The press is agog because the ci-devant Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate is in the midst of her bus tour up and down the East Coast. A girl has to keep an eye on her tv ratings. At present the great bus tour seems to have been primarily dedicated to aborting the rebirth of the Romney candidacy beneath its chariot wheels. Palin gave her press conference in New Hampshire just as Mitt was clearing his throat to shake hands with Destiny.
It’s a safe bet that Ms Palin will be playing the Will she/Won’t she game as far as the elastic will stretch without breaking, though in my view the elastic finally broke the day of the Tucson shootings. It’s safe to say that Ms Palin will never be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, however much the Obamians and the left yearn to have her to kick around until November 2012.
The Republican Party has been on a suicide mission in the months since the midterm elections handed them the House of Representatives last fall, with the US Senate almost within their grasp.
As victorious Tea Party candidates surged into Washington DC, they swore mighty oaths that rather than add a single zero to the debt of the U.S. government they would fast until death, or make a histrionic lunge in that direction, or make a big stink, or a sort of stink. By God, they would draw a line in the sand, if only to get pushed off it.
The establishment press wrote encouraging columns and editorials about newly elected US Republican Senator Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, hailing this throwback to the economic dark ages as a man of measured principle, restoring thrift and budgetary good sense to the Republic.
Sam Smith garnered a fragrant bouquet of their plaudits in The Progressive Review.
“The Washington Post wondered if Ryan can “really manage the hardest sales job in U.S. politics.” The paper seemed to think so: “So far, the sales pitch appears to be classic Ryan. He will make his case with earnestness and a hope that a quiet explanation of budget math can swing the country in a way that previous politicians could not.”
“New York Times columnist David Brooks called Ryan’s budget plan ‘the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes...[which] will put all future arguments in the proper context.’
“Even those who disagreed with Ryan’s plan found ways to praise it. In Time, Fareed Zakaria wrote that ‘Ryan’s plan is deeply flawed, but it is courageous.’ And on NBC’s Chris Matthews Show, pundit Gloria Borger declared: ‘We have to give Paul Ryan an awful lot of credit because, as all of our august colleagues have said, yes, it does define the conversation for 2012.’”
Ryan was duly installed as the new Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee and lost no time in announcing his plan to change Medicare from what it is now – a federal medical insurance plan for America’s seniors, into a privatized affair run by insurance companies which, given the slightest chance, would pare back services to what these same insurance companies conceive to be fiscal prudence.
It took about 30 seconds for America’s seniors to realize that Ryan’s plan represented an lethal onslaught on one of the two federal programs left – the other is Social Security – that keep them barely afloat. On May 25, Democrat Kathy Hochul whacked her Republican and Tea Party opponents with the Medicare issue and seized what had been a safe Republican House seat in the 26th congressional district in western New York state, once held by the late Jack Kemp.
Since then the wind has been whistling out of the Ryan balloon. Republicans who only a month ago were roaring their support for the man have scuttled for cover. As Ryan whimpers at Democratic opportunism and “demagoguery” his prime defenders are the above-mentioned press magnates and their hired opinion formers at the New York Times and Washington Post solemnly urging the Democrats not to over-use the Medicare bludgeon and to remember that Rep Ryan had at least advanced a plan which had not shirked Prudence and Responsibility.
Prudence and responsibility don’t carry much weight when seniors with cancer are suddenly faced with the prospect of bills of $2,500 every couple of months for the treatments keeping them alive. Seniors vote. The Democrats will run on defense of Medicare and Social Security all the way to 2012.
At the moment the Republican presidential candidates in the field are scarcely convincing, whether it be the Mormon Romney who failed in 2008, or the Passionaria of Tea Partydom, the luscious madwoman, US Rep Michele Bachmann.
Scenting opportunity, former New York Mayor Mayor Rudy Giuliani is now making moves consonant with a possible bid, as Stewart Lawrence reported here in Thursday. He’s testing the waters in New Hampshire. The problem is that Giuliani’s candidacy in 2008 – much touted by the press -- fell apart amid bizarre strategic missteps, endless publicity about his wives and mistresses, well founded charges of corruption and the evident fact, rendered more obvious with each debate and press conference, that the guy is a vindictive asshole. His money backers in 2008 are loath to finance another flaky run. So Giuliani is probably dipping his toe in the water to up his lecture fees, and pump up his public image – same as Palin.
As the mayor of New York during the attack on the World Trade Towers Giuliani’s prime card was Leadership in Crisis, a man who wouldn’t hesitate to send a team of SEALS anywhere, anytime to bring back the head of Osama bin Laden. But… that card is no longer his to play. In 2008 Obama was vulnerable to attacks from Giuliani and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton that he was soft on terror. Hard to make that case now. George Bush brought America’s enemies to Guantanamo. Obama just has them murdered in place.
