It sounds like a perfectly impractical and even risible notion – to remove the Pyramids of Giza from the view of the righteous by covering them with wax. Good heavens, what would happen on the first hot day of summer, assuming such a thing could even be accomplished? A vast puddle of melted wax, I am certain. Stick a wick the size of a Titan rocket made out of cotton string in the middle, empty in a couple of truckloads of essential perfume oils and you’d have a scented candle the size of Texas, the eighth wonder of the ancient world and something that could probably fumigate most of the Middle East.
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I was always a bit cynical about the major media news organs, thanks to twenty years in military public affairs, and the related field of military broadcasting. That is, I didn’t expect much of the poor darlings when it came around to dealing with matters military. The military and all its works and all its strange ways were terra incognita to all but a handful of mainstream media personalities and reporters, all during the 1970s, the 1980s and into the 1990s. Stories of media misconduct were fairly common among us; attempted checkbook journalism, howling misstatements of fact, generalized anti-military bigotry, pre-existing biases just looking for a whisper of confirmation … all that and more were the stuff of military public affairs legend. I expect that most media reporters and editors just naturally expected military personnel, pace Platoon and other Vietnam-era movies, to be drug-addled, barely competent, marginally criminal, knuckle-dragging morons. The air of pleasurable surprise and relief almost universally displayed by various deployed reporters during the First Gulf War, upon discovering this was not so – that in fact, most members of the military were articulate, polite, competent professionals – was one that I noted at the time, and found to be bitterly amusing.
So the usual mainstream civilian media tool didn’t know bupkis about the military: this was not a shock to me. Most other dedicated civilians didn’t know all that much, either. As Arthur Hadley noted, it was a whole parallel world, what he called the “Other America of Defense.†It did come as a bit of a disheartening surprise, discovering that the mainstream media didn’t actually know much about anything else, either — and that over the last decade or so, they’ve been frittering away the credibility and respect accumulated since the middle of last century. It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise – but it did. Especially to one raised in the baby-boom generation, with the high standards of Edward Morrow always before me, who grew up reading the LA Times when that paper was at the very top of it’s form, journalistically speaking, who had subscriptions to practically every news and commentary magazine going, from Time and Newsweek, to Mother Jones and the Village Voice, Utne Reader, US News and World Report, Brill’s Content, Spy, Harper’s and Atlantic … even the Guardian, courtesy of an English friend. I had a local newspaper subscription, and raised heck if it wasn’t delivered promoptly. I loved NPR and even watched the Today Show – well, that was part of my job, then. I once thought well of the mainstream media. There, I said it. The Fourth Estate, essential in a democracy to keep the public well-informed regarding important issues, our last defense against political malfeasance and corporate shenanigans … all of that inclined me to hold the media in moderate regard. That they might have a particular editorial slant, politically one way or the other, that reporters might be mistaken, or flat-out misinformed by their sources … that I accepted. Like many another news consumer, I rather expected that eventually, the truth would out.
And then … the shark was jumped. Or actually, double jumped, with a half-gainer in between, and I’ve been hardly viewed established news media outlets with favor ever since. More than that – I’ve no subscriptions to any of the above listed publications, some of them because they’re no longer available, but mostly because they’ve dwindled in importance and credibility. They have nothing much to say that I can’t get from various news aggregate websites or special-interest blogs … or because something in a story, or in an editorial pissed me off beyond forgiveness.
Rathergate: that was the first shark-leap, and the audacity of it just about took my breath away, once I considered the implications; a bare-faced attempt by a supposedly reputable news organization, to throw a presidential election, barely days before the polls opened, using a story based upon a faked document with a deeply suspicious provenance. That someone like Dan Rather would rush to broadcast that story meant something sinister was afoot in media-land. Once that of worms was opened, and doubts began to multiply, there was no going back for me. The well was poisoned.
The second was what I began calling the Affair of the Danish Cartoons, or the Mo’Toons O’Doom; when the fearless guardians of the American public’s right to know … caved like a soggy macaroon when given the opportunity to print or post a dozen fairly innocuous cartoons satirizing the fear of … publishing drawings of Mohammed. Well, yeah – there would be threats from the perennially offended adherence of the Religion of Peace, but I had halfway expected our fearless members of the Fourth Estate to display evidence of having a pair. Instead, craven retreat, following a sprinkle of excuses.
And it’s been straight downhill, ever since: Journolist, the Global Warmening Scam, serving as the Obama Administrations’ public affairs arm, sliming the Tea Parties and lauding OWS – the list goes on. And this week, there was a poor schmuck going door to door, trying to sell newspaper subscriptions for the Sunday San Antonio Express News. It was most sad, actually: his main pitch was the many valuable grocery coupons in the Sunday paper. I wish I had thought to tell him that we don’t use coupons much, but if they ever went to printing the paper on soft absorbent tissue, then at least we would have some use for it all.
(Cross posted at Chicago Boyz)
Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years – since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it – a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed – became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.
Being that humans are mostly optimistic and pretty adaptable, we patched together some new understandings and assumptions, which worked pretty well – or at least we became accustomed to them . . . until the 20th century ended on a glorious autumn morning, ten years ago. One day. And then we had to become accustomed to the new reality. More than three thousand dead, a hole in the New York skyline that will never be filled in again – the ghosts of twin silvery towers showing up in the backgrounds of movies, now and again, drawing your sudden attention with a catch at the heart and memory.
And three thousand-something men and women who went off to work one morning, families who took a vacation, catching an early morning airplane flight, firefighters going on shift, everyone living out those thousands of petty daily routines, most of them probably quite boring. I am certain that practically every one of those who became casualties on that morning – a name and a face on a makeshift poster, a black-framed picture on the mantel or in the obituary pages – were looking forward to the end of the workday, the end of their journey – to coming home for a good dinner, wrapping up that business trip and getting on with that portion of our life that is ours, and belongs to us and our families and loved ones alone.
But they were never allowed that luxury, of having a tonight, a tomorrow. Those lives which they might have had, would have – were brutally wrenched from them, in an organized act of terrorism, wrenched from them in fire and horror and blood, while the rest of us watched or listened – watched in person, on television, or were glued to a radio – ten years ago today.
Ten years. Time enough for children to grow to middle-school age, never remembering that time before, or the loss of a father or mother, who worked in a department in the outer ring of the Pentagon, or in an office on a high floor of the World Trade center. A foreign country to them, is that place, where once you could go into the airport terminal and go all the way to the gate to meet an arriving friend . . . and for travelers not to have to take off their shoes to go through security. Or even have to go through security, come to think on it. A world where one could have no reaction but idle curiosity upon noticing a woman in full black burka, or a nervous-appearing man of Middle-eastern appearance, taking pictures of an otherwise undistinguished bridge or power station. A world where a familiarity with the dictates of the Koran and the Hadith, the maunderings of Sayyid Qutb as regards America and the workings of a desert tribal autocracy are an eccentric interest and hobby – not a professional necessity.
Ten years. The world that was passes from memory, and we have the brutal world of ‘now.’ As an amateur historian, one of my own comforts on this anniversary is that – it was always like this. We will survive, we will live in a world that is made new and eternally renewed by events, events that will eventually fade . . .
But today, we remember.
Past anniversary posts –
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
I didn’t write a specialized post for 2009, and last year I only reposted some music videos.
(In light of the current ruckus over President’s Obama’s very personal wet smooch from Hollywood regarding the proposed “get Osama” movie, I am reissuing my historic memo, from 2004 or so. Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette has the whole depressing, infuriating saga of the world’s longest proposed political advertisement, here.)
