On Missing Forests While Squinting at Trees...

Last night I sat down and watched CSPAN (something that I'm actually doing more and more of these days as I listen to the battles mount in Washington over this illegal, immoral, evil and stupid war). CSPAN was covering the rally that took place at Oakland's Grand Lake Theater this past Saturday, featuring Rep. Barbara Lee (the only congressional representative to say "NO" to Bush's Iraqi charade from the beginning) Sean Penn, Daniel Ellsberg, and many others. Rep. Lee has joined with Petaluma congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (frankly the best thing about Petaluma in my opinion) and LA representative Maxine Waters to form the Out of Iraq Caucus.

Instead of joining jovially with the democratic leadership to authorize funding that KEEPS our troops dying for another year and a half, the true leaders of Congress, these three women from California, voted AGAINST Nancy Pelosi's supplemental appropriations bill on Friday, not for the same reason as Republican dissenters, but because they felt the time table was not good enough. "We can't afford to spend one more dime or lose one more American or Iraqi life on this illegal and unwinnable war," REp. Lee told the crowd. She has submitted a plan to begin IMMEDIATE re-deployment of troops, acknowledging that sending more people to kill and die in a war that can't be won can, under no circumstances, be deemed SUPPORT.

The BIG news of the day was Penn's rather strangely worded attack on the Decider in Chief, "We cower as you point your fingers telling us to support our troops. You and the smarmy pundits in your pocket - those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and blood-soaked underwear - can take that noise and shove it." Unfortunately, it's Sean's strangely surrealistic remark that's gotten most of the press (I even heard about it from a friend yesterday afternoon who had no idea about the context). Despite the fact that he's been personally on the scene, not just in Iraq, but in the middle of the turmoil in New Orleans and that he knows first hand whereof he speaks, his more important comments were largely ignored by the media.

"Let's make this crystal clear: We do support our troops, but not the exploitation of them and their families," he said. He went on, reading from his open letter to Bush, "Speaking of squandering, how about the billion and a half dollars a day our Iraq-focused military is spending, where three weeks of that kind of spending, would pay the tab on a visionary levy-building project in New Orleans and relieve the entire continent of Africa from starvation and the spread of disease. Not to mention the continued funds now necessary, to not only rebuild our education and healthcare systems, but also, to give care and aid to the veterans of this war, both American and our Iraqi allies and friends who have lost everything."

Interrupted by whistles, applauds, and cheers, Sean continued, "You say we've kept the war on terror off our shores by responding to a criminal act of terror through state sponsored unilateral aggression in a country that took no part in that initial crime. That this war would be fought in Iraq or fought here. They are not our toilet. They are a country of human beings whose lives, while once oppressed by Saddam, are now lived in Dante's inferno." With this comment, Penn nailed it. This is the heart of the matter; the real obscenity that is taking place is due to the evil propagated by Shrub and his whole collection of greedy, lying, clueless puppeteers.

It was quite an amazing event, with a collection of interesting and articulate speakers including an Oakland public high school student, and a former Marine with Iraq now behind him, who spoke eloquently and profoundly about his conviction that "supporting the troops" means getting them the hell out of the meat grinder. Emotions were high, but so was hope. The entire event was a positive assault on this administration's cynical, duplicitous, and negative perspective on world affairs, a ray of hope in this dark time.

Bruce Cockburn is right... You've got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

Kid... We don't like your kind.

In the ever growing list of idiotic phrases spouted by members of the Bush administration, in what seems to be an amazing example of who can look more stupid than the boss, Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated Monday that he approved of the U.S. "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy on Gay and Lesbian people in the military. As if that statement (as well as the spineless, hypocritical, and antiquated policy it refers to) wasn't ridiculous enough, General Pace felt that it was necessary to expand upon his comments with a bit of militaristic theologizing.

"I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts," General Pace told the Chicago Tribune.

This of course begs the question of whether or not homosexual acts between THREE individuals might be okay, but perhaps the General hasn’t learned to count that far yet. Or perhaps the concept of two persons of the same sex engaged in “homosexual acts” is so repulsive that to move any deeper into the concept is simply too much for the old warrior to handle. General Pace did, however, add a bit more clarification on his position by stating, "As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior," he said.

I really don't know where to start with this one. First there's the basic stupidity of the policy, but that's been more or less beaten to death, so I'll leave that one alone. There is, of course, the blanket "I believe" statement that seems to, without further explanation or substantiation, simply lay forth a divine rule to be followed without question. This is much the same approach as Dubya himself took when asked if he had discussed the invasion of Iraq with his father, "I asked a higher authority" Shrub explained, in one short sentence both dismissing his father's larger experience and somewhat wiser counsel, and instantly blaming the entire Iraqi debacle on The Big Guy Upstairs.