This is not to say Obama is a shoo-in in 2012. Far from it. Presidents get into trouble when they face grim economic data during the reelection period. The economic outlook is extremely dire. The unemployment numbers are appalling and the total number of Americans near or amid destitution at terrible levels with the necessary large-scale Keynesian measures beyond the political capacities or even desires of the Obama administration. The sky is dark with bad news. Housing is in the septic tank. States are hacking away at their budgets. There’s no credit and people are frightened of borrowing anyway. America is tipping further into a second Depression. This is a record of failure that could very well doom Obama if a Republican challenger can mount an assault not festooned with manifest kookery.
But kooks is what they mostly are, and none of them with the economic populism that could gain purchase against Obama and the Democrats. Homilies from candidates like Romney about allowing the private sector to power the recovery don’t cut much ice, since he flourished by firing workers. The private sector is synonymous in many voters’ minds with tax avoidance, insane salaries for CEOs and flight to China.
This is really Pat Buchanan’s moment, armed with economic populism, plus stances on abortion and immigration that would carry him through the early primaries. It was the Kempian rhetoric about growth that helped carry Reagan past Carter in the 1980 battle when the economy was poor.
Not too many states that handed the Obama / Biden ticket its victories in 2008 have to drop out of the Democratic column for the Electoral College math to make it a squeaker. It’ll probably come down to Florida and Ohio yet again. These are early days. You punters, keep your money in your pockets a while.
In our latest newsletter
Takashi Hirose outlines in persuasive detail how How Japan can prosper without nuclear power. Andrew Cockburn reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s mendacious memoir of his stint running the Pentagon and promoting the attack on Iraq, Known and Unknown. As Andrew emailed me when he sent the review along:
“The opening paragraphs tell us much of what Donald Rumsfeld thinks about himself, and what we need to know about him. Referencing his title, he proudly cites the 300,000 internet citations of ‘known unknown,’ 250,000 of them linked to his name, thanks to his observation at a 2002 press conference that there ‘are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.’
“Given the deferential attitude evinced by contemporary press and public, there is little sign the remark generated any enlightened intuition, but it certainly left reason aside. What can ‘unknown unknowns’ mean other than simply that there are things we don’t know? Like similar exercises – ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping’ -- it carries intimations of profundity, and has been much acclaimed as such, not least by Rumsfeld himself, who introduces it here as ‘a larger point on the limits of human knowledge.’ Though sourcing a variant of the phrase ‘known unknowns’ to a former colleague, he leaves us with the belief that this is a unique Rumsfeld insight, though old Pentagon hands recall it circulating independently in xeroxed form as far back as the 1960s.”
Also in this edition of our newsletter Margot Patterson reports on a recent trip to Syria and the risks of a dreadful civil war.
Subscribe now! Don’t miss out on our Limited Time Special Offer! Get CounterPunch Print Edition By Email For Only $25 a Year!
And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate, I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St. Clair with the brilliant essay featured in this weekend’s website -- and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA), and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The female invasion, or how to relax in style - by Wendy Effer
I had the incurably good fortune to have dated Wendy Effer in 1970. She was (and remains) the most beautiful human being I have ever known (I see only inner beauty; that she was also outwardly beautiful is interesting, but by and large, irrelavent and a distraction). She was kind, caring, compassionate, an incredible listener, and she routinely beat me at bowling by 70+ pins (at 4"10" and less than 90 pounds). I was a frequent guest at her house and had the great priveledge to get to know both of her parents, remarkable people, kind and generous, her older sister (who was in my HS graduating class), the older sister's boy friend, a brilliant mathematician, and all round world class scholar, and could share with her secrets that I've never told another human being.
Via facebook, I have come to learn that she has been in a loving and wonderfully commited relationship for 32+ years. She and her partner SAIL - around the world, and Wendy finds to the time to blog of their adventures.
She will be coming to a port near y'all soon.
May all your sailing days be uneventful, beloved child of God, my dearest Wendy.
L-Imbordin, Malta
Paradise Bay, Malta. Saturday 4th September 2011
After over a week of drippingly hot weather, bathwater seas and diving for treasures, this is probably our last day in Malta / Gozo. Temps a sweltering 30-35 deg C and water 28-30!
A long time without writing and a long time without connections. We arrived back to Gozo on 23rd August and it was still boiling. Rapid prep and shopping for arrival of first round of guests on this leg. R's daughter Sophie and friend Heather joined us on 27th August in Valletta for a week of sun and relaxation.
Now we were worried that they would find things too tame and looked up all sorts of things to do and places to see. We needn't have worried. It was so hot. They were in true holiday mode and were content to sun themselves and swim and chat. Nothing more strenuous than walking from one end of the boat to the other for another drink or book or txting fix.
We had a good time with them here and hope they also enjoyed. Highlights of the week: Improving diving skills off the bow of boat (see pics), falling into the water whenever one felt about to boil over, fishing for lost treasure 20 ft down (one plastic shoe (W), one towel (S), one snorkelling mask (Anon) with R's reel and grappling hook weight. Also the Bombay gin and Lanson's champagne, one ribs meal and one super fish supper (courtesy of S & H - thank you!!). And the snorkelling (nice Maltese gentleman on neighbouring boat loaned us 2 masks for the week, so we each had one).