To: Providers of our Movie & TV Entertainment
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Lack of Spine and Relevant Movies
1. So here it has been nearly three years since 9/11, two years since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a year since the thunder run from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, and all we get from you is a TV movie, a couple of episodes from those few TV serials that do touch on matters military, and a two-hour partisan hack job creatively edited together from other people’s footage. Ummm … thanks, ever so much. Three years worth of drama, tragedy, duty, honor, sacrifice, courage and accomplishment, and all we get is our very own Lumpy Riefenstahl being drooled over by the French. Where is the Casablanca, So Proudly We Hail, Wake Island, They Were Expendable? My god, people, the dust had barely settled over the Bataan surrender, before the movie was in the theaters. You people live to tell stories— where are ours? What are we fighting for and why, who are our heroes and villains, our epics and victories?
2. And it’s not like other media people have been laying down on the job: writers, reporters, bloggers have been churning out stories by the cubic foot: the brave passengers taking back Flight 93, the stories of people who escaped the towers, and those who helped others escape, as well as those who ran in, the epic unbuilding of the Trade Center ruins. What about the exploits of the Special Forces in Afghanistan, on horseback in the mountains with a GPS, directing pinpoint raids on Taliban positions, the women who ran Afghanistans’ underground girls’ schools? What about Sgt Donald Walters, Lt. Brian Chontosh, the 3rd ID’s fight for the strong points at Larry, Curley and Moe and a dozen others. There’s enough materiel for the lighter side, too: Chief Wiggles, Major Pain’s pet turkey, the woman Marine who deployed pregnant and delivered her baby in a war zone, the various units who have managed to bring their adopted unit mascots back from the theater. (Do a google search, for heaven’s sake. If you can’t handle that, ask one of the interns to help.) The shelves at my local bookstore are pretty well stocked with current writings on the subject, memoirs, reports, thrillers and all. Some stories even have yet to be written; they are still ongoing, and even classified, but I note that did not stop the movie producers back then: they just consulted with experts and made something up, something inspiring and convincing.
3. Of course, actually dealing with a contemporary drama in the fight against Islamic fascism would mean you would have to actually come down out of Hollywood’s enchanted world, and actually, you know … speak to them. Ordinary people, ordinary, everyday people, who don’t have agents and personal trainers and nannies, and god help them, they don’t even vote for the right people, or take the correct political line. Some of them (gasp) are even military, and do for real what movies only pretend to do … and besides, they have hold to all these archaic ideals like honor, duty, and country. (Ohhh, cooties!)
4. And since even mentioning the Religion of Peace (TM) in connection with things like terrorism, mass-murder, and international plots for a new caliphate is a guarantee to bring CAIR and other fellow travelers seething and whining in your outer office … ohh, best not. Drag out those old villainous standby Nazis, or South American drug lords, even the odd far-right survivalist for your theatrical punch-up, secure in the knowledge that even if you piss off what few remains of them, at least they won’t be unleashing a fatwa on your lazy ass, or sending a suicide bomber into Mortens’. Just ignore the three large smoking holes in the ground; cover your eyes and pretend it away. Never happened, religion of peace, all about oil, la-la-lah, fingers in my ears, I can’t hear you.
5.To make movies about it all, is to have to come to grips with certain concepts; among them being the fact that we are all potential targets for the forces of aggressive Islamo-fascism, that it is not anything in particular which we have done to draw such animus, and that we are in this all together, and that we must win, for the consequences of not winning are not only unbearable for us all — but they would be very likely to adversely affect you, too. I would expect an industry dependent on the moods and fashions amongst the public at large to have a better feel for what would sell … but I guess denial is more comfortable, familiar space, Sept. 10th is what you know best.
6. Still, if you could pass a word to Lumpy Riefenstahl, about getting signed releases, for footage, interviews and newsprint. It would be the courteous gesture towards all the little people for whom he professes to care, and save a bit of trouble in the long run.
Thanks
Sgt Mom
So, not tacky or energetic enough to do anything to note Bin Laden’s sudden shuffling off this mortal coil save for my daughter and I polishing off a bottle of champagne on the Monday afterwards, and me noting that while I had never killed anyone myself, I had read certain obituaries with a great deal of pleasure. Anything more demonstrative would earn us a severe poo-pooing from the likes of German newspaper opinion columnists and the Arch-Bish of Canterbury, among others . . . which disapproval at this late date has all the effect upon me of a flogging with a wet noodle, or of having my ankles attacked by a toothless Chihuahua. This means a lot of slobber, some momentarily but earsplitting noise, but no lasting damage whatsoever. So, consider the poo-poo noted, and thank you very much for your support, such as it has been. The champagne was very pleasant, by the way, especially considering that I had waited nearly nine and a half years to drink to cold justice being served for Bin Laden.
What a pathetic man, he was by the end – and living in such a dump, to judge by the videos and the pictures. Seriously, his place looked like a cheap residential motel, of the sort where the sheets are as thin as Kleenex and the bedside lamp is chained to the wall. And the raiding SEALS took away stuff by the garbage-bag full – although from the secret squirrel point of view, perhaps it would have been better to be completely quiet about what, exactly was taken away. But even so, I’ll bet there have been a lot of hasty exits from various places in the last two weeks, a lot of stuff being burned/trashed/shredded, and a fair number of hitherto upright types hastily making a last deposit into a secret bank account and checking out the rental rates for upscale walled villas in Marbella. And that’s just Pakistan, or as the fine folks at Rantburg call it, ‘Paki-waki-land’. Oh, and among those items removed from the “luxurious villa†are reputed to be his very own porn collection. Seriously, people are having fun coming up with proposed names for Bin Laden’s stash – say, Fatima Does Dallas, Deep Goat, Brokeback Goat, etc.
Oh, dear, what do we have to do to the Paks – more than slap them over the pee-pee with a lead pipe, I would hope. What an ignorant, bigoted, treacherous dunghill of a country, and I only say this because I used to read the Guardian, on a regular basis. Lots of stories about women with acid thrown on their faces, about Christian persecutions, hysteria about vaccinations and other temptations of modernity. I know we were their best buds and Uncle Sugar Money-bags way back when, because India was flirting with China (or China and Russia by turns, depending on the wind direction) and that left us gingerly holding hands with the dregs of the sub-continent . . . but I think the time has come to sever that relationship and the income-stream. The most wanted international fugitive for the last decade, turns up having hidden for the past how-many-years in a town full of retired Pak military, not a stones through from a military academy? Someone’s got some explaining to do. Personally, I think one faction in Paki-Waki-Land was sheltering him and another faction dimed him out. So, cut off the income stream, and watch it all devolve. I know they say that we need them for support of our efforts in Afghanistan, but if this is what their support means . . . umm, maybe we should explore what their non-support would work out to?
And wonderful – our very own press creatures are trying to play ‘spot the SEAL’ in Virginia Beach. I am amused, though, at how our hapless and militarily clueless reporter is foiled at every turn; a word to the wise, to anyone else playing this kind of game in a military town? Don’t go in without a guide or at least a little bit of internalizing military thought about op-sec. Double-don’t think it, if you have to have op-sec explained to you. And a couple of words of reminder about making note of the names of various places reputed to be military hang-outs? Bobby’s in Glyphada. La Belle Disco in Berlin, the Rib House near Torrejon; places that military of a certain vintage recall . . . because they were eateries that American military personnel favored – in Greece, West Germany and Spain. People with a point to make via high-explosives, sussed those three places out as a place likely to kill American service personnel. And they did, with varying degrees of success. So – it should be any different here in these United States? And do you understand, that in making it known to the public at large – that these places in a relatively small town are reputed to be military hangouts, that you are handing some basic research conclusions to people who might not have the long-term health of American service personnel in mind? Yeah, thanks for your support. Duly noted; And again – thanks.
