Memo: On A Dangerous Road, in the Dark

07. March 2005 · Comments Off on Memo: On A Dangerous Road, in the Dark · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not

From: Sgt Mom
To: All in Group
Re: American Gunfire and Italian “journalist”*

1. If anything at all, this is a perfect demonstration of the old axiom about a lie being half-way around the world while the truth is still getting it’s boots on: About the only fact of which I can be certain of at this point is that Nicola Calipari is dead, and that this will have repercussions up to the international level, but not, I think, in the way that Ms Sgrena and her comrades are expecting. Although she has been driving the story, and the news momentum has been heading in the direction most favorable to those perpetuating the meme of “brutal, trigger-happy cowboys wantonly slaughtering brave journalists and other sensitive, peace-loving Europeans”, the hard questions have only begin to be asked, let alone answered satisfactorily. It is easy enough for Ms Sgrena to tell a story, to elaborate on it, to pile on contradictory details, to tell another version, to make accusations, suppositions— just open the mouth and let it all come out, faster and faster. It will take days, or weeks to even begin investigating, analyzing, measuring skid marks and matching bullet fragments to the weapon that fired it, to calculate the angles and origins, routes of travel, means, motivations and eyewitnesses, and by then the crowds baying for the sacrifice for a scapegoat will probably not be the least interested in hearing the considered conclusion… especially if it turns out that the vehicle carrying Ms Sgrena and Mr. Calipari was clearly warned to stop, that American troops at the check-point clearly identified themselves and followed established procedures to the letter.

2. The whole thing reeks with the reek of a boxcar-load of haddock stuck for a week at a rail siding in South Texas during a sultry August heat-wave, beginning with the somewhat odd nature of Ms. Sgrena’s detention (and that of the two Simonas, also) at the hands of suspiciously gentlemanly insurgents, the payment of a large ransom, the actions of the Italian intelligence service in facilitating that payment, compounding that by not being entirely candid with the American forces in-country, and ending with a car failing to stop at a roadblock.

3. Politically, it is a terribly hot potato for Mr. Berlusconi, and he is screwed no matter which hand he juggles it in. Opposition to Italian participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom is vociferous, and substantial; as a politician he has to deal with that. (One wonders though, if Italians, Germans and French are worthy of being liberated from brutal dictators, mass graves and secret police spies, if being a free and democratic country is their right and due…. Why do the Iraqis not merit the same privilege?) Ms. Sgrena’s captivity is a cause celebre; the easy way out is to quietly pay a ransom and whisk her efficiently out of the country, and hope that interest in her case dies down, and everyone will forget about how many suicide bomb vests and car bombs and contract killings of Iraqi judges and politicians that ransom will purchase. Keep it simple, keep it slick, zip in country, drop the money, pick up the hostage and book on a private jet, and everything’s cool, and keep it in-house. Very daring, very dashing… and how very… cowboy.

4. 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. Lest we forget, the ransom paid for Ms. Sgrena and the two Simonas went to fund the men who send out the head-hackers, the torturers, the terrorists who killed Iraqi journalists and broadcasters, judges, police recruits, the men who loaded a retarded boy with explosives, who butchered Margaret Hassan, the men who want to bring back the mass graves, the secret police and the chemical butchery of the Kurds. The euro-leftists do not seem to have a problem with this; presumably they have a strong stomach after all those decades performing intellectual fellatio on Uncle Joe Stalin and his spiritual heirs, and they are, after all, only behaving in the manner we have come to expect of them.

5. Mr. Berlusconi has been a much appreciated ally in the coalition, and we appreciate that it has cost him dearly, politically, and his position is perilous. In being forced by political demands to cater to a particularly noisy constituency, he has taken actions which result in additional funding for the insurgents. His value as an ally is now somewhat compromised. I realize that politicians have to consider their own constituencies first last and always, but I sincerely hope that when all the investigations are finished, all the reports filed, and all the newspaper stories written about this, that Mr. Calipari will prove to have been the only one to be sacrificed in order to mollify Mr. Berlusconi’s constituency.

6. Unfortunately, there will be some Iraqi police cadets, or soldiers, or people in a crowded market or mosque someplace, who will be sacrificed as well. When that happens…Well done, Ms. Sgrena.

With sorrow
Sgt. Mom

*As always, those are not “scare” quote marks; those are “viciously skeptical” quote marks.

In The Garden of Cats

07. March 2005 · Comments Off on In The Garden of Cats · Categories: Domestic, General

My back yard is entirely fenced, and sheltered from the late afternoon sun by an enormous mulberry tree, and is usually at its best during two times of the year— that is, spring and fall. Summers are hot and harsh, winters are cold and dreary, and our gardening season is split into two short seasons by them. The first best time is beginning now, when the jasmine and the potted Meyer lemon trees are out in clusters of starry white flowers, and everything else is leafing out, recovering from the whatever winter freeze we might have had. It has been a particularly wet and soggy winter, rather than cold, so this year everything in my yard will be most especially green and lush, and may yet carry through summer that way

We only had a couple of days of freezing temps, but it hit the plants I put in last fall the hardest; a grouping of native Texas plants to attract birds and butterflies, around a green glass Japanese fishing buoy in a metal stand, where the bird feeders hang from a branch of the mulberry. The fire bush and lantana, the Esperanza and liatris are all putting out new leaves. I love to sit out on the back porch in the mornings and evenings, when the big rose bush and the Esperanza are alive with birds, and there is a constant flutter of wings around the feeders.
Sgt. Mom's Back Porch
Sammie, the white cat from across the road— who was nearly blind— used to like sitting behind the potted plants, and pretending that he was stalking the birds going after the spilled seed on the ground. Alas, he was too blind to actually catch a bird, not unless it was a bird with a death-wish marching right up to his whiskers. Sammie, who uncharacteristically (according to his owner) developed a deep affection for Blondie when she was home over Christmas, grumpily tolerated sharing my garden with Bubba, the black cat from down the road who has been coming around for years. I think Sammie and Bubba looked on my garden as a sort of gentleman’s club; not in the nasty, titty-bar sort of way, but the comfy chair and old-port English manner of gentleman’s club. Alas, Sammie was side-swiped by a car one day when on his way over; he was not seriously hurt, just shaken up, and stays in his own yard these days, which is for the best.

Bubba, the wise and wily old survivor, who does not have to cross the road— he frequently arrives by strolling along the top of the fence that runs along the back of all our houses— does not have the place to himself though. For the last two weeks, another young cat has been trailing along in his lordly wake, at 6 AM and 6 PM sharp. Just as young Percival the sort-of-feral began hanging around for the food, and was eventually coaxed into tolerating caresses, and then the soft life of an indoor cat of the First Degree, I am contemplating doing the same with this one…. But oh no, not for myself! I have four cats already; another one will be crossing the boundary into “crazy neighborhood cat lady”, as well as being frowned upon by the code compliance section of the City of San Antonio.

This new cat— who may yet actually belong to a neighbor, just like Sammie and Bubba— has been coming around for two weeks now, and already accepts being petted, and tolerates me sitting on the glider and listening to the radio while he crunches through a bowl of finest Science Diet Light. It is another young male, all white underneath with a brindle brown and grey patch on his back, and on the top of his head. He seems touchingly eager to reject the call of the wild, and curl up on soft furniture and embrace the life of an indoors cat…I must be strong and resist! But as soon as he is tame enough to handle without shedding a couple of pints of my blood— and I know for sure that he doesn’t belong to someone (Judy, my neighbor who knows all this sort of thing, says no, he is a stray) he is off to the spay and neuter clinic, and on to the waiting list for the Animal Defense League shelter, awaiting a soft chair and a garden of his own.

Check-Point

06. March 2005 · Comments Off on Check-Point · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

I’ve been following this all day, in between sewing and gardening projects, and thought about a post on the topic— since this is… ummm… NOT good stuff from a Public Affairs POV. On the other hand, there have been doubts about the circumstances of the kidnapping, and the political leanings of the supposed victim do not lend encouragment to belief in her side of the story.
The calmest and most reasoned discussion is here.
Any informed speculation, or particular insight is welcomed.

The Country-Sized Concentration Camp

04. March 2005 · Comments Off on The Country-Sized Concentration Camp · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

Two things distinguished my year-long tour in the ROK, at AFKN HQ, Yongsan Garrison, one completely trivial, materialistic and superficial… and the other something that— every five months or so, scared the absolute piss out of everyone who hadn’t been there for a couple of years.
“You’ll get into that combat shopping mode,” One of the other Air Force women promised me about the first thing, over my first weekend on station, “And you’ll leave here with a whole new wardrobe, made to order.”

And she was right— the shopping was splendid, the prices low and the quality of the goods extremely good; practically anything one’s materialist, acquisitive heart desired was there by the bale in Itaewan, or Electronics Row, or in the markets around Tongdemun gate. The chance to revel in unrestrained retail therapy was seen as one of fortune’s paybacks for having to spend a year separated from the family, and living in comprehensively dumpy barracks buildings, and I indulged, although on a much more discriminating basis than some of my peers. (A drawer-full of silk scarves, two bespoke gabardine suits, some amethyst and garnet jewelry, a couple of pieces of celadon pottery, half a dozen knock-off Coach handbags, and a bale of assorted lengths of fine fabric from the big market near Tongdemun Stadium.) Never mind why guys liked a tour in the ROK; servicewomen, without fail, adored the many opportunities and venues for intensive, prolonged hard-core shopping.

However… and that is the one big big-as-an-elephant-in-the-living-room “however”… The second thing. It never escaped anyone’s notice for long that… umm, there was this little matter of the DMZ… and as long as the Star Channel cable ran M*A*S*H reruns every weeknight at 8PM, we were reminded that yes, there had been a pretty brutal, vicious war. A war which was not actually over, only in remission…. And the North Koreans still hunkered down behind their side of the 39th parallel, emerging at regular intervals to make warlike threats and noises, which since Seoul was in artillery range forced everyone to at least take stock of their contingency plans and their pucker factor. The South Koreans and the old hands got pretty blasé about it all, after the first couple of times. Theoretically at least, the commies still could come blasting over the border again and chase us all down to Pusan, but it had been nearly fifty years since the last time they had any luck with that plan. It had the potential to be pretty ugly, when and if it would ever happen. Sensible (or fatalistic) people like me stoutly refused to panic until such time as when Peter Arnett in a flack jacket was spotted bunkered down on the Namsan Hill.

