A Pilgrim’s Digression

In N.Y., GOP Hails Its Chief (washingtonpost.com)

Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but Bush’s comment that the war on terror cannot be won has generated criticism from the right and the left. Last night on Special Report with Brit Hume, the conservative-leaning Fred Barnes and Mort Kondrake both assailed Bush’s comments as inept and inexplicable. Meanwhile, the President’s Democrat challengers are declaring that Bush now has a defeatist attitude.

Personally, I think the President’s comments are the most honest words he has ever spoken about the war on terror. For liberal critics to suddenly puff up like Churchill delivering his “never surrender” speech is disingenuous. Liberals have been saying from the beginning that the war on terror is unwinnable, as victory is traditionally defined. We cannot kill all the terrorists; there is no country to which they belong which can sign surrender papers on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. As for the conservative critics, there is nothing inexplicable or inept about admitting the truth. What is inexplicable is maintaining a belief despite reason and (to use a phrase from the Iraq war) “facts on the ground.” It would be inexplicable if President Bush actually believed that the war on terror could be won through violent means alone. Actually, that would be perfectly explicable: I would say that the man is a blind fool. The President is not blind, nor a moron, despite the popular caricature of him, and he apparently realizes that violence is only one means to the end, which is a world largely inhospitable to terrorist ideology.

President Bush believes that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is a means to that end. A peaceful, democratic Iraq will spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East, so the formula goes. If so, President Bush has greater foresight than just about anyone else alive today. I do not expect to see such results any time within the next twenty or thirty years. Perhaps he will be acclaimed by history as the first great President of the 21st century. Right now, it is difficult to see that far ahead, and the Iraq war still seems to me a miscalculation—and not just the planning for the occupation, as the President has admitted, but the war itself was a miscalculation. When thinking of the horrors of life under Saddam Hussein, it is shameful to think in such terms as “calculation” or “miscalculation,” profit and loss, yet pragmatic considerations have always divided the political world from the world of pure ethics. Have moral people ever been able to fully reconcile the seemingly simple dictates of the Golden Rule with rule by human government?

I was not particularly impressed by the speeches given last night by Giuliani and McCain. The keywords of both speeches are “strong” and “resolute.” Some call it “stubbornness,” Giuliani said at one point. In some ways, I think President Bush is a prisoner in a cell of his own devising, in this regard. As is now apparent to me, at least, from his comments about the war on terror and the Iraq war in the past few days, he is a more complex character than most people believe. In some ways, he has to be a stubborn, never-look-back kind of guy, because that is what is expected of him, now. But perhaps these really are inborn traits only occasionally leavened by real reflection.

The only other thing I would note about Giuliani’s speech is that he really unloaded on Kerry, and he did so fairly early in the speech, as well. The Democrats probably made a mistake by not going after the President more strenuously in their convention speeches. The Republicans are not going to reciprocate. I liked Giuliani’s humorous story about the day George Bush came to New York, shortly after the terrorist attacks. The story serves to remind the listener of Bush’s response to 9/11—his real response, not this phony “he read The Pet Goat for seven minutes” nonsense of Michael Moore and John Kerry. It also serves to portray Bush as in touch with the common man; in fact, he is just a common man himself. Who would you rather have a beer with, John Kerry or George Bush? And such like irrelevancies. And irrelevent it is, except that it is effective and most people won’t bother to see through it. This kind of humorous anecdote is exactly the kind of tactic which is most effective in highlighting Bush as personable and non-elitist.

McCain’s speech was not particularly memorable. The highlight came when he invoked the name of the conservatives’ most demonized enemy, Michael Moore. A “disingenuous filmmaker,” McCain called him. Moore was supposedly in the convention center at the time, though if true, he is a man of greater courage than I believed previously. I have not yet seen Moore’s film, so I cannot comment on the veracity of McCain’s charge that Moore depicts a pre-invasion Iraq that was an oasis of peace. Other than that, McCain simply reiterated the standard junk about Bush’s strength and resoluteness. McCain’s comment that the war in Iraq was a choice not “between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war; it was between war and a graver threat” has been reprinted in all the highlights of McCain’s speech, but I don’t find it convincing. What was the graver threat? As Pat Buchanan, of all people, said on Bill O’Reilly last night, we had lived with this “graver threat” for twelve years—longer, if one counts the eighties in which Saddam actually possessed and used chemical weapons. Like most of us, of whom (thankfully) the media does not require complete cradle to grave consistency, Buchanan has been all over the place in terms of what he has believed and said over the years. He was not exactly profound on O’Reilly last night, but he got it right on that one point.

