George Bush and the Treacherous Country
by Steve Erickson
(Illustration by Ryan Ward)
I am a traitor. I’m not sure exactly when I first knew it. Of course for a long time I resisted it; I had always thought of myself as a patriot. But sometime over the last 15 years I came to sense it, and certainly I understood it by the afternoon last October when the president officially launched his re-election campaign. That was the day he gave two speeches in New Hampshire on behalf of a war he thought he had won five months earlier; over the next 24 hours, Iraqi guerrillas in Baghdad killed three American soldiers and wounded four, assassinated a Spanish diplomat in the street, and drove a car into a police station, blowing up eight people. This moment wasn’t just the hinge of George W. Bush’s presidency, with the gales of the past and future blowing it open and shut. It wasn’t just the moment that his presidency became the hinge of modern American history. It was the hinge of my very Americanism, between patriotism and treachery.
Some are loath to bestow upon this president any sort of momentousness. Whatever he does or however dire the moment, some can’t bring themselves to believe George Bush deserves such import, given what they regard as the flukishness of his election or what they perceive to be the limits of his capabilities. Among the erudite, ridicule attends his every mispronunciation of this word, his every mangling of that sentence — mistakes that only endear him to a nation of word mispronouncers and sentence manglers. Among those who fret about the unfairness of life, there’s fury at the fortunate son who inherited his power from his presidential father and the Supreme Court, as though Al Gore would have been any less an inheritor from his own senatorial father and the president who made him vice president (none of which is to even mention what Hillary Clinton has inherited, or may inherit still).
To snicker at Bush’s luck and stupidity not only confirms Bush’s gleeful assertions that he’s underestimated, but misreads everything about both the moment and the man. The fortunate son has more natural political skill than his father ever did, and as he proved in his interview on Meet the Press this past weekend, the president is as able to absorb and command the facts of something as anyone else. As was also clear in the same interview, and given the ways in which his reasons for the Iraq invasion have changed from those that he presented to the country a year ago, what’s important about George Bush’s intelligence isn’t its magnitude but its nature. This is to say it’s a perfectly adequate intellect that chooses what it prefers to know, what it prefers to think, what it prefers to believe. Which is to say that the nature of Bush’s intelligence hasn’t anything to do with intelligence at all. Rather it has to do with — here’s a word we haven’t heard in a while — character.
Bush’s presidency may be more fraught with significance than any since Franklin Roosevelt’s. If you believe in any sort of fate, if you believe things happen according to any sort of Scheme, there was nothing flukish about Bush’s election; to the contrary, there was no way he could not have become president when he did. Gore may have had a better résumé, but manifestly Bush was better suited to the dark poetry of 2000. George W. Bush is the Millennial President, and not simply according to the arithmetic of calendars. He’s the president of all the millennium’s metaphors, a commander in chief for the End Days, collecting RSVPs for the Rapture.
By all accounts the president believes the 11th of September, 2001, was his hour of destiny, the great event with which he was born to contend. Uniquely in recent history, the al Qaeda attack had about it an unalloyed evil that didn’t simply conform to George Bush’s worldview but validated it. Beyond that, radical Islam is an enemy to which Bush relates not on a historical or sociological level but rather one deeply intuitive; at heart the president embraces the same kind of absolutes, and the same promise of eternity and yearning for self-obliteration in which such absolutes are rooted. To a lesser degree, he’s also temperamentally grounded in the same suspicion of the modern world and its complications. For about five weeks this made Bush the perfect president for September 11. When those weeks passed, increasingly he found himself first checked by the mechanisms of democracy that routinely check presidential power — beginning with questions by Congress and the press about secret military trials — and then outclassed by Osama bin Laden, whose vocabulary of obliteration exceeds Bush’s even if his means for achieving it doesn’t.
Notwithstanding Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and Jimmy Carter, a Sunday-school teacher, Bush is more than just the most religious president the country has ever had. His most profound political impulses — of which he barely may be conscious himself, but which are the source of his political strength and bind him to his political base — are theocratic. This isn’t reflected simply by the well-documented bulletins he sends to his base in his speeches, with the evangelic references to “good news” and (from the 2003 State of the Union) “wonder-working power,” or by the fact that he’s expressed on occasions his conviction that his faith is the sole passport to eternity (such as when he told a Jewish reporter for an Austin newspaper that only Christians could enter heaven). The president believes himself to be God’s instrument, as do his most devoted followers — two of every five who voted for Bush in 2000 consider themselves evangelical Christians — and the absolute nature of his religious beliefs, and the way in which they demand that the values of secular democracy ultimately submit to Christian values, inevitably lead him to regard democracy with a latent distrust.
In what is still a secular democracy, the president’s theocratic values translate themselves into the language of secularism, which is ideology. Bill Clinton’s efforts to rip American politics free from ideology failed in part because, to ideologues of the right and even the left, in all his appetites Clinton embodied how an absence of ideology is an absence of morality. From virtues viceroy William Bennett to former Reagan/Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan, the right persistently equates ideology with character, by which more often than not it means sexual behavior, citing Ronald Reagan as an exemplar and the Clintons as depraved. “They have made the political landscape,” Noonan has written of the Clintons, “a lower and lesser thing.” To Noonan, ideology is synonymous not only with principle but with a kind of faith. If ideology is theology secularized, then skepticism of ideology is agnosticism or worse.
Ideology for both right and left has become an irresistible way of viewing the truth through the prism of philosophical biases. By its nature, ideology not only is at ease with intellectual dishonesty but thrives on it. Liberals with an expansive view of the Bill of Rights suddenly become strict constructionists when it comes to the Second Amendment, citing the maintenance of militias over the amendment’s clear principal concern with protecting the individual from disarmament by the state. Conservatives with an abiding mistrust of civil liberties suddenly become champions of the First Amendment when it has to do with campaign-finance reform and the power of the very rich to influence how others vote. In a confused and weary America where the political center doesn’t have the energy to take control of the most troubling issues of the time, ideology is a power base not so much for ideas — because original thinking is anathema to ideology — but for the passion that electorally moves the great non-ideological unwashed. Thus a debate as ethically, even metaphysically disquieting as the one over abortion, which involves nothing less than the unknowable answer to when humanity begins, is dominated by polar positions that will defend every “life” from the moment of conception and every “choice” up to the moment of birth, and that finally will reject one notion of humanity for another, whether it be that of the mother in whose body the fetus grows, or that of the child whom medical science has proved can now exist after a five-month pregnancy.
What President Bush translates into ideology isn’t just religious conviction but something more majestic, which is a theocratic psyche. Although he does this because it’s the constitutional deference that must be paid to secularism if the president is to uphold his oath of office, the new right understands what’s really involved. Speaking to NBC’s Tim Russert last fall, one of the new right’s most prominent spokesmen, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, put it succinctly: There’s a culture war in America, he said, between the “secularists” and the “traditionalists.” Of course O’Reilly is correct, if not exactly as he defines the terms. As O’Reilly defines the terms, secularists are atheists who want to marry homosexuals and abort pregnancies and remove God and religion from American life. Traditionalists fight to protect the family and the unborn and God Himself, a remarkably vulnerable deity. This conflict has marked the American experience from the beginning, with the New World originally settled by Puritans who had a theocratic social vision, which gave way to an idea of “America” invented 150 years later by secularists who were products of the Enlightenment. Of all the Founding Fathers — who had varying degrees of religious interest — only Samuel Adams was distinctly devout. The two presidents most responsible for authoring the American Idea, Thomas Jefferson and, later, Abraham Lincoln, were not Christians in any sense of the word that they or anyone else understood it then or now.
This always has been a nation caught between Cotton Mather and Tom Paine. As the New World’s pre-eminent theologian, Mather wrote Memorable Providences and Wonders of the Invisible World, which marshaled passionate arguments in support of the mass executions of women for witchcraft. Paine, raised in England, where he watched starving children his own age hanged for stealing food, disavowed his Quaker religion; employing the language of the Old Testament (which he preferred to the New) in the writing of Common Sense, Paine chortled to John Adams that he had done so for reasons as perverse as they were strategic. Among others, Jefferson was impressed. Similarly impressed by Paine’s later book The Age of Reason, which included an outright attack on religion, was a young Lincoln, who as a congressional candidate in 1846 was hounded by rumors regarding his lack of religious affiliation until finally he issued a statement assuring voters that, while he didn’t belong to any church, he was nothing but respectful of those who did.
Over the centuries, one side or the other of the Mather/Paine divide hasn’t so much held sway as overplayed its hand, beginning with the traditionalists 300 years ago in Salem. Conversely and more recently, if to less spectacular effect, in 2002 the 9th District Court of Appeals ruled the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance a violation of the First Amendment. First among the problems with this decision was its constitutional wrong-headedness: The First Amendment was never intended to strike from public life all reference to a supreme power. Jefferson, the amendment’s guiding spirit by way of his protégé James Madison, and as hostile to organized religion as Bush is committed, made such a reference in the country’s founding document. Rather the First Amendment was intended to ensure that one religion isn’t favored by the state over another, and that religious practice is neither restricted by the state nor imposed; however much public pressure occasionally is brought to bear on the issue, the Pledge of Allegiance isn’t compulsory, with or without God. But beyond constitutional considerations the 9th Court’s decision was a tactical disaster, the sort that gives the separation between church and state a bad name. It played into the traditionalists’ most inflammatory depiction of secularism and undercut a thousand more credible arguments of the future — so that when the day comes that Republican congressional leader Tom DeLay wants to change the pledge to read “one nation under Jesus Christ,” the moral authority of the First Amendment will have been squandered on judicial reasoning specious at best and elitist at worst.
When George W. Bush found Jesus in the mid-’80s as part of a struggle with alcoholism, he was most electrified by the story of Paul’s conversion en route to Damascus, as told in the Book of Acts. Formerly a persecutor of Christians, Paul had a vision and became a prosecutor for Christianity. As pointed out by essayist and novelist Michael Ventura, American Christian fundamentalism is based largely on Paul’s epistles and the books of Revelation and John, from which the president quoted in his address to the nation on the evening of September 11, 2001 (“And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it”). John offers a harsher, more unforgiving portrait of Jesus than is found in the other Gospels. While in the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus turns the other cheek and says on the Mount, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” it’s in the Book of John that Jesus suggests that anyone who doesn’t believe in him is doomed. Most conspicuous about the letters of Paul that so affected Bush is that, in them, Jesus and his actual teachings barely appear at all. Almost exclusively Paul writes of how the soul’s deliverance or damnation resides purely with acceptance of the Resurrection. “Paul constantly insists on his own righteousness,” Ventura explains, “and constantly questions the righteousness of anyone who disagrees with him, as well as twisting the earlier scriptures to suit his views.”
Whether it’s Christian or Islamic, an uncompromising religious vision can’t recognize the legitimacy of democracy without betraying itself. Democracy insists on a pluralism that entertains the possibility that one’s religious beliefs might be wrong and another’s might be right, and that all religious beliefs may be varying degrees of wrong or right — what traditionalists despise as “relativism.” Almost by definition, democracy is at least a little bit blasphemous. It’s a breach of rigorous spiritual discipline, and its mechanisms are among the human works of the modern age, which itself is viewed by fundamentalism as an abomination. Doubt is a critical component of both democracy and its leadership. In the eyes of democracy, doubt is not just moral but necessary; the psychology of democracy must allow for doubt about the rightness of any given political position, because otherwise the position can never be questioned. The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment in particular are monuments to the right to doubt, and to the right of one person to doubt the rightness of 200 million. In contrast, the psychology of theocracy not only denies doubt but views it as a cancer on the congregation, prideful temerity in the face of divine righteousness as it’s communicated by God to the leaders of the state.
Nothing about Bush or his presidency makes sense without taking into account the theocratic psyche. Only once you consider the possibility that his administration means to “repeal the Enlightenment,” in the words of Greil Marcus, do Bush’s presidency and his conception of power, their ends and their means, become comprehensible. Doubt is personally abhorrent to Bush; otherwise he couldn’t have assumed the presidency in the manner he did, with decisions and policies that from the first dismissed out of hand the controversy that surrounded his very election. This isn’t to suggest that his presidency is invalid, or to dispute the constitutional and legal process that produced it. It is to try and explain how on the second day of his presidency — in what was his first major act as president — in such draconian fashion he could cut off money to any federally funded family-planning clinic that merely advised women that the option of abortion exists. This was more than just a message to the president’s evangelical constituency that he was undeterred by what happened in Florida in November and December 2000. It was more than just a message to the rest of the country of the president’s contempt for it (which in part accounts for so many people’s intensity of feeling about him). It was, from the second day of the Bush presidency, a frontal assault on doubt.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that a first-class mind could entertain two conflicting ideas at the same time. In the same way, the first-class leader psychologically manages resolve and doubt at the same time. In American history the best example is Lincoln, whose resolve was informed by his doubt and vice versa during the country’s greatest crisis; forged by both doubt and resolve, he evolved into a visionary for the ages. Bush has based his view of leadership on his sense that God has chosen him for this moment. To doubt himself is to doubt God. For all the Bush administration’s efforts four months ago to distance itself from the evangelical Army general who is its deputy undersecretary of defense, William Boykin’s conviction that ours is “an army of God, in the house of God,” and that George Bush is in the White House “because God put him there,” is in no way at odds with either the president’s conduct of the office or the convictions of the president’s bedrock followers.