Ya know, at least Obama actually did a very good speech, announcing that Osama Bin Laden had been taken down, and he did have the stones in the first place to step up to the plate and give the order for the SEALS to take out the trash. No shilly-shallying around and voting ‘present’ on that one, even if there are reports that he chewed over the decision for 16 hours. Well, it was momentous decision; a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize authorizing a targeted assassination, within the sovereign territory of a nation frequently described as being an ally. The irony abounds – one can only imagine the political and media response to GWB giving the go-ahead. So, our boy-king has the advantage of being one of those with a D after his name, which – when it comes to this sort of thing pretty much affords all-over protection against blowback.
So, approving noises all the way around, all the day long on Monday and into Tuesday this week: OBL sleeps wid da fishes, and the most sycophantic media tools are crowing that he will be a shoo-in for reelection in 2012 on that account . . . never mind that gas will probably close on $5.00 a gallon by mid-summer, and joblessness is endemic and the prices for basic groceries are sneaking up. And then . . .
And then . . . oh, oh. Different stories: firefight with the SEALS . . . or not. Use of a woman – perhaps wife, perhaps not – as a human shield. Plain old down and dirty execution, or did the plan call originally for everyone in the house in Abbottabad to be taken away for leisurely interrogation? Video or still documentation of the whole thing – as well as that rushed burial at sea, proving that OBL did indeed go over the side of the Carl Vinson? And now, not releasing any of the pictures of OBL, pining for the fijords because of inflaming the Muslim street, or something? People, get a grip – the Muslim street is always inflamed over something or other. Besides, they are always telling us that OBL was a bad Moslem, that he hijacked the Religion of Peace . . . so, wouldn’t they also want to see visual proof of his demise. There have been enough bloody pictures circulating in the last ten years, and anyone who has ever watched an episode of CSI has probably already seen many scenes at least as bloody and stomach-churning.
And no one at the higher levels of the administration had any idea as to how to deal with this, as an important news event and public affairs challenge – other than the boy-king making a speech. It was as if that was as far as they could see it going; the Administration appears to have felt no need to work out an in-depth response. Just take their word for it, no need to work out a coherent narrative, backed up by pictures, video, carefully shielded witness testimony, et cetera. Just shoot, shove overboard, and shut up.
Not gonna fly, in this wired world, not with so many people wanting to see just a little bit more, within the boundaries of operations security. I’d guess that the pictures and video outlining just a few more answers to questions will leak or be released within days. Just too many people, who are just too damn curious and haven’t had that curiosity satisfied in the least. I’m a long-retired military media professional – and I am offering this feedback gratis. The Administration better start working out a better response to this, and any future-type events.
Later: Froggy and Blackfive thinking along the same lines…
Yeah, I know – juvenile humor at best, but somehow that’s about the only reasonable response you can make to a walking, talking comic-opera cartoon villain like Moammar Khadaffy. Or Quadaffi, or what the hell – Khadaffy-Duck. I mean, the clothes, the sprocket-hung uniforms, the transparent megalomania, the fembot body-guards, the rip-off of Mao’s Little Red Book . . . and was he the inspiration for the villain in Jewel of the Nile? And then you remember the serious stuff: the airplanes and discos bombed, the terrorists like the IRA generously funded – the politicians and intellectuals paid to be his respectable front, the plight of those foreign doctors and nurses who were accused of deliberately infecting patients with AIDS, the death of a British policewoman in front of the Libyan embassy in London (who was shot from within the embassy), and the brutalization of his own people . . . no, Quadaffy-Duck was every bit as malevolent as Saddam Hussein; his pretensions and dress-sense was just a little more risible. Otherwise, just a matter of degree, and frankly, I can’t think of a nicer person to have a J-DAM coming down the chimney with his name on it, no matter how the heck you spell it. I did so hope that he would wind up like Mussolini (his corpse hanging from a gas-station – which would be ironic in the extreme) or stood up in front of a wall like Ceausescu; the thing being that it would be Libyans themselves performing the necessary chore of taking out the flamboyantly-clad trash. Ah, well; however the job gets done.
Anyway – as you can guess, I’ll be breaking out the popcorn and celebrating the immanent demise of the Duck of Death; it’s been long overdue, no matter who or what is responsible for seeing that he achieves room temperature. However . . . the infamous however, well-freighted with irony . . . I do have a few small concerns, chief among them being – who and what are the anti-Khadaffy Libyans, exactly? When all the dust settles, and someone who is not the Duck of Death or of his ilk and kin is in charge . . . who will that person be, and will they be an improvement?
Secondly; what next? Are we just clearing out the Duck’s flyable assets so that a no-fly zone may be installed? How long will the no-fly zone be in effect – as long as the no-fly zone over Iraq, which protected the Kurds? Months, weeks, days? Of the allied nations assisting in this, who will have the resources to continue that long? Should it be necessary to put boots on the ground . . . whose boots will they be, and what exactly will be the assigned duties of those boots?
And the irony of Obama doing just about what Bush was damned up one side and down the other for doing, with regard to another middle-eastern oil-rich nation ruled by a brutally iron-fisted autocrat with a penchant for seeing his own face everywhere? Rich, I tell you – as in two scoops of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Watching half of Obama’s backers turn themselves into pretzels trying to explain how one of these things is so not like the other, and the other half going into gibbering hysterics realizing that it is . . . it’s turning out to be quite a giggle for me. Enough reason for anther round of popcorn, anyway.
And finally – you know, they told me if I voted for McCain/Palin, that there would never-ending war in the Middle East – and damn if it doesn’t look like it.
So, observing the current imbroglio with the leadership of National Public Radio being played like a fish on the line for a five-million dollar donation from a so-called Muslim Brotherhood front organization . . . well, my feelings are mixed. It’s about 95% schadenfreude-drenched pure pleasure mixed with a 5% sprinkle of regret. I once did like NPR very much and listened faithfully, donated regularly to the local affiliate stations in Salt Lake City and San Antonio, even went to work part-time as an announcer at the classical-music public radio station for nearly ten years. I never missed an airing of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, which I thought at one time was about as close to a modern Will Rogers-type comedian as there was.
Alas, in the run-up to 2008, GK chose to go mean-spiritedly partisan, fell down on his knees metaphorically in worship of the One, and went full-on rabid bigot with regard to Tea Partiers, Republicans and conservatives generally since then. Ok, fine – free country and all that, and I am free to take my fanship – and my pledges elsewhere, preferably to a news and entertainment venue which doesn’t feel the need to kick me in the face, morning noon and night, and three times that on Sunday. Which brings me back to NPR – and yes, I know the two NPR executives featured in the video are management materiel and not reporters or on-air personalities . . . but to appear not to know anything about the Muslim Brotherhood, to be apparently eager to curry favor with a big-money donor, and be so willing to trash Christians and Tea Partiers, not to mention a well-respected former employee like Juan Williams, not to mention appearing to go along with the whole –Jews-control-the-media meme . . . Words fail me on that one, at least the words that I can put onto a family blog. Yes, it’s one thing to gracefully appreciate a potential donation, quite another to look like you’re about to break out the kneepads and the Binaca. So – like the old story of the woman who would sleep with a guy for a million dollars, but not for ten dollars – now NPR is just negotiating the price.
Sheesh . . . at this point, I’m not only convinced that NPR and PBS ought to be de-funded – I want back every dime of every pledge I ever contributed.