In conclusion, I think the kick-off to the Republican Convention has been a great success. The critics have all been harping on the same point, that the convention is front-loaded with moderates while the platform is staunchly conservative. I don’t particularly fault the Republicans for this. The Republican stars, like Rudy and Arnold, are mostly moderates. If the Republicans had showcased people like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson, the critics would just as strenuously denounce the convention as front-loaded with hate-filled and intolerant far-right conservatives (as they did in ‘92 when Bush père invited Pat Buchanan to speak). The convention so far has been a great success, and I think unless something goes terribly wrong, the President might even get a nice bounce out of this.

Bush Revisited (washingtonpost.com):

Nancy Gibbs and John F. Dickerson write (in Time) that “if Kerry’s test in Boston was to show voters that he is not weak, Bush’s task at the Republican Convention in New York City this week is to show that he is not wrong, that his strength comes not from a six-gun temperament but from judgment that has matured through three years of hard testing. His vital audience is not that portion of the electorate that sees him as a savior, nor is it the inflamed opposition that calls him a liar and a zealot. He needs to reach the voters who are unsure about either voting for him or voting at all; who don’t think he lied but may think he made mistakes; who like his manner but question his judgment; who are glad Saddam is gone but wonder if the price was too high; who wonder whether John Kerry really knows his mind but also whether George Bush ever opens his. Those voters aren’t looking for an apology. They do need to see the President growing in the job or get a better idea of where he is going, because his task is not about to get any easier.

This describes me perfectly as a still undecided voter.

I read the following in a Washington Post story this morning:

Bush also acknowledged in the interview that the administration did not anticipate the nature of the resistance in Iraq, and he said that was his greatest mistake in office. “Had we had to do it over again,” he said, “we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day.”

Democrats tried Sunday to exploit that acknowledgment. “The president is now describing his Iraq policy as a catastrophic success,” Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards said in Washington. “I, like most Americans, have no idea what that means, but it is long past time for this president to accept personal responsibility for his failures and for his performance.”

And this from an AP news report:

In an interview on NBC-TV’s “Today” show broadcast to coincide with Monday’s start of the Republican National Convention in New York, Bush said retreating from the war on terror “would be a disaster for your children.’”

“You cannot show weakness in this world today because the enemy will exploit that weakness,” he said. “It will embolden them and make the world a more dangerous place.”

When asked “Can we win?” the war on terror, Bush said, “I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the—those who use terror as a tool are—less acceptable in parts of the world.”

What do these gestures towards complex thinking mean? I think they may mean quite a lot to people who like Bush but are frustrated by his stubbornness, people who want simply an acknowledgement that the President is not infallible. Critics can deride these as mere words, as John Edwards has done, but words have symbolic impact. I am surprised and pleased by these words of George Bush. Sorry, John Edwards, but “catastrophic success” does make sense, enough so that I don’t believe George Bush himself came up with the phrase. I would imagine it was coined just for him by Condaleeza Rice or someone else. And late or no, the President is finally taking responsibility for a debacle that has been apparent to everyone else for months. I give President Bush full credit on this.

On the other hand, Bush’s “greatest mistake in office” has cost lives. We still need to decide whether to hold him accountable for that. In Manhattan yesterday, protestors carried approximately a thousand flag-draped coffins through the streets while Cheney opened the Convention across the river at Ellis Island. I don’t normally give protestors any credit whatsoever, but that is a powerful and effective protest, as opposed to mere displays of childish anger, which is more typical of protestors. I also liked the “Billionaires For Bush” who dressed to the nines and played croquet and badminton on the green at Central Park. That is a very clever kind of protest, I think.

