The Lutheran Church of the Atonement, Barrington, IL has had 4 senior pastors: Arthur Knudsen who was sent to answer the call from the original five founding families - the Willits, the Bowens, and I can't remember the others, in 1963. In 1964, the church cornerstone was lain, and one of Barrington's two most unique architectural structures constructed (the other being the home built in the tree in North Barrington) - the Lutheran Church of the Sat Down Upon (or Ark), as I called it.
The most stunning thing to me has been that of the three white, American male senior pastors, two have been so unfit for the post - one, Marcus Gravdahl was fired for sexually harassing congregants and subordinates, and for not paying his Federal Income Taxes for 8 years running.
An assistant pastor, Pastor Randy, was fired for non-performance of the duties assigned to him by the senior pastor. Randy felt that his ministry was a 40-hour per week gigue to the youths only.
Pastor Said Ailabouni was assigned to be Marcus Gravdahl's assistant, but, as events transpired, within six months Said was the senior pastor, and served brilliantly for 15 years. He left Atonement to accept an ELCA offer to be pastor to the pastors of the ELCA in the Middle East and Africa - being a Palestinian (born in Nazareth) and an Arabic speaker, it was a natural fit, but his decision to accept was prompted in no small part because he did not want to have to deal with firing Pastor Randy.
That job fell on the shoulders of Don Wink, who came with a mandate to straighten up the Randy situation, and start a third service featuring contemporary Christian music. My bother-in-law, Michael, the man of all seasons and many talents was the leader of the bands for 10 years. My sister sang, and my son still drums witn one of the three praise band teams! Three Praise Band Teams, all with about 10 players.
In March of 2007, I e-mailed Pastor Don to take me off the church membership rolls. This he did not do (non-feasance). Hi non-feasance directly resulted in his subsequently denying me access to Sunday worship services (I sang too high, and talked with the praise team setting up), including Easter Sunday, of this year. He subcontracted the job of kicking my sweet ass out on Easter Sunday to Pastor Paul, and I left with no harsh words, telling Pastor Paul that I held him no animosity. I have always abided by Don's wishes. Pastor Paul duly reported to my mother that he had been told by Pastor Don that I would not be permitted to attend Easter Worship (I would served as an usher at St. Anne Roman Catholic Church in town later that morning - wondering what it is that they don't know about me that let's them let me volunteer to be of service?)
My mother told Pastor Paul, "That's not fair."
And for this reason, I did not want Pastor Don to officiate the celebration of her life. I called my dad to ask him to not ask Pastor Don - "already asked, this can't be changed, things are moving too fast," said dad, 96 hours in advance of the memorial service.
I called pastor Don to ask that he not officiate, "The family already asked me," he said.
ALL RIGHT ... NOW, I am pissed. I called my sister, "Gay, could you please ask dad to reconsider having another pastor officiate mom's celebration?" "We already ask ...
And I hung up, exhausted, having slept 3 of the last 72 hours, updated F/B sent e-mails to 500+ people, having put together my thoughts for what the service should be, as well as the obituary ... or at least rough working drafts of the same, and I broke down weeping.
I dialed 9-1-1 and the Grayslake EMT delivered me to Condell Meorial Hospital (one of the worst in the area) emergency room, where, in front of a shrink, and hooked to an IV, I threatened to kill Pastor Don.
A while later a social worker interviewed me, and asked if I still wanted to kill pastor don. I had changed my mind, "No," I said, "I want to kill his family."
Enter the psych ward --- ROFLMFAO!!
Staying 11 days -- missing mom's wake, the memorial (which I would not ave attended with jagoff officiating).
Later, I see my personal physician, and the conversation about Wink the Twink arises, and I tell Jim, "Why in the world would I ever want to return to Atonment? NO ONE, not one member of my family, nor one of the congregants, some of whom I have known for 47 years ever complained to Pastor Don about his whimsical discrimination against me (a 60-year old, mentally ill, totally disabled, Muslim)!"
"I'll talk to Don tomorrow," says Jim.
And two days later, the Cook County Sheriff police hits me up with an order of protection ordering me to stay at least 500 feet away from Wink the Twink, and his family.
But, at least, NOW, I know where he lives (was too lazy to look it up).
And so, will have to come within 500 feet of him tomorrow, BECAUSE the stupid ball buster filed the fucking order.
Am fairly delighted with the prospect!
issued two prayer requests at my new home church, asking them to pray for Don for insight and understanding.
But, I forgot what a wimply coward he has turned out to be!
And so, THAT is why I pray for him for courage!
I wonder what prayers he is praying for me?
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
From Kathleen Harris - One of God's Holy Warriors
Wishing You...Peace, Love and Joy . . . Always and Forever August 30, 2011
As has probably been mentioned by someone or other, suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (aka PTSD) can be a bit like unknowingly entering and blithely traversing a psychic mine field.
Let's see if I can make that a bit more vivid.
It may have to do with the time space continuum in a way. If I come off sounding like I am trying to describe a Magritte surrealist painting to a person who is only familiar with Andy Warhol's creations, I apologize. If that is necessary. To me, a PTSD-affected spiritual landscape is one that has become fraught with subterranean camouflaged pot holes, automobile-swallowing ditches and incendiary devices. And perhaps there are also some pathways that seem like they should be familiar or that used to have clear sign posts now seem to lead to unsuspected destinations and undesirable locations.
Now.
Uh-oh. Have I already lost you?
Or maybe you would rather not continue on the journey with me. If so, I understand.
No harm, no foul.
But these images have been lurking in my consciousness lately, and just tonight I realized why.
The pot holes, mine fields, and deceptive pathways minus familiar sign posts are triggered by the anniversaries of traumatic events or time periods. Even if I go out of my way not to be in touch with the fact that the anniversaries are coming up or upon me, my psyche never forgets. So it's just that the end of August and the beginning of September are times when a lot of exciting and/or traumatic things happened to me.
The even stranger thing is that there are not necessarily uniform ways of experiencing whatever comes up from the underground or appears along a pathway. And the image of mine fields may give you the impression that there is a stark flat plain stretching in all directions when actually there also might be dark forests, or even jungles . . . and/or the mysteries of a deep and wide open ocean.
Often the PTSD episode triggers become evident when I find myself awake all night for one or more nights in a row or several over a short period of time. At first I may tell myself that there is no reason not to be able to sleep, but I am always trying to fool myself when I say that. It is more likely that sleep is elusive because there is no desire to enter into the level of consciousness that leaves me open to the dream state.
Or maybe something from the nocturnal musings of the days leading up to the sleepless nights has already broadcast warnings about the approach to the mine field. Be that as it may, once I really do get back connected with the date, I am forced to confront the reality. Addressing that reality head on does not necessarily help much, however.
That reminds me of the old Air Force saying that begins a lot of war stories. The stories start with: "There I was . . . flying along fat dumb and happy. . . " The story continues with whatever was horrendous, terrifying, difficult and/or shocking, but somehow the storyteller survives.
I guess one of the reasons that things are traumatic is that they come out of nowhere and are so shocking and disturbing that you really can't get your mind around them.
Ever.
I agree with the sentiment expressed by Robin Williams when he said:
"Reality . . . what a concept!"
Even though it may be that some sort of past reality intrudes on contemporary life, the PTSD episode always seems to be more powerful than whatever is going on in the present. Or maybe it's just that whatever the present reality is cannot quite compete with the past "reality." And the traumatic memories can be so vivid that they can tend to make the present reality seem to fade away into the background.
Or even to disappear.
And even more than that sometimes the imagination interjects itself into the memories and the present reality so that there are stacked levels of elements surrounding and enhancing memories, musings, illusions and allegories.
Probably not much of that is really making any of this any clearer, is it?
When I am able to talk to friends who were involved in the trauma I find it helpful, but I also realize then that none of us experienced what happened in the same way. What happened affected and continues to affect (or doesn't continue to affect) each one of us in various ways.
Of course.
How could it be otherwise? Each of us is a distinct individual with a variety of distinct personalities and experiences.
Our lives intersected with one another for that particular time or times and we came to those points from different places and went our separate ways to reconnect with one another again possibly one on one . . . or with several of us or with some of us. Or never again with most or even all of us. At least not yet. or maybe not ever on this terrestrial plane.
As a case in point, not long ago I saw some Armed Forces Television Network dramatizations concerning two soldiers who were wounded in the recent past. They both suffered from PTSD. One was given a chance to talk about the trauma with professional counselors from the earliest time of his physical recovery. The other soldier did not have a chance to communicate with anyone about what had happened to him until a long while after he was released back into civilian life. Each was able to get help, but the latter suffered more and for a longer length of time. Go figure!
Seeing the segments aimed at encouraging military members who have been affected by PTSD to seek help as soon as possible was encouraging since so many veterans are being added to the roles.
And I recently saw the movie "Random Harvest" again, too. (Have you ever watched it? Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman are marvelous in the story about the effects of battle fatigue on a British soldier in WW I.) So even though the term PTSD had not been coined back in the early 20th century, I was reminded that people have been suffering with the condition from way back. (No doubt as long as man's inhumanity to men has been extant.)
There are ways to put the memories to rest and to keep the ghosts at bay.
But actually sometimes I look forward to being with my dearly departed once more. They are all loving and kindly spirits even if they are just as I have imagined them. Or remembered them.
There are times that seem overloaded with intertwining layers of memories because there were different traumatic experiences that happened at the same time of the year -- or even on certain particular dates of multiple years, so that somehow the PTSD trash compactor has smooshed them all together and it's difficult to discern which presenting traumatic memories come from where. Or when.
There also might be organic or atmospheric or astronomical (or other) factors involved in the fertilizing compost heaped up in my psyche. And too much digging around into all that would not be really helpful anyway, no doubt.
But the traumas are not necessarily all negative. Sometimes great joys can trigger recurring disturbances, too. Both positive and negative emotions can be draining, energizing or enervating. Not sure I can always choose which one of those at any particular time.
Because certainly to begin with . . . in my earliest memories the joys of getting to go back to school every Tuesday after Labor Day were fraught with excitement. And tension. And anticipation. So onto those layers of emotional memories were added the adult traumatic adventures that happened to have occurred around the same time.
For instance last year when over 200 of the members of our high school class got together for the first time in ten, twenty, thirty or forty years (or all of the above, or even more or less often), there was a special kind of traumatic experience.
In a good way.
But it reminded me of the other groups of friends I had gone through stuff with when I was on active duty in the Air Force. And when I was at Seminary. And when I was serving churches.
Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. (As the King of Siam was quoted as saying in "The King and I.")
Know what I mean?
Well, even if you don't, by writing this I seem to have diffused the most powerful psychic mines in my way tonight, and I seem to have recovered the sign posts on some of the obscured pathways.
So thanks for hanging in there with me as I wandered around trying to explain it all to you.
That was a big help!
And God bless us, every one.
As ever -- Kathy
Be Blessed
"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."
Matthew 5:3-9
As has probably been mentioned by someone or other, suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (aka PTSD) can be a bit like unknowingly entering and blithely traversing a psychic mine field.
Let's see if I can make that a bit more vivid.
It may have to do with the time space continuum in a way. If I come off sounding like I am trying to describe a Magritte surrealist painting to a person who is only familiar with Andy Warhol's creations, I apologize. If that is necessary. To me, a PTSD-affected spiritual landscape is one that has become fraught with subterranean camouflaged pot holes, automobile-swallowing ditches and incendiary devices. And perhaps there are also some pathways that seem like they should be familiar or that used to have clear sign posts now seem to lead to unsuspected destinations and undesirable locations.
Now.
Uh-oh. Have I already lost you?
Or maybe you would rather not continue on the journey with me. If so, I understand.
No harm, no foul.
But these images have been lurking in my consciousness lately, and just tonight I realized why.
The pot holes, mine fields, and deceptive pathways minus familiar sign posts are triggered by the anniversaries of traumatic events or time periods. Even if I go out of my way not to be in touch with the fact that the anniversaries are coming up or upon me, my psyche never forgets. So it's just that the end of August and the beginning of September are times when a lot of exciting and/or traumatic things happened to me.
The even stranger thing is that there are not necessarily uniform ways of experiencing whatever comes up from the underground or appears along a pathway. And the image of mine fields may give you the impression that there is a stark flat plain stretching in all directions when actually there also might be dark forests, or even jungles . . . and/or the mysteries of a deep and wide open ocean.
