#240 Okay Antonin "Tony Guns" Scalia and You Too Frankie "Dutch" Lautenberg--Let's Talk ... About THE Gun Law of 1791 [UPDATED]

Here is Justice "Tony Guns"  in his youthful gangbanger days sporting a  longer coif, and wearing a single, distinctive and quite becoming earring in the LEFT ear, which I'm told is the secret double-reverse signum of underworld connections (see last post), perhaps even unto the depths of Hell. Or not.

But he sure does love himself them fararms ... and that good ol'-timey Second Amendment of the US Constitution, by which he "justifies" his love. Sweet. Known only to intimates: the mobster-benchman has it tattooed where his tramp-stamp would go. A rite of passage in the organization. And which, lucky for us Patriots, he believes gives us the right to "bear arms" in a delightfully unfettered way.

Now as a "Strict Constructionist" (aka "entomologist") in interpreting the Constitution, he had to eliminate from his decision-making the possibility that the "Framers," or whoever, were NOT thinking of "bear arms" as a noun-noun double morpheme compound substantive as in "bear arms"--that is, weapons to kill bruin-kind (family Ursidae), such ursidicide being a common pastime in Colonial America, especially in Philadelphia, where these quaint gunslingers were meeting. But bears of several species (not including the Koala, which hadn't been discovered yet) can be dangerous for colonial campsites, and pose a threat to New-Nationhood. Proper weaponry guaranteeing Ursine lethality.would have been required of all.  Big long guns. Most antebellum colonists had them anyway. Did the 2ndA restrict firearms to bear-musketry only?

Here's the Original (spelling and all), consisting of one syntactically awkward sentence that "originalist" Justice Mafiabagman had to deal with--tattooed, as I said, slightly north of his hindquarters and tail, making it prima facie difficult for ready reference:

A well regulated Militia, being neceffary to the fecurity of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear armf, shall not be infringed.

Even the fpelling is difficult, as you can see, the Framers being inodinately fond of the alternate orthographic form of "s" (technically, the fistula) at the time. It's an effete rightward slanting "f"-like grapheme (as in parfum, not to be confused with parsum, which is not a word anyway), whose type key the Blogman had installed in the keyboard device for just such an occasion. A curious but meaningless  fact: an unusually high number of Founding Fathers had a lisp, or developed one soon after the Convention ... as would we all.

These minutiae are important to an "originalist" interpreter of our Founding Document and its first ten amendments, because there may be even more. The "textualists" represent the other related approach in the (coinage alert) "Constrictcunnalinctionist" family of two. This branch also sanctifies the words-as-written epistome, but unlike the "originalists" these seditious folk allow for some semantic evolution to be taken into account. Patriotic "originalists" (aka Tea-Baggers) will have none of that. They want to "figure out" what the "Framers" were "actually" THINKING at the "time" they were "actually" WRITING the "words."

Thus the Devil was appropriately in the details for Mr. Justice Uuderworld because he had to come up with the RIGHT (haha) Opinion as he consulted the oft-disputed 2ndA, as nobody affectionately calls it yet. He was deciding a case involving a law prohibiting home hand-gun possession in Wash DC, Difficult. But Antonin came through. This Associated Press headline and lead say it all:
Gun-Crazy*** Justice Scalia Writes Demented Majority Opinion That Strikes Down DC Anti-Hand-Gun Law Based On Delusional Constitutional Right To Bear Armf  Joining Scalia in the 5-4 Decision Banning the Banning of the Ownership of Handguns in the Home Were the Other Barely Humanoid Members of SCOTUS [?]: Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and What's-His-Name (AP 6/22/12)

It would be hard to make these things up. Anyway, Justice Scalia's "originalist" interpretation began by eliminating something SO elementary that it was beyond even my ken, and barbie's too. Bear armf? thought Scalia, trying to think the thoughts of the great Thinkers-up of the thing. Could the Framers have been thinking of the severed fore-limbs of the Ursine-kind? As weapons? To CLUB a Redcoat into submission perhaps, after a soldier's ammunition ran out or gun jammed? Broken bayonet? Might work, till spoilage set in. Heavy enough. Lots of bears around then. The claws would surely be effective. But noooo, too messy for fussbudget aristocrats like Adams, Hamilton, and esp Dolly Madison, who I've heard wrote most of the Constitution. Problem is: never happened. And the OED cites no instance of  "armf" used for bear parts. 

Then the revelation. He had been painstakingly parsing the ideation of each word separately, but now he remembered the "and" preceding "bear armf" and ...  Epiphany. "Tony Guns" knew right then that he was on to something.

[NEXT: How "Tony Guns" justifies thousands upon thousands of needless homicides.]

 *** Saw Gun Crazy, the movie, at the old Avalon theater (q.v. in several archival posts) in 1950 on a "double-bill" (yes, Virginia, TWO movies for a quarter) and tried unsuccessfully to reach and relate it to Annie Oakley and Hoot Gibson . Re-saw it recently on TCM. Wonderfully trashy/campy noir with moral that gunf make good people into killers. Tsk, tsk, a truth for the ages.
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#238 The Two Or Three Faces of Mitt, Or "Lies My Father Told Me" ...

... about TELLING THE TRUTH,.

How's this for a headline:

Honesty All But Destroys Governor Romney's Presidential Campaign  Presumptive nominee's admission of being WRONG costs him GOP major support. Primary battle now shifts in favor of ...

Richard Nixon ... Gotcha. Now you must adMIIT to being totally and completely fooled by my fake/true/fake headline, Or not. But boy-golly it's a tangled web, as Somebody once said, or said was said. The WRONGITY for Romney pere, as it turns out, was about the VIETNAM WAR--he discovered he was against it, In 1965. A Republican fercryinoutloud.. What. A. Guy. Cost him the Presidency in 1968 and his (incumbent) Michigan Governorship later that year, if he'd been running for it. .

Headlines like the one above reflected the Gov's changed attitude about THE war of our time as early as mid-year 1965, when  by now the former auto executive and Michigan CEO appeared already to be the man to run against LBJ in '68. But he had zero foreign policy experience. He decided, alone among presidential hopefuls, to take a look, 'Nam-wise. Result? "I was FOR, but NOT ANYMORE or some such dramatic stuff. Before TET, Cronkite. An epiphany.

He saw the shambles--the literally and etymologically abattoir of bloody failure of US intervention--and declared the so-called "progress" bullshit. Or something like that in Mormonese When he got face-to-face with the Generals directly in charge of the Vietnamese killing fields ... he knew. Their so-ridiculous-sounding-now protestations of "light at the end of the tunnel"--standard issue phraseology memorized from the Officer's Code, or something, as it is today--cut no shit with the Michigan/Mormon Elder. And he said as much, on record, in late-'67:

When I came back from Vietnam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression in SE Asia. [No kidding; this is how a lot of grownups really talked back then]

Ah, soooo ... the Brainwashing. Sinatra's Manchurian Candidate was still fresh in every brainwashed American mind, as it should have been. But Frank got George W. (hmmn) in big trouble when all of this soundbite baggage concatenated up into the newslines of 1968. And the Primaries.

The Chicken-Hawks of the GOP got fugacious ("fug-" to fly; flee; ult. fr. Latin fugere "fuck you"). Yes, they abandoned him in flocks, and prez hopes fluttered away for one of the first unlikely doves, lo unto Zolub, of the anti-Vietnam-war cause.

Naive; i.e. HONEST ... George W. (hmmn) Romney was NOT a dumb guy. He SAVED American Motors Corp,(irony alert) a struggling Detroit auto company on the verge of bankruptcy after buying out the venerable Nash and Hudson brands. He innovated. My first legal motorcaraage, in fact, was via our family's  AMC/Hudson Rambler "Cross Country" model which was CEO Romney's precursor to the modern mini-SUV! No kidding. Great car. It came with--guess what-- a built-in dog-carrier rack on the rear top of the little wagon,

No, not a dumb guy--later, Mitt's father had done a good enough job as Gov of a difficult state to be elected for three 2-year terms. Guess whose  first legal ballot was for George  to serve the second of those terms? Here's the headline:

Noted Future Blogperson Casts His Vote for Romney in 1964 Gubernatorial Election Gov Wins by Single Vote

[more]
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#233 Blog Hard or Die--Return of the Blogman Avenger

Mr Myxyzptlk will always be my favorite supervillain. Against Superman, he don't need no stinkin' Kryptonite, because he could simply disappear at will--POOF--back to his alternate existence in ...  the FIFTH DIMENSION! ... well beyond Superman's space-time universe. Yet he could "virtually" cause all sorts of mischief, and, worse, he couldn't be stopped!

