Ten years later: the torture stories still coming out

The Guardian in Britain still thinks it is worth exposing what the U.S. invasion of Iraq led to.


The Obama Administration has refused to investigate or prosecute any of our torture enablers and war criminals. Whatever else it may accomplish, that is its legacy.

Warming Wednesdays: wind power is coming

Who knew? Though all the noise is about Canadian tar sands and fracking for natural gas, it turns out that "in 2012 wind was the fastest-growing energy source" in the U.S. Here's the picture as put out by the Climate Desk and Mother Jones.



Weirdly, none of this wind power comes from offshore installations like those quite common off European countries. Four factors have inhibited offshore wind development:

• Need for federal money to get the projects started. In the current fiscal mess, it would be hard for developers to bet on anything that required Congressional cooperation.

• NIMBYs and impacted local business like fishermen have slowed projects.

• The United States has no ships capable of planting a 450-ton 400 foot wind turbine on the ocean floor. Current U.S. maritime law requires that any installation be accomplished by a U.S. flag ship.

• State governments and the feds haven't figured out how to work together on the necessary approvals.

The linked Mother Jones article on all this is really eye-opening.

But on land, wind is happening. Why just the other day, in my inner-city urban neighborhood, I noticed this on one of the rare new buildings:

We sure have enough wind when the San Francisco fog rolls in.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

A graceful dismissal of clerical feudalism

This moment when the Roman Catholic Church is going through its ritual exercises for picking a new head seemed a good time to pick up Catholic historian Garry Wills' Why Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist. The author could hardly have known how timely its publication would prove!

The little book is a quick read so long as you are not well-versed enough in Hellenic Greek and scholastic Latin to contest Will's scholarship. The body of the book consists of deconstructing the (not really Pauline) Epistle to the Hebrews -- I think it is fair to summarize that Wills shows this late addition to the Christian canon to have introduced anomalous notions about human and animal sacrifice that have no support in Gospel accounts of Jesus' life. When he's done with Hebrews, Wills gets going on the medieval idea of "substitutionary atonement" -- that God the Father is really a rather nasty demon who had to cause his Son to be tortured to death in order to redeem creation (that's us.) Again, there's no real warrant for this idea in the Jesus story, though it fit well with a feudal and monarchical society and intrudes upon Christians' encounter with Jesus still.

Knock these two props over and the whole theology of the Eucharist as the exclusive gateway to God presided over by a mystically empowered clerical class collapses in Wills' thinking. As he recently put it in an op-ed,

There were no priests in Peter’s time, and no popes. Paul never called himself or any of his co-workers priests. He did not offer sacrifice. Those ideas came in later, through weird arguments contained in the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews. The claim of priests and popes to be the sole conduits of grace is a remnant of the era of papal monarchy. We are watching that era fade. But some refuse to recognize its senescence.

So is Wills still a Christian? Sure. He finds no contradiction between throwing out much of the medieval superstructure of church and continuing to experience the tradition. He affirms the Nicene Creed and other elements of church life he finds enhance his encounter with God, in particular faith that the blessed "body" and "blood" that Christians share in worship recall Jesus' radical practice of eating alongside everyone, even the "impure." And some parts of Church tradition seem to Wills very much worth cleaving to:

“I do not want to get along without the head of Augustine or the heart of Francis of Assisi to help me.”

… “If we need fellowship in belief — and we do — we have each other…"

Not surprisingly, reviewers have asked Wills whether he is still a Roman Catholic. Though he affirms that all people who name themselves Christians and also whoever seeks God through whatever portal have some window on the divine, he's sticking with the particular tribe of his personal history whether its rulers want him or not:

“No believing Christians should be read out of the Mystical Body of Christ, not even papists. It will hardly advance the desirable union of all believers if I begin by excluding those closest to me.”

Tea folk in the modern GOP: once upon a time ...

Maybe we should be relieved that they only want to keep the government's paws off their Medicare ... In 1957, they had other complaints.



Some Herblock cartoons hold up far too well.

Ten years later: suggestions of a shift toward sanity

With the ten year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq looming, re-evaluations of that stupid and immoral adventure are dribbling out in the media. For the next few weeks, I'm going to highlight and comment on some of them.