So – been following what happened/happening in Tunisia, and now in Egypt . . . that’ll be one for the history books, I’m sure. Egypt much more than Tunisia, I’m afraid, what with the Suez Canal and all. Tunisia’s a nice country and all, lovely Roman relics, coastal aspect on the Mediterranean, ancient culture, spectacular if arid scenery and I am sure the people there want and deserve the best they may get for themselves, but Egypt – oh, my, talking about balancing on a knife edge, when it comes to throwing out an entrenched and despotic dictatorship. Egypt’s got all of our attention, whereas Tunisia seems to have had only that of those aficionados of drastic unrest in exotic foreign countries. But access to the Suez Canal does tend to draw a higher level of interest, not to say concern. With umpty-ump percentage of world-wide ship traffic going through the Canal – the Suez Canal, not the Panama – that will tend to make political administrations sit up and pay attention. It may even teach Chris Matthews a little geography. The Suez is still a strategic choke-point, and that has everyone’s attention. With Mubarak Junior and his kithn’kin and various prominent members of Egyptian high society all departing at speed, extraneous Americans also being urged to depart at similar speed, the Egyptian military going over to the protestors, cutting off internet access, and citizens of every rank and stripe turning out into the streets . . . well, at least as near as we can make out from this distance and through the filter of time, distance and the various credentialed and un-credentialed news media . . . something momentous is happening, will happen, or might even have happened already. (Oh, wow- I see that our old camera-hound Dr. Zahi Hawass has gotten in front of them once again . . . Jees on a cracker, is the most dangerous place in Egypt that between Dr. Hawass and the nearest news camera? Up until this week it probably was . . .)
So far in this crisis, the absolutely funniest thing that I read on Open Salon was this comment “Been picking up hints on NPR of this broiling Mideast situation. Thank goodness Obama is president. Can’t begin to imagine the scenario we’d be facing with McCain.†on a post by this OS writer who otherwise is relatively sane – although the Stellaaaaaaa that she refers everyone to for further education is . . . well, why bother with her if you have Rantburg at your fingertips. Nice people at OS, many of them. High percentage of bat-shit crazy libs, though. Have to take them one by one, and refrain from pushing their particular buttons and they’re OK. There are also more libertarians and veiled conservatives among them than is apparent at first glance from the front page. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes – Egypt.
Sorry, the pooch is probably screwed now matter what we – that is the Obama Administration does or doesn’t do. Whatever happens, we will be blamed, solo and chorus. Support Mubarak, or support the right of the Egyptian people to protest, or support whatever leaders eventually emerge, knowing that whatever shakes out, the best-organized faction will probably come out on top. Odds seem to be on the Muslim Brotherhood organization, much as the Ayatollah Khomeini came out on top in that little ruckus in Iran thirty years ago. In that case, the good side to that outcome is that the Egyptians are guaranteed to get good and tired of a strict theocratic rule, just as the Iranians have. Downside – it will take thirty years. In the mean time, the Egyptian tourism industry will be totally napalmed, ship traffic through the Suez Canal ditto, and the odds of a mob of protesters attempting to take over the American Embassy and holding all the staff hostage seem to be pretty good. Second verse, same as the first, just a little bit louder and a little bit worse. On the up side? Can’t think of one, actually . . . except that Jimmy Carter can heave a sigh of relief; there exists now an administration with the potential for karking up an international crisis even more disastrously than the Tehran embassy-hostage affair.
Depressed enough already? You’re welcome – I live to serve.
Having witnessed one form of American rebellion flame up from small individual local protests into a political movement that is about as unstoppable as a wild-fire with a Santa Anna wind behind it, now I am wondering if I am not seeing another, in the current ruckus kicked up about the TSA.
It has often seemed of late that just about every simple pleasure of air travel – and there used to be a good few, even when it just seemed as if flying by commuter air was just a Trailways bus with wings – has been precisely and surgically removed. Cram-jammed flights. A seat about the size of one of those chairs in a kindergarten – and about as comfortable. No meal service. No movies save on long-distance hauls. Fewer direct flights . . . And then, post 9-11 – security. No meeting someone at the gate upon arrival. No seeing someone away, by accompanying them to the departure gate. Emptying your luggage of nail-clippers, lighters, and any sort of liquid. Wearing shoes that can easily be slipped off. Getting to the airport at least two hours early to be sure to make it through the security line to start with. And now this: the unedifying choice between having to go through the stark-naked scanning machine, or a humiliatingly intrusive pat-down search.
Frankly, if I am to be seen in the altogether, or to be intimately groped by another person, I’d like it to be consensual and after a good dinner, a couple of drinks and a movie.
We put up with all of this in the name of “safety†– but my sense is that it has hit a wall of not only diminishing returns, but our own patience. The final straw, as it were. The far frozen limit. The TSA makes a great show of searching for things and of avoiding seeming to ‘profile’ those who might actually be terrorists intent on airborne mayhem. It’s not the tool, fools – it’s the person with the will, training and intent to use the tool – but oh, my – we can’t be caught singling out those specific persons. Might upset them, and then what might they do? So, in order to prove that we are not ‘profiling’ –screaming three year old kids, elderly nuns in full habit, semi-invalids in scooter-chairs, teenage girls, respectable middle-aged business persons with no record of brushes with the law whatsoever, get to be treated like convicted felons on intake to a long term in the state pen. There have been reports lately of terrorists smuggling explosives by stuffing them into body cavities; given how the TSA goes into full reaction mode to counter past terrorist tactics, I can only expect the next step is to administer colonoscopies and issue speculums. Complaints about unprofessional behavior by the TSA agents have become legion. I don’t have any myself – having only flown once in the last five years, but travelers who do have some real doozies to tell, and some of them even have video.
It’s going to be real interesting, seeing how this avoidance of air travel might go, in the next couple of weeks. With the economy the way it is, probably not as many can afford or want to fly, but I have a feeling that unhappiness over the back-scatter screening and intrusive pat-down searches have driven travelers to the limit of saying ‘heck with that, might as well drive.’ Interesting to see what the airlines may do, if travel falls off that far. Any bets?
So the canning of Juan Williams from NPR can be taken as yet another example of the hardening of attitudes in what commenters on various centrist/conservative and libertarian blogs began calling a ‘cold civil war’ some years ago. Pity, that – and I used to listen to, love, and support local public radio and TV outlets, the minute I got back to assignments Stateside where such things were available. Listened to NPR in the morning and in the afternoon for my required news fix, never missed a broadcast of Prairie Home Companion, loved Car Talk and public TV’s Masterpiece Theater. Sent in my pledges during the annual fund drives, scored the occasional mug, tee-shirt and souvenir cookbook – heck, I even worked part-time as a classical announcer for the local public radio classical station for better than a decade.
And then it all went sour, and I am hard-pressed to pin it down exactly when and for what reason; the pull of the internet, and the push of Garrison Keillor going gradually, frothingly, gibbering bonkers having a lot to do with it. Nothing quite so disconcerting as a humorist who made his reputation doing gentle, affectionate ribbing of small-town flyover-country foibles suddenly ripping off the folksy persona to reveal the viciously intolerant, hate-filled bigot within.
(Note to Garrison K. Ya know, ya really lost a large chunk of yer audience, there with the incessant Bush bashing. I know, easy target and all that, but would it have killed ya to take an equal number a shots at John Kerry, dere – almost kinda like ya did with Al Gore? Whattabout der current prez? Ya know, with dis political humor ting, ya gotta be ecumenical . . . less’n you want yer audience appeal to be more . . . selective. Ya, that’s it. Selective. Gotta tell ya, Mr. K – conservatives pledge, too, or dey did . . . Maybe yer serious about this-ere selective audience ting.)