GOP Will Showcase Bush’s Leadership (washingtonpost.com)

Bush advisers said not to expect big new initiatives or detailed proposals. Instead, they suggest the president will use a broad brush while raising the stakes of the choice in November. He will offer a vigorous defense of his belief that his aggressive approach to terrorism will keep the country more secure than Kerry’s approach.

It sounds to me like President Bush is going to be on the defensive this week. Honestly, I was looking for a big, new initiative, tax reform to be specific. Barring any major announcement on that score, I do not see my thoughts and feelings shifting more towards the President and away from John Kerry.

I think a defensive strategy is a loser for the President. I think most people, like me, have probably made up their mind about what the President has already done. I’d like to know what’s next, if he is reelected.

Even if the President choose not to be bold this week, I am still excited and interested in what happens at the convention. I think after it is over, we will be able to better make a prediction, perhaps not to the winner in November, but at least to whether the contest will be close or not. It may be that the President and John Kerry remain in a statistical dead heat and we won’t be able to tell anything, or it may be that the President finally overcomes all his deficiencies and pulls ahead. The Gallup poll last week suggests the latter may be what occurs. Kerry has lost ground to Bush by three or four points, and the pundits attribute it to the attacks by the Swift Boat veterans.

These attacks on Kerry’s service have been the most damaging negative attacks in my short political memory. They are absolutely without merit, either on the issue of Kerry’s medals or his protest of Vietnam upon his return, yet they have been terribly effective. I am irritated that Bush has steadfastly refused to condemn the Swiftees specifically, instead calling for all 507 groups to cease and desist. However, John Kerry has not condemned Michael Moore and MoveOn.org’s scurrilous attacks on the President, so I can understand why Bush is remaining silent. This is just politics, but unfortunately, many voters don’t see it for the game of one-ups-manship that it is; they give serious consideration to these attacks and maybe even base their vote upon them.

Why am I leaning more towards John Kerry than President Bush at this moment? Not for any particular policy reason. I am conservative, especially on economic issues. I have no problems with the Bush tax cuts, and as a fiscal conservative, probably the only reason I can vote for Kerry in good conscience is that he has promised not to repeal the tax cuts for the Middle Class, only the tax cuts for the wealthiest (those making over $200,000.00). On war, I am a hawk, but a cautious hawk. I believe in the Powell doctrine, which was not followed in the Iraq war. A couple tenets of the Powell doctrine were completely ignored by an administration that is now priding itself on its wartime leadership: the Powell doctrine dictates among other things that before engaging in war, there must be a clear exit strategy. The President tells us repeatedly that our exit strategy is to leave when the job is complete, which really is not so much an exit strategy as a handy excuse. I guess since we are not technically at war with Iraq, the President could say the Powell doctrine no longer applies, but clearly, back in 2002 and 2003, not enough thought was given to what happens after the Iraqi army surrenders or is defeated. Bush essentially admitted as much this weekend, a half-hearted and long-in-coming admission from a man who seems to believe in the doctrine of Presidential Infallibility.Any way you look at it, we went into the war with too high of expectations, expectations raised by the President and Vice-President, and without a clear strategy that would allow us to exit, our goals accomplished. The Powell doctrine also dictates that war is always a last resort. I don’t think I need to elaborate on how the Bush Administration violated that tenet. I don’t know what doctrine the Bush administration followed in Iraq, but it was not the Powell doctrine, which is all very ironic considering these same Republicans sneered at Bill Clinton’s military ventures as ignorant of the Powell doctrine.

On cultural issues, I am more divergent from standard GOP doctrine. I have a real aversion to the moral self-righteousness of the Republican party, but I do not let it stop me from voting Republican when there is a candidate I like. So I am an economic conservative, a hawk on the subject of war, but culturally somewhat moderate to liberal. Still I have to ask, why then am I not a die-hard Bush supporter? On a personal level, I just don’t like the man much, and I never have. I felt in 2000 that the primary elections were a joke. Bush was pre-ordained the candidate regardless of his credentials–or lack thereof–mainly as a surreptitious way of sticking the knife into Clinton’s back over besting Bush père in 1992. I supported McCain in 2000 because I did not like the way the GOP establishment came together behind Bush and assaulted McCain for daring to challenge the Chosen One. That election would foreshadow the Bush presidency in microcosm, though. So much of the Bush presidency is one of revenge, of turning the tables on Clinton “liberals” and generally trying to reverse the nineties and declare it an aberration. I think the war on terrorism has been consistently mishandled ever since December 2001, when the Taliban and Al Qaeda escaped during the battle of Tora Bora. Increasingly, I think the war on terrorism was always and already solely about destroying Saddam Hussein. I’ve read accounts that state pretty clearly that by December 2001, when Bin Laden escaped, attention and resources were already shifting towards the upcoming assault on Iraq.