To secularists, including those who believe in God and attend church or synagogue or mosque on a more or less regular basis, the revelation of a CIA operative’s identity by someone in the government as a form of political retribution seems beyond the pale, particularly in an era of terror. It’s a deliberate violation of national security for partisan purposes. But in the theocratic view of power, national security and political self-interest are inseparable when both are factors in a presidential power that’s in the service of Divine Will. From the vantage point of the theocratic psyche, a divinely interpreted national interest overwhelms narrow ideas of security as held by secularists whose insight lacks a divine scope. The theocratic rationale for the Iraq war and the United States’ subsequent presence in Iraq exists far above petty secular anxieties about justifying either. If the president could barely conceal his impatience on last Sunday’s Meet the Press with distinctions between Iraq actually having weapons or having the capacity to make weapons, between imminent threats or threats that might become imminent, it’s because such distinctions couldn’t be more beside the point. It was never a matter of reasons justifying the war. Rather, the war justifies the reasoning. Some might suggest that the president’s case for the war was made in bad faith, but there is no “bad” in the president’s perception of faith, there’s only true faith that sometimes is confronted with hard tests posed by divine destiny, the hardest of which is whether the president can work his will on God’s behalf, however it must be done. That Iraq had nothing to do with those who attacked America almost two and a half years ago is only a distracting detour in moral reasoning, fine print for those whom God hasn’t called.
One night last October, two days before the president announced his re-election bid, Peggy Noonan and conservative commentator David Horowitz appeared with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on the beaches of Venice where the Doors once wrote songs about American apocalypse. They were there to marvel at a new Republican governor’s ascendancy in the gomorrah of California. For months, Republicans had bemoaned how long it was since one of theirs held high office in the state, so now there was giddy talk about the national implications of such a watershed moment. When Republicans talk about how long it’s been since they held power in California, they mean the distant days of five years ago, when Pete Wilson left the governor’s mansion. Over the decades, California’s sun-addled sodomites have launched the careers of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as — with the passage in 1978 of the tax initiative Proposition 13 — the national conservative tidal wave that made Reagan president and gave Republicans control of the United States Senate. Before Clinton and Gore, whose administration, however much the right casts it in bolshevik terms, was the most conservative of any Democrat since Grover Cleveland, Californians went for Republicans in nine of 10 presidential elections, including the first George Bush, Reagan twice, Gerald Ford, Nixon three times and Dwight Eisenhower twice. Counting the term of the new incumbent, in 40 years Republicans will have held the governorship of California for 27.
The bastion of liberalism that supposedly is California isn’t the California in which real people have lived for half a century, but rather the California of a conservative siege mentality that loves to luxuriate in how beset it is. For so many years that it’s practically become part of genetic memory, conservative Republicans in the country consistently have spoken of their struggle in the face of the Liberal Monolith as manifested by all the established political and cultural organs. Conservatives continue to perish gorgeously in the Roman Coliseum of their fantasies, even though in 35 years Republicans have been president for 23, even though Republicans presently control both houses of Congress, even though they narrowly control the Supreme Court that delivered the White House to its current occupant, even though with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory they now hold the governorships of the nation’s four largest states. Perhaps it’s the still-lingering trauma of the ’60s when, for the better part of the decade, Republicans were a minority party that seemed to be on the wrong side of most major issues; perhaps it’s the more recent trauma of the last presidential campaign, when George W. Bush’s opponent was rude enough to get more votes. Perhaps it’s because over the last decade and a half, as the party is more driven by the evangelical right and becomes more the party of the theocratic psyche, there’s something too exquisite about martyrdom to let go of it. If traditionalists are the Christians and secularists the lions, devourment isn’t just validation but the Void, wherein the Saved finally transcend the Damned.
My first political hero was Barry Goldwater. I was 14 when he ran for president, and was crestfallen at his defeat. As time passed, there were things about his politics I found regrettable, none more so than his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; given his relative progressiveness on racial matters back in his early rough-and-tumble Phoenix days, I like to suppose he himself came to regret that one, but this may be wishful thinking. Some later found startling Goldwater’s positions on gay rights and the legalization of marijuana, and his growing antipathy to the evangelicals who took over both his party and his conservative cause; among those on the right there was a whispering campaign suggesting senility. Before he died, Goldwater himself liked to joke that he had become one of the party’s liberals.
Of course Goldwater hadn’t changed at all. It was conservatism that changed, largely in response to what were seen by many as the ’60s’ countercultural excesses. Libertarian championship of “individual freedom” became a Trojan horse in which lurked more ardently adored values of authority and order; and by the ’80s, the only individual freedoms that conservatives consistently cherished in the specific were the rights to own guns and to make a profit unhindered by government regulation. Wedded to the theocratic psyche, conservatism has upended Goldwaterist notions of how far the government should intrude in individual lives. The most theocratic of any State of the Union ever delivered, the president’s address to Congress three weeks ago not only devoted significant attention but committed public money to a growing governmental role in upholding social values, especially as they have to do with people’s sexuality. Forty years ago a true conservative would have found this repellent if not unthinkable. These are the values that historically have been championed and enforced by theocracies, notably fundamentalist ones. At the height of the terrorist danger in the United States, with a nation constantly teetering between yellow and orange alerts and the news filled with the prospects of a single person at the end of a runway idly blowing out of the sky a major airliner with a small ground-to-air missile, one of the highest priorities of John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has been a sweeping crackdown on the pornography industry of the San Fernando Valley.
In what still purports to be a secular democracy, all of this has taken the form of ideology at its most austere. While there are fair-minded exceptions such as David Brooks of The New York Times and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, the more charismatic spokespeople of the right — from perennials O’Reilly and Bennett and Rush Limbaugh to new superstar Sean Hannity and wannabe Joe Scarborough, from grand mavens Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich to cult figures Michael Savage and Mona Charen, from apostolic fathers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer and Franklin Graham to congressional powers Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum — are hardly opaque about the American civil war of values that’s at hand. Ann Coulter’s recent Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism may be the most important American political tract of its generation, because it reveals what many on the right really think. Besides arguing that Islamic countries should be invaded and “Christianized,” Coulter contends that liberals haven’t been just wrong about every single foreign-policy issue of the last half-century but that they consciously wish to hurt America. Along with liberals who are traitors in a society where everyone is too corrupt or squeamish to say so, in the pages of Treason the greatest traitor is history itself. It’s incidental that Coulter willfully misunderstands the facts of the Vietnam War. The actual historical facts of the Vietnam War don’t matter; fact exists in opposition to conviction, as knowledge exists in opposition to faith. History is the heresy of ideology as science is the heresy of the church. The understanding of history as it actually happened is a secular pursuit, whereas the transfiguration of history is the pursuit of believers.
“Everyone says liberals love America, too,” writes Coulter. “No, they don’t,” and probably nothing is more indicative of the ineffectuality and incomprehension of secularists in this civil war than that they would argue. Because of course Coulter is right; it’s not her America that secularists love. Secularists love the America of Tom Paine, not Cotton Mather, but they keep trying to reconcile the two, since both are part of America’s story and since in fact such a reconciliation always has been the dream of America and those who invented it. The secular center won’t accept that there’s a culture war going on. In the desire to reach accommodation, secularists acquiesce to the right on the very meaning of Americanism, not to mention definitions of character. “At least he’s a decent man,” someone recently protested to me about George Bush, by which she meant in comparison to the last guy, of course, even when as a matter of public policy such “decency” means the abandonment of AmeriCorps programs, which allowed college students to pay off loans by teaching underprivileged children to read, in contrast with the expansion of the earned-income tax credit by the morally vitiated Clinton, who raised millions of people out of poverty as a result. It’s a decency that impeaches a president for lying about a sexual affair but not about a war. Whatever the many compelling reasons to question whether Howard Dean would ever actually make a good president, the former Vermont governor emerged from obscurity last year to galvanize the Democratic presidential race largely because he wouldn’t acquiesce.
If the president first expressed neither concern nor even dismay two weeks ago at the report of his former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, it was because by the president’s moral lights the Kay report was immaterial. What the public might consider the president’s misrepresentations regarding Iraqi weapons or Iraqi collusion with al Qaeda were only the scriptures that testify to a higher meaning, translated into secularese. It remains to be seen in the coming election whether Democrats have the imagination or courage to run against Bush on the issue of terrorism from the right, as John Kennedy did against Richard Nixon in 1960 on the issue of the Cold War. They would need to mount a major argument that secularism — not “liberalism” or atheism, but a Jeffersonian value system in which reason, proportion and the simplest assumptions of justice are brought to bear upon human judgment — is better suited to defeat radical theologism, given how the president’s theocratic psyche and the ways it articulates itself alienate those in and out of the Islamic world who might otherwise be on our side. To credibly make such an argument, the Democratic Party has to admit what the reflexively pacifist ideology of its own base ignores: that terrorism is not common revolutionary warfare simply seen from another perspective, that what distinguishes terrorism from other warfare is the targeting of people not in spite of their innocence but because of it, and that in practical terms the real problem with the Iraq war is that it hasn’t enhanced American security but diminished it. Gratifying as the capture of Saddam two months ago was, close to a thousand Special Operations forces were pulled out of Afghanistan and off the trail of those who committed the wholesale murders of Americans 29 months ago. Billions of dollars earmarked for the reconstruction of Afghanistan are being funneled into Iraq as the Taliban regroups. While money and resources and lives are poured into Iraq, the ports and harbors of the United States remain unprotected. The rails and infrastructure remain unprotected. The water sources remain unprotected. The nuclear-power plants remain unprotected. As the president and vice president and secretary of defense indulge their obsession with Iraq, and as the sympathy and good will of the world that existed on September 12, 2001, is shattered — somewhere down a cobbled French street blows that edition of Le Monde which ran the headline WE ARE ALL AMERICANS — agents of al Qaeda plot to simultaneously detonate three small nuclear devices in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. What we can imagine, they can as well. The idea of George W. Bush running in the upcoming election as the “national security” candidate would be laughable if it weren’t potentially so calamitous. If Bush were a Democrat, Ann Coulter would call it treason.
I’m a traitor. I’m not sure exactly when I first knew this. It may have been when James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior, said there were two kinds of people in the country, Americans and liberals. It may have been when George W. Bush’s father based his entire 1988 presidential campaign on the premise that his opponent with the strange Greek name wasn’t American enough, something for which Bush’s campaign manager offered what was tantamount to deathbed repentance a few years later. It may have been when Rush Limbaugh suggested to 20 million listeners that the Clintons murdered White House aide Vince Foster.
Most likely it was when I was writing about the 1996 election for Rolling Stone and went to interview Gary Bauer in his Washington, D.C., office. At that time Bauer, who now directs an organization called American Values, was head of the Family Research Council. During my visit he was gracious and forthcoming — we even had a brief philosophical exchange about abortion without acrimony, perhaps because my own pro-choice position is conflicted with caveats — and since I feel confident he knew what Rolling Stone was, I gave him credit for seeing me at all. As even novice interviewers learn to do, I saved my big question for the end, when the welcome was feeling worn: “Do you think Bill Clinton is evil?” I asked, and he took a long time to answer before finally conceding that, no, he supposed he couldn’t really call Clinton evil. We both knew he didn’t believe it.