In the meantime, we could be pretty sure that it was a very, very strange place, north of the DMZ, especially when Kim Il Sung up and died, and the newscast from KBS that night was the same fifteen minutes of stock video of North Korea… some footage of the city, crowds of people, marching Nork troops, the Great Leader… and then the city footage… patched together to make half an hour of newscast. The most unsettling video segments were of North Korean citizens, and soldiers loudly and ostentatiously wailing in grief. I was watching the newscast from the booth where the English language translators were doing the simulcast, and it seemed to me that the translator and the KBS techs working that newscast were horrified and embarrassed by having to watch their distant kin put on such an over-the-top display. I had generally found the Koreans I worked with to be on the jolly and open-hearted side of the emotional display spectrum, rather than the stoic and undemonstrative side, but this… this was worse than horrible.

At the time there were only a faction of the whispers and suppositions about conditions in the North that there are now out in public… but afterwards the other translators and I agreed that things must be pretty awful, to make people carry on in that unseemly manner. Everything I have read since then only strengthens my conviction that then North Korea finally implodes— when the barriers are down, and the gates open, and the outside world finally looks in, and recoils in horror— we will see things of such brutal depravity as will make Auschwitz-Birkenau look like child’s play. The world— especially the parts of it which enabled North Korea to continue in this fashion for 50 years— will be properly shamed and abashed that we did not act sooner… but Barbara Demick and the Los Angles Times (which used to be a reputable paper, back in the day) will have to content themselves with our contempt for having done such sterling service (and I mean that word in the nasty and vulgar sense) for a murderous dictatorship.

Jason at Iraq Now has quite a bit more to say, but be forewarned, this is a NC-17 sort of rant!

Other musings on Korea, here and here, from my archive.

Home of the Daily Brief

02. March 2005 · Comments Off on Home of the Daily Brief · Categories: General, Military

It may just be an odd fancy, but I have lately begun to visualize what the “Daily Brief” would be like if it existed in the real world, if it were a real place, not a vast collection of bits of data on a server in… wherever our server is. (Duluth, I think. At least that’s where the snail-mail address is, if I ever chose to actually mail them a check, and not just transfer Paypal funds.) We exist in the electronic overworld, linked by posts, comments and e-mails, a mundane version of the linked psychics on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s mysterious planet of Darkover. I have never actually met any of the other “Daily Brief” members face to face, and all we know of each other is what everyone knows from what we write, and post in this space. (Which may be quite a lot…)

Some of us have been coming here for a long time, some wander in and out, irregularly…occasionally a troll washes in, on link from somewhere else, or on a tide of gambling and porn spam… and sometimes a reader just comes to check out a post, and likes the look of the place and sticks around, unaware of three years of archives and history, and all the regulars that were there for a while. Very like the military, actually; people come and go, all the time.

I see “The Daily Brief” as one of those places that pulls in a mostly military clientele— kind of a cross between the unit break-room, one of those private clubs maintained in the barracks, the local VFW, and one of those divey little places immediately off-base with a name like the “Drop Zone”, or “The Rally Point”. Everyone else is perfectly welcome, of course— but should realize that some of the regulars maybe a little more…. umm, testier than others.

It’s dim and a little shabby on the inside, with a bar and a pool table, and a juke-box, and a lot of overstuffed chairs from DRMO, most of which have sprung seats, and splits in the vinyl mended with duct tape. The walls are so well-covered with old framed photos of historical events and heroes, unit patches and banners, souvenirs of wartime and peace time, that it’s hard to make out what color they are; maybe that peculiar institutional green, gone to a dark beige no-color with age and wear.

For such a shabby little place, though it has a killer sound system, and a big-screen TV, and a huge collection of movies, CDs, DVDs and tapes… BX/PX privileges y’know. Fifty years worth of popular music, movies and other cultural stuff. And books, lots of books… history, mostly, but plenty of the light stuff, too. Anything that ever touched on military matters is neatly lined up on shelves knocked together out of plywood, dark stained and then lacquered with a couple of coats of shiny varnish. There’s a dart-board in one corner, I think the Group-Captain left that. And because this is the blogosphere, there’s a cat hanging about the place, usually sleeping in the most comfy chair.

At the back of the “Daily Brief”, there’ll be a couple of windows and a door that opens onto a terrace, a terrace with some picnic tables and a barbeque pit, a couple of steps above a lawn. The butt can is out here, because you can’t smoke inside any more. ” Digital Warfighter” is right next door— we share the terrace and the lawn, of course— and there is a lot of back and forth. There are trees at the edge of the lawn, and beyond that… a shoreline of some kind, I believe, but I can’t really be sure about what ocean. The kids are welcome, since this is a family-oriented sort of place. Sparkey’s daughters and son, and the five-year old version of Blondie are romping on the lawn with some other kids.

The grown-up version of Blondie , though, is over at the bar with ThePie and Capt. Loggie comparing tales of eventful TDYs and interesting things to see in Europe. Sparkey, Timmer and Kevin Connors are swapping brags about the latest toys for the boys, and Stryker pops in from next door, freaking a little because he is trying to quit smoking for real, this time! And Joe and I and a couple of the other retirees are hanging out in the comfy chairs, telling what I always called “Old Sarge” tales, of the way it used to be, back in the day…

Oh, yes, the Daily Brief, for your quick snorkeling trip through what’s on the military mind. Just close your eyes and imagine.

In My Garden

27. February 2005 · Comments Off on In My Garden · Categories: Domestic, General

Where I spent Sunday afternoon, after the first trip of the year to the Antique Rose Emporium….

Side Garden

here… and here

Back Steps

Of course, these pictures are from last spring, when the wisteria was in bloom… but it will be looking like this in about three weeks.

I just think of it as my private patch of paradise….

10 Reasons I Won’t Be Watching the Oscars!

27. February 2005 · Comments Off on 10 Reasons I Won’t Be Watching the Oscars! · Categories: General, That's Entertainment!

1. I don’t remember going to the movies at all, this last year. Honestly, nothing I read about any of them in the reviews would have moved me off a rock ledge overhanging a thousand-foot drop, let alone wasting nearly $10 and two and a half hours of my life.

2. Ooops, I did go to one movie, but only because Blondie dragged me to “Phantom of the Opera”. Nice costumes, very operatic music, principal performers’ voices not really strong enough for the materiel, though.

3. The Oscars are different from how many similar entertainment award shows— how?

4. Four hours of self-congratulatory pap, by over-dressed, over-bejewelled, over-paid nit-wits. Sorry, guys, I am easily bored; I already know I would want those four hours of my life back.

5. I go to movies to be amused, enthralled and entertained; not to be grossed out, have my intelligence (and my values) insulted, or be deafened by the soundtrack. Curiously, this means I have never gone to a Tarantino movie. I may have seen an early Stanley Kubrick movie or two, but I just may be remembering reading the Mad Magazine parody.

6. Characters in movies as sick, psychopathic, or just plain nasty people; somehow these are the award-winning performances, but if I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes with their real-life version…. Why the hell should I spend two-hours plus, with them in the multiplex?

7. Curiously enough, the movies from the past that over time emerge as truly stellar, intriguing, develop a popular or cult following… they were usually pretty well ignored by the Oscars for the year they were considered.

8. Hollywierd is an insular little world, and for the last thirty years dripped covert contempt for those of us in fly-over country. This year, that contempt became overt. Right back at ya, Hollywierd.

9. I actually have a life, and have to go to work tomorrow, where no one there gives a damn about the Oscars, either.

10. There’s no Lord of the Rings move in the running, this year, so why bother?

Meditation on the Great War

25. February 2005 · Comments Off on Meditation on the Great War · Categories: General, GWOT, History

I was looking through my own archives this week, and realized that essay-wise, I periodically came back to the “Great War”, 1914-1918…(here, here, here) which struck me as bit curious. Vietnam was going on up until I started high school, and the effects of that war were still deeply felt when I started service life. We went back to the swamps of South-East Asia, metaphorically speaking, all during the most recent election; it is old and well-trodden ground for pols and reporters and other chatterati.

When I was growing up, though, the war that we harked back to most frequently was of course, World War II. (here, here, here, here) I was born barely a decade after it was all over, my parents were teenagers during it, but many of their slightly older friends were participants; books, movies and television shows all harked back to it, even the plastic airplane models that JP built. That earlier world war seemed merely a prelude, an opening gambit. Seen through the medium of jumpy, coarse-grained film footage, very obviously cranked through a camera by hand, it all looked impossibly archaic… the uniforms and accoutrements, weapons, transport and gear all clearly, distinctly of another age, and faintly ridiculous at that.

And yet the sheer, bloody brutal bungling of that war, the monstrous wastefulness, not to mention the shattering changes that came out of it— the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the end of the Ottoman empire, the end of the Romanovs and the ascent of the Soviet— all of this cast a long shadow. It is a given that the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima, opening the nuclear age and the Iron curtain, dropping across Eastern Europe, all cast a shadow too, but more a political shadow.

Look at the pictures of ordinary people, read novels and other accounts of ordinary lives, before and after the Great War, and compare that with the same, before and after the Second World War. My parents and grandparents lives really didn’t materially change much: the lives they led in 1939 were pretty much the same that they had in 1945, the things they had, and the amusements they favored didn’t change all that much. Unless there are specific references to the war, a mystery novel from the late Thirties reads pretty much like a mystery novel from ten years later. The movies they watched, the radio shows people listened to, all stayed pretty much a constant.

But to go back and consider the difference between the world of 1910 and 1920… just to look at the way people dressed, amused themselves, used the available technologies. To read contemporary literature, to look at how the people who lived through the Great War looked back at the time before it, is to know how heartbreakingly aware they were of what had been lost, and how much everything had changed. The automobile was not a rarity, neither were bicycles, trains, electricity and telephones, but they weren’t all that common as they would be later. It was a horse-drawn world, just as it had been for centuries before. Clothes were elaborate, manners ornate, even the middle classes had servants. The place of monarchy and the nobility was secure, everything was for the best in this best and most cosmopolitan of all possible worlds.

