Freedom is something we take for granted. We think our Bill of Rights and our Constitution and our laws will protect us. But most countries have those sorts of things, and in a lot of places they are nothing but paper. In the real world, paper doesn't beat rock or scissors. We think our armies will protect us, but who controls those armies? Why do we assume that the richest, most powerful people are not, right now, doing what people like that have typically done? They are trying to increase their wealth and their power, at your expense. To do that, they need to weaken the democratically elected government. They do this by convincing you that government is your enemy, and you need to elect candidates (financed by the rich and powerful) who will weaken government's powers to regulate and tax the rich and powerful. By the time they are through with us, the only right we will have left is the right to work for the wage they dictate, if and when they need us to do something.

Iraqis Blogging

If the Iraq situation interests you--and it should--you ought to read the blogs written by actual Iraqis. My favorite is Iraq the Model http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

This gentleman posts nearly every day, and he's pro-democracy, trying desperately to stay optimistic about the political process in his country but having a tough time doing it.

Just as interesting are the comments he draws, for what they tell us about public opinion in America. Most of the commentators appear to be Americans, and many of them pop in almost daily to tell the blogger to stay cheery, not to worry, democracy is hard, everything is under control, the good guys always win and so forth. (I don't know whether to laugh or puke.)

Last night I dreamed about my grandmothers.

Not about them as people--I just dreamed about their houses: Little bungalows in blue-collar Milwaukee. Grandma Helen had a little place where my mom and her three siblings grew up; they lived downstairs and rented out the upstairs after Grandpa died in the 1930s.

Visiting there as a kid, I remember a dimly-lit place full of religious stuff, catholic stuff. The crucifix on the wall with a dried palmfrond fastened behind it, the pictures of jesus and mary with their hearts showing on the outside of their robes, not like real anatomical hearts but like valentines, except with crowns of thorns and swords stuck in them.

Grandma Helen taught all her grandkids canasta and we spent hours playing it. It takes forever to finish a game, but we didn't mind.

Grandma Katarina had a little place her family moved into some time in the 1940s after a highway project took out the house--the whole neighborhood--where my dad spent his childhood, playing with his pals in the railroad yards, scavenging bits of coal for their furnace, stealing stuff from boxcars.

He earned spending money cleaning out the johns in the neighborhood taverns.

Grandma Katarina was about four feet tall and she didn't speak much english. She was always smiling, even though most of her energies went to taking care of grandpa in his wheel chair. He'd drink and yell and curse, and she would do her best to keep him contented. She would make little comments in German with a mischievous grin, or with a mock-serious, wide-eyed expression that would crack up my dad every time we visited. Very little of this was deemed suitable for translation for the kids.

But Katarina wasn't in the dream, just her house, or my memories of her house mixed up with Helen's house. I remember the white enamel gas stove that always had coffee percolating. (What a great smell.) Gas stoves with those blue flames fascinated me as a kid because we never had anything but electric. You could always smell the gas in grandma's kitchen, too, which probably wasn't a good thing but nobody seemed to be too worried about it.

The house had an amazing basement with sausages she'd made hanging from the roof, and a big dartboard that was my dad's when he was a teenager. It was a baseball game dartboard where you would aim for targets that said single, double, triple, homerun and so forth, but if you missed you could strike out or hit into a double play. This thing filled up a whole wall. There was a big box of beat-up wooden darts with lead-weighted heads and long spikes that could really hurt somebody. The fins were made of turkey feathers and my cousin and I had to rummage through the box to find some that had enough fins to fly straight. It was hard to hit a home run because that part of the target was just one big ragged crater from so many darts hitting it, and if your dart went there it would just hit the cinderblock wall behind the board and bounce off to the floor.

My cousin and I would play dart baseball for hours while the elders sat upstairs talking in German and eating cabbage strudel and drinking coffee.

Katarina's house had a picture of the last supper and a pretty little stained glass window on one side.

All this stuff was in my dream, a kind of combination house with things from both grandmas. I woke up wondering what had made me think of it.