I was watching a late-night debate a few months ago between liberal comedian/writer Al Franken and conservative Crossfire co-host/writer Tucker Carlson, when Carlson complained about the liberal demonization of George W. Bush. Although it sounded odd after 20 years of Watt and Atwater and Limbaugh and Bauer and Coulter, it’s also true that for decades rational, conscientious conservatives have been stung by characterizations of them as greedy, racist warmongers. Carlson also allowed as to how the right similarly demonized Clinton. In case it needs to be said in such combustible times, to compare the theocratic psyches of the president and Osama bin Laden is not to make a moral corollary. While it had about it echoes of Dudley Do-Right denouncing Snidely Whiplash, Bush’s description of bin Laden as an “evildoer” was never so unreasonable; close to 3,000 people were killed in cold blood on American home soil in September 2001 — 3,000 people who rose from bed that morning with no idea this was the day they would die in circumstances that not only defied anything the imagination of horror might conceive but threatened to render irrelevant the legitimate grievances of Muslims and Palestinians in the Middle East. Gazing at the satanic terrain of the concentration camps after World War II, piled high with the rubble of bones that could barely be called corpses, no one shook his head and said, “Yes, but you know, Germany really did get a bad deal on that Treaty of Versailles thing.” Once again, for people on the left to protest the president’s language of good and evil plays into false dichotomies of moral “absolutism” and “relativism” as surely as liberal courts play into false dichotomies of traditionalism and secularism.
But that bin Laden and al Qaeda warrant the appellation of “evil” is exactly what throws the discussion into such stark relief. Once we’ve called Bill Clinton or George Bush evil, the moral glossary is bankrupt; and the more freely the president uses the word, the more precarious the value of moral language becomes. On its face, much of what the president says is not only unobjectionable but echoes some of the most exalted words in American history. When he declares, as he did in last year’s State of the Union, that “the liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity,” it isn’t so far from Jefferson’s contention that it’s God who endows us with unalienable freedom. But when Jefferson wrote his words, the excesses of both the Church of England and American Puritanism were recent memories; as much as anything, at its heart Jefferson’s was a statement of secularism, implicitly disputing whether governments and kings and presidents and even preachers were legitimate intermediaries for God’s wishes. Lincoln, perhaps the most truly spiritual of presidents even though he was attached to no religion, firmly believed the Civil War was God’s test of him and the nation. But unlike George Bush, who seems to believe a policy is God’s will by virtue of its having entered his head, Lincoln ceaselessly wrestled with doubt; as someone once said, Lincoln seemed less concerned that God was on his side than that he was on God’s. “The purposes of the Almighty,” he wrote wearily, “are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance . . . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains.” Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the greatest speech ever given by an American president, is haunted by a sorrowful apprehension that the country offended God with the sin of slavery. It wasn’t a call to the country presuming to speak on God’s behalf, but a call to God, speaking for the country: Come back to us.
I am a traitor: When will we say it? As the gauntlet is hurled before us in the name of traditionalism, how often will we pick it up and offer it back, so we can be mugged with it? We should say that we are traitors of one America, patriots of another: We’re traitors of the America of the banged gavel, the Salem stench, the hate that hates in the name of God, the America that declares war on its founding ideas in the name of America; we are patriots of the America of Jefferson’s eternal pursuit, Madison’s manifesto, memory’s mystic chord, our nature’s better angels, malice toward none and charity for all, and the promise America still seeks to fulfill that no deity could help loving even when we break it. We’re traitors, we’re patriots, we’re secularists, we’re Americans: and we acquiesce nothing.
Steve Erickson has written about politics for The New York Times (“The End of Cynicism,” 1992), the Los Angeles Times Magazine (“American Weimar,” 1995) and Rolling Stone (“A Nation of Nomads,” 1995), as well as two books about American politics and culture. As an editor at the L.A. Weekly from 1989 until 1993, he covered such stories as Bill Clinton’s first inauguration (“The Last-Chance President,” January 1993). He’s the author of seven novels, including the forthcoming Our Ecstatic Days from Simon & Schuster, and is also the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and the editor of Black Clock, a literary journal published by CalArts, where he teaches writing.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Iraq
In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military.
"Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.
As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.
But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.
"He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."
In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.
Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.
In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."
"Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.
In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.
Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.
The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.
A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.
In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."
Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.
U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded."
However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations.
"As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.
The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report.
"This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.
The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain.
"The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.
By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.
His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.
Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.
His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death.
"I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."
Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.
On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.
That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.
At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.
Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.
"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."
The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed.
"I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."
After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.
Then there was the note.
Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.
The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.
Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.
"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
"Death before being dishonored any more."
A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."
She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."
One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."
Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.
Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.
Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.
"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."
Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.
In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.
She answered:
"Iraq."
"Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.
As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.
But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.
"He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."
In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.
Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.
In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."
"Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.
In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.
Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.
The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.
A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.
In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."
Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.
U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded."
However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations.
"As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.
The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report.
"This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.
The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain.
"The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.
By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.
His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.
Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.
His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death.
"I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."
Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.
On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.
That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.
At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.
Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.
"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."
The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed.
"I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."
After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.
Then there was the note.
Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.
The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.
Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.
"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
"Death before being dishonored any more."
A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."
She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."
One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."
Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.
Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.
Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.
"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."
Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.
In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.
She answered:
"Iraq."
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Required Reading
Following is the transcript of a speech by conservative Democratic Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania on November 17. Murtha is the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriation Committee's defense panel.
I just spoke to the Democratic Caucus and told them my feelings about the war. And I started out by saying the war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It's a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress.
The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq. But it's time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.
General Casey said, in a September 2005 hearing, the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency. General Abizaid said, on the same date, reducing the size of visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy.
For two and a half years, I've been concerned about U.S. policy and the plan in Iraq. I've addressed my concerns with the administration and the Pentagon, and I've spoken out in public about my concerns. The main reason for going to war has been discredited.
A few days before the start of the war, I was in Kuwait.
The military drew a line -- a red line around Baghdad, and they said when U.S. forces cross that line, they will be attacked by the Iraqis with weapons of mass destruction. And I believed it, and they believed it. But the U.S. forces -- the commander said, they were prepared. They said they had well-trained forces with the appropriate protective gear.
Now, let me tell you we've spent more money on intelligence than any -- than all the countries in the world put together and more on intelligence than most countries' GDP. And when they said it's a world intelligence failure, it's a U.S. intelligence failure. It's a U.S. failure, and it's a failure in the way the intelligence was used.
I've been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed, as some of you know, almost every week since the beginning of the war. And what demoralizes them is not the criticism; what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace. The devastation caused by IEDs is what they're concerned about, being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes -- and you've seen these stories about some of the people's whose homes were destroyed, and they were deployed to Iraq after it -- being on their second or third deployment, leaving their families behind without a network of support.
The threat by terrorism is real, but we have other threats that cannot be ignored. We must prepare to face all these threats. The future of our military is at risk. Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say the Army's broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down even as the military's lowered its standards. They expect to take 20 percent Category 4, which is the lowest category, which they said they'd never take, but they've been forced to do that, to try to meet a reduced quota. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made, and we cannot allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care, to be negotiated away. Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away.
We must be prepared. The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls in our bases at home. I've been to three bases in the United States, and each one of them were short of things they need to train the people going to Iraq. Much of our ground equipment is worn out. And I've told the COs you better get in the business of rehabilitating equipment because we're not going to be able to buy any new equipment because the money's not going to be there.
George Washington said to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace. We don't want somebody to miscalculate down the road. It takes us 18 years to put a weapon system in the arsenal. And I don't know what the threat is, nobody knows what the threat is, but we better make sure we have what's necessary to preserve our peace. We must rebuild our Army.
Our deficit is growing out of control. The director of the Congressional Budget Office recently admitted to being terrified about the deficit in the coming decades. In other words, where's the money going to come from for defense?
I voted against every tax cut -- every tax cut I voted against. My wife says, "You shouldn't say that." I believe that when we voted for these tax cuts, you can't have a war, you can't have a tragedy like we had, the hurricanes, and then not have a huge deficit, which is going to increase interest rates and could cause real problems. This is the first prolonged war we've ever fought with three years of tax cuts without full mobilization of American industry and without a draft. On the college campuses they always ask me about a draft: You're for a draft. I say yeah, there's only two of us voted for it, so you don't have to worry too much about it.
The burden of this war has not been shared equally. The military and their families are shouldering the burden. Our military has been fighting this war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty.
Our military captured Saddam Hussein, captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, and over 2,079 in confirmed American deaths, over 15,500 have been seriously injured -- half of them returned to duty, and it's estimated over 50,000 will suffer from what I call battle fatigue. And there have been reports that at least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.
I just recently visited Anbar province in Iraq in order to assess the conditions on the ground. And last May we put in the emergency supplemental spending bill -- [the] Moran amendment -- which was accepted in conference, which required the secretary of Defense to submit a quarterly report about the -- and accurately measure the stability and security in Iraq. Now -- we've now received two reports. So I've just come back from Iraq, and I looked at the next report. I'm disturbed by the findings in the key indicator areas.
Oil production and energy production are below prewar level. You remember they said that was going to pay for the war, and it's proved to (be) below prewar level. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by security situations. Only $9 billion of $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. And I said on the floor of the House, when they passed the $87 billion, the $18 billion was the most important part of it because you got to get people back to work, you got to get electricity, you got to get water! Unemployment is 60 percent. Now, they tell you in the United States it's less than that, so it may be 40 percent. But in Iraq, they told me it's 60 percent when I was there. Clean water is scarce, and they only spent $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects.
And most importantly -- this is the most important point -- incidents have increased from 150 to a week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over a time when addition of more troops -- when we had addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelation of Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. You look at the timeline. You'll see one per day average before Abu Ghraib. After Abu Ghraib, you'll see two a day -- two killed per day because of the dramatic impact that Abu Ghraib had on what we were doing in [Iraq. And] the State Department reported in 2004, right before they quit putting the reports out, that -- they indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism.
I said over a year ago now, the military and the administration agrees now that Iraq cannot be won militarily.
I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is Iraqitize, internationalize and energize.
Now, we have a packet for you where I sent a letter to the president in September, and I got an answer back from assistant secretary of Defense five months later. I believe the same today. They don't want input. They only want to criticize. They -- Bush One was the opposite; Bush One might not like the criticism and constructive suggestions, but he listened to what we had to say.
I believe that and I have concluded the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress. Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, the Saddamists and the foreign jihadists. And let me tell you, they haven't captured any in this latest activity, so this idea that they're coming in from outside, we still think [they constitute] only seven percent [of the insurgency].
I believe with the U.S. troop redeployment the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted -- this is a British poll reported in The Washington Times -- over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition forces, and about 45 percent of Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice. The United States will immediately redeploy -- immediately redeploy. No schedule which can be changed, nothing that's controlled by the Iraqis, this is an immediate redeployment of our American forces because they have become the target.
All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free -- free from a United States occupation, and I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process. My experience in a guerrilla war says that until you find out where they are, until the public is willing to tell you where the insurgent is, you're not going to win this war, and Vietnam was the same way. If you have an operation -- a military operation and you tell the Sunnis because the families are in jeopardy, they -- or you tell the Iraqis, then they are going to tell the insurgents, because they're worried about their families.
My plan calls for immediate redeployment of U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces, to create a quick reaction force in the region, to create an over-the-horizon presence of Marines, and to diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.
Now let me personalize this thing for you. I go out to the hospitals every week. One of my first visits, two young women. One was 22 or 23, had two children, lost her husband. One was 19. And they both went out to the hospitals to tell the people out there how happy they were -- or how happy they should be to be alive. In other words, they were reaching out because they felt their husbands had done their duty, but they wanted to tell them that they were so fortunate, even though they were wounded, to be alive.
I have a young fellow in my district who was blinded and he lost his foot. They did everything they could for him at Walter Reed, then they sent him home. His father was in jail. He had nobody at home. Imagine this. A young kid that age, 22, 23 years old, goes home to nobody. VA did everything they could do to help him. He was reaching out.
So they sent him -- to make sure that he was a blind, they sent him to Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins started sending bills. Then the collection agency started sending bills. Well, when I found out about it, you could imagine they stopped the collection agency and Walter Reed finally paid the bill. But imagine, a young person being blinded, without a foot, and he's getting bills from a collection agency.
I saw a young soldier who lost two legs and an arm, and his dad was pushing him around.
I go to the mental ward; you know what they say to me? They got battle fatigue. You know what they say? "We don't get nothing. We get nothing. We're just as bruised, just as injured as everybody else, but we don't even get a Purple Heart. We get nothing. We get shunted aside. We get looked at as if there's something wrong with us."
Saw a young woman from Notre Dame. Basketball player, right- handed, lost her right hand. You know what she's worried about? She's worried about her husband because he lost weight worrying about her. These are great people. These soldiers and people who are serving, they're marvelous people.
I saw a Seabee lying there with three children. His mother and his wife were there. He was paralyzed from the neck down. There were 18 of them killed in this one mortar attack. And they were all crying because they knew what it would be like in the future.
I saw a Marine rubbing his boy's hand. He was a Marine in Vietnam, and his son had just come back from Iraq. And he said he wanted his brother to come home. That's what the father said, because the kid couldn't speak. He was in a coma.
