A Pilgrim’s Digression

This afternoon, I read in the Washington Post a story about Emily Perez, a Prince George’s County native and the first female minority command sergeant in West Point history. Perez was killed in Iraq while on patrol September 12.

Running alongside the story of this remarkable young woman’s tragic death was an advertisement for the “Mate 1 intimate Dating Service,” complete with sexy pictures of voluptuous women such as Kitten94366, 25, of Washington, D.C., whose body is described as “slim” (another woman whose picture appears in the ad describes her body as “curvy”). “Find girls in your area,” the advertisement says.

The horror of this war is that we aren’t at war, but people are nonetheless dying horrible deaths. What I mean is, America is not a country on a war footing. This is partly due to the fact that there is no draft, and the President has insisted from the beginning that Americans go on about their lives, spending money and preoccupying themselves with entertainment, regardless of what happens in the Middle East.

One of Perez’s classmates at West Point said, “The fact that she’s died — it makes what’s going on in the Middle [East] . . . so much more real. I mean, here at West Point, it’s kind of like Camelot, you know…”

If before Perez’s death the war wasn’t real to a West Point cadet, how could it be real to civilians now? America itself is like Camelot after the betrayal of Lancelot. America is dying, mostly from self-inflicted wounds; and it is a country that does not yet know it is dying.

Nearly every day, I read another obituary for another soldier, or I hear a report on NPR about a soldier’s death, and then I look around me in the malls and on TV and on the Internet, and I see young people happily oblivious to the death wrought by this war. I see a military-age kid on the street, and I wonder, “Has he even thought about joining the military? Does he realize what is going on in the world?”

My wife tells me about college recommendations she has to write for her students, and I think, “We’re not at war. If we are, what are the signs of it?” I don’t see any, not here. Only in the newspapers are there indications that Americans are dying for a cause–what cause, no one can precisely say–and if conservatives had their way we wouldn’t even see those signs, either. The lengthy stories about the death of another American soldier; the (sadly) much briefer stories about the death of “scores” of innocent Iraqis (how many Iraqis have died? will our government ever tell us?); the stories about the failure to reconstruct Iraq and build a peaceful society there; all this would be off the news, out of the newspapers, and off our minds if Republicans had their way. Because death is “bad news.” It drags down morale. It gives aid and comfort to the enemy.

However, I guarantee you that if there were a draft, High School-age kids would have a whole lot more on their minds than how they are going to get drunk and laid this weekend. And how would their parents feel, knowing that instead of going to college, little Johnny or Sally might be drafted? How long do you think it would be before people demanded an end to the war?

Are we at war, or aren’t we? Or are we trying to keep the war on the low down, so the public doesn’t get too riled? Or maybe the American public itself is content to allow a tiny percentage of the population who are in the military to carry this burden completely? I think we are content to slap a magnetic yellow ribbon on our bumper and say confidently “I support the troops.”

This is the extent of our “war effort.” Sure, there are those who participate in programs to provide care packages to troops. Probably the majority of those who participate have a family member overseas, however. The rest of us, myself included, do nothing. For one thing, to repeat myself, I cannot feel the seriousness of this war.

I don’t even get a sense that our President wants us to take it seriously. Again, I think it all goes back to the unwillingess to impose a draft on young men and women. Supposedly, it would be an economic disaster to effectively take millions of young people out of the economy. More than that, perhaps in the back of our Republican President’s mind is the fear that a draft would galvanize our young people and their parents into opposition to the war.

Or it might galvanize them to support the war. Who knows? It will never be tried.

Either way, wouldn’t it be nice to have a population that cared deeply one way or the other? Imagine a young soldier returning home after experiencing deprivation, hardship, loneliness, homesickness, despair, and fear. Imagine such a soldier has seen comrades die brutal deaths. Imagine such a young person has inflicted a brutal death on someone else. He or she comes home, and America seems largely oblivious. We’ve been keeping ourselves entertained, going about our lives as the President asked us to do.

It’s so tragic when an American dies in Iraq. Now who do you think will be voted off American Idol tonight? And did you see that episode of Flavor of Love where Deelicious craps on Flav’s carpet?

