Church Eternal, Continued

11. April 2005 · Comments Off on Church Eternal, Continued · Categories: General, History

“Then long folk to go on pilgrimages, And palmers for to seek strange strands,
To far-off hallows, couth in sundry lands; And specially from every shires end
Of England to Canterbury they wend.” Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales

And make pilgrimage they did, in payment of vows, to seek healing, to acquire merit, to give thanks— and offerings. The great shrines of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury grew rich on offerings and benefices from the devout, as did any number of lesser shrines. Even more virtue attached to having made the much more difficult journey to St. Peter’s in Rome, the seat of Christ’s Vicar on earth, or the dangerous journey to far distant shrines in Jerusalem. To possess a relic, even one of dubious provenance, was a money-making proposition on the part of the ecclesiastical establishment which held proprietorship, especially if it appeared to have worked a miracle or two.

Many church treasuries in Spain and Italy still contain elaborate jeweled reliquaries, great things of silver and gold wrought to display little grimy brownish bits of bone and teeth, or a shred of crumbling fabric. I never felt myself so sternly a Protestant myself, as when I looked at these objects— those, and the rich vestments in silk, embroidered with jewels and gold, the Episcopal rings with stones the size of walnuts, crosiers and crucifixes in ivory and gold, and more gems. The upwelling urge to begin gibbering incoherently about simony, idolatry and indulgences usually didn’t subside until I went to look at the stained glass or the stone carvings, or something. These present treasuries, although reduced by schism and war, give an idea of how very, very rich the Catholic Church was by the fifteenth century, of how profitable it was to control the means of grace.

Of course, there had been other reformers — some of them later anointed with sainthood — who were troubled by how the church seemed to have been corrupted by power and riches, fallen away from it’s original mission, become distanced from the humble and devout. Early critics and reformers were co-opted, for a time seeing some success in establishing a more rigorous order, or having a particular reform adopted, but as the clamor of criticism became louder and more insistent, the Church tended to squelch it with a charge of heresy, a quick conviction and a public burning-at-stake. Martin Luther, priest and monk, a Doctor of Theology who had been intended by his father to be a lawyer, could not be co-opted, and would not be silenced. Besides his own formidable intellect, he also had the benefit of powerful and highly-placed friends, and the newly popular printing press, which did to theological disputes what the internet is doing to the mainstream news media. The flash of Luther’s insight, that man is justified by faith, rather than works, that grace and forgiveness were freely given – and could not be earned by pilgrimage, by generous donation, by turning over a few pennies or ducats for specific services rendered, had the effect of a bombshell on the carefully structured finances and schedule of benefits offered by the official Church.

It was, I thought, the most amusing of ironies that the Cranach portraits of Luther and his wife, Catarina von Bora hung in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the city of the di Medici, those merchant-princes of the Italian Renaissance. While Luther was studying and preaching in Germany, a Medici was advancing steadily up the ranks, eventually to be enthroned as Pope Leo X. Born Giovanni de Medici, he proved to be as cultured and as worldly a patron of the arts as any of his ancestors, but without a shred of their financial acumen. Having emptied the Papal treasury, and with an extravagant lifestyle to uphold, and the Basilica of St. Peters’ to finish in style, the Pope authorized the sale of indulgences— automatic forgiveness of sins upon payment to the Churches’ representative. Luther, as outraged as a devout and thoughtful person could be in the face of a flagrant abuse and perversion of doctrine, wrote up a list of debating points and posted them as a challenge for discussion on a public notice-board, the door of the church at Wittenburg.

With a couple of taps of a hammer on nail, the established Catholic Church shattered like a bit of crockery with a flaw in it; it had to much invested in the system to entertain the notion of the sort of reforms that Luther and others wanted to see; and by the time that reforms were forced upon by necessity, the tipping point had been reached. Scholars and kings and cardinals had taken positions, and there was no going back – although occasionally someone like Mary of England would try. The monastery cloisters were empty, the bell towers silent, the brothers and sisters gone away, treasuries defaulted to the crown.

And one last little story, a Noel Cowardish, 1930ies screwball comedy sort of story, of the clever woman who met the romantically clueless academician, and made up her mind that he was the one for her. She had been a nun, Caterina von Bora, of a good family but an impoverished one. She and some of the other nuns wished to leave their convent; their escape was facilitated by a merchant who smuggled them out in some empty barrels. Doctor Luther and his friends pledged to help them: some of them returned to their families, and the others all found good marriages or a household position, all but Caterina von Bora. They respectfully asked her what she wanted — did she wish to be married, was there a particular man she would like to be married to? They would do everything they could to arrange that, if it were the case. And she said, yes, there was; Dr. Luther himself would suit her very nicely, thank you. He was nearly twice her age, had lived with the expectation of being executed as a heretic, in all the untidiness and disorganization that a single man tends to accept. It would amuse me to think he was flabbergasted at first, while all their happily married friends were gently and fondly amused – but it worked in the best sort of way. They had six children and were as happy as they could be and a great deal happier than most. It may not have happened quite like that… but that’s the way I like to tell it.

Church Eternal

09. April 2005 · Comments Off on Church Eternal · Categories: General, History

The most striking thing about the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome is that it is immensely, overwhelmingly huge, but so humanly proportioned that the size of it doesn’t hit you right away. It sneaks up on you, as the grand vista unfolds, marble and gold, bronze and Michelangelo’s glorious dome soaring overhead… and then you realize that the chubby marble cherubs holding the shell-shaped holy water font are actually six feet tall, that what looks like ordinary wainscoting at the bottom of the wall opposite is itself six feet wide, and those are not ants crawling slowly along the polished marble floor, they are other people.

All the artistic genius of the Renaissance was poured out lavishly to build and adorn this, the center of Christendom, the palace, church and administrative center of Christ’s vicar on earth, the latest in a line unbroken (although it did distinctly thin, in some places) from Apostolic times. All this, built over a necropolis in what had been outside the ancient walls, across the Tiber River from the city on seven fabled hills, in which tradition held that the bones of St. Peter—apostle and martyr, fisherman, missionary and Bishop of Rome— were laid. Over a hundred years in the building, it absorbed the energies of architects and the papal treasury, even the bronze roofing from the ancient Pantheon were taken to make the baldacchino, the elaborate canopy over the high altar. “Not the barbarians, but Bernini” was the wry comment by ordinary Romans on this particular bit of sack and pillage. But, oh, it is a splendid place, built for the greater glory of God on the Vatican Hill, and it is worth seeing many times, even if one is not Catholic, just for the treasure store of painting and sculpture. When St. Peters’ was a-building, the Church was a spiritual authority to a degree hardly comprehensible to us now, and— even more incomprehensible— a mighty secular power as well. Said the wise man, “Fear not he who has the power of life and death, but he that has the power to cast thee into hell”.

For a thousand years, the church was the intercessor between sinful human beings, and the divine, the keeper of the gates of heaven and the doors to hell, intercessor, arbiter, final authority, before whom even kings and emperors quailed and obeyed. Lesser men and saints trod very carefully, in the majestic presence of he who held all-power in this world and the keys of the next. The Basilica of St. Peter was meant to be a fit frame and show-place, but ironically it’s completion sparked the fracture of that one holy, catholic and apostolic church.

In one of the small rooms on the upper floor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence are gathered many of the small treasures and rarities, portraits and curiosities mostly. Visitors are admitted one by one by a guard, and the line circles the room slowly. The couple ahead of my daughter and I on the Sunday afternoon that we “did” the Uffizi were older Italians with a look of country people about them, but country people dressed in their best, and uncomfortable in it. The man’s black suit was old, and pulled across his shoulders and gut, his white shirt collar and knotted tie looked like they were about to strangle him and he had the faint grimy lines on his knuckles and under his fingernails of someone who works with machines or automobile engines. But he and his wife were extracting the most out of their afternoon of culture, reading very carefully all the little cards underneath the pictures.

