4 May 2020–
Howdy everyone. Welcome to my new blog. Be advised it’s very much under construction, as I revise, adapt and re-post commentary and discussion from earlier projects during the past couple of years.
First, I ought to explain my nom de guerre. ‘Chaos’ obviously isn’t the surname stamped on my birth certificate, but in the 2020 political climate, enforced by woke social-media tycoons and promoted by leaders of both major US parties, I need to cover my tracks.
Why ‘Doc’? Until a few years ago I practiced emergency medicine in a fair-sized city near the southern Rockies. But several years back I did a stint as military contractor. I was a ‘site medical officer’ (basically an overpaid field medic) for a private firm, under Army contract to train cops and soldiers on one of America’s misguided nation-building projects. Like my military counterparts, from unit medical officers down to field medics, I’m generally addressed as ‘Doc.’
After my first contract downrange, I came home and found another ER job. The work itself wasn’t bad, though American patients get crazier every year, and correspondingly harder to take care of. But the ever-increasing accessory bullshit weighing down the practice of medicine soon made me wonder if I shouldn’t have just stayed overseas. A couple years more convinced me of it.
These days I work mostly downrange. My patients are grateful for any care I can provide. I no longer must placate dysfunctional, self-entitled patients in what one ER doc has dubbed Emergistan. I tired of dealing with billing, coding and insurance issues, and the endless bean-counting they require. ER ‘paperwork’ is digital these days, but there’s much much more of it. Some of our digital medical record systems are so dysfunctional, many of us yearn for old-school paper charts.
Why ‘Chaos’? Three reasons converged.
Classically, chaos was the formless void, bursting with hidden potential, from which the world was born. In common parlance, of course, chaos has uglier connotations: It’s a synonym for anarchy or lawlessness. For me, chaos in either sense is preferable to the current order, enforced by the jackbooted Equality and Compliance thugs of the insatiable Regime. The two usages may soon converge: Suppose the Regime and its currency were to collapse under their unprecedented burden of debt, and its enforcers were stranded without the resources to do their duty. The ensuing chaos would certainly entail much lawlessness, but would also be bursting with potential, for those with the brains, balls and skills to take advantage of the State’s collapse. In some quarters this line of thinking is dubbed ‘accelerationism.’
The Chaos moniker doubles as an admiring nod to one of my heroes, US Marine General James Mattis, who used ‘Chaos’ as his call sign during the Iraq war. (My admiration was tempered a great deal after it became clear he was a ringleader of Donald Trump’s unexpectedly warlike foreign policy. He will always be remembered as a great general, but reached his level of incompetence, a la Peter Principle, as SecDef.)
Finally, urban ERs cater to a steady parade of drunks, junkies, hypochondriac hipsters and other parasites. We’re ordained, by law, to divert precious resources to them, away from the relative handful of patients who are actually fixin’ to die. Because parasites by their very nature lack self-awareness, they don’t just waste our time and energy, they do so with an air of insufferable entitlement. We providers try to keep our cool, but every now and then a particularly annoying patient pushes all the wrong buttons in just the right sequence. Then our inner Hugh Laurie emerges.
A Russian-speaking acquaintance recently told me that ‘House, MD’ was popular on Russian TV, aired as ‘Доктор Хаус’. She added that ‘Xаус’, House, differs only slightly from ‘хаос’, the Russian word for chaos, which both Russian and English borrowed from ancient Greek. The penny dropped and I burst into laughter. Doc Chaos sprang to life, like Pallas, full-grown and armed to the teeth.
As a consequence of some unusual job-related experiences in my twenties and thirties, I have a high tolerance – even a preference – for lifestyle and circumstances that most Americans would regard as nothing short of chaotic. That’s probably why I wound up in emergency medicine. A similar mindset was in full flower among the men and women who founded America, and of their kids and grandkids who then struck out westward into a hostile wilderness, establishing the terms of the ‘American way of life’ that prevailed until rather recently.
Sadly, for most Americans today, chaos – in either sense – is just about the most ‘unsafe space’ imaginable. Have you noticed how often progressives and other control freaks refer to any environment they find insufficiently regulated (even digital ones) as ‘Wild West?’
I, Doc Chaos, aim to encourage the brave and willing to defy, escape, evade and undermine the Regime. No, by Regime I’m not referring to the Trump administration. Unlike Facebook Libertarians, many of whom are actually anarchocapitalists, I like Trump for sticking his thumb in Establishment eyes. He has all the right enemies. I even have to acknowledge that he’s made some progress toward deregulation, and would have made much more, had he not spent his most of his first term fighting off attempted coups d’etat.
Perhaps you’re familiar with the relatively new Boogaloo meme, its blogs and social media pages. This seems encouraging: Millennials, of all people, espousing ‘accelerationism’ and preparing for a civil war they believe inevitable. I suspect they’re right about that. Unfortunately most of them are keyboard AnCaps too; like BLM they hate the police, instead of the broken justice system that forces the police into dehumanizing lose-lose situations. I also suspect most ‘Boojahideen’ are fantasists and gamers who won’t survive the first night after the grid goes down. But some may. Boomers ain’t gonna live forever. We’ll take any help we can get.
Defying the Regime means evading not just the Compliance, Equality, Speech and Thought Enforcers, whom we used to dismiss as mere ‘PC thugs’ before they seized power, but also the Income Enforcers. Black markets, barter and other untraceable transactions are useful in this regard, and I’m always on the lookout for other methods. Otherwise the tax man will keep confiscating our earnings and giving them to politicians, who spend most of it paying interest on the national debt, and squander much of the rest buying votes from deadbeats with social welfare programs that get enshrined forever as entitlements. Far more than necessary is also spent on occasionally useful things, like missiles, warships, warplanes, drones and other modern weaponry.
It’s important that America defend its interests abroad. Defining the legitimate limits of our interests is trickier. During the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, we suddenly became masters of a unipolar world. Sadly, our leaders soon demonstrated they were neither intellectually nor morally up to the job.
Throughout my youth – I turned 40 at the turn of this century – a hallmark of the Left was its knee-jerk reluctance to use force, even when we were attacked by enemies who themselves understood nothing else. That mindset owed much to 1960s flower-child liberalism. The liberals, to their credit, understood that war – however just – is a very blunt instrument that always destroys more innocent lives and livelihoods than guilty ones.
But as the ’60s hippies grew up, sobered up, got haircuts and law degrees and won political power, they became less reluctant to flex their muscle. They trained a generation of young successors – ‘progressive’ rather than liberal – who in the new century, shared many of the liberals’ domestic policy goals, felt that those goals justified almost any means, and understood the need to conceal that conviction. Mostly Democrats, after 2008 they developed a dangerous partnership with GOP progressives, often known as neo-conservatives. Together they embarked on the cult of ‘globalism.’ Often justified as ‘promoting democratic ideals,’ globalism drew us into wars and ‘nation-building’ projects that wasted trillions of dollars and caused immense bloodshed and suffering in the target countries. (Yes, Doc Chaos is employed on one of those projects. I make a good living doing work I enjoy; I tell myself that if I didn’t do it, somebody less qualified would.)
Since 2016 election we’ve seen just how violent and ruthless the ‘progressives’ can be, even at home, when confronted with their squalid agenda. Here my direct observations will be those I reckon I’m uniquely qualified to point out. But I’ll link you to other, better-known truth-tellers. It won’t always be pretty, but I’ll try to make it fun.
Hope you enjoyed my very first blog post. Doc Chaos, over & out !
Doc Chaos 