There’s a scene in the film The Best Years of our Lives in which a returning World War II veteran is jostled out of his place in line at an airline ticket counter by a cigar-chomping gentleman who declares that his business is most important and he needs to move to the front of the line. Such is America in general, today. Eager to forget the horror, we pat a veteran on the back and then turn our own backs to them.

I can only imagine what our veterans have been through. Books and movies suggest that it isn’t an easy adjustment. We don’t often think of post-traumatic stress as being a result of “good wars” like World War II, but nonetheless, soldiers came home from that war and found it difficult to adjust. Boys with whom they went to school, but who did not go to war, were married with children. Some soldiers came home with drinking problems. One veteran of WWII commented that he felt like a “grandpa” compared with people his own age, 24 years old, who had not been to war. Everyone smiled at the veteran and said how proud they were, but no one except another veteran could understand all that he had seen. And no one really wanted to hear about it. In 1946, people were eager to put the war behind them.

If such was the response after World War II, an unambiguously just war, how much more so today?

Veterans justify their service in terms of defending American values and our peculiarly American way of life. Perhaps they find it ironic that one of those values is the right to ignorance. They are defending a country so carefree and decadent that an obituary for a female soldier who died bravely and unjustly in war can be juxtaposed with an advertisement for an “intimate” dating service. I know the advertisement was probably chosen randomly by computer. Does that really make a difference?

Do veterans ever wonder if their sacrifice was really worth it, after all?

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast of Katie Couric’s CBS 60 Minutes interview [link will open iTunes] with Condoleeza Rice. Usually, listening to an interview with a Bush Administration official is like listening to a record in which the needle gets stuck in the same groove every time. Or to make a cruder analogy, usually Administration officials just hand us the same brown paper bag full of Dick Cheney’s crap.

“Stay the course”…”We’re making good progress”…”Last throes”… and the latest catch phrase “Safer, but not yet safe.”

Rice repeated some of the formulaic responses, particularly the “safer but not yet safe” oxymoron, but she also intelligently articulated why she believes in the President’s so-called “democracy agenda.” As with Tony Blair, the President’s allies often make the best case for his policies.

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Or perhaps this post could better be titled “Reading of the Fall.” I am dallying with the idea of reading The Lord of the Rings again. It has been about two years since I last read it, or any part of it.

I re-read the third book shortly before the film The Return of the King appeared in theaters, and in the meantime I have read The Silmarillion but nothing else by Tolkien.

Also this Fall, I may take one or two weeks and re-read some Poe. I often do, at this time of year, and having just finished the book The Poe Shadow, in which the author purports to solve the mystery of Poe’s last days and death, re-reading Poe seems a definite possibility.

Or perhaps I’ll just read another novel about Poe. I’ve heard that The Pale Blue Eye is quite good.

What is it about certain authors that endlessly fascinates us? I have a good friend who has criticized me for never reading anything new. I only re-read. However, I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life when there is little new worth reading. Yes, I could read Gravity’s Rainbow, but why?

At age 32, I am already feeling the dreadful brevity of life’s span, so why waste my declining years poring over some potentially unworthy “text” (as books are called these days by the academics), when I could stick with a tried and true classic? I am not a Graduate Student anymore. I don’t have time or the temperament for “difficult” books.

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I have often written about the use of the straw man rhetorical tactic by right wing pundits eager to paint opponents as traitors. I don’t think it can be pointed out often enough how the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter achieve rhetorical dominance over their philosophical opponents by misrepresenting and in some cases outright lying about what their opponents believe.

Nowhere has the straw man been used more stridently by members of the right-wing punditry than in their attempts to demonize members of their own party–Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner–for desiring detainees in the war on terror to be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention. In Ann Coulter’s words, treating captives in accord with principles of human dignity apparently means that John McCain wants terrorists to be “treated like Martha Stewart.” When did Senator McCain express this opinion concerning terrorists?

Never, of course. It’s all rhetorical with these people, you see. Facts don’t matter, just how good a rhetorical dig you can get in. Can you pithily and cuttingly express what you really wish the Senator believed? There you have your aphoristic slogan. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Some observations: single men feel no obligation to clean the toilet or bathroom sink. Ever.