At a pair of Cranach portraits of a husband and wife, though, he leaned down to read the little cards, then straightened up and practically spat with contempt when he hissed
“Protestante!, and moved on to the next item in the treasury. My daughter and I looked at the two portraits. I didn’t need to read the little card, these were faces I was already familiar with. The husband, a bulky man with the thick shoulders and broad features of a working man; shrewd, tough, confident, clad in plain, unornamented clothes. The wife, whose round features sparkled with intelligence, and the assurance of a woman who is entirely pleased with the life she has made for herself, having had the wit to have picked out her man and made her own match and their mutual married happiness… which had been very much to his incredulous surprise.

Dying in bed of old age, was not how Martin Luther had expected his tumultuous life to end. He himself, brilliant, driven and outraged by the corruption of the Church he served with devotion, fully expected to burnt at stake as a heretic, from the moment he defied Emperor and the Pope’s representative at the Diet of Worms with the ringing words: “Unless I am convicted by [testimonies of the] Scripture and plain reason…I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe…Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

(To be continued)

Hanoi Jane, Again…

06. April 2005 · Comments Off on Hanoi Jane, Again… · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not

Ordinarily, NPR is the news venue most useful for minimizing exposure to fading celebs with mounds of baggage, flogging their new doorstop around the usual book-flogging “tour d’lame” circuit. But Jane Fonda was interviewed this morning, on Morning Edition… and I was so sunk in ennui, indifference and disinterest that I didn’t even bother turning the radio up to listen… or down so I didn’t have to. My well of “just don’t care” is practically bottomless as far as she is concerned, as a singular person. She does interest me in a mild way, as being typical of a certain sort of activist dilettante, flitting from one trendy cause du jour to the next. There never seems to be any deep and abiding commitment to one particular cause amongst this sort of person, just a vague attachment to the currently most fashionable of them, as if to cover up a lack in themselves by making an ostentatious show of “caring”.

I suppose I could go back and review her notorious propaganda trip to North Vietnam, remind myself of why practically all the older guys— Vietnam-era veterans all— in my early service life despised her, and boycotted those few movies that she did appear in, in the late 1970ies. I could recall again how very, very few of those celebrity/activists who protested the war vociferously in 1968 were still around in 1975 to help pick up the pieces and resettle the refugee population from South Vietnam that their own good intentions helped create. (Buffy St. Marie is the only one who comes to mind, incidentally.) By then, Ms Fonda had already moved on to being a diet and exercise guru and from there to being a corporate media wife, and fashionable feminist. And I— along with most the rest of the world, have moved on. A good chunk of that world, if they think of her at all, think of her as someone on their mom’s excercise tapes.

The woman has been everything by turns over the last thirty-five years, but none of it for too long, or too deeply. It’s hard to feel anything much about someone so shallow, who seems to drift according to the orbit of whatever husband she was with at the time, or the whim of fashion. Bothering even to work up a dislike feels like beating up on marshmallow fluff; a waste of energy, because it’s mostly air over a creamy and attractive surface.

Bet you the book will be on the remainders table, marked down %50 in six months.

Memo: TV Lives, Real Life

04. April 2005 · Comments Off on Memo: TV Lives, Real Life · Categories: European Disunion, General, Media Matters Not

To: The International Set
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Just Because You Watch American TV Programs…

1. Please stop assuming therefore that you just KNOW all about how Americans really live, think, and conduct themselves. A bare handful of television programs currently gracing international airways may, on occasion, reflect the realities of the lives of all those people who live outside the 90210 area code. Most of them do not. Let me break it to you gently, sweet-cakes… it is all made-up. Fiction. Dramatized. Jazzed up, prettied up and sexed up, to attract the eyeballs and the advertising dollar. It is not real, it is faked. It is filmed on a set, for Pete’s sake. And those people are actors.

2. I will allow that international television viewers may glean some kind of superficial knowledge of how Americans talk, and move and dress, of what the scenery looks like, and what the prevailing sense of humor runs toward. But this is a very limited view, and those limits ought to be more acknowledged. Just because I watch “Blackadder” and “Are You Being Served?” does not mean that I know all about English life… or qualify me to pontificate on how those who live there ought to be conducting themselves, politically and socially.

3. Lamentably, this sense of limitations is not reciprocated. I and many of my fellow citizens— especially those of us resident in “Jesus-Land” are fed to the teeth with being portrayed as drooling, gun-toting, uncouth and uncultured racists, addicted to fast food, exhibitionistic religious cults, and violence. Ordinarily, I could not care less what you really think of us, in your heart of hearts, but spreading this kind of manure all over media outlets like this one does a disservice to your own citizens. They are very disappointed when they come around here expecting to see oil-wells, gunfights in the streets, and holy-rolling snake handling at the 10:45 morning communion service at St. Peter the Stodgy Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod). In fact, they are usually rather crushed when they encounter mostly polite and soft-spoken people, libraries and museums stuffed with all that high culture from Europe and elsewhere, and discover that fine food and drink is hugely appreciated, and that there are in fact, two classical music stations in this one city alone.

4. In addition to those generalities, I should like to point out some of the ways in which I vary, rather substantially from the stereotypical American that the European media loves to sneer at. For one thing, I have had a passport, from the age of 16 on (although it has lapsed now). I have never liked coca cola, and I last ate food from McDonalds sometime in 1990. I own my own house, and it is a small one which does not in the least look like Martha Stewarts, even though I have made or refinished much of the interior stuff myself. I do not own a gun, nor do I intend to. Several of my neighbors do, though. I do not have a problem with that. I have also never witnessed, or been the victim of a violent crime. I draw no association between these last two facts, merely point out the coincidence. I have never been to a NASCAR event, or a pro football game, and have no interest in either, but I gracefully accept that there are individuals to whom NASCAR and football are shrines. I think television evangelists are right there with Jerry Springer, and don’t watch any of them (Or much television at all, come to think on it.) True faith gets its butt off the couch and goes to services in a real church. I refuse to be exhibitionist about matters spiritual, sexual, political or financial, on the grounds that all that is my own damn business. My living room is filled with books and Japanese prints, not pictures of Jesus in the Garden or Thomas Kinkade prints of sentimental cottages at twilight. My car is 30 years old, my stereo system is 25, and my television 20; they will be replaced when they break down irreparably, and not a decade before. I have never seen the appeal of Manolo Blahnik shoes, or indeed any shoe with more than 1-inch heels, and have better things to spend my money on; leaving aside the fact that shoes should protect your feet, and you should be able wear them and escape a hungry mountain lion or a collapsing building. I vote for the person, not the party… and I have, in fact, lived and traveled in several foreign countries. I could stand to loose 20 pounds, though.

5. The first person who says , “Oh, but you’re the exception!” — be warned, I will personally hunt you down and slap you silly. We are all exceptions, in one way or the other. To take your cues on this from exported television shows is to do yourselves a disservice.

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

Just Announced, on AP

02. April 2005 · Comments Off on Just Announced, on AP · Categories: General, History

The Vatican says Pope John Paul has died. Word came in an e-mail from the Vatican. It said “The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. in his private apartment.”

(I’m at my Saturday job at the radio station. We have just announced it, and scheduled special programming. I am most unexpectedly moved by this, especially since I was in the news game 25 years ago, and my voice was breaking up in a most unprofessional manner….)

Just Got the Word…

01. April 2005 · Comments Off on Just Got the Word… · Categories: General, Working In A Salt Mine...

The company I work for is closing down. The owner is gonna pull the plug, and I am going to be job hunting… again!
I will be the last one out the door, however, as we have a number of clients whose work will take a bit of time to wrap up. I will have a severance package and a salary up until August, and will be responsible for much of the wrapping up of the various loose ends.

If any concern in the San Antonio area is looking for an experienced office manager/admin assistant/production librarian with exceptional writing, data entry, and customer relations skilz… drop me a line!
And yes, I have already signed on with a couple of on-line services… hmmmm, it looks like the CIA is looking for former military personnel. I did have a secret clearance, but I suppose it has lapsed by now!