And the laughs and card games. Heather is a shocking cheat (or very very lucky) and trounced us all the first night of play. However, we each of us managed to eventually get our own back at least once. The girls survived the heat and the sleeping arrangements (in the saloon with body bags - they wisely decided the furnace that was pretending to be an aft cabin was better suited to storage). And they did a mean job of washing up and were suitably frugal with water like seasoned sailors. A competent crew course may be in the offing….
So, stocked up on some "British" goodies (still stocked in the shops despite independence and eurozones) and looking forward to Sicilia again and onwards to Greece. We have a date in 3 weeks' time in Corfu - Talisman (alias COOC or Clive and Jane) are joining us there - we just need to make sure we get there!
And wish S well for her move, and H for her next steps. Xx
Via facebook, I have come to learn that she has been in a loving and wonderfully commited relationship for 32+ years. She and her partner SAIL - around the world, and Wendy finds to the time to blog of their adventures.
She will be coming to a port near y'all soon.
May all your sailing days be uneventful, beloved child of God, my dearest Wendy.
L-Imbordin, Malta
Paradise Bay, Malta. Saturday 4th September 2011
After over a week of drippingly hot weather, bathwater seas and diving for treasures, this is probably our last day in Malta / Gozo. Temps a sweltering 30-35 deg C and water 28-30!
A long time without writing and a long time without connections. We arrived back to Gozo on 23rd August and it was still boiling. Rapid prep and shopping for arrival of first round of guests on this leg. R's daughter Sophie and friend Heather joined us on 27th August in Valletta for a week of sun and relaxation.
Now we were worried that they would find things too tame and looked up all sorts of things to do and places to see. We needn't have worried. It was so hot. They were in true holiday mode and were content to sun themselves and swim and chat. Nothing more strenuous than walking from one end of the boat to the other for another drink or book or txting fix.
We had a good time with them here and hope they also enjoyed. Highlights of the week: Improving diving skills off the bow of boat (see pics), falling into the water whenever one felt about to boil over, fishing for lost treasure 20 ft down (one plastic shoe (W), one towel (S), one snorkelling mask (Anon) with R's reel and grappling hook weight. Also the Bombay gin and Lanson's champagne, one ribs meal and one super fish supper (courtesy of S & H - thank you!!). And the snorkelling (nice Maltese gentleman on neighbouring boat loaned us 2 masks for the week, so we each had one).
And the laughs and card games. Heather is a shocking cheat (or very very lucky) and trounced us all the first night of play. However, we each of us managed to eventually get our own back at least once. The girls survived the heat and the sleeping arrangements (in the saloon with body bags - they wisely decided the furnace that was pretending to be an aft cabin was better suited to storage). And they did a mean job of washing up and were suitably frugal with water like seasoned sailors. A competent crew course may be in the offing….
So, stocked up on some "British" goodies (still stocked in the shops despite independence and eurozones) and looking forward to Sicilia again and onwards to Greece. We have a date in 3 weeks' time in Corfu - Talisman (alias COOC or Clive and Jane) are joining us there - we just need to make sure we get there!
And wish S well for her move, and H for her next steps. Xx
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Some thoughts on our beloved American "freedoms"
I would rather have peace than "freedom" because I think I know what peace looks like.
Freedom, well:
I can't ever legally own a fire arm (convicted felon; involuntary mental health committments)
I can't consume a legally made, legally sold, legally purchased product in places of business where the business owners overwhelming preference is that I be able to consume this entirely legally made product in their establishment (cigarettes).
I cannot vote for a state or national official who will represent my interests in the state capital or in Washington DC (because such officials only represent corporate interests, and the interests of the wealthy elites)
If I were employed and making, say $50,000 a year, I would pay more in taxes (percentage basis - all taxes, including FIT, Social Security / Medicare, State, munincipal, sales) So I am not even free to keep as much of the money I make as a very much wealthier person (on a percentage basis)
Without a savings account nor a checking account, I am not free to get my checks cashed for free
When I was in the mental hospital, I was not free to request a change of doctors, the DR assigned to me told me the other doctor wouldn't take me
When my ex-wife took our son out of the country, in clear violation of a court order, I had no money, and could not afford to seek legal intervention to prevent her from violating the court order. I was not free to have the parenting rights that were guaranteed me in the divorce decree
Shall I go on? JUST WHAT freedoms are we talking about when we speak of being "Proud to be an American where at least I can be free ..."
Freedom, well:
I can't ever legally own a fire arm (convicted felon; involuntary mental health committments)
I can't consume a legally made, legally sold, legally purchased product in places of business where the business owners overwhelming preference is that I be able to consume this entirely legally made product in their establishment (cigarettes).
