"Homophobic and Stupid is No Way To Go Through Life, Son"

I got a big laugh from this, the latest on the proposed re-institution of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (aka "Youse Homos Can Serve Until We SAY Youse Can't Serve") from Former Senator "Man-on-Dog" Rick Santorum:

"What we are doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. That's tragic. I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if rick santorum was president. That policy would be reinstituted as far as people in I would not throw them out that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration. But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past. Which was sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual."

because if you needed to know anything about what the man doesn't know about military service circa 2011, this pretty much tells you.And that's...pretty much everything.

I never served in anything but an all-male unit until after I got off active duty. But since then I've been assigned to everything between a headquarters company and a laundry-and-bath platoon with stops along the way with every sort of military critter.

And one thing I can tell you with stone-cold certainty.

Sex is ALWAYS an issue.

Doesn't matter if it's the boys on the girls, the girls on the boys, the boys on the boys or the girls on the girls. We're human, so until we're about 68 years old roughly a third of our brain is occupied in thinking about sex. I'm not sure what the other 66 percent does; sudoku, maybe.

Obviously the most complicated is in mixed-gender units. I've worked in several, and I can tell you that you can walk and talk military discipline and the UCMJ all you want to, but you get a young man and a young woman together and you automatically have the potential for something not covered in the rest positions at the halt section of FM 22-5.

Mind you, the Army has a long history of being stupid about Sex. I saw it first all the way back in 1981, when in its infinite wisdom the Army had set up a mixed-gender BT company. 1st Platoon of A/4/3, Fort Dix N.J. was female. "First Fox" fireguards shared a stairwell with my Second Platoon, and I am told (though I was unaware at the time, being first a squad leader and then platoon guide and thus exempt from fireguard) that the young women on guard ranged from adorable to fugly and the young men from studly to dorky. But almost none of them left Fort Dix unscrewed. It's lucky we never did have a fire; the horndogs were too busy having it off in the empty cadre rooms to have sounded an alarm.And in my experience it almost always has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes Santorum's connection between the Big Gay Scary even less sensible. The disciplinary problems and/or personnel complications were 99.9% heterosexual and 85% consensual (the other 15% were a supervisor/supervised deal, which IMO pretty much can't really be counted as such any more than any other "sexual harassment" type scenerio can).

And gay?

Ask anyone who served in Panama back in '86 and '87; the women's barracks over at 210 Aviation was like a big OG-107-covered episode of "The L-Word". Damn near every one of those gals liked her girls like she liked her corn-on-the-cob; hot and covered in butter.

But y'know what? They worked their asses off and kept those aircraft where they belonged, in the air, and as a result nobody really brought up the whole "hot-girl-on-girl-GI-action" thing.So excuse me if I continue to laugh at young Mister Santorum, who seems to think that U.S. troops have to put their genitalia in the company safe before leaving Reception Station. Sex not an issue?

Maybe on your planet, spaceman...

The Dealer Folds

The ortho and I both looked at the black-and-white picture on the wall.

"So you can see the deterioration here, and here. Both the condyle and the acetabulum are involved. There's just not a lot left to work with."

I could see that. Yes.

Last year I began to notice some difficulty reaching my right foot.

Nothing sudden, or startling. But it got difficult to bend my right leg at the hip, and I found that I had to perform an odd contortion of waist and knee to do simple things like tie laces or trim nails.

Have I mentioned that I have this knee problem? I think so. It's my parent's fault. Really; I have a congenital knee malformation called "patellar subluxation"; my kneecaps look outwards, are turned towards the outside of my legs. This has caused the outside of the kneecap to wear on the outside of the knobby parts of the leg bones (the condyles) and has reduced the bony parts of my knees to a pretty tattered state. I can jog briefly, and walking is usually fine, but running more than a short distance will result in a sleepless night of sore knees and Motrin.

So I thought this might be some sort of complication from the knees. Until this winter, when the stiffness and loss of range of motion began to be accompanied by pain in my right hip.

