Victims Day

Herewith, with a minimum of editing, an email exchange I had today with my daughter:

She: Am  I an ass for not jumping on the Facebook  “Thanks to all our fabulous vets for serving our country freedom isn’t free we love you God bless the USA”  bandwagon?   Even my liberal buddies are doing it. 

I refuse. I'm an ass, right?

Me: You most certainly are not an ass, my girl. I of course am not jumping on that particular bandwagon either. In fact, I think that along with the huge sidle to the right the country did in electing and then deifying Ronald Reagan, it also went way overboard in elevating the military to some sort of exalted status. This status has only gotten higher since. I wince when the president and just about any other politician from senator to county clerk just gushes himself half to death talking about the troops. Why this overblown praise for an institution that our revolutionary forefathers feared and mistrusted? I really don't know, but I regret that the country's original stance toward the military has been altered. It is correct to fear and distrust the military establishment. Just the other day, I read for the first time an American who speculated that a military coup in this country is not beyond the realm of imagining.

I would venture to say that the vast majority of the "volunteers" in this all-volunteer military are there because they could not find gainful employment in an economy that just grinds down the poor and the people from the wrong side of the tracks. So where else could these people go? Societies from the beginning of time have used their mudsills to do their dying for them. Ours is no different. Rather than praise beyond the skies for these poor wretches and the blizzard of American flags on the countless graves from coast to coast and in God knows how many foreign countries, we should drape in black mourning the headstones of all the victims our country has sent to war to die too young and for trumped up causes. It's valiant and false to say one died for his country; it's infuriating and true to say one died for the interests of the rich and powerful. So what do you think relatives of the victims of war plus those whose interests are served by war will say? What do you think the powerful who send people to die for their advancement and security will say?

The correct stance on Veterans Day should always be pity for victims and anger at the people who sent them to die.

Here in Oklahoma the fever of rabid patriotism is high all the time, but probably out of control today. Every little bit I can do to lower it, I will. So I will definitely help you to do that very thing today. Sphere: Related Content

The American Way

Some thoughts about the massacre of people at Ft Hood. President Obama was there today to eulogize the dead and injured and comfort the grieving. It's a real horror and tragedy, with a host of victims beyond the shot. Thirteen killed, with another 30 wounded by a gunman who was: a field grade officer in the Army, a psychiatrist, a Muslim. Guess what aspect of this guy focuses all the attention. Who knows, maybe the shooter, Maj Nidel Malik Hasan, is connected with terrorists. If that's the case, I'd sure hate to be named Muhamed or Hasan in any of the services, much less in the civilian population. 

But likely he's another product of the war-loving country we've become. Why are we shocked when the institutions to which we devote 57 percent of our national budget produce unreasoning violent people? Why should we be surprised that individuals we've sent repeatedly into war zones come home all bent out of shape? The killer here had not even been to Iraq or Afghanistan. He was slated to go, and apparently that's what sent him off the cliff. Obviously this guy was a nut case. Isn't anybody who guns down a bunch of unarmed strangers a nut case? But if you think about it, isn't blowing strangers away the whole business of the army?* And given that, just how likely is it that you're going to have horrific violence by servicemen returning from combat? Indeed, there's been an upsurge of such violence everywhere, and Fort Hood has not been immune. Ten suicides there so far this year. Domestic abuse, divorce, crime in the surrounding community: all are up. 

So there will be investigations, congressional hearings, several reports, grave pronoucements, and "corrective actions" in the wake of this event, but don't expect anything dramatic to happen to change the root causes of stuff like this. We're a violent people; we've been socialized that way, and our foreign policy ensures that we always have some war somewhere to keep us sufficiently blood-thirsty and xenophobic. It's the American way.

*The fact that enemies in war are also armed and trying to kill you is not the point. The point is there's a large spectrum of activities in which we kill people we don't know: war is on one end with mass murder somewhere in the middle. It's hardly arguable that war and mass murder don't share many characteristics. Sphere: Related Content

Back . . .

