Your Pianist hit a sour note, which he realized only after reading Andrew Sullivan's excellent piece (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/the-tragedy-of-hope.html) about President Obama's Nobel acceptance speech.
That's why I deleted my blog, "Audacity sans Hope." In it I wrote that the speech "did not lend itself to quick, facile analysis," whereupon my own attempt at analysis proved my point.
I have not reversed my opinion of the speech as oratory: it is a sublime example of the oratorical powers of our most eloquent President since Lincoln. It was, as Sullivan wrote, "written and spoken in such a way to reach anyone of any faith or none. . . . It was an expression of tragic hope."
I have reversed my opinion that his defense of war while accepting a prize for peace was an act of monumental hypocrisy. Rereading the speech, for perhaps the fifth time, I have come to see it as an act of absolute candor, an honest acknowledgment of his own "difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."
The key to understanding the speech is to understand this paragraph:
"We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified... For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."
Even as an apostle of hope, in his pre-campaign writings, Mr. Obama was ever the pragmatist. Sometimes progressives such as your Pianist found themselves so uplifted by his rhetoric of hope -- especially during the last abysmal days of Bush -- that they did not hear his simultaneous warning about what's possible.
Sullivan writes, "Hope is not optimism. We have little reason for optimism given the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hope is a choice. As much a choice as faith and love."
Mr. Obama did not start these wars. "Our actions matter," he said in Oslo, "and can bend history." The wars launched by another President have bent the history with which he must deal, a history that hands him a terrible paradox. On the one hand, no nation can be truly safe as long as there exist those who not only hate it with a suicidal passion, but also possess the wealth and the means to do it the kind of harm that the United States suffered on Sept. 11, 2001. And so he must pursue Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and to do so he must also fight the Taliban. In the context of the history he inherited, he can do no other. Yet the very process of pursuing those goals, of eliminating those threats, builds new animosity toward America in the muslim world, gives birth to new terrorists and terrorist sympathizers, complicates his already labyrinthine task, and can make his acceptance of a peace prize while justifying war seem like hypocrisy.
It is not, for, as Sullivan wrote: "(Obama) sees that the profound flaws in human nature affect 'us' as well as 'them'; that we "face the world as it is," not as we would like it to be; that the decision to go to war is a moral and a pragmatic one; that ends have to be balanced by a shrewd and sometimes cold-eyed assessment of means."
Obama's cold-eyed assessment of means has led to policies, or the continuation of old policies, that I still find abhorrent. "All nations," he said in Oslo, "must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." There is call in his own use of force for not just assessment, but reform, to meet those governing standards.
Yet, all things considered, as an editorialist in Canada observed, the Nobel acceptance was "the right speech at the right time."
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Monday, December 14, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
How Things Work
Ah, Democracy!
Why was Joe Lieberman, Aetna's $3-million man, the only Senator smiling as they emerged from the closed-door meeting that "compromised" the health care public option for the third or fourth time? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Hartford, which calls itself "the insurance capital of the world," has almost as many insurance company headquarters as Florida has oranges? Nah, that's cynical.
Left on the cutting room floor after that meeting were the last shreds of "reform" in the Senate version of health care reform legislation.
Among them is one that particularly infuriates me because I am a cancer survivor. Its loss represents literally a death blow to fellow survivors who, unlike me, require costly, long-term treatment. A case in point is my friend Garry, one of the most courageous people I know, an athlete who, in the Lance Armstrong mold, continues to push himself to the limit even as medicine and chemistry keep him alive.
He'd have had to start paying all of his treatment costs if the new Senate health care "reform" bill had been in effect. It would have wiped him out, leaving him a pauper. (A dead pauper, most likely.) That's because the bill would place dollar limits on insurance coverage for costly illnesses like Garry's.
The Associated Press reports today: The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.
The AP quotes an American Cancer Society official as saying, "We don't know who put it in, or why it was put in."
But we can guess, can't we? As investigative reporters used to be told, back when journalism was practiced and there were investigative reporters, "Follow the money."
What began as a noble ideal called health care reform has died aborning.
The best kind of reform, a government single payer plan, was taken off the table before the drafting of the first proposed legislation had even begun.
Follow the money.
When the first weakened draft of health care reform became public, a vast and highly successful campaign of lies and misinformation ("death panels," "forced enrollment in a government plan," etc.) turned the public against it.
Follow the money.
When Max Baucus (an insurance company million-dollar man) and his finance committee went behind closed doors to craft a Senate version of the bill, the media assured us that "the public option is dead."
Follow the money.
Senators Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Rolland Burris, and Sherrod Brown revived the public option. The $80 million insurance industry puppets Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu took Joe Lieberman's Sword of Hartford and carved out another "compromise."
Ah, Democracy! Follow the money.
Why was Joe Lieberman, Aetna's $3-million man, the only Senator smiling as they emerged from the closed-door meeting that "compromised" the health care public option for the third or fourth time? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Hartford, which calls itself "the insurance capital of the world," has almost as many insurance company headquarters as Florida has oranges? Nah, that's cynical.
Left on the cutting room floor after that meeting were the last shreds of "reform" in the Senate version of health care reform legislation.
Among them is one that particularly infuriates me because I am a cancer survivor. Its loss represents literally a death blow to fellow survivors who, unlike me, require costly, long-term treatment. A case in point is my friend Garry, one of the most courageous people I know, an athlete who, in the Lance Armstrong mold, continues to push himself to the limit even as medicine and chemistry keep him alive.
He'd have had to start paying all of his treatment costs if the new Senate health care "reform" bill had been in effect. It would have wiped him out, leaving him a pauper. (A dead pauper, most likely.) That's because the bill would place dollar limits on insurance coverage for costly illnesses like Garry's.
The Associated Press reports today: The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.
The AP quotes an American Cancer Society official as saying, "We don't know who put it in, or why it was put in."
But we can guess, can't we? As investigative reporters used to be told, back when journalism was practiced and there were investigative reporters, "Follow the money."
What began as a noble ideal called health care reform has died aborning.
The best kind of reform, a government single payer plan, was taken off the table before the drafting of the first proposed legislation had even begun.
Follow the money.