And then in the space of half a decade it had fractured into millions of pieces: the murderous war, the flu pandemic at the end of it, the revolution in Russia; the pillars of everything comfortable and familiar were rocked, and the world we have now, ninety years later is the result. With the best of intentions, those who were still alive at the end of it— politicians, intellectuals, soldiers— tried to cobble something together, out of all those smashed pieces of that proud, forward-thinking, immensely confident tower that had been their world.

I think I keep coming back to it because 9/11 had the same effect in the course of a single day; not so much on the physical aspects of our lives… not much has really changed there, save for seeing the American flag in many more places and much oftener than before… and of course for the military being very much better thought of than before. For many of us, certain intellectual verities were smashed in the course of a single day day: amongst them that we were at the end of history, mad Islamic revolutionaries were nothing to fret about, we were secure, and had nothing to fear from anyone– and if we did, it small stuff and really our own fault. But it turned out that we weren’t at the end of history. The really shattering part was that we do have enemies willing to kill any number of us in the most savage ways. A lot of my own writing— and of lots of others in the blogosphere— is an attempt to come to grips with that, to sort out what has happened, what is going on, and what we should do about it… and what the world we build afterwards should look like.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…

22. February 2005 · Comments Off on Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch… · Categories: General

“I’m looking for a good cowboy,” Bush said Monday when a French reporter asked him whether relations had improved to the point where the U.S. president would be inviting Chirac to the U.S. president’s ranch in Texas. (link here)

Oh, yeah… (snort)… like imagine M. Chirac (snicker) out on the Crawford ranch (giggle) helping to cut brush (titter) with a chainsaw (snerk!) in August! (Bwhahh-hah-haw-haw!)

So, will he be cutting, while President Bush trims and stacks? (Owww, jeez, I think I pulled a muscle there, laughing so hard!)

Now, want to picture something really, really funny? Imagine all those pompous, blow-dried, elegantly dressed drones from the French news media… standing around in the mesquite brush and dust, and cow patties, waiting for the photo op!! Gotta be careful there boys, when the chips are down!

(Medic!!! I think I hurt something!)

Supporting the Troops????

22. February 2005 · Comments Off on Supporting the Troops???? · Categories: General, Home Front

Well, I suppose this is an improvement on spitting on uniformed personnel. As for a class assignment, I’m afraid that the spelling in some of the letters needs work, also, not to mention the geography— especially since you can’t get farther away from Iraq than Korea, not without going towards it again. And the historical perspective is a little lacking; for a meaningless, brutal and bungled war, World War I is still win show and place… don’t they teach anything in public schools these days?
If you want to ask about that, here’s a link. Remember, it’s JHS 51, Park Slope, and an air of courteous and civil enquiry is appropriate. It may not get you anywhere, but it is appropriate.

(Original story link courtesy of Rantburg, link to chancellors’ office, courtesy of LGF reader “pookleblinky”)

The Big Lie

21. February 2005 · Comments Off on The Big Lie · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

The world has changed… I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. The power of the enemy is growing.
(From LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring)

That is the power of the Big Lie, the outrageous falsehood that is repeated, and repeated and repeated. Eventually it is everywhere, all at once, so omnipresent that it is worse than a many-headed hydra; no matter how many times you bash away at it, it regenerates, re-grows, it is always there, no matter how many times you cut it down. Once it is repeated enough, it is accepted passively as true, and it is always there, in the water, the earth, the air… in the magazines one reads, the television shows, the movies… so saturated amongst the media that one begins to think that it is in their very DNA.

The other seductive power of the “big lie”, besides constant repetition, is that a good portion of those who hear it are predicated to believe it. They very much want to believe it. It slots easily in to an existing world-view and set of values and beliefs. If you are convinced that international Jewry controls the economy, or that the UN’s black helicopters are patrolling the Western US, or that Karl Rove is a Machiavellian puppet-master, you are already prepped for belief, having been excused the hard labor of looking at uncomfortable and contradictory— or even ambiguous facts and thrashing out some sort of reconciliation in the middle ground. Black and white is ever so much more satisfying than shades of murky grey. The “big lie” is even more embraceable if it serves to deflect blame from an individual, a country, or a cause, and reaches the highest form of usefulness if it can park that blame squarely at the door of whoever it would most richly satisfy the party of the first part to blame.

One of the “big lies” of my time was that of the of the freaked-out, atrocity committing, guilt-ridden Vietnam vet. It was perpetrated by a lazy news media, seized upon eagerly by anti-war activists and grubby politicians hoping to ride a popular cause and finally exploited by the entertainment media looking for the cheap and easy cliché— took on a horrible half-life of its own, poisoning attitudes about the military for decades. Need a handy villain? The military would do! A cheap bit of bathos? Bring in the guilt-ridden veteran! An enduring cliché? Cue up the stock footage of hovering Hueys over a rice paddy with “All Along the Watchtower” on the audio track! I was ultimately and forever put off the “X-Files” when one of their nastier episodes featured a massacre of half-aliens by a unit of the US Army: the show encouraged a very sick kind of paranoia, I thought, and that the show’s writers thought that particular plot twist to be remotely credible said more about them than the Army. I realized how pervasive that big lie had become, when watching news coverage of the build-up to Gulf War I. Most of the reporters actually doing coverage of the American forces could hardly contain their air of pleased surprised at how utterly normal, well-spoken, and… and just darned nice all those military people were, in their funny hats and dusty chocolate-chip cammies. Who would have thought it? Not a murderous hopped-up psychopath among them.

Perhaps this will explain in a small way the almost universal anger of various milbloggers at CNN’s ex-functionary Eason Jordan. Those of us with long memories of how the Vietnam vet “big lie” distorted military service in the eyes of the general public cannot endure to see this happening again, without protest— not from the egregious Mr. Jordan, not from Sy Hersh, not from 60 Minutes. We have to engage the “big lie”, to whack it back to the ground again and again, to fact-check, to post our own stories, to bear witness to events we see happening before our own eyes, to demand an accounting of those who perpetrate the “big lie” for their own ends.

And if that be a blogger lynch mob… be a sweetheart and hand around the torches and pitchforks, please. We have work to do.

To the barracades, my friends!

And Now a Brief Word About Comments…

21. February 2005 · Comments Off on And Now a Brief Word About Comments… · Categories: General, Site News

For the last couple of months, this weblog and many others have been targeted by organized and automated comment-spamming, whereby comments containing links are attached indiscriminately to just about every entry in the archive. These comments, links and originating websites are generally pushing an assortment of prescription drugs, variations on poker and other casino games, and sexual perversions of truly outstanding vileness. There appears to be a profit being made somewhere, something to do with inflating the trackback numbers or referrer logs for the sites, but in the case of “The Daily Brief” that would be money down the drain.

Somewhere, somewhere in the blogosphere there might remain a site or two which has not figured out how to block or delete the comment spam, and plugs for texas-hold-em poker, cut rate cialis and improbable perversions are roaming free and untrammeled across the archives. This site is not one of them, thanks to 1) Sparkey’s timely installation of comment spam filters, and 2) constant updating of the list of keywords which automatically dump a comment into the holding bin for review.

I am not going to be specific about the words which kick a comment into the holding bin, since I don’t want to make it easier for the spam comment trolls to contravene the list, but be assured that assorted references to card games, prescription drugs and particular 4-letter words included in a comment will put that comment into the holding bin until I get around to reviewing them for approval. And sometimes a comment just winds up there anyway…. But if your comment does not immediately appear, don’t panic. It hasn’t been eaten. It will appear eventually.

Curiously, the comment-spamming seems to be entirely automated— even though no more than one or two comments have appeared (for a very short time, and gone as soon as I am aware of them) whoever is doing this is still trying. There were over 950 spam-comments which they attempted to post during an eight hour period starting at 10 PM last night, a new overnight record. I anticipate hitting the 1,000 comment level very soon, and until something or someone puts these jokers out of business, comments at “The Daily Brief” will continue to be lightly moderated.

Baden-Baden: Part the Second

20. February 2005 · Comments Off on Baden-Baden: Part the Second · Categories: Domestic, General

The Caracalla-Therme in Baden-Baden was very new, all sleek glass and polished surfaces, and would have stuck out like a very sore thumb if it hadn’t been so tactfully placed among so very many large trees. Practically everything else of note in the spa-town was built in Beaux-Arts or rustically Germanic plaster and half-timbering, sparkling clean, adorned with gardens and lawns. Every vista delighted the eye; there was nothing to strike a jarring note. I wondered briefly where they stashed unattractive elements like supermarkets, auto wrecking yards and poor people.

Allee, Baden-Baden

“You must zign zis release, madam, “said the attendant at the front desk. “Your dottir, she must be-have in ze baths. Ve haff many invalids taking ze waters, you must see zat she iz not to be runnink and jumpink.” I cheerfully signed the form, and accepted a locker key on a length of elastic, while Blondie looked around with deep interest. I resolved to keep hold of her hand as much as possible, especially in the neighborhood of anyone who looked especially frail. Frankly most everyone else looked robustly healthy.

We changed in one of the women’s changing rooms and locked up our clothes and my purse, and padded barefoot down the corridor towards the pools, the largest of which was housed in a great three-story tall glass tower, a round stone basin full to shoulder-deep with steamingly warm water. A bench ran around the inside lip of the biggest pool— not all the way, as Blondie discovered when she frolicked off the end of it and went down with a yelp and a gurgle into water well over her nearly-five year old head. I fished her out, and we settled on a length of bench which offered a view of the gardens outside, and two smaller pools. Bliss it must be to sit immersed in warm water, up to your neck and regard that view in winter, all covered in snow. It is also hard to be standoffish, when lounging in your bathing suit in a pool of hot water.

