Clouded Visions

2006-03-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

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.)

2006-02-05T16:48:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-02-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-25T18:14:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-09-12T17:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-09-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

David Brooks, who has been an enthusiastic advocate of the mission to democratize Iraq, is striking a somewhat different tone in this column. He suggests that our leaders have no coherent strategy for bringing about the outcome they desire in Iraq. Brooks then offers such a strategy--a strategy posed by a military expert, a strategy that is already getting a lot of attention from the people who have the power to make these things happen. Perhaps this strategy is the solution to our Iraq problem, Brooks suggests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/opinion/28brooks.html
The bad news is that this strategy requires a lot more troops and potentially a lot more time, which is a polite way of saying, a lot more American blood to be shed. Brooks doesn't say so, but that might mean a draft.

He also doesn't say that this strategy sounds a lot like what we tried to do in Vietnam, after we figured out that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were not just going to run away or surrender once we showed up, and it was going to be very difficult to kill them all. We concentrated on creating "strategic hamlets" where the lucky residents would get all the benefits of the American way of life--schools, sanitation, clean water, and so forth. This would win over their hearts and minds, making them pro-American for life. Then we would move on to the next hamlet, until gradually everyone would be on our side.

There are still people today who argue that we could have prevailed in Vietnam if we had given this sort strategy a few more years, a few thousand more human lives, a few billion more dollars. That's the deadly seduction of this kind of strategy: Be brave, be patient, be patriotic, and we will achieve a glorious victory for freedom. We cannot abandon these people to tyranny. We cannot give up, because that will mean that the thousands who died will have died in vain. If you question this war and the wisdom of those who launched it, you are encouraging the evil forces we are fighting against, and demoralizing the valiant young men and women who are putting their lives on the line so that you can sit at home and use your right to free speech so irresponsibly....

This is the kind of reasoning that shuts down the policy debate, at least for awhile. This is the kind of reasoning that enabled us to build that big black marble wall in Washington, D.C., one flag-draped coffin at a time.

Let's admit it: We don't know if this line of reasoning is valid. Maybe we COULD have turned Vietnam into a model democracy if we had been steadfast enough. Maybe we can do the same in Iraq if we are willing to pay the cost.
But here's a scary thought: What if there is no strategy available to us that will bring about the outcome we desire? What if Iraq (and the world in general) is more devilishly complicated than we figured on? What if the Iraqis (or some significant fraction of them) stubbornly resist responding to the incentives we offer them? What if they have some goals, some visions (incomprehensible to us) that they place above the things we value most: peace, prosperity, democracy? What if they are willing to die for their own incomprehensible belief system?

In other words, what if we just can't get to where we want to be from where we are?

2005-08-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

The stage is already being set for the "loss" of Iraq. The media and the liberals are going to be blamed. Yup, the same people who lost China, North Korea, and Vietnam. You were expecting the right wing to admit that short-sighted, self-serving right-wing policy blunders were the cause of it all?

A lot of people in Blogland seem to think the liberal mainstream media are making up all this stuff about how bad things are in Iraq, about what a mess we made of an admittedly already dysfunctional country.

This is the same media that brought us George W. in his flight suit, flashing that irresistable smirk of his, strutting on the deck of an aircraft carrier. This is the same media that brought us that picture of Saddam's statue biting the dust...(I remember watching that one at the time and thinking, Wow, isn't this great. But why aren't the crowds bigger? Why am I watching a few hundred rowdy young men instead of a delirious throng of thousands of grateful liberated people? Why is the reporter describing huge crowds that I can't see?)

At that time, the dovish faction of American liberalism was provoked to an almost violent fury about the mainstream corporate media, acting as a passive mouthpiece for George W. and his imperialistic policies...

Liberals didn't like the news they were getting then, and the conservatives don't much like the news they are getting now. A lot of people (liberal and conservative) don't seem to make the distinction between fictional and non-fictional programming. If they don't like the story line they are getting on CNN, they want the producers to change it: kill off the unpopular characters, make the plot a little more uplifting.

The bad news for all of us is that "Iraq" is a bit of reality TV that can't be canceled, no matter how unpopular it gets. What happens there is going to have consequences for us, whether we keep troops there for 10 years or bring all the boys and girls home in time for the next Congressional elections.

It would be easy to blame Bush. But I think maybe his inept military adventure just triggered the Middle East meltdown that was going to happen sooner or later anyway. Of course, if you're my age, "much later" is always a lot better than "sooner" for something like this.

2005-08-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

http://neurotic-iraqi-wife.blogspot.com/

A young woman--a newlywed--trying to cope with life in Iraq. If you think all the negativity about Iraq is coming from the media, read this.

2005-08-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.adayiniraq.com/
This is an outstanding account of a soldier's life in Iraq. You simply can't write any better than this.

2005-08-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

IRAQ THE MODEL
is an interesting blog by an Iraqi who (like many or most of his countrymen) hopes that the political project now underway leads his country out of the nightmare its citizens must now endure. He also gets a lot of interesting responses from people who appear to be Americans cheering on the sidelines and jeering at Iraqi figures whom they perceive as anti-American.

2005-08-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

Boots In Baghdad is a blog by a young soldier in Iraq. He does a good job of defending our mission there. I wish him well and I hope he is right. I added a comment to his most recent post (and so did a lot of other people...) and if I wasn't clueless as a blogger I would provide a link to that too.

2005-08-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

This Iraq war
is being supported by pure political inertia at this point.

