A War Criminal's Guide to Life

Note: This essay was originally published in our Late Winter 2020 Quarterly (now sold out) and is appearing online for the first time.

I’ve got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld. Regardless of the fact that he is not an admirable person, he’s had some real staying power. Serving his second stint as Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, he was one of the chief architects of the Iraq War. Just look at him - he's a ghoul! He's nearly 90 years old these days, was the subject of a 2013 Errol Morris documentary, and I personally think about him more than what could reasonably be considered to be healthy. 

Back in 2002, at a Department of Defense press briefing he uttered what were perhaps his most famous words:

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

For everybody else, these are just mental gymnastics used to justify the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. For me, eighteen years later, it’s taken on a whole new meaning. Thanks to this old neoconservative snake I find myself thinking about my own known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

First, what are the things I know I know about myself? 

I know that I began to lose my hair at a very young age. I was around 20, not even finished with college, when I noticed things beginning to get a little thin up top. I’ve always known that although I spent much of my life unlucky at love, my capacity for loving another person always existed, like a sleeping giant. I knew long ago that my father was going to die because that's a thing that fathers inevitably do. 

I always knew I liked a good chicken parmesan.

My known unknowns; that is to say, what are the things I know I didn't always know?

I didn't know the beard I'd grow to overcompensate for my male pattern baldness would end up looking so god damned good. Seriously, it's a whole thing and it ended up working out for me. I didn't know  I would  experience true love with someone I first met at a Dunkin’ Donuts but it happened just like that . We both “swiped right” on one of those dating apps. She liked my bald head and my beard and I asked her to marry me 8 months later. 

I didn't always know who I'd become after my father died. I grieved and I got angry, but I also grew. His memory led me to work on becoming a better musician (admittedly, still not a particularly good one). I wanted to better myself and to get better at being myself. I think I did.

In the process, I somehow became one of the world's leading authorities on chicken parmesan. Ask anyone.

Rumsfeld loses me with the “unknown unknowns”. Maybe that was kind of his point way back when he said it. How can I - or anyone - possibly know what I don't know I don't know. I don't know! As Albert “Ally Boy” Barese says in The Sopranos, “[We’re] in no position to go into the unknown not knowing.” Who is? Not me. I'll go into the unknown but I've gotta know a thing or two about it first. If you know what I mean.

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has suggested that there exists a fourth category that Rumsfeld failed to mention: the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know. This one hits home. All those years I was so unlucky at love, it had never really been a matter of luck at all. It was me all along, my own propensity for holding back my true self out of a fear of being unlovable. I knew I deserved to be happy on some level, but I spent a lot of time and energy disallowing it. I didn’t give anyone in my life at a given time a key to my heart or a way in at all. They got a locked window that afforded little more than a glimpse. When we know big things about ourselves yet deny them, that’s really when we get into trouble. Only after we turn these unknown knowns into known knowns can we self-doubting types stand a chance.

I guess where I’m going with all this is that I hate Donald Rumsfeld. He's got me thinking all sorts of ways about - well, everything. Including the incomprehensible. Sometimes that leads to valuable self-reflection and sometimes it just gives me a migraine. Maybe Socrates was right when he said “the only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing” but that was a few thousand years ago, so what the hell did he know?