War & Pizza Hut (Volume I: World War II)

My Grandfather was in the engine room when the kamikaze happened. Zero plane shrapnel sheered through the U.S. destroyer. Frigid South Pacific waters gushed inside. Naval protocol was to close the engine room hatch immediately to keep the ship from sinking more quickly, leaving other men trapped in the engine room. Fred should have been one of the other men. He was unconscious after the engine safety valve exploded into his neck.

Fred didn’t know who pulled him out, but he was the last man out of the engine room. He spent three days alone in a life raft under the searing South Pacific sun with a gashed neck. Tiger sharks circled below, Japanese Zero planes above. But Fred had a dream. He would get off that life boat. He would get back to Western Massachusetts and marry his sweet-heart. He would build a big family house with his own bare hands. And that’s exactly what my Grandfather did.

If a serviceman didn’t see Fred in the engine room at exactly that moment and break naval protocol, he would have sealed the hatch. If not for his split- second decision, 2-going-on-3 generations would have been wiped out instantly, and you’d probably by playing Pseudoko right now.

World War was the coming out party for the United States of America upon the world stage. America was a mere upstart (albeit a very productive one) in the eyes of Europe on the eve of World War II. Sixty million deaths, and two atomic bombs later, the world was split between America and the Soviet Union:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki irrevocably changed the world. Humanity now had the weapon to destroy itself within hours. It paved the way for an arsenal you wish mankind could un-invent. But let history bear witness. During the four-year stretch before Soviet Union joined America in the nuclear club in 1949, the U.S. rained down not missiles and mortar, but Hersey chocolate bars and dollars in rebuilding Europe.

Ironically, World War II has been best remembered today by the director of “Jaws”. Steven Spielberg (and Tom Hanks) memorialized U.S. soldiers in all their gritty realism for the screen. First with “Saving Private Ryan”, and then in two HBO ten-part miniseries: “Band of Brothers”, and “The Pacific” (also known as Band of Brothers On Water). NBC’s grandfather Tom Brokaw has throatily hailed our grandparents, our parents’ parents, as the “Greatest Generation”.

Some of our parents had nuclear bomb drills in elementary school. Teachers instructed my mom she could take shelter from an atomic blast in Manhattan under her wooden desk. Today, NYPD police officers sometimes check my backpack before I take the Subway.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. – Albert Einstein

The real-politik of today is mass world war is too destructive and expensive. The bottom line… is the bottom line. Pulitzer Prize winning Thomas Friedman served up the Golden Arches Theory: no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever been at war with each other.

T’was the rapid rise and fall of oil prices, not Ronald Reagan, that truly felled the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, the WMDs did go off – in New York City. But they were the ones Warren Buffett warned us about, not President George W. Bush. They were the ones concocted, not in bunkers outside Baghdad, but in AIG and Citi boardrooms throughout midtown Manhattan. Built not out of yellow cake but of junky CDOs, unbridled derivatives, and money our homes weren’t worth.

Indeed, China and the U.S. have been locked in an escalating financial world war for decades. Communism-Capitalism vs. Capitalism-Capitalism dueling ideologies. While the U.S. commits its blood and treasure to rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq, China has quietly bought up vast swathes of Africa and the Middle East. Taiwan is the 21st Century’s answer to Cuba.
Timothy Geithner and Fred Bernanke are our generals. Bankers and lawyers, our foot-soldiers by day. Hackers scan for national electric grid weak-points by night. We bombarded China in recent years by manufacturing, not bullets, but trillions of dollars out of thin air. The China-USA monthly trade deficits demarcates our ever-changing tide of war. The floating yuan serves as China’s ticking time bomb.

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