It started as just a soreness after a hard day at work, or playing soccer with the kiddos. But by May it was a constant soreness than ranged from a barely detectable hum when I sat quietly or walked slowly to a startling sort of wince if I tried to run or kick.

Finally in June I went to see my internist.

Like every American today I can't just "go to the doctor". I knew perfectly well that I had some sort of skeletal problem; likely related to age, hard, use, and deterioration (which didn't stop me from occasionally indulging in lurid nightmares about bone cancer or some other gawdawful fright) but clearly beyond the purview of a general practitioner.

But - also like every American today - my medical life is controlled by a massive bureaucracy. Not a government agency that I could petition for relief, but an insurance company that operates like a Sumerian god; opaque, dictatorial, and random.

So to appease the Gods of Blue Cross off to Dr. Le I went.

I love Le. She's this shrewd, no-nonsense character that talks like a B-girl from a Vietnam movie.

"What you do? Mess this up?" she said, poking me in the hip. I winced.

"Yeah, doc. I think I got a bum part and I need to go to Third Shop for an overhaul. You know a good bone wrench?"

"You go see Doctor Langwire. He hip man, Portland Ortho. He check you out."

Sure enough.

So with my all-important referral slip in hand, I spent a sunny afternoon having my leg manipulated by a physician's assistant and getting an x-ray. Which the doctor and I were both looking at now.

"If you were 75 or 80 there would be no question." the orthopod looked me up and down, "I'd be recommending a new hip. Yours is among the worst I've seen, and that includes men in their nineties."

"But..." I already knew the but, having read the little "Total Hip Replacement" brochure, the one with the little old man on the cover.

"Hmm. Yes. But the level of activity possible with a replacement hip would be very restrictive for an active man in his fifties." The doctor paused and looked at the x-ray again. "And there's the issue of functionality; a replacement today would probably mean another before you were seventy. And second replacements tend to have complications, especially if the person, again, intends to remain active."

Complications.

Yeah, I'd read that, too. Hip replacements aren't what you tend to think; you don't go skiing the next week. They're really quite fragile, you have to be extremely careful about things like inverting your leg or the thing will dislocate. Dislocations run about 5-6%, and, remember, we're talking mostly about old gaffers in the seventies throwing a hipjoint out shuffling down the grocery aisle to pick up some stool softener.

"Honestly, doc; what would you do."

To give him credit, I think he really thought about it.

"Well, I'd lose some weight". We both looked down at the thickness around my middle. I like to think of myself not so much as...fat...but as "dense". But I'm fat; I've lumbered around 230-240 for the past decade, ever since my knees really packed in.

"And I think I'd exercise to the best degree possible. And I think I'd try and keep my original hip as long as I could. Because when it becomes too much to go on, you're going to lose a great deal of what you can do now, and never recover that. You will be able to walk again without pain, though. Which at that point might be worthwhile."

I thanked the man, and walked out of the big, airy office in the old Pearl District brickstone building, and got in the work truck, and sat behind the wheel for a long, long time.


I don't want to make some sort of big tragedy out of this. I can do most things just fine. I have a terrific job, a wonderful family, I make a good life in a city I love. If you pressed my I'd have to say that the past nine years - my married life with Mojo and our kids - have been the best years of my life.

But my body is starting to fail me, and that's never happened before.

And I will admit; I abused the hell out of it, me, and the U.S. Army.

I threw it around, and piled heavy loads on it and told it to go past the point where it told me it was ready to stop. I made it bend and stretch in ways it didn't like, and hurled it against hard objects until it protested by swelling up and whining creakily. In my twenties, thirties, and forties I walked and ran further and faster than most Americans do in a lifetime; I climbed everything from hills to mountains, lifted and carried, squat, knelt, and sprawled. I played contact sports for my own entertainment that towards the end would see me with ice packs on both knees.

