.

I wound up taking his advanced writing class in 1966, two years after he began using free writing as his starting place. Wow. I found my way in … into my own soul. I learned that truth is not sheerly an external entity to be found in some important book. We all have it within us. Doing a “free write” is a means of panning for gold.

And this is the context in which I ponder this recent bit of techno-news: that students don’t have to rely on plagiarism to fake an essay. They can simply prompt a bot and let it do the work.

But that’s not the essence of our social dilemma. As long as the system — let’s call it artificial education — focuses on “teaching to the test” and insists on reducing individual intelligence to a number, and in so many ways ignores and belittles the complex and awakening potential of each student, we have a problem. AI isn’t the cause, but it helps expose it.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Real Security

CREDIT: Rfischia | Dreamstime

I call it “news in a cage” — the fact that the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In other words, how nice, but it has nothing to do with the real stuff going on across Planet Earth, like North Korea’s recent test of an ICBM that puts the entire U.S. in the range of its nukes or the provocative war games Trump’s America has been playing on the Korean peninsula, or the quietly endless development of the “next generation” of nuclear weapons.

Or the imminent possibility of … uh, nuclear war.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is not like winning an Oscar — accepting an honor for a piece of finished work. The award is about the future. Despite some disastrously bad choices over the years (Henry Kissinger, for God’s sake), the Peace Prize is, or should be, utterly relevant to what’s happening at the cutting edge of global conflict: a recognition of the expansion of human consciousness toward the creation of real peace. Geopolitics, on the other hand, is trapped in the certainties of same old, same old: Might makes right.

And the mainstream news about North Korea is always solely about that country’s small nuclear arsenal and what should be done about it. What the news is never about is the slightly larger nuclear arsenal of its mortal enemy, the United States. That’s taken for granted. And it’s not going away.

What if the global anti-nuclear movement was actually respected by the media and its evolving principles continually worked into the context of its reporting? That would mean the reporting about North Korea wouldn’t simply be limited to us vs. them. A third global party would be hovering over the entire conflict: the global majority of nations that last July voted to declare all nuclear weapons illegal.

Rfischia | Dreamstime

Two-and-a-half minutes to midnight

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons — ICAN — a coalition of non-government organizations in some 100 countries, led the campaign that resulted, last summer, in the United Nations treaty prohibiting the use, development, and stockpiling of nuclear weapons. It passed 122-1, but the debate was boycotted by the nine nuclear-armed nations (Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States), along with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and every member of NATO except the Netherlands, which cast the single no vote.

What the remarkable Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has accomplished is that it takes control of the nuclear disarmament process away from the nations that possess them. The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty called on the nuclear powers to “pursue nuclear disarmament,” apparently at their own leisure. Half a century later, nukes are still the bedrock of their security. They’ve pursued nuclear modernization instead.

But with the 2017 treaty, “the nuclear powers are losing control of the nuclear disarmament agenda,” as Nina Tannenwald wrote in the Washington Post at the time. The rest of the world has grabbed hold of the agenda and — step one — declared nukes illegal. She added: “The treaty promotes changes of attitude, ideas, principles, and discourse — essential precursors to reducing numbers of nuclear weapons. This approach to disarmament starts by changing the meaning of nuclear weapons, forcing leaders and societies to think about and value them differently. It is likely to complicate policy options for U.S. allies under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, who are accountable to their parliaments and civil societies.”

What the treaty challenges is nuclear deterrence: the default justification for the maintenance and development of nuclear arsenals.

Tilman Ruff, an Australian physician and a co-founder of ICAN, wrote in The Guardian after the organization was awarded the Peace Prize: “One hundred twenty-two states have acted. Together with civil society, they have brought global democracy and humanity to nuclear disarmament. They have realised that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, real security can only be shared, and cannot be achieved by threatening and risking use of these worst weapons of mass destruction.

“For far too long reason has given way to the lie that we are safer spending billions every year to build weapons, which, in order for us to have a future, must never be used,” Ruff wrote. “Nuclear disarmament is the most urgent humanitarian necessity of our time.”

If this is true — and most of the world believes that it is — then Kim Jong-un and North Korea’s nuclear missile program are only a small piece of the threat faced by every human being on the planet. There’s another reckless, unstable leader with his finger on the nuclear button, delivered to the planet a year ago by the flawed U.S. Democracy.

Donald Trump should be the poster boy of nuclear disarmament.

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.