Stories for my daughter

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts, do crownèd sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store.
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am sufficed
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look what is best, that best I wish in thee.
This wish I have; then ten times happy me!

(Sonnet 37; Wm. Shakespeare)

Orphan out of Carolina

I wanted to point you to a very good essay about adoption.

I've followed Lorrie over at Clueless In Carolina for years. She's that rare blogging combination of thoughtfulness and literacy that makes for genuinely good reading. She's hit a rough patch lately, and I hope things look up for her, but she's still a good read.

And her latest post was about adoption - her own.

I blog about adoption quite a bit. I have to; when a quarter of your public is adopted it kinda gets in your face. So it was painful to read;

"Today I realized for the first time that there is an unbridgeable gap between an adopted child and a person who can pick up the phone and call the people who brought them into the world and point to the bed where they were conceived. "I dread Father's Day," I told Roger tearfully. "I've lost two fathers."

And realize that there's really nothing you can say beyond that.

You know our story; we lost a daughter. Lorrie lost a father. Twice. Which is more heartrending, to lose the future, or to lose the past? I don't think that grief bothers keeping score.

I once wrote something about the effects of grief, and said;

"I realize anew reading "We must never limit the universe." from my friend's blog that what this old grief scar does do IS limit my universe. I'm perfectly functional, but I've taken the big wound. I can't ever again KNOW that something good is on the way. Because it was once and what arrived was pain and loss and sorrow. And nothing I could do - and I once foolishly said that anything that wanted to hurt my family would have to kill me first - was enough to stop the awful emptiness that still exists, a tiny universe of nothing but Dark Matter, in the locked room at the top of the stairs in the back of my head."

And now Lorrie knows that she, too, has that locked room where she can climb the stairs, and stand in the doorway, and see the face of Loss and say, welcome, old friend, old enemy.

Have you come to stay with me for a while?

I think you can sum up the entire business by remembering that every adoption begins with tragedy.

We Americans are especially bad at tragedy. We're the ultimate shiny happy people, and in a lot of ways that's a good thing. But not here.

I wish I had some words of wisdom or consolation for Lorrie. I don't. Some things are just pure grief.

The loss of her fathers, like all losses, like all griefs, can be softened by time and distance. As they are for all of us; the grieving parents, the harrowed soldiers, the bereft adoptees.But they will always be there, waiting, at the top of the stairs, waiting patiently to ask us if we want to sit with them on the top step and remember all the pain and heartache of the end of our yesterdays, and our tomorrows.

Cup runneth over...

It's that quadrennial outburst of national fervor, commercial excess, poor taste, tedious, pedestrian business mixed with the emotional explosions and nearly unmatchable excitement of professionals at the top of their game doing what they do best on the largest stage on the planet.

No!

C'mon, do you take me for a fool?

Of course it's not another damn U.S. federal election!

Who the hell would mistake those idiots for "top professionals"? Professional beggars and prevaricators, perhaps. Top of their fundraising game, maybe. But worth getting emotional about? Puhleese!Nope. It's World Cup time again.

It's always hard for me to blog about the Cup because it's just so vast, the multifarious tales and intrigues and lies and commonplaces and idiocies - did the Spanish goalkeeper get distracted by his hot squeeze broadcasting on the sidelines!? Ohimigawd!!! - makes trying to tease a single thread or two loose to mull over is like delaminating your skis while you're skiing on them. You can do it, but the effort and risk exhausts you by the time you're finished.So.

Let's just read some givens into the record, OK?

Lots of the games will be as dreary as any other professional sporting event, or much of your and my lives in general, in fact. Is every every workday a treat? Every weekend a funfest? Do you see the stars and the Sun whenever you make love?

The hucksterism will be appalling and incessant. I would remark that that is a feature, not a bug, of our Industrial lives, too. Try it - reach out, right now, as you read this. Can you touch something with a corporate logo on it? I'll bet you can.Our very lives are a marketing study. Why should we expect the World's Game to be any different?

Sigh.

Okay, what else.

There will be pretty women in skimpy outfits with national symbols on them. There will be obese men with similar apparel and larger breasts.

There will be a lot of snide, or offensive, or offended, comments about the breasts.