“You are American or English?” queried one of the other bathers. Ah, the eternal, pause-making question; it was probably pretty safe to answer it here, when asked by a bare-chested man in swim-trunks. “And where are you from, in America?”
Ah, the other pause-making question: where from? Originally? Lately? Lets’ not even get into the fact that my daughter had been born in Japan, and in another month we would be “from” someplace else entirely. Just travelers, passing through. And what did I think of Germany?
“Do you speak German?” another bather asked all friendly interest.
“Some. I had three years in high school and a year in college, but I’ve never been sent anyplace I could use it.”
“We should help you practice, then, and speak only German,” suggested the first man— oh, well, he had a point. Back in the States, the only practice I had outside of class was with some of the older people at Church, émigrés all, some of whom insisted on singing all the old hymns in German, irregardless of the rest of the congregation. I made careful and laborious conversation for a while, while Blondie got steadily more bored, and fidgety, and then I excused ourselves, saying we were going to check out the really hot pool.

We had passed the steps going into the small ante-room with the very hot pool on our way in. There was a constant circulation of people around the pools, wet feet slapping on the floor, and as we were going down the steps to the hot pool, Blondie suddenly reached up and took the hand of a woman who was also going down the stairs, who looked down at her with startled amazement.
“’Allo, kleine!”
(Blondie: “I really don’t know why I did that… I just had the feeling that she really needed something, something that we could do.”)

The woman was older than I, maybe mid-forties, and painfully slender. She also had a daughter with her, a teenage girl— like Blondie and I, killing time on an afternoon by soaking in the hot water. She was Lise, her daughter Anna: they were in Baden-Baden because Anna was to start at a local high-end secretarial school, which demanded that graduates be fluent in German, French and English, and Lise had driven her down to Baden-Baden in her husband’s BMW sedan.
“It is a luxurious car, “Lise admitted, “But my husband— he had to travel so much, to meet people for business…he needed to be comfortable, traveling so much… we should be speaking English now, so Anna can practice… your husband, is he in ze Air Force, alzo?”
Across the hot pool, Anna and Blondie were discovering a mutual enthusiasm for “Asterix and Obelix”. Anna was the right age to be adored by a small child, and to find the unquestioning adoration of a small child to be completely endearing.
“Asterix.. , Obelix… Dogmatix… Vitalstatistix…Getafix…Fullyautomatix…Cackaofinix… Unhygenix…Geriatrix…”
“Not any more, “I said, “We split up before she was born.”
“I am sorry, “And her eyes rather filled. “So hard for you. My husband died six months ago… he used to come to here on business…”
“I am sorry,” I said. Six months and a widow… five years and a bit, and something else. As hard to endure? Never mind. Grief is the price we pay for having love.

“We are going to the Brenner’s’ Park Hotel for tea, after here, “I said. It was pronounced around there as one long word: “Brennersparkhotel”, rather like Fort Worth in Texas is pronounced by the old hands as all one word: “Fortworth”.
“Truly? How wonderful… I have never been, of course I have heard of it. My husband went there many times, to meet with clients, you understand.”
”Then, why don’t come with us?” I suggested. Lise sparkled with interest, and agreed that yes, it would be a perfect culmination to the afternoon. We would go get dressed and meet in the foyer, and walk over to Brenner’s’ together, and have a lovely leisurely teatime.

(Blondie: I didn’t think anything about her wearing a black dress. In Greece, it was just what older ladies did, wear black all the time.)

The black made her look haggard, I thought. I wondered if it were still the tradition to go to half-mourning after a year, to white and grey and lavender. At any rate, she was a bit more in tune with the ambiance than I was, in denim skirt, and blouse and a preppy LL Bean sweater, but the staff at Brenner’s’ was too well-schooled to appear to take any notice of what guests and customers chose to present themselves in. We were shown to the grand lobby where tea was being served, adjacent to the formal dining room. That end of the lobby was furnished with a grand collection of chairs, sofas, and low tables, set about with urns of plants and flowers; a place to sit and have tea, or wait for someone, or just sit about with a newspaper and people-watch.

“Oh, look, how grand!” whispered Lise, as a very elegant lady in a long formal swept by on the arm of a gentleman in black tie evening dress. “It’s just like “Hotel”… a television show, have you ever seen it?”
“No, “I said. We had watched very little TV in Greece. We were brought a tray with the tea things, and little plates of cake and sandwiches, and service for four in delicate china, and we sipped and nibbled and vastly enjoyed the elegant procession of other guests going in to early dinner in the main dining room, all formally dressed with serious jewelry. One of the black-tie clad gentlemen was circulating throughout the lobby, bowing elegantly over a hand here, nodding grandly to another gentleman there. Lise’s cup of enjoyment quite overflowed when he came up to us and introduced himself as the manager of Brenner’s’; was everything completely to our satisfaction?
“It’s perfect, “replied Lise, and when he had continued on his grand and hospitable rounds, she set down her teacup with a little clink into the saucer and said, “I am so glad we have come with you, so glad we met you at the baths. This was the very first time since my husband died…. That I have gone and done something fun!”

I mumbled something modest and conventional about enjoying it all also, but never said what I was really thinking about grief and loss, as I looked at Anna and Blondie giggling over their mutual fondness for comic books. Blondie’s father still walked in the sunshine of this world, alive and well, but the love to which we should have been entitled, inexplicably, mysteriously withdrawn, if indeed if I had ever had it to begin with. Anna’s father may have been six months gone… but at least he had left, still loving her mother.
And grief is the price we pay for having loved, no matter how long or short the duration of that love.

Baden-Baden: Part the First

16. February 2005 · Comments Off on Baden-Baden: Part the First · Categories: General

At this date, I am not sure what my reason was to stop over for a couple of days in the Wilhelmine splendors of the spa-town of Baden-Baden. We were just passing through, my daughter and I, going from an assignment in Greece to another one in Spain, and taking our time, on a long meandering jaunt up through the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, and across Germany, and France. I had plotted a zig-zaggy route, and made some reservations in places that I knew I wanted to see, but left other stops for following an impulse— did we want to stop and look around here, or was I just tired of driving for the day? Baden-Baden was one of the planned stops; something about the spa-baths, and the splendors of Brenner’s Park-Hotel, all those marvelous relics of the 19th century high-life lived by gentlemen in flannel suits and panama hats, and ladies in sweeping petticoats, with their hair swept up, and whole flocks of birds piled onto impossibly ornate hats was just too enticing to resist. Baden-Baden had been a pillar in what the historian Barbara Tuchman called “The Proud Tower” of Europe before World War I, that wonderfully cosmopolitan place where no one needed a passport and all the royalty were cousins by blood or marriage or both, before war and revolution, blood and barbed wire and the Maxim gun brought down that shining edifice.

I couldn’t afford to stay at a place like Brenner’s, though, but we happily settled into a room in a tiny family-run guesthouse in the old part of town, where a hot bath in the shared facility was extra, and the owner/manageress kept the detached bath taps behind the bar, and handed them over upon payment of the additional fee. Poor woman, she looked a little bit frazzled, and explained that her husband was suddenly hospitalized, and she was left to run the place and do the housekeeping herself, and so she apologized for things not being as tidy as usual. Their son, a sturdy little blond boy named Oliver, was exactly Blondie’s age. The two of them looked enough alike to be twins; in the way of children they became instantly inseparable, constantly dashing off together to the garden or into the family quarters to play with Oliver’s toys and books . How they communicated, I had no idea, but they did.
(Blondie: I dunno how we talked— we were just kids. I think we pantomimed stuff to each other.)

Blondie and Patch

(Blondie in colorful local attire, c. 1985)

She was in two minds about going with me into the heart of Baden-Baden the next day. Oliver’s mother had presented me with a little packet from the local tourism authority meant to be handed out to everyone who came to visit Baden-Baden; brochures and a town map, and some coupons and discount offers on local attractions, including one for a most splendid new establishment, the “Caracalla-Terme”.
“It’s a hot bath and spa, “I said, “Named after a Roman emperor. We’ll take our bathing suits and things, and check it out. And we’ll go eat at Brenner’s Park Hotel.”

I had already discovered through the simple expedient of driving through it, that Baden-Baden was a tiny place, with narrow little streets and little available parking, but until we ventured out on foot, we had no notion of how beautiful it actually was. The Lichtentaler Allee, a long and skinny park, beautifully planted with trees and a velvety green lawn ran along one bank of a little local river, the Oosbach. We followed it, strolling all the way into town, looking across the little river at the back gardens of the villas and mansions on the other side, where formal gardens ran down to the grassy bank. The houses were all painted the pastel colors of Easter candy, with white neo-Baroque trim.

Brenner’s was all that, but blown up to gargantuan proportions. The prices on the menus posted in the porte-cochered covered entryway were pretty gargantuan, also, even the a la cart luncheon menu. However, there was an afternoon tea served daily…
“We’ll come back for afternoon tea, “ I told Blondie firmly. After all, we had come all the way to Baden-Baden, of course we should eat under the Brenner’s fabled roof at least once.

In a paved square in the center of town, ringed by trees still bearing the shredded yellow remnants of their yearly foliage, and two rows of colonnaded shops, a band played lilting music, Lehar and Strauss waltzes for an audience taking their leisure on the sort of metal folding chairs seen in parks all over Europe. The miniature shops in the colonnade sold charming little luxury goods— bath salts and lotions, silk ties, leather gloves and confectionary. We shared a little round cake shaped like a chestnut conker, covered in pale green marzipan and little spikes of sugar icing, and I bought a pair of black pigskin driving gloves. The saleslady brought out a little brocade pillow for me to rest my elbow on while she personally battened the glove onto my hand to check for a good fit. It was a mild day, just cool enough in the shade to put on a sweater. The sky was clear and blue, the sunshine just warm enough, and flowers still blossomed everywhere, in ornamental beds, in urns and hanging baskets. Baden-Baden seemed like one of those enchantingly perfect little towns in a glass globe.

(To be Continued…..)

Crossing the Line

14. February 2005 · Comments Off on Crossing the Line · Categories: General

I swear, this must just be my week taking solid whacks at low-dangling piñatas— there is a mass convergence of lunacy, not a ship of fools but a bus of idiots; Ward Churchill, Eason Johnson all in play, and now Lynne Stewart, weeping all over the news about her conviction. And the full moon, according to my calendar, won’t be for another week and half; perhaps someone has been conducting sky clad rites, or there is some great eruption in the Force. Or maybe everyone is just getting back to work after Superbowl….