Using his superior abilities. the Man of Steel would reliably prevail over brainy supervillain Lex Luthor and others of his 3D ilk, hauling them off to some good ol' 4D jail-time. But his powers, we might say, are merely super-- i.e.extraordinary human attributes of strength, speed, and flight. That's right: Superman's ability to fly was on occasion "explained" in the early Action Comics as a super-benign "side-effect" of  certain differences in gravity, atmosphere, blah, blah, between his home planet and Earth (no indication e.g. that Kryptonians had such powers). Normal, terrestrial humans of Olympic ability can "fly" for instance at a little over seven feet; Superperson Clark Kent, however,  simply raises the bar quite a bit. X-ray vision aside, he is after all a completely humanoid.ET or ALF,  subject like us all to forth-dimensional  natural law and its vicissitudes, plot-wise, including the ultimates: love and death. Not so for Mr. Myxyzptlk..

In the late 40s and early 50s when I bought Superman comics at the Corner Store--an urban forerunner of today's convenience store, whose merchandise included those pre-pubescent-male essentials of comic books, candy bars, and squirt-guns---thirty-two pages of fun cost a dime. And Mr. M at the time was equally modest in appearance.  I was never acquainted with his futuristic avatar pictured above--love the in-your-face cigar-puffing though.. Here's the Myxyzptlk I grew up with in what is called "officially" the Golden Age of comics:

                                   
Supernerd! A daunting uber-villain, indeed. But that was the genius-part of Mr. M's first incarnation, now sadly gone. His Disneyesque appearance belied his almost unlimited powers and sometimes malicious nature, making him all the more sinister ,,, and most interesting. Some nice comic irony for a kid back then. And this super-imp could daunt. Through pure mischief and mostly harmless mayhem, he would annoy, confuse, and confound our superhero with some sort of incomprehensible interference that defied physical  laws. ... before HE was "tricked" into returning to his 5D .world.

Not to get all mythic on you, but  Mr. Myxyzptlk epitomizes the Trickster archetype ... as in Norse Loki, Anglo-Saxon Unferth (in Beowulf, and btw in my doctoral dissertation), Prometheus, Br'er Rabbit, a bunch of others that you can think of, and my nostalgic favorite: Froggy the Gremlin, from the radio and then TV program, Smilin' Ed's Gang. When it was time for hijinks on that kiddie show, after a story or a clip from an "old" western, old Ed would summon up Froggy with this stentorian call: "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" And somehow POOF the squat little grotesquely bug-eyed gravely-voiced frog-puppet (no Kermit he) would appear (imagination-wise on radio) ...  in a self-made cloud of smoke as he puffed away on a giant CIGAR stitched to his puppet-lips! See first picture above. Coincidence? I think not.  Anyway, hilarity would ensue as Froggy did his magic mischief--I remember the late, late can't-hold-a-sneeze comic Billy Gilbert as a frequent guest bearing Froggy's brunt of practical jokes. Another plunk of his magic twanger, however (you are free to utilize this expression in other, creative ways, as us kids were wont to do) ... and POOF he was gone. As if to another dimension.***

Speaking of creativity, you've got to give credit the Action Comics guys for anticipating some of the current quantum-physical fooferah about extra dimensions (It's now up to eleven!) and multiverses of one kind or another. Of course they used this bit of science esoterica for good fun, but what fascinated me as a kid was that it severely challenged not just our hero's superpowers but his common-sense, intellect, and even identity, much like the crazy world of quantum theory does for us today. This antagonist was not only invincible, but in ways that the super-guy couldn't understand. (Okay ... he's non-common-sensically super, but his powers are enhanced anthropic attributes [again, aside from Xray vision], otherwise we would have a had time identifying with him as an archetypal hero ,,, as potentially one  of us. Remember, his flying ability is sort of explained as extra-good high-jumping.)

"I thought I was the only one who could fly?" says the Man of Steel questioning his very identity in his first encounter with Mr. Myxyzptlk--in his oriiginal supernerd guise--when he apparently jumps to his death out of a window.. (I had to "wiki" this to get an example--plaudits to those rich folk who saved their old comic books--because it's been a long time.) Using his 5D powers, the little guy wreaks other mischief on Metropolis and its citizens including getting fatally hit by a truck and then shockingly coming back to life ... giving the Mayor a donkey's voice ... scattering important documents all over town, Pranks. Great kid-stuff,  In fact, he lets slip to superman at one point that he is a court-jester by trade, back on his 5D home planet--explaining everything.

Of course Mr. Myxyxptlk has to be "vincible" in some way for Superman ultimately to prevail. Well, here it is (or was)  ,, he's stupid. Or at base terminally childish .. and why our super-smarter hero can always plunk the little guy's twanger and outwit him back to his fifth dimension world for--get this--a minimum of 90 days. Time to prepare the next issue, presumably..Here's the trick: Mr. M inadvertently reveals to Superman that if Mr.M hisownself pronounces or spells or writes his name backwards ...to wit: Kltpyyxym--then POOF he;s gone. And Superman in extremis is able to get him every time with some ludicrously simple stratagem. "How do you spell that name backwards again?"--I'm making that up, but the ploys were on that level, as I remember. And POOF once again  The play of wit and language and magic ... great fun. (I'll get more  to the point of my return in next post, but this is just such fun.)

***More on Chicago's radio & TV personality Sm+ilin' Ed McConnell and the the death of a childhood hero in Mosteller Musings, as soon as I get the little-sister blog cranked up again..
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#187 Obamacare and the House of Lords

President Obama's vision for an equitable and effective American health care system by reforming the old one--a vision shared by about three-quarters of the electorate--is probably not in the cards this year or next. Goodness gracious, you ask, Why the hell not? This is a #$@ &%$# DEMOCRACY, for crying out loud. Well, not exactly: our system of government has never been a "direct democracy," on the classical Greek model, otherwise we would have all raised our hands, counted them up, and passed health-care reform long ago.

As a matter of fact, we're just about--take a bow--absolutely unique, in the annals of world history. Give us arbitrary labels like constitutional democracy, republic, representative democracy, etc., and their definitions are bound to be self-reflexive, and applying only to us. The closest to the American political system, the U.K., is only a tiny bit constitutional (Magna Carta/common law-wise), with rare recourse to judicial review, and so overwhelmingly representative as to be tantamount to complete parliamentary sovereignty. No separate Executive powers at all. But of course there used to be. They were called a King. However, even after Parliament installed the figure-head royals William and Mary in 1688, giving the precincts of Westminster absolute rule over the land--Constitutional Monarchy hadn't really worked too well since it's inception with Charles II--a kind of "executive-branch" VETO POWER resided until not so long ago in the House of Lords.

When I briefly touristed and balconied the "Upper" of the two Houses of Parliament--the queue for Commons was way too long--it was a cue for a nice nap. Our Framers modeled the U.S. Senate, as a conservative-compromise measure, on that legislative body of hereditary Peers of the Realm, who are now, however, not only non-hereditary and 100% appointed, but entrusted with primarily insignificant matters of ceremony and protocol. The day I was there in 1973, the heated debate was over something about the proper order of the harboring of boats on the Thames. As for making laws of any national consequence (read: involving money), they have been rendered virtually powerless. Moreover, there's always an annual, populist hue and cry to render them--in Britishese--"redundant" (give 'em the sack) altogether. Right now on the Commons table is legislation to abolish the existing House of Lords, unless it become 100% elected, and its name be changed to the "Senate"! For real. But it wasn't always thus.

