Saturday, December 06, 2003
Test for Blog button
A fish eye for you!
The source of the image: My dad and I last summer with the largest salmon anyone in our family had ever caught from a boat.
For reference, I don't have a gap in my front teeth like it shows on the picture. I realize that dad doesn't look so good, but he's just spent all day on a boat, well after he should have been resting. It was vitally important that he make this trip though. He knew he could die at any time. Less than a year later, he did.
By the way, this is a 42 pound salmon I'm barely keeping held up in my arms. This is a BIG fish! I caught it.
Friday, December 05, 2003
IRAQ NOW
This is a really good blog that covers some interesting things from a military-literary (!) viewpoint. http://iraqnow.blogspot.com/ Some of the entries are truly of historical value in that they depict the mindset of military leadership in the most effective military in the history of the world.
If you favored the war in Iraq and are willing to consider further humane military options, you might like to see them in action. If you opposed the war, you might want to leave off obsessing about the minute size and deserved inactivity of your own genitalia and look at what is really happening in the world.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Opposed To and Living With: Fascism
From September 1969 to January 1970, my family lived near Malaga, Spain. It was beautiful, on clear days we could see the Atlas Mountains and the Rock of Gibraltar. One morning fishermen pulled up a huge net of anchovies on the beach behind our house, it was the best catch they had in quite some time. Our maid cooked some of the fish immediately and they were as delicious as anything you can imagine. I was old enough to buy alcohol, because I could reach the counter with money standing on my tip-toes, and champagne was cheap and wonderful. Spain at the time was also a fascist dictatorship that my radical minister father was actively working with the brutally suppressed opposition to overthrow.
There are varying levels of fascism and varying levels of opposition. Just because a government has elements and practices that do not fully respect the freedoms of the people does not mean that blood has to run in the streets tomorrow. There certainly is a very grave risk that active opposition will cause greater harm and oppression to the people concerned than passive strategies. Arguably the hardest correct thing to do is nothing. If you doubt this, look closely at any number of tragic farces played out in South America over the last forty years. Look at the outright tragedies currently in play in Africa. Sometimes the only humane behavior is to try to do no harm.
There are limits to this inaction for humane reasons. At some points, you have to admit that you have done all that you can with restraint and move forward for humane reasons. At other points you must admit that a fascist regime is more than a danger to itself and is in fact a danger to all around it. It can be argued endlessly before and after when the moment to act came, and no answer will ever be satisfactory to more than a handful. It is always too late to overthrow a standing fascist government and always too early to go to war.
I have the privilege of living in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth. The United States is a beacon of freedom and accomplishment in a dark and hostile world. There are limits to what we can accomplish. We can put a man on the moon, but we cannot put all men on the moon. Even if we could, snotty teenagers would still complain about the lines. Within those limits we have a capacity to act, and a responsibility to make those actions count. Priorities must be made, although it is reasonable to argue passionately for placement.
No small part of freeing the world is getting people here to have some awareness of the function of their opinions. Explaining to the "Meat is Murder" crowd that genocide is also murder needs to happen. People committed to giving cattle voting rights may not be reached, but certainly the time has come to take the forum from them. It is also time to tell people that stating "By any means necessary…" is exactly the same as giving a fascist salute. Wearing tie-die does not mean you support freedom, wearing a tie does not mean you are a fascist.
In light of the current flood tide of fascist governments, it is incumbent upon us as free people to increase our capacity to act. Ethanol subsidies and wildly out of control civil lawsuits diminish our capacity to free others around the world without providing us with any meaningful benefit. I do not think we absolutely must increase the size of our military, but I do think that we need to improve its quality. We do not need another fifty battalions ready to resist the Soviet hordes. We do need at least another fifty fully trained special operations teams active in the field. We also need a very strong training and operations budget for the people we do have. Being able to act capably and repeatedly is what the money goes to. Having a limited force for threatening people does not do the job of setting people free.
It has always been about freedom, and if we have forgotten that, we must remember it again. Although it is inflammatory to describe the political spectrum as pro-fascist and anti-fascist, the clarification is needed. There are some fascisms we can be opposed to and living with. We do not need to declare war on everyone immediately. We must shift the debate from the trivial to the crucial, and we must become better able to strike when the moment comes.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Slightly to the Right of Attila the Hun
Growing up in a liberal household, I honestly could not tell you how many times I heard the phrase used to describe somebody to be dismissed. Discounting a person's ideas, making them a non-person was as simple as reciting a magic charm. Since the subject of these dismissals was usually not Vlad the Impaler, a case could probably be made that the character of the person in question was more nuanced than the dismissal allowed. That never happened, though. The charm was cast, the demon vanquished, and the world was restored to a glorious black and white certainty of us versus the fascists.
Roger L. Simon, an interesting person who has made a long intellectual journey against a tidal change in beliefs has come to the conclusion that the primary distinction in international politics today is in fact that simple: pro-fascist versus anti-fascist. What distinguishes his current insight is where he draws those lines. He claims that people in support, for whatever reason, of fascist regimes in Syria, Iran, Palestine, North Korea, or elsewhere are pro-fascist. People opposed to the continuing of totalitarian dictatorships are anti-fascist.