When the first weakened draft of health care reform became public, a vast and highly successful campaign of lies and misinformation ("death panels," "forced enrollment in a government plan," etc.) turned the public against it.
Follow the money.
When Max Baucus (an insurance company million-dollar man) and his finance committee went behind closed doors to craft a Senate version of the bill, the media assured us that "the public option is dead."
Follow the money.
Senators Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Rolland Burris, and Sherrod Brown revived the public option. The $80 million insurance industry puppets Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu took Joe Lieberman's Sword of Hartford and carved out another "compromise."
Ah, Democracy! Follow the money.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Climate Memos
A very bright fellow who worked for me at one of my newspapering stops eventually left The Business to become an information officer for the Argonne national research laboratory in Chicago.
After a few months on the job he e-mailed me that he was "learning" scientists' humor, which, he assured me, was unlike any other. He sent me a few samples. That was 15 years ago and I still don't get the jokes.
Lately, in an effort to make chicken salad out of something less palatable, I have been slogging through the entire text of the purloined e-mails of the climate scientists during a sedentary period inflicted upon me by spinal problems. I do not recommend this for pleasure-seekers -- neither the spinal problems nor the e-mail reading.
I still don't get most of the jokes, but it's obvious to me that the climate change deniers, ever vigilant for easy-on, easy-off propagandizing, don't "get" any of it. Like Bushites plucking squibs of intelligence and spinning them into causes for war, the climate deniers have picked out a dozen or so of the memos and made them sound like a vast left wing conspiracy. Much has been made, for example, about one memo in which a climate scientist acknowledges having used a "trick."
Having lived a good deal of my life with a chemist father whose hobbies included astronomy and archeology, and an older brother with a doctorate in chemical engineering whose hobbies ranged from biology to zoology, I became well acquainted with scientists' fondness for the word "trick."
It can mean a shortcut past an otherwise complicated process; a promising new theory; a happenstance; or a scientific joke that involves false clues that aren't revealed until you confess bafflement and the joker explains the correct result.
In the total context, the "trick" in the purloined memos is simply a shortcut.
Other "suspect" e-mails read very much like the Argonne jokes. Since the climate deniers don't understand basic science, it's little wonder they cannot "get" the esoteric chit-chat of scientists at work.
After a few months on the job he e-mailed me that he was "learning" scientists' humor, which, he assured me, was unlike any other. He sent me a few samples. That was 15 years ago and I still don't get the jokes.
Lately, in an effort to make chicken salad out of something less palatable, I have been slogging through the entire text of the purloined e-mails of the climate scientists during a sedentary period inflicted upon me by spinal problems. I do not recommend this for pleasure-seekers -- neither the spinal problems nor the e-mail reading.
I still don't get most of the jokes, but it's obvious to me that the climate change deniers, ever vigilant for easy-on, easy-off propagandizing, don't "get" any of it. Like Bushites plucking squibs of intelligence and spinning them into causes for war, the climate deniers have picked out a dozen or so of the memos and made them sound like a vast left wing conspiracy. Much has been made, for example, about one memo in which a climate scientist acknowledges having used a "trick."
Having lived a good deal of my life with a chemist father whose hobbies included astronomy and archeology, and an older brother with a doctorate in chemical engineering whose hobbies ranged from biology to zoology, I became well acquainted with scientists' fondness for the word "trick."
It can mean a shortcut past an otherwise complicated process; a promising new theory; a happenstance; or a scientific joke that involves false clues that aren't revealed until you confess bafflement and the joker explains the correct result.
In the total context, the "trick" in the purloined memos is simply a shortcut.
Other "suspect" e-mails read very much like the Argonne jokes. Since the climate deniers don't understand basic science, it's little wonder they cannot "get" the esoteric chit-chat of scientists at work.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
The Obfuspeakers
In the mid-80s, several of our favorite Blue Ridge mountain hiking trails were cluttered with obstructions: diseased trees had fallen across them and Reaganomics left the public lands agencies lacking funds to clear them away.
Forestry experts said the villain was acid rain; it was literally decimating the forests under their care. Drawing on a 1960s paper by a University of Wisconsin graduate student, federal lawmakers came up with a plan to curb the SO2 emissions that were killing the trees and wrote it into Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act. By 2007 acid rain levels had dropped nearly 70% and the forests were healthier.
The allowance market method that won this critical environmental battle came to be called "cap and trade."
Today, thanks to the Republicans' mastery of the art of obfuspeak, cap and trade has been transmogrified into something nasty, like "liberal" and "welfare." In the op-ed columns of the Wall Street Urinal and most of the right-wing corporate media outlets that pose as "mainstream," the term has mobilized wild-eyed opposition to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2007.
Ignoring the two-thirds of the proposed legislation that would create jobs by promoting renewable sources of energy and create more efficient energy across all sectors of the economy, the obfuspeakers have made "cap and trade" a bogey man symbol for the entire bill.
Title III of the bill addresses global warming and proposes an allowance market system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Most proponents of government action to curb global warming favor a straight-out "carbon tax" on bad emissions. But in yet another of the concessions to bipartisanship that have come to exemplify the Dr. Kidglove approach to everything, the bill's authors accepted the recommendations of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of electric utilities, oil companies, chemical companies, automobile manufacturers and other foxes who like to "guard" our henhouses. These concessions to Republican big business interests are the Title III "cap and trade" provisions that Republicans now revile.
Go figure.
Even Thomas Crocker, the graduate student whose paper gave us the allowance market method, has been widely quoted as saying that cap-and-trade is not the best way to cope with today's global warming emissions.
Cap and trade, he said, is better suited to dealing with discrete, regional problems like acid rain. "It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally," Mr. Crocker, now 73, said recently. "There are no institutions right now that have that power." He favors persuading nations to impose straight-out taxes on their own carbon polluting industries.
If Republicans really cared about solutions, rather than obstructionism, they would join a bipartisan effort to replace Title III of the new Clean Energy Act with a carefully crafted carbon tax provision.
But they don't really want that, nor do their big buck campaign contributors in the energy and extraction industries.
They'd rather continue their witless sloganeering against the bogeyman of cap and trade.
