Government

I just finished reading Rachel Maddow’s book DRIFT. It’s all about the military industrial complex and our many wars and….

Dwight Eisenhower warned us about wars back in his day. But we didn’t listen.

And now Congress doesn’t even declare war. Imperial presidents – which started with Reagan and his playmates Meese and Cheney – have all sorts of workarounds to avoid Congressional input or control. That’s not what the U.S. Constitution intended!

And outsourcing for the military. Wow. How not-cool is that? Outsourcing is a great way, apparently, to stop Congressional action.

Read Maddow’s book. Very interesting and informative.

I subscribe to Reader Supported News. Clippings from all over the world – but pretty much all about the U.S. Liberal. Progressive. Free but it solicits gifts and I give.

— On 04-04-12, Robert Reich asked if I wanted social Darwinism or a decent society. I want a decent society. I don’t believe in survival of the fittest. Our society is only as good as the rights and basic human needs we ensure for all. The U.S. doesn’t do that so well and too many elected officials and those running for office want to continue doing it poorly.

— On 04-06-12, Naomi Wolf from the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper described sexual humiliation as a “tool to control the masses.” We have lots of sexual humiliation in the U.S. From poor sex education to limitations on a woman’s right to choose…. And now we have the sexual humiliation of body searches without any justification. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court.

— On 04-04-12, David R. Dow of The Daily Beast suggested we might want to impeach our Supreme Court Justices. Did you know that every democractic country in the world – except the U.S. – has term limits or age limits for its supreme judges? And in the NYT of 04-09-12, Paul Carrington suggested that we “bring our justices back to earth.”

— Another time, there was an article about the focus on private enterprise in the U.S. We privatize war. We private hospitals. We privatize prisons.

We claim that private enterprise does stuff cheaper and better. That’s just bullshit. Instead, what we get is worse for more.

Remember BP and its Gulf Oil spill? And Halliburton and and? You think that’s quality?

The privatization of wars and rebuilding had huge huge huge cost overruns. And still we sent reserves and military over for repeat tours. Prisons, hospitals and education all privatized. Mostly that hasn’t turned out as well as nonprofit enterprise. And we’re still talking about privatizing social security. Oh please!

Private enterprise does not do stuff cheaper or better.

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I read the Nation magazine, a wake-up call to the false slogans and ignorant exceptionalism of the U.S.A. In a recent issue, I learned that fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. warned us against false slogans.

What are false slogans? Things like “tax relief” and “pro-life.” As if taxes are always bad so we need tax relief. As if abortions and birth control mean that one is anti life.

Dr. King warned against the false slogan “right to work.” He warned us that the purpose of “right to work” is to “destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone.”

Thank you, Dr. King. I regret that we are not paying adequate attention to you…yet again.

I’m always frustrated by the non-smart…even dumb…candidates for office in the U.S. But I’m mostly angered by U.S. voters who don’t vote for smart people.

“The question is as old as democracy: should the highest office go to the most intellectually able candidate, or to the most temperamentally ‘normative’ (other words for normative include ‘unexceptional’ and ‘mediocre’)?

“In the rest of the developed world, the contest between brain and ‘gut’ was long ago resolved in favor of brain. In America the dispute still splits the nation….Nine years, if you remember, the populace looked on in compliant silence as the president avowedly ‘went with this gut’ into Baghdad.”

Thanks to Martin Amis’ article “Among the Clowns” in the 12-26-11/01-01-12 issue of Newsweek.

Read the great and marvelous and wonderful and happy article “Teaching Good Sex,” by Laurie Abraham, November 16, 2011, New York Times. Abraham writes about this amazing teacher, Al Vernacchio, who teaches human sexuality at the Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia. What an admirable teacher. What an admirable school. Every youth – every human being – deserves to learn about sexuality and sex in this way. To understand. To feel secure. To be sensitive. Read the article. That’s the world I want. That’s what I want in my schools and in my community. Sadly, this is all too rare.

There was a draft for Nam. As my brother Alain said, “low number = screwed.”

How to stay out of the draft? All those strategies. Like inhale from a vacuum bag and agitate your asthma before your physical. Talk about liking boys and wetting your bed and get a letter from a sympathetic psychologist or psychiatrist. Cut off the right amount of your trigger finger and you can’t shoot a gun.

Or leave the country. Escape.

Tim O’Brien talks about leaving in The Things They Carried. How leaving means giving up your family and your history and your connections. How embarrassing it would be to explain. How lonely it would be. And O’Brien says that he just didn’t have the courage to leave. So he went to Nam instead.

What is the meaning of courage? We’re always told it takes courage to go to war. Or is it courage to survive war, the daily stress and boredom and fear?