I had read a long magazine profile about Lynne Stewart, crusading activist lawyer a couple of years ago; first I had ever heard of her specifically, although I probably heard her name in references to her client, the Blind Sheik, the trial and conviction of whom did make the overseas papers. I can’t remember who wrote the profile or where I read it; probably one of those East-Coasty cultural organs like New Yorker or the NY Times Magazine, but the essence of the piece was immediately filed and stashed in the eccentrically organized mental filing cabinet of my memory. (Imagine drawers full of files and facts with no neatly labeled source and file number on the folders. This is why I am a killer at Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit, but have to do Google searches to verify sources, quotes and dates of publication.)

The profile on first reading seemed pretty straightforward, and rather favorable: portrait of a long-time activist for a whole range of sometimes unpopular causes and people, a principled believer in civil rights, and the law, dedicated to clients who deserved some presumption of innocence, and effective defense, a down to earth, frumpy grandmotherly sort, held in the affection of her family and close friends; the author, I sensed wanted to like her very much, wanted us in reading it to like Lynne Stewart also. But at the end of the article I had just a faint sour taste in my mouth, and uneasy mild dislike that I could really not pick out any particular reason for. There was something chill… a sense of an absence in emotion, as if a sociopath were going through all the paces, saying all the charming, engagingly friendly things, but with cold and empty eyes all the time.

There was mention of the ongoing investigation and charges of assisting Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in communicating with his followers as a sort of threat hanging over her, but it seemed to be treated with airy dismissal, and something of no account, an exaggeration, a figment of post 9/11 paranoia on the part of an over-zealous and bigoted Justice Department. Perhaps that was where my unease crept in. This was after 9/11, after the fatwa on Salman Rusdie, after bombings and riots and murders, after assassinations in Egypt and across the Islamic world, and she thought nothing of aiding her client to communicate with his fanatical followers? At his direction, mayhem elsewhere would be unleashed… and she was carrying on as if it was nothing to do with her, as if she were the consigliore to a Mafia don; a co-conspirator rather than a defender?

I listened to her sobbing on Morning Edition last week— she sounded shocked, disbelieving, as if she had never really considered the possibility of conviction until the very roof caved in on her. And she still hadn’t gotten a clue, and I began to idly wonder why. Didn’t a competent defense lawyer have to keep some kind of detachment about a client, a boundary against identifying too closely and wandering into all sorts of ethical and emotional sand traps? If anything, she seemed to be a true believer in the innocence of her clients and the malignity of the prosecution… and did that make it easier to slip over a line, to regard some rules as dispensable if it served the client’s interest? Laws are laws, planted thick across the land, as Ben Bolt pointed out in “A Man for All Seasons” and they are to protect all of us, not to be cut down as a convenience to a client.

The thought occurred that this is a fantasy ideology; it is not the law, or the client that she has served for thirty years, it is the entrancing vision of herself, the heroine in her own fantasy, defending the indefensible. 9/11 wasn’t real, the jihad of fundamental Islam against our country isn’t real, it’s all someone else’s malign plot, and she is the star of her own heroic epic movie, and everything and everyone else are merely props and extras. It was chilling, therefore, to read an excerpt from the indictment, courtesy of Belmont Club: “Also during the May 2000 prison visit, the superseding indictment alleges that Yousry (a confederate of Abdel Rahman’s masquerading as a translator) told Abdel Rahman and Stewart about kidnappings by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the Philippines and “Abu Sayyaf’s demand to free Abdel Rahman, to which Stewart replied, ‘Good for them.’”. Those held by Abu Sayyaf included more than a dozen children, and a German woman in poor health. Props and extras, indeed. In another interview, (courtesy of Monthly Review via Damien Penny) Ms Stewart stoutly defended the rights of some people to lock up others; “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.” (Imagine, the sheer, unmitigated nerve of those dissidents, to undermine the “people’s revolution”— it’s all up to Mao or Stalin or Fidel to set them straight, of course.)

It may also be worth pointing out that Ms. Stewart seems to have had precious little firsthand experience of actually living under the conditions imposed by a people’s revolution for months or years on end, although she may come to a greater understanding of what “locking up people” actually means, up close and personal. Lost in the fantasy ideology, where other people are only abstractions, Ms Stewart might be that kind of lofty, well-meaning intellectual, like that of the Hallam family in mystery writer Robert Barnard’s “Skeleton in the Grass”

“The Hallam world suddenly presented itself to her as two tracts of territory, separated by a ditch. Within the inner circle were the family and servants at Hallam— a warm beautiful cosy community. Beyond the ditch was humanity at large, for whom the Hallams had a great, generous love, the highest aspirations. But between the two worlds were the people in the ditch: the people among whom the Hallams lived and for whom they felt nothing… a phrase from Bleak House thrust itself into her brain; “Telescopic Philanthropy”. The Hallams kept their eyes on the horizon, on a new and better world, but they hardly noticed what went on around their feet… there was… for all their high-thinking and their social concern, a sort of lack, a sort of blankness.”.

Just that lack, that blankness, that lack of empathy with real people is what really dooms the efforts by these real life-Hallams, like Stewart, who have their eye on the new and better world… but hardly notice what goes on around their feet, or in a Philippine jungle, a Soviet gulag… or what happened to those two big office towers in the Financial district, three years ago.

Full Moon Rising????

11. February 2005 · Comments Off on Full Moon Rising???? · Categories: General

From reader Jaalinta, via LFG, comes more evidence for the theory of coalescing idiocy, which postulates that all the stupidity in the world, of every political extreme and variety is actually converging into one huge, radioactively pulsating orb.
Professor Ward Churchill, faux-Indian activist and intellectual piñata for every humorist in the blogosphere has just been named as a high priest of the Raelians.
I swear, it’s getting harder and harder for Scrappleface and Iowahawk to keep ahead of real life.

Warm, Breathing & Avant-Garde

10. February 2005 · Comments Off on Warm, Breathing & Avant-Garde · Categories: Ain't That America?, General

Since everyone else in the blogosphere has taken a couple of manly thwacks at the academic carcass of Ward Churchill, the dunce of the University of Colorado ethnic studies department, I didn’t think there was a need for moi to pile on… but what the hell. I’ve got the bile and the energy left over from ripping Eason Jordan, a far more suitable target. I can always make the time to mock a guy who looks like the late Susan Sontag in bad drag, anyway. Professor Churchill is just the lagniappe, the dessert truffle… and besides, they had a story about him on NPR Morning edition this morning. Someone over there must have learned how to do a google search, and skim Instapundit, so there may be hope for them still. The story left out all the amusing stuff— the faux-Indian pretensions, the Che-revolutionary posing, the crack-pot political theorizing and the extremely dubious scholarship— and simply dealt with it as a matter of academic freedom. In other words, the right of academia to traffic in unpopular ideas without having your ass canned with extreme prejudice and a couple of burly campus security officers.

Well, it certainly doesn’t get much more unpopular, idea-wise, than suggesting that people who worked in the Twin Towers were all functionaries of a Nazi state, that they were all “little Eichmans” and richly deserved to die by fire, fall or collapsing building. I am sure if he really worked at it, he could have thought up something much more richly insulting, more hurtful, more calculated to outrage the taxpayers of the state of Colorado who (for some bizarre reason!) provide him with an insanely generous paycheck… but.

Oh, yes, the big “But”…. NPR was right; academic freedom means putting up with stuff you don’t agree with. In fact, there ought to be more of it; a lot of people on college campuses everywhere ought to be hearing a lot more of stuff they don’t agree with, but that’s a rant for another occasion. Getting back to the good Professor, though— there is a better reason to keep him. Given the sort of poseur he appears to be, he would milk being fired for even more. Oh, yeah, make me a martyr to the altar of academic freedom, baby! Crushed under the wheels of the fascistic state for the crime of speaking truth to power! I can already hear the interview on NPR, with Juan Williams going all gooey and wobbly-voiced over how poor, poor Professor Churchill was savaged, savaged by the mob of reactionary right-wing death beasts. I have a low nausea threshold, and would prefer not to barf up my morning cup of tea with milk, one tsp sugar, and slice of wheat toast with honey, so I think they should keep him. After all, they hired him, on what looks like very thin qualifications; warm, breathing and theatrically avant-garde. Figuring out who exactly approved him for tenure, and why would provide another vein of rich amusement.

And that brings me to the main reason I think they should keep him; for the sheer amusement value. Professor Churchill has inestimable value as the bulls-eye for metaphoric target practice; chained to the academic stocks as it were, focus for scorn, derision, for deconstruction of his fraudulent scholarship, vilely insulting writings and speeches, his questionable status as a “native American”, extremely thin academic qualifications, bullying demeanor, and general fuckwittedness. There is just so much good materiel to work with; we could go on laughing at him for years, picking him up in the intervals between bigger and more transient matters for a little more thrashing, much like my cats derive hours of amusement and exercise from batting around palmetto bugs. I’d rather go back and thrash him every one in a while for practice, than have him all over the media being a martyr.
Besides, I have the feeling that being laughed at, long and heartily is a far, far more subtle and lingering torment. What say you all?

Memo: CNN—The Most Busted Name in News

09. February 2005 · Comments Off on Memo: CNN—The Most Busted Name in News · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

From: Sgt Mom
To: Mr. E. Jordan, and his legacy media enablers
Re: The game is afoot!

1. I wholeheartedly believe that responsible news reporting requires that its’ practitioners remain loitering with meaningful intent in the vicinity of verifiable facts. However, I have been informed that such a such an innocent belief may pose an impossibly high standard and handicap, and unfit me to participate in “journalism” such as it is practiced by luminaries such as Sy Hersh, Dan Rather, Peter Arnett, Jason Blair, and Mr. Eason Jordan’s very prominent network.

2. Standards have indeed fallen appallingly low when the so-called top-tier, credible news outlets compete in the fraud and fantasy stakes with the kind of tabloids who run pictures of faces on Mars, movie-stars’ weight and addiction problems and bogus miracles. I would not be surprised to see “60 Minutes” doing an expose of Michael Jackson as a space alien… oops, that was already done, wasn’t it?