As recently as the Parliament Act of 1911, the Lords had the power to reject laws enacted by Commons out of hand, or to amend them at will, even if unacceptable to the "Lower House." No longer. Even though they deal mostly with insignifica, all Lords legislation must, through negotiation, receive the imprimatur of Commons--the power of that popularly elected body being understood as always in the ascendant. Not so in the bicameral Congress of the United States. Our "Upper House" is the House of Lords of old ... (more)
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#174 Veterans Day ... V--the Home Front

We're all veterans. All of us alive today are literally and etymologically "old ones" (Latin root vetus, Fr. cognate vieux) when it comes to war--when it comes to the common-sense-defying serial warfare that America has been waging for the last 60 years. The war-weariness of especially us Vietnam-era, "home-front vets" has been insufferable Then not much more than a decade later we get Grenada, Panama, Iraq; then Yugoslavia, Somalia; then Afghanistan, Iraq again; then Afghanistan again, and now Pakistan--dumped on us. Hey, you VFW's had it easy, fighting from the gut--unphilosophically!--over life and limb, while we were left here state-side having to worry and brood guiltily, obsess morally and politically over whether you guys were getting dead and disabled for a just cause. Give us a break.

But can you imagine such a pollyannish poster above being hung anywhere in America today without invoking peals of derisive laughter? I don't know ... maybe if Lady Victory were sowing poppy-seeds. Yeah, that's the ticket. Plant a back-yard garden so our surplus agriculture can go to feed the lately impoverished Afghan farmer and his drug cartel. In the dark days of WWII, though, Americans were serious about their patriotic support, and homeland sacrifices, for the troops overseas. (The muscular Rosie the Riveter poster, which I'm sure you've seen, captured the spirit best.) Since I was born during that war, I would have (unknowingly) shared with my parents some of the hardships, such as food and gas rationing, associated with the war effort on the home front. Some of that is still with us: like my parents and grandparents before them, I always refer to a little improvised horticultural patch as a Victory Garden.

No, I'm happy to say that the better angels lurking in the heart of the American people have NEVER shown that kind of unequivocal support for war, after what I consider the warning-knell of Korea--so aptly nick-named the Forgotten War, at least until M*A*S*H used it purely as an anti-Vietnam metaphor. Since then, the Electorate has been about evenly split about undertaking a foreign war, and then, very soon after--prompted I believe by some Founding-Father super-ego in us all--we're against it. All it seems to take, thankfully, is a bit of hard-nosed TV coverage--and now the internet--to expose military adventurism gone wrong. A few body-bags and bloody-stumps will do it. Okay, not any more. We have to back-exstrapolate from coffins--recently banned from coverage--and V.A. hospital interviews. The ONE THING that Bush and Obama seemed to have learned from Vietnam: don't let the Free Press get too close to the blood and guts, or the people at home will turn against you. Notwithstanding, I take heart in the fact that the majority of Americans now disapprove of our war in Afghanistan, and that many of those polled mention Vietnam.

My first three sons are too old to serve, and safe, but not my last. Remember, it was inconceivable in the early 60s, when JFK began planting a few U.S. "advisers" here-and-there in Southeast Asia, that 50,000+ Americans would die there. But it happened. He was sowing dragon's teeth. My real concern, though, returning to the starting point of this series, is How much longer must my children and grandchildren be subjected to the mental and moral anguish of America at war? That's no small thing. I'm un-scientifically convinced that us war-babies and baby-boomers would have much healthier psyches if we weren't witness to the ceaseless shock and awe of Vietnam. Wasteland carnage ... destroyed villages ... coffins and body bags ... disfigured and all-but-disgraced VETERANS, many of whom are still with us. Sound familiar? The indelible My Lai Massacre has already been replicated a couple of times in the Middle-East War.

Yet lately I've been hearing oxymoronic noises about "WINNING the war in Afghanistan." Will you have a part in Victory?
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#173 Veterans Day ... IV--Onwards and Backwards into Afghanistan

Yet another uncle of mine, by marriage--I had a bevy of good-looking aunts--was, like his father-in-law (yes) Corporal C.A. Edmunds, a veteran's veteran. Even more so. First of all, no mere Gumpish wound to the buttocks for Uncle Frank: during the Allies' last great squeeze that would stifle Nazi Germany and lead to V.E. Day, an exploding land-mine took off both of the infantryman's legs below the knee. What's more, after his state-side convalescence, the Veterans Administration its-very-self figured to put him on the payroll. Hey, a double-amputee war-vet with great spirit and an ingratiating personality (he had one) = perfect P.R. He worked with the V.A. till retirement, which he and my aunt are still enjoying in Florida, alive and well in their late-eighties. Talk about a survivor.

Uncle Frank got along well with or without his artificial limbs. Without was better. Not as much pain--pain that has never completely gone away. Whenever this particular war-hero uncle (among several on all sides of the family) took off his cumbersome prostheses and his no-heel-or-toe socks, we kids--especially this First Nephew--were allowed to cop a feel. Of his scarred and be-wrinkled stumps. After all, it was a cheap massage. And while we were always squirmifiably embarrassed, he seemed totally un-self-conscious about the whole thing. For me, at that young age, it was nothing less than exhilarating. In touchy-feeling the effects of a just-short-of-deadly land-mine, I was magically transported to the European Theater of the Second World War. Right down into the battleground of exploding meat and gristle. My WWI Grandfather Edmunds would TELL me bed-time stories of his battlefield escapades (literally: he was in a tactical retreat when he got the bullet to the bum)--my WWII Uncle Frank could SHOW. Just as well, because he never talked about it.

Getting around without prosthetic help, my uncle looked exactly like Specialist Andrew Soule', 25, pictured above, R&R-ing along the Salmon River in Idaho. An Afghan war-vet, he was blown up by a land-mine, too. (La plus ca change ... indeed.) It was by way of the Middle-East species of land-mine called an I.E.D. We've talked about them before (esp. DM #131). The device carried out its incendiary ambush beautifully, destroying a truck and effectively deleting at least one enemy soldier. To get Forrest Gump-ish once more, it may not have been the kind of "deactivation" that Specialist Soule' would have desired to mark the end of a military career--his cinematic counterpart, Vietnam-wise, was double-amputee "Lieutenant Dan," who would rather have been killed ... martyred heroically in the CAUSE. "Dulce et decorum est ..." again: Sweet and righteous it is ... to die for one's country. Gary Sinise's character in the movie descended into disillusionment and despair when he didn't. Only a Hollywood denoument would save him.

Problem is ... since WWII there has been no cause. No casus bellum to die for, or sacrifice body-parts over. My grandfather's wounded hind-quarters helped defeat the Kaiser; my uncle's lower-extremities helped pay for victory over the Nazis. Just wars. And these were veterans who were proud, and proudly welcomed home, after righteously defeating the aggressor nations on foreign soil. No such happy homecomings have been in store for American veterans ever since. But, please, nobody tell young Andrew (my second son's name) Soule' that he lost his legs for nothing. (more)
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#172 Veterans Day ... III--the Great Sequel

The Germans, though, were finally forced to throw in the towel at the end of WWII. No wimpy armistice here. Not a stand-off, cease-fire, truce. Rather, abject and unconditional surrender on the part of Nazi Germany; total victory for the allied countries. It was Victory in Europe Day, celebrated everywhere on 8 May 1945. In this famous snapshot, a Georgia sailor-boy, sent into battle by my Granddaddy Edmund's draft board, jubilates the occasion in Times Square. Well ... could of been. He's never been indisputably identified.

Again we got in late; again we won the war for them. And once again we reluctantly fought a perfectly righteous, DEFENSIVE WAR. We hadn't quite yet developed our penchant for belligerent interventionism that has characterized our foreign policy forever after. On the defense, and surviving veterans, were two of my blood-uncles from either side of the family. One of them was the son of that same WWI Cpl. C. A. Edmunds, named Pierce, who served in the second one as a rear-turret gunner. "Tail-Gunner" Pierce. Considering that assignment's casualty-rate, no need to point out how lucky he was to be alive to celebrate Veterans Day later in November of that victorious year. But wait ... it was still officially Armistice Day. Only WWI veterans need apply. And moreover it was still meant to be a sort of Wilsonesque PEACE celebration. But the war in the Pacific hadn't ended yet, really for years to come, as it turned out. Korea, Vietnam, and all that.

For even when it officially was, it wasn't. It seems to me that getting entangled in the "Pacific Rim" in the final stages of WWII--we had to, of course--was our undoing for another 60 years. The wars started to pile up-- interventionist, non-defensive wars carried out, for the most part, on the other side of the planet. And the VETERANS!--they now began to run into the millions. It must have occurred to some folks in Congress that the current "honor-thy-veteran" Armistice Day just wasn't cutting it for those un-dead warriors returning from battles fought apres WWI. So after the Korean War, a bill was passed and signed by President/General Eisenhower on 26 May 1954 extending recognition on Nov. 11th of every year to ALL armed-service veterans of ANY war, or no war at all. But here's the wrinkle: it was still to be called Armistice Day! But this, apparently on second thought, wouldn't quite wash. So on Nov. 8th of that year--in the nick of time--an amended bill was sent and signed, re-naming the federal holiday "Veterans Day." All pretense of any association with peace-making was thus permanently abandoned.