Rites of Spring

31. March 2005 · Comments Off on Rites of Spring · Categories: Domestic, General

Late March, April and May are, with all votes counted, the hands-down winner for loveliest time of year in South Texas and the Hill Country: the temperatures are mild and temperate and the rains are frequent enough to turn everything green… or all of that which is not in multi-colored and glorious bloom. The redbud trees are covered with blossoms that are actually not really red, but more of a very dark fuchsia-pink, and there is an ornamental pear or almond tree in the front yard of a house at the top of the street which has been veiled in pure white blooms for the last two weeks. The weeping willows were the first to put on new, delicate green leaves, followed by the ubiquitous Arizona “trash” trees.

In my garden, the new leaves on the mulberry tree have grown to the size of a small child’s hand in the last three or four days, while the wisteria has put forth mightily during the same time. I neglected pruning the wisteria this fall, so it there are not as many bunches of pale violet blooms this year as last, but the Spanish jasmine vine on the back porch is covered with little star-white clusters. In the morning and the late afternoon the scent of the jasmine hangs thick and sweet, mingled with that of the almond verbena’s almost invisible bracts. The bees bustle around waxy clusters of blossom on the dwarf Meyer lemon and lime trees, while Bubba-from-down-the-road lounges on the sun-warmed stones of the path after having eaten his fill. The most recent cat, who for my purposes is nick-named Parfait, is more interested in the flutter of birds around the feeders hanging from a branch of the mulberry tree, and crouches alertly in the untrimmed winter-ryegrass. Parfait, alas, has no hope of ever catching a bird, since he cannot keep his tail from twitching…. And they are well out of his reach anyway.

Wisteria

(Wisteria in bloom, in my garden)

There is a mad rustle of wings, and much excited twittering in the vicinity of three hanging feeders, around sunrise and sunset, but the birdsong is accompanied these days by the constant tap of hammers driving nails into wood, coming from the roof of a house just down the street. I think of the sudden hailstorm three weeks ago as the “Spring Creek Roofing & General Contracting Full Employment Act of 2005”, for every house in the development needs a new roof; if not now, within six months or a year when the damaged asphalt tiles being to leak water into the house. Lawn signs for seven or eight local companies are sprouting in lawns, three or four in a row sometimes.

Three or four houses already have their new roofs complete, the same number are in progress. It is a hazard in the morning sometimes, dodging a small dump truck, or a pickup truck towing a trailer full of new roofing felt and shingles, or carrying away the ruined waste of the old. The nearest roof-in-progress is five doors away from mine, next to the home of the roofing contractor himself; his own roof is as damaged as anyone else’s, but he figures have his crew do his neighbors’ first. I am waiting for his estimate on mine, and will probably accept it. He has been a fairly good neighbor— although Judy, who is a soft touch for animals— thinks he leaves his dog alone too long during the day. Of the houses along my block, two-thirds of them are the homes of single women, or single parents, but Texas is one of the places where chivalry is not yet on life-support. For a woman to develop sudden car trouble, or house trouble, or even be wrestling with an outsized burden in a public place is to suddenly have any number of rescuers, striding forth with a confident manly swagger, and a John Wayne-ish growl of “Hey, little lady, let me take care of that for you!” The roofing-contractor neighbor is just that sort— he’ll do us right, I am sure. And in the meantime, the garden is in bloom.

New Definition of “Split Second”

30. March 2005 · Comments Off on New Definition of “Split Second” · Categories: Ain't That America?, General

Remember the old joke about the definition of the phrase “split second” being the time between the light turning green and the guy in back of you beeping his horn?
Well, the new definition is me, reading this in a e-mail

“I am the chairman of the contract award committee of the petroluem and
natural resources ministry here in Nigeria…”

And hitting the “delete” key.

(Actually, just seeing the word “Nigeria” triggers the delete reflex for most people.)

Grad Night

29. March 2005 · Comments Off on Grad Night · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General

My high school had a football team, and a senior prom, a (suspected) gay drama teacher, and the usual dramatic mix of brains, stoners, soshes, gangsters and outcasts amongst the students, but everyone gave each other lots of elbow room. The boys in the drama class gave their teacher an especially wide margin when it came to those after-school workshops, taking care to always be in groups of three or more. The coterie of brains— a loose alliance of juniors and seniors taking Honors and AE (Academically Enriched) courses— met at the third table over in the lunch room at noon, and in Herr Goulding’s third-year German class, and had nothing but lofty derision and scorn for such things as school spirit, the football team, student government, and the “soshes”— the school social set.

They were the glamorous, attractive, and popular kids who rated not only pictures of their chic selves in singles and couples in the pages of the school annual, but appeared multiple times in the various group photos of various clubs. We brains derived sardonic amusement out of noting that if there were twenty brains and one sosh in a club, invariably the sosh would be the president of it. We derived even more amusement from the suspicion that for a lot of soshes, high school would be the peak of their whole lives. Like the stoners, gangsters and the outcasts, we were only putting up with it, as long as our parents, teachers and truant authorities all variously insisted we had to be there. We could hardly wait for the day that we could pack up our high GPAs and our outstanding SATs and swap the Depression-era Spanish Colonial precincts of Verdugo Hills High for college! For real academic challenges! For a bigger library than the single long, book-lined room, where I had already read every bit of fiction and most of the interesting non-fiction. Not for us all that pseudo Ken-and-Barbie stuff; we had plans! Real plans, beyond this conformist sports-letter and student-council sucking up to the oppressors in this soulless teen-aged concentration camp, moving like automatons from class to class every 55 minutes… oh, yeah, by the calendar, the 1960ies were official over, but the aftereffects still lingered.

And there was a bigger problem for us, with that whole prom mind-set. It was a couples kind of thing… you know, for people who were going steady or dating. The brains who were my friends, the coterie around the lunchroom third-table-over were overwhelmingly male, three our four girls to a dozen or twenty boys… and boys who were, to be fair, not at the peak of their physical attractiveness, or social assurance. (The male of our species is NOT at his best at the age of 14-18. Trust me on this. Or look at your own high school annual.) And besides that, we were all friends; it would be icky to pair off with one of them— like dating your brother.

It really never occurred to any of the rest of us to go stag, or with a mixed circle of friends. Tradition still had enough of a hold that we didn’t even consider it. And it was a sosh kind of party; all rented tuxedos for the boys, and for the girls, shiny sateen prom dresses, towering architectural hair, stiff with hairspray, and a spackling of Maybelline over an acne outbreak, raccoon eyes shadowed and mascaraed to a farethewell. It didn’t really look like all that much fun, and the costs— dress, tux, tickets, even in those fairly undeveloped days— were something to consider. We were above it, anyway. And grad night, which cost only half as much as a prom ticket… no contest as far as the chance of having fun and not looking like a dork went.

Grad Night at Disneyland had only been started a few years before, so it was still being held on one single night, usually the evening after commencement exercises. Graduating seniors converged on Disneyland from all over California for Grad Night, from San Diego, from the string of towns along the Central Valley— there was even a graduating class that flew in from Honolulu. The parking lot in Anaheim became a shoal of yellow school busses, bringing in more and more grads, all neatly and formally dressed; the theory is that if you are dressed in your best, you will tend to behave. I wound up sharing a seat in the grad night bus with John W., whom I had known since 5th grade, when he was plump and pallid and looked like he had been carved out of a potato. He didn’t talk much then (or ever) but he had built a whole model of a frontier fort out of wooden matchsticks, everything beautifully detailed, with tiny trees and little hills and a gravel road, and after that everyone knew he was super-intelligent, but since he never talked much… well, no one had any idea of exactly how intelligent. In junior high, a good friend of mine who had ambitions to be the Dolly Levi of the 8th grade, had tried to match us up, on the grounds that we were both so brainy, we must have lots in common… but yeesh! She was talking inarticulate, potato-boy here, not Shawn N. (on whom I had an enduring crush, from about the 7th grade on, until well after high school graduation). My friend’s clever matchmaking scheme didn’t work— until the bus ride to Disneyland, and we had to share a seat because we were the only two not paired with a friend, already.

