Hard to come by

Now that the rose of your
good fortune is blooming,
why are you standing there
with no glass in your hand?
Have some wine–
fate is a treacherous enemy,
And a day like this
is hard to come by.

~Omar Khayyám (trans. Juan Cole)

(and thanks to Lisa, who passed this along. A strong woman, who does not seek her? Her worth is far above that of rubies.)

This is what I was talking about...

...here.

The image below is from the March 19 Reader's Express, a Washington Post publication aimed at transit riders (h/t to Greenwald for the image):Can you imagine the insane furor - at least and especially from the Right - if Saudis or Iraqis were quoted as saying "Well, bin Laden was just stressed from too much Koran study..." or "Well, in wartime, you have to excuse his captors cutting Dan Pearl's head off..."

I'm sure that this SSG probably was stressed, and probably did go violently nuts because of some fucked up thing.

And, again, in the Great Geopolitical Game we're supposed to be playing in the Paimirs, that means two things; jack and shit.

If counterinsurgency/rebellion suppression depends on the "strategic corporal", it depends even more on the quick, public trial and death of the strategic staff sergeant - even if it's the wrong staff sergeant.

Because if you're really serious about "winning", the important thing is that the village remains quiet.

We still don't seem to fucking understand that. And that is unimportant for 98% of the United States, which has no fucking skin in this Great Game and never did.

But for me, it is important, because it means that more of my Army brothers will die, or return home without arms, or legs, or functioning brains.

And that is a keening and a grief to me, regardless of what most of my country seems to think.

Assuming it even fucking does.

Wish I'd said it first...

I try not to go to the same well too often, but this was too lovely to pass up; more from Chas. Pierce, in this case on the House of Representatives as currently constituted:

"In 2010, the voters, in their infinite wisdom, visited upon the country the biggest bunch of fantasts, paranoids, and general whackaloons since the last time Glenn Beck dined alone."

Like the man or hate him, you just can't be indifferent to the quality of the man's invective.

It is, mate. It is.

It's 7:18pm on a Saturday and I just got through working.So I'm off for a bit of the lager, eh? It's lovely!

(h/t to Erik Loomis over at LG&M for the lovely old advert)

Friday Jukebox Saturday Edition: Like Nashville With A Tan

I wanted to post this yesterday because it came across the radio late one afternoon and reminded me of the way it made me fell back in the late Nineties when it was in heavy rotation on the FM Radio.
In case you don't know the backstory, the guy who did this is someone named "Shawn Mullins", who may very well be the poster boy for one-hit wonders. This is pretty much it.

I was going through a divorce at the time, and I was feeling sorry for myself. Even though reasons 1 through 99 my ex was leaving had to do with that I had been a lazy git, and a self-absorbed dick, and she had finally had enough of my nonsense and left.

But aside from the sob factor something in this little song always got me; maybe it was the horrifying grimness of the story he tells in it, the relentless misery of this wretched woman in this shitty little bar who is out of ideas and hope, and the guy on stage who doesn't have an answer, either...until the chorus.

And then, well, everything's gonna be all right. Right? Because...because...well, everything's gonna be all right.

And it seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, that this goofy little song isn't a bad theme song for our lives, most of us. We know that all around us is the stuff of tragedy, or at least bad melodrama. Poverty, cruelty, misery, unhappiness of every sort and color, pain, death, loneliness, the end of all our hopes and dreams. Non-alcoholic beer. Vengeful tax auditors. Divorce. Cancer.

But those are just the cold and dark outside our window, always there, always waiting.

Inside it's warm, and light, and there's love and hope, and those we care for around us. And if we look away from the black panes long enough, and pretend hard enough we can almost believe that those evils will not touch us; that the Angel of Death will see the blood of our sacrifices on the lintel and pass us by.

And, like the song says - the happy part, the catchy part, the part you want to believe - everything's gonna be all right.