Unlike some of the people writing this stuff, I am glad to have been part of a project, WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras, that was doing its best to expose and oppose the phony, racist, and often vicious premises of the post 9/11 U.S. warfare state. You didn't have to have special information to know that crashing into Iraq wasn't going to be good for much of anyone except perhaps war contractors. You even didn't need special "intelligence" to know that Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" were a symptom of Washington's threat inflation syndrome. And though there was slightly more excuse for the Afghanistan war, it didn't take any special knowledge to recognize how resistant that corner of Central Asia has long been to foreign invaders with big ideas.

The anniversary has many writers talking about this in various ways. For example, here's Steve Coll, head of the New America Foundation and the author of several books about spooks and Bin Laden in the post 9/11 era, writing in the New Yorker:

…[this] dark anniversary offers a reminder, if one is required, that in any conflict where a President claims war powers the Chief Executive’s analytical precision in describing the enemy is a grave responsibility. A franchise is a business that typically operates under strict rules laid down by a parent corporation; to apply that label to Al Qaeda’s derivative groups today is false. If Al Qaeda is not coherent enough to justify a formal state of war, the war should end; if the Administration wishes to argue that some derivative groups justify emergency measures, it should identify that enemy accurately.

Jihadist violence presents an enduring danger. Its proponents will rise and ebb; the amorphous threats that they pose will require adaptive security policies and, occasionally, military action. Yet the empirical case for a worldwide state of war against a corporeal thing called Al Qaeda looks increasingly threadbare. A war against a name is a war in name only. 

Yes indeed -- daring to state that Al Qaeda is done for would be the most truthful, hopeful thing a U.S. chief executive could possibly do for the country. I'm not holding my breath, but count me in for the citizen's movement to demand such an admission.

At his Atlantic magazine blog, James Fallows ran a series of posts by William R. Polk who has been honing his understanding of U.S. foreign relations since service in the Kennedy Administration. As the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan, Polk is concerned with something "not necessarily understood by  Americans." He believes we must recognize and stop

a "blowback" [causing] the warping or degradation of [our] institutions, comity and laws caused by fear…

Stopping lurching about driven by fear is the prerequisite for moving this country away from its post 9/11 rogue behavior. It's a worthy goal. We need not forever allow our institutions to be deformed by barely rational and often inflated fears. We needn't live like a bunch of rabbits, scared stupid!

Nobody has a clearer view of what a putrid pile of nonsense the wars of the last decade have been than the military that has been tasked to fight them. Major Tom Mcilwaine, a British officer, writing at Thomas Ricks' Foreign Policy blog, is asking questions that have not been part of official discourse for over a decade:

Do we really want to be doing this? COIN, or whatever it is that we have been doing over the last decade, is tremendously difficult. The direction of some of these questions suggests that it might be a little bit more than that though. If what we are doing is fundamentally imperial, then it raises two extra questions. First, can we do this without using imperial methods? Second, do we want to use those methods?

… What is required, if we are not to make the same mistakes that we made this time, is a comprehensive examination of what it is we were trying to achieve, what we needed to do to achieve it, and whether we really wanted to travel down this path, or want to now or in the future. A place to advocate some truth and reconciliation rather than escalating the intellectual holy war within our profession might help too.

Maybe it takes someone whose country has already lost an empire to have the clarity to ask what many of us DFHs (dirty fucking hippies) have been wanting to know for years. We long ago repudiated the idea that unconstrained empire was anything we wanted. Nice to see someone in the military coming up with the right questions. The soldiers need a "truth and reconciliation commission" if they are to avoid just doing this again when some U.S. administration dares to flex its muscles.

Photo: U.S. Navy by Lt. j.g. Matthew Stroup. Caption: U.S. Army 1st Lt. Robert Wolfe, security force platoon leader for Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Farah, provides rooftop security during a key leader engagement in Farah City, [Afghanistan] Feb. 25.

"Might as well just brand them."

So said a friend on hearing that North Carolina proposed to issue "NO LAWFUL STATUS" drivers' licenses to Dreamers who took advantage of the administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Dreamers are young immigrants who grew up in the United States after having arrived with undocumented parents as kids. They went to our schools; played our sports; sometimes didn't even know they were not like everyone else until they tried to go to college or otherwise interacted with government bureaucracies.

We are losing their talents and energy when we kick them out of the country. That's both cruel and dumb. So last spring, DACA was introduced as a stopgap measure until a Congress tied in knots by Republican obstruction can pass comprehensive immigration reform. This program saves families -- it only makes sense: in every way but the legal one Dreamers are young citizens.