Glad to be back to my blogging. I've missed it. And a lot has happened since I've gone sporadic that I might never get around to talking about. I'm going to be around now until February when I have to cut out of town for a few days for a surprise birthday party for my mom. I'm not about to give a travelogue of my recent trips, a specialized form of reporting that I don't think I'm very good at anyway. But I will say, I enjoyed seeing Austin for the first time, and I liked the Texas hill country. It's rugged looking and like just about any countryside, beautiful in a way that's all its own. LBJ library (only one with free parking and admission among presidential libraries, we learned) and ranch are well worth seeing.

I was struck once again by the magnificent skyline of Chicago. Kind and old friends put me up every time I'm there in their magnificent three-story house just minutes from downtown and one L stop from Wrigley Field. The drive down from there to Louisville where I attended the Southern Historical Association convention--well, I was in the same hotel, but I didn't go to a single session--wasn't all that exciting. (Conventions are for gathering with old friends; more on that later.) The countryside south of Chicago and in northern Indiana is fairly non-descript, but the closer you get to the Ohio River, the more green, hilly, and forested the country became. Louisville, a town established in the late 18th century, during the American Revolution, in fact, has inherent interest for a historian like me. Autumn blazed out in magnificent glory all over the city. Same for Chicago. Something this southern boy never saw in his youth was the gorgeous free display all the trees and bushes put on to celebrate the fall. Went to the Louisville Slugger museum while I was there and got myself a bat with a Texas Ranger logo and my name on it. That's the world's largest baseball bat in the picture.

Had a blast seeing everyone, all my good friends from graduate school, all accomplished scholars to a greater or lesser degree. What a blast spending time with all those guys, despite the various health problems of some, something that comes with this current age territory. And having now seen a good deal of life, I've concluded that nothing much matters but family and friends. Come to think of it, that's all I would say does matter. Anything else can be replaced. Sphere: Related Content

It Depends . . .

. . . on your perspective in judging how Barack Obama has done as president. This is the first anniversary of that glorious night when Barack Obama won the presidency and spoke to an ecstatic crowd in Grant Park, Chicago. I remember watching on television and thinking that this tremendous victory would mean the undoing of all the hateful polices of George W. Bush, a 8-year disaster who had gotten the country involved in two wars, brought the economy to the brink of collapse, and alienated world opinion about the U.S. I remember thinking that at last the country could be begin addressing a host of serious issues that Bush had ignored or screwed up: health care, environment, global warming, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and of course the wars.

So how has Obama done? Not well, in my opinion. Let's face it, the Obama rhetoric is grand, but the delivery of the goods is slow, slow. If you want to be a bean counter, Politifact will tell you that Obama is actually working on keeping a number of promises he made during the campaign. And he's only broken about 7 or 8. But many, many more are just sitting unaddressed at the moment. True, the man inherited a steaming pile of doo doo from Bush, which he had to address immediately. The jury is not yet returned on the efficacy of the stimulus package. But in other matters connected with the economy, Obama disappoints: Goldman Sacs insiders in top administration financial positions, no moves to roll back the tax cuts for the filthy rich, and, most notably, no move to punish either the financial pirates that brought down the country or the torturers who besmirched American ideals beyond recognition.

But the biggest problem I have with Obama is his leadership. He has proven to be an uncommonly placid person. What I wanted and what the times demand is a kick-ass idealist--somebody who lived up to the promise of change that elected him--and what I got was a measured, overly careful "realist" who to this very day still believes that compromise with Republicans who oppose his every move is the right way to go. This piece by Drew Westen pretty much says it all for people like me:

. . . the essence of the President's approach to leadership -- Obamaprise -- [is] the art of compromising when you don't have to. The goal is not to get the best possible bill, to fulfill his campaign pledges to the people who elected him, or to fulfill values to which he is deeply committed, whatever they seem to be when the dust settles on his latest moving speech. The goal is to find someone with whom to compromise, whether it's the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, or Senate Republicans on health care; the energy industry and the "clean coal" lobby on climate change; or the banks lavishing their latest set of outrageous bonuses on their executives for another Heckuva-Job-Bernanke year.

 It's not too late for the President to stiffen his spine and start really shaking things up. But time is fast running out, from my perspective.

Note to readers: I'm going to be out of town again for a few days. I'll be back Sunday, and then I'll be back to regular postings here.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/leadership-obama-style_b_342269.html

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It's Crazy Out There

Have you noticed it too? I'm struck at the intensity of the political irrationality out there everywhere. Take guys like Glenn Beck, the nutcase on Fox. Or any number of similar crackpots on the right such as Bill O'Reilly, Limbaugh, the majority of the GOP contingent in Congress, the tea partyites, and just about any run-of-the-mill conservative you run into out there. They're all a bit looney, don't you think?