The breasts will not care, particularly, one way or the other.

There will a hurricane of bloviating about the entire business, and the entire world will seem to be caught up in talking about the games, talking about what others said about the games, or talking about something that happened at the games that had nothing to do with sport or soccer at all - Did you hear that Maradona called Platini a French bee-yotch and Pele' an ancient nobody? Ohmifuckinggawd!!!!

Speaking of breasts, the Brazilian women will, as always, manage to look completely covered while somehow deliciously bare, all the while sporting their national team colors.

Hmmm...

Someone or two will fail, or blunder, spectacularly, and will be very publicly pilloried for it, reviled in a way reserved for ex-wives and homicidal dictators, their repentance and abasement demanded, their blood cried for...only to be forgotten by the time the groundsmen finish clearing off the pitch after the final match.

Everyone but the fans of one country will go home disappointed.

It will be utterly ridiculous, and excessive, and foolish. And we who love it will love it again, for all that we're old enough and wise enough to know better.

Oh, yes.

There will be silly mascots.But in order to feel that I'm earning my blogging keep, a bit of business.

One story I would like to tease out is the rich World Cup tradition of Bitching About The Official Ball.

Adidas, the German sports supplier, has provided an "official" ball as backed by FIFA for the World Cup (to go with the official soft drink, the official post-it note, the official t-shirts and drinking glasses, the goddamn official feminine hygiene products, so far as I know. We talked about the merchandising, remember..?) for 40 years. Every four years, for as long as I can remember, some of the players and the fans bitch, moan and whine about the ball. It flies too far, too fast, it wobbles in the air, it's a nightmare for the goalkeepers, it will produce a bucketful of soft goals.

And the first round of group games usually does, and since Alexi Lalas can't even pronounce "post hoc ergo propter hoc" this year's "Jabulani" ballis being blamed for everything from teen pregnancy to the blowout of Deepwater Horizon.

So far as I can tell the soft goals have been mostly the result of nerves, inexperience with teams and pitches, as well as with the ball. I don't think the new ball has been the cause. But I will say this;

I think this thing must take off like it has a rocket up its ass.

I've never seen so many rising shots, long crosses, and misses over the crossbar. The ball has some sort of textured or grooved surface that the maker says are supposed to make it stable in flight.

Weeellll...I don't know. The Wiki entry for it has a slew of quotes from players who hate it. And my observations do suggest that the ball tends to sail or rise more than the previous versions. Is that a problem. Depends, I imagine. I personally like the Real Madrid and Spain defender Álvaro Arbeloa's attitude to the whole controversy.

"It's round," he says, "like always."For all the publicized moaning about the low scores, the group games have had their delights; unlikely victors - Switzerland over Spain! Like having your seductive auntie leave your dashing uncle for the little brown man who sells loafers at the Payless Shoe Store - and shocked favorites, unhoped for wins and pathetic losses. Heroes, villains, wise men, fools...It's the World Cup, the Big Show, and I'll be there tomorrow at 4:30 a.m., enjoying every blowsy, merchandised, oversold moment.

Friday Jukebox: Comes Love Edition

Another wonderful Norah Jones cover.

I think I'm falling for the woman.

And speaking of women I fall for, here's another Norah, this time for my dear friend Lisa, who is under the weather. I never thought I would read or hear anything about the election of 2004 that would make me feel anything but furious, but the magic of Jones is that this song just makes me feel wistful and a touch bereft.Have a wonderful weekend, and, Lisa?

You feel better now, y'hear?

Removing the Teat

Interesting post over at Spenser Ackerman's place here.

Jason at Armchair Generalist discusses it - and the Cordesman piece that set the discussion in motion - here, and he is somewhat skeptical of Cordesman's unwillingness to come out and flat say "this isn't do-able with the resources we're willing to commit and the political capital we have to spend".I'll go further than that. The problem with the way Western nations, or at least the U.S., does foreign internal defense and rebellion suppression (which is all this is - it's trying to gut a slave revolt, same-same as in Cicero's time.) is that by our very nature we infantilize and marginalize the local proxies we adopt. We make them into little local copies of ourselves, or as close as we can. I don't know why, but it probably has a lot to do with our incapability to imagine a better way to fight war than the American way - lots of firepower and mechanization, lots of dead stuff, the liberation-of-Metz kind of war.