Then I remembered, that afternoon, rummaging through some stuff in the basement and finding a picture of the two of them together, Helen and Katarina, taken during the year they lived together in grandma katarina's house--after Katarina's husband had finally died--watching Milwaukee Braves games on the television. They got along fine even though Helen was pretty deaf by that point and Katarina spoke mostly German, which Helen did not. But they had a lot in common, two tough old women who had been through a hell of a lot and shared a set of grandkids. They also knew how to bake. I would pay a lot of money right now to be able to eat the stuff they could make--flaky butterhorns dusted with powdered sugar, with nut filling, and the poppyseed strudel, and the prune danish ...

All that ended too soon when Grandma katarina got killed in a car accident and my mom moved grandma helen in with us. Helen didn't want to live alone, but she wasn't thrilled about leaving Milwaukee and becoming a fulltime grandma, not having her own place, having to live by my mother's routines and so forth. She did get to play a lot more canasta, but I don't think it made up for the rest.

Just seeing that old picture, a blurry snapshot my dad had enlarged, not really looking at it, even, having forgotten it was even down there ... That touched off a lot of dreams once I was asleep and my defenses were down.

I keep the picture in the basement, hidden on a shelf behind some books, because there are too many things I don't really want to remember.

pounding rain

My computer sits under a skylight, which was meant to let in sun when we have it, but most of the year it reminds you how hard it's raining. It's been pounding down now all night and all morning and all afternoon.
Now and then a gust of wind hits the house with a muffled thump and the lights flicker.
We got the girls a big map of the U.S. and put it on a wall. I can't help staring at it. It makes me want to load the tent and sleeping bags in the car and drive off across the country, staying on all the old two-lane highways and visiting all the places that never get on postcards.I'm maybe eight or ten years from retirement and I'm saving all my cash for that, but what if I keel over dead before then?
Maybe I should retire right now, and figure out some crazy moneymaking scheme to keep us all alive. I could sell the house, for example, and we could just live in the car. My wife would not agree, and I don't want to give her up. It probably would be bad for the kids, too.But this is the way my thoughts are trending. I must figure out some way to unchain myself.

Dogs

I just got a call from my son, who's 14. He lives with his mom during the week. He asked if he could be excused from coming over to my house this weekend, as we had planned. The old dog he's known all his life is dying.

I said OK and I'm sorry. I really am, even though I'm not a dog person. I'm a dog hater, even. But I'm glad that my son and his 16-year-old sister can have dogs at their mom's house, so they can enjoy that part of life without me having to deal with dogs. Their mom wasn't really a dog person either, but the guy she moved in with 10 years ago was...

Now I'm reliving my own childhood, and my own dog, Frisky. We picked him up at a pound in Philadelphia when I was 4. One of my earliest memories is driving back home with him and me in the back seat of the Studebaker, and the dog vomiting uncontrollably the whole way. Ol' Frisky never did do well in the car for the rest of his long life. Half a block and he'd be tossing his Alpo.

Well, a four-year-old can't really care for a dog. That task fell to Dad, who had always wanted a dog anyhow but could never afford one during his depression-era childhood. He and his family had a pretty meager diet as it was, and they didn't need another mouth to feed.

The years passed, and by the time I reached an age where I could have cared for Frisky, the yellow half-Shepherd mutt was 100 percent bonded to my dad. Frisky would obey dad's every word and respond even to his facial expressions. Dad could walk Frisky without a leash.

For me, Frisky was a chore. I was supposed to walk him when I got home from school, when I would have rather been doing something else. Frisky didn't have much use for me either, but he wanted to be walked so he could relieve himself, of course. I couldn't let him off his leash to play ball or anything like that because as soon as I did he would take off like a greyhound and sometimes not come back for days. So we would walk, and he would pee on some trees and take a dump in a vacant lot, and we'd go home. All the time I'd be hoping we wouldn't have to deal with any of the many stray dogs who roamed around in those days and sometimes came up to us wanting to fight. I just dreaded that, although all the dogs who came up to take Frisky on would wind up regretting it.

I still remember the time a St. Bernard the size of a small pony came running up snarling, and Frisky yanked his leash right out of my hands and mixed it up with that giant furball, and I thought for sure my dog was gonna get killed. Next thing I know, the Bernard is on his back yelping, and Frisky has his jaws clamped around his snout. I had to pull Frisky off for fear he'd chew that poor animal's eyes out. Never saw that dog again.

At some point dad would get home, and each time Frisky would jump and wag like it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened.