It actually turned out to be quite pleasant; John actually warmed up and made intelligent conversation, now that we were both sprung from constraints of high school— nothing like what anyone had ever expected from him. They herded us unto Disneyland, and locked the gates in mid-evening, and after that the whole place belonged to the seniors, until sunrise the next morning; all the rides were free, there were shows and music, and fairy lights glittering in the trees, the arcades and restaurants were open all night. Although most of the kids started to drag, along about four in the morning, and recumbent bodies strewn everywhere— sleeping on the benches, or on the soft grass, under the stars and the lights—Oh, it was wonderful, and fun, and a great way to celebrate leaving high school behind. I don’t have any pictures, and I never saw John again, as he was off to study nuclear engineering at a state university somewhere, but I’ll hold that there is no possible way that any prom, anywhere in the world, could ever beat Grad Night, 1972.

Some Light and a Lot of Heat

28. March 2005 · Comments Off on Some Light and a Lot of Heat · Categories: General, Politics

That is the way of it, when a great question falls into the public debate, or at least, that’s how it will look to the outsider. The extremes on either side bash away energetically at each other, the op-eds and the commentaries are reeled out like so many furiously unfurled rolls of toilet paper, until either the issue is resolved definitively, or everyone is quite tired of it… or some great event crashes in unexpectedly and renders the whole thing absolutely moot.

In the meanwhile, the consensus one way or the other on the great matter tends to come from the great, conflicted, indecisive middle ground. It comes slowly, little by little; and those great heroic leaps forward beloved of the op-ed pages and the history books have usually had the way cleared for them by decades of discussion, as the great undecided middle thrashes out the matter, goaded by the needle-pricks of activists, cranks and the iconoclasts.

For you see, the thing is that most humans— like most animals— are wary of change. We are innately small-c conservative. Most of us prefer the known, the predictable, the well-established, because that is what we feel best-equipped to handle in our daily lives. Not that we are against change of any sort— it’s just that we prefer to have thought about it for a while, before leaping in. We would like to have considered all the foreseeable angles and alternatives, to have mapped out some of the possible divergences; in other words, to have some sort of idea on what we can expect to come out of these changes, and what course we might have to take, depending.

This advance thought-work takes time, however impatient those activists and visionaries may be; and it simply has to be accomplished if success is to attend on their great cause. There can be no shortcuts, no imposition by judicial or political fiat; unless a great majority of the center is at least tentatively convinced of the utility of it (or that no great and lasting harm will come).

Consider two historic quests in America— for powered flight, and for female suffrage. By the time the Wright brothers and their successors made the airplane a reality, there had been more than a century of experimentation, dreaming, fantasies and discussion about being able to fly. Once the Montgolfier brothers proved it could be done with balloons in 1783, the idea that men could fly like birds was in play as a future reality, and the tinkerers and fantasist went to town, and the rest of the common lump of humanity began to get used to the notion. Not quite a decade after the Montgolfiers’s flight over Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” sets the groundwork for considering a wider degree of political, economic and social freedom for women.

As shocked and horrified as the traditionalists were by the whole notion of women being able to vote, control their own income and their own bodies… the ideas were in play for the next hundred and thirty years. Just as the possibilities of flight were chewed over and digested, so was the advancement of rights and protections for women; in little incremental steps, so most thoughtful people could see that yes, that one little change didn’t mean the end of the world, it worked pretty well, and most everyone was happy with it, or at least not terribly unhappy.

I have often thought that the popularity of science— or speculative— fiction is our way of doing that think-work, in advance of the possibility; of getting ourselves used to the many entrancing possibilities: how would we cope, for example, should we encounter a telepathic race, or one that has three sexes (or only one), or even the vast dark and empty stretches of space between the stars. We need to think about the great matters of our time, and to talk about them reasonably, even when the debate is heated, even angry on the fringes.

In the center, we must still be— as my favorite news commentary site has it—engaged in “civil, well-reasoned discourse”. The radical fringes start the conversation, spur it on, frame the opposing sides, but eventually consensus comes out of the middle. Out of that ongoing discussion is a final resolution arrived at, eventually— here, and other websites and round-tables, over dinner tables and around the water coolers, as messy and indecisive and incremental as it usually seems to be on those days when we are all pounding away. It will be a bit, but good work can never be hurried. And it never hurts to be civil and reasoned.

(Later: Sean, the moderator at the discussion website www.volconvo.com, very much wants to promote the sort of civil and reasoned dialogue that I am encouraging here, as well as a more even balance of his existing community of contributors. Check it out.)

Just Because…

27. March 2005 · Comments Off on Just Because… · Categories: General

Santo Domingo de Silas
(Sanctuary of the pilgrim church of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, 1991)

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day
upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall
I see God.
For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that
sleep.

(45, Air for Soprano, from Handel’s Messiah)

Rites, Practices & Legends #15: On Your Own Time

25. March 2005 · Comments Off on Rites, Practices & Legends #15: On Your Own Time · Categories: General, Military

Timmer and some of the commenters on this story have been marveling over the prospect of a four-star general with a blog, and wondering how on earth that came to pass. Many of us know from bitter experience of the inertia (technological and otherwise) that any large established bureaucracy is heir to, and wonder how this miracle came to pass. Thinking it over after reading the comments, and remembering how certain technological advances came to pass in my own career field, I am wondering if there isn’t an enthusiast somewhere on the generals’ staff, or among his family or friends.

Believe it or not, the military is full of enthusiasts, amateur devotees of all sorts of arcane arts and pursuits in their off-duty time. Drinking, carousing and other hell-raising have been from time immemorial associated with off-duty military, and the economies of entire towns have been built around providing the venues for that sort of amusement… but the little-recognized truth is for most adults, they eventually pall, in the military and on the outside. The advantage to the military is that that there is really no rigid set of socially acceptable off-duty pursuits as there are other walks of life. What you do, when you go home and take off the uniform is pretty much your own business for enlisted people; as long as it is not illegal, embarrassing to the service or the US government, and does not impair you in performing your regular duties or showing up for work on time the next day. There is very little social pressure to conform in your choice of hobbies and amusements, which may seem a little outré for a profession which many civilians expect to set a standard for conformity. In reality, the officer-class is a little more constrained, and expected to be a little more conventional and middle-class in their leisure pursuits, and the very top enlisted ranks are supposed to set a good example, but among the lower ranks it doesn’t really matter if you are off on a weekend motorbike road trip to Burning Man, taking classes in economics or obscure martial arts, building houses for Habitat for Humanity, puttering around with your kids at soccer games, or out in the ville drinking to excess with your friends. On Monday morning the reaction among your co-workers is guaranteed to be “Hey Dude, whatever.”

The acceptable range is very, very wide, and I have known or worked with military people who had the most unexpected hobbies. One of my guys in Spain was rumored to head up a Wiccan circle on base; if true, I was glad for him because it meant that he had a social life after all. Another co-worker in Korea spent all his off-duty time tutoring spoken English: he lived on what he made from that and invested his military pay in stocks and securities. His personal ambition was to be able to live in the income from his investments after his enlistment was up, and I hope the dot-com meltdown didn’t affect that plan adversely. I knew two gifted amateur photographers— a security policeman and a combat documentation specialist during their official time— who spent their down time pointing lenses at either wildlife or street life. A young troop I knew in Japan became devoted to a particularly Japanese martial art, a sort of archery, to the point where he was taking advanced lessons from a master… and taking lessons in Japanese as well, so he could better communicate with the sensei. Indeed, the very founder of this blog is a smart-ass mechanic by day, and a Master of the Universe (Blogosphere Division), by night.

A fair number of the broadcasters I worked with were audiophiles, with huge music collections and elaborate stereo systems to match; they were lucky in that their hobby related to their work, but in one very important case, the off-duty hobby of a couple of our station staff had a very great effect on our broadcast mission.

That would be back in the dark ages, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we worked up the radio and television broadcast schedules in pencil and a septuagesimal calculator (or scribbling and adding the run times on a scratch pad if we weren’t even that lucky) and typed up the resulting radio or television log on a special form for use by the duty board op. This was particularly finicky and time consuming work, and great was the rejoicing in the European Broadcasting Squadron in about 1986 or so, when we were informed that a new technological day had dawned, that henceforward we would be automated, as far as programming for television was concerned.