FOOTNOTE
"Obfuspeak" is a neologism manufactured from "obfuscate" and "speak" to denote the manner in which Republicans have changed the meanings of words to dominate the vocabulary of political debate in the United States.
Forestry experts said the villain was acid rain; it was literally decimating the forests under their care. Drawing on a 1960s paper by a University of Wisconsin graduate student, federal lawmakers came up with a plan to curb the SO2 emissions that were killing the trees and wrote it into Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act. By 2007 acid rain levels had dropped nearly 70% and the forests were healthier.
The allowance market method that won this critical environmental battle came to be called "cap and trade."
Today, thanks to the Republicans' mastery of the art of obfuspeak, cap and trade has been transmogrified into something nasty, like "liberal" and "welfare." In the op-ed columns of the Wall Street Urinal and most of the right-wing corporate media outlets that pose as "mainstream," the term has mobilized wild-eyed opposition to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2007.
Ignoring the two-thirds of the proposed legislation that would create jobs by promoting renewable sources of energy and create more efficient energy across all sectors of the economy, the obfuspeakers have made "cap and trade" a bogey man symbol for the entire bill.
Title III of the bill addresses global warming and proposes an allowance market system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Most proponents of government action to curb global warming favor a straight-out "carbon tax" on bad emissions. But in yet another of the concessions to bipartisanship that have come to exemplify the Dr. Kidglove approach to everything, the bill's authors accepted the recommendations of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of electric utilities, oil companies, chemical companies, automobile manufacturers and other foxes who like to "guard" our henhouses. These concessions to Republican big business interests are the Title III "cap and trade" provisions that Republicans now revile.
Go figure.
Even Thomas Crocker, the graduate student whose paper gave us the allowance market method, has been widely quoted as saying that cap-and-trade is not the best way to cope with today's global warming emissions.
Cap and trade, he said, is better suited to dealing with discrete, regional problems like acid rain. "It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally," Mr. Crocker, now 73, said recently. "There are no institutions right now that have that power." He favors persuading nations to impose straight-out taxes on their own carbon polluting industries.
If Republicans really cared about solutions, rather than obstructionism, they would join a bipartisan effort to replace Title III of the new Clean Energy Act with a carefully crafted carbon tax provision.
But they don't really want that, nor do their big buck campaign contributors in the energy and extraction industries.
They'd rather continue their witless sloganeering against the bogeyman of cap and trade.
FOOTNOTE
"Obfuspeak" is a neologism manufactured from "obfuscate" and "speak" to denote the manner in which Republicans have changed the meanings of words to dominate the vocabulary of political debate in the United States.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
It's Broke; Fix It
The two-party system simply does not work any more.
A far, far right-wing tweeter on Twitter texted, during Obama's war speech, "This could just as well be Bush speaking. . . ."
Democrats were complicit in all the terrible policies of the Bush administration. There is in fact very little difference between the two major parties and the people they elect to office.
It is time for truly progressive Americans, regardless of their voter registration affiliation, to lead a movement toward a multi-party democracy by forming a new party for those of us who believe:
Peace is better than war. For years, a bill sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D. -OH) to establish a cabinet Department of Peace has languished somewhere in the vast bowels of congressional inaction. Kucinich should be among the leaders of the new party, whose platform would incliude a pledge to reverse the United States policy of waging endless war.
Americans -- all of them -- are entitled to affordable health care. The despicable farce that was represented as debate over "reforming" our health care system achieved nothing other than to expose the shameless hypocrisy of our national leadership and our congress. The new party would promise a single-payer, government-managed system that would provide, in effect, Medicare for everyone.
Massive reforms are essential in how we elect public officials. We need public funding of campaigns. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests contributed more than $470 million to presidential and congressional candidates last election. Tax 'em 70% of that for a public campaign fund and they'd save money. You'd have $330 million in the campaign fund pool. Put a $3 voter participation surcharge on every individual tax return and you'd have another $300 million. Divvy the $630 million among all the candidates for congressional seats and the presidency and that's it. Big Oil couldn't buy candidates; nor could Big Banking, Big Defense Manufacturing, Big Anything.
The two worst laws enacted in half a century must be rescinded. The War Powers Act of 1973, in which Congress gave away its Constitutional war-making powers to the chief executive, particularly in Sections 4 (b), 4 (c) and 5 (b), gave us Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan. It must be repealed. The so-called USA Patriot Act -- rushed through a brain-numbed Congress, most of whom hadn't even read it -- was the first and foremost of Bush-era actions to deprive U.S. citizens of the protection of the Bill of Rights. These rights must be restored by repealing the act and replacing it with legislation that at once protects our national security and our individual liberties.
Separation of Church and State. We are not a "Christian nation." Nor are we a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation or an atheist nation. We are a free people with freedom of and from religion. It is imperative that our national leaders recognize and respect this condition, which the founding fathers gave us after intense thought, debate and with prophetic foresight.
Government regulation of business is mandatory. Not just because 25 years of deregulation have left the economy in a mess, but also because the Constitution mandates it (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).
Government has a social obligation, a mandated role in our lives. It's right there in the very preamble of the Constitution: "promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty." The new progressive party must give us candidates who can outshout and outthink the fools who shout "Socialism" every time government proposes to right social wrongs, improve our system of justice for all and help the downtrodden among us to lead better lives.
Absolute Equality for Women. This includes their absolute right to make their own private reproductive health decisions.
There's more, but these beliefs are the framework for a new, viable and vital force in American politics. We need to form a new party around them because the existing parties have long since abandoned them. There is a perfectly good, perfectly respectable, perfectly honorable term for such an ethic. It is "liberal."
We must retake that honorable word and restore its original meaning, even as we lead the way to restore the original meanings of the founding fathers.
At this stage of our national existence, the alternative -- a continuing rightward slide into a domestic police state and a world policy of perpetual war against . . . .something -- is unthinkable.
Follow Up
Today's news about Max Baucus's bedroom gymnastics and their connection to his Senatorial duties regarding U.S. Attorney nominations reaffirms the bipartisanship of the corruption ethic in today's Washington.
Baucus, Israeli Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- two Democrats and a former Democrat turned Independent -- are important obstructions to passage of the sad carcass of health care reform being debated in the Senate.