Iraq now seems to me a war in which our great hopes met an uncompromising and cynical reality. Perhaps if we had fought it differently, it would have been different. Probably not. Increasingly, I think it was a mistake, the height of hubris. And any reader of Greek tragedy can tell you the result of an excess of hubris. All this taken into consideration, I feel no safer today than in 2001. And why should I? The threat to American lives is apparently as great today as in September 2001. Ask Homeland Security.

So then, I cannot think of a single reason to vote for John Kerry, but I can think of many, many reasons to vote against George Bush. Critics of that point of view misapprehend the point of an election such as this, which is really a re-election: this election is a referendum on George Bush. I don’t have to have a reason to vote for John Kerry; I need a reason to re-elect George Bush. I want President Bush to give me that reason this week. We’ll see what happens. I will write throughout the week of the convention as time and reason dictate.

Just before lunch this afternoon, I attended what I thought was going to be another ordinary meeting, but before it ever began, the subject of politics came up. Why do people bring up the subject of politics amongst a group of relative strangers? And why is it almost always Democrats who do this?

Five of us were sitting around a table waiting for everyone to arrive, and the Creative Writer said to the Supervisor, “Have you seen the cover of this week’s New Yorker?” She said, “No.

He said, “Oh, it’s hilarious. Cheney is having his blood pressure checked, and the blood pressure gauge is color-coded like the Terrorism Threat Level.” The Supervisor laughed, and I thought this would be the end of it, but the Creative Writer said, “Well, you saw that Cheney came out the other day and said he thought the issue of gay marriage should be left up to the states?” The Supervisor said, “Yeah, but the other half of the Administration supports the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.” The Creative Writer said, “This is an administration that swings both ways.” Everyone laughed. I just smiled and looked down at the table.

The Supervisor said, “There aren’t any Republicans here, are there? We’re all on the same side, right?” She was looking around at all of us. No one said anything. Then she looked at me and said, “You’re not a Republican are you?” I was stunned for a moment. How does one answer that question from a superior? If I decline to answer, everyone will think I’m a plant from the Heritage Foundation. If I answer it honestly, everyone will be certain in their minds that I am a plant from the Heritage Foundation.

I said, “I’m a registered Republican …”

Suddenly, the smiles were all gone. Silence prevailed over all.

“… but I don’t always vote that way …”

More silence.

” … I voted for Al Gore in 2000 …”

A slight smile from the Creative Writer. Others are busily trying to look through walls.

“… I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary. But previously, I voted Republican throughout the nineties.”

“So how are you leaning this year?” The creative writer asked, with a tinge of sarcasm, I think. Or was it contempt?

I said, “Well, towards Kerry. I’ve never really liked Bush, and I would be voting against him rather than for Kerry.”

No one seemed put at ease by this admission. The Supervisor broke the tension by calling the meeting to order early, and I sat there for the entire meeting wondering if I had just blown my promotion potential for the next ten years. What were they all thinking right now? I made an extra effort to contribute to the meeting, as if to make up for my faux pas of admitting that I was a Republican, but even so I still felt as if I had just come out as gay to a group of homophobes, or revealed that I have African ancestors to a koven of KKK members.

Am I wrong, or are Democrats worse than Republicans about inserting partisan politics into every conversation, regardless of whether the audience might be mixed or not? I think Democrats are worse. I do know one Republican who can make a liberal feel pretty guilty about their political leanings by the comments he makes, but overall, my experience has been that Republicans keep their politics to themselves except in the company of other Republicans. You can interchange Republican for Conservative, Liberal for Democrat, and I don’t think it makes a difference.

