A Nerd's Nerve

Normal people often wonder how the mind of a nerd actually operates. You know, what are the overlapping layers of thought involved and how are complex and ridiculous conclusions reached? It’s all very fascinating, let me tell you.

This nerd effect is well documented. Unlike normal people, nerds have a special nerve hidden somewhere in the cortex. I admit I am afflicted with this odd condition. This is why even my Ice Fishing Excursions to the great north, events that should remain manly and spiced by tales only related to brutal survival in a frozen wilderness, often curiously descend into long-winded orations at the bar regarding the particulars of the 1837 treaty between the United States and the Mille Lacs band of the Ojibwe.

Yeah, really.

For more in-depth research into the specific matter of the “nerd-nerve effect”, I will provide the following example from my own maligned brain, such as it is. Sit back, take your shoes off, grab a cuppa, and marvel at the following twisted line of thought.

Here in the Village, the astute members of the Honored Veteran’s Quilting Bee gathered a few days ago to share some stories, review the past and ponder the future. Their routine charge is to keep things light, not to offend, and to steer clear of any overt political or religious ravings. Yet, at this particular meeting, a sly controversy pushed its way in through the squeaky screen door of the clubhouse. (I know this to be true. I was sitting outside on the porch sipping spiked lemonade underneath a hot sun at the time, listening intently to the crusty banter going on inside, and I witnessed this controversy make its shocking entrance.)

On this day a speech was repeated in the halls of the Bee. This speech was regarding the events that led to 9/11. The theme suggested that it was time for America to wake up. The speech went on to proclaim that Americans and different presidential administrations had ignored or refused to accept the truth for too long. The speech stated that 9/11 wasn’t the start of something as it was just another event in a line of American tragedies which all pointed to the start of World War III. And, as relayed in this speech, the start of that war actually began during the Iran Hostage affair in 1979.

The thrust of the speech was to inspire the audience to “wake up” and join the fight. Sort of like a high school locker room speech, it urged the listeners to get off their duffs, play as a team, get out there and kick some ass.

Of course, the Honored Veteran’s Quilting Bee applauded and cheered. But almost as quickly as the last hurrah had subsided, one of the more distinguished members of the Bee rose to speak. While not belittling the intent of the speech, he began, there might be a bit of concern with the accuracy of some of the selected dates of tragedy. In fact, he suggested, perhaps the origins of this war could be found somewhere further back in our history.

Yeah, I thought to myself, and this subject definitely broke the golden rule of no religion or politics. This went way beyond the line. And, hey, don’t you need to offer up some tragedies other than American to qualify as a “World” war? And, yeah, didn’t I hear the speaker errantly misuse the verbs in a couple of the lines? Didn’t he know he couldn’t start out in one tense and end in another? Didn’t he have some odd dangling participles here and there? Oooh, I would never offer that kind of mistake in front of my peers, how embarrassing! And, when he was talking about the presidents, wasn’t he completely off, assigning events of certain dates to Presidents who weren’t in power at the time? What kind of crap was that? Does he think we are fools?

But, with an irritating force, my “nerd nerve” locked and focused on the accusation that WWIII started with the events of 1979. Soon my nerve was agitated, throbbing out of control. Naturally, after that I was sent spinning on one of my unusual trips for a few days, as I typically do without any overt purpose, putting off more reality-based concerns to read and review the virtual Books of the Dead.

The wife and the boss were, to put it simply, not impressed or pleased.

But, in the end, from a compilation of many different sources, my nitpicking mind pieced together the following unconnected clues.

My first conclusion, like that of the honored member of the Bee, was that we could go way back beyond 1979 to find the origins of modern strife in the world as well in the Middle East. There is a lot of written and deduced history to cover so it’s hard to even know where to start.

I am reminded of a recent debate with my friend Mr. Big. He described to me how he had recently received instruction from a professor of Asian studies regarding the earliest known civilizations of man. Mr. Big now firmly believes we can trace such beginnings back some 10,000 years. That is his hard and fast conclusion, anyway.

I argued that what we know of the first civilizations, from digs in Sumeria and the Fertile Crescent, etc, is somewhat less clear than what he believes. I suggested that perhaps, based more on what we don’t know rather than what we do know, he might be off by a scant thousand years. Mr. Big wouldn’t hear any of that.