And rightly so. We were by then the policemen of the world, and would remain quick on the trigger for the rest of the century and beyond. Just this little bit of perspective should do it: TOTAL TIME American forces fought in BOTH World Wars = only HALF the time our troops have been fighting in Afghanistan ... so far. The Germans after the "Great War" had it right all along: Volkstrauertag. Mourn your heroic war-dead once a year (our Memorial Day) and be done with it. Veterans? Fugeddaboutit. We're all veterans. Moreover, veterans now could be veterans all over again after the next war ... and the next ... (more)
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#171 Veterans Day ... II--the Great War

My Granddaddy, Corporal C.A. Edmunds avoided the American cemetery at Flanders Fields, though several of his squadron are buried there. It was almost wiped out during one of the final Allied offenses against the Germans. It was in the Battle of Argonne Forest that he was Purple-Hearted in approximately the Forrest Gump area of his lower torso--"only a flesh wound." Not only did he survive the War To End All Wars, he was one of a handful of WWI vets alive when he died just a few months shy of 100. In fact, he became the veteran's veteran: as head of his county's draft-board for many years, during WWII and beyond, he was responsible for manufacturing them.

But who could have predicted that next war? Surely not my grandfather, ready to limp back to his Georgia farmstead. After all the obvious carnage that the new modern mode of warfare could produce--killing and maiming and warping a whole generation ... surely the Great Powers would have learned something from the "Great War." (To see how la plus ca change ... please refer to DM #127-129, the "Dulce et Decorum" series, where WWI France could double for today's Afghanistan.) They did, and didn't.

Germany, for one, never really accepted defeat. They didn't have to, technically. The war ended in an armistice = a cease-fire, a truce, a stand-off, if you will. Not a formal surrender--though the harsh terms imposed on the Germans, treaty-wise at Versailles, would make it appear so. Not surprisingly, what the allies celebrated subsequently and variously as our Armistice Day, Le Jour de l'Armistice in France and Belgium, and Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth, was NOT and never-ever would be observed as such in Germany. For them, Nov. 11th became a memorial all right, but not for peace. The annual Volkstrauertag (trauer = "mourning") is for their fallen warriors, heroically dead on the losing side. Could just as well be called Valkyrie Day. Point is ... they never gave up. And thus the sequel to The War To End All Wars was less than one generation away.

The American commanders seemed to have a sense of this in the last days--indeed the final moments--of WWI. I alluded to Monty Python in the first paragraph, and here I'm indebted to one of them, Michael Palin, for providing an interesting sidebar on the events of Nov. 11th,"The Last Day of World War One" (BBC-2008). He hosted (and co-wrote/produced) a documentary so-entitled that was re-run on PBS this Veterans Day. According to the TV-doc, the allied officers in the field, especially our own "Black Jack" Pershing and his minions, were out for German blood right up till that "eleventh hour of the eleventh ... etc." Hostilities were officially to end at 11:00 pm, but everybody on both sides KNEW that the railway-car armistice would have already been signed at 5:00 pm on that day (news spread fast betwixt and across the densely populated trenches). So ... would the allied officers give these long-suffering Tommies and Doughboys a break? Not on your Nellie Duff. During the 6-hour interval, in order to punish the aggressor Kaiser-kampfers to the last possible "detail," the allies launched further offenses along the line, gaining meaningless territory, and senselessly losing more lives. The last to die was a Canadian, at one minute to eleven.

Fortunately ... my grandfather, Corporal C. A. Edmunds, A.E.F., was presumably resting comfortably somewhere behind the lines, nursing his backside. (more)
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#170 Veterans Day--Raining on the Parade

Last week, while our non-vet Commander-in-Chief Obama continued to weigh his options vs. the Middle East War, Veterans Day (officially non-apostropheed, as if nobody wants ownership) was celebrated all over our lucratively-militarized state of North Carolina. It rained all over, too. Parades were canceled or marched indoors ... and I'm glad, rhetorically. In order to make a historical point. (There is a sufficiency of war-vets in my family to memorialize, thank you.)

Originally, November 11 was Armistice Day, federally ordained one year after the fact to commemorate the signing of the (lit.) "arms-stand" agreement ending WWI hostilities at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. It's still celebrated as such by our then-allied countries in that "war to end all wars." It didn't. And I'm unaware of any cease-fire pacts being signed lately. No, let Veterans Day stand rather for this country's perennial war-mongering, it's inexhaustible capacity find itself at-war with someone--somewhere and everywhere--serially and seemingly all of the time. In this soon-to-be former decade wherein my young grandchildren took their first steps, they have not known a moment of at-peace.

It wasn't always thus.

I think that in 1919 the world was genuinely optimistic--having seen the apocalyptic havoc that modern warfare can wreak--that we really weren't going to go through that again. After all, President Wilson and the American "dough-boys" had won the "Great War" in Europe in record time once we got into it, and the planet once again seemed "safe for democracy" ... except in the U.S. Senate. Wilson's idea of the League of Nations was well on its way to becoming reality across the old and newly-coined democracies of Europe (and remained so sans U.S. till after the next war), and everybody signed-off our President's famous "Fourteen Points" for achieving a lasting peace ... except the U.S. Senate. That's right, the world's greatest deliberative body misread the League of Nations treaty as Health-Care Reform, defeated it, and paved the way for WWII.

Okay, I suppose the German people must again share the blame for the latter. Really all of it. What's the old saw?--"Get one German together, he broods; get two together, they argue; get three together, they march." Or something like that. And so the first half of the last century was an era of uncalled-for defensive war, on our part. We resisted entry into both world-wars till the Germans sunk our ships in the first one, and the Japanese did it again in the second one. Ah, the good old days. Nobody really wanted to fight the second one, the caught-by-surprise devastation of the first still holding most nations in shock ... except for Germany. Appeasement was the order of the day, until it was too late. Perhaps this was the sinister and ultimately self-defeating lesson learned and carried over to second half of our last century and dribbling over into this one, that has made us--sometimes in collusion with the latter-day League of Nations: the U.N.--so damnably interventionist. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech sums up our long-distance blood-lust over the last 60 years. Ancient-Germanically though my blood may course, the Blogman has no wish to be a citizen of Berlin. I really do wish JFK had meant, "I'm a jelly-doughnut"--for so the urban legend goes that he misaligned his word with a (for-real) popular confection--but, in context, he didn't.

At 11:01 pm, Nov. !!th 1918, my maternal Granddaddy Cliff, by-then-veteran dough-boy, might have celebrated the Armistice with a jelly doughnut, but not with a Berliner. The young Georgian, Clifford Alonzo Edmunds, Corporal, American Expeditionary Forces, and his squad had already killed enough of them. That fellow on the right above looks a bit as he did, compared with our old photograph, taken at the same time and place. (more)
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#166 BHO and LBJ III

Our week runneth over. The President of late-nite talk, David Letterman, confesses to past sexual adventures shortly after his interview with fellow-sportsman President Clinton; President Obama recognizes the sixtieth anniversary of Red China, while ignoring the ninth anniversary of the Afghan War; college students demonstrate against that war right here in Raleigh; and several old gentlemen in Oslo, Norway try to manipulate world-affairs by giving a Swedish peace-prize to the leader of the most powerful, and lately the most bellicose, country on earth.

Will their devious plan work? I hope so, but there has been so much unexpected and disheartening "Bush-speak" coming out of the White House lately--"Troop-reduction in Afghanistan is extremely unlikely" ... "Draw-down is effectively off-the-table" etc. Whence all this uncharacteristic arrogance? ... I'd like to know.