I cannot vote for a state or national official who will represent my interests in the state capital or in Washington DC (because such officials only represent corporate interests, and the interests of the wealthy elites)
If I were employed and making, say $50,000 a year, I would pay more in taxes (percentage basis - all taxes, including FIT, Social Security / Medicare, State, munincipal, sales) So I am not even free to keep as much of the money I make as a very much wealthier person (on a percentage basis)
Without a savings account nor a checking account, I am not free to get my checks cashed for free
When I was in the mental hospital, I was not free to request a change of doctors, the DR assigned to me told me the other doctor wouldn't take me
When my ex-wife took our son out of the country, in clear violation of a court order, I had no money, and could not afford to seek legal intervention to prevent her from violating the court order. I was not free to have the parenting rights that were guaranteed me in the divorce decree
Shall I go on? JUST WHAT freedoms are we talking about when we speak of being "Proud to be an American where at least I can be free ..."
The largest truth of 9-11 was this: that when our nation was under attack, the ONLY LINE OF DEFENSE our citizens had was our own citizens on Flight 93; not our military (the air force did not have the coordinates of any of the major city air ports), not our police, not our national guard, but citizens who took it upon themselves to GIVE THEIR LIVES to protect us on the ground.
Our government, and our military, and our intelligence gathering apparatus failed us so miserably on 9-11 that there should have been an uprising and a removal from office of the President and Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the director of the FBI, the director of the DIA. These all should have been fired for negligence, incompetence, and non-feasance.
The Republican Party should have issued an apology to Bill Clinton for ever accusing him of his attempt to assassinate Bin Laden for being a political cover for the Lewinsky blow jobs. President Dick Cheney and the Smirking Chimp George W Bush whould have prostrated themselves on the floor in the show window of Macy's and kissed Bill Clinton's fat ass for having failed to heed Slick Willy's warnings about Bin Laden. Richard Clark should have been promoted to Director of the DIA and Michael Scheurer should have been promoted to head the CIA and tasked exclusively with killing Bin Laden.
And the Media should have offered a public policy for having been so biased in its coverage of Al Gore that it (they) were far more guilty of stealing the election from Gore than even the Supreme Court Jefkoffs (yes, including that egomaniacal piece of crap lady justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, who got her just deserts in retirement.
Monday, September 12, 2011
From one of my facebook friends - Scott Werdebaugh
Scott Werdebaugh 5:37pm Sep 11
Wow! I sure needed to hear this today! I hope that it will minister to your spirit as it did to mine! The essay is entitled, "Simplifying Our Spiritual Vocabulary."
Wow! I sure needed to hear this today! I hope that it will minister to your spirit as it did to mine! The essay is entitled, "Simplifying Our Spiritual Vocabulary."
Simplifying Our Spiritual Vocabulary
By Ron Rolkeiser, OMI
2011-05-29
Somewhere near his 75th birthday, Morris West wrote a series of autobiographical essays entitled, “A View from the Ridge.” In the Prologue of that book he suggests that at age 75 you need to have only one word left in your spiritual vocabulary, gratitude, and that maturity is attained precisely at that moment when gratitude begins to drown out and cauterize the hurts in your life. As he describes it: Life has served me as it serves everyone, sometimes well and sometimes ill, but I have learned to be grateful for the gifts of it, for the love that began it and the other loves with which I have been so richly endowed.
I agree with West, though it is necessary to add that the fruit of that maturity is forgiveness. Just as smoke follows fire, forgiveness follows gratitude. Gratitude ultimately undergirds and fuels all genuine virtue, is the real basis of holiness, and the source of love itself. And its major fruit is forgiveness. When we are grateful we more easily find the strength to forgive.
Moreover, just as gratitude undergirds genuine virtue, forgiveness undergirds genuine religion and morality. Thus, as we get older, we can trim our spiritual vocabulary down to three words: Forgive, forgive, forgive! To age into and then die with a forgiving heart is the ultimate moral and religious imperative. We shouldn't delude ourselves on this. All the dogmatic and moral purity in the world does little for us if our hearts are bitter and incapable of forgiveness.
We see this, for instance, in the sad figure of the older brother of the prodigal son. He stands before his father protesting that he has never wandered, never been unfaithful, and that he has stayed home and done the family's work. But, and this is the issue, he stands outside the father's house, unable to enter into joy, celebration, the banquet, the dance. He's done everything right, but a bitter heart prevents him from entering the father's house just as much as the lustful wanderings of his younger brother took him out of that same house. Religious and moral fidelity, when not rooted inside of gratitude and forgiveness, are far from enough. They can leave us just as much outside the father's house as sin and infidelity. As Jesus teaches forcefully in the Lord's Prayer, a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven is forgiveness, especially our forgiving those who have hurt us.
But the struggle to forgive others is not easy and may never be trivialized or preached lightly. The struggle to forgive, I suspect, is our greatest psychological, moral, and religious struggle. It's not easy to forgive. Most everything inside of us protests. When we have been wronged, when we have suffered an injustice, when someone or something has treated us unfairly, a thousand physical and psychological mechanisms inside of us begin clam-up, shut-down, freeze- over, self-protect, and scream-out in protest, anger, and rage. Forgiveness is not something we can simply will and make happen. “The heart,” as Pascal once said, “has its reasons.” It also has its rhythms, its paranoia, its cold bitter spots, and its need to seal itself off from whatever has wounded it.