Anyway, the news began to sour on me too, once I began to notice that certain stories and controversies – which I had already been made aware of on-line – just never seemed to percolate up to the attention of NPR. Or if it did, the attention paid would be pretty one-sided – and since I had already read the story from various aspects and angles online, it would be very, very obvious to me. Listening became a frustrating experience, rather than an informing one: why wasn’t this question asked, why hadn’t the reporter followed up on this aspect, and why, why, why were the same old experts always being pulled out of the Rolodex to give the same old canned response to the same old questions? It got to the point that I could predict the NPR stance on any particular controversy, story or event. So, why bother? I faded away from listening to NPR news around about the 2008 election, which is probably a good thing, since listening to their coverage of Tea Party developments would have sent my blood pressure into the stratosphere.
So, Juan Williams – on the outs, not for what he said, particularly, but for where he said it; on Fox TV, which appears to have sent certain NPR listeners frothing at the mouth. Sacked by the boss, through a telephone call – doesn’t get more graceless than that. And he always struck me as one of those people with whom you could disagree on certain things, but that he would be reasonable. Weirdly enough, it’s the left-hand side of the political spectrum which is going all ugly about this, as if he had suddenly turned into some kind of untouchable. Alas, now it seems that the name of NPR’s major daily news program, All Things Considered should be changed to Only Some Things Considered, Else Your Ass Is Grass and I’m the Lawnmower. Maybe too long to fit into those teeny little blocks on the schedule, though.
So, what do you call it when you – theoretically speaking – have a certain designated freedom bestowed upon you, such as freedom of speech or thought . . . but you are afraid to exercise it, for whatever reason? What then, oh wolves; are you then truly free if you are constrained from exercising that right because . . . ? If honest discussion of certain topics is essentially forbidden because it is infra dig, or rude, or may cause hurt feelings to another, or offend a segment of society, then can we still claim that we have freedom of speech, or any sort of intellectual openness, even if convictions for sedition or blasphemy are relatively rare in the West? That speech is still unspoken, those thoughts un-aired are still un-aired, whether it is fear, social pressure or the rule of law what keeps them so.
Which brings me back to the matter of the Danish Mohammad cartoons – even after four years, the matter is still resonating: at the time I wrote this:
(It) depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.
They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon – but a dozen relatively tame cartoons? Oh, dear – we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Muslims. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people . . . The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.
The latest iteration in this farrago of freedom of the press is the fatwah on American cartoonist Molly Norris, who originally created “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day.†The fatwah originated in Yemen, a place which I am sure a great many members of the American public would have difficulty pin-pointing it’s exact location on a map of the world. But the tentacles of the murderously offended reach a long way. She is now in hiding, and in various discussion threads, a dismayingly large number of commenters are blaming her for provoking Moslem ire.
But that is my point – what good is it to have brave principles about open, intellectual discussion, freedom of the press, of thought and expression, if in the end they are not exercised out of fear?
Here’s the thing – the other half of the intellectual freedom thing; there is no right of the individual never to be offended. In a free and open discussion, there will be differing opinions and interpretations, and there may even be people offended by the exercise of it. God knows, the artistic set have been cheerfully offending the bourgeoisie for decades, on the principle that it is good for us to be shaken up now and again, just to make us all consider or reconsider our preconceptions, or expand our consciousnesses or whatever twaddle they will use to justify themselves with. And the good bourgeoisie, even if offended, usually wasn’t motivated to do much more than grumble and write a letter to the editor; they didn’t go around chopping off heads. One might therefore have grounds for suspecting that in the case of the Danish Cartoons o’ Doom, and Everybody Draw Mohammad’ that a good part of this sudden unwillingness to offend is plain old fear.
Compounding the irony is the fact that those who are the most fearful of repercussions are also afraid to openly admit their fear in the first place – that some Islamic radical nutbag would come after them with a knife, or a car-bomb, or even just get their asses fired for ‘Islamophobia.’ So much easier to transfer the blame, and never have to admit that intellectual freedom has been stifled – not by law, but by fear.
So, now in the multitudinous fall-out from the Ground Zero Mosque, or Cordoba House or Park51, or whatever the heck it’s being termed – is a threat by a Florida whack-job minister to burn Korans as a public demonstration of something or other on Saturday. Cheesncrackers, people, just when I thought this whole issue couldn’t get any more demented. Is there someone I have to sleep with, in order to live on a planet with sane people, preferably ones with a sense of proportion and humor, not to mention toleration for those who don’t agree with them in every aspect of existence?
Frankly, I’d like to set the good Iman Rauf and the good Reverend Jones down on the other side of my official Sgt. Mom desk for a nice discussion of principles. And those would be principles which would apply to both of them, and yes, I expect to be the one doing the talking.
Yes, there is nothing in this supposedly free country which would prevent the Reverend Jones from incinerating copies of the Koran, as a demonstration of his lack of appreciation for Islam and his ingratitude for the many blessings that the strict practice of Salafist Islam brings to the modern cultural table. And yes, there is also nothing which would legally prevent a mosque/community/cultural center from being established adjacent to that place where there were 5,000 people (give or take) crushed or incinerated when a pair of hijacked airplanes were deliberately crashed into two tall and shining skyscrapers nine years ago to the day by representatives of the Religion of Peace.
So, established – they each can do this thing which they want to do, for whatever reasons. And Andres Serrano can take pictures of a crucifix in a vial of his own pee, and Chris O-whatever can adorn a painting of the Virgin with mounds of elephant dung, and Danish cartoonists can do cartoons about how fear of drawing a picture of Mohammad leads to self-censorship, and Salman Rushdie can joke around with Satanic Versifying and all of that is perfectly OK in a free country, or it ought to be.
But where is the line to be drawn, then? And if you are offended by one or the other, than what is the acceptable response? Letter to the editor, an angry post on a blog, a boycott? Threatening violence? Should the fear of violence lead one to self-censor? What about a fear of offending people? Why is it OK to offend one particular class of people by your actions in support of religion or art, but tip-toe around giving offense to the other? Exactly what is the standard at work here, and who decides to apply it? And hey, isn’t the poor old bourgeois getting a little tired of being constantly epatered?
Just as a final aside – the copies of the Koran that Reverend Jones is planning to flambé – are they English translations of the Koran, in which case it doesn’t really count as a Koran, per se, because the only Koran that counts as a Koran is the one in Arabic. Revelations straight from The Big Guy to Mohammad has been my understanding. Everything else is just a translation, and so it really isn’t the Koran, except for when it is. And I think Pastor Jones looks amazingly like the historic John Brown, of Pottawatomie, who tried to kick-start a slave insurrection, pre-Civil War. If The Reverent Jones really wants to cover his posterior for this little venture into protest, he ought to announce the Koran-B-Que as a piece of performance art and apply for a NEA grant. Your mileage may vary. Discuss.
So, it looks like the mosque in NYC near Ground Zero has cleared another hurdle. Seriously though, the NYPD is against it, the NYFD is against it, the families of those who died that day are against it. Having known and befriended just a couple of NYPD’s finest in my life, I have to wonder if anyone thinks for a moment that it will get completed much less stand for very long. I predict many unfortunate accidents.
Simply wonderful stuff bubbling up from other bloggers over the last couple of days – rich, creamy bloggy goodness that I simply have to share … that is, if you have not already found it yourself.
The pretensions of our new aristocratic class, dissected for your pleasure, here
I think what has happened is that over the past few decades, the more traditional forms of conspicuous consumption have become less and less effective for wealthy snobs who wish to ostentatiously parade their privilege. It used to be that the rich could be content with having lots of fancy toys and whatnot. But nowadays, when basically anyone above lower-lower class can head to Wal-Mart and pick up a plasma TV, drive a nice SUV, or even get a mortgage to ‘buy’ a McMansion somewhere (at least before ’07), it gets harder and harder for the wealthy to parade their specialness and privilege in front of the rest of us. So it’s only natural that they have increasingly turned to the realm of political postures as their method of choice for distinguishing themselves from the masses. Indeed, in this light it makes perfect sense that leftist policies would be the ones most likely to harm, constrain and impoverish folks who are merely middle class (but not upper middle class).