I'll put my money on student protesters, and lately on the American people--60% are now anti-war--to turn the heads of the power-brokers in Washington. And let's hope, too, that the students make their demonstrations more than an anniversary event. At the height of the Vietnam War they were out there every day on Pennsylvania Avenue, and everywhere else across the country on a regular basis. It got deadly at Kent State U. on May 4, 1970, as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning news-photo above most famously shows. Student groups organized a huge publicity campaign calling for a national one-day boycott of classes for the very next week to commemorate the event. I was a Teaching Fellow at Vanderbilt at the time. About half the regular faculty took attendance on that day; half didn't. A small "radical" percentage made it clear that their classes were canceled. Pretty much a microcosm of the mood of the country at the time. No surprise: the student-teacher hybrids, like me, supported the boycott almost to a man and woman--we either took no attendance in our classes ... or took off altogether to the picket line.

The boiling point was reached in May 1970 because of CAMBODIA = Obama's PAKISTAN. The only real difference is that Nixon had kept his aerial incursion into a "neutral" country secret. Once he revealed the fact that the over-the-border bombing had been going on for months--in the face of all his pre- and post-election lies about "a plan to end the war"--the college campuses exploded. And so, tragically, did the Ohio National Guard, in the case above.

Look at these parallel configurations, too ominous to ignore:

THREE COUNTRIES--first Vietnam, then the invasion of Laos, then the carpet bombing of Cambodia. But the Ho Chi Min Trail with its tributaries and tunnels led everywhere, anywhere, and underwhere--analogous to the caves and crannies of Afghanistan. And the supply of people to man them grew daily, no matter how many bombs were dropped--in fact: the more bombs = the more people. Newsflash: we didn't win that war.

THREE COUNTRIES--forth and back in Iraq, to and fro in Afghanistan, and then the drone-bombing in Pakistan, which has intensified. Gen. William McCrystal, speaking for the ghost of Gen.William Westmoreland, asks for 40,000 more troops, on top of the 21,000 Obama has already deployed. Where is all this cannon-fodder destined to go? Into Pakistan, of course. That smacks of a slippery-slope fallacy, I know, but I'll let it stand. For there really is no Afghan/Pakistan "border" anyway, at least for those straddling it. Just as it was in Southeast Asia, tribal and ethnic boundaries in the Middle East are more important. In the case of Afghan/Pakistan, the fearsome Pashtuns call the vast and forbidding territory overlapping both nations their ancestral home, and they don't need no stinkin' badges.

The more combat troops, the more piloted air-strikes, the more drone-bombing--no matter--all the more virulent and widespread the insurgency will become. And all the more looking like Vietnam. Get out while you can Obama; don't give college students the opportunity make up nasty LBJ-like chants about a Nobel laureate. So uncool.
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#164 BHO and LBJ II

Yesterday, fortuitously for this post, marked the eighth anniversary of the Afghanistan War, and what did my wearied eyes behold on the local news but STUDENT PROTESTERS! Yes, there they were: earnest youngsters from the University of of North Carolina from nearby Chapel Hill on the State House grounds in Raleigh. They declaimed against our occupation of that despoiled country with picket signs and angry voices reminiscent--finally--of the Vietnam protests of long ago. Did that do my old heart good? Most would agree, in fact, that college students deserve the the credit for initially stirring up the conscience of America and getting the anti-Vietnam ball rolling. Of course they had an added incentive for protesting in those days: THE DRAFT. Selfish motives aside though, their ball would be passed to the rest of America, until virtually universal opposition to our involvement in Vietnam eventually brought it to a close. It couldn't last, after all, once the MOTHERS joined in.

In the late 60's when student-protests got under way across the nation's campuses, I was there. By that time my draft card had already by-passed the student deferment and was comfortably "3A" status--married with kid(s)--virtually impervious to induction. I was there, though, during those years on those very quads of "student unrest" as teacher and sympathetic observer and occasional TV commentator. Well, just once. Shortly after I arrived at my first full-time teaching job at a small southern college, and sporting a bit of "hippie" hair barely over my ears, I was put on the spot by a local newsman covering OUR little anti-war demonstration going on in the video background behind us: "As a teacher at this institution, what do you think of ... etc, etc?" I don't think my response ever got on the air, probably because it was far from "Bomb the Cong!" My students congratulated me, anyway. That was a good thing.

Yesterday, the Chapel Hill kids didn't directly attack Obama, giving him a pass at this point, no doubt thinking as most do that he inherited the bulk of the problem from the former administration. The picket signs were thus generic like "No More Troops!" and "Stop the War!" Sorry, but sad to say Obama's only other definitive accomplishment--besides The Stimulus (and Bush started that)--since taking office has been to expand The War. Health care, etc? Not yet. But lots of blood. (See my "Report Card" posts and earlier.) He's got his own record now to answer for.

No My Lai massacre yet, though, you say. Perhaps not the March '68 premeditated murder pictured above right, but not far from it. Aye, there's the rub--Obama's massacre's are "far from it." Conducted from far above in piloted air-strikes, or from far away on a remote-control, robot-missile computer-screen in New Mexico, the killing of innocent civilians has gone on unabated since Inauguration Day. Here's what was discovered last May:

... the bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men , their corpses blown to bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah ... Afghan survivors carted some two dozen corpses from their villages to the provincial capital in trucks this week to publicly denounce the carnage. [Chris Hedges, Truthdig 5/11, via Red Cross reports]

This "My Lai" happened BEFORE the President sent in his fresh 21,000 troops to do even more killing. And more accompanying air-strikes. And more robot-bombs for Pakistan.

Ell-Bee-Jay, Ell-Bee-Jay ... How many kids have you killed today?
Ell-Bee-Jay, Ell-Bee-Jay ... How many kids have you killed today?
(Repeat, repeat, repeat ..............)

The students drove LBJ crazy with that one ... and out of office. Hasn't come to that point yet for BHO, but it might. He's weighing his options as I write. A wrong decision might conceivably result in Bee-Aytch-Oh, Bee-Aytch-Oh ... Don't kill no kids no mo'! OR, Obama, Obama ... Please don't murder their mama! OR, maybe the students will come up with something better. (more)
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#155 Strange Fruit, Dead Marine, Body Counts II

... In fact, I feel like I haven't stopped writing about the films of Luis Bunuel (see last several MM's)--so very surreal is the reality of our presence in the Middle East slaughterhouse. Nightmare dream-sequences indeed, but nothing ultimately funny about them.

Certainly not the death of Cpl. Bernard. So don't get me wrong. Living in the state of North Carolina, which tops the nation in number of military installations, I see the killed-in-action faces of Fort Bragg soldiers and Camp Lejeune marines flashed across the TV screen every single day on the local news. I mourn the fallen warriors ... and even more poignantly because--let's face it--THEY DIED UTTERLY IN VAIN. Nonetheless, the obituaries get longer and longer as the war intensifies. Bernie's photo was no doubt in one of those TV segments on or about Aug. 14th, the date he was killed by that missile-grenade, in that most cruel of months.

No smiling TV faces of the enemies he killed, of course. Or of the civilians he and his company--not to mention covering air-strikes-- "collaterally damaged" in their "clearing" of Dahaneh. Look back again at Bernie locked and loaded in front of that darkened doorway. I'm sorry, but I need to drumbeat once again that aforementioned statistic: WE KILL TWICE AS MANY CIVILIANS AS THEY DO. But the main-stream media continues to be swindled by the wrong numbers: villages cleared, militants killed. Or, as in my earlier post, Baitullah Mehsud (and family) murdered long-distance by flying robot bomb. As if it made any difference in the world.

For we've been through all of this before. We couldn't "win the hearts and minds"--that was the phrase--of the Vietnamese with the very same military strategy, and we can't in Afghanistan. (And the Vietnamese were much better people.) Deja vue: Cpl. Bernard's village-clearing operation was called, euphemistically, "pacification" during the Vietnam disaster. The "body-count" mentality was in full-force then too, day after day, year upon year in that longest of America's wars. (Obama may be out to set the record, however.) Today, 842 Americans killed or wounded; 28,000 gazillion Viet Cong and North Vietnamese dead ... "and that's the way it is," Walter Cronkite would tell us, credulously, as if this "good news" could be construed as anything other than downright, blood-drenched ghoulishness. Just like today. Maybe Obama's just too young. To remember.