3. In this particular instance, the problem is not in the story as published; it is the spectacle of Mr. Jordan making an astonishing accusation, accusing the American military in Iraq of deliberately targeting and killing a number of reporters, during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month. If true and can be proven, this comes very close to being a war crime, and it would be Mr. Jordan’s responsibility as a citizen to share the particulars— who, where, when— with the proper authorities. At the very least, this would merit the same exhaustive news coverage as the ever-floggable dead horse of Abu Graib. Yet Mr. Jordan seems to have been as least as circumspect here, as he was concerning atrocities perpetrated by Saddam Hussein’s regime during the time that CNN gloried in having a bureau in Baghdad.

4. The alternative is that the accusation is false and made to score casual points with a portion of the audience at an open forum amongst the powerful and well-connected… this is even more appalling for the news profession. To perpetrate an outright lie, an untruth, to bear false witness goes beyond violating the standards of journalism. It is contrary to standards of ethical human behavior; it is wicked and wrong. We would not tolerate this in our children, our personal physician, our spouse, our structural engineers, or our subordinates, and will for damn sure not tolerate of our news media. Lamentably, a certain degree of elasticity with the truth is something we have come to expect, or at least factor in to our dealings with politicians, used car dealers, producers of television commercials, or the cretins who send us e-mails promising enlargement of body parts or transfers of improbably large sums of money from the descendents of deceased Nigerian functionaries. At this rate of depreciated credibility, many of the formerly respectable news organizations, such as CNN and CBS, AP and Reuters, will be shortly be at about that level. Or possibly a little below, given the current conditions.

5. This matter will not be made to go away, either. The tape made of the session must be released to the public, and Mr. Jordan’s allegation must be investigated, thoroughly, and completely. If, as I confidently expect, it is found to be baseless, then Mr. Jordan should— among other things— reminded rather forcibly of the penalties for slander.

6. Should this issue not be aired as it should be in the larger media— as the Deity is my witness, I shall laugh uproariously and throw popcorn at the television, the very next time I see some pompous blow-dried media drone standing in front of a corporate HQ or government office intoning piously about the public’s right to know.

Sincerely, and hoping you will take this communication to heart
Sgt. Mom

Country Roads and “Confiture Bar le Duc”

07. February 2005 · Comments Off on Country Roads and “Confiture Bar le Duc” · Categories: General, History

We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.

“We’ll cross right over Luxemburg, and then we’ll be in France,” I said. “You know, Gaul.”
“Will there be indomitable Gauls?” my daughter asked, seriously. She was just coming up to five years old. Her favorite comic books followed the adventures of the bold Gaulish warrior Asterix, and his friend, the menhir-deliveryman Oblelix, whose tiny village was the last to hold out against the imperial might of Roman conquest, thanks to a magic potion worked up by the druid Getafix, which gave superhuman strength to all the village warriors. The drawings in the books were artistically literate, and there were all sorts of puns and word-plays in the stories – and they had been translated and distributed all over.
“There could be,” I said, noncommittally. Three or four weeks ago, we had left the apartment in the suburb of Athens where we had lived for most of what she could remember of life and taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, on our way to my new assignment in Spain.

In easy stages I had driven the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, through the tiny neck of Austria, and across Southern Germany. We had so far stayed in a castle on the Rhine, a couple of guesthouses, a hotel outside Siena which could have been nearly anywhere, as it overlooked a junkyard on one side, and acres of grapevines on the other three, and another which covered two floors on the top of an office block in Florence and offered a view of the Duomo from the terrace. We had been to see ruins in Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the wondrous Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a Nazi concentration camp, and a mineral bath in Baden-Baden.

“Where are we going to do first?”
“Buy some jam,” I said.
“What kind of jam?” my daughter asked.
“It’s very superior jam, made with currents. They pick out the seeds by hand with a goose-quill, so it’s very expensive and only made in this one little town in France, but it is supposed to be the tastiest on earth. It’s on the way between here and Paris.”
Well, it wasn’t any odder than anything else I had taken her to see in the time that we had lived in Europe. She curled up with Asterix, while the VEV’s tires hummed tirelessly down the road.

I could tell, without having to see a border sign, when we had left Germany. Germany was as clean as if Granny Dodie had dusted it all, and scoured it twice with Lysol, and then groomed all the grass and trees with a pair of manicure scissors. Houses and cottages were all trim and immaculate, not a sagging roof or a broken shutter to be seen – and then, we were in another place, where slacker standards prevailed. Not absolute rural blight, just everything a little grimier, a little more overgrown, not so aggressively, compulsively tidy. And the highway became a toll road, and a rather expensive one at that. I made a snap decision to take the rural, surface roads at that point, and the toll-taker indulgently wrote out a list for me of the towns along the way of the road I wanted, hop-scotching from town to town, along a two-lane road among rolling hills and dark green scrub-forest, and little collections of houses around a square, or a traffic circle labeled ‘centre’ around which I would spin until I saw a signpost with the name of the next town, and the VEV ricocheted out of the roundabout, and plunged headlong down this new road. (Good heavens, a signpost that way for Malmedy! Well, they did say snottily in Europe that wars were a means to teach Americans about geography, but I was interested this day in the earlier war, and my route led south.)

Always two lanes, little traveled on a Sunday it seemed. I had no shred of confidence in my ability to pronounce French without mangling every syllable, but at least I could read signs in Latinate alphabets. And this was Alsace-Lorraine, I was sunnily confident of being able to make myself clear in German, if required. The VEV’s tank was still better than half full, and it was only midday. Here we were climbing a long steady slope, a wooded table-land, and a break in the trees, where a great stone finger pointed accusingly at an overcast sky. A signpost with several arrows pointed the various ways farther on – Ossuaire …Ft. Douaumont … Fleury. A parking lot with a scattering of cars, the same oppressive sense of silence I had felt in places like Pompeii, and Dachau, as if even the birds and insects were muffled.
“What’s this place?” My daughter emerged from the back seat, yawning.
“There was a horrendous battle here, sixty years ago. The Germans tried to take it, but the French held on.”
“Indomitable Gauls,” My daughter said wisely, and I pointed up at the Ossuary,
“That place is full of their bones. We’ll go see the museum, first.”

This was the place of which the stalwart Joffe had commanded, “They shall not pass,” the place in which it could be claimed— over any other World War I battlefield— that France bled out as a significant military power. For ten months in 1916 Germany and France battered each other into immobility, pouring men and materiel into the Verdun Salient with prodigal hands, churning every inch of soil with shellfire and poison gas, splintering the woods and little towns, gutting a whole generation of the men who would have been it�s solid middle-class, the politicians and patriots, leaders who might have forestalled the next war, or stood fast in 1940. It was the historian Barbara Tuchman who noted that the entire 1914 graduating class of St. Cyr, the French approximation of West Point had been killed within the first month of war. For this was a wasteful war, as if the great generals all stood around saying “Well, that didn’t work very well, did it?— so let’s do it again, and again and again, until it does indeed work.” And afterwards, no one could very well say what it had all been for, and certainly not that it had been worth it, only that the place was a mass grave for a million men.

There was the usual little sign at the admittance desk to the museum— so many francs, but students and small children were admitted free, and so were war veterans and members of the military. I got out my military ID, and politely showed it to the concierge, a gentleman who looked nearly old enough to have been a veteran of Verdun saying
“Ici militaire…”
He looked at me, at the card, at my tits, and at my daughter, and then at the card again, and laughed, jovially waving me on to the exhibits; models and bits of battered gear, mostly, and a bit in the cellar made up to look like a corner of the battlefield, hell in a very small place, all the ground stirred up again and again. Supposedly, they had despaired of ever planting a straight row of trees; there was so much stuff in the ground.
When we came out again, the clouds were lifting a bit … down and across the river there was a golden haze over the town.

“Are we going to buy jam now?” my daughter asked.
“When we get to Bar le Duc. I think we’ll get something to eat, and stay the night there,” I said, and in that golden afternoon, I followed the two-lane road, the Voie Sacree, the only road into Verdun from the railhead at Bar le Duc, where traffic never stopped during the battle, two hundred trucks an hour, and 8,000 men shoveling gravel under their wheels day and night. The only visible mark left along the road were square white-washed mile markers, topped with a metal replica of a poilu’s helmet, like grave markers for a France gone sixty years ago.

I bought six jars of the confiture, six tiny jars of preserve as bright as blood, filled with tiny globes of clear red fruit. It was exquisite; saved for special occasions; I made them last for nearly a decade.

7 Days and Counting: Eason Jordan

07. February 2005 · Comments Off on 7 Days and Counting: Eason Jordan · Categories: General

Time to put on the pajamas, and get to work. Eason Jordan’s apparent slander against the the US military is not going unremarked. More here.

If we’re going for the blog-swarm, can we take down Sy Hersh as well? Just asking.

Dances with the Media – Or Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

03. February 2005 · Comments Off on Dances with the Media – Or Bend Over, Here It Comes Again · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

When I worked in the Mather AFB Public Affairs office, I used to marvel at how resolute the Media Relations people were able to be, in the face of always imminent disaster when it came to dealing with the press, especially the Sacramento Bee reporter who specialized in military affairs, and was naturally convinced that he was the next Woodward and Bernstein. This gentleman or �Mr. T-B� seemed to believe that Mather AFB somehow harbored his very own Watergate scoop, which would bring him everlasting renown and showers of journalistic glory�if only he could hector the Public Affairs staff into admitting it. Or, failing that, leaping to the conclusion in print which put the base and the Air Force in as bad a light as possible.

Nothing the Major told � Mr. T-B� ever seemed to make a difference when the final story was published, no matter how polite, prompt and thoroughly his almost always preemptory queries were answered, Public Affairs was screwed, from the moment the phone rang. Just answering the insistently ringing phone, and telling the Major, or his second-in-command, Captain F— that �Mr. T-B� was on the line to speak to them was to see that either of them already had a rotten day, to know they were already thinking �Bend over, here it comes again!� while their lips formed the silent words �Aww�f**k!�� As they picked up the extension to actually say, �Good morning� what can we do for you today?� in a cheerful and professional voice, we all knew we were already lost.

