The More Things Change…

From a former jar-head friend now working in Afghanistan as a contractor:

About the only thing you really need to stockpile is patience because it’s a military/government project, where the sad but common saying is “f–k up, move up”. You’d be astounded at the incompetence and how deep and swift it can flow through here sometimes. You remember.

I want to make an anti-Ken Burns documentary someday, for our decade’s Iraq/AfPak project: over stills of soldiers in the field, accompanied by a soundtrack of melodramatic strings, a voice-over (is James Earl Jones still doing voice work?) reads letters and emails home; but instead of co-opting the chivalrous eloquence of the nineteenth century to romanticise the massacre from the comfort of our temporal remove, we get the contemporary voice and the gruesome comedy. Plain, unsentimental, profane, resigned. And a thousand times truer.

Oh, wait. It’s been done:

cowardice

This is a little embarrassing.

I thought I might write my way out of here. Setting messages in virtual bottles adrift in the electronic ether. Someone would find one, send out a search party. I would finally join society, whatever that meant. I had an idea of what it was, gleaned from a lifetime of secondhand accounts warped by the demented lens of electronic media. These posts are my various attempts to mimic that, to conjure in reality what I see in representation, as, increasingly, is the whole of my behavior. I’m a one man cargo cult.

Years ago, before my self-delusion was finally spent, before I finally accepted as chosen this isolation incrementally achieved through countless retreats from various relationships to the “outside world”, that is to say humanity, I thought of my existence as taking place in a darkened room. There is a door somewhere, but I can’t see it. I can only grope about in the dark, walking the wall with my hands. I could not know if I was endlessly retracing the same circuitous route in a tomb, or moving down an endless hall. But as long as I had faith in the existence of the door I was alright. It would lead me out; I would have friends, lovers, enemies. I would be normal, finally. This has been the unachievable goal I’ve set for myself. I would be part of a greater whole, drawing strength from it, rather than a whole unto myself, consuming my own psychic innards until my hollow, gelatinous shell caves in upon itself in a rubbery heap.

But delusion fades over time. Now I know: there is no door. The darkness is mine, projected outward. I cherish the room as all I know, because it is. I don’t want to leave, therefore I cannot leave. I’m going to die in here. But I do miss the idea of the door. We are all precisely where we have chosen to be.
Save yourselves.

Lone Wolf Tickets

A question. Has anyone yet attempted to leverage yesterday’s tragedy at Fort Hood into a defense of the Patriot Act’s “lone wolf” provision? Maybe the question is not if, but when. I’m thinking of starting a pool.
Of course it may not be necessary. Yesterday* the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to extend three provisions: roving wiretaps; section 215, or the “libraries provision” diminishing privacy rights; and the “lone wolf” provision, which should probably be renamed the “pack of wolves” provision, for its potential (arguably inevitable) future misuse against political “radicals”, as defined by whatever pack is in power.

[*correction: the House Judiciary Committee voted on Nov. 5 to allow the LW provison to expire; the Senate Judiciary voted last month to extend all three]

update: Speaking of grassroots terrorism, if the Seattle police are right, a man now in critical condition who was shot and arrested earlier today for the assassination-style killing of a Seattle police officer was waging a terrorist campaign of his own (with at least one accomplice) against the city’s police department. According to police, Christopher Monfort, an Obama-lookalike with a similar biracial background, is also a suspect in an arson case involving the torching of several police vehicles at a motor pool. The arsonist left a note promising to kill police officers. Monfort is a University of Washington graduate and sometime activist:

Monfort received a bachelor’s degree from the UW in March 2008, according to the university’s degree-validation Web site. His major was in Law, Societies and Justice.

Last year, Monfort belonged to the McNair Scholars Program, part of the university’s office of Minority Affairs and Diversity. The program aims to steep undergraduate students in sophisticated research, preparing them for graduate work.

Monfort provided this title for his project with the McNair program: “The Power of Citizenship Your Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About: How to Change the Inequity of the Criminal Justice System Immediately, Through Active Citizen Nullification of Laws, As a Juror.”