I keep my politics to myself, unless I am in the company of people whom I know well. I think it was entirely inappropriate to broach the subject at work. The Creative Writer probably thought he could score some brownie points with the boss because he knew of her liberal leanings. However, it was the wrong place, the wrong time, and the wrong audience for that, in my opinion.

The John Fogerty website is pretty cool. You can listen to the title song of his new album, “Deja Vu All Over Again,” which is an anti-Iraq War song. You can also hear him sing an acoustic version of “Lodi.” Good stuff.

I was introduced to CCR by my Dad. Dad had quite a record collection from the late sixties/early seventies, and CCR was his favorite. Most of the best records, such as those by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, are all gone now, either lost, stolen, or broken over the years; but I still have two of them, “Cosmo’s Factory” (CCR) and “Smash Hits” (Jimi Hendrix). I also have the Led Zeppelin boxed set that came out in the mid-eighties right at the tail-end of the vinyl era. I haven’t listened to a record in years. I have no record player, nor even a stereo system to which I could connect a record player.

Just yesterday, I heard two older co-workers conversing about their record collections. Both extolled the virtues of vinyl as a storage medium, claiming that music stored on well-cared-for vinyl albums sounds better than music on CD. I don’t know if I agree with that. Certainly, vinyl has its idiosyncracies-the pops and crackles-that make it a unique way to listen to music. But is it better than CD format?

I need a fix cause I’m goin down

After a coffee-less day yesterday, this morning, I could go on no longer. I am supposed to cut down on my caffeine this week, but that can’t possibly mean no caffeine at all. Can it? One cup in the morning can’t hurt. Besides, it isn’t Starbucks, just regular coffee; and I drank it while eating a bowl of Special K with strawberries. That’s gotta count for something. That cereal is like eating a pure bran horse turd, even with dehydrated strawberries to sweeten it. I guess I ought to resign myself to a life of bran cereal and Boca Burger, but I cannot give up coffee.

Last night, I had a cup of green tea before I went to bed. I slept badly and got up early for work again. Maybe I should have skipped the tea, but I had a bit of a headache and I thought the tea might help. I figured I was suffering from caffeine withdraw. In times past, I could drink coffee before going to bed and still sleep peacefully. Unless getting older is weakening my resistance to caffeine, I don’t think my caffeine has anything to do with my sleeplessness. Last night, for example, I woke up thinking about my work day ahead of me. I think that when I wake up, I just start thinking and my mind does not go back to sleep.

And yes, I am listening to the White Album on my iPod today, as you might guess from the first line of this post. I am up to 1968 on my Beatles playlist. “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” … what a great song. I also like the lines Lennon speaks later in the song: “When I hold you in my arms / and I feel my finger on you trigger / I know nobody can do no harm / Because happiness is a warm gun mama.” Practically every line in the song is a double entendre. Michael Moore uses this song to great effect in Bowling For Columbine, especially in the scene in which a buxom woman in a bikini fires an enormous machine gun.

And while I am on the subject of music, there is something that has irritated me for some time, and I have been meaning to write about it. I am irritated by how this election year, politicians and one conservative talkshow host in particular have blatantly misused one of my favorite songs, “Fortunate Son,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Every morning, I wake to WMAL, a local talk radio station on the AM dial; and every morning I hear a commercial for Sean Hannity in which the background music and first couple verses of “Fortunate Son” are interspersed with Hannity blusteringly defeating some caller in rhetorical combat. The only verses we hear are “Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Ooh, they’re red, white, and blue.” Given only that much of the song–which is really all that Hannity can use out of context–one would think “Fortunate Son” is a pleasant, patriotic tune.

Additionally, I know that John Kerry has also used the song to introduce himself at campaign rallies. How appropriate is this song for Kerry? To my mind, no more appropriate than Ronald Reagan using “Born in the USA” back in ‘84. Do these men ever listen to their campaign theme songs? Or do they think somehow they are turning the song’s meaning on its head by appropriating it for their own use. Here are the lyrics to the song “Fortunate Son.” Judge for yourself:

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Yeah!
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand,
Lord, don’t they help themselves, oh.
But when the taxman comes to the door,
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yes,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaire’s son, no.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no.

