A Pilgrim’s Digression

“…need to gather information for the Operating Plan, Operating Plan 5 actually, and if…”

My eyes are becoming thick as glazed donuts. The guy in front of me looks like a pirate. He has a patchy beard; his wife should buy him a beard trimmer for father’s day. Maybe he’s not married. He has a little twist of a pony tail high up on the back of his head. Pony Tail Guy, like Comic Book Shop Guy. Kinda fat, too. Patchy the Pirate. All he needs is an eye patch. Arrrgh.

“…the Directors and I are developing a vision, or a strategy, what have you. Discussions are ongoing to determine…”

Must stay awake. Will Pony Tail Guy fall asleep? This keeps me awake, watching him. He fell asleep in our last meeting. He actually started snoring. Last two meetings, now that I think about it. This room is darker than our usual meeting room, but he doesn’t fall asleep.

Eye patch. I knew a girl with an eye patch. That was third grade, and her name was Donna. I had a crush on her. So I sit here. Imagine if I were a third-grader sitting in on this meeting. Render ridiculous. Riddikulus, Neville said.

Donna. A little girl in my third grade class. It’s a cliché, but her brother shot her eye out with a BB gun. For awhile, she had a big wad of cotton taped over the empty eye socket, then a black eye patch. She wore thick glasses, too, that made her one good eye a glowing, misty orb. She wore her straight, brown hair in a pageboy. I remember her in plaid, which wasn’t a cool style in the early eighties. She wore plaid skirts and multi-colored turtleneck sweaters. She had big teeth, but all third-graders have big teeth. When their permanent teeth come in, children’s teeth are full-size but their faces are still childish and round.

Donna sat beside me in class, and we’d work together when there was group work. I liked sharing my reading book with her. She would shyly put notes in my book for me to find later. Other kids teased us for liking each other.

Wonder what Donna is doing today? Hope she’s happy. What year was it? I always have trouble figuring years, or any numbers really. 1982, maybe. Anyway, it’s long gone.

“…now, we need to discuss whether after each project is submitted we need to have a close out meeting, what…what did the people from Google call it? A post mortem, though I don’t like that word, like it even less than the word fungible, but I think we need to have a close out meeting…”

Why am I always attracted to wounded chicks? Because I myself am wounded. Mutually assured destruction, let’s call it.

After Donna, there was blonde-haired, blue-eyed Colleen Wilt. Overweight, that one. On the playground, there were large tractor tires half-buried in the ground on which we climbed during recess. We would crawl inside the biggest tire and talk for the entire half hour. We liked the way our voices echoed against the rubbery walls of the tire. I remember a gang of boys standing outside the tire and making fun of us. Colleen took me through the rest of that year. Then, next year…I don’t know what happened. Kid’s are so changeable. From one year to the next, who knows what the difference is, but something changes and suddenly two kids don’t know what to say to each other anymore. Maybe their interests change. Friends go their seperate ways after awhile. Gone.

“…now what we should cover in a post mortem is what went right with the project, what went wrong, what worked, and what didn’t…”

Third grade me is shy, quiet. I still cry, if teased. I don’t know my multiplication tables. I remember we had to be able to stand in front of the class and say our multiplication tables through twelve. I could do through six really well, but after that I would hang. Too much to remember, maybe. I can’t count in my head; I have to use my fingers. So that hinders me. My teacher becomes angry if I even look at my fingers, so I mentally visualize my fingers and count imaginary digits. Sometimes when I have to count, I lay my hand on my leg and, ever so gently, I press with each finger as I count. I still do this today, over twenty years later.

The morning I had to say my multiplication tables was a rainy day. I rode the school bus to school, and with my finger, I wrote sums on the steamy bus window as I tried to get over the hump of the sevens. Rain pattered against the glass and cars splashed by in the opposite lane.

At school, when it was my turn, I stood in front of the class and said my times tables until I got to seven. 7 times 2 is 14. 7 times 3 is…21 (I could get that one by remembering the equation in reverse: 3 x 7 is 21; I could do my threes). 7 times 4 is…28. 7 times 5 is 35 (easy, fives are easy). 7 times 6 is…is…(I am gently pushing with my fingers against my leg, trying to count)…41, no, 42 (Why can’t I ever remember that? I like 42!)…7 times 8 is…

I get no farther. I begin to fidget from one foot to the other; I break out into a sweat. My mind is blank now. I can’t count on my imaginary fingers, or on my real fingers.