But North Carolina Republicans have other ideas. Stigmatize those kids!

Gov. Pat McCrory says he signed off on the controversial “pink licenses” that will be issued to some young illegal immigrants who were granted protection from deportation for two years. The new North Carolina governor said he thought it was important that the driver’s licenses for immigrants clearly distinguish “between legal presence versus legal status.”

…Critics of the new license design, such as Armando Bellmas of the Latin American Coalition in Charlotte, charged that the proposed license design was “discriminatory” and created a class of “inferior citizens.”

“The way these licenses have been issued is a direct attack on the immigrant community in North Carolina,” he said in a statement.

Charlotte Observer, March 2, 2013

Saturday scenes and scenery: San Francisco spring in February

It's lovely. This street is in an area that is as close to squalid as any in the city … but there is this.


The trees aren't waiting for the calendar. Spring in full flower is not unheard of in February here, but it does seem to come earlier every year.


That's okay with me.


What exuberance!




Some plants are more subtle, and all the more amazing, when they flower.


Others announce themselves dramatically. Happy spring!

UPDATE: Apparently these lovely spring days portend a water shortage:

The snowpack, dubbed California's "frozen reservoir" by water officials, normally provides about a third of the water for California's farms and communities. But only 2.2 inches of rain has fallen since December in the mountainous regions from Shasta Lake to the American River, just 13 percent of average. The next driest first two months of the year occurred in 1991, when 4 inches of precipitation fell, water department officials said.

There would have to be several big, icy storms over the next month to get the state close to normal precipitation this year, but no precipitation is currently forecast.

Uh oh ...

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Gay openess is creeping up on the NFL

I never thought I'd see this. The hyper-gendered world of the National Football League has tied itself in knots trying to navigate the legal maze that is the employment rights (if any) of gay athletes.

Colorado tight end Nick Kasa, unintentionally, started one part of the fuss by telling a radio interviewer that some team had asked him: "Do you like girls?" According to sportswriter Judy Batista:

Kasa said the question came as part of a series of queries about whether he was married or had a girlfriend. On Wednesday, he said in another radio appearance that he did not think the question was serious, although he said it was asked after he said he was not married and did not have a girlfriend.

Questions about family relationships are not unusual during the scouting process, but the N.F.L. has had to deal with inappropriate questions before, as teams try to uncover anything they can about players before the draft. During a predraft visit in 2010, Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked receiver Dez Bryant if his mother was a prostitute. Ireland later apologized.

Oops. These guys may be treated as high priced beef, but they do have some rights. How many is a little bit unclear.

"Yahoo!Expert" Martin Rogers thinks what may be asked depends on the location of the team asking, hence the interesting list at the left.

Meanwhile, it's not only Kasa whose intimate connections (or lack of them) have led to questions. The much more well-known subject of sexual orientation speculation before next month's draft is Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o. The celebrated Mormon Samoan was caught up in a bizarre hoax involving a non-existent internet "girl friend." This one left fans -- and teams -- not knowing what to think. And the teams who might pick up the rights to his services want to know. But, according to Colorlines, they've discovered there is an obstacle.

... the NFL does have safeguards against this kind of scrutiny, it just appears that teams aren’t following them. Buried deep within the NFL’s most recent collective bargaining agreement is a non-discrimination clause that reads: “There will be no discrimination in any form against any player by the NFL, the Management Council, any Club or by the [National Football League Player’s Association] because of the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or activity or lack of activity on behalf of the NFLPA.”

For this spectator and football fan, it's kind of a hoot to learn that what is probably just unconsidered boilerplate from hundreds of union contracts slipped into this one. Nobody really thought the issue would come up. Not in the NFL! But the world is learning gays might be anywhere.

Meanwhile, one of the NFL's loudest champions of gay rights, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo has predicted we'll see an openly gay football player by 2015. But he wouldn't encourage any prospect to come out before the draft:

He said if an NFL prospect doesn't like girls, the best thing for that player to do when asked about it is lie to improve their draft stock.

"Selfishly, I think players need to say that they're straight right now," Ayanbadejo said. "You need to get drafted as high as you can get drafted, get the money while you can, your career's only going to last 3.5 years."

I'm not sure what this says about the trust between labor and teams in the football league. Not something good I think. Interesting to watch the issue of a gay player become one of the many tension points in the employee/employer relationship. I enjoy watching football but between the growing awareness of the health risks and the ongoing sense of exploitation among the beef, I suspect the game has trouble ahead.

