musing about war

I'm thinking about  the Navahos.  Maybe I was in eighth grade when I heard about them. They had these cool tall buildings, as a Chicagoan I admired tall buildings, so it seemed like they had an advanced civilization.  And the thing that was stressed at the time was that they were not warlike. Unlike all the other Indians who lived in tents and even the Incas and Aztecs who had pretty advanced civilizations, they were peaceful, they didn't regularly attack their neighbors.  I believe since then we have learned that they did have human sacrifices but hey, who doesn't?

I don't think they had that many other tribes around them so that might be one reason they were so peaceful, and they lived in a pretty hardscrabble neighborhood.   Generally people who live in hardscrabble are less warlike than people who live in lands of plenty.  Well there were the vikings but they were a bunch of nut jobs (I see the use of this phrase going way up now that our Dear Leader has put it into play, or more likely we will say Orekhovaya rabota once Russian becomes mandatory in our schools).

Anyway I was thinking maybe warlike genes were less useful in the desert southwest than in the woods teaming with game and other Indians, so that Indians with the warlike gene didn't do so well in the society and didn't have as many offspring so that the gene kind of faded out.

I think the US is the most warlike country on Earth if you count years of being at war as applied to years of not being at war the United States probably has the highest rating.  I see two reasons for that, One as a people we are pretty aggressive, we are bred from people who left home as opposed to those who passively stayed home, and for the last hundred years we have been top dogs and there is this feeling among us that if something is going wrong in the rest of the world it is up to us to do something about it.

Maybe another reason is because we have never been invaded.  Most other countries know that if their invasion goes badly the enemy will come storming right into their country.  We didn't win in the far east, but the draw in Korea and the loss in Vietnam didn't result in the enemy coming across our borders.  We spent a lot of ,money and we lost a lot of men, but back on the home front things didn't change much from wartime to peacetime.

Well I started out with genes and ended up with America at war, one of those musings that go on and on and one of the dawgs has complained about.


Speaking of the dawgs.  I would like to hear the story of Old Dog's second grade setback.  And I know of Beagles' Sawyer School Blue Jeans incident  and of his later, sort of, loss of faith, but  I don't recall the story of his dabbling in sin at the age of eleven,