Each of them has received well over $500,000 in campaign contributions between 2005 and 2009 from the health insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industries.
A far, far right-wing tweeter on Twitter texted, during Obama's war speech, "This could just as well be Bush speaking. . . ."
Democrats were complicit in all the terrible policies of the Bush administration. There is in fact very little difference between the two major parties and the people they elect to office.
It is time for truly progressive Americans, regardless of their voter registration affiliation, to lead a movement toward a multi-party democracy by forming a new party for those of us who believe:
Peace is better than war. For years, a bill sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D. -OH) to establish a cabinet Department of Peace has languished somewhere in the vast bowels of congressional inaction. Kucinich should be among the leaders of the new party, whose platform would incliude a pledge to reverse the United States policy of waging endless war.
Americans -- all of them -- are entitled to affordable health care. The despicable farce that was represented as debate over "reforming" our health care system achieved nothing other than to expose the shameless hypocrisy of our national leadership and our congress. The new party would promise a single-payer, government-managed system that would provide, in effect, Medicare for everyone.
Massive reforms are essential in how we elect public officials. We need public funding of campaigns. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests contributed more than $470 million to presidential and congressional candidates last election. Tax 'em 70% of that for a public campaign fund and they'd save money. You'd have $330 million in the campaign fund pool. Put a $3 voter participation surcharge on every individual tax return and you'd have another $300 million. Divvy the $630 million among all the candidates for congressional seats and the presidency and that's it. Big Oil couldn't buy candidates; nor could Big Banking, Big Defense Manufacturing, Big Anything.
The two worst laws enacted in half a century must be rescinded. The War Powers Act of 1973, in which Congress gave away its Constitutional war-making powers to the chief executive, particularly in Sections 4 (b), 4 (c) and 5 (b), gave us Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan. It must be repealed. The so-called USA Patriot Act -- rushed through a brain-numbed Congress, most of whom hadn't even read it -- was the first and foremost of Bush-era actions to deprive U.S. citizens of the protection of the Bill of Rights. These rights must be restored by repealing the act and replacing it with legislation that at once protects our national security and our individual liberties.
Separation of Church and State. We are not a "Christian nation." Nor are we a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation or an atheist nation. We are a free people with freedom of and from religion. It is imperative that our national leaders recognize and respect this condition, which the founding fathers gave us after intense thought, debate and with prophetic foresight.
Government regulation of business is mandatory. Not just because 25 years of deregulation have left the economy in a mess, but also because the Constitution mandates it (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).
Government has a social obligation, a mandated role in our lives. It's right there in the very preamble of the Constitution: "promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty." The new progressive party must give us candidates who can outshout and outthink the fools who shout "Socialism" every time government proposes to right social wrongs, improve our system of justice for all and help the downtrodden among us to lead better lives.
Absolute Equality for Women. This includes their absolute right to make their own private reproductive health decisions.
There's more, but these beliefs are the framework for a new, viable and vital force in American politics. We need to form a new party around them because the existing parties have long since abandoned them. There is a perfectly good, perfectly respectable, perfectly honorable term for such an ethic. It is "liberal."
We must retake that honorable word and restore its original meaning, even as we lead the way to restore the original meanings of the founding fathers.
At this stage of our national existence, the alternative -- a continuing rightward slide into a domestic police state and a world policy of perpetual war against . . . .something -- is unthinkable.
Follow Up
Today's news about Max Baucus's bedroom gymnastics and their connection to his Senatorial duties regarding U.S. Attorney nominations reaffirms the bipartisanship of the corruption ethic in today's Washington.
Baucus, Israeli Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- two Democrats and a former Democrat turned Independent -- are important obstructions to passage of the sad carcass of health care reform being debated in the Senate.
Each of them has received well over $500,000 in campaign contributions between 2005 and 2009 from the health insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industries.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
What "days are over?"
Something is rotten in a statement by President Obama in his war speech at West Point.
"In the past," he said, "we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear."
Uh-oh!
None of the 30,000 new troops he has committed to the war in Afghanistan can legally be deployed to Pakistan. U.S. operations there are strictly CIA.
The same CIA that was in charge of our operations in Vietnam before we decided to start sending "military advisers" there. The same CIA that in February of 1963 told President Kennedy: We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. . . . Improvements which have occurred during the past year now indicate that the Viet Cong can be contained militarily and that further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside.
More than 58,000 combat deaths later, we finally pulled out of Vietnam.
Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Mr. Obama told us, asserting that we have a coalition of allies supporting the Afghanistan effort whereas we acted unilaterally in Vietnam. In support of Mr. Obama's surge, NATO nations have offered 5,000 more troops, mainly in small increments from small nations like Albania. OK, that's multilateral in the strictest sense of the word, but not exactly a ringing endorsement of the "new" strategy, which sounds a lot like the old one. Neither France nor Germany, for example, promised any fresh troops.
What's new in Obama's strategy is the ominous little paragraph about Pakistan.
How, pray, shall we build this "partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust?"
By expanding the CIA's secret program of attack drones raining terror on Pakistani civilians? Our government proclaims that these robot attacks have killed nine of the top 20 al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan. It does not tell us that in the same time, 687 Pakistani civilians have been killed by the drones, a roughly 50-to-1 ratio of innocents killed to bad guys killed. One suspects that this sort of thing fosters neither mutual interests, mutual respect nor mutual trust.
The hard fact is that Pakistan does not trust the United States and nothing in the new Afghan policies seems designed to change that fact.
Exactly what "days are over" then?
"We cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear." Is that a thinly-veiled threat to a nuclear-armed nation whose people are already suspicious of anything American?
"Further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside," the CIA said 46 years ago about Vietnam.
"America is providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development," President Obama said Tuesday.
"Invest in companies that make prosthetics," a friend advised me after listening to Mr. Obama's war speech. "Our military will be needing a lot of them."
Shall I invest in casket-makers, as well?
Something is rotten.
"In the past," he said, "we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear."
Uh-oh!
None of the 30,000 new troops he has committed to the war in Afghanistan can legally be deployed to Pakistan. U.S. operations there are strictly CIA.