Friday cat blogging: who says you can't take a cat for a walk?

Even on the leash, it seems safer to huddle next to the building.


Of course it is really safe when my person holds me.


Sometimes we stop for coffee so I can watch the world go by.

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

It's not really about the bikes. Or the parklets.

Parklet on 24th Street, Noe Valley

A small item in the New York Times' local city coverage caught my eye the other day. Apparently a cafe operated by new residents in a Brooklyn neighborhood thought it would be a boon to their street if they jumped the city's regulatory hoops and installed a bike corral. The new facility removed one parking space. The "improvement" proved controversial:

… the bike corral set off backlash among many longtime residents and merchants in Crown Heights, who say that they were not consulted and that their parking needs were disregarded….“We did this thinking that we are contributing something to the neighborhood to make it more accessible to some people,” said Ms. Blumm, who is also the communications manager at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

… But far from being a welcome addition, the corral has led to a petition seeking its removal, a counter-petition in support, heated community-board discussions and acrimonious debates on local blogs. How a 24-foot-by-7 foot rectangle of public outdoor space has provoked such controversy is a question that has many in the neighborhood puzzled.

… Chuck Platt, a graduate student and cyclist who has lived in the neighborhood for one year, says he supports the “subtle ways” the city is making it more difficult for cars. “When you put in more bike-friendly access, it increases traffic to an area for the better,” he said.

But Roger Malcolm, who has lived in Crown Heights for 12 years and is also a cyclist, scoffs at the idea of locking either of his two bicycles at the corral. Mr. Malcolm believes the bike corral, while it is public property, sends an implicit signal that it is only for patrons of Little Zelda. It is an example, he said, of how newcomers are “changing the neighborhood.”

Mr. Malcolm was expressing similar sentiments to those I've heard from an old-time Noe Valley merchant-friend about the "parklets" developed on 24th Street. This person has worked in the area for years, has seen many of her customers move away when their children were grown and they needed less space, and fears the loss of even a few parking spaces will keep them from making occasional visits to shop in the old neighborhood. But mostly it is the attitude of the newcomers promoting the parklets that gets to her:

"They just don't listen. They hate cars and they think everyone can ride a bike."

When I listen, what I really hear is that she is mourning a time when the neighborhood had a wider range of ages -- children, their parents, old people who had been in their homes for years. What she sees now is that younger people with good jobs, usually in tech, are buying into the neighborhood. Most merchants adapt to their tastes; after all, they are the ones with the money. To the old timers, the neighborhood and especially the commercial strip is becoming foreign.

I have to wonder -- is the neighborhood's current hipster-oriented monoculture likely to change with time? Will the current batch raise children here and begin to want more practical stores than bars and boutiques? Will some of them age here? Or will urban life and rising property values force this stratum out in their turn? ***I have one other irreverent thought about the parklets: we're lucky in this city if we get 30 warm sunny days when it's not blowing a gale. These are spread out randomly over the year. We've had a nice week of them this February, but it would be no shock if we didn't get a single one in the month of July. Outdoor seating is just not one of the amenities much called for in our climate. The photo above this post was taken on a typical San Francisco day -- no one was lingering outside. Too cold.

Warming Wednesdays: San Francisco schools' solar panels

If you are reading David Roberts at Grist -- and if you are trying to think about abrupt climate change you should -- you would have recently been challenged with this:

The metametatrend in energy is, for lack of a better term, decentralization. Systems that were once composed of a few big technologies and a few big companies — along with thousands or millions of passive consumers — are beginning to be replaced by recombinant swarms of small producers and consumers engaging in millions of peer-to-peer transactions with a wild and woolly mix of small-scale technologies.

It’s going to be awesome! We have lived through a revolution like this before: the information revolution. I’m old enough to remember a time when it was vastly easier to consume information than to produce and distribute it. Even the internet started as what amounted to a large library, from which individuals downloaded info. But the spread of cheap processing power and bandwidth now means that anyone can produce information — a song, a video, an app, a funny cat picture — and get it in front of millions of people, instantly and virtually effortlessly, for dirt cheap.