Obviously feeling that his blanket statement needed some kind of exegetical expansion, the general went on to compare homosexuality with adultery. I suppose the idea that two people of the same sex might actually have a monogamous, committed relationship is something that the general has never contemplated either (if he reached that far, he'd probably have to vomit up his T-Bone), and so in his mind homosexuality (of whatever shape, size or color) is just the same as infidelity and it should be "prosecuted" as "immoral behavior." Of course, this really isn’t all that unusual in these days of retrograde inquisition. A really big segment of the American public, led by James Dobson and Pat Robertson, would feel very much the same way; people who believe a lot of things about what God likes and doesn’t like, feels and doesn’t feel. He also shares his perspective with a large percentage of state legislatures in this country who continue to support the antiquated sodomy laws that are still on the books in a wide range of states. No, the general is by no means alone. Homosexuality (along with adultery and no doubt a whole list of other personal sins) is immoral… case closed…. Let’s go eat.

The thing that I find most disturbing is that General Pace does not, of course, apply any of his intellectual mud wrestling and moral speculation to the various other activities engaged in by military personnel, activities like torture, robbery, or murder. For that matter, also unasked and unanswered are questions of the basic morality of invasion, assault, bombing and the inevitable side effect of the ever present “collateral damage.” These are the true questions of morality for the military, questions which cannot be asked, lest they have to be answered. As Dr. C.T. Vivien, a former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said at a gathering I attended recently, “You can’t go reading Jesus when there’s a war on because if you start reading Jesus, then you can’t go!”

These are the real moral issues for our leaders, our military, our country and ourselves, and these moral issues are not even being imagined, let alone discussed, in either the rooms of power or most of the pulpits of the church. What does it mean to go to war with the whole world? What does it mean to throw out international goodwill and cooperation in exchange for crusading across the planet in the robes of New Empire? What does it mean to kill… anyone? What does it mean to truly seek peace? If those in power and those in the church would actually begin to explore these moral questions we might wind up with a discussion that is worth having. But those kinds of questions are uncomfortable to pose, because those kinds of questions don’t allow you to stand safely off to the side and sanctimoniously point your finger at the evil doings of others. Those kind of questions bring up the perspective of Jesus, most succinctly stated at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

There are a lot of confusing realities contained in the collected stories of the Bible. At the same time, there are some things that are about as straightforward as anything ever presented in human thought. It seems to me that this is one of those rather obviously clear places.

As they say in the commercial… General Pace, what’s in YOUR wallet?

Beyond all of the possible moral, ethical, legal and political issues that this matter brings up however, there stands one enduring image, something that popped into my mind instantly, even before I heard General Pace stop talking. It was with a strange sense of Déjà vu that I ran to my iTunes to find the story of another head muckity muck, in the U.S. army, 40 years ago, in another war. He was addressing the very same issues as General Pace… What is the necessary moral character of those we hire to KILL?

The story comes from Arlo Guthrie sitting on the Group W bench…


And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of
things, until the Sargeant came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said. …

"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-
58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-
the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-
pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-
arresting-officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-
thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for
forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:

("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")

I went over to the sargeant, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind."

As a conclusion, and a call to action, Arlo suggested that it would be possible to stop the war by singing Alice’s Restaurant. At one point, he even proposed the very concept that would send General Pace (and Ann Coulter) into apoplexy.


And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

So it’s my proposal that, in honor of both Arlo and General Pace that’s exactly what we should do… I am hereby calling for the Group W… no, no, no… Let’s call it The Group Q Bench this time - Alice’s Restaurant Anti- Massacre movement!

You wanna stop the war? Just click on the link and start singin’! Send it to someone... and then to someone else and get them to start singin’ too… and pretty soon the whole damn world will be singin…

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Excepting Alice
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

Da da da da da da da dum
At Alice's Restaurant

An answer to a friend...

I got an email late last week from a friend of mine who was having one of those dark night of the soul, battling with the demons of the world moments on the occasion of his birthday.

Here's the letter... unedited, and therefore bearing a few expletives as the subject warrants:


So, it is late at night, but the mind is working overtime.

The little military fucks who went to Iraq and supported Bush and Co.’s lies are now coming home and protesting vociferously about the lies that said they would be well taken care of when they got back home. What am I missing here?

I have heard, for quite some time now that the troops “had no choice”.

So, for some unknown reason their sense of judgment and morality was put in suspension?

They marched off without question to do the bidding of one of the greatest menaces to mankind?

And now they come back and are pissed off because they are not getting the medical help they need?

What a bunch of brain dead idiots.

I say, on the one hand: fuck them.

On the other, I say: we had a compact with them that we should uphold.


Whoa there saffire!!!!


Pardon me if I seem confused. I have little respect for these same-outfitted little pricks who just wish to get their $212 a week paycheck. Might be better than McDonalds or Wall Mart. Eh?

We jail thugs in the ghettos who follow their gangs. It is all they know they know of security.

When the war in Iraq started, the bastard in the Whore House said “We will not accept from Iraqi captured troops saying that they were “Just following orders””.

Of course, he expects the step-and-fetch-it compliance of his own troops to do just the same.

I have no feeling for the dead troops in Iraq. I DO have pain in my heart for the dead innocents that our fucking military killed.

