Nothing better indicates the mental confusion of postmodern Americans than their constant abuse of modal auxiliary verbs like shall and will, should and would, can and could. In introducing the Italian conditional, I included the following preface which may help some to understand how future and conditional are formed in English.
Reading stories on the teapot tempest over the sinking of ship and the subsequent attack on the survivors made me think, for just one second, that the Mainstream Media were finally going to tell the truth about Israel’s illegal and savage attack on the USS Liberty in 1967.
How to speak about politics without sliding into the pervasive banality of mainstream political discourse?
War, much like marriage, is a necessary institution that responds to human need. Sexual desire and the impulse to violence—which can be fueled by cupidity—are both part of the human condition. In a state of nature, unfortunately, human needs are fulfilled without ceremony: rape, promiscuous sex, and incest, in the case of sexual desire, and raiding parties, looting expeditions, ambushes, and genocidal mass murders, in the case of violence.
Maybe Trump won’t invade Venezuela. Or maybe he’ll just launch some Tomahawks, blow up some government buildings in Caracas, and the CIA will a foment a coup to put in power an associate of Nobel Peace Prize Winner María Corina Machado
General MacArthur, it is true, overstepped the limits of his authority, but now Senator Mark Kelly, retired Navy captain, insists that American military personnel have the right to disobey the President–and thus a fortiori senior officers–if they regard an order as illegal.
Or take another example, drawn from my four-year-old son’s videothèque – the sinking of the Titanic, which some inscrutable whimsy makes the child obsessed with at the moment.
If wolves and chimpanzees can usually resolve conflicts within the group without massive blood-letting, why are modern human communities so wracked by violent crime? And, while it is true that in wars between groups of carnivorous mammals, the death rate can be very high, the numbers are only a small fraction of the human beings killed in brush wars that barely make the newspapers. Why, then, are human wars so devastating?