Moreover, all of us have been wounded. No one comes to adulthood with his or her heart fully intact. In ways small or traumatic, we have all been treated unjustly, violated, hurt, ignored, not properly honored, and unfairly cast aside. We all carry wounds and, with those wounds, we all carry some angers, some bitterness, and some areas within which we have not forgiven.
The strength of Henri Nouwen's greatest book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, was precisely to point out both the hidden cold places in our hearts and the mammoth struggle needed to bring warmth and forgiveness to those places. So much of the lightness or heaviness in our hearts, and most every nuance of our mood, is unconsciously dictated by either the forgiveness or the non-forgiveness inside us.
Forgiveness is the deep secret to joy. It is also the ultimate imperative.
Andrew Greeley, writing a review of Frank McCourt's book, Angela's Ashes, praised McCourt for being brilliant, but challenged him for being unforgiving with words to this effect: Granted, your life has been unfair. Your father was an alcoholic, your mother didn't protect you from the effects of that, you grew up in dire poverty, and you suffered a series of mini-injustices under the Irish social services, the Irish church, the Irish educational system, and the Irish weather! So, let me give you some advice: Before you die, forgive! Forgive your father for being an alcoholic, forgive your mother for not protecting you, forgive the church for whatever ways it failed you, forgive Ireland for the poverty, rain, and bad teachers it inflicted on you, forgive yourself for the failures of your own life, and then forgive God because life isn't fair ... so that you don't die an angry and bitter man because that's really the ultimate moral imperative.
How true and how challenging!
Saturday, September 10, 2011
America Should Honor Her Troops by Bringing Them Home by John Nichols
The Nation On Memorial Day, America Should Honor Her Troops by Bringing Them Home by John Nichols
May 30, 2011
It is unfortunate but true that on this Memorial Day -- when we pause to honor those Americans who have fought the good fights against British colonialism, the sin of slavery and the menace of fascism -- U.S. troops are currently bogged down in a quagmire of George Bush's creation in Afghanistan and an continuing mission of Bush's creation in Iraq.
Appallingly, Barack Obama has maintained Bush's undeclared wars of occupation. And he has now steered the United States into another fight with Libya.
Everything about these undeclared and open-ended conflicts is at odds with the vision of the founders of the American experiment -- who generally shared James Madison's view that "permanent war" posed the greatest threat to liberty -- and the serious intent of wars against kings, slaveholders and fascists.
Soldiers fight wars because of a sense of duty. And the soldiers involved in America's current conflicts are good men and women. But these are not good fights.
Nor are their necessary fights for the U.S. military.
It is for this reason that veterans of these undeclared wars of whim have organized so well and wisely to end them, in groups such as Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, which is mounting a Memorial Day campaign to highlight the wrongheaded practice of deploying traumatized troops, and the currently organizing Afghanistan Veterans Against the War project.
There are arguments to be made, some of them sound, some of them not, that people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have reasons to be fighting. But the fights are their own -- not America's.
John Quincy Adams summed the sentiment up 190 years ago when, in an address to Congress, the then-Secretary of State declared that: "[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace."
"If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity," explained Adams. "She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
The cynicism of the previous administration, which was led by a president whose family pulled strings to keep him out of the Vietnam War and a vice president who dodged the draft five times during that conflict, was beyond contempt. But so, too, is the cynicism of many Democrats who, despite their disdain for the failed foreign policies of Bush and Cheney, continue to echo the empty rhetoric of the administration when it comes to the debate about how best to end the war.
The best way to "support the troops" who have been placed in harm's way in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is to bring them home.
Congress considered the prospect last week and more than 200 members of the House voted for a proposal to begin taking steps to exit Afghanistan. Unfortunately, a few more members opposed that necessary step.
The growing opposition to the misguided mission in Afghanistan, as well as the clear opposition to any expansion of the Libya mission, is the encouraging news of this Memorial Day.
America is growing weary of endless war.
Wars of whim, fought without proper congressional declaration and without exit strategies, are not fights for democracy.
Fights for democracy can only be considered successful when American democracy is open and vibrant enough to allow for a realistic discussion of the nation's circumstance. Those "my-country-right-or-wrong" politicians and pundits who would shut down dissent on Memorial Day, or any other day, make a mockery of the oath to defend a constitution that protects the right to speak truth to power and to assemble for the purpose of petitioning for the redress of grievances.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's Vietnam War-era counsel to Americans holds true this Memorial Day.
Americans who love their country and its promise must move beyond "the prophesying of smooth patriotism" toward "a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."
No honest reading of the history of America's founding, or of recent events, can led to a conclusion that the undeclared wars of the moment are justified.
Americans have fought and died in pursuit of what they -- and most Americans -- believed to be noble and necessary causes. It is right to celebrate their memory. But is right, as well, to recognize that not all wars are noble and necessary.