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord,
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more! yoh,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no military son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, one.

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no no no,
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son, no no no.

I realize the song is a Vietnam War protest song, which does reflect Kerry’s past (though not the past he most wants us to recall, which is the past in which he fought in the Vietnam War John Fogerty protested). So I can sort of understand Kerry’s use of the song. Anyway, Kerry was not a Senator’s son; he was an Ambassador’s son. And Kerry wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he just married the owner of the whole damned set of silverware. Yet I can almost justify Kerry’s use of the song. Hannity’s use of it is shockingly brazen, though. I am thinking about writing Fogerty, if I can discover to where to address my letter.

I finally went to the doctor yesterday concerning my sleep problems.
She said its difficult to diagnose the origins of sleep disorders, and
then its also difficult to cure them. Insomnia can be caused by any number of factors including diet, health, age, mental wellness. Have I been depressed? She asked. What’s my caffeine intake during the
day? What triggers my waking in the middle of the night? And what
prevents me from falling back asleep? On nights that I do sleep all
night, do I wake up but then fall back asleep? If I do fall back
asleep, is there something I am consciously doing that achieves this
desired result? Conversely, when I can’t fall asleep, am I doing
something mentally that prevents it?

Good questions, all. I have little hope of answering them. She took
my blood pressure, and it was normal. She said most likely my high
reading last week was triggered by lack of sleep, rather than vice
versa. Same with the headache. The doctor prescribed nothing, but
told me to go to Health Services at work three more times this week
for blood pressure readings, and I am to return to the doctor with the
results on Friday.

Last night, ironically, I slept well all night. I dreamed I was back
in High School. I left my books in my locker; I showed up late for
class. I put my head down on my desk in bored diffidence, and my
teacher asked me to raise my head, which I did with the characteristic
teenage sigh and eye-roll. I was cool. Freud would call this a
wish-fulfillment. All dreams were wish-fulfillments to Freud, a
theory which I have never quite understood. Interpretation of
Dreams is a good book to read for Freud’s descriptions and
interpretations of the dreams of his patients. I don’t find it as
helpful for interpreting my own dreams. But in the case of last
night’s dream, it probably was wish-fulfillment. In my dream, I even
had a pretty girlfriend, a composite of my wife and some other girl I
knew in High School. Obviously, my subconscious carefully elided the
fact that I was having a pleasant dream about a woman other than my
wife by giving some of her features to my dream girl.

Let us probe deeper into this matter …

The dream girl, whom I will call Sandy Cheeks, had features of my wife
but also of a girl I went to school with, whom I saw just recently.
When my wife and son and I were in West Virginia visiting family, in
July, we took my son to the public swimming pool. There, I saw this
woman, Sandy Cheeks, for the first time in over ten years. She laid
her towel right next to ours, actually, but steadily ignored us. I
never even said hello to her because she refused to look at us, even
though she was sitting so close that a observer might have thought we
were all together. I mentioned to my wife after we left the pool that
I had known her.

My wife said, “Well, she practically sat on top of us and then ignored us the whole time. Why didn’t you say hello?”
I said, “She seemed to be pretending that we weren’t there.”
My wife said, “Then why didn’t she sit somewhere else?”
I said, “I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me to know that she was ignoring me. I kept waiting for her to look at me and acknowledge that she recognized me. Then I was going to say something.”
My wife said, “That’s a strange answer. Why would she want you to know that she was ignoring you? How well did you know this girl in High School?”

I could now see where the general trend of questioning was going, so I said, “I only knew her from afar.”
My wife said, “Are you sure? Then why would you recognize her immediately after more than ten years? And why would you remember her name?”

We were headed down the slippery slope now … I had to cut this short. But how?

I said, “I remember her because she had a bad reputation in school.
Rumors were, she was really promiscuous.”
“Uh-hunh, so that’s how you know her,” my wife said.

“D’oh!” I said.