The same CIA that was in charge of our operations in Vietnam before we decided to start sending "military advisers" there. The same CIA that in February of 1963 told President Kennedy: We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. . . . Improvements which have occurred during the past year now indicate that the Viet Cong can be contained militarily and that further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside.
More than 58,000 combat deaths later, we finally pulled out of Vietnam.
Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Mr. Obama told us, asserting that we have a coalition of allies supporting the Afghanistan effort whereas we acted unilaterally in Vietnam. In support of Mr. Obama's surge, NATO nations have offered 5,000 more troops, mainly in small increments from small nations like Albania. OK, that's multilateral in the strictest sense of the word, but not exactly a ringing endorsement of the "new" strategy, which sounds a lot like the old one. Neither France nor Germany, for example, promised any fresh troops.
What's new in Obama's strategy is the ominous little paragraph about Pakistan.
How, pray, shall we build this "partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust?"
By expanding the CIA's secret program of attack drones raining terror on Pakistani civilians? Our government proclaims that these robot attacks have killed nine of the top 20 al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan. It does not tell us that in the same time, 687 Pakistani civilians have been killed by the drones, a roughly 50-to-1 ratio of innocents killed to bad guys killed. One suspects that this sort of thing fosters neither mutual interests, mutual respect nor mutual trust.
The hard fact is that Pakistan does not trust the United States and nothing in the new Afghan policies seems designed to change that fact.
Exactly what "days are over" then?
"We cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear." Is that a thinly-veiled threat to a nuclear-armed nation whose people are already suspicious of anything American?
"Further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside," the CIA said 46 years ago about Vietnam.
"America is providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development," President Obama said Tuesday.
"Invest in companies that make prosthetics," a friend advised me after listening to Mr. Obama's war speech. "Our military will be needing a lot of them."
Shall I invest in casket-makers, as well?
Something is rotten.
President Irrelevant
"Expect it pains you," a dear friend wrote after President Obama's war speech at West Point. She sent me a charming little dog story -- knowing these always warm my crotchety old heart -- to salve my pain.
Another longtime friend posted: "As a one-time Obama supporter, it has been difficult not to notice that we, virtually all us old Obama supporters, have been rooked, or not to notice how consistently and persistently we have been rooked. No more love in exchange for getting rooked, Mr. Obama. No deal. For the first and only time, I watched about half of your campaign's life story replayed on HBO's documentary last night. And as I watched, I kept wondering what you were thinking while you fooled us over and over again. Never again, sir. Never again."
We knew it was coming (see my earlier post on Obama's Sinai). But seeing the scalpel coming doesn't ease the pain of an unanesthetized incision.
Lies, deceit, flippant disregard for basic human decency -- we expected these from his predecessor, an empty-headed buffoon whose only qualification for any office was a rich and well-connected family.
But this man was intelligent, articulate, seeming to ooze human compassion from every pore. Yet as we watched his actions, even in the honeymoon interim between election triumph and the harsh realities of the Oval Office, we quickly realized that the new President was not the person we thought we were voting for.
Well, some tell us now, you simply deceived yourselves. You invented a Knight in Shining armor, named him Sir Barack, and voted for him. Quite a bit of truth to this, Mea culpa.
Well, some tell us, it's simply brilliant strategy. He will compromise with the opposition on everything and when the resulting policies clearly fail, Shazam!, Dr. Kidglove will become Captain Marvelous and fix everything. Now that's self-delusion!
In fact, Mr. Obama is what he is: a gifted orator, mundane politician and largely powerless chief executive.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writes:
"In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups. Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a 'terrorist event.'
"Essentially, Obama is irrelevant."
How sad. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Another longtime friend posted: "As a one-time Obama supporter, it has been difficult not to notice that we, virtually all us old Obama supporters, have been rooked, or not to notice how consistently and persistently we have been rooked. No more love in exchange for getting rooked, Mr. Obama. No deal. For the first and only time, I watched about half of your campaign's life story replayed on HBO's documentary last night. And as I watched, I kept wondering what you were thinking while you fooled us over and over again. Never again, sir. Never again."
We knew it was coming (see my earlier post on Obama's Sinai). But seeing the scalpel coming doesn't ease the pain of an unanesthetized incision.
Lies, deceit, flippant disregard for basic human decency -- we expected these from his predecessor, an empty-headed buffoon whose only qualification for any office was a rich and well-connected family.
But this man was intelligent, articulate, seeming to ooze human compassion from every pore. Yet as we watched his actions, even in the honeymoon interim between election triumph and the harsh realities of the Oval Office, we quickly realized that the new President was not the person we thought we were voting for.
Well, some tell us now, you simply deceived yourselves. You invented a Knight in Shining armor, named him Sir Barack, and voted for him. Quite a bit of truth to this, Mea culpa.
Well, some tell us, it's simply brilliant strategy. He will compromise with the opposition on everything and when the resulting policies clearly fail, Shazam!, Dr. Kidglove will become Captain Marvelous and fix everything. Now that's self-delusion!
In fact, Mr. Obama is what he is: a gifted orator, mundane politician and largely powerless chief executive.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writes:
"In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups. Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a 'terrorist event.'
"Essentially, Obama is irrelevant."
How sad. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Ethics and a Hawk
Our annual ethical dilemma has begun. The Cooper's hawk is back.
He has emigrated from his home in mountain forests somewhere north of us to hunt prey in our warmer clime. He especially likes to hunt from a perch on our back gate, for our premises attract other birds the year round. We ply them with fruit, bread crumbs and seeds and nectar feeders for the hummingbirds. They nest on our roof and in niches and corners of our house. They hatch their young, feed them, teach them to fly.
They are beautiful and welcome guests. But they are also prey for the Cooper's hawk. He is a princely bird, noble in features and stature. One of the smaller accipiters, he is a swift flier who can dart through trees in pursuit of smaller birds. His speed in flight, his aerial agility are forms of beauty, too.
He visits us every winter precisely because our feeders attract other birds. Are we thus complicit in the murder of the birds he kills for food? Last year I watched a harsh episode of nature next to the little pond beside the desert willow tree: a white winged dove -- probably accustomed to easy meals from the nearby feeder -- fell prey to the hawk and provided it with two days worth of nourishment.