He kept rubbing his hand.
He didn't want to come home. I told him the Marine Corps would get him home.
I had one other kid, lost both his hands. Blinded. I was praising him, saying how proud we were of him and how much we appreciate his service to the country. "Anything I can do for you?" His mother said get me a -- "Get him a Purple Heart." I said, "What do you mean, get him a Purple Heart?"
He had been wounded in taking care of bomblets, these bomblets that they drop that they have to dismantle. He had been wounded and lost both his hands. The kid behind him was killed.
His mother said, "Because they're friendly bomblets, they wouldn't give him a Purple Heart."
I met with the commandant. I said, "If you don't give him a Purple Heart, I'll give him one of mine." And they gave him a Purple Heart.
Let me tell you something. We're charged -- Congress is charged with sending our sons and daughters into battle, and it's our responsibility, our obligation to speak out for them. That's why I'm speaking out.
Our military's done everything that has been asked of them. U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily; it's time to bring the troops home.
I just spoke to the Democratic Caucus and told them my feelings about the war. And I started out by saying the war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It's a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress.
The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq. But it's time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.
General Casey said, in a September 2005 hearing, the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency. General Abizaid said, on the same date, reducing the size of visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy.
For two and a half years, I've been concerned about U.S. policy and the plan in Iraq. I've addressed my concerns with the administration and the Pentagon, and I've spoken out in public about my concerns. The main reason for going to war has been discredited.
A few days before the start of the war, I was in Kuwait.
The military drew a line -- a red line around Baghdad, and they said when U.S. forces cross that line, they will be attacked by the Iraqis with weapons of mass destruction. And I believed it, and they believed it. But the U.S. forces -- the commander said, they were prepared. They said they had well-trained forces with the appropriate protective gear.
Now, let me tell you we've spent more money on intelligence than any -- than all the countries in the world put together and more on intelligence than most countries' GDP. And when they said it's a world intelligence failure, it's a U.S. intelligence failure. It's a U.S. failure, and it's a failure in the way the intelligence was used.
I've been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed, as some of you know, almost every week since the beginning of the war. And what demoralizes them is not the criticism; what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace. The devastation caused by IEDs is what they're concerned about, being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes -- and you've seen these stories about some of the people's whose homes were destroyed, and they were deployed to Iraq after it -- being on their second or third deployment, leaving their families behind without a network of support.
The threat by terrorism is real, but we have other threats that cannot be ignored. We must prepare to face all these threats. The future of our military is at risk. Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say the Army's broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down even as the military's lowered its standards. They expect to take 20 percent Category 4, which is the lowest category, which they said they'd never take, but they've been forced to do that, to try to meet a reduced quota. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made, and we cannot allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care, to be negotiated away. Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away.
We must be prepared. The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls in our bases at home. I've been to three bases in the United States, and each one of them were short of things they need to train the people going to Iraq. Much of our ground equipment is worn out. And I've told the COs you better get in the business of rehabilitating equipment because we're not going to be able to buy any new equipment because the money's not going to be there.
George Washington said to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace. We don't want somebody to miscalculate down the road. It takes us 18 years to put a weapon system in the arsenal. And I don't know what the threat is, nobody knows what the threat is, but we better make sure we have what's necessary to preserve our peace. We must rebuild our Army.
Our deficit is growing out of control. The director of the Congressional Budget Office recently admitted to being terrified about the deficit in the coming decades. In other words, where's the money going to come from for defense?
I voted against every tax cut -- every tax cut I voted against. My wife says, "You shouldn't say that." I believe that when we voted for these tax cuts, you can't have a war, you can't have a tragedy like we had, the hurricanes, and then not have a huge deficit, which is going to increase interest rates and could cause real problems. This is the first prolonged war we've ever fought with three years of tax cuts without full mobilization of American industry and without a draft. On the college campuses they always ask me about a draft: You're for a draft. I say yeah, there's only two of us voted for it, so you don't have to worry too much about it.
The burden of this war has not been shared equally. The military and their families are shouldering the burden. Our military has been fighting this war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty.
Our military captured Saddam Hussein, captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, and over 2,079 in confirmed American deaths, over 15,500 have been seriously injured -- half of them returned to duty, and it's estimated over 50,000 will suffer from what I call battle fatigue. And there have been reports that at least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.
I just recently visited Anbar province in Iraq in order to assess the conditions on the ground. And last May we put in the emergency supplemental spending bill -- [the] Moran amendment -- which was accepted in conference, which required the secretary of Defense to submit a quarterly report about the -- and accurately measure the stability and security in Iraq. Now -- we've now received two reports. So I've just come back from Iraq, and I looked at the next report. I'm disturbed by the findings in the key indicator areas.
Oil production and energy production are below prewar level. You remember they said that was going to pay for the war, and it's proved to (be) below prewar level. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by security situations. Only $9 billion of $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. And I said on the floor of the House, when they passed the $87 billion, the $18 billion was the most important part of it because you got to get people back to work, you got to get electricity, you got to get water! Unemployment is 60 percent. Now, they tell you in the United States it's less than that, so it may be 40 percent. But in Iraq, they told me it's 60 percent when I was there. Clean water is scarce, and they only spent $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects.
And most importantly -- this is the most important point -- incidents have increased from 150 to a week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over a time when addition of more troops -- when we had addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelation of Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. You look at the timeline. You'll see one per day average before Abu Ghraib. After Abu Ghraib, you'll see two a day -- two killed per day because of the dramatic impact that Abu Ghraib had on what we were doing in [Iraq. And] the State Department reported in 2004, right before they quit putting the reports out, that -- they indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism.
I said over a year ago now, the military and the administration agrees now that Iraq cannot be won militarily.
I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is Iraqitize, internationalize and energize.
Now, we have a packet for you where I sent a letter to the president in September, and I got an answer back from assistant secretary of Defense five months later. I believe the same today. They don't want input. They only want to criticize. They -- Bush One was the opposite; Bush One might not like the criticism and constructive suggestions, but he listened to what we had to say.
I believe that and I have concluded the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress. Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, the Saddamists and the foreign jihadists. And let me tell you, they haven't captured any in this latest activity, so this idea that they're coming in from outside, we still think [they constitute] only seven percent [of the insurgency].
I believe with the U.S. troop redeployment the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted -- this is a British poll reported in The Washington Times -- over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition forces, and about 45 percent of Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice. The United States will immediately redeploy -- immediately redeploy. No schedule which can be changed, nothing that's controlled by the Iraqis, this is an immediate redeployment of our American forces because they have become the target.
All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free -- free from a United States occupation, and I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process. My experience in a guerrilla war says that until you find out where they are, until the public is willing to tell you where the insurgent is, you're not going to win this war, and Vietnam was the same way. If you have an operation -- a military operation and you tell the Sunnis because the families are in jeopardy, they -- or you tell the Iraqis, then they are going to tell the insurgents, because they're worried about their families.
My plan calls for immediate redeployment of U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces, to create a quick reaction force in the region, to create an over-the-horizon presence of Marines, and to diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.
Now let me personalize this thing for you. I go out to the hospitals every week. One of my first visits, two young women. One was 22 or 23, had two children, lost her husband. One was 19. And they both went out to the hospitals to tell the people out there how happy they were -- or how happy they should be to be alive. In other words, they were reaching out because they felt their husbands had done their duty, but they wanted to tell them that they were so fortunate, even though they were wounded, to be alive.
I have a young fellow in my district who was blinded and he lost his foot. They did everything they could for him at Walter Reed, then they sent him home. His father was in jail. He had nobody at home. Imagine this. A young kid that age, 22, 23 years old, goes home to nobody. VA did everything they could do to help him. He was reaching out.
So they sent him -- to make sure that he was a blind, they sent him to Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins started sending bills. Then the collection agency started sending bills. Well, when I found out about it, you could imagine they stopped the collection agency and Walter Reed finally paid the bill. But imagine, a young person being blinded, without a foot, and he's getting bills from a collection agency.
I saw a young soldier who lost two legs and an arm, and his dad was pushing him around.
I go to the mental ward; you know what they say to me? They got battle fatigue. You know what they say? "We don't get nothing. We get nothing. We're just as bruised, just as injured as everybody else, but we don't even get a Purple Heart. We get nothing. We get shunted aside. We get looked at as if there's something wrong with us."
Saw a young woman from Notre Dame. Basketball player, right- handed, lost her right hand. You know what she's worried about? She's worried about her husband because he lost weight worrying about her. These are great people. These soldiers and people who are serving, they're marvelous people.
I saw a Seabee lying there with three children. His mother and his wife were there. He was paralyzed from the neck down. There were 18 of them killed in this one mortar attack. And they were all crying because they knew what it would be like in the future.
I saw a Marine rubbing his boy's hand. He was a Marine in Vietnam, and his son had just come back from Iraq. And he said he wanted his brother to come home. That's what the father said, because the kid couldn't speak. He was in a coma.
He kept rubbing his hand.
He didn't want to come home. I told him the Marine Corps would get him home.
I had one other kid, lost both his hands. Blinded. I was praising him, saying how proud we were of him and how much we appreciate his service to the country. "Anything I can do for you?" His mother said get me a -- "Get him a Purple Heart." I said, "What do you mean, get him a Purple Heart?"
He had been wounded in taking care of bomblets, these bomblets that they drop that they have to dismantle. He had been wounded and lost both his hands. The kid behind him was killed.
His mother said, "Because they're friendly bomblets, they wouldn't give him a Purple Heart."
I met with the commandant. I said, "If you don't give him a Purple Heart, I'll give him one of mine." And they gave him a Purple Heart.
Let me tell you something. We're charged -- Congress is charged with sending our sons and daughters into battle, and it's our responsibility, our obligation to speak out for them. That's why I'm speaking out.
Our military's done everything that has been asked of them. U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily; it's time to bring the troops home.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
quarentines
What the heck is going on?
For months the media has been going on about the avian flu, even though there are very few cases, and none from human to human contact.
Yet there are huge orders for the current vaccine, which is inefficient against this virus, or the version of it which it would have to mutate into to be communicable between humans. Ok, maybe the pharmaceutical companies are just exploiting these fears for profit.
Yet the government talks about "developing a vaccine", but that requires developing the virus first.
In April the Bush administration added "pandemic influenza" to the list of diseases that the government can order a quarantine for, and last night CNN reported that the White House reiterated that they intend to use federal troops to enforce any "upcoming flu pandemic". The article also quoted officials in the medical community saying it was a huge draconian overreaction. I wish I had copied it, this morning there was no mention of quarantine enforcement in the news, only the tremendous amount of funds being steered into the 'preparations'.
This is a huge issue to me, I mean, a few years ago federal troops weren't allowed to perform domestic police duties. My how things change. Quarantines? What the ...? Can you imagine FEMA and federal troops shutting down airports and highways? Why is the government gearing up this huge operation, generating all of this concern, for a threat that, actually, has always been with us?
Not occasionally, but consistently, this administration has betrayed my trust in every issue I find important. Now, with this, instead of trusting I am actually beginning to fear our government.
Sincerely,
Christopher
I would only add that Australia has announced that if/when there is an outbreak of human to human avian flu, they will close their borders. They suggest that any overseas citizens get home quickly if/when the first outbreak occurs, after that they are on their own. Somehow this doesn't seem like an effective plan for dealing with a potential medical emergency. It does seem like a plan to control and cull vast populations of human beings.
Cheers,
Mark
For months the media has been going on about the avian flu, even though there are very few cases, and none from human to human contact.
Yet there are huge orders for the current vaccine, which is inefficient against this virus, or the version of it which it would have to mutate into to be communicable between humans. Ok, maybe the pharmaceutical companies are just exploiting these fears for profit.
Yet the government talks about "developing a vaccine", but that requires developing the virus first.
In April the Bush administration added "pandemic influenza" to the list of diseases that the government can order a quarantine for, and last night CNN reported that the White House reiterated that they intend to use federal troops to enforce any "upcoming flu pandemic". The article also quoted officials in the medical community saying it was a huge draconian overreaction. I wish I had copied it, this morning there was no mention of quarantine enforcement in the news, only the tremendous amount of funds being steered into the 'preparations'.
This is a huge issue to me, I mean, a few years ago federal troops weren't allowed to perform domestic police duties. My how things change. Quarantines? What the ...? Can you imagine FEMA and federal troops shutting down airports and highways? Why is the government gearing up this huge operation, generating all of this concern, for a threat that, actually, has always been with us?