Here's a footnote that should jog anyone's memory, at least those who bought a ticket for Apocalypse Now or Forrest Gump. Let's go back to to the pomegranate grove. Just before the attack that killed Lance Corporal Joshua "Bernie" Bernard, the Associated Press reporter tells us that the patrol already had a tip that Taliban fighters were lying somewhere in ambush. One Marine had some sort of incendiary weapon trained on the very trees in question, some 70 yards away. The reporter quotes the field commander's orders: "If you see anything move over there ... light it up." Language sound familiar? This guy could easily have been a stand-in for Gump's "Lieutenant Dan," or Robert Duvall's helicopter-cowboy in the Coppola movie, who gives forth with that most memorable line--"Just love the the smell of napalm in the mornin'!" (more)
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#142 Health-Care Reform, the Post Office, and Me

The Blogman must take umbrage--nay, extreme umbrage--at the aspersions cast upon our U.S. Postal Service by GOPers, Blue Doggers, Tea-Baggers, and other rump-fed runnions* bent on denying Americans proper health care. Aroint thee, fat-rump baggage--health care is one thing, but "hands-off" MY U.S. mail bag. That would be my picket sign. For I was a "mail-bagger" once. During one Christmas season long, long ago.

And it was by far the hardest and honestest job I ever had. And the biggest hourly-rate of pay, up to that time. It was Christmas break from my 1962-63 sophomore year at Kalamazoo College. Having taken the civil-service exam in the fall, I became an auxiliary mail-carrier assigned to several routes in our Chicago suburb of Lombard for the three-week rush and volume, mailwise, in and around the big Dec. 25th holiday. And we were true mail-CARRIERS back then--big leather pouch and all--none of those cute little putt-putt Good Humor vans in those days (only for parcel-post). Delivering overflow cards and letters, us temps trudged our appointed rounds faithfully, despite the drifting snow (neither rain nor sleet ...), and got the mail through. It really was a White Christmas the whole time--not unusual for the "lake-effect" Chicago area. Satisfying work, and nobody "went postal"... as far as I know.

So I take these indirect slurs on our postal service personally. Gimme just 5 minutes with John Boehner, please. (*Shakespeare's runnion is a "boner"= male-member, by the way.) The Senate Minority Leader and his minions have slandered the good name of our USPS by way of false analogy and invidious comparison. Asks Boehner: "Would you want our health-care system run by the Post Office, or the DMV?"--thinking it a rhetorical question. As to the former ... hell yes, and I'll get to that in a minute. (Notice though , as mentioned in last post, these folk don't dare point to the V.A., where we have an actual government-run, indeed "socialized," health-care program at work, and working.) As for the DMV whipping-boy, they know this is dishonest ... a TV sit-com cliche'. DMV's are state-run, not federal. Some states are efficient, some not. Inevitably, though, it works--you will always walk out with a license plate, or get a renewal sticker in--you guessed it--THE MAIL.

It's self-defeating, I hope, for those rump-fed, graft-bloated politicians (DM #133) to compare the workings of our postal service to what might happen in a government-run health-care program--e.g. the Public Option. For most thinking people unthinkingly take for granted that their cards and letters are going to get where they send them. Some of us may experience inconvenient clogs at holiday-times, like Christmas, but otherwise, generations of Americans have counted on the non-profit institution as a model of inexpensive efficiency. Put a 37-cent U.S. stamp on your birthday card to Grandma, slip it in the mailbox, and it arrives at her house the very next day. Two days at the most, anywhere in the country. If she lives in Hong Kong, plan on 6-10 days for only 98 cents (I looked it up). Still ... a marvel. And I don't even have to mention the wonderful world of Netflix.

Our government gets a goodly number of good things right, and everything doesn't have make a profit to be good. A very few things are too important to be left to the vagaries of private enterprise. Health care is one of them.
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#139 Universal Health Care--A Morning Danish

I'll get back to more Reform nuts and bolts "directly" (my old Grandaddy's favorite Southern contranym for "whenever"), but in the interim let's take a trip to one of those rosy-cheeked countries with universal health care, mentioned in last post. It's relevant. First of all, though, it shouldn't come as a shock that these first-worlders all placed at the top of the "Happiest Nations" lists. AS USUAL, I might add--Forbes, Business Week, and others do these surveys every year. Canada always scores in the top ten, which is otherwise dominated by Northern and Scandinavian Europe. This year Denmark ranked #1 again in several polls. (FYI: the USA is forever down in the 20's.)

"Do you know why there are so many SMILES on these Danish faces that you are seeing?"--she asked, at one point on our itinerary. Our tour-guide's question came up on one leg of my early 70's journey "retracing" Beowulf's journey from Sweden (another happy "top-tenner") to Denmark after Grendel's first lethal attack on King Hrothgar's mead-hall, Heorot. Subject of my Ph.D. dissertation, the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf is fictional, but the geography is fact. And fun. Bear with me. I shipped out from the English port of Hull, in East Anglia (where I contend the poem was written), on an overnight Swedish casino-boat, and landed across the cold North Sea (even in spring) at Goteborg--note first element Gote="Geat." Beowulf was a Geat/Swede. I was in the hero's tribal "home town" in the area still known as VesterGOTland.

Unable to procure a pre-Viking-age long-boat for the voyage to Denmark's Roskilde Fjord and Heorot, as Beowulf would have done, I enjoyed instead a Swedish holiday in what seemed to be the cleanest city on the planet, and took an overnight boat-train to Copenhagen. Touristic stuff ensued. Then the morning bus trip to the ancient town of Roskilde--first element Ros="Hrothgar's"--on Zeeland's west coast. It is still a "holy city"--all the later Danish kings are buried in the cathedral there. And the poem's Heorot Hall is still there too ... sort of. Only now, not far up the headlands from the fjord, an impregnable medieval-masonry castle occupies forever the hill-top site of the perishable wood-built long-gone dark-age long-building that Beowulf would have visited. Still exhilarating, however.

But back to our Danish tour-guide. Not a "melancholy Dane," by any means, she reminded me of an ebullient Kathleen Freeman, recently-deceased character-actress of hundreds of films, perhaps most familiarly to Myriad Readers as the "mission-from-God" sister/nun, aka The Penguin, in the Blues Brothers movie. Like the actress, our tour-guide was truly a "character." And like Freeman too, she was a stocky/Nordic/muscular type--no doubt from gripping those aisle-side seat hand-holds as she faced and lectured her seated passengers, and standing steady against the sway and jostle of the moving bus. She may have been on some sort of "mission" herself. A diplomatic one perhaps. Anyway, the somewhat stilted-English ANSWER to her own question about smiling Danes was actually quite smart, had a peculiar twist, and was eminently unforgettable. It went something like this:

You see the smiles on all the Danish faces because of two things. We are happy because our wonderful Danish pigs have an extra rib--Did you know that?--which makes the pig longer in the body, and having more meat makes our hams taste much better.

And what else? We are also smiling all the time because of our Danish Welfare State. We are happy that from the time we are born we are taken care of in our health and well-being. We don't have to worry about those things, so we are always having a smile on our face.

So help me. I remember the exact words, "Welfare State," above all because I thought to myself at the time: Whoa--did she mean to put it quite that way? That's got some pretty negative connotations in English and in the USA. Okay, maybe in Danish the equivalent is a little more euphemistic. On the other hand, so what? She was so proud of it. In whatever language, Can she teach us maybe that government looking out for the "welfare" of its citizens in this most important area is not such a bad thing? One thing you can't argue with her about, though: Danish hams.
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#132 Dulce et ... etc. V--"Flound'ring ... in Fire and Lime"

Returning for a moment to the truly iconic (see #130) Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America"--he could be trusted to give us the straight dope on the Vietnam War. As "anchor" (a term coined for him) of the CBS Evening News during the whole of that tortured era, he along with correspondents like Dan Rather in the field SHOWED us the front-line horrors of that war, up close and deadly personal. Many have said that this TV "reality show" was THE deciding factor in turning the American people against the war. We watched it every night; I believe it. Though I give a strong second to the army of anti-war MOTHERS marching and picketing all over the place. But, then again, they would have shown up on "Cronkite." An unbeatable combination!

We just haven't had that kind of coverage of the bloody mess in the Middle East. Bush/Cheney knew better. And now Obama. Only lately have we been allowed to see the coffins returned. No body bags in the field , though. You have to go somewhat "underground" to get a kind of Wilfred Owen look at how our soldiers die, literally "floundering .. in fire and lime." Get on the internet and go to, for example, liveleak.com. Click on some of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) videos from Iraq and Afghanistan. In one, we see the fireball expelling a soldier from his Hummer about two stories into the air, silhouetted by flame, cartwheeling akimbo through his trajectory, and falling back into the burning wreck.