What about the courage to refuse war, to deny its validity. Refusing to go.

To leave family and history and connections must be a truly courageous act.

I began writing these reflections 2009, after reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Vietnam was my war. And Bill’s war. And Connie’s dead husband Michael’s war. And Nam was Tim O’Brien’s war. He’s written it for us. So all those who don’t or won’t remember can remember.

“The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary in your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come to you. That’s the real obsession. All those stories.”

O’Brien reminds us that remembering makes things now. “And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

I was still at MSU when Bill was in Nam. Still working at All Saints Episcopal Church, living at home with my family that year.

I remember walking down Burcham Road and turning onto Lantern Hill Drive. I see myself approaching the curve where Knoll Road meets Lantern Hill Drive. Now I can see the driveway of my family home, many houses away. Do I look quickly or slowly? Is there a car in the driveway? Is it Bill’s mother’s car? Because if it is, that means something bad has happened. She told me she wouldn’t call. She would drive from her home near Detroit to East Lansing to tell me personally.

I see myself, over and over, approaching the curve. Taking a deep breath. Looking down the road to the driveway.

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“Not Just Between Them and Their God” is a great piece by Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times (08-28-11). Apparently, we voters and our media don’t want to ask candidates about their religious beliefs, like it’s invading their privacy. But this is ridiculous. What a candidate believes about gods and goddesses can affect his or her decisions. And I want to know that before I decide how to vote.

In his article, Keller asks, “If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him?” And he responds, “…I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little too squeamish about probing too aggressively.”

I want to know what candidates believe because that might affect their decision-making process. I want to know what Michele Bachmann means by being submissive to her husband. And I expect the media and citizens to ask that question – and not be booed for asking.

As Keller says in his article, it’s way past time that we get over our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life. If your faith is going to affect my life, I have a right to ask you about it. To demand answers. And you owe them to me.

I don’t care what Bachmann or Romney or Perry or JFK or Clinton believe in their religious faith. But this is a secular country – or so we claim periodically. So believe what you want, as long as your faith doesn’t change my rights and those of others. I have a right to know if your faith makes you anti women (just check out those patriarchal religions), is anti marriage equality, and doesn’t believe in global warming.

As Keller says, “I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. It matters to me whetehr a president respects serious science and verifiable history…”

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I was 9 years old in 1957. I lived in France part of that year. I was going to l’Ecole des Baumettes in Nice, my father’s hometown.

On September 25, in Little Rock, Arkansas, 300 U.S. Army troops stood guard as 9 black children were escorted to Central High School. Why the Army troops? Because just a few days before, unruly white crowds had forced the children to withdraw. But on September 25, those kids went to school. Finally, the white people couldn’t stop them.

(Thanks to the New York Times for reminding us every day what happened.)

I remember it this way: Bill enlisted in the Army because the military was drafting into the Marines. We all knew that the Army would be a better risk than the Marines.

I don’t remember the year he signed up. I graduated with my B.A. in 1970. So Bill graduated in 1968. No more student deferment. Maybe he joined up in late 1968 or 1969. We’d been dating for 3 years by then.

Who does one kill in war?

Soldiers kill soldiers. Men only, for so long. But in today’s wars, women, too.

Who are the soldiers? Adults. But not always. Some soldiers are not just young, they’re actually kids.

Bombs and soldiers kill civilians. Women and men. Boys and girls. Old and young. We kill civilians mostly by accident. Sometimes out of fear. And, rarely, with vicious, malicious intent.

My dad told a story once. Maybe he told it to Bill after Bill returned from Nam. There was a young German soldier in a foxhole. Dad kept telling him to get out of the foxhole. The soldier dropped his gun and held up his arms. Dad kept gesturing with his rifle and yelling, “get out or I’ll shoot” But the soldier didn’t. So my dad shot and killed him. And when dad got to the foxhole, he saw why the young German didn’t evacuate the foxhole: his legs were blown off.

Bill told a similar story. A young Vietnamese boy, maybe 12 years old, walked towards a platoon on patrol. In his hand: a Coca-Cola bottle. Bottles were often grenades. The boy wouldn’t drop the bottle. Shots rang out.

My brother Philippe was 12 years old that year, perhaps the age of that young Vietnamese boy. Did I ever tell you that story, Philippe, when you were older?

Dad and Bill and all the other scared soldiers facing scared soldiers and young boys. Acting to protect one’s self and one’s comrades – and killing.

Who does one kill in war? A little bit of oneself. It isn’t just soldiers that kill a bit of themselves; it’s our non-combatant citizens and our governments – our society itself.

[From “My own story of war,” which I began writing in summer 2009 and completed in spring 2011. Read the entire piece in the Free Download Library on my website.]

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