Often the PTSD episode triggers become evident when I find myself awake all night for one or more nights in a row or several over a short period of time. At first I may tell myself that there is no reason not to be able to sleep, but I am always trying to fool myself when I say that. It is more likely that sleep is elusive because there is no desire to enter into the level of consciousness that leaves me open to the dream state.
Or maybe something from the nocturnal musings of the days leading up to the sleepless nights has already broadcast warnings about the approach to the mine field. Be that as it may, once I really do get back connected with the date, I am forced to confront the reality. Addressing that reality head on does not necessarily help much, however.
That reminds me of the old Air Force saying that begins a lot of war stories. The stories start with: "There I was . . . flying along fat dumb and happy. . . " The story continues with whatever was horrendous, terrifying, difficult and/or shocking, but somehow the storyteller survives.
I guess one of the reasons that things are traumatic is that they come out of nowhere and are so shocking and disturbing that you really can't get your mind around them.
Ever.
I agree with the sentiment expressed by Robin Williams when he said:
"Reality . . . what a concept!"
Even though it may be that some sort of past reality intrudes on contemporary life, the PTSD episode always seems to be more powerful than whatever is going on in the present. Or maybe it's just that whatever the present reality is cannot quite compete with the past "reality." And the traumatic memories can be so vivid that they can tend to make the present reality seem to fade away into the background.
Or even to disappear.
And even more than that sometimes the imagination interjects itself into the memories and the present reality so that there are stacked levels of elements surrounding and enhancing memories, musings, illusions and allegories.
Probably not much of that is really making any of this any clearer, is it?
When I am able to talk to friends who were involved in the trauma I find it helpful, but I also realize then that none of us experienced what happened in the same way. What happened affected and continues to affect (or doesn't continue to affect) each one of us in various ways.
Of course.
How could it be otherwise? Each of us is a distinct individual with a variety of distinct personalities and experiences.
Our lives intersected with one another for that particular time or times and we came to those points from different places and went our separate ways to reconnect with one another again possibly one on one . . . or with several of us or with some of us. Or never again with most or even all of us. At least not yet. or maybe not ever on this terrestrial plane.
As a case in point, not long ago I saw some Armed Forces Television Network dramatizations concerning two soldiers who were wounded in the recent past. They both suffered from PTSD. One was given a chance to talk about the trauma with professional counselors from the earliest time of his physical recovery. The other soldier did not have a chance to communicate with anyone about what had happened to him until a long while after he was released back into civilian life. Each was able to get help, but the latter suffered more and for a longer length of time. Go figure!
Seeing the segments aimed at encouraging military members who have been affected by PTSD to seek help as soon as possible was encouraging since so many veterans are being added to the roles.
And I recently saw the movie "Random Harvest" again, too. (Have you ever watched it? Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman are marvelous in the story about the effects of battle fatigue on a British soldier in WW I.) So even though the term PTSD had not been coined back in the early 20th century, I was reminded that people have been suffering with the condition from way back. (No doubt as long as man's inhumanity to men has been extant.)
There are ways to put the memories to rest and to keep the ghosts at bay.
But actually sometimes I look forward to being with my dearly departed once more. They are all loving and kindly spirits even if they are just as I have imagined them. Or remembered them.
There are times that seem overloaded with intertwining layers of memories because there were different traumatic experiences that happened at the same time of the year -- or even on certain particular dates of multiple years, so that somehow the PTSD trash compactor has smooshed them all together and it's difficult to discern which presenting traumatic memories come from where. Or when.
There also might be organic or atmospheric or astronomical (or other) factors involved in the fertilizing compost heaped up in my psyche. And too much digging around into all that would not be really helpful anyway, no doubt.
But the traumas are not necessarily all negative. Sometimes great joys can trigger recurring disturbances, too. Both positive and negative emotions can be draining, energizing or enervating. Not sure I can always choose which one of those at any particular time.
Because certainly to begin with . . . in my earliest memories the joys of getting to go back to school every Tuesday after Labor Day were fraught with excitement. And tension. And anticipation. So onto those layers of emotional memories were added the adult traumatic adventures that happened to have occurred around the same time.
For instance last year when over 200 of the members of our high school class got together for the first time in ten, twenty, thirty or forty years (or all of the above, or even more or less often), there was a special kind of traumatic experience.
In a good way.
But it reminded me of the other groups of friends I had gone through stuff with when I was on active duty in the Air Force. And when I was at Seminary. And when I was serving churches.
Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. (As the King of Siam was quoted as saying in "The King and I.")
Know what I mean?
Well, even if you don't, by writing this I seem to have diffused the most powerful psychic mines in my way tonight, and I seem to have recovered the sign posts on some of the obscured pathways.
So thanks for hanging in there with me as I wandered around trying to explain it all to you.
That was a big help!
And God bless us, every one.
As ever -- Kathy
Be Blessed
"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."
Matthew 5:3-9
Thursday, September 1, 2011
David Somersby Catches a so-called "liberal" With her understanding level at naught!
HE COULDN’T IMAGINE MCCORMACK! Jon Fasman tried to imagine what Tea Party people are like:
MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2011
A professor and a support group/Higher re-education: Paul Krugman is basically right today, though we’d say his perspective is somewhat limited.
(Just for the record: In a December 2010 Gallup survey, 34 percent of Democrats agreed with this statement: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” This compared with 52 percent of Republicans. Failure to believe in evolution is one of the two “anti-science” views Krugman discusses today. It’s worth remembering that many Democratic voters believe in creation.)
(As many commenters noted, Kornacki’s attempt to expose Mitt Romney as a sexist was just pathetically silly. In this piece, Clark-Flory reversed herself on the DSK case, explaining why she took her initial, prosecute-him-anyway stand. Good lord: Clark-Flory said she took her original position because she “felt guilty” about saying what she actually thought!)
The column was written by Patricia Turner, a professor of African American studies and the vice provost for undergraduate studies at Cal Davis. Turner’s column extends the puzzling critique of the movie, The Help, which has emanated from parts of the white liberal world and from parts of the black professoriate. By the time we reached Turner’s third paragraph, we were already semi-kerflubbled. But her fourth paragraph is astounding:
TURNER (8/29/11): Not all blacks are unmoved by “The Help.” Indeed, among my friends, relatives and colleagues a wide range of views have been shared, including comments that some of us might want to establish a support group for strong black women who liked “The Help.”
Perhaps the professor is speaking tongue in cheek. In context, that isn’t real obvious.
Turner goes on to present a bewildering account of this film. As we have read “liberal” attacks on the film, we have often wondered if the writer actually saw it. So it was by the time we reached the highlighted juncture:
TURNER: It is unfair to the filmmakers and cast to expect a work of fiction to adhere to the standards of authenticity we would want for a documentary. But we also recognize that precious few works of art tackle the Civil Rights era, and what people coming of age in the 21st century learn about this era often stems from fictive rather than nonfictive sources.
Forty-eight years after Martin Luther King Jr. was accompanied by tens of thousands of black domestic workers to the National Mall in Washington to demand economic justice, it is not all that difficult to render black fictional characters with appealing attributes and praiseworthy talents. What is more difficult to accomplish is a verisimilar rendering of the white characters.
This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists.
There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.
We’ll let you puzzle out the professor’s logic. (Can “good people” be “racist?” She doesn’t seem to see the problem lodged in this recurrent construct.) But how about that highlighted sentence? “With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable?” Presumably, the possible exception to which Turner refers is the Emma Stone character—a character which is meant to be massively likable, of course. (Elsewhere, that’s one of the basic complaints.) But is that character’s mother “remarkably unlikable?” Is the Sissy Spacek character “remarkably unlikable?” As the column rumbles along, it gets harder and harder to believe that Turner has seen the film:
TURNER: Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.
But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.
Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.
What the heck is Turner talking about? It’s true—in To Kill a Mockingbird, we pretty much never see upstanding, upper-middle-class people expressing racist sentiments. But The Help is crawling with such portrayals; it specifically shows you upper-class white Jackson behaving in various unlovely ways. As with other critiques of this film, it’s rather hard to figure what Turner is talking about.
Alas! Our professors and our “liberal journalists” are often full of dogmatic notions—ideas they are prepared to impose on all manner of outside reality. For an example of what we mean, consider what happened when another professor, Ida Jones, appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to help us pitiful rubes understand what’s so wrong with The Help.
To read the transcript, just click here. (You can also listen to the program.) As with Turner, Professor Jones was expounding about all that is wrong with the troubling film—until black viewers started to call.
The first caller disagreed with Jones’ basic outlook. This was the second call:
ROBERTS (8/18/11): Let's hear from Lisa in Oakland. Lisa, welcome to Talk of the Nation.
LISA: Hi there. I'm a black woman who spent my summers down in the Jim Crow South, went back in the '60s. So I didn't live there, but I experienced enough of the segregated beaches and everything else to leave a real nasty taste in my mouth. My grandmother was a live-in seamstress. She wasn't a maid. She did all the sewing for a white family. And some of her stories were mirrored in the movie. I loved this movie. I walked to the theater, and when I walked home, I was grinning from ear to ear. It was so uplifting to finally hear these stories. It doesn't matter from whose voice they came.
The fact that the stories were told, that we got to see that these women, despite everything, they kept their dignity, they kept their families intact, they did what they had to do, was inspiring to me.
And what was most interesting, though, as I was leaving the theater, all the white women were crying, and all the black women were smiling, uplifted. I have never seen a movie that cut like that. The experiences were so markedly different as those reactions as I saw to The Help. It blew me away.
Apparently, Lisa had failed to get the memo from the nation’s professors. But then, so had the next caller, who discussed the book on which the movie is based:
ROBERTS: This is Toni in Cincinnati on the line. Toni, welcome to Talk of the Nation.
TONI: Hi. I just wanted to say that I am a 41-year-old African-American woman. And I read the book and I loved it. I think the book was a great book. And my grandmother was a maid for many years down South. And the stories she told me mirror the stories that were similar to some of the stories in the book. I think the big discrepancy is, I think that—and I can say this as a black person. I think that sometimes we, as people, we feel that white people telling our story just can't simply relate. And I know. I used to be one of those black people. But I feel, through education, I feel differently.
I feel that there are so many white people out there that educate themselves, that they study and they study black history and they can relate to us. So I don't feel that this white woman writing this book, I really feel that she was dead-on. The book was a great. I haven't seen the movie. I will love to see the movie, but I have to give credit to the author. The stories were dead-on. And I just really enjoyed the book.
Toni is floundering too! Presumably, Turner’s support group will help these women with their re-education.
We’ll restate our personal experience. We saw the film in a jam-packed theater full of black Baltimoreans. The audience loved the movie. Professor Turner will have to raise a lot of dough if she hopes to brainwash this many people into accepting her claims.
Campbell, Putnam, Fiore, Kornacki, Turner, Jones? As the liberal world re-emerges from decades of sleep, it is often crawling with dogma, dogma it likes to impose on the world. As liberals express these dogmatic views, they make it harder for progressive values to gain purchase among the wider electorate. And they help us understand a sad fact—dogmatic cluelessness is found all over, not just in the other tribe.
“Not all blacks are unmoved by The Help!” So the professor instructs us today, showing the power of understatement. Meanwhile, planning for that support group is underway—helping us see the way the professors, and the Times itself, teach average people to scorn us.
Special report: Imagine all the people!
MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2011
A professor and a support group/Higher re-education: Paul Krugman is basically right today, though we’d say his perspective is somewhat limited.
Increasingly, the Republican Party is “anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge,” he writes. We wouldn’t put it precisely that way ourselves, but his points are all well-taken, especially at the leadership/policy/pandering level.
(Just for the record: In a December 2010 Gallup survey, 34 percent of Democrats agreed with this statement: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” This compared with 52 percent of Republicans. Failure to believe in evolution is one of the two “anti-science” views Krugman discusses today. It’s worth remembering that many Democratic voters believe in creation.)
Republican leadership is now anti-science. But then, the liberal world increasingly strikes us as being a bit “anti-knowledge” itself. Before the week is done, we’ll speak again about the work done by Professors Putnam and Campbell in their recent New York Times op-ed column. And did you read the hopeless work at Salon last week, in which Tracy Clark-Flory and Steve Kornacki imposed absurd dogmatic belief on the things of the world?