… utilities used to be in the business of generating power at big power plants and then sending it to consumers over one-way lines for a set price. That basic “hub and spoke” model is rapidly becoming obsolete. There are more and more small-scale power generators and power storage nodes on the network, sending power back and forth in massively parallel fashion. Utilities cannot hope to centrally manage all those transactions. They will be forced, whether they like it or not, to move to what’s known among nerds as a more “transactive” model, in which their main job is to manage power markets, to dynamically price (value) power so that the market can react accordingly. …Another way of looking at this is, utilities are going to have to get used to power markets behaving more like actual markets.

Roberts' shout out to the quiet proliferation of decentralized energy sources grabbed my attention because of what I'd noticed while walking around San Francisco: every school yard I pass seems to contain a free standing solar panel installation, even in poor, rundown neighborhoods.

Curiously, it proved not easy to find information about what program or programs had brought about these installations. Whatever the school district is doing, they are not talking about it much for public consumption. They are proud that John O'Connell High School is teaching solar engineering. They are proud that a sustainability initiative has reduced energy use at seven schools by 30 percent.

Meanwhile, apparently, the solar panels proliferate and form just part of what every child finds in their school yard.

Maybe that's what the trends Roberts calls out will mean: the arrival new forms of energy acquisition and distribution that seem so ordinary we won't notice them.

Update from the foreclosure trenches

Time for some good news: thanks to a little help from her friends and a lot of help from the collective action of many Californians, the Rev. Gloria Del Castillo is going to keep her home. Rather than put it up for auction on December 31, Citibank has negotiated a new mortgage at an affordable rate.

Del Castillo is not alone in finding a big bank more reasonable in the new year. The LA Times reports a 60 percent decline in the number of housing default notices issued in January compared with December. California lenders are now bound by a tough new Homeowners Bill of Rights passed last year thanks to the efforts of community housing organizers.

The California Labor Federation describes some provisions:

• Prohibiting banks from foreclosing until they give fair consideration to a loan modification.

• Requiring banks to give homeowners seeking a loan modification a single point of contact to make sure they don't get the run-around.

• Increasing penalties for filing false mortgage documents.

The new law doesn't solve all the inequities that happen when big banks have aspiring home buyers over a barrel, but it is a significant first step, won by aroused homeowners and their communities.

It's not the drones, dammit!

This is bit of a rant about how the peace movement and liberals more generally are tying ourselves in knots by failing to speak and think clearly about the administration's drone war. Don't get me wrong; I think most everyone who is appalled by what is being done in our names understands most of what I am going say here -- but that hasn't kept us from using short hand that fails to clarify and may sometimes lead us off in useless directions.

• Drones are just a newfangled weapon. What's wrong with them is their use, not the things themselves.
  This should be obvious, but it hasn't always been. I get there is something video-game spooky about the idea that some guy (or girl?) is sitting in Nevada shooting people on the other side of the world. The physical distance may -- or may not -- lead to new forms of post-traumatic stress for the soldiers; the targets, on the other hand, are simply dead.
  
  But drones are just a fancy weapon for trying to maintain an empire on the cheap. Since the citizens on the home front are resistant to suffering casualties during military adventures, the drones look like an answer to our rulers' constraints. If the wars are wrong, the drones are just another weapon in the arsenal of dumb, immoral wars.

• We shouldn't be arguing about whether a president can legally use drone strikes to kill US citizens without a court order; we should be discussing whether we want a president ordering targeted killings of any person all over the globe.
  That's a no-brainer for me: all I have to do is ask how I'd feel if some foreign government were knocking off their enemies here. It's not like the US has a monopoly on the technology; every moderately developed country can have these things if they want them (or we sell them to them.) The Israelis are using drones vigorously over the Palestinian territories.
  
  There are international criminals who are hard to catch (or who enjoy the protection of rogue governments) but creating the context for apprehending, trying and incapacitating them is the opposite of unilateral targeted assassinations in random countries. This real problem requires that we work patiently for international extension of the rule of law, not that we demonstrate our technological prowess.
  
  A lawyer who uses the name Armando recently took a swing at laying out a framework for such an effort -- just a beginning, but a worthwhile project. Since the neocons took the US off the rails with élan in the terrorized aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, we've stopped even trying to figure out how to operate as anything but a pariah rogue state that destroys at will. We won't return to the family of civilized nations until we get over it.

• The real problem of which drones are the symbol is the ubiquity of technical means of surveillance now available -- to governments, spooks, and who knows what other entities.
  Privacy and anonymity are ancient history, over. Is it possible to have a participatory, reasonably egalitarian, relatively happy democracy without them? We are going to find out. The means exist to track us pretty much all the time.Only a strengthened regime of respect for legal constraints on what can be done with available information can protect us in this world we are making. Are we building those constraints? Not that I see.

