Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(3).

Today, the challenge lies in managing information.
Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially.

American culture is alive.
American culture is the culture of the unafraid.
Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude.


Constant Conflict
RALPH PETERS
(From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14.)



Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran.
America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine.
There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department.
Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more.
And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength.
All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection.
American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew.
If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself.
American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement.
All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement.
Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses).

American culture is the culture of the unafraid.
Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude.

The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere.
American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay.
They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding.
They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad).
They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex.
Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.
To be CONTD.(10july2011)