A single man’s house/room smells like a locker room. If the place has ever been cleaned, it’s because he is having a woman over.

A single man feels no compulsion to change his underwear more often than every other day or so. Unless he is going out on a date and expects (hopes) that his date will have the opportunity to see his underwear close up.

Typically, I have resisted believing the old sexist trope that women have a “civilizing” influence on men, but as I’ve grown older, and especially since I married and hopefully became wiser in the ways of the world, I’ve come to believe that women really do have a beneficial effect on men.

When I was in college, I lived with a man who had just graduated with a degree in business, but who was remaining in his old college town at least for another year or so while he worked as a branch manager for a local bank.

Total pig. This is the guy I may have written about before, who once while listening to a Queen CD told me, “It’s a shame that God gave such a voice to a fag.” He also expressed the sentiment that winter served a beneficial purpose by killing off large numbers of homeless people every year.

He had a girlfriend who was only a Freshman in college, and at night I had to listen to them rutting in the next room. I thought to myself, “If only her parents knew.” I would have told them, too, had the opportunity ever arisen, just to stop that incessant slapping of flesh and moaning at night.

And being from Buffalo, he was fanatical about keeping the thermostat turned down, too. I mean, he kept it in the fifties in that place. I froze to death all winter, and the winter of ‘93, you’ll remember, was one of the worst on record in the northeast.

He it was, Dear Tim C___, who gave me my “No Bushit” Coffee mug, which I treasure to this day much more than I treasure the memory of Tim.

Single men are absolute beasts until women come along. I swear it’s true.

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When I was at Cornell in July, I met a woman from Pittsburgh who informed me about a scandal involving Senator Rick Santorum that might prove the undoing of his political ambitions. I did not think much more about it until reading about it at FactCheck.org. It now seems to be coming to the attention of folks outside of Western Pennsylvania, finally.

While living in Virginia, outside of Washington, Santorum took advantage of a Pennsylvania Internet Charter School program to educate his children at the cost of about $73,000.00 to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. As FactCheck.org describes it:

From 2001 to 2004, five of Santorum’s six children participated in classes at the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School , an online charter school that serves children from kindergarten through 12th grade. The school is open to the children of Pennsylvania residents. Under state law, the local school districts of the residents pay 80 per cent of their per pupil costs toward the school’s tuition. For the 2004-2005 academic year the tuition for Santorum’s five children would have been $38,000. The controversy centers on whether or not the Santorums are “residents” of the Penn Hills School District which paid for part of the tuition.

Santorum does own a home in Penn Hills, a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh, but his family actually live in Leesburg, Virginia most of the time, and the Penn Hills school district has sued Santorum for a refund of the $73,000 the school district paid the Internet charter school for the education of Santorum’s children.

I call this a “scandal,” not so much because of the lawsuit, but because I don’t believe the public should be paying to educate a Senator’s children, if the Senator chooses an option for them other than public school. At the very least, it appears disgracefully opportunistic and greedy, especially when said Senator is rich enough to own a home in Penn Hills.

The debate over this issue is outlined at FactCheck.org because the Senator has finally responded to his critics with what can only be called a Nixonian “Checkers”-like political advertisement. For those who have never heard of Nixon’s beloved dog Checkers, the cute cocker spaniel figured in a major speech Nixon gave during the 1952 election.

Nixon had been charged with accepting illegal campaign contributions and gifts. Such gifts included the dog named Checkers, and Nixon swore that if his opponents wanted to make an issue of the gift of the dog, they could do so, but his kids loved the dog and he would never, never give the dog up.

The speech has become a textbook case of how to use fallacious rhetorical strategies to escape from a sticky political situation.

Santorum’s “Checkers,” it turns out, are his own kids. His campaign has been airing an advertisement that can be viewed at his website, titled “Important Job.” The straw man gets stuffed right in the beginning, and Santorum’s thirteen-year old son is the one packing in the straw.

Says little Johnny Santorum, “My dad’s opponents have criticized him for moving us to Washington so we could be with him more.” And then his younger brother, 11 year-old Daniel says, “they criticized us for attending a Pennsylvania public school over the Internet.”