I'm reminded of just how crazy things have gotten by the situation in the 23d congressional district in New York, where a socially moderate Republican has resigned from the race and endorsed the Democrat running against her. Why? Because a third candidate in the race running as a candidate of the Conservative party forced it upon her. And this dude, a businessman named Doug Hoffman, who doesn't even reside in the district has won endorsements from all the above named nut cases of the right. The original Republican candidate, a model of her kind, it turns out, was not sufficiently pure on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. Boom! She had to go. Ideological purity must be a hundred percent pure.

How can we explain this? Maybe it's something in the air or the water. Maybe aliens are bombarding the planet with rays that turn some people's minds to mush. Actually, I think the reason is a lot more terrestrial. Actually, the real reason, or at least what I think is the real reason, is more frightening. It's something innate in the very fiber of some people. It's all-encompassing fear. Fear of changes that won't stop. A black man is president, Chinese money is keeping the U.S. afloat, people are getting divorced all the time. Drugs, gangs, crooked bankers bailed out by the government, homosexuals wanting to get married. Abortion, rap music, babies having babies, priests sexually molesting children. Where does it all stop, they want to know. What next? Whatever the hell it is, it's going to make things worse!

So people seized by such fears seize instinctively on the appropriate symbols of salvation, people who give voice to their outrage. People such as the ones above and--preeminently, a person not mentioned above. Sarah Palin, right now about the spring into the headlines again with the publication of her memoir book Going Rogue: An American Life in a couple of weeks.

Matt Tabai in writing about Palin's resignation as governor of Alaska, says, in that inimitable style of his, that Palin has been grasped by the loonies of the right, even when by any objective standard, she's absolutely clueless about nearly everything. And just why they should seize on her "defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness."

Palin is, he writes, "a conduit for middle American resentment . . . the perfect leader for the inevitable pushback against the Obama era, when America in a vague and superficial sort of way decided to celebrate the values of culture, tolerance and knowledge. The other America doesn’t read and doesn’t remember anything it didn’t learn in the last five minutes; it’s angry and unhappy but doesn’t want to think about why, and knows only that it wants someone to pay the price for what it feels."

These people may be scared, but they themselves are scarier. Sphere: Related Content

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

One of the most memorable of the many chilling government slogans in George Orwell's 1984, is the title today. Perpetual war for perpetual peace. It describes perfectly the mindset of the Pentagon, the service leaders, and, i greatly fear, the Obama White House. Glenn Greenwald's brilliant column of yesterday in Salon, makes precisely this point. I don't know what's gotten into the skulls of the editors of the Washington Post, but they argue that the country should continue to fund the never-ending war in Afghanistan as vital to the national security, but that healthcare for all Americans is an expense that must be paid for on borrowed money, and thus should be postponed. Like Greenwald, who cannot understand or countenance this logic, I too wonder what in the name of all that is holy has gotten into the heads of these well-dressed, well-stuffed, well-insured purveyors of Beltway wisdom. Have all those three-martini lunches and heavy hors d'oeuvres at the soirées of the powerful completed addled their brains?

Staying in Afghanistan, and following Army and Marine Corps doctrine--as an aside, I was always struck by the idea that all the dense justification for what these guys do and how they do it and why they do it, goes under the title of "doctrine." Kinda like the teaching of the Church, eh?--anyway, their doctrine on counterinsurgency is what in practice is nation-building, "securing the population." And this the Pentagon argues is what has to be done in Afghanistan. What this means, of course, is that the US is then committed for who knows how many more years and billions of dollars and who knows how many deaths of American troops. This is necessary, on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowed money, and healthcare for millions of US citizens without it is not necessary and too burdensome on the budget?

[Days later in a new city]: To wrap up the above: I cannot understand for the life of me why the American people put up with these huge lies we're told. Can anyone seriously believe that the tripe now be dished out by our best military mind in Afghanistan, the sainted McChrystal, i.e., that 40,000 more troops is what he needs to implement the correct strategy that will turn the war around in that God-forsaken corner of the world. You mean that's all? Oh . . . I see, there are no guarantees or promises or timetables. Just give me the troops and the billions and we'll see.