(As many commenters noted, Kornacki’s attempt to expose Mitt Romney as a sexist was just pathetically silly. In this piece, Clark-Flory reversed herself on the DSK case, explaining why she took her initial, prosecute-him-anyway stand. Good lord: Clark-Flory said she took her original position because she “felt guilty” about saying what she actually thought!)
It’s hard for a blinkered, dogmatic liberal world to gain traction with the wider electorate. For the latest example of “liberal” dogmatics, we have the puzzling column which sits next to Krugman’s piece today.
The column was written by Patricia Turner, a professor of African American studies and the vice provost for undergraduate studies at Cal Davis. Turner’s column extends the puzzling critique of the movie, The Help, which has emanated from parts of the white liberal world and from parts of the black professoriate. By the time we reached Turner’s third paragraph, we were already semi-kerflubbled. But her fourth paragraph is astounding:
TURNER (8/29/11): Not all blacks are unmoved by “The Help.” Indeed, among my friends, relatives and colleagues a wide range of views have been shared, including comments that some of us might want to establish a support group for strong black women who liked “The Help.”
Perhaps the professor is speaking tongue in cheek. In context, that isn’t real obvious.
Turner goes on to present a bewildering account of this film. As we have read “liberal” attacks on the film, we have often wondered if the writer actually saw it. So it was by the time we reached the highlighted juncture:
TURNER: It is unfair to the filmmakers and cast to expect a work of fiction to adhere to the standards of authenticity we would want for a documentary. But we also recognize that precious few works of art tackle the Civil Rights era, and what people coming of age in the 21st century learn about this era often stems from fictive rather than nonfictive sources.
Forty-eight years after Martin Luther King Jr. was accompanied by tens of thousands of black domestic workers to the National Mall in Washington to demand economic justice, it is not all that difficult to render black fictional characters with appealing attributes and praiseworthy talents. What is more difficult to accomplish is a verisimilar rendering of the white characters.
This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists.
There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.
We’ll let you puzzle out the professor’s logic. (Can “good people” be “racist?” She doesn’t seem to see the problem lodged in this recurrent construct.) But how about that highlighted sentence? “With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable?” Presumably, the possible exception to which Turner refers is the Emma Stone character—a character which is meant to be massively likable, of course. (Elsewhere, that’s one of the basic complaints.) But is that character’s mother “remarkably unlikable?” Is the Sissy Spacek character “remarkably unlikable?” As the column rumbles along, it gets harder and harder to believe that Turner has seen the film:
TURNER: Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.
But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.
Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.
What the heck is Turner talking about? It’s true—in To Kill a Mockingbird, we pretty much never see upstanding, upper-middle-class people expressing racist sentiments. But The Help is crawling with such portrayals; it specifically shows you upper-class white Jackson behaving in various unlovely ways. As with other critiques of this film, it’s rather hard to figure what Turner is talking about.
Alas! Our professors and our “liberal journalists” are often full of dogmatic notions—ideas they are prepared to impose on all manner of outside reality. For an example of what we mean, consider what happened when another professor, Ida Jones, appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to help us pitiful rubes understand what’s so wrong with The Help.
To read the transcript, just click here. (You can also listen to the program.) As with Turner, Professor Jones was expounding about all that is wrong with the troubling film—until black viewers started to call.
The first caller disagreed with Jones’ basic outlook. This was the second call:
ROBERTS (8/18/11): Let's hear from Lisa in Oakland. Lisa, welcome to Talk of the Nation.
LISA: Hi there. I'm a black woman who spent my summers down in the Jim Crow South, went back in the '60s. So I didn't live there, but I experienced enough of the segregated beaches and everything else to leave a real nasty taste in my mouth. My grandmother was a live-in seamstress. She wasn't a maid. She did all the sewing for a white family. And some of her stories were mirrored in the movie. I loved this movie. I walked to the theater, and when I walked home, I was grinning from ear to ear. It was so uplifting to finally hear these stories. It doesn't matter from whose voice they came.
The fact that the stories were told, that we got to see that these women, despite everything, they kept their dignity, they kept their families intact, they did what they had to do, was inspiring to me.
And what was most interesting, though, as I was leaving the theater, all the white women were crying, and all the black women were smiling, uplifted. I have never seen a movie that cut like that. The experiences were so markedly different as those reactions as I saw to The Help. It blew me away.
Apparently, Lisa had failed to get the memo from the nation’s professors. But then, so had the next caller, who discussed the book on which the movie is based:
ROBERTS: This is Toni in Cincinnati on the line. Toni, welcome to Talk of the Nation.
TONI: Hi. I just wanted to say that I am a 41-year-old African-American woman. And I read the book and I loved it. I think the book was a great book. And my grandmother was a maid for many years down South. And the stories she told me mirror the stories that were similar to some of the stories in the book. I think the big discrepancy is, I think that—and I can say this as a black person. I think that sometimes we, as people, we feel that white people telling our story just can't simply relate. And I know. I used to be one of those black people. But I feel, through education, I feel differently.
I feel that there are so many white people out there that educate themselves, that they study and they study black history and they can relate to us. So I don't feel that this white woman writing this book, I really feel that she was dead-on. The book was a great. I haven't seen the movie. I will love to see the movie, but I have to give credit to the author. The stories were dead-on. And I just really enjoyed the book.
Toni is floundering too! Presumably, Turner’s support group will help these women with their re-education.
We’ll restate our personal experience. We saw the film in a jam-packed theater full of black Baltimoreans. The audience loved the movie. Professor Turner will have to raise a lot of dough if she hopes to brainwash this many people into accepting her claims.
Campbell, Putnam, Fiore, Kornacki, Turner, Jones? As the liberal world re-emerges from decades of sleep, it is often crawling with dogma, dogma it likes to impose on the world. As liberals express these dogmatic views, they make it harder for progressive values to gain purchase among the wider electorate. And they help us understand a sad fact—dogmatic cluelessness is found all over, not just in the other tribe.
“Not all blacks are unmoved by The Help!” So the professor instructs us today, showing the power of understatement. Meanwhile, planning for that support group is underway—helping us see the way the professors, and the Times itself, teach average people to scorn us.
Special report: Imagine all the people!
Monday, August 15, 2011
Thinkin' 'Bout Chew
I know, it sounds so incredible, but I swear
That we've met before, and I think it was on
An inbound train to the city.
Of course, you wouldn't recognize me now,
For then, I was a bald-headed man,
And weighed 35 more pounds.
What I remember about you is how beautiful
You looked, and it was more than your lovely
Face, and your piercing eyes, and soulful
Smile – it was much more than that!
It was the way you looked so much the mature
And talked, the mature young lady that I was
Stunned to see, that when you curled your hair
With your fingers, it was clear that you were
Still just a teen-aged girl, with the single solitary
Exception that you had never been given the
Opportunity to safely be a young teen-aged girl
Hanging out on weekend nights at slumber
Parties with your best friends forever,
Doing your nails with and for each other,
And talking and LAUGING so uproariously
About young boys, and how they would
embarrass themselves with you, not understanding
That their shyness and inexperience did not
Make them unattractive to you, but, au contraire,
Made them charming to you, especially when one
Of them would get out of his shellish world
And call you to talk on the telephone for
A while (what a joke, you'd have talked the
Night away with any one of them; you had
No favorite, just an empathetic understanding
That what they were going through, and what
You were going through, those experiences
They were not so different from one another
And how cruel it must have been, to have your
World betrayed by a trusted one, never again to
Be a teen-aged girl, protected safe in her own home,
The sound of the laughter of other teen-aged girls
Resounding throughout your house, and all the smiles
And goofy ideas for rationales for escape – oh Good
God in Heaven up above, you all could REALLY
Invent some doozies there. 'T'ain't no American
Politician on the planet better at self-rationalizing,
And they usually worked too, because you went
For cigarette butts in the best place here in town
(You had slumber party girl girl-friends here too,
That much I remember) at the restaurant Chelsie's,
Where the butts usually ounumber the customers,
And these butts are SUBSTANTIAL, so substantial that you
Knew for a flat-out fact, that this was an upper income
Town – who else can afford to toss away a two puff butt?
And now, that you've escaped high school, and have a job
All lined up in Colorado, the staff here is telling you that it's
You that is the big problem, and here, I would argue with them
I would be the big champion for you, but they are not going to
Hear me, and they would take it as evidence that my
Meds are NOT working, when in-fact, I feel more factfoid-
Filled and more logical argument winning now than when
My BAL is at the .120 window
So, yes, young lady, beautiful young lady, now you've got
That which you were seekin' that friend who is always there
For you, who can afford to give up what he's doin' and go on
Outrageous adventures – do the slumber party thang, HELL,
Beautiful Lady, I'll even let you do my toe nails, and wear
Clogs for the world to see … won't THAT give us a laugh and a half!
In fact, now I quite understand why Tull sang Goin' Back to the Family
My telephone wakes me in the morning --
have to get up to answer the call.
So I think I'll go back to the family
where no one can ring me at all.
Living this life has its problems
so I think that I'll give it a break.
Oh, I'm going back to the family
`cos I've had about all I can take.
Master's in the counting house
counting all his money.
Sister's sitting by the mirror --
she thinks her hair looks funny.
And here am I thinking to myself
just wond'ring what things to do.
I think I enjoyed all my problems
Where I did not get nothing for free.
Oh, I'm going back to the family --
doing nothing is bothering me.
I'll get a train back to the city
that soft life is getting me down.
There's more fun away from the family
get some action when I pull into town.
Everything I do is wrong,
what the hell was I thinking?
Phone keeps ringing all day long
I got no time for thinking.
And every day has the same old way
of giving me too much to do.
So, with me, the venue is pretty simple:
Monday the IPGA tournament, where with a little bit of luck
I can snag a bag and make half-a-hundred, and with a LOT of luck,
We can both snag bags and make the full C-note
Won't that be grand, almost too much money for us
But, we've been down that road before, and with you
As my body guard, and me as your assassin, we can safely
Ride the rails – get ourselves out to Yvonn'es, where the
Pitchers are, oh my God, check this out:
Three dollars a piece, and the pool table is FREE
Whoop Dee Doo
And the Depot, where my beloved Paul and Sheryl run
What will be the best Irish bar in the country, once they
Start opening at 7 a.m. – except their damn bar tenders
Are so slovenly drunk at that hour, that they'd give the damn
Place away.
Tuesdays – those will have to be your days, love
Wednesdays – open mic at Lamp's
Thursdays – open mic at Corkscrew Pointe
Fridays – karioke at the Deopt
Saturdays – karioke at the Depot
Sundays – chruch in Ingleside, where, quite literally
We can go to three services, plus a bible study,
And learn Spanish well enough to flit peaceably amongst
The crowd at the Spanish bar in Round Lake.
Soundin' like a whole lot of fun, dear.
Whoop Dee Doop!
Something to look forward too.
I got a friend, and she befriends me
I got a friend, we got a lot of worlds to see
She got a friend now, don't get better than this
She gots me, I gots her, we don't ever need to kiss
We shall hit the rails and roam
Never farther than 60 miles from home
I gots her, she gots me, I tell you what a lot of fun will have WE!
Whoop Dee Doop!
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Bumbling in Bananastan
9 Aug 2011
by Jeff Huber
The combat deaths of 30 special operations troops on 6 August should have told the country loud and clear that our woebegone Long War on whatever and whomever it is we're fighting is a travesty that needs to end now. Unfortunately, in today's polluted information environment, the incident is being used to peddle the Pentarchy's agenda for Orwellian persistent conflict.
A team of Army Rangers dropped into some remote Palookaville to snatch some alleged low-level Taliban im-potentate, and they ran into resistance their intelligence officer probably forgot to tell them to expect. Forty minutes or so into the firefight a Chinook helicopter carrying Navy Seals flew in to bail their Ranger pals out of a jam and somebody the intelligence officer probably didn’t know about popped shot down the Chinook with a rocket grenade, killing the all of the SEALs and the aircrew as well.