And you know what? Maybe that's not such a bad way to live.

So let's take that chorus to the bridge, and peer over the railing there, and throw our dreams into the water.

And let the stream take them far away.

Over the Mountains

Sorry for the light posting - I was out of town all last week working in Walla Walla, WA (a place I am told by a native drysider should always be referred to as "the town so nice they named it twice") and was off the net. I have a crazy busy day tomorrow than then should be back on schedule.

I did want to make a brief observation on the latest news-time obsession; the murder of young Trayvon Martin.

Y'know what the really messed up part was?

That the shooter wasn't immediately escorted to the Crossbar Hotel.

Because I'll give you all the rest of the "backstory" here. You know what I'm talking about, right? All the things this is supposed to "tell" us about the U.S. circa 2012?

The perception of young urban black guys as dangerous and scary. The possobility that young urban black guys ARE dangerous and scary. The degree to which this makes it dangerous to be a young black guy. The throwaway quality of life as a young black guy.

Race. RacISM. Class. Bad Laws. Inequal Justine Under Bad Laws. Republicans vs. Democrats.

The fucked-up-ness of writing a law that makes it possible for a knucklehead with a weapon to, in effect, go looking for a fight. The overarching place that race and class plays in American life. The sociology of race, class, weapons, and American urban life. The propensity for places like Florida, where being an ignernt goober is no disqualification for public life, to make fucked-up laws that enable knuckleheads with a 'tude to pull a hogleg whenever they feel disrespected, or spooked, or like scaring somebody, or for no goddamn reason at all.

Let's just take all those as a given, K?

But even given all this, the fucked up part of this story, for me, doesn't come until the local constable doesn't even attempt to take the shooter downtown and book him for manslaughter.

At least.

Because, as we discussed earlier about the Afghan shooter, when you don't do that, you make it obvious to everyone that the dead guy (or women, or kids) doesn't really matter to you.

And when you do that you prove that you've forgotten that the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

Let's thing about what the law is for; what it's "supposed to be for, and what it really IS for.

We all like to cling to the ideal that the law is ground rules for our society; the lines on the playing field. And how we're supposed to be all "equality of opportunity", liberty, and justice for all. But, look, we already know that there are two laws in this country, or, rather, one law that, in its impartial majesty, forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges.

Steal a car, steal a stereo, and you'll probably end up in jail.

Steal an entire pension fund, steal a family's house, steal a company and run it into the ground and put thousands of people out of work?

You'll probably get a job on the Securities and Exchange Commission and never lose a night's sleep.

So we've pretty much admitted by our actions that we don't really CARE about that part of our laws.

But the other part of what the law is for is to keep everyone inside society's fences. To maintain just enough public order that we don't get convinced we're in some sort of Hobbsean war of all against all and then start acting like that. To maintain "public order" in the same way that the rules of engagement of an Army of Occupation are there to convince the occupied that doing what the foreigner tells them to is healthier than planting mines in the roads at night.

So, sure, I'd like my country to actually have one law for rich and poor, powerful and powerless. I'd like to believe that the magnificent words over the courthouse door "Equal Justice Under Law" were true. I'd like for there to be good work, decent work, living-wage work for everyone who wants it. I'd like for my country to be the best it can for the most people it can.

But I'll settle for just enough equality to keep the village quiet.

Because unlike a lot of people - unlike nearly all of our wealthy white folks, the people who are benefiting from the kind of nation where people like Trayvon Martin are, and are shown to be, disposable - I remember what happened the LAST time this country was so open an oligarchy that even the dimmest prole could figure out that both ends of the stick he or she was going to get were dirty.Yeah, that.

We forget that the Gilded Age and the Ragtime Era had a scary edge to them, because the people on the Outside knew they had no way in and many of them decided to kick the thing to pieces rather than put up with that. We had a president assassinated, the first one outside wartime. Anarchists and Reds were under every patrician's bed, and armies of Pinkertons and goons - and the real Army - was employed to "fight them". This damn situation lasted until the Depression, when the New Dealers forced some of the oligarchs to bend a little to stave off what happened to Italy in 1922 and Russia in 1917.

