I’ve been trying to be much more regular about going to the gym in the morning lately, with moderate success. In particular my 30 minute run is becoming somewhat bearable now, to the point where I have been doing things to make it more interesting, like increasing the speed or incline at times. One thing I have started doing that I have never done before, is turning on the TV. Someone had it on American Gladiator a couple weeks ago, and that was just awesome running TV. So I decided to try different channels and see what works for me. Most station it turns out are suck running TV. American Gladiator isn’t normally on when I run, and the only other thing I could find that really did it for me are mexican gameshows. But just the other day I discovered WISE TV.
It is the Chicago public television station. (I didn’t even know they did that!) But they have the awesome science and history items that completely distract me from the fact that I am running. Just this weekend they had a show on observations of the sky, and today they had one on the dawn of American power projection. It was a very interesting program because while I have read a lot about the history of Hawaii, I have read next to nothing about the history of the Spanish American. Interestingly is was intimately tied to the history of Hawaii and the US, though that might have to wait for another blog post. The thing that stunned me as I was watching the show was that I felt like I was watching current news casts.
The parallels between the Spanish American war and the Iraq war are stunning. There was a humanitarian crisis in Cuba and Iraq caused by the current tyrannical power. There were valuable commercial assets in Cuba and Iraq which US companies wanted to exploit. There had been a massive terrorist attack which was used to drum up support across the nation (the Main and 9/11). The leaders of both wars had missed out on fighting in the previous ‘good’ war (Civil War and WWII). And of course we would be greeted as liberators when we rolled into town. There are of course many differences as well, in particular Spain had a number of colonies that we fought over, not just Cuba, and we had the Vietnam war in between WWII and now to remind the leaders that war actually wasn’t a good thing. And in that war McKinley actually was a Civil War vet and wasn’t too keen on joining the war, in fact his hesitance gave Hawaii a reprieve of a number of years. But in the end Teddy and the Rough Riders got their “splendid little war”. He missed out on the Civil War himself you see, and needed to test his manhood. “Any war would do”. Wow.
But the spookiest similarity of all? The local insurrection in the Philippines against the US presence ended up taking more than 5 years and costing 4,000 american lives. Which is almost exactly where we are now in Iraq. I guess we were doomed to repeat it.