(link found, courtesy of Chicagoboyz )
Where our new aristos came from, and what they want. Power, basically. But you already knew that.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
(Link found first through da Blogfadda, but this essay is now being linked everywhere, including a fascinating discussion at The Belmont Club)
From the Department of Take a Number and Get in Line – thoughts on hating Obama…
If anyone during the 2008 had implied, or even speculated, that Obama was capable of anything of the sort, he’d have been dismissed as a demagogue, a hater, even a lunatic. But today, after his abandonment of the state of Tennessee (also wracked by flooding), his betrayal of the Georgians, his pulling the rug out from under the Poles and Czechs, his dragging and cold response to the Gulf blowout, his insults to the UK, the GOP, the Supreme Court, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Dalai Lama, it scarcely raises a shrug. That’s Obama. That’s how he acts — with arrogance, superciliousness, and indifference. We can search the entire roster of American presidents, and we will not find a match. This is not the behavior of an elected chief executive; it’s the conduct of a divine right monarch, and a pretty inadequate one as well.
And finally, those poor, suffering, starving and water-deprived Palestinians of Gaza – they only just now got a new shopping mall.
In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West.
(Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.â€
Link courtesy of Rantburg
You know, being that I am a lady of certain age, and since I will freely admit – that in the full bloom of youth I was really nothing to launch a thousand ships over, and being presently quite grateful for any kindly camera angle and trick of fortunate lighting which does not make me look like my Dad in drag – I really have felt kinda queasy about making fun of Helen Thomas, the doyenne and senior-most reporter of that bit of preciousosity known as the White House Press Corps. Age has not been kind to her – it has been quite brutally and infamously unkind, but I really never felt a need to add to the mockery … well, until now.
Ma’am, I am given to say now that this video clip shows as ugly an interior as an exterior – and that is an exterior which resembles Jabba the Hut with lipstick. From now on I live in hope that this performance will see you exiled from the White House Press Room … but I really am not holding my breath. Have a nice day … you ugly, ugly bigot.
In furtherance of my ambition to fight the war against the more homicidally inclined jihadist by humiliation and laughter directed at them – the following derisive references to the Nigerian who attempted to blow up a landing airliner with an explosive b*tt-plug on Christmas Day are suggested. Vote for the one you think the funniest, or of you have heard of a better one, add it in comments.
Weapon of Ass Destruction
The Knicker-Bomber
Fruit of the Boom Guy
BVD-Boomer
The Crotch-Rocket Bomber
The Undie-Bomber
The Panty-Boomer
From: Sgt Mom
To: Various
Re: Ft. Hood Murders
1. To the families, loved ones, comrades and friends of those killed at Ft. Hood this last week: I am so sorry; our prayers and condolences go out to you all.
2. To our current President: Please start going to your local Toastmaster’s organization, and work on your impromptu speech-making techniques. You are acceptable when prepped and reading it off the teleprompter, but looking all over the place in a triangular pattern – up left, down right, across and up left again – it’s really distracting. Oh, and as the C-in-C you should really learn the difference between the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Maybe working with flash cards would help you remember this stuff.
3. To CAIR, and other prominent members of various mainstream Muslim-American associations: Clean house. Start shopping violent jihadi a-holes to law enforcement. Immediately, if not yesterday.
4. To various deep thinkers, bloggers and trolls of the leftish persuasion, who are inclined to write and post with variations of really, those violent, warmongering and racist, hicks all got just what they deserved; just stop. Just stop it.
5. Department of Homeland Defense: Nice set of priorities, Janet! Looks like everyone was too busy running around in circles, looking for violent Tea Party activists to pay any attention to a whacked-out jihadist. Nice job, lady.
6. Army Personnel Management cadre at Walter Reed: Yeah, I know the usual drill for dealing with a problem troop/officer – quietly send them TDY, give them a pencil-pushing job someplace where they can do the minimum amount of damage, and eventually transfer them someplace remote. Didn’t work out well this time –maybe it would have been worthwhile doing some direct attitude adjustment on Major Hasan?
7. Major Hasan: Hmm … I guess Leavenworth still has a place where they can stand up traitors against a wall and have the firing squad finish the job?
8. Police Sgt. Kim Munley: most excellent job. Need something with more stopping power than a 9mm. Just sayin’…
Sgt Mom.
Oh, man – there are some people who just cannot take being laughed at, as richly as they deserve it. Kudos for Sacha Baron Cohen, for having a brass pair … tastefully trimmed with some fashionable and expensive designer-something-or-other, I am sure.
Well, that’s me – life in the fast lane, as it is, what with fifteen hours a week of soul-numbing drudgery at the call center, or as I refer to it “the Hellhole†(all apologies to anyone who now has the earworm from This Is Spinal Tap now firmly stuck in their consciousness for the rest of the day. No really, I live to serve.)
BTW, I can’t see my way to quitting, just yet. As horrendous as working there is – it’s reliable. Unless and until the monthly royalty checks for the Adelsverein Trilogy and Truckee about double and do so on a reliable, month to month basis. I can’t afford to slice up my nasty plastic employee badge and walk away – as tempting as the thought might be. With the economy apparently circling the drain and certain large corporations getting ready to tank worse than the Titanic … well, a regular job, however unpleasant, is not to be sneezed at. And as I keep reminding myself – it’s only fifteen hours a week.
But it’s fifteen hours away from time I can work on Watercress Press stuff – I have a horrendously complicated memoir, two huge binders full of not-very-well-organized pages (typewritten, mercifully) to work on … and now and again I have a mad wish to squeeze out another couple of hours to continue on the next book, or to market the current lot a little more vigorously. I have a book-club meeting in Beeville on Monday, and a pair of events in July in Fredericksburg … but I can’t even begin to think about that because of the most horrendously looming project…
Tea Party Hearty.
The San Antonio 4th of July Tea Party is going to be at the Rio Cibolo Ranch, a little east of town on IH-10 … and all of us who worked on the Tea Party on Tax Day, have been looking around in the last couple of weeks to try and figure out – well, not how could we top it, but at least equal it. Or come close to equaling it, and yes, we have spent hours and evenings in meetings working on this; how to re-organize the website, how to re-do our media efforts, how to reach out to the local media (and grab them by the short-n-curlies), and how to even begin to keep level of events and the proposed legislation that looks to be fair raining down upon us. It looks to be, sometimes, as if there is a sort of legislative hailstorm of laws approaching us – laws considered at every level, laws now in committee, under consideration, or proposed, each one more potentially damaging than the other, each one seemingly carefully crafted to favor someone involved, to the detriment of someone else, each of them with an apparently harmless intent, but with a vicious sting buried within it’s heart. Like that ghastly CPSIA law… where to start? I had the feeling three or four years ago that there was something malign lurking, some deadly danger, but I didn’t think it would be our republic being nibbled to death by ducks, or at least, some ghastly, self-serving political class of elected aristocrats, out to better themselves at the expense of the nation.
Oh, yeah – and the US is not a Muslim nation. Just thought I’d throw that in. Jeese, who is writing and fact-checking the Obaminator’s speeches these days? What desperately awful institute of learning did they pass through – and I use the word in the sense of fecal matter passing through an intestine. Like I am going to sit by and watch my country turned into something like Argentina under Juan Peron, while the old-line media establishment ooohs and ahhhs. Have a nice weekend – think of the musical that will be made of this in a couple of decades.