Making the distinction between wars that are unavoidable and wars that should have been avoided (and that can now be ended) honors all veterans and all soldiers, as does a recognition that it is time to begin establishing practices and policies that err on the side of making peace -- as opposed to endless conflict.
That's a message that Michael McPhearson, the former executive director of Veterans for Peace and a co-convener of United for Peace and Justice brings to the table this Memorial Day.
"To truly honor fallen soldiers requires self-reflection, questions and action," says the veteran who served as a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during the first Gulf War. "We must reflect on our part in their deaths. Are we allowing the blood of soldiers and civilians to be spilled in war because we are not willing to do the hard work of peace making? Hard work that may mean we must change our lifestyles, consume less and learn more about the world around us. Are we prepared to take any responsibility for our nation’s relationships with other countries? Are we willing to question our government's foreign policies and demand a change from domination to collaboration? Are we willing to take action to change ourselves so that our personal behavior and attitude reflects peace making rather than acceptance of war?"
Americans will have plenty of answers to those questions. But the first ought to be that, on this Memorial Day, the time has come to honor the troops by bringing them home.
© 2011 The Nation
May 30, 2011
It is unfortunate but true that on this Memorial Day -- when we pause to honor those Americans who have fought the good fights against British colonialism, the sin of slavery and the menace of fascism -- U.S. troops are currently bogged down in a quagmire of George Bush's creation in Afghanistan and an continuing mission of Bush's creation in Iraq.
Appallingly, Barack Obama has maintained Bush's undeclared wars of occupation. And he has now steered the United States into another fight with Libya.
Everything about these undeclared and open-ended conflicts is at odds with the vision of the founders of the American experiment -- who generally shared James Madison's view that "permanent war" posed the greatest threat to liberty -- and the serious intent of wars against kings, slaveholders and fascists.
Soldiers fight wars because of a sense of duty. And the soldiers involved in America's current conflicts are good men and women. But these are not good fights.
Nor are their necessary fights for the U.S. military.
It is for this reason that veterans of these undeclared wars of whim have organized so well and wisely to end them, in groups such as Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, which is mounting a Memorial Day campaign to highlight the wrongheaded practice of deploying traumatized troops, and the currently organizing Afghanistan Veterans Against the War project.
There are arguments to be made, some of them sound, some of them not, that people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have reasons to be fighting. But the fights are their own -- not America's.
John Quincy Adams summed the sentiment up 190 years ago when, in an address to Congress, the then-Secretary of State declared that: "[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace."
"If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity," explained Adams. "She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
The cynicism of the previous administration, which was led by a president whose family pulled strings to keep him out of the Vietnam War and a vice president who dodged the draft five times during that conflict, was beyond contempt. But so, too, is the cynicism of many Democrats who, despite their disdain for the failed foreign policies of Bush and Cheney, continue to echo the empty rhetoric of the administration when it comes to the debate about how best to end the war.
The best way to "support the troops" who have been placed in harm's way in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is to bring them home.
Congress considered the prospect last week and more than 200 members of the House voted for a proposal to begin taking steps to exit Afghanistan. Unfortunately, a few more members opposed that necessary step.
The growing opposition to the misguided mission in Afghanistan, as well as the clear opposition to any expansion of the Libya mission, is the encouraging news of this Memorial Day.
America is growing weary of endless war.
Wars of whim, fought without proper congressional declaration and without exit strategies, are not fights for democracy.
Fights for democracy can only be considered successful when American democracy is open and vibrant enough to allow for a realistic discussion of the nation's circumstance. Those "my-country-right-or-wrong" politicians and pundits who would shut down dissent on Memorial Day, or any other day, make a mockery of the oath to defend a constitution that protects the right to speak truth to power and to assemble for the purpose of petitioning for the redress of grievances.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's Vietnam War-era counsel to Americans holds true this Memorial Day.
Americans who love their country and its promise must move beyond "the prophesying of smooth patriotism" toward "a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."
No honest reading of the history of America's founding, or of recent events, can led to a conclusion that the undeclared wars of the moment are justified.
Americans have fought and died in pursuit of what they -- and most Americans -- believed to be noble and necessary causes. It is right to celebrate their memory. But is right, as well, to recognize that not all wars are noble and necessary.
Making the distinction between wars that are unavoidable and wars that should have been avoided (and that can now be ended) honors all veterans and all soldiers, as does a recognition that it is time to begin establishing practices and policies that err on the side of making peace -- as opposed to endless conflict.
That's a message that Michael McPhearson, the former executive director of Veterans for Peace and a co-convener of United for Peace and Justice brings to the table this Memorial Day.
"To truly honor fallen soldiers requires self-reflection, questions and action," says the veteran who served as a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during the first Gulf War. "We must reflect on our part in their deaths. Are we allowing the blood of soldiers and civilians to be spilled in war because we are not willing to do the hard work of peace making? Hard work that may mean we must change our lifestyles, consume less and learn more about the world around us. Are we prepared to take any responsibility for our nation’s relationships with other countries? Are we willing to question our government's foreign policies and demand a change from domination to collaboration? Are we willing to take action to change ourselves so that our personal behavior and attitude reflects peace making rather than acceptance of war?"