Right. This is an exciting prospect for me. How about you? Sphere: Related Content

Wouldn't Ya Know It . . .

I had just typed an entry last evening about defense department contractors defrauding us taxpayers out of billions of dollars, went to post it, and Blogger was having difficulties. I lost the post, and now I'm about to depart on a little week-long vacation. I'm bringing a laptop with me, so there might even be some updates along the way. Sorry about being so abrupt this time. I'll see you all regularly in a week.

Update 1: I see last evening's post did make it. Right below. Sphere: Related Content

Laughing all the Way to the Bank

Speaking of lovable defense contractors like the Halliburton/KBR gang rapists, you'll want to check out all their friends on this list. It's called the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, and it's a product of the Project On Government Oversight. Our government doesn't keep such a list, so we are glad somebody does. Otherwise how would we keep track of all the money the defense department is pissing away on contractor fraud. This is a list of the top 100 defense contractors we taxpayers are funneling billions to who are guilty of some kind of misconduct. Like contract fraud, or environmental, ethics, or labor violations.


Oh, you can start with the rapists of KBR, a company this country paid $4.8 billion to in FY 2007, and presumably more in FYs 2008 & 2009. Since 1995, this outfit has ripped the taxpayers off to the tune of $103 million.


And they're just one of a hundred. No company on the list got any less than half a billion dollars in FY2007. Collectively in FY2007, they had contracts worth $2.6 trillion. And they had defrauded the taxpayers of almost ten percent of that staggering total (9.88 percent if you're being picky). That's a cool $26 billion, brothers and sisters. 


These guys are laughing all the way to the bank . . . the banks on Wall Street, of course. Sphere: Related Content

Let's Hear It for Gang Rape

You've doubtless read about this: a woman named Jamie Lee Jones, 20 years old at the time, was gang-raped by her co-workers at Halliburton/KBR in Iraq four years ago and then locked up in a crate for a day to keep her from reporting it. "She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and 'warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.' (Jones was not an isolated case.) "

 She wants to sue the bastards responsible--the company. But the terms of her contract with KBR prevent her from doing this. So enter new Minnesota senator Al Franken: who introduces an amendment to deny defense contracts to companies that require their employees to sign away their right to sue. The amendment passed, but 30 Republican senators including our two Oklahoma dunderheads--Inhofe and Coburn--and the honorable senator from Arizona, John McCain.

This is gang rape we're talking about here. I have no words. None at all.

Rachel Maddow interviewed the rape victim tonight on her show. 

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And Jon Stewart went absolutely nuts over this outrage.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape-Nuts
www.thedailyshow.com
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Huffin' 'n' Puffin'

Every day I get the latest edition of The Huffington Post ["news blogs video community"] in my email box. And every day, or mostly every day, I read at least one of the pieces. For a couple of reasons. They almost always reflect my point of view on something, or at least some facet of my point of view, because the writers for HP are intelligent observers of the folly and outrage of contemporary American life. And HP almost always points me to aspects of the ongoing folly and outrage that in the avalanche of news (and my bounce around the web way of reading it), there's always stuff that eludes me, either because I've read it and forgotten about it, or because I'm not aware of it. This is the advantage of having a blog like the HP coming every day. So, with all that out of the way, here's what struck me today.

Arianna Huffington's lament about the absurd media circle jerk over the so-called "Balloon Boy." Are you kidding me? This is the kind of utter nonsense that our brainless cable media simply find irresistible. And it all turned out to be a hoax. They say, all these supposedly sophisticated media mavens, that all they're doing by spending hours and hours telecasting this shit is giving the people what they want. Well, that's true. The people are clueless slugs that require constant stimulation of the reptilian brain nodes. What the mavens neglect to mention is that they too love this ridiculous stuff. They only giving the people what they all want. And to think there was serious talk back at the beginning of TV--yes, I fear I am that old--of its potential to literally change humanity as a medium for dispersion of education. Arianna cannot contain her scorn today for the massive attention given to the pseudo story of the balloon boy while the 1.5 million homeless children (42% of whom are under 6 and 17% of  whom have emotional problems) are ignored. Sphere: Related Content