But every time I asked it to work or play for me, my body always responded. Not always gracefully - in fact, I'm to grace what Republicans are to compassion, an utter stranger - but always.

And now it's starting to just quit.

The doc was right. I'm not ready to become an old man, shuffling along at a slow walk for exercise, worrying constantly about making a sudden turn or sharp movement that will produce the instant screaming agony of a dislocated hip.

But the options are not good.

There's something called a "hip resurfacing" that offers a better joint architecture and a lowered chance of dislocation, and I need to look into it. And I'm not bragging myself when I say I have a pretty high threshold of pain, and I think I can go a fair bit before it becomes too bad for me to take.

Oh. And the last time I weighted myself I was down to 217.

So that's something.

But the damn plain fact is that I've been dealt a pretty shitty hand. I'm a 53-year-old man with the right hip of a sickly seventy-year-old. There's nothing I can do about it, and I can't even really whine about it, since it gave me a better run than most Americans before abuse and my fat ass packed it in.

It's the hand I have, and I just have to play it out.

But I don't have to like it.

And I don't.

שמע ישראל

In case you don't read Hebrew, the title above translates as something like "Listen up, Israel".It is the first line from the fundamental Jewish profession of faith, the words of Moses as written in Deuteronomy Chapter 6, Verse 4: שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד which can be translated as some version or other as "Listen, Israel: The LORD is our God. The LORD is the only God."

Speaking of Deuteronomy, it's been a while since I looked at the "Israel Rules" books of the Bible (Leviticus, Numbers, and The Deut) and I had almost forgotten how truly odd some of the contents are.Here's a good example, from Chapter 25, Verses 11 and 12 (from the King James version, just because I like the Jacobean English):

11: When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:
12: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

For those of you who don't speak Jacobean, "secrets" means the guy's package; wedding tackle, junk, manbits, y'know, his genitals. So if you're a-fightin' down at the Jug and the Little Woman tries to help out by giving the other fella's...secrets...a li'l twist, it's off to the chopping block for the soon-to-be-nicknamed-Lefty.

Hunh. Love to know the history of the actual incident that cause the patriarchs of ancient Israel to throw THAT little gem into Holy Scripture. Had to be a good story there.There's lots more stuff like that, too. The Deut is where you come across the still-kinda-skeevy notion that a widow becomes the property of her dead husband's brother, who gets in all sort of theological trouble if he has reservations about shtupping his dead brother's bride.

Plus building a wall around your roof so people don't fall off it and raising animals fallen in the road. The Deut is a real page-turner.

Why bring this up now?

Because we just went to a bar mitzvah.It was one of the better - maybe the best - I've ever attended. The service was endless for five- and eight-years-old, so there was some difficulty there, and it was mostly in Hebrew, so I had a lot of time to kill skimming the juicier parts of the Torah readings.

But I like the rabbi at our friends' temple; he's the very embodiment of the rabbinical traditions of humanity and learning, the cantor there has a rich, full voice, and - since this wasn't just any service, the most important bit - the bar mitzvah himself did a terrific job.

The trickiest part of these is where the new adult has to make a brief statement to the congregation. I've been to several where the young man (or woman) tries to be very Talmudic, or mistakes the day for a middle school speech assignment, or just mumbles through some perfunctory semi-religious boilerplate.

But last weekend's bar mitzvah had a very witty little speech that managed to talk about the week's Torah reading and incorporated it into his life - he's a broth of a boy, and hasn't been the most dutiful of sons, and he talked about how disobedient sons are discussed in the scripture versus how they were, and are, typically dealt with in history - and he did terrific work with the readings. And the kiddush afterwards was good, as always (what's the point in being Jewish if you don't lay out a good spread?) as was the unusual but entertaining party at the local archery store and indoor bow-and-arrow range.It was mostly just fun, but it got me thinking about religion in general and Judaism in particular.