And I'm on the wrong side, here: the kind of people I was then were the ones shot down by troops breaking strikes, beaten by company goons, lynched by American Legion thugs, and railroaded by corrupt judges. They were shot by people very like this Zimmerman who shot the kid Martin; because they didn't like the way my sort of people; poor people, union people, working-class people, looked.

Like I've said here before; the United States was founded as a sort of oligarchy and can work perfectly well as one.

But it's not much fun unless you're an oligarch and, can you tell me, sitting there reading this, that you feel lucky?

I didn't think so.

So while I'm sorry for Martin, his family, nice black guys everywhere, and my country in that we've made it possible for jackholes like Zimmerman to exist, because of who I am and where I am I have a vested interest in keeping the lid on enough to keep my society from flying apart.

So, for me, the important thing here, now, is that this shooter goes to jail. Goes to trial. Gets convicted - assuming the evidence shows that he did what he seems to have done, pursued an unarmed man into a fight and then killed him - and spends a long, long time in prison. Hell, we all have an interest in seeing that the people who use bloody-handed methods to emphasize the fucked up things we believe swiftly take the long step to the end of the short rope that German soldier took in Pont-avec-Crap back in 1878.

Because if we don't; if we convince enough people that the law is for you and not for me, that they might as well be hung for what they did do rather than what they didn't and some ignernt asshole thinks they did...well...

...then the village becomes unquiet and we've taken the first steps up the pass over the mountains of madness.

The Army I Knew: Light Sleeper

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post about AIT and jump school; sleeping on the floor and burning paste wax. Both were peculiarities I encountered at Ft. Benning for the first time. They tended to reappear any time I went to an Army school, but Benning was the first.

The former was a simple expedient to having too much to do in too little time.

We learned very quickly that we were expected to keep our barracks to an IG inspection standard daily, from the uniforms on the hangers to the items in the drawers to the tightness of the bunk. Anything less meant returning from the day's training to find a nightmarish disaster that had to be repaired by the next morning.

One thing we quickly learned was that beds don't HAVE to be for sleeping. And that a tightly-made rack could easily be used as a static display whilst the exhausted GI managed to camp out on the floor using his sleeping pad and poncho liner. I don't think I spent a single night in my jump school rack until the night after the final jump. I dusted the blankets and tightened the corners, but that was all.

Let me tell you this, though; linoleum is fucking cold, and don't let anyone tell you different.

The other requirement was perfectly - and I mean perfectly - glass-like linoleum floors.

First of all, nobody - nobody who valued their lives - wore their boots into the barracks. Like little Japanese schoolboys, we took off our shoes at the door.

But the true, genuine, mirror-bright shine was only possible through the workings of modern technology which, in this case, meant Johnson's Paste Wax^TM, an electric buffer, and very small private, and a selection of terrycloth towels.

Here's how it worked.

First, you set fire to the can of paste wax; this was easy to do but hard to control - the trick was to make a sort of field-expedient handle out of a wire hanger and not mind the second-degree burns you got out of the sloshing, boiling-hot liquid wax.

You poured this liquid onto the floor and then, with a miniscule troop perched on it and a folded terry towel under it, ran the buffer over and over the waxy floor.

The effect was magical. Decades-old linoleum gleamed like jewels. I remember being mesmerized by the pure military poetry of it. Mind you, it could do nothing to close with and destroy the enemy, heal wounds, defend borders, succor allies, or defeat the enemies of my country. But it sure was pretty.

I also remember vividly one of the student leaders doling out this piece of advice regarding the floors; "You-all will want to remove your footgear before walking on my floor, because whoever fucks up my floor will be fucked up in reciprocity."

Indeed.