We didn’t really argue, my wife and I. We were going back and forth
more in a half-joking manner, really, but the incident must have stuck
in my mind. Seeing that face from the past there at the pool, so
unexpectedly, I thought to myself, “She seems attainable now.”
That might seem like an odd thought to think about someone who is determinedly ignoring me, except that I knew that if I had wanted, and if I had been free, I could have spoken to her and gone on from there. Twelve years ago, I would never have been able to look at her straight in the face. Today, I am not the boy I once was. It helped that to me, in terms of her attractiveness, she seemed perfectly average now, whereas ten years ago, she seemed definitely out of my league. Of course, you’ll remember that up to that point, one of my few romantic achievements in “my league” was going steady with a one-eyed girl in grade school (see Young Love in the archives).

Thus in one way, my dream was a wish-fulfillment in the sense that I
was having the chance to relive High School with the extra ten or
twelve years of experience I have accumulated since 1991. I was bold,
I was non-chalant, I was cool. In some ways, probably every man
wishes he could do the same, not just correct the mistakes of the past
but correct himself. Why? Well, as with everything involving men, it
comes down to sex, really. Every man knows that armed with the
experience of a thirty-year-old, his fifteen-year-old self would be
quite the ladies’ man. Would a man really rend asunder the fabric of
time itself in order to have had more and better sex in High
School? That question is best left unanswered.

In another way, my dream was occasioned by my own son starting
pre-school yesterday. Actually, his first day was Friday, but it was
just a “transition” session, only an hour, and I attended with him.
Yesterday was much more difficult. When his mother and I left him, he
cried so hard. He grabbed his mother’s shirt and wasn’t going to let
go. The teacher had him around the waist and was trying to pull him
away, but he had a good grip, and all the while the tears were
flowing. We stood outside the door until he stopped crying, which
only took about a minute (the teacher asked him if he wanted to feed
the class Guinea Pig). His mother was crying, too, and I felt sad
myself.

I worry most about how he will get along socially in school because I
myself felt like such an outcast. Thus perhaps my dream can be
interpreted as a wish for his happiness in school. That may be
slightly incorrect; I don’t know that anyone is really happy in
school. As for myself, I hated it, which does not explain why I later
became a teacher for a time. Or perhaps it explains everything, I
don’t know. Perhaps what I should say is that I wish him happiness in
his relations with other children. That is a good thing to wish for,
I think.

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My iPod arrived Thursday of last week. Unfortunately, my blog has been on hiatus since then, though not for any particular reason. I am very happy with my iPod. The picture above is not great, but I wanted to show as much as possible what it was like to open the box. The box itself was a plain, brown box, with the words “Genuine Apple Refurbished Product” on the side and top. For $291.00, I got a refurbished 30 GB iPod, a remote, a dock, a firewire cable, an AC adapter, earbuds, and an Apple-brand iPod case. I also got a disk with Musicmatch jukebox on it, which tells me that my iPod must have originally been sold as a PC iPod. Anyway, it’s in a Mac household now, right where it belongs and will be happiest.

The iPod itself is pristine. When I took it out of the box for the first time, the metal on the reverse side was so shiny and slick, I could have used it as a shaving mirror. It would be an expensive shaving mirror, but nonetheless the thought did cross my mind, if only fleetingly. The irony is that now I have an iPod with a hard drive bigger than both my computers combined. I have an iBook and iMac at home, both of them getting long in the tooth at this point. The iMac is the elder machine; we bought it in summer 2000. It’s an iMac 400 Mhz DV Special Edition. Nothing so special about it these days, but it still works for me. The iBook is a May 2001 Dual USB iBook, the first in the white iBook line. The iMac has a 12 GB hard drive, and the iBook only has a 10 GB hard drive. Theoretically, I could completely back up both hard drives to my iPod and still have space to spare. The age of my computers might be surprising, except that they are Macs. When people judge Apple Computer based on its paltry market share, one factor not often considered is that Mac Folk don’t upgrade as often as PC folk. We don’t need to upgrade as often. My two Macs still work well for me. I could never play any recent games on them; that is, if I played games. But for Word processing and Internet, they still run like champs. The hard drives could be larger. That is my only complaint. On the flip side, my PC-using step-brother buys a new HP or Dell every two years or so. I don’t know that it is necessary for PC users to upgrade as often as that, but it does seem a common trait among that breed of computer users.