Some warriors will come home ...

My partner teaches college students about the intersection of ethics with service in the community. Every once in awhile she has newly discharged vets in her class; they often discuss war (she has experience of one). One Iraq vet with whom she developed a friendship urged her to understand:

"If anyone comes back from Iraq or Afghanistan and tells you they are undamaged, don't believe them."

I think Karl Marlantes would agree.

If you are a US combat veteran, or you love one, or you worry about what war after war is doing to the people who fight those wars and to the ethos of your country, you should read Karl Marlantes' What It Is Like to Go to War. Yes, that is as unequivocal a recommendation as I ever make. The book has flaws -- one of them personally upsetting to me -- but this is one of the most clearly-argued, heart-felt, intelligent volumes I've ever read.

Marlantes is a Vietnam-era Marine Corps combat vet who brings to his subject the agonizing of a lifetime. Although the Marine Corps proudly let him take up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford in 1968 instead of calling him up after he completed the college education they had paid for, he volunteered to join his peers in the jungle. He came back with a chest full of medals, little sense of accomplishment, and a lot of anger. Soon thereafter, he remembers being spat upon by a civilian woman when traveling in uniform on a stateside passenger train. (He says such incidents, which have iconic status for the US right, were actually quite rare.) Though he apparently successfully resumed civilian life for a couple of decades, he eventually blew up and was diagnosed with PTSD. This book is his prescription for what recovery might mean for damaged soldiers.

Our wars go on, yet they are remote for most of us. We need to be reminded of some truths about sending soldiers to fight:

Warriors deal with death. They take life away from others. This is normally the role of God. Asking young warriors to take on that role without adequate psychological and spiritual preparation can lead to damaging consequences. It can also lead to killing and the infliction of pain in excess of what is required to accomplish the mission. … the more blurred the boundary is between the world where they are acting in the role of God and the world where they are acting in an ordinary societal role, the more problematical the reintegration becomes.

Perhaps in other times and in other places, fighters might have an easier time negotiating the transition between the devastating horrors we ask of them and the civilian moral order. But little about US life helps them. Hidden behind our two oceans and cushioned by our collective wealth, by and large we haven't a clue about what we put combat veterans through. Marlantes shares an anecdote about the sort of help he needed and didn't get from early in his tour as a platoon leader. He had survived his first fire fights in northwestern Vietnam, near the DMZ, where Marines fought the North Vietnamese Army over rugged hills and vertical valleys. He had seen his men wounded and some had been killed.

Two days before Christmas the fog lifted just enough to allow a single chopper to work its way up to us, a dangerous journey, squeezing beneath the cloud ceiling just a few feet above the jungle-covered ridges. Along with food, water, mail, and ammunition came the battalion chaplain. He had brought with him several bottles of Southern Comfort and some new dirty jokes. I accepted the Southern Comfort, thanked him, laughed at the jokes, and had a drink with him. Merry Christmas.

Inside I was seething. I thought I'd gone a little nuts. How could I be angry with a guy who had just put his life at risk to cheer me up? And didn't the Southern Comfort feel good on that rain raked mountaintop? Years later I understood. I was engaged in killing and maybe being killed. I felt responsible for the lives and deaths of my companions. I was struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite, and he was trying to numb me to it. I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies and friends, not Southern Comfort.

… I had no framework or guidance to help me put combat's terror, exhilaration, horror, guilt, and pain into some larger framework that would have helped me find some meaning in them later. Maybe if the right person had shown up for me that Christmas in Vietnam, he might have started me on an inner journey that could have saved me and my family a lot of grief.

Marlantes believes that today's combatants are in some ways worse off than his generation of soldiers. In World War II, units came home together, usually by ship, and the process took a month. They had some chance to work their experiences through together. In Vietnam, individual soldiers flew home, often hours after leaving firefights. Today, Marlantes worries that frontline fighters never get separation from home at all.

I am not against hot turkey at Thanksgiving. I would have loved some. … Today a soldier can go out on patrol and kill someone or have one of his friends killed and call his girlfriend on his cell phone that night and probably talk about anything except what just happened. And if society itself tries to blur it as much as possible, by conscious well-intended efforts to provide "all the comforts of home" and modern transportation and communication, what chance does your average eighteen-year-old have of not becoming confused? … When it comes time to leave the world of combat behind for the world of "ordinary life," it is going to be more difficult to do the more we blur the two worlds together. How can you return home if you've never left?