Ranger and Seal outfits are highly trained and custom-armed units of young Adonises genetically disposed to war. Unleashed in a village someplace to run amok and do something you can brag about and/or have to cover up later, these war dogs are fierce, they are dazzling, they are undefeatable. Piled into a helicopter they become a low/slow flying duck begging to get bagged by turban togged rock rancher armed with a weapon that the poorest people on earth can afford to own. (36 percent of Afghans live below the poverty line, and we’re not talking about the U.S. poverty line. Afghanistan’s per capita GDP is $900. That’s right: nine hundred dollars. Per person. Per year. Those people couldn’t buy a bag of potato chips at a Junior Market in Detroit.)
The 6 August incident shouldn’t have surprised anybody, even the intelligence weenies. The first time We the People heard about troopers in helicopters getting whacked in Bananastan by bottle-rocket technology was back in 2002. We heard about it again in 2005, and in 2007, and in 2008, and in 2009, and in 2010. The only greater threat to troops in helicopters than rocket propelled grenades are the helicopters themselves, which have a penchant for shooting themselves down due to mechanical failures, weather, pilot error, and the animus of the gremlins that inhabit them. Incredibly, we’re now hearing that subsequent to the 6 August incident, the Pentagon brass is examining the wisdom of landing helicopters like the Chinook in battle zones. Why do you reckon the Pentagon brass is just now scratching its collective hat on the subject? Maybe the Pentagon intelligence officers weren’t briefing them on all those other shoot downs over the years. Tsk, tsk.
Worse than the insanity of continuing to pursue a proven failed tactic is that said tactic—vertical assault on targets chosen by the most inept intelligence apparatus in the history of warfare—is the cornerstone of an even more profoundly failed grand strategy. As Jonathan S. Landay and Hashim Shukoor of McClatchy report, the SEALS who died on 6 August were operating in a valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids like the one the SEALS were reinforcing are driving the locals into the arms of the Taliban. No strategy can be more self-defeating than one in which attacks against enemies provide them with aid and comfort.
Lamentably, McClatchy is just about the last of the mainstream news outlets willing to tell the ugly truth about our disingenuous wars. The rest of big media is scrambling to see who can put the most pro-war spin on the affair. A 6 August New York Times story by ace Pentagon echo chamberlain Thom Shanker noted that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the “attack,” and that the “attack” came during a “surge of violence” that has “accompanied the beginning of a drawdown of American and NATO troops.” That’s a remarkable statement considering that we were the ones doing the attacking in this scenario, and that the only “surge of violence” it seems to have been part of is the one in which we’re using commando units to blow the smithereens out of remote villages in hopes of bagging Taliban non-coms who are as important to the insurgent war effort as The Good Soldier Schweik was to Kaiser Wilhelm’s general staff.
NBC's Jack Jacobs says elite combat
units are too valuable to risk in combat.
On 8 August, NBC Nightly News spokesmodel Brian Williams trotted out Retired Colonel War Hero who questioned why high command used “tier one” troops on a target that wasn't that important. I guess Colonel Hero figures if we’re going to throw troops away on paltry missions we should throw away the everyday, disposable troops, not the high-price ones we keep for special company. Then Embedded NBC echo chamberlain Richard Engel slipped in the money mantra about how Afghanistan is getting more dangerous because we’re drawing down (we aren’t yet, actually) and the Afghans aren’t ready to take over (they never will be).
Then Williams brought on NBC’s senior Pentagon bobblehead Jim Mxyzptlk who repeated the five or so words his Pentagon handlers wrote specially for Jim so he could repeat them verbatim on camera. (I can’t see Jim on NBC Nightly News without flashing on John Cleese as a footballer in the Monty Python sketch where he tells interviewer Eric Idle, “Hello, Brian, I’m openin’ a boutique!”).
Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell
provides opportunity to form
disposable combat teams.
I thought Jim's one-line soliloquy would be the end of the torture, but it was just getting started. Next came video of the Monday morning’s Today freak show featuring the wife of one of the guys who got killed, crying about how her SEAL loved his country. Mother Mary at the foot of the cross, man. Remember when the rabid right had a fit over how insensitive PBS was being when it ran a roster of that week’s war dead against a backdrop of silence? I beseech the craven idol I worship to someday locate my mitts across the trachea of the Chief of Naval Information (aka CHINFO) cretin who arranged to put that SEAL’s widow on national television days after her husband was killed in action.
But making a spectacle of the warrior’s wailing widow for propaganda purposes was a ray of decorum compared to the obscenity NBC and the other networks committed by running footage of our newly inserted defense secretary Leon Panetta’s public statement on the affair. At the Special Operations Command ceremony in Florida, Panetta said of the latest commando casualties that we, “must pledge to them and to their families that we will never cease fighting for the cause for which they gave their lives, the cause of a secure and safer America."
NBC's Brian Williams
and Jim Miklasewski.
Holy peyote, Uncle Leo. Even Don Rumsfeld knew that our War on Evil was making more evildoers, not a secure and safer America. What the 30 special ops troopers gave their lives for on 6 August was the continued creation of conditions that ensure perpetual low-level conflict in support of the neoconservative goal of world domination through military force.
Now let’s see some CHINFO bull feather merchant get that widow back on the Today show and have her tell us how proud she is that her husband died for the cause of putting American combat boots on every square inch of the globe from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mt. Everest.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
by Jeff Huber
The combat deaths of 30 special operations troops on 6 August should have told the country loud and clear that our woebegone Long War on whatever and whomever it is we're fighting is a travesty that needs to end now. Unfortunately, in today's polluted information environment, the incident is being used to peddle the Pentarchy's agenda for Orwellian persistent conflict.
A team of Army Rangers dropped into some remote Palookaville to snatch some alleged low-level Taliban im-potentate, and they ran into resistance their intelligence officer probably forgot to tell them to expect. Forty minutes or so into the firefight a Chinook helicopter carrying Navy Seals flew in to bail their Ranger pals out of a jam and somebody the intelligence officer probably didn’t know about popped shot down the Chinook with a rocket grenade, killing the all of the SEALs and the aircrew as well.
Ranger and Seal outfits are highly trained and custom-armed units of young Adonises genetically disposed to war. Unleashed in a village someplace to run amok and do something you can brag about and/or have to cover up later, these war dogs are fierce, they are dazzling, they are undefeatable. Piled into a helicopter they become a low/slow flying duck begging to get bagged by turban togged rock rancher armed with a weapon that the poorest people on earth can afford to own. (36 percent of Afghans live below the poverty line, and we’re not talking about the U.S. poverty line. Afghanistan’s per capita GDP is $900. That’s right: nine hundred dollars. Per person. Per year. Those people couldn’t buy a bag of potato chips at a Junior Market in Detroit.)
The 6 August incident shouldn’t have surprised anybody, even the intelligence weenies. The first time We the People heard about troopers in helicopters getting whacked in Bananastan by bottle-rocket technology was back in 2002. We heard about it again in 2005, and in 2007, and in 2008, and in 2009, and in 2010. The only greater threat to troops in helicopters than rocket propelled grenades are the helicopters themselves, which have a penchant for shooting themselves down due to mechanical failures, weather, pilot error, and the animus of the gremlins that inhabit them. Incredibly, we’re now hearing that subsequent to the 6 August incident, the Pentagon brass is examining the wisdom of landing helicopters like the Chinook in battle zones. Why do you reckon the Pentagon brass is just now scratching its collective hat on the subject? Maybe the Pentagon intelligence officers weren’t briefing them on all those other shoot downs over the years. Tsk, tsk.
Worse than the insanity of continuing to pursue a proven failed tactic is that said tactic—vertical assault on targets chosen by the most inept intelligence apparatus in the history of warfare—is the cornerstone of an even more profoundly failed grand strategy. As Jonathan S. Landay and Hashim Shukoor of McClatchy report, the SEALS who died on 6 August were operating in a valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids like the one the SEALS were reinforcing are driving the locals into the arms of the Taliban. No strategy can be more self-defeating than one in which attacks against enemies provide them with aid and comfort.
Lamentably, McClatchy is just about the last of the mainstream news outlets willing to tell the ugly truth about our disingenuous wars. The rest of big media is scrambling to see who can put the most pro-war spin on the affair. A 6 August New York Times story by ace Pentagon echo chamberlain Thom Shanker noted that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the “attack,” and that the “attack” came during a “surge of violence” that has “accompanied the beginning of a drawdown of American and NATO troops.” That’s a remarkable statement considering that we were the ones doing the attacking in this scenario, and that the only “surge of violence” it seems to have been part of is the one in which we’re using commando units to blow the smithereens out of remote villages in hopes of bagging Taliban non-coms who are as important to the insurgent war effort as The Good Soldier Schweik was to Kaiser Wilhelm’s general staff.
NBC's Jack Jacobs says elite combat
units are too valuable to risk in combat.
On 8 August, NBC Nightly News spokesmodel Brian Williams trotted out Retired Colonel War Hero who questioned why high command used “tier one” troops on a target that wasn't that important. I guess Colonel Hero figures if we’re going to throw troops away on paltry missions we should throw away the everyday, disposable troops, not the high-price ones we keep for special company. Then Embedded NBC echo chamberlain Richard Engel slipped in the money mantra about how Afghanistan is getting more dangerous because we’re drawing down (we aren’t yet, actually) and the Afghans aren’t ready to take over (they never will be).
Then Williams brought on NBC’s senior Pentagon bobblehead Jim Mxyzptlk who repeated the five or so words his Pentagon handlers wrote specially for Jim so he could repeat them verbatim on camera. (I can’t see Jim on NBC Nightly News without flashing on John Cleese as a footballer in the Monty Python sketch where he tells interviewer Eric Idle, “Hello, Brian, I’m openin’ a boutique!”).
Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell
provides opportunity to form
disposable combat teams.
I thought Jim's one-line soliloquy would be the end of the torture, but it was just getting started. Next came video of the Monday morning’s Today freak show featuring the wife of one of the guys who got killed, crying about how her SEAL loved his country. Mother Mary at the foot of the cross, man. Remember when the rabid right had a fit over how insensitive PBS was being when it ran a roster of that week’s war dead against a backdrop of silence? I beseech the craven idol I worship to someday locate my mitts across the trachea of the Chief of Naval Information (aka CHINFO) cretin who arranged to put that SEAL’s widow on national television days after her husband was killed in action.
But making a spectacle of the warrior’s wailing widow for propaganda purposes was a ray of decorum compared to the obscenity NBC and the other networks committed by running footage of our newly inserted defense secretary Leon Panetta’s public statement on the affair. At the Special Operations Command ceremony in Florida, Panetta said of the latest commando casualties that we, “must pledge to them and to their families that we will never cease fighting for the cause for which they gave their lives, the cause of a secure and safer America."
NBC's Brian Williams
and Jim Miklasewski.
Holy peyote, Uncle Leo. Even Don Rumsfeld knew that our War on Evil was making more evildoers, not a secure and safer America. What the 30 special ops troopers gave their lives for on 6 August was the continued creation of conditions that ensure perpetual low-level conflict in support of the neoconservative goal of world domination through military force.
Now let’s see some CHINFO bull feather merchant get that widow back on the Today show and have her tell us how proud she is that her husband died for the cause of putting American combat boots on every square inch of the globe from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mt. Everest.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
Saturday Night Libya
2 August 2011
by Jeff Huber
Operation Unified Protector, our woebegone war in Libya, has become the only major undertaking of the developed world worse conceived and executed than the present manifestation of Saturday Night Live. OUP and SNL both consist of a large number of people combining misdirected efforts to produce an abysmal farce. SNL, however, has a couple of things going for it: it is not responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, and even thought it is a major pollutant of the information environment, its very existence is not illegal.
The latest news of our burlesque in North Africa comes to us by way of a 30 July New York Times story titled, “NATO Strikes at Libyan State TV.” Insider knowledge gives me a unique perspective from which to appreciate the monumental absurdity of that headline, but the eyebrows of even the most casual observers are likely to collide as they wonder to themselves, You mean they’re just now getting around to doing that?
Air Marshall Lord Basil Fawlty scrubs
tomorrow's Unified Protector target list.
It was clear back in May, already months into young Mr. Obama’s “days not weeks” Libyan lark, that his euro-stooge NATO commanders announced they were “broadening” their target list to include Libya’s infrastructure. Otherwise, claimed Britain’s Sir General David “Harrumph” Richards, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi would “cling to power.” Before directing air strikes at infrastructure, NATO had already bombed Qaddafi’s “command and control” centers.