Not occasionally, but consistently, this administration has betrayed my trust in every issue I find important. Now, with this, instead of trusting I am actually beginning to fear our government.
Sincerely,
Christopher
I would only add that Australia has announced that if/when there is an outbreak of human to human avian flu, they will close their borders. They suggest that any overseas citizens get home quickly if/when the first outbreak occurs, after that they are on their own. Somehow this doesn't seem like an effective plan for dealing with a potential medical emergency. It does seem like a plan to control and cull vast populations of human beings.
Cheers,
Mark
Monday, October 31, 2005
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Weird
| You Are 40% Weird |
 Normal enough to know that you're weird... But too damn weird to do anything about it! |
Friday, October 07, 2005
"If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will never know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few men who have been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done mischief unless they intended to it. This is why great scoundrels have been beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy" - GB Shaw
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Pussy
Bush has finally revealed his true agenda. It is a pattern that repeats in every action he has taken. He appoints people who will be personally loyal to him, fires those whom he suspects may not be, regardless of competence. Katrina was a glaring example, but not the only one. If you look at all the on-going disasters of this Administration, from Enron, Anthrax, 9/11, Abu Graib, Gitmo, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the deficit, the Stock Market ( still hasn’t recovered to pre-Bush levels), Osama Bin Laden, et al, you see warning signs ignored, incompetent managers, and a response that only partially fixes the problem but mainly advances some right wing policy. The avian flu scare should demonstrate this clearly. There is a potential, doctors have said, for a disastrous pandemic flu out break somewhere in the US, and the response is to prepare the military to quarantine large segments of the populace. Not to help people to avoid getting sick, not to offer some kind of emergency heath care program, but to set up a program that would probably result in greater destruction. After the quarantine is in place, and riots have been quelled, and the fires have burned themselves out, Bush will pay Blackwater, Haliburton, and Bechtel, to pick up the bodies and clear the land. Similarly, but in reverse, the Missile Shield is still consuming billions of dollars and diverting scientific talent on a system meant to respond to a failure of diplomacy: China is the only country that could instigate an attack that would be (hopefully) dealt with by the SDI. North Korea, Iran, or some other neophyte nuclear power would as likely deliver the bomb in a boat or balloon, or cruise missile, avoiding the untestable system altogether. The Supreme Court has become another such an example. Appointing young sycophants seems like a preparation for responding to some potential Constitutional crisis that Bush would need to be bailed out of. For example, if the Democrats regain control of either the Senate or House in 2006, he would need the Court to protect him from hearings and independent investigators. Roberts has already shown that he will ‘legislate from the bench’ in the assisted suicide case, in support of a Bush policy.
Friday, September 30, 2005
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction . . .
George Orwell
George Orwell
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Censorship
All blogspot blogs are banned in China. I seem to be able to post but not review. Looked it up on google and sure enough they are blocking most blog sites completely.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
travels
Travel updates will be posted to: fareastasiareview, I will continue to post other observations, quotes, dreams, and writings here.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Katrina
Q: What's George Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Looking Good
I'd rather be smarter than I look than look smater than I am. I just got laser eye surgery...Quite the miracle of modern science. They gave me a video tape of the procedure if anyone wants to be grossed out.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Hamlet translated into American
The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? Dying, sleeping—that’s all dying is—a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us—that’s an achievement to wish for. To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream. Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep who knows what kind of dreams might come, after we’ve shaken off the flesh from our souls. That’s certainly something to worry about. That’s the consideration that makes us stretch out our sufferings so long. After all, who would put up with all life’s humiliations —the abuse from superiors, the insults of arrogant men, the pangs of unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal system, the rudeness of people in office, and the mistreatment good people have to take from bad—when you could simply take out your knife and call it quits? Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life, unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers from and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards, and our natural boldness becomes weak with too much thinking. Actions that should be carried out at once get misdirected, and stop being actions at all. But shh, here comes the beautiful Ophelia. Pretty lady, please remember me when you pray.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Hiroshima
Mr. Osamu Kataoka. Age: 45; occupation: university professor; family: wife. At that time -- age: 13; at school (800 meters from the hypocenter); father and elder brother died; mother and two elder sisters injured.
"I ran to the edge of the pool. What did I see there? A drowned classmate, who was burned all over. Another classmate was trying to put out a fire on a friend's clothes with his own spouting blood." (written at age 17)
"I ran to the edge of the pool. What did I see there? A drowned classmate, who was burned all over. Another classmate was trying to put out a fire on a friend's clothes with his own spouting blood." (written at age 17)
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Itinerary
Itinerary
08-29-05 Long Beach to Tokyo:
MS Yellow Sea
09-12-05 Tokyo Accommodations:
Ryokan Kangetsu, Tokyo
09-13-05 Osaka Accommodations:
Kaneyoshi Ryokan, Osaka
09-16-05 Osaka to Shanghai :
Ferry # 1298: depart Osaka : 09/16 (12:00 noon) arrive Shanghai : 09/18(11:00 am)
09-18-05 Shanghai Accommodations:
Shanghai Metropole Hotel, Shanghai, China
No.180, Jiang Xi Zhong Road,, China.
09-20-05 Shanghai to Nanning Train:
Train K181
Departs Shanghai: 20:06 Arrives Nanning: 00:56 Travel Time: 1 day 4 hours 50 min
K181 from SHANGHAI to NANNING Upper berth
09-23-05 Nanning to Hanoi Train:
depart Nanning: 21:15 Friday
arrive Hanoi: 08:10 Saturday
09-24-05 Hanoi Accommodations:
Anh Dao, Hanoi, Vietnam
37 Ma May street, Vietnam.
09-26-05 Hanoi to Saigon Train:
Hanoi - Saigon (1,726 km)
09-28-05 Saigon Accommodations:
PALACE HOTEL - HO CHI MINH CITY - VIETNAM 56-66 Nguyen Hue Street, District 1, Ho chi minh city Saigon, Vietnam
09-30-05 Saigon to Phnom Penh:
Boat
08-29-05 Long Beach to Tokyo:
MS Yellow Sea
09-12-05 Tokyo Accommodations:
Ryokan Kangetsu, Tokyo
09-13-05 Osaka Accommodations:
Kaneyoshi Ryokan, Osaka
09-16-05 Osaka to Shanghai :
Ferry # 1298: depart Osaka : 09/16 (12:00 noon) arrive Shanghai : 09/18(11:00 am)
09-18-05 Shanghai Accommodations:
Shanghai Metropole Hotel, Shanghai, China
No.180, Jiang Xi Zhong Road,, China.
09-20-05 Shanghai to Nanning Train:
Train K181
Departs Shanghai: 20:06 Arrives Nanning: 00:56 Travel Time: 1 day 4 hours 50 min
K181 from SHANGHAI to NANNING Upper berth
09-23-05 Nanning to Hanoi Train:
depart Nanning: 21:15 Friday
arrive Hanoi: 08:10 Saturday
09-24-05 Hanoi Accommodations:
Anh Dao, Hanoi, Vietnam
37 Ma May street, Vietnam.
09-26-05 Hanoi to Saigon Train:
Hanoi - Saigon (1,726 km)
09-28-05 Saigon Accommodations:
PALACE HOTEL - HO CHI MINH CITY - VIETNAM 56-66 Nguyen Hue Street, District 1, Ho chi minh city Saigon, Vietnam
09-30-05 Saigon to Phnom Penh:
Boat
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Best worst start to fake novel award
As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Four unusual neurological syndromes
The Brain, Mind, and Language site has a page with short descriptions of four different rare neurological syndromes.
People with "Kluver-Bucy Syndrome" try to put anything they can get their hands on into their mouths and will "typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it."
People with "Capgras' Syndrome" think everyone around them is an impostor. They feel like they are living in a real life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
People with "Cotard's Syndrome" believe they are dead -- walking corpses. "The French physician Charles Bonnet described a lady who insisted of dressing in a death shroud and being put in a coffin. She demanded to be buried and when refused, remained in her coffin until she died several weeks later."
People with "Fregoli Syndrome" see everyone around them as the same person. It must be like seeing the Oompa Loompas in Burton's Willy Wonka Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which were all played by the same actor.
People with "Kluver-Bucy Syndrome" try to put anything they can get their hands on into their mouths and will "typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it."
People with "Capgras' Syndrome" think everyone around them is an impostor. They feel like they are living in a real life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
People with "Cotard's Syndrome" believe they are dead -- walking corpses. "The French physician Charles Bonnet described a lady who insisted of dressing in a death shroud and being put in a coffin. She demanded to be buried and when refused, remained in her coffin until she died several weeks later."
People with "Fregoli Syndrome" see everyone around them as the same person. It must be like seeing the Oompa Loompas in Burton's Willy Wonka Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which were all played by the same actor.
Monday, July 18, 2005
The 10 people who are fucking up America
A list of the top 10 people who are not only fucking up America, but dismembering, traumatizing and drinking the blood of your children:
1) Dick Cheney
2) Donald Rumsfeld
3) George Bush
4) Tom Delay
5) Bill Frist
6) Antony Scalia
7) Thomas Sowell
8) Bill O'Riley
9) Michael Bay
10) Sean Hannity
1) Dick Cheney
2) Donald Rumsfeld
3) George Bush
4) Tom Delay
5) Bill Frist
6) Antony Scalia
7) Thomas Sowell
8) Bill O'Riley
9) Michael Bay
10) Sean Hannity
Monday, July 11, 2005
Dream- July 2nd 2005
I dreampt I was resting on a cot with a girl under a blanket in a sort of corner shop. THree tough guys came up and one gives us each some money, saying it is like a loan. I tell him to put the money between my toes. He does so and says that we are in with his gang now and we are taking over the area. They leave. After cuddling with the girl for awhile I get up and go down the street where I see one of the henchmen sitting at a card table on the sidewalk like he was collecting signatures for a petition. I casually dropped all the money on the table and told him to tell the boss that the deal was off and I was leaving town anyway. He says that won't do, but I just walk away. A few blocks later he comes up behind me and grabs me by the neck, and, choking me, he says, "You're either in or you're dead!." I realize it is time to go ape-shit, so I stick my thumbs in his eyes, then clamp onto his ear, ripping it off in my teeth, He recoils and I spit his ear out at him, then lunge at him and bite him in the throat. He wants nothing to do with me. Cradleing his head with both hands, trying to staunch the blood flowing from his ear and neck, he steps away with a panicked look on his face. Just then another thug comes at me, pointing a shotgun at me. I grab the barrel of the gun and aim it at the wounded man. I pulled on the gun and it went off - shooting the guy in the leg. The gunman lets go in horror and I grab the gun and without pause, blast the gunman's arm off.
The dream continued but the preceeding was writen as soon as I woke up, in the dark, in pencil. My later notes refer to an on-going battle with the gang, although with bow and arrow and no fatalities on either side. As soon as I managed to wound my enemies they would be on my side. Eventually they were all vanquished and I returned to where we had been sleeping to see that the door (that had been the entrance to the gang's lair) was gone. Then I and the girl and the remaining allies ( ex badguys) realized the boss was the devil.
The dream continued but the preceeding was writen as soon as I woke up, in the dark, in pencil. My later notes refer to an on-going battle with the gang, although with bow and arrow and no fatalities on either side. As soon as I managed to wound my enemies they would be on my side. Eventually they were all vanquished and I returned to where we had been sleeping to see that the door (that had been the entrance to the gang's lair) was gone. Then I and the girl and the remaining allies ( ex badguys) realized the boss was the devil.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Quotes
The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
-Lao Tsu
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth we cannot bear rather than rest content with the fictions that we manufacture out of each other.
-Lawrence Durrell
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
-Lao Tsu
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth we cannot bear rather than rest content with the fictions that we manufacture out of each other.
-Lawrence Durrell
Onward!
"A momentous hour has struck for our country. Envious rivals everywhere force us to legitimate defense. The sword has been forced into our hands. I hope that in the event that my efforts to the very last moment do not succeed in bringing our opponents to reason and in preserving peace, we may use the sword, with the help of God, so that we may sheathe it again with honor. War will demand enormous sacrifices by our people, but we shall show the enemy what it means to attack us. And so I commend you to God. Go forth into the churches, kneel down before God, and implore his help for our brave army.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the expression of your loyalty and your esteem. When it comes to war, all parties cease and we are all brothers. One or another party has attacked me in peacetime, but now I forgive them wholeheartedly. If our neighbors do not give us peace, then we hope and wish that our good sword will come victorious out of this war !
The sword is drawn, and I cannot sheathe it again without victory and honor. All of you shall and will see to it that only in honor is it returned to the scabbard. You are my guaranty that I can dictate peace to my enemies. Up and at the enemy! Down with the enemies of our way of life! Three cheers for our army!"