So, I am sending this to the folks I think have serious thoughts on these matters. I want serious response, thoughtful response. I want to know why my tax dollars are going to this war effort and its profiteers rather than feeding the hungry and curing the ill.

Let me know. I am confused. I am having an anniversary of my birth, and I desperately wish to have someone explain why the world is better now than when I was born.

Good fucking luck.


***********************

With bait like that, I really felt like it was necessary to respond. After I sent him my response, I decided that it bore enough general interest that I should work at iit a little more and post the response here.

So here goes...


On the first point, I started out in agreement with you. One of the problems with an "all volunteer" military is that they did, in fact, VOLUNTEER!

Even the guy who was convicted of desertion last week after he ran away from his unit in Germany before going out on his second tour (he had attempted unsuccessfully to get Conscientious Objector status) stated that he JOINED to get money for college and figured he would never have to fight.... He joined in 2002!!!!! Hello!?!?!?! Was he not watching television? Did he have some hopeful positive thinking perspective like The Secret that made him believe that if he simply imagined himself stationed in Honolulu or Monterey that he would be there? At the same time, I find that it's important to pay attention to what's going on in this country. What drives people like that to join the "all volunteer" military in the first place? Even Andy Rooney had something to say about this on 60 minutes last night. His was a somewhat different focus than mine, but his point was well made.

A fabulous article I read the other day (and can't find at the moment) related the author's experience of sitting on a plane next to a young African American woman Marine. She had joined because she had no other possible options and she was hoping that she would not go to Iraq. Let's face it... she is going to Iraq. On his return trip, the author of the article sat next to a young, wealthy rich white kid in college, on his way to medical school; all the world's possibilities in his hands. When this is the story... when the opportunities for one group lead through Iraq and the opportunities of others lead through Fraternity Row, we don't have a volunteer army; we have a defacto draft of the lower classes. It's wrong - very wrong - and they deserve our support, before, during and after their forced ordeal.

Okay so here we go with what I feel about the rest... There are obviously any number of people in Iraq right now who would seem to be, at the very least, as you say, brain dead idiots. At worst they are voluntarily, and even enthusiastically, participating in some of the greatest evil of our time. BUT... as an on again off again pacifist/revolutionist currently in pacifist mode...

1) I believe that one of the things that we must seek is care, justice, and peace for ALL sides, even the warriors on our side (and the warriors on the other side) as well as the many more innocents and "collateral damage." EVEN the Decider in Chief for that matter. Respect for ALL is important. "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them."

2) For those on our side, we do indeed have a compact (more on that later) and as tax payers (at least those who ARE tax payers) your money is supposed to be going to those places for the support and care of those people whom the country collectively (through our idiotic elected officials and not just the Resident Shrub) made a contract.

3) Even for those, like the folks I mentioned above, who went into the military on the vain hope that they could cash in on our militaristic culture without having to pay a price are VICTIMS of this militarism; people who for reasons of poverty, or militaristic cultures, or blatant lies, felt like they indeed had no other choice. Again... all of us, as common citizens of this one republic, bare a burden of responsibility for them both before and after they made their unfortunate choice.

We OWE those folks the proper attention of at least fulfilling THAT promise, even if the other promises of this country are stolen from them.

There is another side to this as well... All of the above answers are, to varying levels, altruistic and grounded in my current pacifist belief that peace is only created by seeking peace FOR ALL.

On a more pragmatic side:

4) By maintaining the justice of our contract with our military, we on the left are conveniently given another weapon (oops, not a very pacifist metaphor there) with which to bludgeon (oops again... let's just consider this my shadow side) the Bushies. By pointing out that they not only sent you off to almost certain maiming and possible death and that even when you come home they treat you just like the folks in New Orleans we are given another place to raise the flag of JUSTICE. Ultimately, we can, hopefully, make the educational lesson that this equals that and that if you'll just give it some thought soldier (or senator, or congressperson, or friend), you'll see that not only did they lie to you about THIS, they lied to you about EVERYTHING.

5) We live in the real world and while MY politics are currently of an extreme left perspective (and getting more extreme even as they become more peaceful) it is also necessary to acknowledge that if we are going to live in this society together we are going to have to accept that we don't always get our way. SO... we compromise. The current compromise is supporting those who were sent to battle, while at the same time we continue raising as much hell as possible about the evil of, and the lies in, that sending.

6) Finally... it is facilitative, particularly as advocates for peace, to, as they say in the south, "BE SWEET." It just has a way of moving things along.

As for the state of the world since your birth... I can think of several things (the absence of war not being one of them) that are better. Most particularly I am of late most taken by the obvious change in the way our world attempts to understand people who are different. This is most manifest for me in my world of New Orleans and my African American friends (when I was a kid it was a TOTALLY different reality!!!!) On my speaklo blog I wrote about being moved by Oprah's new school for girls in South Africa... 20 years ago South Africa was still under apartheid and Nelson Mandella was in jail.

And then of course... there's YOU. I didn't know you even... 10 years ago.

Happy Birthday.