Every air war gets run by a different set of air-power theorists called “targeteers” who are trained, among other things, in how to choose what kinds of targets to bomb in order to achieve a campaign’s strategic and political goals. When Unified Protector was still just “Odyssey Dawn,” a thou-shalt-not-fly zone you probably heard about and a naval blockade nobody cared about, the only legitimate targets were stuff like surface-to-air missile sites and navy bases. That was when the only stated goal was to protect the freedom-loving people of Libya from their freedom-hating dictator. Then, in April 2011, Obama for all practical purposes admitted that regime change had been the objective all along, at which point the target list should have broadened exponentially.
There is no such thing as uniformity in military jargon. Depending on when any given set of any given air operation’s targeteers went to any given target college, different kinds of targets and missions will be called different things. One war’s “interdiction” is another war’s “strategic strike,” just as “command and control” targets can fold into the “infrastructure” target set and then morph into “regime” targets.
But whatever you want to call a regime’s mother-effing state-controlled television and radio stations, the mother-effing mother-effers doing the mother-effing targeteering should bomb the mother-effing monkey mucous out of them in the first fifteen mother-effing minutes of the mother-effing war. It’s next to impossible to believe that these mother-effers were too mother-effing dumb to do that. Talk about theater of the absurd meets film noir. They ought to call the talking chimps running this one-buttock operation The Gang that Couldn’t Bomb Straight.
We’re justified to a certain extent in snickering up our sleeves at the French fire drill our little NATO buddies have created. But we have to remember that NATO actually stands for “The United States and a handful of mostly white schmoes who speak in Romance and Germanic tongues.” The top military commander of NATO is always a U.S. four-star who only takes legal orders from two dudes: America’s secretary of defense and its president. Accountability for this fiasco rolls all the way to the top of the pile.
Of course, it’s comical to invoke the term “legal” in any discussion of our Libyan involvement. In waging it without so much as a by-your-wink-and-nod from Congress, Bombardier Barry has flushed both the Constitution and its freckled stepchild, the War Powers Resolution of 1973, clear down the Potomac, out the Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic. Progressive popinjay Juan Cole says the Libyan sock-hop is legit because it’s mandated by a UN resolution, an aegis that he characterizes as the “gold standard for military intervention.” Jesus in a G-string, where do we find such eggheads?
Fops like Cole argue that because the Senate ratified the U.N. Charter it became, as per Article VI of the Constitution, the “supreme law of the land.” Such assertions leave the law-of-the-land clause out of context; it actually appears at the end of a litany that reads “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the…” One can easily show that this order conveys an intended precedence hierarchy: in cases where any of the three may conflict, the Constitution trumps the laws of the United States, which in turn trump treaties. To suggest otherwise is to declare the Constitution an instrument of March hare insanity, a legal framework that says the legislature can legally pass laws that demolish the very framework that legitimizes the legislature and makes its laws legal.
Article I of the Constitution clearly assigns the preponderance of foreign policy powers to the legislature: the powers to ratify treaties, to confirm ambassadors, to regulate international commerce and the military, and to declare war. And it is the legislature, not the executive branch, that the Constitution grants powers to “repel invasion.” So everybody who talks about a president’s “constitutional prerogative” to conduct foreign policy or defend the country is feeding you a line of bull roar. Claims of unitary presidential powers you typically hear from Rolex-sporting prevaricators with degrees in jurisprudence stem from the Federalist Papers, documents that are not the Constitution, nor an amendment to the Constitution, nor an annex nor an addendum nor an attachment to it.
The Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Monroe, three landed cats who didn’t believe democratic government was such a keen idea and who wanted the president to be a sort of dress-down Friday king that they could easily control, which is pretty much what today’s Federalists want. Federalist notions on the subject of presidential powers contrast sharply with those of Founders like Jefferson and Washington and Adams.
The UN charter itself has numerous codicils regarding nations going to war on the Security Council’s say so, most notably its numerous references to “special agreements” that essentially grant that no country has to go to war for the UN unless it really, really wants to. Moreover, since the U.S. is a permanent member of the Security Council, we can veto any resolution that calls for war, so the UN isn’t going to ask us to fight a war unless it’s a war we crammed down the UN’s throat the way we did with the present cluster bomb in Libya.
So what Cole and fools like him are asserting when they call a UN resolution for war the “gold standard” is that warmongering lunatics like John Bolton and Susie Rice can vote us into any old conflict anytime they want to and the rest of us have to go along with it because the Constitution says we do.
That respected American intellectuals actually think that way and are taken seriously could be the basis of a wholly hilarious SNL sketch if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. I think that we might have, in a decade or so, grown back the toes we shot off with our antics in Iraq and the Bananastans. But I’m afraid this Libya business will prove to be the whimper our republic went out with.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
by Jeff Huber
Operation Unified Protector, our woebegone war in Libya, has become the only major undertaking of the developed world worse conceived and executed than the present manifestation of Saturday Night Live. OUP and SNL both consist of a large number of people combining misdirected efforts to produce an abysmal farce. SNL, however, has a couple of things going for it: it is not responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, and even thought it is a major pollutant of the information environment, its very existence is not illegal.
The latest news of our burlesque in North Africa comes to us by way of a 30 July New York Times story titled, “NATO Strikes at Libyan State TV.” Insider knowledge gives me a unique perspective from which to appreciate the monumental absurdity of that headline, but the eyebrows of even the most casual observers are likely to collide as they wonder to themselves, You mean they’re just now getting around to doing that?
Air Marshall Lord Basil Fawlty scrubs
tomorrow's Unified Protector target list.
It was clear back in May, already months into young Mr. Obama’s “days not weeks” Libyan lark, that his euro-stooge NATO commanders announced they were “broadening” their target list to include Libya’s infrastructure. Otherwise, claimed Britain’s Sir General David “Harrumph” Richards, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi would “cling to power.” Before directing air strikes at infrastructure, NATO had already bombed Qaddafi’s “command and control” centers.
Every air war gets run by a different set of air-power theorists called “targeteers” who are trained, among other things, in how to choose what kinds of targets to bomb in order to achieve a campaign’s strategic and political goals. When Unified Protector was still just “Odyssey Dawn,” a thou-shalt-not-fly zone you probably heard about and a naval blockade nobody cared about, the only legitimate targets were stuff like surface-to-air missile sites and navy bases. That was when the only stated goal was to protect the freedom-loving people of Libya from their freedom-hating dictator. Then, in April 2011, Obama for all practical purposes admitted that regime change had been the objective all along, at which point the target list should have broadened exponentially.
There is no such thing as uniformity in military jargon. Depending on when any given set of any given air operation’s targeteers went to any given target college, different kinds of targets and missions will be called different things. One war’s “interdiction” is another war’s “strategic strike,” just as “command and control” targets can fold into the “infrastructure” target set and then morph into “regime” targets.
But whatever you want to call a regime’s mother-effing state-controlled television and radio stations, the mother-effing mother-effers doing the mother-effing targeteering should bomb the mother-effing monkey mucous out of them in the first fifteen mother-effing minutes of the mother-effing war. It’s next to impossible to believe that these mother-effers were too mother-effing dumb to do that. Talk about theater of the absurd meets film noir. They ought to call the talking chimps running this one-buttock operation The Gang that Couldn’t Bomb Straight.
We’re justified to a certain extent in snickering up our sleeves at the French fire drill our little NATO buddies have created. But we have to remember that NATO actually stands for “The United States and a handful of mostly white schmoes who speak in Romance and Germanic tongues.” The top military commander of NATO is always a U.S. four-star who only takes legal orders from two dudes: America’s secretary of defense and its president. Accountability for this fiasco rolls all the way to the top of the pile.
Of course, it’s comical to invoke the term “legal” in any discussion of our Libyan involvement. In waging it without so much as a by-your-wink-and-nod from Congress, Bombardier Barry has flushed both the Constitution and its freckled stepchild, the War Powers Resolution of 1973, clear down the Potomac, out the Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic. Progressive popinjay Juan Cole says the Libyan sock-hop is legit because it’s mandated by a UN resolution, an aegis that he characterizes as the “gold standard for military intervention.” Jesus in a G-string, where do we find such eggheads?
Fops like Cole argue that because the Senate ratified the U.N. Charter it became, as per Article VI of the Constitution, the “supreme law of the land.” Such assertions leave the law-of-the-land clause out of context; it actually appears at the end of a litany that reads “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the…” One can easily show that this order conveys an intended precedence hierarchy: in cases where any of the three may conflict, the Constitution trumps the laws of the United States, which in turn trump treaties. To suggest otherwise is to declare the Constitution an instrument of March hare insanity, a legal framework that says the legislature can legally pass laws that demolish the very framework that legitimizes the legislature and makes its laws legal.
Article I of the Constitution clearly assigns the preponderance of foreign policy powers to the legislature: the powers to ratify treaties, to confirm ambassadors, to regulate international commerce and the military, and to declare war. And it is the legislature, not the executive branch, that the Constitution grants powers to “repel invasion.” So everybody who talks about a president’s “constitutional prerogative” to conduct foreign policy or defend the country is feeding you a line of bull roar. Claims of unitary presidential powers you typically hear from Rolex-sporting prevaricators with degrees in jurisprudence stem from the Federalist Papers, documents that are not the Constitution, nor an amendment to the Constitution, nor an annex nor an addendum nor an attachment to it.
The Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Monroe, three landed cats who didn’t believe democratic government was such a keen idea and who wanted the president to be a sort of dress-down Friday king that they could easily control, which is pretty much what today’s Federalists want. Federalist notions on the subject of presidential powers contrast sharply with those of Founders like Jefferson and Washington and Adams.
The UN charter itself has numerous codicils regarding nations going to war on the Security Council’s say so, most notably its numerous references to “special agreements” that essentially grant that no country has to go to war for the UN unless it really, really wants to. Moreover, since the U.S. is a permanent member of the Security Council, we can veto any resolution that calls for war, so the UN isn’t going to ask us to fight a war unless it’s a war we crammed down the UN’s throat the way we did with the present cluster bomb in Libya.
So what Cole and fools like him are asserting when they call a UN resolution for war the “gold standard” is that warmongering lunatics like John Bolton and Susie Rice can vote us into any old conflict anytime they want to and the rest of us have to go along with it because the Constitution says we do.
That respected American intellectuals actually think that way and are taken seriously could be the basis of a wholly hilarious SNL sketch if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. I think that we might have, in a decade or so, grown back the toes we shot off with our antics in Iraq and the Bananastans. But I’m afraid this Libya business will prove to be the whimper our republic went out with.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
Spent 11 days in a mental hospital
Finest facility of its type I've ever been in.
And it still sucked.
Best psychiatrist I've ever had.
And he still sucked.
Most of their patients, they kept 5 working days plus the weekend. I was special. Simply another instance of me not being treated the same as other folks. They discharged a weenie-wagging, alcoholic, with a bi-polar diagnosis in 3 working days plus a weekend. Me, they keep 9 WD plus WE! Well, I didn't really change too much, except that I did acceed to their forced medications of me (believe me, they have a LOT of leverage over you). And then they wanted to shoot me up with a medication for schizoprenia. Ass holes. You've only labeled me bi-polar. So just let me take my bi-polar mood stabalizer and go home.
Well, it worked out just fine, I needed to meet one more resident before I booked, and I did, and all is well with the world. Amen.
And it still sucked.
Best psychiatrist I've ever had.
And he still sucked.
Most of their patients, they kept 5 working days plus the weekend. I was special. Simply another instance of me not being treated the same as other folks. They discharged a weenie-wagging, alcoholic, with a bi-polar diagnosis in 3 working days plus a weekend. Me, they keep 9 WD plus WE! Well, I didn't really change too much, except that I did acceed to their forced medications of me (believe me, they have a LOT of leverage over you). And then they wanted to shoot me up with a medication for schizoprenia. Ass holes. You've only labeled me bi-polar. So just let me take my bi-polar mood stabalizer and go home.
Well, it worked out just fine, I needed to meet one more resident before I booked, and I did, and all is well with the world. Amen.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Every so often, we do something that is so outstanding, that even we must take pause to ask, "Now, just where in the hell did THAT come from?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4knwXnLqZDo&feature=related
Susan Werner, May I Suggest
nashvillehigh 704 videos Subscribe
109 views Like Add to Share
Susan Werner, May I Suggest
nashvillehigh 704 videos Subscribe
109 views Like Add to Share
Thursday, July 28, 2011
One spectacular flash of brilliant, life-changing, love-affirming light
Salam Allaikum.