Excitement and anticipation were at a peak, as each detachment was presented with a computer system, (No, I can’t remember any of the technological particulars) and a special suite of software, developed for AFRTS, and briskly informed by our higher management we would have everything up and running in six months. All of our program materials—the spots and programs in our library— would be entered into the computer, all the program information for the TW and TD (Television Weekly and Television Dependent) packages would arrive on floppy disk, and generating a weeks worth of TV logs would be accomplished by simply merging a master schedule template with the relevant weekly package, and hey presto! In six months we would be able to throw away the pencils, septuagesimal calculators and the old log forms, and embrace the automated future.

In retrospect, this was kind of like presenting a non-driver with an erratically functioning automobile, an owner’s manual and a copy of the relevant Department of Motor Vehicles regulations, and telling them that they should be able to A) Get the car to work, B) Teach themselves to drive and C) Qualify for a drivers’ license. The operating system and the software suite had more bugs than a high rise tenement. The manuals and instructions which accompanied the computer were incomplete and contradictory, and nothing worked as it was supposed to. Plug in, boot up, load the software and take off running was simply out of the question, however much our higher-ups wished it to be so. At least one of the detachments threw up their hands in despair of ever making it work as advertised and went back to the old way.

My detachment was not one of them, blessed as we were with two people— the station manager and one of the engineers— who were seriously into computers. Between them, it took weeks to debug the system, and the software, and figure out how it was all supposed to work, and even then it was trial and error, hit and miss, especially heavy on the error and miss side of the ledger. Just when we did get the hang of it, we crashed the system because we had filled up the memory with old programming info. It wasn’t apparent until then that we needed to delete the old package info and run a defrag… After that we were able to throw away the pencils and calculators, and embrace our new computer overlords, and the program director had to find another way to fill up the fifteen or twenty hours of time that had been previously taken up by doing it the old way.

But the only way we were able to make it work at all, was a pure coincidence; that two of our staff just happened to pursue an enthusiasm that turned out to be essential to our mission. I think this must happen quite a lot, and invite any reminiscences by readers, about military members with unusual, or with ultimately useful hobbies.

I Laughed, I Cried….

23. March 2005 · Comments Off on I Laughed, I Cried…. · Categories: General, General Nonsense, The Funny

…And I’ve never (well, hardly ever!) read this sort of book… unless I was really, really bored and there was nothing else. (Blondie did, when she was in high school, though.)

So, I can look at these, and about die from laughing!

(Courtesy of the great Blogfather himself)

Book Review: Delta Force/Operation Michael’s Sword

22. March 2005 · Comments Off on Book Review: Delta Force/Operation Michael’s Sword · Categories: General, GWOT, Military

I had gone nearly halfway through this book, thinking that one of the “friendly fire” encounters as described and upon which the plot turns, was grotesquely contrived, terribly unlikely…. And then there was the incident at a checkpoint near the Baghdad Airport, where a car with a freed hostage and an Italian special agent was fired on by American troops, under circumstances so murky and uncertain that we may never know why it all happened the way it did. Only that there are deep-laid plans, an impenetrable veil of secrecy, and taking the fight to an elusive and vicious enemy were all mixed up in it, and after the real-world tragedy, the fictional one seemed, sadly, much more believable.

The story opens on the morning of September 11, 2001, with Army officer Connor Tyler on a flight departing New York, looking out the window by his seat— and watching the first hijacked aircraft smash into the World Trade Center. Tyler knows at once that something horrible has happened, that in an instant everything has changed, and events will soon cascade, faster and faster. At the Pentagon that morning after a third aircraft smashes into the outside ring, Tylers’ boss, Major Spangler, is the man on his feet and on the spot with a long-prepared, deep-laid plan to take the war to the terrorists… and thereby hangs the rest of the book. It is the first of a projected series, so the story arc is a little more taken up with establishing the characters, the situation and the ground rules than with the title mission itself… which is to go after Bin Laden and Al Quada with a specially selected and trained counter-terrorist force. Spangler has the go-ahead from the highest level to tap whatever resources he needs, and build a unit which will take America’s war with terrorists where it needs to go. Spangler recruits, among others, Gunnery Sgt. Robert Night Runner from the Marine Recon Force, and Capt. Ramsey Baker out of Delta Force and Connor Tyler himself.

In a way, this is the kind of story which was told in the war movies of the 2nd World War, telling is what the war was about, what was happening (sort of) at the front, and what we would have to do, who our heroes were, and what we valued. This story, written by an Army veteran goes a little farther than those movies, or other military genre adventures do. It touches not on just the physical risks and dangers of a life lived at full-throttle at the tip of America’s military sword, but on those other, subtler hazards; wrecked marriages, loss of a lover, of one’s self-respect, of self-confidence, of comrades, the fall-out from bad decisions, and finally, the very real risk of slipping over the line and becoming the terrorist, the monster you are fighting against.

Baker, a fluent Arabic linguist— and of whom it can be said if it weren’t for bad luck he would have no luck at all— is sent by an elaborate scheme to the camp of an Afghan warlord who may—or may not be a Bin Laden ally. It is Baker’s advantage in this war, and his misfortune, as well, that he does not look in the least like what he really is. Meanwhile, Tyler screens and trains the teams that will go into Afghanistan and hunt down Bin Laden, training that so rigorous and realistic that it is only a hair less hazardous than the actual mission will eventually be.

Mr. Harriman writes a gripping and credible yarn, drawing on many years of military service, with an acute ear for the way that soldiers and military commanders talk, to each other and to the troops.

Later note: Part 3 of Mr. Harriman’s “Warrior to Warrior” is here.

The Flowers That Bloom In the Spring, Tra-La!

21. March 2005 · Comments Off on The Flowers That Bloom In the Spring, Tra-La! · Categories: Domestic, General

I have spotted the first blue-bonnet in bloom in my neighborhood, a single lonely specimen in a patch of assorted wildflowers where the little streamlet meanders from top to bottom of the development. There is a largish patch of them coming up amidst the grass in an empty tract of land along Stahl road, unmistakable harbingers of spring. Very soon there will be acres of them in bloom up in the Hill Country, followed by herds of photographers, and a couple of double-page features of them in the local newspaper. It’s a Texas thing, going ga-ga over the bluebonnets and other wildflowers every year, but it’s a much healthier obsession in the long run than high school football. I may even encourage bluebonnets in that part of my garden given over to native plants and flowers, assuming there the two Arizona trash-trees allow enough sunshine underneath.

I’ve been much too busy the last two weekends cleaning up after the hail-storm two weeks ago; so has everyone else. The curb is piled high with bundles and bags for trash pickup: the hail came down the size of marbles and golf balls, knocking down sticks and leaves by the pile. Some of the trees are now looking very lop-sided, with all the leaves stripped off their outer branches. The concrete sidewalks and driveways are freckled with pale little blotches, where the hail-stones struck, and all the local auto-repair places have suddenly sprouted extra signs touting hail-damage repair. Signs from different roofing contractors are also sprouting in the yards through-out the neighborhood. A friend from church said she had counted no less than seven different companies and contactors’ pickup-trucks with ladders hanging out of the truck-bed cruising the side streets as thick as fleas. It seems to have been a very tightly-focused storm; outside the immediate impact area, it was just another ordinary thunderstorm. My neighbors who were caught at home by it all said it was quite terrifying. The noise of it was incredible, and it went on for ten or fifteen minutes.

I did not think there had been much more than superficial damage to the garden; I thought my roof had escaped serious damage. Many of the other houses in the neighborhood looked like they had great dark smears or shadows on the weather side of their asphalt-shingled roofs. There were also a number of broken windows, and vent-covers, and supposedly someone’s patio roof gave way. I didn’t have any broken windows, and I couldn’t see any new damage to the screens that couldn’t be accounted for by the cats, and astonishingly enough, the fiber-glass over the back porch was un-perforated. But this weekend, and last weekend I talked to all my neighbors, and the up-shot is that we are all going to get new roofs. The insurance adjuster just told me that she is doing up the damage estimate for my house, and yes, I need one also… so, that is what I am working on this week! One of the neighbors, whose house is next to Judy’s is a roofing contractors, and it looks like he is doing bids for all of us, up and down the street. It would be great if he could just stage all the materials at once, and just go from house to house, all at once, and give us a bulk discount. My insurance adjuster says it might be a very good idea to hire him anyway; after all, if he does a bad job, I know where he lives….