Mrs. Smith clears her throat. She is a thin, black-haired woman, someone I would describe today as having a French woman’s face and a French woman’s severity. “You can’t count, Matt,” she says. At first I think she is insulting me; I lose count on my mental fingers.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Smith says coldly, finally.

I hear sniggers from a boy named Chris as I go back to my seat beside Donna.

“Don’t feel bad,” Donna whispers. “Seven is a hard number.” And I feel a little better, though my eyes are still prickly with tears.

Donna says her times tables all the way to twelve. Bright girl. Beautiful girl.

“…perhaps before the post mortem, um, close out meeting…now I’ve got that word post mortem in my head…I will send around a form I’ll make up for you to voice your concerns in writing. That will serve as an informal agenda…”

I read somewhere that school, with its bells, assigned seats, and discipline is meant to be preparation for the drudgery of adult work. Where did I read it? I don’t know. Karl Marx; Pink Floyd. Who knows. This is like a scene from Office Space: we are having an hour-long meeting to plan for future meetings.

Third grade me sits, fingers pressing his leg, trying to work out the product. I can’t quite figure it. Quiet, quiet me; how did you get here? I remember a story we read in third grade about a boy who moved from the country to the city, and how he was homesick for the country. In the book, he wore sneakers. That was the first time I’d heard that word. I’d always heard them called tennis shoes. I remember thinking I’d like to live in a city; I’d like to walk on sidewalks and take the bus. Now I do all those things.

It isn’t even half as glamorous as I expected.

“So then, are there any questions? No? Until next time…”

Brown shrilly defends FEMA, spreads blame

The Bush Administration ought to keep Michael Brown on the payroll. He makes an excellent scapegoat. If you’re George Bush, keeping Brown on staff at the very least provides a much needed humorous distraction from your own ineptitude. How often do reporters get to attach the following tag to a high-ranking Administration official: “Brown, a lawyer and former commissioner of an Arabian horse association…” This guy was born to be the butt of late night monologues.

When you learn that someone like Brown is coming to Washington to testify before Congress you expect that he will be appropriately contrite for mistakes even the President lays at his feet.

There was no contrition in Michael Brown’s testimony yesterday. During the course of the day, I read some of his statements. Out of all the mistakes that piled upon mistake in those days after Katrina, the only ones he takes responsibility for are: doing too many interviews and not enough “media briefings” (I’m not sure I understand the difference), and not being able to bridge the divide between the Louisiana Governor and the New Orleans mayor. Everything else, it was all local officials’ faults.

Seeing his performance on television last night was an entirely different experience than just reading his words. His angry statement, “So I guess you want me to be the superhero, to step in there and take everyone out of New Orleans” made for some priceless TV. As a Boston Globe editorialist said yesterday, “Former FEMA Director Michael Brown forgot the first rule of holes: you know, when you’re in one, stop digging.”

What might have been missed in Brown’s testimony yesterday was that he didn’t just blame Louisiana officials for the bungled response to the hurricane. He also blamed Michael Chertoff, saying that “officials at Homeland Security, the only Cabinet department allowed to transfer funds among its own agencies without congressional approval, routinely took money from the agency. He estimated that over the past three years, $77.9 million was taken from the disaster agency for other departmental programs” (San Francisco Chronicle, The Blame Game).

He also blamed the President, saying that he had told the President and his chief advisors that “this is going to be a bad one” several days before the storm hit. The implication Brown makes is that the President ignored his dire predictions of a debacle.

Brown is really an incredible piece of work, a God send for the Democrats and Republicans both, really. Everyone can find something about Michael Brown to use and abuse. On the radio this morning, the Conservative morning crew on WMAL, Andy Parks and Fred Grandy (former actor on “The Love Boat” turned Congressman turned talk show host) both said they now had great respect for Brown because he had stood up to Congress and told them what for. No doubt other Conservative opinion makers will feel the same as well. Ever since the disaster, they have been trying to pin the blame on local and state officials anyway. Brown just helps them make their case.