This author also breaks one of the veteran clan's great taboos -- he tries to explain to us, the home folks, what killing means to the combat soldier who does it.

When people come up to me and say, "You must have felt horrible when you killed somebody," I have a very hard time giving the simplistic response they'd like to hear. When I was fighting -- and by fighting I mean a situation where my life and the lives of those for whom I was responsible were at stake, a situation very different from launching a cruise missile -- either I felt nothing at all or I felt exhilaration akin to scoring the winning touchdown. … it makes me angry when people lay on me what I ought to have felt. More important, it obscures the truth. What I feel now, forty years later, is sadness.

… it is unlikely young soldiers will feel about killing in war the way I felt, decades older… it just goes against the nature and level of development of the mostly young people who will do our nation's killing.

..So ask the now twenty-year-old combat veteran at the gas station how he felt about killing someone. His probable angry answer, if he's honest: "Not a fucking thing." Ask him when he's sixty, and if he's not too drunk to answer, it might come out very differently, but only by luck of circumstance -- who was there to help him with the feelings during those four long decades after he came home from war. It is critical for young people who return from combat that someone is there to help them, before they turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. We cannot expect normal eighteen-year-olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war. …

In addition to urging that all returning combat vets need counseling, Marlantes also has a very concrete picture of how the civilian society that sent them might help them make the transition.

There is a correct way to welcome your warriors back. Returning veterans don't need ticker-tape parades or yellow ribbons stretching clear across Texas. … There should be parades, but they should be solemn processionals, rifles upside down, symbol of the sword sheathed once again. They should be conducted with all the dignity of a military funeral, mourning for those lost on both sides, giving thanks for those returned. Afterward, at home or in small groups, let the champagne flow and celebrate life and even victory if you were so lucky -- afterward.

It is not the soldiers that keep us from adopting this sort of respectful welcome for our returning combatants; it is our fantastical attachment to the illusion of effortless world dominance.
*** About that painful flaw in this book that I mentioned at the outset: Marlantes found his route to healing through adopting a Jungian understanding of existence. I have no quarrel with that, but the Jungian paradigm includes what I think is junk essentialism about men and women, our inexorably different roles and potentials. That stuff, I just can't stomach. Gender is more complex than this paradigm in ways we only begin to understand. When women take full part in combat, we will probably learn more about this -- for good and ill.

But read the book.

Freedom to travel?

The New York Times points to an outrage:

BEIJING — Flush with cash and eager to see the world, millions of middle-class Chinese spent the 10-day Lunar New Year holiday that ended on Monday in places like Paris, Bangkok and New York. Last year, Chinese made a record 83 million trips abroad, 20 percent more than in 2011 and a fivefold increase from a decade earlier.

Sun Wenguang, a retired economics professor from Shandong Province, was not among those venturing overseas, however. And not by choice. An author whose books offer a critical assessment of Communist Party rule, Mr. Sun, 79, has been repeatedly denied a passport without explanation.

“I’d love to visit my daughter in America and my 90-year-old brother in Taiwan, but the authorities have other ideas,” he said. “I feel like I’m living in a cage.”

Mr. Sun is among the legions of Chinese who have been barred from traveling abroad by a government that is increasingly using decisions on passports as a cudgel against perceived enemies — or as a carrot to encourage academics whose writings have at times strayed from the party line to return to the fold.

What a terrible practice, preventing citizens from traveling. The United States would never do such a thing.

Except to its Muslim citizens.

The graphic is from this site where there's a good summary of one of the many legal challenges to the government habit of using the no-fly list arbitrarily, especially against Muslims.

Saturday scenes and scenery: a little neighborhood tiff

The residents of this Mission District dwelling didn't appreciate the restaurant that occupies the ground floor. They put up a sign.


Several years later, they STILL have a beef.


Across the street, some commentary. These folks too live over a restaurant.

Sequster poll

I was polled on the sequester last night by someone claiming to be from Princeton Research Associates which seems to be a Massachusetts company. Odd they'd be calling San Francisco.

Their survey didn't offer the option of mentioning that the solution to the deficit is to raise taxes on the rich -- or even to raise taxes at all. But I did get to indicate that I wasn't much scared by the deficit and this BS will cause some level of economic havoc. Also that it all is the Republicans' fault. Not bad for one phone call.