-Kaiser Wilhelm II 1914
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the expression of your loyalty and your esteem. When it comes to war, all parties cease and we are all brothers. One or another party has attacked me in peacetime, but now I forgive them wholeheartedly. If our neighbors do not give us peace, then we hope and wish that our good sword will come victorious out of this war !
The sword is drawn, and I cannot sheathe it again without victory and honor. All of you shall and will see to it that only in honor is it returned to the scabbard. You are my guaranty that I can dictate peace to my enemies. Up and at the enemy! Down with the enemies of our way of life! Three cheers for our army!"
-Kaiser Wilhelm II 1914
Friday, April 15, 2005
Kraut Hammer
"The 15 months following the pope's elevation marked the high tide of Soviet communism and the nadir of the free world's post-Vietnam collapse. It was a time of one defeat after another. Vietnam invaded Cambodia, consolidating Soviet hegemony over all of Indochina. The Khomeni revolution swept away America's strategic anchor in the Middle East. Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas, the first Soviet-allied regime on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere. (As an unnoticed but ironic coda, Marxists came to power in Grenada too.)" C. Krauthammer, April 3rd editorial
This right wing cripple seems to suggest that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was in some way a bad thing when in fact they were overthrowing Pol Pot's murderous regime. Khomeni overthrew the despotic Shah, whom we installed after killing the democratically elected leader of Iran. The vile dictator Somosa fell to the Sandinistas. And Grenada was a pathetic joke. It would seem that Krauthammer is saying that the deposing of some of the worst dictators in recent memory was somehow a defeat for the USA.
This right wing cripple seems to suggest that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was in some way a bad thing when in fact they were overthrowing Pol Pot's murderous regime. Khomeni overthrew the despotic Shah, whom we installed after killing the democratically elected leader of Iran. The vile dictator Somosa fell to the Sandinistas. And Grenada was a pathetic joke. It would seem that Krauthammer is saying that the deposing of some of the worst dictators in recent memory was somehow a defeat for the USA.
Khmer New Year
Excerpted from www.khmer440.com (I didn't write this)
So there I was (in the words of Martin Luther ‘I could do no other’), sitting in one of my favourite male orientated drinking establishments a couple of nights ago. The clock had chimed twelve and the bar was being run by a skeleton staff of one, and that one person really wished that she was in whooping it up in Svay Rieng rather than filling my glass with Bier Laos in Phnom Penh. ‘’It’s a special day now,’’ I offered up in the way of conversation. ‘’Yes it is,’’ replied the dusky waitress, with just the hint of a smile forming around her full Khmer lips. This part time university student paying for her studies through drink pouring was a full blooded Khmer from the boonies with the delightful lack of guile, large faun like eyes and the deep brown complexion that differentiates her provincial compatriots from their fairer skinned pointier nosed, mixed race Sino-Khmer brethren to be found so abundantly in Phnom Penh.
‘’It’s a very special day,’’ she emphasised. ‘’Of course,’’ I responded. ‘’It’s Thai New Year.’’ Sarcasm doesn’t go down so well in Cambodia and those full eyes narrowed. Nevertheless, she cheered up sufficiently to allow me to take her out for a late supper after work (small shellfish cooked with basil in case you’re interested) and now she really is in Svay Rieng back in the bosom of her family as all Khmers hanker to be at this most important time of the year. Yet, even as we hunted for a 2am noodle stall the water throwing idiocy made famous and typified by Thailand’s Songran had kicked off on a smaller scale in Phnom Penh. And guess what? The Khmer’s were innocent. It was the drunken deathpats, pantsniffers and other assorted white loudmouths who were tossing buckets of water onto passers by around the strip adjacent to the Heart of Darkness. For a second I considered cracking a hammer into the skull of the nearest deathpat, staying around just long enough to watch the blood pour from his head and blend in with the spilled water while his limbs malfunctioned and shuddered in a grotesque dance of death. Instead I did a 180 turn and found a quiet little noodle stall near Monivong and around the corner from the Billabong Hotel.
continue at www.khmer440.com
Gladhands/Brickbats etx to peter@khmer440.com
So there I was (in the words of Martin Luther ‘I could do no other’), sitting in one of my favourite male orientated drinking establishments a couple of nights ago. The clock had chimed twelve and the bar was being run by a skeleton staff of one, and that one person really wished that she was in whooping it up in Svay Rieng rather than filling my glass with Bier Laos in Phnom Penh. ‘’It’s a special day now,’’ I offered up in the way of conversation. ‘’Yes it is,’’ replied the dusky waitress, with just the hint of a smile forming around her full Khmer lips. This part time university student paying for her studies through drink pouring was a full blooded Khmer from the boonies with the delightful lack of guile, large faun like eyes and the deep brown complexion that differentiates her provincial compatriots from their fairer skinned pointier nosed, mixed race Sino-Khmer brethren to be found so abundantly in Phnom Penh.
‘’It’s a very special day,’’ she emphasised. ‘’Of course,’’ I responded. ‘’It’s Thai New Year.’’ Sarcasm doesn’t go down so well in Cambodia and those full eyes narrowed. Nevertheless, she cheered up sufficiently to allow me to take her out for a late supper after work (small shellfish cooked with basil in case you’re interested) and now she really is in Svay Rieng back in the bosom of her family as all Khmers hanker to be at this most important time of the year. Yet, even as we hunted for a 2am noodle stall the water throwing idiocy made famous and typified by Thailand’s Songran had kicked off on a smaller scale in Phnom Penh. And guess what? The Khmer’s were innocent. It was the drunken deathpats, pantsniffers and other assorted white loudmouths who were tossing buckets of water onto passers by around the strip adjacent to the Heart of Darkness. For a second I considered cracking a hammer into the skull of the nearest deathpat, staying around just long enough to watch the blood pour from his head and blend in with the spilled water while his limbs malfunctioned and shuddered in a grotesque dance of death. Instead I did a 180 turn and found a quiet little noodle stall near Monivong and around the corner from the Billabong Hotel.
continue at www.khmer440.com
Gladhands/Brickbats etx to peter@khmer440.com
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Youth in Asia
George W Bush has just said that the judiciary should always err on the side of life. This is meant only to apply to one vegitative woman in Florida - not to the hundreds of people on death row or to the suspected enemies of America all around the globe. They have removed the feeding tube from a woman who lost all quality of life many years ago while children in Asia are actually starving to death, completely cognizant of their situation. It seems Bush wants to keep the American people in an irreversable state of vegitation, fed only lies and hyperboly. Halliburton's subsidiary bilks the american people out of one hundred million dollars, (a tenth of a billion) but we must worry about steroid abuse in an illegal monopoly and some poor family's legal battles with natural death. Bush and his cronies have stated clearly that they do not support youth in Asia; well I do support them and I think that they need to be hooked up to a hundred million dollar feeding tube. (All youth deserve this but I am making fun of the idiots who keep talking about euthanasia as if they understood the fucking word.)
In Nazi Germany the term "euthanasia" (Euthanasie) referred to the systematic killing of disabled children and adults under the T-4 Euthanasia Program. This has tainted the word in German-speaking countries; the alternate term is "Sterbehilfe", which means "help to die." Any time that medical personnel determine on behalf of a sentient and responsible individual that his or her life is not worth living, the medical killing of such a person as it is considered to be done for the prevention of suffering is involuntary euthanasia. This is not to be confused with medical killing in cases of capital punishment or as part of genocide. - wikipedia
Not to be confused because capital punishment and genocide* as practiced by the Bush administration is good while letting someone die of natural causes is evil. Up is down and two plus two equals five. Double plus good.
I've been back a few days and I'm cured of my optimism.
* When I say genocide I realize that Bush has not technically begun his program of extermination (that we know of) but it took Hitler eight years to get his under full steam.
In Nazi Germany the term "euthanasia" (Euthanasie) referred to the systematic killing of disabled children and adults under the T-4 Euthanasia Program. This has tainted the word in German-speaking countries; the alternate term is "Sterbehilfe", which means "help to die." Any time that medical personnel determine on behalf of a sentient and responsible individual that his or her life is not worth living, the medical killing of such a person as it is considered to be done for the prevention of suffering is involuntary euthanasia. This is not to be confused with medical killing in cases of capital punishment or as part of genocide. - wikipedia
Not to be confused because capital punishment and genocide* as practiced by the Bush administration is good while letting someone die of natural causes is evil. Up is down and two plus two equals five. Double plus good.
I've been back a few days and I'm cured of my optimism.
* When I say genocide I realize that Bush has not technically begun his program of extermination (that we know of) but it took Hitler eight years to get his under full steam.
Friday, March 18, 2005
Story
J. B. was just as you would imagine, only a little taller. She lived in a plastic cube that had wheels and was attached to a trike of her own design. In fact it was all of her own design. She built the cube and made it comfortable for both her and Jake. Jake was not at all like you would imagine, he was big and covered with soft black fur. He had big ears that usually stood up straight and a crescent shaped tail that wagged to and fro constantly. He was unusual even for a dog. Other dogs might look at him and wonder, "what an odd dog". But Jake paid no heed as he was convinced he was human like Janiva Beyer (that's her full name-not J.B.), his loyal companion. There was room in the cube for both Jake and Janiva so they didn't need a blanket or a pillow- Jake would just curl up around her. The two of them would travel from commune to commune - she pedaling her trike and he padding along beside. They were never hurried and would often stop to pet the cows that might graze near the path or pick flowers to trade at the next market on down the road.
Janiva was independant like most eleven year olds, but she travelled more than most. Her mother lived in Grass Valley, so named because it is a valley covered in pretty blue-green grass, and her father lived in Sandy Beach, so named because it is by the shore and covered in pretty white sand. Janiva tried to spend an equal amount of time with both so she and Jake travelled back and forth often. She enjoyed stopping along the way and she had many friends all over the Pacific Coast.
Usually the only unusual occurances on her journeys involved wild animals, although Jake would have a word with them and they would go on about their business. On this trip, however, a very odd thing crossed their path.
It was grey from head to foot with goggles for eyes and a black rubber hose where a nose and mouth should be. Janiva was sure it was a man in some strange costume but Jake wasn’t so sure. It waved at them from the side of the path. Janiva stopped her trike beside him and Jake circled around the grey man until he was downwind and could get a good whiff of clues about the stranger. The man raised his goggles and Janiva was proven correct.
“Mumble, mumble...” said the man, and awaited a reply.
Janiva cocked her head the way Jake does when you try a new word on him. The man unhooked his rubber breathing apparatus.
“Hello, Hans am I.” He said unmuffled.
“Hello, my name is Janiva.”
“Woof”
“And this is Jake”
“Pleased. I am pilot of plane. Landed over there.” He pointed over the hill.
“Nice to meet you.”
Jake made a low grunting noise.
“Is town near? I am run out of fuel.”
“Island View is just down the road, about thirty minutes as the dog pads. We are on our way there.”
Janiva wasn’t sure what a ‘plane’ was, and she had never heard of anyone running out of ‘fuel’, but she didsn’t want to let on about this.
“What sort of fuel are you in need of?” She asked assuredly.
“Gasoline, of course.” Said the pilot.
“Well, I don’t think they have that.” Said Janiva trying to look contemplative, as if she were considering other towns that might have this thing she had never heard of.
“This area was known as a producer of gasoline...From the air I have seen trains running out to platforms on the sea...”
“You must mean the monorail. That runs out to the Channel Towns. They harvest seaweed and farm fish, then they trade with the towns along the monorail.”
“They don’t trade oil?”
“Oh, there is a market for fish oil and olive oil and a couple other oils. The communes on the other side of these mountains grow grapes and olives, they trade milk and wine and stuff like that.”
“This monorail it must need fuel, no?”
“I don’t think so...it makes electricity from solar panels on its roof. I can walk faster than it moves, but I could never carry all those fish. It has never run out of ‘fuel’ that I know of.”
“Yes, well, perhaps you take me to this town and we find someone who can explain a solution to my problem.”
“O.K., I’ll pedal slow.” Janiva got on her trike. “It has special gears for going slow, it practically drives itself.”
“It is a very smart looking vehicle.” Said Hans, admiringly.
“Thanks, its of my own design.”
The three rode, padded, and walked along in silence for awhile.
“You live in this village?” Asked Hans.
“Nope, just passing through.”
“You are very young to be travelling by yourself.”
“Well I’m old enough to vote, I should be able to come and go as I please.”
Hans looked at her strangely, “You vote for the leaders of your village?”