Even Captain F—, a statuesque blond who looked like one of the minor Valkyries had only slightly better luck with �Mr. T-B�— and she was especially adept at the fine art of media handling. Watching her cope with a hostile media inquiry was like watching someone tap-dancing on a high-wire while juggling two flaming torches and a hand grenade— a dazzling display of dexterity, control and grace under pressure. Mr. T-B was probably not insensitive to the fact that his telephone calls were about as welcome to us as a case of the intestinal flu. He accused me of lying about the Major being at lunch; when he called one day, and everyone was out, save for myself and the senior civilian.
�He told you to say that, didn�t he?� Mr. T-B snarled, �You�re covering for him, aren�t you?�
�It�s eleven-thirty,� I said, rather stunned about being accused of lying over such a little matter. �Everyone�s at lunch.� Out of desperation, I gave the call to the senior civilian, a retired Army WO� and of course the first thing Mr. T-B wanted to verify was that the Major really was at lunch.

No, he was hands-down our most un-favorite person in the locality, especially after the front page story in the Sac Bee about the two little old ladies in an orange coupe. Owing to an unfortunate confluence of events, initiated when they blundered in the back gate, the two old ladies in coupe managed to get thoroughly got lost on base. In panic, disorientation and hysteria, they wound up speeding down the runway towards the SAC alert ramp, hotly pursued by a posse of armed Security Police troops, as they were heading into� umm� one of the places on base that was defended by deadly force and then some. The SPS had realized immediately what was happening; their commander later applauded them for good sense and restraint, but the ladies damn-near had heart attacks.

It made a very funny story and it percolated around the base for a month or two, by the time Mr. T-B snooped it out, and called the Public Affairs office to verify� which we did. The cartoon comic sketch of the whole scene that ran with the story was a low blow� but heck. It was a funny story, and we lived it down. The following year when a Buff crashed on takeoff in a muddy field nearby, and a senior officer at a tenant unit was accused of molesting children, I imagine the Public Affairs staff looked back nostalgically on the little old ladies in the orange coupe, barreling down the alert-area ramp.
It put things into perspective, though— the press had their job, and we had ours� and no matter how hard we worked to put a favorable image of the Air Force into it, the reporter was perfectly free to blow us off. To his credit, Mr. �T-B� did apologize, sort of, for the cartoon sketch. It was, he claimed, his editor�s idea. Just doing his job— and it was true. It really did happen.

I googled Mr. �T-B� before I wrote this, and he had a byline a couple of years ago, writing up an obit for the Sacramento Bee, so I don�t suppose he ever hit the pay dirt, his Watergate scoop, his entr�e into the big leagues. He just might have been too much of an old-fashioned gentleman for the so-called big leagues of journalism. Whatever else we might have thought of him in the Public Affairs office, he didn�t make s**t up, and he always called to verify facts. And if the facts were against him, he dropped the story. All this would seem to disqualify �Mr. T-B� for the practice of journalism in the style of Dan Rather, of Sy Hersh, and Eason Jordan, where bearing false witness, in promoting blatant and absolutely debunkable falsehoods is the order of the day.

They seem to have sold their souls for a byline, for a bit of fame and limelight, to stand in front of an appreciative crowd, telling that crowd what they want to hear. It must be a heady thing to stand before an approving audience, not realizing how stories of massacres, and targeting of journalists in Iraq by American military is taken as an offence, an offence against the honor of those Jacksonians who hold the values of �Duty, Honor, Country� in high regard, who may not be in the audience, but are listening now. Such people do not take well to being slandered, most especially by the press. We hear you, Eason Jordan. We hear you very well, and we know what you are. Writing obits for the Sacramento Bee might start to look very good to you as a career move by the time you have finished hearing from us.

They’re Not Laughing With You, They’re Laughing At You!

01. February 2005 · Comments Off on They’re Not Laughing With You, They’re Laughing At You! · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

To: The Associated Press
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: Another Story, Too Good to Be True

1. Honestly, it does not take all that much to fool you guys, these days. Ummm… it might be that gullibility may not be a good survival trait for an international news service. I know you want to be first with the scoop, but the speed with which this particular story was debunked reflects no credit. You do have editors? Someone with a sharp eye and a little bit of knowlege? How about a Boy Scout with rabies?*

2. On the other hand, I rejoice to see that my previous memo on the subject of the proper application of humor is being taken seriously.

3. I don’t think we need any more pics of “Sorority Slut Barbie” though**.

Carry on, all
Sgt. Mom

*Obscure Maxwell Smart reference
**Google this yourself. It’s not as if dirty minds need encouragment

The Poisoned Pool

31. January 2005 · Comments Off on The Poisoned Pool · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

In the twilight afterglow of the Edward Morrow era of journalism, the only people that I remember routinely complaining about bias, selective reporting, or outright lies in journalism—print and broadcast both— were of the far-right-over-the-horizon John Birch Society persuasion, sourly grumbling about creeping godless communism (or maybe it was godless creeping communism) at cocktail parties or in letters to the editor. Considering that John Reed and Walter Duranty, among others, made careers out of painting world socialism in far more sunny colors than completely unbiased and disinterested journalism required, I have to concede that those doughty anti-communists of my youth may have had a point. On the whole, it was a given that the main-stream media outlets of the American mid-century had enormous stores of credibility with the public.

It was accepted that the major newspapers, the big three television channels were generally telling the truth, as fairly and as accurately as they knew it. Reporters might be lied to by sources, might be misled or mistaken, might miss the story entirely… but if it was in the paper or on the 6 PM news, well, then it must be an accurate reflection of reality. Our media was not like the Russian propaganda organ, Pravda, which had to be read carefully, teasing out small nuggets of information from tiny scraps inadvertently included, or deduced from a sudden appearance of certain topics. This was American, damn it, and serious reporters had the benefit of the doubt. Only the supermarket tabloids with pictures of monkey babies and hundred-year old shipwreck survivors were assumed to have made up stories out of whole cloth.

I honestly can’t— and won’t given the depths to which the profession has lately fallen— claim to be a paid-up member myself, on the basis of an eight-week shake-and-bake military broadcaster course at the Defense Information School, but I spent a fair amount of time after that, loitering meaningfully in the neighborhood where acts of journalism were being committed; radio and television news, and dabbling a little in the print side. I know the mechanics of interviewing, editing, and writing fourteen lines per minute of copy, or how many yards and minutes of tape wind up in the trash can, because fifteen minutes of talk with an expert must be boiled down to a 15-second insert into a story written in the active voice and taking care to pronounce all the names right. I know that I usually had a pretty good idea of where I was going with a story; because I was in in-house hack for the military establishment… it was what they paid me for.

I was also a voracious news consumer, considering it part of my job to know the direction from which every imaginable s**tstorm might come, and to where TDY orders might send the military personnel who were my audience. I read or had subscriptions to… well, practically everything, at one time or another. Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, Stars and Stripes, Rolling Stone, the military Times newspapers, Harpers’, Atlantic, Working Woman, National Geographic, Smithsonian, MS, Guardian Weekly, National Review, Mother Jones, Utne Reader, Spy, Brills’ Content, Village Voice, History Today, American Heritage…just for starters. The fringier publications often had stories that were a long way off on the horizon; I remember the Village Voice being about the first to start airing troubling doubts about alleged satanic child abuse at day care centers, months before the more mainstream news started taking those doubts seriously, too. Of course, every outlet, every magazine had a different take, a different emphasis, a different angle, and obviously some of the above had a little more credibility than others, and more than a few grains of salt necessary as an adjunct.

When did the rot begin? Hard to say, really, since there has always some potential for distortion of the news. The great press magnates of the mid century did have their foibles: Henry Booth Luce was so enchanted with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife that he (and by extension Time Magazine) overlooked for twenty years the Generalissimo’s complete ineptitude at governing China. No note was ever taken of Roosevelt’s almost complete reliance on braces, wheelchairs and the sturdy arms of aides all during his presidency… or more alarmingly, JFK’s compulsive serial womanizing during his, although both were open secrets among the press corps. Some will argue for Watergate, when the thrill of taking down a presidency put blood in the water for the ambitious investigative reporter seeking fame everlasting.

Peter Boyer’s “Who Killed CBS”, from twenty years ago puts the blame squarely on the emphasis in television news— specifically CBS news, and 60 Minutes— on emphasizing a gripping visual image at the expense of plain facts, of news as entertainment spectacle. A modern morality play as it were. James Fallows in “Breaking the News” put the blame on—among other things— a disconnect between the consumers of news, and the highly paid elite press corps. Whether the genesis of the current situation was ten, twenty or thirty years ago is almost irrelevant, in light of that everything that has piled on in the last three or four years.

Any sort of list has to include CNN maintaining their bureau in Baghdad by quietly killing stories about Saddam Hussein’s atrocities. It has to include mention of how coverage of the Middle East is warped by major international news services reliance on local stringers who have every reason to tilt their dispatches very much to one side. Of how on-scene reportage on the West Bank and Gaza is controlled by the Palestinians, who control access of the place to film crews and reporters. Of photographers who are marvelously on the spot when car bombs, ambushes and executions are going down, and respected news professionals insist that it is their obligation to watch it all happen. Or of reporters like Sy Hersh, whose past performance guarantees a pulpit for dubious and improbable stories of war crimes committed by the American military. It has to include stories based on transparent frauds and forgeries, on political hit-pieces perpetrated by reporters insisting that, no; they really, really are totally unbiased. It has to include stories where interviewees are presented as being merely interview subjects, when they are actually deeply compromised, with a strong interest in the coverage of the story one way or the other.

The pool has been poisoned.

I never was one of those people who assumed that just because it was broadcast, or in print, that therefore it must be true, but when I read or listen to something now, I am thinking: OK, who is this that you are talking too, and what is their game. What is yours? Why did you pick that expert out of your golden rolodex? Who is your local stringer, or your taxicab driver? Your local minder? Who gave you the lead and why? Why does your voice sound somehow warmer, more enthusiastic, when you talk to, or about this person or situation? What footage wound up in the wastebasket? How many people did you talk to before you got the answer that fitted your mental outline of the story? Where have you been before, who really writes your paycheck, and why? How long have you been in this place, how much do you really know, based on your previous reportage?

The saddest part of this new era of journalism, is that I already assume that I am being lied to, until otherwise confirmed by research. It is good to be an informed and savvy consumer… but what trust and credibility the mainstream media have carelessly pissed away.

Edward R. Morrow is probably revolving in his grave like a Black & Decker drill.