That was an exception. We seldom find evidence of his bird-kills. I tell myself that he feeds far more often on rodents and other small mammals on the desert floor around us. In this part of the country, certain rodents can transmit a terrible, fatal disease to humans. Since the hawk helps control the rodent population, he is, in a sense, like the rattlesnake, a friend of man.
My wife Lois frets over the hawk's annual threat to the birds she so fondly feeds. But we need not feel guilty, say I; we are not abettors in murder. The hawk does what it must, and has a place in the natural order of things. We should be acting badly if we interfered in that order. Let hawks be hawks, sparrows be sparrows, wolves be wolves and fawns be fawns and may all, as species, survive.
I say that's just being pro-life.
He has emigrated from his home in mountain forests somewhere north of us to hunt prey in our warmer clime. He especially likes to hunt from a perch on our back gate, for our premises attract other birds the year round. We ply them with fruit, bread crumbs and seeds and nectar feeders for the hummingbirds. They nest on our roof and in niches and corners of our house. They hatch their young, feed them, teach them to fly.
They are beautiful and welcome guests. But they are also prey for the Cooper's hawk. He is a princely bird, noble in features and stature. One of the smaller accipiters, he is a swift flier who can dart through trees in pursuit of smaller birds. His speed in flight, his aerial agility are forms of beauty, too.
He visits us every winter precisely because our feeders attract other birds. Are we thus complicit in the murder of the birds he kills for food? Last year I watched a harsh episode of nature next to the little pond beside the desert willow tree: a white winged dove -- probably accustomed to easy meals from the nearby feeder -- fell prey to the hawk and provided it with two days worth of nourishment.
That was an exception. We seldom find evidence of his bird-kills. I tell myself that he feeds far more often on rodents and other small mammals on the desert floor around us. In this part of the country, certain rodents can transmit a terrible, fatal disease to humans. Since the hawk helps control the rodent population, he is, in a sense, like the rattlesnake, a friend of man.
My wife Lois frets over the hawk's annual threat to the birds she so fondly feeds. But we need not feel guilty, say I; we are not abettors in murder. The hawk does what it must, and has a place in the natural order of things. We should be acting badly if we interfered in that order. Let hawks be hawks, sparrows be sparrows, wolves be wolves and fawns be fawns and may all, as species, survive.
I say that's just being pro-life.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Come Back, Col. Horton
Someone said of Burke Horton that if you asked him the time of day, he'd tell you how to make a watch.
He was an engineer and inventor. He was also a musician, tennis player and coach, hockey player and coach, retired military officer and an expert on small-force counter-insurgency tactics.
As an Air Force colonel working in military intelligence, he often gave President Eisenhower's daily intelligence briefing in the west wing of the White House.
I've got to assume that in the enormous labyrinth of the world's largest armed force, there were a number of counterparts of Col. Burke Horton on Sept. 11, 2001. I wonder if they were even consulted after the terrorist attacks that day.
I doubt it because our response was all wrong. Massive military force is useless against stateless terrorism, as Burke Horton knew full well. But the civilian leaders of our military, from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld down through the ranks, were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq even as they ordered a token military effort to capture the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Afghanistan.
Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority issued a report this week saying what we all knew, that bin Laden was vulnerable in December of 2001 in the Tora Bora area near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Gearing up to attack Iraq, Rumsfeld pursued the fleeing terrorist leader with a force of a mere 100 troops through the rugged mountain terrain. Of course he got away.
But the pertinent point in the report was buried: appropriate military power, "from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," it said.
The point is important because it hints at what would have been a far more effective response to 9/11 than the purely military and essentially unilateral effort that we mounted. Burke Horton would have designed something very different.
First, he would have assembled far more reliable intelligence. The entire world was sympathetic to American sensibilities in the aftermath of the attacks. Horton would have moved swiftly to use that empathy: he'd have tapped every national intelligence service to pool information about bin Laden and his whereabouts and his associates and his vulnerability.
Then he would have mounted a clandestine police action, employing elite military and intelligence units from around the world, supplemented by the very sniper teams and ultra mobile Marine divisions mentioned in the Senate report, especially including Arab-speaking experts in high-mountain maneuvering, to run down bin Laden and his band and bring them to justice.
The Bushhawks' obsession with Hussein and Iraq's enormous oil reserves blinded them to that option, if anyone even presented it to them.
What Dr. Kidglove needs in his faltering administration is another Burke Horton. When Burke was the tennis pro for my group of early bird tennis players at an indoor racquet club, not even a blizzard could keep him from unlocking the door to the club at precisely 5:30 a.m. every day. "How the heck did you get here?" I asked during a record blizzard one February day. He nodded to the corner of the office toward a pair of cross country skis. "A successful operation requires two things," he said. "Provision for every exigency, and a strong will." Burke was 77 when he skied the six hilly miles to open the tennis club door.
Would that someone as steel-willed had this president's ear.
FOLLOW-UP
Michael Graham, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer, writes:
I knew a lot of guys like Col Horton, honorable old soldiers who just wouldn't tolerate the BS the Pentagon is slinging today.
Over the weekend, I read the entire Senate report on Tora Bora. A friend of mine was there at the time and confirms that we could have had bin Laden.
But here's the problem: If we had caught him, it would have destroyed the plan to pin 9-11 on Saddam, thus destroying the "reason" to invade Iraq. Look how much money was made in that little adventure.
He was an engineer and inventor. He was also a musician, tennis player and coach, hockey player and coach, retired military officer and an expert on small-force counter-insurgency tactics.
As an Air Force colonel working in military intelligence, he often gave President Eisenhower's daily intelligence briefing in the west wing of the White House.
I've got to assume that in the enormous labyrinth of the world's largest armed force, there were a number of counterparts of Col. Burke Horton on Sept. 11, 2001. I wonder if they were even consulted after the terrorist attacks that day.
I doubt it because our response was all wrong. Massive military force is useless against stateless terrorism, as Burke Horton knew full well. But the civilian leaders of our military, from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld down through the ranks, were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq even as they ordered a token military effort to capture the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Afghanistan.
Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority issued a report this week saying what we all knew, that bin Laden was vulnerable in December of 2001 in the Tora Bora area near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Gearing up to attack Iraq, Rumsfeld pursued the fleeing terrorist leader with a force of a mere 100 troops through the rugged mountain terrain. Of course he got away.
But the pertinent point in the report was buried: appropriate military power, "from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," it said.
The point is important because it hints at what would have been a far more effective response to 9/11 than the purely military and essentially unilateral effort that we mounted. Burke Horton would have designed something very different.
First, he would have assembled far more reliable intelligence. The entire world was sympathetic to American sensibilities in the aftermath of the attacks. Horton would have moved swiftly to use that empathy: he'd have tapped every national intelligence service to pool information about bin Laden and his whereabouts and his associates and his vulnerability.
Then he would have mounted a clandestine police action, employing elite military and intelligence units from around the world, supplemented by the very sniper teams and ultra mobile Marine divisions mentioned in the Senate report, especially including Arab-speaking experts in high-mountain maneuvering, to run down bin Laden and his band and bring them to justice.
The Bushhawks' obsession with Hussein and Iraq's enormous oil reserves blinded them to that option, if anyone even presented it to them.
What Dr. Kidglove needs in his faltering administration is another Burke Horton. When Burke was the tennis pro for my group of early bird tennis players at an indoor racquet club, not even a blizzard could keep him from unlocking the door to the club at precisely 5:30 a.m. every day. "How the heck did you get here?" I asked during a record blizzard one February day. He nodded to the corner of the office toward a pair of cross country skis. "A successful operation requires two things," he said. "Provision for every exigency, and a strong will." Burke was 77 when he skied the six hilly miles to open the tennis club door.
Would that someone as steel-willed had this president's ear.
FOLLOW-UP
Michael Graham, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer, writes:
I knew a lot of guys like Col Horton, honorable old soldiers who just wouldn't tolerate the BS the Pentagon is slinging today.
Over the weekend, I read the entire Senate report on Tora Bora. A friend of mine was there at the time and confirms that we could have had bin Laden.
But here's the problem: If we had caught him, it would have destroyed the plan to pin 9-11 on Saddam, thus destroying the "reason" to invade Iraq. Look how much money was made in that little adventure.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
His Military Masters
The utter intimidation of Dr. Kidglove by the military he ostensibly commands could not be made more clear than by the story in this morning's New York Times.
Alissa J. Rubin reports from Kabul: " An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base."
Kidglove campaigned on the theme of change, promising to reverse the shameful Bush policies of torture, illegal imprisonment, Geneva Convention violations and lies.
His promises have turned into lies to equal those those Bush told, with the possible exception of the fairy tale WMDs in Iraq that have wasted the lives of thousands of United States military personnel.
The Bagram jail, Rubin writes, "consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions."
Kidglove signed an order last January to eliminate the so-called "black sites" run by the CIA, but -- oops! -- it didn't apply to this particular torture chamber because it's run by the military Special Operations forces.
Ah, but last August, our kindly torquemadas revised Pentagon policy so that detainees in these black sites could be held there no more than two weeks.
Rubin writes:
“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who was detained there and who, like some Afghans, doesn’t use a last name. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”
Mr. Hamidullah was released in October, after five and half months in detention, five to six weeks of it in the black jail, he said.
Two weeks, schmoo weeks, he's only a raghead, right?
Rubin's article refers to "tension" between Kidglove and his military commanders, to whom the President wants to give "leeway to operate."
Operate? What's that mean, "operate?"
“They beat up people in the black jail,” Hamidullah said. “They didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep." Two Afghan teen-agers held in Bagram jail for more than ten months told a reporter they had been subjected to beatings and "humiliation" by their captors.
They were detained because they were suspected of being Taliban terrorists. They weren't. They were just people. When their captors finally learned the truth, the detainees were released.
One of the freed prisoners said he was told, "'Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10 months and gave me nothing back.”
By that time his family had spent two years' income in a futile effort to learn if he was alive or dead.
Alissa J. Rubin reports from Kabul: " An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base."
Kidglove campaigned on the theme of change, promising to reverse the shameful Bush policies of torture, illegal imprisonment, Geneva Convention violations and lies.
His promises have turned into lies to equal those those Bush told, with the possible exception of the fairy tale WMDs in Iraq that have wasted the lives of thousands of United States military personnel.
The Bagram jail, Rubin writes, "consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions."
Kidglove signed an order last January to eliminate the so-called "black sites" run by the CIA, but -- oops! -- it didn't apply to this particular torture chamber because it's run by the military Special Operations forces.
Ah, but last August, our kindly torquemadas revised Pentagon policy so that detainees in these black sites could be held there no more than two weeks.
Rubin writes:
“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who was detained there and who, like some Afghans, doesn’t use a last name. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”
Mr. Hamidullah was released in October, after five and half months in detention, five to six weeks of it in the black jail, he said.
Two weeks, schmoo weeks, he's only a raghead, right?
Rubin's article refers to "tension" between Kidglove and his military commanders, to whom the President wants to give "leeway to operate."
Operate? What's that mean, "operate?"
“They beat up people in the black jail,” Hamidullah said. “They didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep." Two Afghan teen-agers held in Bagram jail for more than ten months told a reporter they had been subjected to beatings and "humiliation" by their captors.
They were detained because they were suspected of being Taliban terrorists. They weren't. They were just people. When their captors finally learned the truth, the detainees were released.
One of the freed prisoners said he was told, "'Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10 months and gave me nothing back.”
By that time his family had spent two years' income in a futile effort to learn if he was alive or dead.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
A Thanksgiving Day
It was Thanksgiving Day of 1943 -- the only one from my childhood that I can truthfully say I remember.
The Herbert Avenue gang was in the Hembergers' spacious yard, tossing a football around, and swapping tales of downing enormous quantities of turkey and trimmings and pie -- especially pie.
Many of us had big brothers fighting in the Great War, kids who had signed up the moment they turned 18, without waiting for a draft notice. One of the big brothers was "Bud" Dougherty. He had been serving aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet when it went down in 1942 in the Battle of Santa Cruz. He hadn't been heard from since and was presumed killed in action.