Unfortunately, there is seemingly no one in this country who can lead us out of this wilderness of ideological madness we find ourselves in today. The Government charged with protecting us in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster proves itself totally inept, and yet people from the President on down to his buddy Brownie continue on with their petty game of blaming the opposition political party and its supporters. Democrats aren’t any better. Without doubt Blanco and Nagin were incompetent to deal with the natural disaster that struck New Orleans. They have no high horse on which to ride above the fray, claiming innocently, as Nagin did yesterday, that they don’t know what Brown is talking about when he says the governor and mayor were unable to coordinate an effective evacuation of the city. We know they were all incompetent; we saw all of their incompetence on TV, from Bush to Brown, to Nagin and Blanco. The only people who are still pretending like they saw members of “their” political party do nothing wrong are the die-hard partisans who are tearing this country apart at the seams.

This post is another that has been delayed during my ten day hiatus from blogging. I meant to upload this last week.

After Hurricane Katrina and the resulting promise of billions in federal aid, Limbaugh had to field a lot of rants from outraged callers who felt, among other things, that Bush had betrayed Conservatives. At least one woman caller was downright nasty, citing the looting as a good reason not to give one dime to the recovery. Limbaugh, in his mock Liberal voice, said we had to “understand” her anger. As a way of assuaging public opinion, Limbaugh took it upon himself to propose the Limbaugh Plan for New Orleans. While defending the necessity of spending money to rebuild New Orleans, the plan was simply another Republican attempt to justify increased spending while refusing to raise taxes.

I found the above picture to be strikingly ironic, in a way. Suddenly, Republicans are talking about their New Deal. They are engaged in major Nation Building efforts around the world that would have appalled them during the Clinton years. And somehow, they have to justify these 180 degree shifts in terms of the Conservative ideology that catapulted them to power in the last decade. It can’t be justified, and it may well be their downfall.

Maybe if we put our “collective” heads together, we can come up with a good caption for this picture? What do you think?

Stakes in Iraq rival those in World War II, Gen. Myers says

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, who will leave his post as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the end of this week, said the United States must win in Iraq because “the outcome and consequences of defeat are greater than World War II.”

This is an absolutely disgraceful appropriation of history for political purposes. Considering that many of the men who actually fought the fascists in World War II are still alive, Myers’s statement is all the more shameful. The USA Today headline is misleading, as well. Myers didn’t say that the stakes in the Iraq war “rivalled” the stakes in World War II. He said “the consequences of defeat are greater than World War II.”

Stop and think about that for a minute. First of all, think of the rationale for why Myers believes that: if we “lose” in Iraq (lose, to him, means withdraw) “the next 9/11 is right around the corner.”

There is a presumption here that “winning” in Iraq (whatever winning means; winning is even more ill-defined than losing) can prevent another 9/11 when common sense tells us another terrorist incident on American soil cannot be staved off indefinitely.

There is also a presumption that another terrorist attack would be a worse consequence than what we would have faced if Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini had won World War II. Ask any Jew, or any non-German or non-Japanese for that matter, if they believe that to be true. Imagine for a moment living in a world where Hitler possesses a nuclear arsenal, as he would have most assuredly possessed if we hadn’t stopped him; then imagine Japan, too, with a similar atomic arsenal. Japan also trying to develop nuclear weapons at a laboratory in Korea right up until the end of the war. The Japanese perfected suicide bombing. Kamikazes not only flew airplanes into American ships; Kamikazes piloted bombs, called Baka Bombs, and they piloted torpedoes, called Kaitans. The Japanese knew something about fanaticism. Think of the cruelty of the Japanese and how the Emperor of Japan ruled his colonies in Asia. Before there was a 9/11, there was the Rape of Nanking, perhaps the most brutal cleansing of a city in the history of warfare. And despite all these known facts about the enemy we faced then, somehow in Myers’s opinion leaving Iraq would be worse than having a Japanese empire in the far East?

Our priorities are out of whack, folks. Our government has so convinced us that nothing could be worse than a terrorist attack that we forget that peoples have known far worse crimes against humanity. We aren’t the only generation to deal with degenerate fanatics who wish to kill as many people as possible. In terms of ability to kill, we aren’t even dealing with the most efficient maniacs in the history of the world. That award goes to Stalin and Hitler.