Update: Just exercising my privileges as an admin here, as the freaking system won’t recognize my comment:

Somehow, darling, I can’t imagine you attending any cocktail parties in “the twilight afterglow of the [Edward R. Murrow] era of journalism,: as he moved from CBS to the USIA in 1961. 😉 — KC

Memo for the “Honorable Gentleman” from Massachusetts*

28. January 2005 · Comments Off on Memo for the “Honorable Gentleman” from Massachusetts* · Categories: General, Rant

To: Senator Edward Kennedy
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Exit Strategy

1. Allow me to break it to you gently, Senator: there is an exit strategy in place for American troops in Iraq. It calls for leaving when Iraq is a democratic, stable and prosperous country, and the majority of bitter-end Baathists and traveling jihadi wanna-bees are either in the jug, in the grave or taking up more sedentary hobbies like needlepoint or building ships in bottles… and not one damned minute sooner.

2. Any publicized plan involving predetermined quantities of troops and calendar dates for withdrawing is an invitation to disaster…not for us, of course. For the Iraqis. Just like it was for the South Vietnamese. You remember South Vietnam, Senator Kennedy? Put down the whiskey bottle and concentrate, man. We had an exit strategy there, too… phased troop withdrawals, a set schedule, all that. It worked really, really well. Still can’t remember? Try the words “sell-out”, or “betrayal”, or even “left in the lurch”. Still can’t remember? Tell you what, there must be some nice Vietnamese restaurants in Boston or Washington… go get some pho or some spring rolls, and strike up a conversation with the owner or manager, I am sure they can fill you in, especially if they are about fifty or sixty or so.

3. Now that we have gotten that straight, it occurs to me that we could use an exit strategy for American troops in a couple of countries which are now democratic, stable and relatively prosperous: Germany and South Korea come to mind immediately. Please turn your piercing intellect and dazzling command of foreign policy matters towards an exit strategy from kasernes and camps there.

4. Oh, and while you are pondering, please come up with an exit strategy for departing the UN, too. With a little practice, this exit strategy stuff could really catch on, and we are relying on you to do your bit… just as long as someone else does the driving, mmmkay?

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

*Note: these are not “scare” quote marks. These are “viciously skeptical” quote marks.

Happy Birthday!!!!

26. January 2005 · Comments Off on Happy Birthday!!!! · Categories: Domestic, General

To my darling daughter, Cpl. Blondie— it’s been 26 years of the most amazing, eventful, bumpy but satisfying journey! (and neither of us has ever been arrested, either!)

Blondie, aged 3 Days

The very first picture I took myself of my daughter!
Happy Birthday, Sweetie!!

Who do You Trust, and Where do You Stand?

26. January 2005 · Comments Off on Who do You Trust, and Where do You Stand? · Categories: General, History

A couple of years ago, I wrote (here) about my adventures in the periodical stacks and the microfilmed archives of various newspapers, while in pursuit of a degree in English at California State University, Northridge. I spent hours in the Oviatt Library, reading periodicals and newspapers from the Thirties and Forties, leafing over the pages of magazines, sepia with age, and bound into heavy volumes, or spooling miles of film though the microfilm readers, my entrée into the world of my parents and their parents, and a disconcerting view of how things appeared the very day or week that they happened, before the historians set to and put it all to rights, smoothing out the wrinkles and making all the below-the-surface connections apparent.

There was an essay I read, whose premise has always stuck in my mind, although I cannot remember the author, or where it was published. I have the vague idea it was in the Reader’s Digest, reprinted from somewhere else— the Atlantic? New Yorker? Harpers’, maybe? Something meditative and literary anyway, penned by a woman sometime after the defeat of France, when England looked like being the next to fall, maybe even after Stalinist Russia had changed sides yet again, but well before Pearl Harbor, when the US was uneasily and technically at peace. But the war was on the authors’ mind, war and occupation, the loathsome-ness of the Nazis, and the tension between resistance and collaboration; France would have been occupied for at least a year, when the essay was published, and America was still a neutral, with businessmen, diplomats and journalists moving somewhat freely around the Continent.

The unremembered author wrote as someone familiar with Europe, and current events, and imagined herself at a literary cocktail party in her elegant New York apartment, looking around at the other guests and thinking “What would you do, under Occupation? How would you conduct yourselves? Would you resist? Collaborate? To what degree, and why?” She sketched out the character and background of her guests— old money, new money, artist, writer, actor, academic, non-conformist, businessman, man-about-town, and poseur—-and ventured suppositions on who would go along to get along, and who would quietly resist. I don’t quite know what struck me about the essay, other than her calm and even slightly chilly acknowledgement of the fact that, yes, given a military defeat and occupation of ones’ own country, the reactions of a personal circle of friends would be all over the ethical map.

There would be no united front, given ordinary day to day realities, and the necessity of making a living and keeping safe those you loved. Of course there would be individuals who wholeheartedly embraced their new overlords, and some who would feel obliged to strongly resist, and those in the middle who would have to work out some kind of accommodation, some way of enduring the situation without feeling ethically soiled. The writer did get that part quite right, but the trouble with that kind of speculation is when it got to specifics about people. Speculation is a more or less educated guess, and people can be more complicated than even the most imaginative writer can fathom.

A very few people are absolutely straight forward, and possess the heart and courage to carry on with the principles that they are renown for, like this man. But this man— for most of his life a soldier, patriot and hero— still fell resoundingly short of what anyone would have expected of him in the crunch. Yet this man, a bon-vivant, adulterous husband and dodgy businessman from whom nothing principled and high-minded could have been expected calmly risked everything to save lives, hundreds of lives. And this unremarkable young student nurse organized an escape line which funneled Allied evaders across three borders and a mountain range. If people sadly have the capacity to disappoint, they also have capability to take your breath away with their courage and dedication…. And most times it is just not something that you can see in advance. But what you do see it, the least you can do is recognize and honor those qualities.
In four days, the Iraqi people vote, in defiance of murder, bombs and terror, and it is in my mind that we may see the same hopeful, reckless courage, for out of that is a free nation born.

THE THRILL OF THE CHASE: A TRUIMPHAL ODE TO FLEA MARKETS

24. January 2005 · Comments Off on THE THRILL OF THE CHASE: A TRUIMPHAL ODE TO FLEA MARKETS · Categories: General, Home Front

Sing, ye muses, about the joys of snagging the exact, perfect item that you need for a room or project at a thrift store, flea market or marked better than 60% down at a post-Christmas sale. In this world I know there exist people whose approach to home decoration is to throw lots of money at an expensive interior decorator, in the hopes that purchased good taste will eventually stick to their walls— I may even have met some of them, on occasion— but it always seemed a rather bloodless way to do it, and not very much fun. It is on par with that internet hunt that people were hyperventilating about last month in the blogoverse; a gun with a webcam set up, and a program that let people log on, and aim and fire the gun at whatever wandered within range. They were still working out the logistics and some of the practical aspects to this project, but primarily it just did not seem nearly as much fun to serious devotees… it was just too easy. Being able to just order it up, money no object, is just like that— too easy. There’s no challenge to it, no opportunity to overcome a sudden obstacle, no sudden inspiration, no chance to exercise the old ingenuity.

And since I don’t have heaps of money, and was raised by fairly frugal— but tasteful— people, I have to take the budget approach, even though they call it “shabby chic” , to sorting out a new look for my daughter’s old bedroom. She is planning to go to college, post USMC, so the week she spent at home over Christmas this year were devoted to ripping out the carpet, painting the walls and stenciling the floor, reassessing all the furniture crammed into one tiny front bedroom, and hanging shelves all along the walls on either side of the window. Anything new would be either from the thrift store, or something we put together ourselves, or bought on sale: the bed is new, but it came from an unpainted furniture place, and I am making new pillow covers and curtains from severely-reduced decorator fabric… and just this last weekend I scored the perfect bedside lamp from the thrift store for $2.49, and made a pair of hanging wall vases from a couple of yards of wired ribbon and some slender glass vases from the hobby shop. Oh, yeah, eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.

The framed pictures over the bed all came from the thrift-shop too, but I took them apart and repainted the frames to match. Blondie even zeroed in on a nice oriental vase and a framed print from the same thrift-shop, things which looked remarkably good, once removed from the disreputable jumble of the thrift store. We could have, if time and budget permitted, driven north of San Antonio to the legendary Buseys’ Flea Market, and bought everything at once instead of piecemeal…

Heck, you could outfit an entire house with gleanings from Buseys’. It’s a couple of acres of rambling, single-storey sheds, booths, stalls, ranks of wooden tables under tin and tarpaper roofs. The vendors are a jumble, both regulars, who have established premises with lockable doors, and others who come occasionally to sell garage-style stuff from the trunks of their cars, or spread out on trestle tables: antique furniture, and just plain junk furniture, clothes, socks and underwear by the bale, work clothes and tee shirts, Orientalia and Mexican pottery, books and potted plants, birds in cages, tools of all sorts, old military uniforms and memorabilia, garden art, wind chimes, old and new and cheap kitchen appliances and tools, cheap jewelry, old typewriters, horse brass, china and silverware, lunch boxes, camping gear, drawer pulls, area rugs, old chenille bedspreads the color of orange sherbet and peptol bismol, video tapes, cassettes and old record albums… the contents of dozens of junk shops, garage sales and small retail places all jumbled together, every Saturday and Sunday.

There are a couple of food stalls, too, and I think I saw a fortune-teller, last time. The smell of funnel cakes and hot deep-fat frying wafts from one direction, and mariachi music from the stall selling imports from Mexico spills out into the walkway by the ATM machine— Buseys’ has it all. 95% of it is total krep, of course— but that remaining %5, if you are sharp-eyed and know what you want, and have the wit to buy it as soon as you see it— oh, that five percent is worth the trip. I should think it would make a most wondrous reality-TV Home-Decorating DIY show: to go to a place like Buseys’ and tastefully outfit an entire house— furniture, accessories, bedding and rugs and all— just from what you could find there. All I’d need would be a pretty good budget and a pickup truck— send any TV offers through my agent, please.

Oh, and Buseys’ is about a half hour drive north of San Antonio, on I-35. Look for the enormous concrete armadillo.

« Older articles
Newer articles »