Another video clip supplies some gruesome audio commentary by two American soldiers, sentries maybe. They witness an IED conflagration, presumably with binoculars--we see the smoking "Bradley" truck at some distance through their fixed surveillance camera. Breathless and helpless they angrily describe the action:

They're fuckin' dead, man ... Two guys burning to death on the road ... That motherfucker is burnin' up in the road ... Two guys burnin' up in the middle of the street ... These guys are still alive man ... He's crawlin' away from the fire ... Still on fire, man ... movin' ...

We must assume the worst, since the the only witnesses were too far away to assist, and perhaps couldn't leave their posts anyway. Burned to death, unmourned and alone, by the side of the road. THIS is what happens to our mothers' sons and freedom-fighters in AfganIraqiStan.

Good news: they're replaceable! Defense Sec. Gates announced yesterday that he is increasing the size of the US Army by 22,000 troops, "temporarily." He told reporters that the increase is "intended to cope with strains from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ... The Army faces a period where its ability to deploy combat brigades at acceptable fill rates [?] is at risk." Maybe he'll even get volunteers ... after all,

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

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#126 Obama's War III--McNamara's Ghost

He's dead, and he's had to writhe in his guilt for half of his 93 years--just watch the Errol Morris documentary, Fog of War (2003--where he looks positively ghost-worthy). Punishment enough? Hell no. In our grad-school bull-sessions of the late Sixties and early Seventies we wanted to pointedly HANG Robert McNamara and his people for war-crimes (a la Nuremberg) committed against the people of Southeast Asia, America , and hell yes ... Humanity.

Okay ... McNamara top of the list ... Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, the Bundy brothers [all household names in those days]. Hunt 'em down; string 'em up. LBJ probably out of reach ... death's door anyway ... JFK already dead ... had something to prove after Bay of Pigs ... hey, Karma, man ... he sort of paid for getting us into Vietnam--killed same month after the Diem brothers' assassinations [bull-session straight talk]. But listen, if Nixon doesn't get our asses out as promised--time's running out--we'll haul his ass in, along with Melvin Laird and all those other guys.

They all got away scot-free. McNamara was awarded a distinguished career as head of the World Bank. Nixon went ahead and killed another 30.000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians as he expanded the war ... only to be stopped by Watergate. President Obama is dangerously close to becoming another Nixon, if not an LBJ. As he expands the conflict from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan (thereby further destabilizing all the rest of the volatile Middle East), his policies invoke the spectral images of Vietnam.

At the risk oversimplifying--but listen, the Blogman went through those long frustrating years until that Hip-Hip-over-the-radio-top-down-speeding-along-the-highway-open-beer-can-HooRay! day, 30 April 1975, when it was announced that the last Marines escaped by helicopter off the US Embassy building in Saigon--some strong and straight-up words need to be spoken:

• They dare not call it "Iraqization," but the Obama brand of troop "withdrawal"--turning over the war to Iraqi forces when "ready" (beginning with the bogus Day of Sovereignty a couple of weeks ago)--rehashes Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy that went on for about as long as the our entire Iraq War. After all, it only took fifteen years of American presence in Vietnam for ARVN to be ready enough to be easily overrun by Northern armies.

• The new escalation in Afghanistan replicates LBJ/Nixon's "search-and-destroy" and "pacification" (Orwell-speak for blowing up villages). Find the Taliban/al Quaeda strongholds; attack with ground troops; fail; call in air support; bomb everybody. Except the "enemy," who will slip away to fight again from desert caves (or the tunnel-bunkers of Vietnam).

• But now we've got a new weapon against innocent civilians: the DRONE (robot-plane) BOMBER. Can't have American ground-troops in Pakistan, officially/technically, so let's just attack by remote-control. I wonder if there's much chance of "collateral damage" in that.

The ghost of McNamara stalks. MSNBC headline just today: U.S. Commander: Afghan Forces Insufficient--Obama strategy may need more funds, U.S. troops, say military officials. "General Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that ... if President Obama's [time-warp alert] WINNING THE WAR is to succeed ... [it] would require spending billions more ... and the likely deployment of of thousands more U.S. troops ..." [emphasis and ellipses mine]

And so it goes, Billy Pilgrim ...
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#113 Obama and Me--Grant Park Revisited

Yes ... we're up and running, but please see #112 for an introduction to this post.

#105---What a difference in the post-election speeches of the two candidates!?--well ... venue-wise, at least. Because, in fact, they were very much alike. Switch a few words related to winning or losing, obviously, and each could have read the other one's speech without too much damage to essential content and tone. Both candidates were gracious and deferential ...

#113--- ... McCain so much so indeed that his kind words about fellow-senator Obama incited groans, cat-calls, and even boos when he called him his "good friend." Despicable behavior, but by this time to be expected from the kind of hate-filled crowds that he and Palin and fellow-traveling speechifiers were drawing in the last months of the campaign.

I want to talk mainly, though, about the wildly contrasting VENUES that seem to define the candidates and their campaigns even unto the last moments. It's all in the symbols, the PR perceptions maybe. But the Grant Park Chicago location for Obama's victory speech has personal and historical resonance for me. Just look at the physiognomy of the two places: Las Vegas Hilton convention hall versus Grant Park concert bowl. Not only half-a-continent, but worlds apart. Look at them: you've got the enclosed, private and exclusive versus the open, public, and free. (In fact, the Hilton space would literally have been that "smoke-filled room" of bad political omen in earlier, less health-minded times.) More: dry, desert playground of the conspicuously rich, "paying" customers and supporters versus well ... them too, but also whoeverthehellelse wanted to wander in from the green, breezy lakefront . Here again it's that constricted smallness of McCain-dom (tiny-minded, mean-spirited people and places) as opposed to the expansive and inclusive world of Obamaland. Like Alice's claustrophobic underground compared to the wide, wonderful world of Oz that I alluded all about in #102-3.

And Grant Park is a beautiful place, day or night. Obama's audience that evening would have sparkly Lake Michigan beach-front on one side and the lights of Michigan Avenue's "magnificent mile" on the other. Been there many, many times in my youth, especially to the renowned Field Museum of Natural History and the Shedd Aquarium nearby. Not much over 10 minutes and only10 cents by CTA bus from the South Shore. It's appropriately for Obama a "people's park"--free art and science and history museums, free open-air summer concerts, where me-and-a-girl-and-a-blanket could enjoy a very cheap date (for real) during my late high-school years. (I had a friend and fellow-percussion-student at American Conservatory who was good enough to gig on tympani in that off-season version of the famed Chicago Symphony.) And lo, years later there would be Obama performing in the very same band shell! One more: during the last two summers of suburban high-school I took the train all the way to the "Loop" to work in the mail-room at Quaker Oats (Merchandise Mart). Guess what: I was third-baseman on the their softball team after work on the fields of nearby ... Grant Park. Good times.

But no doubt the Obama team was parlaying Grant Park's historical/political angle too, because a little more than 40 years earlier in the summer of '68 it was the site of a true "people's park" rebellion--the anti-Vietnam "youth" protests at the Democratic Convention that ended up as a bloody police riot instigated and carried out (as the official investigation proved) by Mayor Daley's Finest. Chicago Seven and all that. You've heard of it. I was long gone but had a good friend and colleague later on who was right in the thick of it and had the psychological scars to prove it. LBJ's henchman in that ill-conceived and endless war (or so it seemed at even that early date) was up-for-nomination Hubert "Dump the Hump" Humphrey, who decided waaaay too late, shortly before his defeat by Nixon in November, that it might be a good idea to just PULL THE TROOPS OUT. Of course this was always the intention of the then-late Bobby Kennedy (even though his brother had paved the way for LBJ's excesses), who doubtless would have won the nomination in what would then have been a pacific Chicago ... and Grant Park, as flower-children peacefully frolicked and skinny-dipped in Buckingham Fountain. "What if" ... indeed.

I couldn't vote for the Hump. Nor Tricky Dick ... who notoriously and mendaciously, as it turned out, "had a secret plan to end the war." Nixon won, and we had SIX MORE YEARS of it. Well, Obama got my anti-war vote this time around. So he had HIS extravaganza in Grant Park, where he promised a new era of Change You Can Believe In that would have pleased the hippie-youth of forty years ago ... and where, as I recall, he said something about ending the war in the Middle East. But wait. Are we out of it yet? I think I'm getting queasy. Yes, the Economy tanked, and health care reform is urgent--people are dying for lack of it. But people are getting killed in Iraq for no goddam good reason at all.

