COMMENSAL ISSUE 94

Theo Todman (C93/21) : Dump or change my stuff as much as you like, you're doing the work. And by all means feel free to comment as much as you wish.

Blitzkrieg (C93/22) : Shorter OED 1977 Vol II Addenda: Blitzkrieg: See Blitz. Blitz: a shortening of Blitzkrieg and can be used to mean a series of intense air attacks carried out over a longish period. Taking a year or so of ground war (5mph) as about equivalent to a week of air war (250mph), and allowing a series and six months for the original "Blitz", I don't think I cast Blitzkrieg out too far. And hardly that much further than I had to reach to catch the term snide, where, in 93/22, its user got so lost in his argument he actually ended up admitting he threw it wide. I would say the score is one all, but I won't mind if you want to post it as 0.8 to 1.2 and leave it to posterity to sort out which way round to read it!

Kevin Arbuthnot - Your Comments 93/8-9: In your comments you touch variously on the quality of man. To summarise what seems your essential point, you say you rose to your present giddy height because of your aggressive nature and great skill in killing, and you find it disappointing when in effect I fail in any way to meet the standard you claim for yourself. Now, I would say this standard you claim and promulgate is but some garbage of misplaced faith. Taking your extreme to illustrate. The appendix we carry and the wear marks on the teeth of our ancestors indicate we lived more on vegetable products than meat. This suggests a species which if left unstimulated is not particularly aggressive compared to many others. Secondary evidence is we run slower than almost every other animal there is, certainly slower than everything which is of comparable size to us or larger. That suggests we were originally rather timid. Also, almost every creature out there larger than a football, and many that are smaller, can destroy us directly or indirectly more efficiently than we can destroy them. Standing up probably enabled us to see and avoid them better. We were never really designed to resist or attack. The evidence is in what is not there, we have no horns or claws, our teeth have always been small in killing terms. Weight for weight we are not very strong. We have a long record of tool making. From that you might argue that it is our brains and armoury which make us superior. But that is also not a matter of fact. Compared to simple minded fighters we are in fact very slow and clumsy with the weapons we make. And what is in old cave paintings and the long cold ashes of ancient camp fires makes it perfectly clear that when we did manage a kill it was usually by ambushing something infantile or long past its prime. Surely, being good at trapping the odd baby or geriatric is not the mark of the overlord, the vast majority of what the ambusher would like to get never comes within reach. Further evidence against our not having amazing ability to asses and destroy the opposition is also to be found in more recent times. Ten thousand years of civilisation and still there are many who do not mind sewage in their water. And a few interesting facts and figures from the killing fields. In WWI we did indeed occasionally kill efficiently, but they were our own, and it was only because the species threw itself on its own weapons. That does not mark the clever or the carnivore. It only shows a species which from time to time is prone to be most incredibly stupid. Curiosities from WWII are that the war effort cost America 250,000 civilians killed in industrial accidents, 50% of Luftwaffe losses were due to crash landings in bad weather on the eastern front, only 5% of armed troops fired on an enemy they could see, the vast majority of kamikaze hit only the Pacific Ocean, and all of Bomber Command was lost on Berlin. There you have the measures of our efficiency in making, deploying, launching, succeeding, and forgetting. To test your sentiment further, and the aerial warfare of that time offering further important insight into ourselves. As an example of how we rationalise: Reconnaissance and trials showed it was necessary to send 10 bombers each with ten bombs to get one bomb within 100yds of the target. This was not good for the moral of bomber crews nor did it sit well in press releases. It meant each target would need 25 raids. So the average force dispatched became 250 bombers. But what happened with the 249 bomb loads that did not drop on the target. It became rather embarrassing to explain why so many schools, churches and hospitals were being gutted. The definition of target was therefore changed. Mass raids began and targets became entire cities. All acceptualised on the basis every city surely would have something about it of a military nature. So there is no misunderstanding of my view: It was an event in which in the species some bought others the luxury of being able to praise or insult those caught up in it. Given the scale remarkably few deserve insult. The survivors of things like that become marked one way or another, having won or lost their personal battle between fear and confidence. In retrospect most say they would rather be elsewhere next time and very few come to wish anything like it on anyone else. And that shows in reality how we became so successful. We bred like rabbits and given half a chance ran from what we couldn't handle, usually straight up a tree from where we shouted a lot and threw nuts and twigs at the thing until it went away. Then, screeching victory cries to the world, many said good-by to it by falling out of their trees, doing themselves in and whoever they happened to drop upon. To emphasise the last. In Britain we have recently noted the 500,000th death by motoring accident and the discovery of drug resistant bacteria. So, it turns out we are really quite good at killing ourselves or others by chance, not very good at killing each other intentionally, hardly able to kill anything else unless we have it at such a disadvantage we can't miss, and almost completely unable to kill off anything which is a real threat. In truth, about the only creature we are really good at clobbering is the fish. But the problem is that the fish has never been a threat to our survival at all, though not having any might be. There is a lot of other killing we do of course, but it would not count here as your comments were centered on awareness of other parties and relative precision in what we do. This last aspect of killing I have in mind is were we do creatures in just by destroying their habitat or chucking chemicals about. It is too much to class that under accidental killing, the term accidental too often drawing in awareness and skill factors. To call it just incidental killing would perhaps serve better. The fact is until we interfered so much with things quite recently hardly anything out there has ever presented much of a threat to us, and still we are not much good at controlling the mechanisms of death. But in our numbers we have just now changed into a randomly dangerous disease. Perhaps the people you complain about are the ones most likely to notice the mutation and in time see it reversed, so we might continue with a planet for a home rather than find we end up gasping our last in the autoclave nature seems to be preparing for us. If you listen you will hear her whistling while she works. Your claim you are the planet's finest is fiction. Now draw your heavy pen, load all the mighty cries of your gods and devils, and launch your inky darts. As the master of greatness prove the greatest risk I run is not that you might fall out of your tree while I happen to be under it. But remember, should you score even a single blot it will likely be just by chance, and, as it will be on one of your own, might well prove my point rather than yours.

Albert Dean