So I passed the weekend ripping CDs and purchasing music from iTunes. I even bought a couple audiobooks from Audible. One can buy Audible books via iTunes, but I’d rather buy direct from the Audible site. Audible allows one to re-download purchased items at any time, as many times as one desires. iTunes makes no such allowance, which I have always thought is a fault of the Apple music store. If I lose my music from a hard drive crash, I ought to be able to go back to iTunes and re-download the music I bought there. As it is, I back up my purchased music routinely, in addition to the “backup” on my iPod. But still, it would be nice to know that Apple is looking out for me, too, in case of data loss.

So what am I listening to on my iPod now, as I write? I am listening to an audiobook, “The Classic Fifty Poems.” Specifically, I am listening to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Afterwards, I may listen to the Beatles. I ripped all my Beatles CDs and organized the songs according to year of release, so I am looking forward to about five hours of listening to the Beatles from “Love Me Do” through “The Long and Winding Road” in 1970 (the original version, not the new version with the orchestra removed).

Oh, and I did indeed name my iPod Brian.

Kerry Decries Bush’s Military Realignment (washingtonpost.com)

Kerry’s reception by Veterans was apparently pretty cool. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Kerry received his most enthusiastic response from 6,000 VFW members when he strongly advocated improving health care, disability and other benefits for veterans. But overall, he was received here far less enthusiastically than was Bush, who generated two standing ovations during his speech. By contrast, Kerry’s audience offered cordial and polite applause, with one detractor heckling the Massachusetts senator.

The article goes on to quote some of the veterans’ opinions of Kerry. Overall, I felt the Post was going out of its way to present a fair depiction of the event. The article could have been simply about Kerry’s words, rather than about the reaction he received. Here are what some of the veterans said:

Robert Belding, a Persian Gulf War veteran, said he boycotted the speech because Kerry’s “promises don’t reflect his Senate record. He says he supports troops, and then he votes against the $87 billion request to help them.”

“I heard he missed 75 percent of his votes on the intelligence committee,” said World War II veteran Gerald Kulligan, echoing the e-mails being sent out by the Bush campaign. “Who wants a president who works 25 percent of the time?”

Some said they have not forgiven him for protesting the Vietnam War when he returned from the war in 1969. “That was a bad time for guys coming back, and he come back and was hooked with Hanoi Jane,” said Elmo Pennington, a Vietnam War veteran, referring to Jane Fonda’s war protests. “He never made no friends with that.”

Still, others here mobbed Kerry at the stage and praised his push for veterans benefits and his comments protesting the troop realignment. “As a Korean War veteran, I don’t think we can pull out of Korea,” said Jack Carney of Florida.

CBS News goes into more detail (Kerry Slams Bush Recall Plan), stating that the Veteran who heckled Kerry called him a “liar” and was told to keep quiet (”admonished” is the word the reporter uses) by the VFW Sergeants at Arms. CNN reports that two men turned their back on Kerry while he spoke, in imitation of how he turned his back on his Vietnam veteran comrades in 1972.

On WMAL this morning, I heard that last night, CBS News with Dan Rather reported that Kerry’s criticism of the troop withdraw is his biggest flip-flop yet. CBS News reportedly showed footage of Kerry and Edwards on their campaign bus shortly before the Democrat convention. In this footage, Kerry says blatantly that troops should be withdrawn from the Korean peninsula. This has been reported nowhere else.

To find the evidence of this flip flop, I had to turn to–you guessed it–right wing radio. Neil Boortz (he’s a libertarian, not a Republican, if that makes a difference) cites a Boston Globe article from August 2nd, Kerry Edwards Defend Their Agenda, in which Kerry is quoted as saying,

I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops. We will probably have a continued presence of some kind, and certainly in the region. If the diplomacy that I believe can be put in place can work, I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just there but elsewhere in the world — in the Korean Peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps.

If Kerry is on tape saying this, you can bet this will make it into a Bush advertisement within the week.