And reminded me again why, of all the three big monotheistic religions I tend to have more respect for the god (and the adherents) of the Torah relative to the Bible or the Koran.Most of this is because of the three Judaism is perhaps the most reflective, the most scholarly, and the most self-critical.

This isn't to say that there are no religious scholars in Islam, or Christianity. But, frankly, I tend to judge a religion more by its average schmoe than by its leaders. Leaders can posture and prate all they want, but it's the way that the average Jew, the typical Muslim, or the rank-and-file Christian lives that determines the nature of the religion and its effects on everything around it.And I find many more Jews willing to look hard at their religion, to examine its foundations, and to apply its tenets in ways that are inconvenient and even hardships in their lives than I do the other two. Perhaps because for many centuries Judaism was so divorced from political power and the expedient, self-justifying, self-deluding nonsense that because of the demands of overlordship has permeated the others.

A Christian or a Muslim has to either explain how an Islamic or a Christian state must do things that Islam or Christ forbade them, things like taking innocent lives, punishing the weak, or ignoring the helpless.

A Jew hasn't had that impossible task until recently; his or her struggle was within, with their own conscience, and while that is the toughest thing in the world it is less corrupting to the soul than trying to justify a massive defense budget with commandments to live a poor and humble life, or using might and force to beat down the defenseless civilians of an enemy nation.The second reason is that unlike Christianity, the Jews have never pretended that their God is anything but what he was from the days of Abraham; a desert patriarch. Loving dispenser of largesse to those who revere and obey him, merciless enemy of anyone or anything who looks at his family sideways...the God of Israel is a stone killer, a real bad-ass, both to the stranger as well as to those in his own tribe who have problems with his rules.

The God of the Koran is a similar guy - which may go a long way towards explaining the recent animosity between the adherents of the two faiths in the Levant

It's the Jesus-sweetened God of Christianity that has real personality problems. He wants it both ways - turn the other cheek, but beware Divine Wrath - and that's the same problem as it always is when you want two incompatible things.

The God of the Torah is a less conflicted guy, and it shows.The thing is...this brings me back to the modern State of Israel, and the problem it both faces and represents.

Several people here have observed that I seem to have a problem with Israel, when in fact I have no real problem with Israel that it doesn't have with itself. Because it seems to me - as well as to many people, including many Israelis - that you can either be a democratic state, or a religious state, but not both. And you can have peace as a egalitarian monoreligious state (where everyone is equal in the state faith) or you have to be an elitist multireligious theocracy where one religion is more equal than all the others, but you can't have both.

Because a state is defined in large part by it's institutions, laws, and rules. And in a democracy those are defined by the people as in "We, the People"; they must, or the state is not really a democracy - mere elections don't make a genuine democracy any more than good looks make a good actor.But religion is not an opinion poll. It doesn't matter if a popular vote says that women are the civic equals of men, or that blacks are the civic equals of whites; if the Holy Writ tells the uppity Negroes or ladies their place, and that place is not in the public square...well...how do you change that? Does God want you to vote on it?

Or is he more likely to cut your damn hand off?

So it seems that a nation can be a secular democracy...or a theocracy. But not both.

The original Israel, the one founded in the Forties by the largely-European Zionists, elided the issue by making its Jewishness official rather than sectarian. An Israeli was a Hebrew-speaking secularist rather than a Talmudic scholar, and Israel was a secular nation that made special place for Jews in its borders but not in its laws.Then.

But much has changed since then, and Israel has been riven, as its ancient predecessor was, with tribal divisions largely driven by the incompatibility of religion and democracy. Seculars versus orthodox Ashkenazim versus orthodox Sephardim versus Russians versus non-orthodox religious versus Arabs (both secular and devout), all fighting for control of the state, its laws and rules, and its largesse. And it has absorbed the lands of many people who are not Jewish, and must deal with the problem that these people must either be treated equally (and thus eliding the point of a "jewish state") or not and thus eliding the point of sound government.

It's a hell of a problem.