Americans will have plenty of answers to those questions. But the first ought to be that, on this Memorial Day, the time has come to honor the troops by bringing them home.
© 2011 The Nation
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book is The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols' other books include: Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.
more John Nichols
Thursday, September 8, 2011
What we have here is a failure to communicate
I am rereading the exchange we had when you thought I was pregnant. I am laughing so hard (at me) because I had just briefly woken up when I initially read that you were praying for me. When I'm that tired my brain functions at pretty low levels...and to top it off...I'm a classic ADD...hence, my response:
I'm not sure about the child womb at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran church. We go to a church out here. Tell me about the one you mean, of what's happening there.
To which you responded, and that I am giggling so hard right now, I have tremors:
"well, hell, you're pregnant, right? so ... got to pray for more than just you ... is my point ... oops, forgot the other guy, the father guy - will remember him next time."
That is classic!!
I'm not sure about the child womb at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran church. We go to a church out here. Tell me about the one you mean, of what's happening there.
To which you responded, and that I am giggling so hard right now, I have tremors:
"well, hell, you're pregnant, right? so ... got to pray for more than just you ... is my point ... oops, forgot the other guy, the father guy - will remember him next time."
That is classic!!
The patriot's prayer
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, over 300 journalists have been killed, more than in any other war.
Heavenly Father, we pray that you will send your angels to protect those independent journalists who cover and report on the atrocities of war. They are targets of the U.S. military, because they are dangerous truth seekers, unafraid to speak truth to power; unafraid to report the war crimes that are invariably committed when the U.S. decides it needs to go to war to protect or expand the financial / power / political agendas of this nation's elites. It is these people, who would accumulate capital for the mere sake of capital's accumulation, who gain from war, and no other class of people does. Father we know that in WWII, 50% of the casualties were civilians; in Vietnam, 70%; in the Iraq Invasion, 90%. Father, we weep for these lives of your beloved children. Give us strength, Dear God, to become instruments of your peace. Give us the courage to march, even unto death, to put an end to the wars waged by the most savage nation on earth, our own country. Give us this courage, and shield the civilians, this we ask, Oh Lord, in the Name of Your Son Jesus Christ, who suffered death that we all might live, if it be Thy will. AMEN.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Eeek! I'm a book hoarder!
Patti Shanaberg: Eeek! I'm a book hoarder! I can't seem to get rid of useless books!
Pam English: I have nursing school books from 1990...I'm afraid to toss them.
Erika A. Burch: You guys are funny! Donate them!!
Ginny Rankin: If they're progressive or at all liberal (or maybe selacious), give them to Sarah Palin. I'm sure she'd arrange a big book-burning. Michelle Bachmann would probably help you out, too.
Patti Shanaberg: If only they would READ them! lol @Erika - where to donate?
Erika A. Burch: Women's shelters and Retirement homes, prison's and Goodwill. Women's shelters also like nail polish (that isn't thick and stringy) and anything else that a woman in need could use to make her feel better. I buy LOT'S of books from Goodwil...See More
Erika A. Burch: I used to keep all my books. I LOVE books. LOVE LOVE LOVE them. But how many books does a person need? Some books that I am partial to I keep. Years ago in my apartment laundry room I put about 50 books in there with a nice sign that said "Please read me and then return me. And if you have any books you don't want, add them." Within 2 weeks there was one heck of a little library there.
Patti Shanaberg: You mean I can't sell or donate my 1970's college text books?! LOL Thanks - yes, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has a thing for books. I figured I could find plenty of places to donate them (not my text books, just kidding about thosebut I have PLENTY of others) just hadn't decided where yet. And I'm so pathetically attached to the dumbest things! I just threw out 10 boxes of old canceled checks from over 10 years ago. I can't believed I moved here from LA with all of those!!!
Drew Bourne: give them to the VA, they usually collect books to send to our troops.
I finally started selling some of them on Amazon. Those that are in abundance and lowest price is less than it's worth go to Goodwill, Library, Nursing Homes, etc. Textbooks (current) sell FAST and for almost if not more than what I paid (I buy used when available).
Erika A. Burch: Good to know, Rebecca!!!
Mark Ganzer: Even the most useless of books can be used for toilet paper, in a pinch!
Anne Alberts: I am a cook book hoarder! I love them and have collected them from all over the world. I only use about 10 of them all the time. The rest are in boxes in the attic. I haven't seen them in three years and I use the Internet for recipes all the time. Why can't I just let them go? Do they have meetings for this? LOL
Mark Ganzer: The only things I possess are (1) my clothes (2) my vinyl records (3) my books (4) my golf clubs (5) my golf balls (6) my golf tees (7) 150 decks of playing cards (8) four duplicate bridge bidding boxes ... and OUT!