“Well, yes, for our representatives, and for any laws that are about to expire. We vote for the entire Sydicated Communities Of the Pacific Association, SCOPA for short. The laws passed by the general assembly all have expiration dates, the more votes a law gets the longer it lasts, and when it expires the general population votes to keep it or let it go. I’ve been voting since I was nine.”
“This SCOPA, it is many communities?”
“It is the entire Pacific Rim, from here in California up to Alaska, to Kamchatcka, China, Japan, Australia, Chile, all the way up the coast back to California, and all the islands inbetween. There are big ships with metal sails that travel back and forth accross the ocean. I think it takes about a month to traverse the Pacific. Along the coast there are also great Airships that stop in the larger cities.” As Janiva was talking to Hans she noticed he was limping slightly. “Are you injured?”
“I hurt my knee when I landed, not too bad.”
“Would you like some money?”
“Money? For my knee?”
“Yes, I have some analgesic notes, they are for my great uncle, but you can have one.” She reached behind her into a pouch hanging from her cube and withdrew a folder. “I should have asked if you were hungry, I have some nutrition notes too, here’s a dollar of analgesic and five food dollars.”
“I, uh, thank you.” Hans looked closely at the money.
“You just eat them, they taste good. They print on seaweed with inks made of vitamins or medicine. Five dollars should be like a nice big dinner. Not as nice as having a nice big dinner but the same nutrition you know.”
Hans ate the money, saving one of the food dollars, “For later...” He said.
“So you must be from far away...” Janiva proposed.
“Yes, from New Germany I come...”
“Oh! I know that, I’ve seen it on maps. It is beyond the great Wasteland and over the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Ach, no that is the old Germany. New Germany is much further...”
“It must have taken months in that plane of yours.”
“The plane I have only been flying from this Wasteland of yours, from the Atlantic city called Cape Canavaral. It is not so long by plane.”
“I haven’t met anyone who has been to the Wasteland.”
“Yes well, the people of the place call themselves Republicans and they mostly live on the coast in the south. I did not travel north as they said it was unhealthy. But I found much of this Republic to be unhealthy. That is why I borrowed the plane to get over the desert and mountains to you.”
“Woof,” said Jake.
“To you and Jake, I mean.”
“Are you trying to get home then? To New Germany?”
“Perhaps...maybe this is impossible. If I cannot even get fuel for my borrowed plane...”
“We’ll ask my great uncle about that. He lives in Island View”.
The three walked on in silence until they came upon a monorail station. It was just some stairs leading up to a platform that sat astride the single rail that passed over the path, curving from the mountains towards the sea.
“We could wait for the next one if your knee is still bothering you.” Said Janiva.
“My knee is fine, thank you. We can walk.”
“Good, because it would take twice as long, and it usually smells of fish.”
“This transport costs money?”
“Oh no, it’s free. That’s one of the laws that didn’t expire.” Janiva smiled.
Over the next hill, the town of Island View appeared. It was nestled between the foothills of the mountains and a shallow curved bay with a low mesa at one end. The houses were all spead about and intermingled with trees and parkscape. Larger buildings were clustered near the shore where the harbor was. Lights were just starting to twinkle as the sun began to set.
“Uncle Mark lives on the Mesa overlooking the harbor - he is a teacher at the university.”
“It is very pretty, this town.”
“Woof, woof,” Said Jake.
“Jake has lots of girlfriends here.”
“We go to your uncle’s direct?” Asked Hans.
“Yeah, I’ll let him know we are comming.” Janiva took a small device from he jacket pocket and held it in front of her face like it was a pocket mirror. “Uncle Mark, Island View.” She spoke to the device. It made a few beeps and then played a little tune. The visage of an old man appeared in the screen of the vidphone.
“Janiva, how nice to see you!” Said Uncle Mark.
“Hi! Me and Jake are just comming into town.”
“Always at the last minute! You couldn’t have called from Grass Valley?”
“But that would spoil the surprise!”
“Yes, yes, you are just like your mother, planning always spoiled the adventure. Well, come on over, I see Sophie has perked up her ears. We’ll throw together some impromptu feast and have the neighbors over!” The old man was a big smile on the little phone.
“O.K. be there in five. Oh and by the way, we picked up a friend along the way. He wants to ask for your help regarding his plane.”
“Plane, huh? Well, all are welcome to ask, come along...”
“See you soon.”
“Right.”
Janiva flipped off the vidphone and tucked it away.
“All set,” She said to Hans, “Sophie is a dog in case you were wondering.”
“Woof, woof, woof,” said Jake.
Four minutes later they were at the front door of Mark’s house. It was a very organic looking house, all curved surfaces and natural building materials, mostly wood. Mark opened the large ornately carved door and Janiva jumped into his arms, “Welcome, welcome!” Sophie darted in-between his legs and went straight to Jake wagging her tail furiously, Jake played it cool so she went up to the stranger in gray and after a quick sussing out gave her human welcome routine. Mark swung Janiva over the threshold into the house and set her down, then offered his hand to Hans, “Hello,” said Mark, “pleased to meet you.”
Hans shook hands, “Hello, I am Hans, pleased to aquaint you.”
“Well, do come in, make yourself comfy.”
Soon they were all settled into the large living room in front of a stone fireplace with a small fire going. Jake curled up next to Sophie while she nibbled at his big ears and he pretended not to like it. Tea was served and biscuits eaten.
“You’re not from these parts, I can see that. Your wearing an old pilot’s outfit, and ‘niva here mentioned you needed help with a plane. Just what kind of plane?”
“An old prop plane, a Cessna. It has run out of gasoline.”
“Crashed?”
“No, a near crash landing.”
“I like that - like a near miss,” Mark slapped his hands together, “bang! nearly missed” He chuckled to himself, then noticed the blank reactions, “Sorry, showing my age - that was an old George Carlin joke.”
“If I may ask, how many years have you?” Hans asked politely.
“Ninety one come next April, this time around.” Mark answered with a glint of pride.
“Ach so! Impressive. You look only forty.”
“Well, there are fewer things to age one, these days. You’ll find many people are older than they look. There is an easy pace to life here.”
“How do you mean by this time around?”
“Well, you know about reincarnation?” Hans nodded. “Well in my last life I was a dog, not unlike Jake here. I led a pretty good life for a dog but I had some lessons to learn as a human so here I am, still learning. You see, Jake was a dog in a previous life and he was pretty good at it and he decided to stay a dog. I think I am still doing pretty good for a dog as a human. Sophie here was Janiva’s Grandmother in a previous life, that’s actually the only way me and ‘niva are related. I live with her grandma, whom I loved as a human and love still as my companion.” Janiva stole a glance at Hans and rolled her eyes.
“Anyway, I’ve been around the block. I know a thing or two. As far as gasoline, I’m afraid it’s nonexistent - this side of the Rockies.”
The doorbell chimed. “The guests!” Mark jumped up and headed for the door, turning momentarily to say, “I’m sure that we will be able to help you someway, Hans.” Sophie and Jake scrambled quickly to the door barking with glee. One by one as the guests came in, some carrying fresh produce or flowers, they were introduced to Hans by Janiva.
[I sort of wrote myself into a corner so, until the paint dries on the inside of my mind, I will proceed in snippets:]
Some time later, all were seated around a great long dining table. Several of the guests had brought food and helped in the preparations.
Clare, the honorable Ambassador from Mozambique
Matt, head of the craft guild
Heddy, village healer
Luka, inventor
London, chief of police
April, head de-domesticator of animals
Tai, inventor of the intanet
Nilsson, music loving dog
“I see you are admiring the painting.” Hans nodded. “That is by the famed artist, Arosha Buddhabelly - it is a depiction of the turning point in the battle for the defense of Island View. ‘At The Barricades’; there you see Sarita Queens with the flag and bared breast, next to her with the black hair and the fiery eyes is Arun Sunray, there is Ken Mugg with the machine gun and Lou Generous, there. All great heroes. Of these, Lou was the only one to survive, if you look closely you can see he is holding a water pistol.” Hans looked again at the painting.
“You see, a lot of the technology of the 20th century was developed initially for warfare - then adapted for civilian use. So these inventions had an inherent yang energy. Take the jet airplane; invented at the end of the second world war, soon it was the principle mode of transportation, and although at first it may have striven for some level of comfort for the passengers, people would even dress up like they were embarking on a ship, in no time jets were nothing more than flying missiles with people crammed inside. There was no way to correct the essential design. They have been replaced by Airships (Zeppelins you would say), and great Sailing Ships, which may take longer to arrive, but are perfectly safe and enjoyable ways to travel.”
“The arrival of true democracy and global suffrage was the real turning point. It, by it’s nature, could not allow poverty or pollution. And without poverty or pollution things slowed down considerably.”
“They used to use a thing called statistics as a way of guaging the relative safety of most things. Jet Airplanes were considered safe because only one in ten thousand people die from using them. Or one in a thousand are killed by cars. The problem was that statistics failed to address the basic problem that these vehicles were travelling too fast to be safe. I mean, you walk down the street and you bump into somebody - according to statistics you would have a one in a gigillion chance of mortal injury, and they would conclude that it is relatively safer to walk, but then they add all kinds of data and divide by the time it takes to get somewhere and how many labor hours are wasted and suddenly being propelled throught the void in an aluminum casket at 500 miles an hour makes economic sense.”
“The Shift came in 2012, just as the Mayans and Magellan had predicted. Not Magellan the explorer, but Frank Magellan, a friend of mine. He was able to decrypt the hidden truths in cartography - from ancient times to the Space Age. He decoded the Nazca Lines, he saw that ancient maps were more than just navigational tools, at the time of thier creation they were embeded with secret knowledge, just as myths are maps of our evolving subconscious, his maps were myths and he was able to tap into this collective knowledge and predict the Shift. His goal was to actually prevent the Shift but by the time he finished his ultimate treatise it was too late. He was in Antartica when it happened. he went down there with a special drilling rig and was set to release a massive pocket of magma building up under the ice. The followers of Magellan believe the Shift would have been worse but for his efforts. I count myslef among those - and you need only read his book to decide for yourself. At the least his warnings saved a lot of people.
“His wife, Kim, was a great advocate for children before the Shift
- she made award-winning documentaries about poverty stricken children around the world. After the Shift (Frank wouldn’t let her go with him on his expedition to Antartica) she began the movement to begin universal suffrage at age 14. This has been improved upon over the years - now it is at age 9. I think once certain animal species are given the vote that human children as young as can talk will be given suffrage.”
“You would allow animals to vote?” Hans asked.
“Well it’s only at a nascent stage. Communication has to improve. Jake-” Jake rose to attention, “would you vote for Hans here? One bark; yes, two barks; no.” Jake sort of grumbled. “See? He hasn’t made up his mind. You will have to give him a stump speech later.”
“It seems like a...a...” Hans searched for a word.
“Jake, do you think you should be able to vote?” Jake barked once. “Should cats be allowed to unionize?” Jake barked twice. “See? an informed electorate is all that is required.” Mark smiled at Hans.
“And Jake will not be swayed by table scraps as he believes he has a right to those," Janiva put in, "although they might work on Nilsson.”
Janiva was independant like most eleven year olds, but she travelled more than most. Her mother lived in Grass Valley, so named because it is a valley covered in pretty blue-green grass, and her father lived in Sandy Beach, so named because it is by the shore and covered in pretty white sand. Janiva tried to spend an equal amount of time with both so she and Jake travelled back and forth often. She enjoyed stopping along the way and she had many friends all over the Pacific Coast.
Usually the only unusual occurances on her journeys involved wild animals, although Jake would have a word with them and they would go on about their business. On this trip, however, a very odd thing crossed their path.
It was grey from head to foot with goggles for eyes and a black rubber hose where a nose and mouth should be. Janiva was sure it was a man in some strange costume but Jake wasn’t so sure. It waved at them from the side of the path. Janiva stopped her trike beside him and Jake circled around the grey man until he was downwind and could get a good whiff of clues about the stranger. The man raised his goggles and Janiva was proven correct.
“Mumble, mumble...” said the man, and awaited a reply.
Janiva cocked her head the way Jake does when you try a new word on him. The man unhooked his rubber breathing apparatus.
“Hello, Hans am I.” He said unmuffled.
“Hello, my name is Janiva.”
“Woof”
“And this is Jake”
“Pleased. I am pilot of plane. Landed over there.” He pointed over the hill.
“Nice to meet you.”
Jake made a low grunting noise.
“Is town near? I am run out of fuel.”
“Island View is just down the road, about thirty minutes as the dog pads. We are on our way there.”
Janiva wasn’t sure what a ‘plane’ was, and she had never heard of anyone running out of ‘fuel’, but she didsn’t want to let on about this.