On the Road, Again

17. March 2005 · Comments Off on On the Road, Again · Categories: Domestic, General

We stayed in a castle, a real castle, Schloss Rheinfels on the Rhine, across from St. Goarshausen. The hotel part was newer than the medieval ruin that topped the crag overlooking the river, the railway, severely vertical acres of grape-vines which gripped the rocks with vinous fervor, and several other ruined castles up and down the river as far as could be seen. It was a great roomy barn of a place, with thick stone walls; you could have dropped rolls out of the dining room windows straight down on the freight-cars passing down below, at the very foot of the cliff. The ruins of Schloss Rheinfels were adjacent, and much overgrown. Many of the towers and doorways were filled with dirt, leaving just enough space for a child, not that Blondie was very interested in the dark and cobwebbed tunnels within.

We explored it all one late afternoon, and then had to take the VEV to the nearest Volvo mechanic in Bingen-am-Rhine for some mechanical work (bad gas in Italy, apparently) and the train to Rhein-Main AB to get an emergency loan to pay for it. It was getting to seriously autumnal, nearly a month after we had driven away from Athens and the only place my daughter remembered living in. We were on our way to Spain, taking a leisurely auto-ramble through Italy, Germany and France. There was only one thing my daughter didn’t miss about Greece, and that was the habit of any and all— especially the elderly— patting her on her blond head, and admiring her northern coloring.

“Like I was a little dog,” she muttered rebelliously. I was worried that she might just take a bite out of the next well-meaning hand, and looking forward to Germany because there she would fit right in, and no one would notice her particularly. Some hope— she looked like everyone’s grandchild, and was just as admired, although there was not as much head-patting… for which we both were grateful. Small children do, after all, have sharp teeth, and at four and a half, Blondie was very forward and brash.
The VEV was purring smoothly again, on the road along the river, north to Koblenz, all castles and vineyards, and little towns with a riverside promenade and a church with onion-domed towers, and if that didn’t kick over the quaint-and-rustic meter, the roadway along the Mosel pegged that sucker all the way over into the red.

The road along the Mosel was a two-lane country road of the sort that I had become very used to, narrower but nearly empty of traffic, and the river meandered and looped among rolling green hills, trimmed with russet and gold autumn-harvest colors. The August holidays were well over, and all the tourists had mostly gone home. Early in the afternoon, we came around pronounced bend in the road, and there was a beautiful, half-timber and thatched little town, straight ahead.

Cochem Am Mosel

(Cochem Am Mosel, 1985)

It clustered around a conical green hill topped with a toy castle, a tall central tower trimmed with mosaic tiles. A perfect, Grimm’s fairy-tale castle, with battlements and tiny pepper-pot turrets, peaked roofs and a portcullis gate, guarded like an enchanted place by a surrounding palisade of taller hills. I pulled over, and looked at my map, the Hallwag atlas opened on the passenger seat.
“We’ll stay here, tonight,” I said. “That has got to be the prettiest place I have ever seen.”
“Can we go look at that castle?” my daughter asked, “It’s not a ruin, like the last one.”
“Of course,” I said, and turned off the road along the river. I had no idea of where to stay inexpensively in a place like this, but trusted to luck: there was always something, a gasthaus, or even a private home with a “zimmer-frei” sign swinging from the gate. The main road threaded through town, around the back of the castle hill, past a little ski-lift moving continuously up to the top of the tallest crag overlooking the little town. There, on the right, the modest “zimmer-frei” sign in front of one of the houses in a modest block of townhouses.

We took the last parking place in front, and snagged the last room too, for the home-owner came out and took down the sign as soon as I paid the required 40 DM. The windows of our room looked onto the back of the house, where the dangling seats of the little ski-lift moved up, up, and down down, twenty or feet above the steep slope.
“Ohh, Mommy, can we?” My daughter leaned out of the window, tiptoe with eagerness, and I sighed, and hauled her inside so I could close the window. I had a very bruising experience with one of those little lifts, as a teenager, going up to a youth hostel in Koblenz, which was housed in a castle on top of the customary crag. I was not terribly athletic and heights— or the imminent prospect of falling from them— bothered me terribly. I took my camera and handbag— we would walk over to the castle, and have some dinner in town, but first… the ski lift.

It was one of those constantly-moving ones, requiring deft-timing in swinging yourself into the moving seat, and in the case of my daughter, a boost from the attendant. Going up wasn’t so bad, facing the steep hillside and going up, and up, staggered rows of grape vines sweeping past your dangling toes. The ground appeared to be little more than a short drop below. At the top, Blondie jumped down from the seat herself, and neatly moved away from the path of the moving line of suspended seats. I took her hand, and we walked around to the look-out, below which was the whole town, neatly spread out like a toy village, centered around the crossroads and the castle.

And then, going down again. Just like going up, but in reverse. Horribly in reverse, because going down meant facing out, and a long, fast and horrible controlled fall, and my daughter screaming. Screaming, in excitement,
“Oh, Mommy! It’s like Wonder-Woman, it’s like flying!”
She was exhilarated. I on the other hand, was torn between screaming, throwing up or fainting, and not wanting to do any of the above in front of her. So, since I had my camera in my lap, I uncovered the camera lens and took a picture. Two things came to mind in the first twenty feet of the ski-lift drop; that as a child, my daughter was totally, completely and utterly fearless, and in the coming years, I faced any number of occasions watching her do things, where I would be torn between screaming, throwing up or fainting… but it would be best just to sit calmly, with white knuckles and a faint smile. And take a picture.

Looking Down

(Looking down, from the top of the lift, Cochem Am Mosel, 1985)

Wearin’ O’ the Green

17. March 2005 · Comments Off on Wearin’ O’ the Green · Categories: Domestic, General

They say St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, but do you know what he said, as he was about to do it?
He adjusted the rear-view mirror, looked over his shoulder and said,

“Arright, yiz in th’ back, are yiz aright, and ready to go, then?”

But I don’t wear green, myself on St. Patricks’ Day, as Grandpa Jim was an Orangeman, through and through.

Grandpa Jim with Uncle Jimmy

(Grandpa Jim and Uncle Jimmy, early 1920ies)

From the archives, “My Grandpa Was an Alien”

Can I Call It, or Can I Call It?

16. March 2005 · Comments Off on Can I Call It, or Can I Call It? · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq

A week ago Monday I wrote in this entry, about the Sgrena/Calipari/Roadblock incident: The blow-back from this may very well include Italy stepping down from the coalition; ironically, just when it seems that a tipping point has been reached with successful elections, when the war is over and the mopping up and rebuilding is getting well underway. This morning, on NPR, Sylvia Poggoli was reporting on how internal political considerations were forcing Berlusconi to look for an exit strategy for Italian troops in Iraq.
Sometimes I almost scare myself with my own predictions…

Repeat of a Classic “In the Army, Now” Letter

14. March 2005 · Comments Off on Repeat of a Classic “In the Army, Now” Letter · Categories: General, General Nonsense, Military

This was forwarded by regular “Daily Brief” reader Capt. J.M. Heinrichs; it is an amusing Australian variant on one that has been going the rounds since WWII, or possibly earlier:

Text of a letter from a kid from Eromanga to Mum and Dad. (Eromanga is a small town west of Quilpie in the far south west of Queensland)

Dear Mum & Dad,

I am well. Hope youse are too. Tell me big brothers Doug and Phil that the Army is better than workin’ on the farm – tell them to get in bloody quick smart before the jobs are all gone!

I wuz a bit slow in settling down at first, because ya don’t hafta get outta bed until 6am. But I like sleeping in now, cuz all ya gotta do before brekky is make ya bed and shine ya boots and clean ya uniform. No bloody cows to milk, no calves to feed, no feed to stack – nothin’!!

Blokes haz gotta shave though, but its not so bad, coz there’s lotsa hot
water and even a light to see what ya doing!

At brekky ya get cereal, fruit and eggs but there’s no kangaroo steaks or
possum stew like wot Mum makes. You don’t get fed again until noon, and by
that time all the city boys are buggered because we’ve been on a ‘route
march’ – geez its only just like walking to the windmill in the back
paddock!!