And through all of that, Israel, like Napoleon's France, has had to deal with the physical reality of being surrounded by enemies. Her response has been, as his was, to fight, and, again like the First Empire, while she has never lost a battle she has never conclusively won the war, either.

One of the most significant results has been to discredit the old secular Arab regimes and empower the Islamists - surely not a result that any Israeli (or American) would have wanted. The great Arab and, now, Islamic, Coalition that surrounds them still remains, waiting, hostile, unblinking. Neither the Israelis nor their enemies have ever found a way to solve this political dilemma. Perhaps because there is nothing TO find.

And on the way Judaism has finally been presented with the conqueror's dilemma; can a polity that is founded on a creed rule others outside that creed - or, indeed, rule at all - without bending the tenets of that creed to that breaking point. Fortunately for Israel the God of Abraham was a pretty tough guy. But even He might blench at what is being done to maintain the country's hold on the eastern edge of the Levant.Now generally speaking I like Israel. It's a nice little country, very Western, and I like the no-nonsense toughness of the secular and non-orthodox Israelis I've met. The orthodox? Enh, not so much. But then, they feel the same way about me, the damned meshugana goy.

I've always felt that the best solution Harry Truman had was to offer the European Jews a state right here in 1945. Utah is kind of deserty and not very populous. We might have avoided a pack of troubles right there. Okay, the Mormons might have had some issues. But, still...

But right now it seems to me that we've dealt ourselves an ugly hand and lots of nice kids, like the bar mitzvah who sat grinning and eating pizza with his cronies the shabbas before last, are going to be the ones who have to make the change for the money we're putting down on that particular yarborough.

And that just makes me feel old, tired, and sad.

Because a faith is supposed to bring us closer to God and ourselves, and - as, I think, was the case for the young man whose coming of age we just celebrated - a religion can bring maturity and a deeper, more farseeing understanding.Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.

Or not.

Home from the Hill II Electric Boogaloo

The house is silent except for the rattle of rain on the barrel-lid outside the front window.

Portland has resumed it's autumnal grays and browns, albeit with the lingering savannah-yellow color of the late summer lawns. You should know that a green lawn in Portland is reserved for the enclaves of the feckless Well-To-Do; a sturdily hip urban Stumptowner takes pride in his or her sere expanse of waterless yard as evidence of an unshaken commitment to conservation in the Mediterranean climate of northwest Oregon. Let Laurelhurst and Bridlemile remain green through September; in North Portland and Sellwood we stand condescendingly amid our own miniature African veldt, humorlessly proud of our own superior ecology.I'm home again from a week working out of town.There really is something to be said for a home; not just a living space, but a well-loved surrounding that enfolds people, objects, and activities that define the place you are most defined by.

Or perhaps it is a facet of maturity. I spent most of my young adulthood in a search for the exotic. I find that on the descending branch of adulthood I enjoy the familiar as much or more than the novel.The wild land of the Olympic Peninsula is a stark magnificence. There is no gentleness, no softness there; the deep tangle of forest and brutal vertiginous mountains glower rather than beckon. Even as a place for work they are a beautiful surrounding, and I enjoyed my time there this week, seeing new places and doing new things.But it is now, in the quiet gray of dawn, with my family asleep behind me, that I find my heart at peace and my soul content.

September 12th

So.

My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.

The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rumsfeld/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.

After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."

All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?

Over at MilPub one of the commentors brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.

And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?

Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.

So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!

But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).

We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.

We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".

Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.

Yeah, that.

But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.

So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.

Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.

And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.

We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.

Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.

And that, we will never do.

And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.

We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.

You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.

So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.

But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.

This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.

We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.

So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.

The Laughing Policeman

On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.

We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.

Why, I do not know.

And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.

And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".

Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?

Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?

Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?


In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.

Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.

But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.

But...

Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.

And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.



So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.

So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.

We were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.