We’ve exaggerated the threat against us, and in so doing have given aid and comfort to the enemy. These Islamo-fascists are now feared to an extent far beyond their ability to actually hurt us. They can’t bring down our government. They can’t mount an invasion of the United States. They can’t launch a nuclear barrage against us that would wipe life from the surface of this continent.

I simply refuse to accept the rationale by which we now must fight the Iraq war. Essentially, we are given the same reason to continue in Iraq that we were given in Vietnam: “We’re already fighting there, and so now we must win. If we don’t win, the dominoes will fall. South Asia/Iraq will become a communist/terrorist haven, and eventually America will have to fight an even more brutal war against communism/terrorism.” We did not accept that rationale in 1975. Why should we accept it now?

Among other items I would have blogged about this week, if my stream of patter hadn’t been interrupted with technical problems, was the introduction of the New York Times “Times Select.” Otherwise known as yet another attempt by newspapers to start charging for what they have been giving us for free for nearly ten years.

I was slightly annoyed on Wednesday to discover that I could not read Maureen Dowd’s weekly column; nor was Frank Rich’s Sunday column available. I stewed about it for the better part of the day.

No doubt these newspapers have regretted ever making their news available for free on-line, and editors have been looking for ways to renege on the unspoken agreement between consumer and publisher that whatever is available in print will be available for free on-line. I can understand that it costs money, lots of money in fact, to maintain a “free” on-line newspaper. However, as a consumer I always find it irksome to find I have to pay for something I am used to having for free. It’s almost like a bait and switch: the Times hooks you with their great opinion columns, then says, “Not so fast. You gotta pay us fifty bucks a year if you want to continue reading.”

But my point is, I see both sides.

I signed up for the fourteen day trial after much inner wrangling. I haven’t decided whether to let myself be billed for the year subscription. I can cancel anytime within the fourteen day period.

What do you folks think? Is it worth paying? Is there somewhere else I can find these columnists? Is anyone else signing up for this service?

Another worry is that all of the free, on-line news sources are anxiously watching the Times with little lines of drool dribbling down their chin. If the Times discovers that people will pay for this service, will the Washington Post and other newspapers follow suit? I don’t want to indirectly contribute to the consumerization of news and information on the Internet.

The experiment at sodsbrood may be over, at least for me, anyway. I have been locked out of my blog since last Friday, and as another Friday is fast approaching, I have to consider that I may never post at sodsbrood again.

My technical difficulties began sometime late in the afternoon on Friday the sixteenth. My friend, an administrator of sodsbrood, sent me an email he had received from the owners of our server space. The text of that brief email was as follows:

Hi,

We’ve disabled access to the public_html/pilgrim account. A script (send.php) located in that account was being used to send out spam. Please contact us asap so that we can resolve this matter.

If you have any further questions or experience any problems, please let us know. Thank you.

Regards,

[name withheld]

We both responded ASAP as requested, but in the ensuing six days we have not received a single email either explaining why the account was summarily locked nor how to fix this problem.

From what I gather, the people who own the server space believe that I am a spammer. Thus, if you try to go navigate to my sodsbrood blog, you are greeted with the ominous message “Forbidden. You don’t have permission to access /pilgrim on this server.” My own investigation reveals that the permissions have been changed on my “pilgrim” directory, which is the UNIX equivalent of changing the locks on the doors of a house. I can’t even redirect traffic here to my Blogger site.

For an indefinite period of time, I am going to try to pick up where I left off at sodsbrood and continue to blog from here, my Blogger site. I hope you will bear with me as I readjust to “blog serfdom” at Blogger, and be prepared for another address change if suddenly, miraculously my sodsbrood space is unlocked.

An article on the front page of the Washington Post website today, titled “Study Looks At Teen Sex Levels”, suggests that slightly more than half of all teenagers engage in oral sex before they turn eighteen. Between age eighteen and nineteen, the percentage rises to 70%.

What really got my attention, however, was the following quote from a doctor.

“Oral sex is far less intimate than intercourse. It’s a different kind of relationship,” said Claire Brindis, professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Francisco. “At 50 percent, we’re talking about a major social norm. It’s part of kids’ lives.”