This one will kill me brothers Doug and Phil with laughter. I keep getting
medals for shootin’ – dunno why. The bullseye is as big as a bloody possum’s
bum and it don’t move and its not firing back at ya like the Johnsons did
when our big scrubber bull got into their prize cows before the Ekka last
year! All ya gotta do is make yourself comfortable and hit the target – its
a piece of piss!!

You don’t even load your own cartridges – they comes in little boxes and ya
don’t have to steady yourself against the rollbar of the roo shooting truck
when you reload!

Sometimes ya gotta wrestle with the city boys and I gotta be real careful
coz they break easy – it’s not like fighting with Doug and Phil and Jack and
Boori and Steve and Muzza all at once like we do at home after the muster.
Turns out I’m not a bad boxer either and it looks like I’m the best the
platoon’s got, and I’ve only been beaten by this one bloke from the
Engineers – he’s 6 foot 5 and 15 stone and three pickhandles across the
shoulders and as ya know I’m only 5 foot 7 and eight stone wringin’ wet, but
I fought him till the other blokes carried me off to the boozer.

I can’t complain about the Army – tell the boys to get in quick before word
gets around how bloody good it is.

Your loving daughter,

Jill

(For maximim giggles, imagine Cate Blanchett as Jill– Sgt. Mom)

Whose Truth?

14. March 2005 · Comments Off on Whose Truth? · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not

This story appeared Sunday in the San Antonio Express News. I sent an e-mail this morning to the writer, Sig Christenson, who is (to give him credit) not entirely clueless about the military, since he served as an embedded reporter. Does he know about milblogs? Time will tell, time will tell…
My response is as follows;

So, whose truth really is true, when what appears on the TV news (or in newspapers) is either the “work of Uncle Sam, not journalists…”

Frankly at this point I am not at all enamored with the recent output of those anointed by custom as “journalists” by the mainstream media outlets, seeing that that group would include Peter Arnett (of the poison gas/Special Forces fiasco), Dan Rather (of the “fake-but-accurate-memos), Eason Jordan (who soft-pedaled atrocities by Saddam Hussein in order to keep the CNN bureau in Baghdad, and has accused the US Forces of deliberately targeting journalists) and the egregious Sy Hersh, who is still going around with heart-rending tales of US forces casually committing atrocities. Main stream media is after all the ones who bought off on John Kerry being a true Vietnam War hero when all the veterans that I know (and a lot of the active-duty folks as well) despised him with a passion that made them practically incoherent with rage. Main stream media is propping up the bar at the Hotel Palestine, interviewing the maitre d and their interpreter, singing the song that Iraq is a quagmire… and get blindsided by the election turnout. Main stream media is putting video of staged car-bombings on the front page, or the nightly news, and never getting around to the dull stuff like fixing sewers and rebuilding schools, and setting up local city councils. “If it bleeds, it leads”, but it is damn lazy journalism, and in Iraq it’s a disservice amounting to malpractice. Lets just say there is a bit of a credibility problem, at present, and a bias that makes the DOD version of news (not to mention what is available on the various milblogs) look pretty good in comparison.

By the way, the DOD has had in-house journalists, via AFRTS, base newspapers, and video feature programs like Air Force Now, and combat videographers for decades. They generally have a pretty good idea about what is news, and how to put together zippy, attractive and informative features, sticking to the good old who, where, when, why and how. Dismissing all that as merely the “work of Uncle Sam, not journalists” is a little bit insulting to all of us who did news features, stories, newscasts and all— especially if it gave some of us the experience to move on to civilian media afterwards.

If stations want to use whatever materiel is spoon-fed to them to fill up the news block, at least they ought to give credit, where credit is due, and not give the impression that their own news crew was Johnny on the Spot. That is where the deceit lies, not in the DOD making what they have been doing for years available to anyone who wants it. And looking on the bright side— at least the military media will get things like service and ranks correct, which cannot always be counted on.

I worked for 20 years in AFRTS and in Combat Camera, and have spent the last three years contributing to a military oriented weblog, The Daily Brief (www.sgtstryker.com), which according to our chief engineers, racks up 32,000 to 35,000 unique viewers monthly. We feature essays, commentary and links on popular culture, the military, politics and the war. Does that make us journalists? I’ll get back to you on that.

“Sgt Mom”, USAF, Ret

Gardens of Delight

13. March 2005 · Comments Off on Gardens of Delight · Categories: General, World

Captain Loggie has e-mailed me this weekend, to let us know that he has arrived in Herat, Afghanistan, and had been given a tour of the city. I expect they told him that it is one of the cities founded and named originally after Alexander the Great, and that it was a rich, powerful and cultured place, full of monuments and gardens, under the reign of the Timurid kinds of the 15th century…. and is supposed to be still full of lavish gardens, most particularly of roses. And yet, Afghanistan is so often portrayed to us as a harsh and barren place, either cold and dusty, or hot and harsh and totally barbaric. But one of the gardens in Herat was written up in this book, which I gave to my mother for a Christmas present after I scored a very marked-down but pristine copy at Half-Price Books— but I read it first!
The thing is though, in a harsh and desolate climate, a garden— a green and thriving garden— is most particularly cherished, since it is achieved with such great effort and against such odds. Water is the thing, water and shelter; high walls and deep wells. A garden in the Islamic tradition may be large, but most always it is enclosed, sometimes no more than a courtyard in the center of, or adjacent to a house. Sometimes no more than a collection of plants in pots and tubs, there is nearly always a fountain or a pool. The largest gardens are sometimes meant to look like an elaborate carpet, with raised paths between the beds, which would be planted with elaborate arrangements of blooming plants. And always there would be shade, and water, and a place to sit and look at it all… for after all, Paradise is most assuredly a garden, the most lavish and beautiful of all.

Garden in the Generalife, Alhambra, Spain

This is one of those gardens, in the Summer Palace by the Alhambra complex in Granada, Spain. More here, from my archive.

We Are the War: Part 2

11. March 2005 · Comments Off on We Are the War: Part 2 · Categories: General, GWOT

Part two of John Harriman’s letter is here.
(Mr. Harriman has very generously sent me a copy of his latest book, and I am halfway through it: review to follow)

The Crucible

11. March 2005 · Comments Off on The Crucible · Categories: General, GWOT

Some years ago, the news program “48 Hours”— whose main news hook is to roll the cameras on something interesting for a solid 2 days— followed a training company of female Marine recruits completing the “crucible”, the two-day exercise/ordeal that is the final exam for basic training in the US Marine Corps. I taped that program, as Blondie had just competed basic. By odd coincidence, her training company was doing the crucible at the same time as the company that “48 Hours” focused upon. She actually appears very briefly in the program, distinguished only by her name on the back of her helmet, in a shot of her company marching by. She fell out for the crucible on barely-healed stress fractures, and shot full of antibiotics for an infected insect bite, but insisted afterwards that she had actually rather enjoyed it, for the challenge of being able to use everything she had been taught at Parris Island, to think instead of merely do as ordered.

The program made it clear the crucible was anything but a gentle amble through the woods and obstacle courses, but a 48 hour test of endurance, on two meals and a little sleep, concluding with a grueling night-march back to base from the training area, arriving just as the sun comes up. The video of the last, long slog was particularly touching: exhausted young women, marching along, fueled by their last few shreds of energy. Some of them are visibly failing, field packs and other gear dragging at their shoulders, barely stumbling along; the only thing keeping them on their blistered feet and moving forward being the knowledge they are nearly to the end, that and the whispered encouragement of their friends around them. In one touching shot, a trainee reaches back, and is holding the hand of the woman in the rank directly behind her. One knows that that silent, encouraging hand-clasp is keeping both of them going, that and their own grim determination to become Marines.