I also probably won't get many future calls as I indicated that I use my cell phone more than my land line (where this came in.)

Friday critter blogging

Jojo clearly enjoys a degree of security that we might all envy.

Calling all football fans -- prison company sponsors stadium

Go ahead. Sign the petition. Let Florida Atlantic University (a fixture among the East Armpit Bowls) know that they should seek a less tarnished sponsor.

Messages from 2012 marriage equality campaigns

The front page of The Public Eye, the newsletter of Political Research Associates shouts: "WHY MARRIAGE WON -- the Right's marriage messages and the 2012 elections." David Dodge has investigated media strategies used by opponents of marriage equality as well as by winning LGBT-led campaigns in Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and Washington state. The full report is online here.

Last November's elections were a breakthrough for same-sex marriage at the ballot box; after 37 straight losses, we won affirmative marriage laws in three states and defeated an anti-marriage equality state constitutional amendment in Minnesota. Dodge points out several differences in the media strategies from previous campaigns. Two particularly struck me:

• Anti-LGBT forces chose to rely more heavily on "victim" messages than in the past.
  Previously, particularly in their winning campaign for Prop. 8 in California in 2008, anti-marriage equality campaigns had leaned heavily on warnings that gay marriage would somehow hurt kids. Maybe they'd be taught in school that two mommies or two daddies could live together! All the polling research shows that this is deeply unsettling to undecided voters, especially to younger parents with kids.
  
  But this time around, the antis emphasized "victim" messages in about half their ads. Dodge explains

  N[ational] O[rganization for] M[arriage] hoped to co-opt and neutralize pro-LGBTQ charges that anti-LGBTQ positions are homophobic or discriminatory. …The Right paints those who hold anti-same-sex marriage views as "victims" of religious persecution, contending that churches would be required to conduct same-sex marriages were the practice to become legal. This language has expanded to include faith-based non-profits in the last few years, and grown wider in scope so that now the Right warns that individuals' beliefs regarding sexual orientation -- as with contraception -- are the target of state-based religious persecution.

  This seems completely unsurprising to me, given that the Roman Catholic Church was funding and vigorously supporting the anti-gay campaigns. Anti-marriage campaigns were on message with their friends the Catholic Bishops, even though this dragged them away from messages that might have been more effective for their cause. I wonder if those Catholic Bishops have become reticent about pretending they are the protectors of children?
  
  Moreover, it is not entirely surprising that "victim" messages were so prominent. People who oppose gay marriage probably do feel as if they are being bowled over by a tsunami of changing social attitudes. State after state has adopted gay marriage; the 2012 electorate was younger, browner and more cosmopolitan than previous US voter pools. Opposing gay marriage is a losing game -- feelings of being victimized come right after denial.

• In these winning campaigns, pro-marriage equality messages stressed "pro-LBGTQ" messages instead of "rights" messages.
  According to Dodge, past campaigns have tended to focus on the some 1400 legal rights not available to gay people when we cannot marry: matters of child custody, inheritance, health insurance, etc. He reports that such messages have "worked" -- in Oregon, in 2010, 42 percent of voters said that gay people want to get married in order to have rights. But when these straight voters were asked, 72 percent of them said they got married for love, not "rights."

  … LGBTQ advocates have been communicating to voters that LGBTQ couples get married for different reasons than their heterosexual peers.

  This year pro-marriage equality messages focussed on the emotional content of gay relationships, saying in effect: see, these people love each other; why shouldn't they be able to marry?
  
  I see this shift as a sign of the increasing self-confidence of the gay community. Saying to the world this is about love makes us more emotionally vulnerable than complaining it's only fair … Given the experience of rejection many of us have suffered, it is not surprising that our first recourse is demand our common humanity rather than to show our feelings in public. But as gay lives and partnerships have come to be seen as unexceptional in more and more places, it has become safer to risk going to the emotional heart of the matter. Hence more emotional messages, though often delivered by straight family members or neighbors.

Actually, I think gay people will get married -- when we can -- for the same mixed bag of reasons that other people do: love, health insurance, romance, custom, companionship, etc. But we're getting to the point that the social response has become, why not? instead of incomprehension or revulsion. Good for all of us.

Here is a campaign ad from last year in the new vein:

They are sweet, aren't they?