La Gloire

The French call it La Gloire. The Chinese call it Glory, but in Chinese.

Some Americans call it their Divine Right, a mission from God that feels so correct.

Wherever you live, in many cultures, there is a feeling that your culture should be number one. Like the Denver Broncos or something.

Recent articles about tent cities rising up around major American cities is creating neo-Hoovervilles, or what I like to call, Bushtowns. This is where our rampant spending and glory hunt has brought us.

The overreaction of Neocons to the disaster of 9/11, 2001, which they touted as What-Must-Be-Done-to-Make-Us-Safe, was really nothing more than a veiled excuse to maximize glory. It is the fight of the very right to expand, overtake, plunder and enslave. In this case, they would have been mostly happy to acquire the oil, which they did not. If their motives were not only cynical rapaciousness, that they did desire democracy in Iraq, well, certainly, there are better means to achieve this goal than the ham fisted use of marching into a sovereign nation uninvited, killing innocent people and torturing prisoners without due process all to the tune of Because-we-must for our safety, revenge and necessart ideological expansion.

It was all glory. The glory of oil. The glory of making others live under a system that is the RIGHT system. The glory of smacking people into submission and lording it over them for their own good. The glory of the largest embassy ever built in a capital city. The glory of saying, “We have the might to do this. We are doing this. You cannot stop us.” Feels so good to do whatever the hell you want.

Glory builds triumphant arches, but these structures are only visible to the folks back home in the town square. It might make them feel good, but a monolith is just a big load of stone and eventually, you have to keep cleaning it because of all the soot.

Men love the taste of glory. (Sarah Palin prefers the term Victory.) It is primal monkey motivation, the feeling that one monkey can make the other monkeys in the crowd do all the banana work while the most glorious king monkey smugly decides which banana in the huge pile is to his liking. It is not wrong to aspire to glory. In fact, it is impossible to ignore something which is so biologically based and can feel so good when it is engaged into action. But there are other ways to achieve this. You can’t just do something just because it feels good.

Besides, old glories fade. Enough. Take care of the folks at home. The rest of the world is the rest of the world. And truly, they don’t want you there. We sure don’t want them here telling us what to do. You want glory, glory seekers, find it. But not at the expense of others. And I will not be so presumptuous as to suggest the more positive ways to fulfill your glory hole. That would be vainglorious of me.