Greetings my brothers and sisters. Peace be unto you, Peace be among you, and may Peace reign forever within your houses.
I have for too long been absent from the Mosque. But I hereby once again declare and proclaim:
“There is no God except Allah. And I declarer and proclaim: that Muhammed (PBUH) is his messenger.”
From those statements, I have never backed down, These declarations I shall never revoke. And thus, I am a true Muslim – albeit flowed, albeit ignorant of many things, but now aware, having been awakened in one spectacular flash of brilliant, life-changing, love-affirming light, I am ready to return, to fulfill my part of Allah's plan. To return to the mosque, to once again worship with you, oh wise ones, oh compassionate ones, oh kind ones, and to share in that great joy of the knowledge of the love that our Creator has for us.
My path in returning to you has been most crooked, with many twists and turns, many hills (yea, even mountains) to climb and oceans to cross. But in the climbing, and in the crossing, it has been affirmed to me this:
That after illness overtook me, and laid me so low, in the darkest of dark places, that in my darkest of moments and doubt, that Allah, in His wisdom, His benevolence, and His infinite love and mercy, did send two mighty angels to guard me, that I might not slip into and be forever lost to hell; that darkest of places, where Prophet Jesus (PBUH) descended and remained for three days until he was resurrected.
And what is hell? Hell, is the absence of love. Simply that. The absence of love. The absence of love of self, in the presence of a self-loathing that denies all attempts by your loved ones to enter, to soften your heart, and to give you love. Once we fathom what hell is, then we begin to fully love our neighbor as ourselves (from which we learn that we must love ourselves, so that we might better love our neighbor - some of this has been lost in translation - but the words of Jesus have always held kernels of virtually unfathomable eternal truths; truths that any child, of course, understands; yet truths of which we can but pray to see a glimmering.
This was revealed to me quite recently, on Sunday, October 31, 2010, in Centerville, Iowa, at a Presbyterian Church service of all Saints Sunday. I had attended neither mosque services, nor Protestant worship services since I was last in the mosque in 2007. The Pastor, and the Choir Director of my parents' church made it abundantly clear that I would be welcomed back with loving arms. But they did not understand this: That I am a Muslim, that I will always be a Muslim, and that while I may certainly attend their worship services, I believe in but one faith tradition: Islam, and I subscribe to but one Holy Scripture: the Koran. And these are beliefs and subscriptions that I came to, of my own free will, as my steps were directed by the unseen yet ever present hand of Allah. To return to my parents' church would have meant turning my back on my faith, on my family, on my friends, and this, I will never do. This is THE one thing, that I can never do.
In Centerville, Iowa, on that blessed Sunday morning, near the end of the worship, I suddenly found myself sobbing uncontrollably, for in the moment of grace, I realized what has most been missing from my life these past three years: Sharing in worship and praise of our Creator, Allah, with you, His saints and His apostles.
So, sobbing, I left the Church, to behold the brilliance of the Sun shining, revealing much of Allah's grace unto me. And this was a revelation. And then this: that of the 21 members of my family gathered that weekend to bury the ashes of my mother's older twin sisters at the family cemetery in Livingston, Iowa, there was but one to whom I could possibly explain all that had been there revealed to me; my youngest sister, Marianne. And that was a very lonely moment, that realization, that I could not share my joy. (And in these thoughts, perhaps I was giving too little credit to the rest of my family; but this is what I then believed).
And that was a lonely, but also a joyous moment. And as Allah smiled upon me, He then revealed the most astonishing truth; that truth from which I have run and hidden so successfully, but at no small cost to my spirit and soul. This truth: Brother Mark, of course I forgive, but, there is nothing to forgive. You were sick, and I sent unto you My angels, to protect you, and nourish you back to health. Brother Mark, you never even had to ask My forgiveness, much less beg for it, for what you have so mistakenly believed to be your sins. You are washed clean. You are made whole. It now is time to go and proclaim to the world, that Allah created you (all), that Allah loves you (all), that Allah protects and blesses you (all).
And that when the day of final judgment comes, you will come before Prophet Jesus (PBUH) who loves you (all). For did he not say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me?”
Come and give glory; come and give praise; come with joyful heart; come give thanksgiving; come to worship.
And as the founder of the faith into which you were first born, Martin Luther, wrote in this, his resoundingly affirming hymn, Built on a Rock:
My peace I leave with you. Amen.
In love, and with joy,
Br. Mark
I look forward to greeting you all again this afternoon.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
LET'S DO SOME REAL GOOD IN THE WORLD AND TRY TO HELP CURE CANCER!!!
Dear Mark Ganzer,
Michelle Hupfer
PGA Member
Biltmore CC
815-761-1277
It was nice speaking with you on the phone the other day. I'm glad that you are interested in participating in the golf outing I started held in memory of my father.Sincerely,
So far we have raised over $100,000 for Prostate Cancer Research and the event has been a huge success year after year. This year will be the 5th Annual Bruce Alan Hupfer (BAHUP) Memorial Golf Outing and will be held on Monday, August 15th at "McHenry Country Club." Format will be a four person scramble, 9AM shotgun with lunch, silent auction, live auction, and raffle following. There will be a Mercedes hole in one car, 50/50 raffle, long drive contest, closest to the pin, and lots of great prizes. Entry Fee $150 and includes golf, cart, prizes, and lunch. Please visit the website at www.BAHUPMemorial.com
I am also excited to have ProCure as our main sponsor. ProCure specializes in Proton Therapy which is an effective form of radiation therapy for many types of tumors. Proton Therapy destroys cancer cells by preventing them from dividing and growing and can more precisely target the tumor. Feel free to read more about it at www.Procure.com
Attached is the flyer/registration form. If you could also please spread the word about this event I would greatly appreciate it. I am looking for golfers, sponsors, volunteers, and raffle prizes. Hole sponsors are $150, cart sponsor $350, food sponsor $500, and corporate and event sponsorships are also available.
I hope you can attend. Thanks for your support!
Michelle Hupfer
PGA Member
Biltmore CC
815-761-1277
Sunday, July 17, 2011
I'll be performing tomorrow, July 18, 2011 in Crystal Lake, IL
At the Williams Street Public House
83 N. Williams Street
Crystal Lake, IL
Starting at 11:15 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
This will become a regular gig for me, whoop dee doop!
Will play the oldest songs I know (Introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh), The Myth of Er (from Plato's Republic) and a Gregorian chant, which, written circa 700 AD is almost contemporary! ... ROFLMAO!!
Will play the "Welcome to My World" set (while my folks aren't in, they're not overtly fond of Umbilical Detonation) with my two newest songs:
Steve Kunkel - Bar Fightin' Street Fightin' Man
Claire (instrumental)
And then will astound the audience with a cornucopia of tunes from the 60's.
83 N. Williams Street
Crystal Lake, IL
Starting at 11:15 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
This will become a regular gig for me, whoop dee doop!
Will play the oldest songs I know (Introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh), The Myth of Er (from Plato's Republic) and a Gregorian chant, which, written circa 700 AD is almost contemporary! ... ROFLMAO!!
Will play the "Welcome to My World" set (while my folks aren't in, they're not overtly fond of Umbilical Detonation) with my two newest songs:
Steve Kunkel - Bar Fightin' Street Fightin' Man
Claire (instrumental)
And then will astound the audience with a cornucopia of tunes from the 60's.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Singing the Praises of the Thursday evening open microphone @ CorkScrew Pointe, in McHenry, IL.
Hi Doc - just to try once again to convince you how much fun I had the other night, I'm forwarding to you a letter I sent to Rachael, the ukelele player for H.O.T. Fox (Heart of the Fox), an astonishingly gifted duet which performs their own original work ... featuring the Uke (of course), a Flamenco acoustic guitar underpinning, and a lead female vocalist who makes sounds that can be heard only in mosques -- a not to be missed experience!
Again, thanks for being such a wonderful host, avid listener, and all round good person.
Mark Raymond Ganzer
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Mark Ganzer
To: Rachael, vocalist and ukelele player with Heart Of The Fox
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 5:17 AM
Subject: An extraordinary open mic venue
Greetings Rachael,
It was such a treat to get to hear you two jamming with the players after the cut you off so early.
Thursday nights, you simply CANNOT MISS the open mic (starting at 7:00 p.m.) hosted by Doc Brown at Corkscrew Pointe. Doc is such a talent, but, as the man in charge of the open mic, he
(a) starts on time
(b) let's every one play
(c) works new folks showing up late into the rotation
(d) follows up with a thank you e-mail the next day
The venue is this incredible dimly lit back room, the martini room, which last Thursday seemed almost as if the assembled (Robin, the acoustic guitar soloist and her two lady friends, Doc, me, and the bar tender) group had been treated to a night at Xanadu hosted by Orson Welles and featuring the three finest musical players no one has ever heard of.
We later were joined by two young high-school aged ladies who sang an original duet, then each sang a solo. The father and mother of the one girl (who also plays the fiddle and has been commanded to bring the fiddle this Thursday upcoming, 14 July, 2011) own the music store in McHenry, and their eldest son runs it.
Later still, a retired postal worker came in and just delighted us with such levity and uplifting songs as "Love Begins with a Tube of Tooth Paste" (and ends the same way).
And even later still, we were joined by a dramatic reader, also named Mark - who read from Jimmy Durante's "Yes, We Have No Banannas," until he dropped his book, lost his place, and couldn't finish the last line! He then proceeded to read two actual letters, on from Ben Franklin, and the other, I believe from George Washington. Quite appropriate so near 4 July.
Hope to see you there this Thursday (they also hold an open mic on Tuesdays, same time, but I do not know the host). lThe owner of the bar uses the open mic to determine who to hire to play to the lunch and dinner crowds. Have I at least piqued your curiousity, darlin'?
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Again, thanks for being such a wonderful host, avid listener, and all round good person.
Mark Raymond Ganzer
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Mark Ganzer
To: Rachael, vocalist and ukelele player with Heart Of The Fox
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 5:17 AM
Subject: An extraordinary open mic venue
Greetings Rachael,
It was such a treat to get to hear you two jamming with the players after the cut you off so early.
Thursday nights, you simply CANNOT MISS the open mic (starting at 7:00 p.m.) hosted by Doc Brown at Corkscrew Pointe. Doc is such a talent, but, as the man in charge of the open mic, he
(a) starts on time
(b) let's every one play
(c) works new folks showing up late into the rotation
(d) follows up with a thank you e-mail the next day
The venue is this incredible dimly lit back room, the martini room, which last Thursday seemed almost as if the assembled (Robin, the acoustic guitar soloist and her two lady friends, Doc, me, and the bar tender) group had been treated to a night at Xanadu hosted by Orson Welles and featuring the three finest musical players no one has ever heard of.
We later were joined by two young high-school aged ladies who sang an original duet, then each sang a solo. The father and mother of the one girl (who also plays the fiddle and has been commanded to bring the fiddle this Thursday upcoming, 14 July, 2011) own the music store in McHenry, and their eldest son runs it.
Later still, a retired postal worker came in and just delighted us with such levity and uplifting songs as "Love Begins with a Tube of Tooth Paste" (and ends the same way).
And even later still, we were joined by a dramatic reader, also named Mark - who read from Jimmy Durante's "Yes, We Have No Banannas," until he dropped his book, lost his place, and couldn't finish the last line! He then proceeded to read two actual letters, on from Ben Franklin, and the other, I believe from George Washington. Quite appropriate so near 4 July.
Hope to see you there this Thursday (they also hold an open mic on Tuesdays, same time, but I do not know the host). lThe owner of the bar uses the open mic to determine who to hire to play to the lunch and dinner crowds. Have I at least piqued your curiousity, darlin'?
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Writing the Unthinkable: Preparing for War with China
Columns : Paris, June 7, 2011 – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Kabul at the start of June talking about withdrawal -- or non-withdrawal -- from Afghanistan, but before he went home he was in Singapore to talk about an enlarged American military engagement in Asia. That was a speech to an International Institute for Strategic Studies meeting, in support of “a robust [U.S.] military presence in Asia.” He said that one of the “principal security challenges” to the United States is that some nation would try to keep it out of Asia.