Mark Ganzer: I'd give up the vinyle, the clothes, the golf crap, the cards / bridge crappola in a heart beat, or New York Minute .. but NEVER the books ... NEVER!!
Anne Alberts I am a cook book hoarder! I love them and have collected them from all over the world. I only use about 10 of them all the time. The rest are in boxes in the attic. I haven't seen them in three years and I use the Internet for recipes all the time. Why can't I just let them go? Do they have meetings for this? LOL
Mark Ganzer: The tactile feel of them - HELL ... I can't get a woman nor a dog to bed me down, but I've read books, magazines (not just Playboy and Hustler), newspapers that have put me to sleep and SOMETIMES, when the writing is real damn good - keep me up and excited all night long!
Patti Shanaberg: I'm in the midst of loading up books, books and more books to donate as I type - so many old favorites - really good rich literature - then I come to "Men are from Mars; Women Are from Venus" and "Rules" and more of that genre - WHATEVER POSSESSED ME???!!! Then I pull out "Smart Women Stupid Books" (a parody of the same type of book called "Smart Women Stupid Choices") - ahh - a moment of clarity! The sad thing is I'm barely making room on my book shelves for all the books piled up on the floor. I wasn't kidding - I'm a book hoarder! EEEK!
Pam English: I have nursing school books from 1990...I'm afraid to toss them.
Erika A. Burch: You guys are funny! Donate them!!
Ginny Rankin: If they're progressive or at all liberal (or maybe selacious), give them to Sarah Palin. I'm sure she'd arrange a big book-burning. Michelle Bachmann would probably help you out, too.
Patti Shanaberg: If only they would READ them! lol @Erika - where to donate?
Erika A. Burch: Women's shelters and Retirement homes, prison's and Goodwill. Women's shelters also like nail polish (that isn't thick and stringy) and anything else that a woman in need could use to make her feel better. I buy LOT'S of books from Goodwil...See More
Erika A. Burch: I used to keep all my books. I LOVE books. LOVE LOVE LOVE them. But how many books does a person need? Some books that I am partial to I keep. Years ago in my apartment laundry room I put about 50 books in there with a nice sign that said "Please read me and then return me. And if you have any books you don't want, add them." Within 2 weeks there was one heck of a little library there.
Patti Shanaberg: You mean I can't sell or donate my 1970's college text books?! LOL Thanks - yes, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has a thing for books. I figured I could find plenty of places to donate them (not my text books, just kidding about thosebut I have PLENTY of others) just hadn't decided where yet. And I'm so pathetically attached to the dumbest things! I just threw out 10 boxes of old canceled checks from over 10 years ago. I can't believed I moved here from LA with all of those!!!
Drew Bourne: give them to the VA, they usually collect books to send to our troops.
I finally started selling some of them on Amazon. Those that are in abundance and lowest price is less than it's worth go to Goodwill, Library, Nursing Homes, etc. Textbooks (current) sell FAST and for almost if not more than what I paid (I buy used when available).
Erika A. Burch: Good to know, Rebecca!!!
Mark Ganzer: Even the most useless of books can be used for toilet paper, in a pinch!
Anne Alberts: I am a cook book hoarder! I love them and have collected them from all over the world. I only use about 10 of them all the time. The rest are in boxes in the attic. I haven't seen them in three years and I use the Internet for recipes all the time. Why can't I just let them go? Do they have meetings for this? LOL
Mark Ganzer: The only things I possess are (1) my clothes (2) my vinyl records (3) my books (4) my golf clubs (5) my golf balls (6) my golf tees (7) 150 decks of playing cards (8) four duplicate bridge bidding boxes ... and OUT!
Mark Ganzer: I'd give up the vinyle, the clothes, the golf crap, the cards / bridge crappola in a heart beat, or New York Minute .. but NEVER the books ... NEVER!!
Anne Alberts I am a cook book hoarder! I love them and have collected them from all over the world. I only use about 10 of them all the time. The rest are in boxes in the attic. I haven't seen them in three years and I use the Internet for recipes all the time. Why can't I just let them go? Do they have meetings for this? LOL
Mark Ganzer: The tactile feel of them - HELL ... I can't get a woman nor a dog to bed me down, but I've read books, magazines (not just Playboy and Hustler), newspapers that have put me to sleep and SOMETIMES, when the writing is real damn good - keep me up and excited all night long!
Patti Shanaberg: I'm in the midst of loading up books, books and more books to donate as I type - so many old favorites - really good rich literature - then I come to "Men are from Mars; Women Are from Venus" and "Rules" and more of that genre - WHATEVER POSSESSED ME???!!! Then I pull out "Smart Women Stupid Books" (a parody of the same type of book called "Smart Women Stupid Choices") - ahh - a moment of clarity! The sad thing is I'm barely making room on my book shelves for all the books piled up on the floor. I wasn't kidding - I'm a book hoarder! EEEK!
Going to court (again) tomorrow
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?
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?
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.
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