“What sort of fuel are you in need of?” She asked assuredly.
“Gasoline, of course.” Said the pilot.
“Well, I don’t think they have that.” Said Janiva trying to look contemplative, as if she were considering other towns that might have this thing she had never heard of.
“This area was known as a producer of gasoline...From the air I have seen trains running out to platforms on the sea...”
“You must mean the monorail. That runs out to the Channel Towns. They harvest seaweed and farm fish, then they trade with the towns along the monorail.”
“They don’t trade oil?”
“Oh, there is a market for fish oil and olive oil and a couple other oils. The communes on the other side of these mountains grow grapes and olives, they trade milk and wine and stuff like that.”
“This monorail it must need fuel, no?”
“I don’t think so...it makes electricity from solar panels on its roof. I can walk faster than it moves, but I could never carry all those fish. It has never run out of ‘fuel’ that I know of.”
“Yes, well, perhaps you take me to this town and we find someone who can explain a solution to my problem.”
“O.K., I’ll pedal slow.” Janiva got on her trike. “It has special gears for going slow, it practically drives itself.”
“It is a very smart looking vehicle.” Said Hans, admiringly.
“Thanks, its of my own design.”
The three rode, padded, and walked along in silence for awhile.
“You live in this village?” Asked Hans.
“Nope, just passing through.”
“You are very young to be travelling by yourself.”
“Well I’m old enough to vote, I should be able to come and go as I please.”
Hans looked at her strangely, “You vote for the leaders of your village?”
“Well, yes, for our representatives, and for any laws that are about to expire. We vote for the entire Sydicated Communities Of the Pacific Association, SCOPA for short. The laws passed by the general assembly all have expiration dates, the more votes a law gets the longer it lasts, and when it expires the general population votes to keep it or let it go. I’ve been voting since I was nine.”
“This SCOPA, it is many communities?”
“It is the entire Pacific Rim, from here in California up to Alaska, to Kamchatcka, China, Japan, Australia, Chile, all the way up the coast back to California, and all the islands inbetween. There are big ships with metal sails that travel back and forth accross the ocean. I think it takes about a month to traverse the Pacific. Along the coast there are also great Airships that stop in the larger cities.” As Janiva was talking to Hans she noticed he was limping slightly. “Are you injured?”
“I hurt my knee when I landed, not too bad.”
“Would you like some money?”
“Money? For my knee?”
“Yes, I have some analgesic notes, they are for my great uncle, but you can have one.” She reached behind her into a pouch hanging from her cube and withdrew a folder. “I should have asked if you were hungry, I have some nutrition notes too, here’s a dollar of analgesic and five food dollars.”
“I, uh, thank you.” Hans looked closely at the money.
“You just eat them, they taste good. They print on seaweed with inks made of vitamins or medicine. Five dollars should be like a nice big dinner. Not as nice as having a nice big dinner but the same nutrition you know.”
Hans ate the money, saving one of the food dollars, “For later...” He said.
“So you must be from far away...” Janiva proposed.
“Yes, from New Germany I come...”
“Oh! I know that, I’ve seen it on maps. It is beyond the great Wasteland and over the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Ach, no that is the old Germany. New Germany is much further...”
“It must have taken months in that plane of yours.”
“The plane I have only been flying from this Wasteland of yours, from the Atlantic city called Cape Canavaral. It is not so long by plane.”
“I haven’t met anyone who has been to the Wasteland.”
“Yes well, the people of the place call themselves Republicans and they mostly live on the coast in the south. I did not travel north as they said it was unhealthy. But I found much of this Republic to be unhealthy. That is why I borrowed the plane to get over the desert and mountains to you.”
“Woof,” said Jake.
“To you and Jake, I mean.”
“Are you trying to get home then? To New Germany?”
“Perhaps...maybe this is impossible. If I cannot even get fuel for my borrowed plane...”
“We’ll ask my great uncle about that. He lives in Island View”.
The three walked on in silence until they came upon a monorail station. It was just some stairs leading up to a platform that sat astride the single rail that passed over the path, curving from the mountains towards the sea.
“We could wait for the next one if your knee is still bothering you.” Said Janiva.
“My knee is fine, thank you. We can walk.”
“Good, because it would take twice as long, and it usually smells of fish.”
“This transport costs money?”
“Oh no, it’s free. That’s one of the laws that didn’t expire.” Janiva smiled.
Over the next hill, the town of Island View appeared. It was nestled between the foothills of the mountains and a shallow curved bay with a low mesa at one end. The houses were all spead about and intermingled with trees and parkscape. Larger buildings were clustered near the shore where the harbor was. Lights were just starting to twinkle as the sun began to set.
“Uncle Mark lives on the Mesa overlooking the harbor - he is a teacher at the university.”
“It is very pretty, this town.”
“Woof, woof,” Said Jake.
“Jake has lots of girlfriends here.”
“We go to your uncle’s direct?” Asked Hans.
“Yeah, I’ll let him know we are comming.” Janiva took a small device from he jacket pocket and held it in front of her face like it was a pocket mirror. “Uncle Mark, Island View.” She spoke to the device. It made a few beeps and then played a little tune. The visage of an old man appeared in the screen of the vidphone.
“Janiva, how nice to see you!” Said Uncle Mark.
“Hi! Me and Jake are just comming into town.”
“Always at the last minute! You couldn’t have called from Grass Valley?”
“But that would spoil the surprise!”
“Yes, yes, you are just like your mother, planning always spoiled the adventure. Well, come on over, I see Sophie has perked up her ears. We’ll throw together some impromptu feast and have the neighbors over!” The old man was a big smile on the little phone.
“O.K. be there in five. Oh and by the way, we picked up a friend along the way. He wants to ask for your help regarding his plane.”
“Plane, huh? Well, all are welcome to ask, come along...”
“See you soon.”
“Right.”
Janiva flipped off the vidphone and tucked it away.
“All set,” She said to Hans, “Sophie is a dog in case you were wondering.”
“Woof, woof, woof,” said Jake.
Four minutes later they were at the front door of Mark’s house. It was a very organic looking house, all curved surfaces and natural building materials, mostly wood. Mark opened the large ornately carved door and Janiva jumped into his arms, “Welcome, welcome!” Sophie darted in-between his legs and went straight to Jake wagging her tail furiously, Jake played it cool so she went up to the stranger in gray and after a quick sussing out gave her human welcome routine. Mark swung Janiva over the threshold into the house and set her down, then offered his hand to Hans, “Hello,” said Mark, “pleased to meet you.”
Hans shook hands, “Hello, I am Hans, pleased to aquaint you.”
“Well, do come in, make yourself comfy.”
Soon they were all settled into the large living room in front of a stone fireplace with a small fire going. Jake curled up next to Sophie while she nibbled at his big ears and he pretended not to like it. Tea was served and biscuits eaten.
“You’re not from these parts, I can see that. Your wearing an old pilot’s outfit, and ‘niva here mentioned you needed help with a plane. Just what kind of plane?”
“An old prop plane, a Cessna. It has run out of gasoline.”
“Crashed?”
“No, a near crash landing.”
“I like that - like a near miss,” Mark slapped his hands together, “bang! nearly missed” He chuckled to himself, then noticed the blank reactions, “Sorry, showing my age - that was an old George Carlin joke.”
“If I may ask, how many years have you?” Hans asked politely.
“Ninety one come next April, this time around.” Mark answered with a glint of pride.
“Ach so! Impressive. You look only forty.”
“Well, there are fewer things to age one, these days. You’ll find many people are older than they look. There is an easy pace to life here.”
“How do you mean by this time around?”
“Well, you know about reincarnation?” Hans nodded. “Well in my last life I was a dog, not unlike Jake here. I led a pretty good life for a dog but I had some lessons to learn as a human so here I am, still learning. You see, Jake was a dog in a previous life and he was pretty good at it and he decided to stay a dog. I think I am still doing pretty good for a dog as a human. Sophie here was Janiva’s Grandmother in a previous life, that’s actually the only way me and ‘niva are related. I live with her grandma, whom I loved as a human and love still as my companion.” Janiva stole a glance at Hans and rolled her eyes.
“Anyway, I’ve been around the block. I know a thing or two. As far as gasoline, I’m afraid it’s nonexistent - this side of the Rockies.”
The doorbell chimed. “The guests!” Mark jumped up and headed for the door, turning momentarily to say, “I’m sure that we will be able to help you someway, Hans.” Sophie and Jake scrambled quickly to the door barking with glee. One by one as the guests came in, some carrying fresh produce or flowers, they were introduced to Hans by Janiva.
[I sort of wrote myself into a corner so, until the paint dries on the inside of my mind, I will proceed in snippets:]
Some time later, all were seated around a great long dining table. Several of the guests had brought food and helped in the preparations.
Clare, the honorable Ambassador from Mozambique
Matt, head of the craft guild
Heddy, village healer
Luka, inventor
London, chief of police
April, head de-domesticator of animals
Tai, inventor of the intanet
Nilsson, music loving dog
“I see you are admiring the painting.” Hans nodded. “That is by the famed artist, Arosha Buddhabelly - it is a depiction of the turning point in the battle for the defense of Island View. ‘At The Barricades’; there you see Sarita Queens with the flag and bared breast, next to her with the black hair and the fiery eyes is Arun Sunray, there is Ken Mugg with the machine gun and Lou Generous, there. All great heroes. Of these, Lou was the only one to survive, if you look closely you can see he is holding a water pistol.” Hans looked again at the painting.
“You see, a lot of the technology of the 20th century was developed initially for warfare - then adapted for civilian use. So these inventions had an inherent yang energy. Take the jet airplane; invented at the end of the second world war, soon it was the principle mode of transportation, and although at first it may have striven for some level of comfort for the passengers, people would even dress up like they were embarking on a ship, in no time jets were nothing more than flying missiles with people crammed inside. There was no way to correct the essential design. They have been replaced by Airships (Zeppelins you would say), and great Sailing Ships, which may take longer to arrive, but are perfectly safe and enjoyable ways to travel.”
“The arrival of true democracy and global suffrage was the real turning point. It, by it’s nature, could not allow poverty or pollution. And without poverty or pollution things slowed down considerably.”
“They used to use a thing called statistics as a way of guaging the relative safety of most things. Jet Airplanes were considered safe because only one in ten thousand people die from using them. Or one in a thousand are killed by cars. The problem was that statistics failed to address the basic problem that these vehicles were travelling too fast to be safe. I mean, you walk down the street and you bump into somebody - according to statistics you would have a one in a gigillion chance of mortal injury, and they would conclude that it is relatively safer to walk, but then they add all kinds of data and divide by the time it takes to get somewhere and how many labor hours are wasted and suddenly being propelled throught the void in an aluminum casket at 500 miles an hour makes economic sense.”
“The Shift came in 2012, just as the Mayans and Magellan had predicted. Not Magellan the explorer, but Frank Magellan, a friend of mine. He was able to decrypt the hidden truths in cartography - from ancient times to the Space Age. He decoded the Nazca Lines, he saw that ancient maps were more than just navigational tools, at the time of thier creation they were embeded with secret knowledge, just as myths are maps of our evolving subconscious, his maps were myths and he was able to tap into this collective knowledge and predict the Shift. His goal was to actually prevent the Shift but by the time he finished his ultimate treatise it was too late. He was in Antartica when it happened. he went down there with a special drilling rig and was set to release a massive pocket of magma building up under the ice. The followers of Magellan believe the Shift would have been worse but for his efforts. I count myslef among those - and you need only read his book to decide for yourself. At the least his warnings saved a lot of people.
“His wife, Kim, was a great advocate for children before the Shift
- she made award-winning documentaries about poverty stricken children around the world. After the Shift (Frank wouldn’t let her go with him on his expedition to Antartica) she began the movement to begin universal suffrage at age 14. This has been improved upon over the years - now it is at age 9. I think once certain animal species are given the vote that human children as young as can talk will be given suffrage.”
“You would allow animals to vote?” Hans asked.
“Well it’s only at a nascent stage. Communication has to improve. Jake-” Jake rose to attention, “would you vote for Hans here? One bark; yes, two barks; no.” Jake sort of grumbled. “See? He hasn’t made up his mind. You will have to give him a stump speech later.”
“It seems like a...a...” Hans searched for a word.
“Jake, do you think you should be able to vote?” Jake barked once. “Should cats be allowed to unionize?” Jake barked twice. “See? an informed electorate is all that is required.” Mark smiled at Hans.
“And Jake will not be swayed by table scraps as he believes he has a right to those," Janiva put in, "although they might work on Nilsson.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)