He said that for some time American naval and air force chiefs “have been concerned about anti-access and area denial scenarios,” and planning how to overcome any effort to block American free movement and deployment “in defense of our allies and vital interests.” This was despite “myopic souls” at home, isolationist spirits, daunted citizens, who doubt the American nation’s strength and determination, and might not support America’s place “as a 21st century Asia-Pacific nation,” imposing itself wherever it will, despite whatever obstacle.
He ended the Singapore talk by telling a questioner who doubted the permanence of a quasi-proprietary U.S. oversight of the South China Sea and other Chinese foreign preoccupations in the region, including the Taiwan relationship and the North Korean problem, that he would wager 100 dollars that the influence of the United States in Asia would be stronger five years from now than it is today.
Now 100 dollars is not a great deal of money, especially to Mr. Gates, who is accustomed to spending trillions of dollars in military expenditures connected with the global U.S base system, as well as running three simultaneously ongoing wars, or less than ended wars, or prospective wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
Perhaps that bet should not be taken too seriously; he is well paid and can afford to lose. Yet he could win. Five years are a short period in the life of an empire, and the United States is now a militarized and militarist empire, of benevolent intention in the minds of the people who have been running it under both Democrats and Republicans since the end of the Cold War. Before that it was a fortress nation, focused on a big single threat and a few auxiliary troublemakers. Now it goes in for civilization wars, globally utopian ideologies, and altruistic dominion.
The permanence of this undertaking depends upon the American people, who have shown that they can suddenly change their majority minds. This was an isolated and isolationist society from early after its founding. Despite minor episodes of aggression in Mexico and the splendid little war with Spain, -- the latter seen in Washington as well as Iowa and Oregon as an exercise in political clarification of the incomprehensible Caribbean, and of naval coaling stations and Christian missionaries in the western Pacific -- the American nation took until 1917 to really want to go to war again. Woodrow Wilson held the presidency in 1916 on the slogan that “He Kept Us Out of War,” but he and the people immediately afterwards decided that getting into the war would actually be rather glamorous.
The second world war left the public determined to bring the troops home in a heedless rush, reversed just as quickly when Russia posed a menace. Vietnam ended in a shameless precipitation and lies, the conscripts who had fought it punished by their elders for having done so. Creation of an all-volunteer army afterwards guaranteed that such sunshine patriots and parasitic careerists as Richard Cheney would never again be personally inconvenienced by a national priority.
Now America’s perpetual wars can be conducted by profitable corporations mostly behind the public’s back, while the Members of Congress conduct their private affairs and pick up their envelopes at K Street addresses. But what if the people awakened from their torpor, and realized what was going on?
This is not impossible. The secretary of defense’s Singapore press conference last week was alive with questions of a single tenor: will you protect us if China threatens us? That is why Secretary Gates and the service chiefs make so much of “access” and scenarios of “area denial.” They are thinking of going to war against China. What would those Asian reporters in Singapore think of that? What would an awakened American public think of it? It was advised against by General Douglas MacArthur, a man of greater experience than Mr. Gates; but then Mr. Gates is about to leave the government.
© Copyright 2011 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
He said that for some time American naval and air force chiefs “have been concerned about anti-access and area denial scenarios,” and planning how to overcome any effort to block American free movement and deployment “in defense of our allies and vital interests.” This was despite “myopic souls” at home, isolationist spirits, daunted citizens, who doubt the American nation’s strength and determination, and might not support America’s place “as a 21st century Asia-Pacific nation,” imposing itself wherever it will, despite whatever obstacle.
He ended the Singapore talk by telling a questioner who doubted the permanence of a quasi-proprietary U.S. oversight of the South China Sea and other Chinese foreign preoccupations in the region, including the Taiwan relationship and the North Korean problem, that he would wager 100 dollars that the influence of the United States in Asia would be stronger five years from now than it is today.
Now 100 dollars is not a great deal of money, especially to Mr. Gates, who is accustomed to spending trillions of dollars in military expenditures connected with the global U.S base system, as well as running three simultaneously ongoing wars, or less than ended wars, or prospective wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
Perhaps that bet should not be taken too seriously; he is well paid and can afford to lose. Yet he could win. Five years are a short period in the life of an empire, and the United States is now a militarized and militarist empire, of benevolent intention in the minds of the people who have been running it under both Democrats and Republicans since the end of the Cold War. Before that it was a fortress nation, focused on a big single threat and a few auxiliary troublemakers. Now it goes in for civilization wars, globally utopian ideologies, and altruistic dominion.
The permanence of this undertaking depends upon the American people, who have shown that they can suddenly change their majority minds. This was an isolated and isolationist society from early after its founding. Despite minor episodes of aggression in Mexico and the splendid little war with Spain, -- the latter seen in Washington as well as Iowa and Oregon as an exercise in political clarification of the incomprehensible Caribbean, and of naval coaling stations and Christian missionaries in the western Pacific -- the American nation took until 1917 to really want to go to war again. Woodrow Wilson held the presidency in 1916 on the slogan that “He Kept Us Out of War,” but he and the people immediately afterwards decided that getting into the war would actually be rather glamorous.
The second world war left the public determined to bring the troops home in a heedless rush, reversed just as quickly when Russia posed a menace. Vietnam ended in a shameless precipitation and lies, the conscripts who had fought it punished by their elders for having done so. Creation of an all-volunteer army afterwards guaranteed that such sunshine patriots and parasitic careerists as Richard Cheney would never again be personally inconvenienced by a national priority.
Now America’s perpetual wars can be conducted by profitable corporations mostly behind the public’s back, while the Members of Congress conduct their private affairs and pick up their envelopes at K Street addresses. But what if the people awakened from their torpor, and realized what was going on?
This is not impossible. The secretary of defense’s Singapore press conference last week was alive with questions of a single tenor: will you protect us if China threatens us? That is why Secretary Gates and the service chiefs make so much of “access” and scenarios of “area denial.” They are thinking of going to war against China. What would those Asian reporters in Singapore think of that? What would an awakened American public think of it? It was advised against by General Douglas MacArthur, a man of greater experience than Mr. Gates; but then Mr. Gates is about to leave the government.
© Copyright 2011 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
Can Old Empires Give Way to New Communities of Peace?
Columns : Can Old Empires Give Way to New Communities of Peace?
aris, June 14, 2011 – Looking backward, there is a great deal to be said for leaving well enough alone, which is more difficult than one might think. Western Europe in the nineteenth century is now generally looked back upon as having constituted a pinnacle of Western civilization. Certainly in literature, music, and the plastic arts this was so, the last-named in the century’s final decade, when painting ceased its period as domestic decoration and exploded into a myriad of ways to perceive not only the external world but the interior universe as well.
The modern western intelligence was invented then, and the world has since played variations on nineteenth century political themes: nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, populism, class liberation, revolution, anarchism, class and racial warfare. The Napoleonic wars began the century and transformed its political institutions. The Franco-Prussian war ended the century, setting the scene for the hyper-destructive twentieth century. Better to have stayed in the peaceful years of the nineteenth century.
The Ottoman empire finished the century in decline, its political implosion impending, certainly with the West Europeans observing or actively promoting the Balkan and Crimean Wars, trying to take the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires apart (“the “Eastern Question,” to western statesmen of the period), and finally succeeding in doing just that in what was appropriately named “the Great War” (it became the “first” world war only when the “second” one arrived).
There was an article in the papers a few days ago (in The International Herald Tribune), by Anthony Shadid, writing in Gaziantep, Turkey – an old Hittite city, bordering Syria, strategic during the Crusader wars, center of Turkish resistance to the French occupation in 1920-21. He wrote of its people’s nostalgia for the Ottoman past when Turks and Syrians “were brothers.” “What really divides us?,” asks one of the people Shadid spoke with in Gaziantep, having been born across the border, in present-day Syria, once an ancient Ottoman province, and before that a center of Arab Empire.
Shadid writes of the possibility of new (or resurrected) identities’ being established these days in what once was a single realm (the Turkish state replaced what had been the Ottoman polity only in 1923). Today Syrians are crowding the Turkish borders in flight from their own president, Bashar al-Assad, and his family-controlled security forces and army. Prosperous modern Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights publicly decry this ruthless suppression of Syrian protest.
The Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires were medieval in origin, the Ottoman being the eventual version assumed, under the invading rule of Central Asian Turks, of the Muslim Caliphates created when the desert Arabs explosively emerged from Arabia under the inspiration of Muhammad’s teachings, and rapidly conquered the eastern and southern Mediterranean peoples, invaded Spain, and were stopped only by Charles Martel and a French force in the Pyrenees. These “Moors,” as they were called, ruled Spain for seven centuries.
The Turks’ expansion into Balkan and Central Europe was stopped only at Vienna. The recent war of Yugoslav succession, in which Serbs and Croatians tried to drive Muslim Bosnians out of the former Yugoslavia, could be considered the most recent episode in this centuries-old war.
The Hapsburg Empire was more conventional in origin, a product of feudalism and dynastic wars, broken up, like the Ottoman empire, by nineteenth century nationalism, commonly thought a result of the French Revolution but probably more precisely described as a product of education. The peasants and townsmen of nineteenth-century Europe knew who they were, as did the aristocrats. As literacy and education had spread since the Reformation, a class of teachers and aspirant intellectuals came into being who were not content to be the passive subjects of undeserving monarchs and aristocrats, wanted to learn and embellish the origins and history of their native lands, to celebrate its ancient identity and alleged virtues, and eventually – why not? – to rule it themselves.
Their emigrant American relatives eventually agreed, and by the early twentieth century American presidential candidates were promising to liberate oppressed lands in the “Old Country.” Woodrow Wilson and all that. By mid-century, a second world war objective of the Roosevelt administration was to put an end to French and British imperialism.
And so the European empires came to an end. Have their former subjects benefited? If you consider the Yugoslav war, the chaos produced by Israel’s Mid-East presence, and America’s wars and other military interventions in the former Ottoman region, you can scarcely say yes. What formerly was the Hapsburg world is for the most part a different and peaceful place.
The cold war kept Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation, but in the meantime the European Union was invented by West Europeans who had had enough of international and internecine war, and were convinced that above all Germany had to be fitted into a European system that could tame it. This succeeded (even if the Germans today are defying the world on monetary matters!). Twenty-seven European states, all at one or another time part of warring dynastic, nationalistic, or ethno-centric imperial state systems have now found peace.
It has been an astounding achievement, that in 1945 few believed could succeed, and in 1939 none could imagine. Turkey has for years struggled without success to become a member of this European community of peace. Possibly the failure was destiny. There is a Muslim community of peace for Turkey to build and inspire.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
aris, June 14, 2011 – Looking backward, there is a great deal to be said for leaving well enough alone, which is more difficult than one might think. Western Europe in the nineteenth century is now generally looked back upon as having constituted a pinnacle of Western civilization. Certainly in literature, music, and the plastic arts this was so, the last-named in the century’s final decade, when painting ceased its period as domestic decoration and exploded into a myriad of ways to perceive not only the external world but the interior universe as well.
The modern western intelligence was invented then, and the world has since played variations on nineteenth century political themes: nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, populism, class liberation, revolution, anarchism, class and racial warfare. The Napoleonic wars began the century and transformed its political institutions. The Franco-Prussian war ended the century, setting the scene for the hyper-destructive twentieth century. Better to have stayed in the peaceful years of the nineteenth century.
The Ottoman empire finished the century in decline, its political implosion impending, certainly with the West Europeans observing or actively promoting the Balkan and Crimean Wars, trying to take the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires apart (“the “Eastern Question,” to western statesmen of the period), and finally succeeding in doing just that in what was appropriately named “the Great War” (it became the “first” world war only when the “second” one arrived).
There was an article in the papers a few days ago (in The International Herald Tribune), by Anthony Shadid, writing in Gaziantep, Turkey – an old Hittite city, bordering Syria, strategic during the Crusader wars, center of Turkish resistance to the French occupation in 1920-21. He wrote of its people’s nostalgia for the Ottoman past when Turks and Syrians “were brothers.” “What really divides us?,” asks one of the people Shadid spoke with in Gaziantep, having been born across the border, in present-day Syria, once an ancient Ottoman province, and before that a center of Arab Empire.