(This is a reworking of an essay I wrote, now lost and unreachable in the old MT archives, in light of current events in India. It seemed to have particular resonance, in light of some informed opinion, that the attacks in Mumbai are having rather the same effect locally and to the Indian diaspora that 9/11 had on Americans.)
It wasn’t quite the oddest thing I ever saw in a military museum: for my money, that would be Edith Cavell’s dog, stuffed and mounted in the Imperial War Museum, but it was the most unsettling, the most heartbreaking. The object was in the little local museum in the northern English city of Carlisle, in a suite of rooms in the castle, dedicated to the local regiments, which had been distinguishing themselves in the service of the British Empire for two or three centuries.
My younger brother JP and sister Pippy and I had spent a couple of weeks in the Lake District, and stopped in Carlisle on our way north to Scotland, during our wandering summer of 1977. We were discovering, or in my case, rediscovering the country of our ancestors, but on the bargain basement level— staying in youth hostels, traveling on public transportation, and buying groceries in the local Tesco. JP in particular was the champion of the inexpensive lunch; purchasing a hard roll, a slab of cheese and a tomato, and then sitting on the curb outside the store entrance and eating the lot.
Our itinerary was dictated by curiosity, a list of must-see locations, and the availability of a youth hostel, which charged the equivalent of about $1.00 a night for members, and offered some primitive kitchen facilities, but limited the duration of a stay to three consecutive nights, and locked us out during the day. We had gotten terribly efficient at looking after ourselves, and locating and extracting whatever inexpensive and educational resources were available in a city or town, over and above whatever attraction had drawn us there in the first place.
The first order of sightseeing business; go see the church and/or cathedral. There was always a church or cathedral, most usually with something interesting in it, and for free, or nearly free. Next, hang out in the park; there was always a park, nearly always a pleasant place to sit and kill an hour or so, and eat whatever we had bought for lunch.
Then go see the castle. There was always a castle, possibly in ruins, and if not, there would be a small fee to get in, but there would be something fascinating and educational within. Carlisle’s cathedral was interestingly truncated, owing to a little local spot of bother called the Civil War. The castle seemed to have escaped serious damage, and we were pleased to discover the military museum, three or four tiny stone rooms, with narrow windows and cases full of old uniforms and medals, a veritable military mathom-house of memorabilia. I had begun to suspect that many of the things in this museum and in the three or four others that we had seen were donated out of despair: what on earth to do with Great-Uncle Bert’s old dress tunic? Kukri? Camp tea service? You couldn’t throw it away, donate it to Goodwill, or the English equivalent thereof, and you certainly didn’t want to give it house room, so donating it to the museum was the honorable solution. The same sort of curious things tended to show up over and over, though, and we had begun to see them as familiar old friends.
“Have you found the Queen Victoria gift tin, yet?” I asked. During some long-ago imperial war, the dear Queen had made a gift to every man in the forces of a little tin of sweets, at least a third of whom had kept the tin as a souvenir, and his descendents had given it to the local military museum.
“Two of them,” reported JP, “Over here. Right next to the piece of hardtack with a poem written on it.”
There was always a piece of fossilized and slightly bug-nibbled piece of hardtack. In one museum I had seen one with a heroic ode neatly covering the playing-card sized surface, written in neat, flowing letters.
“Where’s the cap-badge? I didn’t see it in the other room.”
There was always a cap-badge, slightly dented where it had deflected a bullet and saved the life of the wearer. Every museum had a variant on that; if not a cap-badge, then a canteen, or one of those tiny Bibles with metal covers. The only exception I ever noticed, was the small metal-covered aircrew first aid kit. It was perforated with a bullet hole. According to the inscription next to it, the bearer had also been perforated, but non-fatally.
The last and largest room in the Carlisle museum— which wasn’t much bigger than the bedroom that Pippy and I shared at home— had a large case in the center, filled with weapons for the most part: Malay knives, and ancient pistols and swords, but the most curious thing of all was on a little stand in the center.
“What’s with that?” JP asked, “It doesn’t belong here at all.”
It was a white muslin baby’s cap, one of those lacily ornate Victorian bonnets, with ruffles and eyelet lace, and dangling ties that would make a bow under the baby’s soft little chin. Our family’s christening dress was about the same style, carefully sewn with tiny, tiny stitches, out of fine cotton muslin, but our dress was in pristine condition, and this little bonnet had a number of pale rusty blotches on it. We looked at it, and wondered what on earth a baby’s cap was doing in a case of guns and knives, and I walked around to the other side of the case, and found the card that explained why.
“Oh, dear, “ I said, “They found it at the well in Cawnpore. The local regiment was one of the first to re-enter the city.” I looked at the stains, and knew what they were, and what had happened to the baby who wore that little bonnet, and I felt quite sick.
“Cawnpore?” Pippy asked, “What’s that to do with it?”
By the time I finished explaining, poor Pippy looked very green. I knew about the Sepoy Mutiny, because I read a lot, and some of Kipling’s India stories had piqued my interest in history not covered in American public schools. The British garrison— and their wives and dependents, and any number of civilians, in the town of Cawnpore stood off a brutal siege by elements of their rebelling Indian soldiers, and local nobles who thrown in their lot with the mutineers in hopes of recovering their old position and authority. Reduced by disease, shot and starvation, the survivors had surrendered on the understanding that they be allowed to take boats down river, but they were massacred at the landing, in front of a large crowd, in as grisly and brutal a fashion as can be imagined.
Only one boat managed to float away, but all but five men were eventually recaptured and killed. Two hundred or so women and children who survived the massacre at the boat landing were taken to a small house close by, and held as hostages in horrible conditions. When the avenging British forces and their loyal allies were a day or so away, the leader of the mutineers in Cawnpore gave orders that those last surviving women and children be killed. They were hacked to death by a half-dozen men from the local bazaar, and the bodies thrown into a nearby well. Men from the returning British relief force later reported finding that house awash with blood, throughout all the rooms.
The horror of that particular massacre inflamed British popular opinion to an extraordinary degree. Sentimental and earnestly chivalrous, seeing it as their special duty to protect women and children, to live by the code of a gentleman, to keep promises— the actions of the Indian mutineers at Cawnpore, in breaking a truce and killing defenseless wives and children, seemed calculated to outrage every one of those values held dear by the typical Victorian. Commanders and soldiers came to look at the blood on the floor of the murder house— shoe-deep by some accounts— and resolved that there could be neither parley or mercy with those who had done this. The gentlemanly gloves came off, and the Mutiny was put down, with no quarter asked or given.
Captured mutineers were dragged back to Cawnpore and made to lick the floor of the massacre house, before they were hung, or tied over the mouths of cannon and blown to pieces. It’s all in the history books— this one is most thorough, and I recommend it. In reflecting on this, and on the running battles being fought in the streets of Mumbai – which is India’s modern Wall Street and Hollywood all mixed together – I wonder how much history those responsible for these bloody scenes at hotels, a hospital and a railway staion may know, or do they only know their own? I wonder if they have any clue of how much they risk putting themselves as far beyond the pale as the Cawnpore mutineers, all for making a show for their fellows and sympathizers? Eventually, when a group of terrorists violate enough norms, those who have been made targents will run out of any patience and sympathy, and feel no particular obligation to observe them in the breach. Having sown a storm, I wonder if those who sponsered a coordinated attack on India’s major city have any notion they are in danger of reaping a whirlwind. It has happened before, you know. In that very country and not to terribly far away.
A baby’s little white ruffled cap, faintly spotched with pale rusty bloodstains: we looked at it again, and went away, very quietly.
Robert Ferrigno on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Usually I hope that Robert is just kidding. In this case, I hope he’s not.