Fact Check provides the details about how the ad misstates the arguments of Santorum’s opponents. For example, despite what the Senator has said, no one has criticized him for wanting his family to live with him in Virginia, and certainly no one has criticized him for educating his children via an Internet charter school. The issue is whether the Pennsylvania taxpayer should pay for that education when Santorum can damn well afford to pay for it himself. Or (God forbid) he could send his kids to the Leesburg, Virginia, public schools. From what I hear, Loudon County has some of the best public schools in the area.

What Fact Check balks at addressing, however, is the shameless way in which Santorum uses his own children as pawns in his political game. When I saw this ad at Fact Check, I could not believe that any Senator, let alone a Republican, would stoop so low as to shield himself from political fire with the bodies of his own children.

Senator Santorum should be ashamed of himself. But he probably isn’t. In November, Western Pennsylvania voters need to help the Senator decide whether he actually lives in Leesburg or Penn Hills. I know my wife’s relatives would prefer it if he took up permanent residence in Virginia.

Incredibly, it’s about as big as a matchbook and holds 1 gigabyte of music. The iPod Nano also got an update today, but the update is more retro than forward-looking. The addition of color to the iPod Nano line is reminiscent of the dearly departed iPod Mini of yesteryear.

In addition to the new iPods, Apple also announced a forthcoming product, called iTV, which would make it possible to play movies and TV shows downloaded from iTunes on your home entertainment system. Apple almost never previews a not-yet-available hardware product, so the iTV is probably going to command most of the attention from bloggers and Mac rumor sites.

MacDailyNews has photos of the iTV. It looks like a sleek DVR box, but from the description it is apparently not a DVR. No hard drive. No TV tuner. The box acts as an intermediary between your Mac and your TV and other home entertainment components, and as such seems kind of redundant.
The question becomes, are future Macs going to offer built in TV tuning and recording capabilities, such as are available from current models of DVR? Will the Mac effectively become the DVR?

I have to admit it seems a bit clunky to have two devices, an iTV and a Mac, performing the same functions as one device currently, a Tivo or DVR. Maybe when the product is finally released, we will find that the iTV is closer to the Apple-brand DVR or media center than it now appears to be.

Show me, O Lord, my life’s end

and the number of my days;

let me know how fleeting is my life

You have made my days a mere handbreadth;

the span of my years is as nothing before you.

Each man’s life is but a breath.

Psalm 39: 4-5

Yesterday, in observance of 9/11, our pastor preached a sermon on Psalm 39. To him, the central lesson of September 11 is that our life is transient and can be cut off in a moment, like the snuffing of a candle. That is probably not the message our President wants Americans to take to heart, this day, when we are all supposed to feel safe.

But as I watch the news and listen to NPR this day, a general sense of insecurity seems to be pervasive in America. Who would have thought bin Laden and Zawahiri would still be living in freedom this day, after five years? Should we not have made more progress?

Part of the problem is, aside from capturing or killing bin Laden, we have no real way to measure progress in this war, if it can even be considered a war in any traditional sense.

My friend David at the Anti-Manicheist has also been reflecting on the lessons of 9/11, and he also concludes with some observations that the President would not be pleased with: our sense of security is, to a degree, “illusory,” and evildoers cannot be entirely stopped from committing their crimes; and second, our fears are easily manipulated to political advantage.

The almost funny thing is, no one on the right or left would ever admit to manipulation. Oh no. Yet, what else to call it? When every radio talk show in the Universe is trumpeting this ABC mini-series, “The Path to 9/11,” as a “wake up call” to Americans who have grown complacent, what is that but a hope that somehow through media, Americans can be manipulated into feeling something of the anger they felt five years ago?

One reason I refuse to see any of the fictionalized depictions of 9/11, such as “United 93,” is that I don’t want to be manipulated in that way. I am probably going to break that vow and watch “The Path to 9/11,” because it purports to be at least in part documentary-like, but in general I don’t want the emotion of remembering that day to cloud my rational mind.

Today, to solve our problems we need thinkers who feel, not primarily feelers, or people who listen to their “gut” (as the President is fond of saying).