It has struck me in the last few weeks that the latest round of suicide bombings and assassinations in Iraq may also constitute a crucible of sorts, especially those happening after the elections. The deaths are horrifying, senseless; deaths of bystanders in the street, in a bakery, of a newscaster, of Iraqi army recruits and police cadets, politicians and clerics, and people are rightfully frightened, and angered by violence dished out by the bitter-end Baathists and the foreign jihadists, and common criminals. Frightened and angry… but not cowed. They put on their best clothes and voted anyway, in spite of threats. They are stepping forward to take charge, to take the place of murdered policemen, informing on insurgents hiding in their neighborhood, and saying “enough”; creating an identity for themselves by standing in opposition to the terror.

Shia, Sunni, Kurd, devout or secular matter less than simply being an Iraqi, or so I read over and over in stories about the election and the political dickering afterwards. It is as if a national identity is being forged, right in front of our eyes, that every blow pounds a harder, finer and more flexible edge on the steel. Out of adversity, danger and horrors which are shared by all may be built a stronger, more determined and truly democratic Iraq. Both the Baathists and al Quaida wanted to create a strong Islamic state in the Middle East, and they may have done it in Iraq… but not quite in the way they were expecting.

History Fades

11. March 2005 · Comments Off on History Fades · Categories: General, History, Military

A bit of our history— a woman who was part of a legendary group in the annals of women in the military has gone, this week. Gone, but not forgotten, thanks to this book.

Chartres

09. March 2005 · Comments Off on Chartres · Categories: General

I drove across France on secondary roads, one perfect golden September, when my daughter was just shy of five years old. We had packed our luggage into the VEV and left Athens for a new assignment in Spain, with the Hallwag driver’s atlas open on the passenger seat beside me, and Blondie contentedly curled up in the back seat, watching the world go by and listening to her mother mumble curses upon whoever had designed road signage in France. Everywhere else we traveled, directional signs bore the name of the largest city along the road or at it’s terminus. Easy enough, at the start of a day on the road, keeping in mind and an eye out for the arrow helpfully pointing the way in the direction of, say “Roma” or “Munchen” or “Augsburg”.

Not so in France, not on the little two-lane country roads, hop scotching from town to town. Following the road into each town, I would be directed helpfully into the “centre” where there would be a crossroads or worse yet, a traffic circle, with a choice of roads leading out of town again; which one? I would have to pull over, and study the atlas, and commit to memory any and all names of towns along the road I wanted, and look for any of them on the fly. No chance to appreciate the cobbled square, the covered market hall, the village church and quaint old shop fronts, I was too busy scanning for the elusive black and white sign and arrow, which would put me out onto the right road. With luck, and presuming that the French sign-posting authorities had managed to put a sign where I could see it, I would emerge into the countryside again.

The country roads were the best, most aesthetically satisfying way to travel across France— not by the expensive, boring highways. One single stretch of road (along the Loire, I think) still stands in my memory of the most beautiful, perfect stretch of roadway imaginable: two lanes, arrow-straight, lined on each side with a perfect avenue of trees, planted just so, like columns in the aisle of a cathedral. The road aligned perfectly on the church steeple in the town ahead, as steady as a compass needle pointing north. Someone had planned that road, centuries ago, for the church and the avenue of trees were all very old.

The towers of Chartres cathedral drew us, as inexorably as a compass needle, floating like a stone ship on a golden sea of unharvested fields, the town around it invisible. There once was a time when men dared not build taller buildings than church-towers. The town of Chartres was built in a riverine valley, with the cathedral on a knoll in the middle, a bit of higher ground nearly the level of the land around, so for many miles it alone was visible, splendidly isolated.

“That’s what we’re going to see,” I said to my daughter. “Look, we can see it already. It’s supposed to be the finest, most perfect medieval cathedral around. The glass in the windows is like nothing in the world.”
Blondie didn’t quite yawn, but looked as if she were close to it, and thinking resignedly
“Oh, yay, another big old building. Whatever, Mom.” She had already spent three-fourths of her life being dragged around by me to temples, cathedrals, museums, castles and fields of ruins from every age from classical Greek to late medieval. I had no idea what this had done to her aesthetic sensitivities, aside from instilling a peculiar fondness for Botticelli. It had done a number on her religious beliefs, such as they were; the Greco-Roman pantheon was well mixed in with the Judeo-Christian and the Norse, and she had walked solemnly around the great bronze statue of Zeus in the Athens Archeological museum, and then announced to me in tones of great disapproval that God’s tushie was hanging out.
Chartres Doorway
Where saints in Glory Stand:Chartres, 1985
The air in the cathedral breathed of cool stone, and dust and candles, stone steps and paving under our feet worn by 800 years of devoted traffic. There were other people there, tourists like ourselves, lost in contemplating that soaring space inside. Chartres is not one of the exuberantly decorated spaces, tending rather to the ascetic glory of perfect purportion; the walls and columns and arches framing the matchless windows, through which stream sunlight stained in reds, blues, green, painting little blobs of color on the ancient stone floor. It is a holy place, built to the glory of God, at a time when men felt it was an act of highest worship to carve the perfect stone, fit it in exactly the right place, to cut the pieces of jewel-colored glass and bend the lead canes precisely around each piece, to set the great soaring arches in place.

Stained Glass Windows at Chartres
Sermon in Stained Glass at Chartres
They lived mostly short and uncomfortable lives, did they who built Chartres and places like it, lives that we would find unbearably squalid and uncomfortable, but they were visionaries, and built for the future, secure in believing that we… and their God would remember them. In time, the devotion of the faithful would turn from great buildings to causes; Sunday schools and anti-slavery, social justice, leaving the magnificent medieval buildings like an ornate but outgrown shell, but one where we can still wander, and marvel, knowing that we are in a holy place, made holy by a thousand lifetimes of work, hundreds of years ago.

Hail, Hail…

08. March 2005 · Comments Off on Hail, Hail… · Categories: Domestic, General

There probably is some kind of karma involved, because several hours after I posted the pic of my back porch and wrote about the neighborhood cats that see my garden as a sort of clubhouse (and, no… I will not be adding the new one to the pride, he will be tamed and neutered and fostered out to another human of his very own! Really! Stop looking at me like that!) my neighbor Judy called me at work:
“I just wanted to let you know that it just finished hailing out here, “She said “Hail the size of marbles, some the size of golf balls. Just so you won’t be surprised when you get home tonight.”
I was pretty surprised, because it had just rained a little where I was; but it has happened before around here: one part of the city can be having all sorts of horrible weather and five or six miles away, it’s mild and calm, and people there are watching the weather reports and going
“Huh???”

So, it was very interesting to get home last night, and see a lot of the new leaves off the Arizona trash tree plastered all over the driveway. The storm roared in from the south, more or less, as Judy told me, so the south-side of my house— normally the most sheltered— had a five or six inch deep drift of hailstones piled up in the flower bed and the walkway. All the firespike and mona lavender are stripped of leaves, the photina growing by the front door has shed a layer of leaves all over everything underneath, and the grass and stone path in back are covered with shredded laurel leaves, like green confetti.

The hailstones were the size of large and small marbles; as of this morning, twenty hours afterwards, they are still not melted. The branches of the rosemary shrubs along the front walk, which took the brunt of it, are covered with patches where the bark was entirely scraped away. A painted ceramic pot has had the paint chipped off, all the way around the edge. Everything else— oddly enough much of it in pots where I would have expected it to be much more exposed to the hail is not very much damaged at all. Most of the stuff had only begun to put out small leaves, and is not very much affected.

I have never seen hail that big; one of my neighbors had their skylight shattered, someone else has had a patio roof collapse, and another was caught on the road and has a cracked windshield. Even the old-timers say they hardly ever saw so much large hail at one time. The worst I ever saw before this was in Spain one summer, when it came down about the size of BB shot, but so much of it, that it looked like snow, and washed into the storm drains where it promptly froze and blocked them up. The resulting mess flooded half the low-lying buildings on base.

And to top it all, after the storm blew over, it was mild, and warm and got up to eighty degrees yesterday afternoon. The popular saying is that if you don’t like the weather in Texas… wait five minutes, it will change.

Our Man in Afghanistan

08. March 2005 · Comments Off on Our Man in Afghanistan · Categories: General, Site News

Just a quick heads-up: Capt. Loggie e-mailed me to say he has arrived in Afghanistan, and will post, and send pictures as soon as he has some internet access time!
Stay tuned….

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