In an abstract of his project, Monfort said he planned to “illuminate and further” the scholarship of Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University. Butler is a proponent of jury nullification, a controversial principle whereby jurors feel free to disregard a judge’s instructions and acquit a defendant no matter the strength of the evidence.

Butler has argued that such nullification may be particularly appropriate in cases where black defendants are charged with nonviolent crimes.

“It is the moral responsibility of black jurors to emancipate some guilty black outlaws,” Butler wrote in a 1995 Yale Law Journal article, adding: “My goal is the subversion of American criminal justice, at least as it now exists.”

update II: Seattle police now claim to have found bomb-making materials and more evidence linking Monfort to the arson and the murder, and have declared him a “domestic terrorist.”

update III: After initially speculating that Monfort acted with one or two accomplices, they are now saying he acted alone

Narrative Blowback

Has the media’s recoiling fascination with the Angry White Mobs of health care reform’s roadshow crippled that effort and stalled the Obama administration?

Marshaling evidence to that effect, liberal codger E.J.Dionne, for one, draws the only relevant conclusion: there is no such thing as a “liberal media bias.” In giving the “tea-baggers” all that sneering attention,the media overstated their numbers and fury; and as we all know consequence equals intent and consequences are always intended. Employing their conspiratorial mob tactics (political organization and assembly, raised voices, unfashionable clothing) they snookered the media into acting as their own oblivious man behind the curtain, projecting the illusion of a powerful force. It’s a new twist on an old story: idealistic and naive city folk brave the American interior in search of a dream, get taken by slick operating small-towners. It was a Simpson’s episode. Of course, eventually everything will be a Simpsons episode.

But the pitchfork extras were too well cast. Like anthropologists happening upon a long-isolated tribe, the press marvelled at these folk, no longer mere legend. For all their habitual rhapsodizing about the historic demographic shift America has taken from shameful homogeneity to the uncertain (but nonetheless mandated Great and Necessary) multiracial beyond, the media was nonetheless shocked to find a retired middle-class as white as the workforce it once was. The past exists only as reproach, and those consigned to it carry its shame like the mark of Cain.

They have no character arc, or future. First this was prophesied, then it was decided. The unease produced in them by the media’s endless celebrations of their long-overdue and deserved demise (the post-racial age of Obama) is treated as spontaneous bigotry welling up from inexhaustible depths. The racist nature of their demand for their “nation back” is presumed and condemned in one breath, and made no more understandable by Obama’s open claim to the nation on behalf of a new, better people, defined by only by what they are not–white. Those clamoring for their “nation back” are literally guilty of talking back.

Of the accusatory adjectives used to describe the crowds, old and white, the first remains a furtive and facile appeal to an ancient prejudice, but the second has become a pejorative in its own right, encouraging a new sort of bigotry–one not so much sanctioned as it is required. All else being equal, “White” is now a moral failing into which one is inescapably born. How we arrived at this perversion of both Christian and Enlightenment values (in the name, alternatively, of both) remains shrouded not in mystery but coercion. One is not allowed to ask.

Media bias, liberal or not, is nothing more than the aggregate of the influential class’ prejudices, fantasies, and phobias. It is not action but drift. Its predictable nature creates the illusion of direction and control. But once set in motion, round and round it goes, where the narrative stops, nobody knows.

Oblivironia

That’s my suggested word for oblivious to irony.

An example. Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, in Israel as part of a 56-member Congressional contingent summoned by AIPAC, repeating a theme developed there to criticize US foreign policy:

“I’m very troubled by that, because I don’t think we in America would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws.”

Maybe I need to combine oblivion with gall. Yeah, needs work. From Philip Giraldi’s Sept. 3 column.

Summer ends over a weekend here, usually right about now. The grey cloak shrinks the sky, the fall chill shrinks the skin, my spirit lets out a pathetic whimper, but, as if by design, I’m returned the energy I’d thought, as every year, lost for good to one last August. Doors will reopen this Sunday, muse willing.