What depresses me, this day, is that I don’t see any way out of the wilderness for us. Military might clearly does not preclude or prevent terrorism. We could kill a hundred of them a day–in fact we probably are killing a hundred people a day in this war–and there still would be no end to the violence or the threat. In fact, it would probably just grow, like a cancer that spreads the more a doctor hacks away at it with his sharp knives.

But what other options are there but to fight? Is non-violence really an option? I was reading the other day about Ghandi, and his response to Nazi and Japanese aggression during World War II. Ghandi sounds like a naive fool, today, in his recommendation that the Jews could have defeated their Nazi oppressors through non-violent means.

Nevermind the fact that the Jews, in general, did not fight back, but went like lambs to the slaughter. It seems to me Ghandi’s non-violence was borne out of his struggle with the reasonable British rather than monsters like the Nazis. Had he lived in Nazi Germany, he would have simply been dispatched the first time he raised his voice, if not sooner.

So what options are available to us? Is it an either/or proposition, with the two options available to us being a combination military and law enforcement tack, or a non-violence tack?

I wish violence were the answer. It would be so easy to just give in to the impulse that seems to have overtaken so many other Americans, who believe we really can kill our way to greater security. I hear that sentiment all the time on talk radio, best expressed by Anne Coulter, who famously said shortly after 9/11 that “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”

It’s refreshing to believe that a problem is so easily solved. Carpet bomb Baghdad, or Fallujah, or Ramadi. Or Damascus. Or Tehran. It’s swift, and painless in terms of American casualties.

We have the power. Not using it is like Sauron having the One Ring, but holding back. Do you think our enemies would hold back, if they had it? One often hears that argument: if terrorists had a nuclear weapon, would they refrain from using it?

So why should we? Ahmadinejad could be simply and swiftly killed today, along with millions of other Iranians…but those millions dead are just collateral damage. The important thing is we have removed an evil dictator, right? We have eliminated a threat to our security. Right?

Most unsettling about this 9/11 is how there is no security, how we are “safer, but not yet safe” as the President hilariously puts it. As if we will ever be safe again. Like many Americans, I am waiting for the next terrorist attack. I think all it will take is one more attack, and we will see our freedoms evaporate like a breath. Like a human life.

I have foreseen my own death, and it ain’t pretty. I am going to die the addict’s death, alone in a rented walk-up somewhere in an uncaring Eastern city. My wife has divorced me; my son has forsaken me. My teeth are rotten from poor nutrition, since I subsist mainly on noodles I scavenge from the garbage cans in the alley behind Chinese take-out restaurants. My body reeks of foulness from my soiled clothes. I can’t remember the last time I bathed. I sit all day and all night with my one companion, an ever-faithful iBook that keeps my drug flowing continuously into my bloodstream.

Just you and me, my sweet iBook. You’re all I’ve got left in the world. You and me and World of Warcraft.

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The last three weeks, I have been driving to work one day a week, on Thursdays, and parking on Capitol Hill. Previously, my habit was to take Metro back to my rented room in Silver Spring to retrive my car to drive home to Virginia for the long weekend. My co-workers did not have to talk too much to convince me how inefficient this is.

However, today I have started to think I was right in the first place. Driving in to D.C. saves me as much as an hour or more on my commute home, chiefly because I don’t have to drive the Beltway from Silver Spring across the American Legion Bridge into Virginia. However, the parking situation on Capitol Hill is so atrocious, I am just about ready to give up that hour and live with the longer commute.

My co-workers advised me that since I came to work so early anyway, around six AM, I could probably take one of the limited number of parking spots around local churches that are all-day parking. Supposedly, the police don’t ticket the three or four spots in front of a church. My first week driving, sure enough I found one of these spots. I was so happy, and even happier when I arrived home more than an hour early that night.

However, each week since has been hell to find parking. All the church spots have been full. The rest of the parking on Capitol Hill is either two-hour, or two-hour meter parking. I have seen a few one-hour meter spaces, but these are effectively useless for me. The last two weeks, I’ve been parking in a two-hour zone and taking my chances. My co-workers, who previously advised me on the ease of driving in to D.C., now shake their heads and cluck, “Mm-mm, you better move your car!”

The parking ticket will be thirty dollars, if I get nailed.

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