Of all of the manufactured news “events”* of the last couple of years – the Koran flushing story, the so-called Jenin massacre, the adventures of Green-Helmet Guy and his penchant for playing with dead children, 60 Minutes and Dan Rather’s amazing faked TANG memos – the Al-Dura hoax sets a number of awful records, besides being about the first of them all. Jenin was debunked within a couple of weeks, ditto for Green-Helmet Guy, and about the only casualty for Dan Rather’s adventure with copies of old files was his own credibility. The Koran-flushing story sent the Moslem world screeching like a cage full of howler monkeys, even though no one could explain how on earth a solid book could be flushed all the way down past the u-bend anyway.
The Al-Dura story – that stands by itself for a couple of reasons, not least because of the very horror of the event that it presented; a frightened, cowering child, killed by Israeli troops right in front of the news cameras. A horrible event, as presented – but what was even more horrible was the speed with which the image and the event became an icon and how unquestioningly it was accepted at face value across the Moslem and the western world as well. The Al-Dura story also killed people, quite a lot of them, starting with the two lost Israeli reservists who were murdered and torn apart by a Palestinian mob within two weeks of its’ incendiary broadcast.
Of course it had happened, right in front of the television cameras – couldn’t you believe your own eyes? But as it eventually developed, maybe you couldn’t. Compare all the other video footage shot that day, of Palestinian mobs trying to provoke a reaction from Israeli solders at the Netzarim junction, while dozens of news cameras rolled, to the final edited version of the apotheosis of the littlest Paleo-martyr – which no apparently no one saw fit to do until months and years afterwards. If anything, the whole appalling story is proof of the axiom that a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its’ boots on.
To me, the worst thing about matters like the al-Dura affair, and the TANG memo was how eagerly a thin story and staged footage were initially embraced as a representative of a gospel truth by reporters and news establishments that we had come to expect better of. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity doesn’t even begin to excuse actions like that. I don’t know which is worse – that our national and international media overlords would be so stupid as to swallow stuff like that listed in my opening graf whole, or so venial, malicious and arrogant as to cooperate in perpetuating a blood-libel, fully knowing the basis for their story was manufactured.
I do know that increasingly the credibility of the traditional news media has been pissed away over the last half-decade, now that we have the ability through the internet to follow-up on stories like this, that once would have been relegated to the newspaper morgue and to history books written decades after events. Progress in that, I suppose. Tn the popular mind, the half-life of a libel like the al-Dura hoax is probably right up there with that of plutonium, and President Bush’s famous plastic turkey and several times more harmful.
Is it just me, or does the current news of Al Queda looking to attack America again seem just a little too convenient? I mean, I assume that they’re always looking for a way to hit us again, but to have it make “the news,” during an election year?
Maybe I’m being cynical, but this just seems to be a bit too convenient for the Republicans and it’s a bad idea if that’s what they’re thinking.
I know we’re facing an ongoing threat but let’s keep that perspective. Dragging out that threat when it’s politically convenient is even more cynical, and it’s insulting.
To: The Arch Bishop of Canterbury
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The discrete attractions of sharia vis a vis English Common Law
1. Having been raised in the relatively intellectual and logic-based tradition of the Lutheran church, the temptation to take a swipe at a church founded on Henry VIII’s scheme to get out of one unrewarding marriage and into another more to his liking is almost overwhelming. The Church of England came about because King H. had the hots for Anne Boleyn and she wasn’t giving him any until he ponied up a ring and a crown and lots of other pretty shiny baubles. Lutherans have the 95 Thesis nailed to a church door, and the C of E… has Henry VIII’s gonads. I admit, Bish – you made a damn good show of it though, especially with the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible and all that. Speaking as a wordsmith, it beats Luther’s Small Catechism all hollow. Pure ecclesiastical and literary gold, but lamentably, it looks like your church has been running out of steam ever since.
2. What on earth where you thinking, urging your fellow citizens to acquiesce to the use of sharia law in Britain, as anything other than a small-scale, mutually-agreed-upon-between-the aggrieved parties adjunct, a sort of counseling service? Did you have any idea of the ruckus that would arise, upon suggesting that it was inevitable and by implication a good thing in this pretty, shiny multi-culti 21st century Britain? Do you even, god save us, have any idea that your casually tossed off remarks appeared to approve of grafting an alien sprout onto the tree of common law? An alien and wholly contradictory sprout that no matter how often or how loudly the praises of sharia law are sung by the usual chorus, casual consumers of recent media reports cannot help concluding those places in which sharia law holds sway are violent and benighted hellholes? In the eyes of those innocent of spectacles constructed of industrial-strength rose-colored glass, it is a turd. No amount of gold-plate will make it acceptable, not least, I suspect, to those who have had first-hand experience of it. (Especially those of the female gender.)
3. It is one thing, my good Bish, to discuss theoretical constructs – it is quite another to install them as workable and working systems, when real-world experience of them suggests that the outcome will be something comprehensively different, from what it appeared to be in ones’ airy world of theory and abstraction. See the practice of communism, when tried out in any place you could name.
4. Hoping that this memo will be of assistance to you, in explaining the storm which has descended upon your miter-capped head.
5. Sorry; coming up with an explanation for all those gorgeous but empty church buildings the length and breadth of Britain is more your line of work. Good luck with that.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
Later:This lovely monologue/rant courtesy of I-don’t-know-who-it’s-a-couple-glasses-of-chablis-into-my-birthday-eve here
Eh – Rantburg, the source of all things sour and sarky
Yes, I did write quite a number of posts about them, didn’t I? Stern words, had to be said. And I think I did a pretty ringing job, the first time around, so here are exerpts and links:
The strength of the West is in that very noisy disputation, our freedom to put everything on the table, to question, to non-conform, and by disputation and argument, make our beliefs even stronger for having all the idiocy knocked out of them. As such has been our custom, and in the reported words of Martin Luther, at the Diet of Worms: “Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason–I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other–my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.” (original post here)
As far as American newsprint and broadcast television is concerned, the phrase “freedom of the press” is from this day now enshrined in my favorite set of viciously skeptical quote-marks. The affair of the Danish Cartoons, and their non-appearance in all but a handful of newspapers has put the lie to every bit of lip-service ever paid to the notion that the American people had a right to know… had an absolute right, enshrined in the foundations of our very Republic to know… well, whatever it was that would goose the ratings, or boost circulation this week… A right that every journalist would fearlessly defend, with every fiber of his principled, journalistic being. Oops, there seems to be a little contradiction there. Principled… journalist… now there is a concept worn to tatters by this little international imbroglio, especially after Eason-gate, Rather-Gate and all the other tedious-gates. (original post here)
…the next time I hear someone pontificating away on the awesome responsibilities involved in upholding the “freedom of the press”… and they are from a newspaper which refused to run the Danish Cartoons, or a television station which refused to air them, citing “community sensitivities” or “deference to religious feelings” or whatever the sad excuse du jour is…. I shall laugh and laugh and laugh. (original post here)
Amusingly, that lugubrious old talking prune, NPR’s Daniel Shorr was coming out on the side of being all sensitive and being responsible about “using the power of the press” as regards the Matter of the Danish Cartoons. (Doesn’t that sound like a very dull Sherlock Holmes adventure, or the worst name for a war since the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”?) Just like the pet professor of international relations whom my local paper keeps on hand to drivel on about the Moslem world and international relations, and how the US must…must…zzzzz… oh, sorry. Dozed off there for a moment. I do that when reading the gentleman’s editorials, but so do probably most of his students. (original post here)
Wouldn’t change a thing… well, except to point and laugh at Daniel Shorr a little more.
From Iowahawk, naturally. How can an English major resist a parody entitled:
“Heere Bigynneth the Tale of the Asse-Hatte.”
Read, and savor the final punchline. You won’t regret it. Really.