Bud and the Hembergers' big brother, "Speed," had been stars on an American Legion Junior baseball team that went to the national finals in Pennsylvania in 1940. They were neighborhood heroes even before they went off to war. Now they were gods.
We didn't talk much about Bud when his little brother was around. He was a sensitive boy, the youngest of the Herbert Avenue gang, and the hurt in his heart was too enormous to violate.
We talked football -- Ohio State, mostly, and the Western Hills high school team we all aspired to play for one day .
Whence cometh a wailing and shouting from up the hill, toward the street car stop.
At first it was incomprehensible but as it came closer we could make out: "He's alive! Bud's alive."
It was Bud Daugherty's sister, racing down the Herbert Avenue hill, blubbering and bellowing, "Bud's alive!"
The residents of Herbert Avenue poured into the street. They surrounded Rose Daugherty and hugged her until she caught her breath. She was heading home from work on the Westwood Avenue street car when a sailor with lots of battle ribbons took the seat beside her. "Do you know where Herbert Avenue is?" he asked. "I live there," she said. "Get off when I do."
"I've got to see a shipmate's family on Herbert Avenue," he said. "Tell them their son is OK. He was in a coma for months after his ship went down. When he came out of it, I was in the bed next to him. 'Tell my family I'm OK,' he said, when he found out I was going home."
"What was his ship?" Rose asked.
"The Hornet," the sailor said.
Through tears of disbelief she gasped, "And the sailor's name?"
"Daugherty," the young man said. "Bud Daugherty."
At that moment the streetcar came to a halt at the Herbert Avenue safety island.
Rose began her sprint down the street, shouting out the good news.
She didn't even get the sailor's name.
The Herbert Avenue gang was in the Hembergers' spacious yard, tossing a football around, and swapping tales of downing enormous quantities of turkey and trimmings and pie -- especially pie.
Many of us had big brothers fighting in the Great War, kids who had signed up the moment they turned 18, without waiting for a draft notice. One of the big brothers was "Bud" Dougherty. He had been serving aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet when it went down in 1942 in the Battle of Santa Cruz. He hadn't been heard from since and was presumed killed in action.
Bud and the Hembergers' big brother, "Speed," had been stars on an American Legion Junior baseball team that went to the national finals in Pennsylvania in 1940. They were neighborhood heroes even before they went off to war. Now they were gods.
We didn't talk much about Bud when his little brother was around. He was a sensitive boy, the youngest of the Herbert Avenue gang, and the hurt in his heart was too enormous to violate.
We talked football -- Ohio State, mostly, and the Western Hills high school team we all aspired to play for one day .
Whence cometh a wailing and shouting from up the hill, toward the street car stop.
At first it was incomprehensible but as it came closer we could make out: "He's alive! Bud's alive."
It was Bud Daugherty's sister, racing down the Herbert Avenue hill, blubbering and bellowing, "Bud's alive!"
The residents of Herbert Avenue poured into the street. They surrounded Rose Daugherty and hugged her until she caught her breath. She was heading home from work on the Westwood Avenue street car when a sailor with lots of battle ribbons took the seat beside her. "Do you know where Herbert Avenue is?" he asked. "I live there," she said. "Get off when I do."
"I've got to see a shipmate's family on Herbert Avenue," he said. "Tell them their son is OK. He was in a coma for months after his ship went down. When he came out of it, I was in the bed next to him. 'Tell my family I'm OK,' he said, when he found out I was going home."
"What was his ship?" Rose asked.
"The Hornet," the sailor said.
Through tears of disbelief she gasped, "And the sailor's name?"
"Daugherty," the young man said. "Bud Daugherty."
At that moment the streetcar came to a halt at the Herbert Avenue safety island.
Rose began her sprint down the street, shouting out the good news.
She didn't even get the sailor's name.
10 Million Child-Killers
Don't you just love our government's propensity for euphemism?
We're not a perpetual war machine; we're "a global provider of security."
The phrase was repeatedly invoked this week to defend the U.S. government's decision, announced Tuesday by the State Department, not to join a global treaty banning landmines.
The treaty prohibits the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of landmines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.
The signatories to the treaty will convene this weekend in Colombia to review its terms and compliance records. The United States will send "observers" to the conference, a State Department spokesman said, because "as a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there."
That "interest" is a U.S. stockpile of 10 million such weapons and a grim determination to retain its option to use them as it pleases. "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," the spokesman said.
Just who the hell are these "friends and allies," I wonder? All but one NATO nation, and most of our other allies, are parties to the treaty. If most of our allies are pledged not to use the damned things, why are we hoarding 10 million of them?
These antipersonnel devices (another government euphemism) are in fact child-killers. Once planted, the lethal gizmos stay in place long after the conflict that impelled their use has ended -- whereupon civilians step on them and get fragged. Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.
Our eloquent President speaks grandiosely about leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons -- a worthy, but impractical, dream at this time. But the many small, practical steps toward a more peaceful world, the things he could do right now with the stroke of a pen, go undone.
Things like signing the landmine treaty.
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."
You can't hide that behind a euphemism.
We're not a perpetual war machine; we're "a global provider of security."
The phrase was repeatedly invoked this week to defend the U.S. government's decision, announced Tuesday by the State Department, not to join a global treaty banning landmines.
The treaty prohibits the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of landmines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.
The signatories to the treaty will convene this weekend in Colombia to review its terms and compliance records. The United States will send "observers" to the conference, a State Department spokesman said, because "as a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there."
That "interest" is a U.S. stockpile of 10 million such weapons and a grim determination to retain its option to use them as it pleases. "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," the spokesman said.
Just who the hell are these "friends and allies," I wonder? All but one NATO nation, and most of our other allies, are parties to the treaty. If most of our allies are pledged not to use the damned things, why are we hoarding 10 million of them?
These antipersonnel devices (another government euphemism) are in fact child-killers. Once planted, the lethal gizmos stay in place long after the conflict that impelled their use has ended -- whereupon civilians step on them and get fragged. Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.
Our eloquent President speaks grandiosely about leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons -- a worthy, but impractical, dream at this time. But the many small, practical steps toward a more peaceful world, the things he could do right now with the stroke of a pen, go undone.
Things like signing the landmine treaty.
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."
You can't hide that behind a euphemism.
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