"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"

Decimation

I thought after last year that our long national indulgence in the compounded delusions of self-pity and self-righteous anger were starting to fade.But for the tenth anniversary of the events of 11 SEP 2001 has brought out all the usual idiots parroting all the usual tropes; It's was all about US! OMFG it was Pure Evil! It was Such a Shock 'Cause We were just Minding Our Own Business when We were viciously mugged!Well, okay, so we've had ten years and we're STILL thinking about this.

(Anybody want to make a bet as to whether Pearl Harbor was still front page news on 7 DEC 1951? No? Didn't think so. It was a very different war in a very different time, and in many ways were were a cruder, harder, simpler...but more sensible people fifty years ago.)

So let's get a couple of things out of the way first.

That an Islamic attack of some sort was successfully completed on U.S. soil was an entirely rational and expected result of the Middle East policies we had been pursuing for decades; since 1948, at the very least. This doesn't make OBL or AQ any more loveable or "justified". But you bankroll, arm, and act as consigliere for one of the local mobs in a bad part of town, don't be surprised to wake up with a horse's head in your bed some morning. It ain't an "if", it's a when, goombah, capisce?That it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Saudi maker is unquestionable. If 9/11 was a battle and you looked at it trying to define "Who won 9/11?" the world's tallest dead Saudi would have to be the winner, hands down. For the cost of a relatively small number of expendable fanatics (and the bombing and occupation of a stone-age tribal wasteland back into the stone age) he sent his target rampaging through the Middle East, bombing, shooting, and - worst of all - acting like the least competent imperial power in history. Too meek to conquer, too clueless and viciously self-protective to woo, too stupid to realize the difference...Osama must look back at the past ten years and the present position of his target, exchange incredulous looks at the demons tormenting him, and all three of them must collapse in helpless laughter. Satan in all his genius couldn't conceive of a richer foul joke.That the most significant, durable, and successful effect it has had has been the erection of a monstrous internal and external surveillance and propaganda contraption that extends across multiple agencies and continents, absorbs billions of dollars and tens of thousands of careers and lives...and all in pursuit of this chimera. Al posted the link to a Naval War College journal article in the preceding post. In it the author bemoans the costly, inept behemoth we know as the Department of Homeland Security.Because it is a massive boondoggle ginned up by the world's last superpower to oppose the efforts of a handful of raggedy-assed clerics and Muslim fabulists dreaming of Caliphate in dumpy rooms in Third World shitholes that, even if successful, would be unlikely to do better than 9/11 - that is, kill a relative handful of Americans compared to the number who drive into utility poles while texting every year?

No.

Because "...we need a longer term strategy for dealing with terrorism overall. Perhaps the most disappointing non-event of the past ten years has been the complete failure of America's intellectual infrastructure, including its colleges and universities, to create a reserve of expertise similar to that funded by the U.S. government in the wake of the Soviet challenge in the 1950s."

Got it?

The threat from a tiny band of poorly-funded, tactically-incompetent, Islamic boneheadsis and should be considered the modern equivalent of the challenge posed by the world's only other global superpowermassively armed with blue-water fleets, intercontinental bombers, an trained army of spies and assassins, and, oh, yeah, fucking nuclear ICBMs.

So one would think that this tenth anniversary of the moment we started the geopolitical equivalent of slamming eleven vodka and Red Bull shooters, stripping down to our skivvies, and leaping into the beer tub down at the local lesbian softball victory party swinging a length of tire chain and shouting "I can whip any bitch in the park!" we'd be looking around sheepishly at all the angry bull daggers, picking our saggy wet Jockeys out of the crack of our stinging ass and wondering what the fuck we had been thinking.

(Stops. Sighs. Shakes his head.)

Instead of indulging in an orgy of self-pity, maudlin sentimentality, and self-righteous victimhood.

But we won't.

Friday Jukebox: Latter-Day Lehrer Edition

Caught this on our local jazz station KMHD on the way back from Port Angeles tonight;She's got a CD release party tomorrow here in Stumptown and unless I'm held captive by social obligations I intend to see her, by Joe.