I’m a man, and even I would disagree with that statement. I’ve always thought of oral sex as being far more intimate than any other kind of sex. I mean, you’re taking another person’s sexual organ into your mouth, or in the case of a man, you’re putting your mouth and tongue on the sexual organs of a woman. To me, that is the most intimate you can be with another person. Agree, or disagree?

Now, I’ve got to deal with the fact that I was in the lonely minority of High School students when I was a teenager. I’ll be brooding over here when you finish discussing.

Series of Baghdad Attacks kills at least 160

“We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here at home.”

As I read today about scores of Iraqi civilians murdered by terrorists, I can’t help but recall George Bush’s smiling face as he reassures us that we are protecting our “homeland” by fighting terrorists in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Bushniks in “Homeland Security” tell us the exact opposite when they say that another terrorist attack is not a matter of “if” but “when.” But that’s another story.

How cruel and morally suspect it is to invade a foreign land that did not attack us, thus bringing other innocents into the line of fire between ourselves and terrorists. And why did we do this terrible thing? So that Americans can go about their lives as usual. That is the noble cause for which we invaded Iraq.

No doubt the Iraqis who lost loved ones today are thanking George Bush for fighting terrorists in Iraq so that Americans do not have to fight them at home.

We brought terrorism to Iraq. I wonder if Americans will ever recognize that fact. Probably not.

For all the comparisons and contrasts between Vietnam and Iraq that pundits like to debate, one salient point is always neglected: America did not start the Vietnam War. We liberated Iraq from one kind of horror only to impose upon it something nearly as bad, a kind of dictatorship of terror.

I think we all need to pray for the Iraqi people today, and in addition, we should ask that God forgive America and our leaders for the death and destruction we brought to a land that already knew too much of murder.

The Howling

Cheesy werewolf special effects, bad hair, perky, nude, nineteen-eighties breasts…The Howling is a pretty dreadful movie to watch twenty-four years after it was first released. What makes it worse, I feel guilty saying that.

Saturday, I bought a cheap “Special Edition” DVD at the Krogers. it was an impulse buy. The DVD was in the bargain bin. I thought to myself, “I haven’t seen that movie in years!” So I bought it. Tonight, I watched it.

Why do I say I feel guilty about panning this movie? For one thing, the director, Joe Dante, has gone on to do…well, not much of anything according to IMDB. I feel sorry for the guy. This movie is his masterpiece. Dante also put together some documentary materials on the making of the film that are supposed to embiggen his masterwork in the mind of the viewer. For some reason, hearing a director explicate his film always makes it seem better than it actually is. So I feel guilty that, despite the screenwriter’s explanation that the film is in fact a satire on early-eighties group psychotherapy, I just can’t see past the cheese in this movie.

What was it exactly that compelled me to watch this movie more than once when I was a kid? Was it only those breasts? For the era in which it was made, The Howling is probably as good as any of the slasher pics I watched back then, maybe even better. Friday the 13th had a young, horny Kevin Bacon. The Howling had two great character actors, Slim Pickens, of “Dr. Strangelove” fame, as well as Peter MacNee from the old “Avengers” TV program.

The Howling also contains probably the most unintentionally funny line in the history of cinema. During the final sequence, the hero is racing in his car to rescue the heroine. He pulls into a gas station for gas (always a bummer to run out of gas when your girl is about to be eaten by werewolves) and honks his horn at a young guy filling up his tank at the only pump.

The guy turns to him and says, “Take it easy buddy, not all of us got enough money for a Mazda.”

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this movie. It has one throwaway line that will forever be etched in my mind.

Er, we didn’t do body counts, at least up until the past year or so. Reading the Washington Post this morning, specifically an article titled In Tal Afar, a brawl to blow off some steam, I was struck by the contradiction at the heart of the story.

The first line of the story says that our soldiers spent “months” training “for a battle with insurgents that never fully materialized.” This basically echoes what I’ve read in other places. The Tal Afar offensive has been a bust; the insurgents melted away before the Army moved in.

And yet:

During the incursion into Tall Afar, a city of more than 200,000 located about 40 miles from the Syrian border in northwestern Iraq, more than 550 suspected insurgents have been killed or captured this month, commanders said. Much of the fighting was carried out with air strikes or by the Iraqi army, which led the assault.

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