But, no matter, I doubt ancient dust from some buried wine jar will really help us define our situation and the dawn of civilization seems a bit too wide for the origin of WWIII. Ya know what I mean, we could say, well, with no Universe, there would be no Galaxy, then there would be no Earth, then there would be no Man, then … pretty meaningless train of thought, don’t you think?

With little doubt, I think many agree on this, we could point to the births of Christianity and Islam as starting points for the grand finale. At least with these two points we know which one comes first.

But to me those points remain unsatisfying in this quest because, truly, our current problems seem far more modern. I guess I’m downplaying the problem from an ancient historical standpoint. But, honestly, how can we today be held accountable for actions that occurred thousands or even hundreds of years ago?

With that in mind, I limited my search to more recent events, sometime within the last couple of hundred years. I instantly locked on to the establishment of Israel, knowing that plays a part in the whole mess. There’s a lot of pain associated with that history, lingering anger and distrust among different parts of the world, but it sort of left me wanting a little bit more at the same time.

And, then, I stumbled upon the name Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and wife died on the same day, February 14, 1884. In his diary, Roosevelt drew a large X on that day’s page and wrote, “the light has gone out of my life”.

Two years later in 1886, Roosevelt married Edith Kermit Carrow. Teddy’s third child, Kermit Roosevelt, was born from this marriage on 10/10/1889.

Kermit fought in WWI, traveled with his father on the big hunts, was described as brilliant and imaginative, arguably the closest child to Teddy and one of his staunchest defenders. He was also often moody, chronically depressed and driven to drink. He killed himself while on active duty in Alaska in 1943 while holding a remote war-time position that was arranged for him, in part, by his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

During his spirited life, long before his dispirited death, Kermit had married Belle Willard, daughter of a US Ambassador to Spain, in 1912. Kermit and Belle had four children and their first son, Kermit, Jr., was born on February 16, 1916, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, some 32 years after Teddy had summarized his mother’s and wife’s death in his diary by penning, “For joy or sorrow my life has now been lived out”.

Ironic words, as we know, since Teddy’s life was far from over. Out of his more temporary recession, he rose to energize a nation and encouraged a sleepy government to wake up and whip the world with a big stick for years to come.

And his grandson, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr, known as Kim, followed his family tradition to become the muscle behind Operation AJAX, the CIA covert plan that brought the Shah of Iran back to power in August, 1953.

In 1951, the Iranian parliament nationalized the oil industry. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company thus lost control of the world’s largest oil producer at the time and the 85% profit it enjoyed due to the 60-year D’Arcy Oil Concession of 1901. (The AIOC changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954 and is now called BP Amoco.)

The British were pissed off by this event. The British embassy in Iran closed in 1952 over the rift. Britain wanted to forcibly take back control of the oil fields but felt it needed US help, which was denied by Truman who did not consider the Iranian government a threat and placed a higher priority in Korea.

Eisenhower was then elected and was soon convinced that this nationalization of oil companies signaled Iran was leaning towards communism. The Dulles brothers were ready to engage and Kim, a senior CIA Middle East operative, was dispatched to Tehran to initiate TP-AJAX.

That fact is, Kim Roosevelt helped the US and Britain overthrow a freely elected, Democratic government in Iran in 1953. (See Kim Roosevelt’s book, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, published ironically in 1979.) He and others at the time may have been convinced that it was a fight against communism but, in my review, it seems more clearly a fight for greedy US and British control of the world’s oil resources and corporate profit.

(There is, I believe, a Vietnam corollary to this but I will omit that discussion for now.)

One point here is that the modern fairytale of US international affairs guided by the high minded spirit of spreading democracy and equality around the world is thus called into question if not completely unveiled for what it truly is.

And, as quoted on the Wikipedia website, Stephen Kinzer, in his book All the Shah's Men, asserts: "It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

So if WWIII has started, my friends, then its origin does go past 1979. In fact, we had our greedy hands in its development as far back as 1953, not so long after the “last” World War ended. If we were roused from our global slumber on 9/11, then we were blinded to our own actions for much longer than we may think.

But, in my nerdy, romantic mind, I am thinking the trouble really began in February, 1884, when Teddy Roosevelt’s life lost its light and turned to a new, different kind of energy. And that leads me to suspect this entire period, the last 100 years or so, will one day be historically judged less as a myopic time-line of evolving, distinguishable “World Wars” as much as it was a living, lasting legacy to the Era of Roosevelt.

Cheers,

Mb