There is some concern amongst his readers that he should not be using the word fascist so often. They claim that it cheapens the word and reduces its impact. I understand that concern, the need to keep the word up on a high shelf and use it only sparingly to preserve its power. Regrettably, that semantic strategy functions only to preserve the power of the word, and does nothing to dissuade the hateful crime the word represents.
One of the things preserving the power of the word fascist on the internet has been an acceptance of Godwin's Law, which states: "if you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in". Although this law functioned to hold down a veneer of civility in the early days of the internet, it also functioned to suppress discussion of very real threats to human freedom. It is time to repeal Godwin's Law in our own minds and have a discourse on the very real existence of totalitarian oppression in the world today. We also need to have a very clear idea of what our belief, statements, and actions do to empower or dissuade oppressive regimes, and that cannot take place if certain words are given magical powers.
Saddam Hussein made Vlad the Impaler look like a piker. The death toll in his war against Iran made the top-five list of wars in the industrialized killing twentieth century. Hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen were brutally murdered to maintain a constant terror of his regime. It can never be known how many women were raped by the official "defilers of women's honor" employed by his security apparatus. He was more than slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Sean Penn and many others supported Hussein's regime, openly and without coercion. Sean Penn and many others need to be confronted for this, not on the basis of left versus right or conservative versus liberal. Sean Penn and many others need to be confronted with their decision to be pro-fascist, just like Lindbergh was.
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Thanksgiving in Baghdad
My Uncle Roy wants to know what I think about Bush's famous visit to Iraq last week. I mentioned the visit at both Thanksgiving dinners I attended this year, my aunt's and my brother-in-laws. My Cousin Michelle was dismissive in the extreme and was more than eager to go off on an anti-Bush tirade; amazing everybody familiar with my willingness and aptitude to destroy family gatherings, I chose to discretely close the subject. My Mother-In-Law's immediate reaction was positive; she is a dear woman who served in the diplomatic corps and is quicker than a whip at salvaging social occasions. In both cases I brought it up because I thought the event very important.
Some in the press have complained about not getting the chance to cover the story. More than a few would have liked to cover it well enough to have caught footage of every SAM in the Middle East heading towards Air Force One. It was frankly humorous to hear CNN and the New York Times complain about how they had been excluded from covering it. I am sure that the President's staff thought long and hard about excluding these people from the trip; it probably gave them the kind of soft warm glow normally found only in a bottle of really good scotch. Perhaps the CNN and NYT folks should watch more episodes of "West Wing" to understand the kind of smarmy self-righteousness the White House staff felt about this. Oh wait, only the politically correct get to feel good about harmless petty triumph over their opponents!
I have a notion how good it feels to have somebody care about me while I served in the military. My Uncle Roy and Aunt Maxine visited me for graduation from Navy boot camp. I will forever be grateful to them for doing this. My immediate family never showed even the slightest interest in coming to see me during my service except in those occasions when they were in the area for their own reasons. I have the feeling that they didn't care for what I was doing. I got that feeling after my sister told me that I was a worthless brainwashed idiot for defending the US and its interests. This was after I had spent three years on a half-crewed frigate breaking my heart to keep her a fighting part of the fleet only to have her decommissioned on me. It was not the best time of my life.
Building Iraq is hard work and the people who are out there risking their lives to make it happen deserve all the support we can give them. Regardless of anything else, President George W Bush has given and continues to give our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan all the support he can. I disagree with some of the deals he is making to get the votes he needs to continue that support. I do not think that he is accomplishing everything that might be done, but I see strong evidence that his administration is doing as close to everything they reasonably can as to not matter. Flying to Iraq, sneaking past vicious criminals, not further endangering the troops, and providing a clear appreciation for the efforts of dedicated people is in the highest traditions of service to the United States.
Monday, December 01, 2003
Turnabout Is Fair Play
Almost thirty years ago I started reading Doonesbury. We didn't get the comics in the local paper; we got them in book form and read them over and over again. In the early 1970's they were a revelation, funny, topical, and above all liberal. About twenty-five years ago, Trudeau turned his eye on the situation in Iran and the "Stop the Shah" crowd. He was in favor of overthrowing the ancient dynasty and letting a new government take charge. I clearly remember the comics of Kissinger being confronted by his students wearing cardboard masks, one of whom had to cut an additional hole for his nose. The thing about the "Stop the Shah" masks was that they were worn to prevent the Iranian secret police from hurting your family. The joke was that the big-nose student was readily identifiable.
There are today some very dedicated and brave people working to free Iran from the control of the intolerant mullah's who are abusing the Persian people, but they aren't being covered in Doonesbury. This makes sense in a lot of ways because they aren't a joke. They don't wear masks for a lot of reasons, probably because the terror squads have already imprisoned or brutally killed their families. The other statement of not wearing masks is that they are prepared to be accountable for a democratic Iran. In the spirit of fair play, though, I think that Trudeau owes these people some coverage. Arnold in
California is undoubtedly an easier target and carries less anguish than admitting naïve stupidity. Can Doonesbury stay relevant another? Can Trudeau respect turnabout?
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