But this kind of war - and this kind of government, since we tend to do the same thing to the local political elites - takes an obscene amount of jack, cash which these crappy little countries don't have. So essentially these supposed foreign proxies get locked on to our military and economic teat and neither want nor try to let go. We end up with a crippled proxy run by a kleptocratic parasitic elite whose "army" is a little Mini-ME, a U.S. Army minus the air, armor, and artillery support, minus the trustworthy officer corps, a brutally incompetent bayonet-prop for the Quisling throne.We've been here before, remember?

The U.S. Army has always sucked at this. You could trace it back to George Washington's day, when the "lesson" he learned from Braddock's defeat wasn't that low-tech irregular soldiers do better in low-intensity guerrilla wars than expensive, foreign regulars, but that you just have to be more...regular. The last chance we might have had to produce genuinely effective foreign proxy armies - the sort of thing that people like "Chinese" Gordon used to do for the British - vanished some time in the middle Nineties when the Charlie Beckwith/SAS/Ranger faction captured the U.S. Army Special Forces and turned them into a glorified SWAT team. We haven't managed to create an effective foreign armed force - particularly one that can stand on its own for more than the time it takes to load the swag into the trunk of the Lexus, huck the door keys at the maid, and grab a hat - since the fucking Apache Scouts.

And they were pretty much "trained" when we got'em.

Think about it. The Americas? Africa? Asia? Where has a large American maneuver MAC produced a local military that successfully resisted a truly popular local guerrilla movement - none of this crappy fake-ass MRLA stuff like in Malaya - serious, hard-core G's like the Shining Path or the Tamil Tigers?

We just don't have the right stuff. We're shitty colonialists.

Look at what we're doing now in Afghanistan in "going after corruption". Think about that. Let's say that American culture was permeated with a tradition that put family loyalty first, that rewarded compliant and sycophantic servitude with largesse and the dibs of the public purse, where bribery and kickbacks were an accepted part of doing business.

Yeah, right, like the Bush family, right, you get it.

So along comes the foreigner with a poker up his ass and says "No more fucking baksheesh, Ali, get it? No more mordida. Get you fucking hand out of the till and get your fucking cousins off the payroll most rikki-tik."

Would that make you happy? Would you want to be like the foreigner - even if the defenestration of the insiders made it easier for you, the outsider? Or would you be irked because it meant that when you got a shot at being the insider you'd miss out on on the lovely lush?

Thought so.

So it's even simpler than Ackerman or Exum or Cordesman lay out. After eight years we've done nothing but created a self-licking ice cream cone. Every "victory" we shoot out over the locals makes our local "allies" weaker, more dependent on us. We can't "win" because the longer we stay the worse we'll be for our Afghan proxies.

We've given them eight years of "breathing space" and so far they've sucking in Sammy's teat and are giving it all the tongue love they can manage.

It's time to wean this monstrous infant.Before its habits of sucking cash out of the government teat begin to spread even further.

(Cross-posted to MilPub)

U.S. 3 - 2 Slovenia

Bad, bad call.Should be reversed by FIFA, as I've discussed. Not to excuse the mistakes that got the U.S. men's team 2-nil down at the half. But this is really inexplicable. If it was supposed to be an offsides, it was just wrong. If it was some sort of push or other contact, well, you couldn't really call it on one side without the other - both teams were fighting for position.

Three games today, two stunning and featuring some very...unusual...refereeing. In the Germany-Serbia match from what I could see much of the Spanish referee's work was within the letter of the Laws of the Game, but not what you typically see in international soccer. The Germans were very slow to accept that he was showing yellow for what would have been ordinary fouls to a different official and paid the price for it.The third, England's goalless draw with Algeria, was just dire.More tonight.

Die verfickte vuvuzelan.

I'll be back tomorrow with my observations on this year's World Cup Finals. But before that, my friend Mr. Schickelgruber had some observations to make on the ubiquitous droning horns we've been hearing every game:
I'm the Fire Direction Chief and I endorse this message.

Fucking vuvuzelas.