If dad wasn't around, Frisky would come looking for me, wanting to be petted and scratched, although he never wanted to play much, and if he saw an open door he'd dart for it and be gone, and my mom would send me out to try to "catch" him. He would usually dance around and mock me for awhile, then turn on his afterburner and bolt for the horizon. Might as well try to run down a cheetah.

Dad would always take him for another walk at night, before he went to bed--they'd just head out the door without a leash, and Frisky would run around, and dad would whistle and he'd come right back and go home with him, no nonsense at all.

One night a kid came zooming down the street in his new car and slammed into ol' Frisky. He got out, apologized and kept on going.

Up to that point, Frisky had been a mighty spry old teenager of a dog. He might have held on for quite a few more years. He got up from the street and walked around a little, very slowly. We took him to the vet, who poked and prodded and said he would probably be ok. Then Frisky threw up and there was a lot of blood in it. The vet didn't look too pleased about that. Just told us to take him home and keep him quiet and hope for the best.

That night Frisky wouldn't go to sleep--he just kept pacing slowly back and forth in the living room. I stayed up with him, tried to keep him quiet, but he wouldn't rest. Finally I conked out and fell into a deep sleep. My dad came into my room not long after dawn and started shaking me. I asked him why he was bothering me so early. He just stalked out of my room and I collapsed and slept a few more hours.

When I woke, Mom told me Frisky had died and dad had taken his body to the vet for disposal.

I started sobbing. I was mad at myself for not paying attention to my dad early that morning. I was mad at my dad for getting mad at me and walking out and not taking the trouble to tell me why he was there.

I guess that's the way it always was with me and dad.

Robert Kaplan has a report in the current Atlantic on the latest counterinsurgency tactics being employed by U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan and the Philippines. (Did you even know we HAD Special Forces battling Muslim insurgents in the Philippines??)

They are doing the same kind of thing that David Brooks talked about in his column (see my earlier post...)

That is, they are doing roads and water systems and so forth in the insurgency zones, winning over the natives and getting them to help the good guys (us) and turn in the bad guys--the Islamic guerrillas. And it seems to work, Kaplan reports--at least in the short term.

Part of the strategy is letting local governments take credit for the stuff that Americans do, so that these local governments allied with the United States can take over the affected areas after we leave.

It's a wonderful idea--except that, in the Philippines at least, the local government doesn't seem to be able to keep the momentum going after the Americans depart and take their guns and money with them. In Afghanistan, local government remains little more than a gleam in the eyes of American strategic planners.

The result: Things quickly go back to the same old same old, and the poor, disaffected people in these places are likely to drift back to rebellion fairly quickly.

Am I the only one who thinks that the Islamic guerrilla movements of the 21st Century, in places like the Philippines, seem to be taking up where the Marxist-Maoists of the 20th Century left off--offering the Third World's disaffected citizens a neat, disciplined, all-encompassing system that promises a better life for people tired of waiting for the better life that free enterprise has promised them? And Islam has a big advantage over Marxism: it promises a better life in the next world as well as in this one.

As we survey the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, one thing becomes painfully obvious. Our governments (federal, state, local) are approaching Third-World levels of incompetence.

On second thought, maybe incompetence is the wrong word. Perhaps they are competent in the wrong areas. Our governments are staffed with people who are competent at enforcing the bureaucratic regulations that provide jobs for them and people like them. They are competent at shifting responsibility for tough decisions to other people, other departments. They are competent at finding or creating well-paid positions to pay off the political hacks who helped them get their even-better-paid positions.

In the absence of crisis, few people notice how inadequate these systems have become. In a crisis, when we demand effective, decisive performance from all these people, we suddenly see the shortcomings.

This is what happens in Third World countries governed by people who are competent at enriching themselves through public service. People in those countries generally expect next to nothing from their governments. Expectations rise only during crisis--and then there is an uproar about how inept the government is.

In the Third World, the uproar dies down and everything goes back to the very bad state that passes for normal.

Will the same thing happen here? Or do we have enough public spirit, enough civic pride, to demand change? This is not a liberal vs. conservative, red vs. blue issue.

Homeland Security was recently placed in charge of response to epidemic--a threat that public health officials believe is certain to come, when Asian bird flu viruses undergo their inevitable mutations and begin to pass from human to human in airborne form.

If these people display the kind of sluggishness they demonstrated in New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die.

Maybe this is the Bush plan for saving Social Security.