Dennis Does Democracy

I went to my congressman’s (Rick Larsen, Democrat) “health care forum” yesterday, having been compelled by one of the Moveon-type liberal activist organizations that send me emails (I think it was “BarackObama.com”).

I arrived at the stadium (of the Seattle Mariners’ triple-A baseball team, the Everett Aquasox) two hours early as the email suggested; there was a crowd gathered at the gates. The anti-reform faction had set up a table. A woman with a microphone was reading from a sheet of talking points, her insufficient amplification system being shouted down by the chanting of the pro-reform faction. Whenever someone took the microphone they were drowned out by chants of “Yes We Can” or “Liar, Liar.”

The lefties were outnumbered by about 2 to 1, but appeared to be more the product of a unified organizational effort, with pre-printed signs and many in matching t-shirts (the conservatives all had hand-written impromptu signs). The local Democratic Party affiliate had set up their own booth with petitions and campaign-style paraphernalia. People jostled to block their opponents’ signs with their own, but mostly kept their hands to themselves.

Eventually a group of young men showed up with Obama-as-Hitler posters. One of them positioned himself behind the conservatives’ table as a woman was speaking, holding his sign aloft. He was hustled off by one of the larger conservative men. I later learned this was a contingent of LaRouche supporters. They were all young, with at least one woman in their group, and unexceptional enough in appearance.

At one point an overweight fellow with an effeminate manner showed up with a bullhorn, demanding: “Repeal the Bush tax cuts! Repeal the Bush tax cuts!” He was surrounded by detractors who argued with him for a while; he explained that he was there because the anti-reform protesters were “not welcome” at a “rally for health-care reform.” Whether he was mistaken about the nature of the “town hall meeting” or was referring to the preliminary gathering at the gates I’m not sure. While his bullhorn gave him amplification superiority over the conservatives’ paltry sound system, he gave it a rest after a few minutes.

After about an hour the conservatives shut down and the crowd calmed. People mingled about showing deference to friends and foes alike; debates broke out here and there; a polite Northwestern version of the contentious battles that are going on across the nation.

When they opened the gates people were passing out question forms but once we got inside Rep. Larsen, after speaking briefly, took random questions directly from the crowd. These were mostly challenges to reform, often lacking coherence or taking the form of statements; this went for both sides. Not all challenges were from the right; one citizen asked if Larsen opposed single payer reform because he had taken “half a million dollars from the insurance companies” (Larsen denied this charge). Larsen denied that illegal immigrants would be eligible and the “death boards” charge. Occasionally there were shouts from the audience, boos or applause; one man stormed over to place himself directly in front of me (if you want to find the crank, he’s always right in front of me; it was annoying, but I delighted in pointing myself out to my daughter later on the evening news) and berate the congressman at volume. He shortly relented, sulking off in an exaggerated fashion, muttering that he would “be quiet, for now.” This was the single such incident of “shouting down.”
If what I saw was a typical example of what’s happening at these meetings across the country, then the media is overreacting. But then, as I’ve pointed out above, this is the polite Puget Sound.

Slog Days

I’m out on the back porch because the house just won’t cool down. Tanned and tawny haired from the sun, looking like an aging surf bum and moving like the just plain aged in the oppressive heat, I swear I’ll never complain about the Northwest’s lack of sunshine again.
I have my legs crossed–habitually in what I’ve been taught is acceptable male fashion, ankle on knee and calf not angled too far above the horizontal. Our cat positions himself to look up at me, framed comically by the triangle formed by my propped-up leg. He blinks hello; it goes unacknowledged and he blinks again, more slowly and deliberately. I’m convinced this familiar practice is conscious signalling of affection on his part, born of the circumstance that cats only sleep in the presence of those they trust. He closes his eyes as an expression of this trust. I blink back and he is contented. He stretches languidly before moving on to a shaded spot, where he nearly pants like a dog in the heat. It seems suspiciously overdone, as if he’s playing it up, not necessarily for me but for himself. Such as I am doing here. No work will be done today.