Shadid writes of the possibility of new (or resurrected) identities’ being established these days in what once was a single realm (the Turkish state replaced what had been the Ottoman polity only in 1923). Today Syrians are crowding the Turkish borders in flight from their own president, Bashar al-Assad, and his family-controlled security forces and army. Prosperous modern Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights publicly decry this ruthless suppression of Syrian protest.
The Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires were medieval in origin, the Ottoman being the eventual version assumed, under the invading rule of Central Asian Turks, of the Muslim Caliphates created when the desert Arabs explosively emerged from Arabia under the inspiration of Muhammad’s teachings, and rapidly conquered the eastern and southern Mediterranean peoples, invaded Spain, and were stopped only by Charles Martel and a French force in the Pyrenees. These “Moors,” as they were called, ruled Spain for seven centuries.
The Turks’ expansion into Balkan and Central Europe was stopped only at Vienna. The recent war of Yugoslav succession, in which Serbs and Croatians tried to drive Muslim Bosnians out of the former Yugoslavia, could be considered the most recent episode in this centuries-old war.
The Hapsburg Empire was more conventional in origin, a product of feudalism and dynastic wars, broken up, like the Ottoman empire, by nineteenth century nationalism, commonly thought a result of the French Revolution but probably more precisely described as a product of education. The peasants and townsmen of nineteenth-century Europe knew who they were, as did the aristocrats. As literacy and education had spread since the Reformation, a class of teachers and aspirant intellectuals came into being who were not content to be the passive subjects of undeserving monarchs and aristocrats, wanted to learn and embellish the origins and history of their native lands, to celebrate its ancient identity and alleged virtues, and eventually – why not? – to rule it themselves.
Their emigrant American relatives eventually agreed, and by the early twentieth century American presidential candidates were promising to liberate oppressed lands in the “Old Country.” Woodrow Wilson and all that. By mid-century, a second world war objective of the Roosevelt administration was to put an end to French and British imperialism.
And so the European empires came to an end. Have their former subjects benefited? If you consider the Yugoslav war, the chaos produced by Israel’s Mid-East presence, and America’s wars and other military interventions in the former Ottoman region, you can scarcely say yes. What formerly was the Hapsburg world is for the most part a different and peaceful place.
The cold war kept Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation, but in the meantime the European Union was invented by West Europeans who had had enough of international and internecine war, and were convinced that above all Germany had to be fitted into a European system that could tame it. This succeeded (even if the Germans today are defying the world on monetary matters!). Twenty-seven European states, all at one or another time part of warring dynastic, nationalistic, or ethno-centric imperial state systems have now found peace.
It has been an astounding achievement, that in 1945 few believed could succeed, and in 1939 none could imagine. Turkey has for years struggled without success to become a member of this European community of peace. Possibly the failure was destiny. There is a Muslim community of peace for Turkey to build and inspire.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
Greece on the Brink - France to the Rescue. by William Pfaff
Columns :
thens, June 29, 2011 – Athens in recent days has
experienced continuing popular protest, sporadically violent, against
the economic austerity program demanded of Greece by the IMF. This
reaction has been more severe than most of those seen elsewhere since
last year’s Wall Street “sub-prime” mortgage scandal, or
collaborative swindle as we might indelicately call it, that provoked
global economic crisis, its prime (or “sub-prime,” let us say)
victims being the ordinary citizens of recklessly indebted national
economies, such as those of Greece and the United States.
Among worldly Greeks, most recognize that Greece itself
invited what the ordinary Greek citizen interprets as victimization –
in particular as victimization by the German government and banks,
implacable critics of Greek profligacy, and until now opponents of
any “bailout” for Greece. The Germans have never paid war
reparations for what they did to Greece, the Greeks will tell you, as
they also accuse the Germans of having stolen Greece’s national gold
reserve during the war.
Ordinary Greeks are nonetheless aware of their country’s
national fiscal insouciance during the good years of the past two
decades – when Greece won the UEFA European Football (soccer)
Championship in 2004, and brilliantly staged the summer Olympic
games, while the Greeks enjoyed unprecedented individual prosperity.
The Harvard-educated Andreas Papandraeou (father of the
present Greek prime minister George Papandraeou) spent years in
political exile in the United States, ending as head of the Economics
Department of the University of California at Berkeley (of all
things, in view of what has followed!). He returned to his homeland
after the collapse of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-1974,
becoming prime minister in 1981. As one Greek remarked at a recent
meeting here of economic and political observers, the Athens Seminar,
“Andreas brought back from exile an American-style populism, to a
Greek population lacking the economic prudence instilled in most
American families by their native Protestantism.”
The conservative New Democracy governments that followed
the departure of Andreas and held power from 1985 to 2009 contributed
to national irresponsibility. When they left office, Greece had a
deficit of 12.7 percent of GDP, four times the Eurozone limit. The
country had entered the European Union on false pretenses, tolerated
by an EU leadership that believed “Europe” could not be fully
European without Greece’s membership.
Andreas’ son, George, born in the United States and also
educated at Harvard (and in the United Kingdom and Sweden) during his
father’s foreign exile, inherited leadership of his father’s PASOK
(Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party). Possibly he did so reluctantly, as
one of his actions has been to change the electoral system in an
attempt to end “dynastic politics” in the country.
As foreign minister he put and end to the ancient
hostility between Greece and Turkey, sending Greek firefighters to
help the Turks in a national emergency. He was elected Greece’s
prime minister in 2009, just in time for the world crisis – for which
the electorate is now holding him responsible.
However today – June 28 – he won his second vote of
confidence for his austerity program (155 to 138) within days,
despite a 48-hour general strike and massed protestors outside the
parliament. Angela Merkel called this “really good news,” although
the immediate financial community comment was confused, with a
negative bias (as usual). Greece – a miniscule nation of only 11
million people – has recently been the most convenient press and
popular scapegoat for the Eurozone crisis.
The result of France’s effort last weekend to rescue
Greece and the Eurozone still has unclear results. Nicholas
Sarkozy’s weekend announcement of an innovative rescue plan was a
typical French effort to support Europe while fashionable opinion
forecasts default for Greece (and possibly the whole
Eurozone). The French Treasury, the Bank of France and
national bank confederation (the largest European holders of Greek
debt) propose to “roll over” half the Greek debt for thirty years,
allowing debt-holders to take an immediate reimbursement of 30
percent, with 20 percent invested in a “guarantee fund” of 30-year
zero-coupon bonds, with triple-A ratings presumably underwritten by
the IMF, European Central Bank, or the EU itself.
The great advantage of this to banks is that it would allow them to remove
Greek debt from their balance sheets, lodging the debt in an ad hoc
vehicle known on the markets as an SPV. The guarantee fund and the
SPV are designed to attract participation by other European and
foreign banks. The plan in part resembles the “Brady Bonds” solution to
Latin American debt in the 1980s, which allowed creditors to exchange
defaulted bank loans for secure instruments, usually backed by U.S.
Treasury Bonds.
The French invented “Europe” with the coal and steel
community treaty in 1951. They have since driven it forward with
such projects as Concorde, the Airbus industrial airspace alliance
(Boeing’s deadly enemy), the European space agency and its Guiana
launch center, which dominates world commercial airspace, the
European high-speed train network, and the Franco-British European
military link now being tested in Libya.
President Sarkozy’s debt relief plan has won qualified
interest thus far, including from the most important European
financial paper, The Financial Times, but people at the fatally
influential rating agencies are talking about it as a disguised Greek
default. George Papandraeou’s parliamentary victory on Wednesday,
with Angela Merkel’s endorsement, may prove crucial factors in what
will follow.
© Copyright 2011 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights
Reserved
thens, June 29, 2011 – Athens in recent days has
experienced continuing popular protest, sporadically violent, against
the economic austerity program demanded of Greece by the IMF. This
reaction has been more severe than most of those seen elsewhere since
last year’s Wall Street “sub-prime” mortgage scandal, or
collaborative swindle as we might indelicately call it, that provoked
global economic crisis, its prime (or “sub-prime,” let us say)
victims being the ordinary citizens of recklessly indebted national
economies, such as those of Greece and the United States.
Among worldly Greeks, most recognize that Greece itself
invited what the ordinary Greek citizen interprets as victimization –
in particular as victimization by the German government and banks,
implacable critics of Greek profligacy, and until now opponents of
any “bailout” for Greece. The Germans have never paid war
reparations for what they did to Greece, the Greeks will tell you, as
they also accuse the Germans of having stolen Greece’s national gold
reserve during the war.
Ordinary Greeks are nonetheless aware of their country’s
national fiscal insouciance during the good years of the past two
decades – when Greece won the UEFA European Football (soccer)
Championship in 2004, and brilliantly staged the summer Olympic
games, while the Greeks enjoyed unprecedented individual prosperity.
The Harvard-educated Andreas Papandraeou (father of the
present Greek prime minister George Papandraeou) spent years in
political exile in the United States, ending as head of the Economics
Department of the University of California at Berkeley (of all
things, in view of what has followed!). He returned to his homeland
after the collapse of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-1974,
becoming prime minister in 1981. As one Greek remarked at a recent
meeting here of economic and political observers, the Athens Seminar,
“Andreas brought back from exile an American-style populism, to a
Greek population lacking the economic prudence instilled in most
American families by their native Protestantism.”
The conservative New Democracy governments that followed
the departure of Andreas and held power from 1985 to 2009 contributed
to national irresponsibility. When they left office, Greece had a
deficit of 12.7 percent of GDP, four times the Eurozone limit. The
country had entered the European Union on false pretenses, tolerated
by an EU leadership that believed “Europe” could not be fully
European without Greece’s membership.
Andreas’ son, George, born in the United States and also
educated at Harvard (and in the United Kingdom and Sweden) during his
father’s foreign exile, inherited leadership of his father’s PASOK
(Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party). Possibly he did so reluctantly, as
one of his actions has been to change the electoral system in an
attempt to end “dynastic politics” in the country.
As foreign minister he put and end to the ancient
hostility between Greece and Turkey, sending Greek firefighters to
help the Turks in a national emergency. He was elected Greece’s
prime minister in 2009, just in time for the world crisis – for which
the electorate is now holding him responsible.
However today – June 28 – he won his second vote of
confidence for his austerity program (155 to 138) within days,
despite a 48-hour general strike and massed protestors outside the
parliament. Angela Merkel called this “really good news,” although
the immediate financial community comment was confused, with a
negative bias (as usual). Greece – a miniscule nation of only 11
million people – has recently been the most convenient press and
popular scapegoat for the Eurozone crisis.
The result of France’s effort last weekend to rescue
Greece and the Eurozone still has unclear results. Nicholas
Sarkozy’s weekend announcement of an innovative rescue plan was a
typical French effort to support Europe while fashionable opinion
forecasts default for Greece (and possibly the whole
Eurozone). The French Treasury, the Bank of France and
national bank confederation (the largest European holders of Greek
debt) propose to “roll over” half the Greek debt for thirty years,
allowing debt-holders to take an immediate reimbursement of 30
percent, with 20 percent invested in a “guarantee fund” of 30-year
zero-coupon bonds, with triple-A ratings presumably underwritten by
the IMF, European Central Bank, or the EU itself.
The great advantage of this to banks is that it would allow them to remove
Greek debt from their balance sheets, lodging the debt in an ad hoc
vehicle known on the markets as an SPV. The guarantee fund and the
SPV are designed to attract participation by other European and
foreign banks. The plan in part resembles the “Brady Bonds” solution to
Latin American debt in the 1980s, which allowed creditors to exchange
defaulted bank loans for secure instruments, usually backed by U.S.
Treasury Bonds.
The French invented “Europe” with the coal and steel
community treaty in 1951. They have since driven it forward with
such projects as Concorde, the Airbus industrial airspace alliance
(Boeing’s deadly enemy), the European space agency and its Guiana
launch center, which dominates world commercial airspace, the
European high-speed train network, and the Franco-British European
military link now being tested in Libya.
President Sarkozy’s debt relief plan has won qualified
interest thus far, including from the most important European
financial paper, The Financial Times, but people at the fatally
influential rating agencies are talking about it as a disguised Greek
default. George Papandraeou’s parliamentary victory on Wednesday,
with Angela Merkel’s endorsement, may prove crucial factors in what
will follow.
© Copyright 2011 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights
Reserved
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