The New York Times had an excellent article about the Ohio region that has lost so many young Marines in the past few weeks. Some of the bereaved spouses, brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents are questioning why their loved ones had to die. But most are still supporting the war and the man who started it.

Their logic: We can't bear to think that he might have died in vain. And it's cruel of anyone to suggest that.

Other war supporters, not as close to the carnage, use the same argument. A little red, white and blue magnetic ribbon on the car simply says, "Support Our Troops," meaning, Support the War so they won't get demoralized. Help our troops maintain their faith that their courage and their lives and their limbs are not at risk for an illusion.

That pretty much ends the argument, doesn't it? Oppose the war, oppose the commander in chief, and you are being cruel to the troops, and to the grieving relatives of those already dead.

That's the logic that killed 50,000 of our troops in Vietnam.

2005-07-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

I've seen some news reports lately saying that the long, difficult tours of duty in Iraq may make it hard for our armed services to find new recruits.

I am not worried about this. Life in the armed services has always been hard and dangerous, and has there ever been any shortage of young men willing to suit up to fight for god and country?

The pharoah, the emperor of Rome, attila the hun, genghis khan, they all had plenty of volunteers. So did the crusaders and the islamic armies who swept across the Mediterranean ...

There are always young men who are ready for adventure, who can't think of anything better to do with themselves. In modern America we're not likely to run out of those guys anytime soon, not in a time when industrial jobs with decent pay are disappearing and lots of people without the means to get through college are looking at a life of burger flipping or yard work. And in the modern army we can sign up the women as well as the men---all those Lynndie Englands out there looking for a chance to shed those small town blahs and have some excitement...

If only we could find some better outlet for their youthful energy and their undeniable courage.

2005-07-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

bullshit

A Princeton professor named Harry Frankfurt recently published a small book or a long essay entitled "On Bullshit."

In a New York Times interview, Frankfurt expressed some bewilderment about why there's so much bullshit around and why few people seem to mind.

I think we accept bullshit because it seems to have become so necessary to survival in the kind of world that has evolved around us.

If I challenge your bullshit, there is a serious risk that you will challenge mine. We need our bull because unrealistic demands have been placed upon us, and most of us need to fake it much of the time.

Farmers, herdsmen and hunter-gatherers have no such difficulties. Nor do truckers, loggers, forklift operators, welders, plumbers... Maybe that's why we often think of people in blue-collar occupations as being blunt, plain-spoken types. They don't need bullshit to survive, and they may not even know how to sling it.

We also are afraid to challenge the bullshit of the powerful, such as the President, because we are afraid of wounding the credibility of the leader who cares for us.

Middle-class Americans find it comforting to ignore the inadequacies of the man who is our leader in these scary times. They prefer to think he is as competent as he appears to be, even though they know that the way he appears to us is pure stagecraft. He presents himself as the plain-spoken, bullshit-free Texan, even though his roots are in New England, and he went to Yale as well as to an exclusive New England prep school--like his father and grandfather before him.

Maintaining an empire may require an imperial leader, an emperor, whose fitness cannot be questioned. We are tending towards that kind of system at the present time. Our empire may well collapse before we get all the way to actual worship of the president, in the manner of ancient Rome or Egypt.

The president slings the bullshit for the same reason that a newspaper reporter, college professor or corporate executive does: He is trying to cope with everyone's unrealistic expectations for him. Nobody faces a greater gap between his human capabilities and other peoples' expectations than the President of the United States.

When I was in journalism school more than 30 years ago, I recall hearing my roommate (a stressed-out, heavy-drinking Vietnam vet with a morose Irish sensibility) expounding on how our age would be remembered..."We had the Age of Faith, then the Age of Reason, then the Industrial Age," he said. "Now we're in the Age of Bullshit."

2005-07-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

We need an online community where people who have been to Iraq (or people who live in Iraq) could share their perspective on what is really happening there. No doubt those perspectives would differ, but at least we would get some sense of a reality unfiltered by the marketing agendas of news organizations. Those organizations have their uses--they are not as demonic or craven as some would have us believe--but at present I feel as though my Iraq news is going through so many filters that it's devoid of meaningful content by the time it arrives.

On one hand, you have people saying that things are going a lot better in Iraq than the liberal media would have you believe. A lot of returning servicemen are saying this.

On the other hand, people are saying that America's Iraq adventure has turned into a hopeless disaster, making terrorism worse, weakening the military, and sentencing the Iraqis themselves to a hellish existence amid ethnic strife, terrorism, gang violence, kidnapping--and all the while the lights aren't working and no water is coming out of the tap. The bad news is that a lot of the people saying this are Iraqis--you can read this version of events on their blogs. The most disturbing element of what the Iraqis are saying -- and this is an element I have not seen in any U.S. media -- is that instead of Western-style freedom, the fall of Saddam has brought them Iran-style medieval religious repression, with gangs of fundamentalist Shiite thugs beating up people who don't want to live in the 12th Century. They are NOT saying they want Saddam back, and they are not necessarily saying they want the Americans out. They are saying that the Americans have made a mess of their country and they are hoping--with increasing desperation--that we can somehow make things right again.

I see lots of blogs from soldiers, and a fair number from Iraqis--wish there were more, but it's probably hard to focus on your blog when you don't have electric power--but it would be neat if there was some site where these people could have a civil dialog, along with the private contractors, reporters, diplomats, aid agency folk and others who have recently been or still are in Iraq. Does such a site exist?

2005-07-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

Everyone ought to visit and read the blogs of Iraqis. You will come away with a very different idea of what is going on over there. It seems to me that our President and his experts have created a disaster of colossal proportions.