Do we have some broken promises here? A breach of trust? Answers to these and other questions coming soon--I PROMISE--so stay tuned.
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#95 The Bailout--pt. 3: "What, Me Worry?"

The Mad Magazine motto worked itself out pretty nicely over the last couple of days, with record gains on the NYSE from the jumping-out-of-windows mark to the coming-in-off-the-ledge levels of moderate loss. It simply WAS to be that way, and hence forward for the next couple of years--no, no ... not soon enough, ye gods forfend, to infect the upcoming election day with any kind of McCain/Palin/Republican resurgency and turn the tide for them--as the Economy stabilizes. As it will, if only because echoing in the back of everybody's mind is the refrain, "the Democrats are coming ... the Democrats are coming." They'll fix IT, just like F.D.R. and Bill Clinton did. It's a 99% placebo effect, I'm convinced. Because nobody really knows for sure how to get a grip on this Protean/Procrustean monster.

Except Alfred E. Newman, and his school (see #92). Print lots of money; lend it to almost anybody. Treas. Sec. Paulson's now even shipping it overseas. And, as I predicted, it's working. (But please don't BUY anything, Henry. Way too far from free-market principles for me. Usury, OK. Outright purchase, no-no. Let the banks use the loan-money to buy back bad assets from themselves, if need be. They need the practice.) Of course this exaggerates 20th C. liberal economics, which was the the other side of my liberal education in the field. Sherill Cleland (see last post) in his Econ 101 class at K-College was the purveyor (indeed actor, in a minute) of the Pump-up-the-economy-when-necessary-with-federal-funds Theory. He had the aid of still-one-of-my-favorite books, Heilbruner's The Worldly Philosophers, still-in-classroom-use in later editions, I'm sure, across the known world. The text, as I recall, took us through the preliminaries and up to classical Adam Smith and Parson Malthus (Darwin's and Aldous Huxley's favorite), then ultimately to Marx and J.M. Keynes and the economic activists. In fact, there seemed to be a kind of Darwinian agenda to the book, as if really all that went on before was leading inevitably to Keynesian Economics (I don't know about later editions, where Friedman and his conservative ilk might come into play). And I was sold, just as I been on the tee-total free-marketers in H.S. Civics.

These were the Kennedy-Johnson years, after all, where the Keynsian J.K. Galbraith held sway at almost cabinet level, and where Dr. Cleland his-very-self was called upon by the that administration to help pump some good-will American money into several Latin American countries on the edge of what we're facing now. (He took a leave of absence as a kind of financial ambassador for several years shortly after I luckily had my class with him, and didn't return until after I graduated.) But that's basically the theory: modulate and moderate and even preempt the ups and downs of the economy with a "liberal" flow of funds from the government treasury.

What the heck: I swing back and forth in a bi-fiduciary kind of way, man. Let the ghosts of Adam Smith and Fred Hayek hover over a REGULATED (some of what's been going on smacks of simple fraud) Free Market most of the time. But when it's in extremis, as it is now, boogie down with a dose of Marx and Galbraith, and let the Monopoly money flow. Alfred E. Newman would approve.
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#94 The Bailout Again--Two Views for the Price of One

I'm a Libertarian ... (slap!) ... No, a Liberal ... (slap!) ... Libertarian ... (slap!) ... Liberal ... (slap!) ... OK, I'm her mother AND her sister, Mr. Gittes. Please stop.

At least as regards Political Economy, I've always been a bit schizoid, even polarized. It all started I think with two charismatic academics from opposite sides of the Dismal-Science fence when I was right around college-entrance age. Our teacher for 12th-grade Honors Civics was Mr. Tip-Of-My-Tongue, a rabid anti-communist in bow-tie, pin-stripes, and wing-tips--a very dapper, graying-at-the-temples fellow--with an M.A. Unusual for a high-school teacher at the time, but I'm sure it was in History and not an M.B.A., because otherwise he would have been out earning a living in the real world, and not wasting his ideological fervor on us kids. I guess.

A couple of books, classics, as I was later to learn, stand out for me in that class: Sociologist David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (with its "tradition-, inner-, and other-directed" business) and Economist Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom. The latter, along with co-conspirator Mr. TOMT, convinced me that any government involvement WHATSOEVER in The Economy would lead us to the salt mines of Siberia. Tax a piece of candy, and pretty soon the State would be telling you What Flavor, and soon be interfering in other areas of your political life, until ultimately getting right in between your bedsheets, and generally violating your moral privacy all-to-hell. Now that I've for sure mis-characterized him sufficiently--it was a rather slippery-slopery argument in retrospect (thus prima facie fallacious), but also classically Adam Smithian premise-wise, whose "invisible hand" laissez-faire-ism had a clean, simplistic appeal to an economically blank-slate senior in high school. Thus you could say that I was a sociologically tradition-directed and economically inner-directed upon graduation. Pretty much.

But that lasted for only a couple of years, until I took Econ 101 at Kalamazoo College from Dr. Sherill Cleland, a rabid Keynesian in bow-tie, pin-stripes, and wing-tips--a very dapper fellow, but too young for graying temples at that time. What is it about bow-ties and Economists?--but they couldn't have been more wildly apart on Economic Theory.

But more of this later. Must check on the NYSE, which at this very moment is setting sales records (upwards), and may, in so doing, prove my point while increasing my portfolio ... as if I had one anymore.
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#93 Sunday Sundries

In no particular order...

• Can the Republican attack ads get more scurrilous and out-of-context deceptive? My favorite: "Obama favors sex-ed for Kindergartners [or some such]--sex before they can even read!" Wow ... Obama must be a pedophile. The earlier the better as far as I'm concerned, but the Kinder-class in question is a lot more innocuous--but absolutely life-and-death important--than these sleaze-spinners would have you believe. It involves "how-to" instruction on avoiding molestation by older folk. Sheer pornography, what?
  

• Or, when not dragging the campaign through the mud, will they strain credulity beyond the breaking point? Case in point: Obama and the "liberal Democrats in Congress," according to a McCain-approved TV ad I just witnessed, are responsible for for the rampant DEREGULATION of our financial institutions, thus leading to our our current crisis (cue shot of a Joe Six-Pack out of work). Can you believe it?! The bedrock of Neocon-Republican mis-thinking since they have been in charge is now whipping-boyed on the back of Barack.

• Or, can McCain/Palin partisan-defenders finally break through the ceiling of ultimate inanity? Not sure, but here's one that's breathtaking: OUTRAGE over the Palin Newsweek cover this week. Was it a scathing Tina-Fey-like satire or ironic New-Yorker-like caricature that stoked their ire? Nope. It's a life-photo of the Governor in extreme and not un-flattering (how could it be otherwise, really) CLOSE-UP. What's the problem? Well, for the rabid Republican women (including the anchor) interviewed in a Fox News program (uh, oh) the magazine's cover reflected extreme radical-liberal left-wing media bias because the photo WAS NOT RETOUCHED or otherwise prettified to their liking. Kid you not. And I guess you could see a blemish or two (haven't seen the hard copy). Regardless ... "For a major publication not to retouch a major celebrity [or some such] is an outrage--why, look at this one of Obama [as she holds up his not-very-flattering cover-shot]--obviously retouched!" Again, wow.

• But at the same time, the moral-political Zeitgeist moves forward in a nicely Libertarian way, over in the state of Connecticut. The supreme court there has affirmed the right/rite of marriage for same-sex couples. Now only 49 left behind.

• Global Warming continues right off my back porch. Love it ... Thunor-the-Weather-God help me. Record-high mid-summer temps in Raleigh next week. Great for my chronic S.A.D. Hey, I've got a condition--let the grandkids (all smart) handle the problem. They'll just have to grow up as quickly as possible. All they need to do is stop the Greenland ice-sheet from plopping into the North Atlantic (within 50 years probably), thereby preventing a gazillion cubic miles of fresh-water from disrupting the Thermohaline Circulation and thus blocking the Gulf Stream and thereby plunging us into an irreversible Ice Age culminating in another Snowball Earth. They can do it.

Finally...

BANANAS

TammyRose could eat no ripe,

J.D. could eat no green;

So betwixt the two of them,

They peeled the platter clean.

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